The Flame Tree (9 page)

Isaac wiped his face and blew his nose. He settled down to his Esperanto lesson, not knowing why God would have used a Muslim to make him feel better, but quietly grateful for it nonetheless.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, I
SAAC
woke up with another headache. He took a Panadol. His mother told him to stay in bed because she wanted to do a blood test later, just in case malaria was rearing its head. Lieutenant Nugroho was downstairs at the breakfast table, along with a policewoman and Reverend Biggs, discussing the raid on the church with the Williamses. Isaac listened through the bedroom’s open door.

“Aside from the ringleader, your former gardener, Tanto, no one recognized any other of the men,” the lieutenant said. He was speaking Indonesian, as were Mary and Graham.

Graham Williams said, “They were from the Nahdlatul Umat Islam.” He’d learned to the say the name right. As a matter of fact, Isaac reflected, everybody in the compound was saying the name right. “Why don’t you question them? Bring in that Tuan Guru fellow of theirs for some questioning.”

The lieutenant did not reply.

Graham said, “You a sympathizer?”

“I’m no follower of the Tuan Guru Haji.”

“Then why not question him?”

“That would be difficult,” the lieutenant said.

“Okay, let’s try for something less difficult. The mosque
across the street is harassing us with its speakers. Overly loud. We are a hospital, you realize. Patients need rest and quiet. Something must be done.”

The lieutenant said, “The Imam of the Masjid Al-Furqon is one of the Tuan Guru Haji’s important deputies and—”

“Then bring him in for questioning.”

The lieutenant ignored that. “Do you know what
kunut nazilah
means? It is an Islamic concept, a type of jihad against enemies who threaten Islam.”

Reverend Biggs, who knew no Indonesian and had been silent until then because of the language barrier, said, “Jihad,” spitting out the word.

The lieutenant said, in labored English, “Not WTC, no jihad, that terror of bad men. Not good men.”

“The president says ‘crusade,’ and the Muslim world shouts in outrage,” the reverend said, “but this bin Laden monster cries ‘jihad,’ and the Muslim world keeps silent. No wonder Islam breeds terrorists.”

Graham said sharply, “Maynard, be quiet. The last thing we need right now is such inflammatory rhetoric.”

The lieutenant said calmly, “It okay, many stupid people everywhere.”

Isaac smiled, wishing he could see the reverend’s reaction. The lieutenant continued, in Indonesian, “That attack is not jihad, that is evil.
Kunut nazilah
is a different jihad, a jihad of prayer against you.”

“But we’re a hospital,” Mary protested. “We’re doctors treating the poor and the sick.”

“To the Nahdlatul Umat Islam, you are trying to seduce Muslims from the true way of Islam by your doctoring.”

Mary said, “We have never hidden the fact that we are Christians. We try to show the love of Christ to everyone. Everyone receives the same care and compassion.”

“Speaking as a Muslim, I have no quarrel with that or with you,” the lieutenant said. “Wonobo needs your hospital. Now, speaking as a police officer investigating a crime, let me ask a few more questions.” He did so, filling in a few blank spots about the gang of robbers.

Mary said, “That boy took our son’s new shoes, you know.”

“Yes?” the lieutenant said. Paper rustled. “That was not mentioned on the list of stolen items. And where is your son?”

“Upstairs,” Graham said. “A bit sick.”

“I’d like to see him.”

“Isaac, would you come down here, please?” his father called out.

Isaac trudged down the stairs. He knew what was coming. The lieutenant was going to ask him about Ismail. No matter that Ismail wasn’t his friend anymore, he couldn’t tell on him. That wouldn’t be right. He sat down next to his father, opposite the lieutenant. Reverend Biggs sat on the living-room sofa, watching CNN with the volume turned down.

The lieutenant’s uniform was as tight and crisp as ever, but his eyes were red with tiredness. The creases in his cheeks had deepened. “Would you please tell me what happened Tuesday night?”

Isaac did, with strategic omissions.

The lieutenant said, “So you don’t know this boy.”

“No, sir.”

The lieutenant said, “I bet you get around town, the cane fields a lot. I used to play in the fields when I was a boy. I bet you have a lot of local friends your age. In fact, didn’t I meet one last Sunday? A local boy who likes to throw stones?”

