Singapore Noir

by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

  Once across, Rose demanded: How much you have in your pocket? Show me. Come on, you monkey. She twisted Cha-li’s arm. I know you’ve got money in your pocket. Her nails dug into Cha-li’s flesh until she cried out. Then all of a sudden she felt Rose’s hand stroking her face. Don’t cry, little monkey, please don’t cry. A thrill shot through Cha-li’s heart. It was pounding so hard against her rib cage she had to shut her eyes to stop the dizziness coursing through her, the better to savor the sensuous feel of Rose’s hand on her cheek. She took out all the coins in her pocket and dropped them into Rose’s hand.

  I knew it! You little monkey! Forty cents! Let’s go and buy tau huey!

  Sweet bean curd was Rose’s favorite dessert. She ate tubs of it in those half-forgotten days, which was why her skin was so smooth and fair, and smelled so sweet that Cha-li almost swooned when Rose held her in the kitchen the night they both turned fifteen. Prostitute! Kai-ma’s broom hit them on their heads. Rose sprinted out of the kitchen, and didn’t return for three days and three nights.

  * * *

  Cha-li sighed, and returned the binoculars to her glove box feeling as if she had crawled out of a black hole where time had warped like a rattan mat left in the sun too long. How long had she been sitting in the car lost in her own thoughts? She was ashamed. This was uncharacteristic. And worse, she’d lost her quarry. Robert Lee’s white Mercedes was gone. The gate of the corner house was shut, and the woman who looked like Rose had disappeared back inside. The house stood in darkness. Butterfly Avenue was wrapped in silence at three a.m. The night air was soft and sweet, as though this avenue was not part of such a densely populated city, as though it belonged to a time when there were few cars and migrant workers from China, India, or Bangladesh hadn’t yet squeezed Singaporeans out of the crowded buses and trains.

  Cha-li took out her black notebook, wrote down the time, date, and her observations, and then shut it. It pained her to think of what she’d tell Robina Lee the next day. The woman had phoned earlier to say that she was coming to the temple tomorrow. Cha-li had no wish to see her yet, but an operative must maintain close contact with her client just as a medium must maintain close psychic contact with the spirit she is channeling.

  She got out of the car. She had to clear her head. She walked past the corner house and followed the road beyond the silent gated bungalows, their orange roofs gleaming in the ghostly night sky. There was no moon. Just banks of ominous gray clouds. Her mind returned to the woman who looked like Rose. If it was Rose, what was she doing back here? Had she moved up in the world through Robert Lee, son of a hotel chain tycoon? Was he her young lover? Was he bankrolling her?

  Information was scarce at this point. Robina Lee was reluctant to tell her more. You are the investigator. You find out, she’d said at their last meeting. And let me remind you of your high fee plus expenses. In return, I expect the strictest confidence.

  Cha-li grimaced at the memory of that voice. No, she didn’t want to see Robina Lee tomorrow, and looked up, surprised that her feet had led her to the gate of Cedar Girls’ School. She must have turned onto Cedar Avenue without thinking. This was their secondary school before Rose was expelled for what the school called “unhealthy relationships.”

  Monkey! Rose had yelled on the first day. Did you see the school toilet? No shit! No flies! No smell! So clean! You just pull the metal chain. And whooooosh! The water flushes away everything! Rose’s face was glowing. The toilets aren’t like those in Potong Pasir village. When I grow up I want to live in a beautiful house with a clean toilet just like this. And me? What about me? Cha-li asked. Oh, you? You will live in the temple, lor! You will be Lord Sun Wukong’s medium. No, Cha-li protested. But it was not a very strong protest.

  She turned away from the school and returned to Butterfly Avenue. A dog barked at her, strident and querulous. Cha-li crossed over to the other side of the road just so the stupid Alsatian wouldn’t wake up the neighborhood. The avenue was U-shaped, and where it curved, there was a small playground with a slide and a swing under the trees. Their shadows fell across the park where a girl’s soft giggles broke the night’s calm. She saw a young Rose and herself on the swing. Rose was pushing her higher and higher, and she was laughing and screaming, Stop! Stop!

