Savage Harvest Part 1

Savage Harvest.

Carl Hoffman.

Dedication.

For Lily.

Epigraph.

Every encounter with the Other is an enigma, an unknown quant.i.ty-I would even say a mystery.

-RYSZARD KAPUSCINSKI.

PART I.

1.

November 19, 1961.

MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER IN NEW GUINEA.

(Library of Congress).

THE SEA FELT warm as Michael Rockefeller lowered himself in from the overturned wooden hull. Rene Wa.s.sing peered down at him, and Michael noticed Rene was sunburned and needed a shave. Their exchange was brief. They'd been drifting on the ocean off the coast of southwest New Guinea for twenty-four hours now, and there wasn't much that hadn't been said.

I really don't think you should go.

No, it'll be okay. I think I can make it.

Michael cupped his hands and swung his arms, swiveling around. It was eight a.m. The tide was high. He was wearing white cotton underpants and thick, black-rimmed gla.s.ses. He had two empty gasoline cans tied to his webbed, military-style belt. He hugged one tightly and started swimming, kicking toward the coast, a hazy line of gray, barely a smudge. He estimated they were five to ten miles off the coast. He kicked slowly and ran the numbers. A mile an hour and he'd be there in ten hours. A half-mile an hour and he'd reach sh.o.r.e in twenty. No problem. The sea was almost as hot as a bath, and it was just a matter of setting his mind to the task. Plus, he and Rene had the tide charts for the coast and he knew something else in his favor: the tides weren't evenly s.p.a.ced right now. Between four p.m. and the next morning, there would be a high tide at midnight, a brief low tide at two a.m., and then another high tide at eight a.m. Which meant that for twelve of the fourteen hours between four p.m. and the next morning, the water would be pus.h.i.+ng him toward the coast when he was the most tired.

It wasn't long until there was no more Rene on the overturned catamaran behind him. He knew that feeling from swimming off the coast of Maine every summer, how the sh.o.r.e behind you receded quickly even when the destination didn't seem any closer. And the Arafura Sea here was shallow. He ought to be able to stand, to touch the muddy bottom, when he was still a mile from sh.o.r.e. He rolled onto his back and kicked, long, slow, steady kicks, dragging the cans. He could hear his heart thumping and the sound of his own breathing.

He never would have said it out loud, but he carried a sense of destiny. A bigness. A self-confidence he was barely aware of. Twenty-three-year-olds don't think about death; life seems eternal, the same as when he would speed along the Maine Turnpike in his Studebaker doing eighty. Now was everything to a twenty-three-year-old. Plus, he was a Rockefeller. Sometimes it was a burden, sometimes a gift, but it defined him, even when he didn't want it to. "Can't" wasn't part of the family lexicon. Everything was possible. He had grown up being able to go anywhere, do anything, meet anyone. His great-grandfather had been the richest man in the world. His father was governor of the state of New York, had just run for president of the United States. In epic survival situations, will is everything, and Michael's was as big as a will could be. He carried a responsibility, every Rockefeller did, to do good things, big things, to make something of himself. "Stewards.h.i.+p" was the word the family used. He wasn't just swimming for his life. He was swimming for Rene, who needed to be rescued. He was swimming for his father, Nelson. For his twin sister, Mary. For the Asmat themselves, in a way, because he had collected so much of their beautiful art that he wanted to share with his father, with Robert Goldwater at the Museum of Primitive Art, with his best friend, Sam Putnam, with the world. He didn't exactly articulate this, he just knew it, felt it. So he swam and stroked and kicked with confidence. It was a big world, but he was in a bubble. Him and the sea, the big Arafura.

