Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (8 page)

“How about the neighbors? A Caucasian in that
neighborhood would have been pretty conspicuous. Didn’t anyone know
him?”

“I haven’t found anyone yet, sir. But with
everyone else assigned to the bombings, they won’t give me any
extra manpower and I’ve had to do all the door knocking myself.
I’ve only found a few people at home so far and nobody knew
anything at all about a Caucasian in the neighborhood. If you could
get me some more men and we had more thorough coverage—”

“If he wasn’t a citizen or a permanent
resident,” Tay interrupted, “he would have filled out an
immigration card when he entered Singapore. Can’t you trace him
that way?”

“I’ve already asked for a list of all the
male Caucasian entries who haven’t exited yet and the Singapore
address they gave, but it’s going to be a long list. I’m not sure
it’s going to be very helpful without anything to narrow it down.
If he’d been carrying a wallet or something—”

Tay abruptly slapped both hands on his desk
and pushed himself up from his chair.

“Well, better get to it, Sergeant. Sounds to
me like you’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

“Where will you be, sir? Just in case I need
you.”

“Don’t worry about that, Sergeant. You won’t
need me. I’m absolutely certain about that.”

“Yes, sir.”

THERE WAS SOMETHING Tay wanted to do before
he went home so he asked the cab driver to drop him off behind Ngee
Ann City, which was about half a mile from where he lived on
Emerald Hill Road.

Walking first west and then turning north, he
passed behind the closed-down Wisma Atria Shopping Mall and emerged
on Orchard Road. The roadway was still closed to traffic other than
that connected with cleaning up the aftermath of the bombings and a
security barrier had been erected around the worst of the
destruction. Tay showed his warrant card at the nearest opening in
the barrier and was passed inside.

At least I’m not on a banned list
, Tay
thought.

He didn’t actually believe such a list
existed, and even if it did he didn’t see how he could be on it,
but he supposed either was at least possible. There wasn’t all that
much that surprised him anymore.

Most of the debris had already been cleared
from the roadways and sidewalks, and presumably all the
identifiable human remains collected, but it was evident at a
glance even to Tay who knew nothing about such things that at least
half a dozen buildings in the immediate area would have to be razed
to their foundations. The Marriott and Tang Plaza underneath it,
the Grand Hyatt, Scotts Square next to the Marriott, Shaw House
across the road, Wheelock Place on the opposite corner, and the ION
Orchard Centre all looked to him like total losses. There were a
lot of windows blown out of the Orchard Residences Tower further
back and, although he couldn’t see very far up Orchard Road, he
imagined there were even more windows blown out up there. But all
of those buildings looked as if they would survive. Badly damaged
perhaps, but salvageable.

Apparently in preparation for taking down
some of the structures that could not be salvaged, the intersection
of Orchard and Scotts was blocked off for a hundred yards in all
directions and a security perimeter consisting of a three-foot
concrete barrier with six feet of razor wire above it had been
built around the whole area. Tay never thought he would see razor
wire barricades in the streets of Singapore but, God help them all,
he was seeing them now.

There was heavy construction equipment
everywhere, most of it painted bright yellow. Cranes so tall they
could reach the top of everything around them, bulldozers so big
they looked like they could scrape an entire building off the
surface of the earth, an entire army of backhoes, and seemingly
endless ranks of other equipment the function of which Tay wouldn’t
even dare to guess at. And there were the dump trucks. Lines of
dump trucks parked everywhere. Who knew there were so many dump
trucks in the entire world, let alone right here in little
Singapore?

Just in front of what was left of the
Marriott, Tay came upon two gray metal chests about the size of
steamer trunks that looked like they contained equipment of some
kind. Tay’s mother had stored his father’s clothes in trunks of
about the same size after he died. Tay had never understood why she
did that. It was as if she expected his father to return someday
and need his clothes. Maybe she did.

Tay tested whether the chest nearest to him
would hold his weight and, when it was clear that it would, he
settled himself on it, folded his arms, and took stock of the
tumult around him.

It looked like….

No, it looked like nothing Tay had ever seen
anywhere else. Not even in the pictures of New York in the
aftermath of September 11. The scale of it was just so big, so
spread out, it was difficult to grasp it was real. It was more like
Tay had suddenly found himself inside an extraordinarily realistic
disaster movie, one in which the images were entirely computer
generated.

A little later — in might have been ten
minutes or an hour, Tay wasn’t sure — a man in a yellow hardhat
that had KAJIMA printed across the front in black letters came over
and sat on the second metal chest next to the one on which Tay was
sitting. He looked Indian or perhaps Bangladeshi, and his dark skin
was streaked with sweat. His eyes were empty.

Neither man spoke nor acknowledged the other.
Tay didn’t feel like a conversation, and it was obvious the other
man felt exactly the same way. The two of them just sat there
together in silence watching the turmoil around them, each alone in
his own thoughts.

When the other man abruptly stood and walked
off, Tay was strangely disappointed. He watched until the man
mounted three wooden steps outside the door to a construction
trailer near the entrance to the Marriott’s driveway and
disappeared inside.

