Dark Places

Part III: Indonesia 13. Too Many Australians

The flight passed in a haze of bad food and bad movies and bad company. I didn't really mind. Sometimes I felt that as I had gotten older the only thing I had really gotten better at was waiting. Twelve hours on an airplane? No problem. I dozed, watched movies, read the Lonely Planet guide I'd bought at the airport, stared out from my window seat at the endless metallic sheen of the ocean. I had an emergency-exit row and the extra space to go with it, for which I was very grateful, as they don't make economy-class seats for men six feet tall. I didn't really think. There didn't seem to be any need for it.
   The twelve hours passed in a flash, and then I was outside in Indonesia's sweltering heat, walking down steep stairs from the airplane to the tarmac. I passed a McDonald's and a Hard Rock Cafe on the taxi ride from the airport to the beach, and found a comfortable bungalow room for two dollars a night.
   Kuta Beach was awful. Green, and pretty, and it boasted a terrific beach, but awful all the same. It reminded me of Fort Lauderdale. The population consisted largely of noisy, obnoxious, drunken college-age Australians. Generally I like Aussies, but not this batch. Indonesian men wandered around with hateful eyes and briefcases full of cheap knockoffs for sale, watches and perfume and rings and Zippo lighters. Indonesian women walked around, barely clad, offering five-dollar "massages" to the Australians. And watching the Aussies I could see how the idea that all white men look alike and all white women are easy gets around the Third World.
   I sat on the beach and watched the sunset. It was spectacular. But it was half-ruined by the company. One drunken batch of Aussies played rugby on the beach, shoving the Indonesian hawkers out of their way, knocking one woman and her cargo of bright sarongs sprawling onto the wet sand. Another group passed a huge hash pipe around. At the beachfront cafe where I sat there were two men sitting at tables with prostitutes. One was a fat bearded man in his twenties, strutting and beaming as if the presence of two twenty-dollar-a-day whores showed that he was the most desirable man on the planet. The other was a wrinkled, white-haired man with two girls who looked about thirteen.
   It occurred to me that The Bull was not so different from a lot of other travelers. Some people go traveling to explore, or to experience; but a hell of a lot go to exploit. Many Third World travelers are there at least in part because poor countries offer cheap drugs, cheap sex, complete anonymity, and police who happily turn a blind eye in exchange for a small contribution. The Bull took it a little further than the drug tourists or the sex tourists, he got his kicks from murder, but the general idea was the same.
   I was no angel myself. I had lost track of how many countries I had gotten high in. Sure, soft drugs should be decriminalized, but in the meantime it was hard to argue that I was somehow helping a country by contributing to the violent gangs that invariably control the drug trade. I'd never slept with a local girl, the idea made me morally queasy, but I'd met and traveled with lots of people who had. It wasn't exactly prostitution, the way it was usually done, just an accepted tradeoff; the local girl sleeps with you for a week or two, and you buy her a lot of gifts. It wasn't just men, either, I'd met musclebound Africans with temporary European girlfriends who were, shall we say, not conventionally attractive. Sometimes it was genuine romance. Sometimes it was a harmless fling. Sometimes it was exploitation. The line was much too fine, and rationalization much too easy, for my liking. I was sure the fat bearded man was already telling himself that the two beautiful women at his side were there mostly because of his powerful physical magnetism.
   I finished my beer, watched the sunset, listened to the ocean. I was exhausted, drained by a day's travel and by jet lag. I wanted to sleep, but instead I went out and found the Internet World cafe. It was fair-sized, about twenty machines. There was nobody there that I recognized. I'd spent the flight alternating between fear that I wouldn't be able to find the killer and fear that I would. Now that I was here it was the first fear that dominated. There were literally thousands of tourists in Kuta Beach; even if my theory was correct and I would recognize the killer, what were the odds that I would just happen to bump into him?
   I logged in and checked the Thorn Tree, but no response from our boy yet. Talena had sent me an email telling me I was a complete idiot and she'd be damned if she'd help me and I better send daily updates. I sent one back telling her I'd gotten in and everything was fine, went back to my bungalow, and got a much-deserved night's sleep.

