by A. J. Low
“Unless-he-developed-sentience-and-walked-out-of-his-own-volition-as-I-said-earlier,” Watson said.
“Well, we’re not going to get any closer to solving that mystery while I drive around completely clueless,” Dad said. “I think it’s time to ask some locals about this Stone Breaking Street. I haven’t seen a single sign that might point me in the right direction.”
Dad stopped the minivan and I asked a passing pedestrian about the street.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’ve never heard of that street. Are you sure that’s what it’s called?” I showed her the piece of paper with the address on it. She shrugged and kept walking.
We encountered a few more people who all said the same thing: they had never heard of Stone Breaking Street.
“Maybe it’s in code?” Nazhar asked.
“Maybe, but I’m not convinced,” I said. “It seems too specific.” Dad had doubled back, and we were now parked on Love Lane. I looked at the street sign again. It said Lorong Cinta underneath in Malay, and had Chinese characters as well.
“Wendy, what do those characters say?” I asked, trying to hide my smirk.
Her head snapped up from the map. “Uh...what?”
“The Chinese characters under Love Lane, on the sign. What do they say?” I asked again.
“Uh...I don’t know...uh...” Wendy looked around for help and saw Nazhar shrugging his shoulders, Eliza looking at her nails, and Jimmy and Watson staring at the ceiling. Watson was trying to find what Jimmy was looking at, it seemed.
“Uh...”
Dad squinted and said, “I think it says se lan ru...or something. But that doesn’t mean Love Lane at all.”
“Hi!” Jimmy shouted, startling everybody. An old lady passing by nearly dropped her grocery bag and Watson nearly fell over. “What do those Chinese characters mean?”
“I...what?” She got a stronger grip on her groceries.
“The characters on the street sign there,” Jimmy continued, smiling widely.
“Oh, it means Eurasian Lane,” she said.
“What?” Dad asked, squinting at the sign. “That doesn’t say Eurasian Lane at all. It says blue milk something.”
The old lady chuckled. “That’s because you’re reading it in Mandarin. We mostly speak Hokkien in Penang, and those characters read as ‘sek lân ní hāng’. ‘Sek lân ní’ is a transliteration of the Malay word for Eurasian.”
“I get it,” Nazhar said. “You mean serani.”
“Wait, I don’t understand,” Wendy said.
“Serani is the Malay word for Eurasian. They used Chinese characters that sounded like serani—sek lân ní’,” Nazhar explained.
“So the same street has different names in different languages...” I stared at the piece of paper we had found, and then back to the street sign for Love Lane, or Lorong Cinta, or Eurasian Lane.
“How do you say ‘Stone Breaking Street’ in Hokkien?” I asked.
“Phah chióh ke,” she said.
“But it has another name in English or Malay, correct?” I deduced.
“You’re right. You mean Lebuh Acheh! Ya, ya. It’s over there,” she said, pointing southeast. “Khoo Kongsi and the Lebuh Acheh Mosque are both there. Just follow the signs.”
“Thank you very much, Auntie!” Jimmy said. The auntie waved at Jimmy and then walked away, a big smile on her face. Jimmy turned towards us with a similar smile.
“Good job, Jimmy!” Wendy said, hugging him.
“You got all that, Dad?” I asked.
“Lebuh Acheh, here we come!” Dad started up the minivan again and drove in the direction the auntie had pointed. He had a few issues navigating the streets as many of them were one way, but we made it. When we saw the street sign, I had Dad translate the Chinese characters, after Wendy’s rather feeble first attempt, to make sure the auntie was correct.
Nestled in between the mosque and the kongsi was 55 Stone Breaking Street, George Town, also known as Ben’s Vintage Toy Museum.
I turned to Eliza, holding up the written address. “Still think this is unrelated litter?”
She stared daggers at me while crossing her arms. “I still found it.”
“Wow!” Jimmy said. “Another toy museum! Penang is the best place ever!”
“Do you think this is some kind of toy museum war?” Nazhar asked as we got out of the minivan.
I thought about armies of PEZ dispensers, dolls, action figures and toy cars facing off against each other. “That would be kind of cool.”
