Meanwhile, the sea had picked up. Ariffin tied the speedboat to the tanker’s railing and scrambled aboard to find the engine room. It was there, an hour later, that he got a frantic call from Lukman on the bridge. The missing crewman had escaped in their speedboat, stranding them on the tanker. Ariffin ran the Nepline Delima’s engines at full throttle trying to reach international waters, but even at top speed the tanker could make only about 12 miles an hour (19 kilometers). Within a few hours the Malaysian marine police had cut off their escape. Ariffin went up on the deck and lit a cigarette. “There was nothing to do,” he said. “Allah had his hand on that sailor.”

A guard signals that our time is up. I hurriedly tell Ariffin about my plans to visit Batam. The guard puts his hand on Ariffin’s shoulder. The prisoner squeezes the phone. For the first time, I notice his muscular forearms. He speaks quickly before the guard leads him away.

“He said go to the coffee shop behind the Harmoni Hotel,” says the interpreter. “Tell the seamen there that John Palembang said hello. And don’t forget about the toothbrush.”

Cinderella’s Dark Sister
“You want girls?” the cab driver asked on our way to Nagoya, one of Batam Island’s largest towns. “Drugs?” he caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “I can get for you. Everything. No problem.”

If Singapore, just seven miles (11 kilometers) to the north with its glittering skyline and robust economy, is Southeast Asia’s Cinderella, Batam is her dark sister. The two are located across from each other where the Malacca Strait feeds into the smaller Singapore Strait, and a ceaseless parade of ships, more than a thousand a week, passes between them. Most do business in Singapore, home to one of the world’s preeminent free ports and expanding financial and technology sectors.

In the 1980s Indonesia tried to mimic Singapore’s success and began to transform Batam, one of the Riau islands off Sumatra’s eastern coast, from a malaria-ridden fishing outpost into a tariff-free zone for entrepreneurs. Developers carved golf courses out of jungles and built casinos to lure tourists from Malaysia and Singapore. Investors backed factories and strip malls, office parks and apartment blocks. Indonesians flocked to boomtown Batam to find work. The island became a hub for maritime brokers, who hired sailors for shipping companies.