"You can stick that apology right up your ass." Tullock had taken his seat, legs crossed, foot tapping. "Of course it's mine. You knew all along it was mine. Don't try to play coy now."
To Lieutenant Suradi, I said, "I'm very sorry. I heard a rumor that he had a similar object—an innocent mistake."
I crossed to the window, held the glass ball out to Tullock—a deferential gesture. "I admit it. You said it was yours and it is yours. You've proven it. Hope there are no hard feelings."
Tullock was reaching for the ball, saying, "Lieutenant? I want to press charges. This was a vicious attempt on Mr. Ford's part to create legal problems for me in my new home," as I allowed the ball to roll off my fingers much too soon . . . saw Tullock bat at it, trying to stop the sphere's fall. . . watched the sphere hit the floor and explode into shards of glass and plume of heavy gray dust.
"You clumsy bastard!" Tullock was on his feet, hands balled into fists. For a moment, I thought he was going to take a swing at me. I would have liked that. He shouted, "You can pay me for this right now. Pay me in cash!" But then he seemed to have a better idea. "Wait—" He turned to the two Indonesian policemen. "I want you to charge him with this, too. The intentional destruction of my private . . ." He allowed the sentence to trail off as he noticed that neither Suradi or Prajurit was listening to him. Both were too intent on the mess at Tullock's feet to hear.
Among the shards of glass was a substantial mound of grayish powder, fine as talcum.
"What's that?" Tullock asked—the voice of a confused adolescent.
I had backed against the open chest of drawers when the ball shattered, the bandanna once again in my hands. Now I stepped away from the chest of drawers, shrugged, and said, "I wouldn't know. Like you said, Ray: it's not mine."
Lieutenant Suradi was on one knee, studying the powder. Sumatra, apparently, was one of the few remaining places in the world where police officers actually touched and tasted unidentified chemicals. I wondered if it tasted offish.
Maybe it did. Suradi tasted his finger once more, then spat. He looked from Officer Prajurit to Raymond Tullock, then back to Officer Prajurit. Then he spoke in very fast Bahasa Indonesian; long, involved directive sentences that had the ring of discovery.
Tullock's confusion began to overwhelm him. "What are they saying? What the hell's going on here!"
Prajurit had a portable radio out and was talking into it. He banged the radio a few times, trying to get it to work. It wouldn't work, so he used the telephone. Suradi stood, felt around for the handcuffs on his belt as he tried to take Tullock by the left wrist. Tullock yanked his wrist away. "Goddamn it, what is that stuff?"
I watched his face very closely as I said, "I think I heard them say the word 'heroin.' "
"Heroin?" The expression on his face reminded me of the night he had caught Hannah and me together: bug-eyed crazy . . . wild with rage . . . grotesque. He said, "Do you know how they deal with that? What. . . what the punishment is for that?"
I wanted to ask, Have you ever seen Simpang Alas Prison? Instead, I gave him a private little wink. Said, "You crossed the borders, Ray. That's always risky."
What happened next was not pretty. Tullock lunged at me, screaming, "He did this! Search him!" as Suradi tried to get a wrist handcuffed. Suradi interpreted the movement as an attempt to escape. He went to work on Tullock with a wooden baton. Suradi was a tough and determined little man, but Raymond Tullock had a wild tenacity that one associates with the truly insane ... or with those who have absolutely nothing left to lose. When Tullock went down for the fourth time, he lay on the linoleum, alternately cursing me and pleading for my help. We're both Americans, for God's sake.
I watched his face closely, enjoying it, as I said, "Ray, you're only half right."
When the backup cops arrived, Suradi did search me. He was no fool and, by now, he was also in a fighting mood. I cooperated fully in what was a very thorough search. In my pockets, he found a clip full of American money. In my zippered leather belt, he found more money. He also found a single passport and tourist card, on which the money had been accurately declared. Aside from a few shiny-bright tarpon scales—he puzzled over those—he found nothing more.
Later, when Suradi and the others did an equally thorough search of Tullock's room, they would certainly find a second ball of opaque green glass in the chest of drawers . . . where, minutes earlier, I had placed it. . . and what remained of a bag of Burmese heroin—heroin for which a Rangoon bank draft, wired to Norvin Tomlinson, still awaited my final approval.
But that was Raymond Tullock's problem, not mine.
Still . . . Lieutenant Suradi didn't like it. Like all cops, he was cynical and suspicious. Coincidence and drug smugglers were two things he did not suffer gladly. Before releasing me, he took my passport—my real passport—along with my tourist card. "When you leave Medan?" he asked.
I told him truthfully that my plane was due to leave in less than an hour. Pictured Rengat waiting at the airport with my ticket and luggage— luggage full of wood scraps, taped tight—although it was more likely that Rengat had dropped both ticket and luggage at the Garuda counter before taking his family into the mountains for a convenient vacation.
Suradi shook my passport meaningfully. "You no go to airport tonight. You no go to airport till I say."
I promised him that I would not go to the airport.
Outside, on the busy night streets of Medan, the cab I had hired was waiting, my new duffel bags locked in the trunk. I opened the trunk and took out one of my false passports . . . not the passport I had recently had made; not the one that listed my name as Raymond Alan Walley; not the one I had used to clean out Tullock's bank account earlier that afternoon. Could hear Tullock saying, We all look alike to them. Could hear the teller at the Dutch East Indian Bank tell me, "Have nice day, sahr!" as I walked away with a briefcase full of 50,000-denomination rupiah notes—about 1110,000 worth.
I put the false passport in my pocket, swung into the back seat with the briefcase. Told the driver, "Port of Belawan," as I checked to make sure that I still had the torn halves of the hundred-dollar bills so that I could pay my passage to the captain of the red teak junk out of Rangoon.
Epilogue
Here is why I decided, and how I decided, to return to my home at Dinkin's Bay, on Sanibel Island:
Because I did not trust the betel nut-chewing captain of the Burmese junk, and because I became convinced that he and his crew of Bougie pirates planned to rob me, I jumped ship at the island of Phuket on the Isthmus of Thailand, and spent the next few weeks traveling around Indochina. I needed the time; felt I had rooted myself too deeply in the community that was South Florida, and now was an opportunity to sever those roots. Why had I stayed on Sanibel so long? The accoutrements of a modern life—and the obligations they imply—grow as slowly but as surely as a strangler fig. They also suffocate just as completely.
One night, at Raffles Hotel in Singapore, I sat outside in the tropical garden and realized, with some surprise, just how completely I had allowed myself to become entwined by the bonds of my island home. I was on committees, I was on boards, I paid electric, water, phone, and insurance. I had become a convenient source of advice and comfort and conversation for the dozens of friends who had come to depend on me almost as much as I had come to depend on them. I had a schedule; I had a routine. I had become one of the regulars, for God's sake. But all human interrelationships exact a price, and for me, that price was the lost look in Hannah's eyes just before she died, and the chill limpness of Tomlinson's hand.