by Peter Tonkin
She sat for a moment, a sailor before she was a woman, turning her bandaged head from side to side. The slight movement she felt revealed that the ship was still drifting slowly through a near calm. The silence spoke eloquently of continued failure down below by the chief engineer and his team. Narrowed eyes judged the time of day by the fact that the whole room seemed to have been washed down in blood a day or so ago. The surgery itself, with windows out onto the weather deck, looked as though it had been washed with blood a moment or so ago. It was sunset and the shadows of the north-facing bridgehouse dictated the colours reflected in here by the ruby sky, the red and grey deck cargo and the green-brown deck itself. Please God it was sunset Thursday, she thought. Even sunset Thursday would mean that she had been out for more than eight hours. She did not care to think what her insensible body might have gone through in a longer time than that, especially as the alternative would seem to be more than thirty hours.
Robin swung her legs over the side of the bunk and stood up. The action required some fortitude, for her head swam and her legs shook while her knees threatened to buckle and all sorts of internal bits of her threatened to revolt — each in its own revolting way. She took several deep breaths, an action which served to remind her of the state of her clothes. But she did nothing to put it right, for she found herself crossing to the door as though in a dream. As though in a nightmare, she discovered that the door was locked. She shook it and battered on it but there was no response. Her head continued to swim and her ears to ring.
The sensation of woozy almost inebriated disorientation was so strong that Robin drunkenly checked her arms for signs of needle marks, half believing that she had been drugged. Certainly her current state put her forcefully in mind of experiments with a strange-smelling cigarette during her days at the London School of Economics and with an odd little pill at Johns Hopkins. She wiped her forehead and found herself looking dully at the back of her hand, wondering whether the liquid there was so vividly red because of its natural colour or because of reflection. Looking at the floor down a body which seemed to have grown dizzyingly tall, she watched her feet place themselves one after another, increasingly heavily on the linoleum flooring as she walked back to her bunk. Here she stood for a while, catching her breath and collecting her thoughts. Then she set herself in motion again and managed to cross as far as the doorway into the surgery. Here again she paused, hanging crucified between the uprights, gasping for breath and feeling the perspiration running down the outside of her ribs and the inside of her thighs. The surgery was not a large room. There was a basic operating table in the middle of it and glass-fronted cases of medicines on two walls. There was a secure cabinet for sharp instruments and a safe for drugs. On the wall opposite the open doorway were square windows which currently looked out onto the variegated wall of the containers on the deck.
Robin crossed to the operating table and paused again with her hands spread over the smooth plastic surface, her wrists close together, leaning her short ribs against her elbows. Eventually she summoned up the strength to swim across the thick red air towards the window and look out across the deck. When she reached the window, she found she had to lean against it with her hands spread and her arms straight in order to remain erect. For this reason, she remained at arm’s length from the thick glass, and the extra element of drug-enhanced distance gave the scene which met her eyes then the quality of utter unreality which she for ever afterwards associated with it. All but insensible with fatigue, stress, painkillers and concussion, she saw the first of the natives come up over the side. He was tall, dark-skinned and stark naked apart from a necklace of shells and a headdress.
All the books Robin had read during her youth and teens had been to do with high adventure in far-flung places. She knew, therefore, exactly what was going on when orang laut came stealthily aboard a powerless freighter drifting helplessly through the South China Sea. Given strength by a sudden, giddying, surge of adrenaline, she turned and prepared to stumble back to the door. She must give the alarm, no matter what. The phrase ‘play up and play the game’ fled through her mind like a blazing bonfire rag borne aloft by a November wind. But a further movement caught the corner of her eye and swung her head back again before she moved her feet. Behind the naked man came an invasion of further figures. All equally naked, all very obviously female. Not even the most xenophobic of the late-Empire adventures had ever suggested that a stark native, up to all sorts of unsportsmanlike skulduggery, would be accompanied by the contents of a seraglio, stripped and ready for action. But that was probably because such works were usually sexist as well as racist. Only the Greeks had ever come up with the idea of a race of warrior women and, according to the Victorian cannon, the Greeks had been deeply suspect to a man.
As Robin stared, the deck seemed to be inundated with a flood of lightly-oiled café-au-lait flesh. The gleaming curves flowed like liquid, mesmerising, seductive; they turned to reveal brief muscularity, pulling this and that aboard. Robin strained to see the darkening ocean beyond the safety rails but the deck obscured the water — and the long canoes which must be hurrying to and from the ship. Robin shook her head like a punch-drunk boxer fighting the count. What sort of invasion was this? How would she go about stemming that gleaming, irresistible tide of naked bodies? What sort of weapons had they brought aboard? Who was there to stand against the invasion with her?
As Robin lingered, indecisive, the deck lighting came on. Each curve of rib, buttock, thigh and breast, each point of finger, toe, nose and nipple was thrown into stark relief at once. And there came Captain Sin, no longer sick; Wai Chan, no longer on watch; Chief Chen Hang, no longer working on the engines; Fat Chow, no longer preoccupied with supporting the captain and spying upon her; and even Sam Yung, no longer quite so boyish after all. They took in hand the naked, nubile native girls and vanished with them into the cinnabar shadows.