He wasn't in a hurry. Fear, panic, those were what killed people, made their minds crazy, frantic, exhausted precious energy. He remembered that from army basic training. And he even smiled a little, recalling how he and his Harvard cla.s.smates had rolled their eyes at the Widener swim-the requirement that every Harvard graduate complete a fifty-meter swim before graduation, stipulated by the mother of former alum Harry Elkins Widener, who'd died on the t.i.tanic, when she gave $2.5 million for the school's new library. This was a matter of steadiness. When he felt his calves starting to cramp, his shoulders tiring, he rested, floating, clinging to the gasoline cans, staring at the big sky full of s.h.i.+fting, changing clouds overhead. Luckily the wind and the sea were calm, and they grew calmer as the afternoon pa.s.sed. At sunset, the ocean was as still as a swimming pool on a summer's eve. He swam on. He thought about the exhibition he wanted to mount in New York. The feast poles twenty feet tall he'd collected-no one had ever seen anything like that in the United States before; they would dwarf anything else in his father's new museum. The stars came out, billions of them. Heat lightning flashed along the horizon. The moon rose, three days from full, and he wasn't in total darkness.

He swam on.

He wasn't sure where he was, but probably somewhere between the Faretsj and the Fajit Rivers, between the villages of Omadesep and Basim. By dawn there'd be people along the sh.o.r.e, for sure-they were always there fis.h.i.+ng. He was happy with how well he already knew these people; Asmat, this remotest corner of the world, had become his. His universe, an alternative world that he'd discovered, was untangling, and this swim to sh.o.r.e was like a baptism, deep in Asmat, and it would be a good story to tell. It was dark and had been for a long time when he saw strange reflections on the water. Behind him the sky lit, white, the light of phosph.o.r.escent flares dropping toward the sea. He saw them, but he didn't know what they were.

Around four a.m. the sky started to turn faintly purple, first light. Out here Michael could feel those subtle s.h.i.+fts. He had been swimming for eighteen hours, but it was almost done, he knew, if he could keep going. His waist was raw where the belt holding the floats was chafing. He was exhausted, but the dawn gave him some added strength. He could see the trees more clearly now. They were a dark line, but they were there. He rested again. Floated again. His whole body hurt. He was thirsty and hungry, and the salt water stung. He'd do anything for a long drink of cold, fresh water. He s.h.i.+vered. Best keep going. As the day got lighter, brighter, he got closer. He tried to touch bottom and he could. Barely. It was mud, though, slippery and sticky, and it was easier to swim. But he could stand and rest, and just knowing that was everything. He knew he would make it. He untied one of the empty gasoline cans and let it go; it was easier without it. He swam, he stood, he swam some more-on his back now, really the only way to make progress, even though it hurt. He was almost safe. Nipa palms and mangrove rose seemingly right from the water, and among them canoes, a flotilla of them nestled in the trees.

And men.

2.

November 20, 1961.

AN ASMAT ANCESTOR SKULL. THE LOWER JAW IS ATTACHED, INDICATING THAT THE DECEASED WAS NOT THE VICTIM OF A HEADHUNTING RAID.

THEY SAW HIM, fifty of them, resting in eight long canoes along the mouth of the Ewta River. It was six a.m. The sun was already rising above the trees, the saturated glow of the early morning tropics soon to be washed out by the stark tropical light. The tide was almost high, and there was no definitive sh.o.r.eline to speak of-just flooded, scattered shrubby trees where water and land came together and the swamp and dense jungle began. Here they could float in the shade, have a smoke with long cigarettes rolled in the yellow husk of nipa palm, and munch b.a.l.l.s of sago flour after a night of paddling toward home, just three miles up the Ewta.

"Look, an ew!" said Pep, in the Asmat language. A crocodile!

The men reached for their spears, ten feet long, carved with vicious, inch-long barbs, some of them tipped with the claw of a ca.s.sowary.

They watched the crocodile, which didn't move like any crocodile they'd ever seen before. Michael was swimming on his back, but he rolled over and saw the men and the canoes and smelled the smoke from their cigarettes and the smoldering coals nestled in mud at their sterns, and he waved, shouted. Unbelievable. He'd made it!

