Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (25 page)

A VIOLENT STORM swept through Singapore that
night pushing curtains of rain across the city. Gusts of wind bent
and twisted the banana trees in Tay’s garden so violently that the
big leaves slapping out the rhythm of the storm against his bedroom
windows waked him repeatedly from an uneasy sleep. Lightening
cracked and thunder boomed. Singapore felt like a city under
siege.

Tay finally gave up tossing and turning and
dragged himself out of bed when it was barely light. He felt more
tired than he had the night before, but he made some coffee anyway
and took a cup out to the garden to inspect the broken stalks of
his banana trees.

The dawn was electric. Tay thought that if
every day in Singapore began like this he might even become an
early riser. There was a coolness to the air and a dim golden light
painted the pastel shophouses of his neighborhood with a warmth he
could never recall seeing before in the hard, white light that was
Singapore’s usual lot.

So energized was Tay by the delights of the
morning he decided to walk to the Coffee Bean on Orchard Road for
breakfast. He showered and dressed as quickly as he could. He
didn’t want to waste a moment of the brief breath of coolness the
morning had brought.

Tucking in his shirt, he turned sideways and
looked in the mirror. His stomach was larger than it had been the
last time he had looked, wasn’t it? He was pretty sure it was, but
by how much? He still had that bicycle he had ridden once or twice
the last time he had been overcome by a burst of healthy living.
Maybe it was time to haul it out again.

Tay was nearly fifty, and every time he
thought about that he found it hard to believe. He had begun to ask
himself sometimes how many years he had left. It was not a morbid
question, just one of fact. At fifty, he was unquestionably closer
to the end of his life than he was to the beginning. But how
much
close was he? He wasn’t obsessing about death, he told
himself. He was merely curious. Still, he had to admit he had been
thinking about death quite a lot recently. For some reason, every
time he sat on the toilet he thought about death. Taking a crap had
become a Woody Allen movie for him. Maybe he
was
obsessing
just a little.

***

Tay left his house and walked up to Orchard
Road. The smell of honey roasted chestnuts drifted from a
stainless-steel food cart tended by a young, dark-skinned girl with
a large silver ring in her nose. Propped against the front of the
cart, a hand-lettered signed announced the price as two dollars a
dozen. That seemed very cheap to Tay and the roasting nuts smelled
so good in the cool morning air he would have stopped and bought a
dozen or two, but something put him off and he kept walking. Was it
the ring in the girl’s nose that had done it? Yes, probably it was.
He was a little embarrassed to admit it, even to himself, but he
had no doubt that was exactly what put him off.

At the Coffee Bean he got a large black
coffee and two apple fritters which had been warmed to exactly the
right temperature. While he ate, he thought about Paraguas Ltd and
Johnny the Mover and the umbrella man and his father. He didn’t
really want to think about any of them — the morning was far too
nice to spoil by sliding back into that swamp — but they were all
hovering somewhere out there just over his shoulder. A Greek chorus
that refused to speak to him.

Tay tried to divert himself for at least a
few minutes by listening to the conversations he could hear around
him, but that wasn’t much fun either. The staccato rhythms of
spoken English in Singapore were anything other than the soothing
sounds Tay would have preferred at that hour. English words in
Singapore were not really spoken at all, but hurled and spit. Many
Singaporeans spoke Mandarin at home, and Tay had always assumed
that was why Singaporeans spoke English the way they did. They used
English words, after a fashion, but they spoke them with Mandarin
tones and inflections. No wonder tourists mostly looked
confused.

When Tay finished his coffee and apple
fritters he wanted a cigarette, of course, but he didn’t
particularly want to go stand outside on the sidewalk, which was
the only place he was allowed to smoke. He was trying to quit —
well, at least he was
thinking
about trying to quit — but
the more difficult the government made it for him to smoke the more
determined he became to keep doing it. And this was yet one more
time he wasn’t going to let the bastards stop him.

