East of Suez (4 page)

“Go on.”

“The scuba diving was extremely lucrative. We lived very well down there. Then the chance came to put some of the profits into— Are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Just tell me that he hasn’t killed anybody.”

“
Jake?
Don’t make me laugh! What you don’t understand is that
everybody
down there does things in business—”

“—that would be unthinkable in Grantham. Yes, you said that. Sometimes ethics is just a matter of timing and geography. Next year we’ll be in the tank with the sharks too. You’d better tell me the worst of it. Wait a minute! Where is all this happening? If you told me, I’ve forgotten.”

“Miranam. On the Malay Peninsula. Next to Thailand and Malaysia. Between Bangkok and Singapore.”

“A palm-treed oasis on the edge of the ocean, I’ll bet.”

“That’s the place.”

“With a suitcase full of secrets.”

“We’ll get to that.” Her eyes weren’t meeting mine. This was never a good sign.

“Okay, go on with the story.”

“Jake knew somebody, a friend, who brought dope to Takot and needed a safe place to leave his shipments.”

“Some friend! You know his name?”

“Jake didn’t tell me. He said the less I knew about it, the better.”

“Sorry I interrupted.”

“The reef where Jake took his scuba-diving customers was the perfect place where the dope could be exchanged for cash.”

“What kind of dope?” I asked. “
Never mind!
I don’t know the difference. It’s all the same to me. Let me see if I’ve got this right: Jake’s partner brought the dope to Jake and picked up his payment? At the reef, where Jake took his people diving?”

“Not exactly. It was like Jake rented his garage without asking what it was being used for. I guess he got paid for his service, but I don’t think he was in on any of the details.”

“That’s half of it.” I was trying hard not to lose any of the pieces of information as they moved from my ears to my brain. “And another partner provided the money and got rid of the drugs? I suppose you don’t know his name either?”

“Right.”

“Wait a minute!”
I exploded. “What did they need Jake for? Were they waiting for somebody to
introduce
them? Jake could have done that and taken a flat payoff. Weren’t these guys on speaking terms?”

“Maybe they liked the set-up. You see, Benny, this way they didn’t have to know one another. They each had Jake, an honest man.”

“Unless we get technical.”

“Jake didn’t ever
see
the dope. He never brought any of it home. He simply offered them a safe haven where one side collected his dope and the other collected his money. He said it was a groovy set-up.”

“He needs a refresher course in the argot of the street. Were the government authorities suspicious of what was going on? Is that why they moved in on you and forced Jake out of his scuba-diving business?”

“I’m not sure. I think they just wanted to take over something that seemed to be making a profit. We were visitors and they were local. Live there for fifty years and you’ll still be a tourist. They didn’t like to see tourists in business. That’s not the way tourism’s supposed to work.”

“So who do you think killed Jake? The supplier, the buyer, or the authorities?”

“That’s what I want you to find out.”

“And the suitcase? The suitcase comes first?”

“
Jake
comes first! I told you that!” It would be easier to turn her down now that she was cross with me. I still had no defense against tears. “Why do you keep harping on about the suitcase?”

“What’s in it? No more games.”

“Money. I
think
. He kept it locked.” She still wasn’t looking me in the eye. I got a mental glimpse of my trying to go through customs with it. Miranam customs. Canadian customs. Maybe even
U.S.
customs. I didn’t like it any better after I let go of the breath I was holding.

“It’s no good my repeating that you’ve got the wrong guy? Did I tell you I’ve never been further from Canada than Miami? I don’t know anything about foreign food, foreign money, or foreign languages. I don’t speak Chinese. Even my

French is practically nonexistent. And I can’t
read
any known language.”

She ignored me and took her checkbook from her purse. She began writing. Beside the check she left a stack of fiftydollar bills. I have always been a sucker for hard cash. My defensive rearguard collapsed without another shot being fired.