"No," said Fin, "it is a man!"

"Wo!" they grunted. Pep and Fin and Ajim and the others stood and bent forward at the waist and dug their long paddles into the water with powerful strokes, their canoe surging toward the swimming man. The other men in their canoes did the same. The canoes were forty feet long, narrow and low to the water, and some bore faded ochre and white vertical stripes. They surrounded him. Michael was smiling and panting, his beard wet, his lips chapped, blistered. Pep reached down and tried to pull him in, but Michael was too exhausted to help them. Fin and Pep held his arms and began towing him toward sh.o.r.e. They recognized him. In a world without photographs or writing, they had sharp memories, and they had seen him before; he had been in the village. His name was Mike.

The men in the canoes were black-skinned, strong-featured, with high cheekbones and holes in their septums the size of dimes. Beyond the occasional wild pig or human being, they ate no fat, no oil, and they didn't know sugar. Absent was the subcutaneous layer padding even thin Americans. They were hard muscle, vein, and skin, their chests and shoulders broad from a lifetime of paddling. Their waists were narrow, their abs ripped. They were naked but for tight, finely woven bands of rattan just above their knees and elbows and fiber bags decorated with the seeds of Job's tears and ca.s.sowary and c.o.c.katoo feathers. The bags of the older, more important men hung over their chests; those of the younger hung over their backs. Ajim's, Pep's, and Fin's bags hung over their chests, and their left wrists were bound in thick, six-inch-wide bracelets, protection against the powerful snap of the coa.r.s.e rattan strings of their seven-foot-long bow. Some had a carved pig bone through their septum.

Ajim looked at Pep. "Now is your chance," he said. It wasn't just a statement-it was a taunt. Ajim was the head of one of the five jeu, or men's houses, that made up the Asmat village of Otsjanep. He had killed more people than any of them, had taken more heads. He was quick of mind, fierce, bold, belligerent, full of pa.s.sionate extremes, and he'd earned his status through fearlessness and risk-taking. He exuded what the Asmat called tes, charisma.

Pep didn't hesitate. He was surrounded by relatives and fellow villagers, and his status was built on how bold he was, how many people he killed, how many heads he took. He howled and arched his back and drove his spear into the white man's floating ribs. Michael screamed, groaned a deep, inhuman sound. They hauled him up into the canoe, blood spurting from the wound. They knew what they were doing, had done it dozens of times before, were following sacred rules that prescribed every step of what they were about to do, rules that defined them. Made them men. Made them whole. For they were about to take his power, become him, and restore balance to the world.

The fifty men rowed south on the Arafura Sea, standing up in a line in each canoe, the most important men at the stern and bow, the places of hardest work. Their shoulders and triceps rippled; sweat poured off their chests and foreheads; their backs glistened in the sun. They sang, shouted "Wo! Wo! Wo!" as they clacked their paddles on the sides of the canoe and blew bamboo horns that sounded like eerie foghorns. They laughed. They chanted "Wo! Wo! Wo!" over and over again. They were filled with adrenaline and purpose, the white man's hot blood mixing with the water in the canoe, slos.h.i.+ng around their bare feet.

A few miles south of the Ewta River, they turned left, into a barely perceptible cut in the sh.o.r.eline. Here the ocean was silvery over the black mud, long banks of which ran along the sh.o.r.e. The jungle was thick green on all sides, nipa palm and mangrove roots like claws in the water. Flocks of sulfur-crested c.o.c.katoo flew overhead, screaming. The c.o.c.katoos ate fruit, and Pep and Fin and Ajim were like them, for they, too, ate fruit-human heads. Human heads were the fruit of men and powerful symbols of fertility, precious seeds that blossomed, grew, died, and from which new men sprouted.

