Gone Wild, page 33
Beside the sidewalk ran a deep open sewer, blasts of foul air rising from it as she walked. To escape the odor she angled off the walkway, cut across a dusty field toward an open-air market. As she meandered among the food stalls, old women watched her warily from behind their displays of vegetables and fruit. Children played in the dirt at their feet, and groups of young men lounging in the shade eyed Sean, her bare arms, the shape of her exposed calves.
Feet swollen from the long flight, painfully tight in her shoes. Her lower back ached, her calves quivered, on the verge of cramping. The weariness seemed to have seeped into her marrow, taken root, but she marched on, determined to have a glimpse of the Brunei she remembered, even if it meant pushing herself over the edge of exhaustion.
She left the market, went further north, past the concrete landing beside the river where a dozen boys in speedboats hooted at her in English, offering their services for a scenic tour. She circled through the cheerless main shopping district, three-and four-story buildings of prosaic architecture, the shop windows filled with standard foodstuffs and cheap, dreary clothes. She drifted toward Kampong Ayer, the water village where thousands of the city’s poor lived in a labyrinth of flimsy stilthouse shacks. It was one of the places she remembered fondly as being extravagantly colorful and exotic. Now she saw what it was, a vast slum at the city’s core.
Doggedly she held her course, passed through the water village market, examined the sides of beef hanging in the sun, fish, squid, clams, squeezed through the throng of subdued shoppers bunched around the stark tables. A few yards away the speedboats roared, delivering afternoon shoppers, racing away, the river rocking with their overlapping wakes.
She wandered farther into the village, picking her way along the shaky walkways, boards loose or missing, no handrails, murky water slapping below her at every step, and into the heart of the dense cluster of ramshackle houses built of gray, weathered wood, following the rickety dock past living rooms with doors and windows flung open, exposed bedrooms and kitchens, inhaling the bitter tang of cooking, of sewage, rot, and decay. In the distance she saw the magnificent golden dome of the mosque hovering in the northern sky, and a half mile upstream in the other direction loomed the sultan’s palace.
Dismal and discouraged, she retraced her steps through the market, took a narrow bridge back to the city streets, glancing down at the shoreline, which was covered by a rank layer of litter. The plastic containers, Styrofoam, oil cans, and car tires of any garbage dump in any part of the world.
On the way back to the hotel, Sean passed again through the central business district, cheap hotels, pungent restaurants, tiny Chinese-run shops, a museum whose architecture was as flat and spiritless as a hospital. Everywhere the muggy stench of open sewers.
All of it had once seemed so fantastic, so picturesque, had so completely caught the fancy of that fourteen-year-old girl, Sean Marie Farleigh. But now it seemed drab and squalid, a gloomy, oppressive town. The people listless, their conversations muted and tight-lipped. Even the markets were bland. There was no color, no hum, no sense of eagerness in the bargaining. As if the entire country were observing some somber religious observance, or commemorating a grave national disaster. Shoulders stooped, speaking in guarded whispers.
Around her, the streets were packed with new Mercedeses, BMW’s, Rolls-Royces, and Jaguars. Even the boys jockeying with their speedboats for taxi fares were well dressed, and on their wrists were gaudy Rolexes and heavy gold bracelets. Their boats and outboard engines were bright and new. And maybe that was it. So much easy money had stunted their spirit. It squared with what her father had frequently said, Sean only half listening as he discoursed on the social history of Brunei.
Over half the population was employed by the government in one of the world’s most bloated bureaucracies. They were well-paid civil servants with virtually nothing to do. The rest of the workforce received a minimum wage, which Harry claimed far exceeded the usefulness of their labor. No taxes, free health care, lazy money. No reason to work hard and certainly no reason to revolt. Like Communism with lots of cash.