He swept up his empty cup and his paper plate
and dumped them in a trash bin, then he went outside and found a
spot in the cooling colonnade that separated the row of shops where
the Coffee Bean was located from the bottom of Orchard Road.
Concrete archways every twenty or thirty feet, a wide tiled
walkway, and two or three steps under every arch to trip the
unwary.

Taking a new pack of Marlboros out of his
shirt pocket, Tay felt the cellophane between his fingers and
listened to it crinkle as he rolled it into a ball between his
thumb and forefinger. He slit the package with his thumbnail, tore
back the top, and inhaled the sudden whiff of tobacco that emerged.
It was all part of the process, all part of what he loved. Tay
shook out a cigarette and lit up. After taking a deep draw, he
leaned back against one of the archways, exhaled, and looked around
him.

There were three other smokers near him, all
male, and all of them to his eye looking vaguely guilty. A black
plastic sign on a chrome stand sat in the colonnade near the
entrance to the Coffee Bean. It issued its crisp orders in white,
block-printed type that read,
It Is Illegal to Smoke Beyond This
Point.

Tay looked at an elderly Chinese man not far
from him who was just finishing his cigarette.

“I blame the Americans for this,” Tay said.
“I really do. The pricks.”

The man glanced at Tay, dropped his butt, and
hurried away without replying.

Tay shrugged and went back to his own
cigarette.

By the time he had finished it and ground out
the butt on the sidewalk, he had decided exactly what he was going
to do.

He hurried to a taxi stand about fifty yard
east down Orchard Road where the line was mercifully short. Within
ten minutes he was in the back of a taxi and on his way to the
Cantonment Complex.

***

“We’re going to reopen the Mayling Aw case,”
Tay told Sergeant Kang.

Kang shifted his weight in the uncomfortable
chair in front of Tay’s desk, looking every bit as puzzled as Tay
had expected him to.

“But, sir—”

“Just hear me out, Robbie.”

Tay told Kang about his summons to ISD, Goh’s
pronouncement that the Woodlands case was being closed as a
suicide, and his subsequent meeting with their boss at which the
SAC seemed to say he would look the other way if they continued
investigating the case anyway.

He did not tell Kang about his trip to JB or
the message from one of John August’s people about him being under
surveillance by ISD. And he certainly didn’t tell Kang the
reason
August claimed he was under surveillance by ISD. It
wasn’t a matter of trust. It was just that he couldn’t tell Kang
any of those things without telling him who John August was, and he
wasn’t going to do that.

Tay had never told anyone about August, and
doubted he ever would. His boss had guessed that he knew someone
who knew a lot of things, probably someone in American
intelligence, but he had no idea who it was. Actually, to be
honest, Tay wasn’t sure
he
knew who it was either. He didn’t
know who August worked for, could only guess at what he did, and
didn’t even know if John August was the man’s real name. He didn’t
know much, but he did know he trusted August. That was just the way
it was. He wouldn’t have had the first idea how to explain it to
Kang so that it made sense, so he wasn’t going to try.

“We’ll tell anyone who asks what we’re doing
that we’re investigating the Mayling Aw case. It’s a decent enough
cover for staying on the Woodlands case since she lived near the
Woodlands. We can get away with it for at least a few days.”

“But, sir, there’s nothing to investigate in
that case, nothing even anything to
say
we’re
investigating.”

“We’ll claim we have reason to think she was
smuggled in by a human trafficking ring.”

“Human trafficking ring. Sir, that’s
really—”

“That will give us a reason to keep looking
at movements through the Woodlands checkpoint. There’s something
there CID doesn’t want us to find. We’re going to find it.”

“We don’t even know who the dead man is, sir.
The prints have never come back from Interpol and we don’t have
anything else.”

“Actually…” Tay paused.

How was he going to tell Kang this without
bringing August into it?

“I
do
know who he is. I have a
photograph of him. I haven’t told you about it yet.”

Kang’s face clouded up, but he said
nothing.

“I’m sorry, Robbie. I found the picture in
some old things of my father’s.”

Now Kang’s face creased in puzzlement, as
well it might have.

