Paul Theroux - The Consul's File

But they were pictures of nothing. He had no fire. I had suspected him of keeping something from me; but he hadn't, he was concealing nothing, he had been destroyed.

He said, 'I told you I couldn't help you.'

And I left. I was driving back when I remembered that poor Indian in Kampala. I hadn't thought of him for years. I was sad, sadder than I had been for a long time, because I knew now he was dead.

It took me weeks to write my report on Rao. I had to suppress the implications of what I'd seen. I put down the obvious facts, and — saying that he'd returned to normal life — invented a happy man, whom prison had cured of all passion. The conspiracy was complete. But I was glad he had showed no interest in a scholarship or a travel grant, because when I reflected on Rao I saw his transformation as the ultimate deceit. I knew I would not have trusted him an inch.

The first victim was a British planter, and everyone at the Club said what a shame it was that after fifteen years in the country he was killed just four days before he planned to leave. He had no family, he lived alone; until he was murdered no one knew very much about him. Murder is the grimmest, briefest fame. If the second victim, a month later, had not been an American I probably would not have given the Johore murders a second thought, and I certainly would not have been involved in the business. But who would have guessed that Ismail Garcia was an American?

The least dignified thing that can happen to a man is to be murdered. If he dies in his sleep he gets a respectful obituary and perhaps a smiling portrait; it is how we all want to be remembered. But murder is the great exposer: here is the victim in his torn underwear, face down on the floor, unpaid bills on his dresser, a meagre shopping list, some loose change, and worst of all the fact that he is alone. Investigation reveals what he did that day — it all matters — his habits are examined, his behaviour scrutinized, his trunks rifled, and a balance sheet is drawn up at the hospital giving the contents of his stomach. Dying, the last private act we perform, is made public: the murder victim has no secrets.

So, somewhere in Garcia's house, a passport was found, an American one, and that was when the Malaysian police contacted the Embassy in Kuala Lumpur. I was asked to go down for the death certificate, personal effects and anything that might be necessary for the report to his next-of-kin. I intended it to be a stop-over, a day in Johore, a night in Singapore, and then back to Ayer Hitam. Peeraswami had a brother in Johore; Abubaker, my driver, said he wanted to pray at the Johore mosque; we swanned off early one morning, Abubaker at the wheel, Peeraswami playing with the car radio. I was in the back seat going over newspaper clippings of the two murders.

In most ways they were the same. Each victim was a foreigner, unmarried, lived alone in a house outside town, and had been a resident for some years. In neither case was there any sign of a forced entry or a robbery. Both men were poor, both men had been mutilated. They looked to me like acts of Chinese revenge. But on planters? In Malaysia it was the Chinese towkay who was robbed, kidnapped or murdered, not the expatriate planters who lived from month to month on provisioners' credit and chit-signing in bars. There were two differences: Tibbets was British and Ismail Garcia was American. And one other known fact: Tibbets, at the time of his death, was planning to go back to England.

A two-hour drive through rubber estates took us into Johore, and then we were speeding along the shore of the Straits, past the lovely casuarina trees and the high houses on the leafy bluff that overlooks the swamp-land and the marshes on the north coast of Singapore. I dropped Peeraswami at his brother's house, which was in one of the wilder suburbs of Johore and with a high chain-link fence around it to assure even greater seclusion. Abubaker scrambled out at the mosque after giving me directions to the police headquarters.

Garcia's effects were in a paper bag from a Chinese shop. I signed for them and took them to a table to examine: a cheap watch, a cheap ring, a copy of the Koran, a birth certificate, the passport.

'We left the clothes behind,' said Detective-Sergeant Yusof. 'We just took the valuables.'

Valuables: there wasn't five dollars' worth of stuff in the bag.

'Was there any money?'

'He had no money. We're not treating it as robbery.'

'What are you treating it as?'

'Homicide, probably by a friend.'

'Some friend.'

'He knew the murderer, so did Tibbets. You will believe me when you see the houses.'

I almost did. Garcia's house was completely surrounded by a high fence, and Yusof said that Tibbets's fence was even higher. It was not unusual; every large house in Malaysian cities had an unclimbable fence or a wall with spikes of glass cemented on to the top.

'The lock wasn't broken, the house wasn't tampered with,' said Yusof. 'So we are calling it a sex-crime.'

'I thought you were calling it a homicide.'

Yusof smirked at me. 'We have a theory. The Englishmen who live here get funny ideas. Especially the ones who live alone. Some of them take Malay mistresses, the other ones go around with Chinese boys.'

'Not Malay boys?'

Yusof said, 'We do not do such things.'

'You say Englishmen do, but Garcia was an American.'

'He was single,' said Yusof.

'I'm single,' I said.

'We couldn't find any sign of a mistress.'

'I thought you were looking for a murderer.'

'That's what I'm trying to say,' said Yusof. 'These queers are very secretive. They get jealous. They fight with their boy-friends. The body was mutilated — that tells me a Chinese boy is involved.'

'So you don't think it had anything to do with money?'

'Do you know what the rubber price is?'

'As a matter of fact, I do.'

'And that's not all,' said Yusof. 'This man Garcia — do you know what he owed his provisioner? Eight hundred — over — dollars! Tibbets was owing five hundred.'

I said, 'Maybe the provisioner did it.'

'Interesting,' said Yusof. 'We can work on that.'

Tibbets was English, so over lunch I concentrated on Garcia. There was a little dossier on him from the Alien Registration Office. Born 1922 in the Philippines; fought in World War II; took out American citizenship in Guam, came to Malaysia in 1954, converted to Islam and changed his name. From place to place, complicating his identity, picking up a nationality here, a name there, a religion somewhere else. And why would he convert? A woman, of course. No man changed his religion to live with another man. I didn't believe he was a homosexual, and though there was no evidence to support it I didn't rule out the possibility of robbery. In all this there were two items that interested me — the birth certificate and the passport. The birth certificate was brown with age, the passport new and unused.

Why would a man who had changed his religion and lived in a country for nearly twenty years have a new passport?

After lunch I rang police headquarters and asked for Yusof.

'We've got the provisioner,' he said. 'I think you might be right. He was also Tibbets's provisioner — both men owed him money. He is helping us with our inquiries.'

'What a pompous phrase for torture,' I said, but before Yusof could reply I added, 'About Garcia — I figure he was planning to leave the country.'

Yusof cackled into the phone. 'Not at all! We talked to his employer — Garcia had a permanent and pensionable contract.'

'Then why did he apply for a passport two weeks ago.'

'It is the law. He must be in possession of a valid passport if he is an expatriate.'

I said, 'I'd like to talk to his employer.'