Born Slippy Read online

  One day a car came down the path, a beat-up Pinto, maybe the last one on the road, and driving it was the old man. In the back seat was a huge, ancient German Shepherd that he spent quite some time trying to coax from the car. He really is the most wonderful dog you’ll ever know, the old man said as they walked over to him. Come on big fella, he said to his pride and joy, Come on, buddy boy, getting more and more agitated that the dog wouldn’t get out of the car. The dog groaned and stuck one leg out. Come on, now, Scrunchy! the old man kept yelping, and Dmitry and Frank looked at each other. Great name, Dmitry said quietly. After much more exasperated coaxing, the dog had set its two front paws on the ground, without lifting his hindquarters off the back seat. The old man kept up his urging, desperate, about to cry, but this seemed the most the dog was prepared to do. Hey, yeah, no, really — great, great dog, Dmitry said, and he doesn’t know us from Adam, why would he want to get out of this nice back seat. He went over to the dog and pet his greasy, dandruffy coat and exclaimed how wonderful he seemed. A spectacular canine. A noble beast. Then the poor old thing grunted and moaned its way back into the car, with Dmitry giving an assist, and the old man, muttering about what had possessed the dog to behave like that, got back in the car, too, and without saying goodbye or even acknowledging them, backed down the driveway and went home. Dmitry really was quite kind, in his way. After the man left, he said, again quietly, Bette Davis.

  Frank wandered around the rest of the empty apartment, much larger and more elaborate than he had remembered, and except for that last batch of boxes, completely cleaned out. His only hope was that whoever came to get these remnants would tell him where Yuli had gone. He worried that he didn’t know a single word of Chinese, and wondered whether he should wait in the hall, or outside, or right where he was. It might be hard to explain how he got in the apartment, but it also might be hard to explain why he was hanging around on the street or in the entryway. He had noticed a service set of stairs leading down at the back of the kitchen — he could wait out front and miss them, wait out back and miss them. If he wasn’t there for the last shipment of boxes, how could he ever find Yuli? He decided to wait in the room.

  His jet lag was catching up with him, and dusk descending. He poked at the sides of the boxes in the vain hope that one might contain bedding of some sort, but they all seemed to be packed with books or papers or something else solid. He used a box to wedge each door open as he went down the back stairs, ran around the building and out to his car, grabbed his suitcase and came back in. He took out some of his clothes and used them as a pillow, lay down on the floor next to the boxes, and in minutes was asleep.

  He woke frequently, turning on the hard wood, once pulling an extra shirt on against the night chill, once wandering around in search of a bathroom to pee, each time returning to restless, spasmodic sleep. In the middle of the dark night the light flashed on overhead with a snap, and he looked up to see Dmitry’s driver, who was shocked, and further shocked when Frank said his name.

  “Prabam!”

  “Sir,” he said.

  “Where are they?”

  The moving men were behind him, and Prabam made whatever calculations he needed to before motioning them to come in and take the boxes.

  “Mr. Heald is dead, sir. His building exploded.”

  “Yes, I know, Prabam. Where is Mrs. Heald? And the children?”

  “They have gone away, sir.”

  “Yes, I can see that, but where?”

  “I am not at liberty to say, sir.”

  “But I am an old family friend, Prabam, I’m here to help.”

  Prabam remained silent, then bowed as the men took the last boxes out and onto the elevator, and, still bowing, backed out of the room.

  “Prabam! Don’t do this! Are they in trouble? Do they need help?”

  “Please, sir, go home, Mr. Franky,” was all he said as he backed into the elevator. Frank watched the doors close.

  He threw his clothes into his suitcase and ran down the five flights of back stairs. Circling around the building, he saw the men closing up the back of the truck. As they pulled away from the curb, he let it go a block or so before running to his car and beginning to trail them, leaving his lights turned off.

  They headed back toward the airport, and once on Route 2 the early-hours lack of traffic made it easy for Frank to let them get a half mile ahead and still follow. The grey sea felt less welcoming to him in the murky dawn. Just before the airport Prabam’s crew turned off onto a service road and passed a series of fenced Quonset huts. As they pulled into what he assumed was a freight hangar, he parked a couple hundred yards away, slid down in his seat, and waited. Some fifteen minutes later the van came back, and he ducked further while they passed. As they disappeared in his rearview he drove toward the hangar and pulled up to a gate. A man came up to his window. He rolled it down and pointed at the hangar.

  “I’m sorry,” Frank said. “We put one wrong box in that hangar. I’m going to go get it.”

  The guard tried to process what he was saying, gave up, said something in Chinese, motioned him to stay, and went back into his booth. He got on a telephone and after an exchange, motioned Frank to come over.

  He got out of the car and walked up to the booth. The guard handed him a telephone.

  “Can I help you sir?” said a Chinese man on the phone, in a voice that sounded like it had just been awakened.

