with rickshaws and pedicabs stood in a line outside the hotel, waiting for fares.
The room Havildar had arranged for me was opposite the Hotel Tiara and down less than a block. It was a native place named Selamat Sian— 'Good day!' in Indonesian. The little rooming house was as dark and narrow- staired as a New York tenement building. It smelled of curry and rotting durian fruit and Indonesian cigarettes. My room overlooked the street, so I could watch Tullock coming and going.
Havildar's note also told me that I should not trust Rengat, but not to fear him either. The note included the names I needed of a few local men, and it concluded by reminding me that Havildar and I still had unfinished business on the nearby island of Timor. In 1975, the Indonesian government had staged a brutal military takeover of East Timor. Military rule there—enforced by Indonesian death squads—continues even today.
Years ago, I had used Sumatra as a staging area for a surveillance operation that had accomplished absolutely nothing but earn me the friendship of the little Gurkha sergeant. I was sorry about Havildar's father, but I wished to hell Havildar were still in Medan, and not working his way up to his native village in the Himalayas. It did more than change my plan. I would now have to completely abandon certain elements of it.
There was one thing I didn't want to do, couldn't do: spend much time in Medan. It was possible that the Indonesian government had learned about my earlier work. If I was caught—particularly with three false passports in my possession—I would be summarily jailed. Maybe the American Embassy in Jakarta would be notified, but that was unlikely. A more probable scenario was that I would be locked anonymously away until an appropriate time when I might be used as a bargaining tool. If that opportunity never materialized—I could think of no reason that it would—then I would be left to die in the local prison.
I had once driven past that prison—the Simpang Alas it was called, named for a local river. Alas Prison was a monstrous old fortress of rotting cement and concertina wire built north of town. It had reminded me of Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi, because the outside walls were painted the same damp, mustard-yellow color. Its few windows were as black and narrow as gunports; the yellow walls were high. Two elements dominated the prison grounds: the silence . . . and the smell. Simpang Alas possessed the eerie silence of an abandoned city; the kind of silence that fills the void after someone has abruptly ceased screaming. The wind that blew over the prison carried the defecant odors of humans who have been reduced to cave animals. That smell was the stench of nightmares.
Even local travelers who passed Simpang Alas averted their eyes, as if a dark vacuum radiated out beyond the prison walls and to look upon it put them at risk of being sucked into that darkness.
What I needed to do was hit Raymond Tullock quickly, then get the hell out. I would have preferred anything to even a year in Simpang Alas—a firing squad, a knife . . . anything.
But with Havildar gone, it would not be so easy.
For three straight days, I watched Tullock from my window, or tagged along after him in a car, with Rengat driving. I watched him and made cryptic notes.
He was never hard to find. In the alleyways of Sumatra, a tall, blond American stands out in any crowd.
Tullock had three Japanese business associates. The four of them spent two mornings at the huge fish market in Belawan, not far from the port where I had met the junk days earlier. They also spent a day traveling around the foothills of the western mountains. I got the impression that Tullock was thinking about expanding into the timber business. Also got the impression that he was looking for an estate to buy or rent.
In Indonesia, a man with a monthly income of a couple thousand U.S. dollars could live like a sultan. Maids, gardeners, a chauffeur, cooks, and all the wives and mistresses he wanted.
I wondered if Tullock was afraid of the murder charge that might await him back in the states. He had cleaned out his bank accounts. So maybe that had been his plan all along. Hannah had made it plain that he would never have her, so why go back?
I also wondered if Tullock, through phone calls back to the States, had discovered that he had killed Hannah, not me.
I found it oddly irritating that I did not know.
Tullock was a punctual man of habit. Each day he returned to his hotel just after five and drank bottled Pellegrino water on the patio that overlooked the hotel garden. He would sit there in his catalogue-new safari clothes and listen to the eerie wail of the muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to prayer. Would sit there as the whole city came to a stop around him; as passersby threw prayer carpets onto the dirt walkways and bowed toward Mecca. He would continue to sip water and write in his ledger book, indifferent to it all. Then Tullock would return to his room and reappear an hour later, right at dusk, and go for a jog. His route was always the same: down the crowded streets, then north along the Deli River. His route followed dirt footpaths that wound through several patches of park that were as dark and wooded as jungle.
My original plan was to have Havildar sneak into Tullock's room while he was out. It would have been so simple, so damn easy. I could have chosen any time I wanted to confront Tullock—I
That wouldn't work now. Rengat couldn't be trusted, and like Tullock, I stood out in a crowd. People would notice me in his hotel. People would notice me on his floor.
I couldn't risk that... yet it seemed mad to proceed without knowing what was in the man's room.
I could hear Tomlinson's voice saying,
But I took little on faith, and I knew nothing instinctively.
What I did know was that revenge included risk, and risk had a price.
One night, I stood in my room and looked at myself in the flaked mirror that was nailed to the wall. I was a little drunk—I'd had a couple of liters of Tiger beer. In the mirror was the face of a stranger. It was like standing behind a wall, looking through a two-way mirror. If I moved my mouth, the stranger moved his mouth. If I rubbed a hand over the beard stubble on my chin, the stranger did the same. But the stranger's eyes were not my eyes. His were predator-bright. Mine felt bleary. It was as if the stranger were mocking me:
It seemed so easy to the stranger; everything clear-cut and neatly defined. And it
It was so easy that, each day at dusk, as I watched Tullock trot off, I had to fight the temptation ... a temptation so strong that I found myself procrastinating, getting the man's patterns down for no other reason than to underline the simplicity of that stranger's simple solution.
Yet I didn't want it to end that way. Not for Raymond Tullock. More important, not for me.
I decided to proceed with a variation of my original plan. I had taken risks before—not many, but a few. Now, at least, it seemed that I had much less to lose. . . .
Friday is a Muslim holy day, so I spent it transferring my belongings into two canvas duffel bags that I had purchased at the Central Market which was just off Sutomo Street.
Into my old bags—which included my favorite Loomis travel rod satchel—I placed rags and chunks of wood that I had pilfered from the back of my boarding house. When the bags looked and felt about right, I used duct tape to seal them tight.
Then I dressed myself in a favorite pair of baggy Egyptian cotton slacks; the kind with the big cargo pockets. Into the right pocket, I stuffed a big bandanna and the opaque green glass orb I had taken from Hannah's house.
The little ball had a nice weight to it. It was granite-smooth except for the ingenious flanged stopper.
I spent half an hour practicing, but just couldn't seem to get it right. My hands were too big, my fingers too long and blunt. Once upon a time I had spent a deadly boring week in a boat off the coast of Cambodia. One of my companions had three small baggies filled with sand, and he had tried to teach me to juggle. I never did get it. My hands are fine for focusing a microscope, or for using a scalpel, but they are not clever in a way that I now needed.
Once I almost dropped the glass ball, and I thought: You're insane to try this without Havildar's help.
But I ignored the small, destructive internal voice. Blotted out the images of me squatting in some cell in
