The Black Isle (56 page)

Fire captain? I switched to the Cantonese station, where the female news announcer was much more agitated and emotional.

Redhill. Four hundred and thirteen dead. For the first time, I wished I had a television set so I could see what was actually unfolding.

I got dressed and dashed out to hail a taxi.

“Wah!” the cabdriver exclaimed as soon as we drove up to Wonder World.

A giant gray cumulus was rising beyond the park’s crimson walls. The car couldn’t move any farther. The streets were crammed with people—refugees, looters, gawkers like me—neither coming nor going but standing agape, blocking the traffic. It was hard to know which was louder, the police sirens or car horns, or if the smoke we were inhaling came from the fire or the stalling vehicles.

I hopped out of the taxi, pushing my way through the throng—some living, some dead—until I came face-to-face with a grim Sikh policeman.

“No” was all he had to say.

Behind him lay an obstacle course of fire engines and snaking hoses, all flaccid. Firemen in black helmets and khaki shorts dragged their feet. They’d already written the project off as a lost cause—too many hours of too much fire and too little water. Soaked in sweat and dejection, some of them threw off their helmets and mopped their wet heads.

Beyond this barricade, the black-tipped flames leapt hungrily, very much alive. As walls melted away, structures toppled like dominoes. Each time one came crashing down, voices inside screamed.

Survivors squeezed out through holes the firemen had sawed in the slum’s walls. In their arms were whatever they could carry—chairs, table frames, mattresses, funerary urns. An old woman in pajamas clutched a mountain of photo albums; another pulled along a clothesline of air-cured ducks, dragging the whole lot in the mud. There was surprisingly little panic. The refugees looked unnervingly calm, not even stopping to argue. The act of escaping had pushed them into placidity. Or perhaps deep in their hearts, they were relieved to have been forced to flee this miserable ark.

The dead were the ones who wailed. I tried to avoid them, but they were all around me. Mothers shrieking for their sons; sons shrieking for their mothers. As during the war, the newly dead were too consumed by shock to notice their surroundings. I would be better off returning in a few days to console them.

The moment I got home, I rang Kenneth’s office. Though I had no actual proof—Kenneth being Kenneth would have made absolutely certain there would be no proof—I had no doubt the fire was his doing. Like Taro, he was much too clever to get his own hands dirty. He would have bribed a few anonymous thugs, hungry, amoral kids seeking an excuse to play with fire. Our city abounded with candidates.

“I’m afraid Prime Minister is not available, madam,” came his secretary’s matronly voice. “Whom should I say is calling?”

 Always a tricky question for someone who was supposed to be invisible.

“Lady Midnight.” As soon as I said it, I realized how ridiculous it sounded.

“Oh, yes, in fact, Prime Minister did tell me to expect a call from you. He’s on a diplomatic mission to Java, but due to the incident at Redhill, he’s cutting short his trip and will return this evening.”

Of course. Being out of the country was the perfect alibi.
The incident at Redhill
. Her bureaucratic coldness made my blood boil.

“What about Iskandar Ibrahim or Zhang Ming? Can I speak to either of them?”

“I’m afraid both Iskandar and Zhang are no longer here. They tendered their resignations two days ago. Personal reasons.”

Issa and Cricket, both? “Can you tell Ken I expect a call from him, at my home. A house call, preferably.”

The secretary went silent, stunned by my directness, my lack of respect. She recovered soon enough. “Certainly,” she said, then added, in a mocking lilt, “Lady Midnight.”

Kenneth never called. Nor did he show up in person. Of course I realized he was run ragged during that national catastrophe, rushing to the scene to pose for pictures as he consoled the ones who’d lost everything, racing to the podium to declare, teary-eyed, a Day of National Mourning, promising the victims wonderful new flats, then hurrying yet again to the secret conference of his planners where he gave the okay to his waiting bulldozers.

Reelection time was nearing and this was business as usual.

The
Tribune
was packed with his photos during those weeks—sleepless eyes, gray ash in hair. The boy prime minister was no more. He looked at least sixty. With my own head of white hair, I knew a bit about paying the price.

I typed out my terse letter of resignation and hand-delivered it to the guard stationed outside Parliament House.

Lady Midnight was no more. I burned the black clothes, the file folders with all the lists and invoices. Everything related to my ghost-hunting career was gone. Exorcised.

By ignoring my advice, Kenneth had sent me a clear signal: He could and would do whatever he wanted. Cricket’s and Issa’s sudden resignations only confirmed this; at least, I told myself, I wasn’t the only one who felt cast aside.

After dropping off my letter, I went to see Issa at his Arab Street apartment and tried to persuade him to have tea at the Kandahar coffee shop. He agreed only when I told him that I, too, had severed my ties with our old friend.

“Better late than never, I suppose,” he said. “But I know how
flexible
your vows are, Cassandra. Remember when you swore you’d never get involved with spirits again? Then before I knew it, there you were,
profiting
from your gift. I never said anything because it’s none of my business, but I was disappointed. You’ll never know how much I regret teaching you. Because in the end, you’re just like the rest of them.”

The accusation stung. I was nothing like Kenneth. “Quelling them is
not
the same as calling them up. I was working to clean the Isle up. I did it for all of us.”

“Lie to yourself all you like.”

I looked him in the eye, wondering if I still had a friend in him—and wondering, too, if I’d been lying to myself.

“What really happened at Redhill?”

He smiled and folded his hands. “No comment.”

Cricket was even less forthcoming, though I’d never have guessed it from his effusive new manner. I met him at the tea room of the Metropole hotel, where decades ago I’d gone looking for Odell and found instead his widow.