Robin hung there, supported by her left hand against the window, looking back across the sickroom, away from what was all too clearly happening so close at hand. ‘Watch the wall,’ she told herself, quite loudly and extremely ironically. ‘Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by.’
Chapter Thirty
Edgar Tan stepped out of the early-morning bustle of Rizal Avenue and into the offices of Beautiful Views Ltd. It was a little after 8 a.m. on the morning of Friday, 20 June, and the detective had already had a bad day. He had arrived at Ninoy Aquino Airport at 5 a.m. on the Red-eye out of Singapore and his luggage had been lost by 6. He thanked the Lord that, knowing Manila International of old, he had kept anything of any real importance in his pockets or in his briefcase. He had waited for half an hour before a cab had turned up and then he had watched in growing disbelief as the driver, obviously lost, took him on an unwanted tour of the south of Manila. They ended up on Santos Avenue instead of Rizal, miles away from where Tan wanted to be, and he very nearly had a fight with the driver over the exorbitant fare. In the end, perversely glad he did not have to worry about his heavy suitcase, he had caught the rush-hour Metro up to Don Jose Station, exited with a crowd which seemed to comprise about half the population of the city, and walked.
At first glance, Beautiful Views was unpromising. It lurked behind one of those narrow, slightly tatty shop fronts which can be found in any city. Its one mean window was filled with a display of views which Tan himself did not find particularly beautiful, for all their anatomical precision. The gamely smiling women on show were in almost every respect at the furthest possible end of the spectrum from the genuinely beautiful view on the postcard still wrapped in plastic in the briefcase. And it was quite a shock to find one of these game women, fully clothed, standing behind the counter in the dingy, dust-smelling little shop.
Tan put his briefcase on the counter. ‘Good morning,’ he said in English. ‘I would like to see the manager, please.’
The woman looked at her watch. ‘He be in by ten, maybe.’
‘Well, perhaps you can help me
.’ Tan opened the case and extracted Captain Gough’s card. ‘Can you tell me which of your photographers took this picture?’
The woman’s long eyes dwelt on the plastic-wrapped photograph. She seemed almost surprised to see the long swell of sand coloured like the flank of a sleeping native woman; the chiaroscuro palm trees leaning down towards the wine-dark sea etched against the orange and rose-coloured sky. Tan astutely surmised that his was not an unusual question, it was just unusual for someone to be asking about a sunset.
‘Why do you want to know?’ she asked.
Tan, correctly, guessed that this question actually meant, how much are you willing to pay?
A pair of well-practised hagglers, they switched into negotiating mode. Each polite phrase carried a financial undertone which both of them recognised.
‘I am conducting an extremely important investigation,’ he said. I haven’t time to haggle — name your price.
‘It is an old photograph, I am not certain …’ It’s going to be expensive.
‘This is an extremely important investigation. I will be very glad of any help you can give.’ I don’t care how expensive.
‘I could look at the records, of course. Are you in a hurry?’ You want speed, you’ll have to pay even more.
‘Records? Perhaps I should wait for the manager.’ Don’t push your luck or you’ll have to share.
‘No, no. I’m sure I can find what you want without waiting for him.’ OK. Point made.
‘In that case,’ said Tan, closing the deal, ‘perhaps I could offer you a little remuneration for your trouble …’ And he named the sum the cabbie had demanded for taking him to the wrong address.
The woman’s jaw fell, and Tan realised a little ruefully that he had overpriced the market. He could have had the information, a couple of hours with the woman, carnal knowledge of a couple of her friends in the window and a great deal of change. But he had named his price and he would stand by it.
She gave him the address of a studio out on Santiago in Quezon City without consulting the records after all, and he handed over the money. As he crossed to the door, however, he asked, ‘How come you didn’t have to check the records?’
‘We have only ever had one photographer. He is my husband. He starts work at nine. He will be in the studio all day today. My name is Consuela, Consuela Lopez. His name is Jorge. Tell him I sent you; I will call him and warn him you are coming otherwise he will not let you in, I think. He has his girls around today.’
This time, Tan found a taxi driver who knew the city and understood the charging system. The detective was outside the address Consuela Lopez had given him by nine thirty. His persistent ring at the bell was answered after a few moments. The door opened a little and the face of a teenage girl peered enquiringly round its edge. ‘My name is Edgar Tan. I have come to see Jorge Lopez,’ Tan said. The girl seemed to understand nothing more than the photographer’s name but she gestured him in. He stepped through the door and stood, rooted to the floor with shock, as he realised that she was wearing only panties and a towel clasped to her chest. ‘Jorge Lopez,’ he said again and she nodded, smiling, closed the door and led him deeper into the house. He followed her through a dark corridor, too surprised even to admire the way in which her long pale back dived, divided and spread into the seat of her tiny white cotton panties.
She pushed open a door and called something impenetrable in Filipino. Lopez, recognisable because he was the only person in the room with a camera, the only man, and the only person fully dressed, called, ‘Mabuhay; sandali lang! You wait please, Mr Tan. Halika dito, Conception.’ The girl dropped the towel which had so modestly concealed from Edgar Tan the bosom she was all too obviously about to display to the camera, and dived among the other girls on the bed beneath the studio lights. There was much giggling and wriggling.
