Ab took the long way home, the Boyolali-Solo road, and then the road that would take him past the Susu Senang turn-off outside of Klaten. Driving down to the plains, Ab felt as if he were sinking into a hot, hazy soup. Behind him, the mountains wavered and disappeared into a blazing blue haze. He rolled up the windows and put on the air conditioner. Well, that part was settled. Now, what to do about the anthrax at the main farm?
Through the haze in front of him Ab saw a truck and a Colt running toward him side by side. Looked like they were coming at about eighty kilometres per hour. He swerved between two mahogany trees at the side of the road, slalomed around them, and skidded back on to the road. His heart was racing. The trouble with this country was you never knew when people were actually trying to kill you and when this was just the normal course of events. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes and turned up the air conditioner. He reached instinctively over to the passenger seat and wished he hadn’t given up sunflower seeds. He passed the turnoff to Susu Senang and kept going. He was thinking about Nancy.
It was noon when he arrived back. Old Budi opened the gate for him. He had barely stepped into the coolness of his living room when the phone rang. He sat down. He could hear Tina in the kitchen.
The phone rang twice, three times, four times. One thing Ab had learned in veterinary practice was that telephone ringing, like hemorrhaging, eventually stopped without any human interference. He stood up and was going to reach for it when it stopped. Beside the phone, on the buffet, was a package, something loosely wrapped in newspapers. Something Nancy had left lying around? Slowly, he opened the paper. It was the kris. The phone rang again. He picked up the receiver. It was Sarah.
“Ab? Listen. George went to see your friend Soesanto last night. He seemed very upset when he came back. He said he dropped something off at your place, but you weren’t there and he needed to talk to you as soon as possible, that you shouldn’t under any circumstances sleep at home tonight. You might be in danger.” She was quiet. “Ab? Are you there?”
“I’m here.” He was staring at the kris.
“He said you should talk to him before you see Nancy again. He didn’t explain. He told me to keep phoning until I talked to you. He seemed in such a rush. He had to go out to the farm early today. One of the big shots from Jakarta, rumour had it maybe even Suharto, was supposed to visit, and he went out extra early to make sure everything was okay. He said he’d be back well before noon. I’m worried. When he said he needed to talk to you, he seemed really agitated. He wouldn’t tell me anything. I tried calling earlier but you weren’t in. I phoned John Schechter. He said he would check, but said George might just have gotten caught in the middle of a traffic jam or something.”
Ab picked up the kris, turned it over in his hand. It felt warm. “You phoned Schechter? Why?” He pulled the knife partly out from the sheath. There seemed to be flecks of rust caught on the etching.
“He and George seem to have been talking a lot lately. Why? Shouldn’t I have?”
“Sure. That’s fine. Schechter’s right. It’s probably just the traffic.” Or maybe the Jakarta General took up a lot of time. The escorted car had been yesterday. Witono must have arrived a day early. If there had been a plot, it had probably been foiled. So why did George go today? Had he not been informed? And what had upset him at Soesanto’s? He put the knife back into its paper wrapper.
George had said something about Nancy. What? Ab would love to just take the day off and spend it with her. Maybe he could give her a massage this time, maybe they could finish that dangling conversation from the other night. Sarah sounded really worried. Maybe Nancy could go along with him. He picked up the wrapped kris, walked out to the car, and threw it into the back seat. Budi smiled and bowed as Ab backed rapidly out into the street.
Ab took a brief detour to check on Soesanto. He’d try the house first, as he seemed to have been avoiding the office lately. Maybe he could fill in what George wanted to say. Ab’s note from two days ago was gone. The house looked shut up, the birds quiet at this time of day. He rattled the gate. No answer. On an impulse, he scrambled over the gate and wandered around the side of the house toward the back. The birds were everywhere, in the trees over his head, on top of the screen, climbing up and down both sides of the open wire-mesh aviary door, squawking, singing, ruffling feathers.
