The Black Isle (58 page)

“He’s got commandoes with him. Former navy men, people like that.”

“We’re well aware of that.” I could hear him grinding his teeth. “Don’t you think we’ve been working twenty-four hours a day for the past two years looking for them?”

“But the Isle’s not that big!”

“And you’re a bloody
librarian
!” He held himself back from saying worse. “Look, I’m already having the worst day imaginable. I have to get back to work.”

Rather than fight him, I said something I never imagined I’d say to him again:

“Let me help.”

It took a few days, but through the mysterious, invisible veins of the underground circuit, my request for a meeting was ferried to Issa’s ear. To my surprise, he agreed. I suggested we meet at midnight at his father’s grave in the cemetery on Forbidden Hill, where he would feel protected by spirits he could corral at a moment’s notice.

Of course, I’d picked this spot also because if I was endangered, I, too, could call up an army of my own. But I felt confident that neither of us would break our sacred treaty and disturb the dead.

At the stroke of midnight, in the silent heart of the cemetery, a voice boomed out of the darkness, “Your hair’s gone white.”

I turned. “Iskandar.”

He smiled. “I forgot about that. I thought you’d sent an old woman in your place.”

He was dressed in a white long-sleeved shirt and khaki slacks, more or less what he’d worn on our first meeting on this mount. But I was startled by how he’d aged. His hair was gone and he limped along with the help of a cane. Other than his smile—still the image of potent ambiguity—he looked like the average Malay grandfather, not an idealistic freedom fighter or some unstoppable satanic mastermind.

My first impulse was to embrace him. But as he hobbled toward me from behind the moss-covered gravestone, I could tell he didn’t wish to be touched. His eyes brimmed with mistrust.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because he hates us. He hates all of us. The man is built on hate. But you knew that from the beginning. You made that bargain yourself when you became close to him.”

“If it’s a bargain, as you say, then you made one with him, too, for far longer than I did.”

“True, but I had to do it, for my cause. The same way he went with the British when it suited him, went against them when it stopped suiting him. Isn’t that politics? And now he’s going after us.”

“Us?”

He smiled. “Oh, Cassandra. Of course I don’t mean you. I’m referring to all of us who don’t fit into his master plan—the ones who make his Isle
dirty
, the ones he wants to make disappear. The underdogs, the original people, the dark ones, the ghosts. I had to do something before he began purging us.” His voice rose. “The Isle belonged to
us
first! Before the Dutch came and the Portuguese and the British came, before
you people
came, we were doing perfectly well for ourselves. We had our land and our water and our spices—God was on our side. This was
our
paradise—ours!—and then you people with your greed and your ambition came and snatched away our souls.”

I winced at the cruel readiness with which he flung “you people” at me.

“I know you think I quit his government because of the fire. But I didn’t give a damn about Redhill—that place was full of your kind. No, I quit because of what he said a long time ago to win the election. Surely you remember. He said he wanted to move the Isle away from these waters because this part of the world wasn’t good enough for him. I knew that this was how he’d always felt but to proudly say it out loud, to stir up the kind of feelings that a comment like that would stir up, that’s
wicked
. You people stole our land and yet you feel the right to condescend?

“I was filled with so much rage and shame. Every night when I went home from work, my neighbors would stare at me as if I’d sold my soul to the devil. I wanted to quit right then but I couldn’t. I knew I had to resist, to learn his ways, to use him against himself. And the moment I left, I felt reborn.”

“Do you feel better off now, killing innocent people?”

“Innocent?” he scoffed. “There are no innocent people on this island.”

“What do you want?”

“You, of all people, should understand, Cassandra. I no longer want to be in the shadows. I no longer want my people to be in the shadows.”

“And through violence, you’ll get the attention you deserve?”

He laughed at me, like I was a naïve little girl.

“No, you misunderstand me. I don’t want attention. All I want is respect and dignity for my people, for us to be returned what is
rightfully
ours, what is
owed
to us.” These words seemed to soften him, and he grew quiet, almost ruminative. “As soon as he got elected, he dropped me like a stone. Do you know how difficult it is to talk to him? He surrounds himself with soldiers and gunmen, as if he’s some emperor everyone’s out to kill. It’s been like this for years. I could never get a minute alone with him. He always had somebody around guarding him, as if he trusted that stranger more than he trusted
me
—me who saved his life more than once. Wouldn’t you find that insulting?”

