Umbrella Man (9786167611204)

by Needham, Jake

  ***

  He and Mai Lin made small talk for a while after that, but all Tay could think about was Vincent Ferrero so later he wasn’t absolutely certain what else they had talked about. Whatever it was, they didn’t talk about it for very long. No more than fifteen minutes later, Tay was walking out through the gates of Gallop Green to the street. This time both security guards snapped off crisp salutes as he passed. He nodded but said nothing and walked quickly north toward Farrer Road where he knew there were plenty of taxis.

  He found one almost immediately. The driver was a heavy-set Sikh wearing a dark blue turban who just nodded silently when Tay told him to go to the Cantonment Complex. Even the cab’s radio was turned off. That was more than Tay normally hoped for given the average Singapore cab driver’s tendency to talk nonstop or listen to full-throated Cantopop on his radio or, all too frequently, to do both at the same time.

  Tay leaned back against the seat, savored the silence, and looked out the window while he thought about what he knew now.

  He knew now that Joseph Hysmith was really Vincent Ferrero, the man who was doing everything he could to prevent Tay from investigating the death of Johnny the Mover.

  Vincent Ferrero was the man holding the umbrella in the photograph with his father and the dead man. Vincent Ferrero was the man who had been regularly visiting the safety deposit box at HSBC for the last three years. Vince Ferrero had the ledgers for Paraguas Ltd with his father’s initials in them.

  Paraguas. The Spanish word for umbrella.

  Vincent Ferrero was the umbrella man.

  Three men in a thirty-five year old photograph all connected to each other. But connected exactly how? That was still the question, wasn’t it?

  If one of the three men in the photograph had something to do with the bombings, did that necessarily mean the other two, including his dead father, had something to do with them as well?

  That just didn’t make any sense to Tay. His father had died of a heart attack thirty-five years ago. He obviously couldn’t have anything to do with the bombings. Yes, his initials were on those ledgers that Ferrero had been guarding in the safety deposit box at HSBC, that was true enough, but he still couldn’t have had anything to do with the bombings.

  And why was Vincent Ferrero so worried about Tay investigating how Johnny the Mover had died? Had Ferrero killed him? Or at the very least did he know who did?

  Tay’s head was spinning. Too many questions. Absolutely no answers. He was getting a headache.

  The obvious thing to do, he supposed, was to find Vincent Ferrero now that he knew he was the umbrella man and simply ask him what the answers to all those questions were.

  But where the hell did he even start doing that? Call the American embassy and ask them if Ferrero was there? Leave his number and ask Ferrero to call him? What kind of a plan was that?

  What he really needed right then were a couple of fresh ideas.

  And a cigarette, of course.

  FORTY-ONE

  TAY SMOKED TWO Marlboros on the sidewalk outside the Cantonment Complex, then he went up to his office and spent the rest of the day moving stacks of papers from one side of his desk to the other.

  He was waiting for a great idea about how to find Vincent Ferrero to drop out of his head and fall face up on the desktop right in front of him. Sergeant Kang was out doing something to make it look convincing that they were really reopening the Mayling Aw case, so mercifully there was no one to interrupted his paper moving or his waiting. It didn’t help. No ideas fell onto his desktop, face up or otherwise.

  Tay did ring the number he had for John August again, but August still didn’t call him back. He also called Goh, but the woman who answered at ISD said Goh was out of the office and not expected back for several days. Tay doubted that was true. It was probably what she said to everyone who called asking for Goh and whose name she didn’t recognize. But whether the woman was telling him the truth or not, all Tay could do was leave his number.

  If an afterlife existed, Tay had often thought, hell would not be a place of roaring fires and cackling demons. It would be a desk and a telephone and no one ever returning your calls for all eternity. In other words, it would be pretty much like the life Tay had now on earth.

  ***

  By five o’clock he’d had enough. He hadn’t had a single original thought all afternoon and the only two people he knew who were well enough plugged into the intelligence community to finger Vince Ferrero weren’t even interested enough in his telephone calls to return them. So Tay locked his desk and headed out to find a cab to Emerald Hill.

  He told himself he was going home because he could think more productively there, but he knew that was just a lot of crap. He was going home because he could sit in his garden and smoke. That was it pure and simple and he decided not to bother to lie to himself about it.

  When he got home, he realized he had nothing in the house for dinner and he certainly didn’t feel like going out anywhere, so he walked up to the Cold Storage Market on Orchard Road and bought two frozen Mrs. Mac Beef and Pepper Pies, a quarter pound of green olives with pimento, and six bottles of San Miguel, the real stuff from the Philippines, not that shameful slop they made in Hong Kong and called San Miguel. He dumped everything in the kitchen, poured the olives into a bowl, and took the bowl and one of the San Miguel’s out to the garden. He came back inside, opened a fresh pack of Marlboros, picked up a lighter, and found a pad and pen and his cell phone, then he carried them outside too and settled into his chair all prepared for some serious thinking and note taking.

