Kremerstadt*
*Medan
“Who do you think you’re talking to? When I look at you, I know you’re lying!”
It was a piece of news which, bad enough on its own, could not have reached Anjali Pillai by a more jarring route. When Mrs. Vellayan asked her, earlier that afternoon in line outside the cluttered neighborhood grocer’s shop, whether she might have a word in private, Pillai immediately picked up on the notes of seriousness and urgency in her neighbor’s voice. What exactly it was that Mrs. Vellayan needed so badly to tell her, however, Pillai would never have guessed, and the information Vellayan, once they were out of any casual stranger’s hearing, hissed into her ear, sent Pillai scurrying home in a cold fury. That a neighbor should have been better informed about what happened under her own roof than Pillai herself was ample cause for embarrassment. Then again, if what Mrs. Vellayan had told her was true, Pillai knew all too well that far more was at stake than merely her standing in that tightly-packed, and admittedly somewhat gossip-prone, urban community.
Her early return from what might normally have been another one or two hours’ worth of errands caught her daughter Anita, then enjoying a nap after her own recent release from work, entirely by surprise, and her initial smile immediately disappeared once she beheld her mother’s face set in a scorching scowl. Anjali Pillai, too distracted to bother with putting down her only partially-loaded bags, marched up to her reclining daughter and, suppressing at the last possible moment an urger to slap her puzzled face, drew a harsh accusatory finger with which she prodded sharply at Anita’s sternum, just below the neckline of her sky-blue cleaner’s smock. While Anita had at first tried to put on a brave face, against her mother’s implacable, piercing gaze her powers of deception, such as they were, soon failed, and, tears welling up in her eyes, she withdrew to bring out evidence confirming Mrs. Vellayan’s whispered report.
Right up until that moment, and although all indications suggested otherwise, Anjali Pillai had hoped to be proven wrong, to find her daughter innocent and Mrs. Vellayan guilty of spreading what was by any standard a powerfully dangerous rumor. Even when Anita emerged with a greasy bundle of old rags and towels, a decidedly poor means of concealment for a device whose actual character someone far less perceptive than her mother might immediately have guessed, Anjali hoped to find some innocent object contained within, some youthful indiscretion which, whatever her reaction to it might have been on any other day, would just then have struck her as utterly trivial. Anjali tore the wrap out of her daughter’s hands the moment she approached within range and began to peel back its layers. The hiding-place yielded up its secrets with a sinister readiness, and in a moment Anjali, wearing an expression of horrified disbelief more frightening to her daughter than anything she’d seen before, faced unmistakable proof that Mrs. Vellayan had not been lying.
“Where did you get this?” hissed Anjali, though in truth she absolutely did not want to know, and having stuffed the hastily-reassembled bundle into her grocery bag turned to leave before Anita had a chance to reply. “You stay right here. If anyone asks why I went back out, tell them I’m going to the post office.” She turned her head to take one more look at her daughter before stepping outside, and at the sight of her, her reddened eyes and tear-stained cheeks, shaking as she cried softly, Anjali’s anger evaporated. Only with difficulty did she hold back her own tears as she recrossed the small room. “You know I love you, more than anything,” she said as she hugged her daughter tightly. She brushed a stray lock of hair back above Anita’s forehead. “If anything ever happened to you…” Anjali planted a kiss on that same forehead as she turned at last to leave. “I’ll be back soon…Then we can forget this ever happened.”
Anjali’s head was spinning as she rejoined the traffic on the streets and sidewalks. Where exactly her eighteen-year-old daughter had managed to obtain a pistol, of all things, and for what purpose, was immaterial. What mattered above all, she knew, was to get rid of it, and quickly, for if Mrs. Vellayan knew about it, she had obviously received that piece of intelligence from someone else, and in no time at all the whole block might be in on the secret. Thoughts and fragments of plans coursed through Anjali’s mind as she walked along, trying to appear as normal and unobtrusive as possible despite the fact that the contents of her grocery bag could see her locked away for years. Men and women alike, she was perfectly aware, had been gunned down on weaker pretexts. Eventually, though, as she walked along the main thoroughfare, past shops and stalls humming with business on that traditional market day, a course of action began to take shape. Risky though it was, it seemed to her the least so of all conceivable alternatives. She would continue on past the densest concentration of shops and people, down to where a concrete pedestrian tunnel ran beneath the highway, and at the soonest possible opportunity drop the unthinkable item through a sewer grate.
