The Jade Figurine (6 page)

H
E WAS SITTING on a batik-covered rattan chair, smoking one of his English cigarettes and wearing his gingerbread-boy smile. His suit was the color of cultured pearls this time around, and he had substituted a blue-silk ascot for the tie he had worn the previous day; he looked painfully out of place among the shabby possessions of a man he undoubtedly considered to be one of Singapore’s
profanus vulgus
.

I stayed where I was, outside the doorway, and looked the room over. It seemed otherwise empty. Van Rijk said, “I’m quite alone, Mr. Connell. You needn’t fear.” He spread his arms in a relaxed, corroborating gesture.

I took a couple of steps forward, cautiously, poised. Nothing happened. I decided he was telling the truth, but I left the door open just the same. “How did you get in here?”

“The locks in these Chinatown tenements are flimsy at best,” he answered and shrugged. He tapped his cigarette out daintily in the shell ashtray on an adjacent table; light from the overhead bulb reflected brightly off the jade lion’s head ring on his little finger. “I have damaged nothing, I assure you.”

“You’ve got a lot of balls after what happened last night. Or don’t your boys confess their mistakes?”

“Mistake is precisely the proper word,” Van Rijk said. “What took place near the Old Cathay last evening was a most unfortunate incident. It should never have happened. Khee was not acting on my orders when he, ah, fired at you, Mr. Connell. I severely reprimanded him for it.”

“I’ll bet you did.”

“He’s quite simple-minded, you know. You hurt him rather badly, both physically and in his Asian pride, and he reacted as one might expect a simpleton to react.” Van Rijk shook his head sadly and sighed. “I apologize deeply for Khee’s foolishness—and yes, for my own rash words yesterday. I was highly agitated, and I, too, allowed my baser emotions to briefly take hold.”

“You’re so full of shit I can smell you from here, Van Rijk. I ought to throw you out on your fat ass.”

He looked pained. “Please, Mr. Connell. Can’t we speak and act like gentlemen?”

“Just what is it you want?”

“Merely a few moments of your time. That is why I came alone tonight. I did not think you would care to talk freely with Khee and Tulloh in my presence.”

“Talk about what? La Croix, maybe?”

“You have heard of his death?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“The King girl killed him, of course.”

“What King girl?”

“Really now, Mr. Connell, let’s not do any more fencing.”

“Listen, I don’t know anything except that you were looking for La Croix yesterday morning, and last night he turns up dead. He was a friend of mine, Van Rijk. I don’t like to see my friends murdered.”

“You think I had him killed?”

“Didn’t you?”

“Certainly not! If I had, would I be here talking to you this evening?”

“Why not?”

“There would be no need for it. Khee and Tulloh are most thorough. When they ask questions, the proper answers are shortly forthcoming.” He shuddered faintly, as if recalling a past interrogation conducted by Khee and Tulloh.

I thought: If Inspector Tiong talked to him about La Croix’s death—and about the attack on me—he couldn’t have found out much, or been able to prove anything at all. Van Rijk wouldn’t be running around loose if it were otherwise. And he couldn’t have mentioned my name to Van Rijk, either, or the fat bastard wouldn’t have come here alone and smiling. I was going to have to do some of Tiong’s work for him, the way I had done with Marla King.

I said, “What was La Croix to you? Why were you looking for him?”

“He had something which belongs to me.”

“Such as?”

“An item of great value.”

“What sort of item?”

“Perhaps he told you himself, yesterday morning.”

“He didn’t tell me anything.”

“Or perhaps Marla King told you.”

“Who’s Marla King?”

I watched the mildness go out of those liquidy blue eyes of his for a brief instant, as it had the day before at the waterfront eating stall; but he regained control of his temper and gave me one of his gingerbread smiles. “Do you take me for a fool, Mr. Connell?”

“No,” I said truthfully. “You’re a lot of things, Van Rijk, but a fool isn’t one of them.”

“Then why do you persist in playing the innocent?”

“All right. Nobody told me anything. I don’t have any idea what it is La Croix had that belongs to you.”

