Assignment - Sulu Sea by Edward S. Aarons Read Free Book Online

Pandakan.
     
                                                                                                    chapter five
    PANDAKAN was hot, dirty and decaying. Its streets were
pitted with holes and the canals clotted with refuse. Under the old colonial
administration, the waterfront had been kept reasonably clean and efficient,
with white government buildings and warehouses bulging with tin ore, rubber and
copra. The boulevards radiating toward the low hills surrounding the harbor had
been well maintained, adorned with royal palms and decorated with a central
mall of green lawns and flower beds. The main streets of the European
section had boasted fine old Victorian structures, all painted white,
with government missions and business offices of trading companies in neat,
well-tended rows.
    The buildings and boulevards were still there, with the palm
trees and flower beds, but everything had wilted slightly around the
edges since the colonial administration had been given forty-eight hours
recently to pack up and get out; There were chuckholes in the street that
nobody bothered to fill, some cornices of masonry had fallen from some of
the Victorian facades and allowed to remain there, the grass in the central
malls had gone to jungle weeds, and where white-gloved Malay policemen had
stood on their little wooden platforms under umbrellas to direct the tonga,
bicycle and auto traffic, there were now battle-helmeted, uniformed soldiers
with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders, patrolling the crowded
sidewalks in pairs and cautiously considering the sidewalk cafes that seemed to
have lost considerable clientele since the most recent wave of Red and
Indonesian terrorist bombing.
    But no city and harbor could have had a lovelier setting,
Durell thought. A narrow river bisected the town, flowing from the green jungly uplands of the island. There was a green promontory
capped by a hotel and several gleaming consulates to the north. On the other
arm enfolding the harbor was a native quarter built out over the placid waters,
a vast, tangled jumble of reed and thatch-roofed huts, nipa shacks, Dyak houses
and shanties built on piers in a labyrinthine maze of waterways crowded with
native canoes and fishing praus and of plank walks that swayed and
twisted precariously over the harbor water, without plan or rhyme or reason.
    “Dendang, otherwise known as Fishtown,” Willi said briefly
as she circled toward the airport landing strip and let down the amphibian’s
wheels. There was a high radio tower to be avoided, several more beacon towers
whose lights blinked in the last rays of daylight-apparently the local
technicians left them on all day—and then a bumpy landing on the plane’s fat
rubber tires, not because of any clumsiness on Willi’s part, but because there
were mortar potholes from recent fighting in the center of the main
runway. “Most of the local Chinese,” Willi went on casually, “live out over the
water. The Malays live in town, and the European whites, who get fewer every
day, live on the South Point. In between are the indigenous natives who never
seem to have a say in what's going to happen to them, one way or another.”
    She paused and taxied the amphibian in front of the tin
hangar sheds and leaned across him to open his door. “If you don’t mind, I’ll
drop you off here and fly on down to see Grandpa Joseph. I’m worried
about him. A man in his nineties—well, you never know. I’ll be back in Pandakan
before morning, if you trust me. And I used the radio to reserve a room for you
at the Hotel des Indes. It’s still got running water, but I suggest you stick
to tonic or Evian water-—which you can still get here, oddly enough, all the
way from Paris.”
    “Thanks,” he said drily. “And what did you tell the local
radio people I Was? A spy?"
    “I said you were an oil salesman from New