It was difficult enough, in her excited state, for Anjali to maintain a persuasive air of nonchalance, and while a person such as herself could not expect to get very far in her particular circumstances without a certain savvyness, she could not, all experience and learning to the contrary, resist an occasional backward glance. Then again, it would have been far beyond the resources of even a notoriously vigorous and watchful police service to follow up on every rumor and whisper that happened to circulate, and so as she continued on her way, free to all appearances of followers and as yet uninterfered-with, Anjali began to find it less and less difficult to feign normality. At last Anjali found herself on the curb, facing across 39th street to the crumbling, water-streaked concrete causeway which carried the city’s ring road through its outer residential districts. 39th street like almost all those like it on Sumatra and, in truth, in metropolitan Gandvik as well, was as usual a fast-flowing river of honking, smoky, bristling and ill-governed traffic the likes of which a pedestrian chose to ford at their extreme peril. Experienced city-dweller that she was, Anjali gathered herself up for the crossing, and, looking in both directions to judge an opportune moment, stepped out onto the pavement right in the wake of a charging panel van, from there on dodging motorists and other pedestrians with a degree of speed and agility that could only be called impressive.
Suddenly, however, just as she crossed the raised median that divided traffic in two directions, the public address speakers fitted, typically, to every fourth or fifth lamp-post or utility pole gave a loud and jarring wail, the effect of which was to freeze Anjali in her tracks. The siren, whose import all of those in hearing would grasp immediately, broke Anjali’s concentration for not longer than a split-second. It was long enough, at any rate, for a motorcyclist, no doubt equally disoriented by the sudden burst of noise, to clip Anjali’s arm and send her spinning. Under normal circumstances that might all too easily have been the end of her. Audible over the loudspeakers’ sustained blaring, however, was the screech of a policeman’s whistle, and before Anjali could quite make sense of what was happening the oncoming traffic had been brought fully to an albeit clearly grudging halt. Her eyes fastened on the image of field-gray fatigues, submachine gun slung over one shoulder, striding toward her with an outstretched hand, while several of his comrades stood on the median shouting at motorists. She grabbed for her handbag, but, clutching nothing but air and gravel, Anjali was overtaken by panic. She searched about frantically, oblivious to the policeman’s growing confusion, spreading her arms across the filthy and garbage-strewn street surface. After what seemed an eternity, if probably no more than a few seconds, she locked her eyes on it, cast out onto the street several yards away, just at the moment another policeman picked it up. If they hadn’t noticed the suspicious bundle, kicked out of the bag by its weight in the collision, a glance at Anjali herself, wearing an expression that mixed shock and terror in equal measure, would have told them everything. The policeman who had first approached her quickly unshouldered his VKT machine-pistol and, in what was evidently a well-practiced fashion barked a series of curt orders to his comrades. Within moments Anjali, handcuffed, found herself being frog-marched to a waiting truck, into which she was promptly and roughly thrown. What awaited her from there, she could only guess at. She knew very well, however, that people from her social station, if taken into police custody, tended not to come back out.
Iembang
Whatever Gandvians, generally, might at one time or another have felt about the value of their nation’s Sumatran colony, as for instance a source of strategic raw materials or as proof of Gandvik’s status as a great world power, it was only ever a decidedly small minority who allowed their attitude to be shaped by any significant degree of sympathy for Sumatra’s actual inhabitants. In those faraway years when imperial ardor ran high, of course, talk of what might broadly be termed a civilizing and a Christianizing mission, Sumatran social realities, naturally, notwithstanding, would have been encountered often enough, and from then on Gandvians, when they thought about Sumatra at all, preferred to characterize their administration of that island as benevolently paternalistic. Nearly all Gandvians, however, would draw a very thick line between themselves, and their own government, and those actually in direct control of Sumatran affairs, about which a strikingly different set of ideas tended to hold.
