a burial at surabaya (english)
After Abe Sassoon died in Tretes, his cook got a jaga to guard the house and then took a taxi to Surabaya to tell me. He chose me because my cook was related to him, and what he said was that Abe, normally an early riser – always in his vegetable gardens by six o’clock – was not up for breakfast that morning. The cook had forced the door and found Abe in bed clutching the mosquito netting he had yanked right off its pulley. It was draped in tangles over his face, giving the cook the impression he had smothered. I knew this couldn’t be true. Abe had a bad heart.
I was having lunch at the time. The cook stood in the kitchen doorway, shouting the information, awkwardly trying to convey sorrow in his shrill parrot’s voice. He said he came quickly because he knew we had to bury the old man before nightfall according to Yehudi custom. I thanked him for remembering that, gave him his taxi fare and told him to go back to the house and wait for us.
Hesitantly he asked for some ‘coffee money’ for the jaga.
We have known better times, and I can recall when that cook would not have had to take a taxi to tell me. We even had a synagogue in Malang – the rabbi there was a very learned fellow who always had his nose in a book. The telephones were better then, and you could pick it up and tell the operator the town you wanted and in minutes you would be gabbing away, clear as a bell. Now, the telephone squawks, then goes dead in your hand, and no one risks sending a cable. People will say it was when the Dutch left that things went to pot, but it wasn’t: it was when the sugar prices fell. It doesn’t matter now; there aren’t enough Jews in Surabaya to support one synagogue, and business hasn’t been good since the early fifties. Our age is an advantage. It means fewer interruptions – no marriages, no births. We don’t observe the holidays, and it seems that every death over the past ten or fifteen years has happened after the person went to a hospital in Singapore. I can’t say I looked forward to these deaths, but they gave me a chance to pick up a little stock for my business, which is mainly ship’s hardware. I was thinking to myself, as I was driving over to Mr Aaron’s, that it would have been simpler for all of us if Abe had died in Singapore.
‘I’m not surprised,’ Mr Aaron said. But he had closed his eyes on hearing the news, and his wife had groaned. ‘We haven’t seen Abe down here for months.’ He shook his head. ‘We should have visited him, you know. And the funny thing is, I passed through Tretes a week ago. It was so late I thought I’d better hurry back. My driver is hopeless after dark. I bought a basket of apples and didn’t see anyone.’
Mrs Aaron was sitting next to her husband. Her plump shoulders shook with sobs, and when Mr Aaron mentioned buying the apples and coming straight back she groaned again in what struck me as the deepest grief, disappointment.
‘What time did it happen?’ Mr Aaron asked.
I had forgotten to ask the cook, but he had discovered him in the morning, so I guessed it was after midnight.
‘Let’s call it four A.M.,’ said Mr Aaron. Mrs Aaron looked at him and seemed slightly horrified; but she didn’t say anything.
Mr Aaron shrugged, not carelessly but hopelessly. ‘I was just going to have my nap,’ he said, pulling off his corduroy slippers and showing them to me.
‘I thought we could use your van,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, lacing his shoes. ‘Gunawan will be back about three. We can go up together. We’ll have to leave the burial till tomorrow.’
‘Disgraceful!’ Mrs Aaron said.
‘We can’t bury him any quicker than that,’ said her husband. ‘It’s lucky he hasn’t got a wife who’ll see us doing it this way. That would be awful for her.’
‘It is awful,’ Mrs Aaron said in a whisper more terrifying than a shout.
‘It can’t be helped,’ said Mr Aaron. ‘Benjamin can conduct the ceremony. Is that cousin of Abe’s still in Hong Kong, do you think?’
‘Benjamin will know,’ I said.
‘Try to calm yourself, Lool,’ said Mr Aaron to his wife. ‘Get Benjamin on the phone and tell him about Abe. He can cable – what’s the fellow’s name? Greenman? Greenberg? We’ll go around town and tell the people here. Everyone’s going to be napping: it’s after two.’ He sighed. ‘I haven’t finished my papaya.’
Mrs Aaron said, ‘What if it was you? That’s what I keep thinking! I don’t want it to be like this, to make a chore out of your funeral.’