As they turned into the inlet-a deserted, beautiful place with small white waves rolling in, the mud s.h.i.+ning in the sun and the river water brown, a place that had never seen an engine or a radio, a place where the spirits dwelled-they were about to acquire a powerful new seed: Michael Rockefeller's head.

There was no beach, just a brief sh.o.r.eline of thick, soft mud the color of ash. They dragged the white man out of the canoe and slapped him on his skull. "This is my head!" screamed Fin, as the others gathered around, shouting and taunting. Michael was limp, gravely injured, blood oozing from his mouth, matting his wet beard. Fin and Pep and Ajim held his chest off the ground and pushed his head forward and with one blow of an ax in the back of his neck, Michael Rockefeller was dead. Ajim turned him over and thrust into his throat with a bamboo knife, then pressed the head back until the vertebrae cracked. Man, pig, it was all the same now-Michael was sacred meat. As others gathered dead branches from the forest and lit them with coals from the canoe, Fin made a deep cut from Michael's a.n.u.s to his neck, through one side of his trunk to his armpit, across the collarbone to his throat, and down the other side, exactly as the ancestors had instructed them how to butcher a man. Blood ran everywhere, soaking their hands, clotting on their arms, spattering their legs. Flies too, buzzing and swarming by the thousands.

Fin broke Michael's ribs with an ax, put his hand underneath his sternum, ripped it loose, and put it aside. Ajim twisted his legs and arms and cut them off and then pulled out Michael's entrails with a vigorous jerk. Fifty voices chanted and sang in unison, a powerful, earthy rhythm that might have been the pulse of the mud and the trees themselves. It was sacred violence. The fire was crackling and smoking and hot, and the pieces of meat were placed in it to roast. When it was done, they pulled the charred legs and arms out of the fire, tore the meat off the bones, and mixed it with crumbly whitish-gray sago into long sticks for everyone to eat. Their hands were slippery with precious grease and fat, some of which they saved in small woven bags.

If this had been a normal killing of a fellow villager just a few years earlier, they would have taken the body back to the village for the elaborate, shameless ritual that should ensue. But times were changing. This was a white man, and this had to be done now, here, in secret. They held the head over the fire just long enough to scorch the hair. Fin took the burned hair and mixed it with the blood they'd saved, which they all smeared over each other's heads, shoulders, and bodies, even their a.n.u.ses. They were coated in Michael Rockefeller.

When the head was cooked, they scalped it, cut across its face from the root of the nose to the nape of the neck, and as they did this they talked about what Michael had been doing when he was alive.

"He was eating fish yesterday," said Pep.

"He was swimming," said Fin, "and now he is dead."

Ajim cut a hole about two inches in diameter into Michael's right temple with a stone ax. The ax had a name, a new one. Its name was Mike. They shook the brains out onto the leaf of a palm, sc.r.a.ped inside the skull with a knife to get every last bit, then mixed the ma.s.s with sago, wrapped the leaf up, and roasted it on the fire. This food was special. Only Pep, Fin, Ajim, and Dombai, the most senior men there, ate it. It tasted rich. It was hard to be full in Asmat, and they were all now full. Finally they could rest, sleep without fear. They wrapped the skull in banana leaves, tucked it into Fin's canoe, and paddled home.

3.

February 2012

AMATES, MANU, AND WILEM (FRONT TO BACK) IN THE LONGBOAT ON THE ARAFURA SEA.

WE CRESTED a wave, the thirty-foot, fibergla.s.s longboat slamming into a narrow trough. As the waters of the Arafura Sea crashed over me, I wondered if that was how Michael Rockefeller had died. The swells were short and steep, and my mind had been racing, picturing Michael as a victim of the sacred Asmat ritual of killing and butchering described in detail in the American Anthropologist in 1959. If they'd killed Michael, that was how it had been done.

