Forever and a Death

by Donald E. Westlake

  That was Mark! She was convinced of it. That was Mark, and in her hand was the explanation for his continuing non-appearance.

  She thought, I should bring this back to Jerry and Luther. Then she corrected that thought: I should read this, and then bring it to Jerry and Luther.

  There were benches along the pedestrian path in front of the Empress Place Building. Kim found a free spot, sat down, looked around, saw nothing unusual—what would be unusual? what should she look for?—and unfolded the paper.

  It was letterhead, Richard Curtis’s letterhead, which startled her. RC STRUCTURAL it said across the top, with the Singapore office address and phone numbers and fax numbers and e-mail address. Handwritten in the middle of the page in neat small script was: “Jerry, you are being followed by a man from Curtis. In fifteen minutes, take the #167 bus south. Be sure you’re the last ones on the bus. M.”

  Her hands were trembling when she refolded the paper. She stood, feeling suddenly awkward, and stuffed the paper into her jeans pocket. It was as though she had stage fright, this sudden self-consciousness. She’d forgotten how to walk normally, and it seemed to her she lurched like some not-well-made robot as she made her way back to the hawker center and the two men at the table.

  “Well, there you are,” Jerry said, but Luther had looked at her face, and he said, “What is it, Kim? What happened?”

  Wordlessly, she handed Luther the folded paper, then sat down. Luther opened it, and Jerry leaned close to his shoulder so they could both read it. “No reaction, Jerry,” Luther said quietly, not looking up. He refolded the paper and pocketed it.

  Kim could see that Jerry wanted to react all over the place, but all he did was look wide-eyed at Kim and say low, as though not to be overheard, “Mark gave you that?”

  “It must have been him,” she said. “He just stopped in front of me, handed me the note, and went right off. I didn’t have a chance to say a word to him.”

  Jerry said, “I don’t see what the point is in taking a bus. If somebody’s following us, they can certainly follow a bus.”

  Luther said, “I’m sure Mark has something in mind.”

  “But what? He doesn’t even say where to get off the bus.”

  “We’ll find out,” Luther said. “Come on.”

  * * *

  The #167 bus was crowded enough to have standees, but they weren’t all jammed tightly together. Kim and Jerry and Luther stood in a group, holding on as the bus swayed down Collyer Quay, and it seemed unlikely to Kim that any of the obvious tourist types on the bus could be the person who was following them. So, had they gotten away?

  The bus made another stop, and among the people who got on was the young man who’d given her the note. He looked around, not appearing to recognize them at first, and she noticed that Jerry and Luther also remained deadpan. Then he came toward them and stood near Jerry. “Why don’t you all cluster around me?” he asked quietly.

  They did, and Jerry said, “Where is he?”

  “In a taxi, following the bus.”

  “Jesus, Mark,” Jerry said. “So where can we meet?”

  Mark grinned at him. “We are meeting, Jerry. This is it.”

  “Very clever,” Luther said. “May I introduce Kim Baldur. Kim, this is Mark Hennessy.”

  They exchanged nods, and then Luther said, “How do you know it’s somebody from Curtis?”

  “Yesterday morning,” Mark said, “Mr. Curtis’s secretary had me carry five thousand dollars in cash to Mr. Curtis in the small conference room. There was a man in there with him, I just got a quick look at him and I don’t think he noticed me at all. Last night, I was about to go into the bar to meet you two, and I saw the same man in a car parked just down the block. Today, I saw you arrive, and the same man was behind you.”

  “Hired by Curtis,” Luther said.

  “It would seem that way.” Mark Hennessy was an American, Kim was pretty sure, but he’d been away from the United States long enough for his accent to begin to slip, to move into something more general and foreign, with traces of Britishness. He said, “It’ll be easy to pick him out. He’s a bulky man, Eurasian, and he’s carrying a Polaroid camera.”

  Kim said, “A Polaroid!”

  Jerry said, “Mark, he’s staying at our hotel.”

  “Then he’s probably tapped your phones,” Mark said. “Which would explain why he knows what you’re going to do.”