“If you get stuck down there, call our lawyer. Bernhardt Hubermann. He’s in the book. It’s Hubermann with an ‘h,’ but the French people down there don’t pronounce it.” I tried the name on my tongue. “I’ve got the
right
guy! I’ve got a feeling.” She was almost smiling.

“Was your selection of Jake to be the father of your children another of those feelings? Never mind. Will I need a visa to get there? I’m going to have to see if my passport’s still valid. If it’s not, there’s that friend of my cousin, Melvin, in Ottawa. He may be able to speed things up.”

BOOK TWO

THREE

IT TOOK ME
the better part of three and a half weeks to pack and to get my papers in order—the visas took longest. When my cousin’s friend in Ottawa failed me, Anna’s father, a wellconnected retired businessman and on more Canadian and Ontario boards of directors than I have delinquent accounts, got me a valid passport in less time than it took me to get a pair of pants into the cleaners and out again. I considered buying a pith helmet, but thought that I could pick one up cheaper on the other side.

A dusty geography book with my mother’s maiden name in it, found among my old schoolbooks in the cellar of my parents’ house, had a quarter of a page devoted to Miranam. It was lumped in with a three-page treatment of the whole of Southeast Asia, including
The East Indies
. Miranam appeared next to Siam and Burma, on the Malay Peninsula. The rainfall was over sixty inches a year.
Burma?
I hadn’t heard it mentioned in years. The map put Miranam north of the Federated Malay States. It mentioned the French rulers and warned that many of the people there were Taoists, who believed that there “are all sorts of evil spirits which man must fear and propitiate.” The local products were given as “rubber, rice, sugar-cane, exotic fruit, tapioca, coffee, spices, gums, and cotton.” Something about the book made me check further. The same tome gave the United States a population of one hundred and thirty million and England thirty-eight million souls. I looked for a date at the front of the text, but couldn’t find one. The price, which was given, was almost as good:
fifty cents
! The book was seventy years out of date.

A more up-to-date atlas added to the list: zinc, tin, rare wood, coal, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and gold. This book also told me that Burma had vanished like Siam and Upper and Lower Canada. Miranam is a former French colony. Its capital, Takot, has a population of a third of a million. Until the French pushed their way through the great Iron Gates of the capital in 1865, at the head of three hundred hussars, lost without their horses, but backed by a gunboat in the excellent deep-sea harbor, Miranam had maintained almost hermetic independence from its neighbors as well as from the great powers. Zeno Charpentier, a great nephew of Napoleon III, governed the colony until the eve of the Great War. His assassination, unfortunately upstaged by a similar event in Sarajevo a week earlier, caused little stir, either locally or internationally, except at the Élysée Palace. During the Second World War, the place was overrun by the Japanese, who introduced the least-respected of their customs. The Takot merchants, after three years under the heel of the military, opened the Iron Gates for the retreating invaders to welcome the U.S. Marines a week later. Metal miniatures of the landing of Admiral Halsey in his launch are for sale in gift shops at Takot International Airport. Everywhere along Ex-Charpentier Avenue, the chief commercial street leading up from the harbor to “the hill,” stand the monuments to imperial highwater marks—this is the neighborhood of the former great houses, now turned into embassies, private clubs, and gambling casinos.

I made detailed notes about the flight—the landings at Vancouver, Tokyo, and Bangkok—but I’ve been told politely that they sound like any other plane trip. So I’ve left that part out. My tale starts again when the plane touched down at Takot International Airport. By then, heartily sick of that aircraft, I finally stumbled out into a scalding blast of wind in my face. At first I thought it came from the jet engine or some other machine whose by-product was hot air. No: the hot air belonged all around me; it was the local weather. I felt like Margaret Hamilton melting as the Wicked Witch of the West in
The Wizard of Oz
. The heat hit me in the solar plexus like the fist of a heavyweight. The humidity drilled through my shirt. The strap of my carry-on bag began to bother my shoulder before I reached the bottom of the rollaway steps. We weren’t collected onto an enclosed ramp that would keep us off the tarmac; we descended down to it, so that we might not miss the strong smell of aviation fuel,
eau de Miranam Airways
, nor the savage stab of tropical heat. Melting tar halfsoled my shoes as I trundled my carry-on to the terminal. I thought that things would become better once we got away from the runway apron. The press of the people behind me carried me from the outside heat into the terminal where the
real
heat began. Inside, the air conditioning didn’t cool things off, it only made a clattering noise. Here I noticed that most of my fellow passengers had changed into tropical clothing before we left the aircraft. Men in short pants, women in pressed khaki skirts. I could see that my tweed jacket was a big mistake.

