Fishing for Stars (74 page)

Anna had been in Indonesia the week it happened and I was anxious to question her about the incident. She arrived on the island during the afternoon, and we were soon, as usual, drinking champagne on the verandah before dinner. ‘How are the Indonesians reacting to the invasion of East Timor and the news of the five journalists killed? What do you think really happened?’ I asked.

‘What the news report said – they were caught in crossfire between the two sides.’ She sipped her champagne. ‘As for the locals, I don’t think the deaths caused much of a stir. Violent death is pretty commonplace in their society. Last week the price of cooking oil went up; to them that’s the truly tragic news.’

‘Jesus, it’s a weird world! But I guess you’re right – if it isn’t happening to us, we don’t care! But you can’t help thinking it’s rather strange. The journos were not all from the same media organisation. Bloody strange that they should all be in the same spot at the same time.’

Anna shrugged. ‘Bad luck, I guess. Balibo is not a big town and it’s built in the Portuguese style more or less around a large square. That’s where most of the fighting took place. It would be quite logical they’d be found there. It’s horrible . . . their poor families,’ Anna concluded.

‘You’ve been there? Balibo?’

‘No, Budi has . . . is.’

‘There now, as we speak?’

‘Well, perhaps not now, not at this moment, but after the incident. He’s head of the army’s legal department; there’s going to be an inquiry into the deaths,’ Anna explained.

‘Inquiry or the usual whitewash?’

‘Nicholas, Budi is a good lawyer!’

‘Yeah, but working for a bad country.’

‘That’s not entirely fair. We don’t know what happened.’

There was no point in continuing along this line. ‘You speak to him regularly. Why are the Indonesians so keen to take over East Timor?’ I asked. ‘It’s an impoverished agrarian country, has no strategic importance and produces bugger all that Indonesia doesn’t possess in spades anyway. You would think it will prove a millstone around their neck rather than an asset.’

Anna laughed. ‘Well, I don’t have to ask Budi for the answer to that one – the Indonesian newspapers are full of it, have been for months. It’s Fretilin, the home-grown communist group who have become a force in East Timor. Indonesia – well, the Suharto regime – is paranoid about the communists. Look what they did to their own! They’re afraid it’ll start to spread from East Timor and create trouble in the region.’

‘Anna, that’s bullshit. Indonesia has the biggest army in Asia after China, they couldn’t possibly be concerned.’

‘Well, the invasion seems to have pleased America and that’s important to Indonesia. Besides, Australia isn’t exactly rushing to condemn the invaders, either at home or at the United Nations. Or, it seems, make too much of a fuss over the five dead journalists.’

‘Precisely. That’s what worries me. It’s a Labor government and Whitlam is running for cover. Talk about prevarication. Richard Woolcott is bending over backwards toadying up to Suharto – the back of his ambassadorial head is practically touching his heels. I just don’t get it. Five of our blokes are killed and our prime minister is full of mealy-mouthed words of regret but taking bugger all action to discover the bastards who did the killing.’ I sniffed in disgust. ‘Crossfire my arse!’

Anna proffered her empty glass. ‘Thanks, Nicholas, the third glass is the one that makes me relax.’ I poured the champagne and, accepting it, she said almost casually, ‘It’s the oil.’

‘What oil? There’s been nothing about oil in the Australian papers.’

She laughed. ‘Nor in the Indonesian ones. Of course not! It’s the very last thing either country wants to talk about but it’s the unspoken reason for everything.’

‘You mean the death of the journalists? Is that why no one is making an official fuss?’

Anna shrugged. ‘Possibly.’

‘How do you know all this? Budi?’

Anna pouted and shrugged again. ‘How else?’

‘This oil, is it a lot? What does Budi know about it?’

‘As it happens, quite a lot. Remember he’s the army’s top legal man. And yes, the ocean floor deposits are huge.’

‘Let me guess, the oil is in East Timor’s territorial waters.’

‘And a small part of it in our own. No prizes for obvious conclusions, Nicholas.’

‘Ah, I see! Stupid me. Fretilin, the communists, won’t cooperate but Indonesia will?’

‘Well, yes. They, the Indonesians, are prepared to give us a more equitable share.’

‘Of a commodity they don’t own!’