Mr Aaron, like me, was born in Baghdad; but he looks like a man of the desert, and I have always looked like an iron-monger. His lean face has the furrows of dry soil, aging like erosion; he has a skinny hawk nose, his teeth are bad, black from cheroots and the poor food at Tjimahi Camp during the war. He often jokes, though he never smiles. He said to his wife, ‘At least, when I die no one will have to drive all the way to Tretes to pick up my body.’
Glassman was the cousin’s name. I remembered it as we were driving back in the van. None of us had ever seen him, but Abe had told us that if we were ever in Hong Kong we should look him up – he’d be glad to see us. Abe made a point of saying that this Glassman was something important in one of the banks there.
In the old days we might have seen him at a wedding, like the Meyer girl’s in Djakarta. Old Meyer invited people from all over. They looked out of place – they kept saying how hot it was – and asked us how was business and why not try Manila or Singapore or wherever, if it’s so bad? No one admitted it was bad, but these strangers knew the sugar price was down; and none of us said that Surabaya was hotter than Djakarta. You could look at people’s shoes and know exactly how business was, and more than that, you could tell from their shoe styles where their business was. The Philippine friends had these huge pebbly-orange or purplish American shoes, the ones from Singapore and Hong Kong had English-style, rather smaller, without laces, and other people had low, narrow Italian ones with thin soles, bankers’ shoes. Ours were old-fashioned, square-toed and stitched, and some were scuffed from the train. We were staying with friends, not in hotels where the room boys polish them every night. It was quite a wedding, and after the champagne some of us sat up all night, liking the company, drinking cold little glasses of Bols genevaer and eating beady caviar on small squares of toast. ‘I wish we could meet like this every year,’ said Meyer. ‘We’ve got enough money – we owe it to ourselves.’ He had enough money, but he went to Zurich a few years later, and they say his daughter’s in Israel. The rest of us took our hangovers to Surabaya.
‘Glassman wasn’t at the Meyer wedding,’ I said to Benjamin the next day.
‘Who says?’ Benjamin is a sharp one, pretending to be a bit older than he actually is, because he knows he can have the last word that way. He uses an old man’s preoccupied gestures, and looking thoughtful says as little as possible.
‘I didn’t see any Glassman there,’ I said. ‘And I’m sure I met everyone.’
‘He was there,’ said Benjamin.
‘I didn’t see him either,’ said Mr Aaron. ‘I think you’re making this up, Ben.’
Benjamin sniffed in annoyance. ‘He was ten years old then.’
Mr Aaron looked at me. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ After a moment he said, ‘Why didn’t we meet his parents?’
‘How do I know?’ said Benjamin, acting more irritated than he was. ‘Maybe he didn’t come with his parents. Maybe he’s an orphan. Anyway, you can ask him this afternoon.’
This was news. ‘He’s coming?’
‘From Singapore,’ said Benjamin. He had withheld the information, the old person’s privilege and pleasure. ‘I just got a cable. His people in Hong Kong must have rung him up there – his bank has a Singapore branch. I don’t know the details. He’s due in at two-twenty.’
‘I hope the plane’s on time,’ said Mr Aaron. ‘The burial’s at three. We can hold it up for a little while. But if he’s late?’
‘Who’s picking him up?’ I asked.
‘Morris,’ said Benjamin. Morris is the Honorary Austrian Consul in Surabaya, and with the CC plates on his car he can be counted on to get through the airport confusion with the least delay.
‘I hope the plane’s on time,’ said Mr Aaron again. He looked out the window. ‘I would go over to my house if it weren’t for those women. Their weeping upsets me worse than Abe’s coffin. Would it be disrespectful to have a drink? It’s a hot day.’
Benjamin got a bottle of whiskey, three glasses and a bucket of ice. We drank without speaking, in the still, dusty air of the narrow parlor, sitting in hard chairs. I propped myself up on a cushion and tried to think of something to say. One disadvantage about drinking in silence is that you become self-conscious if you drink quickly. I sipped mine. Benjamin held his drink under his nose and inhaled it.
We had walked to Benjamin’s, followed by betjak drivers, a half a dozen of them cycling along urging us to ride. Mr Aaron told them we weren’t going far. It didn’t do any good. Now the betjak drivers – I could see them through the barred windows of Benjamin’s parlor – were curled in the seats of their green vehicles, their feet resting on the handlebars, parked in front of the house. Their number had attracted a few hawkers, some women selling fruit and one man with a noodle stall on wheels. ‘Have some respect for the dead,’ I was going to say to them. I thought: In a few hours Sassoon will be in the ground and I can go home and sleep. I was sorry it was Saturday; that meant a whole day tomorrow with nothing to do except think about him. I’d rather go to work after a funeral, to remind myself that I can still work.
