Black Water (15 page)

He managed to slow his breathing a little, but only a little. Each time he inhaled, he still sucked the cloth into his mouth, like a tiny billowing sail, shortening the breath that followed. When he exhaled, he blew the cloth back out with more force than was wise, filling the interior of the hood with his own CO
₂
.
I must stop this
.

The door opened again, slammed back against the wall. The light in the room changed – he could tell through the hood. Sounds were muffled but he felt sure that several men had entered the room. A pair of hands scrabbled against his neck and the drawstring around the bottom of the hood. For a moment he thought, if they aren’t careful, they’ll asphyxiate me instead of getting me free. The string pulled against his windpipe, released, and the hood was yanked away. As his eyes adjusted he caught the blurred form of a figure in front of him and then another two against a wall, more distant, to one side, but before he had time to configure what he was seeing a hand grabbed a handful of his hair and shook his head from side to side and Joosten’s round face was in his and his voice was booming in his ears, ‘Wakey wakey Nic old man, you’ve passed!’

‘Fuck you, Joosten,’ Harper gasped, his breath still painfully laboured in his chest, ‘fuck you.’

The two trainers, leaning back against the wall of the cell with their arms folded, burst into appreciative laughter; Joosten clapped him on the shoulder; and for a moment or two, as the breath that heaved in his throat still felt as heavy as sand and his chest pressed painfully inwards, it occurred to Harper that when he got out in the field, it would not, after all, be one big game.

There was a pleasing symmetry to his arriving in Jakarta by ship. He had left on a long sea journey at the age of three from this very port, perhaps even this very jetty, and here he was, returning the same way, nearly two decades later. Last time he had stood on this spot he was an undersized boy, head shaved to keep the lice at bay. Now, he was a man. He had done his national service; he had – as Gregor had pointed out to Johnson – received the Cadet Lion Honourable Mention in his group; he was fit and trained.

He imagined his younger self, big-eyed and malnourished, a refugee child clinging to his mother’s skirts, looking up at his grown self in awe. I’m
back
, he thought, as he stood on the dock long after the other passengers had disembarked, waiting for the crate he was accompanying to be unloaded, looking around at the vast sheds and the gangs of shirtless men, a foreman yelling at them in a high-pitched voice. The jetty he was standing on was for deep-sea ships, the passenger liners, and his boat was the only arrival in port at present, but stretching far in the distance, to his right, was the long strip of docking bays for the smaller freight boats, old wooden things, hardly seaworthy they looked, with peeling paintwork on their high bows. These were the boats that would sail to and from Sumatra, Borneo, the smaller islands perhaps, carrying everything from cement powder to coconut husks for animal feed, coffee, spices. He could get on one of those freight vessels and be almost anywhere, nowhere as far as anyone else was concerned. What a fine thought. The further you travelled, the more you faded from view, until nobody knew where you were or if you even existed. Were it not for the seriousness of his mission, he would be tempted to stroll down to one of those boats now, deserting his crate and his tin trunk full of research, shedding everything Dutch or American about himself, bribe the captain with cash, stow away – and disappear.

The port was undergoing expansion; skeletons of new sheds were ranged in different stages of construction and beneath the mechanical chunter of boat engines and the shouts of men was the grind and spin of machinery at work: a cumulative noise that made the port seem like a living thing, a monster needing to be fed. A row of open trucks loaded with sandbags and coils of rope lined the edge of the concrete jetty to his left – parked perilously close to the water, he thought. As he watched, a man standing on top of the bags raised a hand in which there was the steel question mark of a hook. He jabbed the hook into one of the bags then pulled, slitting the bag open. Sand ran out in a torrent, down the side of the truck and into a wheelbarrow held by another man waiting below. Indonesia: always a work in progress – he had followed the recent history of the land of his birth enough to know that. But now what? Where was that progress heading now the great
Bung Karno
was drifting ever closer to Peking?

He had bought a packet of
kreteks
on board ship and he paused to light one now, ceremoniously – he had made himself wait until he was standing on Javanese soil. It wasn’t much to mark his return but it was small and private, which suited him just fine: the only other person who would appreciate the significance of this arrival was his mother and she didn’t know where he was, only that he had left Amsterdam ‘on another one of your stupid trips’, as she called them. Lately, she had taken to accusing him of not being abroad at all, just avoiding her. ‘When are you going to find a nice girl and settle down? What’s wrong with you? I’d been married twice by your age.’ That wasn’t strictly accurate but then Anika rarely was.

