ACCORDING TO TAY’S alarm clock, the numerals of which were glowing in a shade of green that some idiot apparently thought was soothing, it was 3:00 am exactly.
Tay woke up with a conviction at the forefront of his mind that he now knew something he had not known before. He just didn’t know what it was.
He rolled onto his side to get away from the sickly green glow coming from his alarm clock and tried to go back to sleep, but he soon realized that wasn’t going to happen. His mind was racing to bring something into focus. But like a dream, it hung somewhere just out of reach.
A dream?
It flashed across Tay’s mind that perhaps his mother had appeared to him again and slipped him one of those cheat sheets she kept pushing at him, but he didn’t think so. He generally remembered when he dreamed about his mother, and he always remembered when she claimed to be tipping him off about something. Unless, of course, he hadn’t remembered at all, in which case he wouldn’t know he had forgotten, would he?
Tay’s head was spinning so fast he thought he might never sleep again, so he pushed himself upright in bed, propped his back against the headboard and tried again to focus on whatever it was that was working at him.
He thought for a minute more about his mother…
And, suddenly, there it was.
***
Tay jumped out of bed and put on a robe. Pulling the belt tight around him and tying it in a bow, he went downstairs to the kitchen and got the pitcher of cold water from the refrigerator. He poured himself a glass and sat at his kitchen table. Before he had finished drinking the water, he knew exactly what was on his mind.
Up in one of the spare bedrooms where he never went anymore, were two old trunks filled with things his mother had left behind when she moved to New York. For years Tay had been telling himself he would throw them out, but he never did. Eventually, he more or less forgot all about them.
Until about twenty minutes ago. When he was fast asleep.
And that was when he remembered the things his mother had left included some photographs he hadn’t looked at in nearly forty years. Photographs of his father, the place he used to work, and the people he worked with.
If he could find a way to identify any of those people, if they were still alive, if he could locate them now, they might have some idea why his father’s initials were on those ledger sheets in the HSBC safety deposit box.
A lot of if’s.
But it was a place to start.
He wondered briefly if his mother had tipped him off about the photos in a dream, but he quickly dismissed the whole concept as far too wobbly to think about at 3:00 am and decided to make some coffee and get to work.
***
Tay measured coffee into the filter of the coffeemaker, poured in some water, and went upstairs while it was dripping. He changed into a t-shirt and a wrinkled pair of khakis and, by the time he got back downstairs, the coffee was ready. He filled up a white ceramic mug, drank half of it straight down purely for medicinal purposes, then refilled the mug and trudged upstairs again.
This time he turned the opposite way, went all the way to the end of the hall, and entered a small bedroom in the back of the house he didn’t think he had been in for years. He flipped on the light and was pleased to see the room was neat and clean. His housekeeper, an elderly woman from Indonesia, was almost as obsessive as he was and had obviously been cleaning the room religiously whether he went into it or not.
The room had been used for storage for as long as he could remember, probably even back when his father had been alive and he had been a child and they had all lived in this house like a normal family. Well…normal might be overdoing it a bit, but this was hardly the time to dig up those bones.
Now the room looked like a used furniture store, if there was any such thing as a used furniture store anymore. Chairs, upholstered and plain; cabinets of various description; at least half a dozen tables; lamps, mostly with ceramic bases, sitting on every flat surface; and over against one wall, the two black steamer trunks banded in bronze metal strips that Tay remembered.
Tay put his coffee mug on a small mahogany table against the wall, pulled up a straight chair, and then opened the lid of the first trunk. It took him a while to work his way through it, but when he had finished he had found nothing but women’s clothing. It all belonged to his mother, he presumed. Still, none of it looked familiar, but then he couldn’t describe what Dr. Hoi was wearing when he saw her two days before so he guessed it was pretty obvious he wouldn’t recognize clothes his mother wore several decades ago.
Had he been wrong about the photographs? He piled the clothes back into the trunk, closed the lid, and sat on the straight chair for a minute sipping his coffee which was now lukewarm. No, he was sure he wasn’t wrong. The photographs were either in the other truck or they were somewhere else in this room. He was sure of it.
