by Tham Cheng-E
“Cut the crap, John,” Landon seethes. “Where exactly are you taking me?”
John realises there is no better way of putting it. “Some place safe.”
An invective slips out of Landon in a bitter laugh. “You’re not a bodyguard.”
“I never said I was one.”
“So you’re going to kill me?”
“No.”
“But you are going to let them milk me?”
“Possibly.”
Landon throws back his head in despair and closes his eyes. “Just how are they going to milk me, John?”
No response.
“HOW THE HELL ARE THEY GOING TO MILK ME?”
“I don’t know.” John relents. “I’m only tasked to keep you alive.”
“You’re one big walking lie, John.”
“I withheld some truth.” John’s tone is calm, icy. He checks the rear-view mirror and veers hard to the left, causing Landon to lurch. “But that doesn’t make me a liar.”
“Yeah?” A vein surfaces just beneath the skin of Landon’s neck. “So you think I’m the hare between two hounds? You think I can’t bail if I have to? Where in all your shitty lies can I find a single bit of truth, huh?”
John watches him from the corner of his eye. “Take your hand off the door handle.”
“Answer the question, John. Tell me one truthful thing you’ve uttered.”
“My sick daughter,” says John.
Landon suddenly feels beaten. He throws himself into the seat and draws his hands miserably across his face. “For two centuries I’ve been running from some invisible threat and I’m so darn tired of it. If you’re going to kill me just do it now and be done with it.”
John whips out a small holstered pistol from the side of his seat and hands it to him. “A token of trust. Strap it to your ankle. It’s cocked and ready to go. Safety’s where your right thumb is.”
“What if you’re ordered to dispose of me after I’m milked dry?”
“I gave my word to keep you alive.”
“Over your daughter’s life?”
John pauses in calculation, all the while checking his rear-view mirror and veering evasively. “I’ll work something out, Landon. I promise.”
“Oh, hell,” Landon exclaims wretchedly. “That’s what she said too!”
A sudden jolt yanks his head backwards, and with it comes a crash of metal and plastic. He strains over his shoulder just in time to catch a tailing vehicle drive headlong into their bumper. The impact briefly sends the rear of their car skidding.
They are ascending a highway ramp. From the pitched roofs of waterfront condominiums on the right and the luminous blue observation wheel on the left Landon knows they are now travelling west along the East Coast highway. Another bump sends the car swerving dangerously close to the rushing barriers on the left. They smell burning rubber.
“What the fu—” Landon whips back front. “Why didn’t you see that?”
“Watching it the whole time,” says John. “It’s been tailing us since we left.”
Landon braces his arms against the dashboard. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Didn’t want to frighten you.”
John is leaning so far forwards that his chin is almost touching the steering wheel. The tailing vehicle—a large pick-up truck— accelerates and pulls abreast, and Landon finds Hannah in its driver seat, her predatory gaze bearing down on them.
The truck suddenly swings left and ploughs into their side, sending the side-view mirror spinning off into the night. The right wheel protests in a scream of grinding metal.
“Hold on to something.” John swings his car right and brings it hard into the truck. Hannah counters the move by turning into John and equalising the force of the impact.
John wrestles the steering but fails to keep the car in the lane as another jarring impact sends it into the side barriers. Metal grinds concrete and sparks fly beautifully. Another jolt shatters the window and John cowers at the shower of crystalline chips. “You get the point now?” he snarls at Landon, his expression now livid and ferociously leonine, like a rabid vampire. “This her way of working something out?”
“Just shut up and drive!”
Hannah pulls the truck farther apart to gain momentum, and bears it down on their car so hard that the impact tilts John’s car and leaves it limping momentarily on two wheels before falling back on its suspension. Once more the truck peels away and swings round for another collision. John turns the wheel this way and that to counteract the centrifugal forces. But this time the impact drives the car up the barrier and crushes its left corner. The steering becomes sluggish as blow has cripples the right wheel.
“Roll down your window!” John instructs and leans hard into his seat.