He flicked the match away, inhaled deeply on the cigarette, blew out, then flapped his hand at the young man who had darted forward from the crowd in the hope of picking up his tin trunk or one of the cases that sat on top of it. ‘
Tidak, tidak . . .
’ he said, then added, ‘
Terima kasih, tak usah . . .
’
He passed his tongue over his lips – the sweet taste of cloves; the
kretek
was a honeyed hint of delirium, temporary and addictive. The ground beneath his feet felt pliant after three weeks at sea.

He was being met by a driver – the local office had organised it. The ship had docked early but it would take some time for him to locate his crate once the ship had been emptied. The driver would be late. There was no hurry. Above him, to the right, some of the crates from the cargo hold were already swinging on ropes, the men waiting below, the foreman shouting.

The Institute’s operations were in their infancy here: there was no physical office, just two local staff who both operated from their homes and they were out of town in Central Java, assessing the situation there. There would be no briefing for a while and even afterwards, he would be running his own operation, more or less, under Johnson’s instruction. The local staff were there to help with his language skills and advise on customs and etiquette, they weren’t trained men. There would be a chance to orientate himself, walk around, get used to the humidity, practise his Indonesian in shops and restaurants in districts of the city away from the ones where he would be working – and to buy more
kreteks
. Gregor may have been over-optimistic about his language skills but soon he would be smoking just like a local.

His instructions were to go with the driver to an area north of Glodok. The driver would know where to go, which street to wait in. Afterwards, he would be taken to a guesthouse in the Menteng district – but first he had to hand over the crate to the Americans. As they drove, a light rain began to fall, misting row after row of low-rise buildings, the warehouses giving way to long strips of open-fronted shops. Harper glanced at the driver from time to time, a silent man with a small, triangular face. More than just a driver, he guessed. He tried a little of his Indonesian on him but the man spoke so quickly and briefly in reply that he couldn’t catch what he was saying.

The main roads were broad in Old Jakarta but behind them were multiple smaller roads and alleyways – although he’d been told to take a walk through the
kampong
if he wanted to understand the meaning of the word narrow. Most of Jakarta was
kampong
, Joosten had said, vast shanty towns of slums, divided and subdivided, with streets so small, so densely lined with open shacks that you walked through people’s living rooms as you strolled along. At the height of the dry monsoon, in August, a load of them would burn down. Then they sprang up again. And later, when the weather broke and the wet monsoon rolled in, they would be flooded. Fire and water: the alternate hazards of Jakarta.

They parked in a road behind Kota railway station. There, they waited in silence. Harper offered the driver a
kretek
and he took one with a terse nod. Eventually, another car pulled up behind and a white man around Harper’s age got out with two Indonesian men. Harper saw them emerge in the rear-view mirror and opened his door. By the time he had climbed out, the white man was standing there, extending a hand. ‘I’m Michael, welcome to Jakarta.’ He had an American accent and a short crowbar leaning at a diagonal out of his jacket pocket.

‘John.’ They shook hands.

Michael turned to where the other men were already lifting the crate out of the boot of Harper’s car. It was heavy – they both carried it, two-handed and shuffling, to the boot of the American’s car and placed it inside. Harper waited while the American went round to the rear of the car, gestured for the men to get back in, then bent his head into the boot. There was a crack and a splintering sound as he prised the crate open. He stayed bent into the boot for a few moments, counting, perhaps, moving straw aside? M1 Garands? The Heckler & Koch? Or it could be ammo, more likely with a small delivery – or something specialist, perhaps. After a moment, Michael straightened, lifted his hand to Harper in salute.

First job done. That was pretty easy. Harper got into the passenger seat of his car.

‘Guesthouse now, sir?’ asked his driver, cracking a smile for the first time.

Harper nodded. ‘Guesthouse now.’

For the next few months, he acclimatised. He got used to the blanket of heat that lay over the city at all times of the day and night, the way the closeness of the air made him feel a little nauseous first thing in the morning. He toured the city on a moped, weaving in and out of the traffic on the wide superhighways that carved their way through the shanty towns like a lawnmower scything grass: the Great Leader Soekarno was on a massive building programme, to prove to the world that Jakarta was a modern city, the Paris of the East. He wrote reports for Johnson and Amsterdam on the grip the PKI was exerting in certain districts: anti-Western graffiti was everywhere:
KILL CAPITALIST SKUM.
He befriended Benni the gangster – and saw his first but not last incident of a man being tortured.

