Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (22 page)

***

When he got to the center, he exited the
highway and drove around until he saw the Polo Shop. There was a
parking place right in front of it which he took, and then he
locked up the Volvo and went inside.

The same attractive young woman he had seen
before was straightening up colorful piles of golf shirts displayed
on a long wooden table just inside the front door. The last time he
had been there she had greeted him with a dazzling smile. This
time, she didn’t.

“May I help you, sir?”

“I need to see August.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t understand.”

“I need to see John August. It’s
important.”

“No one by that name works here, sir.”

Tay stared at the young woman. Could he be
mistaken? Wasn’t this the same woman who had greeted him when he
had been here before and taken him straight to August?

No, he wasn’t mistaken. Maybe it was just
that she hadn’t been told to expect him this time. Which was
understandable, since August didn’t know he was coming.

Tay pointed back to the door between the
shelves holding packages of underwear and the horizontal rails
holding rows of identical blue blazers.

“Tell August this is important or I wouldn’t
be here.”

“I really don’t understand what you mean,
sir.”

“Look,” Tay snapped, “I know you’re just
doing your job, but I don’t have time for this crap. Either you go
back there and tell August I need to see him or I’ll do it
myself.”

The girl took a couple of quick shuffling
steps away from him. Now Tay could see something like fear on her
face. He had to hand it to her. It was a very convincing
performance, but he was tired of standing there and admiring
it.

With a dozen strides he was through the
unmarked door in the back wall and into the short hallway paneled
in blond wood he remembered from his last visit. He went straight
to the last door on the right where August’s office was, knocked
briskly, and — hoping August wouldn’t shoot him or something —
opened it.

Inside were stacks of cartons with large
Ralph Lauren logos on both ends. Tay quickly backed out of the room
and rechecked the hallway doors. August’s office
had
been
the last door on the right, hadn’t it? Yes, of course, it had. He
looked up and down the hallway. It was identical to what he
remembered, and this was the last door on the right. He peered
inside the room again.

It was the size and shape he recalled, but
the paintings and all the furniture were gone. Instead, there was
nothing there now but piles of white cardboard cartons. Tay reached
for the nearest one and tore it open. Inside were packages of
athletic socks with tiny blue polo players on them.

Tay was too flabbergasted to do anything but
stand with his hands on his hips and look around the room. He half
expected John August to materialize from a hidden door or perhaps
to rise straight up through the floor. But August did neither.

It took Tay a moment to accept what he was
seeing, but finally he did. He was standing in a storeroom in the
back of a Ralph Lauren factory outlet right across the Malaysian
border from Singapore. It was not an office and John August was not
in it. It was a fucking storeroom, and he was sick to death of all
the cloak and dagger bullshit.

Tay didn’t speak to the young woman as he
walked out and crossed the store to the parking lot, but he shot
her a glance as he pushed his way outside. The half-smile on her
face was impossible to miss.

***

Tay drove south a lot faster than he probably
should have.
If some Malaysian cop stops me for speeding,
he
told himself,
I swear I’ll take out my gun and shoot the little
shit
. Fortunately, he didn’t have his gun with him, so he
wouldn’t have to decide whether or not to make good on that pledge
if circumstances arose to test it.

What was he getting into here?

ISD was threatening his career to get him to
drop a murder case, and the one man he knew who might be able to
protect him from the wrath of the local Gestapo had just
demonstrated exactly how insignificant one Inspector Samuel Tay was
in the greater scheme of things.

He passed a silver Bentley in the right-hand
lane that had Singapore plates reading SGD8888. Did SGD stand for
Singapore dollars? Of course it did.

You couldn’t stop a Singaporean from thinking
and talking about money. Money was the first thing most
Singaporeans thought about every morning and the last thing they
thought about every night, and now Singaporeans were even
plastering it on the backs of their cars. To be entirely fair,
since religion and politics were both forbidden subjects in
Singapore, that’s about all that was left to talk about. Other than
the weather, of course. And, in Singapore, the weather wasn’t worth
talking about.

