by Ovidia Yu
Sergeant Bong, the young officer assigned to observe/protect Sharon Sung the previous day, had no idea. He had watched everything but wondered about nothing and found the whole assignment very boring. Bong was a stolid Candy Crush addict who found most of real life very boring.
“He went there to talk to Miss Ang, sir. Miss Sung got angry with them for talking without her. She said they should not keep secrets from her because she is in charge of everything now. Then they went inside her office to talk and closed the door, so I didn’t hear what they said.”
“In charge of what, that’s the real question,” Staff Sergeant Panchal said from the doorway. “Bong, you’re useless. Why didn’t you say you had to stay in the room with her and listen?”
For once, Salim agreed with her. The two young corporals were tense with excitement, hoping he would give them a chance to do better. But Salim knew it would be no use. Sharon Sung had decisively dismissed Sergeant Bong and the idea she needed protection. Salim could sense she had information she was not sharing and they would have to get it some other way. And he knew someone who would do the job better than corporals Chan and Ismail.
Salim announced he would be out of the office for a while and left, ignoring the surprised looks of his staff.
Less than fifteen minutes later Inspector Salim pushed open the door to Aunty Lee’s Delights.
“Aunty Lee,” he said, “can you tell me everything you know about buah keluak?”
“What are you doing here?” Nina asked. “We are very busy here, you know. Shouldn’t you be busy doing your own work, questioning people in their own homes and things like that?” Though Nina was always busy, this time she looked genuinely cross. Salim guessed Cherril had told them about the visit to the Peterses’. But this time he was there because he was busy too. And getting information from someone who knew both the subject and what he needed to understand was faster than sifting through material online.
“I want to do my work. But I need to understand more about the background first.” He looked past Nina to Aunty Lee, who nodded. He hoped she would understand. After all it was something he had learned from her as well as from his mother . . . you had to understand a process inside out before you could find out where it had gone wrong. “I’m not here to question anybody, just to learn. I’ve been eating buah keluak all my life, I just don’t know much about it.”
“Get Salim a drink, Nina.” Aunty Lee waved him to take one of the bar stools by the kitchen counter. She was always ready to talk about food, especially traditional foods that modern young people risked losing touch with.
“I still remember in the old days, if you wanted to find buah keluak, you looked for where the older wild pigs went to eat. Those babirusa always knew where to find kepayang trees with ripe buah keluak. Nowadays Singapore has no space for old pigs any more than for old people. I usually go and buy my buah keluak nuts from the sellers in Tekka Market.
“When we were children we used to go and collect them ourselves. In those days no matter how poor you are, no money too, you could find food. Tapioca, kang kong, chicken, fish . . . as long as you got space you can grow your own. Nowadays no money means no food. And they say we are better off.
“The women collect nuts and bring them over from Indonesia. There they still have many wild trees, so they gather them and treat them first to remove the poison before selling them. But to be safe I always soak my buah keluak at least overnight in water before cooking. See? Like these ones. I don’t need them until next week but I’m soaking them already.”
Salim looked into the large tub of water. The (dangerous?) dark nuts looked like misshapen golf balls. He wondered whether Aunty Lee was trying to convince herself she could not have made such a terrible mistake. Nina had looked cross when he came in, but now she brought them glasses of cold lemongrass tea. She did not even pretend to be listening to her boss. Salim guessed she had heard it all before.
“I am very careful! All the people who come and eat my ayam buah keluak and nasi rawon, they don’t know that buah keluak seeds contain cyanide. Even the wood and the leaves of the tree are poisonous. People crush raw buah keluak kernels to poison lizards, insects, and animal ticks. If you eat even a small amount you get trouble breathing, you get dizziness and headaches and seizures. If you eat too much you get heart attack and die. People don’t know that but I know. That’s why I am always very careful!”
Salim thought this did not sound too different from what had happened to Mabel Sung and her son. He knew ayam buah keluak was chicken stewed with buah keluak seeds and nasi rawon was an Indonesian rice dish cooked with the same. Because of its distinctive rich, oily bitterness, buah keluak was an acquired taste not everyone shared.
“Of course you are careful,” he said soothingly. “But you know the police have to suspect everybody who was there when it happened.”
“They should be suspecting everybody who was there, but it is easier for them if they decide to blame my cooking and close the case and never eat buah keluak again. At least they will never eat my buah keluak again. I might as well close shop now, nobody will ever come here to eat again,” Aunty Lee said dramatically.
“But you said eating buah keluak isn’t really a risk if it’s properly prepared, right? How is that done, Aunty Lee?”
“To make sure all the poison is removed, the seeds are removed from the fruits and boiled and then buried in ash pits lined with banana leaves and covered with earth for over a month. At the beginning the seeds are hard and yellow, but by the time they are dug up they are dark brown, almost black color, and after fermentation the insides are soft like lumpy tar. Some people say they smell like opium. Then they have to be washed because fermentation releases the hydrogen cyanide, which is water-soluble.
