Looking out over the sprawling mass of west Jakarta, Mac thought about that waiter he’d seen. He’d been athletically built and moved like a soldier, although he’d tried to conceal it with a baggy hotel tunic. It wasn’t just that the bloke was watching Mac and Grant with a different intensity to the waiter scanning a room for a raised glass. No, there was something strangely familiar about that waiter. He couldn’t put his fi nger on it. The face? The hair? Or was it the gait?
Faces, eyes and hair could trigger connections but it was gait that really formed code deep in the brain. Scientists at the Shin Bet academy in Tel Aviv had concluded that humans were reliant on gait analysis to identify friend and foe because before the advent of language, anthropologically very recent, that’s all they had to go on. Even from a distance the human brain could pick up if someone was a warrior, injured, tired, aggressive, male or female, strong or weak.
Mac knew that waiter’s walk, but couldn’t place it.
Behind him the sofa squeaked slightly. ‘Pay extra for the view,’ said Diane, who wasn’t a great fan of Jakarta’s vistas.
Mac turned, took her in and struggled to keep it tight. She was sitting on the edge of the sofa in white bra and panties, rubbing lotion into her tanned legs. Looking up, her sapphire orbs sparkled like she was taking the piss. She knew he was married but she couldn’t help herself. Mac hated that and, in spite of himself, he felt his jaw clench, searching for the best way to tell an ex-lover that her charms were still working but he was no longer a buyer.
‘Look, Diane -‘
‘Yes, Richard?’
Diane was an extraordinarily manipulative person. To offset her own betrayal of Mac with Peter Garrison, she was highlighting that even when he was on the verge of proposing marriage to her, he let her call him Richard rather than coming clean. She was daring him to take the high moral ground, an unstable place for a couple of pros.
‘Got some more info on the NIME guys – the real principals,’ said Mac, trying to take his eyes off her.
‘Want to talk about Michael?’ she said, knowing that it would irritate him to hear Vitogiannis referred to by his fi rst name.
‘Sure – did he hit on you?’ said Mac.
She chuckled. ‘Of course not, darling. He saw how devoted I was to my husband.’
Without taking her eyes off him, she started with the lotion on her belly.
‘So that’s it?’ he asked.
‘No, Michael’s very excited about the deal. He says Australia has the right technology and expertise for Asia during an infrastructure build-out, and he thinks NIME is an exciting partner.’
‘So, he’s legit?’
Diane looked at him. ‘He said something about how the Australian government weren’t coming to the party, or something like that?’
Nodding, Mac pushed. ‘So he was open about it all?’
‘He didn’t lie, except for when he said partner and partnership. Why would he lie about that?’
‘Because he’s got no interest in a partnership with anybody. He’s a venture capitalist – he wants to exit, wants to be bought out.’
Mac was getting really annoyed, uncomfortable. Then he smelled the liquid she was rubbing, and he lost it. Before he knew what was going on, he was in front of the elevator banks, breathing shallow, gulping, banging on the ‘down’ arrow and muttering to himself.
He got to the bar by the lagoon and settled into a bar chair where he could scan the comings and goings out of the hotel lobby. Positioning himself so he wasn’t looking straight into the security camera above the top shelf single malts, Mac looked for eyes, but could only see animated businessmen. Exhaling, he let the tension run out of him.
‘Evening, Mr Davis,’ said the barman.
Mac smiled, realised he still had his name-tag on. He unclasped it, slid it across the bar and, looking at the bloke’s name-tag, asked for a beer, and Bundy on a rock.
The beer arrived and Mac said, ‘Thanks, Clyde,’ then drank from the long neck and felt its coolness rush down his throat. He remembered the days when he was dating Diane between Sydney and Jakarta. It had been early summer in Sydney, and on a beautiful Saturday morning the woman he’d fallen in love with had wanted to go swimming at a beach. Mac had suggested Bondi or Manly, something with a bit of oomph, something to put the willies up a Pommie girl. But Diane wanted to go to Camp Cove, a harbour beach in Sydney’s east with no waves and a lot of fl oating rubbish.
Mac remembered carrying a big seagrass bag behind Diane, who was dressed in a see-through pink sarong that revealed she was topless. He tried to be sophisticated and not too Rockhampton about the topless thing. He was trying to impress this bird.
They had walked up the Camp Cove beach and continued under the trees and around the point. He wanted to tell her they’d gone too far but they’d kept walking around the point and gone down a cliff path at the next beach. He’d followed her to a position in the middle of the sand where a lot of tanned bodies lay around like seals, and as Diane was fi nishing off a story about a nympho secretary at the British High Commission in Islamabad, she unfurled her mat on the sand and removed her sarong. And then took off her undies.
He could remember it like it was yesterday. He’d turned slowly to see what reaction the crowded beach was going to have to this dramatic nude form and then the penny dropped: it was a nude beach.
Everyone was starkers.
Mac had been running full speed to try to stay with her, to downplay the provincial Queensland thing and make it about his education, his worldliness. But when Diane had said, ‘Come on, get those shorts off – it’s good for you,’ Mac had run headlong into who he really was, which was a Mick footballer from Rockhampton who had never been on a nudist beach in his life and had no intention of removing his shorts now he’d found himself on one.
He’d stood there humiliated and embarrassed as Diane lay down on her mat, pulled her Evian and then her squirty bottle of carotene oil from the seagrass bag. He’d tried to leave that nudist beach quick-smart but Diane wouldn’t go, just lay there laughing at him from behind her Ray-Bans. ‘You silly old thing,’ she’d taunted with her plummy English accent. ‘No one’s looking. You are so funny, Richard.’
He’d broken the deadlock that day by dropping his daks and lying down on the damned towel, clenching his bum like he was trying to crack a walnut, praying to God that no one from HMAS Watson up on the cliff could recognise him. His enduring image of that day was the smell of carotene and the vision of a tanned woman who was waxed all over. An enigma of a woman who had left him for dust.
Now, sitting in the pool bar at the Shangri-La, Mac felt physically relieved not to be standing on the beach at Lady Bay. Clyde put a glass on the bar, dropped in one large rock and poured a double of Bundy rum over it. Jenny said it was a hick’s drink but the Queensland rum was comforting for Mac. He gulped a mouthful and, opening his mouth slightly, felt the fumes evaporate into his mouth and sinuses.
An Anglo male, fortyish, with an IBM salesman haircut, sat down at one of the tables near the pool and, leaning back, read the Economist .
The Economist at nine-thirty in the pm? Spies always carried a prop such as a magazine or newspaper into a public place, but to Mac’s brief glance the bloke didn’t seem like a dire unfriendly. Maybe a Canadian or Kiwi embassy intelligence designate, just merging into a conference and seeing if Mac was up for a chat. It’s how the vast majority of human intelligence was conducted: with a smile, over a beer.
He smelled her before he saw her, and then Diane’s arm was over his shoulder and she was kissing his ear.
‘Hello Mr Grumpy Pants,’ she whispered. ‘Still sulking?’
Before he could reply, she ordered her own drink. ‘I’m having what he’s having, thank you, Mr Clyde.’
She had changed into white tennis shorts, navy tank top, fl at espadrilles and lots of tan. She looked stunning and as she folded her arms and cleared her throat, Mac found her a barstool, dragged it over and Diane sat down as her Tiger arrived. She clinked glass with Mac and drank from the bottle.
Diane had been annoying with the whole bra-and-panties act, but they made up over a few drinks, and attempted to bore Mr Economist into leaving with a louder-than-necessary marital conversation about mortgage rates and mobile phone plans.
