State of Siege (4 page)

“What do you mean?”

“You can have my job if you like.”

“No, thanks.”

“Wise man. It’s not going to be pleasant having murderers about the place.”

“Understanding is a fine thing,” I said; “but sometimes it is better to carry a revolver.”

“What’s that?”

“Something that Major Suparto said.”

And now I was sitting in Gedge’s office for the last time, listening to what was being said, yet knowing that in less than three hours what I was hearing would seem as remote as a dream.

Unlike his five brother officers, Suparto had been an unqualified success. The ability to plan and organise is rare among the Sundanese; but, in this respect, Suparto was exceptional by any standards. Secure in a two-year contract, the Transport Manager had no qualms at all about delegating authority to so able and energetic an assistant, and had resisted the efforts of other departmental managers to lure him away.

Suparto had outlined the situation crisply.

There had been a strike of stevedores down at Port Kail the previous week and some important machinery had been unloaded on to the quayside by the ship’s crew. Now, the Customs people were making difficulties about identifying the individual items on the ship’s cargo manifest, and were refusing to clear it. In his
opinion they were turning a small confusion into a big one in the hope of getting a substantial bribe. He believed that if he were to go down to Kail and see the head of the Customs himself, the problem would very soon disappear. The Transport Manager shared that belief.

“We’ve never had trouble with the Customs before,” Gedge was saying; “even in the early days when they could have made things good and tough for us.”

“Major Suparto thinks that the local men may be getting squeezed from above,” the Transport Manager said.

“I think it is possible,” said Suparto; “but that is not something which can be discovered by radio telephone. I must talk with these men privately.”

Gedge nodded. “Very well, Major. We’ll leave it to you. The main thing is to get that machinery on its way up here. How long will you be away?”

“Two days, perhaps three. I propose to leave at once.” He turned to me. “Mr. Fraser, I shall not have another opportunity. May I wish you a safe journey and a happy future?”

“Thanks, Major. It’s been a pleasure knowing you.”

We shook hands and he went out with the Transport Manager. Then began the rather more elaborate business of saying goodbye to Gedge.

The Dakota arrived at twelve thirty. When they had off-loaded the two mailbags, some cartons of dried
milk and a couple of small air-compressor sets, they put my suitcase aboard and slung the outgoing mail in after it. My successor and one or two particular friends had come out to the airstrip to see me off, so there was more nonsense to be talked and handshaking to be done before I could get aboard myself.

Roy Jebb was the pilot. The first officer was a Sundanese named Abdul. They never carried a full crew on those trips, so, as I was the only passenger, I sat in the radio operator’s seat just behind them. The plane had been standing in the sun for an hour and was suffocatingly hot inside; but I was so glad to be going that I did not even think to take my jacket off. I could see the men who had been seeing me off walking back to where the jeeps were standing, and wondered vaguely if I would ever see any of them again. Then the sweat began to trickle into my eyes and Jebb called to me to fasten my seat belt.

Two minutes later we were airborne.

T
he dark green mass of the jungle moved away beneath us and we began to follow the coast line with its ragged fringe of islands and turquoise-coloured shoal water.

Jebb glanced over his shoulder at me. He was lean, rangy and very Australian.

“Done anything about getting yourself a room, Steve?” he asked.

“I thought of trying the Orient.”

“You might get a bed there. You won’t get a room to yourself. Isn’t that right, Abdul?”

“Oh yes. You can’t sleep alone in Selampang. That is what they say.” The first officer giggled deprecatingly. “It is a joke.”

“And not a very funny one. They’ve got six beds now in some of those fly-blown rooms at the Orient. It’s a fair cow.”

“I’ll buy my way in,” I said; “I have before. Anyway, it’s only for three days. I’m hoping to get a plane to Djakarta on Friday.”

“You can try if you like, but you’ll still have to share with a stranger. Why don’t you come over to the Air House with me?”

“I didn’t know they let rooms.”

“They don’t. I’ve got a little apartment up top there over the radio station. You can doss in the sitting room if you like.”