I had my passport checked and watched a customs official paw through my luggage. He found a transistor radio, which he made a big fuss about. He was a wispy man with shortcropped black hair which refused to stand up, Prussian-style. Like the rest of us, he was sweating. Of course, I couldn’t understand a word he said, even when he repeated it in a louder voice. I recognized his French and German as French and German, but that is about as far as it went. The woman next to me, anxious to have her turn with him, told me to offer him twenty dollars American. As I did so, the man made a scribble in white chalk on the top of my bag. He then greeted my helpful fellow traveler in English. I moved on through a crowd of sweaty relations and friends of the other passengers pressing against a wire barrier. Next to them were the taxi touts and the eager faces hoping to drag me off to a
pension
or maybe to discover the fleshpots of the capital. During the flight, I’d been warned about them by my seatmate. He said it made Joyce’s Nighttown look like a Sunday school picnic, whatever that meant.

When I got clear of the mob, I joined the line waiting for the better class of taxi. Behind me I could see the backs of cotton shirts all waving their arms at the chance of picking up a fare or a meal ticket. In the end, after a ten-minute wait, I shared a taxi into Takot with a chubby Catholic priest who had been on holiday in Paris. I asked him for the name of a reasonable hotel while we were exchanging pleasantries. I had tried to book a room from home, but failed to make myself understood. The taxi made its way through the suburbs, dragging the heat with it.

“You were right to share a taxi,” the priest said, without looking at me. “You’ll get on to the
tuk-tuks
later on, after you’ve got your land legs. A
tuk-tuk
driver will pull up at his cousin’s so you can buy jewelry or at his friend’s where you can buy drugs. You can die on a
tuk-tuk
if you aren’t firm.”

“A sort of local taxi, is it?”

“I suppose that you can stretch the definition: a lump of coal is a kind of diamond without a pedigree. Riding a
tuk-tuk
is more like riding the whirlwind or mounting a cyclone. I hope you have travel insurance.” He fell silent after that and turned to look out the car window.

I hadn’t expected suburbs: nobody ever puts suburbs in a guidebook. There were low, earth-colored buildings running to no more than three floors, sometimes with a penthouse showing torn awnings and bamboo screens. The buildings looked old, stained, and shopworn, like the wall behind a bedstead. Concrete brick was the popular building material. Wooden and cardboard plugs filled space originally covered with glass. Drooping palm trees lined the highway, all of them looking like they were suffering from tropical diseases, their leaves clumped and yellow, some of them bald as a Canadian maple tree in January. Trees away from traffic fared better, as I discovered later on. Where the houses were badly cared for, the trees looked scrofulous. The rusting skeleton of a French 2CV looked like the ravished leftovers from a feast at the side of the road. I caught a glimpse of the ocean from the window on my companion’s side of the car, but it vanished again behind more blocks of three-floor ocher flats. The glimpse was a postcard view and I promised myself to come back some time to enjoy it properly. The priest and I watched our steady approach to the great Iron Gates of Takot while the taxi climbed up the hill. As we passed through the gates into the Old Town, I could see not only that the gates were modern but also that they were afflicted with the same disease troubling the trees along the edge of the road. We didn’t actually go through the gates: the road pierced the wall to the left of the high metal doors. From a security point of view, it was like finding a fiberboard back on a steel bank vault.