‘But now control. Yes, they gain and we gain. We don’t make more than a token fuss with the UN and everyone’s happy.’

‘Except the people of East Timor who get bugger all. Shit, that’s unfair!’

‘Nicholas,’ Anna said reproachfully, ‘get real. You’ve been around long enough and you’ve seen enough in the islands to know what goes on. Only, with the big countries, the grubby commercial realities are all dressed up in sanctimonious crap about freedom and regional security. The free world will never have a better scapegoat than communism.
There’s a red under every bed
still works as a scare slogan. Both countries should pay Fretilin a bonus for supplying the perfect excuse for an invasion. There’s certain to be an Order of Australia coming up for Ambassador Woolcott as soon as the fuss dies down. Our good man in Indonesia,’ Anna laughed.

We were silent for a while then I asked, ‘Anna, this oil. You and Budi, you’re not . . . ?’

Anna drained her glass. ‘Of course not! It’s much too early yet. Burmah Oil haven’t completed mapping the extent of the find.’

‘Every two minutes a woman is raped in the world! Every two minutes! That’s 263 000 reported cases, and it’s estimated only sixteen per cent of rapes are reported. When you extrapolate from that, every twenty seconds a woman or a child is being raped somewhere in the world!’

Anna Til

IT WAS NINE YEARS
since Anna and I had talked about East Timor, but in retrospect, Marg’s telephone call was nicely timed to coincide with a resurgence of bad publicity about what was now referred to as the murder of the five journalists in Balibo by the Indonesian forces. While nothing could be proved – no country had yet instigated an independent inquiry into the deaths – it was impossible to ignore the many rumoured eyewitness accounts maintaining that it was a deliberate assassination carried out by Indonesian military forces. This was certainly the opinion of most thinking Australians.

I had been pretty angry at the time and still believe that, as a country, we behaved in an unconscionable manner. When Britain deserted Australia in 1942, leaving us open to invasion by Japan, the Australian people felt betrayed, and now we were watching another even smaller country being trounced by a much larger power. It is no different to watching your neighbours being murdered and their home being trashed while you sit by and do nothing.

In fairness, the Whitlam and the caretaker Fraser governments couldn’t have done much to stop the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. While the Indonesians deliberately flouted international law, nobody, least of all the Americans, was interested in coming to the defence of a new ‘communist’ island state or challenging an invading anti-communist Indonesia whom America regarded as a good friend. Australia simply lacked the necessary military might, quite apart from the political will, to launch a military operation to halt the invasion of the fledgling independent state.

To my mind, our refusal to take a strong political and diplomatic stand against Indonesia’s actions was gutless and morally reprehensible, a cynical decision, although politicians will always claim it was pragmatic. We didn’t even take the matter to the United Nations, the organisation supposedly set up to resolve such issues.

One of the major reasons was that we were greedy. We understood that, with a proverbial diplomatic nod and a wink, Indonesia would agree to Australia getting the lion’s share of the vast, newly discovered Timor Sea oil and gas reserves – a far greater share than we were entitled to under international law or special treaty – so long as we acquiesced to the annexation of a tiny, newly independent nation.

The Australian Government’s cowardly acceptance that the deaths of the Balibo Five were an accident of war when they were so obviously blatant murder, and the craven refusal by successive Australian governments to condemn the murders meant that nine years later the issue still refused to go away; in fact the greed, cowardice and duplicity of all three Australian governments became more and more evident as time went by. The repeated atrocities – some observers called it genocide – against the population of East Timor continued to keep the issue on the front pages.

To put the losses of the East Timorese in perspective, Australia in all its wars to this point has lost a total of 102 807 service people. East Timor, in the short, vicious and unequal war with Indonesia and its subsequent struggle over the past nine years, had lost 200 000 people! Almost one in three Timorese lost their lives, while we calmly looked on, and continue to do so.

Indonesia was on the nose big-time, and Marg’s threat to expose Anna’s destruction of old-growth forests in Indonesian Borneo, taken together with the heart-rending photos of the cruel deaths of the orangutans and the threat of their extinction, was perfectly timed and had all the ingredients of a major journalistic coup.