  * * *

  What must you say? What must you say?

  Mei kwei, Mei kwei, wo ai ni.

  Rose, Rose, I love you.

  * * *

  The Alsatian’s barking grew louder, joined now by the yelpings of other dogs. She quickened her pace. Just as she was about to reach her gray Toyota, a glimpse of black hair caught her attention. Near the red car. No, the black one. No. It’s a mirage. An optical illusion. She must be hallucinating. Go home, Cha-li. Get some sleep!

  She parked her Toyota in the wasteland next to the canal, formerly known as the Kallang River, that meandered through Potong Pasir village. Wild grass, bush, and creepers grew around the old temple. The wasteland became a fairground every August during the feast of the Monkey King when an open-air stage was erected and a street opera was performed for the gods and devotees. When Kai-yeh was the medium, the entire village of Potong Pasir would gather at the temple to pray, eat, and watch street opera for three days and three nights. These days, however, like the slow-flowing Kallang River that had given way to the rapid Kallang Canal, the street operas had given way to getai in which scantily clad women sang and danced, not for the gods but for the younger devotees who loved MTV. The wasteland had also shrunk, and the concrete blocks of housing board apartments had moved closer to the temple each year.

  Cha-li unlocked the side gate, collected the mail from the red letterbox, and opened the door to her private quarters. Exhausted but hungry, she cooked a bowl of instant noodles and ate it while sorting through her mail.

  What’s this? She tore open the letter from the National Development Board. Her application to renew the temple’s lease had been rejected. We regret to inform you that the temple’s site has been rezoned for public housing . . . Cha-li swore under her breath. Lord Sun Wukong’s Temple had been here forever. This was her home. She must see Kai-yeh and let him know the bad news at once.

  2

  Outside the ward in the Goddess of Mercy Home for the Aged Sick, Mr. Singh, the night watchman, looked flummoxed. The gate, which he had padlocked the night before, was unlocked again this morning.

  “The third time this week, Mr. Singh,” the staff nurse said.

  “But Miss Tan, I lock the gate last night!”

  “No, you didn’t. The gate was open when I arrived. And you weren’t at the gate.”

  “I had to go to the loo.”

  “We have residents here suffering from severe dementia. The gate must be locked at all times. I have to report this to the matron.”

  “If you report, then I susah-lah!”

  “If I don’t report, and something happens, then how? I’m not going to be responsible, you know!”

  Sitting on a chair next to the bed, arms resting on her lap, Cha-li stared out the window and pretended not to look at Kai-yeh’s wizened face. Curled like a shriveled fetus on his side, Kai-yeh was following the altercation outside his ward with avid interest. Neither of them spoke until the nurse and watchman walked away.

  “Troublemaker,” Cha-li hissed. “You did it, didn’t you?”

  Kai-yeh’s eyes lit up. For a second, Cha-li saw the simian features pass through his wrinkled face like a wind moving across water. Then his lungs seized up. His chest heaved with the effort to draw in air. Fourth stage, the doctor had told her. The cancer had spread to his lungs. When his coughing worsened, Cha-li summoned the nurse. An oxygen mask was placed over his nostrils. Aahh . . . ah, Kai-yeh dragged in each breath of air. Cha-li placed a hand on his chest. Gradually his breathing quieted. He waved off her hand, and pointed to the mask clamped over his face. Cha-li took it off.

  “I . . . I . . . Rose. Bring . . . her . . . back here.”

  “What? Kai-yeh. Did Rose visit you?�
��

  He coughed again and again, and could not stop. Each explosion was worse than the one before. The young Malay nurse strode into the room and clamped the oxygen mask back on. “You should go. The patient has to rest.”

  Cha-li bent down and whispered in the old man’s ear, “Kai-yeh, you hang in there. I’ll find Rose.”

  His eyes remained closed; he gave no sign that he’d heard. Cha-li knew he wouldn’t last long. She had to find Rose before Kai-yeh entered the eternal Peach Garden.

  She drove back to Potong Pasir via Aljunied Road, past Mount Vernon where the crematorium used to be, where the Christian cemetery and its dead slept in peace, where love had made the evening air fragrant when Rose held her hand as they walked among the tombstones and kissed in front of the dead.

