Burke shrugged. "What counts is the two underfunded brainstormers found the lending terms acceptable."
"And the identity of the generous third party is…?"
Burke looked at him again.
"Marcus 'Moneybags' Caine," he said. "Your boy Gordian's number-one detractor."
Kirby took a deep breath, released it, and gazed out at the plate in time to see Dale Lanning swing his bat a mile high of the ball.
Burke bent to pick their gloves up of the ground, and handed one to Kirby.
"That's allll, folks," he said, frowning. "Time for us to let the prosecutors score more points. I'm telling you, this has got to be a goddamn nightmare."
Kirby appeared to be looking out across the field at something Burke couldn't see.
"It is," he said, slipping on his glove. "It very definitely is."
Chapter Eleven
Although it was only a little past eight in the morning, Zhiu Sheng had noticed a dramatic reduction of trade at the floating market as the motor canoe brought him to where the waterway narrowed and the wooden stilt houses of impoverished locals came crowding up on either bank. Most of the peddlers and buyers had appeared at daybreak, preferring to get their business out of the way before the heat and humidity became too oppressive — the former with their goods displayed on the decks of small boats or log rafts, the latter poling along in shallow dugouts, or arriving via klotoks like the one he had hired, forming long lines of slow-moving watercraft in the canals twisting through outer Banjarmasin like the tentacles of some languorous octopus.
Zhiu saw small boats loaded with bananas, star fruits, lichees, melons, and salaks; with green vegetables; with fish, eel, cray, and frog; with selections of precooked foods. Conspicuously, he did not see a single vender selling chicken meat, once the largest source of animal protein for Indonesia's citizens, now an imported delicacy served mainly to foreigners in Jakarta's expensive restaurants. Rising feed prices coupled with the devaluation of the rupiah had devastated the poultry industry when the so-called "Asian miracle" lost its glow, resulting in most of the native breeding stock being liquidated. The American chicken farmers had moved in to exploit the livestock shortage and essentially captured the market… their success ironically assured by the greed of Chinese and Malaysian feed producers, who had refused to lower their prices or extend credit to the Indonesians.
Zhiu understood supply and demand, but it vexed him nonetheless.
He rode in silence, looking with steady fascination at the other vessels winding along the canal. In addition to the market craft, there were postal boats, water buses, and tublike rice barges with sailcloth tops wobbling toward docks at the city center. It was a scene that brought back memories of his last visit to this district nearly three decades ago, when Sukarno's PKI was at its height of power and had sought to establish a united Communist front with the government in Beijing. He had come, then, as an official envoy of Zhou Enlai to help organize state construction projects… a straightforward assignment for a man whose revolutionary passion was still in full blush.
Like many things in life as one became older, the circumstances of his present trip were laced with greater complexity, Zhiu thought.
He accepted the differences and rarely looked back on his beginnings, but supposed returning to this place after so long a duration of years had made him reflective. How hard Sukarno had struggled to eradicate the stain of Western cultural influence, and how painfully he would have viewed its indelibility. Even here it could not be ignored. A few moments earlier, a group of white tourists had darted past in rented speedboats, reminding him of noisy macaques with their round eyes, sunburned red cheeks, and loud excited voices. But he'd clamped down on his annoyance, preferring, as always, to look on the bright side. At least the water spouted by their outboards dispelled the mosquitos, and added a relieving coolness to the semblance of a breeze coming off the Barito River.
"Pelan-pelan sayaZhiu told his canoe guide in Mandarin-accented Bahasa. He pointed toward a woman selling rice cakes from a boat that had been cobbled out of warped old boards.
"Ya"
The canoe man cut his motor, paddled up to the rickety boat, and reached down beside him for a bamboo pole with a nail fastened to one end. Extending the pole across his bow, he speared a rice cake for Zhiu Sheng and held it out for him to sample.
Zhiu took a bite, swallowed, and tossed a bronze-colored coin onto the vender's deck.
"Terima kasi banyak" she said, smiling with gratitude.
Zhiu instructed the guide to restart the outboard, and settled back for his light breakfast.
A short while later, the canoe man turned a bend in the canal, swung toward a house and rice barn overhanging the near bank, and informed his passenger they had reached their destination. Zhiu did not bother saying that he'd already guessed it for himself. The further they had progressed beyond the market, the more he'd sensed eyes watching from behind shuttered windows, and noticed hard young men tracing his progress with quick, covert glances from the walkways connecting the ramshackle structures.
Khao Luan was like a feudal warlord to the people of this area, giving them just enough to keep them loyal, but not so much that they might become independent of him.
Now the canoe man again silenced his engine, and rowed up to a ladder running into the muddy water from the dwelling's front door. Three teenagers sat on separate rungs — two boys in faded denim shorts and T-shirts, and a girl wearing similar shorts and a halter of some sheer, revealing material that had been tied below her breasts to expose her midriff. There was a kind of affected sexuality about her that at once saddened and disgusted Zhiu Sheng. The boys also seemed to be playacting at roles they did not quite grasp, sitting with their shoulders hunched and smoking unfiltered cigarettes as they listened to an enormous radio blasting out American rock music.
They slouched under the hot sun, staring into the water as if they might find something other than aimless drifts of reeds and sediment beneath its torpid surface.
The Asian miracle, Zhiu Sheng thought dryly.
He saw them raise their eyes from the crawling water as his guide brought the canoe up beside the ladder. All of them had bad complexions. All looked dirty and undernourished. Their expressions were bored and impassive and uniformly sullen.
He waited until the canoe had been lashed into a berth composed of four vertical bamboo poles, then paid the guide, lifted his carryall onto his shoulder, and rose to step ashore.
The teenagers watched him a moment longer. Then the taller of the boys stood up to block his approach, crossing his arms over his puffed-out chest, doing what he thought was expected of him under some artificial standard of toughness.
It would probably kill him in a streetfight before he was twenty.
Zhiu Sheng finished his rice cake, then rubbed his fingertips together to wipe off its pasty residue.
''Saya mahu laki bilik,'' he said from the prow of the boat. "I'm here to see the men inside."
The tall boy stared down at him, letting his cigarette dangle from his lips the way they did in American gangster movies. The smoke curling from its tip carried the pungently sweet odor of cloves.
"What is your name?" he asked.
Zhiu was in no mood. "Go on. Let the men know their friend from up north has arrived."
"I asked you—"
"Berhenti!" Zhiu checked him with a motion of his hand. "Stop wasting my time and do it."
The boy stared at him for a second, then turned and went up the ladder to the door, taking longer than he should have, wanting to save whatever face he could with his companions.