to drop it back. Then I hesitated. Maybe this was the reason he’d died. Maybe this was the clue that would tell me who had killed this man and why.
I wanted to know. I wanted to know about the moments before his death and those after. I squeezed the bag’s hard contents and stood uncertain, his presence pushing, prodding, egging me on. The bag grew heavier in my hand, and when the policeman and the servant stopped at the door, I stuck it into my pocket, with a groan at the stupidity of what I was doing. I heard the sharp intake of the officer’s breath and the sob that struggled from the servant’s throat.
I waited for the policeman to tell me to get out, but he didn’t. Then I heard him turn on his heel and retch at the side of the house. The servant continued her sobbing, turned away, and left me alone again with Flip.
Looking down at him, I felt queasy at what I’d done, dizzy from the vulnerability of that arm, that ineffective shield. I couldn’t leave him on his own.
2
The policeman, finished retching, stood at the door and watched me; he didn’t speak to me, tell me to leave. Nor did he come any closer.
The clack-clack of the monkeys’ chatter had subsided, and now their jabbering mimicked the hum of a cocktail party, as the gamelan music rose and fell in counterpoint to them. The keening of the women, a pulse of sorrow, rose above all other sounds. The rich, sweet, fragrant aroma of cooking bananas, a particularly Indonesian smell, had filled the air when I arrived and continued unabated.
The single painting that still hung askew above the sitting platform invited my attention. The painting looked to be a Bonnet. Bonnet, a Dutch painter, came to Bali in 1929 and along with the German Walter Spies is said to have revolutionized Balinese art. This was the era that I had come to Bali to research. I squinted at the painting, trying to make out the signature. I thought briefly of walking to it, but my sandals felt glued to the floor.
I squeezed the bag and felt a surge of anger. At him for dying. At his murderer for killing him. At myself for plucking the sack from his waist. The policeman was staring at me, making it impossible to drop the sack back unnoticed. I concentrated on looking around the room for clues.
Absorbed, I didn’t hear him coming until he stood beside me. A small man, his shoulder only a few inches higher than mine. He smelled of rice and peanuts. When the call came in, he must have been eating his lunch, a salad of gado-gado with peanut sauce, or skewers of sate with the same. I continued scanning the room. He looked at the body.
“Selamat pagi,” I said, good morning, and turned again to the Bonnet. I dropped the silk sack into my pocket.
“Selamat siang,” the policeman responded, his answer acknowledging the forward movement of time. My greeting a good morning, his, a good midday.
I glanced at him and, following his gaze, said, “It must have been a man.”
“Yes. He was very strong.”
“Not long before I got here. The blood was still glistening on the blade. It looks dry now. It dried fast in this heat.”
“Ah.”
“I arrived on time, right about noon. Maybe if I’d been early.”
“No one is ever early in Bali.”
“No.” I pulled my hand out of my pocket, then stuck it back in. He was very still, this man. “If there was a struggle, I can’t make out just how it happened. Where was he standing? Who attacked whom? Is his arm raised in defense, or has it just fallen that way? And if he didn’t defend himself, why not? If the killer made a search, he was not very thorough. Unless he found what he was looking for and quit looking. Or my arrival interrupted him.”
“That’s possible,” he said.
My thoughts tumbled out of me. “There’s something vindictive about swiping the paintings off the wall. The ultimate insult for an artist, isn’t it? And, he hasn’t pulled off all of them. That Bonnet—I think it’s a Bonnet—is still there. And the Spies over there. Maybe it’s only Flip’s paintings that are now on the floor.” I looked into his eyes.
“Cruel,” was all he said.
“Jenna Murphy.” I extended my hand, realizing as I did that I held my pen, which I shifted to my left hand.
His eyes flashed for a brief moment and he gave me a closer look, scanning my face, slowing as he looked at my hair, and frowning. “Wayan Tyo. Welcome back.”
His name ruffled the surface of my consciousness, but Balinese names repeat, repeat, beginning with the indicator of birth order—Wayan, Made, Nyoman, Ketut—followed by a seemingly limited choice of given names. “I came here to talk with him about painting. To discuss the pre-war Balinese modernists. My museum—I’m a curator—was given a collection. I know that he had been pursuing serious research on the topic. Now . . . What a loss.”
We stood in silence, looking down on the man, the spear, the mess of easel and paints at his side.
I looked again at the banana frond sticking through the window and felt the sweat run down my spine. The monkeys, the cooking bananas, the jet lag, the dead body. I steadied myself. From a nearby room the shrill keening had given way to soft sobbing that shuddered a constant beat.
“Do you need to sit down?” he asked.
“I think the killer knew him and was very angry.”
“He’d have to have been feeling some strong emotion to have done this,” he said.
“Beautiful weapon. Look at the damascening. Probably quite old.” The soft patina on the wooden shaft could only be achieved over years, decades, of handling. “What does one use a spear like that for?”
He didn’t answer. Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe he was too busy making a mental inventory of everything in the room, just as I had done. Maybe he had stopped looking and was listening to the sounds of the house, the muffled footsteps as others joined the sobbing women. Maybe the person who had led me in was not a servant, but Flip’s lover, or his wife.
Finally he said, “The puputan of the royal families in the early twentieth century.”
“Puputan?”
“The finishing. The Dutch decided to conquer Bali, which they had previously largely ignored.”
“Yes, I think, yes. I would like to sit down.”
He led me to the dining table and pulled out a chair.
I tried to compose myself, to think of something other than the body that was now blocked by the chairs opposite me. “Puputan. Oh, I remember. Some of the regencies in the north fought, but the royal families in the south didn’t resist.”
“That is right. We came out of our palaces dressed in white, the color of purification and death. We carried lances—spears—though few of us used them on the enemy. Before committing suicide, we men and the older ones, men and women, killed the young women and children with our krises, so that the Dutch could not harm them. Two thousand people slaughtered in a single morning in Denpasar alone. Killed by the Dutch, outright or by suicide.”
“This
