Chapter Forty-Two: Hotel K

There is a name for the building on Jalan Gunung Rinjani in Kerobokan, Bali, and everybody in the world who has ever been there uses it, and it is not the name on the gate.

They call it Hotel K.

Kerobokan Prison. Lapas Kerobokan. Hotel K.

He named a luxury villa development Hotel K.

And he built it — or did not build it — in Kerobokan.

And the Balinese builder suing him for unpaid work pointed out, in a filing, that the villas marketed as being in Seminyak are in fact located in Kerobokan, close to Bali's main prison.

Read it one more time.

He marketed a development named after the prison, next to the prison, in the suburb of the prison, to buyers who were told it was somewhere else.

Nobody around him knew. That is the astonishing part, and the novel is going to say it plainly: there is no evidence it was a joke, and if it was a joke then it was the darkest one ever made by an Australian.

The likeliest explanation is much more Jamie than that.

Hotel K sounded expensive. It sounded European. It sounded like a boutique brand — a single letter, minimalist, the kind of thing a designer charges forty thousand dollars for.

K for Kerobokan, because Kerobokan is where the land was.

And Seminyak is what the brochure said, because Seminyak is what people pay for.

The presentation.

The substance.

The gap.

He chose that name off precisely the same instinct that hammered WEST BROADVIEW into eight hundred and forty hectares of frost country in the 1890s.

And he chose it without once looking up from the rendering to see what else in that postcode was already using it.

And here is the last scene of the novel.

It is not a trial. There may never be a trial; this book does not know and will not invent one, and if a court eventually clears him of everything then this chapter is fiction and nothing more, and the record at the back will still say exactly what it says.

It is a room.

Not a cell — a room. In an administrative block. With a window high up and a desk and three plastic chairs and a ceiling fan that moves the air without cooling it.

The kind of room where a foreign national sits while a process happens around him in a language he never learned in nine years of living inside it.

He is fifty-two. He is in a polo shirt and he has not shaved. His hands are on the desk and they are the hands of a man who grew up on eight hundred and forty hectares of granite country, and the officer sitting opposite him is twenty-nine and polite and has a folder.

The officer opens the folder.

And turns it around.

And slides it across the desk.

And Jamie Neville McIntyre puts on his reading glasses.

His hands are shaking.

"Right," he says. "Yep. And this figure here, that's the—"

The officer tells him what it is.

"Right," he says. "Yep."

He doesn't know.

Nobody in that room knows that he doesn't know. He is too proud and too frightened to say so. And so he sits at a desk in a building in Kerobokan and nods at a document that is taking his life away from him —

exactly the way his father nodded at a kitchen table at West Broadview in 1991.

And the boy who watched that happen, and felt contempt instead of pity, and decided that the answer was to make sure he was always the one holding the folder, has arrived — thirty-five years later, eight thousand kilometres away, through five countries and twenty schemes and eighty million dollars —

on the wrong side of the same table.

The fan turns.

The officer says, kindly, because he is a kind young man:

"Do you want me to get someone who can explain it?"

And Jamie McIntyre — the spruiker, the auctioneer, the man who could hold nine thousand people for four hours and ten minutes without a note — looks up at him.

And he says:

"No. I've got it."