  The bus trundled along, now leaving Raffles Quay and starting down Shenton Way. Passengers got on and off, and Jerry kept his voice low, but Kim could hear the stress in it. “Mark, we can’t keep meeting on buses all the time.”

  “Well, the fact is, we don’t have to,” Mark said. “I don’t have that much to report. The main thing going on now in the office is the preparations for Kanowit Island, the construction and all that.”

  “Curtis is planning something else,” Luther said, “something much worse. We just don’t know what.”

  “Something to do with the ocean,” Jerry said. “There’s a destructive ocean wave he can make.”

  “Same as at Kanowit,” Mark said, and shrugged. “Haven’t a clue,” he said. “I’ll tell you, though, he had a visitor from Hong Kong this morning.”

  Luther said, “Really? I thought he’d burned all his bridges to Hong Kong.”

  “This is a labor thug called Jackie Tian,” Mark told them. “He and Curtis were tight in the old days, in Hong Kong. I doubt Tian has any influence anywhere else.”

  Luther said, “You think Curtis is planning something around Hong Kong? He does have a grudge against them, god knows.”

  Jerry said, “But it has to be something to do with that wave, that soliton wave.”

  “Listen,” Mark said, “I’ve got to get off here, I’m going to be late getting back to the office as it is. Jerry, here’s the phone number of a friend of mine, he’s somebody we can trust. I’ll be at his place every day at six. You call me from a pay phone, not from your room, and I’ll tell you what if anything I’ve learned.”

  “Very good,” Jerry said, pocketing the small card Mark had given him. “I’ll have some Planetwatch folks do some digging— quietly. Without telling them why.”

  Mark said, “And I’ll snoop around, see if I can find anything that uses the soliton.”

  Luther said, “You have access to that sort of information?”

  “I can get access,” Mark said. “I was part of the support team for Kanowit. I didn’t go out to the island, but I filled special requests. George Manville used to phone me all the time.”

  Kim started. “You know George Manville?”

  “Of course. I like him, to tell the truth, I think he’s a good guy.”

  Kim found she could hardly speak. “How is he these days?”

  “No idea,” Mark said. “Haven’t seen him since he went off to Kanowit.”

  Kim said, “But didn’t he come back to Singapore with Mr. Curtis?”

  “Not that I know of,” Mark said. “Haven’t seen him around, anyway. Do you want me to look him up?”

  “Not needed,” Jerry said, putting a hand on Kim’s shoulder. “We know all we need to know about George Manville.”

  All at once, Kim wasn’t so sure about that.

  10

  “I don’t like this,” Colin Bennett told himself. “I think they’re up to something.”

  What he didn’t say out loud, because he didn’t want to have to acknowledge it to himself, was that he thought they were onto him. “Don’t queer this with Curtis,” he begged himself, whispering inside the car, afraid to overhear himself.

  But there was no denying there was a difference in the manner of those three people. He’d become aware of it only gradually, so he couldn’t say for certain when the change had taken place, but it seemed to him it had been after their hawker center lunch on Wednesday.

  So far as he could tell, at that lunch their friend Mark had once again failed to appear; at least, Bennett hadn’t seen them meet or exchange
words with anybody. At one point, the girl had wandered off by herself, but it was the men who knew Mark and expected to meet with him, so Bennett had stuck to the men, and he was absolutely certain that nobody had approached them.

  Then the girl had come back, and they’d had some palaver, looked at a map or something—he was discreetly too far away to see exactly what that was—and then took a city bus to nowhere in particular, as though they were no more than tourists.

  In fact, since then, they’d behaved as though that’s really all they were, tourists. There were no more phone calls from or to Mark from their hotel room. They went out in the mornings, but not to anywhere in particular, as far as he could tell. Late in the afternoon on Thursday and Friday, Jerry Diedrich made brief phone calls from a pay phone wherever they happened to be, but no secret rendezvous followed; and on Saturday he didn’t even do that.

  Something had changed. They had been urgently trying to meet this fellow Mark—a disloyal employee of Richard Curtis’s, that was certain—and they had failed twice to meet him, and now they acted as though they didn’t care. As though they had no agenda at all.

