Mark Lee - The Canal House

“Don’t worry about me. I’m going to look for a cold beer.”

Daniel touched his canvas shoulder bag. “I’ve got the phone. I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”

I walked around the wheelhouse, heading for the gangplank, then heard footsteps. Julia had followed me. “I’m glad you’re here, Nicky. I really am. Daniel said you had some doubts about coming along.”

“I still do. But everything’s going to work out.”

“Of course it will.” She gave me a quick hug.

Hiking up the steep walkway to downtown Darwin, I found a group of clapboard houses halfway up the hill. It was the Stella Maris Centre, a low-cost dormitory for sailors coming into the port. There was a bar in one of the buildings—a big open room with ceiling fans and louvered windows. I bought a schooner of Victoria Bitter, sat on the deck and looked out at the sea.

I had always been sensitive to the first signs of weakness in a couple’s relationship. When two people were falling out of love, someone would always act sad or a little too happy. Daniel and Julia had come back together without effort, and their separation hadn’t changed anything. In some peculiar way, I was involved with what had happened. I was their witness.

WE STAYED IN DARWIN for nearly a week before the UN peacekeepers invaded Timor. Billy hired Tig Collins and Harvey Briggs, two Australian security consultants, in order to get defensive weapons for the ship. Collins was the younger of the two, a blond surfer with a can of beer glued to his hand. Briggs was an ex-cop from the Northern Territory, broken-nosed and broad shouldered; he reminded me of a professional rugby player. Both men strutted around the main deck with their assault rifles, coming up with emergency scenarios. What if Malaysian pirates attacked the ship? What if the Indonesian navy tried to seize all the supplies? I felt like I was listening to two Hollywood screenwriters getting ready to pitch an action movie.

With these two jackaroos, it was easy to see the virtues of Billy Monroe. Billy was calm and confident. He realized that you could anticipate problems but never predict the outcome. One day, Collins showed up with a “croc sticker”—a sheath knife with a fourteen-inch blade. Slashing the air with the weapon, he proceeded to tell us how to kill someone in two seconds. “Really?” Billy kept saying. “Is that so?” His right arm shot out, there was a twist and a leg sweep, and Collins was lying on the deck with the knifepoint pressed against his neck. “Better keep practicing,” said Billy. “Those crocs are pretty damn tricky.”

Every morning, I would leave the hotel and walk down to the coffee shop on Stokes Hill Wharf. As the light changed and the ocean turned from blue to dark green, I’d order a cappuccino and read the Northern Territory News , a local tabloid with comforting headlines like KANGAROO ATTACKS PICNIC or STOUT LOVERS IN A FROTH. By the time I reached the sports section a large crocodile would inevitably appear a hundred yards from the wharf like a dark piece of wood floating in the water. The croc would drift toward the harbor, looking for a stray tourist. Daniel would leave the Seria and join me for a cup of coffee.

We would sit there for hours, talking about the stories Daniel had written during the last few years. I remember a long conversation about the black-market diamond trade, the pit mines scratched in the red dirt of Angola and Sierra Leone, and the Lebanese merchants with their secret airstrips. European politicians as well as American intelligence organizations were involved in the business, and Daniel explained how the diamonds were sold and how weapons were purchased for warlords and how a handshake between two men in Paris led to rape and murder in Africa.

Julia spent her days on the Seria , making sure that the emergency supplies arrived from Sydney. She had to assume that there would be no electrical power in Dili and that the harbor equipment had been destroyed. Everything carried on the ship had to be taken out of their heavy cargo containers and strapped onto wood pallets. The job had to be finished in a few days, but Collins and Briggs refused to lift anything and Richard was usually back at his hotel. The Indonesian crew hated taking orders from a woman, but Julia ignored that and acted as if of course they would obey her and of course this would get done. Wearing a wide-brimmed sun hat, she paced back and forth on the dock. Blankets go there. Tents go there. Please get me some more water bottles. Right away.

Daniel and I offered to help, but Julia turned us down. “You do your job,” she told us. “I can do my mine.”

Our job was just a lot of waiting around. Early in the afternoon, we’d leave the hotel and meet a crowd of other journalists at Stella Maris. The beer was cheap, and we could have our own table and buy a good lunch for a few dollars. I met several Australian photographers and a Spanish journalist who had spent a lot of time in Rwanda. On the second day, the famous Tristram Müller of Der Spiegel arrived from Germany.

Tristram weighed at least three hundred pounds. He carried the bulk well, moving in a slow, steady manner like an oceanliner passing through the water. The layers of muscle and fat seemed to insulate him from the shocks of the world. Tristram’s editor kept calling him at five o’clock in the morning. “She wants the German angle to the story,” he said. “When we finally get to Dili, I should look for blown-up Volkswagens and militiamen wearing lederhosen.”

The German angle to the East Timor story became a running joke at what we decided to call the Stella Maris Social Club. Someone would announce that he was getting the Spanish angle on a new bottle of beer while a young photographer named Mulvaney would come up with complex Australian conspiracy theories that involved the forced consumption of Vegemite. We played pool on the coin-operated table and gossiped about the television journalists who hung out at the bar in the Carlton Hotel. “They’ve all brought flack jackets and army helmets,” a British reporter told us. “Bunch of bloody poseurs. Wartime Charlies. You watch what happens in East Timor. They’ll stay out at the airport, get a recording of gunshots, then bleed in fake bang-bang when they do their broadcast.”

Daniel sat a few feet back from the crowded table and sipped his beer. He rarely said anything, but everyone knew who he was. Tristram Müller cornered me outside the men’s room and asked if Daniel had cancer or some other serious illness.

“Of course not,” I said. “What gave you that idea?”

“He isn’t like he was in Sarajevo. He reminds me of my father in the hospital room. Quiet, but watching everything.”

Before sunset, Daniel would leave the social club and walk down the hill to the Seria . Usually I’d go back to my hotel and watch television, but one night I took a cab out to the MGM Grand and had an expensive dinner with Billy. After threatening me at Westgate Castle, I figured he owned me that much.

“Eat up, Nicky. You’re my guest,” he kept saying. “Order dessert. Order some brandy. Have some fun before the crucifixion.” Afterward we ended up in the casino where I lost eighty dollars playing blackjack. There were no windows in the casino. No clocks or newspapers. Aside from the cricket match showing on a big-screen TV it was difficult to know if you were actually in Australia. Billy said it was a very American hotel, but it was more than that. America was the Snake River or downtown Memphis or the Blue Ridge Mountains—some location that was distinct in my memory. The casino was part of the growing worldwide nation of the Same. You could be in Cairo or Kathmandu, but you could still find the same pastel-colored furniture and piped-in music, the same bottled water and strip of paper on the sterilized toilet seat. No pine trees or fresh-cut clover. No smell at all.