by Ming Cher
She took a deep breath and replied simply, “Let’s not think about the future. Let’s live for now.” She pushed him down on the rattan couch, kissed him hard and sat atop him, grinding into his lap. Despite his reservations, Kwang responded in kind, and soon they were making love rough enough that he worried they might break the rattan couch into bits. She closed her eyes and let out a cry of passion as she climaxed, and he found himself finishing soon after.
He left her house around 6pm, and walked with his head down all the way back to Big Mole’s pet fish shop.
“Hey Kwang, you find Big Mole? What she say?” the waiting General asked eagerly.
“Yes, I have,” Kwang said coldly. “You have to let her go. You don’t own her. This is all I can say.” He then turned and walked back out of the shop.
“Hmm. Looks like he is not happy with what’s going on,” the General said to Quiet One.
“He has given his verdict,” Quiet One said. He agreed with Kwang, even though he didn’t share the other man’s motivation; he was more certain than ever that Kwang was sleeping with Big Mole behind Hong’s back, and was glad that Hong could now focus his efforts on Koon Thong.
“I guess Kwang is right,” the General said. “I am finish with Big Mole.”
Quiet One smiled. “Maybe we buy her shop as a business for Koon Thong?”
This suggestion made the General’s dreamy eyes twinkle. “Hey, not a bad idea!” he said, raising his finger. “We could use the old rubbish dump behind the backyard as extra land for potted plant business. Wouldn’t cost much either.”
“I wonder what she want for her shop.”
“My ankle is a lot better now; that doctor of yours damn good. I go ask Big Mole tomorrow early-early when we move out to our new bungalow in Serangoon, by 9am, to make sure she is at home. You hire two trishaws before we go over to the Malay kampong.”
“I will be here by 7am,” Quiet One said. “Once we shift to the bungalow, we can have fresh bar girl there every night, if you like. Forget about Big Mole in no time.”
•
Big Mole sat at her kitchen table on Friday morning, eating two half-boiled eggs for breakfast and thinking. She didn’t blame Kwang for leaving her out in the cold the previous day. At least he was honest with me, she consoled herself and looked at the clock; she still had more than an hour to spare before needing to be at Jade’s place for their day at the Sisters’ Islands.
As she sat there wondering about the future, she heard the General and Quiet One outside talking in Hokkien; she peeked outside the kitchen window and saw them with two trishaw men. “We pay you both double for waiting,” the General was saying. “Don’t know how long. Could be one or two hours. How much all together?”
“Three dollars an hour for each of us is fair,” one of them said eagerly.
“Okay lor, agreed,” Quiet One said, then followed the General up the squeaky wooden stairs to knock on Big Mole’s front door.
She got up to answer, and blocked the doorway with her body. “Are you coming to pack up and go?” she asked, one hand on her hip.
“Yah lah, what I am here for,” the General replied. “You give me three days, so here I am. Can we come in?”
She moved aside and sat down on the couch in the lounge, motioning to the cardboard suitcase near the door. “I already pack your clothes last night. The rest are just your books on the shelves.”
“Better to split up nicely, right?” Quiet One said to Big Mole as he packed books into a cardboard box.
“Agree lah. Hey Hong, you hear that?” she said to the General.
“Yah lah, that’s what we should do,” the General said. “Hey, have you thought of selling your shop?”
“Why?” she looked at him, surprised. “You going to buy it or what?”
“I don’t ask if I’m not going to. Are you willing to let your shop go?”
“For how much? You tell me.”
“Hmm, we both know the fish are worth around $400 at wholesale price. Shop has no legal lease, correct? Sitting on squatter land claimed by that retired charcoal man you pay $50 a month on rent. Average turnover is $30 a day, net profit basically one-third, so that’s ten bucks a day after all the fish food expenses. Around $300 a month, right? You take $3,000 for everything to be fair?”
“I don’t know what Sachee will think about that,” she said, wanting to see what else he had to say.
“Sachee will be away for a few months. You want to wait for him to come back before you make up your mind?”
She sighed. “No, I don’t want to wait that long,” she said. “You really serious about buying my shop for $3000?”
“Of course lah.”
“How can you afford it though?”
“With money we made from that racecourse,” the General said.
She managed to stop herself from laughing in his face at the lameness of the continued lie. “Okay lah,” she said. “Deal. I inform the charcoal man about change of hands. When I get my money?”
“We come back tomorrow morning, at this time.”
“I will take your gentleman’s word for that,” she said decisively. Hong buying her pet fish shop solved all of her problems. She no longer had to worry about the danger of sitting in her shop, or about the plastic box of money and valuables buried under her stilt house getting stolen if the General were not around. She just wanted to be safe, and safety was what she now had. Money was definitely no longer an issue. And for the sake of goodwill, she helped to load the General’s belongings into the two waiting trishaws outside.
As the trishaw men pedalled the General and Quiet One toward Serangoon, Quiet One laughed and said, “I expect her to ask for more than three grand.”
