Rembrandt's Ghost by Paul Christopher Read Free Book Online

into shuddering life. A few seconds later, McSeveney’s voice came echoing up through the wheelhouse speaking tube.
    “Captain! D’ye ken that lovely sound?” he called.
    Hanson stepped off the flying bridge and into the small shelter of the wheelhouse. “Thank you, Willy!” he said, bellowing into the old-fashioned funnel-necked instrument. He rang the engine room telegraph himself, repeating the request into the speaking tube. “Ahead slow. Let’s get off this reef.”
    A few seconds later the churning propeller dug in and the
Batavia Queen
, like the reluctant dowager she was, began to move out to sea again.
     
     
     

Chapter

5

     
    One hundred thirty miles farther up the coast, the notorious pirate known simply as Khan, or sometimes as Tim-Timan, the Faithful One, rested in his temporary home—a native
rumah
, a house built on sticks in the estuary of the Rejang River’s northwest channel. His fingers, heavy with gold rings, played with the necklace he wore like worry beads. The necklace was strung with dozens of human teeth, some yellow and dark with age, others whiter and much more recent. One or two still even had gnarled dangling bits of nerve and pulp attached. The necklace had been a gift from his grandfather on his mother’s side, the infamous
penghulu
, Temonggong Koh.
    From his swinging hammock on the wide verandah Khan could see the other houses of the riverbank village,
rumahs
like his. A few were open-sided bungalow-style barracks built by the Japanese during the war, and there was even an old longhouse or two like the one his grandfather had been raised in, filled with smoke and laughter and the ghosts of the men, women, and children whose shrunken, withered heads were lined up on the rafters, row after row of trophies from a savage past.
    Like many modern members of his tribe, Khan was part Malay, part Chinese, and part indigenous Melenau native, but unlike any other Khan could claim direct descent from the original White Rajah himself, Charles Brooke, the adventurer who came to Sarawak in the mid-1800s and whose family had ruled like Oriental potentates for a hundred years. Not only could he claim it, but he could prove it, for although his brutal features were those of a Chinese-Malay half-caste, Khan had bright blue eyes—blue eyes capable of casting spells, seeing through lies, and envisioning the future, or so some superstitious subjects of his pirate kingdom believed. It was an idea that he encouraged and sometimes even half believed himself.
    A brief squall pushed in from the ocean and suddenly the air was full of hissing rain that rattled on the old tin roof of the
rumah
like handfuls of thrown pebbles. Khan slipped out of the hammock and walked to the edge of the covered porch, looking out over the rain-tattered river. His feet were bare on the woven mats that covered the floor and he wore only a simple black-checked sarong. He was thick-bodied and tall, hard muscles rippling, his gold-brown skin gleaming with a faint sheen of perspiration. His hair was jet-black, cut in the severe bowl-and-bang style of his ancestors. He was
iban
, a sea dyak, and every inch a warrior
penghulu
of his clan.
    He picked up the cup resting on the verandah railing and took a swallow of the fiery
tuak
rice wine it contained, swishing the harsh liquor around in his mouth, then spitting it out over the railing and into the river below. The rain began to slow, the sound of it on the roof above him tempered to the slow drumming of angry fingers.
    Once upon a time, it had seemed that Khan might have traveled on a different path. He was James How Ling Singbat Alaidin Sulaiman Khan back then, the younger son of Sarawak’s minister of health under Stephen Kalong Ningkan, a privileged young man who had attended the prestigious Lodge School, won entry into Phillips Academy Andover in America and then went on to Harvard and a combined degree in business administration and international law.
    During his long time