Of even more concern was Marg’s hint that she possessed new material on East Timor and that Budi might be implicated. If this was about the Balibo Five, then Anna was, technically at least, in the clear. But if it concerned East Timor oil . . . Nine years previously Anna had hinted to me that she and Budi might become involved, which for Anna was shorthand for certainty. She would, I knew, by now be in it up to her neck. Anna was a long-term planner who could sniff out money long before anyone else caught the faintest whiff.

Anna’s association with Budi wouldn’t be hard to uncover. If he was somehow implicated in the deaths of the Balibo Five, as well as being in on the oil deal, her involvement with him could lead to all sorts of conclusions being drawn. Major General Budi Til was head of the military legal department, married to one of Suharto’s cousins and known to be among the powerful and mega-rich (read corrupt) generals in the president’s inner council. Add to this their destruction of the jungle and the great apes story and Australia’s richest self-made woman had nowhere to hide. She would be seen as totally corrupt. Once it was known that she had been born in Java and was half Javanese, she would be regarded as one of them. There was a lot of loose ends, but an imaginative journalist wouldn’t have too much trouble tying them together, and once knotted, there was enough rope to hang Anna Til, the woman with the same surname as the notorious major general. No doubt just another coincidence? Ha! Ha! The Sunday tabloids would have a field day.

That’s the trouble with a couple of stiff Scotches on an empty stomach – you start to speculate, then make connections, then draw conclusions. Cook called me in to dinner and I found I’d lost my appetite, even though shepherd’s pie is a favourite.

I picked Anna up from the airport the following day but decided not to broach the subject with her until champagne hour. I’d also decided to refer to the oil first, because it wasn’t connected directly with Marg, unlike the deforestation and the orangutan photograph. With luck I could fudge it and say I’d heard it elsewhere. I knew that, no matter how much I denied it, if I led with the photograph she’d instantly know Marg was involved and from that point on any possibility of finding a solution would be lost.

These days Anna’s time at Beautiful Bay was less about relaxing and more about work. I was lucky if we got two days free to go sailing. She didn’t seem able to relax and was losing weight. For the first time since we’d known each other her incredible eyes seemed to lack some of their former lustre, and sometimes, when she thought nobody was looking, I’d see her slightly slumped with her eyes closed, gripping the arms of her chair. Anna was obviously under a fair amount of stress but if I brought it up she’d laugh. ‘Part of the business, Nicholas; it goes with the territory. But really, darling, I’m fine, it’s just that the past three weeks have been busy.’

I’d long since given up hoping that her one week a month at Beautiful Bay would allow her to relax and for a few days forget about the empire she was building. I had gradually learned that making money in very large amounts was an obsession like any other and that it had nothing to do with never having enough or even with security. It was a psychological need and an addiction. Her substance abuse was no different; Anna was never going to kick her heroin habit and she’d long ago giving up trying. Asking her to stop increasing what was already a vast fortune in order to smell the roses was equally pointless.

Rather than have her working all day in her bedroom, I’d built her an office next to my own so that we could share the filing facilities, fax and phone lines, and if anything came in for her while she was away, I’d fax it to her office in Melbourne then file it without reading it, or I’d re-direct callers to her office. While always maintaining what I hoped was a healthy curiosity about how the world works I’ve never been a stickybeak. If Anna didn’t care to tell me what she was up to, as was usually the case, I didn’t want her to think I was a snoop. There was also the fact that Anna’s financial affairs were all transacted through Port Vila, not only because it was a tax haven, but also because government administration was pretty lax and unlike the Australian Tax Office or Corporate Affairs, there would be no one looking over her shoulder.

But now I realised that all along, Marg (perfidious woman) must have been taking the opportunity to rummage through the documents in Anna’s filing cabinets. I’d have to speak to her, for if Anna, who was by nature secretive, discovered that she couldn’t trust me to maintain her confidentiality, it would lead to a major breach of faith between us.

Anna maintained a suite of offices in Melbourne with a staff of seven dedicated women who took care of things, knowing exactly what to do when she was away. As an interesting aside, these seven employees were all ex-Madam Butterfly dominatrices. As they grew older, the rigorous physical effort required for some of the discipline routines of bondage became more difficult, so Anna paid for the women to be re-trained. They continued to earn the same salaries they’d made in the bondage house, which was greatly in excess of a normal clerk’s wages, but then the work they did was greatly in excess of that of a normal clerk. They also had generous superannuation and their mortgages were all paid out.

