Notorious (39 page)
He is still turning pages. I see shiny skin between the strands of his pale fine hair.
Now he looks up. ‘Not for you. For Devlin.’
My hands clench. ‘But he works for you.’
‘That’s debatable. He’s just admitted he’s still drinking.’
‘Really?’
‘That can’t be too rewarding for you.’ He puts out his hand, touches mine briefly. As he withdraws it, he makes a small sharp movement. The edge of his nail scratches the back of my hand. I can’t believe it is accidental. Only the thought of Devlin stops me reaching across the table and hooking my nails into his eyes.
He says, ‘Unrewarding in all areas.’
A red welt is growing on my skin. ‘Devlin’s taken care of me.’
He watches me, unblinking. His eyes are a very dark brown. That must have hurt him career-wise, I think, not having blue eyes. Or he would have thought it did.
‘You think Devlin cares,’ he says. ‘But really, how high are your standards? He’s an incompetent. A drunk who’s done little but lose valuable merchandise.’
I should have known what was coming next. He reaches out, grabs my wrist and pushes up my sleeve.
‘It fell off,’ I say.
‘It fell off. Yes, that’s what Devlin told us. Where exactly?’
I hesitate.
‘The two of you should get your stories straight,’ he says, sitting back.
‘I don’t want to get him into trouble.’
‘Touching. But I can’t play footsies with you all fucking day. I’ve already had to spend extra money – money I don’t have – to retrieve the fucking thing from the bottom of that fucking lake. At least the fucking car was covered by insurance.’
‘The lake,’ I say.
‘Next to the hut,’ he says. ‘That’s a cosy set-up. We’ve all enjoyed the photos on Devlin’s camera. I sure hope you’ll take me there some time.’
‘Aren’t I bit old for you?’
‘I’ll keep my eyes closed.’
We look at each other.
‘You’re lying,’ I say.
He reaches into the file and throws a half-dozen photos at me. They fan out across the table: shadows and absences, heat and light, sweating skin blurring into black. I want to look to see which day they were taken, which hour, which minute. But I won’t give him the satisfaction.
‘My lawyers – ’ I say.
‘Don’t get paid until the funds are unfrozen. And we know you returned all the paintings. Fucking crazy.’ He smiles. ‘You’re in a foreign country. With no friends.’
‘Devlin – ’
‘Devlin isn’t your friend,’ he says. ‘This whole time in the hut – do you understand? It’s all recorded.’
‘You won’t play those recordings,’ I say. ‘Not the ones where we discuss how you used to read
Soldier Of Fortune
magazine in the staffroom. When you were the mail boy.’
His eyelids twitch. ‘Promoted over Devlin,’ he says, ‘the disgruntled employee.’
‘An Australian court will make mincemeat of this,’ I say.
‘You won’t be tried in an Australian court. It’ll be US military, closed.’
‘Who’s the star witness? Devlin?’
He leans forward. I have to stop myself from thinking that I see a ring of yellow around his pupil, like a dog’s. ‘John Devlin cares so little about you,’ he says, ‘that he agrees you’ll say yes when Pietr asks you to marry him.’
I stare at him. ‘Pietr won’t – ’
‘He’s been shopping for a ring,’ he says. ‘What he doesn’t tell his mistress he’ll tell his wife.’
I look behind me, to the stairs.
‘Devlin can’t help you,’ he says. ‘Those tapes damn him more than you. He’ll do years. You know he won’t make it.’
‘Actually,’ I say, ‘I think prison will be a relief to him.’
‘You two.’ He shakes his head. ‘They said there was something weird going on with you two.’
‘We’re locked together,’ I say. ‘Like magnets in blood.’
He studies me. ‘We were told you weren’t using.’
I think for a moment. ‘I wouldn’t be much use to you then, would I?’
‘Maybe you just need more information.’ He pushes across the manila folder. ‘Devlin’s personal file. His own words. Pick any page.
See if you know the man in there.’
It is the typed transcript of an interview with Devlin. I feel black ice growing in my spine when I see the word in bold at the top of the page.
Borneo
.
I begin to read.
D
evlin woke to lapping water and a drumming and clicking in his ears. The sky had the soft blue blackness of pre-dawn, the stars already withdrawing. The frogs’ castanets were deafening in the last calls of the night.
