by Jake Needham
“I’m taking you out to dinner, sir. I won’t take no for an answer.”
Tay knew that Kang meant well and he didn’t feel like arguing about it so he tried a slightly different tack.
“Okay, Robbie, you got me. But let’s make it lunch instead.”
“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t. I’m giving a…”
Kang hesitated, and Tay wondered what it was that he didn’t want to say.
“I just can’t,” he finished after a moment.
“Out with it, Sergeant. You know you can’t get away with hiding things from me.”
“I’m not supposed to talk about it, sir.”
Tay said nothing. He knew that if he waited Kang out eventually he would get a straight answer. And sure enough, after a couple of moments of silence, Kang started talking again. He pitched his voice at a half-whisper, and Tay had to bite his lip not to laugh out loud.
“The review board called me back to give another statement about the shooting, sir. I’m supposed to be there at one o’clock. And they specifically warned me not to talk to you about it.”
Robbie Kang was the only witness to the shooting that had led to Tay’s suspension. Tay didn’t see why the review board would want Kang to give another statement. Even if the new head of CID was combing back through the investigation looking for some way to hang Tay, he wasn’t going to find it no matter how carefully he combed. There was no question Tay had acted appropriately, even if perhaps he had been a little overenthusiastic in the number of shots he had fired.
Asking Kang to give a new statement seemed a bit off. Were they just fishing for some contradiction between it and Kang’s original statement? If they were, that was downright stupid. Kang was a professional who had taken hundreds of statements in his career. Whether he had told the truth the first time or not, and of course he had, there was no way they were going to trap him into a contradiction with a second statement. It was out of the question, and surely they must know that.
But if that wasn’t what they were trying to do, what were they trying to do? The obvious thing to do was to ask Kang, but Tay didn’t want to put him on the spot so he decided to let it go.
“Okay, Robbie, come around to my house when you get off tonight and we’ll go from here. What time?”
Kang hesitated. “That’s not a good idea, sir.”
“Not a good idea? What does that mean?”
“Do you know where the Highlander is?” Kang asked, ignoring Tay’s question.
“You mean the whiskey bar down in Clarke Quay that’s usually full of yuppie assholes?”
“The very one, sir.”
“When did you start hanging around expensive places like the Highlander, Sergeant?”
“I don’t. But I hear they charge so much for drinks and food I figured there’s no chance of running into another policeman down there. Which makes it the perfect place to meet you, sir.”
“You’re not going to run into another policeman in my living room either.”
“No, sir, but I might run into one outside.”
What was Kang saying? That his house was being watched? By the Singapore police? Surely not. Why in the world would they do that?
“Look, Robbie, I don’t think—”
“Nine o’clock, sir? There’s a small bar all the way in the back room. I’ll meet you there.”
Tay wondered briefly if Kang was having a bit of a joke at his expense, but he sounded dead serious so Tay didn’t ask any more questions.
“Okay, Robbie. Tonight then. Nine o’clock.”
Sergeant Kang cut the connection without another word.
Clarke Quay is tucked into a bend of the Singapore River, which really isn’t much of a river at all. It’s certainly nothing like the Thames, or the Seine, or the Hudson. It’s narrow and shallow, and it doesn’t carry maritime traffic anymore except for the occasional sightseeing boat. Tay had always figured most visitors probably thought it was just a big drainage ditch. Maybe they should have just called it the Singapore Ditch and avoided confusing the tourists.
A hundred years or so ago the area around Clarke Quay was tough and gritty. It was Singapore’s dock area, and fleets of lighters called bumboats by locals shuttled back and forth to the sailing ships anchored offshore loading cargoes of rubber, rice, and jute. When containerized cargo put an end to the need for bumboats, the government set out to turn Clarke Quay into a tourist attraction. They claimed they wanted to preserve the historical charm of the area, but of course they wanted to do no such thing. What they really wanted was to create a cleaned up, idealized version of Singapore’s history that they hoped would cause future generations to forget what the reality of it had been.
After a resolute scrubbing, Clarke Quay had been turned into an attraction that could have been designed by Walt Disney himself. The crumbling old warehouses were all repainted in cheerful, bright colors, and the pathways between them were neatly tiled and edged with identically sized palm trees. Stylish restaurants and bars now filled all the warehouses, their tables spilling out under the palm trees and the strings of white fairy lights that illuminated them. Most of the places were clogged every night with local yuppies, Australian tourists, and Caucasian expats. The men sat with their shirtsleeves rolled to their elbows, laughed loudly, and knocked back mugs of beer. The women sipped daintily at brightly colored concoctions filled with fruit and eyed the men.
As Tay walked toward Clarke Quay along the wide boardwalk that tracked the winding course of the Singapore River, he looked across the tidily concreted channel and took in the panorama of extensive restaurants and noisy bars. He wondered what the old dock coolies would say if they could return and see what had become of the dirty river and grimy warehouses where they had sweated sixteen hours a day to survive. He couldn’t even imagine.