Someone out front sat up in his betjak and began shouting. His hat was still pulled down over his eyes. They’re always camped against your fence. Mr Aaron said, ‘Lool’s right. It is awful.’
Lool’s crazy, I was going to say: Why should death make someone your brother? But that truth was an inappropriate argument.
Ponderously, Benjamin addressed his glass: ‘Sassoon was a good man. He had some money, but he was a very simple man –’ He went on, and Mr Aaron agreed. I knew what was starting and I dredged around for a complimentary reminiscence of old Sassoon.
The word that came to me was: ruins. We had seen them at Sassoon’s house in Tretes. I said, ‘Look at that,’ but Mr Aaron had gone straight into the house. I was standing under a mango tree – fruit had ripened and dropped and turned black on the ground – and I was looking toward the back of the house. Once it had belonged to a Dutchman, a happy one to judge from the back garden. There was a swimming pool, children’s swings, a miniature golf course with toy bridges and stone chutes and plump low posts. The swimming pool was sooty, filled with tall weeds; the bolts of the diving board remained, but they were large with rust. The swings were rusty, too, the chains had snapped, and the odd stone shapes of the golf course, sticking up from the overgrown yard, looked like the baffling gravestones you see in a Chinese burying ground.
It was dusk, soon dark as a cellar, and I wasn’t sure I had seen all those decaying, neglected things: I couldn’t verify in the blackness what might have been my imagination. I went into the house. Later, Mr Aaron said the house held the smell of death, but what I noticed was an odor of vinegar and cabbage, boiled meat – probably what Abe had eaten the previous evening. That, and the mangoes which, newly rotting on the ground, gave off a high ripe smell and filled the house with sweetness.
‘We should be starting,’ Mr Aaron was saying in Benjamin’s parlor.
I had been daydreaming. On the way I told them a story the cook had told me about Abe’s giving the Javanese kids English lessons at night.
‘And look what he gets for it,’ said Benjamin.
The signboard, lettered Graveyard for Foreigners in yellow and blue – but in Indonesian – was nailed to a high archway at the entrance. There was a little argument at the parking lot over our taking the van in. A Javanese came out carrying a long, rusty parang; he laughed when he saw us glancing at his knife, and he explained that he was head gardener. We’d have to leave the van outside, he said, and carry the coffin ourselves. Benjamin told him to lower his voice. We had attracted ten or fifteen onlookers, young boys mostly, in faded shirts. They watched us, smiling, as we heaved the coffin onto our shoulders and shuffled up the dusty road.
Benjamin walked in front, with his head down. Mr Aaron and I were at the head of the coffin, Solomon and Lang had the other end; and behind us walked Mrs Aaron, Benjamin’s daughter and her husband – the Manassehs – Mrs Lang, Mrs Solomon and Joel Solomon. Joel is a fleshy fifteen-year-old with a big backside and mustache fur on his upper lip. We must have looked very strange, walking so solemnly in our black clothes, past the torn and carved-up trunks of the casuarina trees which lined the road, their needles glistering in the bright sun and making a mewing moan, a sinuslike sound over our heads – an especially odd sound, for the breeze causing it didn’t drift near the hot road, and we could hear the coolness we couldn’t feel. Squatting around these trees and next to scarred sisal clumps were groups of boys, most of them about Joel Solomon’s age, captivated by the sight of eleven black crows marching with a box through the heat.
At the top of the road we turned right, past a monument in white marble with black graffiti painted on the wide plinth. There had been names and dates carved into the peeling casuarinas, and more names – nicknames, names of gangs – were painted on the gravestones. But it didn’t strike me as blasphemous to scrawl your name on a broken monument or carve it into a dying tree. Down the cinder path, on an embankment, two goats were ripping grass with their lips, brushing the ground with their beards, their hoofs planted on Rudy van Houten Feb. 1936–Dec. 1936, a tombstone not much bigger than a water-swollen bread loaf: Rust zacht kleine lieveling en tot wederziens. A little farther along there was a broken, lamed angel, face down in the grass. There were no trees anywhere – we had left the moaning casuarinas behind – and the ground was so dry it opened in jagged cracks the width of your heel, big enough to trip you. The cloudless sky was enormous without the trees, and the flat plain of graves, the markers leaning this way and that, pushed over by the eruption of a rough grassy tussock – not even green – and scarred and scratched with charcoal – this baking plain was the kind you sometimes see in remoter places in east Java, a few acres of stony rubble signifying a dead story of habitation, which people visit to photograph. But this was not very far gone – more like Sassoon’s own swimming pool, blackened and filled with tall grass, a recent ruin, in an early, unremarkable stage of decay, obviously crumbling but not far enough for alarm or interest. I wanted this history to be dust, and the dust to blow away.
