‘If it was an alliance forged in hell, it was a strong one, with the added advantage of having the United States as a covert ally. Sidney bought land in Florida, where he created a golf course and kept in contact with the CIA. It was sweet, it was neat and it was safe, a nice tidy operation. Then, in the early sixties, the US involvement in the Vietnam War escalated and the inevitable trickle of heroin to US troops began.
‘The trickle of heroin going into South Vietnam became the Niagara Falls, and the Wings and Fongs thrived and continue to do so. The Drug Enforcement Agency – in other words, my lot in Washington – started to get alarmed. Once the heroin is shipped from Thailand to Singapore and Hong Kong for worldwide distribution, we are dealing with the Fong and Wing network. The heroin money received worldwide is sent back to several Singapore banks, where it is laundered, and a small portion of it, about two million US dollars, is what Mercy B. Lord carries each week to be used by Lotus Blossom to pay the corrupt Thai police, army and assorted officials.’
‘Jesus, that’s big-time!’
‘Yessir,’ said Dansford gravely. ‘They’ve got the product, they have the money and the distribution system, bars all over the world where they’d built their contacts in the sex trade, as well as the girlie bars and brothels in Vietnam. They know who to bribe, and finally they have the covert endorsement of the CIA itself.’
‘So, there you are, Simon,’ Detective Chicken Wing interjected. ‘Now you know what we’re up against. We’ve already told you more than anyone outside the operatives knows and, of course, one or two government people. We can’t tell you more for your own safety. With Beatrice Fong’s fatal heart attack, everything changed overnight. Okay, we knew the old lady was going to die sooner rather than later, but we hoped to have the whole thing wrapped up before this happened. And, yes, of course we have and always have had contingency plans. But we didn’t know or factor in the inheritance. Not only that, but Mercy B. Lord now controls the Beatrice Fong Agency. In the larger sense, together with Lotus Blossom’s share, this is fifty per cent of the Fong and Wing drug organisation. She is now a big player – the big player.’
Dansford nodded. ‘If Sidney and Johnny intend to take over the operation in Singapore, they have to sort out several things in a hurry. Not the least of these is Mercy B. Lord’s future involvement in the organisation. They can’t eliminate her, as there is Lotus Blossom to contend with, who, in her own right, is hugely wealthy and can’t be easily dismissed because she controls the Burma and Thai side of the operation and is consequently very powerful, perhaps even more so than the Wings.
‘The fact is that they’ve got to reorganise quickly and bring all the important operators worldwide up-to-date with the new arrangements.’ He paused. ‘But, of course, we don’t know how Mercy B. Lord is going to react. That’s the big question. Overnight she has become potentially one of the most powerful criminals in the world, and Sidney will no doubt emphasise when he’s briefing her that, apart from her inheritance, she is now one of the richest women in Asia.’
I was beginning to shit myself. Mercy B. Lord was trapped, caught between a rock and a hard place. If she refused to be a part of the criminal cartel, the Wings would no doubt dispose of her. Lotus Blossom couldn’t really do much to protect her from Burma – and besides, it could easily be made to look like an accident. And would Lotus Blossom came to the aid of her daughter and put the entire operation at risk? It wasn’t a case of a mother’s love prevailing at any cost. Mercy B. Lord was a once-a-week nominal daughter she’d never known as a child and was only getting to know now as an adult. Then again, if Mercy B. Lord agreed to take over from Beatrice, she was also doomed. She would be executed along with all the others. I knew I had to find some way to warn her.
I turned to Detective Chicken Wing. ‘You’ve suggested, and I’m certain, that Mercy B. Lord knows little or nothing about the drug cartel run by Beatrice Fong and has only acted as a courier because of the opportunity it affords her to see her mother in Thailand each week. Is she not about to be caught up in something for which she can’t possibly be responsible?’
Detective Chicken Wing was too much of a professional to look over at Dansford but it wasn’t hard to figure out what they were thinking. Then she said, ‘Simon, if it turns out to be an operation where the Singapore police are involved, then the local members of the drug cartel may be imprisoned here or possibly flown to America. I simply don’t know. Hitherto, Mercy B. Lord appears to have simply been used as a mule to carry money, though money from the sale of drugs and who knows what, or who, else. She may argue that she couldn’t have known this. It may work in her favour if she isn’t implicated in any other criminal activity subsequent to her inheritance.’
