I raised my eyebrows at the inspector to illustrate my question, then made a sawing motion with my hand. Did he want me to cut the fish open?
The man shook his head, already bored with me, and waved me through.
I carried my package back to the little car and got in beside Rengat. As we neared the city, I suggested he make a quick stop at his home so that I might meet his wife and children. Rengat was reluctant. I pressed the issue, telling him I wanted to make small gifts of money to his children.
Ultimately, greed got the best of him. His tiny block house was just off a side street named Madong Lubis. I bowed to Rengat's wife and dipped a cup of kava from the wooden bowl in the tiny living room. In Asia, loud slurping is the sound of polite approval. I patted Rengat s children and gave them crisp greenbacks. As I held the bills out, only I seemed to notice that my hands were shaking.
Once we were back in the car, Rengat was not so talkative, and he seemed less eager for me to approve of him. Familiarity diminishes authority while increasing dependency. My visit had accomplished both. As he drove me to my hotel, I was aware that Rengat was aware that the price of any sort of betrayal had increased exponentially.
I now knew where the man lived.
A sealed note from Havildar apologized for his absence and told me that Raymond Tullock was staying at the H otel Tiara, third floor, room 217.
The strange numbering system, I knew, was a holdover from the old Dutch colonial days when Sumatra was one of the thriving dark corners of the rubber trade.
The Hotel Tiara was the best hotel in Medan—which is to say that it was about as plush, but not as clean, as the average Motel 6. It was a tall, squarish salmon-colored building on busy, potholed Cut Mutiah Street. Small men with rickshaws and pedicabs stood in a line outside the hotel, waiting for fares.
The room Havildar had arranged for me was opposite the Hotel Tiara and down less than a block. It was a native place named Selamat Sian— "Good day!" in Indonesian. The little rooming house was as dark and narrow-staired as a New York tenement building. It smelled of curry and rotting durian fruit and Indonesian cigarettes. My room overlooked the street, so I could watch Tullock coming and going.
Havildar's note also told me that I should not trust Rengat, but not to fear him either. The note included the names I needed of a few local men, and it concluded by reminding me that Havildar and I still had unfinished business on the nearby island of Timor. In 1975, the Indonesian government had staged a brutal military takeover of East Timor. Military rule there—enforced by Indonesian death squads—continues even today.
Years ago, I had used Sumatra as a staging area for a surveillance operation that had accomplished absolutely nothing but earn me the friendship of the little Gurkha sergeant. I was sorry about Havildar's father, but I wished to hell Havildar were still in Medan, and not working his way up to his native village in the Himalayas. It did more than change my plan. I would now have to completely abandon certain elements of it.
There was one thing I didn't want to do, couldn't do: spend much time in Medan. It was possible that the Indonesian government had learned about my earlier work. If I was caught—particularly with three false passports in my possession—I would be summarily jailed. Maybe the American Embassy in Jakarta would be notified, but that was unlikely. A more probable scenario was that I would be locked anonymously away until an appropriate time when I might be used as a bargaining tool. If that opportunity never materialized—I could think of no reason that it would—then I would be left to die in the local prison.
I had once driven past that prison—the Simpang Alas it was called, named for a local river. Alas Prison was a monstrous old fortress of rotting cement and concertina wire built north of town. It had reminded me of Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi, because the outside walls were painted the same damp, mustard-yellow color. Its few windows were as black and narrow as gunports; the yellow walls were high. Two elements dominated the prison grounds: the silence . . . and the smell. Simpang Alas possessed the eerie silence of an abandoned city; the kind of silence that fills the void after someone has abruptly ceased screaming. The wind that blew over the prison carried the defecant odors of humans who have been reduced to cave animals. That smell was the stench of nightmares.
Even local travelers who passed Simpang Alas averted their eyes, as if a dark vacuum radiated out beyond the prison walls and to look upon it put them at risk of being sucked into that darkness.
What I needed to do was hit Raymond Tullock quickly, then get the hell out. I would have preferred anything to even a year in Simpang Alas—a firing squad, a knife . . . anything.
But with Havildar gone, it would not be so easy.
For three straight days, I watched Tullock from my window, or tagged along after him in a car, with Rengat driving. I watched him and made cryptic notes.
He was never hard to find. In the alleyways of Sumatra, a tall, blond American stands out in any crowd.
Tullock had three Japanese business associates. The four of them spent two mornings at the huge fish market in Belawan, not far from the port where I had met the junk days earlier. They also spent a day traveling around the foothills of the western mountains. I got the impression that Tullock was thinking about expanding into the timber business. Also got the impression that he was looking for an estate to buy or rent.
In Indonesia, a man with a monthly income of a couple thousand U.S. dollars could live like a sultan. Maids, gardeners, a chauffeur, cooks, and all the wives and mistresses he wanted.
I wondered if Tullock was afraid of the murder charge that might await him back in the states. He had cleaned out his bank accounts. So maybe that had been his plan all along. Hannah had made it plain that he would never have her, so why go back?
I also wondered if Tullock, through phone calls back to the States, had discovered that he had killed Hannah, not me.
I found it oddly irritating that I did not know.
Tullock was a punctual man of habit. Each day he returned to his hotel just after five and drank bottled Pellegrino water on the patio that overlooked the hotel garden. He would sit there in his catalogue-new safari clothes and listen to the eerie wail of the muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to prayer. Would sit there as the whole city came to a stop around him; as passersby threw prayer carpets onto the dirt walkways and bowed toward Mecca. He would continue to sip water and write in his ledger book, indifferent to it all. Then Tullock would return to his room and reappear an hour later, right at dusk, and go for a jog. His route was always the same: down the crowded streets, then north along the Deli River. His route followed dirt footpaths that wound through several patches of park that were as dark and wooded as jungle.
My original plan was to have Havildar sneak into Tullock's room while he was out. It would have been so simple, so damn easy. I could have chosen any time I wanted to confront Tullock—I wanted to confront him—then left the rest to Havildar and the men he had named in his note.
That wouldn't work now. Rengat couldn't be trusted, and like Tullock, I stood out in a crowd. People would notice me in his hotel. People would notice me on his floor.
I couldn't risk that... yet it seemed mad to proceed without knowing what was in the man's room.
I could hear Tomlinson's voice saying, I take it on faith, man. On faith. Could hear Hannah's voice saying, I knew . . . I just knew.