I knew I was going to do it.
You stop being noble and unselfish when your life is at stake—it was as pure and simple as that.
I thought about the Citröen, and wondered if it was still parked on Jalan Tenah. There was nothing at this point to tie Dinessen to me, and so there was no reason why Tiong would have paid any attention to the Citröen, why he would have had it removed from the area. If it was still there, if I could get to it, I would have transportation to the Katong Bahru Housing Estate; the key to the car was still in my pocket. Two things were certain: I couldn’t walk to the estate, and I couldn’t take any public conveyance. The only other alternative was to steal a car, and in a conscientious and wary city like Singapore, that wouldn’t be simple.
I wished I knew the time. If it was late enough, Tiong might have called off the search of the area and things would have settled down and become quiet again. There was still the chance that he had left one constable, or two, to watch Number Seven Tampines Road—but after the removal of Marla King’s body, he wouldn’t expect me to have a reason to return there.
I knew I had to get out of this mangrove brake now, that I couldn’t afford to wait. Unless I moved soon, I would be too weak to move at all. I leaned away from the palm bole and lifted my body onto my knees. The thunder began inside my head again, raging. I set my teeth and began to crawl out the way I had come in.
When I reached the edge of the bank, I parted some of the resilient bamboo stalks and peered across the stream and across the road at the bungalows on the other side. No lights showed anywhere, and there was no discernible movement. The moon was high and bright amid brilliantine stars, the clouds completely gone. In the creek below, the rushing water had shrunk to half its earlier size—and that in itself told me a considerable amount of time had passed since I had crawled into the brake.
I worked my way down the bank, crossed the stream, and crept up to the roadway. It took me a minute to get to my feet, but once standing I seemed to be all right. I tried a couple of mincing, experimental steps. My knees buckled, stiffened, held my weight. I shuffled across the road, to the left, keeping in the shadows. When I reached the corner, I turned right on the street paralleling Tampines Road; every house was shrouded in darkness, and there was only the singing of cicadas to intrude on the quiet.
Before I came to Jalan Tenah, I had to pause several times for rest. My face felt hot and flushed, and oily sweat formed thick pustules on my forehead that broke like thin blisters and ran down over my cheeks. Weakness turned my legs into rotted tree stumps, my arms into sapless branches.
I saw the Citröen as soon as I turned right on Jalan Tenah, still and dark where I had parked it earlier that evening. Luck seemed not to have deserted me completely. I moved toward the car, slowly and carefully, on the near side of the road. Moonshine washed the street, but the darkness was thick among the trees and fences and shrubbery. I paused several times to watch, to listen. Nothing moved. Distantly, a dog barked softly and then was quiet once more.
I drew abreast of the Citröen and hunkered down beneath a casuarina tree, looking across the moonlit roadway. I got the key out of my pocket, clenched it tightly against my left palm. Stillness. If Tiong had a man posted to watch Number Seven, he was either well-hidden somewhere along Jalan Tenah or Tampines Road, or staked out inside the bungalow itself. I knew the possibility existed that the car was a trap, that Tiong had somehow discovered its connection with me and had left it in position as bait; but the chances of that were slim. Dinessen’s body wouldn’t have been discovered yet, and there was nothing to link the Swede to me, his car to me.
Get it over with, I thought. You’re dead on your feet, in more ways than one.
I levered up and ran stumbling through the moonlight to the Citröen, jerked open the door. No whistles, no shouts. I lowered my body under the wheel, eased the door to, and fumbled the key into the ignition lock, awkwardly, with my left hand. The starter made a soft grinding noise when it turned over, but the engine caught immediately. I released the clutch, looking up at the rear-vision mirror; the street remained dark and empty.
At the first intersection, I swung the wheel right and went half a block before I touched the switch for the headlamps. With the dash lights on, I could see the pointers on the clock there; it was 2:28. I could also see my left hand as I returned it to the wheel, and the way it was trembling . . .
