Chapter One - Richard Lewis

iggest thief of all. The gap-toothed fellow was also spying on Reed for the PKI. This
worked to Reed's advantage, because Reed had warned Ompreng that if anything went
missing in his house, a plate or a lantern or a towel, he'd march right down to the PKI
office and tell them. The Reds might be back-stabbers, but they could also be fussy
puritans. Ompreng scoffed at the cops, but he was in fear of his bosses.
Ompreng was the in-house spy, but whenever Reed left the house, another man
named Rustaman, or Rusty for short, had the duty of tailing him. As scrawny as
Ompreng was muscled, Rusty lived in a shack right across the road. Whenever Reed
took off in jeep, Rusty hopped on a motorized bicycle whose toy engine couldn't handle
the hills. Rusty had to pump hard on the pedals. It was easy enough to lose him, but more
often than not Reed would kindly wait for him to catch up, panting and sweating.
Today when Reed eased his jeep down his dirt lane to the main road, Rusty was
sleeping in his hammock. Reed honked his horn. Rusty jerked awake. Spotting Reed in
the jeep, his eyes widened in alarm, and he swung out of the hammock, tripping over his
feet.
"I'm going to Den Pasar," Reed called out. "Buying coffee and butter at Hwa
Chen's. Maybe some illegal Coca-Cola, but don't tell anybody about that." He trundled
off with a wave. He wasn't exactly lying, because he did plan to go shopping, but his first
stop was Batu Gede, and he didn't want Rusty tagging along.
Reed's jeep was a World War II Willys with left-hand steering that made for some
excitement when Reed overtook lumbering buses on the narrow lane winding through the
terraced fields. A few times he'd barely escaped a head-on collision from an oncoming
vehicle. His friend the artist Tjok Arsana had painted the jeep front bumper to back with
a landscape mural of Mount Agung and rice fields and jungle. Prominently featured on
the hood and half-doors were long-nosed foreigners as monkeys, Tjok having using Reed
as a model.
Beyond a village of basket weavers, Reed turned off the main road for Batu Gede.
The name meant "big rock", and Reed assumed it came from the volcanic hill
overlooking the village, its peak swaddled with mature teak trees. Reed passed through a
leafy corridor and down switchbacks to the edge of a mangrove swamp, the bushes a
rumpled carpet of dull green giving way to sparkles of blue sea. A community of saltfarmers
had long eked a living in a corner of cleared swamp, where evaporated salt pans
glistened with crystals. In the past two years, more mangroves had been cleared by
refugees whose villages and fields had been destroyed by Mount Agung's 1963 eruption.
They lived in a ramshackle camp, their hovels constructed of whatever they could
scrounge, from driftwood planks to rusted tin. Several men were chopping mangrove
branches into firewood, and they stopped to stare at Reed's passing jeep with dull eyes.
A rocky ridge flanked by an irrigation culvert separated the mangroves from a
reef-protected lagoon and a white sand beach. The coconut groves fronting the beach
gave way to rice fields. In contrast to the salt makers' hardscrabble lives, the rice farmers
of Batu Gede lived more prosperously, or at least without the continual threat of
starvation. The worst of the potholes on the road here had been patched with tar and
crushed rock.
On the outskirts of the large village was an old colonial house once occupied by a
minor Dutch official. The house had a central hall with two wings, all three sections
connected by a common porch. The left wing was evidently a private residence, with a
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