WHEN TAY GOT to his office at the Cantonment Complex the next morning, Sergeant Kang was waiting for him.
“I’ve got something on that accident for you, sir.”
It took Tay a moment to figure out what Kang was talking about since he had never been at his best first thing in the morning, but then he remembered he had asked Kang to find out about the accident in which Ethel Zimmerman had been killed back in 1976.
“Does that mean you don’t have anything on any of the other names I gave you?”
“They’re all such common names, sir, and it’s been nearly forty years. I just don’t see how—”
“All right, Sergeant. Don’t whine. Just tell me what you’ve got for me.”
Kang flipped a few pages in his notebook.
“Well, sir, the accident was on October 12, 1976. Ethel Zimmerman was driving a 1973 Mercedes north on Woodlands Centre Road toward the causeway. She—”
“She was headed for the Woodlands?”
“No, sir. It looks to me like she was headed to the causeway to JB. The Woodlands Centre Road was the old road to Malaysia until the new Woodlands checkpoint was opened and then they—”
“Never mind about all that, Sergeant. What happened to Ms. Zimmerman.”
“It’s hard to tell all that much from the report, sir. All it says is the car went out of control and hit a tree. She was dead when the first fast response car got there.”
“Was anyone with her?”
“No, sir.”
“What time was the accident?”
Kang glanced back at his notebook again. “According to the report, a call came in just after 11:00 pm. The first fast response car didn't get there until 11:27 pm.”
“That doesn’t sound like a very fast response to me.”
Kang said nothing.
“What were the road conditions?” Tay asked
“I don’t recall anything special in the report, sir. I guess they were normal.”
“Don’t guess, Sergeant. Find out.”
“Sir, how am I supposed to find out—”
“I’m sure you’ll think of a way. After all, you’re a highly trained detective, aren’t you?”
Kang fidgeted in his chair and looked uncomfortable.
“Out with it, Sergeant. What’s on your mind.
“Well, sir, why are you so interested in this? It was just an ordinary one-car accident that happened nearly forty years ago.”
Tay ignored Kang’s question and asked another of his own instead. “What did you find out about her family?”
Kang looked at Tay for a moment, then shifted his eyes back to his notebook.
“Her husband died in 1982 of a heart attack. One daughter, born 5 November 1965. Never married. She’s still living here in Singapore.”
Tay’s eyebrows went up. That was a lucky break. He figured he was entitled to a break every now and then, but was always mildly surprised when he actually got one.
“Do you have an address? A telephone number?”
Kang ripped a page out of his notebook and passed it across the desk. Tay could have thanked him and congratulated him on his good work in tracking down Ethel Zimmerman’s daughter, but he didn’t.
“One other thing, Sergeant,” he said instead. “That Woodlands apartment is only a few minutes from the causeway to JB. Get me a list of all the male foreigners who entered Singapore over the causeway during the twenty-four hours immediately before the body was found.”
Kang closed his notebook and gave Tay a baleful look. But he didn’t say a word.
***
When Kang had gone, Tay looked again at the page from Kang’s notebook and read what was written there. Laura Anne Zimmerman, followed by an address he thought was somewhere out near Holland Village, and a telephone number.
Why did he think talking to this woman was going to be any help at all? Her mother had worked in his father’s office nearly forty years ago, it was true, but she had been only a child when her mother died. What did he expect her to remember? He had been almost exactly that same age when his father died, and he could remember next to nothing about him.
Tay was beginning to get a sickening feeling this was just a wild goose chase. Was he pursuing the idea of talking to this woman just because he didn’t have any other ideas to pursue, or did he really think it might get him somewhere? Tay had to admit he wasn’t absolutely sure. Maybe if he went outside and had a cigarette everything would become clearer.
Probably not, but he was going to do it anyway.
Tay put the page from Kang’s notes into the center drawer of his desk, collected his Marlboros and some matches, and headed for the elevator.
***
As Tay walked north on New Bridge Road away from the Cantonment Complex, he shook a Marlboro out of the pack. He stopped, turned his body to block the breeze from the south, and lit it with a match from a box he always carried. The act of smoking had been stripped of all dignity by the public nannies who gloried to instructing everyone how to live, and it was Tay’s self-conscious act of rebellion against that always to have a box of real matches on him. Not a matchbook of cardboard imitations matches, not a plastic lighter, but a box of actual matches made of real wood and sulphur. It didn’t matter to the cigarette what he lit it with, he knew, but it damn well mattered to him.
New Bridge Road led Tay straight into Chinatown, which was a place where he particularly enjoyed the occasional stroll. He had always been slightly bemused that an essentially Chinese city like Singapore had a neighborhood called Chinatown, but then he assumed that had been done mostly to attract tourists.
