'Coral pebbles, not sand,' Suzanne clarified. 'Difficult to walk on or lie down on.'
'The surfers like it, though,' Johann said, and he and Suzanne exchanged looks and laughed at some private joke.
'Lots of surfers here,' Suzanne said.
'But down the road to the east, maybe two miles… '
'Oh, yes, there's a perfect beach,' Suzanne said. 'Wonderful. A big white… ' She made an arc with her hands, searching for the right English word.
'Crescent,' Johann filled in. 'It must be nearly a kilometer long.'
'But it's dangerous,' Suzanne said. 'You must remember, if you go there. The owner here, he says there's a terrible riptide in the middle of the beach, and people die there every year. Swept out into the ocean and drowned.'
'There are no signs there, can you imagine?' Johann said. He sounded a little outraged. 'No signs at all. It's disgraceful. But as long as you're careful, it's a perfect beach. And there's nobody there.'
'A few locals with coolers on their heads, selling Cokes and pineapples, and that's it. No buildings, no stores, no hotels,' Suzanne added.
'Sounds like paradise,' I said. My nasi goreng had arrived and I attacked it with a will as they chatted to each other, nostalgically, in Dutch.
Five minutes later I felt a thousand times stronger. 'Listen,' I said, 'I ran into an old friend of mine in Tetebatu, I think he was coming here, have you seen him?' I described Morgan and company.
'Oh, yes,' Suzanne said. 'The big man with all the tattoos. We had lunch with them yesterday. The girls seemed very nice. There was no Dutch man with them, though. I think he went east to Flores instead of coming down here. Just your friend and the Swedish girls.'
'They went out to that beach, didn't they?' Johann asked her.
'They did,' Suzanne said. 'During the rain. When everyone else was staying in they went out to the beach. Your friend said that it was best then, that swimming in the rain was better because you didn't get so hot.'
'And nobody follows you around trying to sell you a sarong,' Johann added, and they both laughed. Sarong salesgirls were the bane of Indonesian travelers. I didn't laugh.
'Did you see them afterwards?' I asked.
'Let's see… did we?' Suzanne said, thinking about it. 'I think we saw your friend last night, on the road.'
'Yes, we did,' Johann said. 'But not the Swedish girls.'
'That's right,' Suzanne said. 'Just your friend Morgan.'
I sipped from my beer to cover my consternation. I felt so cold I nearly shivered. Morgan had taken Kerri and Ulrika to a deserted beach yesterday, a beach already known for death by drowning, with the monsoon thundering down and nobody else around. And he had been seen again, but they had not.
'I have to go,' I said, putting my beer down half-finished. I was sure it was too late but that was no reason to delay. 'I forgot something. I'll see you later.'
I fled from their startled okays and went back out into the rain. It had not let up, which seemed amazing to me. Surely all the fresh water in the world had poured down on Indonesia in the last eight hours, and there could be no more to dump on us. I went to the roofed area I had caught out of the corner of my eye when I had entered the Anda Cottages compound, where the mopeds and bicycles were stored, along with a crudely lettered 'For Rent' sign.
An Indonesian boy who couldn't have been more than twelve years old sat watching the bikes. I told him that I wanted to rent, and he looked at me as if I was crazy, but only for a moment. Every Indonesian knows that all white people are crazy; taking a bike during the height of a monsoon was not insane enough to be noteworthy. Mad dogs and Englishmen and all that.
'You want bike or motorbike?' he asked. His English was passable. For a moment I wondered how many languages he spoke. Most of the Indonesians in the picking-white-coconuts business could conduct business in English, German, Dutch, and Japanese, at a minimum.
'Bike,' I said. I wanted to get there fast but I'd never driven a motorbike before and figured these were not ideal conditions to learn in. He gave me a battered old iron thing which was a little too short and reminded me of the bike I once rented in China that lost its pedals five miles from town. But better than nothing. I wheeled out of the Anda Cottages and headed off down the road, in the direction Johann had indicated, looking for the beach.