By the time Sean made it back to the Sheraton she was drunk on gloom. Disgusted with the place, with herself. Beginning to feel that it had been a desperate mistake coming here, still driven by that giddy creation of her fourteen-year-old mind, expecting some romantic, palmy paradise. And what troubled her more was the possibility that her attraction to Patrick, her feelings for him, might be part of the same juvenile fantasy. It wouldn’t be the first time that what was merely exotic had been confused for beauty, that lust had been mistaken for love.
She took the elevator to her room, called room service for a gin and tonic. No, make it a double. She was informed stiffly that alcohol was no longer allowed in the country, and in fact had not been permitted for some three or four years now.
She hung up. Lay her head against the throbbing pillow. Closed her eyes and quietly began to weep.
***
At six o’clock Allison could wait no longer. Thorn’s simple task was taking far too long. She got a taxi to the Gables house, asked the driver to wait.
She went inside the house, found no sign of struggle anywhere. Upstairs in her bedroom she saw shampoo and lotion and deodorant were missing. Some clothes. As if perhaps after he’d finished here he’d taken some detour, shopping for himself, clothes, groceries. She was probably worried for nothing. He’d be back at the marina waiting for her, concerned she wasn’t there.
Allison was on the front porch locking the door behind her, when she saw it. A small manila envelope balanced on the lip of her mailbox. She drew it out, opened it while she walked toward the waiting taxi.
A dog was howling down the street, as Allison stopped, shuffled hastily through the stack of color photographs. Borneo. Borneo. Coming to the bottom, where she found a dozen enlargements of a single photograph, setting them on top of the stack, angling one of them up to catch the sunlight. And Allison felt the earth lurch beneath her feet.
***
After a fitful sleep Sean woke, rolled onto her back, and lay staring up into the dark until she was fully awake. She looked over at the red numerals of the digital clock, six-ten in the morning. She struggled for a moment to calculate the true time. Her body’s time. But it was hopeless. Her brain wasn’t wired for such computations. It was six in the morning in Brunei. That was the only time that mattered.
Reaching over, she switched on the bedside light, and when her eyes had recovered, she picked up the phone and rang the front desk, asked for a taxi to take her to the airport. You’re checking out? a woman asked her. I’m checking out, Sean said.
Somewhere as she was drifting away to sleep or waking up, she’d decided what she had to do. She’d leave Brunei this morning. From back in Miami she could sort this out, her confusion, the icy draft blowing across her feelings for Patrick. She would write him a letter, leave it at the desk, call him when she was back home. This had been a mistake. Impetuous, silly. Patrick would be angry, hurt. It would be a difficult phone call. Patrick would say she’d run away from him, and she’d have to admit it was true. She would tell him she needed sufficient distance from him to digest their situation, its seriousness, its future. He would want to join her in Miami, and she’d refuse, at least for now. It would be complicated, messy.
A few minutes later Sean was in the shower when she heard the phone. Pulling the curtain aside, she listened to it ring, seven, eight times before it stopped.
While she was toweling her hair it began to ring again. She walked over, looked down, and picked it up, said hello.
The phone line was silent for a moment. Then echoing down a long, empty corridor from the other side of the earth came her mother’s voice.
“Sean? Is that you? Sean? Are you okay? Are you safe?”
***
“I’m looking at it,” Allison said. “I swear to you, it’s in my hand and I’m looking at it right now. A color photograph of Patrick Sagawan. An orangutan tied to his belt, his rifle aimed up at the trees. Raimondo White, the Miami animal dealer, standing next to him with a rifle too.”
Sean said, “I don’t believe this.”
“There’s a date on the photo. Printed in orange down in the right-hand corner, like all of Winslow’s snapshots. October 26. The day she was murdered. This is them, Sean. This is a picture of her killers, the last one she took. I heard her camera rewind automatically. These are the men who knew my name.”
“Goddamn it, Mother. What the hell are you trying to pull!”
“I’m looking at it, Sean. It’s true.”
“How can you invent such a thing! Because I ran off, didn’t consult with you first? You trying to punish me? Is that what this is?”
“Look,” she said. “I’ll fax it to the hotel. You find the number for me, then go wait at the fax machine. See for yourself.”
