First job done. That was pretty easy. Harper got into the passenger seat of his car.
‘Guesthouse now, sir?’ asked his driver, cracking a smile for the first time.
Harper nodded. ‘Guesthouse now.’
For the next few months, he acclimatised. He got used to the blanket of heat that lay over the city at all times of the day and night, the way the closeness of the air made him feel a little nauseous first thing in the morning. He toured the city on a moped, weaving in and out of the traffic on the wide superhighways that carved their way through the shanty towns like a lawnmower scything grass: the Great Leader Soekarno was on a massive building programme, to prove to the world that Jakarta was a modern city, the Paris of the East. He wrote reports for Johnson and Amsterdam on the grip the PKI was exerting in certain districts: anti-Western graffiti was everywhere: KILL CAPITALIST SKUM. He befriended Benni the gangster — and saw his first but not last incident of a man being tortured.
As the antagonism towards foreigners in Jakarta grew, more and more of them left the city, particularly the Americans and the Brits, and he began to understand why Gregor had chosen him. He bought his clothes at a store next to the guesthouse and let his hair grow for a bit then went to a barber on Jalan Gondangdia who cut it like the local men’s — he had arrived with it too short and neat around his ears, he realised. He worked on his language skills and his mannerisms. When he wasn’t hanging out with Benni’s gang, he took to wandering the streets in a white shirt and sarong. Sometimes, he would spend time squatting by the road alongside other men with mopeds but nothing to do because petrol was so scarce. He joined a couple of demonstrations where he wore a red bandana and shouted slogans but his instructions were clear: observe, join in a bit but don’t get actively involved. Only once did he overstep the mark, caught up in the excitement of one march, when he observed an Australian television crew filming the gang he was with. As they passed, he shook his fist at them and shouted, ‘Lackeys of the British!’ and the young men either side of him took up the shout. The film crew followed them for a few minutes, until two of the young men in Harper’s group detached themselves and went up to the Australians and started shoving them backwards. Harper kept going but glanced back: it was frustrating, always being on the fringe of the action.
At other times, he dressed in his beige slacks and a shirt, combed his hair with pomade and pressed a panama on top and went hanging out in the bars frequented by the foreign press. Once, he even encountered a man he was sure had been amongst the Australian television crew — but with Harper in Western clothes and speaking immaculate English, there was no flicker of recognition from the Australian, to whom all Indonesian protestors no doubt looked the same. The man was called Gibson and they got drunk together on Tjap Tikus, high-end arak, round a small table in a side-street bar off Jalan Thamrin.
‘Soekarno’s started eating his own,’ Gibson confided. ‘You know lots of the ministers have taken to sleeping away from their homes at night? The Father of the Nation’s getting careless. When you start making your own people that nervous, you know. .’ He made a short stabbing notion at Harper’s ribs.
Later, after Harper had moved on to fruit juice but Gibson had stayed on the arak, the Australian became loquacious. ‘Indonesia isn’t a nation, it’s an imagination,’ he said, then looked around, pleased with himself. ‘S’karno made it up! Made it up, the speeches, and, take it from me, when they push’m out, the whole lot will just evaporate. . like a dream. .’ At this, Gibson splayed his fingers and moved his hand in a semi-circular motion in front of Harper’s face. ‘S’all going to fall apart. Easy to sneer at him, in his hat, with his girlfriends, but you look at what will happen if he goes. Jus’ wait. Holds it all together.’ He clenched his fist.
Harper made a note of the man’s sympathies — perhaps the Americans should look into him — and could not resist adding, ‘Well, maybe we should wait and see what happens if this region becomes the next Communist bloc. I wonder what the Indonesian for gulag is.’
The bar was dark, the fan above them inefficient, the crowd large even though a lot of Westerners had left: there were so few places in the city where Westerners felt comfortable any more, they had a tendency to congregate. Gibson withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. ‘God knows why they call it the Cold War, it’s fucking hot in Jakarta.’ And Harper rewarded him with a clap on the shoulder and a convincing laugh.
Then came the abrupt command from Johnson: forget the gangsters. Four months of careful, nauseating and sometimes dangerous sucking up to Benni and it was all down the drain.
‘Why?’ Harper asked. He and Johnson were in the same bar where he had drunk Gibson beneath a table, but this time it was daytime and they were sipping green tea. The curfew had made nighttime excursions increasingly difficult, the journalists all stuck to the hotel bar now, and the power shortages meant many places closed at night anyway. The Merdeka Day celebrations had been and gone and Soekarno had declared a new stage in the revolution, which for most people meant that the rice shortages had reached epidemic proportions. No one was paid in rupiah any more, there was no point: people were demanding to be paid in rice and there wasn’t enough rice to pay them. Some were simply marching into stores in mobs and helping themselves.
They were sitting at the front, by the windows, where the shutters were pulled back and Johnson’s car was parked on the kerb. Harper had noticed that Johnson never went anywhere on foot any more — he was always in a car with a couple of minders in it. The People’s Youth had taken to beating up foreigners.
Johnson was in his usual taciturn mood, sipping carefully at his tea, glancing out of the window from time to time. ‘Things are moving fast,’ he said. ‘We need to speed things up a bit.’
Johnson insisted that Harper move into Hotel Indonesia, which was full of foreign journalists like Gibson and the businessmen who were prepared to overlook the rising political tensions while Jakarta was an opportunity: Soekarno was still building freeways, after all. ‘We can’t guarantee your safety if you stay in that guesthouse,’ Johnson told Harper and Harper wanted to reply, when have you ever guaranteed my safety? Johnson would stay concerned for his well-being right up until the point when he was compromised in any way, upon which he would deny that he or any other American official had ever met or known him. Surely the visibility of being in a place like Hotel Indonesia, full of foreigners, constantly spied upon, had its own dangers?
And so, he changed identity again. He folded his sarong neatly and put it away and checked into the hotel wearing slacks and his panama, carrying a newspaper, walking with his shoulders thrown back.
‘Welcome to Hotel Indonesia, sir,’ said the doorman, with a deep bow.
He acknowledged the courtesy by touching his newspaper to the side of his forehead and toyed with the idea of saying, ‘Ciao.’ Maybe he should learn some Italian. He’d passed for Italian before now. He knew Jews, Arabs and Asians who had pretended to be Italian. Everyone liked Italians — the food was great, the women beautiful, and they were hopeless at invading other countries.
He disliked being in a smart hotel, which almost certainly had eavesdroppers on the end of the telephone lines and apparatchiks of the government security services amongst the staff. Okay, so the air conditioning and comfortable bed were good but from a professional point of view, he felt too exposed to do his job. He couldn’t operate underground now — there could be no more strolling the streets in a sarong. He began to wonder if Johnson had parked him here in such a stupidly expensive place because he had decided he didn’t really have any use for him. Not for the first time, he wondered how much operations like this cost, and how the American taxpayers who funded CIA guys like Johnson would feel about it if they knew.