If it had, it certainly worked. Singapore’s Chinatown was thronged year round with camera-wielding crazies of what Tay thought to be extraordinary girth and uncertain origins. For that reason, he generally avoided Temple Street with its rows of preserved shophouses, the ground floors of which all seemed to be filled with Chinese restaurants that Tay assumed sold sweet and sour pork by the barrel. Instead, when he went out for a walk he generally turned left on Pearl Hill Terrace and climbed slowly up the slight hill between the People’s Park Complex and Pearl Hill Park.
While he made the climb this time, he thought about what he had so far, and what it meant.
***
First of all, of course, he had a dead man who looked to be in his sixties, and the dead man had a key to a safety deposit box stuck up his ass. In the safety deposit box, Tay had found the accounts with his father’s initials, and that had led him to search his father’s old things and discover the photograph of his father with the dead man, apparently taken in Saigon just before the city fell to the North Vietnamese.
John August had taken one look at the picture and identified his victim as an old-time smuggler everyone called Johnny the Mover, a man who apparently worked for decades for some branch of American intelligence — maybe all the branches, for all Tay knew — and who had presumably retired years ago.
But even John August couldn’t identify the third person in the photograph: the umbrella man. At least he had told Tay he couldn’t. Tay didn’t know whether to believe him or not.
Tay’s father had been dead nearly forty years now. And Johnny the Mover had been found on the floor of a shabby apartment in the Woodlands, just as dead, barely a week ago. The only person Tay could identify who had worked with his father was dead as well. The accident sounded suspicious as hell to Tay, but what did it mean even if he was right about that? Was he really thinking somebody had killed his father, then a year later had killed Mrs. Zimmerman, and then forty years later had killed Johnny the Mover? Good Lord, what sense did that make?
It was beginning to feel like a long shot to Tay that the umbrella man, whoever he was, was still alive. It was beginning to feel like no one involved this case was still alive.
Tay dropped his cigarette, ground it out with the toe of his shoe, and kicked the butt into the gutter. That was probably against the law in Singapore — almost everything else was — but right at that moment he truly didn’t give a damn. He turned around, jammed his hands in his pockets, and started walking slowly back to the Cantonment Complex.
***
There was a connection of some kind between Tay’s father and the dead man. Tay had no doubt of that. But what kind of a connection was it? And had Tay ever met the victim? He had no idea. None. Even if he had met him once when he was a child, what good would that do him now in trying to figure out who had killed him forty years later?
Then there was the other feeling Tay had, and it was what was really driving him.
Johnny the Mover was somehow connected to the bombings.
Tay had absolutely nothing to support his feeling, but the sudden appearance of ISD in his office accompanied by an American spook had left him with no doubt that it was true.
It certainly seemed more than possible. The man had been killed at about the same time the explosions were ripping apart the Marriott, the Hilton, and the Hyatt. His body had been found in an apartment near the border a few days later, one that lay on the most direct route out of the country.
Tay was so startled to realize where that line of reasoning was taking him that he abruptly stopped walking. An elderly Chinese woman ran into him from behind with her shopping basket and started muttering what Tay took to be curses in some obscure Chinese dialect. He muttered his apology and stepped out of the woman’s way.
Tay lit another Marlboro and thought some more.
If he was thinking Johnny the Mover was somehow connected to the bombings, and his father had known Johnny the Mover, then was he thinking his father was somehow connected to the bombings, too? No, that was nonsense. Just because his father had known someone forty years before, and then that man had done something terrible forty years later, it didn’t mean his father had any connection with it. Well, not really. His father did have a connection, he supposed, in the broadest sense of the word, but certainly not in the sense of sharing any degree of responsibility for what Johnny the Mover had done. If he had done anything.
All that brought Tay right back to where he had started. He knew of only one person who might understand what the connection actually was. That was the umbrella man. And Tay didn’t have a damned clue how to figure out who the umbrella man was.
So what was Tay’s very best idea at the moment?
He was thinking of asking the daughter of a woman who used to work for his father if she had known either Johnny the Mover or the umbrella man, which really didn’t make that much sense since, when the woman’s mother died, she had been about the same age Tay had been when his father died. He was already up to his ass in dead people and children who didn’t know anything about them. What good was one more going to do him?
Still, it was all he had, wasn’t it?
Tay dropped his cigarette, ground it out with his foot, and started walking briskly back to his office to retrieve the page of notes Kang had given him. It sounded crazy, even to him, but he was going to call Laura Anne Zimmerman and arrange to talk to her. He would ask her what she remembered about the people her mother had worked with, including his father.
If she remembered nothing, she remembered nothing. But he had no other ideas at the moment, so why not ask?