The streetlamps in the Katong Bahru Housing Estate glowed a dull amber, mingling with the shine from the swollen face of the moon to brighten the empty streets. I drove two blocks distant, on Geylang Road, and left the Citröen in a public parking slot. I wanted to park directly in front of Tina Kellogg’s building, but that hadn’t seemed wise; once Dinessen’s body was discovered, there would be a bulletin out on his missing automobile, and I had no way of knowing when that would be. The two-block walk would be a long haul—and a dangerous one, in my blood-spattered condition—but it couldn’t be helped. I had enough strength to make it, and enough sense to keep to cover.
Two cars passed as I made my way through the landscaped grounds of the buildings in the estate, but neither of them was a police vehicle. I saw no one. I was breathing heavily when I reached Tina’s building; I had just about reached the limit of my endurance as well. Once into the vestibule, I tried the interior door. It was locked. I leaned heavily against the bank of mailboxes on the far wall, found the button for Apartment 34, and put my finger on it, leaving it there.
A long time passed, and then an intercom unit mounted to one side clicked and hummed static. Tina’s voice said guardedly, metallically, “Yes? Who is it?”
I put my mouth close to the speaker. “Dan Connell.”
“Dan! My God, what—?”
“Let me in, can you? I have to see you.”
“What is it?”
“I need help, Tina. I’m hurt.”
“Hurt? What happened—?”
“Let me in and we’ll talk,” I said. “But prepare yourself. I’m in pretty bad shape.”
The unit clicked and hummed again, and the inner door buzzed softly, like a giant mosquito. I shoved it open and pulled myself up the stairs to the third floor, hanging onto the hand railing. Tina had her door open on a night chain, peering out at me when I came down the hallway, and I heard her gasp audibly when she saw my face, my body, my clothing in the pale light from a domed wall fixture.
She snapped the chain free and opened the door, and I stumbled into the apartment past her and sank into one of the chairs at the half-table in the wall niche; I didn’t want to bleed all over her girlfriend’s settee. Tina closed the door, locked it, and ran over to me, her face white, her eyes wide. She wore a flowered Chinese robe, held closed by a pair of buttons, and it was obvious, even in my condition, that she wore nothing beneath it. Her hair was tousled, her face scrubbed free of make-up. She looked like somebody’s teenage daughter.
Soft fingers probed at the dried blood on my right arm, gently. Then, without speaking, Tina hurried out of the room—and came back half a minute later with iodine, gauze, adhesive tape, a bottle of wood alcohol, a package of absorbent cotton. She set everything on the table, still silent, her face grimly concerned, and then poured alcohol on a wad of cotton and began swabbing at the caked blood. Twisting my head to watch her, I could see the puckered bluish edges of the entrance hole on the near side, just above the elbow, and the exit hole on the far side when she turned the arm over. The alcohol burned coldly, like an ice abrasion.
I said, “Listen, Tina, I had no right coming here—I know that. I’m six kinds of bastard, and if you want to throw me out after you bandage that arm, I’ll go without argument. But I’d like to stay the night; I need sleep and I need it badly.”
Her lips pursed slightly. “Why did you come here?”
“I had nowhere else to go.”
“Are you in trouble with the police?”
“Yeah. But trite as it sounds, I happen to be innocent.”
“How did you
get shot?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I looked up at her, but her eyes were cast downward at my arm. “You’re entitled to know what I’m involving you in just by being here now,” I said. “All right, it’s this way—” and I told her all of it, about the Burong Chabak and about Van Rijk and Dinessen and Marla King and Tiong, and what had happened on this long, long night.
She listened without interruption, her fingers busy with the alcohol-soaked cotton. When I had finished speaking, she said, “That’s a fantastic story.”
“The truth isn’t always simple.”
“I suppose not.”
“I’m not lying to you, Tina.”
“I think I believe that, God knows why.” She paused, as if she wanted to say something else, and then moved away to enter the kitchenette. She came back with a clean dishtowel. “I’m going to put iodine on your arm,” she said. “You’d better bite onto this.”
