But he did nothing.
He sat on the grass at the edge of the crowd, away from the platform and the microphones. He felt the dampness of the grass through his bony bum, leaving his scrotum cold. He had brought along two books in case one turned out to be dull. He had fortified himself with a bacon-and-egg breakfast to last him till the next morning. The most difficult part of the fast, he remembers as he lies in the warm bath, was not being allowed anything to drink except water. Time drags a weary arm when you are alone and self-flagellating, he smiles to himself, hand still on his near-bursting penis. He should have just gone for asphyxiation, neat and efficient.
By the late afternoon, he was feeling colder and lonelier with nothing in his stomach to warm him. The crowd seemed to get merrier and nosier in their restlessness. He moved to a quieter corner and saw a couple making out on the grass. The man’s hands were all over the woman’s body, his mouth on hers, his legs wrapped around hers. The woman rolled over on her back and her brown hair fell from her face, revealing pale Irish skin and emerald eyes. Those years they were together had counted for nothing. She was fucking another man one week after dumping him. Yang turned away, quickening his steps. He vomited what was left of his breakfast into a bush.
Yang rubs his penis harder and harder to get that relief he so desperately needs to rid himself of that woman. He explodes with a loud cathartic moan, stands up and pulls the plug in the tub in the hope of draining away the humiliation he suffered from Katherine.
As he dries himself, his mother knocks on the bathroom door and asks what he is doing at that time of the night. She asks if he has eaten the food saved for him in the wok. When he comes out of the bathroom, wrapped only in a towel, he is surprised to see her waiting for him in the hallway.
“Why you bathe so late?” Mrs Chow asks, her brows knitted.
“I was hot and sticky.”
She speaks in a hybrid of Singlish and Cantonese. “Don’t bathe so often at night, you get rheumatism when you are old.”
“Okay.”
Mrs Chow follows her son into his bedroom, and as he puts on a T-shirt and boxer shorts, she notices he is little more than a bag of bones.
“You should eat some meat. Why go and be a vegetarian? Some more you drink so much. All that alcohol and no meat, no wonder you so skinny.”
“Better to be skinny than fat.” He pulls up his T-shirt, then spreads talcum powder on his body.
“You come back two years already, you still want to go away again?”
“Don’t know. See how.”
“Everybody is leaving. Your father is gone. If you also go, who’s going to look after me?”
Yang looks at his mother, purses up his lips and goes to switch on the air-conditioner.
“Your father die so early. All the money from his hard work he got no chance to enjoy.”
“Do you know how much money Pa had?”
“How do I know? You know your father never talk much to me. But I know he work very hard for you all. He would be very happy if you come back and stay in this house, even if the CPIB take away all his other properties.”
“Who knows if we can keep this house?”
“Those evil men. They don’t have any yan cheng. Want to kill means kill, never think how much Sze Teck has done for them.”
“Pa should have known that this was bound to happen when he did what he did.”
“He did what everyone also do. He just unlucky because he lost favour with his boss so they pick on him.”
Yang looks at his mother in a new light. “How do you know he fell out of favour with his boss?”
“I never study as much as you but I am not stupid. I married your father for over 40 years, I know what he is thinking. When we first got married, he was a good man, never drink, never gamble, never look for women. He become like that because he don’t know what he was doing anymore.”
Yang remembers the old photos of his father with his comrades from the Anti-British League on St. John’s Island, prisoners of the imperialists. The photos had been taken by Edward Wee. He was their lawyer then and had brought them beer and a big tin of Khong Guan biscuits every time he visited. His father and cellmate, Lim Min Tong, were the undisputed leaders, even or especially in jail, commanding support and respect from workers and students. Their imprisonment had given the movement impetus to eject the British and was indeed the prelude to the British withdrawal.
Those were his father’s defining moments. Yang feels a fleeting happiness for his father. Then he feels sorry for himself. His father had lost faith in his work in his middle age but at 36, he, Yang, is consumed by a life of fucking around, fucking up and fucking off. He thinks about his great-great-grandfather, who had three wives and three concubines, and wonders if the old sleazeball was as fulfilled as Yang is not. What is the true path to achieving human happiness? Where did he go wrong? Perhaps he should have just completed his law degree, returned to work for a government-linked company and married a Chinese woman who was a kindergarten teacher. Then had two children called Sarah-Jane and Joshua, and visited his parents and in-laws on alternate Sundays.
Breaking his thoughts, Mrs Chow whispers as though in conspiracy, “Yang, tomorrow we’ll go and complain to the police. How can they take away all your father’s things like that? What for they take away his photo albums? For what?”
“Okay.” He goes to his bed and slips beneath his thin blanket, as a signal to his mother to go.
His mother tells him not to sleep all night with the air-conditioner on, turns the light out and leaves.
FIFTEEN
“I DEMAND TO see your director. I want to register my complaint about six men from your department,” Ming barks at the receptionist at the CPIB office, who is on the telephone. He slaps his name card down on the reception counter.
