‘Do you think she’s involved?’
‘Well, you know she is, Simon,’ he said, a tad sternly.
‘Yes, Thursdays, but how deeply?’
‘I think that’s the very point. Until yesterday, when she inherited, it may have been only marginally – we simply don’t know. But now, with the old lady’s death, everything changes and she certainly appears to be very much in charge at the moment.’
Then, before I could explain that the old crone had made her responsible for the funeral arrangements, Detective Chicken Wing said, ‘An hour after her death was reported we had the house under plainclothes surveillance, front and back. We observed Mercy B. Lord arrive by taxi, unlock the gate and leave it unlocked for the ambulance to arrive fifteen minutes later. After the ambulance left, Mercy B. Lord walked up and chained and locked the gate.’
‘Oh, I don’t think that’s suspicious,’ I said, defending her. ‘She told me Beatrice Fong had briefed her on the funeral arrangements. She was to go to Barclays Bank to get her instructions.’ I turned to Dansford. ‘Look, mate, I’m becoming very bloody confused. Obviously you’ve been watching Beatrice Fong, the Wing brothers and, it seems, Mercy B. Lord, for a long time.’
‘Well, yes, they are why I came to Singapore, but of course the DEA had an eye on them for some time before that.’
‘You said something about the CIA? Did I hear that correctly?’
‘That’s classified, it was a slip.’
‘A deliberate one?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, I see,’ which, of course, I didn’t.
‘Simon, it’s complicated. May I leave that for later, perhaps? There are more urgent matters we have to talk about.’
I nodded. ‘Just one thing. Are you ostensibly mounting an operation against the CIA? In effect, against yourself – USA versus USA?’
Dansford looked directly at me. ‘It’s complicated, but yes, in a manner of speaking, you could say that.’
Detective Chicken Wing then said quickly, ‘Simon, I know it’s a lot to take in when you’re not well, but there’s a bit more to come – a few direct questions, some background, one or two things you should know if Mercy B. Lord tries to contact you. To begin with, what do you know about Thursdays?’
‘Not a great deal, I’m afraid. Mercy B. Lord is involved as a courier who leaves Singapore and goes to Thailand every Thursday.’
‘Oh, and how do you know she goes to Thailand?’
‘Molly Ong checked her flight records with the airline, and I’d made an educated guess after checking the airport for suitable flights.’
She glanced quickly at Dansford. ‘Molly Ong – how much does she know?’
‘Well, presumably only what I know. That Mercy B. Lord takes a briefcase to Thailand every Thursday.’
‘Do you know what’s in the briefcase?’ she asked me.
‘No. Molly tried to find out, but got hauled over the coals by a government minister – the minister for customs and excise, I think.’
‘Why was it necessary for her to know what the briefcase contained?’
‘She was doing research into Mercy B. Lord’s potential to be the Singapore Girl. It was a chance to exploit … er, take advantage of the publicity surrounding my portrait win. The appointment of the Singapore Girl, who is intended to be an ambassador, required overseas travel, and her being away every Thursday potentially posed problems. I had to tell her Mercy B. Lord and I were no longer together. I think, I can’t remember, I told her it was the reason we were no longer together.’
‘I see. So she, Molly, and presumably you, didn’t know what the briefcase contained?’
‘And do you think that’s all Molly Ong knows?’ Detective Chicken Wing asked before I could answer Dansford.
‘Who’s first? Okay, Dansford. No, I didn’t know what was in the briefcase.’ I now glanced at Detective Chicken Wing. ‘If Molly knew more, she didn’t say … Well, not to me, anyway. But it wasn’t hard to guess. It was metal lined, perhaps lead lined, locked with two very professional combination locks – it was almost certainly money. But what I didn’t know was why she was carting money to Thailand every week.’
‘Do you think Mercy B. Lord knew what was in the briefcase? Did she ever say anything to you?’
‘The answer to the first question is: I don’t know; to the second: no. She isn’t a fool. If I can venture a guess about the contents, then so could she. But why are you asking? You obviously know the answer.’
‘Yes, Simon, but it’s necessary that you do as well, so you don’t decide to rescue a maiden in distress. Mercy B. Lord isn’t quite the person you or even she thinks she is, or until yesterday may have thought she was.’ He paused, then announced, ‘She’s Beatrice Fong’s granddaughter.’