The road was superb, no cracks or potholes, and nobody else on it. Jungle to my left, coral beach to my right, rain absolutely everywhere. I could barely hear the roar of the surf over the machine-gun noise of rain on the road. Once I built up a good head of steam the bike moved like a racing machine, carried along by its own massive inertia. The road inclined slightly upwards, which was good. I didn't like my chances going downhill at this speed in this rain with these brakes. The beach began to slope downwards to my right, steeper and steeper, until there was a wedge of vegetation between me and the coral gravel, a wedge that widened and widened until I had jungle on both sides. It was getting darker; either the clouds were growing even thicker or the sun was setting. The jungle was thick as a wall, and the clouds were so low I seemed to be riding through a tunnel.
Suddenly the jungle to my right vanished, replaced by a steep rocky slope that dropped to a beach so white it seemed to glow. Crescent-shaped, like the blade of a parang, the beach ran almost perpendicular to the road and was framed by a high wall of jumbled rock too steep to be navigable anywhere but where it met the road. It was a good half-mile long and I could only just make out the other end through the rain.
The opening in the wall of jungle to my right was only about a hundred feet long, and by the time I'd reacted and the brakes had stopped the bike, the beach was once again hidden behind vegetation. I walked the bike back to the rocky slope above the beach, leaned it against a tree, and began to descend. My Teva sandals were soaking wet, and the rocks were slippery with rain, and I had to use my hands to brace myself on several occasions.
Then I was on the beach. It was amazing how white the sand was even though it must have been darkened by the rain. Fine sand, damply solid, easy to walk on. It was about a hundred feet wide at its thickest. The storm was intensifying now, and I had to shield my eyes with a hand to see anything. The whitecapped waves roared and plunged into the beach again and again, as if they wanted to pillage it, carry every grain back to Davy Jones' Locker. Even in the bay they were at least six feet high. The open sea was twice that size, a churning maelstrom of whitecaps.
I couldn't see anything but sand, sea, rocks, and jungle high above. It didn't seem likely that he'd hide bodies here. They would have stood out like crazy against the sand. Maybe he'd hidden them under cairns of rocks? Hard work, but he was a big strong guy. I began to follow the line of the rocky slope, looking carefully under the rocks. The sky had grown darker still and I had to squint against the rain.
After maybe five minutes I heard a shout and nearly jumped out of my skin. I looked up. And nearly jumped out of my skin again.
'Balthazar Wood!' Morgan shouted. I could barely hear him through the rain and the sea. 'As I live and breathe!'
I was about halfway along the beach. He was a little further along, maybe thirty feet away from me, between me and the ocean. I could see footprints leading back towards the ocean. He wore a blue swimsuit and carried a parang in his right hand like he knew how to use it. I was sure he did. He was the Great White Hunter, after all. He seemed an unreal figure, something out of a bad dream, looming out of the rain with his shaved head and that blade in his hand and those Chinese-dragon tattoos on his arms, as heavily muscled as a Marvel Comics superhero. His eyes shone with anticipation and his face was stretched into a giant carnivorous grin.
I backed away towards the road along the slope, moving slowly, thinking furiously. He followed, equally slowly. There was no rush after all. He had me at his mercy. There was no way I could scramble to safety up this steep slippery slope, and there was nowhere else to go. He must have been waiting for me. He must seen me from up high, come down and swum along the beach in order to catch me by surprise.
'I gave you a little examination, Woodsie!' he cried. 'I put you to the test, and I'm sorry to say that you've failed!'
No: there was someplace to go. There was the ocean. He was a stronger swimmer than I was, but could he swim fast carrying that parang? I very much doubted it. But he'd already thought of that, he was moving to cut me off, staying between me and the surf.
'I warned you, Paul! I told you to fuck off and leave me alone! But you just couldn't do that, could you?'
