Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (28 page)

The woman took Tay’s hand, but she said
nothing. She only lowered her eyes and smiled slightly in a gesture
that might have seemed coy and artificial from another woman. But
from her it seemed entirely right and natural.

Tay reluctantly released her hand and
gestured her toward the other chair in from of Harry Lee’s desk. He
glanced quickly at Lee and saw Lee beaming like the father of the
bride.

“Thank you for coming,” Tay told the
woman.

Thank you for coming?
What an idiotic
thing to say. This woman worked for the bank, for God’s sake. Her
boss told her to come into his office and answer Tay’s questions.
Thank you for coming?

Men simply turned into fumbling jerks in
front of beautiful women, didn’t they? Did women know that? Yes, of
course they did. The beautiful ones used it against the men they
met, and those that weren’t beautiful hated men for acting the way
they did toward the ones that were.

“Mr. Lee tells me you may remember something
that is crucial to an investigation I am conducting.” Tay rushed to
safe ground before he said something irretrievably stupid. “This
man I’m interested in has been accessing a safety deposit box here.
His name is Joseph Hysmith. Do you remember him?”

“Yes, sir. I do.”

It was the first time Mei Lin had spoken and
her voice matched her face. Perfectly pitched and modulated, no
hint of an accent, a voice that could sing you to sleep.

Tay was hunting now for flaws. He needed to
find some flaws. He did not want to accept that this woman could
possibly be as perfect as she appeared to be. He noticed she had
very small fingernails. Her blood red nail varnish was little more
than a tiny dot on the end of each finger. As flaws went, it wasn’t
much, but it was the only one Tay could come up with.

“Is there some reason you remember him in
particular from all the people who must come into the bank every
day?”

The woman smiled slightly and Tay felt a
fission of jealously that he was not this man she remembered so
well. It was just plain stupid to feel that way, of course. It made
no sense at all. But still, he felt jealous. That was just the
simple truth of it.

“I have a photograph I would like to show
you,” Tay said, moving on before Mei Lin explained her smile. “It
was taken over thirty years ago so you will have to think of the
man you have met as many years younger, but I would like for you to
look at it and see if you recognize him.”

Mei Lin said nothing, but she gave a small
nod of assent.

Tay retrieved his briefcase from the floor
and removed the manila envelope with the 5x7 black and white of his
father with Johnny and the umbrella man. He removed the photograph
and handed it to Mei Lin. He watched her studying it as he returned
his briefcase to the floor. He searched her face for any flicker of
recognition. He was disappointed to see none.

Tay and Lee waited in silence. Mei Lin
continued to study the photograph without expression, and Tay’s
heart began to sink. But then abruptly she looked at Tay and
smiled.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m pretty sure that’s
him.”

It was all Tay could do not to leap from his
chair screaming
Yippee!

He
had
been right. Johnny the Mover
was Joseph Hysmith.

“He’s much bigger now, but the face looks
very much the same.”

Tay wasn’t certain what Mei Lin meant by
that. Johnny had gained some weight over the thirty years since the
photograph had been taken, that was true, but he would hardly have
described him as big. Maybe Mei Lind’s petit frame made her think
of most men as big.

Automatically, Tay sucked in his stomach.

***

Mei Lin tilted the photograph first one way
and then another as if she were trying to improve the quality of
the light falling on it, although Tay couldn’t see that it made
much difference.

“May I know when this photograph was taken?”
she asked.

If an elderly fat man had asked him that, Tay
would probably have snapped at him to shut up because
he
was
damn well asking the questions here. But Mei Lin was as far from an
elderly fat man in the tree of evolution as it was possible to get
and still be in the tree at all. Tay was helpless to do anything
other than answer pretty much any question she might want to
ask.

“In 1975,” he said.

And caught in the spell of a beautiful woman,
he couldn’t resist adding, “That’s my father right next to the man
I’m asking about. He was acquainted with Johnny somehow. I’m not
certain exactly how, and he died a long time ago so I’ll probably
never find out. It couldn’t have anything to do with this case
anyway, since that was over thirty years ago.”

“Johnny?” Mei Lin asked.

