Suddenly at Singapore

by Gavin Black

  “Kate … you’d better think what you’re saying.”

  “I have thought about it, all night long. I’ve been behaving like a schoolgirl. And I’ll soon be thirty, set in my ways. Without the courage any more to take what I want. All those prohibitions, they’re just fear. Fear! Fear!”

  “Kate, stop this!”

  “I’m a sham in my job, too. I haven’t any of the ingredients to make what I pretend to be. So far I’ve fooled a lot of people, but I can’t go on doing it. I don’t think I am even now. I can guess at my rating back in the New York offices. They’ll be having a board meeting one of these days and deciding on a new correspondent for South East Asia. I’ll get one of those nice letters, all about the happy relationship which has been built up over the years. But suggesting that I’m tired.”

  “They wouldn’t do that!”

  “Oh, wouldn’t they! And the way I feel now I wouldn’t care. Paul, if only we could break through this trap!”

  “What trap?”

  “The thing that’s holding you in Singapore. These men watching.”

  “What would we do then, Kate? What would you like to do if we could break through the trap?”

  “I’d like to get away to some place far up country. Where there would be only you and me, and no one would know who we were. Where we couldn’t be traced.”

  “You ought to sleep on this.”

  “But I can’t sleep because of it, don’t you see? I couldn’t really help you up there in Kuala Lumpur because I’m not part of your life. I’m only sitting on the edge of it, playing safe. Well … I don’t want to play safe any more.”

  No one was watching us. I put out my hand. Her fingers caught mine, hard. Her lips were a little parted.

  “We might land in a mess,” I said.

  “Oh, Paul, that’s not the point. Can’t you see I’m tired of caution. I want to be committed to something. I know that now.”

  I assumed then that she did.

  “All right, we can get away.”

  “How?”

  I told her. Jeff had always said to keep things simple, to see the obvious and use it. That damn’ pagar of his had been the obvious, and I’d never liked it, but he’d got away with it for six years. Maybe it proved him right after all. And if he wasn’t dead he’d still be using his pagar.

  “When?” Kate asked, when I’d finished.

  “Two days from now.”

  “So long?”

  “Not before. Kang will follow you up after this meeting. But if we don’t have any contact he’ll accept it as a social, casual thing.”

  “Oh, Paul, we’ll pull it off. We’re going to get right away from this damn’ horrible town where they watch you.”

  “No one will watch us where we’re going.”

  “Where is it?” Kate asked.

  “Kuantan,” I said.

  I didn’t know why Ruth had joined me for breakfast, she didn’t usually. Then she said:

  “How long are you going to be away, Paul?”

  “Oh, three days or thereabouts.”

  “Or thereabouts? And I’m not to know where you are?”

  “You never have known, Ruth, when I was off on a trip. I don’t really know myself yet.”

  “This time it’s different. You’re supposed to have a police guard. And I think you plan to shake them off.”

  “Well, just for a time. I’d like the feeling of no feet clomping behind me.”

  “It didn’t occur to you that it’s some comfort to me to know of those feet behind you?”

  “Ruth, I’ll take care of myself.”

  “You always say that. I think you might let me know where you’re going first.”

  “I told you last night. I’m going on the morning plane to Kuala Lumpur.”

  “Funny, I phoned up and you haven’t got a reservation.”

  “It’s not in my own name.”

  “Aren’t you quick, though? I’ve never been able to catch you out, have I? You know, I used to think at these times that it was a Chinese cutie, like Jeff.”

  “Well, it’s not!”

  “I know that now.”

  “How?”

  “I just know.”

  She got up and found herself a cigarette. The number two boy came in with bacon and eggs for me.

  “Where’s the Goldfish?” I asked.

  “He’s sick.”

  The Goldfish was our number one. He had eyes that popped, weird in a Chinese face which was wide and flat. We’d had him ever since we were married and he had appointed himself a kind of male amah to Booney. He wouldn’t allow a woman near the boy and at the end, when it was all over, I came on the Goldfish crying in the garden, sitting on a stone seat bent over as though in pain, crying.

  Ruth turned.

  “Paul, I don’t want you to go off just now. Whatever your business it can’t be that important. I keep seeing a man walking along in shadows waiting to put a bullet in you.”

  “I don’t think he’s that close.”

  “I do. What’s to stop me phoning Inspector Kang that you mean to leave town?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I feel damn’ like doing it.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “That’s right. Put the little girl on her honour. Paul, there’s one thing I want to say. I’ve decided this for myself. I’m not going to be bullied into going to America. I’m staying here.”

  “All right, I won’t try to bully you.”

  “Then I’ll go and see Goldfish. I won’t wait to watch you drive off.”

  She came to me and I stood. She put up the side of her face. I kissed her cheek. She smiled.

  “The last time you kissed me at breakfast you used your napkin first. Things are warming up.”

  Then she went out.

  Russell Menzies came into my office at quarter to twelve, when the noon heat was clamping down on the city. He was my lawyer. He was also a man who loathed the tropics and sweated continuously in a kind of protest against being in them. His dream was to return to become a sheriff of a minor county in Scotland, but he was hopelessly out of the running here, so was making money hard just to go fishing when he retired. He habitually referred to Singapore as “this open sewer.”

