Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (2 page)

It was about four in the afternoon when
Mayling pulled herself up onto the low wall that edged the roof and
sat down. Her palms were pressed against the pitted concrete and
her legs dangled straight down the side of the building. The
twelve-story drop to the ground didn’t seem to frighten her.

Eventually someone saw her and a crowd
gathered below. When the police arrived, two patrolmen made their
way to the roof. When Mayling saw them, she started screaming and
waving her hands. Neither patrolman could understand the language
she was speaking, but neither were they in any doubt as to what
Mayling was saying. She was telling them to stay away or she would
jump.

That was why they didn’t approach her. They
remained about thirty feet away and tried to get her to talk to
them. At first they spoke Mandarin since the woman was of Chinese
appearance but, when Mayling didn’t appear to understand them, they
switched to English. They could tell she didn’t understand English
either, but it didn’t really matter. They weren’t trying to start a
conversation.

Two other patrolmen had slipped onto the roof
through a different stairwell and they crept up behind Mayling
while the first two patrolmen distracted her. The taller of the two
men, a policeman of Indian appearance identified as Singh by the
black plastic plate over the breast pocket of his light blue
uniform shirt, threw his arms around Mayling and with a single
swift jerk pulled her off the wall and back onto the roof. She
didn’t try to struggle or run. She just sat there in the
accumulated grime of that rooftop, one leg folded under her and the
other stretched out in front, and sobbed into her hands.

The four patrolmen exchanged embarrassed
glances and shifted awkwardly from foot to foot until two more
patrolmen arrived on the roof with information they had obtained
from a neighbor as to which apartment Mayling occupied. Singh and
his partner gently lifted the still-sobbing girl to her feet and
took her downstairs to her apartment, hoping they would find
someone there who could calm her down.

That was where Singh found Mayling’s baby
girl. She was floating face down in a bathtub half full of dirty
water.

The story appeared the next day in the
Singapore Straits Times
. The young reporter who wrote the
piece spun it effectively into a melancholy tale of bad luck and
trouble, and the story was quickly picked up by most of the
regional dailies in Asia. Within twenty-four hours the European and
American press picked it up, too, and CNN and the BCC even briefly
added the story to their news cycles.

A kind of fame had come to the lost,
forgotten little girl from China stranded in a world about which
she knew almost nothing and understood even less. Mayling Aw had
been forgotten and ignored until she killed her child and tried to
jump off a twelve-story building. Then, in a twinkling, she became
an international celebrity.

Tay had drawn the case. There wasn’t much to
investigate. Nonetheless, he had to assemble the investigative
papers and so he had thought about Mayling Aw all day. And the more
he thought about her the more disgusted he became. He was sick to
bloody death of the world and the wretchedness of its endless,
tawdry miseries. And he was angry to the very bottom of his soul at
the ghoulishness with which people watched what they did to one
another.

So it was because of Mayling Aw that Tay had
left his office and gone home early that day. It was because of
Mayling Aw that he was standing in his garden smoking a cigarette
when it happened.

And it was because of Mayling Aw that
Inspector Samuel Tay was at the center of it all the night
Singapore began to bleed.

TAY STOOD ON his narrow front porch and held
the door open with one hand. He listened carefully for anything
that might explain the sounds he had heard.

There was something peculiar in the air,
although Tay couldn’t decide what it was. It wasn’t a noise
exactly, more of a dull resonance like an echo from a crowded
football stadium somewhere off in the distance. It was more of a
presence than a sound really, but it felt large, and it felt
frightening.

Tay’s house was a three-story structure with
a tiny front garden surrounded by a high wall of white-painted
brick. A heavy gate made of filigreed black iron bars stood in a
low archway and through it Tay could see out to Emerald Hill Road.
A young girl wearing a green and white school uniform was holding a
bicycle as if she had been pushing it along, or perhaps she had
been riding it and just jumped off. In either case, now the girl
was standing stock still, her head twisted back over her shoulder
in the general direction of Orchard Road. Reflexively, Tay glanced
in the direction she was looking, but from his position on his
front stoop he could see nothing but the inside of his own garden
wall.