It wasn’t an answer, but then again it was. Hilda was demonstrating that her law degree hadn’t been wasted. Dansford remained silent then said, ‘Before we came this afternoon, we were informed that Sidney had arrived at the Beatrice Fong residence, ostensibly to pay his respects to the dead, but this is unlikely to have been his real motive.’
I nodded. ‘When is the funeral?’ I was aware that he was trying to divert me from the possible execution of Mercy B. Lord.
‘Tomorrow morning.’
‘Will they – all three Wings and Mercy B. Lord – be allowed to attend?’
‘Yes, of course, it’s business as usual.’ Dansford then added, ‘Simon, we cannot tell you anything more.’ He looked directly at me, his expression sterner than I had ever seen it. This was a different Dansford Drocker from the merrymaking late-afternoon drunk. ‘The entire reason we are here is to alert you to the gravity of this investigation, so that you won’t under any circumstances, as you previously attempted to do, contact Mercy B. Lord. We don’t know which way she will jump and we cannot, in any event, influence her. She’s either voluntarily ensconced with Johnny Wing in the Beatrice Fong residence or she’s not being allowed out until the funeral. Short of raiding the premises, we couldn’t get to her even if we wanted to.’
‘Oh, but you could!’ I protested. ‘You could have the funeral director or someone going into the premises to attend to the body, slip her a note to explain that she’s in danger.’
Dansford sighed. ‘Simon, you must know we couldn’t and wouldn’t do that. There are nearly 200 operatives worldwide and countless police waiting to close in on the cartel. By alerting Mercy B. Lord, we could effectively jeopardise the entire operation, and we cannot allow that to happen.’ He glanced at Detective Chicken Wing and nodded almost imperceptibly.
She rose from her chair. ‘Simon Koo, I must inform you that you are under arrest,’ she said calmly, then added, ‘You will be taken from here and placed in immediate detention.’
Dansford shrugged. ‘Sorry, Simon, that’s how the cookie crumbles.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SO BEGAN THE WORST fortnight of my life. I was in a bungalow. Planes were coming in to land, their engine noise bruising the air; I could hear the distant stutter of kettle drums; a brass band; occasional marching feet and shouted commands; sirens once in a while. I was forced to conclude that I was near or within a military base close to an airport. But there were policemen, not military personnel, at the front door, back door and the gate, two with dogs – tongue-lolling Alsatians – patrolling what appeared to be large grounds surrounded by a high wall. While it wasn’t a jail, I knew I was just as incarcerated as if I’d been locked up in Changi Prison. I was being prevented from causing further trouble. I’d have liked to go for a walk around the grounds to get a sense of the place, which I was permitted to do with a policeman accompanying me, but on the third day after my beating every muscle still hurt and I was as stiff as a board, my every step tentative. Just getting about the house was painful. Bending made me gasp, which in turn sent sharp, stabbing pains through my ribs. Even turning of my neck was pure agony. There was no mirror in the bathroom so I couldn’t take a squiz at the damage to what has always been laughingly known as my face and that now, I dares
ay, was beyond being a laughing matter. But at least my eyes were beginning to open up.
The house contained all the bare essentials. It looked as if it may have been furnished by a Caucasian bulldozer driver in a hurry, who had pointed to stuff in a furniture shop and hastily scribbled an address for delivery. The general feeling was that this was temporary accommodation, ugly and solid as a house brick and not meant to be comfortable or accommodating. If not strictly punishment, it was distinctly reproving, a house designed for solitary male confinement, a hangover from British colonial days, with the only hint of Asia being the teak window shutters. There was one curious exception, though: instead of the iron cot and coir pallet you might expect in the bedroom, there was a double bed with a half-decent mattress. It may have been that in cases of prolonged incarceration, inmates were allowed a female visitor. The bed was certainly a curious addition to this subtopia.
