Louise Doughty: Black Water

Benni’s face became still as he listened further. In his meetings with Harper so far, he had been jovial and hospitable, giving him lunches and imported whisky, but when he was with his men, Benni liked to affect an air of seriousness. Then, without saying anything, he strode towards the back of the bar, his men following anxiously. Harper decided to wait where he was, wishing the bar was still operational. It was the first time Benni had involved him in his daily activities, which was good, a sign he was beginning to trust him — but he would hang back until he was called, let Benni initiate his level of involvement. He rubbed his palms together quickly and tried to ignore the small thumping in his chest.

The others disappeared behind a door that clanged shut, leaving a metallic silence in its wake. Harper went to the front of the building, which was open to the alleyway, and looked down at the cement step to see if it was clean enough to sit on: it wasn’t. The alleyway was lined with drainage ditches that smelt of shit and piss.

While he waited, a very young boy wearing nothing but a dirty T-shirt came and stood opposite him and stared, fearlessly, three fingers of one hand in his mouth and the other hand supporting his elbow, little round stomach protruding. Harper stared back at him. After a moment or two of appraisal, the boy turned and ran, kicking up dirt, shouting out something high-pitched and triumphant, as if he had fulfilled a dare.

The door behind him clanged again. One of Benni’s men was standing at the back of the room, gesturing. ‘Mr BB says come.’

When Harper entered the room, a filthy storage place with a low ceiling and one high, barred window, he saw in the dim light that there was a Chinese Indonesian seated on a low chair, with a table in front of him and his hands tied behind his back. It took Harper’s eyes a moment or two to adjust. It was hard to tell the man’s age. His face was covered in blood, and part of his scalp had been removed: what lay beneath was gleaming, wet and bare. His head was slumped a little to one side, as if he knew that he was going to be killed anyway, whatever he said — which was true — and had simply given up, resolved to endure what must be endured before his final moments.

Benni was standing in one corner. ‘Come, you come stand next to me,’ he said to Harper in English. ‘Stand next to me, watch for a bit. He sees white man, he thinks someone. He thinks maybe, things maybe okay. Maybe he talk.’ Harper understood that his presence was, in effect, to extend the man’s torture. Perhaps they were hoping that by accident they had picked up a Commie after all. He might give them names. Nothing was as valuable as names, back then in ’65, as Jakarta simmered higher and higher, everyone was collecting names — they were a lot more valuable than the plummeting rupiah, which was worth so little now you had to walk around with a duffel bag of the stuff on your shoulder if you wanted to buy a beer. Even he, Harper, the man with access to the hardest currency of all authorised by his organisation, even he was dealing in names.

The man had raised his head as Harper entered. He was staring at him, eyes wide in his bloodied face. Harper stared back. He tried to communicate that there was no hope, that the man should simply go back to wishing, waiting to die, make his peace with whatever god he might worship, say goodbye in his head to his family. The man lowered his head.

This seemed to enrage one of Benni’s men, a small moustachioed type who stood nearest to the Chinese merchant and who was, Harper guessed, Benni’s number two in these matters. He snatched a pair of bloodied scissors from the table in front of the man and began to wave them in the man’s face and scream. It occurred to Harper that this was a test, that Benni had invited him in here to see how he would react — Benni was, after all, under the impression that he was recruiting Harper rather than the other way around. He glanced at the other men. They were all striking various poses around the room — two of them were mimicking the man with the moustache, staring at the merchant, teeth bared, faces gleaming with sweat. Two others were leaning against the wall, arms folded, staring, trying to look as hard as possible; one of the others was turning restlessly to and fro. The last one, the driver, who was about eighteen, Harper guessed, a tall boy with sloping shoulders, stood close to Harper and Benni, motionless but with his arms raised and his fists clenched, his gaze flitting this way and that, as if he were engaged in a high-speed race on a dangerous road and needed to be hyper-alert. Some of them had been drinking but they were all, all but Benni and himself, possessed by a kind of pseudo-sexual excitement. It came off them like a scent. Harper guessed these boys didn’t get much, if any. This kind of activity had to do instead.

The man with the moustache carried on screaming, his face contorted, his voice high-pitched, and Harper found this screaming more unbearable than anything. Just die , Harper thought, looking at the merchant, just close down, make your thoughts leave your body . He wondered if it was possible to make yourself die, in extremis , to will it to happen but of course it wasn’t. Dying was a giving up of will. You could no more will it than levitate.

He wanted to think about something other than the bloodied man in front of him so he thought about his own end. He would like to be able to see the sky, he thought. A perfect death would come in an arbour of some sort, with trees and flowers around, with a woman beside you who loved you and laid a cooling hand on your forehead. Your last thought as you slipped into unconsciousness would be that you were loved; the air full of sunshine, a blue and infinite sky.

Not somewhere like here, alone but for the people who wanted you dead. Not this darkened room, with dank walls and a stinking dirt floor and a little grey light scarcely strong enough to illuminate the faces of the people who were about to kill you. Not like this. Not circling in water, either, unaware — how’s that for fresh air, Bud?

The thought that he pushed to the back of his mind, as he stood and watched a man in pain and did nothing because his handler at the embassy had told him to win the trust of a filthy gangster who may or may not have good contacts with the military, was that he would never know what the look on his own face was like in the minutes before he died. He would never see it mirrored in a loved one. It felt like the most profound of premonitions, that there would be no witness to his departing, or no benign witness, but it was only three decades later, sitting on a rock above a green pool on a beautiful island, with a notebook on his lap, that he remembered it.

That night, he slept better than any night since his arrival on the island. The irony of this did not escape him. He rose early and greeted Kadek, told him that he would like to go into town later, pick up a couple of things. The roads to town were so potted and poor that he could have strode along the river in the same time it would take them to bounce there together on Kadek’s moped, the weight of Harper on the back flattening the tyres.

He told Kadek to finish his duties first and then get the moped and return for him later in the morning. It didn’t look like rain that day. When he stared at a man across a desk or in a prison cell, he could assess with cold accuracy not only whether that person was lying but whether later he would give up the truth. When he looked up at the sky, he knew what it was hiding too, what it would yield later that day.

By the time they got to town, the sun was high. He got Kadek to drop him on the main street and told him to meet him there at five. He would walk around a bit to get his bearings, then find somewhere to drink coffee and watch the street, see what he could glean from a couple of hours observing who was in town. He would probably drink several coffees. Kadek brought a flask of hot water in the mornings so he could make it with powder but it didn’t really do the trick.