Malik took me deep into yet another kampung. Its market was as pungent and cacophonous as any Middle East bazaar. Our destination jewelry shop sold primarily baubles and imported knockoffs, cheap Rolex imitations and the like, but Malik and the jeweler were well acquainted. After a whispered conference, the shopkeeper invited us behind a curtain, into the rear of the shop.
We shared tea and cordialities. Then the jeweler examined the ring. Real gold in the setting, he said. Real diamonds too, perhaps two carats total weight.
And the green stone?
He shrugged. He could only guess. Burmese jadeite, he thought. The finest jade in the world. Jadeite was not found on the island of Java. It was a gemstone seldom seen in Jakarta. He wouldn’t know jade from a piece of glass.
Value, please?
He shrugged again and said maybe one hundred million rupiah. Quick mental arithmetic converted the rupiah to Yankee dollars: over fifty thousand of them.
The jeweler asked if we wished to sell the ring.
I said it was not mine to sell.
No matter, he said; I could not afford to buy.
I paid him a small appraisal fee and we left.
What next? Malik asked.
Good question, I said, answering his with mine: What “same places” did you drive Mr. Lee?
Actually just one same place, Malik said.
Will you show me?
After a pause, Malik said yes. But not now.
When?
Tonight. Midnight. When the night sky is as dark as it can be.
So why am I doing this? I asked myself as I yawned and climbed into Malik’s becak. The truth, I replied. Truth and justice. Well, sure, yeah, that’s part of it. But another factor is that we’ve been hanging on to (and have been seen hanging on to!) a valuable piece of probable contraband that is evidence in a crime we can’t prove took place.
In other words, I’m up to my you-know-what in alligators. I’ve got nothing to lose by lowering my head, plunging forward, and playing detective. I figure we’ll get to the bottom of the mess, then I’ll put the ring and an anonymous note into an envelope and drop it in a mailbox at the airport about ninety seconds before I board my plane. I’ll do the right thing, have myself an adventure, and escape intact.
Funny how things work out.
Malik entered Menteng, a close-in ’burb, a neighborhood that was by no stretch a kampung. Menteng was green and leafy. Menteng was paved roads and street lamps. Menteng was spacious villas, orange tile roofs, and walls of concrete and hedges. Menteng was where you lived if you were a Jakarta somebody and could afford digs costing a billion rupiah and up.
Malik stopped. We pushed his becak into thick shrubbery to conceal it.
Mr. Lee always came to Menteng this time of night; he made me hide my becak here and climb this tree, he said. He pointed at a bushy banyan across the street. Keep quiet and out of sight, Mr. Lee told me. Mr. Lee was gone one or two hours. I got cold and sore being so long in the tree. One night I followed him.
To where?
Come on, Malik said.
A left, a right, and a left, and we were there, at the iron gate of a residence that need not feel inferior to its neighbors. Inside the gate was a driveway and a three-car garage. But for the flat terrain and drenching humidity we could have been in Beverly Hills. Lights were on, draperies not fully drawn.
Who lives here?
Malik didn’t know. The night he followed Mr. Lee, he had gone no farther than this. I had a queasy feeling he would go farther now, though, a hunch confirmed by squeaking gate hinges. He opened the gate just wide enough to slip through. Two more hinge squeaks allowed me to make it through. Sideways.
I trailed Malik to a lighted bank of windows, thinking how overrated “adventure” was. Henceforth, I vowed, when I visit a strange land, I shall confine myself to folk dancing festivals and the cathedral.
The windows were jalousies, but the louvered panes were cranked shut despite the temperature’s being a typical seventy-five or eighty degrees. Air conditioning, of course.
The windows were also high, several inches above the top of my head. I told Malik to get on my shoulders. He said no, you sit on mine, you are the holder of the ring who must see faces. I’m twice his size, but by the way he stated his position I knew he’d lose face if we didn’t at least give it a try.
Malik was as solid as a pillar. Thus elevated, I pressed my face to the glass and saw a bearded Caucasian male of about forty pacing the room. Although I couldn’t make out what he was saying, even the language he was speaking, his tone and expression and jerky hand gestures suggested extreme frustration and anger. He was wearing a pistol belt, khaki shorts, and a matching shirt with epaulets.
He was ranting and raving at an Indonesian male in his thirties. Garbed in the first polyester leisure suit I had seen in over a decade, and in spite of being Javanese, a member of a slender and lithe race, he enjoyed the dimensions of a sumo wrestler.
He was dealing with the tirade by puffing furiously on a cigarette and staring at the floor. I was reminded of a circus bear whipped into submission by a sadistic trainer.
My surveillance ended as quickly as it started. Either my breath fogged the glass, attracting the bearded one’s attention, or he merely happened to focus in my direction. Whichever, he began pointing at me, shouting louder. No Neck had spotted me too, and was flexing fists the size of boxing gloves.
I came off Malik’s shoulders as if I had been bucked from the world’s meanest rodeo bull. Verbalization was unnecessary. I lit out of there, Malik at my heels. He passed me, but I kept him in sight.
He was already in the banyan when I arrived, stretching an arm down to help me upward. Within a minute, the two men were there, almost directly below us, walking, looking, muttering.
The bearded one, looking even more like a refugee from one of those magazines that glorify mercenary soldiers, was carrying an automatic pistol. No Neck was wielding a kris. A kris with a wavy, gold-inlaid blade.
Malik and I held our breath until they passed. He whispered that we should stay the night.
Good advice. We did.
A note of interest. Jakarta is situated at seven degrees south latitude, just about as tropical as tropical can be. But if you spend the night in a banyan tree while pursued by killers, you will become cold.
The next morning I was afraid to go to my hotel room, afraid I had somehow been traced. An irrational and paranoiac fear, true, but I stuck with Malik nonetheless. He maintained an outward calm, but we didn’t travel a familiar route. He, who knew everyone, was as much a stranger as I.
I again pleaded that we seek professional assistance. Malik relented. I thought we were bound for a police precinct station. I thought otherwise when we stopped in the core of a kampung, at a wooden and corrugated iron house.
It was the home of Malik’s dukun.
A dukun is a traditional Javanese mystic. A dukun is consulted for his magical powers to cure diseases, to discombobulate enemies, and to predict the future.
Swell.
If age were a valid yardstick of wisdom, we had it made. The dukun was a graybeard as old as Malik and I combined. Malik explained our dilemma, and I gave the dukun the jade ring to examine.
The dukun pondered awhile, then recited a short chant, gave us cups of foul-tasting herb tea, and handed me the ring as if it were on fire.
The ring is evil, said the dukun.
Plausible, Malik and I agreed. But what should we do?
Return it to the evildoing owner, advised the dukun. The evil departed his foul heart into the ring. It will stay locked in the green stone and infect you both until it can escape to its origin. Nor can Mr. Lee’s soul depart to the abode of the dead specified by his particular religion until the ring evil escapes.