Umbrella Man (9786167611204)

by Needham, Jake

  Laura Ann Zimmerman chuckled again.

  “And then he said, ‘Your mother was really a spy.’”

  TWENTY-SIX

  TAY THOUGHT ABOUT that all the way back to the Cantonment Complex. He sat in the back of the taxi with his arms folded and he thought about Laura Ann Zimmerman and her memories of her father saying her mother was a spy.

  Perhaps her father had really told her that. Perhaps he had only told her something like that. The woman seemed certain she remembered the moment exactly. Tay didn’t say anything to challenge her, but he wasn’t nearly so sure.

  Tay understood all too well that people had memories of things they didn’t really recall. He had come to believe everyone’s memories were more dream than remembrance. A few recollections of moments that were genuine connected by other moments that were entirely imaginary. He had memories like that himself. It was as if he had found pieces of discarded film lying around in the cutting room of his mind and then worked them up into a coherent narrative by sticking a few bits in between them.

  That was the thing about the past. You carried it with you as a jumble of remembrance and imagining. But once you knew that, and once you accepted that some of your memories weren’t real, how could you hope to understand your past?

  You might even tell yourself it doesn’t matter whether you understand your past because it is…well, past. Dead and buried. Why does it matter now how much of what we remember is true? Why does it matter whether we can separate the truth of our past from what we have merely imagined?

  It matters because the past is not really past. Just when you least expect it, the past returns for you. You can never bury the past. It is always there, just waiting for you to turn your back. And when you do, the fingers of the past rise up out of the ground right at your feet and wrap themselves around your ankle.

  Forget Laura Ann Zimmerman.

  What was bugging Tay was that he knew the past was just on the verge of returning for him. It was already teasing him with glimpses of secrets he had never known it held. He could feel its fingers reaching for him now.

  ***

  Duncan Tay had been his father, a man of whom Tay now had only the vaguest memories. He remembered he was an accountant, of course. And he remembered what he looked like. At least he thought he did. But that was about it.

  Now Tay had a picture of his father taken more than thirty-five years ago with another man he knew had worked for American intelligence most of his life. A man who was apparently a skilled smuggler and who had been found dead in Singapore, his neck broken, three days after terrorist bombings had gutted the city. Tay might have written that off as a coincidence, one of those odd happenstances that occasionally do occur in real life. But after the ISD goon and his CIA sidekick turned up asking questions about his investigation, he realized it wasn’t going to be nearly that easy.

  Then, out of nowhere, this woman tells him a story about her long-dead father claiming that her mother, a woman who once worked for Tay’s father, was really a spy.

  What, Tay asked himself, was he supposed to think now?

  That his father was somehow connected to American intelligence, too? That he might not have been an accountant at all? That his accounting firm had been just some sort of front? And if it had been a front, what had it been a front for?

  The past. Rising right out of the ground at his feet. Secrets Tay hadn’t even known were buried were coming back to torment him.

  ***

  The taxi stopped at a light just past Raffles Place and the driver shot a quick look over his shoulder at Tay. Tay wondered if he had spoken out loud without realizing it. He hoped he hadn’t said something he shouldn’t.

  The driver was small and dark, possibly a Bangladeshi, and not young, probably in his sixties. When he saw Tay looking at him, he half turned in his seat.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said to Tay, his face wearing a beatific smile. “I am a Christian. Have you found Jesus Christ in your life?”

  Tay felt trapped. He didn’t want to be rude, but wasn’t about to sit there and pretend to listen to the man’s evangelical pitch. Why did people do that? He knew they meant well, but didn’t they have any respect for his privacy? He was just taking a cab ride, for God’s sake, and now here he was the target of a religious pitch. Why couldn’t people just leave him alone?

  Tay was suddenly aware of a strong odor of curry coming off the man’s skin.

  First a religious pitch and now this.

  He didn’t want to look like a racist, but he had to get out of the cab. The smell of curry was making him sick.

  ***

  Tay walked the rest of the way back to the Cantonment Complex. It wasn’t far and it only took him about fifteen minutes, but it was hot and humid and the exertion made him sweat. It was worth it. Anything was better than listening to a religious pitch from an evangelical Christian who stank of curry.

  Robbie Kang was at his desk in the squad room and Tay waved him into his office.

  “Have you got the list of entries through the Woodlands checkpoint?”

  “No, sir. Immigration says it will take another day or two.”

  “Isn’t it all in some kind of a database? Can’t they just push a button?”

  “They say they’re busy, sir. I think ISD has them running around like crazy.”

  Tay drummed his fingers on the desk. Annoying, of course, but it probably didn’t matter. He doubted his dead man would have entered Singapore under a passport that gave his name as Johnny the Mover, and that was all he had. So what good was the list of entries going to do him anyway?

  ***

  That night at home, Tay suddenly got a crazy idea. He resisted it at first, but then he gave in. He picked up a pack of Marlboros and some matches and walked out to his little brick-paved garden.

