He stared at the water. The only secret the canal would hide that night would be that he had realised he had a choice. He went back inside the shack. He put the leather case back into his holdall and then bunched the holdall up so that it formed a pillow. He laid his head on it and slept for some time, opening his eyes later while it was still dark, then lying there, waiting for dawn.
Two days later, handover done, he was having a beer with Abang by the Bali Beach Hotel and thinking that it was the best beer of his life. Blood sinks into sand really fast.
Afterwards, Abang drove him to his bungalow in Denpasar, only ten minutes from the centre of town but in a wide, tree-lined street behind some of the old buildings, now closed and boarded. Few people were out and about: two elderly men, shirtless and wiry, in bamboo hats and sarongs, digging at something in one of the ditches by the side of the road; a woman walking with a huge cloth bundle balanced on her head, her compact figure swaying a little with the effort, her hands loose by her side. As they drove past, he glanced back, to see if she was beautiful, but she was older than she looked from behind. Denpasar struck him as unnaturally quiet.
Abang had stayed with a family in the Chinese district for a bit — it was a good way of finding out what was happening on the ground, he said, but it got too dangerous after a while. ‘The British have this phrase, you know this one? A bird in a coal mine. The little yellow birds.’
‘Canary. Canary in a coal mine.’
‘That’s it.’
Abang made a point of moving lodgings every three months. People forgot their suspicions about you once you moved — even if they remembered you, your absence rendered you innocuous.
The bungalow was set back from the road, hidden behind a head-height wall in its turn obscured by tall bushes. The doors in the narrow stone entranceway were thick carved wood — the hinges creaked as they pushed their way through. Never oil the hinges, always scatter gravel beneath your doors and windows: these were the ways you made yourself secure without anyone knowing that was what you were doing. As they crossed the small lush garden and approached the front porch, he saw there was a young woman kneeling on the step preparing an offering. She smiled at Abang and Abang smiled back, then said something to her in a language Harper didn’t know. The young woman bent over the offering, eyes closed, for a moment, then rose from the step and, in a bowed position, backed away down the path.
Inside, the bungalow was clean and plain. Abang extended his arm and Harper sat on a low, wooden two-seater with woven cushions. Abang went out back and returned with two bottles of beer — he handed one to Harper, they gestured cheers! at each other, then Abang went over to an old filing cabinet against one wall that had a wide, shallow bowl on top full of incense sticks and limp petals with curled brown edges. He tilted the bowl and from underneath it withdrew a thin notebook, which he tossed over to Harper. ‘Back inside page.’
There was a name and the description of a village, a diagram sketched lightly in pencil.
‘That’s the village, Komang lives just outside it,’ Abang said, walking over to and sitting next to him. He pointed at the page. ‘He’s our contact in the district. He’s very well connected with the neighbouring villages, sits on the Irrigation Committee and his cousin is Big Man in the next village. His brother-in-law is a civil servant over in Klungkung Town.’
‘Why’s he working for us? What’s in it for him?’ Harper asked.
Abang shrugged. ‘Decent type, family man, worried about PKI land grabs. The peasants are worried too because they are loyal to the old landowners. They don’t really get the idea of parcelling up the land even though they are going to get some. Komang isn’t a peasant though, far from it, and he should have been fine, he has status, but trouble is, his brother joined the PKI last year, it’s widely known. Once the round-ups of Communists start here, that whole family is in trouble.’
‘Can’t we get a message to the military? Leave him alone?’
Abang shook his head. ‘Doesn’t work like that here. It’ll be the local militia comes for him. Once that lot get going, they work pretty much on their own initiative.’
‘Ah.’ Harper took his own small, leather-bound notebook from his back pocket and a stub of pencil and, holding Abang’s notebook open with one hand on one knee and his own on the other, began to copy down the details in the tiny, illegible scrawl he had developed for himself, a personal mix of English, Dutch, Indonesian, some Javanese he knew and a few words and abbreviations of his personal invention. If his notebook fell into the wrong hands — well, good luck to the man who had to try and decipher it.
When he looked up, he saw that Abang had gone to the open door that led out to the front porch and was leaning against the doorpost, looking out, silhouetted in the light from the garden, a bulky man with something of a paunch, a half-distracted air. He gave the impression of solidity, trustworthiness — even geniality in different circumstances, Harper thought: a favourite-uncle type. Abang lit a kretek and then stood staring out towards the street, smoking. Harper had a feeling he was thinking about the young woman who had beaten such a hasty retreat as they arrived, wondering what would happen to her once he had left, perhaps? Then Abang glanced back and caught Harper looking at him.
‘Sorry.’ He patted a pocket.
‘It’s okay,’ Harper said. ‘In a bit.’
Abang drew on the cigarette. ‘I’m not sorry to be getting out of Denpasar before it all kicks off here, you know.’
‘I’ll be up country by then.’
‘Yeah, I wouldn’t count on it being much better up there, you know. Once you’ve warned Komang, it’s up to you, take whichever route you like, scout out the highlands, observe and take notes, just make sure you don’t stay more than two nights in any one place. I would say you’ll be here for a few weeks at least, unless Amsterdam in its wisdom changes its mind. What are your contact arrangements?’
‘I’ll have to come back to Denpasar. They know I’ll be out of contact for a bit.’
‘Good one,’ Abang inclined his head.
It was every operative’s favourite kind of job; freedom of movement and using his own initiative.
Abang smiled. ‘You’re not a romantic, are you?’
Harper looked at him, a query.
‘I mean, you’re not the kind of person who is taken in by the landscape? Sorry, of course you’re not.’ He tipped his head back and exhaled smoke in a sharp, upward stream. ‘You’re not like Joosten and the others.’
What Abang meant was, you’re not a fool. You won’t think that because a field is green and has a pretty woman with sleek black hair bending to harvest it that that means you can let your guard down. You’re not so stupid as to believe — like all those operatives back home — that ugly things can’t happen in beautiful places. What Abang meant was, you’re not white.
‘No,’ said Harper, bending his head back to the notebooks, ‘I’m not.’
The next morning, he woke after sunrise on the low day bed in the corner of Abang’s sitting room. From the back porch, there was a clanking sound and the tuneful murmur of Abang singing a low, indistinguishable song.
He had slept deeply: the light striped through the shutter slats in bright white. He threw back the sarong Abang had given him, sitting and stretching: both arms, bending them at the elbows, arching his back, then circling his head first one way then the other. He looked down at his torso, examining a livid bruise on his ribcage — the swelling had gone down and the deep red edge of it was spreading into purple and yellow tracery, like lace. His cock rested small and limp against his left thigh and he thought, not for the first time, it could have been a lot worse. On more than one occasion in the years to come, as an older man, he was to remember the speed of his recovery after the Jakarta incident and how much he had taken it for granted: the easy belief he had back then in his own powers of survival, the rapidity with which bruises faded and the confidence, the elasticity of youth.