19

Tony Fairchild thought his Singaporean opposite number was more or less an ass. Wai Fung, inspector of police, the exact identical rank to Fairchild, was a slender man of middle years who seemed determined not to let anything at all ruffle the orderly progression of his day, his life, his career. He seemed to believe that he was not in his position as police inspector to solve crimes, bring malefactors to justice and affirm the rule of law (all of which Fairchild believed in passionately), but was here merely to maintain calm, as though he were an usher at a cinema on a Saturday afternoon.

Which meant, of course, that Wai Fung was having a great deal of trouble accommodating the notion that he should go out and ruffle the existence of a prominent Singaporean businessman like Richard Curtis, nor that he should concern himself with the cares and woes of a provincial policeman from far-off Australia, nor that he should want to involve his island nation in the murk of international intrigue, particularly if it might at all have any bearing on Hong Kong, which is to say, China. So all in all, Wai Fung was being a smiling obstructionist.

On the other hand, Fairchild had to admit to himself that a part of his antipathy to Wai Fung was no doubt caused by his own unease. First, he was uneasy because he was out of the world he knew and into a world where he had neither insights nor standing. But even more importantly, he felt unease, even embarrassment, because he had already once before fallen down on this job so miserably and completely.

It had taken no more than three minutes of the first meeting among himself and the lawyer Brevizin and the real George Manville for Fairchild to realize he’d been snookered, by the smooth-talking Curtis and by the false Manville, telephoning him from Singapore (and even that wasn’t certain) to say he’d had minimal dealings with Kim Baldur and in fact actively disliked her.

If Fairchild hadn’t allowed himself to be lulled into inactivity by that phone call, he’d have kept his original appointment with Brevizin and the whole plot would have unraveled right then, or at least begun to. Instead of which, they’d lost a week, more than a week, and Fairchild blamed himself.

As an overachiever from the Sydney slums, a bright boy who’d always had to provide his own impetus in life, Tony Fairchild was a stern taskmaster when it came to his own actions. He didn’t like to fail, he didn’t like to be sloppy, and he didn’t like to be cozened, and all of those things had happened in the Richard Curtis affair. So he was (and grudgingly he knew this) taking it out on the unaccommodating Wai Fung.

Fairchild and Wai Fung and a few of Wai Fung’s younger staff and the German, Luther Rickendorf, now sat together in a conference room in the station, waiting for George Manville to return with Kim Baldur. Jerry Diedrich had gone missing, presumed kidnapped, possibly dead, and that meant Kim Baldur was very likely also at risk; it had been agreed that the circumstances might now be too risky for Kim to travel by herself around Singapore, so rather than just telephoning her at the hotel and telling her to get a taxi, Manville had gone to fetch her. When Fairchild thought about the alacrity with which Manville had volunteered to be the one to go get the Baldur woman, he could only wince at his gullibility when he’d accepted the sneers of that other ‘Manville’ as genuine.

The hall door opened, and Manville came in, with a distraught-looking Kim Baldur, and a police escort. Kim turned to Rickendorf, seated near the door, to say, “Oh, Luther, he attacked me!”

Rickendorf and Manville both started to speak, but Wai Fung surprised Fairchild by slicing through them with a suddenly steely voice: “Who attacked you? You say you were attacked?”

She looked around briefly, but clearly understood that Wai Fung was the person of importance in this room. She said, “The man who’s been following us. Didn’t Luther tell you about him?”

Rickendorf said, “I told them, Kim.”

“The man from Richard Curtis,” Kim said, sounding contentious and bitter.

“From Richard Curtis,” Wai Fung echoed. “Mr. Rickendorf made a similar assertion, but unfortunately lacked proof. May I hope you have brought the proof? The proof,” he said, “may be of any sort. Fingerprints, documents, eyewitnesses—”

“George saw the man, he can describe what happened.”

“Very well,” Wai Fung said, and gestured at the conference table. “Why don’t we all sit down?”

They did, and Fairchild pulled out his small notepad and black-ink pen.

Manville said, “When I got to the hotel, when I got out of the elevator, I saw this man forcing his way into Kim’s room.”

Wai Fung said, “You knew he was forcing? She was not inviting?”

“She was screaming for help,” Manville said.

Wai Fung said, “Very well.”

“I ran down there,” Manville went on, “and pounded on the door, but he’d closed and locked it. Kim was still calling for help. Then I heard a crashing sound. I didn’t know it then, but—”

“No, no, please, Mr. Manville,” Wai Fung interrupted. “Tell it to us in the order in which you knew it.”

“All right,” Manville said. “I heard a crashing sound. I was trying to kick down the door, but it took a few tries. When I finally got it open Kim was there, looking very frightened. She was holding a can of something—”

“Hairspray,” Kim said.

“The bathroom door was broken and the man was coming out of there, rubbing at his eyes.”

Fairchild looked up from his notepad. “Well done,” he told Kim.

Manville said, “He ran for the window. I chased him, but he got out the window and when I tried to follow him he kicked me.” He touched an angry-looking scrape on his right cheek.

Wai Fung looked around at them all. “I take it that is it? You don’t know this man? His name?”

Kim said, “He’s been staying at our hotel. A Eurasian man, big and bulky. He carries a Polaroid camera.”

Rickendorf said, “Inspector,” and Fairchild automatically turned toward him, but of course it was Wai Fung he meant. “Inspector,” he said, “we believe he put bugs in our telephones. They’re probably still there.”

“Interesting,” Wai Fung said, and turned to Kim to say, “This man. When he attacked you, did he have a weapon of any kind?”

“A piece of pipe,” she said, “Like an iron pipe, I don’t know, six inches long?”

“And do we still have this pipe?”

“I gave it to your people downstairs,” Manville said.

Wai Fung said, “Is that it? No witnesses?”

Manville, with a very slight edge, said, “I’m the witness.”

“From the mark on your face, Mr. Manville,” Wai Fung told him, “you were a participant. A witness is an outside observer. I take it there were none of those?”

“As a matter of fact,” Kim said, “there were.”

They all looked at her in surprise. Sounding not completely pleased, Wai Fung said, “And who was that?”

“When I looked out the window,” she said, “while he was running down the fire escape, there were two painters out there, painting the fire escape.”

Wai Fung said, “And what did they see, exactly?”

“They saw the man roll out of my room, kick George in the face, and run down the fire escape.”

Now Wai Fung made a note, then peeled off the top sheet of his pad and gave it to one of his assistants, with quickly murmured instructions. Then Wai Fung turned back to the others. “Whatever may have happened in Ms. Baldur’s room this morning —and we will investigate, I assure you—the connection between this incident and Richard Curtis remains, at least to my eyes, invisible.”

Rickendorf said, “Inspector, my friend Jerry has a friend working for Curtis. That friend told us last Wednesday that he had seen a man in Richard Curtis’s office who fit the description of the man who attacked Kim. He said he himself had carried an envelope containing five thousand dollars to Curtis, and that he’d seen Curtis give the envelope to this man.”

Wai Fung said, “And this friend’s name?”

Fairchild watched waves of indecision cross Rickendorf’s face, like speeded-up cloud systems on a TV weather broadcast.

“Mr. Rickendorf,” Wai Fung said, “without this person’s statement, what do I have? Mere assertions. Your assertions.”

Rickendorf said, “Would it be all right if I telephoned him?”

“Certainly,” Wai Fung said.