  She slowed as she turned onto Serangoon Road, and let the trucks and buses roar past her. New condominiums and shopping malls had replaced the black-and-white colonial bungalows. No remnants of the dairies, duck farms, vegetable gardens, and attap houses remained. Rural disarray and abundant greenery had given way to concrete flyovers, congested roads, and blocks of flats built by the Housing and Development Board. The only real village left in Potong Pasir was St. Andrew’s Village, a school complex with a chapel and an artificial rugby pitch. Butterfly Avenue and Sennett Estate, on the other side of Upper Serangoon Road, were part of the Potong Pasir constituency now, although this could change in the next general election when boundaries would be redrawn, and the authorities would once again deny that such redrawing of electoral boundaries was gerrymandering.

  Cha-li thought of going to see the opposition MP, but changed her mind. She doubted that the old man, Chiam, could save the temple sitting on land slated for development. The temple was famous for its support of the opposition. Since the early 1980s, Kai-yeh had invoked the spirit of Lord Sun Wukong to help Chiam See Tong win in every general election, and Chiam’s success was credited to Lord Sun Wukong’s benevolence to the people of Potong Pasir. Cha-li smiled. So many stories had circulated to explain how Chiam, a humble lawyer with less-than-stellar school results, had held his own against the might of the PAP in general election after general election. No, the temple was doomed. The authorities would sooner bulldoze it to the ground than preserve it.

  Cha-li parked her car and went into the temple, surprised to find Robina Lee among the women praying at the altar of the Monkey King.

  “Good morning, Wong Sifu,” the women greeted her.

  In their eyes, she would always be Sifu or Master Wong, who channeled the spirit of the Monkey King. That she was also a private investigator was irrelevant to them; it was just a job to fill her rice bowl. Periodically, Cha-li suffered pangs of unease. She was a fraud burdened by a sacred duty that had been imposed on her as a child. As the chosen one, selected by Kai-yeh, who had consulted the Monkey King’s spirit before anointing her as his successor, she had to serve in his absence. Years of performing the rituals, the chanting, and the comforting had won her scores of grateful devotees, women who respected and adored her. Some had even been her lovers when she was young, handsome, lonely, and pining for Rose.

  “Good morning, Sifu!” the women called out to her again.

  “Good morning, good morning!” she said, laughing as she opened the door to her office. Robina followed her inside and closed the door. She was wearing a dark pantsuit and sunglasses. When she took off her glasses, Cha-li saw the wretched look in her eyes. Her face was puffy, and there was a dark bruise on her right temple.

  “Did your husband do this?”

  Robina shook her head, and Cha-li didn’t press her.

  “He slept in the baby’s room last night. He didn’t want me near him.” Robina’s voice was flat. “You must give me a ritual cleansing. Please.”

  Shocked by the request, Cha-li tried to focus her attention on the case instead.

  “I have checked out your husband’s new office in Shenton Way. His clients are all Indians. Rich fat cats who are buying up our luxury condos.”

  “Robert is repulsed by the sight of me.”

  “He’s running some kind of consultancy that includes real estate.”

  “Help me, Wong Sifu,” Robina pleaded, kneeling suddenly.

  “No, no, please. Please stand up.”

  “Our little boy is only six months old. Robert owes people a lot of money. My father-in-law does not know it yet. I fear . . . I . . .”

  “Wait, Robina. I know. I ran a check—”

  “He’s bewitched. It’s that vixen. Please, Wong Sifu, help me. The family . . . the . . . the scandal will ruin his father. Please, Sifu!”

  Cha-li sighed. She was hoping it wouldn’t lead to this. “Go into the prayer hall, Robina. I have to change.”

  She did not move until the woman had left the room. Then she locked the door.

  The anointed are never free. They must respond to the cries of the broken and lost—Kai-yeh had drilled this into her from a young age. They sought her, these broken hearts. She had tried to tell them that Lord Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, was a figment of an author’s imagination, but all to no avail. Besides, there were the women’s testimonies. Lord Sun Wukong answered my prayers, some claimed. He granted me a son, declared another. He made my husband stop seeing that woman and come back to me.

