Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (19 page)

“HELLO?”

Laura Anne Zimmerman’s voice was soft, and
Tay thought he heard a cautious note in it, too.

“Mrs. Zimmerman, this is—”

“It’s Miss.”

Tay hesitated. “I’m sorry?”

“It’s Miss Zimmerman. Not Mrs.
Zimmerman.”

Then Tay remembered Kang telling him the
woman had never been married, but did women really care these days
about what prefix people put in front of their names? He had no
idea.

“I apologize, Miss Zimmerman,” Tay said,
trying and probably failing to inject at least a modest amount of
remorse into his voice. “My name is Inspector Tay. I’m with the
Criminal Investigation Department of the Singapore Police. I need
to ask you a few questions.”

“About what?”

“About your mother.”

“My mother? You can’t be serious. Who is
this, really?”

“Miss Zimmerman, I am exactly who I told you.
I am Inspector Samuel Tay of Singapore CID.”

“Why would you want to ask me about my
mother? My God, she’s been dead for—”

“Yes, I know. It’s a little complicated to
explain. May I come to your house? I can be there in just a few
minutes.”

“Come to my
house
? What’s this all
about?”

“It is about your mother. It really is. If
you will give me just a few minutes of your time, I can be more
specific.”

There was a silence on the other end of the
telephone. The woman was obviously skeptical, but now she was
clearly curious as well. Tay could imagine how she felt. If someone
had suddenly phoned him asking about his father, he would have felt
exactly the same way.

“Can this wait? My mother’s been dead for
thirty years. Surely there can’t be any hurry.”

“I’m afraid there is, Miss Zimmerman. I won’t
keep you long.”

“I was just leaving for work. I really can’t
wait for you.”

“Then I’ll be happy to meet you at your place
of work. This is important, Miss Zimmerman. I need to show you some
pictures.”

“Pictures? Of my
mother
?”

“Where is it that you work, Miss
Zimmerman?”

There was another silence. Tay could almost
hear the woman weighing caution against curiosity, then making up
her mind.

Curiosity won.

“I’m the front office manager at the Marine
Bay Sands. Give me a couple of hours to deal with the shift change
and then come there and ask for me at the reception desk.”

Tay glanced at his watch. “Shall we say
twelve noon?”

“Yes,” Laura Ann Zimmerman said, sounding a
little relieved. “Twelve o’clock will be fine.”

***

The Marina Bay Sands was probably the most
recognizable building in Singapore. Its three slim towers set along
Marina Bay were capped with a dramatic structure called the Sky
Park that spanned all three towers at the fifty-fifth level. The
Sky Park was curved on one end and squared off on the other and had
always looked to Tay like a huge surfboard unaccountably abandoned
across the tops of three blue and white skyscrapers.

Tay took a taxi home and had the driver wait
while he went inside and removed some of the photographs from his
father’s albums and placed them in a brown manila envelope. Then he
took the same taxi to the Marina Bay Sands. At exactly twelve
o’clock he presented himself at the reception counter and asked a
smiling young man with an Indian face to tell Laura Anne Zimmerman
that Inspector Samuel Tay was there to speak with her.

While he waited for the woman to appear, Tay
folded his arms, leaned back against the counter, and inspected the
lobby of the hotel. It was undeniably spectacular, but far too
outsized and over-scale for Tay’s taste. He assumed it must have
been purposely designed to be architecturally intimidating, but
exactly who was trying to intimidate whom was unclear to him. In
keeping with the vast open space, everything in it was huge. Huge
plants, huge pots, huge lamps. Human beings were reduced to ants
scurrying for safety across the gleaming marble floors.

The interior of each tower was an open atrium
rising the full height of the buildings, which had to be at least
six hundred feet. All too frequently the police were called to
collect the scattered pieces of a guest who had lost more than he
could bear in the huge casino adjoining the hotel. How desperate
did someone have to be, Tay often wondered, to jump to his death
inside a hotel that he couldn’t afford to stay in anymore? Leaping
from the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower he could almost
understand. At least he could see the poetry in something like
that. But jumping to one’s death inside a hotel that had little to
recommend it apart from its cost seemed to Tay to be an unbearably
sad thing for anyone to do.

