“Crazy.”
“Whatever, and now you’re going away….”
There are few good conversations for a parting. Kids, the dog, her airplane, good-bye, good-bye. I love you, I love you.
She stared at the security gate and the metal detector. “Jakarta,” she said, as if she could see it there. “I’ve just never heard anything good about Jakarta.”
He kissed her. “You will.”
The next day, Jerry Piat slept until noon. At four, he went to Hilda’s and a whorehouse and several bars.
Bobby Li ran around Jakarta, stopping four times at his business, which was only an office and a storage space; a woman old enough to be his mother answered the telephone for him and kept the place clean. He visited Si Jagur; he bought a much-used SKS with a scope and wrapped it in a grass mat and took it out to a suburb where a petty gangster named Ho had a fiefdom of about three square blocks.
“Got a job,” Bobby said.
Ho grunted and looked at the rolled mat. “I don’t shoot guys,” he said.
“Surveillance job. I need you and three others. You use a camera?”
Ho grunted.
“Use it good?”
Ho grunted.
“You use a telephoto?”
Ho grunted, but without conviction.
“Okay, I get you a point-and-shoot.”
They talked money. Bobby made a deposit from the bundle Andy had given him. He handed over the roll with the SKS in it. “Pay some glue-head to put this up on the old platform in the Orchid House. You know, the Treetops? Some doper who’ll do it but then forget it, okay?” He peeled off another hundred, tore it in half, and put half in Ho’s hand. “I’ll check five o’clock this afternoon. You get the other half if it’s been done right.” They talked terms some more, then communications, and Bobby told him he and the team would have to be ready to move on short notice. That required another deposit.
He went to the street market and bought an Olympus point-and-shoot cheap, probably ripped off from some tourist, loaded it with 400-speed film and took it back to Ho, who held it in his fat hand and looked puzzled. Bobby explained how it worked.
He tried to buy a stun grenade.
He told his wife nothing was wrong when she asked what was wrong.
He went to a different street market and bought six Walkabout radios.
He met with Andy and the team. He told Andy he needed more money.
That evening, Alan Craik landed in Jakarta.
About the same time, Dick Triffler took off from Washington.
3
“Hello, Mister!”
Alan tried to ignore the swarm of aggressive children, each with his palm stretched up toward him in supplication. It was the morning after his arrival, stunningly hot, the streets steaming from a ten-minute downpour.
“Hello, Mister! Hello!”
The route on the map looked very clean and neat; here on the streets of Jakarta it was virtually impossible for a foreigner to decipher the name of any road, much less the maze of alleys (gangs) that had been marked for him to travel. He did his best, which was usually quite good, and found himself the only foreigner in what appeared to be the courtyard of a colorful and desperate tenement.
“Hello! Hello! Mister!”
Alan looked down at the sea of little faces that moved with him through the gang and took a folded bill from his shirt pocket and held it up.
“Anyone speak English?”
“Oh, Mister! Hello, Mister!” Like a children’s choir.
“Mister!” Hand raised in the affirmative. A chorus of Yes.
“I need a guide.” Alan didn’t think that James Bond required a nine-year-old to guide him through his surveillance detection route, but he wasn’t James Bond.
“Why don’t we practice?” he had asked Triffler, back in Washington. Triffler had explained to him that if the Indonesians or the Chinese or any other service were watching them, they couldn’t practice in Jakarta, because anyone observing the practice might be set up to watch the real thing. The explanation had confused him, because the military believed that people should practice complex evolutions, but he followed his orders, and here he was, lost in Jakarta Barat. At least, he hoped he was still in Barat. And Triffler, who was supposed to be with him, was — Alan hoped — still over the Pacific somewhere.
“We won’t even meet.” Triffler had been quiet, assured. “You’ll see me at the end of the route, because I’ll be the signal that you’re clean. But we won’t hang out; we won’t be in the same hotel or travel together; nothing to link us.” Nonetheless, Alan was tempted to look for Triffler on every corner.
“I can speak Inglis, Mister!” one kid said. “Real Inglis, like you can understan’.”
Alan handed him the folded bill without hesitation, then withdrew a second bill before the boy’s eyes wandered or he contemplated flight. This one he held up ostentatiously and then put back in his pocket.
The boy launched into a torrent of abuse at his mates, most of whom vanished in an instant, although a few merely fell back as if waiting their turn.
Alan read the next street on his route to the boy, who nodded and set off at a fast walk. Alan followed, sweating. He liked the sweat. He had been right: It felt good to be doing something, even if he required a nine-year-old to help him.
A minute later, the boy stopped in a gang identical to the last, carpeted in the same bright trash that reeked of rotten fish.
“Here, Mister. What we do here? You buy batik? This not a good place for batik.”
Alan looked at the wretched row of shops, each offering its own batik and some of the “cap” cloth that every tourist seemed to want. Alan couldn’t see Rose in “cap.”
In Washington, Triffler had told him that every stop would “make sense.” “These things have to have a logic of their own, Alan,” he had said. “We depend on that logic to look natural.” Alan saluted him, mentally. I look like a natural lost tourist. To keep his cover, he pointed at a piece of cloth slightly less repulsive than the others and nodded at the price.
“He ripping you off,” his guide said, turning on the merchant. The exchange went on and on, getting louder and shriller; and then, suddenly, everyone smiled and Alan got a pile of cash back — too much, he thought, but the transaction seemed to have satisfied all parties.
“Now I want this one.” Alan pointed at the next destination on the list, marked “Fish Market.”
“Okay.” And they were off, Alan almost running to keep up, his batik (or cap, he couldn’t tell) clutched under one arm.
It certainly smelled like a fish market. This one he had checked out on the Internet — supposedly the oldest part of the city, with some parts dating to the fourteenth century. What was he supposed to do, buy some squid? He walked about for a few minutes, followed by the boy. The fishmongers shouted at him and one another, and he was reminded of his first visit to Africa and how alien it had all seemed. Jakarta was alien, too — almost more alien, with a sturdy structure of the ultramodern, hung with a great deal of African-style poverty.
Beyond the fish market were boats, old sailing boats with brightly colored hulls and sharply raked bows and masts, and he moved toward them without really thinking. The boy followed, incurious, and Alan walked along the pier, threading through the piles of nets and watching them being mended in much the same way that nets were mended in Mombasa and in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The ocean didn’t seem alien. He felt as if he had his feet under him, and he smiled at the boy.