by Gavin Black
“Where do you suggest? A nice island in the South Seas? I daresay I’ve got the bank account to be a desirable citizen in Tahiti. Ever been there?”
“No.”
“It’s preserved. It’s a monument.”
“Paul! Are you looking for Jeff’s killer … this way?”
There was a stool near the old man. I took my drink over and sat on it.
“That’s not easy to answer. I mean to find the killer. But I’m not rushing it. I thought about how Jeff would have approached this if it had been me instead of him. He’d have gone slowly, he always did. He’d have taken a deep breath and gone on quietly about his business, waiting. That’s what I’m trying to do now.”
“Have you thought that it might be a hired assassin who simply came into this country to do the job and then went out again?”
“Then why not get both of us together?”
“That might have been the intention!”
“No. Whoever killed Jeff knew his habits. He would also know mine, and that we were rarely together in Jeff’s apartment. I haven’t had a drink with him at that hour twice in a year.”
“But there’s another thing,” de Vorwooerd said. “They may have wanted Jeff dead and you a prisoner.”
“I’ve thought of that. It’s what I’m watching for.”
“Paul! I don’t feel you’re watching for anything. I know I’m an old man. I’m subject to fears and tremors which don’t come when you’re younger. My fear tonight … ever since I knew you would be coming here … it’s like something I felt in Java in those last months. Something against which I was helpless. There was no use mustering strength to fight because the time for that was over. You can call this superstition if you like. I don’t know. I just know it’s here.”
The old man thumped a thin chest. It was rather horrible to watch. He was trembling. I thought what a mistake it had been for Jeff and me to use him, even in this minor way as a kind of signalling post. He was of an age to be uncommitted and he’d earned this, a peace in rooms designed by himself, to be alone with a dream of a whole world now being forgotten, as though it had been wiped out. I felt ashamed that Kim Sung had been free to come here, to make use of de Vorwooerd.
“It’ll be all right,” I said. “You’ll see. It was all right before. Look, I’ll go out and find Kim Sung. I can get to the estuary all right. You have a boat …”
“No! Let him come here. I’ll tell him what you have to say. What is it?”
“The lorries are coming over on the last ferry at Jerantut. They’re waiting in the jungle until an hour before dawn, when they’ll go down the track Kim knows near the ferry here. The bank there is like a dock. Kim knows what to do. When the junks are unloaded they’re to clear off. It’ll be light by then, but they can go downstream without their motors.”
“What about coming up? They have to use the motors then, don’t they? What if they’re heard?”
“They weren’t last time. Besides, launches use the river.”
“Your junks have diesels, it isn’t the same sound at all. Paul, you are chancing it again.”
“You have to a lot of times in this game.”
“Ach!” de Vorwooerd said, like a sigh. “Give me a schnapps after all. A small one. What about Kim? You’re not seeing him this time?”
“There’s no need. I’ve got everything laid on. I want him to clear off and he’s not to go near Pulao Tioman. The Jap ship may have been spotted anchored there. Keep well away. In ten days he’s to bring his junks to Singapore and anchor. He can come up to my office. If the local police seem interested he’s not to mind. Can you remember all that?”
“Of course. I think he’ll be pleased to do some normal trading. And he never liked going to that pagar of your brother’s.”
“Neither did I much. De Vorwooerd, can I bring a friend to see you to-morrow?”
“A friend? What is this? An excursion for pleasure?”
He looked almost angry, that beard stuck out at me.
“In a way. I think you’ll like her.”
“Haut ver dammer! A woman! No! I’m too old for parties.”
“I’m bringing her for lunch. All this will have been over for a long time by then. You can serve a good hot curry.”
When I got back to the rest house the tin miners were eating in the dining-room, and being noisy about it. They had the gramophone playing jive which blared out into the hot night. There wasn’t going to be any place where you could get away from that din. Another thing we wouldn’t get away from easily was that sense of three men with tongues hanging out for a woman. They’d probably spend the evening bellowing and then go off to the bazaar. It wasn’t quite the setting I’d thought about.
I went up the stairs slowly, and along to Kate’s door, knocking on it. There was no answer. I knocked again and then tried the handle. The door opened into emptiness.
For a moment I thought I’d made a mistake. It couldn’t be her room at all, the bed tidied and not a trace of her things, no case, nothing on the dressing-table. I stepped in and closed the door.
She might have moved, of course, hearing the din from below and wanting to be away from it, some place at the back. Then something made me turn my head.
There was a man standing in the opening to the bathroom. He was small and compact, black haired, white suited, dark skinned. He had a gun in his hand, pointing at me. He was even smiling. When he spoke his voice was low, a little nasal and droning.
“I think, Mr. Harris, that we can say we have caught up with you.”
He lifted his hand a little, the one with the gun.
“Don’t move, please. Nothing foolish. I’m not alone in this. I have my assistant.”
I saw the assistant from a corner of my eyes, a figure stepped out from behind a curtain. I knew he also had a gun. They were taking no chances.
“We don’t want any noise if it can be avoided, Mr. Harris. Though we’re not afraid of it, you understand?”
“Who the hell are you?”
