Chapter One - Richard Lewis

you a donation for your activities, but as it is, well, people would probably talk. Best to
stick to business."
"And you wish to buy hair."
"It is a good business," Reed said. "Some villages have silver, some villages have
carvings, some villages have textiles, but all villages have hair."
Dharma nodded. "Your uncle is a wise man. I'll see what I can do."
A week later, Reed attended a high caste wedding of important royals. Rusty sped
after him as usual, but the tiny engine on his motorized bicycle seized up. Reed braked
and backed up and told his minder where he'd be. When Rusty showed up a half hour
later at the palace, Reed smuggled his bemused minder into the back garden where the
younger men were drinking moonshine arak. There he introduced Rusty as his good and
quite thirsty friend. By the time Reed finally left, Rusty was baying songs with the others.
When he got home, he found Dharma waiting on the steps to the verandah, a large
basket at his feet. Greeting his guest, Reed invited him up for coffee. Dharma glanced
with alarm over the railing at river rocks far below. His curiosity overcame his manners
and he asked, "Forgive me for my rudeness, but why do you want to live on such
worthless land, so exposed to all this open air?"
"The view," Reed said. "The river and the rice fields."
Dharma gave him a blank look, swung around to look again at the ravine and at
the carpet of rice-fields on the other side of the ravine, and back at Reed. It wasn't the
first time that this concept of view had perplexed a Balinese, so Reed moved on and
asked his guest about his family and their health. When finally the niceties were done and
the bushes well circled, he nodded at the basket. "And what is that you bring, my
brother?"
"Oh, this? Just some worthless hair." Dharma opened the top. Within were curled
long strands of gleaming black hair. Neat and tidy, bundled with bamboo twine. "If you
don't wish to buy, it is of no great matter," Dharma said.
Reed got out the flour scales and weighed the hair, which he jotted down in a
black notebook. Excusing himself, he entered his bedroom and put on canvas gloves. He
kept under his bed a decoy cash box with a few bills, but his real stash was up in the roof.
Standing on the headboard of his bed, he thrust a hand between the third and fourth
overlapping leaves of the thatched roof. The other week he'd been stung by a scorpion,
hence the gloves. He pulled out a manila envelope of hundred dollar bills, took five to
slip into a smaller envelope, and shoved the cash back into hiding. Dharma accepted the
envelope with his right hand supporting his left hand, a gesture of humble gratitude that,
Reed thought, didn't diminish on whit the back-bone pride of the man. Dharma didn't
bother checking the amount but tucked the envelope into the waist-fold of his sarong.
Reed also had in his hand a photo album, black-and-white pictures taken at the
Batu Gede rally and which he'd had developed in a Den Pasar studio, a darkroom he
rented by the day.
"Who are these people on the podium?" he asked.
Dharma looked through the photographs and named them. The assistant chairman
of the Communist regional party. The chairwoman of the Batu Gede Gerwani. The leftist
information officer from the Udayana military command who often had coffee at the Bali
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