We passed the children’s graves. The next were families – stone shelters, flat white roofs on posts. Three boys sat under one for the shade, playing cards and listening to loud music on a portable radio. They looked up as we passed, and I heard Solomon curse them. I was fascinated by the heated ruins, the grasshopper whine, the awful litter inspiring not funereal sadness but the simple familiarity of this as a dumping ground in an old country with so many junkyards of cracked tombs and smashed statuary anyone can cart away. Here was a cluster of Chinese graves, photographs of old men and old black-haired women, wincing in egg-sized lockets and posed like the faces in newspapers of men wanted by the police, but much more blurred: Anton Tjiung Koeng Li, and beside those stacked slabs, another set of slabs with deep, once gold letters: Hier Rust onze Dierbare echtgenoot em vader Hubertus Tshaw Khoer Tan. I had never been a pallbearer here, and today the slow march down the cemetery path, the fact that I was carrying a heavy coffin on my shoulder, made me curious about the details of the graves I was passing: Geboren Solo 1877, Batavia 1912, Pontianak 1883, Soerabaja 1871. The Dutchman born in Solo died in Surabaya. I saw a husband and wife; both were born in Malang, both died there: what journey? The next stone made me pause, and the coffin lurched as I read it: In Memoriam Augusta Baronesse van Lawick-Hercules. I made a point of remembering it for Mr Aaron.
The Jewish corner of the cemetery adjoins the Chinese Buddhist section on one side, with a dingy crematorium the size and shape of a warehouse on the other side. I was hoping our section would be either in good repair or completely fallen to bits and covered by ashes and gnawed at and pissed on by goats. It was neither; in that intermediate stage of decay that characterized the whole place, a crack through a name, a date effaced, a dry turd cake against a column, weeds uncut, it was resisting pathetically, in the squeezed posture of indignity – but you knew it would disappear. Small boys with grass clippers and sickles had been following us, hoping for a chance to earn a few rupiahs trimming the weeds on our plot. As soon as we arrived at our corner, Mrs Solomon and Mrs Aaron turned and hissed to shoo them away. The boys stepped back, but this wasn’t good enough: the women didn’t want these urchins to watch. Mrs Solomon pretended to chase them. The boys ran, stopping once to see if she was still after them.
We had put the coffin over the narrow, newly dug trench, and I was wiping my face. Benjamin compared his watch with Mr Aaron’s. ‘I thought he might catch up with us. I don’t see any sign of him.’ Benjamin shaded his eyes and looked down the path.
‘Let’s give him ten minutes or so,’ said Mr Solomon.
‘The sun,’ I said, wrinkling my nose and squinting. ‘We should move over there.’ I felt a whiskey headache creeping across the back of my eyes. Our black clothes weren’t doing us any good. ‘Mrs Aaron,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to stand over there, in the shade?’
‘I won’t leave him,’ she said, nodding at the coffin.
‘Irma?’
‘No.’
Mrs Aaron shook out her umbrella and pushed it open.
‘Very nice,’ I mumbled to Mr Aaron, ‘we all get sunstroke.’ Just behind him I read: Mÿn geliefde broer Hayeem Mordecai Mizrahie.