As the antagonism towards foreigners in Jakarta grew, more and more of them left the city, particularly the Americans and the Brits, and he began to understand why Gregor had chosen him. He bought his clothes at a store next to the guesthouse and let his hair grow for a bit then went to a barber on Jalan Gondangdia who cut it like the local men’s – he had arrived with it too short and neat around his ears, he realised. He worked on his language skills and his mannerisms. When he wasn’t hanging out with Benni’s gang, he took to wandering the streets in a white shirt and sarong. Sometimes, he would spend time squatting by the road alongside other men with mopeds but nothing to do because petrol was so scarce. He joined a couple of demonstrations where he wore a red bandana and shouted slogans but his instructions were clear: observe, join in a bit but don’t get actively involved. Only once did he overstep the mark, caught up in the excitement of one march, when he observed an Australian television crew filming the gang he was with. As they passed, he shook his fist at them and shouted, ‘Lackeys of the British!’ and the young men either side of him took up the shout. The film crew followed them for a few minutes, until two of the young men in Harper’s group detached themselves and went up to the Australians and started shoving them backwards. Harper kept going but glanced back: it was frustrating, always being on the fringe of the action.

At other times, he dressed in his beige slacks and a shirt, combed his hair with pomade and pressed a panama on top and went hanging out in the bars frequented by the foreign press. Once, he even encountered a man he was sure had been amongst the Australian television crew – but with Harper in Western clothes and speaking immaculate English, there was no flicker of recognition from the Australian, to whom all Indonesian protestors no doubt looked the same. The man was called Gibson and they got drunk together on Tjap Tikus, high-end
arak
, round a small table in a side-street bar off Jalan Thamrin.

‘Soekarno’s started eating his own,’ Gibson confided. ‘You know lots of the ministers have taken to sleeping away from their homes at night? The Father of the Nation’s getting careless. When you start making your own people that nervous, you know . . .’ He made a short stabbing notion at Harper’s ribs.

Later, after Harper had moved on to fruit juice but Gibson had stayed on the
arak
, the Australian became loquacious. ‘Indonesia isn’t a nation, it’s an
imagin
ation,’ he said, then looked around, pleased with himself. ‘S’karno made it up! Made it up, the speeches, and, take it from me, when they push’m out, the whole lot will just evaporate . . . like a
dream
. . .’ At this, Gibson splayed his fingers and moved his hand in a semi-circular motion in front of Harper’s face. ‘S’all going to fall apart. Easy to sneer at him, in his hat, with his girlfriends, but you look at what will happen if he goes. Jus’ wait. Holds it all together.’ He clenched his fist.

Harper made a note of the man’s sympathies – perhaps the Americans should look into him – and could not resist adding, ‘Well, maybe we should wait and see what happens if this region becomes the next Communist bloc. I wonder what the Indonesian for
gulag
is.’

The bar was dark, the fan above them inefficient, the crowd large even though a lot of Westerners had left: there were so few places in the city where Westerners felt comfortable any more, they had a tendency to congregate. Gibson withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. ‘God knows why they call it the Cold War, it’s fucking hot in Jakarta.’ And Harper rewarded him with a clap on the shoulder and a convincing laugh.

Then came the abrupt command from Johnson: forget the gangsters. Four months of careful, nauseating and sometimes dangerous sucking up to Benni and it was all down the drain.

‘Why?’ Harper asked. He and Johnson were in the same bar where he had drunk Gibson beneath a table, but this time it was daytime and they were sipping green tea. The curfew had made nighttime excursions increasingly difficult, the journalists all stuck to the hotel bar now, and the power shortages meant many places closed at night anyway. The Merdeka Day celebrations had been and gone and Soekarno had declared a new stage in the revolution, which for most people meant that the rice shortages had reached epidemic proportions. No one was paid in rupiah any more, there was no point: people were demanding to be paid in rice and there wasn’t enough rice to pay them. Some were simply marching into stores in mobs and helping themselves.

They were sitting at the front, by the windows, where the shutters were pulled back and Johnson’s car was parked on the kerb. Harper had noticed that Johnson never went anywhere on foot any more – he was always in a car with a couple of minders in it. The People’s Youth had taken to beating up foreigners.

Johnson was in his usual taciturn mood, sipping carefully at his tea, glancing out of the window from time to time. ‘Things are moving fast,’ he said. ‘We need to speed things up a bit.’

Johnson insisted that Harper move into Hotel Indonesia, which was full of foreign journalists like Gibson and the businessmen who were prepared to overlook the rising political tensions while Jakarta was an opportunity: Soekarno was still building freeways, after all. ‘We can’t guarantee your safety if you stay in that guesthouse,’ Johnson told Harper and Harper wanted to reply, when have you ever guaranteed my safety? Johnson would stay concerned for his well-being right up until the point when he was compromised in any way, upon which he would deny that he or any other American official had ever met or known him. Surely the visibility of being in a place like Hotel Indonesia, full of foreigners, constantly spied upon, had its own dangers?