While this was kind and generous it was also practical. Her staff were accustomed to keeping information about their clients to themselves. Anna demanded and received absolute loyalty, probity and secrecy in return for her largesse. They not only loved her but also, I felt certain, would willingly have committed perjury for her and happily gone to prison with their mouths still firmly shut. I felt sure they would have worked for a bed and a meal, if necessary. They were at her beck and call twenty-four hours a day and if they possessed lives of their own they could only lead them once Anna’s needs had been satisfied.

I had dubbed them the Secret Seven, and while they all treated me with the utmost respect on the phone and when occasionally we met in Anna’s offices, I knew better than to ask them even the smallest detail about her business. More than one financial journalist, TV current-affairs producer or tabloid gossip columnist had tried to crack the Secret Seven but to no avail; Anna Til remained a closed book, each page seemingly glued to the next. The exception might have been Marg. Just how much she knew of Anna’s affairs I couldn’t say, but certainly, as far as Indonesia was concerned, obviously she knew more than I’d like to think.

That evening, I poured Anna a glass of champagne and myself a Scotch (I keep a clearer mind on whisky, or so I tell myself). As I handed it to her she said, ‘Yummy, thank you, Nicholas. Now, what’s wrong? You’ve been like a bear with a sore head all afternoon. C’mon, out with it.’

It was pointless denying it. Anna could sense the twitch of a single synapse. ‘Can we talk, darling?’ I said, attempting a grin.

‘Of course, always providing you don’t want the details of my bank account,’ she laughed.

‘No, it’s about an anonymous call I received two days ago,’ I lied.

‘What about? Me?’

‘Only indirectly. It was about your mate, Budi.’

‘So, what about him?’

‘Well, as you may know, the conspiracy about the Balibo Five has blown up again.’

‘Yes, it’s in all the papers. I was unaware that Budi had been mentioned.’

‘No, I don’t think he has, but the voice on the other end of the phone suggested that he was about to be.’

‘Oh? Did he give any details?’

‘No, just referred to the media and said, “Watch this space.”’

Anna took a sip from her glass. ‘Nick, are you telling me everything you know? I sense you’re not.’

I guess Anna dealt with duplicity a lot more than I did and had a finely tuned ear for a lie – either that or she was bluffing – but except for saying the call was anonymous I’d stuck to the truth . . . so far. ‘I think I resent that,’ I replied evenly.

‘Sorry, Nicholas,’ Anna said hurriedly. ‘I don’t mean to offend you. Was the voice Australian or Indonesian?’

‘Australian.’

Anna seemed to relax a little. ‘Aha. There’s been a reporter from the
Fin Review
snooping around. Two of the girls have been approached in the coffee shop in our building. He’s probably chancing his arm, knowing your connection with me. His name is Peter Yeldham, the one investigative reporter no one in the financial community wants sniffing about. He’s a hard-evidence man and doesn’t deal in speculation, but he also never lets go. A certain titled millionaire in Sydney is said to have tried to pay him off once and Yeldham simply reported the bribe in the piece he wrote linking the knight of the realm to serious corruption in the transport industry.’

‘Who would sool him onto you? Stan McVitty?’

‘He’d be awfully silly if he did, but that’s unlikely. This is obviously about Indonesia.’

I wasn’t quite silly enough to ask Anna if she had anything to hide, but ventured, ‘Is that anything to worry about?’

Anna laughed. ‘In business there’s always something to worry about, Nicholas.’

‘No, Indonesia, is there something specific?’

‘Well, no, I don’t think so. Business is good, the clothing factory is doing extremely well . . . no, I don’t think so,’ she repeated as if she was reconsidering the question. ‘You yourself know that business in Indonesia is always done in partnership, usually with a general. Budi’s involvement is by no means unusual, every financial reporter would be aware of that.’

It wasn’t yet time to bring up her timber concession. ‘Anna, nine years ago, right here, drinking champagne, we talked about the murders of the five journalists in East Timor and you told me the invasion was all about the oil that had been discovered on the continental shelf, most of it in East Timorese territory. You hinted that maybe you and Budi might get involved, but said it was still much too early . . .’ I paused before asking, ‘Are you?’