The next morning, he was woken by a tapping sound, the more intrusive for its lightness, on the apartment door. He opened his eyes. He was not in a bed. He was lying on a hard wooden floor. He lay very still. The tapping continued, lightly. He felt very calm.
He sat up, propping himself up on one elbow. It was full daylight, the shutters open, the air in the room light and smoky. He hauled himself up to his feet, staggered a little, reeled towards the door, but before he reached it there was the small clatter of a key and Wahid let himself in along with two men Harper didn’t know. Wahid stopped when he saw him and with a look on his face said, ‘The old man has gone, John. Soeharto’s resigned. You’ve got to call Amsterdam now, then we are here to take you to the airport. You’re going on holiday.’
He stared back at Wahid. The two other men stepped past him and began moving around the apartment. One bent and straightened the rug in front of him. The other began using the side of his foot to sweep some broken glass to the edge of the floor, against the wall. Only then did Harper look around the room and see that the small dining table was pushed at an angle, a chair overturned, papers and books and pencils on the floor.
‘I’ll get your things,’ Wahid said, and walked into the bedroom.
Harper went into the bathroom and locked the door behind him. He bent over the sink and splashed his face with cold water. His hand slipped on the tap as he shut the water off — it was made of mottled brown plastic that was supposed to look like marble. In the mirror above the sink he saw his ravaged face, his hair damp at the edges, thinning. His eyes were large and watery like those of any man of his age — the tear ducts were not working properly any more. Of all the irritations of ageing, he had not expected that one to bother him so much. Even though he had not vomited, there was the taste of something bitter in his throat. He bent and ran the cold tap and tried to rinse his mouth, swilling and spitting, but the bitter taste was too far down his throat to be dislodged. Enough, he thought, his hands against the edge of the sink, letting his head drop, like a beaten dog, the bitter taste in his mouth, and the knowledge that would not be dislodged from his head stuck there, inside, like a growth of some sort. Enough. He would do whatever they said.
Wahid tapped gently on the bathroom door. ‘John,’ he called, ‘John, you need to come out and talk to Amsterdam. They’re on the phone now.’
It was daybreak now, all greyness gone, the sun was full and the valley glowing as if it had been sprayed with very fine gold paint. Still Kadek had not come. Harper wondered if he had observed him and Rita on the veranda together and was discreetly delaying his arrival, waiting in the lane until the coast was clear. Or — and here was a thought — returning to the village after spying on them, to report back that Harper had had an overnight guest at the hut?
Back in Amsterdam, there had, no doubt, been a meeting about him. He had cracked up before and they had brought him back into the fold — but that was when he was in his twenties, newly trained, with decades of useful life in him. What was he now?
He had probably frightened the young woman on the end of the twenty-four-hour hotline. The call would have been recorded. He imagined Jan and some of the other partners gathered in the office at the end of the building, the one with the curved glass wall and the bare brick. There were fourteen partners now — but not all of them would have been called in to deal with a personnel issue. There would be five or six of them in the room, perhaps, and the head of personnel, and the specialist personnel secretary to take the minutes — Hannah would have been kept out of the loop because they were friends, he thought: it was clear she had known nothing when he called her from the hotel in Sanur. He imagined the head of personnel reaching out and pressing the ‘on’ button on the tape recorder with a hard click, and the men around the table all listening to him shouting about cannibals, the young woman operative taking the call staying very calm and saying, ‘Would you repeat that for me, please?’ He imagined the head of personnel leaning forward and turning off the tape, the small silence that would follow that second click and the glances that would go from man to man around the table, the faces they would pull. The senior partner in charge of Asia, a plump half-Japanese half-German who he liked a lot, would take off his glasses and rub at the bridge of his nose before replacing them, inflating his cheeks as he blew air out of his mouth, saying, with a sigh, ‘Well. . this is an interesting one. .’
‘So. .’ he said to Rita, ‘here I am. Not on holiday, not exactly. Enforced leave. If you can call it that.’
He was still holding her from behind, speaking into the back of her hair.
‘That tickles,’ she said, a smile in her voice. ‘I didn’t think you were really on holiday, you know. You didn’t show a great deal of interest in sightseeing. Have you been sacked?’
‘I don’t know, probably, they just haven’t told me yet. They are working out how to get rid of me discreetly.’ He had made the Institute sound harmless enough.
‘Give me a cigarette,’ she said.
He leaned over to the packet, which sat on the edge of the rail, lit a kretek for her, passed it forward. She stayed where she was, looking out over the valley. ‘I don’t really understand why you’re in so much trouble.’
‘I was sent out here to draw up a report on the devaluation of the rupiah, the unrest it might lead to. I said things would stay stable, I said Soeharto would never resign. Badly wrong on both counts. Then the students were shot, and the riots.’
‘Terrible. .’
‘I guess at that point I went to the other extreme, after before, I mean, once it got going, I thought it was all going to kick off like it did before.’
‘In sixty-five, you mean?’ She shook her head, leaned it back a little against him. ‘The world is different now.’
He rested his chin on her shoulder. ‘They thought the world was different then.’
She drew on the kretek, exhaled. ‘Smoking this early is making me dizzy.’
‘And I got drunk and broke client confidentiality to a journalist.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’m guessing that isn’t very cool.’
He sighed, lifted both hands and began to massage her shoulders. ‘Truth is, I’m old.’
‘You’re not old, Donkey.’
‘In my business, I’m old. And my boss will hate me now, my fuck-up will reflect badly on him. Makes his judgement look poor. If my intuition is shot to bits I’m no use to anyone.’
‘Intuition is nothing more than experience, surely, just guesswork, anyway?’
He shook his head. ‘If you’re an oil company who pays tens of thousands of dollars for a report, you expect a little more than that.’
She shrugged. ‘So, you’ve been sacked. Or you’re going to be. It happens.’ And he felt the small ache of loneliness he knew he would feel when he told her only a part of the truth.
She turned then, offered him the cigarette. ‘It’s making me dizzy. .’ she repeated, wobbling her head and rolling her eyes.
He took the cigarette, stepped back a little and smiled at her, drew on it, tossed it over the railing. They faced each other for a while, both smiling, and then the memory of his bad behaviour the night before returned to him and he reached out a hand, and, very gently, stroked her upper arm with the back of his fingers.
She lifted her chin a little then, gave him a cool look.
He exhaled.
‘It’s okay, you’re sorry, I know,’ she said softly, and stepped towards him at the same time as he moved against her, pressed his mouth to hers, lifted both hands and put them in her hair, holding her head still, his fingers entwined. Her mouth opened wide, their tongues mingled; smoke, sleep, familiarity. He pressed his groin to hers and ached with the desire to lift her knees, slip into the soft comfort of her right there on the veranda, with only the thin protection of a wooden railing stopping them from plunging, conjoined, into the lush thick valley below.