“That is just as well,” he said. “It is better for all concerned that you do not know.”

It was the sort of thing I had expected him to say—and that was the reason I hadn’t admitted knowing about the figurine. Van Rijk was a dangerous man, and the less he thought I knew, the better it was for me. It was obvious that he didn’t think, as Marla King had, that I had the Burong
Chabak;
he was after something else, and I was fairly certain I knew what it was.

I said, “Make your pitch, Van Rijk.”

“Pitch?”

“You came here for a specific reason. Let’s hear it.”

“Very well.” He looked at me steadily. “I came here to offer you twenty thousand Straits dollars.”

“For what?”

“For the delivery into my hands of Marla King.”

“Because you think she killed La Croix.”

“Oh, she killed him. Most certainly.”

“And because you think she’s got this item of yours.”

“Quite correct.”

“What makes you think I know where to find her?”

“She came to you once. She will come again.”

“Why should she have come to me in the first place?”

“For the same reason as Monsieur La Croix.”

“Passage out of Singapore?”

“Exactly.”

“Why couldn’t she get out by the normal means?”

“She has very little money, and she will not be able to dispose of the item now in her possession on the island. She also happens to be on Singapore illegally.”

“Do you think I agreed to take her out?”

“I have no idea. But I do know that she could not have offered you anything approximating the sum of twenty thousand Straits dollars. And we are all mercenaries, are we not, Mr. Connell?”

I smiled at him. “She could have promised me half the worth of this item of yours,” I said. “That might be a hell of a lot more than twenty thousand Straits dollars.”

He blinked, and I knew that the idea hadn’t occurred to him before now. His soft mouth underwent a transformation, and the blue eyes were like chips of bright glass. “Did she make such an offer?” he asked softly.

I was pushing him too much again. I said, “No,” and crossed the room to the ice-cooler. When I had popped the cap on a bottle of Anchor Beer, I turned; Van Rijk was sitting forward in the rattan armchair, watching me intently.

“Well, Mr. Connell?”

I had a long drink from the bottle and went over to the settee near the window and sat down. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He relaxed. As far as he was concerned, our roles were fixed: master and hired menial. The power of the long green —a power I had, for too many years, used and abused with the same confidence and indifference as Van Rijk.

He removed a box of Players from an inside pocket of his suit jacket, opened it, and placed another of the cigarettes carefully between his lips; he fired it just as carefully with the jade-and-gold lighter. “I do not pay in advance for services not yet rendered,” he said. “When you have delivered the girl, I will see to it that you receive the amount I promised you.”

“Or a knife in the back.”

He gave me that injured look again. “You do me a great injustice, Mr. Connell. I am an honorable man.”

“Sure you are.”

“I would extend one word of warning, however.”

“I’m listening.”

“Should you be offered a percentage of the item which belongs to me, or by some method come into possession of it yourself, it would be most unwise for you to consider a double-cross. The grass may seem of a greener hue elsewhere, but green grass ofttimes conceals a shallow grave. Do I make myself clear?”

“The pointed homilies aren’t necessary, Van Rijk. I don’t underestimate you in the slightest.”

The gingerbread smile. “I am glad we understand each other.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Now how do I get in touch with you?”

“I will call you tomorrow evening at seven o‘clock,” he answered. “And each evening after that at the same time, should it be necessary. When Marla King contacts you again, you will arrange to meet her at an isolated location —Bukit Batok Hill, perhaps—at nine o’clock that same evening.”

“And then you keep the date.”

“Certainly.”

“Suppose she balks at the meeting place and wants it public?”

“Then it will be up to you to put her in my hands as best you can.”

“I get the feeling you don’t trust me much, Van Rijk.”

“No more than you apparently trust me.”

I shrugged. “Such is life in Southeast Asia.”

He liked that. He let me hear his burr-edged laugh. “Indeed,” he said. “Oh yes, indeed, Mr. Connell!”

“All right,” I told him. “We’ll do it your way. There’s just one thing.”

“Yes?”

“Keep your boys off my tail and off my neck. I wouldn’t want any more ‘mistakes’ like last night.”