  She sighed. The women’s beliefs had tinted their perceptions and shaped their universe; Lord Sun Wukong was the godly spirit who came to their aid. If she was tempted at times to tell them to pray to a rock, which would work just as well, she restrained herself. If praying had helped these women to sit still long enough for their problems to work themselves out, what right had she to destroy their faith in something higher than themselves? No bloody right at all! She yanked off her blue jeans and pulled on a pair of gold-colored silk pants. Then she took off her red checked blouse and slipped on a white silk shirt and the Monkey King’s bronze headband. She gazed at the woman in the mirror, dressed in silk pajamas.

  Would her features turn simian when she was as old as Kai-yeh?

  * * *

  She was six when Lord Sun Wukong, through the intercession of Kai-yeh, chose her to be his young messenger. Thrilled and scared that she, and not Rose, was the Chosen One, she had knelt before his altar and drunk a cup of tea mixed with holy joss ash. Lord Sun Wukong was a wise, courageous, shape-changing god in the Taoist pantheon of deities, Kai-yeh told her. Capable of forty-nine changes; he could change himself into a fly, a beautiful woman, a monster, or a rock at the blink of an eye. That’s what I want to do, she declared. Kai-yeh laughed: That you will, my child. That you will.

  Later, in school, she discovered that the English storybooks referred to the deity as the Monkey King. In the temple, however, he was respectfully addressed as Lord Sun Wukong. His altar was covered with a red velvet ceremonial tablecloth embroidered with the Eight Immortals. The cloth reached down to the floor, hiding anyone under the altar from view. This was where she and Rose had slept as teenagers, hugging each other close each night, especially after Kai-ma’s death when Rose refused to sleep in the kitchen alone. Kai-yeh sleepwalks and touches me, she complained.

  * * *

  The temple’s drum boomed. Her assistant called out in a loud voice: “Make way for His Excellency, Lord Sun Wukong!”

  Cha-li took her rod and glided into the prayer hall.

  3

  The following week, on Monday evening, Cha-li waited in the parking lot of Tower Block One, Shenton Way. Outside, a thunderstorm was pelting the city hard. After two weeks of blistering sunshine and high humidity that caused her shirts to cling to her back, the weather had finally turned. The storm raged as she sat in her car, watching Lift Lobby Two and the white Mercedes parked near it. Robert Lee should appear at any moment. By seven, the storm petered out. Several men and women walked out of the lift, got into their cars, and drove off, leaving large gaps between the remaining cars. Bored, Cha-li continued to keep an eye on movements in the lift lobby as a light drizzle started to fall
on the city’s gray towers now gleaming wet in the lamplight. Another hour passed, and still no sign of Robert Lee. Lift Lobby Two was brightly lit and empty, most of the executives having left the building by now. For the past two weeks, Robert had left his office between six and seven. Tonight he was late, but he could dash out of the lift any minute. Two evenings ago, she’d had to duck her head and pretend she was reaching for something in the backseat when he’d come out of the lift suddenly with an Indian client in tow. Tonight she was better prepared. She had donned a wig and changed her glasses.

  At 8:46 p.m. Robert Lee came out of the lift, alone. He drove out of the parking lot with Cha-li tailing him through heavy traffic to Orchard Road and the Hilton. She did not follow him into the hotel this time. Instead, she drove home to collect Saddam Hussein. Tonight she would try a new strategy.

  At ten p.m. she parked her gray Toyota near the playground on Butterfly Avenue and got out. “Come on, Saddam boy. Okay, okay! Let’s go!” Her fox terrier jumped out of the car, pulling at its leash. Laughing, Cha-li jogged after Saddam Hussein—taking the dog out at night was good camouflage. Running down the lanes gave her a chance to observe the corner house on Butterfly Avenue from different vantage points. She could see a pattern beginning to emerge.

  As she came around the corner, Robert Lee’s white Mercedes stopped in front of the corner house. His passenger, a well-groomed Indian male in a long-sleeved blue shirt and dark trousers, stepped out and pressed the buzzer on the gate. When it opened, Robert Lee drove off.