Chapter One - Richard Lewis

"Over fifty thousand were massacred in Bali alone," she said. "For being members
of the Partai Komunist Indonesia or affiliated organizations like Gerwani, the Gerakan—
"
"Gerakan Wanita Indonesia," Reed interrupted. "The Indonesian Women's
Movement. I know who they were."
"Completely legal organizations. One day you were a law-abiding citizen, and the
next day you were killed."
Reed tossed back his drink and stared at the setting sun with a hooded gaze.
"Like you say, Bali's a small island," Tina continued. A certain momentum had
built up. "Whole families, entire hamlets wiped out. That's the equivalent of what, twenty
million Americans taken out and slaughtered? The Nazi Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge
horror, the Rwanda genocide: all imprinted on the human consciousness but the
Indonesian killings, hardly a blip. I find that astonishing and depressing."
Above the ravine, pigeons circled in descending flight to their coop, the whistles
attached to their feet sighing in an ebb and flow of a mournful music for the dying day.
From the side pocket of her bag, Tina took out a folded sheet of paper. "When I
was in Lombok, and asking around about 1965, a woman I don't know came by and
handed me this and left without a word." Unfolding the paper, she cleared her throat and
read the typewritten lines:
We Gerwani women were called immoral, lascivious, depraved. They said we
danced naked and seduced the men and had orgies. Lies! Tell me, what is so immoral
about teaching children working in the fields how to read and write? Tell me, what is so
lascivious about insisting a man have only one wife? Tell me, what is so depraved in
demanding that a poor farmer be allowed a small part of land to call his own? If you can
tell me this, then fine, we deserved to be hunted down and killed like dogs, to be kept like
dangerous beasts in prison cages, to be tortured and raped.
Reed unfolded his long legs and hitched up his sarong, revealing bare bony feet.
He brooded into the stream a hundred feet below, dark water whisking through the rocks.
What was he thinking? The rumors said he'd collected names of Communists that the
CIA had deemed worthy of special attention, a list that he'd slipped to the nationalists.
The rumors said he handed over briefcases of cash to cover organizational costs of the
killing teams.
"I can tell you any number of stories, like the one I just did," he said. "Bodies
floating down rivers out to sea and to the sharks. Women and children. Is that what you
want?"
"Whatever you think can help me."
He picked up the bottle of vodka and slugged a straight shot, wiping his lips with
the back of his hand. "Maybe you should start asking questions right there in Batu Gede."
"Why is that?"
He lowered the bottle and watched the last pigeon disappear behind the tree line.
"That's where it started. Batu Gede is where the blood began, a trickle that turned into a
flood."
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