Chapter One - Richard Lewis

Arini was trying to get her to eat some young coconut. "Just a few bites," she
cooed.
Naniek weakly pushed aside the spoon and from the bed looked at Reed as if he
had emerged from her sweat-soaked dreams to trouble her. She closed her eyes and
turned her head away.
Arini put aside the bowl. "I have to get back to Batu Gede," she said. "I'm leaving
her in your care."
"Before you go," Reed said, "I need to tell you something."
She sat patiently on the verandah sofa, her eyes weary and calm and without
curiosity. "Yes?"
"My people found a dossier on me in the burned-out PKI headquarters." He fell
silent, frowning at a frog by the rails.
"Yes?" Arini prompted.
He picked up the frog and tossed it into the lotus pond. "Naniek was called back
to Djakarta just before the coup. I found out there that she was also a PKI cadre. Some
Gerwani women are. I put two and two together to get four. At least I thought it was four.
That she was also Luhde Srikandi. The Special Bureau agent. But it doesn't make sense.
It isn't four at all. A Special Bureau agent wouldn't wear another hat. She wouldn't be
Gerwani. She would be deep undercover, an ordinary citizen. Most likely a nationalist.
And she wouldn't be called back to Djakarta. She's an agent in place. She would be in
Bali and stay in Bali. But the coup failed from the get-go. Now she's abandoned. Alone.
Everybody out to lynch her. It must be a terrible feeling." He looked up, looked directly
at Arini, at her pretty face now tautened into a severe beauty. "Isn't it, Arini? A terrible,
lonely feeling.
Arini held his gaze for a long moment, then softly said, "When I was in
university, there was an outbreak of polio in the hill villages. The government sent teams
out to vaccinate the people for free. I was assigned to one to help. But the head of the
program sold the vaccines to the rich landlords and merchants, who tripled their money
selling it the poor. I told myself, this must be changed."
"The trouble with people," Reed said, "is that when the poor become powerful,
they are just the same."
Over the mountains, in the late morning heat, the first of the thunderclouds were
starting to build. "There's going to be another storm," Arini said. She rose to her feet.
"The loneliness is more than you can imagine. You wanted to save one person. She is in
your house."
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