Paul Theroux - The Consul's File

Evans's provisioner was that unusual person in Malaysia, a fat man. I distrusted him the moment I saw him. He had an obscure tattoo on the back of his hand, three linked circles, and he had that wholly insincere jollity the Chinese affect when they are among strangers.

Evans introduced him as Pickwick and the fat man laughed and said his name was Pei-Kway. He said, 'Too hard for Europeans to say.'

I stared at him, pursed my lips and said crisply, 'Pei-Kway.'

Presser was leading the girl into the room. She was even prettier than she had seemed in the car, but her look of wildness was gone; she was slow, uncertain, domesticated. She watched the floor.

'Ask her how old she is,' said Jan.

'Go on, Picky, do your stuff,' said Evans.

Pei-Kway spoke to the girl and getting no reply he repeated his question in a slightly different tone, licking at the words and gulping as he spoke.

The girl's answer was little more than a sigh.

'Hokkien,' said Pei-Kway. 'She is sixteen years.'

'Amazing,' said Evans. 'Small for her age.'

'Not really,' said Rupert. 'Ask her where she's from.'

This time the girl seemed reluctant to speak, and I could see that Pei-Kway was urging her. He was certainly challenging her, and he could have been uttering threats, his tone was so nasty. He did most of the talking, with greedy energy. The girl replied in monosyllables to his squawks. None of us interrupted; we stood by, lending Pei-Kway authority in what was by the minute becoming an inquisition. Though instead of going closer and bearing down on her, Pei-Kway inched back as he kept up this flow of questions.

He stopped. After all that talk all he said was, 'She's not from Ayer Hitam.'

'I could have told you that,' said Evans.

'Doesn't she have parents?' asked Jan.

'Dead,' said Pei-Kway. He made a vague gesture with his tattooed hand. He seemed satisfied, almost subdued. He had become as laconic as the girl; his grin was gone.

Now, unprompted, the girl spoke.

Pei-Kway said, 'She wants to stay here. She is saying thank you.' He said something to the girl in a harsh growl and I saw her react as if he'd given her a push.

I said, 'What did you just say to her?'

Pei-Kway gave me a vast empty smile, simply a stiffening of his face. 'I say, this is not your place.' To Evans he said, 'Tuan, I'm going.'

But Jan had put her arm around the girl. 'Wait a minute,' she said. 'Why is it she doesn't speak Malay? I thought everyone in this country knew Malay.'

'They speak Hokkien in her village.'

Rupert said, 'Where is this village?'

'Batu Pahat,' said Pei-Kway, who no longer looking at the girl was replying without referring to her. He appeared restless. He had announced his intention to go, but was kept at the door by the questions.

Jan said, 'But what's her name?'

Angrily, Pei-Kway addressed the girl. Her mutter sounded familiar.

'Nina,' said Pei-Kway.

For several days I saw nothing of the Prossers, but as usual when someone stayed away from the Club he became all the more present in conversation. Gossip and hearsay made absentees interesting and gave them a.uniqueness that was dispelled only when they showed up.

‘Prosser's got his hands full,' said Evans one day. 'Nina tried to do a bunk last night. Found her sneaking out of the house. Scared rigid, she was. Had to carry her back bodily and lock her in her room.'

'Lucky he caught her in time,' I said.

'Very lucky, I'd say.' Evans laughed loudly. 'Imagine old Presser, who's in bed by midnight — and he sleeps like a bloody log — imagine him catching the girl leaving his house at four in the morning.'

'You're sure of the time, are you?'

'Jan heard him. Maybe he was up splashing his boots,' said Evans. 'But she's pretty, that girl.'

I had not heard from Father Lefever. I rang him when Evans left, and he apologized for not getting in touch with me. He said he had found out nothing — he had completely forgotten about the girl.

'But now that you've reminded me,' he said, 'I will get down to business.'

I told him to try Batu Pahat.

And yet I began to feel that I was prying. The Prossers seemed happy, and Evans's gossip I was sure was full of malicious envy. The girl had to be given a chance. If what Evans had said was true — that she had tried to get away— then it was only the fact of the odd numbers, the three of them. I pictured them in their bungalow on the oil-palm estate, playing at being a family, as the children in threes played their games on the Club's grounds. And I began to think they had succeeded with the girl in creating one of those outposts of intimacy so rare in the tropics, a happy family. They had left us.

There followed a period of dateless time, the hiatus of the delayed monsoon, hot and lacking any event; only the whine of the locusts, the occasional roar of a timber truck, the sound of the thin breeze rattling the palms, the accumulation of dust on the verandah that was more like sand or silt, bulking against my house. Silence and the meaningless chirp of birds, the scraw of lizards behind the pictures on the wall. I wished that I had, like Rupert Prosser, found a child in a garden at midnight that I could treat as my pet.

The mood was broken one afternoon by Prosser's voice saying, 'Come over quick. I can't leave the house. Hurry, it's important. Evans is on his way.'

'If anyone rings,' I told Miss Leong, 'I'm at the Prossers'. But I'm not expecting any calls.'

Jan and Nina were on the sofa when I arrived. Nina was pale and held her face with the tips of her thin fingers; Jan was comforting her. Nina's face was shining with fear. Rupert was almost purple, and before I could speak he shouted, 'They had her in a bag! '

Hearing this, Jan hugged the girl so tightly I thought she'd break. But the girl only drew her arms together, contracting in grief and closing her fingers to hide her face.

Evans's car drew up to the verandah. Rupert paused until he entered the room, then said again, 'They had her in a bag! '

'Chinese?' said Evans.

'Three of them,' said Rupert. 'They must have been watching the house, because as soon as Jan left for her tennis they stepped in.'

'Rupert found them—'

'I had an inkling something was wrong,' said Rupert, and he swallowed hard, trying to resume. 'I was at the estate stores and had this inkling. As soon as I saw their car I was on my guard, then three blokes came out of the house struggling with this bag. It shook me. I ran back to the car and got my pistol. They took one look at it and dropped the bag and drove off. They had parangs, but they're no match for a bullet. I thought it was a break-in — reckoned they had my hi-fi and Jan's jewellery in the bag. When I saw Nina crawling out you could have knocked me over with a feather.'

Evans, with just the trace of a smile, said, 'Lucky you came back when you did.'

Rupert bent over and tugged his kneesocks straight.

'I didn't know you had a gun,' I said.

'I was in Nigeria,' he said. 'I would have shot the bastards too, but they dropped the bag. I don't want any trouble with the police. You can get a jail sentence for shooting burglars in this bloody country. Burglars! But these were kidnappers.'

'Probably political,' said Evans.

'Sure,' said Rupert. 'Communists. They want to hold the estate to ransom.'

'That sort of thing doesn't happen around here,' I said. 'This isn't Kedah. It might have been her relatives. Anyway, she's sixteen. You don't know much about her. She might be married. Her husband—'

Rupert said, 'She's not married,' and cleared his throat, 'Dead scared, she was,' and coughed, 'I got their licence number. But I don't want to go to the police because they'll start asking a lot of questions about who she is.'

'The kidnappers might try again,' said Evans.