He knew this routine: whisky, cigars, a little manly talk. Parno was the kind of bureaucrat who prided himself on living a westernised lifestyle but a reasonably modest one — there would be no gold taps in the bathroom. It was his relative modesty that would allow him to do deals to the benefit of friends and relatives. You didn’t hand a man like Parno a briefcase full of cash; he would be insulted. You offered a job opportunity to his nephew. That way, he got to feel munificent, not corrupt. There were always ways of corrupting those who didn’t want to feel corrupt. In many ways, they were the easiest to corrupt of all.
‘So, Mr Harper,’ Parno said as they sipped their drinks. ‘What do you think? If it comes to a fight with Malaysia, what is your view?’ Parno had already done two things: let Harper know he knew some personal information about him and indicated that they would not be discussing recent events in Jakarta. He was sticking to a safe subject. Konfrontasi: the political classes here liked to discuss it in the same way the Brits discussed the weather, as a polite opener.
Harper’s view was that the sabre-rattling across the Malacca Strait would come to nothing. ‘I wouldn’t like to say. .’ he replied politely, raising his hands. ‘The British are famously stubborn. The only thing they really understand is when other people are stubborn to them in return.’
‘That is true, Mr Harper, very true.’
He let Parno lead the conversation but hoped that the point would soon come when he would move things forward, and eventually, Parno leaned towards him and lowered his voice, a little melodramatically Harper thought, and said, ‘So, how soon can your friends provide us with the list?’
He paused. He had learned a thing or two from Gregor. ‘The list is already prepared.’
Parno’s face gave nothing away. ‘How many, Mr Harper?’
‘Eight hundred. Individuals, not families.’ The Americans had been working on the lists of Communists and their sympathisers for years — eventually the names would run to thousands, from the top down. Aiding the provision of such a list would ensure Parno a secure position in the new regime. He imagined that however calm the man’s exterior, he must be quite excited. But then Parno surprised him.
‘And how accurate, do you suppose, is this list?’
Who would think a man like Parno would concern himself with accuracy? Surely it was quantity, not quality, that mattered here.
‘That isn’t my concern,’ Harper replied. Nor yours.
Parno paused. His face became heavy. He was, after all, a man who allowed shadows to cross his heart, Harper thought. Perhaps I have misjudged him.
‘When?’
‘The end of next week.’
‘And who will bring it?’
‘I’ll bring the list myself. But the handover has to be personal, to the General. My employers want an assurance from me about that. I am here today to receive that assurance from you so we can proceed.’
Parno raised his eyebrows very slightly. Officially, Harper had come as supplicant: unofficially, they both knew that the power in this conversation worked the other way around. Harper sensed in Parno a keenness that their transaction should be about more than the practicalities. He was a conviction bureaucrat, it would appear, not just a man on the make.
‘You’re an American. How did you learn Indonesian?’ Parno said.
‘I was born on Sulawesi, in forty-two.’ Harper offered. ‘Spent a bit of time here in Jakarta after the war, then my parents and I emigrated to the US. My father had relatives who sponsored us. Chicago.’
‘Ah, great pity, great misfortune not to be Javanese.’ Parno was chuckling again. The Javanese thought the only island worth being born on was Java: on other islands, the Javanese got blamed for everything. ‘Your parents did well to get out, considering what the Dutch did to us after.’ There was some none-too-subtle point-scoring in this remark: Parno would be wondering why Harper’s parents hadn’t stayed and fought for independence but it would have been risky for Harper to invent a cover story like that. Parno had probably fought himself, been imprisoned. If Harper claimed his parents had too, Parno would want to know all the details of what they had done, where they had done it and with whom.
‘You know how backward Dutch thinking is? A few of them get locked up by the Japanese and afterwards they think that means it’s justified to take our lands all over again. .’ There was genuine hatred in Parno’s tone, as there so often was when Indonesian conversation turned to the Dutch. Harper’s cover story never went near his Dutch roots. He would have had a bullet to the back of the head down some alleyway long before now if it had. Parno tossed back his whisky. ‘They got off pretty lightly.’
Harper wondered if his father felt he was getting off lightly as he was forced to kneel on the dusty ground by a screaming Japanese soldier — or his mother, for that matter, who had been a starving young widow when she gave birth to him in a flooded shack full of cockroaches.
‘But tell me something. .’
If he uses the phrase we are both men of the world, Harper thought to himself, I will get up and leave right now.
‘Tell me, is it true that there are people still out there hunting Nazis, after all these years? There is always something bad happening in the world. And yet there are men hunting down those Germans all over the world twenty years later, is that true? Even in South America, I believe?’
‘I believe so,’ Harper said.
Parno shook his head. ‘The Jews, you can bet they won’t ever forget. Hasn’t it been proved half those stories were made up?’
‘Well,’ said Harper, mildly, ‘the documented evidence is that it was pretty bad.’
A look of scorn crossed Parno’s face. ‘Why is it Westerners think a Jew child being murdered is worse than a child of ours, ha?’ He lifted his fingers and rubbed them together.
Harper looked at Parno’s face, which was a mask of certainty — and then it came to him what this conversation was really about. Parno was thinking of what would happen to the people whose names were on that list, them and their children. That was what was behind all this; the man had a conscience and he, Harper, was supposed to relieve it in order that they should get the deal done. Perhaps he should mention another name to Parno: Stalin. Maybe they could talk about what might happen in the Soviet Bloc now they’d kicked out Khrushchev. Perhaps if they discussed the people trying to scramble over the bloody great wall that had sliced Berlin in half, then Parno wouldn’t feel so bad about handing over a list of Commies to the military. While he was at it, Parno could usefully dwell on what would have happened to him and his family if the Communists had pulled off their coup — whatever his official post, his connections to the Generals would be well known; the army and the civil service were full of PKI informants from top to bottom. It was easy to have moral qualms about people who were going to be arrested when you were on the side that was in power. Such qualms were a luxury allowed only to the winners. If Parno was in a football stadium now, on his knees with his hands tied behind his back, would he be worrying about the health of the youth in the red bandana who had the pistol pressed against his temple? He’d be lucky if a pistol was how they did it.
He felt weary. He hadn’t eaten much that day, it was too sweltering, and the whisky — quite good whisky — was swimming in his head, and he had smoked a cigar even though he didn’t particularly like them. Parno wanted to inveigle him into a discussion that would make himself feel better: he felt like grabbing Parno by the lapels and bringing his face up to his, nose to nose, holding him there and saying, don’t you understand, it’s not my job to make you feel better and it’s not your job to feel bad in the first place? It isn’t our job to think or feel anything. Haven’t you got it?