Angel in the Shadows Read online

  Calvino pointed to the fading bruises on Paul’s face. ‘I assume those are the legacy of that encounter?’

  ‘Among other things,’ Paul said. ‘My informant was murdered right before my eyes. He was thrown off the fiftieth floor by the same scum that went on to beat me to a pulp. Dingane visited me in hospital. He explained they were Lavrov’s men. I was lucky to be alive and it was best for all concerned if I left South Africa for a while. What does he need from me?’

  Calvino looked at Tomasoa, who said, ‘It turns out that Zhulongu, your informant, took serious precautions before meeting up with you. Not only had he stored his findings on a USB stick, but he made a good backup as well.’

  Paul stared at both men in disbelief. ‘Are you telling me the information is still available?’

  Tomasoa nodded. ‘If anything happened to him, Zhulongu told his wife to pass the information to you. And nobody else. Apparently you were the only person he really trusted.’

  Paul looked around. He felt the need to sit down for a moment, but there was no furniture in the windowless room.

  ‘I take it that the main reason I’m talking to you now and not with Dingane is that you want me to share that information. Correct?’

  ‘Much more than a piece of journalism is at stake here. We’re neck-deep in a criminal investigation,’ Tomasoa said.

  ‘Well, I’m an investigative journalist,’ Paul said. ‘And if there’s one thing we value, it’s our independence.’

  ‘Our cooperation doesn’t have to get out. This secret is safe with us,’ Calvino said.

  ‘That remains to be seen,’ said Paul, who realized that Calvino’s superior tone, the way he was dressed and, in fact, his whole attitude were beginning to irritate him no end.

  ‘Come again?’ Calvino asked.

  ‘I have a problem with your interpretation of “secret”. More specifically, the secret with which Farah travelled to Moscow. Officially, our newspaper had asked Valentin Lavrov to be a guest editor and put together an art supplement with Farah. But the real reason for her trip was to find out more about Lavrov himself. Aside from my Editor-in-Chief and me, you were the only one who had this information.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ Calvino said.

  ‘You shared that confidential information with a fourth party, someone at the Dutch Embassy in Moscow.’

  Joshua Calvino looked at him alarmed. ‘Where did you hear that –’

  ‘I’m a journalist; I don’t reveal my sources,’ Paul said. ‘But Lavrov had been briefed on Farah’s true intentions before she’d even set foot in his villa. It almost cost her her life.’

  ‘Almost,’ Calvino said. ‘So she’s definitely still alive, right?’

  ‘She’s missing,’ said Paul, aware of his mistake. ‘So I assume she’s still alive.’

  Calvino looked at him closely. ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘Even if I knew, do you really think I’d reveal that to someone who works for Interpol?’

  Calvino was clearly upset. His hands were shaking and he was perspiring. ‘To someone who’s never doubted her innocence – not for a moment,’ he said.

  ‘That makes two of us,’ Paul said.

  ‘Three,’ Tomasoa said.

  ‘With this difference,’ Paul said. ‘Of the three of us, I’m the only one who can prove it.’

  They looked at him as if he were the new Messiah. He saw the relief on their faces. This was the critical moment in his decision – a decision informed by the realization that the three of them had the same interests at heart and if they didn’t cooperate, none of them would get anywhere.

  He agreed to their proposal.

  But not before telling them that he had a condition.

  He smiled, feeling sure of himself and amused by their growing bewilderment.

  And then he added something else.

  ‘In actual fact, it’s not a condition. Conditions are negotiable. This is a demand.’

  Life could be simple. All you had to do was hop on a motorbike, step on the accelerator and ride away. Solitude could become synonymous with freedom. But Paul knew this freedom wasn’t worth anything to him unless he carried out the tasks he’d assigned himself and fulfilled the promises he’d made.

  Riding his motorbike from one bank of the IJ to the other, he took little if any notice of the maximum speed limit.

  Of the six hours that had initially separated him from his third assignment that day, the press conference, only six minutes remained. Now he was standing on the fifth floor of the AND building, in Edward’s office, and he was nervous. He hated addressing groups of people. Since it made him feel insecure, he either tended to be incredibly loud or, the opposite, withdraw deep into himself. Unlike Edward, he simply wasn’t the kind of eloquent speaker or elegant storyteller who managed to win people over. But he wouldn’t, no, he couldn’t, run out on this one.

  He had to do this.

  During the course of the day he’d come to realize how much those four words that had popped into his head in the morning really meant to him.

  Respect for the truth.

  As a journalist you have to respect the truth, since the truth is nothing other than a collection of unquestionable facts. And all citizens have the right to learn about those facts without spin doctors, multinationals and politicians twisting them. Readers have to feel confident that the information they’re given squares with the facts. He’d now taken it upon himself to refute something that everybody took to be true and he was certain it would unleash a storm of reaction, as Edward had predicted.

  He felt his uncle’s hand on his shoulder. ‘Ready?’

  Together they walked to the escalator.

  And as he approached the army of national and international journalists in the downstairs lobby, the opening words popped into his head.