The Highlander was near the middle of the complex, directly opposite a restaurant called the Hospital where Tay was bemused to see the patrons sitting around the tables in wheelchairs. That seemed both uncomfortable and somewhat insensitive to him, but what did he know? Perhaps it was cool in some way that utterly eluded him.
Tay stopped in front of the Highlander, took in the waiters decked out in red and black plaid kilts, knee socks, and black berets, and he sighed. He had expected the worst, and he was apparently not to be disappointed. The place would probably be done up inside to represent what some Singaporean Chinese decorator thought a Scottish pub looked like but almost certainly didn’t.
When Tay made his way to the back bar, however, he was pleasantly surprised. The Highlander turned out to be a quiet expanse of gleaming hardwood with comfortable-looking leather furnishings and a wall of mirrored glass shelves on which was the most elaborate collection of single malt whiskeys he had ever seen. At one end of the bar, two local men with their sleeves rolled above their elbows slumped toward each other in serious conversation, and near the middle a somewhat chubby and nearly bald Caucasian male was talking earnestly to a much younger local woman who seemed to be doing her best to avoid eye contact with him.
Tay took a stool at the empty end of the bar and ordered a glass of sixteen-year-old Lagavulin with water on the side. Then he settled back to wait for Sergeant Kang.
CHAPTER SIX
“YOU’RE LATE,” TAY said as Kang slipped onto the stool next to him.
“And good evening to you, too, sir. Yes, I’m fine, and I’ll have one of whatever you’re having. Thanks for asking.”
Tay shook his head and waved at the bartender. He pointed to his glass and then pointed to Kang. A few minutes later the bartender set another glass of Lagavulin and a small pitcher of water in front of Kang.
“To fifty more, sir,” Kang said, raising his glass.
“Dear God, I hope not,” Tay murmured.
“Had a nice day for yourself, did you, sir?”
“I read a biography of Winston Churchill and spoke to no one. It was a perfect day.”
Then Tay went straight to what he’d had on his mind ever since he had
spoken to Kang that morning.
“Do you really think CID is watching my house, Robbie?”
“Not CID, I’d know about it if it were CID, but…”
Kang hesitated, and from the way he did Tay knew exactly what was coming.
“Remember I told you they asked me to give a new statement today, sir?”
Tay nodded, but said nothing.
“It wasn’t for CID. It was for ISD.”
The public security establishment in Singapore is ferociously efficient and the police are only the visible part of it. The police force is part of the Ministry of Home Affairs, but the really heavy hitter when it comes to maintaining order in Singapore is a different part of the Ministry of Home Affairs, an outfit called the Internal Security Department.
“Why is ISD interested in my suspension?”
“Beats me, sir. The Chief Superintendent called me into his office today and these two guys I’d never seen before were sitting there. He told me to tell them whatever they wanted to know and left the office. When he was gone, they asked me questions about the statement I gave before, the one about you and Vince Ferrero.”
Vince Ferrero was the man Tay had shot and killed.
“What kind of questions?”
“They had a copy of my statement, sir, and mostly they just went over it again with me, but they also had a copy of your statement, and…”
Kang trailed off again, and Tay waited patiently.
“It’s probably nothing,” Kang said after a moment.
Tay could see that Kang was uncomfortable. He was a good policeman, but Tay knew speaking candidly about how power was wielded in their tiny island state made Kang uneasy. It made most Singaporeans uneasy.
“Go on, Robbie.”
“Well, sir, they were particularly interested in what you said about the other person who was shot. The one I couldn’t find when I went downstairs.”
Tay sipped at his whiskey and thought about that. Two people were shot in the shophouse off Geylang Road that night, but Tay had only shot one of them: Vince Ferrero. And he shot Ferrero only because he was holding a gun on the top of a staircase up which Sergeant Kang was running to rescue Tay. At least that’s what he told himself.
The other person shot that night was a man named John August, and Vince Ferrero was responsible for shooting him. At least Tay thought Ferrero had shot John August. He didn’t see it happen, but he did find August at the bottom of the stairs unconscious and bleeding, and Ferrero was the only other person in the house as far as he knew. Tay was unarmed, so he took August’s backup gun and went in pursuit of Ferrero. If he had not had August’s backup gun when he found Ferrero, he would have died that night. He was sure of it.
After Ferrero was no longer a threat to either of them, Tay sent Kang downstairs to help August, but he had not told Kang he knew who the man downstairs was. Kang found no one when he went downstairs. No injured man, no body, nothing. John August had been badly wounded, Tay was sure of that, but somehow he picked himself up and vanished into the night. Tay had no idea what had happened to him.
At the time, Tay had been mystified, but when he thought about it later he decided it was entirely in character. August was a ghost. Tay had known him for a couple of years and he still wasn’t certain who August really was. He was introduced to August by a member of the American Diplomatic Security Service, a woman who was then the Regional Security Officer at the American Embassy in Singapore. August was retired, she said, and running a bar in a cheerfully seedy Thai beach resort called Pattaya. She was vague about what August was retired from, but she left Tay with the impression it was the CIA. Later, Tay came to doubt that August was CIA, although he was pretty sure most people believed he was. Tay thought it was more complicated than that. August was a warrior, not a spy. It was more likely that he was something worse than CIA. Far worse. Tay simply didn’t have a clue what that might be.