“I usually get them from dried food stalls in Tekka Market or Geylang Serai Market. The sellers already do the whole poison removal process, but to be on the safe side I always soak them again. In fact I leave in the water until I need them, up to four or five days. Nina changes the water twice a day, so no mosquitoes. Not just because of the poison but to get rid of the taste of mud—most of the time the trees grow in the mangrove swamps, very muddy there—and to make the shells soft enough to crack.”
“Sounds like a lot of work.”
“That’s only the beginning!” Aunty Lee crowed, the current sad state of affairs pushed aside by the thought of work.
“After that, you have to scrub every nut one by one and then chop off one end and dig out all the flesh inside. You combine all the insides and pound it and season it. Sometimes you must use a small cutter to trim smooth the opening you chopped into the nut so that when people eat it they won’t cut their mouths. And then you stuff the flesh back in, along with all the other ingredients, and cook on a low fire for a few hours until the soup is thick and everything has the flavor. Now, that is a lot of work!”
“It is.” Salim found himself wondering what could be worth all that effort.
“It’s delicious when you get used to it.” Aunty Lee smiled. “And even if you don’t like the taste, when you know how much work went into making it, you’ll eat it.”
12
Evenings at Home
Having already announced that Aunty Lee’s Delights was closing early that day because of the (now canceled) catering job, Aunty Lee and Nina took advantage of a night off and went home early after Salim left. It had been a long time since they had had a quiet night with no one to cook for but themselves.
In the smaller home kitchen, Nina made arroz caldo like she had done so many times at home in the Philippines. The thick, savory chicken rice porridge reminded Aunty Lee of Chinese chicken congee and Korean ginseng rice chicken soup. When it came to finding comfort in food, different peoples were often far more alike than they realized. And the love of similar comforts went far beyond food.
They ate together at the dining table instead of in front of the television because Aunty Lee needed space to spread out all her notes.
“I’m seeing so many reasons why Mabel might have killed herself and her son. Leonard became a drug addict while studying in America and had heart and lung problems and was on the waiting list for a heart transplant.”
“Madam, if he is already on the waiting list, then what would she kill him for? Why not just wait?” Nina asked dully, more because it was expected of her than because she wanted to know.
“Because that is almost a hopeless case. The donor has to be a healthy person who dies quickly in a way that doesn’t damage the heart. You must rush him or her to be kept alive in hospital while they prepare you for the operation. Plus he or she must have signed the donor consent form or the relatives must sign it and the police must be satisfied there is no funny business because organ trading is illegal. Surely all these things cannot happen together without some kind of funny business, right?”
“Why is organ trading illegal in Singapore? I thought in Singapore people can sell everything. As long as can make money, it is all right.”
“We have got to protect people who are desperate for money. There are medical risks and things like that.”
“If people are desperate for money they need money, not protection.”
Something in Nina’s tone made Aunty Lee really look at her for the first time since sitting down. Nina looked tense and worried. She had barely touched her dinner. Aunty Lee, gulping down delicious spoonfuls of creamy rice broth with chunks of delicately flavored chicken as she leafed with equal relish through the notes that she had spread across most of the dining table, had already finished her second bowl.
“Can I get you some more porridge, madam?”
“First tell me what’s wrong, Nina.”
Nina looked at the papers with notes and excited arrows and sticky tabs all over them and said nothing.
“Nina, are you upset because you think they killed themselves?” Nina was Catholic and Aunty Lee had a vague idea that Catholics considered suicide and birth control far worse than murders and miscarriages. Ordinarily this might have been the beginning of a very interesting discussion. But at the moment Nina had more pressing worries.
“Madam, you don’t understand. This is serious. The police went to Madam Cherril’s house because they want to make trouble for you—”
“Nina, I’m sure Salim won’t—”
“Madam, people think it is because of your buah keluak that those people die. Maybe they will make you close down the shop. Maybe even if they don’t close down the shop, people won’t come anymore. Today already somebody canceled. Think about what is going to happen if everybody also cancels?”
Nina was not worried for herself, Aunty Lee realized. She had sent home enough money for her mother and sisters to buy farmland in her name and was already the biggest landowner in their village. She could stop work now and live a very comfortable life back home. Nina was still in Singapore and worried because she cared about what happened to Aunty Lee. And maybe because she cared about someone else she wouldn’t admit to.
“I have thought about it, Nina. That’s why it is so important that we find out what really happened.”
“That is the policeman’s job.”
“But we have an advantage over the police, even your Salim. They have to consider the possibility that Mabel and her son were accidentally poisoned by our buah keluak. You and I know very well that could not have happened. So it is up to us to find out whether they poisoned themselves or were poisoned by someone else. Okay?”
Nina nodded. “He’s not ‘my’ Salim,” she said. But just saying the name made her smile. Though she really did not know what that man was up to, or what she thought of it.
Salim had been trying to get Nina to take an online prelaw class with him. He knew that with Aunty Lee’s full encouragement Nina had invested her spare hours in Singapore studying. So why not law? But Nina was trying to learn all she could about cooking, hairdressing, and massage—practical skills that could be practiced anywhere in the world for pay. Nina knew she could never be a lawyer in Singapore. To her, working toward an impossible goal like studying law was as much a waste of time as not working. And it seemed as impossible for Salim as for herself. Salim could not or would not see that. Much as he loved his work, he felt the system he was part of could be improved. And the only way he could improve it was from within because throwing complaints and criticisms from outside was about as effective as bird shit landing on a car.