“Mother, this is stark-raving insanity. Do you hear me? Can you hear me clearly enough?”
“Find the fax number, Sean. Please, just do it. Go to the office, wait till it comes over. Please, sweetheart. Look at the photo and then call me right back.”
“I’m going to hang up now, Mother. Don’t try to call me again. I won’t be here.”
“Wait, there’s more.”
Allison glanced at the other photos from the envelope. Fanned them out on the coffee table. Her hands quivering so badly, she almost scattered the pile on the floor. The taxi driver was standing in the doorway shaking his head.
“The whole roll is here. All thirty-six. When you and Winslow went off on your own exploring Kuching. Snapshots of the marketplace. A long-house, bright clothes hanging outside. There’s another one of you in the swimming pool at the Holiday Inn, you’re making a face at Winslow. Sticking your tongue out. Do you remember that, Sean? Do you remember doing that? It’s on the same roll with Patrick and his rifle.”
“Mother.” Sean’s voice had changed, stiff and empty. “Where did you get these?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know!”
“I told you, Sean. Someone put them in the mailbox. I was on my way out, and there they were. No stamp, no address.”
“In the mailbox. Just sitting there.”
“That’s right,” Allison said. “Just sitting there. Now look, honey, you have to get out of there right now. You can’t let Patrick suspect you’re aware of any of this. It’s serious. Sean, do you hear me? This is very, very serious.”
In an empty voice Sean said, “Was there a note? Anything that might suggest who sent them?”
“Just a word,” she said. “Someone printed a single word on the envelope.”
“What?”
“Reparation.”
***
A white Mercedes taxi was waiting at the front doors of the Sheraton Utama, Sean’s bags in its trunk. The hotel’s fax machine was streaming out documents from the New York office, weekly communiques, page after page. One of the desk clerks, a man in his early twenties with Chinese features, stood next to the machine plucking the pages out as they appeared.
“Soon,” he said. “Soon be finished. Or perhaps you want to go now, catch plane, I send fax on to you somewhere else.”
“I’ll wait.”
She was in the office behind the registration desk. A dull tingle had replaced her pulse. She looked out at the lobby, every chair filled at this hour of the morning. Businessmen from all over the world, coming here to court the sultan, sell him something, trying to divert some small trickle of the great offshore gushers in their direction. Men of every nationality, most in the same uniform, dark slacks, white shirts, most of them smoking. Businessmen waiting for the sultan to return from his trip, then waiting for an audience with his Majesty. That lobby stank of waiting men. Men with briefcases full of prospectuses, charts and graphs, brochures. Offering the best that money could buy, the crown jewels of the world, the creamiest of the cream.
“It finish,” the Chinese clerk said. “Your fax can come now, I think.”
Sean moved out of the doorway, came close to the small black box. A moment or two later the phone rang twice and the machine answered. She heard the quiet chatter of electronic connections being made, thousands of silent messages relayed from the other side of the globe, pluses and minuses, positives and negatives. That stream of opposites flooding into the small computer, instantly decoded, and the printer switching on.
She stood beside the machine and watched the first inch of white paper emerge, heard voices behind her. She saw her mother’s name printed on the top of the sheet. Allison Farleigh, Wildlife Protection League. And as Sean focused on the paper inching out, she heard behind her a woman politely answering in Malay a man’s indignant question. Patrick’s voice.
Her eyes fixed on the paper; she felt her knees sag, a blind stab of panic.
“Miss Farleigh,” the Chinese clerk said. “There gentleman to see you.”
She watched the paper rise from the machine. A smudged copy, but clear enough. Two men surrounded by a dense wood, rifles in their hands, aimed into the trees, a shadowy blur hanging from the belt of one of them. An orangutan.
“Sean,” he said from several feet away. “What’s going on?”
She heard the machine slice the sheet free and she lifted the single page out of the tray and held it to the light. A tall man held one rifle, and beside him stood a lean young man with wavy black hair. The printer had turned the photo into a murky sketch washed in shadows, but still there was no doubt who the slender man was.