‘Oh, c’mon, you’re joking!’ I was totally taken aback. It was like being hit on the back of the head with a cosh.
Detective Chicken Wing then explained. ‘We Chinese are obsessed with family. Beatrice Fong’s granddaughter was her only hope of dynastic continuity. Besides, the wealthy Chinese don’t as a rule leave everything they own to an employee or servant in gratitude, even for a lifetime of service. Especially as Mercy B. Lord would hardly qualify in that regard. She’s only twenty-three, having been in Beatrice Fong’s employ for seven years, a very short time by Chinese standards. It is very unlikely – in fact impossible, when you know something about Beatrice Fong – to believe the money was left to Mercy B. Lord because she’d been a loyal mule for the crime cartel.’
‘Hang on – Mercy B. Lord is an orphan. She was left on the steps of an orphanage at two months. Brought up by the nuns. Her father was a Japanese soldier. She said her mother had to leave Singapore because of the stigma and couldn’t keep her baby. Are you suggesting that Beatrice Fong is – was – her grandmother and that she allowed her to be brought up in an orphanage?’ I turned to Detective Chicken Wing. ‘You just said the Chinese are nuts about family!’
Dansford interrupted. ‘Simon, you need to know the background. In fact you already know some of it, as I recall you telling me after your lunch with Elma Kelly. It begins with the first Wing, the patriarch, William. You know his story – he married the madam of a whorehouse and opium den, which financed his canning operation. She died owning three combined brothels and opium dens, then a sister came across from China and took over. Well, without going into too much detail, she married a customer, an opium addict who died shortly after she gave birth to a daughter in 1878, who was, of course, Beatrice. When her mother died, Beatrice, schooled early and well in the business, took over the three combined brothels and opium dens. She evidently ran the business very well: her brothels were clean, the girls regularly checked for disease, and the drugs – opium, that is – handled discreetly. As a result, she received the blessing of the British authorities when she wanted to expand. The Brits, as you know, never banned opium and additionally saw brothels as a necessity in a major shipping port. In other words, provided always she kept her place neat and discreetly tucked away in the general fabric of Singapore society, she was allowed to prosper, which she did – hugely, it would seem, as she ended with fifteen establishments.’
Dansford grinned. ‘As an aside, while doing the research we came across a rather apt euphemism. In those days Singapore brothels were referred to by merchant seamen as “poke and smokes”. With fifteen establishments, Beatrice was the biggest madam in town and her girls were reputed to be the choicest. She had a reputation to maintain and had become a major supplier of young girls. I guess Beatrice was, in her own profession, an entrepreneur. Anyway, she decided to go into the female flesh trade herself and soon became a major procurer from China and other Asian countries, mostly Thailand, Cambodia and Burma, countries she personally visited regularly to buy her raw product, if you’ll excuse the term. It seems she also expanded the business beyond Singapore, selling girls to brothels in Europe and the Middle East as well as to surrounding Asian countries, first training them in her S
ingapore establishments in the niceties of pleasing a male, and then, as we say in the ad business, selling the value-added product at a premium.’
Dansford paused again. ‘In our research we found a mention of Noël Coward, who in the 1930s paid a visit to Singapore, where he gave a concert during which he performed a song about the pleasures of drink and its consequences. The song contained the lyrics “fond fruit of the vine”, but to get a laugh from the Singapore audience, he cleverly adapted them to include a reference to Beatrice Fong’s trained concubines: “Fong Fruit – oh, divine!”
‘Well, not allowing any moss to grow on the rock-hard Beatrice Fong, she soon realised that what works in the flesh business also works with drugs. In Burma she got involved in paying the peasant farmers to grow opium poppies. Again, she expanded this business beyond the needs of Singapore to other buyers, mainly in Asia, but also in Europe and the UK, where heroin was being used increasingly among the wealthy during the twenties. She even set up the first heroin lab in Burma – in fact, the first in Asia. By the mid-thirties she was already an international operator, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, in drugs and the female slave trade.’ Dansford paused. ‘I guess you’re beginning to get the idea, Simon.’
All I could do was nod and add rather lamely, ‘Bloody hell!’