“Soesanto?” No answer. The back door to the kitchen was open and he stepped inside, waiting until his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness. There were two small parakeets pecking at something on the counter. “Soesanto?” His voice hung heavily in the air, like a wet towel on the wash-line with a bird sitting on it. He walked slowly into the house. The next rooms were even darker. The air smelled feathery and musty. There seemed to be someone sitting at the desk at the far end of the room. “Soesanto?” His voice broke. No answer. Ab walked slowly across the heavy, dark silence of the room. The glass door to the case where Soesanto had kept his krisses was propped open against the wall. A red and purple and green parrot-like bird was scrabbling among the knives. Black-capped lory. I remember, Soesanto.
As he walked over to the figure a tawny bird with black markings and long silky white and yellow tail feathers lifted from Soesanto’s shoulder, skimmed over Ab’s head, the feathers dragging across his scalp, and flew out the door. Lesser bird of paradise. I will always remember. He stopped, his heart pounding, and placed his hand on the shoulder. The head fell back as he pulled, and his fingers slipped down into a slit near the base of Soesanto’s neck. What had he said? A Balinese execution, also good for sneaking up behind someone. The body was cool and blotchy, beginning to self-destruct in the heat. Ab looked around the room in slow motion, breathing deeply, while a thought formed in his head. There were no signs of struggle. Either someone had been very quiet or it was someone Soesanto knew, and he had sat down at the desk to check something.
Ab sank to the floor, his back against the wall. Call the police? What had Soesanto said about “when the thought police come”? Ab ran his hands back over his head.
“Flecks of rust on the blade,” he said out loud. “Mischief, my good friend. No shit.” He pushed himself to his feet again and stood behind the body. He hugged Soesanto from behind, the already rank smell of decomposition in his nostrils, a mixture of fear and anger tearing around inside his head, tears forcing their way from his eyes. There was nothing that could save Soesanto now, nothing that could see justice done without also getting Ab into really deep shit with both the Canadian and Indonesian governments. There was nothing.
The ground trembled under his feet and he rolled back on to his heels. “Damn!” he shouted as loudly as he could. And then he thought: George.
The road to Solo was jammed. Buses, minibuses, trucks, people, people hanging out the doors of the buses, herded like cattle into the backs of trucks. Four people to a bicycle. Bicyclists hanging on to the hands of motorcyclists as they dodged and wobbled in and out among the traffic. People walking in groups down the road. And in between, the express buses from Solo and Bali and the Honda Accords and new Toyota Camrys with tinted windshields at one hundred kilometers an hour. There were several dead chickens on the road today. He imagined there were some dead people too, but there was a tendency to clean those up faster. People around here didn’t like to see messy things like blood out on the road, out in the open.
***
It seemed to take forever to get to the farm. In a few hours daylight would plunge into night. Waluyo came toward him at the gate, waving his hands in the air. “Too many problems, too many problems,” he exclaimed. “Yesterday morning, General Witono come. Too many dead cows, he say. Then today Mr. George…” He waved in the direction of the back of the pens. George’s truck was parked to one side of the yard. The young cattle were kept in roofed-over concrete pens with feed bunks along one side. The ones that were left seemed sleek and healthy. He walked toward the back, where the bigger cattle were kept. There were several cattle bodies out back, one with her feet straight up, and George bent over her. Ab came up behind him, agitated.
“George! What did I tell you?! No post mortems! Jesus, do you have some sort of death wish? I just saw Soesanto. You won’t believe…” He reached to grab George’s shoulder and when he did so, the body fell back against his legs. There was blood on George’s arms from where they had been inside the cow, and blood on his hair from where it had rested against the incision. There were no autopsy knives visible.
Ab reached down the neck for a jugular pulse. His fingers slipped down into a slit just at the collar-bone. He felt as if his hand were being sucked into the body and held there, against the collar-bone, and he fell into a squatting position. The body was slouched back against him, his hand still in the wound. He couldn’t move. Soesanto. George. Jesus. Not this. A noise near his leg startled him, and he turned to see a brightly coloured snake slither into the water of the canal and swim away, head held straight up out of the water.
He turned to where he had last seen Waluyo. There was no one.