The Timor Man (76 page)

He'd had the occasional affair or two but these never amounted to anything. He had no wish to make commitments. During his first year in the Philippines there had been one girl, but when she discovered that he'd never divorced his first wife, she had left him and taken up with an Italian. He had not been bothered by the strange behaviour, or at least he thought it was strange, considering the Catholic morality that existed in a country which did not even permit divorce.

He'd moved on then to Palau where he was pleased to discover that the people knew little of Indonesia and kept mainly to themselves. He remained happily ensconced in the small community for almost two years.

Stephen always attempted to position himself close to a beach and not too far from a bar. Mostly he was successful. He would sit in a canvas sun-deck chair around a pool or spend the afternoon lying in a hammock permitting the sea-breeze to rock him gently.

He really didn't want to think about the past. He knew he should try to sort out in his mind what had happened to him but he preferred to try to forget the past, with its painful memories.

Ignoring Seda's instructions Coleman never did make contact with the Macau number. He was convinced that it would only be a matter of time before the Javanese killer called on him. Umar could decide that Stephen's time had come and take matters into his own hands despite his master's concerns over repercussions.

He refused to return to Australia, but sent postcards with scribbled messages to his mother. For some time he hadn't known that she had passed away, and now couldn't remember how he had discovered that she was gone.

Sometimes he was annoyed with himself for doing nothing constructive with his life, but this feeling of regret would last no more than a day, or at most two.

He had no feelings of guilt. When he considered what had happened in Timor he reasoned that, as he had not known what the General's real agenda had been from the outset, how could he be responsible for what had happened? And the hundreds of thousands who died were almost forgotten, who really cared? The passing years and historical fact had treated them all so very badly.

He recognized that somewhere there was a woman to whom he was still married and that he had neglected her out of lack of compassion and understanding. Because most of his life he had acted in a most self-serving manner his present demise was a direct result of that selfishness, and he was now paying the price for his selfishness and the selfishness of others.

Sometimes he would wonder about Anderson. But not for long. When he reached his fortieth birthday he had celebrated alone, privately, sitting on the raised wooden veranda of a beachside bungalow consuming the bottle of Dom Perignon he'd saved for the occasion.

On that one day, as he sipped the long cool mixture of rum and coke, he realized that he had no ties, no friends and virtually no family. His life had no real value. He was nothing.

He made an annual visit to Hong Kong to replenish his money supply, and even that city had slowly lost its character and become sad. Most of the intelligentsia had fled for greener and safer fields as time began to run out for the former British colony. He felt that it was as if suddenly, one day, some monstrous world clock somewhere had suddenly chimed, passing ownership of the land and its islands to the undeserving mass of humanity across the hills, leaving the struggling few to cope with their new masters.

It would be a sad day for all, he knew.

 

From time to time in his wanderings Coleman bumped into vaguely familiar faces. He always left when the whispers started, but as the years progressed this happened less frequently. It had to be expected, his having been such a prominent, even notorious figure. Stephen had at first grown a beard but then considered it ridiculous and had it removed, explaining to his bed partner of the time that he was only doing so to please her.

Funds were never a problem. He continued to live off his capital, living modestly without being overly frugal. Stephen felt that there was just a limit to how much one could spend without making a career of it.

There was no necessity for him to place his funds on deposit. Besides, that would leave trace records and, although he was a staunch convert when it came to believing in the sanctity of the specialized numbered deposit system most of the Asian capitals had developed, he had never really believed that these could not be compromised under pressure should the situation arise.

Switzerland
was a good example, he thought. Recent years had seen an exodus of capital from that country as it assisted other governments recover funds secreted away by former dictators, drug lords and even the more ordinary criminals.

He no longer cared about all of that. He was now totally devoid of ambition. His life had drifted along and Stephen Coleman became accustomed to, and even accepted, the emptiness and lack of commitment that filled his days.

 

How quickly the years seemed to have passed, he reflected, dragging his thoughts back from this self-indulgent reverie. Reminiscence was not necessarily good for the soul.

Acar horn sounded down below. He smiled as the waiter brought him another coffee and addressed him in French. Stephen sat for a while longer enjoying the evening air. A sense of drowsiness enveloped his body. He pushed the remaining coffee aside and called for his cheque. The relaxing atmosphere had almost caused him to become philosophical about his self, his life and his future.

He'd travelled the region for years and expected to do so for many more. He had been to Kathmandu and Shanghai, to Yangon and Mandalay, crossed the Thai countryside until he knew it almost as well as the inhabitants themselves, smoked grass on the beaches of Phuket and Pattaya, and fornicated in almost every resort on the tourist map.

And now he was in Saigon. And so was Greg Hart.

      
       Canberra
— Ho Chi Minh City — Jakarta — Hong Kong

 

The Prime Minister disliked immensely being referred to as that silver-haired politician. But as he ran the comb vigorously through his ample grey waves it wasn't his appearance that occupied his thoughts. It was those fucking files! He wished he could burn the documents.