Dansford continued. ‘Anyhow, to backtrack a bit, in 1927 Beatrice married a Chinese named Samson Fong. She was thirty-nine and, as Hilda says, progeny and continuity of the family line are very important and her safe childbearing years were coming to a close. It seems Mr Fong was simply a means to an end, and soon after her daughter was born he disappeared from the scene, never to be heard from again. Beatrice named her child Lotus Blossom.’
I laughed. ‘A touch of irony there! The lotus is the symbol of purity, although it has its roots in the muck. What happened to the daughter?’ I grinned. ‘She didn’t put her in an orphanage, did she?’
‘No, nothing like that. Perfectly normal childhood, if growing up as Beatrice Fong’s daughter could be said to be normal. The daughter was fifteen when the Japanese invaded Singapore.’
‘So, what happened to her?’
‘Beatrice Fong?’
‘Yes, but especially her daughter.’
At this point the hospital ship HMS Virago came steaming into the room. ‘That’s quite enough. My patient has to rest now,’ Sister Virago announced. ‘You may return after lunch. After 2 p.m., thank you!’ The ‘thank you’ was said sharply and was clipped at the end so that it came out as a single word – ‘Than-queue!’
Dansford hesitated, glancing at Detective Chicken Wing, who nodded. ‘If we return shortly after two, will that be okay, Simon?’
‘Yes, sure. You’ve left me a fair bit to think about.’
‘Come on, hop along now, you two,’ Sister Virago said impatiently. I wondered briefly what it might take to scare her.
My mind was racing but I admit I was actually quite pleased that I’d be left alone for a couple of hours. I needed to think. But then a Chinese nurse entered with a glass of water and a pill. ‘You sleep maybe little bit, sister say.’
I suddenly realised I was bloody exhausted. I pointed to the pill. ‘How long will I sleep?’
‘How long you want?’ she replied.
‘Two hours.’
She nodded vigorously. ‘Ja, ja, you take.’ I realised she hadn’t a clue, but I took the sleeping pill anyway and woke up at one-thirty with my lunch tray at my bedside, two ham sandwiches and tomato soup grown cold. The morphine was wearing off and I was in a lot of discomfort, which is probably why I woke up. Despite the pain, I was hungry, so I drank the cold soup and ate the sandwiches, leaving the crusts as the extra chewing hurt. I left the cup of cold milky tea, but I felt a little better after eating. I wondered how I was going to get through the afternoon with Dansford and Detective Chicken Wing without the aid of morphine. I rang the bell beside the bed and when the same Chinese nurse arrived I asked her where the toilet was.
‘No, no, I bring, you stay bed. What you want – wee-wee? Poo-poo?’
‘I want to wash my face,’ I told her.
‘I do for you,’ she said, and returned with a bowl of warm water and a facecloth and insisted on doing the job herself. I tried not to wince too often but her touch wasn’t exactly delicate. At the end she said, ‘You want inject? I tell sister.’
I thought, Just one more shot of morphine won’t hurt. ‘No! No more injections!’ I told her. ‘You got a codeine tablet?’
She nodded and smiled. ‘No want inject. Very strong man, Mr Simon.’
But she was wrong. I was beginning to fall apart mentally. I realised all the implications of the inheritance for Mercy B. Lord and the shit she was in. This was Singapore where major crimes meant the death sentence, and they were not going to make an exception for her lovely neck.
Dansford and Detective Chicken Wing returned just on two o’clock, and after the usual pleasantries Dansford explained that Detective Chicken Wing was going to relate the remainder of Beatrice Fong’s background. ‘Simon, Hilda’s done the painstaking stuff, Singapore under the Japanese. Most of this information comes from interviewing domestic staff and the now middle-aged prostitutes and, well, anyone at the time who knew anything. The Chinese are acute observers and listeners. The saying “The walls have ears” must have been invented to describe the Chinese servant class. They are also walking memory banks and their eyes miss nothing. So, while she can’t vouch for every tiny detail, we’ve pretty sure we’ve got the Beatrice Fong wartime information correct.’
I should warn you that what follows sounds dramatic, but there is no reason not to believe it. In the end everything fits perfectly and Detective Chicken Wing did a fantastic job.