If they'd killed him-that's what I was here to find out. Thankfully, the waves brought me back. We were taking them beam on, Wilem throttling up their faces before they could break, then decelerating to minimize the downward slam on the other side. He'd been bottle-fed on these waters, and he knew what he was doing, but the boat was becoming uncontrollable. It was just growing light; in Asmat you travel with the tides, and we'd left the village of Atsj at 3:30 a.m. The moon had been huge and full and so bright it was a dull sun in the darkness, making shadows off the trees and the bow waves silver. The Southern Cross had been directly overhead, as sharp as a string of Christmas lights. Small bats had jerked back and forth over the boat. Now, though, we were getting hammered on the open sea, with water pouring over the gunwales, and the beauty of the night had given way to terror. I crawled forward, reached under a plastic tarp, fumbled blindly for my duffel, found it, found the Ziploc bag holding the satellite phone, slipped it into my pocket, and was soaked by another wave.

I hadn't wanted to bring the phone, but at the last minute I'd thought how stupid it would be to die for want of a call. Had Michael Rockefeller had even a radio when his boat overturned in 1961, he never would have disappeared. It was as simple as that.

We were crossing the mouth of the Betsj River, off the southwest coast of New Guinea. Here, north of Australia, the Arafura rolls across a thousand miles and then hits the swamps of Indonesian Papua. Where the water ends and the land begins is hard to know. The Arafura is the color of pale opal, heavy with silt carried by a thousand brown rivers that course from central New Guinea's great mountains, jagged, steep sawteeth reaching sixteen thousand feet. The peaks trap the heavy, moisture-laden tropical clouds, and every rivulet feeds another and another, and they grow larger and intertwine and curve as the land flattens, and it flattens quickly, suddenly, and for a hundred miles to the sea this land is without a hill, a rock, or even a pebble.

The Arafura is an ocean of fifteen-foot tides, epic s.h.i.+fts of water, an invisible swelling that daily slides into this flat swamp. It inundates the land, which becomes a netherworld of water and trees through which you can navigate a canoe, as if you're floating within a hydroponic garden. Mangroves with tangled, mossy roots hang with vines and epiphytes. Stands of bamboo rise high and tight in green cl.u.s.ters. The fronds of prehistoric-looking nipa palms are thirty feet long and rustle in the breeze, their roots twisted and black and bulging. Towering ironwood trees grow out of water as brown as a strong cup of tea. When the tide runs out, it leaves behind great swaths of glistening mud so fine you sink up to your knees if you step in it. The mud feels as soft as liquid satin. And cool to your skin. It's alive with wiggling mudskippers and tiny yellow crabs the size of your fingernails.

From above, in an airplane, it is nothing but a flat, impenetrable green carpet cut with the interconnected veins of brown water snaking in every direction. From a boat or the banks of a river, the land is so flat the sky is always huge overhead, changing, full of layers and shapes, patches of blue mixed with angry pewter-colored clouds. Torrential curtains of rain fall from the sky, so much water in drops so big, hammering with such force, you can't believe the air could hold it all. Often the sun is s.h.i.+ning and it's raining at the same time. It's hot. Humid. Sometimes glimmeringly bright. Quiet, the sound of leaves rustling and water trickling, the plop of a fish jumping or a c.o.c.katoo's screech or the dip of a paddle. At night the stars are bold and bright, the Milky Way overhead as swirly white and thick as tapioca pudding. And even on those wonderfully clear nights heat lightning flashes along the horizon, as if somewhere out there big things are happening, just not here. The Arafura is a whole, big sea; sometimes it's flat and still and almost blue, and sometimes it's wild and angry, a steady hot wind pus.h.i.+ng it against the opposing current of river mouths three miles wide, creating a boiling turbulence. It feels primal. Biblical. Distant from everything.

