by Gavin Black
SUDDENLY AT
SINGAPORE
Gavin Black was the pseudonym used by Scottish author Oswald Wynd to publish his highly successful thrillers. Born in 1913 to missionary parents in Japan, he was educated at The American School in Tokyo until his family moved to the United States where he undertook a year of high school in Atlantic City. Upon graduation, he attended The University of Edinburgh until the outbreak of WWII. He then joined the Scots Guards and was sent to Malaya with British Intelligence, attached to the Indian Army. After the Japanese invasion, he was captured in the jungle and spent more than three years in a Japanese prison camp in Hokkaido where his fluency in the language aided both himself and other prisoners of war. It was when he returned to Scotland via the Philippines that he thought to try his hand at a ‘first novel’ contest run by Doubleday in America. His entry Black Fountains (about a young American-educated Japanese woman embroiled in the war) won him both first prize and the staggering sum of $20,000. He went on to make his fame and fortune writing critically acclaimed thrillers as Gavin Black, most of which were set in Asia and featured Paul Harris. He died in 1998.
SUDDENLY AT
SINGAPORE
GAVIN BLACK
THE LANGTAIL PRESS
LONDON
This edition published 2010 by
The Langtail Press
www.langtailpress.com
Suddenly at Singapore © 1961 Gavin Black
ISBN 978-1-78002-021-1
SUDDENLY AT
SINGAPORE
To
W. H. T.
CHAPTER I
KATE CAME towards me down the long passage which was also a sort of veranda in front of the bedrooms. Behind her, under a mock Moorish arch, I could see the Kuala Lumpur traffic swinging into a roundabout. There was the rumble of it, and the din of Tamil drivers using their horns a lot, but I only really heard the click of Kate’s heels on a flagged floor. I felt again the tightening of stomach I’d never stopped feeling when she came towards me like this, even in a roomful of people, as though she wasn’t looking at anyone else or caring about anyone else.
She was tall and tanned a deep brown as though the Malayan sun suited her. She had black hair, cut short like a cap, and she dressed like someone who doesn’t think about clothes a lot, suitably, in the British manner, odd for an American.
I loved Kate. It wasn’t something new, but we didn’t get used to it, perhaps because we hadn’t the chance. She held out both hands to me.
“Paul!”
I took her hands.
“Come into my room a minute.”
Before she would do that she looked up and down the passage. I had left the fan on and it creaked over us while I held her. Her body was hard against mine. Then she said in my ear:
“Sweetie, did you come haring up, or did you have business?”
“Much business.”
“I don’t even run it a close second, do I? You always have your alibi.”
“It’s what you preach.”
“I know, I know. Can you have dinner with me here in the hotel or do you know too many people in this town to risk it?”
“I thought a Chinese place.”
“It’s always a Chinese place.”
“And the food’s always better. They do a speciality up here of duck and mushrooms.”
She stepped back then, smiling.
“I’m not complaining.” She looked around. “What a lousy room.”
“It’s an old hotel.”
“We’ll hear the trains all night. You in your room and me in mine.”
“That’s your doing,” I said.
She looked at me.
“It’s odd, isn’t it? That I could have come so far in my trade and still cling to the conventions. It’s something to do with having been brought up on Cape Cod. All our spinsters are so respectable.”
“Kate!”
She smiled again, forcing it.
“I didn’t mean to start this all over again. It’s probably that I didn’t expect to see you. Let’s go out. Quickly. I’m all ready, if you are. We could go somewhere for a drink, couldn’t we?”
She was trembling a little. I was certain then that Kate hadn’t wanted me to come up to Kuala Lumpur, that she had been running away again. I gave her a cigarette, and lit it and then opened the door.
“Wait,” she said.
“There’s no need to peer into passages, Kate.”
“I think there is. There was a Chinese boy in one of the alcoves as I came back to my room. Just before I got your message. He was standing there as though waiting for something. He could have been a hotel servant, but I don’t think he was. I’m sure I knew his face.”
“You couldn’t tell one Chinese face from another.”
“I knew this one. Not well, but I knew it. He’d served me drinks in someone’s house somewhere.”
“Houseboys can go into hotel service and often do. What are you worried about? Someone spying on us?”
She took a long draw at her cigarette. Kate was nervous, tight with it.
“That, or something else. I’ve had a lot of time to think up here on my own. It’s occurred to me that if there was a list of a hundred men in Singapore that a lot of people would like to see out of the way … well, you and your brother might be near the top of it.”
“So I’m down for elimination?”
“You find that funny? I don’t.”
Kate walked past me and looked out of the open door.
“We can go now,” she said.
We walked along towards the lift. I was wearing crêpe soles. The only sound was the click of Kate’s heels, a sound magnified and echoed down from the weird stone vaulting. Each open arch was a view of broad streets and jungle trees beyond them, framed by a fretwork of stone carving.