Something tapped his finger. He thought it was Kenje trying to wake him after a lapse. Lapse. What a quaint word. He swatted, his knuckles grazed cold serrated skin. The ridged ground rocked beneath him; the smudged and shaking world was dissected by bars.
His hands went down to grip the ground and he felt bamboo poles, smooth but for the occasional knot, spaced six inches apart. If he sat still, the rocking settled.
He probed carefully: poles above him, thick rope lashing them together. A bamboo cage then, big enough to sit in but not to stand. He ticked off what he was left with: work boots, watch, shirt, shorts. What day was it? Was it the day after Friday? It was too dark to read the watch face. He peered, rubbed at the glass. A useless instrument for twenty years of service.
Hello, he shouted. Hello. Some of the cries and clicks paused but most of the frogs clapped on. I’m just an engineer, he shouted.
You’ve got the wrong man
. He waited. The frogs snapped on. What day was it?
Devlin dreamed it was Friday afternoon. He was in his office. He was laying out his pens – the red one inside the two black ones – his laptop, the satellite phone, the diary turned to next Monday’s page, the clean trousers, the blue tie, the socks, the boots, the two ironed shirts, two pairs of underpants, the four packets of dried biscuits, the dozen litres of bottled water. The towels. The buckets.
He must have fallen asleep again. When he woke, the frogs had stopped, silenced by the usual inexplicable shower. The light was soaking in cautiously. He was curled on his side, his clothes damp but not cold, the occasional gritty flick of water hitting him.
He saw that the cage was lashed to chunky wooden poles driven into the bed of a river. The river? He was assuming he was still within distance of the mine site. He peered down. A long ridge of gun-metal grey humps moved slowly beneath him. He sat up too sharply and the cage dipped to one side, swayed back, dipped again – it felt even lower – swayed, dipped, swayed, trembled to a stop. Foam swirled below a knot on the nearest pole.
Hello? he shouted. Is anyone there?
He looked at his watch. It was five in the morning of the twenty-fifth.
The cage was almost exactly in the middle of the river, thirty feet each way to the nearest bank. The trees and scrub went right to the edge; the gnarled roots of the mangroves poking like irritable fingers at the muddy water. A kingfisher hooted its familiar jokes in the treetops and he saw small hunched figures moving along the upper branches. Ironic – the mine site was the only place where the monkeys weren’t hunted for food. He’d enforced the ban – it would help when Jakarta produced a fake environmental impact study in another grab for bribes. The miners had snickered and rolled their eyes when they thought he wasn’t looking. The next day there were two monkey heads nailed up in the gym. The men took the ban seriously once he sacked four of them.
He wondered now if the cage was payback for the ban. But he thought not. He had inspired plenty of other reasons for revenge.
He peered down. The water seemed to be swirling less vigorously around the knot. He didn’t know how many crocodiles were in this section of the river. Until recently he had only left the mine site to take the chopper to Belipatan for the plane flight to Jakarta. When he had to see Mitch.
He stared up at the criss-crossed blue. There was a grinding pain behind his temple and when he felt the back of his head he found a lump; dried blood flecked his fingers.
He tried to remember. He saw the office: the old fan clicking overhead, stirring the diesel fumes which drifted in from the generator. He heard the raucous shouts from the gym: a four-hour work-out session in progress, lines of speed on the window sill, the bets getting bigger and more dangerous as the weights were piled on.
Behind him: the wind-up radio with a Singapore pop singer cracking the high notes. Devlin could remember saying to Kenje, ‘There’s nothing like a love song for a good laugh.’ He saw sunlight falling through the window onto the files arranged in precisely spaced rows, Kenje’s thin brown arms as he put the mail in the trays on the desk. He saw his own neat writing on the labels on the trays – every letter the same width and height –
Site
,
Jakarta
,
Canberra
,
Washington
. He looked around the room, searching for the cardboard box. He couldn’t see it. So it was not Friday afternoon.
Kenje was placing an envelope in front of him. The Embassy’s crest crouched over the brown paper like a scorpion.
‘This needs now,’ said Kenje. ‘Not this afternoon.’
‘Have you read it?’
‘I only read Monday mail.’
The reference to the weekends silenced them both.
‘You such a lazy bastard,’ said Kenje quickly. ‘Another lazy whitey sitting around doing nothing.’ He hesitated and took a small orange- painted wooden fish from his pocket. He placed it on Devlin’s desk. ‘Come to here,’ said Kenje, fast. ‘Take our land.’
