‘How’s it going. .?’ she asked, softly, and they talked of nothing for a while. She had woken lonely and had rung to comfort herself with the sound of his voice. ‘How’s work?’ she asked, but he could hear her moving around the kitchen and knew she wasn’t really listening to what he was saying any more than she had done when they were together, any more than he had done to her. That was what it was like, after a few years: you could conduct a relationship on automatic pilot, thank God.
‘Local firms are really suffering now,’ he said, just making conversation. ‘The devaluation’s showing up in their balance sheets, can’t get rid of their own currency fast enough, buying what few dollars they can while they can buy any. It’s bad.’
‘Mmmm. .’ replied Francisca. She had, over the years, perfected the art of the non-committal, encouraging noise that kept him talking while her mind was elsewhere. ‘Always is, though, isn’t it?’ He heard her take a sip of coffee.
‘This one’s different,’ he replied. ‘Nobody can buy anything imported any more, think what that means.’
‘Mmmm, really?’
Francisca worked as a personnel manager for a medium-sized clothing import business out at Muiderpoort. She knew plenty about how currency rates affected businesses, but he had never been able to persuade her to debate the wider picture with him. It had always annoyed him that a woman as intelligent as her didn’t take more interest in global affairs, but then people who lived in countries with hard currencies couldn’t grasp it: the idea that your job, your home, your life could be as vulnerable to currency changes as they would be to a tidal wave that engulfed your house in water.
‘It’s Christmas soon. I miss you,’ she said then, a catch in her throat, and he knew that was a lie, and that he didn’t miss her either. It was just the ghosts of their former selves on the phone to each other, mimicking the past.
It wasn’t Christmas in Jakarta, and by January, you needed more than eleven thousand rupiah to buy yourself one single dollar.
Each morning, Harper rose with the dawn and set off early — the hot walk to the office was infinitely preferable to the claustrophobia of being stuck in a car. It was either wet or dusty, rarely sunny. The anti-government or pro-government protest demos were mostly further north, on the Hotel Indonesia roundabout or Merdeka Square. The old Hotel Indonesia was showing its age and era; it had been declared a national heritage site. Sixties architecture wasn’t chic and modern these days but a relic in need of preservation. What it really needed was a big multinational to come in and modernise and restore it, but who was going to do that now, with everything so unstable?
There was a six-lane dual carriageway just before his office. Before he crossed it, he would stop by a food stall on the corner, outside a blue shopping mall, and eat standing up, then buy all the newspapers from the stand next to it. He was often first in at their unlovely, grey stone building, sandwiched between two much more glamorous, gleaming towers. He would unlock, open the shutters in his office, the only one that had any natural light. There were six local staff now — the three Harper worked with were a man the same age as him, Wahid, and two young women who acted mostly as translators and administrators, well-educated young people who were hoping that if they worked all hours then one day this Western firm might actually start paying them properly. Wahid reminded Harper a little of his old colleague from before, Abang, a phlegmatic type, did his job, fed his family, rarely passed judgement. What had happened to Abang? He must be in his seventies now, or dead.
Amber and Wahid would arrive not long after him and Amber would make them all coffee while Harper spread the papers across his desk and turned his computer on to this thing called email that he still didn’t like, messages that took forever to fill the screen, line by line. It was, in his opinion, a lot less efficient than picking up the phone.
The local client base still worked mostly by phone and every day Amber was fielding more and more calls from companies wanting to know what was going to happen, what should they do? In February, the government announced a twenty-five-day ban on all street protest. Such bans always led to an increase in whatever activity they were trying to prevent. Amsterdam started to get twitchy: well, the clients started getting twitchy and that communicated itself to Harper and his team via Amsterdam. Harper advised that the large-scale companies, the important international clients, should sit tight. This kind of instability had been going on and off for years — Soeharto would never allow chaos on his watch.
‘Are you sure?’ Jan in Amsterdam kept asking. ‘Our credibility is at stake here. If things are going to go belly up out there, our clients want to be warned, they don’t want to get caught out.’ Nobody knew what was going to happen in Jakarta well in advance, least of all people who lived in Jakarta.
Then in May, something did happen: a protest at Trisakti University, four students shot dead. Later, they would call it the Trisakti Incident — but it wasn’t an incident when it happened, it was the army shooters getting trigger-happy after months of unrest and, possibly, just the beginning. Jakarta exploded.
That was when Amsterdam sent in Henrikson.
When it all kicked off, Harper was in his apartment, watching the riots on a small TV sheltered by the doors of a walnut cabinet opposite the brown leather sofa. He had been at home writing a report all day and only turned on the television that evening. The commentary complained of forces conspiring against the people as the camera showed a street where young men were aiming sideways kicks at shop fronts, flying it seemed, their bodies at improbable horizontals, and then suddenly, at the front of the screen, two women were laughing and rushing toward the camera, carrying something heavy between them. Harper sat upright, thinking for a moment they were carrying a human torso, then realised that they were struggling with a huge, frozen joint of meat, heavy enough to bend them double and threatening to slip from their grasp as they ran. They passed behind the cameraman and beyond them was revealed a man who lifted something and shook it in the air triumphantly. It looked like a plastic mop handle. Beyond him, there were the hurrying figures of a crowd criss-crossing the street, each person carrying something, and, dimly, beyond them, black smoke pouring out of a shop. This was what happened when you made people’s lives harder and harder: eventually, things got so hard there was nothing to lose. Why fear retribution when your life is a punishment already?
He picked up the phone and tried to get through to Wahid: he tried the office line but there was no answer, then tried him at home but his line was engaged. All this was going to make a nervous client base very unhappy — there had been stories of people fleeing to the airport and getting carjacked by looters on the flyover. Failing to reach Wahid, he wondered if he should check in with Amsterdam. Then he had another beer and went to bed.
He knew, as he turned off his light, that that was not what he should be doing: but he told himself that what was going to happen would happen, and the best thing was to get a good night’s sleep, then call Wahid for an update as soon as he woke up.
His pager went off before dawn. As soon as he heard the beep, he knew he had made the wrong call the night before. He called the office back home, as the message demanded. Jan — solid, unflappable Jan — was not happy. He wanted to know what the hell Harper was doing in his apartment, why hadn’t he gone straight to the office as soon as word of the riots got out? Why hadn’t he spent the night at the office on the phone? There had been an emergency meeting of the Asia Department, he told him. They were sending in an extraction team for the clients. It would be led by an Extraction Specialist, Henrikson.