Each time I brought up Kenneth or Redhill, he steered the conversation to property values or my health, and offered me more Earl Grey, more scones—anything to get me off the subject. He talked about his family and the rigors of splitting time between two households: His first wife, whom I’d seen at Kenneth’s wedding, was Indian, from a Hindu background, and he had married his second, a “very bossy little” Roman Catholic Peranakan, just before the government outlawed polygamy.

Two families! As with Issa, I was moved by how we had drifted apart over the years, how I hadn’t made any effort to keep abreast of his life, his thoughts. The darkest effect of my time with Kenneth suddenly became clear—the casualty wasn’t my heart but my
world
. During those years, with secrecy guiding both my work and my life, I had turned isolationist, voluntarily becoming my own island. Two families. Too late to close this chasm now.

“When I was younger, I used to worry about being lonely, and now look at me!” Cricket chuckled, and lit up a cigar. “I just don’t have the patience for politics anymore. My wives and my children, they take up all my time and energy.” He poured me more tea. “I’m glad you’ve expanded your wardrobe—black was not a happy color. Now that you’ve come back to life, you should think about settling down, too. It’s not too late, you know. It’ll do wonders for erasing bad memories, believe me.”

Over the next years, I followed Cricket’s exploits in the news. He went into the soft-drink business and did quite well for himself, eventually owning the largest bottling plant on the Isle. Each time I drank a bottle of Fanta Grape, I thought of him smiling at me.

Issa, on the other hand, disappeared. I’d called at his apartment again but the landlord told me he’d moved out in a hurry, leaving no forwarding address. Nobody in his neighborhood, not even the owner of the Kandahar coffee shop, had any idea where or why he had gone. Even odder, I thought, none of them appeared to care in the slightest. Issa, a pillar of the tight-knit community and former right hand of the prime minister, had upped and vanished and nobody cared. It could only mean one of two things. Either they hated him or were harboring him from outsiders like me.

“People come and go here all the time,” said an old Arab at the Kandahar, the
teh halia
bubbling with gingery heat in his glass. “Didn’t you hear? PM says our island’s the crossroads; we’re the
blahdy
center of the
blahdy
world.”

Without his former comrades, the prime minister embarked on a building spree, like all the best dictators. To be fair, he built no monuments in his own honor or stadiums in which to deliver his sermons. It was his vanity that he should always appear humble, pragmatic, never vulgar. And so he erected apartments, schools, hospitals, and factories from north to south, making the entire island a testament to his caring.

His new idea was to turn the Isle into a base for foreign businesses—British and American petroleum refineries, Swiss banks, Japanese electronics firms. In return, Kenneth made these companies employ a high quota of Islanders, even in management, righting the exclusionary wrongs of old British rule. If he couldn’t sail the Isle to the developed world, he would bring the developed world to it.

I found most of Kenneth’s plans admirable; they brought prosperity and stability to our country. What I objected to was the disinterment of graves in cemeteries for nothing nobler than golf courses and shopping centers, playgrounds to subdue a restless, gentrifying middle class—and worse, the Medusa’s head of motorways he was planting near the city center, over where Redhill had been. With each such project, I called his office with new warnings. He was playing with fire. Never once did he call me back.

I had to do something. One afternoon, I made my way to the construction zone that was the Redhill Memorial Highway—oh, the false piety of the name! There, looking at the progression of concrete Xs each five stories high, I was hailed by two ghosts who’d perished in the blaze, a schoolboy and an old man.

As gray dust from the excavating cranes and dozers fell over our heads like snow, an echo of the fire that had brought us all here, they spoke to me:

“I was a light sleeper so I heard them,” said the boy in Teochew, his emotions still raw. “They came in the night, like shadows. At first I thought they were thieves, you know, the ones going round, but then they threw a burning match into our room. I tried to wake my mother and my two small sisters. But the fire…It’s not fair! I didn’t get to run or say good-bye. My mother and sisters were killed in their sleep. That must be a happier way to die because I haven’t seen them here, and I’ve been waiting. I don’t leave in case they come back, but to be honest, every day, my memory grows weaker.”

What the older ghost had to say was grimmer still: “Two live babies were buried at the base of these pillars last month. I tell you, I saw them put those crying twin babes in the ground. A Taoist geomancer came in and blessed them; then they threw the soil over them. I know of this superstition from my old home village. In Swatow, we believed in such things because we were uneducated brutes, but I didn’t think people would believe in the same rubbish here. Now, I’m an old man and I’m not bitter about dying, but I want everyone still alive to know that wrong has been done here. People must know! Those poor babies may have been orphans, but their lives were robbed! It’s a horrible, meaningless sacrifice.”

I knew the testimonies of dead men would mean nothing to Kenneth, who was too occupied with the big picture to truly be a great man. But they weren’t worthless to me.

I got down on my knees. I said a prayer for the dead twins and for my two confidantes, who, surprised that anyone cared, began to fade before my eyes.

EVEN TO THOSE WHO KNEW HIM WELL
, Kenneth Kee became increasingly hard to grasp. While ideas of free love and personal liberation were flourishing in the West, he fed himself on the works of Han Fei, the ancient Chinese philosopher known for his cunning statecraft. Kenneth called it pragmatism; I called it paranoia.

For here’s how Han Fei spelled out the qualities of the ideal leader:

He is so still that he seems to dwell nowhere, so empty that no one can seek him. He reposes with non-action above and his ministers tremble with fear below.

Han Fei also said one should hire only minions whose loyalty could be bought and exile those who exceeded their duties; their facility, after all, meant they could switch sides. I often found myself wishing Kenneth’s head had been filled with Machiavelli instead. It would have kept him much nicer.

So it came as a great surprise to me when, early in the year 1972, he called me out of the blue.

“I have your sisters.”

“What do you mean?”

“My people seem to have located them. Or at least, their last known address.”