“It’s kind of you, but …”

“No ‘buts’ about it. You’d be doing me a favour. I’ve got to go to Makassar tomorrow and won’t be back till Friday. It’s asking for trouble these days to leave an apartment unoccupied.”

“Thieves?”

“Either that or you come back and find some bloody policeman’s wangled a requisition order and moved in with his family. I lost my bungalow that way when I went on leave last year. Now, I always try and get a pal to stay, even if it’s only a couple of days.”

“Then, I’ll be glad to.”

“It’s a deal. What do you want to do on your first night of freedom?”

“Where’s the best food now?”

“The restaurants are all pretty bloody. Did you know we’ve got a new club? The New Harmony it’s called.”

“It’s a year since I’ve been down here.”

“Then that’s settled. Your evening’s made. Now then, Abdul, what about some tea? Where’s that thermos?”

Selampang lies at the head of a deep bay looking westward across the Java Sea. It used to be called Nieu Willemstad, and along the canals near the port there are still a few of the old houses, with brown-tiled roofs and diamond-paned windows, built by the early Dutch colonists. It stands on what was once swamp land, and the network of canals which covers the whole city area is really a system of drainage ditches; ditches in which the majority of the inhabitants, serenely ignoring the new sanitary regulations, continue to deposit their excreta, wash their bodies, and launder their clothes. When the Dutch left it, Selampang had a population of of about half a million. Now it has over a million and a half. Yet, when you drive along the wide, tree-lined streets of the modern sections, past the big solid bungalows standing in their spacious compounds, there are no signs of overcrowding. It is only the pervasive smell of the canals and the occasional glimpses you get of the teeming
attap
villages which encrust their banks that remind you. The new slum city has grown like a fungus behind the colonial façade of the old.

The Air House was on the south side of the big Van Riebeeck Square, next to an eighteenth-century Residency which housed a department of the Ministry of
Public Health. The highest and the newest building in Selampang, it had been put up by a consortium of oil companies and airline operators as an office block, and was nearing completion when the Japanese occupied the city in 1942. For a time the Japanese had used it as a military headquarters; then their psychological warfare people had moved in, erected lattice masts on the roof and made a short-wave radio station of it. After the war it had remained a radio station. Only the ground floor had been handed back to the airline operators, and this was now a booking office and the terminal for the airport bus.

Jebb’s apartment was on the top floor. The lift only went to the fifth; after that you walked along a rubber-floored corridor, through some swing doors and up a flight of stairs. Beyond the doors the building was still unfinished. The concrete of the auxiliary staircase was as the builders had left it in 1942. Footsteps echoed dismally down the staircase well. The window openings were roughly boarded up and it was not easy to see where you were going.

“Mind yourself here. You’ll catch your coat,” Jebb said.

We rounded a concrete upright bristling with the ends of reinforcement rods and walked a short way along a dusty passage. Then Jebb stopped at a door and took a key out.

“They’d just started to put the drains in these apartments
when the Japs came,” he said. “This is the only one they finished. The other five are still empty. After all this time and with a housing shortage, too! What a country! I had to bribe the whole of the city hall before I could even get the water turned on.”

He opened the door and we went in.

My spirits had been drooping a little as we mounted the stairs, and I was remembering the camp bed I had so confidently given away; but inside things were different. There was a small tiled hall with a kitchen leading off it and another door into the sitting room. This was long and narrow, but almost the whole of the outer wall was taken up by french windows leading on to a deep terrace with a concrete balustrade. Over the terrace there was a plaited bamboo sun roof and, at the sides,
attap
screens. There was not much furniture; apart from the usual bamboo long chairs and a divan that was clearly used as the spare bed, there was a radio, a portable phonograph, a bookcase full of paper-backed novels and a bamboo serving trolley with drinks on it. On the walls were some Balinese pictures. It was cool and comfortable. I said so.

“The girl-friend helped me fix it up.” He started the ceiling fan going very slowly. “Got to watch this bastard. Don’t switch it on too quickly or it’ll blow the main fuses down on the floor below. Now, what’s it to be, Steve? Drink first or shower first? I’ll tell you what. We’ll have a long drink first while I show you where
everything is. Then we’ll shower and go on from there. What’ll it be? Brandy dry? Gin fizz? Scotch if you like, but if you want to stay on the same thing all the evening, brandy or gin are easier. I’ll go and get the ice.”