As a favor to Salim, Nina had agreed to look at the syllabus and online material he had printed out. Perhaps she could help him study, he had said shyly. Her friends with male friends in Singapore were taken on picnics and out dancing and on movie dates. Nina and Salim went to the library study rooms and discussed points of law while walking along the Parks Connector green routes that crossed the island.
To her surprise Nina enjoyed their discussions. But when Salim brought online registration forms for both of them, she had balked. It was a nice dream, that was all. And Aunty Lee needed her in real life.
“Nina.” Aunty Lee’s voice cut into her thoughts.
“Yes, madam.”
“The big woman with the little-girl voice, do you know if she was one of the lawyers or one of the Christians?”
“I don’t know, madam.”
Then again, life with Aunty Lee was not most people’s idea of “real life.”
With her eyes half closed, Aunty Lee was trying to match the people she had seen at the party to the names on her list. She had not seen Leonard Sung while he was still alive. Nina had found photographs of the young man online that showed his progression from a smug, plump schoolboy to a painfully thin, sneering man. Tributes from friends suggested most of his friends from school had not seen him for years but remembered his “crazy sense of humor” and missed laughing at his “wild pranks.”
And Mabel Sung? According to the newspapers, she was seventy-four years old but she had managed to appear younger despite the stress and worry in her life. A handsome rather than a beautiful woman, Aunty Lee thought. Mabel Sung looked as though she was used to taking the lead and standing out in a crowd. She reminded Aunty Lee of someone—oh yes, her old mathematics teacher who had been so inflexible she had turned a generation of schoolgirls off math forever. Why was it so much easier these days to remember people from twenty, thirty, or even forty years ago than someone she might have met last week? But wait—Aunty Lee returned to Mabel Sung. Had Mabel really seemed stressed and worried? Aunty Lee remembered her short, unpainted fingernails drumming on the buffet table, the barely covered irritation that caused her to lash out at her husband and daughter . . . and the strange expression that crossed Mabel’s face when she first caught sight of Edmond Yong’s long-haired woman. Yes, Mabel had definitely been on edge. And for some reason she had been anxious to please the PRC woman, had looked almost afraid of displeasing her.
Mabel Sung and her son were found dead in the boy’s bedroom. Her husband had been in his office, farther along the corridor. Aunty Lee had seen Henry Sung several times but the man left no lasting impression, unlike his wife. He looked like a successful man, the sort whose funeral wake would be attended by former ministers of state and whose idea of exercise was being driven around golf courses. But then, what was the connection between Henry Sung and Doreen Choo? Aunty Lee had only seen them together for a moment but it had been enough for her to see that the two were definitely not strangers. Strangers, even friends and acquaintances, greeted and talked to each other. Henry Sung was familiar enough to go up Doreen Choo and stand by her side without a word. And she had reached out and steadied his tray on the railing post with an automatic familiarity that told Aunty Lee as much as catching them in flagrante delicto would have.
Aunty Lee paused. She had known Doreen Choo for many years. Doreen and her late husband had not been particularly close friends of hers. But at their age even mere acquaintances from the old days became a precious link to who they had once been. She said as much to Nina.
“I didn’t recognize her at first. Then afterward I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognized her.”
“She was your old school friend, ma’am?”
“No. She came from that girls’ school with blue sleeveless uniforms. My father would never have let any of his wives or daughters wear sleeveless dresses. He thought it was immodest. But we ended up running around like little ruffians in our sailor suits and bloomers while they grew into ladylike girls who shaved their armpits and legs.”
Aunty Lee did not say anything about Henry and Doreen. She knew she was not mistaken, but even the faithful Nina might doubt the evidence of words not said. And even if Henry Sung was having some kind of relationship with Doreen, it might not mean anything. She would talk to Doreen Choo herself first.
Who else had been there? Several assistants from the office had come early, then left before the bodies were found. Two other lawyers had been invited but had not bothered to show up. It seemed that things were definitely starting to fall apart at the seams at Sung Law. All the other guests had been friends or members of Mabel’s Never Say Die prayer and healing group. None of them had gone up to the big house. Apparently there was a toilet on the far side of the little pool house that Aunty Lee (fortunately enough) had not noticed.
Sharon Sung had been up at the house, of course. And Mabel’s assistant, that fair girl with a complexion so perfect it had to be standard theater makeup—
“GraceFaith Ang,” Nina said.
“That’s right. GraceFaith Ang. She must have very Christian parents. I wonder whether she has a sister called Joy-Hope or maybe CharityPeace. It must be very difficult for a child to go through school with a name like CharityPeace. Just think of the teasing.”
Nina’s ability to ignore Aunty Lee’s less relevant digressions played a big part in how well the two women worked together.
“GraceFaith told the police that Sharon spent the whole night before the party in the office going through her mother’s work folders that her mother had passed her. I think she is lying. Why would anybody stay in the office and read old files all night?”