TAY SHUFFLED FORWARD in the line at the taxi stand. He was on his way to HSBC to see Henry Lee again and Lee had known his family for a long time. Maybe Tay would ask him what he knew about his father’s past. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t.
Tay looked back in the direction of the house he had inherited from his father. He couldn’t help but wonder how many people knew who his father really was, and how many of them knew how he had made his money.
As a son, was Tay in the same category as those husbands everyone says are always the last to know? Tay had never been a husband, so he had no idea how much truth there was in that popular cliché. Come to think of it, he didn’t have much experience as a son either — he had only been one for the first eleven years of his life — so he was equally unsure how sons were supposed to feel when they stumbled over their father’s secrets.
Did they really want to know if everyone else already knew? What would he say if he asked Lee and Lee looked astonished and said, You mean you didn’t know?
Then there would be nothing for him to do but sit there like a fool, would there? Life was full of questions people didn’t really want to know the answers to. Maybe one of those questions for Tay was whether he was the last to know who his father actually was.
***
Tay looked out the window as the taxi passed the Raffles Hotel and turned right on Nicoll Highway toward the central business district.
He could feel it all coming together now. He was close. He just didn’t understand yet what he was close to.
Ferrero was even more desperate to scare him away from the Woodlands investigation than ISD had been. What was it about Johnny the Mover that ISD and the CIA didn’t want him to find out?
According to August, ISD knew the bombings had really been domestic terrorism and the Singapore government was scrambling to cover that up. But how was the CIA involved? Surely they wouldn’t go out on a limb just to keep the secret that everybody in Singapore didn’t love the government. There was something else here. Something he was missing.
Tay was convinced the answer was in that safety deposit box. Somewhere. He just hadn’t seen it yet.
Surely Johnny could have gotten rid of that safety deposit key if that was what he was trying to do. After all, shoving it up his ass hardly amounted to getting rid of it. He had done that because he wanted someone to find it. Someone other than his killer. In Tay’s experience, which admittedly was pretty limited with respect to shoving things up his ass, he couldn’t believe Johnny would have done that without having an awfully good reason. Now it was up to him to find out what that reason was.
Lee had told him the only person who had accessed the safety box in three years was someone who always signed in as Joseph Hysmith. It seemed to Tay that Joseph Hysmith was really Johnny the Mover. Who else could it be?
And so he had called Lee and told him he wanted to show a picture of Johnny to the woman who signed people into the bank’s vault to access the safety boxes. If she recognized Johnny, he would at least have that nailed down. Then all he would have to do would be figure out what the hell it meant.
In his briefcase he had one of the autopsy pictures of Johnny. Just a close-up of his face, not one of the scary ones. He also had the picture taken in Vietnam thirty-five years ago of Johnny, his father, and the umbrella man. It was possible the woman wouldn’t recognize Johnny from a thirty-five year old picture even if he was Joseph Hysmith — more than possible really, Tay thought — so he was inclined to go with the picture of dead Johnny.
Tay didn’t like to show pictures of dead people around. It bothered him on some primitive level. He thought the dead were entitled to their peace, no matter who they were or how they got dead. None of us was entitled to all that much out of life, so it seemed only fair to Tay that, in death, people were entitled at least to their peace.
Maybe, Tay thought, he would show the vault attendant the picture from Vietnam first after all. If she didn’t recognize Johnny, then she didn’t. He could always pull out the autopsy photo and try again. But if she did recognize him, Tay would have his ID and Johnny would have his peace. Win-win, as the cliché masters like to say.
The taxi crossed the Singapore River where the bum boats had been tied three abreast to the old wooden wharfs back when he was a boy. It passed the Fullerton Hotel that had been the General Post Office back when he was a boy. And they pulled to the curb in front of the Collyer Quay branch of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank that had been a row of shophouses back when he was a boy. Shaking his head at man’s never-ending attempts to defeat the past, Tay paid the driver and went inside.
***
For the second time, Tay was shown straight into Harry Lee’s office. While he was pleased not to have to wait, he was beginning to wonder if Lee had anything else to do other than talk to him.
They shook hands.
“Well, I think I’ve found your girl, Sam. Mei Lin generally handles the vault for us. She says she’s pretty sure she remembers Joseph Hysmith. Apparently he’s a hard man not to remember.”
Tay wondered what that was supposed to mean while Lee picked up his telephone, called someone, and asked them to send in the woman he was talking about. Almost immediately there was a knock at Lee’s door. It sounded to Tay as if the woman had been standing out there all along just waiting for her five minutes in the spotlight. He already disliked her.
“Sam, this is Mei Lin Lee. No relation.”
Tay glanced over his shoulder toward the door. And, in spite of his best efforts to stop it from happening, his mouth slowly opened all by itself.
Standing in Lee’s doorway was the most beautiful woman Tay had ever seen.
She was of average height and dressed professionally in a dark gray skirt that stopped just above her knees, a white blouse with a high collar, a short black jacket, and black pumps with medium heels. Her shiny black hair was cropped very short and shaped to her head in a cut that was both practical and stylish at the same time.
It was the woman’s face that stopped Tay dead. It reflected no single ethnicity, but was one of those Singaporean faces that spoke of generations of multiracial inbreeding. At the base of her features was an unmistakable dose of Chinese ancestry, but Tay could also see tweaks and flourishes that were Malaysian, Indian, and even Caucasian. And her face simply glowed. There was no other expression for it. From somewhere deep inside this woman rose a luminescent warmth that flooded the room. It made Tay think of the mysterious radiance of the Mona Lisa.
Tay lurched to his feet and stuck out his hand. “I’m Inspector Tay,” he said. “CID.”
And immediately, of course, he felt like an asshole.