I thought then what it would be like to walk with Kate this way without our curious guilt for company. Curious because though we loved, we weren’t lovers. Our precautions were to escape the label that could so easily be put on us when we hadn’t earned it. The idea that we hadn’t earned the label would make some people laugh, and was probably already doing that.
We worked the lift ourselves. In it she said:
“I’m glad to see you. If it didn’t seem that way, I’m sorry. I’ve been hating this pretty little town on my own. I hate anything on my own these days.”
I took her hand. When the lift stopped we got out and went into the hotel bar. We had the place to ourselves and Kate drank whisky, which she didn’t like, but it was part of her role as a newspaper woman. There were times when she drank it steadily, like a medicine, but it never relaxed her.
“It’s been ten days,” I said. “Why didn’t you write me, or phone the office?”
“I told you. I’ve been thinking about things. An odd thing happened before I came up here. Didn’t your brother say anything?”
“Jeff? No.”
“I thought he probably wouldn’t. I had dinner with him. It was a surprise when he suggested it. I’ve only met him half a dozen times and wouldn’t have thought I rated his flat.”
“He had you there?”
“Yes. So we could talk. We did. Not many preliminaries, either. We got down to it, and the subject was you. He loves you, Paul.”
“I know that. But what the hell was all this?”
She didn’t answer at once, looking at her glass.
“He told me that you and I had to stop our funny little adolescent game of staring at each other across other people’s rooms.”
“He’d no damn’ right!”
“Wait a minute, you don’t understand. Jeff said we ought to get married. He practically said that I was the sort you should have married in the first place. Don�
�t drop your jaw like that. It doesn’t suit you. Jeffrey wants me to replace your present wife. He says Ruth won’t really suffer, that there is no reason why she shouldn’t go on having all she has from you now. He said she wasn’t your wife anymore.”
“It’s not her fault!”
Kate drank her medicine again. I was beginning to get angry.
“We didn’t really discuss your marriage, Paul, perhaps because I wouldn’t. He just outlined his plans. Ruth is to go back to the States, and a lot of money with her.”
“I’m not buying off my wife!”
Kate looked at me.
“I said that. But your brother didn’t seem to listen. I had the feeling all the time of being with someone who had his mind made up. I tried to tell him you just couldn’t organise living that way, but he just looked at me and said: ‘Why not?’ I began to be almost afraid of him. There’s a sort of myth about your brother in Singapore, and I could believe it then. He’s a little frightening. It was as though he had assessed something and decided it was time he took a hand in it. I might have been checked and graded and got a kind of ‘A’ rating for his purposes.”
I sat there knowing I was glad Jeff wanted Kate for me. We had never discussed her, but it was a kind of relief I felt then. Maybe it was a sense of Jeff’s power, too, for it was real, just as Kate said. He would have thought a long time before he moved in like this. The only thing I couldn’t do was go along with him on this seeing everything as a game on a chess board. Jeff sat down to play and at once made the first move with a pawn.
“You know what you are going to do?” Kate asked.
“I’m going to tell Jeff to concentrate on a little piece of business we have cooking in northern Sumatra.”
“I’m glad you said that. Could we get out of here now?”
We went out to my car. It was a new Bristol, with seat belts to stop you going through the windscreen at a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Jeff had given it to me three months ago on my thirty-seventh birthday and it had cost him twenty-two thousand Malay dollars. He’d given me a lot of things since the war, but I knew I had earned them all.
“We’ll go for a run before we eat,” I said. “Up to the Gap.”
Kate just nodded. It made sense to her, going for a run in this car, anywhere. It was that kind of car, though Ruth hated it; she said the seat belts made her feel like being strapped into a missile. Kate pulled the buckle tight.
“How far is it to the Gap? About forty miles? What do you allow, twenty minutes each way?”
“If there aren’t any oxcarts.”
“I’ll pray for them.”
There was about half an hour to go before sunset. Already the sky was getting organised for the nightly flamboyance. A pinky-yellow light came down and glowed on the green land, a kind of fluorescence. There had been a shower and everything was glistening wet, with thunder clouds still hovering up there on the ridges of the main range.
“I think I’m being recalled to New York,” Kate said.
The wheel jerked under my hand. The car didn’t like that treatment and showed it, an angry tail flip.
Kate was the Singapore correspondent of the American news magazine, Day. As a woman in a man’s job she had the feeling a lot of the time that the skids were under her. This wasn’t exactly something new and I said so.
“Sure, I worry a lot, Paul, I know. But I’ve a good reason this time. I told them all about a story I was on and I haven’t produced it. I can’t. And you know why.”
I did. Kate’s story involved Jeff and me, very much. She passed me a lit cigarette.
“The trouble with being a woman in my business is that you can’t ever be really good. Not tops. We’re not ruthless enough. We don’t keep things tidy and unemotional. Not in the way you can, for instance.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that if you had to leave me to-night to go on one of your missions, you’d go.”