***
He put down his coffee mug and opened the second trunk, and he saw immediately that it was filled with things that had belonged to his father. There were some clothes, but most of the space was taken up with stacks of ledger books, piles of neatly labeled file folders, and — right there on top, underneath a double-breasted blue blazer folded in half — two green leather photo albums.
Tay lifted the two albums out, sat back down in the straight chair, and piled them on his lap. When he opened the cover of the first one, he saw neatly mounted on each page rows of postcard-sized photographs of people at an office. The color photos were faded, some of the ones that looked like old-fashioned Polaroids were even too dim to make out, but the black and whites were crisp and clear.
Tay popped one photo out of its mounts and turned it over. Sure enough, he found exactly what he was hoping for. Someone had written a date on the back of the photograph in pencil, and beneath it were four names.
As soon as he saw the writing on the back of the photograph, it gave him another idea. He put the albums on the floor and picked up one of the ledger books at random. When he opened it, he found page after page of hand-written accounts, although he had no idea what they were accounts for. He flipped slowly through the book’s pages, skimming each of them quickly, and about a dozen pages in he found exactly what he was looking for.
DST.
The initials were penciled in the margin next to a column of figures that had been totaled.
DST.
His father’s initials.
Tay had no idea what the accounts were or why his father’s initials were on them, but that wasn’t the point.
What really mattered was the handwriting looked exactly the same as the initials he had found on the ledger sheets in the HSBC safety box. If Tay still had any doubt there was some connection between the dead man and his father, he had it no longer. He just didn’t have the first idea what that connection could possibly be.
***
Tay opened one of the photo albums and leafed through it. There must have been forty or fifty photographs in all. His father was in several, but most were of people he didn’t know doing things that didn’t look very interesting. They had all been taken in what looked to be the same office and they were all images of people working at desks or drinking coffee from big ceramic mugs. The subjects were mostly men, but there were a few women, too. Judging by the mode of dress and the haircuts, Tay guessed the photos had all been made in the late sixties or early seventies, but he couldn’t be sure. He assumed the office was his father’s office there in Singapore, but he couldn’t be certain of that either.
The very ordinariness of the photographs made him wonder. Why would anyone have taken them? And why would his father have kept them at all, let alone mounted neatly and with such obvious care in an expensive leather photo album.
He laid the first album on the floor and picked up the second. The photographs in the second album were entirely different. The first one even looked somewhat official. In it, his father and three other men were formally posed in somebody’s office standing next to an American flag hanging from a staff set in a heavy-looking metal base. What kind of an office had an American flag in it? Then Tay remembered his meeting with the American ambassador at the embassy in Singapore. The ambassador’s desk had been flanked with an American flag on one side and some other kind of flag he didn’t recognize on the other, so an ambassador’s office was certainly one possibility. No doubt, Tay reminded himself, there were a lot of other possibilities as well.
The rest of the photos had mostly been taken outdoors somewhere. While the place looked Asian, Tay did not think it was Singapore. Most of the photographs were of his father, and in many of those he was with a stunningly beautiful girl who looked to be not more than twenty. She was clearly Asian, perhaps Laotian or Vietnamese, Tay guessed. In every photograph the woman was simply but elegantly dressed in western clothes.
The attachment between this girl and his father was plain to Tay. As he turned the pages of the album, he could not help but wonder if his mother had seen these photographs. Of course she had seen them, he reminded himself. How else would these albums have gotten into the trunk?
Tay had a feeling that all the pictures had been made in Vietnam, although he couldn’t put his finger on the specific reason he thought so. From his father’s age and appearance, he would guess they had been take about 1974 or 1975, right before his father had his heart attack. Could the office with the flag be the office of the American Ambassador to Vietnam? Tay went back and examined that photograph again. He had read several photo histories of the Vietnam War and, although he couldn’t remember the name of the American ambassador right off the top of his head, he thought he would recognize him if he saw him. He was pretty sure none of the people in the photograph with his father was the American Ambassador to Vietnam during that period.
Besides, what would his father be doing posing with the American Ambassador to Vietnam in the years right before Saigon fell? His father wasn’t a diplomat or a soldier. His father was just an accountant. Unless the Americans hoped to bury the North Vietnamese in ledger sheets, he didn’t see what use they would have for his father.