  12

  Close by the Dutch fortress, which looked out across Sunda Kelapa, Farah crossed the drawbridge to the other side of the Kali Besar, the old canal that linked up with the River Ciliwung. Once upon a time colonial ships laden with goods set sail for the Netherlands from here; now an emaciated old man in an unsteady canoe scooped floating litter out of the murky water.

  A television screen high up on a restaurant wall could be heard blaring out the news. Farah paused and watched a correspondent reporting that last night large groups of demonstrators had marched towards the Parliament building, where they clashed with police. She saw footage of cars being torched to serve as fire barricades, armoured vehicles driving into the crowd to break up the demonstration, and the military police firing rubber bullets and tear-gas grenades. The clashes last night had claimed twenty to thirty lives, while hundreds of injured people had been taken to hospitals in vans; even bajajs were serving as improvised ambulances. Before going into hiding, opposition leader Baladin Hatta had delivered one final passionate speech, fiercely criticizing Gundono.

  ‘Nuclear energy has no place in a democratic society. We must fight Minister Gundono’s political regime. He runs a state within a state, which enacts decisions without our consent. These new energy plans make Minister Gundono an enemy of democracy and an enemy of the people.’

  Thousands more demonstrators were expected to march on Parliament today, this time to protest against the excessive force used by the police.

  Farah entered Taman Fatahillah from the spot where she’d got off the bus previously. The square was teeming. A group of Japanese tourists with face masks were mesmerized by a macaque monkey dressed up as a doll, wearing a fake leather jacket and riding around in circles on a wooden miniature Harley Davidson. From a distance, the creature looked like a frightened gnome with dark, hairy legs and a rat’s tail.

  Clustered around a dry fountain, American tourists were listening to a female guide who needed a small megaphone to be heard above the din. Four hundred years ago, this was the heart of the old walled city of Kota. A majority of the population had been enslaved, controlled by a minority of Chinese and European coloniz
ers. A guillotine where rebellious slaves were publicly beheaded had stood close to the fountain. The guide tried to illustrate this by bending over as deeply as she could while bringing the megaphone down on the back of her neck in simulation of an axe. But the group only had eyes for a skeletal street artist in a shabby circus ringmaster’s uniform who was trying to squeeze his wiry body through a wooden barrel.

  A small fairground wheel with four pods had been mounted on an acid-green cart. The children who were lifted into the seats by their parents would go around for a while, either crowing with pleasure or crying with fear. Meanwhile, vendors selling wayang dolls, barong masks and other exotic wood carvings tried to make themselves heard with tired slogans to attract the attention of tourists who had money to burn.

  Farah checked her watch: twelve forty-five.

  She hurried over to the eastern edge of the Taman Fatahillah, where the former Palace of Justice, now converted into a museum, was located. There she exchanged the square’s stifling chaos for the refreshing calm of the entrance hall, which was bathed in a soft, almost orange light. Floating above her head were angels made of bleached wood with cotton wings and red boots. Every single one of them boasted an impressive erection. Their white faces were made up with bright red lipstick and black lines around their wide-open eyes. Attached to their chests were small boxes full of used clock parts and old pieces of electronic equipment. A small speaker near their navels produced shrill birdsong, insect noises and distorted Javanese words.

  It was close to one when she bought her ticket.

  After stowing her rucksack in one of the lockers, she walked past two towering malevolent demons into a dimly lit gallery crammed full of old statues of Hindu deities. The silence made her realize just how tired and agitated she was. As she walked among the ancient blocks of granite and tufa, with their carved patterns of flowers, butterflies, birds and the heads of demons, she noticed her heart was pounding much too fast. She paused in front of a large, four-headed statue of Brahma, the creator of all life, who was seated on a granite swan. The Hindu gods – among them Shiva, the great destroyer of life, and Vishnu, half bird, half human – had arrived on the Indonesian archipelago around AD 150, in the wake of Indian immigrants and monks. Since then, their images had figured prominently in the Prambanan temples.

  From the moment Uncle Parwaiz had taken her by the hand and shown her around Kabul’s large National Museum as a child, she’d been fascinated by the history of old statues, paintings and other objects, by the stories they told of how people long ago used to live, fight and love. In Amsterdam, she was a regular visitor to the Tropenmuseum, where she could while away hours among the historical collections from the four corners of the world. Her most impressive experience to date had been a visit to the ‘Hidden Afghanistan’ exhibition in De Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. This time, she’d been the one to take Parwaiz by the hand. Speechless with admiration, they’d filed past the treasures from Tepe Fullol dating back more than four thousand years: statues crafted by nomadic tribes, jewels from the burial mounds of Tillya Tepe and objects from Begram with their Indian, Greek and Egyptian influences. The two of them had stood in front of the statue of Sharada.

  ‘Do you remember, Uncle,’ she’d asked him, ‘how you told me the secrets of love at a very young age?’

  ‘But my dear child,’ Parwaiz had replied, ‘surely you’re never too young for the wonder of love?’

  Meanwhile, someone had sidled up to her. Glancing sideways, she saw a man in his fifties with a battered face. Tears trickled from his swollen left eye, as if he were crying silently.

  ‘Ibu Hafez?’