Asmat is, in its way, a perfect place. Everything you could possibly need is here. It's a petri dish, teaming with shrimp and crabs and fish, clams and mussels and snails. Crocodiles fifteen feet long prowl its riverbanks, and jet-black iguanas sun on uprooted trees. In the jungle there are wild pig, the furry, possumlike cuscus, and the ostrichlike ca.s.sowary. And sago palm, whose pith can be pounded into a white, edible starch and which hosts the larvae of the Capricorn beetle, both key sources of nutrition. The rivers are navigable highways. There are flocks of brilliant red-and-green parrots. Hornbills with five-inch beaks and blue necks. White sulfur-crested c.o.c.katoo and coal-black king c.o.c.katoo sporting elaborate crests.

And secrets, spirits, laws, and customs born of men and women who have been walled off by ocean, mountains, mud, and jungle for longer than anyone knows.

Until fifty years ago, there were no wheels here. No steel or iron, not even any paper. Today there's still not a single road or automobile. In its ten thousand square miles, there's but one airstrip, and outside of the main "city" of Agats, there isn't a single cell tower.

The waves slammed and the boat rolled, and I tried to form a plan. The craft was fibergla.s.s; presumably it would float. Would I be able to climb anywhere out of the water enough to use the phone? Who would I call, and what would they be able to do if I reached them back in the United States in what was the middle of their night? For that matter, habituated to my cell phone, I didn't even know most people's numbers by heart anymore. We were nearing the southern mouth of the river, close to sh.o.r.e, but there wasn't really any sh.o.r.e-just flooded coastline and swamp. Could I climb one of the flimsy mangroves? And craziest of all, this was the exact spot that Rockefeller had been trying to navigate fifty years earlier.

He was twenty-three years old, just out of Harvard, the privileged son of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, seven months into the adventure of a lifetime that had transformed him from clean-cut student to scruffy photographer and art collector. One moment his boat was being tossed by the waves, just as ours was, and the next it was upside down. And then Rockefeller had swum for sh.o.r.e and was gone. Vanished, no trace of him or his body ever found, despite a two-week search involving s.h.i.+ps, airplanes, helicopters, and thousands of locals prowling the coasts and jungle swamps. The fact that such a simple, ba.n.a.l thing had happened to him made what was happening to us feel all the more real. There'd be no foreboding music. One bad wave and I'd be clinging to a boat in the middle of nowhere.

The official cause of Rockefeller's death was drowning, but there had long been a mult.i.tude of rumors. He had been kidnapped and kept prisoner. He had gone native and was hiding out in the jungle by choice. He'd been consumed by sharks or crocodiles. He'd made it to sh.o.r.e, only to be killed and eaten by the local Asmat headhunters. The story had grown, had become mythical. There had been an off-Broadway play about him, a novel, and a popular rock song, even a three-part television series in the 1980s hosted by Leonard Nimoy. I'd been fascinated with the story ever since I first saw a photo of Michael. In it he is bearded, kneeling, holding his thirty-five-millimeter camera under the close eyes of natives in what was then Dutch New Guinea, while working on a film in the highlands of the Great Baliem Valley. That film, Dead Birds, had been a groundbreaking and controversial ethnographic examination of a barely contacted, Stone Age culture that engaged in constant ritual warfare. The mountains, the mist, the naked men yelling and screaming and attacking each other with spears and bows and arrows, had fascinated and entranced me, as had the whole idea of contact between people from dramatically different worlds. In my twenties, I'd tried to get to what was then called Irian Jaya, but it was too expensive for my young budget, and I'd ended up, briefly, in Borneo instead. I had a photograph that mirrors the one of Rockefeller-we are about the same age, and I am holding my camera up to the eyes of a Dayak child in Indonesian Borneo.

I was a half-Jewish middle-cla.s.s mutt with a public education, not a blue-blooded scion, but Rockefeller's journey resonated with me. I knew what he was doing and why he was there, at least in part. It wasn't just to collect what was then called "primitive art," but to taste, smell, see, touch that world for himself. An older, less "civilized" world, one as different from his own as it was possible to find. An encounter with the Other. And I wondered if he, like me, wanted to know what the Other could say about him, about us. Whether he wanted not just to interact with it, but to see if these naked men whose pursuit of sacred heads that resulted in spectacular carvings might be a mirror of a younger, more elemental self, a self before all the complications of technology and civilization. To see if there might even be something Eden-like about it-a world before Eve tasted the apple. To see himself, Michael Rockefeller, before privilege and social convention. Were they the same, or different?