  There was only the one explanation possible. Somehow.

  In some way, they’d come to realize they were being observed. And they would do nothing to make trouble for themselves or their friend Mark so long as they knew the observation was ongoing.

  This was no good. Bennett had phoned Curtis on Friday, to assure the man he was still on the case but that nothing had as yet turned up, and Curtis had told him, “We can’t take much longer on this.”

  “I’m on them, Mr. Curtis, night and day.”

  “I have to leave the city next week,” Curtis had said. “I need this situation resolved before then, Colin. Can I count on you?”

  “Absolutely, Mr. Curtis.”

  But it wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. The less urgency Diedrich and his friends showed, the more urgency Bennett felt. Curtis wasn’t paying him to sit around in hotel rooms and cars. Curtis was paying him to solve a problem called Jerry Diedrich, and he wasn’t solving it.

  And now here it was Sunday, and the three of them left the hotel in mid-morning and, after a brief stop at the local Planet-watch storefront, walked to where they could catch the #7 bus, westbound. Out Orchard Road they went, in the bus, Bennett unhappily trailing after in his little Honda, feeling the heat of the day, having to stop a block or so back every time the bus stopped, having no idea where they were going because they didn’t talk to one another on the phone anymore. They rode the bus all the way out to the end of Orchard Road, then walked on to Holland Road and the entrance to the Botanic Gardens.

  The Botanic Gardens! Bennett knew it well, it was an annual event when he was a schoolchild for a class trip out to the Botanic Gardens. The city was proud of the Gardens, and deservedly so. It was natural for schoolchildren to visit, and tourists. But it was not at all natural for a grown-up native Singaporean to be hulking around the Botanic Gardens all by himself in the hot humid middle of a Sunday, and Bennett found his frustration and unease steadily edging over toward resentment.

  Would they at last meet the mythical Mark here? Unless Mark had disguised himself as a Boy Scout troop, Bennett didn’t see how it was possible.

  We can’t have another week like this. Time to do something. Time to do something Richard Curtis will like.

  11

  Monday was a day of frustrations and irritations for Richard Curtis. First, when he arrived in the offices at nine-thirty that morning, Margaret presented him with a fax from Jackie Tian in Hong Kong:

  “Diver unavailable. Arrested on smuggling. No substitute yet.”

  This was bad news. The project needed a skilled scuba diver, skilled and trustworthy, and Tian had a man who had been used in any number of dubious operations in the past, sabotage and smuggling, working for management and labor and government, whoever would pay him. This was a hell of a time for the man to be caught.

  And if Tian had no substitute, what was Curtis supposed to do about it? He did use divers himself sometimes, in his construction projects around the world, but they were all legitimate employees, simple workers skilled with scuba equipment; none of them could be approached with this assignment.

  “Margaret,” Curtis said, “ask Personnel to put together a list of all scuba divers in our employ. On any of the projects.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I want their work history,” Curtis said, “with us, of course, but also, where we know it, with others. And any personal information we might have on each of them would be good.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She went off to take care of that, and he returned to the Kanowit architects.

  This project was both fascinating and frustrating in a number of ways. To begin, with, it was a relatively small island, and they would have to pack it with a lot of different elements without giving the impression of overcrowding.

  Then there was the soliton, the way the island had been recreated, which would leave a deceptively smooth and inviting surface. Down inside there, however, would be undigested chunks of the old Japanese buildings, and jagged blocks of coral. For items like cisterns, swimming pool, basements, the golf course lake, they would very literally be digging into the unknown, with always the possibility of creating a subsidence or discovering an air pocket.

  The most elegant solution seemed to be to build all underground structures separately, aboveground, and then sink them into the new soil of Kanowit. It would be the most reliable way to build there, but it was full of complexities.

  Curtis loved this work. He loved thinking about it, he loved finding the problems and then working on the solutions. He loved working with like-minded men and women, who could give the same kind of concentration and devotion as he to this kind of problem.