  He shut the door.

  “What the hell’s the idea of behaving like a tinpot tycoon?”

  “Meaning what, Russell?”

  “Ringing me up, giving me orders, instructions to my solicitors and all that?”

  “I told you what I wanted done and asked if you could do it.”

  “And or else if I couldn’t. The valuable Harris account. You know what you can do?”

  “Sit down, Russell.”

  “I had no intention of doing anything else.”

  A chair groaned.

  “What about my fisherman?”

  “He’s still in the clink. And your silver-tongued pleader won’t be able to get him out.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because a funny little man who stays cool called Kang says so. He’s slapped a theft charge on.”

  “How could he?”

  “Very simple, he has one to slap. The fisherman’s idyllic little straw thatched hut contained an eight hundred dollar Leica.”

  “So what?”

  “So it belonged to your brother. A shop in Ampang Road is prepared to swear same. Fisherman say … Me gettee giftee. Kang say … Oh, yeah? And if you want my legal opinion on the matter any court will support Kang.”

  “My brother could have given him that camera.”

  Russell smiled at me.

  “Oh, absolutely. It’s the sort of thing the white man is doing all over the East these days, handing out Leicas to thatched-roofed natives. It’s got something to do with United Nations, I wouldn’t wonder. Anyone would believe about that gift except the law; we’re old-fashioned, twenty years behind the times. For instance we still believe in hanging. I do personally. Half my clients could easily, if luck went a little
against them.”

  He looked at me.

  “Though it won’t be a rope for you, dear fellow.”

  “I’m glad you think I’ll never be caught, Russell.”

  “I don’t think you’ll live long enough, the way things are going. What’s the matter with you? You’ve a lot of money.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you loosen your stays and relax?”

  “I’m young. Still red blood in my veins.”

  “You ought to have a mirror in here,” Russell said.

  He lit a cheroot. After that he put one foot on my desk and with some effort lifted the other and set it up there, too.

  “I respected your brother, Paul. He was a business man first and played games second. You’re a loony all the way. Rushing around in this heat ready to burst into tears at the sight of a bloody palm tree against a bacon and egg sunset. Not turned that car of yours over yet?”

  “I’m a good driver.”

  “That’s what they all say. Then … wham! It’s the good drivers who always leave those wills with codicils establishing trusts down to a third generation as yet unborn. I hate all their guts. Get me a beer, will you?”

  I got him a beer and he poured it into his flesh without pausing to breathe. He held out his glass for a refill.

  “I’m sorry about your fisherman. I gather you wanted to score over Kang? Well, you haven’t. And now I’m going to preach a little sermon just as soon as I get the feel of coolness between my fingers. That’s nice. I’ll sip. Sit down yourself.”

  He took out a vast handkerchief and mopped. He trickled, little rivulets running out of his scanty hair. His flourishing moustache was touched with beer foam but beaded damp by nature above the white line.

  “Sermon begins. Watch Kang. He’s looking for more than the man who killed your brother. I can smell a political type. He’s probably secretly taking a law course by post from England, and when he has pulled off his coup, will resign from the police and produce his B.L. London, Detached. Then he’ll stand for Senator. It came leaping into my sodden mind that you might be the big coup. The fisherman is just one little coloured fragment in the jigsaw and Kang means to hold on to him. You know what Kang thinks? He thinks that if he lets the fisherman go, one night the poor man will have his throat cut.”

  “On my orders?”

  “When will you learn that us legal types dislike that straight from the shoulder stuff? There are a thousand ways you could have put that. Cut out this simplicity. It makes my gorge rise and increases my blood pressure.”

  “I don’t go in for murder.”

  “Splendid, my dear chap, splendid! And now we have cleared the air, as you might say. He doesn’t go in for murder. I wish I’d brought my secretary along to take notes. Or we could use yours? She’d be interested.”

  “Russell, what is all this?”

  “You’re bloody careless. With Jeff to watch it was all right. Now it isn’t. You’ll blow everything to hell. And then expect me to sit and hold your hand through one of the prettiest rumpuses the sewer has seen for half a decade. Oh, I don’t know what I’m talking about … officially. But I still think that you’d make a lovely target. And a lot of highly respected European business men think so, too. In fact every time they wake up in the night and think about Harris and Company they have to reach for another sedative tablet. You’re giving honest men ulcers. The situation is explosive. The pure Goddess of Commerce trembles on her pedestal.”

  “I’m getting a swelled head.”

  “God gave it to you, dear chap.”

  He stared at his highly polished shoes.

  “By the way, what’s this about a divorce? Jeff gave me a sort of tip.”

  “He had no right to!”

  “Jeff never gave me a wrong tip yet. Did he want it?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, of course it’s your marriage. You’ve been of age a long time. But Jeff was right.”

  “We’ll drop this.”

  “All right, all right. So long as I’m in the picture. As you know well I like to creep around things, not rush them. Rather like that boy Kang. Bright boy, I think. Might make me a judge if I endorsed his diploma. Chief Justice Menzies, late of Singapore, Retired. Go down well in Inverness. Get me on to all the best stretches of river. Coming to have lunch with me?”