Imperialism in Southeast Asia as it eventually took shape under Gandvian direction did so, as was probably the case more often than not overall, much more by accident and circumstance than according to any master plan. When Riga’s gunboats first established themselves permanently in Sumatran waters few in government, if any, intended or expected their ever more closely-watched protectorate to eventually function as a place of either explicit or de facto banishment for troublesome social groups. Indeed, it was initially believed that tropical diseases, the likes of which continually dogged and nearly put paid to numerous military and commercial expeditions, would render large-scale colonization by Europeans, and particularly those so deeply unaccustomed to the tropics as Gandvians, permanently unfeasible. When internal troubles did start to worry metropolitan Gandvik, however, its political and military leaders wasted remarkably little time in seizing on Sumatra as a most exceptionally convenient solution. In consequence, between approximately 1890, when dissident Christian movements began to blossom in such great numbers and with such worrying vigor, and 1960, at which point changing economic circumstances largely served to solve the problem, Riga deported men, women, and children in their millions, particularly from those bitterly-contested and famously fertile districts along the middle Jaizar and in black-earth Ruthenia. Most, compelled to decide between imprisonment, forced conversion to the staid official Lutheranism, or relocation to the tropics, chose the latter option, and to Riga’s mild astonishment, dismay also, within three decades these transplants from the Eurasian plains had formed themselves into a cohesive, relatively prosperous settler society.
That most of these not-altogether-willing settlers would harbor some measure of hostility to Gandvik itself, while not by any means lost on Riga, was nonetheless a circumstance which most relevant officials were prepared to tolerate given available alternatives. Toleration, indeed, very quickly became the watchword for Gandvian colonial policy, at least as it pertained to European settlers, and in an impressive if entirely characteristic feat of ideological acrobatics Riga promptly reconciled itself to the establishment overseas of just the same type of Calvinist theocracy which it had repressed with such violence at home. Though far from what one might ever have categorized as a warm relationship, it was still one from which both parties drew important benefits, at least for so long as Riga continued to see Sumatra as worth holding on to. It certainly seemed a great deal cheaper to buy the loyalty, or at any rate the acquiescence, of the white deportee-settlers with increasingly wide-ranging guarantees of autonomy, in addition to their being granted effective hegemony over the island’s native population, than to try and maintain a military presence equal to Sumatra’s strategic worth in Gandvian eyes, particularly at a time when no few prominent voices made very plain their preference for territorial aggrandizement a great deal closer to home.
As Sumatra, its output of strategic resources surpassed more and more each year by the metropolitan state, steadily lost value according to Riga’s caluclations, the level of authority granted to white settlers over that ostensible colony only grew, while Gandvian colonial administration, never especially comprehensive to begin with, withered to a husk. Its only real remaining function, besides as a dumping-ground for bureaucrats and military officers of low quality who nonetheless could not be demoted or sacked outright for one reason or another, was to remind locals that, contrary to most visible evidence, and in spite of the aspirations harbored by many, if perhaps not most of the white settler population, the island was not in fact an independent state. That most high-level offices in both the Sumatran ‘provincial’ government and the Gandvian East Indies Army were filled with a mixture of geriatrics, bunglers, nonentities, and criminals the likes of which Riga, having got them out of Gandvik proper, happily left to their own devices, indicated, to many observers, a waning interest in even so much as keeping up appearances. Riga could in theory still threaten to reduce or withhold its not-insignificant budgetary subsidy if Sumatra’s actual rulers stepped too far out of line, though this danger had long ceased to be taken seriously on the island itself, and for good reason. Nothing of substance remained to link Sumatra and metropolitan Gandvik save for that subsidy, and if metropolitan authorities ever chose to cancel it, independence, they feared, or still worse union with a foreign power, could not be far behind. Granted, the proportion within Gandvik’s political structure who might feel comfortable risking such a contingency had grown, over the past fifty years, at a formidable rate.