“Inspector Tay?”

So absorbed had Tay been in contemplating the
mysteries of human behavior that he had not noticed the woman walk
up beside him. When she spoke and he turned his head, his first
thought was how hard it was for anyone to be
that
absorbed.

Laura Anne Zimmerman was well over six feet
tall and so thin she called to mind photographs Tay had seen
somewhere of prisoners just freed from concentration camps. Her
reddish-colored hair was cut very short and lay tight against her
head. She was wearing a bright green dress that ended a good way
above her knees. The woman’s skin was an unhealthy looking ivory
color and her facial features were so sharp they looked as if you
could cut your hand on her nose. Still, the whole effect was
extraordinary and striking. Laura Anne Zimmerman could not have
been described by anyone as a beautiful woman, but Tay had no doubt
she was noticed and remembered by everyone she met.

“Is there somewhere we can talk privately,
Miss Zimmerman?”

She led him across the lobby and into some
kind of cocktail lounge that had not yet opened for the day. They
sat at a table far enough into the lounge that people passing
through the lobby couldn’t overhear their conversation. Tay took
out his warrant card and placed it on the table between them. The
woman barely glanced at it.

“What is this about my mother,
Inspector?”

Tay returned his warrant card to his pocket
and replaced it on the table with one of the photos he had taken
from his father’s album. The photograph included three women
standing in a straight line in front of a desk on which could be
seen an old-fashioned adding machine with a big handle on its side.
There were three names penciled on the back of the photograph and
one of those was Ethel Zimmerman. Since two of the women in the
photo had Chinese faces, Tay assumed it was fairly obvious which
one Mrs. Zimmerman was.

“Is this your mother?”

Laura Anne Zimmerman broke into a smile as
soon as she saw the picture, and Tay thought it was a very nice
smile indeed. It seemed to him to come from somewhere deep within
the woman, not just from the surface muscles of her face, and it
made her unexpectedly interesting to Tay.

“Where did you get this?” she asked. “I’ve
never seen it before.”

“So one of these women
is
your
mother?”

“Right there.” She reached out with her
forefinger and it hovered over the woman in the photograph who was
Caucasian. “That’s my mother.”

“What can you tell me about her?”

“Not much. I was only ten or eleven when she
was killed. Why do you want to know about her?”

Tay told her. At least he told her some of
it.

He told her about her mother working for his
father, that some old accounts with his father’s initials had
turned up in the course of another investigation, and that he was
trying to locate people who had worked with his father in an effort
to figure out what the accounts might actually mean. To be honest,
Tay didn’t think his explanation sounded like it made all that much
sense, but maybe the story was better than he thought it was since
the woman didn’t question it.

“My mother worked for your father?” she said.
“How incredible. Is your father still alive?”

“He died the year before your mother.”

Tay saw the woman thinking about that. She
was no dummy, he could tell. She immediately worked out that it was
a little odd both her mother and his father had died within a short
time of each other and now a policeman was asking her
questions.

“Are you saying their deaths were somehow
connected?” the woman asked, picking her words carefully.

“I thought your mother died in an automobile
accident.”

“She did, only…well, I’ve always wondered a
little what really happened since there were apparently no
witnesses. Is that what this is about?”

Instead of answering, Tay removed from the
envelope the picture of his father, Johnny the Mover, and the
umbrella man and placed it on the table in front of the woman.

“Do you recognize any of these men?”

The woman examined the photograph, seemed to
study it a minute. Then she answered without any sound of doubt in
her voice, “No, I don’t think so.”

Then Tay took out the rest of the photographs
and dealt them out onto the table one by one like a blackjack
dealer. After looking at each of them, the woman shook her
head.

