‘Amber said he left some instructions for me, with you?’
‘Oh yes, this.’
Wahid put the hammer down and unlocked a small drawer in his desk. He withdrew a black, hardback notebook. ‘Client list, handwritten, did it last night. We’ve wiped the computers and the floppies are going.’ He gestured at the floppy disks with his hammer. ‘You’ve to take charge of this, Henrikson wants you to keep it at your apartment and take it to the hotel tomorrow, where he will personally place it in the safe inside his room.’
Harper groaned. ‘Why didn’t he just take it with him?’
‘He said he wants to interview hotel security before he lets the notebook into the building.’
‘You are joking, aren’t you?’
‘I’m afraid not.’ Wahid tapped the side of his nose again.
As Harper turned to go, the notebook in his jacket pocket, Wahid added, ‘By the way, there’s an Englishman here. He’s been waiting for you over an hour. Amber made the mistake of saying you’d be in at some point. He asked for you by name.’
‘What sort of Englishman?’
‘A client-type sort. But local commerce, small.’
‘Extractive industries or import and export?’
Wahid frowned down at the floppy disks. ‘Do you think this will damage my desk?’
‘Well, you aren’t going to damage the disks if you don’t.’
Wahid lifted a finger. ‘Good point,’ then picked up a handful of the disks, bent to put them in a neat pile on the floor and knelt beside them. ‘Extractive,’ he said, ‘but small-time and nearing his pay-off, I would say, I’m not even sure if he’s still paying subs.’ He brought the hammer down on the disks and the top one skidded across the room and smacked into a wall where it span and came to rest, undamaged.
‘Good luck with that,’ Harper said, as he reached for the door.
The Englishman was waiting in the small, empty room they used for meetings and interviews. The only decoration was a crispy-looking cactus plant in a red bowl on the windowsill — the window was frosted; it looked out over the internal corridor of the building — and a tattered, bleached map of Indonesia hanging from two bamboo poles and a piece of string slung over a nail on a wall.
In the middle of the room was a rectangular table with four chairs and the Englishman, whose stomach put his suit jacket under a certain degree of strain, was leaning back on one chair with his feet up on another. He had his eyes closed. On the table was a bottle of cheap whisky and two glasses, one half full.
‘Have you been waiting long?’ Harper asked politely. Damn, what was the man’s name?
The Englishman sat up quickly, put his feet down and shook his head as if he had been asleep. ‘Oh Harper, there you are, what took you?’ His voice was very slightly slurred.
‘Small matter of the city in uproar,’ said Harper, sitting down on a chair opposite, pouring himself a whisky and topping up the Englishman’s glass. ‘You want some coffee with that?’
‘Terrible habit,’ the Englishman replied, ‘very bad for you. Only drink green tea now.’
Harper half-turned back towards the door but the Englishman said, ‘Don’t bother your young ladies, they have enough to do tearing all those papers up.’
‘What can I do for you?’ Harper asked. They had met three or four times, he remembered now. He was a local vice president of some company or other, did he export sandalwood?
‘I’m just here informally,’ the man said, sipping his whisky. ‘Just informally, as, you know, just wondering what your opinion is on the way things are. . going, you know,’ he waved a hand in the air, ‘going.’
Ah, free information. That was why the man had brought a bottle of whisky, a gesture from one chum to another.
‘Well, let’s just hope that whatever the outcome is, it leads to improved stability for the Indonesian people,’ Harper said, in a tone formal enough to indicate that he had no intention of giving anything for nothing. If this man wanted a report, his company could pay for it.
The Englishman groaned. ‘C’mon Harper, you’re an experienced man, don’t go sentimental on me, I have decisions to make. You like fishing?’
He’s more drunk than I realised, Harper thought. Ten minutes of politeness, no more, then he would have to lever him out of the door. ‘Yes, don’t get much time for it, but yes.’ He had never fished in his life.
‘Well, you have a bag of big fish, I don’t know, some large trout or something, and there’s one fish you want to let go, maybe it’s small or sickly, but even so, you’re hardly going to make a hole in your net, are you? Next thing you know, all the damn fish are going to wriggle out of it.’
‘I’m not sure I follow you.’
‘Well, the big man is hardly going to let the protestors have their way. You’ve heard Kopassus is involved?’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Oh c’mon, Harper, there’s a few too many “students” with military haircuts milling round, don’t you think?’
The Englishman suddenly bent forward and clapped his hands on his knees. ‘Right! Right you are!’ as if he was replying to something Harper had said, rather than just agreeing with himself, as if he had got the information he came for. He stood, a little unsteadily, his centre of gravity shifting over one foot so that he tipped into a slight diagonal before righting himself. He turned, and Harper thought, great, but instead of heading for the door, the Englishman wheeled round to the wall to face the faded map and stood there, waving his glass at it.
‘It looks as if God just took a few rocks and a load of pebbles and went. .’ The Englishman made a sweeping gesture with the glass. ‘But beautiful. A whole country made of islands. Fifteen thousand. . can’t exactly. . push them all. . together I mean.’ He turned to Harper and gestured with his hands, holding both palms apart then pushing the air between them, as if Harper was personally responsible for making sure that the islands of the archipelago did not drift apart in different directions, floating off irresponsibly to join other continents. His tone was a little accusatory. ‘How do you expect to hold it all together?’
It was seventeen thousand islands, actually. Harper wasn’t sure if the man was just stupendously drunk or discovering his mystical side. He must hide his drinking from his firm back home — not hard to do when you were thousands of miles away — but even British firms were getting better at sacking drunks these days. Harper made a mental note, just in case the information should prove useful. He would have to check what the man’s name was when he was gone, what relationship, if any, Harper’s firm still had with his.
‘I thought God had abandoned me back then. .’ the man mumbled, looking down into his glass, ‘. . they believe in so much here, you know, sure not what we believe but at least. .’
Next he was going to start telling Harper how Timor was created by two small boys and a crocodile.
Instead, the Englishman took a vicious swig of whisky, turned and glared at Harper, his voice becoming harsh. ‘Now the great Soeharto, Sustainer of the Universe, is on his way out, they are all at it.’ He coughed heartily. ‘Face it, Harper, these people just like killing each other.’
It occurred to Harper to remark that, in actual fact, they weren’t killing each other, not really. The people being burned alive in shopping malls in the north of the city weren’t burning anyone back. When an elderly woman got lynched for being a witch in East Java, she didn’t lynch another person in return. This was the way killing worked: there were perpetrators, and there were victims. It wasn’t a two-way process.
‘You think he is on the way out?’ Harper asked politely. ‘Then who is giving Kopassus their orders?’