  He hardly resembled the combative Independen editor she’d seen online. Prison, torture and fear had transformed Saputra into a whispering shadow of his former self who kept staring straight ahead while dabbing his weeping eye with a handkerchief. His right cheek was swollen and he wore false teeth.

  ‘I think you’re a brave man,’ she said.

  ‘That very much depends on your perspective, ma’am.’

  He kept a watchful eye on his surroundings. He talked with difficulty, as if every single syllable hurt. And it probably did. One of the consequences of the abuse the police had meted out to him recently.

  ‘I don’t have much time. The State Intelligence Agency, the BIN, keeps a constant eye on me. By now they will have discovered that we’re trying to continue Independen underground. Perhaps we can be of assistance to each other in this regard.’

  ‘You guys are after Gundono; I’m after Lavrov.’

  ‘If you want to expose Lavrov’s practices in Indonesia, you’ll have to do so via Gundono. As you know …’

  He fell silent. Mechanically, almost like a radar device, he moved his head to try to pick up the noises that Farah heard too from the entrance lobby. Curt, measured male voices. Although not loud, their tone was alarming and therefore all the more menacing. Saputra began to tell her everything as fast as he could, but did so in a whisper.

  ‘As you know, Gundono is the CEO of Perusahaan Listrik Negara, the state-owned electricity company. As Chairman of the Concession Committee, he has a decisive say in who receives licences for any new nuclear power stations. I’m telling you, Gundono is your direct link to Lavrov.’

  ‘But how do I get to Gundono?’

  ‘We’ve got a mole at his headquarters, a heavily armed compound on the coast near Tanjung Priok. All the important digital communications take place there. If we could hack into –’

  ‘I’m a journalist. I work on an ancient laptop. I know nothing about zeros and ones.’

  ‘Edward Vallent told me that you’re working with an IT expert. If you come up with a way of hacking into Gundono’s computer network, our man there can help you on the inside.’

  ‘What kind of help would that be?’

  ‘Our contact is the compound’s facilities manager.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s possible,’ Farah said. ‘I’ll need to discuss it with the others first. Where and when can I meet your man?’

  Saputra didn’t respond. When she turned to him, she saw him staring across the room, where a man had just walked in slowly but assertively. He wasn’t alone. A second man appeared from the lobby, his dark silhouette sharply outlined against the soft, orange light.

  They’d stood side by side in the half-light, she and Saputra. They’d barely even looked at each other. It had been brief. It hadn’t seemed even remotely like a meeting. Now they had to become casual passers-by. Saputra understood. He was the first to move.

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon at four,’ he whispered in passing. ‘Jalan Surabaya Market, the record shop. Ask the owner for Foreigner.’

  He leaned forward, as if trying to read Vishnu’s history, while she walked in the direction of the entrance lobby. She paused in front of the statue of Brahma, turned around and noticed that Saputra was now walking to the entrance of the room called the Hall of the Golden Artefacts. The two men briskly followed him, each from a different direction.

  Farah watched them until they were gone. Only then did she see the caption by the entrance to the other room: MONITORED BY CCTV. By failing to scan the sculpture gallery for camera surveillance she’d made a schoolgirl error. Any security official with rudimentary lip-reading skills could zoom in on them and figure out what information they’d passed to each other.

  She studied the room from her current position, checking all possible corners, all the places where the walls met the ceiling, where cameras that could monitor the space with 90-to-180-degree rotations might be mounted, but she couldn’t detect anything in the dimly lit room. Not even a tiny red light that revealed the location of a well-hidden security camera. She drew a relieved conclusion: apparently the gods’ golden objects qualified for video surveillance, but the gods themselves did not.

  Now she had to try to get away unseen.

  The moment she made a move, a third man entered the sculpture gallery from the lobby. He was dressed almost identically to the ot
her two: dark-blue baggy trousers and a loose-fitting jacket in the same colour, a white shirt and a dark tie. A pair of sunglasses dangled from his hand. Only the sculptures in the space separated them from each other. As calmly as possible she walked in his direction. When she got closer, she heard him talking softly with two fingers pressed against his right ear. She paused and tried to pick up what he was saying. No luck. He was issuing orders, that’s all she could make out.

  From the Hall of the Golden Artefacts she heard the sounds of a brief but intense scuffle. As if someone were trying to get away but had been stopped. Shortly afterwards, she saw Saputra being marched out of the Hall by the two men. He walked with difficulty because one of his sandals had come undone. His undamaged right eye was open wide. It was practically popping out of his head with terror. His left eye was watering heavily. Each of the men pinned one of his arms against his body. The third man turned around and followed them into the lobby.

  Her first impulse was to run towards the group and free Saputra. But it was doubtful that she could eliminate three trained security agents, while sacrificing her cover once and for all was probably not a smart move either.

  She kept watching as the two men dragged Saputra away through the sliding glass doors.

  The third man remained in the lobby, where he issued orders to two museum guards, who then took up positions by the exit. From now on visitors were only allowed to exit the museum after showing identification. Although it wasn’t very busy, it didn’t take long for a line of grumbling people to form, all eager to leave the museum.