  (That’s why he’d so enjoyed working with George Manville, and why he’d been so reluctant to end the relationship by ending Manville. Could that still be worked out, somehow? He doubted it.)

  It was twenty past eleven when Margaret interrupted: “Mr. Farrelly, from Australia, on the phone, Mr. Curtis,” she said.

  Why, I was just thinking about Manville, Curtis thought, and this must be something about him. Good or bad? “I’ll be right there,” he told Margaret, and said to the architects, “This won’t take long.”

  No problem, they assured him, in the usual murmuring way, going back to the blueprints before he had left the room.

  At his desk, he picked up the phone, said hello, and Albert Farrelly sounded worried: “This man Raf here wants to talk to you, Mr. Curtis.”

  Raf? That was one of Pallifer’s men. Why didn’t Pallifer come on himself? “Put him on,” Curtis said, and a minute later the raspy voice said, “Morning, Mr. Curtis.”

  Curtis said, “Where’s Pallifer?”

  “Well, that’s the thing, Mr. Curtis,” Raf said. “Nobody knows.”

  “Nobody knows?”

  “Well, sir, last Tuesday, Morgan got a phone call from some banker, I dunno what about—”

  Curtis knew. The location of the Manville-Baldur hideyhole, no longer a factor. “What did Morgan do?”

  “He said he had to go back to Brisbane, just for the one overnight, we should lock up Manville while he’s gone.”

  With all the other details to think about, Curtis realized, he hadn’t remembered to tell Pallifer that the search for Kim Baldur in Australia could stop now, that she was here in Singapore. He hadn’t really thought about Pallifer at all since leaving Australia, had simply assumed everything was in position there, waiting for further orders from him.

  He said, “You locked up Manville. And then?”

  “Well, that’s it,” Raf said. “We couldn’t find him.”

  “Couldn’t find— For how long?”

  “Ever since, Mr. Curtis.”

  Curtis took a second to absorb that. “Are you telling me,” he said, “George Manville has been missing since last Tuesday? For a week?”
/>   “Both of them, Mr. Curtis.”

  “Both of them? What both?”

  “Morgan, too,” the man said. “We looked for Manville and couldn’t find him, all of us, and Morgan thought maybe Manville heard some of the phone call, so Morgan just took off before it got dark, and told us to lock up Manville when we found him, but we never did.”

  “A week ago.”

  “We kept expecting Morgan to come back,” Raf said. He sounded worried, almost embarrassed, like a man who wasn’t used to such emotions.

  “Clearly,” Curtis said, “Manville left with Pallifer.”

  “No, sir, I don’t think so,” Raf said. “Morgan put his bag in the trunk, and the fella wasn’t there. And when he drove away, there wasn’t anybody in the back or on the roof or like that, or we’d of seen him.”

  “Then Manville took off, on foot,” Curtis said. “And Pallifer caught up with him.”

  “I’ve driven all around out there, Mr. Curtis,” Raf said, “in the Land Rover, and I don’t find anything. Not the car, not either man.”

  Curtis said, “Manville could not have walked anywhere from Kennison, it’s not physically possible. He and Pallifer must have met up, somehow, there’s no other explanation.”

  “Yes, sir,” Raf said. “Except, if they met up, and if Morgan killed him, I’d of heard from Morgan by now. And if they met up, and Manville killed Morgan, we’d all have heard from the law by now.”

  Two men dead in the desert; the thought crossed Curtis’s mind. They’d met somewhere out there, and neither survived.

  But then, why wouldn’t Raf have come across the car? Curtis said, “This makes no sense.”

  “Mr. Curtis,” Raf said, “yesterday, I phoned Billie, you know, Pallifer’s girlfriend in Townville, said have you heard from him, she said no, now she’s worried. I’m sorry I did that, but I thought you ought to know.”

  “So no one has seen or heard from either man since last Tuesday.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Curtis would be leaving Singapore in two days, on Wednesday. His travel plans showed him flying to Manila on the first leg of an inspection tour of RC Structural projects. Only Margaret would know where he was really going, and she wouldn’t tell anyone.