6

Kim didn’t think it was fair. She was part of this, wasn’t she? She’d gone through as much as anybody on this; more. So why couldn’t she come along to meet this Mark person?

She and Jerry and Luther were having dinner in one of the Indonesian restaurants on Orchard Road, and she spent the entire meal hammering this point. They were in this together, weren’t they? She had as much reason to pursue Richard Curtis as they did; more. So why were they refusing to let her come with them to talk to their friend Mark?

At last, Luther gave her an answer. “Because,” he said, “it’s a gay bar.”

“So what?” she said.

Jerry said, “Kim, you don’t want to go to a gay bar.”

“Why not?”

“You wouldn’t like it.”

“I’ve been in gay bars before,” she said airily.

Sounding interested, Luther said, “Really? Why?”

It had been a lie, of course, quick and thoughtless, and she saw no way to either defend it or explain it, so she pushed forward instead, saying, “Why do you have to meet in a gay bar anyway? Why not somewhere else?”

“Because we are gay,” Luther said, “and so is Mark. So it won’t be suspicious if we all show up there at the same time.”

“But if we showed up with you,” Jerry pointed out, “that would be suspicious.”

“Maybe I’m in drag,” she said, and they laughed, and she saw she wasn’t going to get anywhere. “I’ll want to meet him later, then,” she insisted. “Somewhere that tourists go, or something like that, so it won’t be suspicious.”

“We’ll arrange it,” Jerry promised.

It wasn’t much comfort, but it was all she was going to get, and she knew it.

They insisted on putting her in a cab. “I can walk,” she said. “It’s a beautiful night, it isn’t too far to walk.”

“It is, in fact,” Jerry told her, “but even if it weren’t, you don’t want to be wandering around the city streets after dark.”

“I like the city streets,” she objected, “and I wouldn’t be ‘wandering around,’ I’d be walking from here to Little India, and straight to the hotel.”

Luther said, “Kim, you have enemies in Singapore. You really do have to remember that.”

Which brought her up short. It was true, she did have at least one enemy in Singapore, in Richard Curtis. And Richard Curtis had people everywhere.

Would some of those people be looking for her? Would they have her picture? Would that awful man, that killer from the boat who’d chased her in Brisbane, be here now in Singapore, waiting for further orders from Curtis? He’d accidentally stumbled on her once; could it happen again? Could she be walking peacefully along a well-lit city street in Singapore and suddenly have a car stop beside her, that man appear again, with his friends?

“All right,” she said, “I’ll take the taxi.”

At the hotel, the cab was just pulling up to the curb when someone came bustling out of the gaudy entrance, waving his arm. “You have another customer,” Kim told the cabby, and climbed out, leaving the door open.

It was the man with the Polaroid camera. He hurried into the cab, looked quickly over at her, then shut the door and rolled the window up before telling the cabby where he wanted to go.

Oh, for God’s sake, I’m not snooping, she told him inside her head. What do I care where you’re going, it’s nothing to do with me. She turned away as the cab sped off, and went into the hotel, and up to her room.

The television set offered two channels in English, 5 and 12. Kim, restless, switched back and forth between the two for a while, then turned it off and went looking for the magazine she’d started reading on the airplane and never finished, a three-month-old copy of Scientific American.

At first, she couldn’t find it. She knew she’d put it on top of the free tourist magazine that had been in the room when she’d arrived, but it was no longer there. Nothing was on top of that magazine. Had she moved it somewhere else?

She searched the room, failed to find the Scientific American, then decided to see if there could be anything at all to read in the tourist magazine. She picked it up, and the Scientific American was underneath.

That’s not right, she thought. She’d never touched the tourist magazine before this second, so how could hers be under it? The maid hadn’t been in here since they’d gone out to dinner. No one was supposed to have been in here.

She searched the room once more, carefully, the drawers and the closet, and when she was finished she was sure. There was no doubt in her mind. Someone had searched the room.