Assignment - Sulu Sea (6 page)

The young man shrugged. “One never knows. Indonesia and the
Malaysians would both prefer the plebiscite to be forgotten. And this may well
happen. A U.N. commission member was wounded yesterday by a grenade thrown into
the Europa Hotel bar, and some Indian shops, including the
Mekassar
Silver Shop, were bombed out. Hence I suggest you stay at the consulate, with
us.”

“Thanks,” Durell said, “but the Hotel des Indes sounds just
right for me.”

Although the airport had no obvious traffic, it was crowded
and busy. The GIA Airways—Garuda Indonesia Line—had offices cheek by jowl with
the Lembaga Kebudajaan Indonesia—the Indonesian Cultural Institute, an open
center for propaganda from Djakarta. Across the field, the Qantas Empire
Airline hangar was empty and deserted. There was a row of shops along the road
immediately beyond the hangars, predominantly Chinese, such as Lee Cheong’s,
for jade; Mui Fong’s restaurant; and next to them, an Indian store selling
batik, a shop specializing in wood-carvings with a Dutch name above the door,
Vos & VanKamp, but with a smiling Indonesian in charge. The air was filled
with the chatter of a dozen animated tongues, dominated by Bahasa, a refined
Malay, but Durell also identified Dutch, Sudanese, Madurese and even some
English. Despite the heat, the crowds along the road were animated, in brightly
colored clothing, and apparently untroubled by the political tensions that
loomed like thunderheads over the jewel-like island.

Pandakan was not the largest of the Tarakuta Group, but was
certainly the loveliest, not more than ten miles long and five in
breadth. The slopes of the interior highland were devoted to neat rice fields,
chinchona and tea plantations, and teakwood forests. Young Mr. Lee was polite
and instructive on the swift drive through the city from the airport. He
handled the car himself, with Durell beside him in the front seat, and he did
not linger at traffic signals that seemed to work with a peculiarly
sporadic timing, since terrorists enjoyed hurling grenades at cars halted at
intersections; and he managed to avoid the potholes in what had once been a
broad, smooth boulevard.

Pandakan’s architecture reflected the island’s history
for three centuries. There was a ruined and picturesque fortress on the harbor
front built by the Portuguese in the seventeenth century; there were Dutch and
British administrative buildings from the Victorian era, mingled with native
Malay, Moslem mosques and Catholic churches and Buddhist temples, and a great
sprawling mass of a palace owned by the former Sultan of Pandakan, when the
East India Company dominated the islands. Along the seawall flanking the
harbor were dozens of sidewalk cafes under brightly colored, slightly
dilapidated awnings that sheltered wire chairs and metal tables. Traffic was
mainly bicycles that flowed in tidal waves around corners and down the
main arteries of the city. Here and there were trishaws, a three-wheeled
bicycle taxi, and an occasional dokar, or carriage. There were double-decker
buses that reminded Durell of London and New York’s old Fifth Avenue line, but
painted a brilliant orange and green, the newly proposed national colors.
Chinese tea shops, Moslem coffee houses and European cafes shared the
waterfront boulevard. Here and there a building showed the black scars of a bombing.
But the life of the city surged and flowed brightly in the streets, and
despite the number of posters, banners and signs exhorting the populace to vote
for one new expansionist Asian power in Borneo or another, there seemed no
overt hysteria.

But hysteria was here, Durell thought, manifested in the
hatreds expressed by bomb scars and bullet-pitted walls. Some of the Hindu
shops were shuttered with steel, and the local policemen at the intersections,
standing on high wooden pedestals under bright umbrellas, wore white gauntlets
and stubby, Russian-made automatic rifles slung over their shoulders.
There Was the usual contradiction of tin-shack and mat-walled slum houses next
to impressive public buildings, of natives cooking noodles, shrimp or curry on
the sidewalks, of canals where people bathed and did laundry and brushed their
teeth in water used as a lavatory.

Tommy Lee pointed out the sprawl of the Sultan’s former
palace, a building with clean, fat white columns supporting carved eaves
overhanging wide verandahs and interior courts. The palace was now used as a
government house, where Colonel Mayubashur, head of the militia, was the
highest resident official, ruling by military fiat until the U.N.
commission, its presence indicated by a limp blue and white flag at the
palace masthead, decided to which new imperialism the island population should
belong.