“There will be no further difficulties, I assure you. Unless, of course, such measures are warranted.”

“You don’t have to beat it into the ground, Van Rijk. I told you I’ve got the message.”

“Yes, so you did.” He stood up. “I believe we have discussed everything of mutual interest, Mr. Connell. I will bid you a good evening.”

I made a gesture with my left hand and tilted the bottle of Anchor Beer. Van Rijk moved across the room, trailing curls of cigarette smoke, and went out without looking at me again and without saying anything else; you didn’t observe the amenities with hired rabble.

I said, “Up yours, chubs,” to the closed door and drank off the last of the beer. I was beginning to feel a deep fatigue. The work I had done for Harry Rutledge had been physically exhausting, and it had been a long day in several other respects. Tomorrow promised to be an even longer one. I didn’t much care for the prospect of setting foot inside the walls of the Central Police Station, but that was the one sure way of getting out from under this whole goddam thing and I knew that I didn’t have much choice if I wanted to keep on living clean in Singapore.

I was even going to enjoy it a little, the way the knitting ladies must have enjoyed the public guillotine executions during the French Revolution.

Heads were going to roll, all right.

And Van Rijk’s would be first in line.

T
HE LETTERING on the pebbled door glass said:

It was located at the end of a long, narrow corridor in the Central Police Station, one of several similar doors with similar lettering. I opened it and walked in without knocking. Tiong had kept me waiting for better than a half hour in an anteroom before he had consented to see me, and I was in no mood to observe the proprieties.

The office was small and spartan and meticulous. There were a metal desk and two metal visitor’s chairs and a wooden table with a gently whirring fan on its top, set under the only window. Venetian blinds were drawn against the glare of the early morning sun, but the fluorescent ceiling lights which illuminated the cubicle made it seem as hot and bright as noon in there.

Tiong looked up from where he sat behind the desk, and a small frown dipped the corners of his brown mouth. I shut the door and went to one of the chairs and sat down without being invited. He watched me and said nothing, but I could feel his dislike as if it were something tangible created by his small, hard, alert eyes.

I lit a cigarette and blew smoke a little to one side of him. He kept on watching me. There was a file folder open in front of him, and I knew without looking at it that it was my file. There were a lot of papers there—too many papers.

Tiong said at length, “I have just been refreshing my memory as to your past activities, Mr. Connell. I am not enjoying what I read here.”

I shrugged. “There’s nothing I can do to change what I once was.”

“Once
was?”

“Once
was.”

“Leopards seldom change their spots, Mr. Connell.”

“Listen, Inspector, I’m clean. I’ve been just another citizen for two years and you know it.”

“I know nothing of the kind.”

“If that file is half as complete as you’d like me to believe, you damned well
do
know it.”

“The file is most complete,” he said. “There is very little about your past of which I am not aware.”

I wondered how much truth there was in that statement. I wondered if he knew, or cared to know, about the scared young kid who had gone to Korea in 1954 to fly an F-86 sabrejet, and of the things he had seen and done that had too quickly, too cynically, turned him into a man; about the girl who had promised to wait for that boy-man in San Francisco, his home—and the three trite paragraphs on a single sheet of scented pink stationery received in Inchon, South Korea, that had shattered what idealism remained in him and destroyed all his desire to return to the place of his youth; about the aimless wandering for two years following his discharge, looking for something, for roots, for peace of mind, looking and never finding; about the Belgian who ran a small air freight line out of Kuala Lumpur, and who had offered excitement and the fast dollar flying weapons into Indonesia during their struggle for independence with the Dutch; about the substitutes of easy living and big money for the things that should have counted in his life over six years and seventy-nine nighttime runs across the Straits of Malacca, dodging bullets, soldiers and himself during Sukarno’s
konfrontasi
with the Federation of Malaysia; about the prospect of even more of the bitch goddess Money, and the graduation to the black market smuggling of contraband and illicit art objects, and the contacts this lucrative hauling made for him; about the move to Singapore and the purchase of a couple of DC-3s and his own freight line in partnership with a quiet, honest young guy named Pete Falco, whom he had known in Korea —simply because Pete had a solid reputation with the government, and it had seemed like a very good idea to bring him in on the legitimate end of things; about the warm and genuine friendship that had grown and prospered between him and Pete, and the way he had thought he would be helping his friend by bringing him in on the smuggling angle he had so carefully concealed previously; about Pete’s refusal, and the way he had kept after him and finally convinced him to make that one run to Penang with the load of contraband silk; about Pete’s protests and the crash and the waking up in a hospital in Wellesley Province three days later with a broken leg and a few minor burns, hearing Pete’s scream of terror echoing in his mind, finding out that Pete was dead; about dying a little inside, and understanding what he was, what he had become, and giving it all up because the bitch goddess meant nothing to him any more—there was not much of anything that was meaningful in his life any more . . .

