A VIOLENT STORM swept through Singapore that night pushing curtains of rain across the city. Gusts of wind bent and twisted the banana trees in Tay’s garden so violently that the big leaves slapping out the rhythm of the storm against his bedroom windows waked him repeatedly from an uneasy sleep. Lightening cracked and thunder boomed. Singapore felt like a city under siege.
Tay finally gave up tossing and turning and dragged himself out of bed when it was barely light. He felt more tired than he had the night before, but he made some coffee anyway and took a cup out to the garden to inspect the broken stalks of his banana trees.
The dawn was electric. Tay thought that if every day in Singapore began like this he might even become an early riser. There was a coolness to the air and a dim golden light painted the pastel shophouses of his neighborhood with a warmth he could never recall seeing before in the hard, white light that was Singapore’s usual lot.
So energized was Tay by the delights of the morning he decided to walk to the Coffee Bean on Orchard Road for breakfast. He showered and dressed as quickly as he could. He didn’t want to waste a moment of the brief breath of coolness the morning had brought.
Tucking in his shirt, he turned sideways and looked in the mirror. His stomach was larger than it had been the last time he had looked, wasn’t it? He was pretty sure it was, but by how much? He still had that bicycle he had ridden once or twice the last time he had been overcome by a burst of healthy living. Maybe it was time to haul it out again.
Tay was nearly fifty, and every time he thought about that he found it hard to believe. He had begun to ask himself sometimes how many years he had left. It was not a morbid question, just one of fact. At fifty, he was unquestionably closer to the end of his life than he was to the beginning. But how much close was he? He wasn’t obsessing about death, he told himself. He was merely curious. Still, he had to admit he had been thinking about death quite a lot recently. For some reason, every time he sat on the toilet he thought about death. Taking a crap had become a Woody Allen movie for him. Maybe he was obsessing just a little.
***
Tay left his house and walked up to Orchard Road. The smell of honey roasted chestnuts drifted from a stainless-steel food cart tended by a young, dark-skinned girl with a large silver ring in her nose. Propped against the front of the cart, a hand-lettered signed announced the price as two dollars a dozen. That seemed very cheap to Tay and the roasting nuts smelled so good in the cool morning air he would have stopped and bought a dozen or two, but something put him off and he kept walking. Was it the ring in the girl’s nose that had done it? Yes, probably it was. He was a little embarrassed to admit it, even to himself, but he had no doubt that was exactly what put him off.
At the Coffee Bean he got a large black coffee and two apple fritters which had been warmed to exactly the right temperature. While he ate, he thought about Paraguas Ltd and Johnny the Mover and the umbrella man and his father. He didn’t really want to think about any of them — the morning was far too nice to spoil by sliding back into that swamp — but they were all hovering somewhere out there just over his shoulder. A Greek chorus that refused to speak to him.
Tay tried to divert himself for at least a few minutes by listening to the conversations he could hear around him, but that wasn’t much fun either. The staccato rhythms of spoken English in Singapore were anything other than the soothing sounds Tay would have preferred at that hour. English words in Singapore were not really spoken at all, but hurled and spit. Many Singaporeans spoke Mandarin at home, and Tay had always assumed that was why Singaporeans spoke English the way they did. They used English words, after a fashion, but they spoke them with Mandarin tones and inflections. No wonder tourists mostly looked confused.
When Tay finished his coffee and apple fritters he wanted a cigarette, of course, but he didn’t particularly want to go stand outside on the sidewalk, which was the only place he was allowed to smoke. He was trying to quit — well, at least he was thinking about trying to quit — but the more difficult the government made it for him to smoke the more determined he became to keep doing it. And this was yet one more time he wasn’t going to let the bastards stop him.
He swept up his empty cup and his paper plate and dumped them in a trash bin, then he went outside and found a spot in the cooling colonnade that separated the row of shops where the Coffee Bean was located from the bottom of Orchard Road. Concrete archways every twenty or thirty feet, a wide tiled walkway, and two or three steps under every arch to trip the unwary.