I closed my eyes and imagined myself keeling over; I was on my feet when I opened them, and the sun’s dazzle blinded me. I held the lapels of my jacket and worked them back and forth trying to fan myself. Sweat crawled down my chest like harmless ants, tickling the hairs there, and my eyes were stinging with salt. I read the gravemarkers to pass the time; it might have looked like veneration. Our beloved Hilda Wife of Adolf Lisser Died 19th Elool 5701 – 11th Sept. 1941, and a little lozenge-shaped stone, Joseph Haim Bar 4½ Years. I counted the ones born in Baghdad: two, three, five – six altogether, one with the inscription Born in Baghdad (Aged 49) Died on Wed. 28th Nov. 1945. That was Isaac Abraham, but something was missing on his stone: where had he died, a Wednesday in what place? It was Tjimahi, the concentration camp in west Java – I knew him there. It would be forgotten. Here was a misspelled one: These memory of loving uncle Solomon Judah Katar – Decierd (what was that?) 10 Feb. 1945 Saterday Tjimahi Kamp His Soul Rest in Peace. Not quite rubble, not yet incomprehensible: I wanted them dust, or else impossible to decipher, nameless as the stone with the top half missing and only Died on Sat. Night 13 June 1926.
‘We should start,’ said Mr Lang. Thank God, I thought.
‘Do you hear a car?’ asked Benjamin. He nibbled air, listening.
‘It’s those trees down there,’ said Mr Aaron.
I read: Selma Liebman-Herzberger.
‘Maybe Morris got a puncture,’ said Mr Solomon.
‘I’m thinking of the women,’ Mr Lang said. ‘If it was just me I’d wait until five, or even later. But these women can’t take the heat. Look. Covered with sweat, your wife’s back. I’d hate to see one of them faint. Something like that would hold things up.’
‘Lool was awake most of the night,’ said Mr Aaron.
‘That’s what I mean,’ said Mr Lang.
‘So was my Irma,’ said Mr Solomon. ‘Her feet are killing her.’ He looked in her direction. ‘She never complains.’
‘Look at this,’ I said, holding my jacket open. My shirt was darkly plastered, bubbled in places, on my chest. ‘Sopping wet!’
‘I didn’t think it would take so long for Morris to get here from the airport,’ said Benjamin.
‘It shouldn’t,’ said Mr Lang. ‘That’s why I suggested we start.’
‘If David thinks so –’ I started to say.
Benjamin was looking uneasy. He didn’t want to make the decision alone. He said, ‘Who thinks we should go ahead?’
‘I do,’ said Mr Lang promptly.
‘Who’s this cousin?’ Mr Solomon was asking Mr Aaron.
‘I’ll go along with David,’ I said.
Mr Solomon and Mr Aaron nodded, and ‘All right, then,’ said Benjamin. The women were still standing around the coffin, holding their shiny black handbags tightly against their stomachs. Mrs Aaron was sharing her umbrella with the Manasseh girl. Benjamin said, ‘We’ve decided to start.’
‘What about Glassman?’ asked Mrs Aaron.
‘He’s not coming.’
The coffin rested on two beams which had been placed across the trench of the grave. Benjamin stood on the red mound of dirt lumps that had been shoveled out. We made a little circle around the coffin and listened to Benjamin read the prayers. The cover of his leather-bound siddur had sweatstains on it from being carried in the heat, black finger marks on the cover, a black patch on the spine.
He started reading slowly, but after a few verses his voice quickened to a reciting pace, a hurrying drone that emphasized only the last word before he sucked in a breath. The death chant for Abe Sassoon was being muttered to himself; this speeded rendition made it private. Jakob Sassoon, I was reading on the stone next to Benjamin, Born in Baghdad, and then Joel Solomon’s whining voice, ‘Dad, I hear a car.’
It was the screech of a car braking in gravel, and one after another, two doors slamming. We all heard.
Benjamin slowed down and read in a louder voice. Each of us sneaked a look down the dusty path to the entrance, but only the little boys were on the path. Two figures in black appeared, both running – one on long legs was far ahead of the other. This was Glassman, for just as I had turned to concentrate on what Benjamin was saying, he was on us. He came panting, a yarmulke in his hand, his face red, preparing to frown. We made room for him, and he fell on his knees beside the coffin, at the same time clapping the yarmulke on his head. He let out a great affronted wail. The women stopped crying and stared at him. Benjamin faltered in the verses, then continued, as Glassman hugged the coffin, knocking our black-bowed wreath askew. Now Glassman was crying piteously.
Benjamin stopped reading.
‘Why stop now?’ said Glassman angrily to Benjamin, a youthful quaver in his voice. ‘You started without me – why stop now! Go ahead, if you’re in such a hurry!’
Benjamin lifted the book and read slowly.