  “No, I’m staying in. I’ve got a lot of work to get through. I’ll have a sandwich.”

  “You’ve never been a boy for sandwiches. What’s up?”

  “Nothing’s up. I’ve taken over Jeff’s work, that’s all.”

  “I wish I thought it would anchor you. Not thinking of moving anywhere, are you?”

  “How could I, with three coppers on my tail all the time?”

  “Hm. You didn’t tell me. Kang’s worried. The last thing he wants is you dead. It’s hard to work up a good-going rumpus over a corpse. No, he’s most anxious to keep you alive. And in Singapore.”

  “Kang has no right to stop me going anywhere I like.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that, boyo. He’s probably got something to slap on you, too. An absolutely fool-proof case that you pinched your wife’s gold wrist-watch and hocked it.”

  “You’re a big comic, Russell.”

  “It’s not what I feel.”

  He lowered his feet, slowly. Then he heaved himself up.

  “If there’s anything a lawyer hates it’s to have the feeling that he lacks his client’s confidence. Long experience has taught us that the worst is quite unspeakable, but we like to know it. It hurts, deep down inside, to feel shut out.”

  “What you don’t know about me you can guess.”

  “That’s the trouble, I can.”

  “I suggest you go away and eat yourself into your siesta.”

  “I may be gross,” Russell said with dignity, “but I don’t nap in the middle of the day. I’d hate to see you on a slab, Paul. More than Kang would. I wouldn’t go and see Jeff on his.”

  “For God’s sake cut it out!”

  He looked at me.

  “Other people quite like you, you know. Even though you don’t stop to give them a chance to do anything. You bloody fool!”

  He lumbered across the room without looking at me and slammed the door behind him. I found I was sweating. Beads of it were on my hands and I could feel them on my face. I pushed down a button and said:

  “Miss Flores, you go to lunch.”

  “Very good, Mr. Harris.”

  The harbour seemed oddly silent, as though the torpor of heat had caught all the ships out there. The Misuni Maru had gone. I sat down and checked my wallet, the money in it, the things I would need. Then I waited, with the electric clock on the wall moving slowly.

  Soon the outer office would be empty. Miss Flores would expect me to see that the lock was down when I went out the main door. I wrote a note and left it on the pad for her, telling her I’d been called away suddenly. She was to say I’d be back in a few days, and cancel my appointments meantime.

  Russell had made me feel alone. It was a feeling I’d never had with Jeff alive. There was more than excitement ahead this time, for with it was the sense of being a little lost, of leaving no one behind in control. That control had been so tight and firm.

  That building full of offices went almost still for a time in the middle of the day. This was the time and I had to use it. I went out, the business man leaving his office a little late for lunch, doing everything I had to, locking doors. The passage seemed empty, but when I went into the L where the lifts were, one of Kang’s men was standing there reading a newspaper. He had been bored until he saw me.

  Kang liked them young, this one was scarcely more than a youth and an athletic youth at that. Only a few years ago he could have been a member of one of the Young Comrades school cadre. There’d be no record of this on his recruitment form, of course, nor on that of his pal waiting in a doorway somewhere. I hadn’t time to place the pal, it didn’t matter, but he would be
on this floor, probably behind me somewhere. A third man was almost certainly in the lobby downstairs keeping an eye on the lifts. There was a pattern in the way they did things, a shade too methodical, I’d had time to observe it.

  The man with the paper went on reading. I pressed the button and waited, my back to him. The lift came up from below, with a clanking. The doors opened and I got in.

  When I turned Kang’s boy was folding his newspaper. He was just about to come forward and use my lift when I smiled. Somehow that stopped him. He looked for a moment sheepish, waiting there.

  The doors of my lift clanged. I began to go down. I’d pushed for the ground floor but you could change your mind in these models, if you did it at just the right moment. I knew that above me two men would be waiting for the other lift, and the boy below would have seen the flash of the light indicating a descent.

  Just when I was over it I pressed the buzzer for the first floor. There was a grumbling sound and the lift came to a stop, slowly. This wouldn’t show below, I knew that. The man down there would be waiting for the little cabin to arrive as signalled. It would be a moment or two before he tumbled to the fact that it wasn’t coming.

  In the corridor I ran, away from the lifts and the stairs. A girl came out of a door and looked at me. I knew her face and she knew mine. She stared, opened her mouth, but didn’t say anything. With the girl watching I had to open the fire-escape window at the end of the passage, a french door. For a moment it didn’t want to open.

  Then I was out on an iron grille. The fire-escape was solid up the back of the building except for the last drop which operated automatically when you stepped on it, rather like a ship’s gangway. But it hadn’t been used for a long time. I had to bounce on it. Then there was a frightful din, of old metal clattering. A weight rose and we went down, those steps and me. I was jumping down them, like a man playing tricks with an escalator. The base clanged on to concrete.

  I ran across the courtyard, pulled open a double gate and stood there with my back to it for a moment. Kate’s Ford was parked across the pavement with its engine running. I heard a shout from the fire-escape, then feet on it.

  Kate didn’t turn her head, but she had her car moving before I was in the back.