  It was a nice night, at least it was by Singapore standards which meant it wasn’t actually raining. Still, the air was so heavy with humidity Tay thought the sheer weight of it might cause water to start draining from the air at any moment the way a sponge starts dripping when it can’t hold any more water.

  He walked around the garden for a minute or two, poking at a plant here and collecting a fallen leaf there. He was stalling, of course, and he knew it. Finally he settled himself in one of the green-cushioned chairs around his small teak table. Then he shook out a Marlboro, lit it, and dropped the pack and matches on the table.

  He held the first mouthful of smoke for a moment as he always did and thought about how it tasted sweet and bitter at the same time. He didn’t smoke because he was nervous or because he needed something to do with his hands. And he was reasonably sure he wasn’t addicted to nicotine. He smoked for the same reason other people ate cheeseburgers. He liked the taste. He figured he could quit if he wanted to and switch to cheeseburgers, but he doubted that would make him a whole lot better off. So he took another long pull on his Marlboro and stopped thinking about it.

  Tay smoked quietly for a moment, but the longer he stalled the more annoyed he became with himself. Abruptly he stabbed out his cigarette in the heavy glass ashtray sitting in the middle of the table, then leaned back and folded his arms.

  ***

  “Hello, Mother?” he called. “Are you there?”

  He felt like a complete idiot doing it, of course, so the sound of his voice came out somewhere between a whisper and a mumble, but he screwed up his courage and tried it one more time.

  “Mother? Can you hear me?”

  There was no reply.

  Has it really come to this? Tay asked himself.

  Here he was, sitting in his garden on a reasonably pleasant night, and was he enjoying a drink and smoke and wondering about his life the way he usually did? No, he was trying to summon up a ghost. And not just any ghost, but the ghost of his mother.

  It was ridiculous, he knew, but…well, his mother had known there was some connection between the dead guy at the Woodlands and the bombings. Somehow. He couldn’t have hallucinat
ed that, could he?

  And if she knew about that, and particularly now that he could connect the dead guy to his father, he figured questioning his mother was the next logical thing to do. He had talked to her, hadn’t he? So what was the big deal? He would talk to her again.

  Of course, the fact that she’d been dead for two years raised the bar a bit in trying to work out exactly how to do that. Raised the crap out of it actually.

  “Mother? Would you answer me please?”

  But all Tay heard out there in the night was the swishing of the two big coconut palms in his neighbor’s garden rubbing against each other in the warm breeze.

  “Fuck it,” he muttered after a moment.

  Then he scooped up his cigarette and matches and stalked inside.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TAY WAS NOT an early riser. He had never understood why such virtue attached to rising at dawn while going to bed late implied nothing but involvement in unsavory pursuits.

  If one slept for seven or eight hours out of every twenty-four, what difference did it make which seven or eight hours it was? But the plain fact was it did make a difference in the eyes of most people. Which seven or eight hours you slept was nothing less than a reflection of your character. And the seven hours Tay slept were ones that made his character suspect. It was all so damned unfair. He always seemed to be on the wrong side of these things.

  He was in the Cantonment Complex just after nine the next morning, early for him, so he was in no mood for small talk when the young uniformed officer intercepted him before he made it to the safety of his office.

  “What is it, Corporal?”

  “Excuse me, sir. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  The young man’s face was round and earnest with large dark eyes set deep in slightly brown skin. It was the kind of face that spoke of generations of Singaporean mixed marriages among Chinese, Malays, Indians, and God only knew how many other races. Tay searched it for any sign of a rebuke over his late arrival at his office, but saw none. Of course he saw none. Singaporeans were obedient to a fault. To rebuke someone of higher rank, even obliquely, was unheard of.

  “I’ve been ordered to bring you to Phoenix Park immediately, sir. You had an appointment there at eight-thirty.”

  That was news to Tay. Had he forgotten? No, of course he hadn’t. What was going on here?

  The young man consulted his watch although Tay was pretty sure he already knew exactly what time it was. “I’ll get you there as quickly as I can, sir.”

  New Phoenix Park was the real headquarters of the Singapore Police. The Cantonment Complex housed only CID, the Central Narcotics Bureau, and some local policing functions. New Phoenix Park was on the north side of the city in the heavily-secured compound of the Ministry of Home Affairs along with some of the other agencies MHA supervised such as the Immigration and Checkpoint Authority. Perhaps, it suddenly occurred to Tay, Sergeant Kang’s inquiries about crossings at the Woodlands checkpoint immediately before the murder had turned up something interesting after all.

  Tay would have liked to have an hour or so of quiet in his own office sipping a coffee and bringing his blood circulation slowly up to its normal speed before having to face the bureaucrats of New Phoenix Park, but that was apparently not to be. Still, he supposed progress was progress, no matter what the hour, so he would take it when he could get it.

  He thought briefly about asking the corporal to stop at a Starbucks on the way across the city, but he knew that was out of the question. The young man would probably be scarred for life by having to deal with a conflict between his orders and a request from a senior officer. And he seemed nice enough. Tay just couldn’t do that to him.