Tay knocked back the rest of his whiskey and looked at Kang.
“They were interested because I didn’t put anything about the other man in my statement,” he said, “but you mentioned him in yours.”
“You didn’t say anything about the other man? Why did you leave out something like that, sir?”
Tay wondered the same thing himself when he thought about it, which he tried not to do since he had never come to any particularly useful conclusion. So he didn’t know how to respond to Kang’s question.
The simple answer, he supposed, was he had always kept his relationship with August to himself. For a CID detective in Singapore to have connections with American intelligence, whatever brand of American intelligence August might really be, would raise eyebrows. Worse, mentioning those connections for the first time after he and August had ended up in a Geylang Road shophouse together and people were shooting at each other seemed like an especially lousy idea. He doubted anyone would accept that as a coincidence, in spite of the fact that it was. Mostly.
But there was a harder answer, too, and it involved the protective feeling Tay had developed toward August. After all, August had protected him more than once, so his first instinct in that dark house had been to return the favor. He didn’t know for sure what August was doing there, but his guess was that August was tracking Ferrero, too. And not to arrest him as Tay would, but to kill him. Tay didn’t quite know how to explain that, or who August was doing the killing for, so he had said nothing at all about August being there. Now it looked like that might be coming back to bite him in the ass.
Maybe he could just say Kang had misunderstood him and no one else had been in the house at all. No, that sounded ridiculous. He had to do better than that. How about claiming he was in shock from the shooting and that he didn’t remember now what he had been trying to tell Kang when he said something about another man downstairs? That was pretty lame, too, but it sounded a little better than claiming Kang had misunderstood him. Maybe that would fly.
The big question, of course, was how much ISD already knew. Was it possible they somehow knew about John August and knew he had been in that house? Of course, it was possible. It was possible that ISD knew almost anything, but it didn’t seem very likely. If they knew about August, and they knew who August was, Tay figured they would have been all over him already. They wouldn’t have wasted time asking Kang vague questions.
The more Tay thought about it, the more he realized that none of that really mattered. All that really mattered was what had caused ISD to start nosing around in the first place. Why did ISD care about any of this? He needed to figure that out before he said anything else to Kang.
“You weren’t supposed to talk to me about this, were you, Robbie?”
“No, sir.”
“Then we ought to change the subject.”
“But, sir—”
“I had an interesting caller yesterday morning. Let’s order and I’ll tell you about her.”
Tay waved at the bartender again, this time to get menus. He used another gesture that felt stupid, this time cupping his hands in front of him as if he were holding a book, but once again it worked out fine so he tried not to think about how silly he probably looked doing it.
He and Kang studied their menus in silence and both ended up ordering the same thing: rare roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and another whiskey. While they waited for their food, Tay told Kang about Emma Lazar and the Wall Street Journal, and her proposal to hire him to investigate the death of Tyler Bartlett. He did not tell Kang about his mother speaking to him the night before from a disco ball and instructing him to agree to Emma’s proposal.
“Wow, small world, sir.”
“You know Emma Lazar, Robbie?”
“No, sir, but I do know quite a bit about the dead American.”
Tay’s paused. “The dead American?”
“Tyler Bartlett, the American who was found hanging in his apartment.”
“I know who you’re talking about, Robbie. I just thought that was an awfully cold-blooded way to refer to him.
”
Kang shifted his weight on the barstool and looked sheepish. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just what most people around CID called him.”
Tay said nothing. He didn’t like to be reminded of the casual callousness his fellow officers sometimes showed, particularly when the victim was someone who wasn’t exactly like them. Regardless, there was no point in beating Kang up about it, so they sat in silence until the bartender had served them both fresh drinks and drifted away again to the other end of the bar.
“You’re involved in the Tyler Bartlett case?” Tay asked then.
“Was involved, sir. It’s closed now. I was in the second group sent to the crime scene, and later I was assigned to brief his parents on the investigation.”
That put Kang on the periphery of the case, Tay thought to himself. Which probably meant he didn’t know much about the investigation.
“They took me off before I really did anything,” Kang said as if he knew exactly what Tay was thinking and wanted to confirm it. “The boy died sometime on a Saturday night or Sunday morning. By Monday afternoon, the case was turned over to a two-man team and everyone else was reassigned.”
“Who did they give it to?”
“Inspector Chin and Sergeant Rajah.”
“They were the people who closed the case as a suicide?”
“Yes, sir. Do you know them?”
“Chin’s name sounds familiar, but I can’t place him.” Tay thought for a minute. “I’m pretty sure I don’t know Rajah.”
“They’re both…”
Kang trailed off and flicked his eyes at Tay.
“Go ahead, Sergeant. Say what’s on your mind.”
“You wouldn’t like them, sir.”
“Why not?”
“They do what they’re told. They don’t ask too many questions. They go along to get along. They’re just so damned…”
Kang searched for a word, and the one he finally came up with caused Tay to smile.
“… Singaporean.”
Tay knew exactly what Kang meant.