  He called August’s number one more time just for the hell of it, and Goh’s, but now neither of them answered. He dumped his cell phone on the table and leaned back and thought about what he ought to do next.

  Tay had finished the beer, two cigarettes, and half the bowl of olives when he finally accepted that he had not come up with a single idea worth writing down.

  So, having no better idea what else to do with himself, he went in and heated the two Mr. Mac Beef and Pepper Pies in the microwave and got himself another San Miguel. He grabbed a bottle of HP Sauce to douse the pies and a couple of paper napkins, then took everything into the living room and watched the BBC News while he ate.

  As usual, the television news was little more than a lumbering chronicle of depressing disasters, both natural and man-made. It didn’t enlighten Tay about the state of the world. It just reminded him why he never read newspapers or watched television news. If this was what had happened that somebody thought worth remembering, Tay generally ended up deciding on those few occasions when he did either, today was certainly a day that mankind could just as easily have skipped.

  He took the dishes into the kitchen, then made some coffee and returned to his chair in the garden. The night air was heavy and there was no moon. He lit another Marlboro and watched the smoke curl away into the darkness.

  It was mostly his imagination, of course, but it almost seemed as if he could still smell the smoke and dust from the bombs. He thought he could smell the death, too, and the agony of those who had not died, but might have wished they had.

  The bombing of Singapore had already been reduced to just another chapter in the world’s daily parade of agonies. Three hundred killed by suicide bombers today in Singapore, fifty more slaughtered tomorrow in Afghanistan from a rocket attack on a school, another five hundred dead the following day in China in an earthquake. Man and nature were equally callous to the suffering they inflicted, and we had all gotten used to it, mostly. No matter what awful events transpired, a few days later more awful events transpired and we all moved on.

  No, that wasn’t really true. Everyone remembered the fires that had burned them, just not the fires that burned others. Here in Singapore no one would ever forget the bombings. And Singapore would never again be as it was. The buildings could be rebuilt, and Tay had no doubt they would be, but the smug certainty that life would smile on them forever here in their little cor
ner of the world was no more.

  Tay was a policeman and he had always known how fragile life was, that catastrophe visited without warning. That life was a succession of random turns and arbitrary choices. If you were standing in the road when the bus got there, it ran you down. Simple as that.

  Now everyone else in Singapore knew it, too.

  Tay stabbed out his cigarette, swung his feet up on another chair, and folded his hands over his chest. He closed his eyes. Just for a moment, he told himself, and only because the death in the air made them burn so badly.

  Tay thought about things he could not remember. Thinking about things he could not remember was what Tay usually did in the moments right before sleep took him.

  What had happened to that red VW he had owned when he was in university? What was the name of that woman he had gone out with when he first joined the police force? What had he done with that green ceramic ashtray that once sat on his desk?

  Tay slid over the cliff that separated the conscious world and the other world for which he had no name, and slipped away.

  ***

  A sudden sound like someone speaking befuddled Tay.

  Was he asleep and dreaming someone was speaking to him? Or was he awake and someone was actually there in the garden with him?

  No, it was impossible that anyone was there. He was alone. He had been alone when he closed his eyes for a moment and he was still alone. No one had broken into his house, walked through the living room, gone into the garden, and started speaking to him. That was stupid. Of course he was alone.

  Tay opened his eyes. Or he dreamed he opened his eyes. He still wasn’t entirely sure whether he was awake or asleep.

  He looked around. It was so dark he saw only shades of gray. The lighter gray of the patch of sky above his neighbors’ houses became the darker gray of his garden wall, and then became the deep, brooding gray all around that seemed on the verge of swallowing him. One lamp was on in the living room and it cast a dim glow through the glass panes of the French doors, but most of the illumination was lost to the gloom before it provided any definition to the world around him.

  Tay bent in the direction of the glow and lifted his wrist, but he could barely see his watch. It was certainly too dark for him to read the time.

  “Wake up, for God’s sake, Samuel! I’m back, but I’m in a hurry!”

  It was a woman’s voice.

  Oh no, Tay thought. Here we go again.

  FORTY-TWO

  HIS MOTHER WAS dead.

  Right after the bombings, he had a psychotic episode of some sort and the sense of talking to his mother had been very real, but it had not been real. His mother was dead. And the living did not carry on conversations with the dead. No one would ever be able to persuade him otherwise. Not really.

  “For Christ’s sake, Samuel, answer me! You’re acting like you’re as dead as I am.”

  Tay cautiously swung his feet down and pulled himself up straight in his chair. His eyes flicked left and right, but he saw nothing except gloom.

  “Pay attention, Samuel! I’m over here!”

  The voice came from his left, over in a corner of his garden where the banana trees were a little thin and he had been thinking about planting some bamboo or something else that grew rapidly to fill out the otherwise thickly planted insulation of his sanctuary.

  At first he saw nothing.

  But then he did.

  It was nothing more than a swirl of tiny points of light in an area no larger than a person’s head. The swirl made him think of a tiny gathering of fireflies, very tired fireflies, too exhausted to generate anything other than a passable glow. It was so dim Tay wondered if it was there at all.