Dad stayed in the van and asked us to give a shout if we needed him inside. He probably just wanted to take a nap after all that driving.
We stepped inside the building and immediately noticed it was much smaller than the museum Auntie Vivian was working with. There was a cramped first floor and a staircase leading up to the second floor, and that was it. However, for all its smallness, it still managed to pack a lot of toys in.
Most of the first floor was devoted to toy robots, so I asked the Supper Club to look around for Auntie Vivian’s robot. I didn’t think we would find it out in the open, but one should never underestimate the stupidity of criminals. I had just heard about a man who tried to rob a store immediately after applying for a job there. He even left his real name and address on the form! Needless to say, he was quickly arrested.
I divided the many glass cases filled with toy robots among the six of us, but Eliza suddenly decided she didn’t want to help.
“If I wanted to stare at robots all day, I would have asked to room with Watson,” she said.
“I-promise-I-do-not-snore,” Watson said. “I-may-occasionally-crackle-however.”
“I’m going to wait outside with your dad.” Eliza walked back out of the museum.
“Good riddance,” Wendy said.
Nazhar turned to me and said, “Is it just me or is Eliza being extra mean today?”
“What do you mean?” Wendy interrupted. “She’s always nasty.”
“Her-mean-remarks-have-increased-by-eighteen-per-cent-this-trip,” Watson added.
“Nazhar should ask her about it later,” I said. “She seems to be the nicest to him. But we should focus on the case right now. We don’t have much time.”
We looked through all the robots. Watson had to fly up to check the cases that were too high for the rest of us. There were a lot of vintage robots from as early as the 1920s all the way until today. They even had an R.O.B., a Robotic Operating Buddy, which used to come with the original Nintendo video game consoles in 1985.
“There’s a lot of neat stuff here, but Mom’s robot isn’t one of them,” Jimmy said.
“It-is-true-that-Auntie-Vivian’s-robot-is-not-among-them,” Watson said.
“Yeah, I figured as much,” I said. “We should still try to talk to the owner, if he’s here.”
Nazhar went up to the front desk and asked about the owner. The boy said he was in a meeting, but we could wait for him.
We decided to go upstairs and look at the rest of the museum. There were two small rooms, each filled with bigger toys like little red wagons, rocking horses and pedal cars. There was also a glass case full of old comic books in Malay. Watson spotted a Star Trek comic and said, “Semoga-umur-panjang-dan-hidup-makmur.”
I was shocked! Since when did Watson speak a language other than English!?
“Ha ha! That’s good, Watson,” Nazhar said.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“‘Live long and prosper’,” Jimmy replied, wriggling through the legs of a rocking horse. Wendy was trying to get him out before we got in trouble. I stared at my robot. Something was going on in that metal brain of his, but I wasn’t sure what. This wasn’t the first time he’d displayed skills I hadn’t programmed into him. We walked back downstairs as I tried to remember all the times Watson had surprised me.
As we reached the ground floor, a door opened on the far side of the room and two men stepped out. One was dressed in jeans and a singlet, with geometrically-de
signed tattoos going up his right arm. The other was dressed in bermudas and a short-sleeved buttoned-down shirt.
“It’s a really nice piece,” the guy in bermudas said. “I really wish I could afford it. If you gave me a few weeks, I could get the money together.”
“There are some international collectors interested now, so I can’t give you a few weeks,” the man in jeans said.
“I’d hate to see the piece leave Penang,” the guy in bermudas continued. “Maybe you can check with Loh and see if he can afford it for his museum.”
The man in jeans gave a short, derisive laugh. “Sure, I’ll check with Loh,” he said, before leaving the museum. The boy behind the counter quickly said something in Hokkien to the guy in bermudas, who came up to us.
“How can I help you, my young friends?” he said, smiling.
“Are you the owner?” I asked.
“Yes, I’m Ben,” he said. “Would you like to play with some of my toys?”
“Yes!” Jimmy shouted.