“Yes,” I said. And I understood. But I was here to stop Issa’s attacks, to forge a truce. “If there’s something I can tell him for you, what would it be?”

“I want to meet him, face-to-face, and talk to him alone, like old times, the way you and I are talking now. I’d like to believe he’s still got that much humanity—and humility—left in him.”

I nodded, and to my surprise, he embraced me.

We stood there in that cemetery on the hill, two worn-down soldiers looking down through the night at the city we’d fought to create. The Black River lay beneath us, uncoiled like an onyx snake. On its banks were warehouses and godowns now silent, black and asleep. The only light came from the Edinburgh Bridge, the serpent’s metallic waistline. It shone like a white cummerbund. And such a clean bridge it was, too. No pedestrians passed over it—the bombs had kept people at home—and no ghosts either—the lights had taken care of that.

Issa pointed. “Let’s meet there, tomorrow midnight.”

I went to see Kenneth that same night. It was my first time visiting the prime minister’s office, and I was stunned at how his personal style had colonized the Victorian grandeur of Parliament House: bare white walls, uncarpeted wood floors, and the pervasive smell of 4711 cologne. The cologne, he explained, was to ward off the old British smells that still clung to the cracks.

“Cheesy feet, gammon breath, and goaty underarms.”

Not having seen him in the flesh for years, I felt weak-legged with longing. For my youth perhaps, and an earlier Kenneth. It wasn’t that he looked any different from his newspaper photos or televised appearances—he was even wearing his campaign uniform of gray-blue shirt and pants. No, it was his presence—the smell of him, the darting eyes, the quick, slippery smiles, the quintessence of Kenneth that nobody but me grasped.

We stepped into his chamber. His desk was flanked by two framed pictures. Both were color panoramas: one showed a Jakarta slum, the other downtown Geneva.

“This is so every time I decide on policy, I see the two possible scenarios and I’m reminded of why I do what I do,” he said. “Order…or chaos.”

“And you walk the middle path—tyranny.”

He stared at me, mystified, it seemed. “What crude and appalling labels you use, Cassandra. Didn’t you learn anything by going to China? The root of my success,
our
success, is that
we
, as in
all
Islanders, share a secret. You’re not exempt. We all understand it, we all abide by it, and the secret is this: We came here with nothing but we sure as hell aren’t going to leave with nothing. And so long as we keep this secret that others like to call greed or ambition, so long as we hold on to it like a
family
, we won’t end up poor and depraved like our neighbors.”

An assistant brought us a midnight snack—warmed-up chicken rice from Mitzi’s, served on the gilded, embossed china of the prime minister’s office.

“I know, the takeaway version just doesn’t have the same snap.” He shrugged. “The chicken seems…wan. But beggars can’t be choosers. I can’t just waltz into any old coffee shop like you. I’ve lost that luxury.” He popped a piece of thigh meat onto his tongue. “So what did our former comrade want?”

I gave him Issa’s list of conditions: no police, no weapons, no recording devices; in short, no nonsense. Naturally, I neglected to share with him some of Issa’s more outlandish views.

I wanted to believe that Kenneth’s drained, haunted look was sincere. I’d seen that same expression at his baby’s christening—bewilderment that his outer self had run ahead and done things without first consulting his inner self. But what did it mean?

“I wish I’d kept him closer. Him and Zhang—even
you
.” He laughed dryly. “You may not believe me, but there’s a big part of me that just wants to ditch everything here and run off into the jungle with him. Just
vanish
. There’s such a purity to how he views the world. It’s almost”—he searched for the right word—“comforting.”

“Comforting for him or for you?”

He didn’t answer. But I wondered if, like me, he had grown weary of his world and wanted something simpler—not the jungle perhaps, but something else.

As I was leaving, he took my arm.