‘Simon, your last question before we left this morning was what happened to Lotus Blossom, Beatrice Fong’s daughter. I think it may be better to hear the whole story, as that’s the only way I can really answer the question satisfactorily. I’ll tell it as quickly as possible but stop me if you have a question.
‘However, before I deal with the war, the story takes a curious twist that will eventually assume importance. The Wings, still very remotely related, reappear in the picture nearly a hundred years after William Wing married Beatrice’s aunt. Johnny Wing at eighteen falls in love with the fifteen-year-old Lotus Blossom just before the fall of Singapore. Beatrice agrees that it is an appropriate match and that they may one day be betrothed but must wait until both are older. But, of course, the Japanese arrive just two months later, and Johnny escapes into the jungle, as did a great many young Singaporean men, to join the communist guerrillas to fight against the new enemy. This communist movement was mostly home-grown and grew up as a protest both against the British and what the Japanese were doing in China. The British authorities banned the movement and so it went underground, and when the Japanese invaded, the communists were a readymade guerrilla force.
‘Anyway, Beatrice Fong was a very wealthy woman when the war broke out – some say the wealthiest woman in Asia. But before the Japanese invasion of Singapore, she too had been caught up in the “impregnable fortress” myth. Curious, that. She would have been well aware of the Japanese coming through Thailand and then down the Malayan peninsula. But she had prospered under the British and was an anglophile or, at least, believed Britain was invincible on this island, and she was caught napping. Virtually all her assets, including a large amount of silver and gold bullion in the main vault of Barclays Bank, fell to the Japanese, who, additionally, closed all the brothels except three, which they reserved as comfort houses for their troops. They also banned opium.
‘The comfort houses were under the direction of a Japanese captain named Kazuhiro Takahashi, who charged Beatrice with choosing the best of the young prostitutes to fill the three brothels, the prettiest going to the House of the Swallows, as they named the officers’ brothel. After this they appointed Beatrice to oversee the three houses. “Manage” is probably the correct word becaus
e they imported several Japanese mama-sans to educate the girls in the needs of the Japanese troops in two of the establishments and three retired geisha to train the young prostitutes in the sometimes peculiar sexual needs of the officers in the House of the Swallows.
‘Beatrice was back in business, and while she had lost everything, she had permission from Captain Kazuhiro Takahashi to keep her daughter from being forced into prostitution. She’d also avoided the summary execution she might have expected as a drug dealer. Furthermore, unlike most of the population, there was rice in the bowl and so she could be said to have landed on her feet.
‘All went well until Lotus Blossom was approaching eighteen, when Captain Kazuhiro Takahashi decided to take her as his concubine. There was no possibility of refusal if Beatrice hoped to stay alive.
‘Then, on the 6th of August 1945, the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima, and three days later a second fell on Nagasaki. When the Japanese emperor announced the surrender, the Japanese troops in South-East Asia were taken by surprise. In the chaotic days that followed, and before the allies arrived in Singapore, Johnny Wing, along with other former city boys, came out of the jungle and slipped back in among the population to harass the suddenly disorganised and demoralised Japanese.
‘Beatrice was duly informed by Captain Takahashi that the brothels were to be closed down and the prostitutes given their freedom. When she had completed this task, he would come to inspect the premises. He instructed her that he wished at the same time to pay a final visit to Lotus Blossom. It seems Beatrice must have known Johnny was back in town, because she sent him a message telling him of the intended visit. We can only surmise that Johnny knew what had happened to Lotus Blossom.
‘Kazuhiro Takahashi, despite having taken Lotus Blossom as his concubine, had in the past behaved with dignity and always taken the necessary precautions, but this day he arrived an hour early and clearly drunk, accompanied by two guards who searched the vacant premises. Beatrice had wisely cautioned Johnny not to arrive until after the Japanese officer. The guards, having searched the premises, were told to wait outside. Beatrice then invited the captain to a beautifully prepared meal she had set up in the suite used by staff officers of senior rank, where a saddened Lotus Blossom would be happy to attend to all his needs. The idea was that she would serve him and, as she had done often in the past, relax him with warm sake and then remove what garments were necessary. At this stage Lotus Blossom would excuse herself to prepare —’ Detective Chicken Wing glanced up at me, then said, ‘for you know what.’
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