She wadded the paper up, dropped the ball into a half-filled wastebasket. She turned and forced her lips into a smile.
Patrick stood in the doorway, several steps away. In black silk shirt, pale gray slacks, a thin gold bracelet at his wrist.
“What is it, Sean? They called me. They said you were checking out. What’s happened? What’s wrong?”
She let Patrick lead her out of the hotel office, out into the lobby.
“I made a mistake,” she said.
“What mistake? What is it, Sean? You look terrible.”
“I feel terrible.”
A furtive murmur passed through the crowd of businessmen. Idly Sean swept her gaze across the room, watching their flutter of interest in Patrick. If she cried out right now, she wondered if there were any among them who might have the courage to come to her aid. Not likely. Unless perhaps she waved a roll of thousand-dollar bills. Probably not even then, so strong was their focus on Patrick. So great was the wealth he represented, so high in the chain of command.
“I need to go home,” she said. “Mother’s sick. She needs me.”
“She’s sick? What’s happened?”
“I have to go, Patrick.”
He studied her for a moment, eyes becoming shrewd.
“No,” he said evenly. “You’re not going anywhere.”
He turned and spoke in harsh Malay to one of the bellmen. The young man sprinted off toward the cab.
“Now, what is this about, Sean? I leave you alone for a few hours to rest, and you try to run away.”
“Mother called. She’s in trouble.”
“Is she sick? Or is she in trouble, Sean? Which lie is it?”
Stepping across to the elevator, Patrick jabbed the button. The bellman hustled over with Sean’s luggage and held the elevator doors aside for her. His hand gripping her arm, Patrick moved Sean inside the elevator.
“May I join you?” Patrick asked. “Upstairs.”
She clenched her jaw, stared at him, Patrick’s eyes as hard and cold as the grip on her arm.
He spoke again to the bellman holding the elevator doors, then turned away and marched to the front desk. The Chinese clerk nodded solicitously, and held the swinging gate aside. Patrick followed the clerk behind the counter and into the hotel office. He was inside for only a few seconds, then came briskly across the lobby, rubbing his neck as though he had developed a sudden crick.
He stood close beside her in the elevator, his shoulder brushing hers. He stared straight ahead, his face blank, watching the elevator doors shut.
The car began to rise.
“Patrick?”
He slanted his eyes in her direction, and by slow degrees a smile materialized on his lips.
“Yes, my dear?”
“Who are you?”
“You mean you’re not sure?”
“No,” she said. “I’m not.”
“Well, my dear, I suppose we’ll have to fix that right away, won’t we? I’ll have to tell you everything now.”
CHAPTER 33
The professor was so excited about the orangutan’s arrival, he decided to work late Friday night. But before he could actually begin his stress experiments on the orangutan, he had to chart the ape’s baseline physiology. Measurements of limbs, height, weight. Blood tests, pulse readings, body temperature, oral and rectal. Reflexes. Electrocardiograph. Pupil dilation. Ears, teeth, gums, nose, genitals.
At seven-fifteen that evening, when he was finished with the preliminary testing, he put the orangutan back in its cage, and retired to his office to record the results.
The ape’s cage was smaller than the one at the animal dealers’ warehouse, and much more confined than the movie star’s room. The cage was actually closer to the size of the crate in which he’d been stuffed on his airplane ride.
For years animal-rights activists and primatologists had urged the USDA to increase its minimum standards for housing research animals to a square footage of not less than four hundred feet for each primate. While the four-hundred-square-foot figure had not yet been officially accepted, industry standards had improved somewhat in recent years, under pressure from animal-rights groups.
However, colleges such as Hickman regularly received exemptions from even the weak USDA regulations governing cage size. College officials usually pleaded a lack of funds, and claimed that allocating sufficient resources to enlarge their facilities would be impossible and therefore all research would stop and the animals would have to be terminated. Wasn’t it more humane to keep the animals alive albeit in confined spaces than to kill them?
