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

as Lee Cheong’s,
for jade; Mui Fong’s restaurant; and next to them, an Indian store selling
batik, a shop specializing in wood-carvings with a Dutch name above the door,
Vos & VanKamp, but with a smiling Indonesian in charge. The air was filled
with the chatter of a dozen animated tongues, dominated by Bahasa, a refined
Malay, but Durell also identified Dutch, Sudanese, Madurese and even some
English. Despite the heat, the crowds along the road were animated, in brightly
colored clothing, and apparently untroubled by the political tensions that
loomed like thunderheads over the jewel-like island.
    Pandakan was not the largest of the Tarakuta Group, but was
certainly the loveliest, not more than ten miles long and five in
breadth. The slopes of the interior highland were devoted to neat rice fields,
chinchona and tea plantations, and teakwood forests. Young Mr. Lee was polite
and instructive on the swift drive through the city from the airport. He
handled the car himself, with Durell beside him in the front seat, and he did
not linger at traffic signals that seemed to work with a peculiarly
sporadic timing, since terrorists enjoyed hurling grenades at cars halted at
intersections; and he managed to avoid the potholes in what had once been a
broad, smooth boulevard.
    Pandakan’s architecture reflected the island’s history
for three centuries. There was a ruined and picturesque fortress on the harbor
front built by the Portuguese in the seventeenth century; there were Dutch and
British administrative buildings from the Victorian era, mingled with native
Malay, Moslem mosques and Catholic churches and Buddhist temples, and a great
sprawling mass of a palace owned by the former Sultan of Pandakan, when the
East India Company dominated the islands. Along the seawall flanking the
harbor were dozens of sidewalk cafes under brightly colored, slightly
dilapidated awnings that sheltered wire chairs and metal tables. Traffic was
mainly bicycles that flowed in tidal waves around corners and down the
main arteries of the city. Here and there were trishaws, a three-wheeled
bicycle taxi, and an occasional dokar, or carriage. There were double-decker
buses that reminded Durell of London and New York’s old Fifth Avenue line, but
painted a brilliant orange and green, the newly proposed national colors.
Chinese tea shops, Moslem coffee houses and European cafes shared the
waterfront boulevard. Here and there a building showed the black scars of a bombing.
But the life of the city surged and flowed brightly in the streets, and
despite the number of posters, banners and signs exhorting the populace to vote
for one new expansionist Asian power in Borneo or another, there seemed no
overt hysteria.
    But hysteria was here, Durell thought, manifested in the
hatreds expressed by bomb scars and bullet-pitted walls. Some of the Hindu
shops were shuttered with steel, and the local policemen at the intersections,
standing on high wooden pedestals under bright umbrellas, wore white gauntlets
and stubby, Russian-made automatic rifles slung over their shoulders.
There Was the usual contradiction of tin-shack and mat-walled slum houses next
to impressive public buildings, of natives cooking noodles, shrimp or curry on
the sidewalks, of canals where people bathed and did laundry and brushed their
teeth in water used as a lavatory.
    Tommy Lee pointed out the sprawl of the Sultan’s former
palace, a building with clean, fat white columns supporting carved eaves
overhanging wide verandahs and interior courts. The palace was now used as a
government house, where Colonel Mayubashur, head of the militia, was the
highest resident official, ruling by military fiat until the U.N.
commission, its presence indicated by a limp blue and white flag at the
palace masthead, decided to which new imperialism the island population should
belong.
    Tommy Lee slowed the car to allow yellow-robed Buddhist
priests with shaven heads cross the boulevard. “The situation is