“What for?”
“Just do it, you idiot!”
For the third time Hannah banks away, even farther this time.
The traffic around them has lightened and an empty lane now separates them. In the abundance of manoeuvring space the truck begins its approach, turning so sharply it faces John’s car in an almost headlong position.
John abandons the steering, hugs his head and ducks towards Landon, forcibly pressing him down sideways into his seat. The truck’s one functioning headlight floods the interior of the car, and the next instant everything explodes in a terrific din. The side of the car caves in upon impact. Vision blurs and jaws rattle.
The jolt alone would have snapped their necks if they weren’t lying across their seats. Arthur feel the crush of the bonnet as it strikes the low concrete barrier. Grey dust billows through the shattered windscreen and fills his nostrils. A nauseating sensation of weightlessness comes after, and the wrecked car sails through the air and plummets towards the Marina channel.
36
FEBRUARY 1915
TANGLIN BARRACKS NESTLED in the tropical fauna of Mount Harriet. Trails of yellow dirt ran between clusters of thistles and led up to white oblong blocks huddling in the shade of overhanging roofs. Between them coconut palms rustled in a warm, dry breeze. Hedges of bougainvillea garlanded tiny lawns furnished with wicker chairs and tables. Everything exuded a lovely, bucolic charm.
The westering sun shone at an angle. It was almost five in the afternoon. At this hour officers usually occupied the lawns, reclining on long chairs after tiffin. This afternoon however, the lawns were empty.
The pyramidal roof of the Drill Hall loomed near; a row of columns, thin as matchsticks, lined its perimeter. Anton was driving his mule towards it and towing a cart laden with cigarettes: Army Clubs, Kenilworths, Black Cats, Smith’s Glasgow Mixtures. Anything the Tommies loved. Anton knew the regular supplies to the barracks had been disrupted by the Lunar New Year festivities and the Tommies needed their fags as if the Great War depended on it. He threw his voice above the shrill of insects, lyrically declaiming the brands of cigarettes in hope of invoking some business.
But the compound did not respond.
He went a little farther, peddling the brands in an oratorical chant and passing one silent block after another. He was approaching the detention barracks that supposedly held German internees—mostly sailors from a German cruiser which had been put out of action earlier by an Australian warship. And there at last, he found a soldier perched on the edge of a platform at a guard post.
He leapt from the cart, took two cases of Kenilworth cigarettes and went over, only to present them to a face mutilated by a ghastly bullet wound. The bullet had obliquely entered the right temple and come out through the spot where his nose would’ve been. Dollops of brain matter fell from it and onto the dead soldier’s crotch.
Anton didn’t scream. He just stood gawking at the grisly sight. When he mustered sufficient courage to advance another hundred yards towards the cricket ground he found two more dead soldiers at another guard post. On the portico steps of a nearby stilted bungalow he discovered the mangled body of a man, presumably a drill instructor by his uniform, his back and nape riddled with the raw
, almond-shaped wounds of bayonets.
In a staff office of the detention barracks, papers fluttered under a whirring electric desk fan and coffee had gone stale in their tin mugs. An officer laid face-down on his bullet-splintered desk with his head shot open. By the cricket ground itself, Anton surveyed a field stippled with corpses still in their white exercise attire.
Terror finally stole its way into him. He struck the mule hard on its hind and sent it kicking and braying down the dusty track. He whipped the wretched creature mercilessly until it brought him to a wider avenue of jambu trees and angsanas. The discovery of a small crowd ahead brought relief and restored equanimity, and Anton slowed the mule.
There was a gharry with its wheels wedged in a roadside ditch, its side stippled with bullet holes. Pulling abreast of it, Anton saw that in it were the corpses of a European man and a lady festering in the afternoon heat. The lady’s skin was a ghastly grey; her white muslin blouse matted in dark old blood. There were five more corpses laid out in a row just beside the gharry. Anton saw that one of them had a large, bald head that shone like a pearl in the daylight.
