The Jade Figurine (11 page)

“I don’t know yet; there are ways.” The fever was spreading hot and enervating through my body now, and my eyelids seemed to be fluttering up and down like window shades over distorted glass. Tina finished putting a bandage on my temple, took the towel from where I had put it on the table, and wiped some of the sweat off my forehead. Then she stroked my hair, and her fingers were cool, cool.

“Dan,” she said, and there was alarm in her voice. “Dan, you’ve got to get to bed. You . . . you look awful.”

“Yeah.”

“Can you stand up all right?”

“Think so.”

“I’ll help you into the bedroom.”

“Can sleep on the settee, once I’m rid of these clothes . . .”

“No, you’ll sleep in the bed.”

I got up on my feet, leaning against her momentarily, the softness of her, the firmness of her. The trembling worsened, spreading to every extremity of my body now, and my knees felt strange and uncontrollable. The room seemed to shimmer slightly, in distortion.

“The bathroom first,” I said, “I have to get out of these clothes . . . the blood . . .”

I took two steps away from Tina, and the room dissolved slowly, curiously, into an oscillating grayness, into a netherworld of shadow images like shapes seen through a dense fog. Tina’s voice clutched at me, fading, fading, something dropped into a deep well, and the grayness began to spin, I began to spin,

spinning and

falling and

jarring impact and

the void.

. . . rushing, rushing, the strip rushes up, the wheels touch and bounce and touch again, we’re almost down but we hit something, the Dakota begins to roll, I can’t hold it, oh God, oh God, the world tilts crazily, lights spin and spin and spin, there is an impact, no, no, Pete screams, he screams, there is the stench of high octane fuel, no, I feel myself being lifted, lifted, no, blackness and screaming and blackness and screaming and blackness and screaming . . .

Wake up, wake up.

I’m awake. Or am I? Reality and illusion commingled, and I can’t separate them. I don’t know where I am. Yielding softness beneath me, the faint creak of springs—bed? Yes, bed, but a bed should be warm and I’m cold, cold, so cold. And trembling. My whole being vibrates, muscles spasm, appendages jerk like an epileptic in a clonic seizure. Sounds fumble incoherently from my throat. Cold, cold, trembling, cold.

A blanket floats out of nowhere and covers me. A second materializes from the darkness. I pull them tight around me, so cold, but the trembling does not stop. A voice shimmers into the half-reality. “Dan,” it says. “Dan.”

Female voice, Tina’s voice. “Tina,” I hear myself say. “I’m so cold.”

“. . . no more blankets . . .”

“So cold,” I say, “so cold.”

Springs creak louder, movement beside me, hands touching me, warm hands, oh warm hands, and warm flesh too, stretching out, fitting to me, warming me, the hands stroking my neck and shoulders, holding me, and Tina’s voice whispering words I can’t quite understand. I clutch the warmth. Soft flesh, naked flesh. I hold it, I pull it to me, I cover myself with it. Warmth, warmth. A breast, a thigh, a hip, a spinal ridge. Tina. Warm body warming cold body, easing the trembling, soft Tina.

“Sleep,” she whispers. “Sleep, Dan.”

“Sleep . . .”

Cold gone, trembling gone, warm flesh, warm Tina, warm . . .

. . . and silent black.

I opened my eyes.

Morning. Or afternoon. Sunlight filtered through louvered shutters on a window across the room. Room. I felt a brief moment of disorientation, and then it passed and I realized I was in bed—a big double bed in a small bedroom. The sheets above and beneath my body were twisted and sodden. A pair of blankets were bunched at the foot of the bed and half-draped onto the floor, where I apparently had kicked them.

I lay quietly, not moving. There was a curious odor in my nostrils, and after a time I managed to decipher it as three parts sour fever-sweat and one part sandalwood perfume. My thoughts seemed to be clear now, and I could remember the events of the previous night—and remember, too, the dreams and the half-dream with Tina that seemed to have been reality after all.

Weakness made my body ache faintly, but it was the weakness of a broken fever rather than that of debilitation. I wondered if the sleep had done it, or if Tina had fed me some kind of antibiotic. My right arm throbbed distantly, like a vague but annoying toothache—the same sort of throbbing that plagued my temples. I lifted the arm a few inches off the bedclothes, flexing the fingers gingerly; in spite of a cramped stiffness throughout the limb, the musculature was unparalyzed and functioning sufficiently to allow me limited use of it.

