State of Siege

“That is a polite way of describing them. They know how to operate the transmitter, which switches to press, which dials to turn, but they are not technicians. They know nothing about the generator except how to start it.”

“But somebody on the staff must know.”

“Possibly, but we have only certain members of the staff with us. The sympathisers.”

“You’re in control of the city. Can’t you round up the others?”

“The three senior technicians are all Chinese. We have sent patrols into the Chinese quarter with instructions to find the men, and they may eventually succeed. But not today, and perhaps not tomorrow either. The General cannot wait.”

“Why not? What’s so important about the radio? I shouldn’t have thought that there were very many people in the country with short-wave receivers.”

“It is not the people inside the country who matter to the General. It is the impression outside that he is concerned about. Later today, he proposes to broadcast again in English. His speech will be addressed to the cities whose good opinion matters most to him at the moment: Djakarta, Singapore, Canberra and Washington. The speech, part of which you have already heard, will be issued to the world press correspondents here at a special conference afterwards.”

“What do you mean, ‘part of which I have already heard’?”

“Surely you did not believe that so much eloquence could be unrehearsed? ‘To you, to any European, that much is certainly obvious.’ Come now, Mr. Fraser, admit it. You must at least have wondered.”

He was smiling slyly at me. It was an invitation to share a joke and I distrusted it deeply.

I said non-committally: “I had other things to wonder about.”

“Ah yes. But you see why it is so important that the station should be working properly. If the General does not speak to the world, the world may think that he cannot speak, that he is not yet really in control and that they had better withhold their gestures of friendship until they see more clearly who has won. The General attaches great importance to the power of radio propaganda. He believes that it can be of decisive political importance.” There was a distinctly critical note in his voice.

I said: “And you do not?”

“I think that the realities of power are important, too.”

“You make the General sound a bit naive.”

“Not naive, Mr. Fraser. Simple, like all great men.”

We had been picking our way down the rubble-strewn stairs. Now we were at the ground floor. In the hall there were troops stacking rice sacks half-filled with earth to make a blast screen. The elevator gates were open and a man’s body in a police uniform lay across the threshold in a mess of congealed blood. I caught a glimpse of his face as we came down the stairs. It had been one of the guards who had passed Rosalie and me into the building the previous night.

Suparto stopped and shouted for the N.C.O. in charge of the sandbagging. The man came running and Suparto told him to have the body taken outside. As the man went off to carry out the order, Suparto looked after him unpleasantly.

“They are animals,” he said.

We started down the stairs to the basement. From below there came a sound of voices and a smell of fuel oil and drains. On the landing halfway down, I stopped.

“May I ask you a question, Major?” I said.

His face became impassive. “About what, Mr. Fraser?”

“Last night you were good enough to say that you liked me. I have been wondering why.”

His face cleared. “Ah, I see. You wish to assess the value of my friendship, the extent to which it might be relied upon and used. Well, I will explain. You remember the day I arrived in Tangga with my colleagues?”

“Very well.”

“We were stiff-necked, presumptuous, and arrogant. I most of all, because I did the talking. There were reasons, but”-he shrugged-“we will not discuss them now. You had reason to be annoyed, and you were annoyed with me, were you not?”

“A bit.”

“You made it plain. But it was the way in which you made it plain that impressed me. You did not say to yourself: ‘Here is another of these tiresome little brown men, these pathetic little upstarts in uniform, whom I must pretend to treat respectfully in order to show that I do not think of him as an inferior human being.’ You did not patronise, as Mr. Gedge does, and you were not more tactful than was necessary. You dealt with me frankly as you would have dealt with a European in the same circumstances, and there was no calculation in your attitude. You treated me neither as a dog, nor as a pet monkey who may bite. And so I liked you.”

“Oh. Well, that’s very civil of you. But it wasn’t to assess the value of your friendship, as you put it, that I brought the matter up. What I wanted to know was if you would trust me.”

“With what, Mr. Fraser?”

“A confidence. Which side are you really on, Major? The National Freedom Party’s or the Government’s?”

“Naturally, Mr. Fraser, I am on the side of the General. How could you doubt it?” He smiled easily.

“I don’t, Major. But which General do you mean?”