She throws him a dagger look and replaces the receiver. She grabs the card and disappears behind a security door, slamming it after her. Ming paces up and down the brightly lit room, whose solid walls silence the activities behind them. Perhaps because it is only 8.35 on a Tuesday morning, or because there are no other complainants that day, he is alone in the large, stark white space. He cannot fathom the full depth and breadth of the monster bureau situated in the six-storey building with the neighbourly name of Hill Street Centre. The Hill Street police station is just a couple of blocks away. Ming wonders, is there an underground tunnel joining the two buildings? The piquant smell of fried spices and roast fowl from the open-air hawker centre on the ground floor gives Hill Street Centre a congenial air, smoke-screening the building’s more serious business.
Ming sees a camera mounted on each of the four corners of the room, like birds’ nests. The slogan ‘To Combat Corruption Through Swift and Sure, Firm but Fair Action’ in blue vinyl lettering is plastered on the wall behind the reception counter. It feels like he has waited 10 minutes or a year, for his eyes keep going back to those words against his own will, in the absence of anything else to read. The door of the main entrance opposite to the reception opens, and the receptionist and two heavy-set men enter. Ming is slightly disconcerted by her reappearance through a different door and by the presence of the two men. He is certain labyrinthine passages run through the building, connecting strategic rooms and a basement.
The receptionist returns to her seat behind the counter and one of the men approaches Ming. “Mr Chow, can you come with us?”
“Where to?”
“I thought you wanted to see our director?”
“Where is his office?”
“We’re here to take you there.”
The two men escort him out of the first-floor reception room, past the lift lobby and into the sticky-hot car park that requires security passes for entry, reserved for tenants of the building. They walk to a stairwell at the end of the car park away from the thoroughfare, down too many flights of stairs for Ming to count, and come to a sturdy door with the sign ‘Strictly No Entry to Unauthorised Personnel’. The other heavil
y-built man who has not spoken inserts a key into an unusually-shaped keyhole. It occurs to Ming it is probably a key that cannot be easily duplicated by any locksmith. The door opens to a cool, dimly lit vestibule without any furnishing. There is only another door on the facing wall. The silent man uses another key to open that door into a cavernous passage with a low ceiling. Ming reckons this to be a tunnel leading to the police station two blocks away. He feels a sudden urge to retreat to the hot and grimy car park. But all thoughts of leaving dissipate when he sees the man deadlocking the door.
“The director’s office is here?” he asks, his heart palpitating.
The two men do not answer. They lead him down the passage whose sound-proof walls are painted black and the floor shoddily paved with cement. The scene seems to morph before his eyes into the Great World Amusement Park, where his parents took him when he was a boy. The scariest trip of his life was through the Ghost House, with all manner of tacky sights and sounds to effect bottomless fear in a child’s heart. The dark, interminable passage now in front of him updates his childish fear.
The two men escort him to a door on the left of the passage with a small red bulb lit above it, and enter a room. Ming makes out a third man in a thick cardigan. The wintry room makes Ming feel naked in his thin shirt. The room is jet black except for two harsh yellow standing spotlights on either side of a desk, shining on an empty chair, throwing everything else into shadow. The man in the cardigan introduces himself as the deputy director of the CPIB, Hoe Yuan Hai, and gestures for Ming to sit on the hard chair. As soon as he feels his way to the chair, he is sorry, for the gust of cold air blusters at his head. As his eyes adjust to the subterranean lighting, he discerns the outlines of the two heavy-set men standing over him and the deputy director sitting in front of him, behind a desk.
“Is this another of your interrogations?”
“We’d actually planned to invite you over for an interview, and then you turned up this morning, saving us a phone call.”
“So this is what you put my father through. I hope you guys gave him a coat as warm as yours.”
“This is our standard interview room. If you have any complaints, you can write to our PR department.” He pulls out a stack of A4 typing paper from a drawer and places it on the desk, next to a ballpoint pen.
“You bet I will. I’m not even done with those six men who ransacked my office.”
“Mr Chow, I suggest you do not get too worked up as we have barely started the investigation on you.”
“What more do you want? You guys have pushed my father over the edge—”
“Mr Chow,” the deputy director cuts him short, “it is about something else we would like to talk to you today.”
The ensuing silence and cold pierce Ming’s spine. He can only hear his own strangled breathing.
“It has come to our attention that with your father’s help, the law firm in which you are a senior partner has won many major conveyancing contracts from the Ministry of Housing.”
Ming steels every muscle in his body. “My firm won those contracts on merit.”
“Really? We’ve studied the tender documents, the shortlisted tenderers’ proposals and the final costing of your firm’s service to the ministry. There is no evidence that your law firm’s proposals or track record were better than the other firms’.”
“I was obviously not involved in the selection. You’ll have to ask the tender committee.”
The deputy director catapults from his seat and roars, “We have, and they have all said your father had the casting vote!”