“For missions read business trips,” I said.
“Oh sure. It saddens me when I think of all the chances I’ve missed to Mata-Hari you in winy moments. The professional slipping up. I should have gone all alert when I noticed you beginning to watch my legs.”
“So you’ve noticed that?”
“Part of your appeal, dear, is that you’re perfectly normal.”
The car began to climb, the road twisting, but I knew it, and kept the speed up to between sixty and seventy. It meant some sharp cornering but we did it without any whining from the back end. It was a sweet little car, built low and snug on the road, liable to error only from the hands which held her, but from no trace of viciousness in design. I knew that Kate was sharing the small elation of this kind of driving, that she liked the feeling of her body pushing against the belt sometimes. All about us now were the huge trees of primary jungle.
I had tried to tell Kate what I felt about Malaya, how my love for it wasn’t something acquired, but natural, because the country was mine. I had no other home, neither Jeff nor I had ever tried to find one. My grandfather was a business man in Shanghai and in 1931 my father had moved the firm to Singapore, where his methods of conducting it were almost Oriental, and we had inherited that approach.
In this country, at eighteen, after six weeks of fighting, I had gone into a Jap prison camp along with my brother, and with him come out of it. We had seen our world blown up and had set about building it again. But we did a little more than that; on the side we began to take out our kind of insurance against another day when explosion might threaten. It was a simple form of insurance, too direct for a lot of tastes.
There’s a great chasm between people like Jeff and me and those who come out East to use it for their careers. In our hearts we don’t trust the Occidental. Perhaps the main reason is that, unlike them, we have no line of retreat, no future in a house built in the English home counties for the agreeable English life. Or the American life in Southern California. We just don’t want it, or any part of it.
I had talked about my feelings here to Kate, but wasn’t sure that she understood or could accept them, any more than my wife could. A deep feeling for place may be a male indulgence.
We went back to Kuala Lumpur in quicker time than we came out, to eat in a Chinese restaurant where the millionaires come from Singapore. We had our meal on stone seats in a garden. There was a fountain in colonial Chinese taste spattering water about, and Chinese jazz from a distant radio.
With the first bottle of raisin wine Kate said.
“Paul, how dangerous is what you do?”
“Are you on to that again?”
“Do you mind? I didn’t ask the question as a journalist. It’s just for myself. Or isn’t it safe to talk here?”
“I choose my tables carefully, it’s quite safe.”
“All right. I swear I won’t use any of this. I just have to know more of what it means to you. I’ll never talk about this to anyone.”
“Very well. What I do isn’t dangerous most of the time. Only occasionally.”
“I won’t ask how you do it, I just want to know why. It might help if I said I know you supply arms against the legal government of Java.”
“I don’t object to the legal government of Java at all. They can do what they like on their own island, go Red if they want to. It’s taking other people with them that’s not so nice, people who don’t want to go. Like the majority in the Celebes and Sumatra.”
“How do you know they don’t want to go with Java?”
“Because they’re willing to die resisting. Pretty good evidence, isn’t it?”
“Some people say those little wars are organised in Singapore.”
“I don’t accept that, not for one minute.”
The waiter served food, bland, not seeming to look at us at all. It was no break in the thread with Kate, she just waited.
“Without arms from outside those wars couldn’t happen, Paul.”
“They are happening. The guns come afterwards.”
“I’m scared,” she said. “I can’t see any end to this. It’s not something that you can stop easily. And clearly you don’t think about stopping. While all the time people over there must be building up information about you. I’ve heard quite a bit in Singapore. There’s a character in Sumatra just now called General Sorumbai. He’s their hatchet man, isn’t he? He can’t like you much.”
“If the general knows what we do he won’t like us much.”
“They could kill you … so easily!”
“I wonder? We’ve survived a long time, Jeff and I. Life in this part of the world hasn’t been any picnic since 1941. I admit that not everything we do in our business would go down well at a Rotary lunch. But Rotary isn’t very strong out here. Maybe it’s a pity.”
Kate held up her wine cup.
“I suppose all women have to accept this,” she said. “The way her man puts his life into compartments, a big one for what he’s doing, a little one for love. I envy you really. You do it so neatly.”
“Kate … I love you!”
“Yes, when you open that compartment. I think we might go now, don’t you?”
We went out, through the noise of the main restaurant, packed with Chinese family parties stuffing in food with the kind of near violent zest for it you only see with them or the French. We got in the car and this time, without fastening the safety belts, drove off.
“Have you finished your business up here, Paul?”
“Yes, I did it to-day.”
“Before you bothered to get in touch with me.”
“Kate! I didn’t think you’d be in the hotel.”
“You were quite right, I wasn’t. What are your plans now?”
“I thought I might stay up here for a few days. With you.”
Kate looked out at the people in the streets.
“I may go north to Penang. I’ve never been there for some reason.”
“Penang is pretty and dead.”