The Love of a Good Woman

“Don’t you think?” Sonje said, “Of course I think.”
    “There wasn’t any insurance?”
    “Don’t be silly.”
    “If there’d been insurance, they’d have found out the truth.”
    “Yes but there wasn’t,” Sonje said. “So. That’s what I intend to do.”
    She said that this was one thing she had never mentioned to her mother-in-law. That after she was on her own, she was going to go looking. She was going to find Cottar, or find the truth.
    “I suppose you think that’s some wild kind of fantasy?” she said.
    Off her rocker, thought Kent with an unpleasant jolt. With every visit he had made on this trip, there had come a moment of severe disappointment. The moment when he realized that the person he was talking to, the person he had made a point of seeking out, was not going to give him whatever it was he had come for. The old friend he had visited in Arizona was obsessed with the dangers of life, in spite of his expensive residence in a protected community. His old friend’s wife, who was over seventy, wanted to show him pictures of herself and some other old woman dressed up as Klondike dance-hall girls, for a musical show they had put on. And his grown-up children were caught up in their own lives. That was only natural and not a surprise to him. The surprise was that these lives, the lives his sons and daughter were living, seemed closed in now, somewhat predictable. Even the changes in them that he could foresee or was told were coming—Noelle was on the verge of leaving her second husband—were not very interesting. He had not made any admission of this to Deborah—hardly even to himself—but it was so. And now Sonje. Sonje whom he hadn’t particularly liked, whom he’d been wary of in some way, but whom he’d respected, as a bit of a mystery—Sonje had turned into a talkative old woman with a secret screw loose.
    And he’d had a reason for coming to see her that they were not getting any closer to, with this rant about Cottar.
    “Well to be frank,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like such a sensible thing to do, to be frank about it.”
    “A wild-goose chase,” said Sonje cheerfully.
    “There’s a probability he might be dead now anyway.”
    “True.”
    “And he could have gone anywhere and lived anywhere. That is if your theory is correct.”
    “True.”
    “So the only hope is if he really died then and your theory isn’t correct, then you might find out about it and you wouldn’t be any further ahead than you are now anyway.”
    “Oh, I think I would.”
    “You could do just as well then to stay here and write some letters.”
    Sonje said she disagreed. She said you couldn’t go through official channels regarding this sort of thing.
    “You have to make yourself known in the streets.”
    In the streets of Jakarta—that was where she meant to start. In places like Jakarta people don’t shut themselves up. People live in the streets and things are known about them. Shopkeepers know, there’s always somebody who knows somebody else and so forth. She would ask questions and word would get around that she was there. A man like Cottar could not have just slipped by. Even after all this time there’d be some memory. Information of one sort or another. Some of it expensive, not all of it truthful. Nevertheless.
    Kent thought of asking her what she planned to use for money. Could she have inherited something from her parents? He seemed to remember that they’d cut her off at the time of her marriage. Perhaps she thought she could get a fat price for this property. A long shot, but maybe she was right.
    Even so, she could fling it all away in a couple of months. Word would get around that she was there, all right.
    “Those cities have changed a lot” was all he said.
    “Not that I’d neglect the usual channels,” she said. “I’d go after everybody I could. The embassy, the burial records, the medical registry if there is such a thing. In fact I’ve written letters already. But all you get is the runaround. You have to confront them in the flesh. You have to be there. Be there. Keep coming around and making a nuisance of yourself and finding out where their softspots are and be prepared to pass something under the table if you have to. I don’t have any illusions about its being easy.
    “For instance I expect there’ll be devastating heat. It doesn’t sound as if it has a good location at all—Jakarta. There are swamps and lowlands all around.