Zhiu understood supply and demand, but it vexed him nonetheless.
He rode in silence, looking with steady fascination at the other vessels winding along the canal. In addition to the market craft, there were postal boats, water buses, and tublike rice barges with sailcloth tops wobbling toward docks at the city center. It was a scene that brought back memories of his last visit to this district nearly three decades ago, when Sukarno's PKI was at its height of power and had sought to establish a united Communist front with the government in Beijing. He had come, then, as an official envoy of Zhou Enlai to help organize state construction projects… a straightforward assignment for a man whose revolutionary passion was still in full blush.
Like many things in life as one became older, the circumstances of his present trip were laced with greater complexity, Zhiu thought.
He accepted the differences and rarely looked back on his beginnings, but supposed returning to this place after so long a duration of years had made him reflective. How hard Sukarno had struggled to eradicate the stain of Western cultural influence, and how painfully he would have viewed its indelibility. Even here it could not be ignored. A few moments earlier, a group of white tourists had darted past in rented speedboats, reminding him of noisy macaques with their round eyes, sunburned red cheeks, and loud excited voices. But he'd clamped down on his annoyance, preferring, as always, to look on the bright side. At least the water spouted by their outboards dispelled the mosquitos, and added a relieving coolness to the semblance of a breeze coming off the Barito River.
'Pelan-pelan sayaZhiu told his canoe guide in Mandarin-accented Bahasa. He pointed toward a woman selling rice cakes from a boat that had been cobbled out of warped old boards.
'Ya'
The canoe man cut his motor, paddled up to the rickety boat, and reached down beside him for a bamboo pole with a nail fastened to one end. Extending the pole across his bow, he speared a rice cake for Zhiu Sheng and held it out for him to sample.
Zhiu took a bite, swallowed, and tossed a bronze-colored coin onto the vender's deck.
'Terima kasi banyak' she said, smiling with gratitude.
Zhiu instructed the guide to restart the outboard, and settled back for his light breakfast.
A short while later, the canoe man turned a bend in the canal, swung toward a house and rice barn overhanging the near bank, and informed his passenger they had reached their destination. Zhiu did not bother saying that he'd already guessed it for himself. The further they had progressed beyond the market, the more he'd sensed eyes watching from behind shuttered windows, and noticed hard young men tracing his progress with quick, covert glances from the walkways connecting the ramshackle structures.
Khao Luan was like a feudal warlord to the people of this area, giving them just enough to keep them loyal, but not so much that they might become independent of him.
Now the canoe man again silenced his engine, and rowed up to a ladder running into the muddy water from the dwelling's front door. Three teenagers sat on separate rungs — two boys in faded denim shorts and T-shirts, and a girl wearing similar shorts and a halter of some sheer, revealing material that had been tied below her breasts to expose her midriff. There was a kind of affected sexuality about her that at once saddened and disgusted Zhiu Sheng. The boys also seemed to be playacting at roles they did not quite grasp, sitting with their shoulders hunched and smoking unfiltered cigarettes as they listened to an enormous radio blasting out American rock music.
They slouched under the hot sun, staring into the water as if they might find something other than aimless drifts of reeds and sediment beneath its torpid surface.
The Asian miracle, Zhiu Sheng thought dryly.
He saw them raise their eyes from the crawling water as his guide brought the canoe up beside the ladder. All of them had bad complexions. All looked dirty and undernourished. Their expressions were bored and impassive and uniformly sullen.
He waited until the canoe had been lashed into a berth composed of four vertical bamboo poles, then paid the guide, lifted his carryall onto his shoulder, and rose to step ashore.
The teenagers watched him a moment longer. Then the taller of the boys stood up to block his approach, crossing his arms over his puffed-out chest, doing what he thought was expected of him under some artificial standard of toughness.
It would probably kill him in a streetfight before he was twenty.
Zhiu Sheng finished his rice cake, then rubbed his fingertips together to wipe off its pasty residue.
''Saya mahu laki bilik,'' he said from the prow of the boat. 'I'm here to see the men inside.'
The tall boy stared down at him, letting his cigarette dangle from his lips the way they did in American gangster movies. The smoke curling from its tip carried the pungently sweet odor of cloves.
'What is your name?' he asked.
Zhiu was in no mood. 'Go on. Let the men know their friend from up north has arrived.'
'I asked you—'
'Berhenti!' Zhiu checked him with a motion of his hand. 'Stop wasting my time and do it.'
The boy stared at him for a second, then turned and went up the ladder to the door, taking longer than he should have, wanting to save whatever face he could with his companions.
Let him have that, at least, Zhiu thought. He may never have anything else.
The boy knocked on the door — two slow raps, a pause, followed by three rapid ones — and waited a moment before pushing it open. Then he leaned his head through the entry and said something and waited some more. After a brief interval Zhiu heard a male voice answer from inside the house. Though the words were unclear to him, their tone was unmistakeably harsh and reprimanding.
The boy turned from the door and shooed away his friends, who climbed down to the landing and went hurrying off somewhere along the bank.
'Ma'af saya,' he said nervously, offering Zhiu Sheng a contrite bow. 'I did not mean to offend—'
'Never mind.'
His patience exhausted, Zhiu brushed past him and ascended the shaky ladder, half expecting it to buckle under his feet.
He was met at the entrance by a pair of lank, brown-skinned islanders with undulant kris tattoos on their hands. Was it not said that such a dagger could claim a victim merely by being driven into one's shadow? Perhaps so, Zhiu thought. But ancient myths aside, he believed the semi-automatic rifles slung over the men's shoulders would prove much more lethal.
'Selamat datang,' one of them said. He bowed his head deferentially. 'Welcome.'
Zhiu nodded and went inside.
The interior of the dwelling was a large rectangle, its floor and walls made up of bare plywood boards, the high peaked roof supported by tiers of slanting beams. Midway down the length of the right-hand wall was a closed door with a third islander standing guard in front of it. Towering and rigid, he had coarse features, long black hair, and was bare-chested under an open denim jacket with cut-off sleeves. The blockish muscles on his torso and upper arms were heavily covered with tattoos. In addition to his rifle, he carried a knife — a kris, no doubt — in an elaborately tooled leather sheath on his belt.
Zhiu ran his eyes over to the middle of the room, where the men he had come to meet — General Kersik Imman, Nga Canbera, and the drug trafficker, Khao Luan — were waiting at a long plank table.
Glancing up from a conversation with the others, Kersik was the first to acknowledge his presence.
'Zhiu Sheng, you look well,' he said, dipping his head. 'How was your trip?'
'Hot, tedious, and hopefully worthwhile,' Zhiu said.
A smile touched Kersik's thin, lined face. While the eyes below his shaggy brows were as strong and sharp as ever, he had aged a great deal over the past several months and, in civilian clothes now, possessed an almost grandfatherly mien that hid his true severity of nature.
By contrast, Zhiu thought, Canbera looked scarcely older than the children outside, and like them seemed to be working at a role that was beyond him. Political subversive, champion of the poor. His soft features and vain demeanor put the lie to it, though. As did his social position. The eldest son of a diamond baron, Nga had been born into immeasurable wealth, and handed control of Banjarmasin's largest bank only to serve as a place marker on his family's sprawling financial game board. He understood nothing of human struggle, and less of material hardship.