“Wait—” but before I could continue, Ben had already gone back through the door he first emerged from. He came back carrying a white, bulky robot. It had a square base and body, and a domed head. It was carrying marbles in one cupped hand. As soon as Ben set it down on the floor, it began moving about, beeping and blorping.
Watson extended his legs to let it pass underneath him.
“Wow!” Ben said. “Your robot is way better than anything I have!”
“But he’s not a toy!” Jimmy said, running after the bulky robot. “He’s Watson!”
“Well, Watson, would you like to play Western Bar?” Ben asked, holding out a bulky handheld game. He turned to us and said, “It’s an old video game your parents probably played when they were young. It was quite popular in Singapore and Malaysia in the eighties.”
“Wow, that’s a super long time ago,” Wendy said.
Watson extended his arm and took the game from Ben.
I cleared my throat. “Excuse me, Uncle Ben. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about a toy robot.”
“Sure, I’d be happy to share my expertise on toy robots!” Ben said. “The first toy robot was probably—”
“Sorry, Uncle,” Wendy said. “There’s one specific robot we wanted to ask about?”
“Oh, sorry. Which one?”
“It’s shiny chrome and—” I started to say.
“I-have-beaten-your-game,” Watson said, interrupting me and handing back the game.
“What?” Ben said. “I didn’t even know this game could be beaten. I just assumed it went on forever!”
“It-had-ten-stages-of-three-levels-each,” Watson said. “It-was-a-simple-matter-of-timing-button-presses-correctly. The-patterns-were-easy-to-figure-out.”
“For you, maybe,” Ben said. “I’ve been playing this game for 20 years, and I never got past the Wanted Man in Stage 4.”
“Watson always helps me when I get stuck on video games,” Jimmy said, still running after the bulky robot. It would periodically let a marble out, and Jimmy would scoop it up and put it back into its hand.
“If you’re done boasting, Watson,” I said, glaring at my robot. “The robot I want to ask about is shiny chrome and has electric blue highlights. The head is shaped like a pyramid, and it has ray guns in its hands. It can roll, too.”
“What a coincidence!” Ben said. “The man I was just talking to wanted to sell me such a robot, but unfortunately the price he was asking was too high. He showed me a picture that fits your description exactly.”
Everyone’s heads snapped to attention, even Jimmy’s.
“The guy that just left?” I asked. “With the tattoo on his arm?”
“That’s the one,” Ben said.
We hurriedly thanked a surprised-looking Ben for the information and for letting us play with his toys, then rushed out of the museum.
I opened the door to the minivan. “Dad!” I said. “Did you see the man with the tattoo?”
“Snerk! What?” He had been snoring softly, and he woke with a start. “Do what now?”
He tried to rub the sleep out of his eyes. “I’m sorry, son. I wasn’t as alert as I should have been.”
“Where’s Eliza?” Nazhar asked. “Maybe she saw something.”
I looked in the minivan and realized only Dad was inside.
“Where is Eliza?” Wendy asked.
“I thought she was with you,” Dad said.
We looked up and down the street, but didn’t see her.
“There she is!” Wendy yelled. She was pointing across the street, down Lebuh Cannon, where Eliza was talking to someone. The boy—or girl, I actually couldn’t tell—was wearing a cap that shadowed his or her face.
“Eliza!” Nazhar shouted. She turned towards us, her eyes wide. The other boy or girl left immediately, and Eliza was left alone in the street. She turned away from us and smoothed down her pants before walking back to the minivan.
“Who was that?” Jimmy asked.
“Uh...just somebody looking for directions.”
“But you’re not a local,” Nazhar said.
“That’s what I said!” Eliza snapped.
Nazhar immediately turned to look at me. My theory of Eliza being nicer to Nazhar was proven false.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We need to find where that man went!”
“What man?” Eliza said.
“He-was-wearing-jeans-and-a-singlet,” Watson said. “He-had-geometric-tattoos-on-his-right-arm.”
“Oh, that guy,” Eliza said. “Yeah, I saw him when I was talking to...when that kid was asking for directions.”
“Where did he go?” I asked.
“He went past me on that street and then turned right,” Eliza said. “Why does it matter?”
“He was trying to sell the robot to Ben!” Jimmy said.
