The Singapore Wink

by Ross Thomas

  The cab was an old yellow-topped Mercedes whose Chinese driver wove it in and out of the traffic on Serangoon Road, turned left with a certain amount of flair on Lavender Street, then right on Beach Road, and dropped us off before the white colonial facade of the Raffles Hotel that fairly glistened in the hot sun. I paid him his three Singapore dollars, tipped him another fifty cents to show that I was a sport, and followed Carla Lozupone into the dim, cool interior of the hotel where a beaming Chinese clerk happily informed us that our reservations were in order. Carla Lozupone’s only comment during the ride from the airport had been: “It’s hot.”

  In the lobby she looked around at the century-old building. “I’ve heard about this place ever since I was a kid,” she said.

  “I like old hotels,” I said.

  She gave the lobby another appraising glance. “You’ll be happy here.”

  Our rooms were on the second floor, across the hall from each other. Just outside her door, Carla Lozupone turned to me as the Malay bellhop inserted a key in the lock. “I’m going to take a bath,” she said. “Then I’m going to get dressed and then you’re going to buy me a drink. A special drink.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t fly nine thousand odd miles for nothing. I’m going to have a Singapore Sling in the bar of the Raffles Hotel. After that, we’ll do whatever we’re going to do. But we’ll do that first.”

  “It’s as good a way to start as any,” I said. “Maybe even better.”

  I followed the bellhop into my room which was high-ceilinged, large, and furnished in what I suppose could be called British Empire modern. At least the bed looked comfortable. I gave him a Singapore dollar, felt like a miser, and was relieved when he grinned and thanked me effusively. After I had unpacked, and shaved and showered in the enormous bathroom, I put on a lightweight suit, found the telephone book, looked up a number, and made a call to Mr. Lim Pang Sam, the only person whose name I knew in Singapore other than Angelo Sacchetti’s. I didn’t think that Angelo’s name would be in the book, but nevertheless I looked. It wasn’t. I had to go through two secretaries to reach Lim, but when I identified myself as Richard Trippet’s associate, he was exceedingly cordial and wanted to know how Dickie was. I told him that Dickie was fine and we agreed to meet at Lim’s office at ten the following morning. After I hung up I began to feel that asking a respectable Singapore businessman about an American blackmailer might not prove to be an auspicious beginning. Yet it seemed better than asking the Sikh doorman in front of the hotel. Better, perhaps, but not much.

  Singapore, which has some aspirations of becoming the New York of Southeast Asia, is fairly new as cities go, having been founded by Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles in 1819. That, if you don’t count what was there before the Javanese leveled it during a raid in 1377, makes Singapore younger than both New York and Washington, but older than either Dallas or Denver. It likes to think that it offers “instant Asia” to the touring Garden Club from Rapid City, South Dakota. A more apt description might be “Asia without tears,” because the water can be drunk from the tap, the city is fairly clean, there are no beggars, but numerous millionaires, and almost everybody that a tourist encounters either speaks or at least understands English.

  I was telling all this to Carla Lozupone as we sipped our Singapore Slings in the Elizabethan Room’s small, comfortable bar.

  “What else has it got?” she asked.

  “The world’s fifth largest port—or perhaps busiest, I’m not sure. A hell of a naval base which the British are giving up soon because they can’t afford it now, any more than they could afford it when they built it in the twenties and thirties—”

  “That’s the one where the guns were all pointed the wrong way during World War II, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Towards the sea,” I said. “The Japanese walked and pushed their bicycles down through Malaya which was supposedly impenetrable and there wasn’t much that the British could do about it.”

  “So what is it now?”

  “What?”

  “Singapore.”

  “It’s a republic now. Eight or nine years ago it was a crown colony, then a self-governing state under British protection, then a member of the Malaysian Federation until it was kicked out in 1965. Now it’s a republic.”

  “It’s a little small, isn’t it?”

  “A little.”

  Carla tried her drink again, lit a cigarette, and looked around the bar which, at three o’clock in the afternoon, was almost empty. “Do you think he ever comes in here?”

  “Sacchetti?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t even know he was alive until four days ago. But if he can show his face, I suppose that he’d come here. It’s popular and stylish and Angelo, as I recall, always liked places like that.”

  “I knew he was alive six weeks ago, perhaps even seven,” she said.

  “How did you find out?”

  “One of my old man’s associates heard about it. You can substitute anything you want for associates.”

  “You didn’t choose your parents,” I said.

  “No, but one of them tried to choose my husband.”

  “He seemed to have had his reasons.”

  “Reasons,” she said. “All the wrong ones.”

  She was wearing a simple, yellow sleeveless cotton dress which was probably more expensive than it looked. When she turned in her chair to look at me the dress tightened across her breasts and I could tell that she still didn’t have much use for brassieres.

  “Tell me something,” she said. “What happens when you find Angelo? Are you going to beat up on him, as the boys down on the corner used to say?”

  “What good would that do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Therapy maybe. It might cure your St. Vitus dance or whatever it is that you’ve got.”

  “I have to find him first.”

  “When do you start looking?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “Fine,” she said and drained her glass. “That gives me plenty of time to have another one of these.”

