Chapter One - Richard Lewis

A good host, Reed saw his guest to her rental car, a rusty VW Safari. She drove
off with a final wave, the car trailing plumes of exhaust. Reed shuffled back to the
verandah, feeling his years, the weight of them layered on his heart like sediment, an eon
compressed into an inch. He sat down to polish off the bottle of vodka that he'd opened as
a courtesy.
Tina. Not a bad sort for an anthropologist. She wanted to get her teeth into 1965,
did she? He should have kept his big mouth shut. Or sloughed her off onto Dominick
Legard, that excitable man who'd be happy to talk her ear off on the treacherous
machinations of the CIA. Oh, she'd said the politically correct things about justice, and
she did have a point there, but Reed would bet his knobby knees that she was in it for the
paper. Publish or perish.
As for himself, rot and perish.
Godalmighty, he was getting tired of Bali, of what it had become. Nothing stayed
the same anywhere, but too rapid and ugly a change was called a malignancy. He was
weary of how noisy and polluted and overcrowded the island was, everybody cramming
into a paradise that was getting seedier by the day, timeshare salesmen and dull arrivistes
and air-headed spiritualists getting high colonics with sacred spring water, trying to find
in Bali what they couldn't find at home.
After the terrorist bombs of 2002 had ripped through the Kuta nightclubs,
foreigners had fled the island as fast as Red Sox fans abandoning Fenway Park after a
Yankee thrashing. Even the expats who'd blathered on and on how they'd found their
home on earth had bailed as soon as they could book a flight. You could walk from one
end of Ubud to the other on the actual goddam sidewalk. It was a bad time for the
economy, sure, but people slowed way down and talked to each other without the hustle.
You could hear the birds. The band of smog that thickened each year had lessened until
one could see again the sharp silhouettes of the far hills. It reminded Reed of the Bali he'd
once known.
Maybe the island needed a good massacre every so often. Feed the gods, give
Siva his destruction and Durga her blood.
His housekeeper Komang appeared on the verandah. "What time do you want to
eat, Pak Reed?" she asked.
"Thank you, but I'm not hungry tonight, Komang," Reed said. He spoke in
Balinese, his teeth tight with the vodka. "You can go home. I'll clean up
Komang took the empty bottle and glasses and ice bucket anyway, a strand of hair
slipping out of her pinned coil.
"You know, Komang, if you sold your hair, you'd make a lot of money."
She chuckled. "My husband likes it how it is."
"How's the salt harvest coming?"
Several years previously, Komang's husband Ruda and several progressively
minded Balinese had bought several hectares of destroyed mangrove swamps out by
Tanjung Benoa from underneath a Jakarta consortium planning a landfill and a golf
course. Reed had helped with the planning and financing. Ruda had replanted most of the
swamp with mangrove seedlings, but at Reed's urging kept half an hectare as a salt farm,
with the idea of selling organic sea salt to help fund the operation. It'd taken a while to
clean the fine black sand of pesticides and chemicals, but now the first batch of coarse
sparkling salt crystals was being processed and packaged. A French company had been
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