The rebels were breaking through again. A gap showed at the top of the door. Hotchkiss shouted at Officer Lu, who snatched a black knobby cylinder from his belt and tossed it through.
Two seconds passed. There was a cataclysmic flash from behind the door, a horrific bang, and the door jumped open, gushing smoke. “Go!” Hotchkiss yelled.
The upper stairwell was littered with rebels, deafened, blinded, howling. One was still on his feet, slashing frenziedly at empty air with a ceramic sword and screaming, “Martyr! Martyr!” Lu knocked him flat with a burst of jelly-rounds. Then they marched in, firing with their tangle-pistols into the heaving crowd.
Aw tossed another flash-grenade onto the landing below. Another cataclysmic wham. “Okay,” Hotchkiss said from behind Laura. “You wanna play Gandhi, you’ll do it with two broken arms. March!” He shoved her forward through the door.
“I protest!” Laura shouted, dancing to avoid arms and legs.
Hotchkiss jerked her backward against his chest. “Look, Yankee,” he said with chilling sincerity. “You’re a cute little blonde who looks real nice on telly. But if you muck about with me, I’ll blow your brains out—and say the rebels did it. Where are the goddamn controls?”
“Ground floor,” Laura gasped. “In the back—glassed in.”
“Okay, we’re moving. Go! Go!” Vicious racket as Lu opened up with the gun again. In the enclosed stairwell the hellish noise of it spiked right into her head. Laura felt a sudden burst of sweat drench her from head to foot. Hotchkiss yanked her along, his hand wedged under her armpit. He was crashing down two, three steps at a time, half carrying her. A big man, unbelievably strong—like being dragged by a gorilla.
The throat-catching sting of smoke. Great bubbling spatters on the cheerful pastel walls: purple dye, or smeared blood. Rebels down whimpering, some screaming, hands cupped over eyes or ears. Rebels glued to the stair railings, black-faced and gasping in the grip of tangle-tape. She stumbled on the sprawled legs of a boy, unconscious or dead, his face punched open by a jelly-bullet, blood streaming from a ruined eye.…
Then they were down on the first floor, and out the stairwell door. Distant sunlight poured through the smashed-out front of the godown, where the cops and rebels were still in pitched battle, the rebels getting the better of it. Inside the cavernous godown the A-L.P. were frenziedly rallying, machete-slicing tape from some of their tangle-victims, dragging captured, handcuffed cops behind a wall of crates.… They looked up in surprise, thirty sweat-drenched, blood-smeared, angry men, backlit by the street.
For a moment they all stood in frozen tableau. “Where’s the control room?” Hotchkiss whispered.
“I lied,” Laura hissed at him. “It’s on the second floor.”
“You fucking cow,” Hotchkiss marveled.
The A-L.P. were edging forward. Some wore stolen police helmets and almost all had riot shields. One of them suddenly fired a tangle-round, which narrowly missed Officer Aw and writhed on the floor like a molten, spastic tumbleweed.
Laura sat down, heavily. Hotchkiss made a grab at her, thought better of it, and began backing up. Suddenly they broke and ran for the back of the godown.
Then it was maelstrom all around her. Men ran after the retreating SWAT team, shouting. Others dashed up the stairs, where Hotchkiss’s stunned and blinded victims were moaning, cursing, crying out. Laura drew up her legs, clenched the hands cinched behind her back, tried to make herself small.
Her mind raced wildly. She should go back to the roof, rejoin her people. No—better to help the injured. No—try to escape, to find the police, get arrested. No, she should—
A mustached Malay teenager with a swollen, battered cheek menaced her with a drawn sword. He gestured her up, prodding her with his foot.
“My hands,” Laura said.
The boy’s eyes widened. He stepped behind her and sawed through the tough plastic strap of her cuffs. Her arms came free with a sudden grating rush of pleasure-pain in her shoulders.