Tommy Lee slowed the car to allow yellow-robed Buddhist
priests with shaven heads cross the boulevard. “The situation is most
explosive, both literally and politically,” Tommy Lee said glibly. “The
Europeans still here are detached, and although colonialism was never an issue
here, it is used to trigger a few atrocities, Mr. Durell, in the name of
merdeka
—freedom. Most of the Western
consulates are run these days by a skeleton force only, and European and
American branch business offices are all practically deserted, since most of
their personnel have left for ‘extended vacations’ until the dust settles.”

“You’re well-informed, Tommy.”

“It is my business to be, sir. And I still think it would be
wisest if you stayed at the consulate."

“No, I’ve chosen my bed, and I’ll sleep in it.”

“Peacefully, I trust,” the Chinese murmured.

Durell found only one wrong note on the drive, and that
dealt with a remark about Dendang, or Fishtown. They were halted for a
troop-carrier convoy, burdened with solemn brown men under big helmets. Dusk
was imminent. At the same moment, grenades exploded with a muffled crumping
noise a few blocks away, but the site was invisible under the old banyan trees
that lined the road. The people at the sidewalk stalls, selling or buying egg
noodles, bananas, batik, hammered brass from India and carved
sawo
wood images from Bali, seemed
undisturbed either by the troops or the explosions. Traffic waited patiently
for the convoy to pass. A crowd of Malays gathered around a cockfight in
a dusty alley nearby never paused in their heated gambling.

Against the loom of the ancient Portuguese fortress on the
waterfront, Durell glimpsed a maze of waterfront alleys, mat huts, sampans,
Dyak long houses, Chinese tearooms and Moslem prayer houses all built in a
rickety nightmare of alleys and canals over the fetid harbor water. He asked
Lee if that was Fishtown, run by Prince Ch’ing, and Tommy Lee's smile was quick
and nervous.

“Oh, you have heard of our local ogre? Ch’ing is the
favorite whipping boy for every bad thing that happens in this part of Borneo.”

The big, pleasant young Chinese seemed defensive and
embarrassed, and Durell thought it odd. He filed the item away for future
reference as the car swung ahead and they sped up a wide boulevard lined with
pleasant,
stuccoed
villas smothered with oleanders,
frangipani, palms and bamboo hedges. Some of these houses were privately
guarded by armed men. There was a
padang
, or square, on this headland forming the north shore
of Pandakan Bay, lined with some public buildings—the Indian-style Hotel des
Indes, with its ornate fretwork and towers, opposite a mosque and a sidewalk
café and a modern sugar cube of a hospital—all fronting on the green
padang
that was
equipped with a Victorian, gingerbread bandstand under a gilded Moorish cupola.

“Drop me off at the hotel, quietly,” Durell said. “Is that
the Pandakan Hospital, by the way?”

“Yes, sir. I understand you may wish to visit the Papuan
schoonerman named Simon." Tommy’s smile flashed big, white teeth.
"Dr. Malachy McLeod mentioned it before he left for Tarakuta.”

“I see. How is Simon doing?”

“He is on the critical list, sir. If I can assist you—”

“Don’t worry, Tommy, I’ll be calling on you.”

There was no sign of tension in this Western oasis perched
on the breezy hill overlooking the bay. The cafes were crowded and the height
of land yielded a relatively cool breeze that rang melodiously with the scores
of bicycle bells and
betjas
sweeping around the
padang
.
A Malay boy took Durell’s grip and vanished with it into the high, cool
fret-work of the enormous lobby of the Hotel des Indes. Durell felt hot and
gritty from the long trip, as if he had been traveling forever; and it had not
been a restful flight shared with Willi Panapura. He longed for a cool
tub, a tall bourbon, and a. good meal, if one was available.

