Chapter One - Richard Lewis

"Yes. I'll let you know. Good night."
A week later, Reed sauntered off to Benoa Harbor with his camera for one of his
periodic surveys and had a chat with a clerk at the harbormaster's office about the
Chinese flagged vessels that'd been in and out of the harbor.
When he returned to Ubud, there was a telegram waiting for him in the hefty
bosom of Reed's housekeeper, Mrs. Nyoman. She plucked the blue envelope from her
armor clad bra and handed it to him.
== COME HOME FOR VISIT STOP AUNTIE==
Reed would rather not. Since that night of the falling stars, he'd not yet seen or
heard from Naniek. Arini told him that Naniek and other Gerwani women were busy
going around the island organizing demonstrations against spiraling food prices. But one
did not disobey Auntie.
The next morning, he packed a carryon and hired a car to take him to the airport,
where the Garuda counter clerk had his ticket ready. The flight was delayed as the pilots
went shopping at Den Pasar's cheap market for their wives in Djakarta. Several hours
later the DC-3 bumbled through Djakarta's smoky sky, skimming across red-roofed
kampong homes to land at Kemayoran Airport. Reed swiveled through the throng at the
domestic terminal, abruptly detouring into the godawful stinking toilet. When he
emerged, no one was loitering, waiting for him.
He hopped into a taxi, old Ford with a young driver. Gambir train station, Reed
said. The driver replied that's have to detour around Djalan Veteran, one of the city's
main streets, as there was yet another demonstration to crush Malaysia. Clever Dr.
Subandrio, the former doctor and present foreign minister, fashioning a bully boy out of a
former British colony to distract Indonesians from their country's growing woes.
Once out the airport's parking lot gates, the driver hit the accelerator with a racedriver's
élan. Blaring his horn, he careened around groaning buses stuffed with
passengers, while at the same fiddling a radio. He finally tuned into an illegal station
blaring the Beatle's latest hit, banned from official airwaves.
Reed tsked and shook his head. "No good," he said. "Ngik ngak ngok," he said,
using Sukarno's derisive term for immoral rock and roll.
The driver grinned and give the thumbs up. "I like. Very good."
Built on former swamps drained by Dutch-built canals, Djakarta steamed under a
smeared out sun. At Gambir, Reed paid the driver, adding a generous tip for the rock and
roll, and casually looped through the main station hall back out again to hail a trishaw,
pedaled by a tiny man with huge calves. Reed gave the driver an apartment address
behind the US Embassy. Nobody followed, either in car or on bicycle as the trishaw
cruised down West Merdeka Avenue that flanked Freedom Square. In the center of the
enormous square rose the slender obelisk of the National Monument, thrusting its gold
flame hundreds of feet high into the hazy heat. Sukarno's public erection, wags liked to
say.
The Crush Malaysia demonstrators had now gathered in front of US Embassy's
shut gates, and were desultorily shouting anti-American slogans. Following Reed's
directions, the trishaw driver cut down a back alley and stopped at the front gate of a
three-story apartment block. An armed guard let Reed through the gate, but in the
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