Nevertheless, no Gandvian government had yet been willing to risk Sumatra’s loss, in light of the blow to Gandvik’s international prestige and the unforeseeable strategic consequences that would inevitably follow, no government that is until the present one. The great difficulty, however, as those newly-appointed relevant officeholders on General Bjorgstrom’s Council of State soon realized, was that of imposing a policy, one bound moreover to unleash some scarcely-containable passions on virtually all points of the political compass, on an island which Gandvik ruled on paper, and little more. Matters were scarcely helped by the fact that colonial, or rather Overseas Territorial, administration was divided between no less than four separate and by no means mutually-cooperative departments, and that Aarno Mäkinen, whose Interior Ministry had assumed the greatest share of responsibility upon the former Colonial Office’s demise, appeared not to have been aware of this until some time after his appointment. While sincere or at least professed commitment to decolonization at some not-too-distant stage was universal among the new crop of State Councilors, only Jarkko Kuosmanen, retired Ilmavoimat colonel and new Foreign Minister, had thoughtfully and earnestly considered how this might be brought about, and it so happened that regions over which Gandvik still claimed sovereignty, of however thin a character, fell categorically outside the sphere of his direct power. Arguments emphasizing the extent to which colonial affairs were linked to wider foreign policy, though convincing, and in Kuosmanen’s case undoubtedly well-meaning, were however not, by themselves, sufficient to shake a deeply-rooted bureaucratic suspicion of ‘poaching.’ If Kuosmanen was, grudgingly, permitted to make decolonization his personal project, this was most of all because it seemed to his colleagues a doomed enterprise, with which no one else was eager to become closely associated.
Kuosmanen’s plan had managed nonetheless to find one important if altogether unanticipated ally in Jussi Mattila, commander-in-chief, officially at least, of the sizable Gandvian East Indies Army. Lieutenant-General Mattila’s promotion in rank, first off, and appointment to command the combined local, mercenary, and metropolitan (the latter accounting for an almost insignificant minority) ground forces on Sumatra were, as Mattila himself knew all too well, intended in no way to signal any confidence in his abilities. His actions at Rockfurth Reservoir, where he withdrew his division in the face of an attack by what turned out to be nothing more than a Shieldian regiment, were almost universally held to have cost Gandvik victory in that albeit highly confused engagement, and cost Mattila his professional reputation as well. If it hadn’t been for Riga’s dogged insistence on inflating grossly the number of Shieldian troops engaged, and for the fact that Mattila happened to have married one of Field Marshal Kniephof’s more beloved nieces, he would in all likelihood have been court-martialed. While a Sumatran posting perhaps helped Riga to avoid international embarrassment, its true significance was not lost on anyone in Gandvik’s armed forces. For all practical purposes he’d been sent, just like those initital waves of religious dissidents, to a place of extreme banishment, from which never to return, and the Army command had then so thoroughly washed its hands of the matter that it did not even bother to dismiss him when his patron Kniephof was booted from power.
Mattila’s arrival was greeted with much eye-rolling on the part of the settler elite, who were well accustomed to Riga’s habit of foisting upon them officials of the most ineffectual and unqualified type. Then again, of course, this precise state of affairs was what preserved the white settler population in its dominance, and so long as Riga maintained its aloof attitude, the settler elite was perfectly happy to accept metropolitan Gandvik’s unthreatening cast-offs. General Mattila, whose reputation preceded him, seemed to most observers like only the latest in this shabby parade. Better yet, some felt that his poor treatment by the Army at home would make the new East Indies commander a natural ally of settler interests now that Riga obviously sought to impose fundamental changes. For whatever his merits as a field officer, and Mattila’s career prior to Rockfurth Reservoir had been in every way typical of a Gandvian ‘uniformed bureaucrat,’ he had, and rather transparently, been made to play scapegoat for an entire cascade of failures and miscalculations which began at the very top, and Kniephof himself, and reached right down to the level of the unprepared and ill-trained infantrymen under Mattila’s command. Even General Bjorgstrom, whose fortunes since the battle had run in so manifestly opposite a direction to Mattila’s that he now found himself, albeit unwittingly, Gandvik’s titular head of state, wore his victor’s laurels most uneasily, only too aware of his own mistakes and omissions. Neither had those much-lauded tank leaders Hanno Otsason, Richard Edelfelt, and Waldemar Schjerfbeck, usually held responsible for Gandvian arms’ greatest triumphs in the course of the Rockfurth Reservoir campaign, conducted themselves or led their commands in a manner totally above reproach. Posturing aside, it was by no means lost on the more sober-minded of Gandvik’s senior army officers, and in Chief-of-Staff Kuusta von Knorring the Army could point to an extremely ample supply of just that attribute, that luck as much as if not more than skill was to blame for Gandvian successes and just the same for failures. Certainly, in stark contrast to his predecessor Kniephof, von Knorring was not about to hurt his hand patting himself on the back, or hold any particular grudge against the decidedly unlucky Mattila.