I realized Tiong was speaking to me, and again I pushed the memories back into the dark corners of my mind. “What did you say?”

“I asked you, Mr. Connell, why you came here this morning.”

“To get you off my neck, that’s why.”

“I do not believe I understand.”

“I can put the principal suspect in the death of the Frenchman, La Croix, right in your lap,” I said. “And in the process, I can tie Van Rijk into it—and into the theft of the
Burong Chabak
from the Museum of Oriental Art.”

Tiong’s back stiffened into a regimental pose. “What do you know of the
Burong Chabak?”

“I know that La Croix was one of the ones who stole it,” I told him. “The other was a woman named Marla King. Your friend the tobacco merchant was involved, too—I’m not sure how.”

Tiong stared at me for a long moment. Then he folded his hands on top of the papers in my file and said patiently, “You will please explain how you came by this information.”

I told him about Marla King’s visit to the godown the previous afternoon, and about the talk I had had with Van Rijk in my flat. I said then, “I don’t think there’s any doubt that the girl will get in touch with me sooner or later. When she does, I’ll set up a meeting with her, just as Van Rijk wants me to do. Then I’ll wait for him to call, and tell him the location of the meeting, and you can be there waiting to catch the two of them together. That way, you ought to be able to get one or the other to incriminate himself.”

Tiong sat in silence, studying his folded hands in a speculative way. At least two minutes had crawled away before he raised his head to look at me again. “Why have you told me all of this, Mr. Connell?”

“Because I want to be left alone. Everyone keeps trying to involve me in this thing, and I don’t want to be involved.”

“That is the only reason?”

“Yes.”

“You realize, there is no reward for the recovery of the
Burong Chabak.”

“I’m not interested in rewards or jade figurines, or even that a great amount of justice gets done,” I said. “I don’t like Van Rijk and I don’t owe anything to Marla King. The way I see it, one of them killed La Croix—and because he was a friend of sorts, I’d like you to have his killer. That’s the sum total of my motivations.”

“I find it somewhat difficult to believe that a man of your background would turn his back on twenty thousand Straits dollars. That is the sum you said Van Rijk offered you, is it not?”

“That’s it. And it doesn’t interest me in the least.”

“Why not?”

“Money doesn’t mean much to me these days.”

“Money means something to every man.”

“In varying degrees.”

“You would have me believe that a man such as you, a man who smuggled arms and contraband for high prices, a man who once cast money about Singapore as if it were leaves on a pond—you would have me believe that man has no interest in money?”

“Why do you think I gave up my villa on Ponggol Point, and the Eurasian women, and the parties, and the smuggling? Why do you think I live in a Chinatown tenement and work coolie labor on the river?”

“Primarily because your commercial license was revoked, and you were forced to sell what remained of your possessions after the government seizure. It is also my theory that you had a falling out with certain of the men with whom you dealt, that you came into their disfavor.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

“Yes? What is your version, then?”

“Pete Falco is my version, though I doubt if you’d understand. But you can understand this: I don’t work the black market any more, I don’t fly any more, I don’t play games with the government any more. Those are facts, and because they are you can’t discredit them. It’s also a fact that I don’t give a damn for money, except what I need for food and shelter, and that’s why Van Rijk’s twenty thousand Straits dollars is so much sawdust as far as I’m concerned.”

