Umbrella Man (9786167611204)

by Needham, Jake

  It was the woman’s face that stopped Tay dead. It reflected no single ethnicity, but was one of those Singaporean faces that spoke of generations of multiracial inbreeding. At the base of her features was an unmistakable dose of Chinese ancestry, but Tay could also see tweaks and flourishes that were Malaysian, Indian, and even Caucasian. And her face simply glowed. There was no other expression for it. From somewhere deep inside this woman rose a luminescent warmth that flooded the room. It made Tay think of the mysterious radiance of the Mona Lisa.

  Tay lurched to his feet and stuck out his hand. “I’m Inspector Tay,” he said. “CID.”

  And immediately, of course, he felt like an asshole.

  When meeting a beautiful woman for the first time, Tay always felt like an asshole. He suspected most men did. Those that didn’t, he was certain, really were assholes.

  “Sam is conducting a national security investigation, Mei Lin.” Lee’s voice had suddenly taken on the bonhomie of a game show host. Even he was apparently affected by this woman’s radiance. “He needs to ask you a few questions.”

  The woman took Tay’s hand, but she said nothing. She only lowered her eyes and smiled slightly in a gesture that might have seemed coy and artificial from another woman. But from her it seemed entirely right and natural.

  Tay reluctantly released her hand and gestured her toward the other chair in from of Harry Lee’s desk. He glanced quickly at Lee and saw Lee beaming like the father of the bride.

  “Thank you for coming,” Tay told the woman.

  Thank you for coming? What an idiotic thing to say. This woman worked for the bank, for God’s sake. Her boss told her to come into his office and answer Tay’s questions. Thank you for coming?

  Men simply turned into fumbling jerks in front of beautiful women, didn’t they? Did women know that? Yes, of course they did. The beautiful ones used it against the men they met, and those that weren’t beautiful hated men for acting the way they did toward the ones that were.

  “Mr. Lee tells me you may remember something that is crucial to an investigation I am conducting.” Tay rushed to safe ground before he said something irretrievably stupid. “This man I’m interested in has been accessing a safety deposit box here. His name is Joseph Hysmith. Do you remember him?”

  “Yes, sir. I do.”

  It was the first time Mei Lin had spoken and her voice matched her face. Perfectly pitched and modulated, no hint of an accent, a voice that could sing you to sleep.

  Tay was hunting now for flaws. He needed to find some flaws. He did not want to accept that this woman could possibly be as perfect as she appeared to be. He noticed she had very small fingernails. Her blood red nail varnish was little more than a tiny dot on the end of each finger. As flaws went, it wasn’t much, but it was the only one Tay could come up with.

  “Is there some reason you remember him in particular from all the people who must come into the bank every day?”

  The woman smiled slightly and Tay felt a fission of jealously that he was not this man she remembered so well. It was just plain stupid to feel that way, of course. It made no sense at all. But still, he felt jealous. That was just the simple truth of it.

  “I have a photograph I would like to show you,” Tay said, moving on before Mei Lin explained her smile. “It was taken over thirty years ago so you will have to think of the man you have met as many years younger, but I would like for you to look at it and see if you recognize him.”

  Mei Lin said nothing, but she gave a small nod of assent.

  Tay retrieved his briefcase from the floor and removed the manila envelope with the 5x7 black and white of his father with Johnny and the umbrella man. He removed the photograph and handed it to Mei Lin. He watched her studying it as he returned his briefcase to the floor. He searched her face for any flicker of recognition. He was disappointed to see none.

  Tay and Lee waited in silence. Mei Lin continued to study the photograph without expression, and Tay’s heart began to sink. But then abruptly she looked at Tay and smiled.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m pretty sure that’s him.”

  It was all Tay could do not to leap from his chair screaming Yippee!

  He had been right. Johnny the Mover was Joseph Hysmith.

  “He’s much bigger now, but the face looks very much the same.”