Prime Ministers might come and go, but you still had to deal with the bloody political garbage they left behind hidden like some stinking skeleton, waiting for the new and unsuspecting tenant to take the leader's chair. It was just not possible that even his predecessor has been this capable a liar, he thought angrily, pulling at the knot in his tie one more time. He checked the handkerchief — it didn't match.

“Shit,” he muttered, throwing it away then digging like some feral animal amongst the harmoniously laid out clothes accessories in the second drawer of the Victorian dresser.

“Gloria, where the hell is the other half of this combination?” he called, turning to his wife, pointing to the tie he had so laboriously worked on for almost ten minutes before discovering that it clashed.

“I don't know, dear. Have you left it somewhere?” she responded distantly. He guessed she was still annoyed with the magazine article featuring his latest indiscretions.

“Hey!” he snapped, knowing where this was leading. He'd read the bloody article himself.

The Prime Minister scrimmaged around for a few more minutes before deciding that it would be easier to change the tie.

The press were going to have a field day. Today, he thought, they were either going to harass him about the intimate article or, some smart-arsed little bastard would pick away at the Australian Indonesian Defence Accord that had been signed by his predecessor without even consulting the other representative parties in either House. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the Prime Minister thought, the silly prick had waited until the twentieth anniversary of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor to make the announcement!

The press hadn't appreciated the lack of sensitivity. It had been precisely twenty years also since six of their number had been murdered in the area. At the time, most of the world's leaders had fallen over laughing at the naiveté of the man from ‘Down Under'.

The only country which could qualify as being a potential danger was, they chortled, the counter-signatory to the agreement. It was almost another case of history repeating itself, like another agreement signed many years before in Europe, he cited.

‘It will be just like Chamberlain and Hitler!' he had argued in the House at the time, leading the Opposition ranks to rally against the legislation which would legalize the document. As a member of the Shadow Ministry he had the numbers to have his voice heard, and heard he was, at the time, albeit unsuccessfully.

When the government had initiated the ridiculous agreement, the intellectual lobby screamed foul and endeavoured to defeat the government by working against this cosy arrangement. It had the potential to emasculate the Australian Defence Forces. Australia's military strength was only a fraction of its giant neighbour's and would remain so, he believed, as long as the country's defence strategists insisted on competing on a weapon for weapon basis.

The new Prime Minister was a realist. Although he knew that it would probably not happen in his life time, he had always expounded the premise that the country was too large to defend in terms of conventional defence policies. The country's coastline was difficult to maintain in terms of national integrity.

The long term solution would be to change the very nature of the armed forces by following the principle of dualism. In short, he had argued, when the servicemen were not occupied fighting wars or protecting their country elsewhere he believed that they should be gainfully employed in a civic capacity, similar to Third World countries whose maximum utilization of such military manpower had proven successful.

“Stuff the airforce!” he would say when the military budgets were discussed. “Why waste hundreds of millions of dollars on aircraft that can't even fly across the bloody country?”

The Prime Minister's position was simplistic, but he considered it appropriate for his under-populated country.

He envisaged an Australia protected by a massive fleet of gun boats which could double up during peace time as immigration and customs patrol vessels. These would operate in concert with a number of rotary and fixed wing aircraft squadrons consisting of the more conventional type of aircraft.

This would cut out the need for expensive jet fighters that defence departments always scrambled to acquire for their air forces. The savings in terms of the number of refugees who would be turned back alone could pay for a considerable portion of the budget, not to mention the positive counter-smuggling effects on the national economy.

When he had been Shadow Minister for Defence, well before he became the country's leader, he'd been asked how the Defence Forces would protect Australia in the event of attack. He remembered with some satisfaction, his response. “Well, we don't really have the resources to protect all of our coastline. It would be ridiculous to even attempt to do so. As I have maintained in the past, providing we have the ability to secure our coast with patrol vessels and air reconnaissance, then all we would need would be three of our own ICBMs.” There had been a hushed silence after that particular reply. He wished the interview had never taken place, not least because of the copious amounts of wine he'd consumed prior to what should have been an informal discussion.

“How would we maintain the integrity of our own missiles?” he'd been asked by one of the more experienced Canberra reporters. The wine and the attention of the media had provoked an incautious reply.

“Simply, David, if we came under attack, we would send the first one off to one of their larger cities and then phone the bastards and ask them where they wanted the second!”

This had been met with a burst of laughter from the press and the following day's headlines had not done him any harm. Australians had always been concerned about their Asian neighbours'real intentions. It was odd but that off-the-cuff remark had probably been responsible for gaining him the Prime Ministership. Cartoon caricatures of him had appeared for weeks, depicting him walking around the countryside with the third missile hanging out of his back pocket stamped ‘wherdoyawantit?' Overnight his popularity doubled and shortly thereafter he challenged the party's leadership, winning easily.