Tiong’s eyes searched my face and found nothing he wanted. His own features were completely expressionless, but behind the mask lay doubt and suspicion. He was certain, in his one-track Asian cop’s mind, that I had some kind of underlying monetary motive for coming here as I had done. Once a
penjahat,
always and forever a
penjahat
—his philosophy was as simple and unyielding as that. And that righteously implacable certainty made him a dangerous man where I was concerned. If I had been trying to con him in any way, I would have been worried; as it was, even when he finally realized that I was being completely open and honest with him, his insular beliefs wouldn’t allow him to apologize to me, or to judge me in any different light. In his eyes I bore the indelible mark of Cain.

He said finally, his mouth thinner than it had been, “Van Rijk is a man who cannot be trusted—a vicious man behind a genteel façade. Perhaps you fear him, Mr. Connell, and rightly so after his alleged attack on you the other evening. Perhaps you thought that your payment for helping him locate the girl would not be the twenty thousand Straits dollars, but a death sentence instead. That would be a good reason for coming to me, would it not? A simple matter of self-preservation.”

“All right, there’s a little of that involved too—but not as much as you’d like to think. Van Rijk could be a snow bunny and I wouldn’t take a cent from him.”

“Self-preservation,” Tiong said again, as if he liked the sound of the words. Then abruptly he leaned forward, and I knew even before he spoke that he had finally succeeded in dredging up an underlying motive for my visit. “If you had murdered the French national in order to obtain the
Burong Chabak,
and you found the others involved in the theft beginning to apply pressure, what would you do, Mr. Connell?”

“You tell me,” I said thinly.

“You would want to eliminate them,” Tiong answered. “And the simplest method of doing that would be to turn them in to the
polis.
Then you would be free to dispose of the figurine at your leisure.”

“You’re forgetting that you didn’t connect me or La Croix to the theft of the
Burong Chabak
until I came into this office and told you he and Marla King had stolen it. Now wouldn’t I be a damned fool to make that connection for you, with the reputation I’ve got, if I’d committed murder to get the thing in the first place?”

“Shrewd men often adopt the guise of a fool.”

“Not in the Lion City.”

“The
Burong Chabak
is worth the chance.”

“For men like Van Rijk, maybe. Not for me.”

“Ah yes, you no longer care for money or material riches.”

I made an effort to control the anger mounting inside me. “Listen, Tiong, do you want my help in getting Van Rijk and Marla King, or don’t you? I’m tired of your goddam insinuations, and if you keep twisting things around so you can satisfy yourself that I’m up to something, I’ll walk out of here and you can go to hell after Van Rijk and King and the jade figurine before you’ll get any more co-operation out of me.”

He tried to stare me down, failed, and got to his feet and came around his desk to stand over me. I sat still, watching him without blinking; if he thought the psychological advantage of looking down on me was going to get him anything, he was sadly mistaken. “Very well,” he said, “I will assume for the moment that your intentions are as you stated them. We will question Van Rijk and Maria King, but I warn you, Mr. Connell, that if it develops you are more deeply involved in the theft of the
Burong Chabak
and the death of the French national than you profess, I will personally see to it that you spend the rest of your life with bars separating you from the decent citizens of Singapore.”

I said, “Okay, you’ve made your point.”

“I hope I have.”

“Do you want to work a setup the way I suggested?”

“It would seem to be the best way,” he agreed grudgingly.

“Then I’ll call you when Marla King makes contact.”

“And when do you think that will be?”

“Maybe tonight.”

He put a forefinger to his upper lip. “She denied knowing Van Rijk, is that correct?”

“She said she’d never heard of him.”

“How do you explain that?”

“I can’t explain it. Unless she’s a damned good actress, for reasons of her own.”

“Van Rijk obviously knows
her.”

“Obviously.”

“How is that possible?”

“Maybe La Croix double-crossed the girl and, in spite of her assurance to the contrary, made a deal on his own for the sale of the figurine to Van Rijk. If so, La Croix could have mentioned his partner in the theft; that would answer your question. It would also define his part in this business.”