Faintly embarrassed to find himself standing in the shadows watching three eighteen-year-olds wrestling each other out of their underwear, Tan began to look around. Jorge Lopez’s studio was ramshackle and tacky. The photographs pinned to its walls reflected the intense young Filipino’s range as a photographer. Certainly, the girlie shots in the window of Beautiful Views were far more artistic than the basic hard-core stills on the walls.
The detective stood at the back of the squalid little studio, wearily wondering how anyone could find anything new and exciting in the pale, partly-clad bodies lying increasingly graphically revealed on the bed. From the look of it, some of the more nubile students at the university were supplementing their grants. But at least it was only more girlie stuff. Had Jorge Lopez been working on anything stronger, like the stuff up on the walls, Tan would have probably lost his lunch. Yesterday’s lunch; it was coming up to twenty-four hours since he had eaten. But then, unexpectedly, one of the naked young bodies reminded him of the dead secretary he had seen the week before this case had started — what was her name? Miss Fa? — and he began to feel nauseous after all.
Then again, thought Tan, trying to clear his mind of the images from that sad little hotel room in Singapore, had the photographer been doing anything more graphic than this, he would never have agreed to see him. Though he had no doubt that the main reason he found himself here now, watching the show on the creaking bed and waiting to speak to the photographer, was the fact that the redoubtable Consuela, calling from the shop, had told her husband that the foreigner was incredibly rich and could be taken for large amounts of money with hardly any trouble at all.
When he saw how little the photographer handed to Conception at the end of the session Edgar realised just how very generous he had been with his initial bribe and deep in his heart he swore a dark revenge against that first taxi driver, whose fare had been his yardstick, if ever their paths should cross again. But he summoned up an accommodating smile as Jorge patted the girls paternally on the head and sent them off to dress.
‘Magandang umaga, Mr Tan. What can I do for you?’
‘Good morning, Mr Lopez. It’s about this postcard. Do you recognise the photograph?’
‘Aywan ko …’
Here we go again, thought Edgar; he spoke enough Filipino to know ‘I don’t know …’ and he knew that tone in any language.
‘Sayang,’ he spat. What a pity! He began to put the card away.
‘Sandali long,’ said Lopez, thrown off balance: just a moment.
‘Opo?’ Yes? Tan was fast running out of vocabulary, but he was also out of patience and that was a big advantage.
‘Sige,’ said the photographer: OK. There was defeat in his tone; he was not a shadow of his wife when it came to bargaining. He held out his hand and Tan gave him the card.
‘Did you take it?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know where?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me where and how to get there and I’ll give you five thousand pesos. Come with me and I’ll give you ten thousand.’
‘When?’
‘Now.’
‘But it’s too far …’ As he spoke, Conception, the eldest of the models, popped her head back round the door. She had slipped on a silk shirt and tied it instead of buttoning it. The bright material cradled the cleavage which had just been so starkly on show — making it very much more appetising. ‘Tayo na, Jorge,’ she said: let’s go, Jorge.
The photographer wavered. There was sweat on his narrow, intense face. His eyes remained fixed on the postcard, however, and the fortune which it promised him. ‘Alls diyan, Conception!’ he said at last. Get lost, Conception!
And Edgar Tan knew that he had won.
*
‘And finally,’ said Mr Prosecutor Po, ‘the Crown calls Mr StJohn DeVere Syme.’
It was ten thirty in the morning of what Maggie would later come to recall as one of the longest days in her life. Notification of exactly who Crown were going to call, together with the notes of his testimony had arrived at Andrew’s office at 8 a.m. It was only because Andrew and Maggie were effectively living
there that they got such early warning of the development. They read the testimony, naked, over breakfast then had to rush through their shower and ablutions before his secretary arrived to catch them ‘in flagrante’. The notes made depressing reading, but nowhere near as depressing as the testimony itself. Maggie sat back, as alert as a hunting tiger, looking for an opening for cross-examination.
‘You are StJohn DeVere Syme of twenty-three Montpelier Place, London?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You are an under-secretary at the British Foreign Office, with special responsibility for liaison with the Hong Kong police during the period leading up to the handover?’
‘That is correct.’
‘And your most recent specific area of interest has been to do with smuggling in this area?’
‘Smuggling and piracy. Yes.’
‘And, Mr Syme,’ said the apparently mild-mannered advocate. ‘You first became aware of an association between the China Queens Company and this nefarious practice when?’
‘Five years ago. It so happened that the China Queens Company was advertising for a company secretary. We caused one of our operatives to be put in place. She was accepted into the company and awarded the post.’ Maggie at least had the satisfaction of writing ‘Bingo’ on her trial notes.
‘Why this particular company, Mr Syme?’
‘We understood — and when I say we I mean the Crown Colony police, the Singaporean police, and other authorities involved with the investigation — we understood that the China Queens Company was a front for a Triad smuggling enterprise run at that time by the White Powder Triad operating out of Tsimshatsui, Hong Kong.’
‘So this person was placed undercover?’