However, there was nothing insubstantial about the man when I met him in his office. Wearing his standard military uniform, the Colonel stepped out from behind an enormous desk and held out a hand. To my surprise he was quite jocular. He was a burly man with a cast in one eye that made him seem almost humorous. Although he was clearly uneducated and spoke mainly in Sranen Tongo, there was no sign of the man whose reputation was for brutality and graft. He enquired about my background. I explained that my family came originally from Surabaya, Indonesia and that I had obtained a good degree in economics from Leiden University in The Hague. For a moment I thought I saw a shadow of dislike on his face but we chatted on quite amicably. Before long I found myself being taken into his confidence as he stared out of the window. I was faced with a request. Would I mind altering some documents and removing his name from them? He had enemies and did not wish to reveal to them the true origin of his finances lest they try to tap the same source. I have to admit to being craven in those circumstances. I did not like to imagine what would happen to me if I refused. Anyway, it seemed a harmless enough thing to do and I agreed. We shook hands. Back at the office I altered the documents without telling anyone. I gave him copies and thought no more of it.
But within days I was whisked out of my job in the ministry and appointed by the Colonel to be his personal aide. In that way he kept me close by his side. I was trapped. There were other things he asked me to do – falsification of diamond mine ownership and other forgeries. During the brief period when he was out of power I made every attempt to leave the country but his second coup came too quickly and dashed my hopes. I was back by his side wishing I were anywhere else.
The Colonel was smiling as he picked up his cards and addressed me with a chuckle:
‘And so, Budi, what did you think of our telephone coup? One of my boys just picked up the telephone and said to the president: “Go home”. It was as simple as that. The president picked up his papers and left. One telephone call and the government vaporised.’
‘Oh, very good. Excellent,’ I said, hoping to conceal my nervousness with a laugh. The strain of the last few months had caused itching hives to blossom on my neck and inner thighs.
Before his sentencing at The Hague, and while he was still able to travel, I had been co-opted by the Colonel to accompany him to one of the Caribbean islands. He went there to attend the gangster funeral of a top-ranking drug Don, a Don Gorgon who had funded projects throughout the region, including in Suriname. As usual, I was expected to tag along. In the blistering heat we followed the funeral cortege as it jerked its way down the unmade road from a twenty-bedroom palace at the top of the hill. The Don jolted along in his glass coffin like a black Snow White. The funeral was attended by major politicians whom the gangster had supported to the tune of several million dollars.
The Colonel had particularly admired the deceased because he’d emerged from a shanty-town and kick-started his career by going out and shooting fifteen people at random to show how useful he could be. He had grown rich enough to own an airline whose offices were housed in a tall multi-storey building of white purity which rose up high against the blue sky. On the outskirts of the city, scavengers could see the building from the massive garbage dump where they sifted and sorted their way through variegated mounds of refuse and waste packaging and from where, in nearby wooden shacks with no electricity, children emerged in beautifully pressed, pristine white shirts and blouses, making their way past the garbage to school.
‘In this country we have to go to the drug barons and gangsters to ask for money to build a bridge or a road. Even the church pays for protection,’ whispered one of the politicians as we traipsed along behind the cortege, our feet scrunching on the gritted path.
Soon after we returned to Suriname the judges in The Hague condemned and sentenced the Colonel in his absence, but Europe felt far away.
The game finished. The sergeant had won. He smiled but his eyes were loose and unsafe as he opened another bottle of Black Cat rum and poured some out for everyone. We had been drinking all afternoon. I leaned forward and brought out a suitcase full of euro notes from under the table, preparing to make the pay-out. The Colonel always insisted on using euros rather than Surinamese dollars. He was not a good loser. I tried to placate him by striking the right balance of familiarity and obsequiousness as I spoke, hoping to distract him from his defeat:
‘So Do-Man, put us straight now that you are a world statesman. What will be the final struggle? China versus America? America versus Russia? Russia versus China?’
The Colonel’s laugh rumbled directly from his stomach.
‘No. No. No. None of those. The final struggle will be black against white.’
I was the only person there not of mainly African descent. My Indonesian ancestry meant that my face was smooth and yellow as a slab of toffee. I indicated my straight black hair with a coy gesture:
‘So where does that leave the brown ones like me, Colonel? My family came here generations ago from Indonesia. Am I black?’
The Colonel lowered his eyes so that I would not see the contempt in them. I knew I had made a mistake. I was not sure what it was. We were used to any one of us falling out of favour for reasons we could not discern and becoming a scapegoat. He looked me up and down and then said with reluctance:
‘In this instance, yes, you will count as black. The final struggle will be white against all the others. Those Marxist boys missed something. Race, religion and nationalism. Those are the things people are willing to die for.’
The Colonel swallowed another glass of rum, stood up and belched. He stretched, bent his knees like a weight-lifter and held his hands above his head as if grasping imaginary dumb-bells. Then he straightened up and strolled towards the window. Somewhere out there in the bush his former bodyguard and rival commando Rudi Lichtveld was organising an insurgency against him with the support of the Dutch secret service. There was some sort of war over resources: diamonds; lumber; drugs and guns. The Colonel cast an eye over the guards who were keeping watch on his red and white seven-seater Cessna private aircraft perched on the airstrip outside. The white body of the plane was dazzlingly bright in the glare of the setting sun. Inside the cockpit, the pilot on standby dozed, his head drooping forward. The Colonel turned his back to the window and addressed me directly:
‘You know what the sergeant here did to Rudi Lichtveld’s lawyer when we found him?’