He came a little into the light from a bright central fixture, as though to let me see for myself. He had the composure of the trained killer, that was what I thought then.
Malay? Javanese? Not easy to say. A little European blood perhaps, but not too much, just enough to be conscious of it all the time, to be on the defensive in his world where that was no asset. I knew where he came from. And where the other came from, too, a bruiser, with a professionally mangled face, no smile and no manners. The boss had the manners, and used them softly.
“I would like you to listen to me very carefully, Mr. Harris. We’re going to your room now. You’re going to pack.”
“Where’s my friend?”
“I can promise that you’ll find that out soon. Meantime, listen to me, please. I have said that I don’t want noise, but that I’m not afraid of it. If I have to I will shoot you in this building. That means that many people will be involved. It will then become a matter for the Malay police. I think, when you consider it, you won’t want that, Mr. Harris. There’s your friend, Mr. de Vorwooerd, for instance. An old man. A pity to involve him.”
“De Vorwooerd is a personal friend, that’s all.”
“You underestimate us, Mr. Harris. The Dutchman is a link in your chain. But he doesn’t interest us greatly at the moment. Not if we get things our way, that is, with quietness. You see, we don’t want to involve anyone in this country. It’s really against our interests at the moment that we should. And yours too, perhaps?”
“Where’s Kate? What have you done with her?”
“Please keep your voice down. There is certainly a great noise going on downstairs, but one of the boys might be passing. It would be a pity if he heard you shouting. We want to give the impression that everything is quite regular, that only a change of plans has made you decide to leave the rest house. The best way for us … and for you. Do you get my meaning? You are going to sign out and pay your bill. And all the time both of us will be beside you,
Mr. Harris, your friends, but quite ready to shoot.”
Those two kept close, but not too close, all the time. I did what I was told and packed. We went downstairs and stood at the reception desk, settling up with a flustered-looking head boy who was also trying to cope with the party in the dining-room. If I had wanted to send him some signal he wouldn’t have got it.
I had no gun. The quiet man knew it. My things had been searched and it’s not easy to hide a gun when you’re wearing a white shirt and fairly tight slacks.
I was thinking of Kate and de Vorwooerd as I paid over money. The fear I had pushed me towards a kind of inner panic I’d only felt a few times before. There was no shape to things, nothing I could get hold of. Had they made Kate pack like this and go out into the night?
“Ready, Mr. Harris?”
We went across the empty lounge, the bruiser making a noise, but not the other. I could never be quite sure where the quiet man was. A miner shouted with laughter and the beat of that jive pounded on. Then, from the veranda, I saw Kate’s car. It was parked at the foot of stone steps. Light came down from a porch lantern to shine on the side of her face as she sat there behind the wheel.
“Kate!”
“Don’t hurry!” the quiet man ordered.
But I went down those steps two at a time. I was almost by the car when I felt the prod in my back, a jab.
“Foolish, Mr. Harris. It was nearly the finish for you.”
“Kate! For God’s sake, look at me!”
She was sitting with her hands on the wheel, but she didn’t turn her head. Then something seemed to explode in my brain. Kuantan! I’d told her where we were going. I’d told her that back in Singapore. And no one else!
“Kate! Turn your head, can’t you? Don’t sit there like that! Say you didn’t know about this. They came on you in your room, didn’t they? You’re being forced to drive …?” I took a long, slow breath. “Say it!”
She didn’t look at me. I only saw her lips move. Her voice was quite calm.
“I’ve nothing to say to you at all, Paul.”
The muzzle of the gun was cold in my back.
“Get in, Mr. Harris.”
The car windows were down. As we moved off one of the miners came out on the veranda. He shouted:
“I say, chaps. There goes that girl. Do you think we’ve driven them off?”
I was between the bruiser and the quiet man. There was another up in front beside Kate. No one said anything. I closed my eyes.
Kuantan. I’d told her days ago. Plenty of time for her to tip them off. And it was Kate who wanted us to come away together, who’d made the decision, for whom it was so urgent. She’d needed to take the plunge. All of it leading me on gently. Even the staged reluctance coming up here.
Kate was on the story of Jeff and me, to send back to her paper. Like hell! Kate got me out of Singapore. I’d thought I was using her to do that, and hated it, hated that part.
Anger spat in my mind. This was what you got one way or the other no matter how often you went back for it. It even happened in the suburbs to the little men, the wife with her hair still in curlers, pouring your coffee and watching the toast pop up, watching her man who was once again going out into the world to fight for her via the eight-ten train. She said she hated to see you working so hard and all the time was thinking about what your insurance would bring in spread out on the markets at five per cent. That was love, that was what they offered.
I was a little luckier, none of my women had been able to produce the money nag. But I’d seen it all around me. It was virulent in Singapore, all the little men with big salaries that wouldn’t stretch, hanging on to solvency by their teeth while their wives played bridge. Their wives talked about money at bars and at club dances, a kind of theme song leading to falling hair and thrombosis.
That’s what they offered. My mind shouted it. Better to be cheated like this and get it over than have the thing drag on, while you kept polishing your little hopes. Better to be handed over to the executioner.