He spat angry Malay at her. She stood up. Suddenly she was a head taller than he was. He backed off a step, hesitated, turned to someone else—
A wind and a sibilant hissing filled the godown. A chopper had dropped to street level—it was looking in on them through the hole in the godown’s front wall. Expressionless helmets behind the cockpit glass. An explosive huff as a gun-metal canister jumped loose. It hit the godown floor, rolling, careening, gushing mist.…
Oh fuck. Tear gas. A sudden parching, virulent wave of it struck and she could feel the acid grip of it on her eyeballs. Panic hit her then. She scrambled on her hands and knees. Tearblur, savage pain of it in her throat. No air. She bounced off people, blinded and pushing wildly, and suddenly she was running. Running free …
Tears, in poisoned torrents, drenched her face. Where they touched her lips she felt a stinging tingle and a taste like kerosene. She kept running, shying away from the gray blur of looming buildings on the side of the street. Her throat and lungs felt full of fish hooks.
She reached the end of her adrenaline. She was too shocked to feel her own fatigue, but her knees began to buckle on their own. She headed for a doorway and collapsed into its recess.
Just then the sky opened up, and it began to rain. Another vertical, bursting monsoon. Wave after wave of it pounded the empty street. Laura crouched miserably in the doorway, catching rain in her cupped hands, bathing her face and the exposed skin of her arms. At first the water seemed to make it worse—a vicious stinging, as if she’d been breathing Tabasco sauce.
She had two plastic bangles now, over the chafed raw skin of her wrists. Her feet were soaked in their cheap, clammy sandals—not from rain, but from the water-cannon puddles in the street outside the godown.
She had run right through the street battle, blind. No one had even touched her. Except—there was a long strip of tangle-tape on her shin, still wriggling feebly, like the shed tail of a lizard. She picked it off her jeans.
She could recognize the area now—she’d run all the way to the Victoria and Albert Docks, just west of East Lagoon. To the north she saw the high-rise of the Tanjong Pagar public-housing complex—bland, dun-colored government bricks.
She sat, breathing shallowly, coughing, spitting every once in a while. She wished she were back with her people in the godown. But there was no way she could reach them again—it was not a sane option.
She’d meet them in jail anyway. Get the hell out of this battle zone and somehow manage to get arrested. Nice quiet jail. Yeah. Sounded good.
She stood up, wiping her mouth. Three cycle-rickshaws raced past her toward East Lagoon, each one crowded with a clinging mass of drenched, staring rebels. They ignored her.
She made a break for it.
There were two wet, unstable street barricades between her and Tanjong Pagar. She climbed over them in pounding rain. No one showed to stop her.
The glass doors of the Tanjong housing complex had been smashed out of their aluminum frames. Laura ducked into the place, over crunchy heaps of pebbly safety glass. Air conditioning bit into her wet clothes.
She was in a shabby but neat entrance hall. Her foam sandals squelched messily on the scuffed linoleum. The place was deserted, its inhabitants, presumably, respecting the government’s curfew and keeping to their rooms upstairs. It was all mom-and-pop shops down here, little bicycle repair places, a fish market, a quack fractionation parlor. Cheerfully lit with fluorescents, ready for business, but all deserted.
She heard the distant murmur of voices. Calm, authoritative tones. She headed for them.
The sounds came from a glass-fronted television store. Cheap low-res sets from Brazil and Maphilindonesia, color gone garish. They’d been turned on all over the store, a few showing the Government channel, others flickering over and over with a convulsive, maladjusted look.
Laura eased through the doorway. A string of brass bells jumped and rang. Inside it reeked of jasmine incense. The shop’s walls were papered with smilin
g, wholesome Singapore pop stars: cool guys in glitter tuxedos and cute babes in straw sun hats and peplums. Laura stepped carefully over a toppled, broken gum machine.
A little old Tamil lady had invaded the place. A wizened granny, white-haired and four feet tall, with a dowager’s hump and wrists thin as bird bone. She sat in a canvas director’s chair, staring at the empty screens and munching on a mouthful of gum.
“Hello?” Laura said. No response. The old woman looked deaf as a post—senile, even. Laura crept nearer, her shoes squelching moistly. The old woman gave her a sudden startled glance and adjusted her sari, draping the shoulder flap modestly over her head.
Laura combed at her hair with her fingers, feeling rainwater trickle down her neck. “Ma’am, do you speak English?”
The old woman smiled shyly. She pointed at a stack of the canvas chairs, folded against the wall.