  Tay wasn’t certain what Mei Lin meant by that. Johnny had gained some weight over the thirty years since the photograph had been taken, that was true, but he would hardly have described him as big. Maybe Mei Lind’s petit frame made her think of most men as big.

  Automatically, Tay sucked in his stomach.

  ***

  Mei Lin tilted the photograph first one way and then another as if she were trying to improve the quality of the light falling on it, although Tay couldn’t see that it made much difference.

  “May I know when this photograph was taken?” she asked.

  If an elderly fat man had asked him that, Tay would probably have snapped at him to shut up because he was damn well asking the questions here. But Mei Lin was as far from an elderly fat man in the tree of evolution as it was possible to get and still be in the tree at all. Tay was helpless to do anything other than answer pretty much any question she might want to ask.

  “In 1975,” he said.

  And caught in the spell of a beautiful woman, he couldn’t resist adding, “That’s my father right next to the man I’m asking about. He was acquainted with Johnny somehow. I’m not certain exactly how, and he died a long time ago so I’ll probably never find out. It couldn’t have anything to do with this case anyway, since that was over thirty years ago.”

  “Johnny?” Mei Lin asked.

  Tay nodded.

  “So Joseph Hysmith isn’t our customer’s real name?”

  “No, I’m afraid it’s not.”

  Mei Lin thought about that for a moment and a sad look crossed her face, presumably a reflection on the shameful duplicity afoot in the world.

  “So that’s your father in the middle?” she asked after a moment.

  “No, he’s on the right. Next to Johnny.”

  Mei Lin looked puzzled.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  Tay wasn’t sure what there was not to understand.

  Mei Lin had fingered Johnny the Mover as Joseph Hysmith and Johnny was standing in the middle of the three men in the photograph. His father on the right side and the umbrella man was on the left side. How hard was that?

  “Didn’t you say your father was standing next to our customer?” Mei Lin asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then that would be your father in the middle, wouldn’t it? Next to Mr. Hysmith?”

  Tay froze.

  Surely, he told himself, some confusion had been introduced into the conversation that was simply eluding him. The woman could not be saying what she appeared to be saying.

  Tay stood up and walked around behind Mei Lin’s chair. He reached down to the photograph she was holding on her lap and placed his forefinger on his father.

  “That’s my father. The man on the right.”

  Mei Lin turned her head and looked over her shoulder at Tay. She smiled.

  And in that moment Tay knew.

  He felt the small hairs on the back of his neck lift as Mei Lin turned back to the photograph and put her own finger on it.

  “That’s our customer right there,” she said.

  Tay said nothing. He didn’t know what to say.

  “He’s the man on the left,” Mei Lin added unnecessarily. “The one holding the umbrella.”

  THIRTY- SIX

  STANDING ON THE sidewalk outside of HSBC, Tay couldn’t remember what he had said to Mei Lin or Harry Lee after that. He was sure he had thanked them for their help, and no doubt he had shaken hands warmly with both of them when he left, but he had no real memory of any of it because his mind had been a thousand miles away.

  On the umbrella man.

  The umbrella man who w
as really Joseph Hysmith.

  Well, probably not. Joseph Hysmith was just a name the man, whoever he really was, had used to access the safety box.

  The box for which Johnny the Mover had had a key.

  The box within which there were ledger sheets with his father’s initials.

  His father, Johnny, and the umbrella man all connected to the same safety deposit box in a bank in Singapore thirty-five years after his father had died.

  The buried past rising up from the ground. His father reaching out from the grave and pointing to…well, what?

  That was still the question, wasn’t it?

  ***

  Tay knew he wasn’t going to stumble over the answer standing there on the sidewalk. He had found out so much already, but it added up to so little. They needed a break of some kind. He would start by going to the Cantonment Complex to see if Kang had made any progress with either Immigration or Customs. Maybe he had. Maybe that would start the unraveling of it all.