Tay was still thinking about that, and still feeling a certain amount of embarrassment knowing what his mother must have felt when she saw the photos of his father with this very young woman, when he came to the final page of the album and the world tilted sideways.
***
The last page held a single black-and-white photograph, a 5x7 print mounted in four white photo corners. There were three young men in the shot standing against what looked like a concrete wall. At the far left edge of the photograph was what might have been the beginning of a gate constructed of metal bars set close together. All three men were dressed plainly in dark slacks and light-colored, short-sleeved shirts. Their arms where looped informally around each other in the way friends did when they posed together for photographs. None of that was remarkable.
What was remarkable was that Tay recognized two of the men immediately.
The first man he recognized was the one on the right side of the photograph. It was his father.
Tay knew his memories of his father’s appearance were not really his own. He had been far too young when his father died to have many memories of anything and so many years had passed since then that the few he had were dimmed like old photographs from which decades of sunlight had bleached out all the color and detail.
He knew he recognized his father at all only because seeing him in other photographs had created the illusion of memory. And it was in that illusion where Tay found the only real knowledge of his father that he realized he would ever have. With that thought, a wave of sadness washed over Tay and he sat and waited for it to pass. Then he turned his attention to the second man he recognized, the man in the center of the photograph.
It was the dead man from the Woodlands.
Thirty or thirty-five years younger and forty pounds lighter, but it was the man whose body they had found in that shabby Woodlands apartment. Tay had no doubt about it.
He didn’t recognize the third man, the one on the left, so he pulled the photograph from its mounts and turned it over. To his disappointment, there was nothing on the back.
Tay turned the photograph over again and studied the third man once more. Had he ever seen him before? No, Tay didn’t think he had.
The man was very tall and slightly stooped. He wore very dark aviator-shaped sunglasses with metal frames and his dark hair was trimmed very short, so short he looked almost military and, for all Tay knew, he was. Like his father, the third man had one arm looped familiarly around the shoulders of the dead man from the Woodlands. But where his father’s free arm was lifted in a sort of half wave at the camera, the other man’s free hand held an umbrella.
The umbrella was open and the man’s arm was extended above his head and across his body so that the umbrella appeared to shelter both him and the man from the Woodlands. Yet he was wearing sunglasses, and it wasn’t raining.
Perhaps the man holding an open umbrella on a sunny day was the source of the hilarity that was responsible for the broad grins all three men were sporting.
But what was the joke?
And, more important, who in the world was the umbrella man?
***
Three hours later, when the rest of Singapore was only beginning to wake to the new day, Tay had finished his task.
He had taken both albums downstairs to his kitchen table and drunk more coffee while he carefully examined every photo in both of them. Tay had searched each face in every photograph, staring long and hard at each until he was sure, but he found no further trace of either his corpse from the Woodlands or the umbrella man. Their only appearance in his father’s memories seemed to be that single 5x7 print mounted on the final page of the album.
When Tay found names written on the back of any of the photographs, he jotted them on a pad. Most of those from the office had names on the back, but almost none from the Asian location did. In particular, the backs of photographs in which his father posed with the beautiful young woman about whom Tay was now very curious were all frustratingly blank.
Tay looked at his pad and reviewed the sixteen names he had accumulated. None of them meant anything to him, but he hadn’t expected them to. He had been only twelve when his father died. He couldn’t remember anyone his father knew or had worked with.
Tay did remember going to his father’s office a few times. It had been in a white shophouse with green iron balconies that was down at the end of a narrow alley just off of Bugis Street. That had once been a notorious part of Singapore, world famous for the transvestite prostitutes who strutted their wares up and down the sidewalks every evening, but both his father’s office and Bugis Street itself had long ago been bulldozed by the faceless men who struggled tirelessly to bury Singapore’s past and construct on its ruins a fully sanitized future.
Tay went to the sink and rinsed out both his mug and the coffee pot. Then he ripped the page with the list of names off the pad and went upstairs to take a shower.
It was time to get to the Cantonment Complex. He had a lot to do.