“You found a picture of the dead man in
things that belonged to your father?”

Tay nodded. “Yes. And my father was in the
picture with him.”

“The dead man and your father?”

Tay nodded.

“Together?”

Tay nodded again.

“But your father died when—”

“I was a child. More than thirty-five years
ago.”

Kang looked away and consulted a spot in the
air. “I don’t understand, sir.”

“Neither do I, Robbie. But I’m going to get
to the bottom of whatever is going on here and I need your help to
do it.”

Kang still wouldn’t look at him. Tay couldn’t
blame him. He knew he should have brought Kang into this before. He
just hoped it wasn’t too late to do it now.

“YOU KNEW ALL along who the dead man was,
didn’t you, sir? You just didn’t want to tell me.”

“No, I
didn’t
know, Robbie. I thought
there was something familiar about him when I saw the body, that’s
true, but I didn’t know who he was. Even when I found the
photograph, I still didn’t know who he was.”

“So how did you find out?”

“I showed the photo to someone and he put a
name to the face. Well, sort of a name.”

“Who did you show it to?”

“I can’t tell you that, Robbie. I’m sorry. I
just can’t tell you. But it’s someone who knows a lot of people and
someone I trust.”

Kang’s face clouded, but at least he shifted
his eyes back to Tay.

“I’m listening, sir.”

“The only name my source could give me was
Johnny the Mover,” Tay said.

Kang laughed in spite of himself. “You’ve got
to be kidding me, sir.”

“No, I’m completely serious. Our dead man is
an old-time smuggler who has worked as a freelancer over the years
for American intelligence. They called him Johnny the Mover.”

“So your source is this American spook buddy
everyone knows you have,” Kang grunted. “You showed your CIA
connection the picture and he IDed this guy for you.”

Tay didn’t want to lie to Kang. Not directly
at least. So he settled on a response that was literally true, even
if somewhat misleading.

“I don’t have a CIA connection, Robbie. The
SAC thinks I do, but I don’t.”

Kang looked away, not sure whether to believe
Tay or not, and even less sure whether it mattered if he did.

An uncomfortable silence fell over Tay’s
office. Tay knew Kang was completely disgusted with him. He
wouldn’t have blamed Kang if he had just stood up and walked out
right then.

But Kang didn’t stand up and walk out.

“Are you going to let me see this photograph
now, sir?” he asked instead.

Tay opened the bottom drawer of his desk and
took out a thin manila-colored file. Opening it, he removed the
picture of his father and Johnny the Mover and handed it across the
desk to Kang.

“It’s him all right,” Kang said almost
immediately. “He’s gained weight and looks a lot older, but that’s
him right there in the center.”

Tay didn’t say anything.

“Is your father the man on the right?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. You look a lot like him.”

As far as Tay knew, there was no one alive
who had known his father and who knew Tay now so he had never heard
anyone say that before. And now that Kang said it, he didn’t know
what to make of it. Tay’s father had been born in America, but his
grandparents had both been ethnic Chinese. In the pictures Tay had
seen of his father, Tay never thought his father looked
particularly Chinese, and Tay certainly didn’t think he looked very
Chinese either. He wondered now if Kang was saying his father
did
look Chinese, or that he didn’t. He considered briefly
asking Kang exactly what he meant, but quickly decided that would
make him look foolish and vain, so he said nothing.

“Who’s the other guy in the photo? The one
with the umbrella?” Kang asked, cutting off Tay’s ruminations
before they spun him away somewhere he would be better off not
going.

“No idea.”

“So whoever you showed the photo to didn’t
recognize the other man or your father?”

“No.”

“Or at least that’s what he told you.”

Tay wasn’t sure what to say to that. Tay
didn’t think August lied about recognizing either of them, but he
might have. Tay couldn’t deny that. Maybe August knew exactly who
the umbrella man was and just didn’t tell Tay for reasons too
complicated and obscure even to guess at.

***

“The umbrella that other guy is holding up
looks pretty strange,” Kang said.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me either.”