Isaac stared out the living-room window. The slash of sky visible above the top of the compound wall was sickly brown, oozing hazy patches of yellow pus.

“Do you know the boy?” Graham asked.

“You don’t want to tell on him, do you?” Mary said.

Isaac shook his head, left, right, left.

Graham said, “I don’t think the police are after your friend. They want the bad men because they broke the law, in a vicious manner. If we let that be, don’t care about it, we might as well let everything fall apart. Into lawlessness.”

Before and after. Ismail had chosen the side of the Lord of the Crows. It wasn’t Isaac’s fault.

“Ismail,” Isaac said. “Ismail Trisno.” He gave the lieutenant Ismail’s address. He kept his gaze on the table. Tears pricked.
I’m not going to cry. Ismail chose, not me.

The policewoman wrote down the information in a notepad.

Isaac looked up at the lieutenant and said, “His father had his land stolen, and then he was fired from the sugar mill.”

The lieutenant said, “Life’s hard for everybody.” He and his assistant stood. He paused and then said, “My condolences again for the New York tragedy. That is not Islam.”

Isaac meandered over to the living-room window and gazed out at the pustular sky. No crows in sight.

The telephone rang. Graham looked at it with a heavy tired blink and then rose to get it with a disarticulated sigh. “Hello, Sheldon. I’d say good morning, but it isn’t. Yours must be hectic as all—excuse me? You’re on your way here? Okay. I’ll be waiting.”

A half hour later Isaac got out of bed again. He put on his old, dirty sneakers and went out to inspect the flame tree. Yesterday’s crimson bloom had spread and strengthened. In past years this annual blossoming always cheered Isaac, not because of any mystical symbolic meaning about life, but because it normally marked the changing of Wonobo’s season from dry to wet. The first rains of the easterly monsoon were to Isaac what the first snowfall of the winter was to his New England cousins.

Isaac felt too weak to climb the tree. He wandered across Doctors’ Alley to the hospital. The gray-black tarmac had a squishy feel to it, softened by the day’s heat. The rest of his body was cold. His head felt bigger than his skull capacity. Thoughts kept expanding in front of him, and he could never quite catch up with them. A work crew was fortifying the walls around the empty plot of land upon which Doctors’ Alley dead-ended.

Hospital Street was not its usual weekday-morning bedlam of traffic. The sidewalks were empty, as were most of the outpatient clinic’s green waiting benches. Isaac sat down on one of the shaded ones. He had a clear view of the hospital gates, open to Hayam Wuruk Avenue. The emergency room was directly inside the gates, off to the right.

A group of neighborhood men walked through the entrance,
carrying the legless beggar’s wheeled trolley, the legless beggar slumped upon it. One of the men carrying the trolley was the nasty fruit merchant. A male nurse rushed out the doors. “No hurry, he’s dead,” the fruit merchant said.

A female intern joined the nurse. After a minute of probing and checking she declared the beggar to be dead. “Take him to the morgue,” she instructed the nurse. “And make sure Mas Gatot reports it the police.”

“Mas Gatot isn’t working today,” the nurse said, “just his nephew. He doesn’t have authority to do anything official.”

“Then keep him on ice until tomorrow,” the intern said.

The male nurse, with the fruit merchant’s help, transferred the beggar to a gurney. The nurse wheeled the gurney down Doctors’ Alley, heading for the portcullis gate at the back of the empty lot. The beggar’s last ride.

Isaac didn’t have much spare emotion to feel anything for the legless beggar, except a brief pity mixed with a vague gladness that at least the poor guy hadn’t died thirsty.

A minute later there appeared on Hayam Wuruk Avenue a dark blue four-door Ford with white diplomatic corps license plates, blaring its horn, gunning past an intercity bus on the wrong side, timing the gap with split-second precision. The Ford careened around a couple motorbikes and roared up the emergency ramp, squealing to a stop. The windshield was shattered into a spiderweb of cracks. The fragments on the driver’s side had been punched out from the inside, leaving a jagged hole, through which Isaac saw the lean-jawed visage of Sheldon Summerton,
aviator sunglasses accentuating his chiseled cheekbones and smooth forehead, a signet ring with ruby twinkling on the hand clutching the driving wheel.

The Ford’s back door opened, and a plump Indonesian wearing a blue chauffeur’s uniform emerged. His face was pale and waxy. He promptly bent over and threw up. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and raised his head heavenward and gave heartfelt praises to Allah that he was no longer moving and was still in one piece.