  “Please say something so I’ll know you’re listening to me, Samuel. I’m not going to hang around here all night waiting for you to wake up. I’ve got better things to do.”

  Did the dead have obligations and appointments like the living? Tay found the possibility disconcerting. He had always figured one of the advantages of being dead was that the irritating minutia of everyday life would come to an end. If all it really meant was accumulating an entirely new set of responsibilities and commitments, then what was the point of being dead?

  “Goddammit, Samuel, speak up!”

  Tay cautiously cleared his throat, “Yes, Mother?”

  “Ah, he lives!”

  “How are you, Mother?”

  “I was dead the last time you asked and I’m still dead.”

  “I know, Mother.”

  “Then why do you keep asking me how I am?”

  “I was just being polite.”

  To that, Tay heard a snort so loud it seemed to echo off the walls of his tiny garden.

  “I heard you’ve been making some inquiries about your father,” the voice continued.

  Tay almost asked how she had heard that, and from whom, but then he thought better of it.

  “Yes, Mother. It’s connected with a case.”

  “And exactly how is your father connected to this case?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then stop asking questions. That seems simple enough to me.”

  “But, Mother—”

  “Look, Samuel, I’m telling you to stop asking questions about your father.”

  “But why?”

  “Because you may find out things you don’t really want to know.”

  Tay wasn’t sure what to say to that. The same thought had crossed his mind, of course, more than once, but hearing the warning coming from a ghost somehow made it more real.

  No, that doesn’t make any sense, Tay thought. Hearing something from a ghost does not make it real.

  “You’re not going to pay any attention to me, are you?”

  “It’s not a matter of not paying attention to you, Mother. It’s just that this case—”

  “Yes, I know. You think figuring out the relationship between the three men in the photograph will help you find out who killed Johnny.”

  “How in the world did you know that?”

  “How in the world did I know that? Are you trying to make a joke, Samuel?”

  “No, I was just asking—”

  “I know because I am not in the world, as you put it. That’s how I know.”

  Tay’s first thought was that she certainly had him there, but then he quickly had a second.

  “So you know everything I know?” he asked.

  “And a great deal more, my boy. It’s what I know that you do not know that you ought to be thinking about here.”

  “Why do I get the feeling you’re about to tell me something, Mother.”

  “Because I am. As much as I’m enjoying our little chat, this isn’t a social call.”

  Tay said nothing.

  “I’m here to help you.”

  Tay remembered he had once heard someone say that the scariest line anyone could ever utter was, We’re from the government and we’re here to help you. Now he knew that was wrong. I’m from the afterlife and I’m here to help you was far, far scarier.

  “Help me how, Mother?”

  “I thought you wanted to know about your father. Who better to ask than me?”

  Who indeed, Tay thought, although up until now he figured his mother being dead constituted a bit of a hurdle to make any direct inquiries of her.

  “Ask me anything,” the voice continued. “Anything at all.”

  “Was my father a spy for the CIA?”

  That brought complete silence.

  “I thought you said I could ask you anything, Mother. Aren’t you going to answer me?”

  “Of course I am. I was just pausing a moment to contemplate your regrettable lack of manners.”

  “You don’t think that’s a reasonable question for me to ask? When I talked to the daughter of that woman who used to work for him—”

  “I know who you talked to and what she told you.”

  Now it was Tay’s turn to fall silent. This was a little like having a conversation
with himself.

  Hey, maybe that’s it. Maybe I am having a conversation with myself.

  “Your father was an accountant, a very good accountant. While it’s true he did some accounting work for American intelligence, he was not a spy.”

  “So he was a money launderer for the CIA.”

  “Has anyone every told you, Samuel, that you put things too bluntly?”

  “Frequently. And yet I continue to do it.”

  “Your father and two of his friends—”

  “Johnny the Mover and Vince Ferrero?”

  “Yes. They started a company which provided logistical support for the CIA.”

  “What was it called?”

  “It was called Paraguas Ltd.”

  Of course it was.

  “What did Paraguas Ltd do?”

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not absolutely sure. Your father always said it provided support services to government agencies. Things like accounting and transportation.”

  “What government agencies? What government?”

  That brought nothing but silence.

  “Okay, then let’s try this one. What happened to the company after my father died?”

  “Vince and Johnny continued to operate it. It was very successful. I got checks for years as a dividend on your father’s shares, but then about twenty years ago I sold his shares back to the company.”

  Tay wasn’t sure he wanted to ask the next obvious question, but he did anyway. “Is it still operating?”

  “I have no idea. You’d have to ask Vince or Johnny.” The voice paused. “Well…with Johnny dead now, I guess you’d have to ask Vince.”

  “I can’t find Vince. Maybe you could just ask Johnny for me?”

  “Very funny.”

  “What’s funny about it? Both of you being dead, I thought—”

  “You think I see everybody who’s dead? That’s not how it works.”

  Tay was considering asking just how it did work when the voice started up again.

  “Besides, finding Vince can’t be all that hard.”