Dad immediately started the minivan. “Jump in, kids! If this man really has the robot, we’re not going to lose him!”
We all got in, and closed the door. Dad drove up Lebuh Cannon, then turned right onto Lebuh Armenian. He slowed down while we quickly scanned the sidewalks for the man.
“There he is!” Jimmy shouted.
We looked at where Jimmy was pointing, far up the road. I saw the tattooed man walking slowly, but determinedly on our left.
Could he have stolen Auntie Vivian’s robot? There was only one way to find out.
“Dad, follow that man!”
“Are-we-going-in-the-right-direction?” Watson asked.
We trailed the tattooed man walking east on Lebuh Armenian. Nazhar, using a scholarly voice, informed us that an Armenian church used to be located nearby. The man then turned left on Lebuh Pantai, or Beach Street. Again sounding like a history professor, Nazhar told us that there used to be a beach there before they reclaimed the land.
“That’s the same for Beach Road in Singapore, right?” Dad asked, turning his head to look at Nazhar.
“Please-do-not-take-your-eyes-off-the-road,” Watson said. “You-might-run-over-the-suspect.” Dad smiled sheepishly and concentrated on his driving.
“Yes,” replied Nazhar. “My dad said that Beach Road used to be right on the shoreline until the land was reclaimed.”
“This is all very interesting,” I interrupted. “But do you think we can focus on chasing the bad guy for now? He’s getting into a car!”
Another man was waiting in the car, and he immediately drove the tattooed man northwards. Dad followed them as best he could, but almost lost them a few times, especially after they got off the main road. We were going too quickly for me to look at the signs, but we passed a few large warehouses, the Little India district (which reminded me of Little India back home), some wholesale shops and then more warehouses.
The car finally stopped near what looked like a pasar malam, where the tattooed man got out. The car drove off, and Dad parked the minivan so we could follow the man on foot.
“Okay, we’re trailing a suspect on foot,
guys,” I said, “so we have to be very inconspicuous.”
“Huh? Like a policeman’s nose?” Jimmy asked, looking puzzled.
“What?” I said, even more puzzled.
“In cop’s mucus?” he repeated.
Wendy smiled. “No, Jimmy. Inconspicuous. It means we have to make sure we’re not noticed.”
“Yeah, we’re just five kids, an adult and a robot,” Eliza said, rolling her eyes. “There’s no reason anyone would even think to notice us.”
I would have glared at her again, but I was busy tracking the tattooed man. He was going in a relatively straight line, but the pasar malam was very crowded. If we didn’t move faster, we would lose him.
“Son, are you sure this is safe?” Dad asked.
“Of course,” I said. “We just need to keep our distance. And stay inconspicuous.”
“I-can-help,” Watson said, shimmering and turning invisible. A few shoppers stared at us in surprise. Jimmy giggled.
“Yup, that totally helped,” Eliza said.
I walked further into the pasar malam as the others followed. I tried my best to keep the tattooed man in view, but I kept getting distracted by the food stalls. There were some selling Ramly burgers, putu piring, chendol and goreng pisang. We even saw a stall where a man was making tau sar pneah!
“Dad! Can I get one?” I asked. “Penang tau sar pneah is supposed to be legendary!”
“Aren’t we in the middle of a chase scene?” Nazhar asked.
I looked out at the throng of people and saw the tattooed man looking at phone cases, “There is always time for tau sar pneah, Nazhar.”
“How do you ever solve anything?” Eliza asked.
Dad chuckled and bought six tau sar pneah, one for each of us. I stared at mine lovingly, until Wendy said, “He just turned off the main road!”
I quickly stuffed the whole tau sar pneah in my mouth and ran towards the phone case stall. This was a mistake for two reasons: one, I wasn’t a very good runner, and I almost fell down twice; and two, my tau sar pneah was bigger than my mouth. The second one was a common problem of mine, actually.
I tried to ask Dad and the Supper Club which direction the man had turned, but my tau sar pneah made sure my tongue was stuck at the bottom of my mouth and my cheeks were stuffed. I could barely move my lips.