“Yah lah. She will regret it later.” The General laughed with bitter satisfaction. “She has no idea what she has lost. We can actually expand our backyard a lot more. Won’t take much to level some of the old rubbish heaps covered by weeds. Just need some bamboo seedlings to build up bamboo walls around it—easy lah. I am sure the old charcoal man won’t mind us doing that. We should charge him, actually; doing him a favour by clearing land for him for no charge.”
“What you going to do with the extra space?”
“Use planks to build platforms for potted plants to sit on. Can easily get an extra quarter-acre of unclaimed land. Believe me, we get back our money in no time.”
“I don’t call you a wizard for nothing, Hong,” Quiet One said, and the General beamed at the inflation of his ego.
“Big Mole hasn’t seen anything yet,” the General said, waving his finger. “Let’s go and live in our Serangoon bungalow. We hire a van to buy all the furniture we need at one go.”
“I want a comfortable bed for one-night stands with bar girls,” Quiet One said keenly. “That was my fantasy when I was in Changi Prison.”
“Sure lah, can have by tonight,” the General said and grinned at Quiet One. Everything was going his way now.
Part
Two
7
Cracking the Case
Two months passed quickly. The phone line at the Serangoon bungalow had been activated. Life was good—Quiet One and the General’s money spoke louder than words, and there was no shortage of call girls. Their plan to convert part of the old rubbish dump behind the backyard for their potted plant business had just been completed. The bamboo seedlings they had planted earlier had shot up as fast as bean sprouts, and fenced an extra quarter-acre of land, which they covered with truckloads of crushed sea shells to stop the ground from mudding, just like in the backyard. They had also bought a second-hand van and sprayed it with pictures of pet fish and potted plants, as well as with the phone number of the pet fish shop, so that it would look clean and sharp for business.
“All going according to your plan,” Quite One said to the General as they drank strong coffee at the long scaffolding table after the workers had been paid for their labour: they had levelled the areas overgrown with long lalang grass and
wild scrubs, finally fixed the broken back door, and lay down rows of nine-inch-wide planks to make platforms for the potted plants to sit in neat rows.
“Only cost us just over a grand for those guys to sweat for us,” the General said, gesturing with his Consulate cigarette between two fingers. “Our next move is to look in the phone book for the right potted plant dealers.”
Quiet One smoked his Lucky Strike and nodded his head.
“All we need is a bit of this and this,” said the General, rubbing his fingers together to indicate money, then pointing at his head. “Once we set up our potted plant business to look like we have legitimate cash flow on the surface, we should hire a bumboat to test the waters by sea to Pasir Ris, see if we can do business with the harbour rats for the canned abalone. But need proceed cautiously.”
“Yah lah. Time is on our side.” Quiet One sipped his coffee. “By the time our potted plants are ready, Sachee and everybody should be back. Small-Time Thief dropped me a postcard from Kelantan to say they return in another month.”
“One month not that long. Ha! I wonder what they say when they get back!”
“Their eyes will pop out at your transformation here.”
“Yah. Hmm. I wonder what Big Mole will say.”
“Probably regret what she has missed out. She might cry, she see you driving a Mercedes.”
•
Big Mole felt rather empty without her shop, which had kept her busy for years, even as her modelling work increased. Kwang had also been true to his word, and stayed away. She didn’t know what to do with all her spare time and money, and never even considered moving out of the kampong. Based on her life savings, the money Hong had paid her to buy her shop, her modelling fees working an average of ten hours a week at $100 per hour, as well as the stolen money from the khaki bag, she had amassed nearly $25,000, which she deposited in her new POSB account; the stolen valuables from the dead men remained inside the waterproof plastic container, buried underneath her stilt house.
After returning home from a fashion show at the world-famous Raffles Hotel, she wondered what would come next. The loud applause she had received on the catwalk gave her a lot more self-confidence. She had boosted the image of Jade’s clothing lines; large orders came in consistently from overseas buyers. Some of her photos had already been published in glossy Hong Kong fashion magazines. In one of the photos taken of her on the Sisters’ Islands, she had been licking an ice cream while wearing a revealing bikini. A big American company had seen the picture and placed a huge order for Jade’s bikinis.
Aunty Tan, Jade’s elegant manager, had chaperoned Big Mole to the Raffles Hotel’s changing room after her catwalk. “We are holding a fancy dress party at Jade’s house at the end of this month, Djalima,” she said. “We would like you to come. It is for the fifth anniversary of Jade’s boutique in Singapore. Will you come?”
“Do I get anything from that?” Big Mole said, no longer having any qualms about asking what she would be paid.
“You can consider it as half a day’s work. That’s four hours, Djalima.”
“What shall I wear?”
“There is a shop called Hard to Find at the end of Orchard Road, near the Botanic Gardens; we will pay for whatever you choose there, so go and pick something out for yourself. Have you any idea of what you might wear?”
“Hmm, maybe something that makes me looks like a mute scarecrow!” Big Mole joked.
“How interesting,” Aunty Tan said tactfully. “Can you tell me why?”
“Because I won’t understand all the fancy talk in English at the party, that’s why.”
“Mmm, I can understand your frustration, Djalima. Why don’t you learn English?”
“How long does it take to learn?”