All at once a joke Tay had once heard came
back to him.

Heaven is where the police are all British,
the cooks are French, the businessmen are Singaporean, the
playmates are Thai, and it is all organized by the Swiss. Hell is
where the chefs are all British, the businessmen are French, the
playmates are Swiss, the police are Singaporean, and it is all
organized by the Thais.

He hadn’t thought that was funny the first
time he heard it, but now it made him smile. Maybe his sense of
humor was improving with age.

***

The Volvo’s engine coughed and sputtered and
the car began to slow.

“Shit!” Tay snapped.

But there was nobody else there to register
his displeasure and the Volvo didn’t particularly care.

Tay pumped madly at the accelerator, unable
to think of anything else to do, and after a few seconds the engine
coughed once more and caught, and the car began to pick up speed
again. He listened carefully to the car, but his skills as an
automotive mechanic were pretty much limited to determining whether
or not the engine was running. Fortunately, as nearly as he could
tell, it was.

Why was he in such a God-awful hurry to
get back to Singapore?
Tay suddenly wondered. Singapore was one
of the smallest countries in the world.
The Red Dot
some
people called it.
Disneyland with the death penalty
, others
said. Was this really the place where he wanted to spend the rest
of his life?

Singapore was a country with lousy weather
populated by people who cared about little other than money. It was
a country alternately swept by rain or denuded by the caustic
brutality of a blazing sun. It was a country without shadows.

And yet, as Tay knew better than most, it was
a country run by men who
lived
in shadows.

***

The Volvo sputtered again. This time when Tay
pumped at the accelerator nothing happened.

When the engine cut out, it killed the
hydraulic system and the steering and brakes both became heavy and
hard to operate. It was with some difficulty that Tay wrestled the
car into the outside lane, let it roll onto the shoulder, and stood
hard enough on the brakes to bring it to a halt.

He looked around and tried to work out where
he was. He had left the Utara-Seletan Highway a few minutes ago and
turned south through JB toward the Woodlands crossing back to
Singapore. But what was the name of the road he was on now? He
couldn’t remember, but maybe it didn’t matter. What really mattered
was finding somebody to fix the damn car so he could get back to
Singapore as soon as possible.

That was the story of his life, it occurred
to Tay. Knocking himself out to get someplace he didn’t really want
to be.

***

Tay got out of the car and looked around. He
had rolled to a stop in a parking lot in front of a slightly shabby
strip of shophouses. The one directly in front of him had a false
wooden front and a couple of fake windows with fake window boxes. A
sign above the door read
Gourmet British Pub
. If Tay had
been in even a slightly better humor, he would have laughed right
out loud.

He looked at his cell phone and saw,
mercifully, that he had a signal. But who was he going to call? If
he called the motor pool at the Cantonment Complex and asked them
to come tow the car, how was he going to explain what he was doing
in Malaysia?

Before he could decide, he heard the crunch
of tires on pavement and looked up to see a black Mercedes with
Singapore plates rolling to a stop behind him. The driver was a man
who appeared to be alone in the car. He was wearing dark glasses
and a white shirt without a tie, and he had an official sort of
look to him which shifted Tay’s imagination straight into high
gear.

Tay had only the vaguest idea how to detect
surveillance and the dim-witted effort he had made to find out if
he was being followed after he passed through the Woodlands
checkpoint was now an embarrassing memory.

Had he led ISD straight to John August? Well,
he supposed he hadn’t, since John August was nowhere to be found at
the Polo Store and the room where he and Tay had met before was now
filled with cartons of socks. He was certain ISD would get a big
laugh out of
that
.

The man opened the driver’s door and got
out.

Tay took a deep breath. Was he about to sink
even deeper into whatever this quagmire was that he had stumbled
into?

He had no idea, and no better plan than to
wait and find out.