Laura fetched one. It had an inscription across the back in wacky-looking Tamil script—something witty and amusing, probably. Laura opened it and sat beside the old woman. “Um, can you hear me at all, or, uh …”
The Tamil granny stared straight ahead.
Laura sighed, hard. It felt good to be sitting down.
This poor dazed old woman—ninety if she was a day—had apparently come wandering downstairs, for canary food or something, too deaf or past-it to know about the curfew. To find—Jesus—an empty world.
With a sudden, surreptitious movement the old gal popped a little colored pebble into her mouth. Grape bubble gum. She munched triumphantly.
Laura examined the televisions. The old woman had set them for every possible channel.
Suddenly, on Channel Three, the flickering stabilized.
With the speed of a gunfighter the old woman pulled a remote. The Government spokesman winked out. Channel Three rose to a static-filled roar.
The image was scratchy home video. Laura saw the image bumping as the narrator aimed the camera at his own face. He was a Chinese Singaporean. He looked about twenty-five, chipmunk-cheeked, with thick glasses and a shirt crowded with pens.
Not a bad-looking guy, really, but definitely not TV material. Normal-looking. You wouldn’t look twice at him in any street in Singapore.
The guy sat back on his dumpy, overstuffed couch. There was a tacky painting of a seascape behind his head. He sipped from a coffee cup and fiddled with a microphone paper-clipped to his collar. She could hear him swallowing, loudly.
“I think I’m on the air now,” he announced.
Laura traded glances with the little old woman. The old gal looked disappointed. Didn’t speak English.
“This is my home VCR, la,” said Normal Guy. “It always say: ‘do not hook to home antenna, can cause broadcast pollution.’ Stray signal, you see? So, I did it. I’m broadcasting! I think so, anyway.”
He poured himself more coffee, his hand shaking a little. “Today,” he said, “my girl and I, I was going to ask to marry. She maybe not such great girl, and I’m not such great fellow either, but we have standard. I think, when a fellow needs to ask to marry, such a thing should at least be possible. Nothing else is civilized.”
He leaned in toward the lens, his head and shoulders swelling. “But then comes this curfew business. I am not liking this very much, but I am good citizen so I am deciding, okay. Go right ahead Jeyaratnam. Catch the terror rascals, give them what for, definitely. Then, the cops are coming into my building.”
He settled back a little, twitching, a light-trail flickering from his glasses. “I admire a cop. Cop is a fine, necessary fellow. Cop on the beat, I always say to him, ‘Good morning, fellow, good job, keep the peace.’ Even ten cops are okay. A hundred cops though, and I am changing mind rapidly. Suddenly my neighborhood very plentiful in cop. Thousands. Have real people outnumbered. Barging into my flat. Search every room, every gracious thing. Take my fingerprints, take my blood sample even.”
He showed a sticking plaster on the ball of his thumb. “Run me through computer, chop-chop, tell me to clean up that parking ticket. Then off they run, leave door open, no please or thank you, four million others needing botheration also. So I turn on telly for news. One channel only, la. Tell me we have seize Johore reservoir again. If we have so much water, then why is south side of city on fire apparently, la? This I am asking myself.”
He slammed down his coffee cup. “Can’t call girl friend. Can’t call mother even. Can’t even complain to local politico as Parliament is now all spoilt. What is use of all that voting and stupid campaigns, if it come to this, finish? Is anybody else feeling this way, I am wondering. I am not political, but I am not trusting Government one millimeter. I am small person, but I am not nothing at all.”
Normal Guy looked close to tears suddenly. “If this is for the good of city then where are citizens? Streets empty! Where is everyone? What kind of city is this become? Where is Vienna police, they the terrorist experts? Why is this happening? Why no one ask me if I think it okay? It not one bit okay to me, definitely! I want to success like everyone, I am working hard and minding business, but this too much. Soon come they arrest me for doing this telly business. Do you feel better off to hear of me? Is better than sit here and rot by myself.…”
There was furious pounding on Normal Guy’s door. He looked spooked. He leaned forward jerkily and the screen went back to nothingness.
