Singapore Noir

by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

  I learned this early, after my graduation from university, when I was posted to Vice. Once, an eternity ago, I used to date, and thought there was a girl who might be the one for me. Once I thought lovemaking was something which a man chased after, hunted, and won through charm and the promise of dedication, and that was given to him because of merit of some kind; because a woman thought he was a good man with a good career ahead of him, or liked the way he kissed, or danced, or his sense of humor, or the cologne he wore. There were things we men did to increase the odds, like buying them drinks in a bar. But that aside, it was merit.

  I quickly learned otherwise. Money cannot buy you love, but bucks buy fucks.

  Look at the working girls. They sing, drink, and smoke, drape an arm around you, let you pinch their legs, laugh at your jokes, act sympathetic when you tell them your silly stories and then try to make you laugh. These girls open their legs and do so many things to clients, strangers who walk in from the street, through a door: I assumed they would be different.

  They do dress and wear makeup differently on the job. Short skirts. Hugging tops with steep necklines. High-heel stilettos. Glitter. Bright red lipstick and cheeks. Manicured long nails, in bright red or else black with sparkles. But that is like a uniform. Just as I used to wear a policeman’s uniform, they have theirs.

  I met some in other places, off the job, in everyday clothes—when they were in normal makeup, normal clothes, I realized these girls are ordinary. Some are prettier than average. Many are not. I heard them talk among themselves about shopping, eating, movies, father and mother, friends, and hopes for more money, a good life. Some were nice. Others were not. They are just normal. Normal women.

  That is what most disturbs me.

  Fucking and lovemaking, sin and sacred: what differs is the intention, the psychological element, the context. The dick is in the same place. The mind is what is in a different place. The difference between lovemaking and fucking is fundamentally a question of attitude, and these attitudes can be criminal. The working girls are divided from normal girls only by the mind. Money is just the trigger to move from one mental state to another.

  With this knowledge, a world of domesticity closed for me. I cannot marry. I cannot believe in love. It is too much make-believe, a Disneyland world; everything is pretty up front, but artificial, unreal. There is a man in the Mickey Mouse suit. Playing Snow White is a girl, just a girl. A girl who can be bought, for a price. A man who can be corrupted and indeed will corrupt others. I recognize that not just in the working women but also in so many others that I meet, in the city offices, in the fine restaurants and stylish clubs, and, yes, even in the areas where the rich and respectable live.

  What I no longer recognize is myself. I think back to the time before I joined the force and I can remember what clothes and spectacles I wore, even the scent my T-shirt had when I put it on, fresh from the laundry and just after my mother ironed it. Yet, while I remember all this so clearly, I cannot recognize the world that I would see through those now out-of-fashion horn-rimmed spectacles.

  What I do see now when I look around is this: We are guilty. The germ of a terrible crime is already in your mind.

  3. STOLEN UNDER A THIEF’S MOON

  I work at the DSI—the Directorate of Surveillance and Inspection. We are an agency no one has ever heard about but that has been around since the founding of the state, reporting directly to the leader. There are other departments that do so, including those that look at internal and external threats and the bureau to investigate corruption; in the early years, even the pollution-monitoring department.

  At the beginning of our country’s history, our leader gave much attention to details, and the DSI’s mandate—surveillance and inspection—was to assist in that oversight of all things, to provide the many eyes that could quickly and shrewdly scan so that when the alarm bells rang and the red lights flashed, the leader and those he trusted could dive down into the muck and fix whatever was wrong.

  These days—as the city has grown in pace and complexity—that may seem quaint and quite impossible. I don’t know if anyone looks at the details anymore. Sometimes it seems like everything is too sophisticated, on auto-pilot. But in case anyone cares, we still do what we used to do.

  We continue to watch and listen and survey and investigate. We continue to do so quite without attention—not just from the public but even within the state apparatus. If I meet you, and if I should give out my name card, it would simply say, Deputy Assistant Director (Special Duties), Public Service Division, Prime Minister’s Office.

  This is me, at least as much as I would like to say about myself. How about her?

  When we first met, there was a thief’s moon—what I learned as a child to call that night when the moon is at its ebb and things are darkest. It was in a Japanese restaurant, an izakaya along the Robertson Quay stretch of the river—small eats, many drinks—and the lights allowed us to accept the darkness. Someone I somehow knew asked me along for the opening of the restaurant, hosted by the owners; I sat on a high stool at the end of the counter, with a person on my right more interested in the person on his other side, so I didn’t have to talk too much.

  I drank my super-dry Asahi. The beer was icy and the dishes were hot from the furnace, with a squeeze of lemon and a dusting of salt. Okay, I thought, even if I don’t talk to anyone, at least the food’s good.

  Then she bumped into me. Literally. Turning the corner, the idiot waiter with the tray of cold beers gets too near her, and so she moves to one side and bumps into me as I’m putting the beer down. It spills a little on my black T-shirt but I respond quickly enough so no more than a bit hits the floor and counter. I don’t get soaked and the glass does not empty or fall and break. No big deal.

