As I walked away, Dr. Corales said, 'Have a good trip. Too bad you have to fly on a day like today.' One of those bland comments that professionals sometimes use to gauge the mood and the stability of a patient.
I told Dr. Corales that
A little joke. Just to let her know I was okay.
Chapter 18
I was in an ancient Garuda airliner; some recycled transport jet whose fuselage had been polished beer can- thin by all the hours of wind friction, all the years of jungle puddle-jumping, all the days of harsh Indonesian sunlight.
We banked to starboard and descended through volcanic clouds. Below and ahead was Sumatra. We dropped down over mangrove plains off the Straits of Malacca and I could see a plateau of orange smog that was as vivid as the hot haze of a chemical fire. The smog lay over jungle—a stratum of red gas shimmering over emerald green. Then the jungle began to thin. There was a veinwork of dirt roads and brown rivers that ran through rice paddies. The landscape reminded me of Vietnam. Then I could see the city's outskirts: a coagulated mass of slums; thousands of bamboo shanties, each with a television antenna suspended from a bamboo pole. The city's center was to the north: a hazy, geometric clutter packed onto a delta created by the branching of two muddy rivers.
The old plane wobbled, creaked; tires yelped before the reverse thrust of engines, and then a throng of tiny, brown shirtless men were wheeling the stairs toward the open cabin door.
Welcome to Sumatra, the second largest island in the nation of Indonesia. Welcome to Medan, the island's largest city, home to a million or more anonymous souls. Had I attacked the tarmac with a nuclear auger, drilled straight down through the center of the planet, through the thousands of miles of molten core, I would have exited the tunnel somewhere close to Nicaragua, not far from where I had started.
So, welcome to the back side of the earth. . . .
I went through customs, no problem. Expected to be met by an old contact of mine, Havildar Singbah. Havildar had been a stafFsergeant in the Duke of Edinburgh's Own Gurkha Rifles. In military communities, the Gurkhas are considered to be the most fearsome infantry fighters on earth. They are also considered to be among the most trustworthy men on earth. Havildar had seen action in Vietnam and the Falklands. He is about five feet six inches tall, and he is one of the few men I've met in my life who truly frightens me. Not because of the way he looks—the man always had a mellow little smile on his face—but because of the stories I had heard about him while he and his troop served with the Brits.
Waiting for me with a car, though, was a man named Rengat Ungar. Rengat was maybe thirty years old, maybe fifty. He wore a dirty turban and rubber sandals. He told me Havildar had suddenly been called back to Nepal because his father was very ill. Rengat assured me I could like and trust him one hundred percent. 'Just like Havildar, you bet!'
But I didn't like or trust Rengat. He chattered constantly in his broken English and chain-smoked Indonesian cigarettes that stank of cloves. He drove much too fast and the brakes on his little car were bad. Because Medan has no stoplights or stop signs, it was a dangerous combination.
I settled back and stared out the window, hoping that my indifference would cause him to concentrate on his driving.
If there were a million people in Medan, there seemed to be at least that many beat-up minibuses and motorized
'You want nice girl?' Rengat asked me cheerfully. 'Very young, very cheap.'
'Not right now,' I told him.
'A nice young boy, then? I can offer you a selection of very clean young boys.'
It is one of the great ironies of Indonesia that its Islamic communities are brutally strict about some laws, yet totally indifferent to others. Were I found guilty of stealing in Medan, my left hand would be chopped off. Were I caught with narcotics in my possession, I would be condemned to some hellhole prison for a year or more, then shot. No appeals considered, no questions asked, no concessions offered even to a well-moneyed American. But for a few thousand rupiah—the equivalent of about two dollars— I could purchase the innocence of any wandering child, and the local cops would turn their backs.
The few tourists who came to Sumatra—there weren't many—came for the lively sex trade. The only other draw was the timber trade. The Japanese, I knew, were logging the rain forests day and night. The industry had attracted a sizable enclave of Japanese—which explained the niche market Raymond Tullock had found for his mullet roe. That Sumatra was sexually lawless also explained the Japanese's need for it.
I told Rengat, 'No children today, thanks.'
Before he dropped me at my hotel, I had Rengat drive me through town and out toward the port of Belawan. It took me more than an hour of roaming around the docks, using Rengat as an interpreter, to find the boat I was to meet. It was a small brown-sailed junk made of red teak. The junk had a dragon's head carved into the bow, and golden Chinese characters on the stern. Beneath the characters was a word in English:
The captain of the vessel was a dour little man whose teeth were black from chewing betel nuts. He made a show of being angry at me. I was days late! He was now off schedule! Which was all bullshit—they had only just arrived, according to the junk's customs sheet, and had to stay in Sumatra for at least several days, as we both well knew. But I palmed him several twenties, and three evenly ripped halves of hundred-dollar bills to make him happy.
At customs, I showed the inspector one of my three false passports. I also showed him my international collector's permit. All the embossed lettering and stamps seemed to impress him. So did the innocuous ten-dollar bill I slipped him. The customs inspector opened the small Styrofoam box I had taken from the junk. Inside were three frozen ox-eyed tarpon, a species that is found only in Asia and is very common around the river mouths of Burma. To an American biologist such as myself, they were rare creatures indeed.
I raised my eyebrows at the inspector to illustrate my question, then made a sawing motion with my hand. Did he want me to cut the fish open?
The man shook his head, already bored with me, and waved me through.
I carried my package back to the little car and got in beside Rengat. As we neared the city, I suggested he make a quick stop at his home so that I might meet his wife and children. Rengat was reluctant. I pressed the issue, telling him I wanted to make small gifts of money to his children.
Ultimately, greed got the best of him. His tiny block house was just off a side street named Madong Lubis. I bowed to Rengat's wife and dipped a cup of kava from the wooden bowl in the tiny living room. In Asia, loud slurping is the sound of polite approval. I patted Rengat s children and gave them crisp greenbacks. As I held the bills out, only I seemed to notice that my hands were shaking.
Once we were back in the car, Rengat was not so talkative, and he seemed less eager for me to approve of him. Familiarity diminishes authority while increasing dependency. My visit had accomplished both. As he drove me to my hotel, I was aware that Rengat was aware that the price of any sort of betrayal had increased exponentially.
I now knew where the man lived.
A sealed note from Havildar apologized for his absence and told me that Raymond Tullock was staying at the H otel Tiara, third floor, room 217.
The strange numbering system, I knew, was a holdover from the old Dutch colonial days when Sumatra was one of the thriving dark corners of the rubber trade.
The Hotel Tiara was the best hotel in Medan—which is to say that it was about as plush, but not as clean, as the average Motel 6. It was a tall, squarish salmon-colored building on busy, potholed Cut Mutiah Street. Small men