“I know we have history between us, but I think you understand.” He looked me in the eye. “I’ve always done everything for the Isle. You do know this, don’t you?”

“I’d
like
to believe it.”

“Well”—he gave me a tired smile—“that’s a start.”

I went home to catch a few hours’ sleep. The prime minister remained in his office, surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards.

When I returned to Parliament House the next morning, the air was thick, monsoonal. It was exhaustingly muggy, even by Island standards, and this made everyone tense. Or almost everyone. Kenneth sat behind his desk with the distant, meditative aura of a monk, fondling the rosary of his gold Rolex. Was he actually thinking of ditching everything? After all, it would make a frightening sort of poetic sense. But I kept those thoughts to myself; his lieutenants seemed jittery enough.

I went over the plan again, Kenneth nodding neutrally after each point. At midnight, he would stand alone on the Edinburgh Bridge’s north end. The streets within a one-mile radius would be closed off to traffic. I would lead Issa from the Forbidden Hill cemetery down to the bridge’s south end, then disappear into the night, my work done. Each man, carrying his own black umbrella, would walk toward the center of the bridge. The meeting would be almost romantic.

“Are you nervous?” I asked. I certainly was. So much could go wrong: Issa saying something to Kenneth to enrage him, or vice versa. Above all, there was the haunting possibility that Kenneth might abdicate and turn civilian again.

He gave me the frozen smile of a politician forced to squander his Sunday at a supermarket opening.

“It’s going to be all right.” He patted my arm. “Disregard what I said last night. That was just the tension talking. No matter what happens tonight, I’d like you to know I appreciate you. I couldn’t have done all this without you.”

I turned back one last time. “Don’t run away.”

Kenneth stared at me with deadened eyes, his decision already locked in place. Nothing I said could change his mind.

“Don’t you be late,” he replied.

The rainwater gushed downhill, a fast-moving river crashing into the backs of our heels. I guided Issa down Forbidden Hill, clutching his arm so he wouldn’t slip and fall. Water sloshed inside our shoes; we might as well have gone barefoot. The storm was bearing down sideways and ricocheting off the hard ground. The umbrella we shared was no match for this deluge.

His cane useless, Issa almost lost his footing several times. He clucked his tongue, his annoyance so vast it was almost as if he wanted to call the whole thing off—the threats, the men hiding in the forest, and especially this troublesome reunion.

I, too, wished that he could wash away the colossal past with a sad laugh—it was all a stupid joke gone wrong—and surrender himself.

But it was a fantasy that the Isle’s fate could be decided by the messiness of one persistent rainstorm.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Optimistic.”

It wasn’t the answer I’d been expecting. As the white lights of the bridge came into view, the arrogance melted from his face. He tightened his grip on my arm as we stepped across another puddle. I felt the time was right for an overdue confession.

“Iskandar.” Just saying his full, majestic name brought an ache to my heart. “Years ago, I did something very stupid. I tried calling forth the spirits, in the back of the Wees’ house.”

“Did you succeed?”

“No.”

“Then you should have nothing to worry about.”

“But I think I released something. The badi.”

“Why do you think this?”

“Because it crawled out of the grave in the form of a dog-headed man. That was how they buried Mr. Wee, you know—they sewed Agnes’s head onto him.”

Issa’s silence agonized me more than anything he could have said.

“Say something, Iskandar.”

“You should have put it back in the ground.”

“But I didn’t know how.”

“Well, I suppose, the damage has been done.”

I froze. “What does that mean?”

“It means, my friend, that if the badi wants nothing more from you, you’ll never hear from it again. But if it feels it still has unfinished business, you can be absolutely sure you’ll meet again.” His eyes darkened. “A bit like Kenneth Kee.”

We reached the south end of the Edinburgh Bridge. So this was it. Issa seemed to sense it, too. He looked at me with a bit of the old tenderness. “I’m glad you’re with me.”

But was I?

Through the rain, I glimpsed the black silhouette of a man on the other end of the bridge. Black raincoat, black umbrella. I waved to him and he waved back, watch glinting. There was nobody else about, no other sound but the unrelenting claps of rain.