TAY HAD BEEN up half the night going through the photographs and he was getting a little sleepy. He briefly considered going home and taking a nap, but the idea of napping in the middle of everything that was going on struck him as unseemly. He decided instead to take an early lunch, then ended up spending most of it browsing in the massive Kinokuniya Book Store in Ngee Ann City rather than eating.
When he realized it was almost two o’clock, he bought a chicken sandwich and a latte from the Coffee Club inside Kino, had them packed to take away, and then ate in the cab on the way back to the Cantonment complex. The driver was an elderly Chinese man who complained bitterly the entire way that it was against the law for Tay to eat and drink in a taxi. Tay finally showed the old man his warrant card, informed him that he was the law, and told him to shut the hell up.
Tay had to admit that sometimes it felt good to throw his weight around, even if it was only at an elderly man and all he accomplished by it was to consume a sandwich.
***
Tay hadn’t been back in his office for much more than fifteen minutes when Sergeant Kang came in and settled wearily into one of the straight chairs in front of Tay’s desk. He looked vaguely defeated.
“Do you have any idea how many Tan’s there are in Singapore, sir?”
Tay didn’t, but he imagined it was a whole lot.
“The names you gave me are mostly common Chinese names, sir. We need some way to narrow down the possibilities.”
“Start with their age. The photos were all probably taken in the 1970’s. Anyone in them would have to be…” Tay paused to do the math. “At least 65 now. Maybe older.”
“Even then, sir, it could take days just to make up a list of possibilities. Then we’ll have to interview everyone on the list until we locate the people you’re looking for. How are we going to manage that without anyone finding out what we’re doing?”
“Are there any names that aren’t common?”
Kang rubbed at his cheek absentmindedly and looked at the list again.
“Well,” he said, “I thought maybe one of the Indian or Indonesian names might be a better shot for us, but they’re not. Did you know Suparman is one of the most common names in Indonesia?”
Tay hadn’t and, now that he did, he was certain he would promptly forget it.
“There’s one western name on here,” Kang continued. “Ethel Zimmerman.”
“Can you trace her?”
“I already have, but it’s not going to help. There was an Ethel Zimmerman who was a PR from 1972 to 1976.”
“That must be her. If she became a permanent resident in 1972, then that’s probably when my father hired her. Did she leave Singapore in 1976?”
“She left everywhere in 1976. She died.”
“Died? She must have been pretty young. What did she die of?”
“She was in an automobile accident.”
“Do you have the details of the accident?”
“Details? No, sir, but what does that have to do with anything?”
“And what about her family?”
“Sir?”
“Her family, Sergeant. Is her family still in Singapore? Husband? Children?”
“I don’t know, sir. But even if they were, what would they know that might help you?”
“I won’t know until I ask them, will I? Find out all you can about her family and get the details on the accident that killed her while you’re at it.”
Kang made some kind of a noise in the back of his throat. Tay wasn’t sure exactly what it was supposed to mean, but he certainly wasn’t going to ask.
***
Tay looked at his watch and saw it was almost three. If the border crossing into Malaysia was busy, he’d just make his five o’clock meeting with August.
“I’ve got to go,” he told Kang.
“You want me to come with you, sir?”
“No, it’s…ah, personal. You remember Lucinda Lim, don’t you?”
Tay and Lucinda Lim had been going out on and off for years. She was beautiful, wealthy, and much in demand. Tay was…well, a policeman. And that pretty much told the story of their relationship.
Kang smiled. “Good for you, sir.”
He made it sound like he was cheering Tay on at a football match.
Tay looked at his watch again as pointedly as he could. “Well…”
“Oh right, sir,” Kang said jumping out of his chair. “Then I’ll just get on with it. You’ll be coming in late tomorrow then, I expect?”
Kang was grinning like an idiot by now and Tay didn’t bother to answer him. He just pointed to the door, and Kang left, still grinning, closing it behind him.
Tay hated lying to Kang, especially after the conversation they had that morning, but he had no intention of telling him about John August. He had no intention of telling anybody about John August.
Of course, he hadn’t exactly lied, had he? Wasn’t it Henry Kissinger who first said he was simply being economical with the truth?
Tay said he had a meeting, which he did. And then he asked Kang if he remembered Lucinda Lim, which of course he would. Tay hadn’t actually made any explicit connection between the two, had he? He certainly hadn’t said he was meeting Lucinda. If Kang had come to that conclusion…well, that was all just in his own mind, wasn’t it?
Tay reflected for a moment on his extraordinary facility for self-justification and realized he was looking at it with an odd mix of embarrassment and pride. Tay wondered briefly if he shouldn’t consider becoming a lawyer after he retired from the police force.
***
Tay went downstairs and checked out a car from the pool. It was a Volvo V70 that wasn’t too badly beaten up and didn’t smell too overwhelming of dried chilies and nasi goreng. He drove first to Emerald Hill to pick up the two photo albums. Then, in a little less than a half hour, he was headed north on the CTE.
The six-lane concrete ribbon called the CTE would take him to another six-lane concrete ribbon called the SLE. Singaporeans loved acronyms. Sometimes Tay thought if his fellow countrymen were required to speak using complete words instead of initials they would be struck entirely dumb. And that was not, in his view, an entirely unappealing prospect to contemplate.
JB was more or less directly across the Jahor Strait from the Woodlands and it wouldn’t take someone more than twenty minutes to get from one to the other unless border traffic was backed up. Did that mean anything? Probably not, Tay decided after thinking about it for a few more minutes, but he made a mental note anyway to have Kang get a list of foreigners who had entered Singapore over the causeway in the twenty-four hours before their corpse with the broken neck was found. It would probably be a waste of time, but then maybe it wouldn’t. Perhaps the name that went with his corpse would be on that list. It was just possible, he thought, to hope for such things.
***
The further north Tay drove, the gloomier the day became. Over Singapore the sky was a pastel blue, so bright with sun that all the color had very nearly been washed out of it. But to the north, dark clouds marbled the sky and the light turned gray. The Jahor Strait was wrinkled with wind and Tay could smell the brawny odor of a storm somewhere to the west. JB lay ahead of him at the end of the causeway. It looked cheerless and morose, badly disappointed that it wasn’t Singapore.
It took Tay another hour to get to the Premium Outlet Center which was off the Kuala Lumpur highway to the north. When he saw the big green overhead sign, he exited the expressway and found himself in a spacious parking lot with ample spaces for hundreds of cars neatly laid out among islands of landscaped palm trees so perfect they looked as if they were made of plastic. Tay had never been to Southern California but, if he had, he was nearly certain it would look exactly like the Premium Outlet Center in Jahor Bahru.
The center itself was low-slung and built in an architectural style that was obviously meant to appear cheerful and happy and encourage people to buy things, but Tay thought it mostly evocative of a child run amuck with paper and crayons. The signs were all large and their bright primary colors screamed out the names of the usual suspects: Armani, Nike, Salvatore Ferragamo, Coach, Lacoste, Brooks Brothers, Gap, Guess, Burberry, and Timberland. The place was, for Tay, Exhibit A in the homogenization and decline of contemporary culture.
The Polo logo was so familiar even Tay spotted the big blue sign right away and parked the Volvo directly in front of it. He collected the two photo albums and went inside. He was more than a little curious what he would find.
John August was a hard man among hard men. It was beyond the limits of Tay’s imagination to picture August hanging around a clothing store in an outlet mall.