And how could he make his "primitive art"collecting father prouder than by going to its source and plunging in deeper than the forceful governor and presidential candidate had ever dreamed? Michael wouldn't just acquire primitive art from galleries or flea markets, but collect it from the creators themselves, understand it, introduce a whole new group of artists to the world.

I spent hours looking at that photo, wondering what Michael had seen and felt in Asmat, wondering what really happened to him, wondering if I might be able to solve the mystery. That he had been kidnapped or had run away didn't make sense. If he had drowned, well, that was that, except he'd been attached to flotation aids and no trace of his body had ever been found. As for sharks, despite their fearsome reputation, they rarely attacked men in these waters. Which meant that if he hadn't perished during his swim, there had to be more. Someone had to know something. And that "more" was the nightmare of every traveler-to be drawn to a place from which you never returned. There had to be some collision, some colossal misunderstanding. The Asmat were warriors drenched in blood, but Dutch colonial authorities and missionaries had been in the area for almost a decade by the time Michael disappeared, and the Asmat had never killed a white. If he had been murdered, it struck to the heart of a clash between Westerners and Others that had been ongoing ever since Columbus first sailed to the New World. I found it compelling that in this remote corner of the world the Rockefellers and their power and money had been impotent, had come up with nothing. How was that even possible?

Michael's disappearance was a mystery, and mysteries by their nature are open wounds, events without closure. We long to have answers, and the idea of vanis.h.i.+ng is particularly unsettling. The great existential questions, after all, are about who we are, where we come from, where we end up. Ceremonies, from birthdays to weddings to graduations to funerals, are rituals that address those questions in a public and symbolic way, a way that lets us process them, deal with them, accept the pa.s.sing changes of life and time. But Michael Rockefeller had vanished. Though his family had declared him dead, had held a memorial service for him, and maintained a gravesite on the family compound, there had been no body; no one could say with certainty what had happened to him, and no newspaper had ever run an obituary. A ghost was the spirit of a man or woman who'd died but couldn't move on, a death that had been unsettled. As a fellow traveler, a journalist who'd traveled frequently to the fringes of the world, who'd taken the bus across Afghanistan and encountered angry, jacked-up soldiers in the Congo and been in a hundred other crazy situations, I knew something had gone wrong, and I was unsettled, bothered, by the fact that we'd never known what. Michael Rockefeller was a sort of ghost. His twin sister, Mary, had spent her lifetime struggling with the grief and loss and lack of closure, a journey that had taken her from psychotherapy to healing ceremonies. Solving the mystery, I decided, wouldn't be just solving one of the world's most famous cold cases; it would be performing a ritual, telling the end of the story, bringing closure to a life.

I started poking around in Dutch colonial archives and the records of Dutch missionaries, and one doc.u.ment led to another. I found more than I'd ever imagined. After the s.h.i.+ps and planes and helicopters had gone home, new information surfaced in the weeks immediately after Michael disappeared, and a series of new investigations had taken place. There were pages and pages of reports, cables, and letters discussing the case and the events leading up to it, sent by the Dutch government, Asmat-speaking missionaries on the ground, and Catholic Church authorities, and none of it had ever been made public. Men who had been key partic.i.p.ants in those investigations had remained silent for fifty years, but they were still alive, and I found that they were finally willing to talk.

CRASH. ROLL. The wind was picking up, and even though we were nearing sh.o.r.e, Wilem couldn't find a rhythm. The waves were too choppy and steep and fast and close together. Wilem and Amates Owun, my translator and guide, conferred, then Amates said in his painstakingly slow English: "Many boats have problems here in the winter. But there is a bus here, under the water."