  I ordered two more of the drinks that I didn’t much care for but which seemed to be the thing to do the first day in Singapore. When they came, Carla took a swallow of hers and lit another cigarette. There were six of them in her ashtray and we had been there less than forty-five minutes.

  “You smoke a lot,” I said, keeping up my end of the conversation.

  “I’m nervous.”

  “About what?” I said.

  “About Angelo.”

  “Why should you be? The way you tell it, you’re just along for the ride.”

  “Angelo may not think so,” she said.

  “So?”

  “How well do you know him?”

  “That’s what everybody asks me,” I said.

  “All right. Now I’m asking. How well do you know him?”

  “Not well. Not well at all. We worked together a few times. I think he once bought me a drink or I bought him one. I’m not sure which.”

  She found a flake of tobacco on her tongue, picked it off, and flicked it into the ashtray. She did it as well as or better than any woman I had ever seen.

  “So you don’t know him?”

  “No.”

  “I do.”

  “Okay. You know him.”

  “He has something going for him here in Singapore, doesn’t he? I mean he has a Sacchetti-type thing going.”

  “So I understand.”

  “And it’s making money,” she said. “Otherwise he wouldn’t stay.”

  “I’ve heard that, too.”

  “I know this about Angelo. If he’s making money, he’s not doing it legitimately. That’s number one.”

  “What’s number two?”

  “If anyone gets in his way, he’ll walk on them.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re planning to get in his way?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she looke
d at me and her face was no longer pretty. It was as if she had slipped on a pale mask that had been designed to portray only one emotion and that was an intense dislike that bordered on hatred. When she finally spoke, her voice was cold and somehow remote.

  “I don’t know if I’ll get in his way or not,” she said. “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what he says after I talk to him.”

  “When do you plan to do that?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “What do you plan to talk about, old times in New Jersey?”

  She shook her head. “I have a few questions.”

  “Only a few?”

  “Three. Maybe even four.”

  “And if his answers are correct?”

  She stared at me again, this time as if I were some stranger who had made her a particularly indecent proposal.

  “You don’t understand, Cauthorne.”

  “Understand what?”

  “There aren’t any right answers to my questions. There aren’t any right answers at all.”

  CHAPTER XII

  Just like a couple of well-heeled American tourists determined to discover the real Singapore, we had dinner that night in Bugis Street which runs through one of the Chinese sections. The two- and three-story buildings that line the street are about the size of a low-cost American row house, except that as many as fifty persons might be living inside, or at least sleeping there. This forces the cooking to be done outside, virtually on the sidewalk. The specialties are displayed in stalls and served at small tables covered with fairly clean white cloths.

  It was the dinner hour. Later, the street would become a market center where the stalls would sell sport shirts and razor blades instead of eight-inch prawns and steamed cockles. We found a table, sat down, and almost immediately a young Chinese appeared, carrying two hot scented towels in wooden tongs.

  “What’s this for?” Carla said.

  “You’re supposed to be hot and sweaty,” I said. “You can dry yourself off with it.”

  I asked the man who had brought the towels what his specialty was and he claimed that he served a most remarkable roast duck. We decided to try the duck as well as some pau, which are riceballs that contain meat and prawns heavily spiced with chilis and sweetened with something that tastes like plum sauce. We began with a soup that I couldn’t identify but which turned out to be almost as good as our duck specialist promised it would be. The man who sold ducks dispatched a youngster for the pau and the soup which were the specialties of a couple of stalls farther down the street. The service was good, the price was wonderful, the duck was excellent, and if you didn’t mind a motorcycle or two going off in your ear, the blast of what seemed to be a hundred transistor radios, all tuned to different stations, and an occasional elbow in your neck from the passing crowd that thronged the street, it was all very nice, friendly and, I suppose, quite Chinese in a touristy sort of way.

  When we were finished I asked Carla if she would like to take a trishaw back to the hotel.

  “You mean one of those things where the man rides a bicycle in front?”

  “Yes.”

  She shook her head. “That’s where I draw the line, Cauthorne. I’ll do a lot of things, but I’m not going to cause another human being to have a heart attack because he has to pull me around.”

  “You’re thinking of rickshaws,” I said. “They don’t have them in Singapore any more. I think the rickshaw men used to last a maximum of five years before they died of tuberculosis.”

  “How long do they last pumping away on their bicycles?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Really? What a pleasant surprise.”

  Before I could say something clever to that a cab appeared and I hailed it. The driver just missed a very old woman who hobbled along on tiny feet that must have been bound when she was a child, cut smartly in front of a long-haired Chinese youth on a big Honda, and came to a stop before us as if he were surprised that his brakes still worked.

  I have a theory, largely unsubstantiated, that countries whose traffic moves on the left have a higher accident rate than those where it keeps to the right. It may be an entirely provincial notion, but it was lent additional support by the driver who cowboyed us the short distance back to the Raffles, never keeping more than four inches between his bumper and the car in front, and passing a couple of times when there wasn’t any space to pass. Despite my former trade, I kept closing my eyes at crucial moments which seemed to occur every fifty feet or so. It apparently didn’t bother Carla Lozupone at all.

