State of Siege Read online

  “I don’t think so.”

  There was no trace of plaster dust on his uniform. I guessed that he had been in the corridor when the ceilings of the apartment had come down.

  “The planes may be returning soon,” he said.

  “They will have to score a direct hit to do any more damage here. And I understand that you are putting machine guns on the roof. If they couldn’t manage to hit the place before, they’re not likely to do better when they’re under fire.”

  “I hope you’re right, Mr. Fraser. Now, I am sorry to disturb you, but you must come with me.”

  The knot in my stomach tightened. “Where to?”

  “I will show you.”

  “Both of us?”

  “Only you.”

  “Shall I be coming back here?”

  “I am not taking you to be executed, if that is what you mean. If you behave intelligently it is possible that you will be sent back here. Now, please.”

  Rosalie had not moved. There was nothing I could do to reassure her. I pressed her arm and followed Suparto out on to the terrace. He turned into the living room.

  The sentry stared blankly as I crunched past him.

  The living room was in a wretched state. No attempt had been made to clear the rubble. Two pictures were lying on the floor. Some of the chairs had gone.

  There were three officers there, one of them on the telephone. Suparto stopped and addressed himself to the bow-legged one.

  “Nobody is to go into the next room unless this Englishman is there,” he said. “Is that understood?”

  “Ya, tuan.” He eyed me curiously.

  Suparto nodded to me.

  I followed him out into the passage, past a sentry and down the stairs to the next floor. There were two more sentries on guard at the swing doors. As Suparto approached they stood aside for him to pass.

  The ceiling had come down in the corridor beyond, and some of the doors belonging to the offices leading off it were propped against the walls. Just beyond the main stairway landing, a group of officers stood outside an office door listening to a captain reading out orders for the requisitioning of rice. They made way for Suparto and I followed him through an office, where a man sat loading machine-gun magazines, to a door marked “TECHNICAL CONTROLLER.” Suparto knocked on the door and went in.

  There were three men in the room: Sanusi, Roda and a man in civilian clothes whom I recognised as the editor of a Selampang newspaper subsidised by the Nasjah Government. I had met him when he had visited Tangga with a party of other journalists; but if he now remembered me, the memory was inconvenient, for he gave me no more than a blank stare. Sanusi and Roda were reading a copy of a printed proclamation which was spread out on the desk. Suparto and I stood just inside the door, waiting. When the reading was finished, there was a muttered conference between the three men, and then the editor took the proclamation away. Sanusi looked at me.

  “Mr. Fraser, Boeng.” Suparto prodded me forward.

  I went up to the desk. Sanusi examined me thoughtfully as I approached, but it was Colonel Roda, sitting at the corner of the desk, who spoke.

  “You are an engineer?”

  “Yes.”

  “At Tangga Valley?”

  “I have been resident consulting engineer there for the past three years.”

  “Then you are a fully qualified and experienced person, no?”

  I did not hear this properly for the first time. He spoke English with a Dutch accent, but it was his determination to be peremptory that made it difficult to understand. He had broad, fleshy lips, and the words rattled about in his mouth like pebbles.

  “I beg your pardon, Colonel.”

  He repeated the question loudly and even less articulately, but this time I got the meaning.

  “Yes, I am qualified.”

  “Then you will consider yourself under the orders of the National Freedom Government. Any delay or negligence in the carrying out of such orders will be punished immediately by death. Major Suparto…”

  “A moment, Colonel.” It was Sanusi who had spoken.

  Colonel Roda stopped speaking instantly, his eyes alert and respectful within their nests of fat.

  Sanusi considered me in silence for several seconds, then he smiled amiably. “Mr. Fraser is a European,” he said; “and Europeans expect high payment for their services to natives. We must fix a good price.”

  Roda laughed shortly.

  “Were you paid a good price in Tangga, Mr. Fraser?”

  “Yes, General.”

  “And yet you hope to leave us?”

  “A man must return to his own country sometimes.”

  “But what is a man’s own country, Mr. Fraser? How does he recognise it?” He still smiled. “When I was a child here in Sunda and worked with my family in the fields, I did not know my country. If we were near a road and a Dutchman came by, or any European, my father and mother had to turn and bow respectfully to him. Us children, too. It was the Dutchman’s law and, therefore, the Dutchman’s country. Are you married, Mr. Fraser?”

  “No, General.”

  “The woman with you. Is she a Christian?”

  “I don’t know, General.”

  “There are three fine Christian churches in Selampang. Did you know that?”

  “Yes, I knew.”

  “And the Buddhist and Brahmin places of worship, they are also very fine. Have you seen them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me, where are the mosques?”

  I hesitated. Roda laughed again.

  “I will tell you,” Sanusi continued; “one is by the cattle market, the other is by the Chinese fairground. They are small, decayed and filthy. They are insults to God.”

  He was probably right; but I could not see what it had to do with me.

  “And yet President Nasjah wears the cap.” He touched his own significantly. “And so do the members of his Government. Which mosque do they go to for prayer? The cattle market or the fairground? Or do they worship in the toilets of the Presidential Palace?”