When he had made the drinks, he showed me his bedroom and then took me out on to the terrace. It faced north, and from one end you could see out over the funnels and masts of the shipping in the port and across the bay. Beyond one of the
attap
screens at the other end was a Dutch bathhouse with a big stone ewer of water and a galvanised iron scoop.

“What do you know about it?” he demanded. “My word! Fancy putting a thing like that in a new building.”

“Some people say it’s the best sort of shower there is.”

“Not me. Sloshing the water all over yourself with a thing like a saucepan, when you could pipe it up another four feet to a sprinkler—it’s crazy! Besides, you have to be a bloody contortionist to rinse the soap off all over. The can’s okay though—ordinary civilised type. Last place I had, it was practically the old pole-over-the-pit.”

“How long have you been here, Roy?”

“In this country? Four years. Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot I like about it besides the fat salary they pay me. But they’re a funny lot. For instance, all these
things they’re getting now, like cars and fridges and radios, they don’t look on them just as things to use. They
wear
them like lucky charms. Doesn’t matter if the thing’s any use to them or not, or even if it works. They’ve got to have it to feel all right. Abdul saw an American wearing a gold wrist-watch in a movie, so
he
had to have a gold wrist-watch. He starved himself for three months to pay for it. Why? He never looks at the time, he doesn’t wind the bloody thing, he’s not even particularly proud of it. It’s just
his
. They’re mostly like that, and that’s what fools you. You think they’re simply a lot of show-off kids trying to ape western civilisation.”

“Until one day you find out that they’re not simple at all, and that you haven’t ever begun to understand them.”

“Too right. You know, when I was new here, I once asked a bunch of them at the airport what they thought was the most serious crime a man could commit. Know what they said?”

“Not murder anyway. They think we’re too fussy about that.”

“No, not murder. To steal another man’s wife, that was the worst, they thought.”

“I’ve never heard that one before.”

“Neither had I. I didn’t know then that it’s no use asking questions in this country. You only get the answer they think you want to hear. During the war my
wife went off with another man. I’d just divorced her. Those jokers happened to have found out, that’s all.” He grinned. “You married, Steve?”

“Not any more. Same story.”

He nodded. “Mina’ll fix you up all right.”

“Who’s she?”

“The girl-friend. Tell you what. You have the shower first. I’ll go and call her up now and tell her to bring a friend along.”

It was dark when we went down into the square again and the whole place had come to life. There were people everywhere. The casuarina trees and travellers’ palms which ringed the gardens in the centre were festooned with lights, and market stalls had been set up beneath them. Chinese food-sellers surrounded by little groups of eaters squatted in the dust. A boy of about ten sat on his haunches playing a bamboo xylophone, while another beside him beat a drum. The road which ran round the square was jammed with crawling cars, and the
betjak
drivers rang their bells incessantly as they manoeuvred their brightly painted tricycles through the gaps. It was a tribute to the wealth and influence of the Selampang black-market operators that, in a city where the cheapest American car cost three times as much as it cost in Detroit, there should be a modern traffic problem.

There was a line of empty
betjak
by the Air House entrance and, as soon as he saw Jebb, one of the drivers
swung out of the line and pedalled up to us, smiling eagerly.

“We need two this evening, Mahmud.”

“I can take both,
tuan
.”

“Maybe you can, sport, but we want to be comfortable. Where’s your friend?”

Another driver was summoned and we set off.

Once you have learned to disregard the laboured breathing of the driver pedalling behind you and have overcome the feeling that you are the sitting target for every approaching car, the
betjak
is an agreeable form of transport, especially on a hot night. You are carried along just fast enough for the air to seem cool, but not so fast that the sweat chills on your body. You can lean back comfortably and look up at the trees and the stars without being bitten by insects; and, providing the driver does not insist on muttering obscene invitations to the nearest brothel in your ear, you can think.