Mrs Aaron touched Glassman’s shoulder. He raised himself, slapping the dust off his knees, to stand next to her. He had an expression on his face that showed horror and pain, his lips pressed shut, his cheeks blown out, his eyes narrowed to slits, his crumpled yarmulke slightly to one side.
I listened for Benjamin but I heard Glassman, who was breathing heavily, making a thin whistling in his nose and heaving his chest up and down and nodding his head with each long breath. He was wearing a beautiful suit. With the distraction of Glassman’s panting, and with his screams still ringing in my ears, I felt a sharp embarrassment that was becoming terror.
It was time to put the coffin into the grave. We lifted the ropes under each end while the beams were slid away. Glassman watched us. We lowered the coffin on the ropes and Benjamin scooped up some dirt with a spade and threw it in, and said a prayer after it. Each person took a turn with the spade, the first ones making very loud thuds with their dry dirt clods on the coffin lid, the later ones making no sound at all. Glassman, the last to throw in some dirt, burst into fresh tears as he did so. He peered down. I have heard of close relations leaping into the grave, and I was afraid that Glassman might try this, perhaps breaking his leg. He shook his head – but he was indignant rather than sorrowful. What did he expect? Javanese babus in shiny silk pajamas holding umbrellas over our heads, a gilded coffin, the hot air split by mourners’ shrieks, a wise old rabbi chanting into his nest of beard, a resolute throng of relatives at the graveside, shaking their fists at death? I knew this Glassman: ‘Why not try Manila or Hong Kong?’ He walked back to where he had been standing, under Mrs Aaron’s umbrella.
‘Brothers and sisters,’ said Benjamin. He spoke in Dutch, tasting each syllable separately, relishing the long words and closing his eyes as he finished a phrase. ‘These are very sad days for us –’
‘What’s that?’ Glassman’s shout made me jump. ‘What are you saying?’
We looked at him, then at Benjamin.
Benjamin proceeded, ‘But we must remember that our brother Abraham is now in a happy –’
‘Stop that!’ screamed Glassman, his voice cracking.
Benjamin glanced into the partially filled grave. He looked up and bit on a word which, displaying his teeth, he showed Glassman on the tip of his tongue. ‘Home,’ he said in Dutch, ‘he is home now. And someday –’
‘What the hell is going on here?’ Glassman asked Mrs Aaron. ‘This is a bloody mockery. I won’t have him talking in that language.’
‘Ben,’ said Morris. ‘Maybe you should –’
‘And someday,’ Benjamin continued, more rapidly, ‘we will join our brother. Joyfully, yes, our hearts full –’
‘No!’ Glassman broke away from Mrs Aaron, who reached for him. He vaulted the grave and his hands were on Benjamin’s throat. Mr Lang snatched at Glassman’s arms, I yanked on his collar; it took five of us to pull him away. He kicked out, catching me on the shin with the sharp heel of his fancy buckled boot. ‘You!’ he shouted at Benjamin. ‘What are you saying?’
Benjamin clasped his hands and tried to finish: ‘We should not mourn our brother – we should be glad he is at peace –’
‘Let me go!’ yelled Glassman, struggling.
‘– enjoying the rewards of a virtuous life and hard work and let us all say a silent prayer for him.’
We released Glassman and bowed our heads, praying silently. Glassman was surprised at his sudden freedom and then enraged by our silence. A yellow and gray bird with a head like the top of a claw hammer flew past.
‘Shame on you,’ said Glassman while we prayed. ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves. What kind of people are you?’ He went on in this vein, in his British accent, accusing us of savagery, looking quite comical with his jacket twisted around and his yarmulke slipping off and the knot of his tie pulled down and made small.
Benjamin signaled to some workmen to fill the hole. These three men in faded clothes had been standing under the eaves of the crematorium and had seen the whole business. They smiled as they ambled out of the shade, squinting and ducking as they entered the bright sunlight, and holding their spades ready.
Glassman, leaning, held each woman’s shoulders and kissed her cheek. He left with Morris.
‘What does it matter?’ Benjamin said, when we were in the car and driving back to town. ‘It’s his own fault for being late. Bleddy mockery.’ He snorted. ‘I wonder what they do in Hong Kong.’
‘The next problem,’ Mr Aaron said – he hadn’t been listening to Benjamin – ‘is where does he stay?’
It wasn’t a problem. Glassman was on the evening flight to Djakarta. The rest of us stayed just where we were, and no one said that young man’s name again.