  ***

  When Tay made his entirely uncaffeinated arrival at New Phoenix Park a half hour later, the first thing he learned was that his assumption of progress in the investigation had been unwarranted. His meeting was not at the Immigration and Checkpoint Authority. It was at the Internal Security Department.

  The Internal Security Department cultivated a certain air of mystery in Singapore. Tay had always thought it a little silly, for example, that the identity of the Director of ISD was kept a secret while he held his position, although after he left office he was quickly identified so he could be showered with congratulations for a job well done. Tay assumed he could find out who the current director was easily enough, but the truth was he didn’t really care.

  Officially, ISD was the domestic intelligence agency of the Ministry of Home Affairs. It was charged with keeping Singapore safe from terrorists, domestic and foreign, and it had extraordinary powers under the Internal Security Act to detain people more or less indefinitely without charges. Those were exactly the sort of powers that would never have been given to any government agency under American or British law, the kind of government powers of which real democracies were deeply and justifiably suspicious.

  Unofficially, ISD was…well, Tay would just as soon not know what ISD did unofficially.

  Philip Goh was waiting in the conference room on the fourth floor of Block C to which the young corporal guided Tay. He was drinking from a bottle of water when Tay walked in just before ten and he didn’t look happy.

  “This meeting was scheduled for eight-thirty,” he snapped.

  “Not by me,” Tay said.

  In the absence of a formal invitation to have a seat, Tay picked out a chair on the side of the table opposite Goh and settled into it. He wanted to arrange his body into a posture that adequately reflected his contempt for Goh’s summons, but he wasn’t entirely sure how to do that.

  He also wanted to have some coffee, although he could readily see from Goh’s expression he clearly wasn’t going to be offered any. He thought of asking for coffee anyway, just to annoy Goh. But Goh already looked so annoyed that Tay was pretty sure the next stage of annoyance would involve him pulling his gun and shooting people, starting with Tay, so he let it go.

  “This case is closed,” Goh abruptly announced.

  It took Tay a moment to process that. “Do you mean the Woodlands case?”

  Goh nodded.

  “What are you talking about? It’s anything but closed.”

  “We’ve closed it.”

  “You’ve closed it?”

  This time Goh didn’t even bother to nod.

  “Look, Goh, you people may be able to go around locking up anyone you want without charges, but you can’t go around closing CID cases. Even for ISD, that’s way over the top.”

  “Check with your boss, if you like. But the case has been officially closed as a suicide.”

  “Suicide? The guy hit himself over the head with a Maglite and then broke his own neck?”

  “Look, Tay, I don’t give a fuck about your smart-ass jokes. We’ve closed the case and that’s the end of it. It’s a matter of national security.”

  “National security? Oh give me a break, Goh. That doesn’t scare me. And uttering two magic words doesn’t give you the authority to tell me what cases to investigate.”

  “Maybe not. But I know people who have that authority. And they’re telling you not to take this one any further. This meeting is just a courtesy to make certain you understand that you have to comply.”

  “Or what?”

  Goh looked genuinely puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “You said I have to comply. I asked what will happen if I don’t comply.”

  That brought a half smile to Goh’s face. Tay wondered if the man had ever before encountered anyone who hadn’t begun tugging on his forelock and vigorously yes-siring at the barest suggestion of an order from ISD.

  “Well, for starters, Tay, your career would be pretty much over.”

  “My career? Christ, Goh, is that the best you can do? My father left me more money than I have any use for. You can take my career and shove it up your ass, you smug prick!”

  A hugely discomforting thought suddenly flashed across Tay’s mind. Although his suggestion to Goh might be anato
mically impossible, a very big piece of the case they were screaming at each other about had in fact been shoved up the corpse’s ass. Did ISD know about that? If they did, it would explain who had jumped him at home and grabbed the ledgers he had found in the safety deposit box. Christ, was there no limit to what these people thought they could get away with?

  “I’m not going to waste my morning arguing with you, Tay. The case is closed and your investigation is over. All I care about is making certain you understand that and are going to comply.”

  “And all I care about is what’s right. This isn’t right. I’m not going to write off a murder case as a suicide because some ISD weenie decides to label it a national security matter and tells me to fuck off. I don’t work for you.”

  “No, but we both work for the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the minister himself has decided to close this case as a suicide. By the way, did you know the minister doesn’t much like you, Tay?”

  “That’s okay. I don’t much like the minister either.”

  “Always the smart-ass, aren’t you? That’s what everybody says about you, Tay. That you’re just a cranky, sour old smart-ass with no respect for authority.”

  Tay started to bite back at Goh again, but decided not to bother. Besides, Tay figured, Goh pretty much had him dead to rights there. How could he argue with a description like that?

  “Get out of here, Tay. Go see your boss. He’ll tell you the same thing I’m telling you. This case is done. Go do something useful. Maybe write some parking tickets.”

  Tay stood up and left without another word, closing the door quietly behind him. He thought about slamming it, of course — who wouldn’t? — but he didn’t. He didn’t want to give Goh the satisfaction.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TAY THOUGHT THERE must have been times in his life when he had been angrier. But if someone had asked him right then when those times were, he doubted he could have come up with any.