I put the towel between my teeth and bit down on it, and the iodine set fire to my entire right side, bright and hot and lingering in my armpit. But the pain wasn’t all that bad; I had lived with agony too many consecutive hours.
Tina put gauze pads over the puckered wounds and unrolled adhesive tape tightly over them. When the arm was bandaged she poured alcohol on a fresh cotton ball and went to work on the pulpy spot over my temple. She asked then, “What are you going to do?”
“That depends on you.”
“I . . . won’t turn you out.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
She sighed softly. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
“I’m going to try to get out of Singapore. I don’t have another choice.”
“But where will you go?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Do you have money?”
“A few dollars.”
“I . . . don’t have much myself, but I can let you have about a hundred or so if it will help.”
“It’s nowhere near what I really need,” I said. “Keep your money, little girl.”
“But how will you get off the island?”
“I don’t know yet; there are ways.” The fever was spreading hot and enervating through my body now, and my eyelids seemed to be fluttering up and down like window shades over distorted glass. Tina finished putting a bandage on my temple, took the towel from where I had put it on the table, and wiped some of the sweat off my forehead. Then she stroked my hair, and her fingers were cool, cool.
“Dan,” she said, and there was alarm in her voice. “Dan, you’ve got to get to bed. You . . . you look awful.”
“Yeah.”
“Can you stand up all right?”
“Think so.”
“I’ll help you into the bedroom.”
“Can sleep on the settee, once I’m rid of these clothes . . .”
“No, you’ll sleep in the bed.”
I got up on my feet, leaning against her momentarily, the softness of her, the firmness of her. The trembling worsened, spreading to every extremity of my body now, and my knees felt strange and uncontrollable. The room seemed to shimmer slightly, in distortion.
“The bathroom first,” I said, “I have to get out of these clothes . . . the blood . . .”
I took two steps away from Tina, and the room dissolved slowly, curiously, into an oscillating grayness, into a netherworld of shadow images like shapes seen through a dense fog. Tina’s voice clutched at me, fading, fading, something dropped into a deep well, and the grayness began to spin, I began to spin,
spinning and
falling and
jarring impact and
the void.
Chapter Sixteen
. . . rushing, rushing, the strip rushes up, the wheels touch and bounce and touch again, we’re almost down but we hit something, the Dakota begins to roll, I can’t hold it, oh God, oh God, the world tilts crazily, lights spin and spin and spin, there is an impact, no, no, Pete screams, he screams, there is the stench of high octane fuel, no, I feel myself being lifted, lifted, no, blackness and screaming and blackness and screaming and blackness and screaming . . .
Wake up, wake up.
I’m awake. Or am I? Reality and illusion commingled, and I can’t separate them. I don’t know where I am. Yielding softness beneath me, the faint creak of springs—bed? Yes, bed, but a bed should be warm and I’m cold, cold, so cold. And trembling. My whole being vibrates, muscles spasm, appendages jerk like an epileptic in a clonic seizure. Sounds fumble incoherently from my throat. Cold, cold, trembling, cold.
A blanket floats out of nowhere and covers me. A second materializes from the darkness. I pull them tight around me, so cold, but the trembling does not stop. A voice shimmers into the half-reality. “Dan,” it says. “Dan.”
Female voice, Tina’s voice. “Tina,” I hear myself say. “I’m so cold.”
“. . . no more blankets . . .”
“So cold,” I say, “so cold.”
Springs creak louder, movement beside me, hands touching me, warm hands, oh warm hands, and warm flesh too, stretching out, fitting to me, warming me, the hands stroking my neck and shoulders, holding me, and Tina’s voice whispering words I can’t quite understand. I clutch the warmth. Soft flesh, naked flesh. I hold it, I pull it to me, I cover myself with it. Warmth, warmth. A breast, a thigh, a hip, a spinal ridge. Tina. Warm body warming cold body, easing the trembling, soft Tina.