  Tay thought about walking since it wasn’t much over a mile. He actually liked walking whenever he could although everyone thought he was crazy to walk anywhere in Singapore’s relentless heat and humidity. The older he got, the more he thought those people might be right. They were certainly right today. It wasn’t even noon yet, and the air was already so thick Tay wouldn’t have been surprised to see someone painting graffiti on it. No, not a good day for a stroll.

  He started looking around for a taxi.

  And that was when he saw the woman who was watching him.

  He would never have noticed her if he hadn’t suddenly swiveled his head around toward the Fullerton Hotel to see if there were any taxis parked in front of it.

  She was standing just on the other side of Battery Road, about halfway along the narrow driveway that led to the Fullerton Hotel’s entrance. A middle-aged woman who looked entirely nondescript, she was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt and carrying a black shoulder bag that looked heavy. She was smoking a cigarette and staring directly at him. When Tay turned quickly and caught her out, she froze, which was probably what she had been taught to do in surveillance school. Maybe that would have been the right call in a crowd — after all, suddenly turning your head the moment someone catches you looking at them is pretty much a dead giveaway — but out in the open where this woman was, nothing could have made her more conspicuous once Tay saw her.

  Tay didn’t know a great deal about surveillance. Actually, he knew almost nothing except what he had read in spy novels, but some instinct caused him not to react to the woman. Even after he spotted her, he continued looking in her general direction, turning his head a little back and forth and trying his best to look like any other man just trying to find a taxi.

  Was he overacting? Maybe. He wasn’t sure. He’d had very little experience in pretending to ignore surveillance after he had spotted it. None at all actually.

  As little as Tay knew about how this sort of thing was supposed to be done, he knew enough to realize the woman wasn’t alone. You couldn’t follow someone with just one person. You had to keep the subject in a box — at least one person in front of him and others on each side and behind — or he might suddenly turn in a direction you didn’t expect or be swallowed up in a crowd. And if that happened, whoever was responsible for running the surveillance operation would just end up looking like a jerk.

  No, the woman wasn’t alone. There were others out there with eyes on Tay. At least two or three, maybe half a dozen even. Too many for him to do anything about.

  ***

  Walking slowly away from the Fullerton and turning up Collyer Quay, Tay thought about what it meant to him to be under surveillance.

  The first question to answer, he supposed, was exactly who it was watching him.

  That was any easy one at least. It had to be some of Philip Goh’s goons at the Internal Security Department. John August had already told him ISD was keeping an eye on him, which was why August had set up that elaborate ruse with the stalled-out Volvo to cover the message he had sent to Tay. Who else could it be? No one ran a surveillance operation in a tight little society like Singapore other than the guys who made sure it stayed a tight little society. And that was ISD.

  Okay, second question.

  Why did it really matter to Tay one way or another that ISD had him under surveillance?

  They already knew he was continuing the Woodlands investigation under the thinnest possible cover, and now they knew he had gone into the main branch of HSBC on Collyer Quay. So what? It was a bank. People went into banks all the time. And, as far as he knew, they hadn’t connected the safety deposit box where he found the first ledger sheets with his father’s initials on them to this particular bank, if they even knew about the box at all.

  So what could ISD find out by watching him?

  First, they would find out Samuel Tay was really a very dull man. He got up late, occasionally had breakfast out, went to the Cantonment Complex, talked to people all day, then went home and smoked cigarettes in his garden until it was time to go to bed. Surely none of that would interest anyone, at least not very much.

  Still, it made Tay angry that ISD apparently though they could follow a senior CID inspector around Singapore without getting caught at it. Actually, if Tay were being completely honest, it was hard to get too self-righteous about that. The truth was he hadn’t caught them, not at least until he spotted that woman in front of the Fullerton entirely by accident.

  Regardless, he didn’t much like being taken for a fool. Now that he knew they were there, maybe he ought to run them around a little just to stick a finger in their eye. Perhaps it didn’t really matter whether ISD had him under surveillance, but it did piss him off.

