The dirt floor of the shack was slightly raised from the street, otherwise he would have woken in a mud bath. When he went to the opening in the back, the rain was still falling onto the brown water of the canal, but it was easing. It would stop soon, then there would be a little dull light before darkness fell and the huge yellow moon of Jakarta rose in the sky: it always stayed low it seemed, like a mother keeping a close eye on her children.
He went back into the shack, ate the rest of the klepon, then sat on his backside and did a slow inventory of his body, starting with his left foot and working his way up each of his legs in turn, checking for swelling and bruising. He kept a tiny round mirror in his toilet bag, half of a woman’s powder compact that he had detached from the other half after one of his short-lived liaisons had left it behind at his apartment in Amsterdam. He remembered snapping it in two, after she’d gone, tossing the powder half into a wastepaper basket and thinking, a tiny mirror, that could be useful. He cleaned it with the edge of his shirt, which made it more dirty, spat on it, cleaned it again, and then, in the indistinct smear of his own spittle, examined his face. His chin was misshapen. There was a long graze on one side, near his hairline — but he didn’t look nearly as bad as he felt. He probed his left cheekbone in an exploratory manner, decided it wasn’t smashed. He would wash his face properly the next morning, when dawn broke, in the canal. There was a clean shirt in the holdall. He would change into that before he set out.
Once his inventory of himself was done, he checked through each of his belongings, then, perhaps because he was feeling scornful about Johnson and Parno and all those men he dealt with who did most of their business sitting in the safety of houses or offices, he did something unprofessional. He pulled the leather case out of the canvas holdall and unzipped it, and took out the list of names.
He had expected it to be handwritten — you wouldn’t think there were any typists left holed up in the American Embassy with its rolls of barbed wire outside. Instead, the list was typed on lined paper torn from a large notepad, the sort of very thin paper where the dot on the ‘i’ key had made pinprick holes. There were around thirty sheets, held together on the left-hand side by two small bulldog clips. He unfastened them and held up one of the sheets of paper: the tiny holes in it created minuscule white beams. There were twenty-five to thirty names on each sheet. The names were on the left, then underneath them was a one-word note. Member for a PKI party member. Official for someone they thought was higher up in the party. The names didn’t appear to be in any sort of order. The officials might be conviction Communists, Harper thought, but most of the members were probably peasants and workers who thought it might get them a few hours off corvée labour. A couple of names had PRIORITY typed in capitals underneath — they would be the ones the military really wanted. Priority could mean, to be shot immediately, or to be kept alive for questioning. After the names were numbers in brackets, (4) or (2) or (9). Sometimes, there was just a question mark, (?).
In the middle of the page was a list of addresses or sometimes just the single word for a street or district. After the addresses, there was a third column that had handwritten annotations in fine pencil. Harper peered at them but couldn’t decipher the tight scrawl. Eight hundred names, on this list alone: eight hundred people.
It was only after he had clipped the sheaf of paper back into place, brushed at a little dirt that had transferred onto it from his hands and replaced it in the leather case, that he realised what the numbers in brackets probably meant: family members, wives, children, cousins or servants, anyone else in the household who might be of interest.
He stood and walked towards the opening, the leather case still in his hands. Outside, the rain had stopped and darkness had fallen. The moon would rise soon.
He crouched down on his haunches and rested his back, wincing as he did, against the precarious wall of the shack. He wrapped his arms around the leather case and clutched it to his chest. He closed his eyes.
The sheaf of paper he was holding against his heart, his beating heart, the list of names: he was holding death. He was death.
He kept his eyes closed. It was still unnaturally quiet for early evening in Jakarta but around him, he could hear people stirring in the shacks; a woman called out and then was silent, a baby or toddler let out a half-hearted, old-sounding cry.
He thought of Parno, waiting in his bungalow, with his wife and his stuffed tiger. He thought of the people on the list, who were somewhere eating a meal or sleeping or talking to their children. He thought of the secretary who had typed it, the one whose fingers had come down so firmly on the clacketty typewriter that the ‘i’ key had made those holes in the paper. He thought of a room full of men in suits, all seated around a big oval table, with coffee and ashtrays on it, clipboards, an expensive watch that the man in charge had detached from his wrist and placed in front of him in order to keep an eye on the time because he didn’t quite trust the wall clock, which was no way near as expensive as his watch. He thought of a soldier, somewhere in a barrack, here in Jakarta, cleaning a gun. Someone, somewhere, was checking the oil on the engine of the jeep that would transport that soldier to the addresses now in Harper’s possession.
He opened his eyes. The moon had risen. Its glow lit the surface of the canal. If he leaned out over the water, he would be able to see a version of himself, reflected.
Of all the people he had just thought of, he was, as far as he knew, the only one in possession of the list. Perhaps there was a copy somewhere, perhaps there wasn’t. It would be egotistical to think of himself as the sole possessor of it, surely? He was nothing more than a courier. He wasn’t going to kill anyone. But put all the people he had just thought about — and him — together, and collectively they were going to kill all eight hundred people on this list, and their families: (4) or (2) or (9).
Those people were going to be killed anyway. The list might speed things up a bit, that’s all — and think of all the people who would have been killed if the Communists had succeeded in taking power. A man like him wasn’t a policy-maker. The big decisions could only be made by people who had all the facts. He, Harper, only knew a tiny percentage of the story — you had to look at the big picture, after all. He had been hired to pick up a leather case and deliver it somewhere else. If he hadn’t been hired to do that job, then someone else would have been.
He stared at the surface of the canal, flat and black as oil, glossy in the moonlight, and it came to him that he did, after all, have a choice. He could stand up and with one swing of his arm, using hardly any force at all, toss the leather case into the water in front of him, where it would float for no more than a second. In the chaos of Jakarta, it was easy for a man to fail in what he set out to do. In the time it would take for another list to be drawn up or copied, another handover to be arranged, perhaps a handful of people would be warned and disappear, escape to the country — who knew?
Further down the canal, there came the laughter of some girls. They would have slipped out under the cover of darkness to protect their modesty, now the mobs had quietened and the smell of burning had been dampened by the rain. They would be bathing and washing their hair in the black water where everyone urinated and rubbish was thrown, where the canal was opaque enough to hide all manner of secrets.