The Jade Figurine (7 page)

“Do you believe he killed the French national?”

“I like him for it more than Marla King.”

“Then you think he is the one who has the
Burong Chabak?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“The girl, then, in spite of her denials?”

“It could be. But she seemed to think I’ve got it.”

“And Van Rijk did not.”

“No. According to him, King has it and she killed La Croix to get it. That’s the reason why he tried to get me to sell her out to him—or so he wanted me to think.”

“It is also possible that neither of them has it,” Tiong said.

“Meaning me again?”

He shrugged.

I said, “There’s another angle too: La Croix might have hidden the figurine somewhere before he was killed, and his killer was unable to determine the location. If that’s the case, you’re going to play hell finding it.”

“The Museum of Oriental Art would not like that,” Tiong said. “And neither would I.”

“It isn’t my problem either way.”

“That remains to be seen.”

“God damn it, Tiong—”

He turned away from me and walked behind his desk again. “Is there anything else you wish to tell me?”

“I don’t know anything else.”

“Very well. I will expect to hear from you again shortly.
Selamat jalan,
Mr. Connell.”

I stood up. The muscles in my neck and shoulders were bunched tightly with anger. Tiong was sitting now, peering at the papers in my file; he had dismissed me, and I was simply no longer there. I wanted to say something to him, but I was afraid that if I opened my mouth I would make things worse than they already were. I turned and went to the door and through it, slamming it shut behind me just hard enough to rattle the pebbled glass.

When I came out of the building, into the hot bright glare of morning, I paused to light a cigarette. The meeting with Tiong had not gone at all as I expected, and I wondered if I hadn’t made a mistake in coming to the Central Police Station today. But what choice had I had, really? I wanted nothing to do with Van Rijk, or Maria King, or the
Burong Chabak,
and since each of them had kept insistently touching my life the past couple of days, my only alternative had been to dump the whole thing in Tiong’s lap.

It would work out all right, I thought, if he forced a confession out of Van Rijk or Marla King and recovered the jade figurine intact. He would have no recourse, then, but to let me off the hook. If he didn’t get a confession—and more importantly, if he failed to recover the
Burong Chabak
—I had the uneasy feeling that he would focus his attention entirely on me, that I would end up the scapegoat. I was marked lousy in his book, and there was just nothing I could do to alter his fixed opinion.

The irony of it all was bitter: I had gotten myself into what could be the deepest trouble of my life simply by trying to stay
out
of trouble, by trying to do the right thing.

T
HE TELEPHONE began ringing immediately after I let myself into my flat a few minutes past three that afternoon.

I answered it on the third ring, and it was Tina Kellogg. She said in the eager, faintly petulant voice of a child, “Oh, Dan, I’ve been trying to reach you all day! Why did you walk out on me last night?”

“There was nothing more to say.”

“It was still a cruel thing to do.”

“Life is a cruel thing, little girl.”

“Dan, please, won’t you reconsider about helping me with my article? It means so much to me . . .”

“I told you what I thought about your article,” I said. “Take my advice and forget it. Before you get hurt.”

“I can’t, I just can’t. Dan . . . won’t you come by and let me talk to you one more time? Please?”

“No,” I said. “Goodbye, Tina.”

I put the handset down and went over to open the shutters and let some air into the stifling room. Then I switched on the ceiling fan and got an iced Anchor Beer out of the cooler and sprawled out with it on the settee. I was damned tired. The cargo for offloading at Harry Rutledge’s godown today had been heavy containers of raw pepper from Sarawak in North Borneo, and the six hours I had spent jockeying them in the broiling sun had left me feeling drained and dehydrated.

The call from Tina Kellogg had not helped matters any. She was a nice kid, if far too naïve when it came to simple evil and the men who embraced it. I could have gone to see her again, as she’d asked, and tried to lay it all out bright and clear for her to understand; and if it had seemed necessary I might have done so. But as it was I didn’t think she could get very deeply involved on her own, without contacts, and after a while the idea would seem less appealing to her. She would forget about it, in favor of the kind of innocuous articles I had suggested, and she would forget about me too. That was just as it should be.

I drank my beer, listening to the street sounds filtering in through the open window, the languid rotations of the fan overhead. I had hoped that Marla King would make some kind of effort to contact me at the godown today, but there had been no visitors and no telephone calls. The ramifications if she failed to get in touch with me at all were not pleasant. Van Rijk could conceivably locate her without my help, and if that happened I would be able to deliver neither one to Tiong. Too, there was the possibility that she would decide I didn’t have the figurine—or, if she had had it all along, that I couldn’t help her. In that eventuality, I could deliver only Van Rijk by setting up a dummy meeting, and that seemed rather pointless since Tiong undoubtedly knew where to find Van Rijk, as a local merchant, if he wanted him badly enough. My position with Tiong and the Singapore police, in any of those instances, could only be worsened.

I went into the half-bath, stripped, and stood under the tepid shower for several minutes. Then I lay down under the mosquito netting on the bed and tried to sleep. It was useless. The beer didn’t seem to co-exist particularly well with the shashlik and rice I had eaten before returning home, and there was a heavy sourness in the pit of my stomach. The omnipresent heat did nothing to alleviate that or the tautness of my nerves.

After a while I got up again and put on a pair of shorts and padded out into the front room to smoke a couple of cigarettes. In one of the neighboring flats a Chinese woman screamed at her husband in shrill Cantonese, and in another someone was playing a tinny melody on a Chinese flute. Outside, Punyang Street was in its usual state of bedlam—voices raised into a jumbled cacophony, like a recorded tape played two speeds too fast. The intermittent explosions of firecrackers added a discordant accompaniment. Every day is Chinese New Year in this section of Singapore.

