Eric Ambler: State of Siege

Two minutes later we were airborne.

The dark green mass of the jungle moved away beneath us and we began to follow the coast line with its ragged fringe of islands and turquoise-coloured shoal water.

Jebb glanced over his shoulder at me. He was lean, rangy and very Australian.

“Done anything about getting yourself a room, Steve?” he asked.

“I thought of trying the Orient.”

“You might get a bed there. You won’t get a room to yourself. Isn’t that right, Abdul?”

“Oh yes. You can’t sleep alone in Selampang. That is what they say.” The first officer giggled deprecatingly. “It is a joke.”

“And not a very funny one. They’ve got six beds now in some of those fly-blown rooms at the Orient. It’s a fair cow.”

“I’ll buy my way in,” I said; “I have before. Anyway, it’s only for three days. I’m hoping to get a plane to Djakarta on Friday.”

“You can try if you like, but you’ll still have to share with a stranger. Why don’t you come over to the Air House with me?”

“I didn’t know they let rooms.”

“They don’t. I’ve got a little apartment up top there over the radio station. You can doss in the sitting room if you like.”

“It’s kind of you, but …”

“No ‘buts’ about it. You’d be doing me a favour. I’ve got to go to Makassar tomorrow and won’t be back till Friday. It’s asking for trouble these days to leave an apartment unoccupied.”

“Thieves?”

“Either that or you come back and find some bloody policeman’s wangled a requisition order and moved in with his family. I lost my bungalow that way when I went on leave last year. Now, I always try and get a pal to stay, even if it’s only a couple of days.”

“Then, I’ll be glad to.”

“It’s a deal. What do you want to do on your first night of freedom?”

“Where’s the best food now?”

“The restaurants are all pretty bloody. Did you know we’ve got a new club? The New Harmony it’s called.”

“It’s a year since I’ve been down here.”

“Then that’s settled. Your evening’s made. Now then, Abdul, what about some tea? Where’s that thermos?”

Selampang lies at the head of a deep bay looking westward across the Java Sea. It used to be called Nieu Willemstad, and along the canals near the port there are still a few of the old houses, with brown-tiled roofs and diamond-paned windows, built by the early Dutch colonists. It stands on what was once swamp land, and the network of canals which covers the whole city area is really a system of drainage ditches; ditches in which the majority of the inhabitants, serenely ignoring the new sanitary regulations, continue to deposit their excreta, wash their bodies, and launder their clothes. When the Dutch left it, Selampang had a population of of about half a million. Now it has over a million and a half. Yet, when you drive along the wide, tree-lined streets of the modern sections, past the big solid bungalows standing in their spacious compounds, there are no signs of overcrowding. It is only the pervasive smell of the canals and the occasional glimpses you get of the teeming attap villages which encrust their banks that remind you. The new slum city has grown like a fungus behind the colonial façade of the old.

The Air House was on the south side of the big Van Riebeeck Square, next to an eighteenth-century Residency which housed a department of the Ministry of Public Health. The highest and the newest building in Selampang, it had been put up by a consortium of oil companies and airline operators as an office block, and was nearing completion when the Japanese occupied the city in 1942. For a time the Japanese had used it as a military headquarters; then their psychological warfare people had moved in, erected lattice masts on the roof and made a short-wave radio station of it. After the war it had remained a radio station. Only the ground floor had been handed back to the airline operators, and this was now a booking office and the terminal for the airport bus.

Jebb’s apartment was on the top floor. The lift only went to the fifth; after that you walked along a rubber-floored corridor, through some swing doors and up a flight of stairs. Beyond the doors the building was still unfinished. The concrete of the auxiliary staircase was as the builders had left it in 1942. Footsteps echoed dismally down the staircase well. The window openings were roughly boarded up and it was not easy to see where you were going.

“Mind yourself here. You’ll catch your coat,” Jebb said.

We rounded a concrete upright bristling with the ends of reinforcement rods and walked a short way along a dusty passage. Then Jebb stopped at a door and took a key out.

“They’d just started to put the drains in these apartments when the Japs came,” he said. “This is the only one they finished. The other five are still empty. After all this time and with a housing shortage, too! What a country! I had to bribe the whole of the city hall before I could even get the water turned on.”

He opened the door and we went in.

My spirits had been drooping a little as we mounted the stairs, and I was remembering the camp bed I had so confidently given away; but inside things were different. There was a small tiled hall with a kitchen leading off it and another door into the sitting room. This was long and narrow, but almost the whole of the outer wall was taken up by french windows leading on to a deep terrace with a concrete balustrade. Over the terrace there was a plaited bamboo sun roof and, at the sides, attap screens. There was not much furniture; apart from the usual bamboo long chairs and a divan that was clearly used as the spare bed, there was a radio, a portable phonograph, a bookcase full of paper-backed novels and a bamboo serving trolley with drinks on it. On the walls were some Balinese pictures. It was cool and comfortable. I said so.

“The girl-friend helped me fix it up.” He started the ceiling fan going very slowly. “Got to watch this bastard. Don’t switch it on too quickly or it’ll blow the main fuses down on the floor below. Now, what’s it to be, Steve? Drink first or shower first? I’ll tell you what. We’ll have a long drink first while I show you where everything is. Then we’ll shower and go on from there. What’ll it be? Brandy dry? Gin fizz? Scotch if you like, but if you want to stay on the same thing all the evening, brandy or gin are easier. I’ll go and get the ice.”

When he had made the drinks, he showed me his bedroom and then took me out on to the terrace. It faced north, and from one end you could see out over the funnels and masts of the shipping in the port and across the bay. Beyond one of the attap screens at the other end was a Dutch bathhouse with a big stone ewer of water and a galvanised iron scoop.

“What do you know about it?” he demanded. “My word! Fancy putting a thing like that in a new building.”

“Some people say it’s the best sort of shower there is.”

“Not me. Sloshing the water all over yourself with a thing like a saucepan, when you could pipe it up another four feet to a sprinkler-it’s crazy! Besides, you have to be a bloody contortionist to rinse the soap off all over. The can’s okay though-ordinary civilised type. Last place I had, it was practically the old pole-over-the-pit.”

“How long have you been here, Roy?”

“In this country? Four years. Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot I like about it besides the fat salary they pay me. But they’re a funny lot. For instance, all these things they’re getting now, like cars and fridges and radios, they don’t look on them just as things to use. They wear them like lucky charms. Doesn’t matter if the thing’s any use to them or not, or even if it works. They’ve got to have it to feel all right. Abdul saw an American wearing a gold wrist-watch in a movie, so he had to have a gold wrist-watch. He starved himself for three months to pay for it. Why? He never looks at the time, he doesn’t wind the bloody thing, he’s not even particularly proud of it. It’s just his . They’re mostly like that, and that’s what fools you. You think they’re simply a lot of show-off kids trying to ape western civilisation.”