She’d been clever about holding me off, too, the girl who came from Cape Cod where all the spinsters were virgins.
And then I felt sick, sick from the anger and the things I’d been saying to myself.
We got to the first ferry and had to wait for it, five people silent in a car, the engine off and the lights dimmed, and the darkness pressing in all round. The man in the front offered Kate a cigarette and she took it and lit it. There was a tiny oil lamp on the ferry as it came over towards us, with a faint clanking of chains. It was hot in the car, even with the windows down, no breeze, and three bodies packed in together.
My junks would be coming up past this point as the moon was going, their diesels chugging. That is, if they got this far. There was no one to warn Kim or the old man in his house built as a refuge. Maybe there was no real need for a warning and Kim would get away again. That might be what they wanted, to see how we did it, to follow and watch and find out everything.
They might leave de Vorwooerd alone. I could hope.
The ferry touched our bank. Kate switched on the engine and eased the car down. The Japs had dive-bombed this ferry once, in the dark like this, but accurately, pasting us for about an hour, while I waited in a slit trench. A lot of men had been killed. It was something to think about, the good men who had been killed, while you went on for years, and blundered.
I had the feeling then that with Jeff gone so had my luck, as though he’d held the key which turned everything, which let me take chances and get away with them. I was out in a corridor of living on my own now, without Kate, without anything. And perhaps that was best, it didn’t leave you so vulnerable.
We left the ferry, bumping up on to the roadway again. I was certain now that the little man beside me had orders not to kill if he could help it. De Vorwooerd had been right, there were things planned for me, quite big things. The gun that nuzzled my ribs there in the car wouldn’t go off unless there was real provocation. There was a slight inhibition on the impulse to pull the trigger which I just might be able to use.
The man in front ordered Kate into a turning. His English wasn’t very good, the man obviously lacked the educational advantages which we’d been so lavish with in these parts. It could be, of course, that he spoke Dutch well.
I looked out as we bumped over a rough track. This part was like a map in my mind and I remembered the air-strip and this shattered road leading to it. There were no trees about us now, just the lalang grass, some of it as high as the car.
We’d left a lot of these air-strips in Malaya for the jungle to attack but not entirely vanquish. They sat in strange wildernesses, with about them the mouldering attap huts once used as living quarters. Everything metal like the green painted hangars had been carted away, but on this field the car headlights picked up a rusting fire cart sunk down on to rotten rubber tyres. It must have been there all of those fifteen years while I had been so busy.
I recognised the plane. A lot of them had been sold as part of the British export drive, jobs with a wonderful angle of climb and able to land almost anywhere. The headlights showed that the plane was painted jungle green, but with no visible markings. It was a fifteen seater. I wondered if it had come in with all its seats occupied, and if it had, where the rest of the men were now. There were only three standing by the aircraft.
We went close to it. Kate was driving like someone who doesn’t need orders what to do, only has to be told a turning sometimes. She brought the car right in, almost to an open door in the plane’s belly.
I needed a diversion, and had to make it myself. The quiet man had heaved himself out and was waiting for me with the gun. I put my hands on the back of Kate’s seat and pulled myself forward, looking at the back of her head as I shouted:
“Maybe you’ll get insomnia back on Cape Cod. Maybe you’ll sweat this out a lot of nights!”
It might have been the anger in my voice, the real anger, which made the quiet man do what I wante
d. He stepped in and clouted me with the butt of his pistol, and even moving my head quickly I got half the force of that, a crack at the base of my neck. But it meant he didn’t have a finger on the trigger. I hit him in the stomach, as high up as I could get.
Then I ran for the lalang grass. There was a moment I could use before their reaction, a moment of shouting and blundering about the car. If one of them had a torch in his pocket I’d had it, I knew that. But I got to the grass, falling into it, before the lights came on.
There was no wild firing behind me. They didn’t waste their bullets, these ones, or maybe they didn’t want the noise. I was safe enough in there for the moment, threshing my way, hidden.
Lalang cuts when you move through it fast, the long blades of it with an almost knife-like rigidity, slashing at you. You use your hands and feel them gashed at once.
I stopped after a bit and it was the silence beyond which made me do that. They weren’t coming in after me, just placing my position by the sounds I made. It brought me to a kind of panic that, the man on the edge of his escape who isn’t getting the reaction he expects from his pursuers. I tried to control my breathing and see a plan.
It ought to be lalang almost to the highway, then a bit of mangrove I could splash my way through. I would cross the road and work south, then reach the river bank down below the ferry. With luck I could stop Kim’s junks coming up.
Enough of a plan to be going on with. Let them listen, damn them! I could move as fast as they could through this, faster. And I had a good start.
It was very still, and dark. But I could hear the river at a distance, as a guide. The current is fast and it makes an endless low mumbling. I put down my head and went on, fast, using my closed fists against the grass, not really seeing where I was going at all, not caring. There was still no noise behind me, no shouts and this was somehow frightening, though I tried to keep that out of my mind.
The grass stopped and I fell. I hadn’t thought about the irrigation ditch which would almost certainly parallel the air-strip, the whole length. I went down into it, heavily.