  Tay was walking along the side of Chevron House when he saw Raffles Place up ahead and an idea occurred to him. Raffles Place was a small, grassy plaza in the middle of the financial district. Mowed as tightly as a putting green, the grass somehow contrives to appear completely artificial. Too bright, too thick, too perfect. Closed in on all sides by soaring and utterly nondescript towers of stone and glass, the grass of Raffles Place looks as stern and unnatural as everything around it. But Tay’s mind wasn’t on the grass right then. It was on what is underneath the grass.

  A hundred feet below Raffles Place is one of the largest stations in the Singapore Mass Rapid Transit System.

  The MRT is exactly what anyone would expect a Singapore mass transit system to be. Clean, quiet, and incredibly efficient. Air conditioned trains that offer mobile telephone service whisk passengers between pristine stations kept free of beggars and religious pitch men, stations which had been thoughtfully hardened to do double duty as bomb shelters in case Singapore ever comes under aerial bombardment from, say, Papua New Guinea. Like the rest of Singapore, the MRT has numerous and strict penalties for almost every form of human endeavor other than standing quietly and doing exactly what you’re told. Eating or drinking brings an automatic fine of five hundred dollars. Smoking, however, is the greatest sin. It brings a fine of a thousand dollars.

  Tay hated the MRT. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had ridden on it.

  His shadows wouldn’t be expecting him suddenly to join the crowds surging into the Raffles Place MRT entrance, a little white pavilion in the center of the plaza that looked vaguely Egyptian for some reason Tay had never been able to work out.

  Entering the MRT would break the surveillance box they had around him, and the only alternatives left to them would be either to let him go or form up behind him and follow him in. Raffles Place was a mother of a station where two lines crossed, either one of which could be ridden in two directions. They would need a lot of people to cover him in there. If he was lucky and could jump right onto a train, they would lose him.

  And then they would have to explain to their boss exactly how one rapidly aging and slightly overweight policeman had given the slip to a whole squad of strapping young ISD superheroes.

 
This might be fun.

  ***

  Tay took the steps down two at a time. When he got to the line of shiny, aluminum turnstiles guarding the entrance to the platforms, he held his warrant card over his head, planted his butt on top of the nearest one, and swung his legs over the barrier. Some people looked at him, but no one said a word. Singaporeans didn’t much like getting involved in things they didn’t have to get involved in.

  He took the first set of stairs he saw down to a platform without pausing to check which train he would catch there. He supposed it didn’t really matter.

  When he emerged on the platform, he saw he was going to be lucky. A red and white train was just sliding to a stop behind the stainless steel and glass doors that walled the tracks off from the platform. The MRT was so hermetically sealed the experience was more like getting on an elevator that moved sideways than it was catching a train.

  The long rank of doors rumbled open and Tay joined the surge of passengers into the nearest car. Once inside, he turned and watched the bottom of the staircase he had come down, but there were too many people and they were moving too quickly for him to decide if any of them might be following him.

  It was no more than fifteen seconds before the platform doors rumbled closed again, the train doors clicked shut right behind them, and Tay’s train moved out of the station. Were any of his followers fifteen seconds or less behind him? He doubted it, but he couldn’t be sure.

  ***

  The train glided in near silence into the darkness of a tunnel and Tay looked up at the electronic map just opposite where he was standing. It took him a minute, but finally he worked out that he was on a Green Line train headed for City Hall, another busy station. He could stay on the train there, or even get off and take another Green Line train going in the opposite direction and go right back to Raffles Place. He could also change to the Red Line, of course. Tay’s eyes traced both lines on the map and he thought about what he ought to do.

  All at once he knew.

  The train pulled into City Hall Station and he allowed the crowds to carry him out the doors and across the platform to where a Red Line train bound for Dhoby Ghaut was waiting with its doors open. Thirty seconds later it was moving out of the station. Tay could have gotten off at Dhoby Ghaut since that station was only a short walk from his house in Emerald Hill, but he didn’t. He stayed on the train there, and he stayed on it through Somerset, Orchard, and Newton as well. He didn’t leave the train until he reached the Novena station.