  At the hotel, I paid the driver, tipped him handsomely because I was glad to be alive, and suggested a brandy in the courtyard to Carla. She agreed and we sat there, sipping Courvoisier under the palm trees, and admiring the golf-green-like grass.

  “What’s on for tomorrow,” she said. “More local color?”

  “I have to see a man.”

  “What about?”

  “He may have some suggestions about where I can find Angelo Sacchetti.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I may run an ad in the personal column.”

  “When do you see the man?”

  “At ten.”

  She looked at her watch. “I think I’ll go on up,” she said. “I’m a little tired.” I started to rise, but she added: “You may as well finish your drink. Knock on my door when you get back from your appointment.”

  “All right.”

  I watched her walk across the courtyard and enter the hotel. For no good reason at all, I left some bills on the table and followed. Carla Lozupone entered the lobby, turned towards the entrance, and spoke briefly to the turbaned Sikh doorman under the canopy. He whistled up a cab and Carla got in. I looked at my watch. It was ten-thirty and I wondered where a girl who didn’t know anyone in Singapore might be going at that time of night. I was still wondering when I fell asleep a little after midnight.

  Lim Pang Sam’s office was on the ninth floor of the Asia Building on Raffles Quay not too far from Telok Ayer Basin. It was a corner office with a fine view of the harbor. A secretary ushered me in and Lim rose from behind a teak desk, walked around it, shook hands with me, said he was delighted that I was in Singapore, and managed to sound as if he really meant it.

  “I have a letter for you from Trippet,” I said and handed the envelope to him. He read it, standing up, and smiled.

  “I never could understand what Dickie is doing in the car business,” Lim said.

  “His wife says that he likes to get out of the house.”

  Lim read the letter again and smiled once more. “We were at school together, you know.”

  “So I understand.”

  “Please,” Lim said, motioning to one of the teak and fabric chairs that was drawn up to his desk. “I was about to have some tea. Would you care to join me, or do you prefer coffee?”

  “Tea would be nice.”

  He picked up his telephone, pushed a button, and said something in what I took to be Mandarin Chinese. He was a smooth-faced man of middle height, with just the trace of a pot. He must have been Trippet’s age or even older, but his hair was full and black and his eyes were steady and clear behind gold-rimmed Ben Franklin glasses that he wore half-way down a broad nose. His dress was that of the typical Singapore businessman: white shirt, tie, and slacks. His voice and accent were very much like Trippet’s and when he smiled, which he did often, I couldn’t help but feel that he enjoyed doing whatever he did.

  The secretary served the tea and Lim kept the ceremony to a minimum. After his first or second sip, he leaned forward in his chair, offered me a Lucky Strike which I accepted, and lit it for me with a silver desk lighter.

  “American cigarettes are one of my vices,” he said. “It always make me feel rather relieved when I find someone else who still smokes. So many of my friends and acquaintances have quit.”

  “They are probably wise.”

/>   “No doubt,” he said and smiled again. “But one of the keenest pleasures in life is to succumb to one’s vices.”

  I smiled at that and sipped my tea. “Dickie’s letter says that you are here on a confidential matter,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m looking for someone. An American.”

  “May I inquire whom he might be?”

  “A man named Angelo Sacchetti.”

  “Yes,” Lim said in noncommittal voice, drummed his fingers on the desk, and peered at me over his spectacles.

  “By that I take it that you may know him,” I said.

  “No, I don’t know him. Let us just say that I’ve heard of him. He—” Lim broke off and turned around in his chair to take a look at the harbor. He enjoyed the view for a few moments before he spun around and spoke. “Mr. Cauthorne, please excuse what you may consider to be my rudeness, but you are not with the CIA or one of those other intelligence organizations that the Americans and the British seem to be so fond of creating?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not with the CIA.”

  There was a pause and Lim swung his chair around so that he could count the ships in the harbor. “I’m sure that Dickie would not have provided a letter of introduction if you were, but still I had to make sure.”

  “Maybe the letter’s a fake.”

  Lim swung back again and gave me another smile. “No,” he said, “after you telephoned yesterday, I called Dickie in Los Angeles. You are who you say you are. More tea?”

  “Please. It seems strange that a businessman would go to all that trouble, but then I’d say that you are more than just a businessman.”

  “Yes, it does seem that way doesn’t it?” Lim said as he poured my tea.

  I decided that if Lim had something that he wanted to tell me, he would, so we sipped our tea and looked at each other over the rims of our cups until Lim made up his mind about what he wanted to talk about next.

  “We are a small nation, Mr. Cauthorne. A tiny one of only two million persons and seventy-five percent of us are Chinese. We have great wealth here and also great poverty, although it is not nearly as severe as it is in other Asian countries. Next to Japan, I suppose, Singapore is better off than any other country. Asian, that is. We are southeast Asia’s major entrepot, or at least we like to think so and our economy rests primarily on this international trade, although we are making some progress in industrialization. Still, we have neither the time nor the money to engage in the full-time business of espionage. But we are curious about persons who come to Singapore and take up residence here. Not that we don’t welcome foreign capital—from virtually anyplace—but still we are, shall we say, rather curious.”