He sent Tommy Lee on with instructions to notify Dr. McLeod
he had arrived, if contact with Tarakuta was possible, and then followed the
boy from the desk to his room on the third floor. There were wooden
shutter doors for ventilation on all the rooms to catch and circulate the
vagrant breeze from over the harbor. Willi had reserved a corner room for him
that yielded a magnificent view of sea and shore, of the myriad islands
like greenish curd in a milky ocean all the way to the horizon. The harbor
docks and quays looked abnormally empty of shipping. Smoke lifted like a thick
black serpent from a distant quarter of the town, and he saw with some surprise
how narrow a crescent of civilization existed here. The island’s jungle pressed
hard like another dark green ocean against the glimmering river and canals, the
tea and chinchona plantations on the mountain range that formed the spine of
the island like the armor of some prehistoric reptile. But directly below his
balcony was the calm and order of this European quarter, with its hospital,
churches, cafes, shops and green land and bandstand.

“Will there be anything more, sir?” the Malay boy asked.

“A bourbon and soda, with ice, if you have any.”

The boy grinned. “Yes, sir. It is already ordered.”

“And who ordered it?”

“I cannot say, sir. It was on the chit for this reservation,
Mr. Durell.”

His room was huge and airy, with high ceilings and stuffy
plush furniture that might hide anything in the way of insect life or security
microphones. The bed was enormous and canopied with blue mosquito netting. The
bathroom could have doubled for the pool at the
Taj
Mahal
, with gold-washed faucets, a huge marble basin, and a
tub that stood on legs shaped out of cast-iron winged griffins. The
sounds of traffic drifted pleasantly through the windows as Durell tossed
his bag on the bed and gave the room a routine fanning. He did not know how
much of his visit might interest the caretaker police regime here in Pandakan,
but a certain amount of efficiency was obvious at once. In two minutes he
uncovered a mike in a tall lamp made out of a many-limbed Hindu goddess with an
inappropriate number of breasts on her abdomen, and another behind a batik
hanging on the wall. Next to the tapestry-like cloth was a photograph of the
last Sultan, a fat, smiling man whose face did not resemble the way he had
looked when an assassin’s bullet had smashed the back of his skull a month ago.
The microphone bugs were attached by tape to a hole in the plaster wall. He did
not disturb them, but his reflection in the large mirror on the opposite
wall turned dark and saturnine.

A pair of double-leafed, carved doors of jackwood apparently
opened into the next room to form a suite, if desired. They were locked, but
did not stay locked. He turned
 
the
bronze handle downward and had them in his hands when he felt a movement in
them and they clicked open.

He found himself face to face with a plump, tall,
brown-skinned stranger with pale amber eyes and a smiling mouth and a totally
unpleasant Webley pointed at the pit of his stomach.

He remembered thinking with dismay that to be surprised this
way usually happened only once to someone in his business. His reaction was
swift and savage. His right hand knocked at the other’s gun while his left
stabbed with stiff fingers at the brown throat above the braided uniform
collar. Before he saw the military tabs indicating a full colonel, it was too
late to check his attack, but he prevented it from being lethal.

Fortunately, the gun did not go off. It went spinning across
the polished floor to the bed, while the other man drove his left fist
into Durell’s stomach. By then Durell’s karate attack found its mark and the
man stumbled back, clutching and strangling, all interest lost in anything
except getting the next breath of air into his lungs.

Durell picked up the Webley and emptied it, noticed the
safety was on, and felt a bit worried. On the other hand, he owed no apology
for reacting to the colonel’s sudden appearance. He helped the plump brown man
to his feet. The adjoining room was empty except for a very efficient Japanese
tape recorder that was turning slowly with a two-hour reel on it, connected by
wires to the microphone bugs in Durell’s room.

He snapped off the tape recorder before he spoke, and the
colonel’s yellowish eyes followed him and he gave a short, choppy nod of his
cropped bullet head and spoke uncomfortably. “Perfectly correct. I apologize,
Mr. Durell.”

“You surprised
rne
, and you have
my apologies, too, Colonel Mayubashur."

“You know me? I am head of the local police.”

“Ruler pro tern of these islands, too, I understand.” Durell
smiled. “Do you personally bug every visitor’s room, sir?"

“You are not an ordinary visitor, Mr. Durell. We are not
stupid or ignorant, sir. Surely you must realize from your briefing that
the political climate here is most explosive, and any outside interference is
most unwelcome.”

“I am not here to interfere.”