1
The dead man lay in a pool of blood at my feet, my gold sandals glittering in its viscous brilliance, I fought the bile rising to my throat, reached out my hand to steady myself, and encountered only air. So I pushed my feet farther apart, smearing his blood, leaving an arc like the slash of a brush on canvas. Gamelan music floated out of the speakers hanging in the corners of the room, gentle now, though they’d throbbed a hectic beat when I entered.
If I could just find a little distance, a place away from here, a place of safety, I would be okay. I closed my eyes and thought of my work as a curator at the Searles Museum, work that had brought me here to Ubud. I tried to push myself home, away from this carnage. I thought about my parents and brothers. I thought of the hell scenes carved on the Buddhist temple of Borobudur.
I shook myself and looked again at Flip Hendricks, the dead man. I had come to interview him, to study with him, and now I’d never know him. I averted my eyes. I’d known nothing of death until this year, when murder had invaded both my life and my dreams. But those deaths hadn’t prepared me any more for this one than the battles fought on the walls of Angkor Wat or the image of a Rajput painting that now burst into my thoughts, a body gushing brilliant, red blood in all its Technicolor glory.
I heard a sob and, startled, realized it had come from me.
When I entered the room, I’d stepped close to see if he was alive. Foolishly—a man with a spear run through him is certainly not alive. Now I didn’t dare move away for fear the police would think my bloody footprints were those of the murderer. Nor did I want to move away. I wanted to find out who had done this. I wanted to take stock of the room and the man. I wanted to understand what had happened here.
He’d thrown his right arm across his face to protect himself. Yet there were no cuts nor scrapes, no bruises nor blood on his hands, no defensive wounds. He was a big man who looked like he would put up a fight. The blade had pierced flesh, then organs, and flesh again to finally stick out of his back a good five inches. Its damascened surface glistened and gleamed red, the blood pooling thick and thin in the rippled, layered metal.
I looked at the ceiling and took another deep breath. Sounds pulled me—chattering crescendos from Ubud’s Monkey Forest. The keening that had begun when Flip’s servant ran and left me with his ghost swelled up from the next room. Mourning had begun.
With effort, I returned my gaze to the blond hairs that had escaped from his ponytail and flew around his neck, his face. If I focused on the details, the full scene receded. I recalled the online photo of him, his hair down, the thick tresses arranged fanlike across his shoulders, his middle finger raised, flipping us all off. The hair already seemed to be losing its luster. His sensual full lips were parted in the hint of a smile.
Don’t be dead, I thought, or maybe I said it. I wanted him to rise and get back to the easel lying on the floor beside him or to the table where our meal was to take place. I wanted the blood to be paint, the spear a joke.
His checkered sarong, tied tight around his waist, had fallen open to reveal flesh paler than the dark skin of his upper body and legs. He didn’t wear underwear, and I looked away, but only for a moment. A small silk sack suspended from a string around his waist hung next to his genitals.
Outside, the dead man’s servant called across the yard. The police. I took in the rest of the room, the overstuffed cushions on platforms and thrown to the floor. The lovely teak dining table set for our lunch. The bamboo-shaped handles of the silverware, small silver bowls atop heavy cream-colored plates. Tall, narrow glasses for iced drinks, batik napkins, and a small tray of krupuk, shrimp chips, in the midst of the three place settings. All so proper, so elegant, so at odds with the body.
I looked at the sack tied to his waist and wondered if he had been superstitious. If he, like his servants, would have run from a murdered man. What was in it? An amulet? A love token? An herbal concoction? The key to his murder? I dragged my eyes away and glanced at the paintings on the wall and the paintings and books and brushes and paints thrown to the floor.
A frond from a banana tree stuck through one window, the only window with a screen, a screen carefully cut to fit around the frond. At night, when the servants close the shutters against the mosquitoes, they must leave this window open, so that the tree can grow unhindered.
The voices grew nearer, competing with the women’s keening.
I looked at Flip again, certain that the police would soon usher me out, a museum curator who no longer had a reason to be in Bali, a potential suspect, the person who found the body. I mentally catalogued the scene. I didn’t seek meanings, just filed image after image, detail after detail. Surely standing here, taking in his posture, the room, the murder scene, meant the ghost would always be with me. The dead man would always be with me.
The dead man. The words produced an uneasy feeling in my mouth, at the back of my throat, in my gut. I looked at the spear and bile rose up. I fought to swallow.
The policeman’s voice drowned out the servant’s. I took a last look at the body. The arch of his back. The glistening of his blood. The mocking, sensuous lips, that hint beneath the arm of the broad features of a Dutchman, a reminder of Rembrandt’s lumpy nose.
My eyes trailed down his body to the small sack, the orange silk, half exposed beneath his checkered sarong. I held my breath, reached down, and yanked at the sack, breaking the thread. With a single tug, I pulled open the strings to reveal a tiny bronze figure. Closing it again, I held it over the body, ready 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.