The small crowd of townsfolk converged upon the scene and two Malay constables moved in to deter looting. They stood between the gharry and the crowd and rested their fists on their hips, as if undecided on what to do with the corpses.
Anton drove up to them. “Apa berlaku sini?”
One of them, a handsome smooth-faced young man with a light moustache, replied rather proficiently in English. “Sepoys. They went amok and start shooting all the ang mohs they see, young or old also shoot. Sangat terok lah. I heard they even shoot their CO.”
Emboldened by the presence of the crowd, Anton ventured a closer inspection of the corpses and became particularly interested in the hairless one. It was wearing a dark jacket resembling that of a clergyman, with hemming that reached beyond the knees. Everything about it was large; hands, feet, face and all. Its skin exuded a waxy, almost translucent appearance. Beneath bony, protuberant brows a pair of dead eyes sat half-opened in their sockets; the pupil in one of them was yellow and the other a bright emerald-green. On the grass not far from him lay a felt Homburg hat.
Anton seemed to have discovered something in the dead face, and the longer he stared at it the more frightened of it he became. He thought he had seen the dead face alive. In shreds of disjointed memories he saw that it had once breathed and spoken, and they filled him with a desperate need to absolve himself of an unfathomable guilt.
A black Austin drove up to them in a stream of yellow dust and the crowd now turned their attention upon the marvel of an automobile. A dapper Chinese man stepped out of the back, sporting a white cotton jacket, white flannel trousers and a white Panama hat. His attire contrasted sharply with his round-rimmed eyeglasses of flat, smoky quartz. A light moustache grew over his fair, scholarly face.
He crouched by the hairless corpse and laid his hand over its bloodied chest. Then he removed his hat and held that position for a few seconds as if in mourning. When he finished he slid a hand under the corpse’s coat and retrieved a chromium object the size of a pocketwatch. No one seemed to have noticed the crafty move but Anton caught it all and out went his finger, firm and accusing.
“Thief!” he cried.
The accusation alarmed the man at first, but he kept his hands in his trouser pockets and regarded his accuser amusedly with a slight tilt of head. When the constables hustled over to him he raised nothing in defence. Anton seized the sleeve of one of the constables and said vehemently: “I saw this man take the dead man’s pocketwatch! It must be inside one of his pockets now. Search him and you’ll see!”
“He’s a detective,” said the constable. “We know him.”
“Detective or not I saw him slip something into his pocket when you weren’t looking!” Anton insisted. “He can sell such things. I know his kind; stealing from the dead and pawning them for money.”
The constables wouldn’t suffer to hear any more of Anton’s petition and began dispersing the crowd. They might have been offered a cut in the shady enterprise and Anton, although much chagrined, knew he was powerless against such collusion. Before entering his black Austin, the thief picked out Anton over the eyeglasses that hung low over his nose. Their eyes met, and he smiled and touched the rim of his Panama hat in parting.
37
ANTON
15th September 1867, Sunday
I shall turn 30 in two years, and with Origen’s counsel I have made preparations by means of a birth registration duplicate, which I had very fortuitously procured two days earlier from a sagacious ally who interns at the Office of Health and Statistics. I named this duplicate Anton, after my doctor, Anton MacCain.
Dr MacCain said the name Anton came from the Romanic name Antonius, a variant of Anthony. I have immense respect for people who comprehend the context of their names; they often seek a meaning to life, pursue a definitive purpose in the tasks they perform. Undoubtedly Dr MacCain was very good at what he did. Our acquaintanceship, however, did not last, and he has since returned to Scotland to serve in the Board of a hospital there.
It is strange to think that I should be left a house and land and have so little money to spend. Just two years earlier my life had fallen into disrepair when I lost most of my possessions to a consistently-poor hand. They were days of decrepitude which I shall not suffer to commit to memory but for the rule that I shall never again enter a gaming-house or cockpit. This entry shall be a lasting testament to my resolve.
Day count to Anton, day 2 of 5,475 days.
