Behind one vacant parcel of land was a kampung. Rumours circulated that its residents would be evicted as mansions continued to be built. As far as tourist and development maps of Jakarta were concerned, the squatter settlement didn’t exist. But the kampung had survived until now. Those within it bred, bartered and partied to the sounds of dangdut. Fearful of theft, the castle owners constructed imposing walls around their homes and installed barbed wire along them.

Since the death of their son, Anton, a few years before, Ratri spent more time at home. Anton had died in Los Angeles at the age of nineteen after crashing a motorcycle that had been a gift from his father. He was a sophomore at UCLA and had set out to explore Southern California. Once their son’s body was brought home and buried Bambang and Ratri never discussed his death again.

After entering her forties, Ratri filled out a bit but remained attractive. She knew her husband’s colleagues cast admiring glances at her, even tried to tempt her. But she had no interest in those pudgy men. She preferred to look after her home and over-see the running of her boutique a few times a week. She stayed faithful to her husband, who took to sleeping in a separate room after their son’s death.

Bambang’s vehicles conveyed a great deal about their relationship. Fifteen years earlier, Bambang would invite Ratri on drives out of the city in the Mercedes Tiger. Now he always left her behind. When the car left the garage, Ratri knew that Bambang wouldn’t be home for several days.

At times Ratri suspected her husband was playing around with some model or starlet, as his colleagues did. But he mostly went to meetings with his subordinates and there were no women among them. And his secretary was a man in his mid-twenties who regularly visited their house for office business. Ratri concluded that her husband was a workaholic and that she had no competition.

The information Bambang shared with Ratri about his work went no further than what was reported in the media. Nonetheless, Ratri heard rumours of what was really going on. There were whisperings about a publicity-hungry young lawyer who had taken on an embezzlement case that would drag her husband down. Ratri understood that Bambang would fix the problem in classic fashion, as he had learned from his predecessors. A clean solution. Each access point clamped tight, like an iron gate. It was the era of the smiling general, when everything was always in order and violence left no mess. At first, the discovery of her husband’s world horrified her, but Ratri learned to build her own walls. She prepared for the worst, secured her investments and arranged an emergency escape route for herself.

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