That was when Tay registered the smell. It
took him a moment to recognize it, but then he did. It was like the
smell of a construction project.

Another huge shopping complex was being built
on Orchard Road right at the end of his street. Perhaps there had
been an accident there. Perhaps a crane had fallen or a part of a
structure had collapsed and what Tay smelled was the dust thrown up
by the impact.

Tay stepped back inside his house and slipped
on the pair of black loafers he had abandoned by the front door. He
checked his pockets for keys and, when he found by some miracle he
actually had them, he went out again and let the door close behind
him. He walked quickly down the two steps to his front walk and
pushed out through the gate to the street.

The schoolgirl remained frozen where she was
and paid no attention to him. He looked in the same direction she
was looking, but he could see nothing out of the ordinary.

He felt rather than saw the woman who walked
up behind him.

“What was that noise?” she asked.

Cindy Shaw lived two doors north of Tay on
Emerald Hill Road. She was either widowed or divorced, Tay wasn’t
sure which, but she had made her interest in him so plain and
pursued it so embarrassingly that it had become a major
preoccupation of Tay’s life to avoid her at all costs. He generally
made it a habit to take a quick glance at the road outside his gate
before coming out just to avoid something exactly like this
happening, but he had been so preoccupied on this occasion that he
had forgotten.

Keep it simple,
Tay reminded himself.
Say nothing that might start a conversation.

“Those sounded like explosions,” Cindy said
while Tay was still thinking about what to say. “I think it was a
bomb. Maybe more than one.”

“I doubt it,” Tay said automatically, looking
back over his shoulder at her.

Cindy glared at him so belligerently that he
turned his head away.

“Why?” she snapped. “Why do you doubt
it?”

“There are any number of things that
could—”

“Rubbish,” Cindy snapped. “The world’s gone
crazy. Bombs blowing up somewhere every single day. People killing
themselves to kill other people they don’t even know. It can happen
here just as easily as anywhere. Those were bombs.”

“I really don’t think—”

“Why aren’t you investigating? You’re a
policeman. You’re supposed to be protecting people like me. Go and
investigate.”

It was the perfect opening and Tay was not
about to pass it up. He started nodding his head even before Cindy
stopped talking.

“You’re absolutely correct,” he said. “I’m
going right now.”

Tay turned away without another word.
Propelled by a potent combination of his desire to escape Cindy
Shaw and the feeling of unease growing within him, he strode
briskly toward Orchard Road.

***

The first thing Tay noticed when he got there
was that the automotive traffic had vanished as completely as if
there had never been any in the first place. The sidewalks were
still jammed with pedestrians as they always were, but no one was
walking. Everyone was standing stock still, like children ordered
to freeze in some kindergarten game.

Later he would say it was the sound of the
car alarms from the garages up and down Orchard Road that he
remembered most clearly. The pitiless, pounding, relentless
bleating of all the alarms set off by the reverberations from the
blasts. He would never hear a car alarm again without feeling the
same tightening in his chest that he felt that day, and then
remembering all of the horrors that came thereafter.

Most of the people he saw were looking to the
right, so Tay looked to the right as well.

Streetlights burned brightly and neon sparked
on the buildings where he stood. About a hundred yards up Orchard
Road he could see the thirty-story tower of the Mandarin Orchard
Hotel, and just beyond it the massive Ngee Ann City shopping
complex, all brightly lit as usual.

But after that, it was like peering into a
cave. There was nothing but darkness.

Tay fought to understand what he was
seeing.

Where was the Atria Shopping Centre? Where
was Lucky Plaza? Where was the Ion Orchard residential tower? Where
was the Marriott Hotel? The electricity was out down there, Tay
understood that, but there was enough ambient light that Tay should
have been able to see
something.