  I stood there, woodenly.

  “They say they won our independence as a nation from the Dutch,” he went on. “They lie. It was the Japanese forces who defeated the Dutch, and the forces of circumstance that gave us our independence. But the hands of Nasjah and his gang were there to receive it, and so they seemed to the people like great men. The people are loyal but misguided. We have no great men. Under the Dutch, no Sundanese was permitted to rise in the public service above the rank of third-grade clerk. So now we have an administration controlled by third-grade clerks, and a government of petty thieves and actors. We are corrupt, and only discipline can save us from the consequences. To you, to any European, that much is certainly obvious. But it will not come from outside. Not from China, not from America. It will come from what is already in us, our faith in Islam. Of that you may be sure. Meanwhile, we need help. That we must ask help from Europeans and Unbelievers is humbling to us, but we are not vain men.”

  There was a pause. Some comment seemed to be expected of me.

  “What is it you wish me to do, General?”

  “A trifling service. Major Suparto will explain.”

  “One of the bombs that fell in the square just outside damaged the main water conduit,” said Suparto, evenly. “The lower basement of this building was flooded and the generator equipment which supplies the power for the radio transmitter has been put out of action. It is necessary that it should be repaired immediately.”

  “But I don’t know anything about generators.”

  “You are an engineer,” snapped Colonel Roda.

  “But not an electrical engineer, Colonel.”

  “You are a technician? You have a university degree? And are there not generators at Tangga?”

  “Yes, but…”

  Sanusi raised his hand. “Mr. Fraser is a technician and also a man of resource. That is sufficient. For a suitable inducement he will lend us his skill. Yes, Mr. Fraser
?”

  “It’s not a question of inducement, General.”

  “Ah, but it is.” His smile faded. “This woman, Van der Linden, whose religion you do not know, does she please you?”

  “I like her, yes.”

  “To us her presence is offensive,” he said. “Perhaps, if you do what is required, you will persuade us to tolerate it.”

  “I’ve tried to explain, General. It’s not a question of whether I want to help you, or don’t want to. It’s just that I don’t happen to have the right kind of knowledge. There must be someone in this city better qualified to help you than I am.”

  “Coming from Tangga, you should know better than that, Mr. Fraser. Obviously, if there were a technician here better qualified to repair the damage, we should use him. But we have no one available, and work must begin at once. You must be ingenious. You must acquire the knowledge.”

  “With all due respect, General, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Roda sprang to his feet with an angry exclamation, but I took no notice of him. “I’ll see what I can do to help,” I went on; “but, for goodness’ sake, leave Miss Linden out of it.”

  Sanusi stared at me for a moment, then shrugged. “Certainly, if you wish. What is it you want instead?”

  I did not immediately understand what he was getting at, but from behind me Suparto spoke quickly. “Mr. Fraser did not mean that, Boeng. If he is successful, he will hope that the woman’s presence may be tolerated, as you suggest.”

  “Ah, good.” Sanusi glanced at Roda. “For a moment, Colonel, I was afraid that what happened to his woman was of no interest to our engineer.”

  Roda chuckled. He had seen the joke coming.

  Sanusi looked up at me. “We understand one another?”

  “Yes, General.”

  “Then there is no more to be said.” He nodded dismissal. “God go with you.”

  I went.

  6

  Suparto led the way back to the stairway and we began to walk down.

  “Was this your idea?” I demanded.

  “No. It was the General’s.”

  “Do you agree with it?”

  “I am not in a position to agree or disagree. But I think he has had worse ideas.”

  I glanced at him, but he did not seem to be aware of having said anything odd.

  “What’s the extent of the damage?”

  “That you will have to discover for yourself. There are two of the station engineers below. Perhaps they will be able to help you.”

  “Station engineers? Why can’t they do the job themselves?”

  “That is a polite way of describing them. They know how to operate the transmitter, which switches to press, which dials to turn, but they are not technicians. They know nothing about the generator except how to start it.”

  “But somebody on the staff must know.”

  “Possibly, but we have only certain members of the staff with us. The sympathisers.”

  “You’re in control of the city. Can’t you round up the others?”

  “The three senior technicians are all Chinese. We have sent patrols into the Chinese quarter with instructions to find the men, and they may eventually succeed. But not today, and perhaps not tomorrow either. The General cannot wait.”

  “Why not? What’s so important about the radio? I shouldn’t have thought that there were very many people in the country with short-wave receivers.”

  “It is not the people inside the country who matter to the General. It is the impression outside that he is concerned about. Later today, he proposes to broadcast again in English. His speech will be addressed to the cities whose good opinion matters most to him at the moment: Djakarta, Singapore, Canberra and Washington. The speech, part of which you have already heard, will be issued to the world press correspondents here at a special conference afterwards.”

  “What do you mean, ‘part of which I have already heard’?”

  “Surely you did not believe that so much eloquence could be unrehearsed? ‘To you, to any European, that much is certainly obvious.’ Come now, Mr. Fraser, admit it. You must at least have wondered.”

  He was smiling slyly at me. It was an invitation to share a joke and I distrusted it deeply.