“It all depends on you. If you can remember just five new English words a day, you will have about a hundred and fifty words by the end of the month in your vocabulary! I can help you, if you like; I was the assistant principal at Raffles Girls’ School before I resigned to work with Jade, you know.”
“But what about your time?” Big Mole asked, wiping away her make-up and then changing into her batik clothing. She still needed to maintain her conservative image in the Malay kampong, even as Jade and her team were drinking Singapore Slings at the Raffles Hotel Long Bar, socialising with overseas buyers without Big Mole because she didn’t drink alcohol and couldn’t speak English.
“I can give you an hour or two a day, Djalima,” Aunty Tan said, “in the evenings at my place. I live at the Katong Apartments, not far from the shopping mall with our boutique. Would you like to do that?”
“Yes, I do! How much will you charge to teach me?”
“Oh, I won’t do it for money. It’s a thank-you for how much you’ve helped our business. We can start tomorrow evening at seven.”
“Do I need to bring anything?”
“Leave that to me. Now, do you have any other ideas of what you might wear at the fancy dress party?”
“I don’t know. I might change my mind about dressing like a scarecrow. What about you?”
“I am going to dress like a clown!” the manager replied, and they both laughed.
The next evening, Big Mole told Aunty Tan that she first wanted to learn how to read and write her legal name as written on her Singaporean identity card: Dai Lup Mak. Next, she wanted to learn how to sign her name in a fancy way, so that she could actually use the cheques that POSB had sent her. By the week of the fancy dress party, she had learnt nearly a hundred English words and was able to sing “Red Sails in the Sunset” by Nat King Cole, which she had picked up by listening to the song repeatedly on the gramophone record at the Aunty Tan’s apartment. The manager even gave her some basic piano lessons, so that she could play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”.
“Djalima is really motivated in everything she does,” Aunty Tan informed Jade privately at her sea-view mansion. “She can follow a few songs on my record player, and can play a few children’s songs on my piano. She should even be able to use a dictionary on her own soon.”
“What else does she want to do?” Jade asked, sketching in her drawing pad while seated at the cutting table on the top floor, its bay windows facing the sea.
The manager looked at Jade’s sketches. “I have asked; she said she doesn’t know yet. She’s a bit lost without the comfort of her pet fish shop.”
“She is quite the secretive girl. Have you found out any more from our private detective friends?”
“I have! They say she has been living alone in her Malay kampong for the past two months. She doesn’t seem to have a boyfriend any more, which is good. There are also people doing up her former shop.”
“That’s nothing new—I knew that already,” Jade said. “Djalima told me she broke up with her boyfriend and sold him her pet fish shop. But there must be something funny going on between them. I want to know more about that ex-boyfriend of hers. Get our detective friends on it.”
“What’s the point, Jade?” the manager asked.
“She doesn’t look happy—can’t you see that? It could be something to do with that controlling young man.”
“Okay, I am with you now. I don’t want her to get hurt.”
“She keeps her problems to herself, and wouldn’t ask us for help even if she needs it. She is a very proud girl with a mind of her own. We need more details on that boyfriend of hers. Check his background. Find out what he really does for a living, and where he lives. And tell them to get photos; I want to see what he looks like.”
Aunty Tan rang the Three Musketeers Investigation Agency, run by three ex-police detective sergeants—one Malay, one Indian and one Chinese—all in their mid-forties. They each had over twenty years of experience working in the Criminal Investigation Department.
The Chinese investigator answered the call. “Let me see what I can do. I will get back to you in a week or two.”
“Can you do better than that, Eng Hock? Time is money in our business.”
“I will talk to my colleagues and get back to you straight away.”
“Thank you, Eng Hock,” the manager said and disconnected the call.
•
Eng Hock sat behind his desk, opposite his two partners in their expensive office at the new eighteen-storey Asia Insurance Building, the tallest building in Singapore. Their office had a full harbour view and was located in the commercial centre along with international shipping companies, banks, law and accounting firms, and major trading companies, all of whom used private investigators for various reasons.
After hanging up the phone, he said to his partner, “Hey Abdullah, that manager from Jade’s Boutique just rang. She wants a photo of that girl’s boyfriend soon. Can you get on that?”
Abdullah was smoking a cheroot and reading a newspaper at his desk. “I’ll see what my source has to say,” he said. “Would have been easier if they had told us that earlier.” Abdullah had been born and bred in the big Malay kampong where Big Mole lived, but moved out after getting married and having two kids.
“How come?”
Abdullah sat back and explained. “According to my source, there were two chaps living with that girl in the same house. One was older, a small guy, the other younger and bigger. Neither of them is there now. They seem to have moved out after she sold her pet fish shop, so we have to track them down again, which will take more time and money.”
“Money is not a problem for Jade and her partners. We have to look after them. They have recommended quite a few clients to us, you know; that brought in more business than the advertisement we paid for in the phone book.”
“Tell that manager to give us two weeks then.”
“No lah, she said that was too long.”
“All right. If you want a short-cut, we’ll have to use our CID friends to question the girl and get details about those two chaps.”
“No no, we can’t do that. This is a private matter, nothing criminal. The manager would have asked that girl directly if it were so straightforward. They don’t want to alarm her. They want the answer as soon as possible.”