Association with the Rockfurth Reservoir Campaign’s less glorious aspects, however, perhaps counted as one of Mattila’s greatest advantages in his new position as East Indies C-in-C, as anyone would have been hard-pressed to arrive in a new job accompanied by lower expectations. It was therefore all too easy for the Euro-Sumatrans to overlook the fact that, where Mattila’s experience as a troop leader might have been sadly lacking, when the intrigues and intricacies of bureaucratic politics were at issue very much the opposite held true. That Kuosmanen and his none-too-willing Sumatran working group should find themselves able to call upon the services of a man with such well-honed political instincts was, then, an entirely unlooked-for stroke of luck. And much as Mattila may have been conscious of the Army’s intent in giving him a colonial post, he remained, in every way, a loyal, conscientious, sincerely well-intentioned servant of the Gandvian state. If anything, a constant and sharply painful awareness of his failure at Rockfurth Reservoir had inspired in the Lieutenant-General a burning determination, a singleminded focus on successfully carrying off his new mission. No Euro-Sumatran had in any way expected Mattila to prove himself such a force, to keep such long hours, to maintain such an uncompromising travel itinerary. Perhaps it was all for nothing, and Mattila himself knew perfectly well that he had been given what might, indeed, have been an impossible task. He was nonetheless determined to try, to the very limit of his surprisingly extensive range of ability, and it almost seemed, after several months, that in spite of the odds Mattila was meeting with something very closely resembling success.
Certainly, as Kuosmanen and his colleagues fully appreciated, Riga’s leverage over the settler regime on Sumatra was effectively nil. Efforts were of course underway to build some kind of international consensus on decolonization there, ideally involving powers such as Amerique, Chrinthania, and Valendia, more directly able to exert influence in Southeast Asia, but this, obviously, cut both ways. Settler separatists were undoubtedly pursuing a mirror-image of Gandvian diplomacy in those capitals potentially more receptive to their own message, and, though little concrete intelligence had reached Riga on the outcome of those initiatives, Kuosmanen at least had very little in the way of good news to report. Military intervention, of course, was simply not an option, as Chief-of-Staff von Knorring had expressed in terms leaving no room for argument. And as for cutting Sumatra’s budgetary subsidy, a small enough figure already, that was a step which Riga could only take once. Mattila, therefore, was virtually the sole prop of Riga’s Sumatran policy, and it was with undisguised incredulity that Riga began to perceive, among the settler notables and commercial interests at least, a subtle change of heart on the matter of majority rule. If perhaps not an outstanding soldier, Mattila, it soon became clear, was a diplomat, a negotiator, and an intriguer par excellence.
If Riga had begun to notice Mattila’s unexpected superlative qualities, and to acknowledge his centrality to the entire decolonization project, it meant that extremists on Sumatra were well aware of it too. Increasingly, those elements, primarily to be found within the junior officer ranks of the very same East Indies Army which Mattila ostensibly commanded, intent on unilateral independence to preserve their hegemony were unwilling to let him continue his efforts unchallenged. As more and more colonial elders were won over to the notion of reform, on at least a limited scale, calls for drastic action became lounder and louder. Mattila was not so blind as to be unaware of the growing risk which he ran, the likelihood, rising daily, of his being arrested, kidnapped, or even, Heaven forbid, assassinated, and yet he saw no other option save to press on. He was, after all, winning, and for Mattila this was a new and exhilarating sensation.