  “Yes, this is Dmitry Heald,” he said with his best impression of a Liverpudlian accent. “My driver dropped off a batch of boxes for shipment a few minutes ago, and one of them shouldn’t have been included. I need to go in and get it, but didn’t bring my ID.” He wished he had started with the accent, and he scanned the guard to see if he noticed the switch. He couldn’t tell. The man just looked worried.

  The voice on the phone paused for a minute, maybe just catching up with his own translation. Then he told Frank to put the guard back on, and the guard said something in Chinese, hung up, and walked him into the hangar. He recognized the stack of boxes. They and others were being loaded into the cargo hold of a large, shiny new corporate jet, with nine porthole windows on each side. The jet was unmarked except for a sequence of letters and numbers that he assumed were its equivalent of a license plate, P4-AQA, on the engine housing, and a small “Bombardier Global Express” near the nose that looked like it could either be the company that owned the jet or the one that built it. He typed the name and the registration letters into his phone and signaled a foreman over and motioned for his clipboard; all those years bossing people around worked, because the man came over and handed it to him. He saw the same letters and numbers at the top of the sheet, and copied down all the information he could onto his phone, including the large letters CGK, which was the only thing that looked like an airport code, pretending he was checking this against other information he had. He gave the man a job-well-done nod and handed back his clipboard. He feigned searching for a box, grabbed one at random, allowed the man to find it on his list and check it off, and then walked it back to his car. As he turned the key in the ignition he noticed that his hands were both shaking. He drove past the guard, who kept an eye on him as he passed, but really, that was just his job, right? He hit the main airport road and took the exit for rental car return.

  The rental clerk went over his paperwork, asked if everything was OK, since Frank had rented for a week and was returning after less than a day, and he said yes, fine, change of plans. He asked her if she knew what CGK stood for. She said it was the airport code for Jakarta. He took the shuttle bus to the terminal, toting his bag and the pilfered box, and looked at the big board. The next flight for Jakarta was on China Airlines in four hours. He went to their site on his phone and bought a one-way ticket.

  He checked his bag and took the box to a restaurant — he hadn’t eaten since he got off the plane the day before. He set the box on the chair next to his and opened it, and as he suspected, it was full of files. Most seemed to be records of r
andom financial transactions, none of which meant anything to him. He was aching, tired, dirty, and woozy from traveling and sleeping on the floor, but buzzing with suspense, feeling like he’d been dropped into a spy movie. Why was Prabam moving boxes in the middle of the night? Why were boxes of Credit Lyonnais records in Dmitry’s apartment? Why was Yuli fleeing to Jakarta? It made sense for her to run to her family after Dmitry’s death, but to pack up and move all her belongings in a matter of days? And why do it under the cover of night? Obviously she was scared. Obviously she needed help. Then, in one folder, feeling a rush of good fortune, he found a number of documents with the name Yuli Serang, which he assumed was her maiden name, and that gave him greater hope of finding her family’s compound in Jakarta, the one with the sloping white walls and swords over the mantelpiece.

  He used his phone to google things, since he had clumsily left his laptop in his checked bag, and the internet was so slow he kept dozing off in his chair waiting for the next page to load, awakening with a panicked start, afraid he had missed his flight. The Bombardier Global Express was a brand of jet. They sold for around sixty million dollars, could go around the world with only one refueling stop at a maximum speed of 600 mph.

  The jet would clearly be in Jakarta before he would.

  Then it hit him: she may have been on the plane. He may have been standing within a few yards of her. He imagined a bedroom in the back of the plane, a large bed.

  What an idiot. Maybe she was on her way now, and if he had just waited…

  But maybe not, maybe this was a follow-up flight, maybe she’d been gone for days, weeks, months. He knew nothing. He was deeply, deeply tired.

  The flight was longer than he expected, a little over five hours, and he slept the horrible old sleep of the economy seat, his head snapping to every fifteen minutes — one trip on business class and he was ruined. He had booked a room at the Ritz Carlton over the phone before getting on the plane, something he wouldn’t normally splurge on, maybe because he yearned for a good shower and good bed so badly he couldn’t take any chances, maybe because the $478 a night seemed like a bargain compared to a sixty-million-dollar private jet, maybe — well, whatever the reason, he also had them send a car. After immigration he skipped the baggage carousel and let the Ritz’s driver show him to the car and go back to grab his bag. He sprawled across the back seat and fell asleep until he was at the hotel. It was appropriately ritzy. He was shown to his room, tipped the guy a couple of American dollars, and stepped into the shower. He looked briefly out his window at the city’s seemingly endless array of new and unfinished glass buildings, many adorned with Dubai-like sails and curves, dozens of them brightly lit top to bottom — another Asian powerhouse city, sprinkled with fifty-story cranes and rigid concrete accordions waiting for their fascia. Many stories up in the air but still many below him, the Ritz’s impressive rooftop pools and gardens looked like something out of Metropolis. A stark, five-hundred-foot monumental tower stuck out of a park to the east and an oversized mosque here and there reminded him where he was. He was between worlds.

