Chapter One - Richard Lewis

An assistant professor at Stanford, Tina was coming to the end of a productive
sabbatical, studying the cultural differentials between Balinese in their home island of
Bali and the Balinese community who'd lived for centuries on the Muslim island of
Lombok. The Balinese had been gone over and over again with a fine-toothed
anthropological comb, but this was original work she was confident would clinch her
tenure.
"You heard about Soeharto being taken to the hospital today?" she asked.
"The Smiling General. I have indeed."
"I'm thinking of doing a side paper. On 1965. The failed coup attempt and the
subsequent mass murders."
Reed slopped a couple more ice cubes into his glass and a heavy dose of vodka
"You were here," Tina said, coming to the point of her visit. "In Bali."
Reed swirled the cubes. "Yes, I was."
Reed had a dozen stories of how he'd come in Bali in the early sixties. He'd been
kicked out of Harvard for gambling. He was a disinherited scion of a banking family. He
was a sailor who jumped ship. He'd worked in Hollywood as a bit actor and heard of
Bali's charms from Charlie Chaplin.
Reed never said anything about the CIA, but Tina had heard persistent rumors that
as an art dealer and photographer and general all-around foreign dabbler, he'd also
doubled as a deep cover agent, that he'd been involved up to those devil eyebrows in the
1965 Communist coup and counter-coup that resulted in the systematic extermination of
the Communists. The killings began in Java, and took two months to start in the
neighboring island of Bali, but when they did, it was to new heights of thoroughness and
savagery, with over 50,000 Balinese killed by other Balinese.
"Can I pick your brain? Put you on tape?" Tina asked.
Reed grinned wryly. "Bali. Shake a bush and out pops an anthropologist." His
grin died into a sigh. "You don't need to talk to me, Tina. Everybody of a certain age has
a story to tell about that time."
"Nobody wants to talk about it."
"Well. You know how small this place is. Everybody still has to live together, tied
to local community and village temples, a widow still has to attend festivals with the man
who killed her husband. Of course, this being Bali, things could blow up all over again
when Soeharto dies." Reed crunched an ice cube. "You either killed your neighbor or
your neighbor killed you. That's how it was. In 1965 we got right down to the
fundamentals of human nature."
"That's rather pessimistic."
"Christmas Day of '65 I went to Mass with a Red Beret officer. The majority of
the killings on Bali were done by the taming, the Black Shirts, but the Red Berets took
care of special targets. He told me how he and his men entered a Communist hamlet the
Black Shirts had been through. A boy of about nine came up to him and said, sir, they
have killed my mother and father so please kill me too. The officer told me, 'I felt sorry
for the poor boy so I pulled out my pistol and shot him.'"
Tina glanced again at the photograph of the two girls playing hopscotch. An old
ache rose like a muddy whirl. When Tina was fifteen, her twelve-year-old sister Nancy
had been abducted from the scrub brush behind their California home and was never
found.
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