“I’m sorry I can’t be of more help,” she said
when Tay was done and began to return the photos to the envelop. “I
just don’t remember much about my mother. She was a bookkeeper for
somebody, but I don’t even know who. And I certainly don’t remember
ever meeting anyone she worked with.”

They made small talk for a while after that.
Tay knew he had all he was going to get and was mostly keeping the
conversation going just because Laura Anne Zimmerman was a striking
woman who was interesting to be with. Tay wondered if perhaps he
should be pitching himself to her a little bit, but then she was so
much taller than he was that they would make a ridiculous-looking
couple, wouldn’t they? No woman wanted to go out with a man who
made her look ridiculous. So what point was there in that?

“Inspector, I think there’s something else I
ought to tell you.”

Tay said nothing.

“I’m not entirely insensitive to men,” the
woman continued. “I do occasionally know what men are thinking
and…well, I have this feeling right now you’re trying to make up
your mind whether to ask me out.”

Tay glanced away, embarrassed. Was he
that
transparent? He supposed he must be. Good Lord, was he
ever going to stop being so clumsy.

“So let me tell you this now and get it over
with,” she smiled. “I’m gay.”

***

Tay’s first instinct, of course, was to
bolt.

He successfully fought down that impulse, if
only because he imagined it would make him appear even more foolish
than he already did to be seen frantically fleeing the lobby of the
Marina Bay Hotel. So he smiled and nodded and continued making
conversation until a decent enough interval had passed for him to
end the conversation with some shred of dignity still intact.

“I’m sorry I can’t remember any more about my
mother, Inspector,” the woman said as they shook hands at the
hotel’s entrance. “If my father were still alive, I’m sure he could
have been of much more help.”

“Has your father been gone long?”

“Oh yes. Ten, maybe twelve years now.”

The woman stopped talking and seemed to be
thinking back to something.

“You know it’s funny now that I talk about
him, but…” She trailed off with a slight chuckle and shook her
head. “Never mind.”

“Go on,” Tay said. “You never know what might
be helpful.”

“Well…it just came to me that my father and I
were going through some old family pictures right before he died
and a lot them were of my mother. My father said…”

She stopped talking again and shook her head.
“No, that’s too silly. I have no idea what he meant.”

“Meant about what?”

“About my mother.”

Tay said nothing. He knew she wanted to tell
him what she had just remembered and if he waited her out she would
eventually.

“He looked at this one picture of my mother
for a really long time,” she went on after a moment just as Tay had
known she would. “When he put it down, he said to me, ‘You know,
your mother wasn’t really a bookkeeper at all.’”

Laura Ann Zimmerman chuckled again.

“And then he said, ‘Your mother was really a
spy.’”

TAY THOUGHT ABOUT that all the way back to
the Cantonment Complex. He sat in the back of the taxi with his
arms folded and he thought about Laura Ann Zimmerman and her
memories of her father saying her mother was a spy.

Perhaps her father had really told her that.
Perhaps he had only told her something
like
that. The woman
seemed certain she remembered the moment exactly. Tay didn’t say
anything to challenge her, but he wasn’t nearly so sure.

Tay understood all too well that people had
memories of things they didn’t really recall. He had come to
believe everyone’s memories were more dream than remembrance. A few
recollections of moments that were genuine connected by other
moments that were entirely imaginary. He had memories like that
himself. It was as if he had found pieces of discarded film lying
around in the cutting room of his mind and then worked them up into
a coherent narrative by sticking a few bits in between them.

That was the thing about the past. You
carried it with you as a jumble of remembrance and imagining. But
once you knew that, and once you accepted that some of your
memories weren’t real, how could you hope to understand your
past?

You might even tell yourself it doesn’t
matter whether you understand your past because it is…well, past.
Dead and buried. Why does it matter now how much of what we
remember is true? Why does it matter whether we can separate the
truth of our past from what we have merely imagined?