  He had never been so happy to feel clean sheets in his life. He was asleep in seconds. If he dreamt he had no recollection of it.

  Waking up in the black night, he got out his laptop and googled “Yuli Serang” and “Serang Indonesian minister” and found very little, none of which was helpful. Finally “Serang obituary” got him there: “Juwono Serang, Undersecretary of the Interior, Dies.” It was dated May 2009, and noted that he was survived by his wife and three daughters, Amarya Serang, Lastri Serang, and Yuli Heald. Why hadn’t he thought to google “Yuli Heald”? He tried that and the sisters’ names. Yuli and Lastri had various job-related notices, but nothing turned up an address.

  He would go to the Ministry of the Interior. He found a website and an address and started getting dressed. It was the middle of the night. He would have to wait. He fell back asleep for a couple more hours.

  He hit the dining room as they opened the doors at 6am, ate, went back to his room, brushed his teeth, called for a cab, and set out for the Ministry. The traffic was light — a family of five going by on a motorbike, trucks making early-morning deliveries, the buses running only one-quarter full. He saw a couple groups of dirty kids that seemed to be waking up on the street, and as he moved through the city, its contemporary mall-face would pull back here and there to reveal the garbage-strewn canals and narrow alleys, the corrugated tin patchworks of the shanty town within. An additional hundred cars, motorcycles, bicycle-rickshaws, moto-rickshaws, trucks, and taxis were thrown into the street every couple minutes, and the daily gridlock was about to take hold, the grey haze of untreated exhaust starting to colonize the air.

  No one was at the Ministry except a couple of soldiers in an exterior guardhouse, but it was still before seven. He sat on a concrete bench and watched a flock of schoolchildren walk by, all in white long pants and white smocks, the girls with crochet-trimmed jilbabs covering their foreheads, the bottom half tucked under their chins like a Dominican nun’s habit. The majority of women wore a headscarf, some old-fashioned, like the schoolgirls, some updated, almost Grace Kellyish, looking like TV stars or Muslim fashionistas, with here and there an uncovered woman in a suit — businesswomen, he guessed. A few of the lower-class men wore a sari, or whatever they called the skirt, but most of the men walking by, in that part of town at least, were in jeans or khakis or business suits. This was not a boisterous people, and the pedestrians made no notice of each other or of the foreigner watching them, eyes to the ground in front of them for the most part, intent on their various morning missions.

  Twenty minutes into his vigil, a man approached the front of the Ministry. The guards recognized him and nodded, one of them hopping up to unlock the door. Frank ran towards them, making the guard put his second hand on his rifle.

  “Excuse me, sir?” Frank said. The man at the door was in his sixties, probably had been a colleague of Yuli’s father. He had a sizable paunch and deep purple bags under his eyes.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, and the man nodded, agreeing that Frank was bothering him. “I am a friend of the Serang family. His daughter —”

  “That old son of a bitch.”

  Frank wasn’t expecting that.

  “If you say so, sir, I never met him —”

  “I thought you said you were a friend of the family.” This was not a guy to let you finish a sentence.

  “A friend of his daughter’s.”

  The man had been inching into the building, waiting for the least excuse to close the door, but now he stopped and gave Frank the hairy eyeball.

  “Which one?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Amarya,” Frank blurted out, maybe out of some protective instinct.

  The man lost interest again, but before letting the door close between them, gave him one last chance: “What do you want?”

  “The address. The family house.”

  “I don’t know!” he fairly shouted. “Out the Pangang road.” And with that he was gone, the door solidly closing.

  Frank debated whether to wait and sandbag someone else, but he was too edgy. At a taxi stand, with the help of a few other drivers, eventually he made it clear he wanted to start down the Pangang Road — a little like asking a cab to take you to Sunset Boulevard or Broadway, because it went on for miles. He regretted not renting a car again as they wound out of the city center, down streets lined by painted white-and black-striped curbs, meticulous workers in blue coveralls sweeping them clean. The parade of modern high-rises was punctuated by wooden gingerbread colonial buildings, stretches of unreclaimed freelance bricolage, homemade buildings with hand-painted signs, fruit vendors and food stands on the sidewalks. Occasional fortified estates were surrounded by concrete fences topped by coils of razor wire.

  And then, twenty minutes out of the city, eight-foot-high, white-plastered walls came into view as the road curved, and somehow Frank knew this w
as it. The walls seemed so familiar he felt he had been there before. He had the cabbie pull over and, from his window, asked a gardener tending to some shrubbery along the road, “Serang?” The man nodded yes. His nod might mean he had no idea what he was being asked, but the walls did slope and Frank got out and let the cab go.