Tay had never found Orchard Road deserted
before. He was certain it never
had
been deserted before.
But somewhere to his right, out in what was now darkness, the
traffic had been shut off as completely as water streaming from a
tap disappears when the handle is turned.

Directly in front of Tay two women stared
wordlessly at each other. One held a huge blue and red striped
shopping bag and the other clutched tightly to her chest a young
girl who looked to be no more than two. The little girl was as
quiet as everyone else. She sucked at her thumb and her huge black
eyes followed Tay as he pushed past and stepped into the
street.

Around him the crowd was beginning to come to
life. It was like a gigantic living thing waking slowly from a deep
slumber. Tay knew he had only a few moments before the beast was
fully roused and then God only knew what would happen.

He stared harder into the darkness and slowly
he began to understand what he was seeing.

It was a cloud, a cloud of smoke and dust so
thick it had swallowed everything around it. It looked like a hole
in the world.

Tay began to run. He ran straight toward the
cloud.

***

Long before he got anywhere near it, he was
gasping for breath.

I’ll never smoke one of those damned
cigarettes again
.

Just the very thought of smoking gave Tay a
sudden craving for a cigarette and reflexively he patted his
pockets looking for his pack of Marlboros. But when the utter
indecency of yielding to such an impulse at a moment like this
shamed him, he stopped looking for his cigarettes and ran on as
well as he could.

The explosions had been somewhere near the
Marriott at the northeast corner of Scott and Orchard Roads. That
much was clear. What was not clear was what had exploded.

Could there have been a gas leak or some kind
of kitchen accident in one of the hotels in that area? Yes, of
course, there could have been an accident, but Tay knew in his
heart there hadn’t been. This wasn’t any accident.

He plodded on past the Paragon on his right
and Ngee Ann City on his left. He was no longer alone. Now there
were people all around him. They flooded from shopping centers,
from hotels, and from office buildings. They were turning away from
the cloud and running. Tay caromed off a fat man wearing a green
t-shirt and jeans and straight into a handsome woman in a black
business suit and high heels. The woman slapped wildly with her
hands as she pushed past him and her fingers raked his right eye.
Tay raised his forearms to protect his face, but the woman ran on
without seeming to notice him. He tried to blink the pain from his
eye. He couldn’t. It began to water uncontrollably and the tears
rolled down his cheek.

He was almost up to the cloud now, and it
still looked as dense and impenetrable as it had looked from
hundreds of yards away. There was no wind and the cloud just hung
in front of him, neither shrinking nor expanding.

Tay suddenly registered the people emerging
from the cloud and stumbling toward him in poses of shock and
bewilderment, although they didn’t look like any people Tay had
ever seen before. Caked with dirt and dust, they teetered toward
him in stumbling, jerky steps, their arms wheeling, struggling to
keep their balance. It was as if he had suddenly been dropped among
a troop of actors filming a low budget zombie movie.

A tall Caucasian man appeared from the cloud
directly in front of Tay. He was wearing a business suit that had
once been some dark color, but now it was so blotched with white it
looked like urban camouflage. His short black hair and face were
blotched in the same way and they blended so completely with his
suit that every part of him seemed to have been constructed from
exactly the same material. He held a handkerchief to his mouth with
his left hand and carried a briefcase in his right. He hobbled
toward Tay, his head down, his eyes vacant.

Tay began to cough from all the dust and
smoke in the air. He stopped running and felt his pockets for a
handkerchief, but he couldn’t find one. He started to take off his
shirt to cover his mouth, but the flabbiness of his belly
embarrassed him and he hesitated.

What an idiot you are, Sam Tay
.
The
world is falling down around you and you’re worried people will
laugh at you because you’re getting old and fat
.

Tay ripped off his shirt and used the sleeves
to tie it over his mouth and nose. It didn’t help much. He coughed
so hard he lost his balance, slipped, and fell to his knees. He
tried to get up again, but his hands slid in something wet and
slimy. He wiped them on the legs of his pants.