Mattila had long been convinced that the dispatch of a serious political mission to Sumatra, headed by some elder Gandvian statesman not explicitly connected to the new regime, someone known to and, as far as possible, trusted by the Sumatrans, would help greatly to rally moderate opinion and to isolate the extremists, and at last, following a great deal of cajoling on Kuosmanen’s part and that of others, just such a man had been found. Paul Gottlieb von Nesselrode-Dellingshausen, former Foreign Minister, an individual of impeccably aristocratic credentials and, crucially, no publicly-stated views pertaining to Sumatra, had ultimately been prevailed upon to take time off from his responsibilities, such as they were, as fourteenth hereditary Duke of Dorpat to visit the tropics, a piece of news which Mattila greeted with elation. A small step though it was, it was still progress, and while not one to get carried away by optimism, Mattila felt there was cause enough for some small feeling of satisfaction. Indeed, as he awaited the Duke of Dorpat’s flight in the poorly air-conditioned arrivals terminal at Sevenhoeven International Airport, nestled among Iembang’s sprawling informal districts, he could barely suppress a smile, much to the annoyance of his East Indies Army adjutant.
Suddenly, however, the quiet of the near-deserted terminal was shattered by a wailing siren, the import of which Mattila knew only too well. His smile turned to an expression of horror, and, not waiting for his adjutant, he began to sprint for his staff car.
“Call general headquarters immediately!” he yelled. “Tell them to cancel that alert and sound the all clear on my personal authorization!”
Mattila noticed with rising anger that his adjutant remained glued to the spot, and was just about to deliver a salvo of harsh language when he noticed, from the wings of the terminal, a knot of tall men in camouflage fatigues converging on his position. Indignant, if, ultimately, unsurprised, he began shouting.
“By God, I don’t know what you men think you are doing! This is mutiny!” Mattila did not often raise his voice, and when he did, the effect was rather more impressive than might have been expected. “I order you, as your supreme commander, to return to barracks at once! Never through all my years in the service have I witnessed such shameless behavior!”
Several of the paratroopers seemed to falter, momentarily, under this barrage, delivered as it was by an officer entitled, in truth, to command each and every one of them. Still, the majority pressed forward and was soon rejoined by the waverers, united, undoubtedly, in the commission of an irreversible deed. Mattila, appreciating the futility of further speech, fixed each man in turn with a cold and unyielding gaze. “This day,” he said finally, “is a black mark on the honor of the Army.”
Toba Plateau, North-Central Highlands
Few if any of the Reuben Bosch & Sohn packing plant’s four hundred-odd employees would ever have imagined, a mere handful of days earlier, that such a notorious drunkard and incompetent as Mathias Tien Pei-chun, a divorced, childless fifty-one-year-old laborer whose days appeared, according to all available evidence, quite numbered, would manage almost overnight to turn himself from an object of near-universal scorn to one of equally if not more widespread veneration. It all happened very quickly, set in motion by an incident no different, at least outwardly, from any of the small iniquities and oppressions visited upon Sumatra’s vast, impoverished, non-white subordinate classes in their dozens and hundreds on a daily basis, no different, certainly, from the sort of thing Tien Pei-chun had witnessed and endured in his own life on occasions beyond count. In subsequent hours and days, as the stunned floor workers reviewed the sequence of events in their own minds and with family and friends, no one could quite decide why Tien Pei-chun, that seemingly most improbable of all rebels, should have chosen that exact day and moment to act. Act, however, he most certainly did, and reprecussions were very soon to follow.
Recollections on the factory floor might well have been tinged by a great deal more bitterness had there not existed a nagging sense that Tien Pei-chun, whom hardly anyone had thought of kindly, had finally done what no one else, and certainly not men who would have liked to rate themselves better than Mathias, could muster the courage to do. Collective punishment, to be sure, was in the offing, and it was never an encouraging sign to see two Reuben Bosches, grandson and great-grandson respectively of the illustrious founder, strutting among the machines and roller-paths with pistols on their hips, accompanied by their inevitable gang of enforcers. They were in for a difficult time, no doubt about it. Then again, Mathias Tien Pei-chung had dared to stand up for all of them, and if he was still alive, itself a doubtful proposition he would most likely not stay that way for long. Indeed, many, intimately familiar with the Reuben Bosches’ methods of management, wished him a quick end to his undoubted suffering.