I leaned my weight on my left side and raised myself slowly into a sitting position. A thin wave of gray-black dots washed dizzyingly in back of my eyes—and vanished; nausea spread through my stomach—and vanished. I got my legs around and onto the floor, held a breath, and launched myself into an upright position, hanging onto the headboard of the bed for support. I stood there like that, breathing rapidly now, dressed in nothing more than a pair of shorts—and the bedroom door opened and Tina looked in.

She said, “Dan, be careful!”

“I’m all right,” I told her. My voice sounded thick and hoarse. “I just need a minute to get my bearings.”

“You’d better let me help you—”

“I can make it, I think.”

She worried her lower lip, watching me. She had her dark hair pulled into a horsetail, and in a pair of white hip-hugger slacks and a white blouse she still looked like somebody’s teen-age daughter. “How do you feel?” she asked.

“Not as bad as I should.”

“You gave me an awful scare last night, passing out the way you did.”

“I can imagine. How did you get me to bed?”

“I don’t know, really. You were very heavy. It must have taken me half an hour to get you in here and undressed.”

“It was a bad night all around.”

“You were trembling and half-delirious, and I knew you had a fever. There were some pills in the medicine cabinet and I forced some of them down your throat. I guess they worked.”

“I guess they did.”

“I tried to sleep on the couch,” Tina said, “but you were moaning and tossing so badly in here that I was afraid you were going into a coma or something. I’ve never seen anybody shake the way you were shaking. I put some blankets on you, but that didn’t seem to do any good.” Her cheeks colored faintly. “So I got into bed with you and held you until you calmed down and stopped trembling and slept.”

“I remember, vaguely.”

“Nothing happened. I just held you.”

“I didn’t think anything had, in my condition.”

“You kept saying a name, over and over. Pete.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Listen, what time is it?”

“About one P.M.”

“What did you do with my clothes?”

“I had to put them in the garbage. They were torn and caked with blood and mud.”

“Do you think you could go out and buy me some new ones?”

“I suppose so.”

“Good girl.”

“But I’d better make you something to eat first.”

“All right. I should have some food, I guess.”

“Eggs and coffee?”

“Fine.”

She watched me solicitously as I released my hold on the headboard and took a step, and another, and a third. My legs wobbled a little, but they did not give way under my weight. When Tina saw that I could get around without assistance, she backed out and closed the bedroom door. I shuffled across to a tiny bathroom, moving like a coronary patient, and leaned on the heart-shaped basin to have a look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror.

Not bad, not good. There was a swelling on my right temple, and the bandage Tina had applied only partially covered the discolored area there. A bruise of unknown origin made a faint, inverted half-moon on my left cheekbone, and my lips were cracked and puffy. My cheeks seemed hollow, the skin parched and dry. The heavy black beard stubble coating each gave me the look of a derelict, and the wild tangle of my hair, the blood-veined whites of my eyes, added substance to the image.

Tina had swabbed iodine on the puncture marks on my left wrist where the
langsat
mongrel had gripped me with its teeth, and there was no pain in the vicinity. I couldn’t see the bullet wounds in my right arm because of the bandages, but there was no swelling and no localized pain. Infection seemed unlikely.

I found a washcloth and filled the basin full and washed myself awkwardly with my left hand; there was a stall shower in there, but I didn’t think it a wise idea to get any of the bandages wet. Inside the cabinet was a bottle of mouthwash, and I used some of that to dispel the dry, bitter, after-fever taste in my mouth. There was also a Japanese razor with a new blade. I lathered my face with soap and spent ten minutes trying to shave. I couldn’t move my right arm enough to maneuver the razor, and using my left was slow and clumsy. The result was a patchy shave and a couple of bleeding nicks that I covered with moistened shreds of toilet paper.

The shorts I wore were soiled and malodorous, but I decided to leave them on anyway. I wrapped a bathtowel around myself, brushed my hair down, and took my time walking through the bedroom and into the small living room of the apartment. The weakness in my legs seemed to have abated; all things considered, I wasn’t doing badly.

Tina had a plate of brown-crusted eggs and a mug of thick coffee waiting on the half-table. The apartment contained a scorched-food smell. “I’m not much of a cook,” she said apologetically.

“These look fine.”

“So do you. Much better.”

“I’ve got a tough and durable hide.”