The kitchen had utensils for one: one dinner plate, side plate, cup, saucer, teaspoon, soup bowl, knife, fork, dessertspoon – you’d be stuffed if you dropped and broke something – and a handful of assorted kitchen gadgets: cheese grater, egg flip, tongs, wooden spoon, can opener, all built to last but not to impress. The pantry was no gourmet’s delight, either. It contained rows and rows of tins: soup – vegetable, tomato, mulligatawny and pea – baked beans, asparagus, potatoes (didn’t know you could can potatoes), tomatoes, Irish stew, something named pork-belly fricassee (yuck!), sliced pineapple, peaches, chicken noodles in packets (just add hot water). The inventory included a large jar of Nescafé, tea bags, sugar, rice, salt, pepper, sliced white loaf, marmalade and peanut butter. It had the general air of underground bunker food, stored in case the atom bomb was dropped. I reached for a can of butter beans and couldn’t believe my no doubt plum-coloured swollen eyes. The line at the bottom of the label read: Enjoy fine dining from the Wing Canning Company. I checked all the cans, and six of them had this dreaded injunction. I put them aside; I’d definitely be giving them a miss. Sidney had sold the family canning business to the Campbell Soup Company some years previously, and rumour had it that there was an ongoing lawsuit involving misrepresentation. Still, it was a nasty coincidence. Under the benches were two pots, one big, one small, an electric kettle and a frying pan. Butter, eggs and milk were in the fridge. I wasn’t going to starve, but in a city where a tiffin box can contain some of the best grub in the world, piping hot and available within walking distance from almost anywhere, what can you say? Perhaps one of the cops would oblige.
You’ll have to forgive all this mental sewage swilling through my head. I was worried sick, sore, angry, sorry for myself, but most of all ashamed that I could do nothing to help the person I loved more than anyone in the world. In fact, not to put too fine a point on things, I was bloody terrified.
I know it sounds pretty immature and I wasn’t exactly a teenager, but I was very close to losing it completely. The pantry audit was one way of trying to calm my mind. Furniture and the designs on the tea towels would be next (one of them sported a picture of Donald Duck). There was nothing to read, and I had only one tiny spiral notepad and a cheap ballpoint; otherwise, there was nothing with which I could attempt to write down my codeine-induced semi-delusions. Hospital ship Virago had given me an entire bottle and I’d stupidly taken more than I should have, thinking it might block out my panicked thoughts. All it eventually did was block my arse. By the end of the week the act of going to the toilet was a distant memory.
I constantly tried to tell myself to buck up, pull myself together, but all I could see was Mercy B. Lord being hanged. My fevered imagination would take control and I seemed incapable of stepping outside this waking vision. In my mind’s eye I would see Mercy B. Lord, her beautiful hair hacked off and her head roughly shaved, wearing a shapeless white garment of crumpled flannel, similar to an old lady’s nightdress, that hung to her ankles, leaving exposed the hangman’s territory: her slender neck and pretty shoulders. Even with her head almost bald she was beautiful.
She was standing on the scrubbed grey planks of a platform about eight feet from the ground, at the far end of a large rectangular room, the walls of which were painted an unpleasant creamy yellow, with white tiles reaching up to about five feet from the floor, which was raw cement, smooth, very clean and smelling of strong disinfectant. It was the kind of room you clean with a hose and a stiff broom, and as the thought occurred to me, I visualised a brass tap with its handle carefully polished on one of the walls. A single high-voltage spotlight, the shape and size of an old-fashioned chamber pot, was directed at the platform. The sharp white light flattened out what little detail there was in the room and gave Mercy B. Lord’s shapeless garment a kind of blurry electric outline, so that all I could see in perfect focus were her naked feet, shoulders, neck and head. A large moth flew too close to the light and simply disintegrated in a sharp fizzle, one moment flying and the next nothing. Mercy B. Lord was going to be hanged and the electrocuted moth was a terrible precursor.
She stood at the very centre of the trapdoor. Usually her toenails were painted a cherry red but now the old varnish was chipped and broken, and a piece of flesh-coloured sticking plaster was wrapped around the two smallest toes on her left foot. Her hands were cuffed behind her back and a broad leather strap with a highly polished brass buckle pinioned her shapeless gown to her calves. I realised with horror that the strap was to prevent the skirt from flying up as she plunged through the trapdoor, a bizarre bureaucratic detail to preserve her modesty in her final seconds of life. The leather belt was stained dark with the sweat of the dead and the eight holes were worn with use. Prison guards referred to it as the ‘death strap’ and polished the brass buckle weekly as a matter of prideful duty. Its secondary use was so that Mercy B. Lord couldn’t brace her feet against the sides of the trapdoor as it sprang open. The rope with the noose that would snap her beautiful, fragile neck like a dry twig looked insubstantial, ribbon-like, in the blinding white light as it hung suspended, lazily looped once around a hook in the ceiling. The noose at its end hung about eight inches above Mercy B. Lord’s cropped head, ready for the hangman to unfold it from the hook and drop it over her head so that she would smell the newness of the pre-stretched hemp rope. It was carefully pre-stretched to remove the rope’s elasticity so as to increase the shock as the rope snapped tight, breaking her neck.