  But she turns, says “So sorry” more than a couple of times, and finds a napkin to dry me, dabbing the drops along my chest, while I just stand and look at her, and tell her, “No problem, it’s okay, please don’t worry.”

  Then she pauses, glances up at me, and realizes that we are standing close and she is touching my chest, the chest of someone she does not know and has not been introduced to, and she looks down, embarrassed, and takes a step back, bumping into her stool. She stumbles and I reach out and hold her so she steadies.

  Our host comes over. He asks if everything is okay and I nod, while she says nothing. I withdraw my hand from the small of her back. He introduces us. I look her in the face.

  Her features can be simply stated, drawn on an identi-kit in a police station: a long, straight, narrow nose; wide-set, rounded eyes; and a wide mouth, neither too full nor stretched and thin.

  But the impact, the way it all adds up, cannot be mathematically or clinically summarized. This woman is immediately beautiful. Her skin glows, soft as the moon that was missing from the night sky that evening we met. Hers is a face no one can forget.

  I thought that I would never see her again. She was seated next to the person beside me, and we spoke a little but she was nice to everyone there, neither too effusive nor aloof. She asked something about me and my work and said nothing about the usual lies I provided, but she also engaged others around the table. She was not loud or intrusive, and spoke modestly, with polite interest in what others did or thought. I only realized later that she asked about us much more than she talked about herself. I did not say too much about myself. I never do. But from her simple questions asked in a clear, mild voice, I learned more about the others around us than some officers I know could have from interrogating them for an hour under harsh lights in a cold room.

  All I knew about her by the end of the evening was that she was half-Japanese, and part American and Chinese, and had lived in Singapore for some years as a child, and again for the past few months. Then the evening was over and the large group of people who sort of knew each other but didn’t really have much to do with one another dispersed and I thought I would never see her again, even if I wanted to.

  In the weeks
after our meeting, the thief’s moon grew to a crescent and then waxed full. There was a murder in Singapore, late at night, in an alley outside a karaoke lounge in Chinatown. The police traced it to two men who bumped into each other inside, earlier, when one—a Mr. Wong—was preoccupied with a hostess from Hangzhou, famous for its beautiful women, and accidentally walked into the other man, who was already tipsy. Mr. Wong was, for some reason the detectives could not find out, carrying his own tray of shot glasses to the table when the collision occured.

  The spill was not so bad, the hostesses said. It splashed the other man later identified as Weng on his cheek and the collar and top part of his shirt. It splashed the woman too, a little across her bosom. She shrieked at first but saw the glare that Weng, her customer, gave to Wong, and so decided to try to cool things down by laughing and inviting Weng to lick her bosom dry.

  She was, she later reported at the Central Investigation Bureau, scared when he continued to stare at Wong, while his buddies stood up and circled the hapless guy who was still holding the half-empty tray and stammering apologies, red-faced from both the alcohol and embarrassment. The man called Weng took up her wanton invitation, and happily licked away at the drops of whiskey that beaded in the cleft of her ample, enhanced bosom, but she reported that when she looked down, she could still see the hatred in his bloodshot eyes.

  That face, she said, that was a face she would never forget.

  As reported in the New Paper, just hours later, after Weng had paid a reported $1,500 for a quickie with a girl at the rear of the karaoke bar, he and his gang surrounded Wong once more and punched and kicked him to the ground, carrying on with their beating even after he was dead from the fall, having hit his head on the edge of the pavement at an odd angle.

  A face you cannot forget can mean many things.

  A chance collision and a spilled drink can mean many things.

  The week after we met at the izakaya, I followed her.

  I followed her to Bukit Timah, where the rich people of the city live and so many others aspire to live. This is a quieter, greener sector of the city, sprung up around a river that has been concretized into a large canal, off a road that during World War II the Japanese took to get from the north directly into the city, like an artery carrying blood or poison to the heart. Except that this place where the rich people live is only an artery, and there is no heart.

  Her area was privileged even in this context, at Nassim, nestled off the Bukit Timah canal, and right across from the Botanic Gardens, the green and ordered legacy from colonial times. Her apartment building was one of the newest and most prestigious, designed by some world-famous name, and developed by a company that targets only the uppermost elite. Its price could be matched by only a few other neighborhoods in the world. The rent is far beyond what she earns at the office, where I observed her at work, learned her job title and responsibilities.

  She was either from a rich family or else a kept woman, I surmised—without judgment—but kept by whom? Possibilities and theories are useful, I have learned, but in the end can only be resolved by surveillance.

  So it was late one night that I saw the black Mercedes S, accompanied by two Toyota Mark X’s, all with heavily tinted windows, pull up to her apartment block. The heavyset men emerged in dark suits and white shirts, with hard eyes that peered around; it was apparent that they had been drinking, and I knew they were Japanese even before they spoke.

  I was not surprised. Not wholly. The Japanese community is large in Singapore, and where their people go, these people will follow.

  It did not surprise me to learn, as I did by the next day, that the man who goes up to her apartment is the gang boss for not just Singapore, but the whole region; he is on a list of people that we watch and monitor but allow in and out of the country so long as they do nothing here. It did not surprise me that he travels often for weeks or even months or that his returns too often coincide with her visits to the doctor for a bruise, a fall, a slip, a welt. What surprised me is how, just nights after we met under a thief’s moon, and before I did any of this checking, we became lovers.