“Dan—have you thought about what you’re going to do?”

“Yeah, I’ve thought about it.”

“And?”

“I’m not sure yet. Most of the ways off Singapore by plane or a fast boat cost a hell of a lot more than I’ve got or could get on short notice—unless I want to commit a robbery or two, and I’m not up to that yet.”

“Couldn’t you get somebody to fly you out, say, on credit?”

“No way. Credit is the honest man’s albatross. The men who deal in human cargo can’t afford the luxury.”

“But there must be
somebody . . .”

“One man, maybe—but you’d have to have collateral, and be willing to pony up both the fee and a bonus not long after he delivered you out. I don’t have anything for collateral, and I couldn’t make immediate payment.”

“Maybe if you went to him, pleaded with him . . .”

“Christ, little girl, do you think people like him are in the smuggling business for charitable reasons? He’d laugh in my face and kick my ass out the door.”

“Is he an American?”

I gave her a sharp look. “Why?”

“Well, I just thought—”

“It’s that goddam article again, isn’t it? You’re still trying to pump me for information.”

“Not . . .”

“The hell you’re not.”

“Oh all right!” she said with defensive anger. “I suppose I am, a little. I’ve helped you, after all, when you had no one else, and I don’t want much in return, just somewhere I can start on my article, and you flare up and act righteous like you’re my father or something! Well, I’m not as stupid as you think I am! I know what smuggling is and I’m prepared to take the chances involved. Now I think you owe me a favor and I don’t think what I’m asking is too much, Mr. Connell; you said yourself that smuggling was a dirty business in Singapore and if I can do my part to—”

“All right, Jesus, all right! You want a name, God damn it, I’ll give you a name: Steve Shannon, Irish-American, Johore Bahru. He’s killed two men that I know of in cold blood; he’s smuggled everything from heroin to Communist guerrillas; he’s a bastard and a lecher and half a dozen other things. Go to him, ask him questions; hell laugh in your face if he doesn’t rape you first. And he’s one of the better ones. All right? Are you satisfied?”

She clamped her mouth tightly closed, and a thick silence settled in the room. I took a couple of deep breaths. I knew I shouldn’t have told her about Shannon, even though I had laid it on about him a little heavy, but I was in no mood for pressured argument and I still needed her help with fresh clothing. And she was a big little girl now and I wasn’t her father and what the hell was the point in trying to act the saviour? My own life was in jeopardy, I couldn’t afford to concern myself with hers or anybody else’s.

I said, trying to keep the tightness out of my voice, “Have you got a cigarette?”

“In my purse.”

“I could use one, if you don’t mind.”

She got up from the table and went into the bedroom and came out again with a package of Marlboros. I broke the filter off one and lit the shortened cigarette with one of her matches. Watching me, Tina said, “Dan . . . I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m more concerned about you than my article, I want you to believe that.”

“Sure, I believe it.”

“What are you going to do if you can’t get help from this man Shannon?”

“There’s another way. Not good, but then not too bad either.”

“What is it?”

“It’s better that you don’t know what it is. For your sake as well as mine.”

“Where will you be going?”

I shrugged. “As far as I can get on the money I’ve got.”

Tina folded and unfolded a paper napkin between her long fingers. “Are you sure you’re doing the right thing? I mean, wouldn’t it really be the best thing to just turn yourself in to the police? Innocent men don’t go to jail in this day and age.”

“Don’t they?” I asked sardonically. “You’ve got a lot to learn about life, little girl. Listen, I’m doing the only thing I can do under the circumstances. I don’t like the idea of it, but I’ve got no alternative. I want to keep on living, and if I have to run to do that, I’ll run.”

She sighed and pushed her chair back again. “I won’t try to change your mind,” she said. “It wouldn’t do any good anyway. Shall I go and buy those clothes for you now?”

“I think you’d better,” I told her. “Get me a gaudy sports shirt and one of those cheap jungle helmets and a pair of sunglasses. If you don’t want to attract attention in Singapore, the safest way to dress is like a tourist. Nobody pays any attention to tourists.”

Tina had removed my wallet and the few other things I had had in the pockets of my khakis and bush jacket. She produced them for me. There were one hundred and forty Straits dollars in the wallet—more than I usually carry, as a result of my two days of coolie labor at Harry Rutledge’s godown. I gave Tina thirty of that, and my clothing sizes, and she left for the small shops which line Geylang Road.