Sheldon opened his door and got out. Not a hair of his lemon-streaked hair was out of place, despite the wind that must have been whistling through the hole in the windshield. From the front passenger’s side emerged another white man, who brushed off the lapels of his dark blue blazer and straightened his blue patterned tie. Isaac wondered if the guy was in his right mind. Anybody else in this heat would be taking the jacket off and loosening the tie, not tidying himself up as though going into a meeting. But the man appeared impervious to the sweltering humidity.

The chauffeur, recovered from his bout of fear and car sickness, opened the trunk of the Ford and retrieved what looked like a gray laptop computer complete with a built-in carrying handle, which he handed to the consular officer. The two white men headed for the hospital entrance.

Isaac knew he should go to school, to his algebra tutorial with Mr. Patter, but math held no interest for once. And he didn’t want to return to the house. So there was only one thing left to do.

He climbed the flame tree in a trancelike state, seeing again
all those people jumping off the World Trade Center. The branch he put his hand to dipped alarmingly. He had, without realizing it, climbed higher than he had ever before, where the branches were thinner and bending under his weight.

He stopped. He was sweating profusely. His sweat chilled when he saw that the crow was back, with a friend, both close enough to be touched. Were crows territorial? Isaac had no idea, but the birds hunched forward with fearless menace. Isaac was looking for a way down when they exploded into flight. He automatically ducked his head, thinking they were going to dive-bomb him, but instead they flew across the street and settled on the roof of the mosque.

Were crows and other furtive creatures feeding on the dead in Manhattan?

Worshippers were gathering early at the Al-Furqon Mosque, both men and women, the women segregated from the men by a fabric screen. Down at the corner Mr. “Ah Choo” kept popping in and out of his shop. He peered about at the empty street. He pondered the hospital gates and squinted down the road at the mosque. He scratched his chin and wiped his nose. He barked an order, and a shop boy began sliding wooden planks in their slots across the storefront, leaving only a small gap for customers.

From this new height, Isaac could see over the roof of his house. He saw his father, Sheldon Summerton, and the other man walking across Doctors’ Alley. Sheldon was still carrying his odd-looking laptop. Isaac’s immediate impulse was to get back to school before his father spotted him, but he had trouble figuring
out a way down from this new and unnerving perch. He stopped fidgeting as he heard his father’s voice rising from below.

“Very cunningly done,” Graham said.

The three men stood at the section of wall where the secret gate had been. The unknown man took off his jacket and hung it on a branch. With a swooshing thrill, Isaac saw that the jacket was only camouflage for a handgun in a shoulder holster, held snug up to the armpit by the narrow black straps.

The man jumped and grabbed the top of the wall, hoisting himself up by the flat of his hands, avoiding the barbed wire’s coils. He peered down the length of the wall, first to his right and then to his left. He scanned the street and studied the mosque. He pushed himself off the wall and nimbly landed back on the ground. He put on his jacket and strode under the tangerine tree to the school grounds. Graham and Sheldon followed.

“What about the rest of the perimeter?” the man said.

Graham said, “Excuse me?”

“Were there more ‘secret gates,’ breaches intentional or otherwise, in the perimeter?”

Graham Williams massaged his forehead. “Truth to tell, I don’t know. We didn’t check.”

The man turned his gaze toward Graham, who lifted his hands. “Mea culpa. An oversight. Particularly in view of recent happenings. But I’m a physician. My suspicions are mainly of a medical nature.”

Without a word, the man began an inspection of the wall surrounding the school and boardinghouse. He moved along the
wall’s perimeter, sweeping his eyes up and down. He inspected the grass verge next to the wall, at times bending over to put his nose to where the wall’s foundation emerged from the earth.

Graham stared after him, frowning. “Is it legal for him to be carrying a weapon like that?” he asked Sheldon.

“A gray area,” Sheldon said. “Joe had to fire a round off outside Wonobo to clear a mob that came out of nowhere. You saw the car’s windshield. One of their rocks did that.”

The two men sauntered back across the schoolyard and sat down at one of the tables underneath the flame tree, facing each other, the laptop between them.

“What’s he do?” Graham asked.

“He’s State DS, Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Perimeters and securing of such are among the things he does.”