38
MAY 1860
ALL GAMING HOUSES along Kiau Keng Kau stank. It didn’t matter which one you got into. Everything reeked of greed and vice, of sweaty feet and belched breaths. Outside one of them, a gharry stopped and the horse blew a snort. A man alighted, robed in blue silk and a black Chinese cap. He had a thin neck and a moustache that hung past the corners of his mouth. Inside the gharry sat another man of a fair, scholarly appearance—thoroughly Chinese but dressed as a European—in a dark jacket and top hat. He pointed to the murky interior of the gaming house and in it went the moustached man.
The floor teemed with throngs of pigtailed gamblers sweating in the humidity and at the outcome of their stakes. On a straw mat a game of pai gow was in progress, illuminated by kerosene lamps that hung from rafters blackened by soot.
Aldred, mildly inebriated on cheap Chinese wine, perched himself on a stool and played on credit, drowned in the delusion that he might win himself a sufficient fortune to pay his debts. Through the air muddied in opium smoke he struggled to make sense of his hand, his sight alternating between the tiles, his exhausted mind incapable of conjuring any form of strategy. The croupier was a skeletal, bucktoothed man who wore his pigtail around his forehead—an appearance that belied cunning ingenuity. Pokerfaced, he waited for Aldred to reveal his last few tiles before breaking into a gangly grin and declaring the round a croupier’s win, and Aldred’s fourth loss in a row.
“Ee mm see dng lang lah! Bey hiao sng!” said the croupier to everyone else but Aldred. It drew a round of wild, riotous laughter. Aldred comprehended that remark, though he amazed himself in his ability to snub the humiliation. It had to be the wine.
Life had dealt him bitter blows. In the years leading to his mother’s death a debilitating disease struck his family’s nutmeg plantation and withered the fruits before they had time to ripen. All the other blighted plots on Mount Harriet had been divided and sold. Aldred’s plot was the only one that stood in the way of a new barracks compound which the colonial administration had been planning for years.
He turned to cultivating gambier. When those crops also failed he succumbed to the draw of gambling. The goons and dealers, having sensed the rawness in him, tried talking him into deals that would allow them to siphon his latent wealth and bleed him dry. Their plan was to indulge him in vats of wine, only to fail in their attempts to out-drink him. Aldred was always the last to leave t
he table, sober as ever, and often before an eclectic assemblage of swooned drunkards. The Ghee Hin Kongsi was clever enough to have lured Aldred into one of the many gaming houses it operated. The triad achieved success in bleeding him out on the tables; by the time he left the pai gow game, he had already chalked up a debt large enough to rival the price of his family plot.
A scrawny sharp-faced man approached Aldred as he was hovering over a fan-tan table. “You no pay, no borrow more money,” said he in a short, reedy voice.
“I don’t need more money,” said Aldred, ignoring the man and watching the croupier separate little glossy black buttons four at a time until one was left. It roused the gamblers to a cacophony of cheers and moans.
“You don’t want more money also must pay,” the sharp-faced man insisted.
Aldred swatted at him like he would a fly. “I’ll give you something tomorrow,” he said, thinking that perhaps he could find an old vase or an infant’s ankle chain somewhere that he could pawn.
Two larger thugs converged on him and he caught the stink on them. He stood ready to bolt when the moustached man in blue silk took him unexpectedly by the arm and said something in dialect to the thugs and tucked them back into the gloom.
A triad headman? Aldred thought he looked too wimpy for one.
“Do you know who I am?” asked the man in excellent English.
Aldred shook his head and continued allowing his arm to be held.
“My name is Hoo and I have a proposition for you.”
He listened, ready to accept any odds.
“We’ll have a round of fan-tan between you and me,” said Hoo. “No backers. If you win I’ll settle your debts.”
“And if I lose?” Aldred blurted a little too impatiently.
Hoo half-smiled and twitched an eye at his success in securing Aldred’s interest. “If you lose,” he said, lifting his chin, “I’ll still settle your debts, but you’ll have to sign an agreement legally ceding your land to me.”