When meeting a beautiful woman for the first time, Tay always felt like an asshole. He suspected most men did. Those that didn’t, he was certain, really were assholes.
“Sam is conducting a national security investigation, Mei Lin.” Lee’s voice had suddenly taken on the bonhomie of a game show host. Even he was apparently affected by this woman’s radiance. “He needs to ask you a few questions.”
The woman took Tay’s hand, but she said nothing. She only lowered her eyes and smiled slightly in a gesture that might have seemed coy and artificial from another woman. But from her it seemed entirely right and natural.
Tay reluctantly released her hand and gestured her toward the other chair in from of Harry Lee’s desk. He glanced quickly at Lee and saw Lee beaming like the father of the bride.
“Thank you for coming,” Tay told the woman.
Thank you for coming? What an idiotic thing to say. This woman worked for the bank, for God’s sake. Her boss told her to come into his office and answer Tay’s questions. Thank you for coming?
Men simply turned into fumbling jerks in front of beautiful women, didn’t they? Did women know that? Yes, of course they did. The beautiful ones used it against the men they met, and those that weren’t beautiful hated men for acting the way they did toward the ones that were.
“Mr. Lee tells me you may remember something that is crucial to an investigation I am conducting.” Tay rushed to safe ground before he said something irretrievably stupid. “This man I’m interested in has been accessing a safety deposit box here. His name is Joseph Hysmith. Do you remember him?”
“Yes, sir. I do.”
It was the first time Mei Lin had spoken and her voice matched her face. Perfectly pitched and modulated, no hint of an accent, a voice that could sing you to sleep.
Tay was hunting now for flaws. He needed to find some flaws. He did not want to accept that this woman could possibly be as perfect as she appeared to be. He noticed she had very small fingernails. Her blood red nail varnish was little more than a tiny dot on the end of each finger. As flaws went, it wasn’t much, but it was the only one Tay could come up with.
“Is there some reason you remember him in particular from all the people who must come into the bank every day?”
The woman smiled slightly and Tay felt a fission of jealously that he was not this man she remembered so well. It was just plain stupid to feel that way, of course. It made no sense at all. But still, he felt jealous. That was just the simple truth of it.
“I have a photograph I would like to show you,” Tay said, moving on before Mei Lin explained her smile. “It was taken over thirty years ago so you will have to think of the man you have met as many years younger, but I would like for you to look at it and see if you recognize him.”
Mei Lin said nothing, but she gave a small nod of assent.
Tay retrieved his briefcase from the floor and removed the manila envelope with the 5x7 black and white of his father with Johnny and the umbrella man. He removed the photograph and handed it to Mei Lin. He watched her studying it as he returned his briefcase to the floor. He searched her face for any flicker of recognition. He was disappointed to see none.
Tay and Lee waited in silence. Mei Lin continued to study the photograph without expression, and Tay’s heart began to sink. But then abruptly she looked at Tay and smiled.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m pretty sure that’s him.”
It was all Tay could do not to leap from his chair screaming Yippee!
He had been right. Johnny the Mover was Joseph Hysmith.
“He’s much bigger now, but the face looks very much the same.”
Tay wasn’t certain what Mei Lin meant by that. Johnny had gained some weight over the thirty years since the photograph had been taken, that was true, but he would hardly have described him as big. Maybe Mei Lind’s petit frame made her think of most men as big.
Automatically, Tay sucked in his stomach.
***
Mei Lin tilted the photograph first one way and then another as if she were trying to improve the quality of the light falling on it, although Tay couldn’t see that it made much difference.
“May I know when this photograph was taken?” she asked.
If an elderly fat man had asked him that, Tay would probably have snapped at him to shut up because he was damn well asking the questions here. But Mei Lin was as far from an elderly fat man in the tree of evolution as it was possible to get and still be in the tree at all. Tay was helpless to do anything other than answer pretty much any question she might want to ask.
“In 1975,” he said.
And caught in the spell of a beautiful woman, he couldn’t resist adding, “That’s my father right next to the man I’m asking about. He was acquainted with Johnny somehow. I’m not certain exactly how, and he died a long time ago so I’ll probably never find out. It couldn’t have anything to do with this case anyway, since that was over thirty years ago.”
“Johnny?” Mei Lin asked.
Tay nodded.
“So Joseph Hysmith isn’t our customer’s real name?”
“No, I’m afraid it’s not.”
Mei Lin thought about that for a moment and a sad look crossed her face, presumably a reflection on the shameful duplicity afoot in the world.
“So that’s your father in the middle?” she asked after a moment.
“No, he’s on the right. Next to Johnny.”
Mei Lin looked puzzled.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
Tay wasn’t sure what there was not to understand.
Mei Lin had fingered Johnny the Mover as Joseph Hysmith and Johnny was standing in the middle of the three men in the photograph. His father on the right side and the umbrella man was on the left side. How hard was that?
“Didn’t you say your father was standing next to our customer?” Mei Lin asked.
“Yes.”
“Then that would be your father in the middle, wouldn’t it? Next to Mr. Hysmith?”
Tay froze.
Surely, he told himself, some confusion had been introduced into the conversation that was simply eluding him. The woman could not be saying what she appeared to be saying.
Tay stood up and walked around behind Mei Lin’s chair. He reached down to the photograph she was holding on her lap and placed his forefinger on his father.
“That’s my father. The man on the right.”
Mei Lin turned her head and looked over her shoulder at Tay. She smiled.
And in that moment Tay knew.
He felt the small hairs on the back of his neck lift as Mei Lin turned back to the photograph and put her own finger on it.
“That’s our customer right there,” she said.
Tay said nothing. He didn’t know what to say.
“He’s the man on the left,” Mei Lin added unnecessarily. “The one holding the umbrella.”