  I said non-committally: “I had other things to wonder about.”

  “Ah yes. But you see why it is so important that the station should be working properly. If the General does not speak to the world, the world may think that he cannot speak, that he is not yet really in control and that they had better withhold their gestures of friendship until they see more clearly who has won. The General attaches great importance to the power of radio propaganda. He believes that it can be of decisive political importance.” There was a distinctly critical note in his voice.

  I said: “And you do not?”

  “I think that the realities of power are important, too.”

  “You make the General sound a bit naive.”

  “Not naive, Mr. Fraser. Simple, like all great men.”

  We had been picking our way down the rubble-strewn stairs. Now we were at the ground floor. In the hall there were troops stacking rice sacks half-filled with earth to make a blast screen. The elevator gates were open and a man’s body in a police uniform lay across the threshold in a mess of congealed blood. I caught a glimpse of his face as we came down the stairs. It had been one of the guards who had passed Rosalie and me into the building the previous night.

  Suparto stopped and shouted for the N.C.O. in charge of the sandbagging. The man came running and Suparto told him to have the body taken outside. As the man went off to carry out the order, Suparto looked after him unpleasantly.

  “They are animals,” he said.

  We started down the stairs to the basement. From below there came a sound of voices and a smell of fuel oil and drains. On the landing halfway down, I stopped.

  “May I ask you a question, Major?” I said.

  His face became impassive. “About what, Mr. Fraser?”

  “Last night you were good enough to say that you liked me. I have been wondering why.”

  His face cleared. “Ah, I see. You wish to assess the value of my friendship, the extent to which it might be relied upon and used. Well, I will explain. You remember the day I arrived in Tangga with my colleagues?”

  “Very well.”

  “We were stiff-necked, presumptuous, and arrogant. I most of all, because I did the talking. There were reasons, but”-he shrugged-“we will not discuss them now. You had reason to be annoyed, and you were annoyed with me, were you not?”

  “A bit.”

  “You made it plain. But it was the way in which you made it plain that impressed me. You did not say to yourself: ‘Here is another of these tiresome little brown men, these pathetic little upstarts in uniform, whom I must pretend to treat respectfully in order to show that I do not think of him as an inferior human being.’ You did not patronise, as Mr. Gedge does, and you were not more tactful than was necessary. You dealt with me frankly as you would have dealt with a European in the same circumstances, and there was no calculation in your attitude. You treated me neither as a dog, nor as a pet monkey who may bite. And so I liked you.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s very civil of you. But it wasn’t to assess the value of your friendship, as you put it, that I brought the matter up. What I wanted to know was if you would trust me.”

  “With what, Mr. Fraser?”

  “A confidence. Which side are you really on, Major? The National Freedom Party’s or the Government’s?”

  “Naturally, Mr. Fraser, I am on the side of the General. How could you doubt it?” He smiled easily.

  “I don’t, Major. But which General do you mean?”

  For once, I saw him disconcerted; but it was a shortlived pleasure. His lips narrowed and his hand went to his gun.

  “You will explain that remark,” he said softly.

  “Certainly. I was in the garden of the Harmony Club two ni
ghts ago. I saw your jeep. I knew it came from Tangga. I knew it could only have come by road, so…”

  “How much did you hear?” he demanded abruptly.

  “Not much, but enough to know that there are two Generals in this. Who is the other one?”

  He ignored the question. “Whom have you told?”

  “Nobody. It wasn’t my affair.”

  “You said nothing of this last night.”

  “Why should I? Until I heard Sanusi’s voice I thought that he was the other man whom you called ‘General.’ ”

  “Was Miss Linden with you?”

  “She only saw the jeep. She heard nothing.”

  “I can believe you?”

  “Yes.”

  He sighed. “But why do you risk your life by telling me?”

  “Because I want to save my life if I can, and Miss Linden’s. If what I suspect about this business is true, I don’t think either of us has very much of a chance. Do you?”

  He looked me in the eyes. “Nobody here has very much chance.”

  “By showing you that I can be trusted not to betray you, I increase what chance we have.”

  “How?”

  “If you can help us, you will.”

  “Why should I help you? A moment ago, I was on the point of shooting you like a dog.”

  “You will help me because, if the occasion arises, you can trust me to help you. Also, because you are a humane man.”

  He stared at me grimly. “I would not depend too much on my humanity, Mr. Fraser. It may still become necessary for me to shoot you.”

  “If it becomes necessary, of course, you will. I said that you were humane, Major. I didn’t accuse you of sentimentality. Now, you’d better show me this generator.”

  We went on down the stairs.

  “One thing I should like to know, Mr. Fraser,” he said. “Is your ignorance on the subject of generators as complete as you claim?”

  “I have a certain amount of theoretical knowledge, naturally, but I don’t think that’s going to be much use. If the windings are damaged, and they probably are, there’s nothing I can do.”

  “I ask, because if the generator is not running again by sundown, I am afraid that harsh disciplinary measures may be taken against you. I would regret that, but I could do nothing to stop it. And now, here we are.”