* * *

   I had come to Indonesia because I had resurrected the theory that Laura's murderer was somebody on the truck. Originally I had written that off because the dates didn't fit, there was no way a trucker could have been involved in the Southern Africa killings. But now I wondered: what if Laura had been a copycat killing? What if somebody on the truck had heard about the Southern Africa killings, from a phone call or an e-mail, and decided to respond in kind? What if Laura's murder hadn't been random at all? What if she had been killed by somebody she knew, who dressed it up to look like the work of the serial killer allegedly in Africa?
   What if it had been one of us?
   I could think of three candidates. Three people I had traveled with, gotten drunk and gotten high with, cooked with, sweated blood with, who I had seen sick and angry and embarrassed and ecstatic and giddy, who I had spent nearly every day with for four solid months; three people I could still envision as killers. Lawrence Carlin. Michael Smith. Morgan Jackson.
   If true this would explain a lot. Especially if the same person who killed Laura had killed Stanley Goebel as well, if Goebel had been a victim of the copycat — call him The Bull II — rather than the original killer. That would explain why he came after me on the trail. Because he knew me and I knew him. He feared I had seen him in Letdar or seen his name on one of the checkpoint ledgers. I wished I'd looked at those more closely. So it also explained why he switched to using Stanley Goebel's name and passport.
   Of course there were still a few holes in the theory. First of all, how would he have known the vital detail of the Swiss Army knives when apparently nobody knew this but the South African police, who weren't telling? And if Laura's death had been a crime of passion, which I thought possible — Lawrence, in particular, had had a brief fling with her early on in the trip, before she and I came together, and I thought had never really gotten over it — why would the same person have gone on to kill a total stranger in Nepal two years later? And what were the odds against me stumbling onto a crime committed by the same man?
   Actually those odds weren't as awful as they first looked. It is an enormous planet out there, people who say "it's a small world" obviously haven't seen much of it, but the backpacker trail makes up a pretty small and navigable part. It wouldn't be the first time I stumbled into someone I knew. When in Thailand last year I bumped into a girl I knew from England on Thanon Khao Sanh, and the very next day met a guy I'd traveled with briefly in Zimbabwe. The Lonely Planet is a shrunken planet. And it shrinks even further depending on the type of traveler you are. Anyone who spends four months on a truck in West Africa is an adventure traveler, who likes struggle and challenge, prefers doing over seeing, and is too poor to buy their own Land Rover. There are a finite number of places in the world that suit the budget adventure traveler, and the Annapurna Circuit is one of them.
   All of which might lead me to The Bull II, if he existed. There weren't many places around here for an adventure traveler. The drunken beach-bum culture here in Kuta Beach? Definitely not. Culture and dances and art in Ubud, a little further north? No. In fact the only Bali possibility mentioned in my SFO-purchased Indonesia: a travel survival kit was a live volcano named Gunung Batur, in the middle of the island. You could climb to the top of it and fry eggs on the hot rocks there. I thought that might be exactly the kind of thing The Bull II was into. Because I thought he and I might be into exactly the same kind of thing.
   Not counting killing random strangers, of course.

* * *

   It was three days after the cookies-and-minefield incident that Laura and I finally came together. The night Robbie got lost in the desert. Damn fool went for a walk and got caught out by sunset. Then, instead of staying where he was, he kept walking, trying to find us. It was an hour before Emma, who was at that point Robbie's girl, realized he hadn't gone for a nap. We all rushed out to look for him before Hallam could stop us and impose some kind of organization on the search.
   Our camp that night was in the shelter of a U-shaped sand dune. Most of the others ran out towards the mouth of the U calling Robbie's name, but Laura and I,  who had been spending a lot of quietly nervous time near each other in the previous three days, slogged up the dune, sliding two steps back for every three steps forward, until we reached the top. Our idea had been that maybe he had his flashlight with him and we could see him from the top.
   The moon was nearly full that night, which in the Sahara means you can easily read a newspaper by its light. We could see a long way. But there was nothing but the desert wind, so fierce that contrails of sand were visible six inches above the dune, so loud that it swallowed up our cries of Robbie's name as soon as they left our lungs. Laura raised her hand to protect her face from the wind, and without even thinking about I stepped between her and the wind and put my arms around her protectively. She looked up at me, her eyes wide, and held me tight.
   "I hope he's okay," she said. I could barely hear her over the wind's howl.
   "He'll be fine," I said. "He'll stop when he realizes he's lost. Hallam will find him."
   A few seconds passed, and then I lowered my head those final two inches and kissed her for the first time.
   It was the headlights that interrupted us, I don't know how much time later, the headlights of the Tuareg Land Rover that had miraculously stumbled across Robbie wandering through the desert five miles from our camp and, even more miraculously, tracked us back to this particular sand dune. After returning our lost sheep they camped beside us, and Laura and I spent most of the rest of that night beneath their big canvas tent. It was one of my favourite memories, sitting with my arms wrapped around her as we and the Tuareg nomads in their sky-blue robes sat around their fire, sang songs from our respective homelands, and ate grilled chunks of a dead lamb that stared at us accusingly from the back of their Land Rover. It was a good night. It might have been the best night of my life.