It would be fair enough to say that no one felt more guilt over Mathias Tien Pei-chung than Lam Yiu-chung, who’d been sitting, disconsolate, on the dirt floor of his mother’s tin-roofed house, surrounded by a shifting knot of friends and coworkers, ever since they’d been dismissed from work, to savage and obscene threats, earlier that evening. Blood continued to seep from the cotton bandages around his mangled left hand, though if it caused him any pain, Lam Yiu-chung did not show it. Thanks to Mathias, thanks to Mathias…the phrase sloshed about his mind like a wave, gathering power as it inevitably barreled inland, toward decision and destruction. To think that such a man as Mathias would save his hand, possibly his life, in that way, seemed patently absurd. He did not, Lam Yiu-chung recalled, seem in the least bit impaired, which was perhaps the first sign that something abnormal was afoot. And then for Mathias to stand beside him, hand on his shoulder, as the foreman berated him, trading insult for insult, finally catching hold of the foreman’s swinging belt and chasing him off the floor altogether, might as well have been something out of a dream.
Having evicted their persecutor, Mathias reigned benevolently over the factory floor for nearly the next three hours, displaying a side of his character which few had ever before witnessed. Who knew, Lam Yiu-chung thought to himself, that Mathias was such a comedian! He had them all in stiches, so much so they almost forgot what terrible danger they, and he especially, then found themselves in. He could picture it all with perfect clarity, the cascade of papers set loose as Mathias ransacked the foreman’s office, the jokes and insults, some deliciously vulgar, others shockingly witty, and then his comic mock-resistance, pelting his assailants with rubber bands and paper airplanes, as Reuben Bosch IV and his toughs dragged him out, fearful enough, evidently, to hold off pummeling him with their billy-clubs until outside the factory itself. It was all too much to bear, and, not alone, Lam Yi-chung could scarcely believe that it had actually happened.
Night was well advanced, and a brilliantly clear, moonless sky well established, before Lam Yi-chung stirred or spoke, and when he did, it was with a resolution just as unexpected, to lookers-on, in that slight and stooping young man of not quite eighteen years as it had been in scattered, spent, ruined Mathias. “This will not stand,” he hissed through clenched teeth, and his companions, at first wordlessly though with a growing clamour as they filtered through the workers’ settlement, fell in behind his quick, anxious strides.
Meanwhile, not many miles away, though in decidedly dissimilar surroundings, Reuben Bosch IV at last saw fit to descend from atop his long-suffering wife, a rail-thin, harried, prematurely aged woman who if circumstances had been happier might be said to have played Abbot to her husband’s Costello. As was customary after such carnal exertions, Bosch rolled his sweaty frame to starboard, reaching out for a humidor placed within easy grasp on a bedside table. With great care he peeled the wrapper, cut out the end, and, a connoisseur if ever there was one, lovingly played a wood match against the cheroot’s delightfully yielding opposite end until he succeeded in drawing out an impressive cloud of thick whitish smoke, which he emitted with evident self-satisfaction into his bedchamber’s already heavy atmosphere. Mrs. Bosch, satisfied at least that the evening’s labors were categorically at an end, gave a throaty cough and rolled to port. She could not recall quite how long it was that she stared out the window, placidly, before she realized just exactly what she was looking at. With a start she sat up, and reached out for Reuben IV.
“Reuben, Reuben, I think…”
“What?” he snorted, before deigning to look in his wife’s direction. From that instant he moved with a speed which one would perhaps not expect in a man of his size. In what seemed a veritable flash he was up and out, wearing nothing but his pjyamas and the inevitable gun-belt, leaving his wife to take in the panorama at her leisure. Unmistakable in the distance, Reuben Bosch & Sohn packing plant stood silhouetted by a pillar of flame.