I shook my head.
‘He cut the top joints of his fingers off with secateurs so that he would find it a bit more difficult to sign his legal documents.’
He gave a chuckle and waited to see my reaction.
‘Good for him,’ I murmured.
I glanced over at the sergeant whose unsettling dark eyes seemed to move independently as if they were in a pinball machine. He shrugged and reached for the rum bottle. There was an atmosphere of pent-up malignancy in the room which seemed to be waiting for some event or incident to release it.
The sun was sinking fast. One of the men went to switch on the generator and soon the room filled with anaemic blue light the colour of womb-water. The sergeant collected up the cards. All the military men were drunk now, the Colonel more drunk than anybody. He came towards me, swaying. It seemed I was to be the fall guy that day. He leered at me:
‘You read books. If you’re so clever tell me about Skrekibuku?’
I had heard of Skrekibuku, the shriek book, the book of terror, an ancient book of Dutch creole spells. Frankly, I despised that sort of superstition. I had been raised in the world of reason, mathematics and accountancy. He must have seen the dismissive expression on my face.
‘You don’t believe in that stuff, eh?’
From his top pocket he pulled the dead man’s finger, now swimming in formaldehyde in a transparent plastic case, and waved it at me. Then he turned and clambered unsteadily onto the low card table fumbling in his holster to bring out his black Beretta handgun. His eyes were ranging ro
und the four of us. We all knew what he was capable of in this sort of mood. I felt rivulets of cold sweat running down from my armpits. My hives began to itch unbearably.
Then out of the blue his humour changed and his face was festooned with smiles as he gazed at each one of us in turn. Without checking the safety catch, he grasped the barrel of the gun in his fist and turned the handle and trigger section towards his mouth as if it were a microphone. His other hand stretched out towards a vast imaginary audience. He shut his eyes and began to croon softly into the gun:
‘Regrets, I’ve had a few
But then again too few to mention,
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption.’
When he opened his eyes again they were glistening with tears.
‘Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew
When I bit off more than I could chew.’
The rest of us looked at him with fake smiles of admiration on our faces. It was difficult not to laugh. He swayed perilously close to the edge of the table. There was a pause as his head lolled forward and the hand holding the Beretta fell to his side. He raised his head and his eyes rolled as he struggled to stay upright. Then he brought the pistol-grip once more to his mouth and sang into it.
‘I planned each charted course
Each careful step along the byway,
And more, much more than that
I did it my way . . .’
With a gesture, the Colonel commanded us to stand and join in. We rose uncomfortably to our feet and sang along with him. His voice rose.
‘Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew
When I bit off more than I could chew . . .’
He had forgotten the words but his face was still wreathed in smiles. The gun was waving around uncontrollably. In dark times it is important to remember your good manners. Fearing an accident and wanting to curry favour I scrambled onto the table to steady his hand. He pushed me away and tried to disentangle his hand from mine in such a clumsy way that the gun barrel twisted towards his face. Caught in the mechanism my finger involuntarily squeezed the trigger. There was a sharp sound like a twig snapping. The Colonel’s body crashed on to me and I slipped off the table. We both fell to the floor. I lay there for a minute and then got up. The Colonel continued to lie there, a pool of blood spreading slow as black molasses on the wooden floor. The sergeant’s jaw dropped as he looked at me with disbelief.
There is a saint who asks no questions. Our Lady of Death. Saint Death, I think they call her. She’s Mexican or Aztec, something like that. You can ask her for anything and she will turn a blind eye. She makes no moral judgement so you can ask, ‘Please help me kidnap this baby’, or ‘Please steady my hand as I plunge the knife in’. She’s a good one to have on your side. Believe you me I’m not at all religious but at that moment I muttered to her, ‘Please help me out of this situation.’
It must have worked. Fearing they would be accused of dereliction of duty in failing to protect him, the sergeant and the other bodyguards put their heads together and decided to say he had committed suicide. His prints would be all over the gun. My prints would be there only because I had tried unsuccessfully to stop him. We all shook hands in agreement.
Having settled on this story they ran outside to raise the alarm. The Colonel’s body was carried to the seven-seater Cessna and bundled in. I climbed in next to the pilot. He was instructed to fly us both back to hospital in Paramaribo immediately. I expanded the suicide story to the pilot as we lifted off over the bush. Below I could see the sergeant and the rest of the bodyguard packing up to leave with the clear intention of defecting and going over to Rudi Lichtveld’s side.
In the cramped space of the cockpit I glanced over my shoulder at the Colonel’s body lying between the seats. Something had fallen from his pocket. I reached back to pick it up. It was the purple dead man’s finger that was supposed to confer invisibility on the owner if needed. For some reason I did not want the pilot to see it, as if anything out of the ordinary might be a clue to my guilt. Irrational, I know. I shuffled round and hid it in my bag. The journey to Paramaribo airport took three-quarters of an hour. When we arrived an ambulance was waiting. Police were everywhere. In the confusion of the body being transferred from the plane to the ambulance I slipped away to an adjoining area of the airport.