Taking a new pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket, Tay felt the cellophane between his fingers and listened to it crinkle as he rolled it into a ball between his thumb and forefinger. He slit the package with his thumbnail, tore back the top, and inhaled the sudden whiff of tobacco that emerged. It was all part of the process, all part of what he loved. Tay shook out a cigarette and lit up. After taking a deep draw, he leaned back against one of the archways, exhaled, and looked around him.
There were three other smokers near him, all male, and all of them to his eye looking vaguely guilty. A black plastic sign on a chrome stand sat in the colonnade near the entrance to the Coffee Bean. It issued its crisp orders in white, block-printed type that read, It Is Illegal to Smoke Beyond This Point.
Tay looked at an elderly Chinese man not far from him who was just finishing his cigarette.
“I blame the Americans for this,” Tay said. “I really do. The pricks.”
The man glanced at Tay, dropped his butt, and hurried away without replying.
Tay shrugged and went back to his own cigarette.
By the time he had finished it and ground out the butt on the sidewalk, he had decided exactly what he was going to do.
He hurried to a taxi stand about fifty yard east down Orchard Road where the line was mercifully short. Within ten minutes he was in the back of a taxi and on his way to the Cantonment Complex.
***
“We’re going to reopen the Mayling Aw case,” Tay told Sergeant Kang.
Kang shifted his weight in the uncomfortable chair in front of Tay’s desk, looking every bit as puzzled as Tay had expected him to.
“But, sir—”
“Just hear me out, Robbie.”
Tay told Kang about his summons to ISD, Goh’s pronouncement that the Woodlands case was being closed as a suicide, and his subsequent meeting with their boss at which the SAC seemed to say he would look the other way if they continued investigating the case anyway.
He did not tell Kang about his trip to JB or the message from one of John August’s people about him being under surveillance by ISD. And he certainly didn’t tell Kang the reason August claimed he was under surveillance by ISD. It wasn’t a matter of trust. It was just that he couldn’t tell Kang any of those things without telling him who John August was, and he wasn’t going to do that.
Tay had never told anyone about August, and doubted he ever would. His boss had guessed that he knew someone who knew a lot of things, probably someone in American intelligence, but he had no idea who it was. Actually, to be honest, Tay wasn’t sure he knew who it was either. He didn’t know who August worked for, could only guess at what he did, and didn’t even know if John August was the man’s real name. He didn’t know much, but he did know he trusted August. That was just the way it was. He wouldn’t have had the first idea how to explain it to Kang so that it made sense, so he wasn’t going to try.
“We’ll tell anyone who asks what we’re doing that we’re investigating the Mayling Aw case. It’s a decent enough cover for staying on the Woodlands case since she lived near the Woodlands. We can get away with it for at least a few days.”
“But, sir, there’s nothing to investigate in that case, nothing even anything to say we’re investigating.”
“We’ll claim we have reason to think she was smuggled in by a human trafficking ring.”
“Human trafficking ring. Sir, that’s really—”
“That will give us a reason to keep looking at movements through the Woodlands checkpoint. There’s something there CID doesn’t want us to find. We’re going to find it.”
“We don’t even know who the dead man is, sir. The prints have never come back from Interpol and we don’t have anything else.”
“Actually…” Tay paused.
How was he going to tell Kang this without bringing August into it?
“I do know who he is. I have a photograph of him. I haven’t told you about it yet.”
Kang’s face clouded up, but he said nothing.
“I’m sorry, Robbie. I found the picture in some old things of my father’s.”
Now Kang’s face creased in puzzlement, as well it might have.
“You found a picture of the dead man in things that belonged to your father?”
Tay nodded. “Yes. And my father was in the picture with him.”
“The dead man and your father?”
Tay nodded.
“Together?”
Tay nodded again.
“But your father died when—”
“I was a child. More than thirty-five years ago.”
Kang looked away and consulted a spot in the air. “I don’t understand, sir.”
“Neither do I, Robbie. But I’m going to get to the bottom of whatever is going on here and I need your help to do it.”
Kang still wouldn’t look at him. Tay couldn’t blame him. He knew he should have brought Kang into this before. He just hoped it wasn’t too late to do it now.