“NEED SOME HELP?” The man called out as he
walked toward Tay.

“No,” Tay answered automatically. “I’m
fine.”

“It looks to me like you’re having car
trouble.”

Tay supposed there was no point in denying
it. The Volvo was parked awkwardly, neither in the parking lot nor
out of it. It didn’t look like a place anyone would stop who didn’t
have to.

Maybe this was just some guy who was trying
to be a Good Samaritan, Tay told himself. He had been a policeman
for so long that his inevitable response to every situation, no
matter how innocent, was suspicion.

There was nothing about the Volvo to identify
it as a police vehicle and nothing about Tay to identify him as a
policeman so Tay didn’t have to explain anything. He could just
play the whole thing straight.

“Well,” Tay said after an awkward moment of
silence. “The engine did quit on me, but I restarted it without any
trouble the last time it did that, so I’m sure it will start
again.”

“Why don’t you check it out while I’m here?”
the man suggested gesturing at the Volvo. “If it doesn’t start, I
can give you a lift.”

Tay couldn’t think of any reason to say no,
so he nodded and slipped back behind the wheel. He turned the key
and hit the ignition. The starter motor produced the familiar
grinding sound, but the engine didn’t fire. Tay let off the
ignition, waited a few seconds, and tried again, this time pumping
the accelerator a little as well. Nothing.

Tay got out of the car again and shrugged. “I
guess this isn’t my lucky day.”

“Were you headed to Singapore?” the man
asked.

Tay’s suspicions came flooding back. “Why
would you think that?”

The man pointed at the Volvo’s license
plate.

“Of course,” Tay nodded, feeling foolish.
“Yes, I’m going…home.”

The man stepped forward and offered his
hand.

“I’m David Low,” he said.

“Sam Tay.”

As they shook hands, Tay sized the man up.
His surname was Chinese, but Tay guessed he was Singaporean since
he looked a little Chinese, a little Malaysia, and a little
Caucasian. He could have been anything, really. Which is why Tay
thought he was probably a Singaporean.

The man was about six feet tall and seemed
fit. He was probably in his forties, but it was difficult to tell
for sure since Tay couldn’t see his eyes through the heavy gold
aviator-style sunglasses he wore. Tay had the sense that the man
might be military or law enforcement. He sure didn’t look like a
traveling salesman.

“I can give you a lift to a gas station,” Low
said, “but my guess is a gas station isn’t going to be of much
help. You’re going to need a garage. One that knows something about
Volvo’s.”

Tay nodded. He was pretty sure the man was
right.

“Why don’t you let me take you back to
Singapore? You’ll probably have more luck arranging to get the car
picked up from there than you will from here. Malaysia isn’t a
place where…uh, maybe we should just say it’s not very efficient
and leave it at that.”

The man smiled in a Singaporean’s automatic
affirmation that, no matter what he thought of the way things
worked in Malaysia, he didn’t actually have anything against
Malaysians. Not as a race. Not as such. Not really.

The suggestion sounded attractive to Tay
since the Volvo wasn’t his problem. He could just abandon the
damned thing, tell the motor pool personnel at the Cantonment
Complex where he had left it, and then it was
their
problem.
He would eventually have to come up with some kind of explanation
as to what he was doing in Malaysia, of course, but he was sure he
could handle that. He was a senior police inspector. He was used to
lying.

“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Low.”

“David.”

“David, then.”

“Where in Singapore are you headed?”

Where was he headed indeed?

Tay hadn’t thought much beyond finding John
August, and now that August had done his disappearing act he didn’t
have the slightest idea what he would do next. He could hardly go
to his office and get back to work on the Woodlands case. There
wasn’t a Woodlands case anymore, not officially, and if he
continued to act like there was one then he had no doubt the full
wrath of ISD would come down on his head pretty quickly. And he was
sure the full wrath of ISD would be one hell of a lot of wrath.