“You cannot. This is your home. Mum will be fine at Des Indes.”
“No chance,” I answered. I promised to tidy up tonight and be gone in the morning when they returned from the airport. After a little more Alphonse and Gaston, she accepted.
“This is so kind of you, Boom. I feel terrible tossing you out. Can I pay the hotel bill?”
“Never.”
“Will you at least come for dinner tomorrow night? That would be a huge favor. Mum is a lot for me to handle alone.”
I knew she meant it—Narawanda never employed devices—and I accepted. I paused on my way out of the kitchen with my coffee.
“And I’m no longer seeing my friend, as you call her. That’s been kaput since the day I told you I was put out with her.”
Nara reflected a second.
“I am sorry, truly. You seemed very smitten. I hope that odd scene here had nothing to do with it.”
“Of course not.”
Relieved, Nara smiled in her sly way. “I will never forget the sight of her, just as God made her, except that look-at-me hairdo.”
The hairdo! I was always surprised by the way women saw each other.
“There was never any future,” I said about Esma. “And the present, as I should have known, was much too complicated.”
Nara seemed on the verge of saying more, but she stayed silent and I headed upstairs.
At work on Friday, I endured a round of meetings about how to proceed with our case. The pivotal question was whether we should even continue, since we now had to ascribe virtually no value to Ferko’s potential testimony, even in the unlikely event he could be found. The conversations in the office were earnest and marked by a lot of worthwhile questions, but I was somewhat aggravated the discussions had to take place in layers—first with the division supervisor, then with Akemi added, and finally Badu, too. Each time we all agreed that notwithstanding Ferko, the NATO records, especially the aerial surveillance, left us with no alternative but to exhume the Cave. The bodies were now the only likely source of additional evidence. And as Goos had recognized, having embarrassed the United States on the front page of the Times, we were obliged to confirm the crime. Over this last point, Badu wound his head around sorrowfully and said somewhat churlishly that the leak had been very ill-considered.
The deliberations about the future of our investigation brought back a thought I’d been avoiding: I needed to try again to contact Esma, in case she had an alternative way to reach Ferko. He was likely to have worthwhile information, even though virtually nothing he said could be taken at face value. For example, given his true vocation he was likely to know how the stolen trucks had ended up with Kajevic.
Having failed via all electronic means of communicating with Esma, I reverted to the old-fashioned method and composed a lawyerly letter to her on Court stationery, saying that we had visited Ferko at his house with surprising results, which I felt obliged to discuss with her. The letter went out for overnight delivery, addressed to her chambers in London as well as her temporary dwelling in New York.
When I was in college and law school at Easton and brought home friends, as I’d done with Roger, I was often torn by their reactions to my parents, whom my buddies inevitably judged cultivated and intelligent. I didn’t mind that my friends admired my parents—I did, too—but I was frustrated that they were unable to recognize the emotional tightfistedness that made them so challenging for Marla and me.
Naturally, I saw the same process play out from the other side when Will and Pete brought their pals to our house, where, I could tell, Ellen and I appeared far less eccentric and annoying than the friends had been told to expect. It was another truism I’d adopted in middle age that parents and children always stood in a unique relationship to each other whose full effects were inevitably shuttered to everyone else.
Nonetheless, given Nara’s agitation, I walked toward the apartment from Des Indes on Saturday expecting an awkward evening. It was a wet night, sometimes raining hard. I was in a slicker and hat, while the Dutch, as usual, were carrying on in defiance of the weather. As I strolled through the Plein, hundreds of the locals sat at the lines of outdoor picnic tables, drinking beer and huddled under the cafés’ umbrellas. I realized how much I had come to admire the Dutch, with their happy communal air and their polite determination to ignore small obstacles to doing what they liked.
A block away from the apartment, I stopped in the local wine shop and bought a bottle of burgundy I knew Nara favored. Only when I offered it to her, as I was crossing the threshold, did I remember that alcohol was no way to make an impression on a Muslim woman.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said, when I recognized my folly, and asked if I should hide the wine.
“Just leave it in the closet with your coat. I won’t drink in front of her, but I promise, I’ll have several glasses once she’s asleep.” Nara rolled her large eyes, then took me by the elbow to introduce me.
Annisa Darmadi proved to be bright and charming, and quick to laugh. Notwithstanding the dizzy spells that had brought her here to see her doctor, she appeared vital and healthy and, even at seventy, was a virtual look-alike of her daughter, with the same tidy form and dark round-faced handsomeness. Her hijab, which Nara said she wore more often these days, had been forsaken tonight, perhaps for her daughter’s sake.
Mrs. Darmadi had insisted on cooking, as Nara had told me to expect, and she was occupied at the stove preparing several traditional Indonesian dishes. The ingredients were readily available in the Netherlands, with its large Indonesian population, and the mom couldn’t understand why her daughter hadn’t learned to take advantage of that. Having said as much, Mrs. Darmadi shooed Nara away whenever she even looked into the pots.
We sat down not long after I arrived. Mrs. Darmadi was a fabulous chef. There was a soup with coconut milk called soto, a salad with peanut sauce—gado-gado—and a ball of sweet rice surrounded by a pinwheel of grilled beef, whose name I never got. Over dinner, we talked mostly of Jakarta, about which I knew next to nothing, as Mrs. Darmadi brought her daughter up to date on local events. The most interesting thing to emerge in conversation was that Mrs. Darmadi, although considerably younger, was a distant cousin of Lolo Soetoro, the man who became Barack Obama’s stepfather. She spoke of Lolo more approvingly than she did of Obama’s mother, whom Mrs. Darmadi referred to, without elaboration, as “a hippie.”
Throughout the evening, Nara kept following up her mother’s remarks with explanations. This was ostensibly to augment the mom’s middling English. Nara’s amplifications about Indonesian culture were helpful, but very often she tried to temper her mother, who was clearly a woman of strong opinions.
“By ‘hippie’ she merely means unconventional,” said Nara.
I smiled at her and then Mrs. Darmadi and said, “Nara, your mother and I understand each other perfectly,” to which the mom responded with the same brief downstroke of her chin I had seen from her daughter a hundred times. Nara always described herself as ‘sheltered.’ But her mother was far more worldly than the homebound Muslim woman Nara portrayed, and I realized it was the mom’s sharp judgments that had left her daughter feeling hemmed in.