Laura’s cheeks were damp. She was crying again. Her eyes felt like they’d been scratched with steel wool. No control. Oh, hell, that poor brave, scared little guy. Goddamn it all anyway.…
Someone shouted at the shop’s doorway. Laura looked up, startled. It was a tall, tough-looking, turbanned Sikh in a khaki shirt and Gurkha shorts. He had a badge and shoulder patches and he carried a leather-wrapped lathi stick. “What are you doing, madams?”
“Uh …” Laura scrambled to her feet. The canvas seat of her chair was soaked through with the rounded wet print of her butt. Her eyes were brimming tears—she felt terrified and deeply, obscurely humiliated.
“Don’t …” She couldn’t think of anything to say.
The Sikh guard looked at her as if she’d dropped from Mars. “You are a tenant here, madam?”
“The riots,” Laura said. “I thought there was shelter here.”
“Tourist madam? A Yankee!” He stared at her, then pulled black-rimmed glasses from a shirt-pocket case and put them on. “Oh!” He had recognized her.
“All right,” Laura said. She stretched out her chafed wrists, still in their severed plastic handcuffs. “Arrest me, officer. Take me into custody.”
The Sikh blushed. “Madam, I am only private security. Cannot arrest you.” The little old lady got up suddenly and shuffled directly at him. He sidestepped clumsily out of her way at the last moment. She wandered out into the hall. He stared after her meditatively.
“Thought you were looters,” he said. “Very sorry.”
Laura paused. “Can you take me to a police station?”
“Surely, Mrs.… Mrs. Vebbler. Madam, I am not helping to notice that you are all wet.”
Laura tried to smile at him. “Rain. Water cannon too, actually.”
The Sikh stiffened. “Is a very great sorrow to me that you experience this in our city while a guest of the Singapore government, Mrs. Webber.”
“That’s okay,” Laura muttered. “What’s your name, sir?”
“Singh, madam.”
All Sikhs were named Singh. Of course. Laura felt like an idiot. “I could kind of use the police, Mr. Singh. I mean some nice calm police, well out of the riot area.”
Singh tucked his lathi stick smartly under his arm. “Very well, madam.” He was struggling not to salute. “You are following me, please.”
They walked together down the empty hall. “Settling you very soon,” Singh said encouragingly. “Duty is difficult in these times.”
“You said it, Mr. Singh.”
They stepped into a cargo elevator and went down a floor into a dusty parking area. Lots of bikes, a few ca
rs, mostly old junkers. Singh pointed with his stick. “You are riding pillion on my motor scooter if agreeable?”
“Sure, okay.” Singh unlocked his bike and switched it on. They climbed aboard and drove up an exit ramp with a comical, high-pitched whir. The rain had died down for the moment. Singh eased into the street.
“There are roadblocks,” Laura told him.
“Yes, but—” Singh hesitated. He hit the brakes.
One of the cant-winged fighter jets of the Singapore Air Force flew above them with a silken roar. With snaky suddenness, it flickered into a dive, as if sidestepping its own shadow. Real hotdog flying. They watched it open-mouthed.
Something streaked from beneath its wings. A missile. It left a pencil of smoke in the damp air. From the docklands came a sudden violent burst of white-orange fire. Tinkertoy chunks of ruptured loading crane balleted through the air.
Thunder rolled through the empty streets.
Singh swore and turned the bike around. “Enemies attacking! We go back to safety at once!”
They rode back down the ramp. “That was a Singaporean jet, Mr. Singh.”
Singh pretended not to hear her. “Duty now is clear. You are coming with me, please.”
They took an elevator up to the sixth floor. Singh was silent, his back ramrod-straight. He wouldn’t meet her eyes.
He led her down the corridor to a hall apartment and knocked three times.
A plump woman in black slacks and a tunic opened the door. “My wife,” said Singh. He gestured Laura inside.
The woman stared in amazement. “Laura Webster!” she said.
“Yes!” Laura said. She felt like hugging the woman.
It was a little three-room place. Very modest. Three bug-cute children bounded into the front room: a boy of nine, a girl, another boy still a toddler. “You have three children, Mr. Singh?”
“Yes,” Singh said, smiling. He picked up the littlest boy and mussed his hair. “Makes many tax problems. Working two jobs.” He and his wife began talking rapidly in Bengali, or Hindi maybe, something incomprehensible, but speckled with English loan words. Like fighter jet and television.
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