I looked at my watch: 4:05.

And the telephone rang.

I crossed to it, thinking that it had to be either Tina Kellogg calling to plead for my help again, or Van Rijk checking in early, or Marla King. I seldom received social calls. I had no real reason for keeping a phone at all, except that I had always had one and long-standing habits of convenience are hard to break; too, a telephone is considered a luxury in Southeast Asia, and it was one of the few luxuries I could afford or maintained a degree of pleasure in having.

I caught up the receiver, said, “Connell.”

“This is Maria King.”

I released a soft breath. “It’s about time you decided to get in touch, lady.”

“I wanted to give you time to get the figurine. Do you have it now?” Her voice was breathless, excited, nervous—and yet she still sounded vaguely uncertain of herself.

I said, “It’s where I can put my hands on it.”

“How soon?”

“Tonight.”

“Good! How long will it take you?”

“A few hours.”

“Can’t you make it sooner?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, what time then?”

“Nine o’clock.”

“All right.”

“When do we see the buyer?”

“As soon as we can figure a way to get the figurine out of Singapore. We’ll have to smuggle it into Thailand.”

“I can handle that part of it.”

“Just remember—the three of us go together.”

“You, me, and the
Burong Chabak.”

“That’s the deal, Connell.”

“Fair enough. Where do I meet you tonight?”

“I’ll be at Number Seven Tampines Road. Do you know where that is?”

“Out by the New World Amusement Park, isn’t it?”

“That’s right—just off Lavender Street.”

“I’ll find it.”

“Don’t be late, Connell,” she said, and the line clicked and began to buzz emptily in my ear.

I called the Central Police Station immediately and asked for Tiong. He was still there. When he came on the line I said, “I just heard from Marla King. She’s expecting me at nine tonight, at Number Seven Tampines Road. I don’t know if that’s a private residence or not—I didn’t want to press her—but judging from the area it probably is.”

“What else did she say?”

“Not much. I’m supposed to be bringing the
Burong Chabak,
and we’re to work up a way to get it—and us—out of Singapore and into Thailand to the buyer.”

“She apparently does not have the figurine, then.”

“That’s how it would seem.”

“Has Van Rijk called you as yet?”

“No. He said seven o’clock.”

“You will tell him nothing more than the time of the meeting.”

“Of course not.”

“Very well. Please present yourself at my office at nine tomorrow morning. We will talk further at that time.”

“I’ll be there. But just remember, Tiong: I’m co-operating one hundred percent on this.”

“For your sake, Mr. Connell, I hope you are.”

I dropped the receiver into its cradle. The room had grown darker, muggier, and I went over to the window to look at the sky. The near horizon was thickly restless with black-veined clouds. The smell of heavy rain permeated the air, and thunder rumbled faintly in the distance like angry native drums.

I returned to the bedroom and put on a fresh change of clothes and went out for a walk. I had better than two and a half hours until Van Rijk’s call, and it would be considerably cooler in the streets following the impending thundershower. The rains came down in a cascade of water for a while, as if the sky had been cracked open like an egg, and then abated as quickly as they had come; the heavens would be a hot and shimmering blue again within an hour, and the sidewalks and streets would dry like a shirt under a steam press twenty minutes after the sun reappeared.

I walked down to Telok Ayer Basin and stood on the seawall, looking out at the ships lying in the Inner and Outer Roads of the Harbor. There was a humming wind now. The gray water rolled and churned under the force of it, rocking the freighters and lighters and sampans and junks like bathtub toys. In the basin itself, where small boats and pleasure craft were berthed, the water was calmer and the Malay and Chinese boatmen paid little or no attention to the clouds which had now consumed all of the day’s brightness.

When the rains began, I found shelter in Raffles Quay and watched the slanting sheets of water drench unsuspecting tourists dressed in shorts and halters or bright silk shirts. The sight pleased me, as it always did, in a perverse sort of way.

The deluge dissolved into a light drizzle after half an hour, finally ceasing altogether. The gray-black clouds shifted and separated as if they were pieces in a huge jigsaw puzzle, and patches of radiant tropical indigo shone through. The air was fresh and cool, the sweetness of frangipani and jasmine softer, less overripe; beads of water dripped gently from awnings and balconies and the fronds of royal and chamadora palms. This was the nicest time of any day in the Lion City.

I walked back to Chinatown and Punyang Street. The sun was out again, and steam rose in wispy spirals from the drying pavements. I crossed through the jostling crowd that had regathered in the narrow expanse, squeezed past a hawker selling ornamental
jadam
trays, and stepped under the Five Foot Ways to enter the semidark vestibule of my building.

I had one foot on the bottom step in the set of stairs leading to the upper floors when I heard or sensed the movement in the shadows behind me. The hair on the back of my neck prickled, and I started to turn, bringing my hands up instinctively. I had a quick, subliminal glimpse of a whiteness that may have been a face or an article of clothing, and then something hard and unyielding hammered into the side of my head just above the right temple. The pain was white and black and red fragments, like shrapnel bursting through my head, paralyzing my muscles and shriveling my groin, and I went hard to my knees.

I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think. There was a thick redness just in back of my eyes, undulating, curdling, like oil paint swirled through water, like blood stirred with a stick. It was as if the force of the blow had reversed the pupils of my eyes, so that I could see inward but not outward, see what lay behind my eyes instead of what lay without.

I knew he was going to hit me again. I knew there would be another blow, more pain fragments. I knew there would be black emptiness, but I was powerless to prevent it, powerless to move, and then it