“Sleep,” she whispers. “Sleep, Dan.”
“Sleep . . .”
Cold gone, trembling gone, warm flesh, warm Tina, warm . . .
. . . and silent black.
I opened my eyes.
Morning. Or afternoon. Sunlight filtered through louvered shutters on a window across the room. Room. I felt a brief moment of disorientation, and then it passed and I realized I was in bed—a big double bed in a small bedroom. The sheets above and beneath my body were twisted and sodden. A pair of blankets were bunched at the foot of the bed and half-draped onto the floor, where I apparently had kicked them.
I lay quietly, not moving. There was a curious odor in my nostrils, and after a time I managed to decipher it as three parts sour fever-sweat and one part sandalwood perfume. My thoughts seemed to be clear now, and I could remember the events of the previous night—and remember, too, the dreams and the half-dream with Tina that seemed to have been reality after all.
Weakness made my body ache faintly, but it was the weakness of a broken fever rather than that of debilitation. I wondered if the sleep had done it, or if Tina had fed me some kind of antibiotic. My right arm throbbed distantly, like a vague but annoying toothache—the same sort of throbbing that plagued my temples. I lifted the arm a few inches off the bedclothes, flexing the fingers gingerly; in spite of a cramped stiffness throughout the limb, the musculature was unparalyzed and functioning sufficiently to allow me limited use of it.
I leaned my weight on my left side and raised myself slowly into a sitting position. A thin wave of gray-black dots washed dizzyingly in back of my eyes—and vanished; nausea spread through my stomach—and vanished. I got my legs around and onto the floor, held a breath, and launched myself into an upright position, hanging onto the headboard of the bed for support. I stood there like that, breathing rapidly now, dressed in nothing more than a pair of shorts—and the bedroom door opened and Tina looked in.
She said, “Dan, be careful!”
“I’m all right,” I told her. My voice sounded thick and hoarse. “I just need a minute to get my bearings.”
“You’d better let me help you—”
“I can make it, I think.”
She worried her lower lip, watching me. She had her dark hair pulled into a horsetail, and in a pair of white hip-hugger slacks and a white blouse she still looked like somebody’s teen-age daughter. “How do you feel?” she asked.
“Not as bad as I should.”
“You gave me an awful scare last n
ight, passing out the way you did.”
“I can imagine. How did you get me to bed?”
“I don’t know, really. You were very heavy. It must have taken me half an hour to get you in here and undressed.”
“It was a bad night all around.”
“You were trembling and half-delirious, and I knew you had a fever. There were some pills in the medicine cabinet and I forced some of them down your throat. I guess they worked.”
“I guess they did.”
“I tried to sleep on the couch,” Tina said, “but you were moaning and tossing so badly in here that I was afraid you were going into a coma or something. I’ve never seen anybody shake the way you were shaking. I put some blankets on you, but that didn’t seem to do any good.” Her cheeks colored faintly. “So I got into bed with you and held you until you calmed down and stopped trembling and slept.”
“I remember, vaguely.”
“Nothing happened. I just held you.”
“I didn’t think anything had, in my condition.”
“You kept saying a name, over and over. Pete.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Listen, what time is it?”
“About one P.M.”
“What did you do with my clothes?”
“I had to put them in the garbage. They were torn and caked with blood and mud.”
“Do you think you could go out and buy me some new ones?”
“I suppose so.”
“Good girl.”
“But I’d better make you something to eat first.”
“All right. I should have some food, I guess.”
“Eggs and coffee?”
“Fine.”
She watched me solicitously as I released my hold on the headboard and took a step, and another, and a third. My legs wobbled a little, but they did not give way under my weight. When Tina saw that I could get around without assistance, she backed out and closed the bedroom door. I shuffled across to a tiny bathroom, moving like a coronary patient, and leaned on the heart-shaped basin to have a look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror.
The Jade Figurine Page 11