"A bus?" Half the time I couldn't figure out what Amates was talking about. It wasn't just his limited English, but his Asmat mind, which was privy to a world I could never enter or even know about. In the main Asmat town of Agats was a small but wondrous museum packed with ancestor poles, s.h.i.+elds, drums, spears, paddles, skulls, and masks. At night, to me, it was dark and locked tight, but to the Asmat the museum was filled with the cacophony of the drumming and chanting spirits who were embodied in the carvings there. So, a bus? There wasn't even a car or road within hundreds of miles, much less a bus.

"A bus, like with wheels that carries people?" I said.

Amates pointed toward the water with the stub of his right forefinger-the first two inches had been bitten off in a fight the month before. His face was narrow, his eyes close-set, with huge lips and the high cheekbones that characterize many Asmat. He was missing a few teeth, and those visible were brown from chewing betel nut. He was six feet tall, as thin as wire. I looked where he pointed and saw waves and sky and heavy black clouds and patches of blue, but no bus.

"Yes," he said. "The Bimpu Bis. It is a big bus that lives under the water right here, and when people have trouble it comes up and they ride it to sh.o.r.e. Many people have been saved by it. Michael Rockefeller did not know about this bus."

I lit a clove cigarette-we were all smoking incessantly-and gripped the satellite phone in my pocket like it was a talisman. I had no idea what Amates was talking about. I was s.h.i.+vering in the spray, and hungry-a diet of rice and stray bits of fish was never enough calories. I would do anything for a steak. My feet and legs were covered with red bites. We turned toward sh.o.r.e, surfing fast with the waves, and a narrow opening in the wall of swampy green appeared. The moment we entered the cut, the wind fell away. The water smoothed. I smelled smoke and p.i.s.s, the smell of men. We rounded a slight bend and another hundred yards ahead stood eight houses-palm-thatched roofs and walls, ten feet over the water on slender poles, each with a three-foot-wide veranda. Women, some naked from the waist, and children perched on one, men gathered on the one next to it. No one said anything; there was no greeting. It was always like this when I came to a village on my first trip to Asmat, no words exchanged as we slid up to the hut with the men. We tied up, I grabbed a pouch of loose-leaf tobacco and some rolling papers and clambered onto a porch made of split pieces of bamboo fastened with rattan. There wasn't a nail in the place. No running water. No power, no connection to anywhere else in the universe except by human touch and the distance over which a voice could shout. It was silent, only the sound of birds and those voices. The men on the veranda were s.h.i.+rtless and wearing battered gym shorts. I shook their hands, leathery and tough and dry, and they touched their hearts, a gesture picked up from Indonesia's Muslims. Wet and dirty and tired, I plunked down and pa.s.sed out the tobacco. We sat and smoked and stared into the new morning green. I had a thousand questions to ask, but no way to ask them.

4.

February 20, 1957

MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER AND HIS FATHER, NELSON, AT MICHAEL'S GRADUATION FROM HARVARD, JUNE 1960.

(Library of Congress) ON FEBRUARY 20, 1957, in a city of concrete and steel six thousand times bigger than the largest hamlet in Asmat, a village big man named Nelson Rockefeller introduced the world to a new kind of seeing. Temperatures in New York City peaked that day at thirty-seven degrees, and Rockefeller was dressed in the height of New York tribal finery: black tie. He was forty-nine years old, square-jawed, and ambitious, the grandson of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller. At Nelson's birth, which was announced on the front page of the New York Times, John D. was the richest man on earth, with a fortune estimated at $900 million. Nelson's wealth and political and social influence would be hard to comprehend for most Americans, let alone a tribe of hunter-gatherers. In one year he would become the governor of New York. In two he would run for the presidency. In 1974 he would become vice president of the United States under Gerald Ford.