  How did I steal you? Or is it that you—for whatever reason—stole me?

  4. HOW SOME DIE, AND OTHERS LIVE

  I begin to write this in bed, when you are still asleep, your dark hair spilling over the white pillow, your slim arm reaching out for something in a dream beyond this room. I move slightly, slowly, so as not to wake you, take the beautiful lacquered fountain pen and stern black notebook you gave me, and begin to write.

  I look at you. Your leg peers out from under the white duvet. From the ankle to the back of the knee and the first curve of thigh is a path of delight. Along this path, we move from the simple pleasure of eye and mind seeing something of so much beauty to the awkward, heart-quickening, and limb-entwining physical act of possessing that beauty. To look upon you is to gaze and to desire. Then to possess.

  We return to this path, repeatedly. Day after day, and night after night. In our repeated journeys, we find byways of desire, possession, and so much else, until we are covered in a fine sheen of perspiration, until we ache to stand, until we are uncertain whether what we do is acceptable to anyone other than us inside this room.

  I have seen people die. What I have seen explains to me the uncertainty about a soul. One moment I see their eyes catch the light, move and flicker, fragile and also overflowing with life. Then the eyes glaze, turn gray and black, dull, dulled, blunt, opaque, oblique, closed, gone. Perhaps to another place none of us knows, that none can prove in a court with testimony. These are the eyes I have looked into when death came.

  When we make love, I grasp your slender jaw in my thick palm and turn your eyes to mine when you are about to come, and do so again and again, until it is my turn. And what I see in your eyes becomes something to hold back the memories of what I have seen in the eyes of the dying.

  When we are in bed, I know what it is to live. Every part of my body, every sense of being I have, is alive. And from this, I began to want to have that feeling in other parts of my day, to have you with me in more places beyond this bed, this room, this apartment. I investigate your days. I follow you, jotting down your routines in the black book you gave me to write my stories.

  9:15 a.m. You get into your dark blue Maserati, and drive to the cold storage down the road from your apartment. You park in B3 and go to the elevators. A young Australian mother and child come out chattering in broad accents, and bump into you with their grocery cart laden with beef and wine. You do not complain.

  9:30. You buy the bottled oolong tea that I like, the Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie that we eat together some evenings, and then other basics for the apartment. You also buy a Japanese instant ramen with a sour-hot Korean kimchi flavor that I don’t like, and I have never seen you eat. But I know immediately who the item is for—I remember thinking it strange that a Japanese person would like kimchi so much—and I feel my pulse rise at this inventory.

  10:01. You push your trolley into the elevator, headed back to B3. I race down the stairs and catch you as you are unloading the bags into the trunk. I come up behind you, and hold you tight. You turn in shock but do not cry out before I have my hand clamped over your lips. Perhaps you recognize me, perhaps not. I push you over so you are halfway into the trunk, and your feet are off the ground. I hold your arms tight behind you, as you wriggle, quite helpless. I shush you. I reach under your quiet navy-blue skirt and pull your sheer blue panties to one side.

  I finger you, slowly at first, and then, as your breathing grows heavy, I go faster. My fingers get slippery and I begin to slowly open up your other hole. One sharp gasp, and after that suspension of breath, you moan. I unzip and it is brief, and I do not look into your eyes.

  10:19. You drive back to the apartment. I follow in my car. We head upstairs. We do not fuck. We lock the door securely behind us, we unload the groceries into the fridge and storeroom, fold away the plastic bags. We shower and then we
make love. Sweetly, tenderly, with the curtains drawn, like some newly married couple who were school sweethearts in a small town and have never known much of anything else.

  Afterward we go out for lunch around the corner to the French place at the little row of shops along Bukit Timah that gentrified as the property values raced and richer people with richer tastes moved there. A Frenchman who married local and never left runs it; a small place with some comfy tables amidst racks of food and wine that they stock for sale and which feels like a warehouse.

  We come here often because of convenience but also, I realize, perhaps because there is a sense of a couple here, making a home and comfort food amidst the commerce and bare floors.

  Then we are back, in the big bed with the rumpled white cotton sheets and comfortable pillows, even as the city busies itself with commerce and common things. We nap, holding each other, and wake and make love again. Then evening comes.

  Sometimes in this place and time, between us, there is nothing that can be said. Perhaps I feel silly for the pangs I felt when you stocked up things for him, what he and no one else likes, when I know it is his money that pays for not just whatever is in the fridge, but the fridge and the apartment, and that he is the reason that you are here in the first place and that we met. Perhaps I feel guilty for the way I have forced myself on you, in such a place and manner.

  But you do not ask and I do not speak of these things. In bed together, there is no need for such things.

  In my life, I have known sex and death. Now in this time, I have begun to know life—what that might truly mean. But I still know death better.

  And in such moments, I know that no matter why this started between us, no matter how long this goes on, no matter how alive we are in bed, in our passion, when I am in you, this must end and it will end in death.