The young woman returned with their coffees. Harper withdrew a packet of kreteks from his pocket and held it out to Johan but Johan shook his head and said, ‘Ah, no, thanks, I don’t smoke.’
I bet you don’t, Harper thought. He did not look down at the bit of paper. He looked at Johan. After a moment or two, he turned his head to one side to exhale away from Johan, then took a sip of coffee. Johan lifted his cup at the same time.
Harper let the silence between them continue for long enough to force Johan to speak.
‘Look. .’ Johan began and Harper interrupted immediately, ‘Just tell me what the deal is.’
‘If you sign, and stay away, we mean completely away, from the business, including but not exclusively our competitors in the field, then we are calling it redundancy. With all the benefits that accrue, including this.’ The briefcase was still on his lap. The envelope he extracted this time was long and white and unsealed. He handed it over and gestured to Harper that he should look inside. Harper pushed a finger in to widen it and saw that there was a cheque, a more generous one than the Institute was obliged to offer, under the circumstances.
Harper put the white envelope down on the table. ‘Do you have a pen?’
Johan gave a terse, grateful smile. Harper wondered if this young man had expected more trouble. If so, he had been inadequately briefed.
‘Oh, the Institute does have one more request,’ Johan added as he lifted the lid of the briefcase for the third time. ‘We would like you to vacate the company accommodation facilities within three days. Is that reasonable?’
For a moment, Harper was unsure what the man meant, then he snorted, ‘You mean the hut?’
Johan gave a wry smile. ‘It’s a little rudimentary, having seen it this morning, I must agree.’
Harper felt a sudden wash of nostalgia for the hut, a feeling that by not imposing his personality on it, he had made it his. Three days? How had time slipped? He felt as though he had been there forever — and he knew, in that moment, that a return to what was euphemistically referred to as real life was impossible: Jakarta, Amsterdam, Los Angeles — it didn’t matter. He had withdrawn from all these places, and from the transitional places that led from one to the other; planes, taxis, waiting lounges. He could no more imagine re-entering that world than he could growing wings and flying over the crater of Gunung Agung. If you come to a place to die, then what are you supposed to do if, somehow, you carry on living?
Johan passed over a pen. As Harper signed the addendum to the confidentiality clause he said, ‘Three days will be no problem. As you probably saw, I don’t have many possessions.’
Johan mistook his meaning. ‘I’m afraid that the papers and reports, well anything in fact, that you left in the Jakarta apartment belongs to the Institute.’
Harper put the pen down on the confidentiality agreement then slid them both across the table. ‘Fine by me. Just out of interest. .’ He nodded towards the agreement. ‘What would the Institute have done if I had refused to sign?’
Johan shrugged, reached to pick up the agreement and smiled. ‘Well that’s the catch with signing, you never get to find out.’
Harper leaned back in his chair as Johan slipped the signed agreement into the envelope. ‘Have you ever thought, Johan, that we work for the kind of organisation that has people killed?’
He saw the look of shock on Johan’s face. ‘Surely, even in your department, you think through the consequences, now and then? We get involved with governments, we get involved with coups.’
Johan glanced around, and then gave a hearty, vocal smile — less than a laugh but more than a facial expression. ‘I thought you meant us, for a minute there!’ He was embarrassed to have momentarily believed Harper to be suggesting something so absurd.
Harper looked at him and let the question hang between them.
‘I’m a lawyer, you’re an economist. We provide advice, that’s what we do. People like us will always exist,’ Johan said, closing his briefcase. ‘If we didn’t exist, someone else like us would, and the someone else would probably be worse, you seem like a decent enough fellow to me. Agreed?’
Harper looked to one side, at the view, and smiled.
He took the risk of parking outside the school. It was a long wait until the lunchtime break. When Rita emerged, she was surrounded by students and set off down Jalan Hanoman without seeing him. He was momentarily affronted. Shouldn’t she have been looking? Then he was amused at himself; of course she wasn’t looking. Why should she? He remembered how she had strode away from the guesthouse on Jalan Bisma after their first night together without seeing him sitting in plain view in the cafe right opposite. Head in the clouds, he thought, with affection. Or maybe just. . normal. Maybe she wasn’t looking because there was nothing to look for. Maybe the boys waiting by the cafe opposite the guesthouse that morning were just boys sitting on a tree trunk, the young men passing through town in a jeep just young men in a jeep. His heart sang, then. That could be him. If he was with her, he could be like her.
The car was parked awkwardly, as close to the drainage ditch on the side of the road as he could risk without losing a wheel down it, but cars and mopeds had still been forced to pull out to get past him. He restarted the engine and followed at a distance, slowly. The street was full of students streaming from the low building. It was only when she turned onto the main street, still with a student either side, that he was able to overtake, pull in in front of a shop and toot the horn as she approached from behind. He watched her in the rear-view mirror and saw her head lift, the wide brim of her hat rising to reveal her face, her smile of surprise.
She stopped and said goodbye to the students, then lifted one hand and splayed her fingers in a five minutes gesture. He nodded. She went into a shop just behind where he was parked, a mini-market, and emerged a few minutes later with a plastic bag. He leaned over to open the passenger door for her.
As she got in the car she leaned across and gave him a brief kiss on the cheek. The smile she gave him was an ordinary smile because, of course, she did not know that when he dropped her off at the school that morning, he was thinking it might be the last time they saw each other. She had never known what was at stake.
‘To what do I owe this honour?’ she asked.
‘I’ve something to show you,’ he said, pushing his hand into his pocket. ‘Remember how I told you I was being fired?’ He pulled out the long white envelope, which he had folded neatly, concertinaed, and put into his trouser pocket. He rested it on the dashboard and smoothed it out. Then he extracted the cheque and held it up in front of his chest, as if it was a certificate he had just won at a sports day.
She looked at the cheque, then up at his face. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s a cheque,’ he said.
She lifted her eyebrows and said drily, ‘I can see it’s a cheque but I can’t see how big it is, I don’t have my reading glasses on. Is it enough for you? I mean, are you a free man?’
‘Enough for me to do a deal with the landowner who owns the fields beyond Jalan Bisma, and enough for me to stay in one of those guesthouse rooms in the meantime, if that’s easier that is, while I decide which plot of land to lease, on the edge of the rice field, on the way to the Monkey Forest, although I guess it would be a good idea if we asked around about other plots as well. You know this town a lot better than I do. And you’ll have to do the negotiating with the builders, Ibu Rita. You’re the one who speaks Balinese.’
When she spoke, her voice was uninflected. ‘Aren’t you scared of the Invisibles?’