1.             The Toymaker

Dili, East Timor

At the request of the Australian embassy in Jakarta, I was asked to meet an American, Dwayne Rogers, who was arriving from Jakarta. The military attaché explained that the Americans had asked us to offer him assistance.

‘So he is CIA?’ I asked.

‘Did I say that?’ replied the attaché with commendable innocence. ‘Exaggeration, my friend. Be careful. He is supposed to be doing a story for an Indonesian travel magazine. He is quite innocuous.’

‘Aha! So he is a journalist?’ I asked. ‘That’s a crazy cover. Why am I to waste my time with him?’

‘We would like you to help out.’

I was suspicious. Even the name worried me. Dwayne Rogers! My goodness. I hoped he had the good sense to remove the spurs from his cowboy boots when he got off the plane in Dili.

To water down what I expected to be a noxious afternoon, I asked Robin to come with me to the airport. As we approached the immigration counter we could hear a raised American twang. Rogers was berating the immigration officials who were interrogating him as to his bona fides. English was not one of their skills. Rogers saw me and called for help.

‘What do these guys want?’ he shouted.

‘They want to know what do you do’, said I.

‘I am a toy maker’, he replied. I marvelled at mid-air career changes and innovative cover stories.

I looked at the squirming toy maker come journalist or whatever.

‘That is the best cover for a CIA agent I’ve ever heard,’ I joked, wondering why anyone would believe that a toymaker would ever visit Dili.

Rogers blanched. I whispered something to Wayan, one of my intelligence minders whose job it was to follow any westerners who arrived at the airport. They let the toy maker in.

Without thanks for helping him out of a tough spot, Rogers hit the ground as an instant expert. He lectured us on his vast knowledge of Indonesia as we drove to the Turismo Hotel. By the time we arrived, I was sick of him. I had hardly had a chance to talk. He did not need to know the local perspective. He already knew it all. That would be a great help in his toy making.

‘I would like to visit military headquarters this afternoon,’ said Rogers.

‘Going to sell them some toys?’ I asked.

Condescension in every line, Rogers turned to me. ‘You never know, do you,’ he said.

‘I’ll send a driver round later,’ I promised. ‘I’ll collect you this evening at seven for dinner.’

Rogers seemed surprised that I was not going to be his personal guide, but nodded. I had been asked to offer my services, but I found him a vacuous twat.

‘He seems odd,’ commented Robin as we drove back to the office.

‘Let’s see what he has to say tonight,’ I replied.

That evening, Rogers continued to air his impressions. He extolled the peaceful beauty of Dili as he sipped a beer at the beach restaurant. I agreed that the beach was indeed a lovely spot but that things were not so good once you left the relative safety of the controlled streets along the waterfront. Rogers scoffed. I invited him to join Robin and I in a night-time tour after dinner.

He came. Robin sat in the front seat, the toymaker sat in the back. We drove to Bairro Pite on the western outskirts of the city where I knew things were always edgy. We stopped at a military roadblock. The soldiers walked over with their guns at the ready.

‘Where are you going?’ one asked.

‘We are going to visit Bambang, one of my staff who lives with his family just round the corner,’ I replied.

He knew me. He nodded. He gave the word and the soldiers let us through without a smile. Rogers clenched the back of my seat with both hands.

‘Do you think we should continue?’

‘Calm down,’ I urged him. ‘If you want to see reality, stick with it.’

Rogers gulped. We turned the corner. Instead of going to Bambang’s house, I drove left from the housing area and began to cross the dry Maloa River bed. The dry riverbed was an entry point for ‘visitors from the mountains’ who sneaked unseen in to Dili at night. Few military patrols covered this isolated and sometimes dangerous spot. The road petered out as it crossed the wide riverbed to Villaverde on the opposite bank. Rogers was becoming more and more uneasy.

We were half way across when five great-coated shapes loomed from the darkness. Guerrillas. I stopped the car. We exchanged pleasantries. Rogers started to blubber.

‘Why is he doing that?’ asked the guerilla.

‘Is he scared.’

The guerrilla stuck his head through the rear window and shouted in Tetum: ‘Don’t be alarmed.’

A foul smell suggested that Rogers was terrified.

‘Come on Dad,’ shouted Robin, ‘let’s take him back to his hotel and clean the car out. This is pathetic.’

Chuckling, the guerillas melted back into the darkness. We drove out of the riverbed and up the bank into Villa Verde. Immediately, soldiers at another military post stopped us. Guns through the window. Belligerent questions. Maybe this time they objected to the smell?

Rogers, sniveling in the back seat, was pleading to be taken back to the hotel. Disgusted, I suggested that we take in the sights of Becora. Rogers refused. He wanted to go home. By that stage I had to open all the windows to clear the sickening smell from the back seat. When we reached the Turismo, Rogers shot out of the car like a GI who has just realised he has entered a Vietcong camp instead of a brothel.

Robin and I bid a cursory farewell at his retreating form and decided to continue our drive, windows wide open. We drove back through Taibessi, passing through three more checkpoints.

Albino, my driver, was upset when he arrived for duty in the morning.

‘Why does the car smell so much?’

‘Chicken shit in the back seat,’ laughed Robin. ‘Here’s some air freshener.’

We drove to the hotel to meet Rogers.

‘He checked out,’ said Nono, the clerk at the hotel. ‘He went to the airport to get the first flight out.’

‘But the flight is not till 1 pm!’

‘He wanted to be sure he was on it,’ grinned Nono.

When I arrived at the office, my staff sat in a circle looking worried.

‘What is the problem?’ I asked. ‘You look as if you have seen a ghost.’

Bambang (to whose house I had said I was going the previous evening) spoke.

‘The soldiers at the checkpoint waited for you to return from my house last night,’ he said. ‘When you did not, they came to my house, dragged me and my family out and interrogated us all night!’

My bravado was intended to put down an obnoxious visitor had backfired. Thankfully, none of them were beaten up too badly. Despite their own ordeal, their main concern was for my safety. That made me feel even more of a low life, but it also reinforced my admiration for the courage of people who spend their lives under such intense pressure. They never lose their concern for others.

‘We kept waiting to hear shots,’ he said.

I had, unwittingly, stupidly, put them in danger. I decided to think more carefully before being so bellicose again. More to the point, I asked myself why people had to live under such conditions? I apologised. I explained what had happened. Bambang and the others nodded. I knew that they were not impressed.

‘You stuffed up again Father,’ said Robin as we entered my office.