The shout shatters Ming’s notion that they will be civil. He now expects the two goons behind to lunge at him any time he is found to be unhelpful. More icy air penetrates his bones. “I’m not in a position to comment on the workings of the committee.”
Hoe bangs on the desk. “Don’t you be funny with me! Based on the value of the contracts, you will easily get three years behind bars without my even trying. You know the law very well. I have the power to recommend a lighter sentence if you are forthcoming.” He shoves his face within a few inches of Ming’s. “Do you or do you not want to come clean?”
In the shaft of light, Ming can see for the first time his interrogator’s skin resembling the surface of Mars. Ming feels superior to him for he rarely meets someone whose complexion is more flawed than his own. The interrogator looks more criminal than some of Ming’s hard-core clients. That somehow steadies his scattered nerves.
“I have nothing to say. My father has already paid with his life. Do you want to dig his body out of its grave and flog it further?”
“We’re done with your father. This is about you!”
“What do you want from me?”
The interrogator looks at Ming for a full minute without speaking. Ming holds his breath.
“You sit here and think very hard about all the things your father had asked you to do or had done for you. I’ll come back and hopefully by then, you’ll have something to tell me.” He stands up, the chair scraping the cement floor. He takes off his cardigan, hangs it on the back of the chair, then stalks out of the room.
The cold blast of air forces him to hunch in the chair. Ming looks at the cardigan, but is aware of the two men behind him. He turns his head to ask the men for a jacket and a glass of hot water.
“When the deputy director comes back, you can ask him for that,” a disembodied voice replies.
“If I get hypothermia, I’ll see you guys in court.” His empty threat nevertheless restores in him some self-respect. He did not have breakfast this morning, too upset by the search of his office the previous day, and too eager to give those buggers a good thrashing. He looks at his watch and realises it’s almost noon. He has told his secretary he would be in before lunch. He keeps turning his head to look at the closed door. Every sound outside and inside the room plays on his mind, triggering all sorts of images. Chains, shackles, ugly beefy men, rats, warm jackets, seafood fried noodles, hot coffee, shackles, chain, rats…
How much longer would they keep him here? Since no money had changed hands nor gifts had been offered, he knows the CPIB has no hard evidence against him. But he has also been in the business long enough to know that once you are charged, the chances of getting convicted are high. Compliance is the smartest, if not the bravest, thing to do. But why, why, why are they doing it now when the ministry had been awarding jobs to his firm since time immemorial, when the prime minister’s wife’s architectural firm gets all the design contracts from the ministry, when government departments award jobs to companies they find “conducive to doing business with”?
He turns his head slightly to the bouncers standing behind him. “When is your deputy director coming back?”
“We don’t know.”
“What about my lunch? I believe the law allows witnesses to eat and drink?”
“Someone is getting lunch for you.”
“I prefer to go out and get my own food.”
“Sorry sir, you have to have your lunch here. Under the law, we have the power to keep you here for 24 hours.”
Damn the bloody law. He is getting a taste of what he has always known but never experienced—the thin blue line around his neck. When his clients complained to him about police brutality, he listened impassively while he told himself they deserved it. But why are they doing this to me at this time, he asks himself over and over. To recover a few more million? If they push me to the edge, I’ll spill the beans on the government tender selection committee and they’ll all have to jump over the cliff with me. Do I dare to do that? Would I?
A man delivers his lunch and a bottle of orange soft drink and places them on the desk. Ming unwraps the grease-stained paper. His eyes rotate over the chicken wing, soggy vegetables and rice and the chilled bottled drink. Some feathers stick out of the skin of the chicken wing, defying him to eat it. He rises to the challenge and picks up the plastic spoon in the hope that a bit of food will keep him warm, but realises
too late that the cold drink has the opposite effect. He finishes the rice, prods at the vegetables and pushes the half-consumed drink aside. He longs for the warm, nourishing smell of frying spices and roasting chicken, but figures the hawker centre must be as far from him as heaven is from Satan. To relieve himself of the bitter arctic squall, he asks to go to the toilet at the end of the passage. It is a request the guards cannot refuse, a right protected even by the law.
On his escorted trip, he notes that none of the red bulbs above all the other doors in the passageway is lit and gathers he is the only unfortunate person hauled in today. As he pees into the stained urinal, he sees his soul flowing out with the urine into the sewer. When he returns to the room, he tells himself not to wash his hands the next time he goes to the toilet, otherwise they will freeze in the cold. His two guards are wearing only shirts and jeans, but he is sure they have a thermal T-shirts underneath. Bastards.
After four more toilet breaks, deputy director Hoe Yuan Hai returns. It’s four o’clock. He puts on the cardigan hanging on the chair. He sits on the desk, towering over Ming and makes a show of adjusting the standing spotlights, which already shine directly on Ming’s face. He takes a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the breast pocket of his shirt and lights one.
Death of a Perm Sec Page 10