Tay nodded.

“So Joseph Hysmith isn’t our customer’s real
name?”

“No, I’m afraid it’s not.”

Mei Lin thought about that for a moment and a
sad look crossed her face, presumably a reflection on the shameful
duplicity afoot in the world.

“So that’s your father in the middle?” she
asked after a moment.

“No, he’s on the right. Next to Johnny.”

Mei Lin looked puzzled.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

Tay wasn’t sure what there was not to
understand.

Mei Lin had fingered Johnny the Mover as
Joseph Hysmith and Johnny was standing in the middle of the three
men in the photograph. His father on the right side and the
umbrella man was on the left side. How hard was that?

“Didn’t you say your father was standing next
to our customer?” Mei Lin asked.

“Yes.”

“Then that would be your father in the
middle, wouldn’t it? Next to Mr. Hysmith?”

Tay froze.

Surely, he told himself, some confusion had
been introduced into the conversation that was simply eluding him.
The woman could not be saying what she appeared to be saying.

Tay stood up and walked around behind Mei
Lin’s chair. He reached down to the photograph she was holding on
her lap and placed his forefinger on his father.

“That’s my father. The man on the right.”

Mei Lin turned her head and looked over her
shoulder at Tay. She smiled.

And in that moment Tay knew.

He felt the small hairs on the back of his
neck lift as Mei Lin turned back to the photograph and put her own
finger on it.

“That’s our customer right there,” she
said.

Tay said nothing. He didn’t know what
to
say.

“He’s the man on the left,” Mei Lin added
unnecessarily. “The one holding the umbrella.”

STANDING ON THE sidewalk outside of HSBC, Tay
couldn’t remember what he had said to Mei Lin or Harry Lee after
that. He was sure he had thanked them for their help, and no doubt
he had shaken hands warmly with both of them when he left, but he
had no real memory of any of it because his mind had been a
thousand miles away.

On the umbrella man.

The umbrella man who was really Joseph
Hysmith.

Well, probably not. Joseph Hysmith was just a
name the man, whoever he really was, had used to access the safety
box.

The box for which Johnny the Mover had had a
key.

The box within which there were ledger sheets
with his father’s initials.

His father, Johnny, and the umbrella man all
connected to the same safety deposit box in a bank in Singapore
thirty-five years after his father had died.

The buried past rising up from the ground.
His father reaching out from the grave and pointing to…well,
what?

That was still the question, wasn’t it?

***

Tay knew he wasn’t going to stumble over the
answer standing there on the sidewalk. He had found out so much
already, but it added up to so little. They needed a break of some
kind. He would start by going to the Cantonment Complex to see if
Kang had made any progress with either Immigration or Customs.
Maybe he had. Maybe that would start the unraveling of it all.

Tay thought about walking since it wasn’t
much over a mile. He actually liked walking whenever he could
although everyone thought he was crazy to walk anywhere in
Singapore’s relentless heat and humidity. The older he got, the
more he thought those people might be right. They were certainly
right today. It wasn’t even noon yet, and the air was already so
thick Tay wouldn’t have been surprised to see someone painting
graffiti on it. No, not a good day for a stroll.

He started looking around for a taxi.

And that was when he saw the woman who was
watching him.

He would never have noticed her if he hadn’t
suddenly swiveled his head around toward the Fullerton Hotel to see
if there were any taxis parked in front of it.

She was standing just on the other side of
Battery Road, about halfway along the narrow driveway that led to
the Fullerton Hotel’s entrance. A middle-aged woman who looked
entirely nondescript, she was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved
black T-shirt and carrying a black shoulder bag that looked heavy.
She was smoking a cigarette and staring directly at him. When Tay
turned quickly and caught her out, she froze, which was probably
what she had been taught to do in surveillance school. Maybe that
would have been the right call in a crowd — after all, suddenly
turning your head the moment someone catches you looking at them is
pretty much a dead giveaway — but out in the open where this woman
was, nothing could have made her more conspicuous once Tay saw
her.