I am not superstitious. I was brought up with all the benefits of the rational age of enlightenment but I walked through that airport without a passport, without being stopped or seemingly even noticed and boarded a plane for Amsterdam with no ticket. In Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport an equally unlikely scenario occurred. The electronic passport control jammed. For a few moments, before a supervisor came and stopped them, flustered airport staff waved people through with no checks. The electronic gate was open. I passed with no hindrance and continued to the ‘Nothing to Declare’ exit without being stopped. In a daze I found myself walking through the air-conditioned shopping arcade, surrounded by glass-fronted stores with displays of luxury leather goods, perfumes, watches, jewels – even Surinamese diamonds – and electronic devices. Eventually, I stepped out into the night.
I still had in my possession the large bundle of euros from my role as banker in the card game. And so I took a taxi out into the snowy Amsterdam winter.
In the Prins café on Prinsengracht, I ate my favourite pastries and drank coffee. I paid and left. Outside I stepped into a hailstorm. I lowered my head against the driving white force of hailstones that rattled on the ground and swept the canal footpath like a yard brush. Standing by the canal railing, braced against the hail, I must have made an odd sight in my light tropical suit and panama hat. But nobody seemed to notice. I fished in my pocket and threw the container holding the dead man’s finger into the icy grey waters of the canal.
Then I set off to look for a hotel.
FABLE OF A GOD FORGOTTEN
The wide empty corridors of the asylum were silent. At that time of day, an hour or so after lunch, the place was quiet. A solitary figure walked along the shiny brown linoleum floor of the corridor keeping always to the centre. On either side of him the evenly spaced office doors were closed. Inside each office, on the desk, was an alarm bell. He walked down the corridor towards the blank cream-painted brick wall at the end where a metal bucket full of water and detergent and a string mop had been left in the corner for him. Overhead, above the wall, a square glass skylight was set in the ceiling. When the patient reached the end of the corridor he stood there in the shaft of light, his face upturned towards the sun. After a while he picked up the mop and started to wash the floor, filling the air with the smell of disinfectant. This was a privilege he had earned.
Progress had been made. He had been moved from the stage where no-one was allowed within six feet of him. That was for the most dangerous. He had been kept at that stage for only ten days after his admission. A warder and a nurse would look through the spyhole of the cell door and ask him to stand at the back, beneath his window, as far away from the door as possible. Then they would open the door quickly and place his food, drink and medication just inside before retreating and locking the door again. He hardly posed a threat. The warders were mostly twice his size. It was security protocol.
After that came the stage when he had to be kept within eye contact. Never out of sight. That had been the position for the next year. There had been no psychotic episodes in that period although there had been one or two blips. Once it seems he had been impersonating a doctor and writing letters to find the whereabouts of his last victim. Another time a group of patients had signed a petition warning against his release on parole. They accused him of being involved in the death of another patient. But after many investigations nothing was ever proved. Now he was being re-assessed.
A psychologist looked through his reports to evaluate his suitability for temporary release. She flicked through a thick dossier of background notes. There was a small photograph of him stapled to th
e first page of the file.
Yes. He was a sad creature. Thinning fair hair. Broad forehead. Blue eyes. Dragged through children’s homes and asylums. Desperately neglected. A poverty-stricken background somewhere in the north of the country. Possibly schizophrenic. A danger to women. Convictions for both rape and murder. Himself terribly abused in childhood. Ordered to be detained in a secure hospital. The psychiatrist’s report showed the different medications prescribed since his arrival. Largactil mainly. The nurses’ daily reports were handwritten in biro, each paragraph carefully dated and in different handwriting. Nothing exceptional in his behaviour. The occasional petty quarrel with another patient duly logged. Largely co-operative. Symptoms of schizophrenia no longer apparent.
Seven years after his admission he was considered eligible to be released on licence. ‘Leave in the community’ it was called. This was a trial for a week which, if successful, could lead to a more extended parole. It was approved and he was placed in a hostel.
It was the middle of the night. I do not know how he got in. Something woke me and in the dim light I saw the dark shape of a figure about four feet away in the doorway of my bedroom. It recoiled for a moment and then launched a savage attack. The eruption of violence felt as if it were enveloping me. I was pinioned by his weight to the bed. A gloved hand tore at my mouth. A rope was being pulled round my neck. A roar issued out of my throat. His voice was gruff and wheezy:
‘Shut up. Shut up. Don’t move. Don’t move.’
I raised my head from the pillow, trying to avoid suffocation and fought back managing to untwist the sheet from my legs. There was a fierce struggle. With a huge effort I contrived to lift us both and get my feet on the floor. I stood up and somehow pulled the length of rope from around my neck. It dropped to the floor. He darted behind me. His bare muscular arm locked like a vice around my neck. I could feel the silky hairs on his arm. I tried to twist my head round towards him. The voice was a low growl:
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