Now, this wasn’t a dream from which I would wake gasping and crying out, ghastly as that might be. It was a conscious thought-vision that came into my mind the moment I stopped doing something like auditing the pantry or counting the number of wooden parquetry blocks that made up the living-room floor. It terrified me, and yet I was powerless to stop it. I would shuffle around like an old man, losing count, then starting all over again, trying to force my mind onto something else before it allowed the pontificating priest to enter the room, mount the steps and deliver the last rites, watched by a frail and wizened Sister Charity from the St Thomas Aquinas Catholic Mission Orphanage, who was seated on a peacock-tail wicker chair. When I failed, the hangman would place a hood over Mercy B. Lord’s beautiful head, and his smooth, brown hand would trip the lever that released the trapdoor, allowing her body to fall through the dark square, the hemp rope twisting and jerking frantically from the ugly steel hook in the ceiling. Then the terrible, terrible afterthought: Mercy B. Lord never took her accusing eyes from my face and never spoke a single word.
I now realise I was close to going crazy. I had barely slept, existing on a diet of instant coffee and codeine. On the morning of the fifth day I composed a note using all the pages on the tiny spiral pad, requesting that a policemen visit my flat and bring me a large canvas I’d prepared to paint the vista from my flat window of the river and the port. It was to be a large rectangular painting, eight feet long by five feet wide, intended to prove that I wasn’t simply a portrait painter. But, apart from preparing the enormous canvas, I hadn’t yet started it. In my note I asked them to bring all the brushes and the tubes of acryl
ic paint, the two large easels – in fact, everything in my studio, including the rags used to clean the brushes. It was a desperate last effort to prevent myself breaking down completely, and I handed the police officer the keys to my flat and asked him to give the note to his senior officer.
It was a long shot and I expected my request to be ignored, but in the late afternoon a police patrol van arrived with everything I had requested, together with my keys. The only thing they forgot to bring were the glass jars I used for cleaning the brushes. I emptied half a dozen cans I thought the guard dogs might eat, selecting all the Wing brands and the pork-belly fricassee, which the dogs seemed to particularly enjoy. The cops had even brought the gear I painted in, a pair of khaki shorts and a blue cotton shirt with the sleeves ripped out, both splattered with paint. The two garments were like the return of something familiar to my life. I should mention that the clothes I was wearing when I’d been beaten were completely ruined, and I had been led from the hospital in a pair of institutional pyjamas. In the house were two new white shirts, two pairs of underpants and a pair of khaki trousers with a belt. The pair of new sandshoes were two sizes too small so I simply went around barefoot, and the trousers were too small around the waist, so I was obliged to leave the zip undone and my white Y-fronts visible, the strides held up by the belt.
After several hours of reasonable sleep for the first time since I’d left hospital, I spent the sixth day since my beating preparing to paint. For the next week or so I ate cold stuff out of cans, slept only a few hours at a time, started to kick the codeine (the bottle was now empty) and painted as if my life depended on it, which in fact I had come to believe it did.
I had no news from outside. My police guards – pleasant enough young men under the direction of a somewhat irascible sergeant – kept largely to themselves, were polite when spoken to but not forthcoming. So I painted from dawn till dusk, ate something straight from the can then collapsed for no more than four hours before starting again. Totally obsessed, not daring to think, I painted Mercy B. Lord’s execution as I’d seen it in my mind, painted the moment just before the hangman placed the hood over her head. The priest bore Dansford’s face; Sister Charity, in her nun’s habit and veils, I seated in a peacock-tail wicker chair, her wizened face sharp-eyed and grinning, as I remembered it from Karlene’s People when she’d received the prize money from Mercy B. Lord. I allowed myself to change one detail of the hangman. I left the hood off and painted him in profile, giving him two faces like a Janus. The face nearest Mercy B. Lord was Johnny Wing’s. The one at the back of his head was that of Sidney Wing.
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