Chapter Thirty-Nine: Hotel K

Amanda

Amanda Walsh is not a fool, and the novel is going to spend some time proving it, because the great insulation of every fraud is the reader's private conviction that they themselves would not have fallen for it.

Fifty-four. A nurse unit manager from Newcastle. Thirty-one years in the health system. Two grown kids. Divorced at forty-six and did well out of it because she had been careful.

She had been to Bali eleven times. She was not a starry-eyed first-timer. She knew the difference between Seminyak and Canggu and she knew what things cost.

She did her checks. That is the point of Amanda Walsh.

She googled the company. She found a website, a portfolio, press coverage, an Instagram, the handshake.

She asked about the developer's track record and was given three completed projects, two of which existed.

She visited the site — actually flew over, actually stood on the land, which is more than ninety per cent of off-the-plan buyers anywhere on earth ever do — and there was a hoarding and a site office and a man in a hi-vis vest and rebar going into the ground.

She asked about permits and was told the permits were in hand.

She did not ask to see the permits.

And she has said publicly that this is the thing she thinks about at four in the morning, and the novel would like to say on her behalf and with some force:

she would not have been able to read them if she had.

That is not a failing. That is a foreign-language planning instrument in a jurisdiction she does not practise in, and the entire global business of selling off-the-plan property to expatriate buyers exists inside the space that fact creates.

She paid a hundred and eighty thousand dollars.

She was, she found out later, one of the smaller ones.

Silence

The trouble did not arrive as a scandal.

It arrived as silence, which is how it always arrives.

Updates slowed from fortnightly to monthly. The monthly ones started arriving late, and then started being about something else — about a new project, about Lombok, about a vision for the region.

Then the civil enforcement authority came onto the site and stopped construction.

The reason required no investigation: there was no PBG. No Persetujuan Bangunan Gedung. No building construction approval.

Not an expired one. Not a disputed one. Not one under review.

None.

A seventy-unit development, sold to foreign buyers on a progressive payment schedule, on land adjacent to swamp ground with drainage that anybody with a shovel could have told you about — and, the detail the Balinese contractors found funniest and most enraging, no legal road access, the intended route blocked by a third party's wall.

You cannot get a truck in.

That is the practical translation. Whatever else is true or untrue in this chapter, there is a seventy-unit luxury villa development that a concrete truck cannot physically reach.

Made

The contractors had designed, planned and built and had not been paid, and they filed in the Denpasar District Court.

The novel wants a scene with a contractor, because the contractor is the one person in the entire twenty-five-year story who is never in the newspapers.

A site office. Corrugated roof, a fan, a desk, a rendering pinned to the wall — infinity pool, rice terraces, a woman in white with her back to camera. Invented.

Made Wijana, project manager, forty-four. He has thirty-one men. Some of them are his cousins. Some have been with him since he was twenty-five and had one ute.

He has been in this office nine times in four months to be told about the transfer.

The transfer is always coming. The transfer has been initiated. There is a banking issue at the Australian end. There is a compliance hold. There is a public holiday.

On the ninth visit he does not sit down, and he says — in Indonesian, to the Australian liaison, who does not speak much of it and has to have it repeated:

"I have paid them out of my house."

Nobody in that room knows what to do with the sentence, and so it just sits there under the fan.

What he means is that he has been paying thirty-one men their weekly wages out of his own savings for four months, in the belief that the money was coming, because the alternative was telling his cousins there was no money, and because a man who does that in Kerobokan does not work again.

The house is mortgaged now.

That is what he means.

Jamie McIntyre has never met Made Wijana and does not know his name and never will, and if you asked him — genuinely asked him, at four in the morning, with the lines on the glass table and the rain going —

he would tell you he has never hurt anybody.

That is the absence again. That is the crime of this entire book.

A machine that eats a Balinese project manager's house, operated by a man who is never in the room when the eating happens, and who therefore experiences his own life as a sequence of misunderstandings and smear campaigns.

Three thousand dollars

Christina Natalia was the sitting director, and she said the sentence that ends LUX Property Group.

Asked what was in the accounts, she said the balances were only in the thousands of Australian dollars.

Not millions. Not hundreds of thousands.

Thousands.

Sit inside that the way Amanda Walsh had to.

Seventy units. Buyers paying progressively for two years. A sales operation across two countries. A renderings suite, a website, a media apparatus, and a Lombok expansion announced with two more master-planned coastal cities.

And in the account of the company holding the buyers' money: approximately three thousand dollars.

Then she did the thing nobody had done in twenty-five years.

She handed over the bank records.

Not a summary. Not testimony. Not an allegation.

The statements. The raw ledger. Every line, every counterparty, every date.