Tay didn’t know a great deal about
surveillance. Actually, he knew almost nothing except what he had
read in spy novels, but some instinct caused him not to react to
the woman. Even after he spotted her, he continued looking in her
general direction, turning his head a little back and forth and
trying his best to look like any other man just trying to find a
taxi.

Was he overacting? Maybe. He wasn’t sure.
He’d had very little experience in pretending to ignore
surveillance after he had spotted it. None at all actually.

As little as Tay knew about how this sort of
thing was supposed to be done, he knew enough to realize the woman
wasn’t alone. You couldn’t follow someone with just one person. You
had to keep the subject in a box — at least one person in front of
him and others on each side and behind — or he might suddenly turn
in a direction you didn’t expect or be swallowed up in a crowd. And
if that happened, whoever was responsible for running the
surveillance operation would just end up looking like a jerk.

No, the woman wasn’t alone. There were others
out there with eyes on Tay. At least two or three, maybe half a
dozen even. Too many for him to do anything about.

***

Walking slowly away from the Fullerton and
turning up Collyer Quay, Tay thought about what it meant to him to
be under surveillance.

The first question to answer, he supposed,
was exactly who it was watching him.

That was any easy one at least. It had to be
some of Philip Goh’s goons at the Internal Security Department.
John August had already told him ISD was keeping an eye on him,
which was why August had set up that elaborate ruse with the
stalled-out Volvo to cover the message he had sent to Tay. Who else
could it be? No one ran a surveillance operation in a tight little
society like Singapore other than the guys who made sure it stayed
a tight little society. And that was ISD.

Okay, second question.

Why did it really matter to Tay one way or
another that ISD had him under surveillance?

They already knew he was continuing the
Woodlands investigation under the thinnest possible cover, and now
they knew he had gone into the main branch of HSBC on Collyer Quay.
So what? It was a bank. People went into banks all the time. And,
as far as he knew, they hadn’t connected the safety deposit box
where he found the first ledger sheets with his father’s initials
on them to this particular bank, if they even knew about the box at
all.

So what could ISD find out by watching
him?

First, they would find out Samuel Tay was
really a very dull man. He got up late, occasionally had breakfast
out, went to the Cantonment Complex, talked to people all day, then
went home and smoked cigarettes in his garden until it was time to
go to bed. Surely none of that would interest anyone, at least not
very much.

Still, it made Tay angry that ISD apparently
though they could follow a senior CID inspector around Singapore
without getting caught at it. Actually, if Tay were being
completely honest, it was hard to get too self-righteous about
that. The truth was he
hadn’t
caught them, not at least
until he spotted that woman in front of the Fullerton entirely by
accident.

Regardless, he didn’t much like being taken
for a fool. Now that he knew they were there, maybe he ought to run
them around a little just to stick a finger in their eye. Perhaps
it didn’t really matter whether ISD had him under surveillance, but
it
did
piss him off.

Tay was walking along the side of Chevron
House when he saw Raffles Place up ahead and an idea occurred to
him. Raffles Place was a small, grassy plaza in the middle of the
financial district. Mowed as tightly as a putting green, the grass
somehow contrives to appear completely artificial. Too bright, too
thick, too perfect. Closed in on all sides by soaring and utterly
nondescript towers of stone and glass, the grass of Raffles Place
looks as stern and unnatural as everything around it. But Tay’s
mind wasn’t on the grass right then. It was on what is underneath
the grass.

A hundred feet below Raffles Place is one of
the largest stations in the Singapore Mass Rapid Transit
System.

The MRT is exactly what anyone would expect a
Singapore mass transit system to be. Clean, quiet, and incredibly
efficient. Air conditioned trains that offer mobile telephone
service whisk passengers between pristine stations kept free of
beggars and religious pitch men, stations which had been
thoughtfully hardened to do double duty as bomb shelters in case
Singapore ever comes under aerial bombardment from, say, Papua New
Guinea. Like the rest of Singapore, the MRT has numerous and strict
penalties for almost every form of human endeavor other than
standing quietly and doing exactly what you’re told. Eating or
drinking brings an automatic fine of five hundred dollars. Smoking,
however, is the greatest sin. It brings a fine of a thousand
dollars.