Anak Agung Nura would go back to Bali to organize his many friends into a resistance group and to further the movement in the nearby islands.

My role was to become known as the girlfriend of Frisco Flip, and be introduced to Japanese officials and to mix generally in Japanese circles, and to paint pictures of pretty Balinese maidens and sell them very cheaply to the Japanese.

By day, then, I painted canvases, the quickly done, calendar-type pictures which I loathed, but which were greatly admired by the Japanese. I couldn’t turn them out fast enough to keep up with the demand. And at night I became a playgirl, an habitue of the night clubs, a friend of the Japanese and especially of Frisco Flip. For a city at war, Surabaya was surprisingly lively – in fact, almost gay – at night. The fighting had moved thousands of miles to the east.

An interesting addition to the after-dark attractions of Surabaya was a group of geisha girls and a theatrical troupe, recently arrived from Tokyo. They were to tour Asia, entertaining the troops. The geisha girls were bright and charming, not at all the rough type I had expected. And full of informative chatter about conditions in Nippon and elsewhere. The members of the theatrical troupe were most gracious. It was hard to associate them in any way with a war.

Weeks had passed since I had heard from Agung Nura and I was beginning to worry. Then a courier arrived, with an envelope from Bali. The young man’s face was very familiar; I could see that he was not a Balinese. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ I asked.

The courier gazed at me intently for a moment and then his face lit up with a pixie’s grin. ‘Good American lady,’ he chanted. ‘You like good guide. I show you the way.’

Pito! It couldn’t be, but it was! The nine-year-old ragged urchin I had picked up on my first midnight ride in Java years ago, now grown into a handsome young man.

‘Your father, Pito, what of him?’ I asked. ‘Remember you told me the Dutch had kidnaped him and sent him to the land beyond the moon to die?’

‘Oh, yes, indeed. My father was liberated from Tanah Merah when the Japanese came. He has always been a freedom worker for his country. That is how I have become a courier.’

Pito said that when Anak Agung Nura asked him to take a letter to K’tut Tantri, he did not realize that this was the American lady he had met as a child.

Pito promised to visit me each time he passed through Surabaya.

The letter from Agung Nura asked that Frisco Flip send money and small firearms to Bali as soon as possible. All bank accounts in Bali had been frozen while the Japanese sorted out Dutch accounts from Native accounts. The need for firearms needed no explanation.