‘Blame Jakarta,’ said Devlin. ‘They do the leases.’ The coloured wooden fish gazed up at him. It had thick wavering black lines drawn on its body, thinner lines on the fins.
‘Is this a piranha?’ said Devlin.
‘Right,’ said Kenje. ‘A whitey bastard eating piranha.’
Devlin picked up the fish. There were yellow triangles stamped in odd spots, to represent scales.
Love Borneo
was written along the belly in uneven capitals. The wood felt cool and smooth to his touch.
‘No wonder they don’t want Dyaks as foremen,’ said Devlin. ‘You’ll have my head on a stick soon.’
‘Too right,’ said Kenje. ‘Where all whiteys should be.’ He took the fish from Devlin, tore off sticky tape from the dispenser and taped the fish to the edge of the desk.
‘So you can see it,’ said Kenje. ‘On Saturday.’
The cage began to rock. Foamy water slapped around the wooden poles. A ridge of grey humps passed beneath him, and another, and another. The hooded eyes rolled back at him. But the humps swam on and he saw why: a small monkey, a baby, its fine russet hair lifting in the early light, had come down from the trees. It was sitting at the water’s edge, drinking. As the crocodiles closed in, a chorus of shrieks broke out from the canopy. The monkey froze, its hand raised halfway to its mouth. The crocodiles sank from view. The monkey turned to look behind it. The brown-grey water lifted and the crocodiles came out, fast, one from the right, one from the left, one directly in front. Working as a team.
In his first month on site, he had done little but sort papers and eat the greasy chow. He slept in his office. After the inquest that was all he wanted to do. If he couldn’t break his Friday afternoon ritual, he would do nothing but work in between.
He processed the pay, collated the findings in the new tunnel and mopped up the bad bookkeeping of the previous manager, a Jakarta drunkard – another one, thought Devlin. The manager had propositioned a Dyak girl and fled from the site at news that two hundred of her relatives, armed with machetes, were coming down from the mountains.
‘They get really worked up about things like that,’ said the company representative who was showing him around. The rep was British with spindly white legs and a big belly rolling over his shorts. His half-undone zipper was being pushed lower by the weight above it. Whenever he talked to any of the Dyaks on site, he raised his voice and spoke very slowly, as though they were deaf.
Now he said, thumping his fist on Kenje’s slender shoulder, ‘When the mine started, the locals all thought the lights were the lights of heaven.’
Devlin glanced at Kenje, who stared into the distance, unblinking. ‘Really?’ said Devlin. ‘Well, they wouldn’t think that now, would they?’
The Brit laughed as though it was a compliment, but after he had gone, Devlin said to Kenje, ‘I bet the locals didn’t dream up that lights of heaven bullshit.’
‘No, boss,’ said Kenje, staring at his feet.
‘Should I tell him his fly’s undone?’ said Devlin.
Kenje raised his head and smiled. ‘No, boss.’
Two months into the job Devlin sat, head shaking, hands shaking, the usual Monday morning tremors rocking his stomach. He had washed out his mouth but the memory of vomit was acid on his tongue.
He stared through the window of the prefab office, across the tamped-down dirt, past the other boxy buildings. There was no greenery here, the mine was a cleared circle of dirt and pebbles, like the blast radius of a rocket. It stepped away from the jungle, its tiers of scraped earth and dead dirt descending into the dark holes which, all day and all night, regurgitated men and trucks.
There were no trees or flowers or pot plants on the site but somehow, on this Monday, he was back twenty years, gawking out the window of the squad room as the sergeant demonstrated weapon dismantling.
The naming of parts was the lesson that day. He saw himself, the fleshy young recruit, so in love with history and military manoeuvres, his carefully painted Napoleonic tin soldiers banished – but not forgotten – to the garage of his father’s house. The house he now couldn’t bear to return to.
The sergeant was droning on; he had a blocked nose and breathed heavily through his mouth at the end of every sentence.
Outside, practically touching the glass, was an apple tree. Its blossoms were white tipped with pink spilling into red; a bee was hovering languorously over the pollen, its wings a blur as it plunged and the blossoms shuddered and the pink deepened. Devlin could almost smell the perfume trembling through the room. He almost asked, Can anyone smell that? Can I go outside to smell that? But the sergeant snapped at him and he stopped looking.