Down by the Hyatt a half dozen skip loaders
scooped debris from a huge mound, pivoted toward a line of dump
trucks, and emptied their buckets into the trucks’ dump beds. The
sound of the loaders’ engines rose and fell as they strained to
handle the weight and the chorus of throaty roars was punctuated by
the thunder of debris crashing into the truck beds.

Where were they taking all that debris, Tay
wondered? When the Twin Towers had come down in New York, he
remembered reading that the debris had been sifted and taken away
on barges to somewhere in Staten Island. All of Singapore wasn’t
much bigger than Staten Island, and they certainly had no Staten
Island of their own where they could collect the residue of their
tragedy to keep it out of sight. The logistics involved in getting
Singapore back to normal would be mind-boggling.

Forget normal.

Forget normal for a very long time.

Maybe forget normal forever.

It had taken the famously efficient Americans
with all of their expertise and resources well over a decade to
clear and even begin to rebuild a much smaller area in lower
Manhattan. What chance did little Singapore have of doing the same
kind of thing over a much larger area in less time, or for that
matter in twice the time?

Would his city ever be the same again? Would
the scars be healed in his lifetime?

Tay thought he knew the answers to those
questions, but he didn’t want to give them voice. Maybe if he
refused to admit how terrible the wounds were, they would heal
sooner.

***

No one had claimed credit for the
destruction, not as far as Tay knew at least. The Chief had said
ISD had already tied the bombings to Jemaah Islamiyah, but he
hadn’t told Tay how ISD had done that and now he found himself
wondering if the Chief even knew.

Were they just rounding up the usual
suspects, or did ISD actually have hard evidence that JI was
involved? There is a grisly act of terrorism and the immediate
suspect is the best-known terrorist organization in Asia? Maybe.
But it all felt too easy to Tay.

Whether JI was involved or not, nothing had
leaked to the effect that ISD suspected them, if they actually did.
That was why everyone was still asking who was responsible.

But the longer Tay sat there, and the longer
he looked at what had happened to his city, the more he understood
that was the wrong question.

Why
had it happened?

That
was the right question.

The Americans claimed the bombings had been a
terrorist attack on them. But whatever happened in the world and
whoever it happened to, that was what the Americans generally
claimed. While it was true the point of attack for three of the
bombs had been hotels with American brand names, Tay didn’t come to
the same conclusion.

The three hotels were Singaporean owned, not
American. They just operated under American names. And all three
hotels were major pillars of the Singaporean visitor industry which
was, in turn, a mainstay of the Singaporean economy. While it was
true the guests had largely been foreigners, he would wager very
few had been Americans. Besides, most of the dead and injured
weren’t hotel guests. They had been employees or passers-by, and
virtually all of those were Singaporeans.

So…was this an attack on America?

Tay didn’t think so. That wasn’t what it felt
like to him.

It felt more like an attack on Singapore.

But then that raised a difficult question.
Who would want to attack Singapore? The country was engaged in no
conflicts, no adventures. It had no foreign enemies that Tay could
think of. If Jemaah Islamiyah was actually responsible in some way
for the bombings, why would they want to attack Singapore?

Tay could think of no reason at all.

That left only one other possibility and Tay
was reluctant to voice it, even to himself.

That left the possibility that the bombings
were some form of domestic terrorism.

For all of its short life as a nation,
essentially the same small group of men had governed Singapore.
They had been decent and honorable men on the whole, and they had
no doubt acted for forty years in the sincere belief they were
making the best choices for the country, but they were also
cautious men who had acted to nip opposition in the bud before it
could sprout roots. Singapore had been a one-party state since
independence and the channels for expressing opposition were few
and carefully regulated. The election process was heavily weighted
to protect the governing elite. The press was tame and
ineffective.

What if there were people out there somewhere
who had grown tired of waiting for real democracy to develop in
Singapore? What if the bombings were an effort to sow fear and
instability and destabilize the only government Singapore had ever
had?

The Americans claimed the attacks were part
of their international war on terrorism, of course, and aimed at
them.

But what if they were wrong?

What if these attacks were aimed squarely at
Singapore? And what if those responsible were willing to continue
killing people in great numbers until fear and dread took over the
country and the government lost control?

***

Later Tay would wonder how long he sat there
thinking. It had been afternoon when he passed through the barrier
into the security area, and it was nighttime before he passed out
of it again. In between those times, he came to a decision.

“Robbie?”

“Is that you, sir?”

Tay shifted his cell phone to his other hand
and sidestepped someone taking pictures of the devastation with an
iPhone.

“I’m not giving up. And if I’m not giving up,
then you’re not giving up.”

“Ah…giving up on what, sir?”

“We’re going to find out who did this,
Robbie. I don’t give a fuck what cases the OC assigns us to. We’re
still going to find out who did this.”

“Did what, sir?”

Tay was so astonished at Kang’s question that
he stopped where he was and turned around. He examined the wreckage
behind him just to make certain it was actually there. Then all at
once he realized Kang had no idea where he was and couldn’t
possibly know what he was talking about.

“I’ve just come from the Marriott,
Robbie.”

Kang cleared his throat. “But, sir, the SAC
told you he doesn’t want us on that case. That’s why he assigned us
the body at the Woodlands.”

“But what if the two cases are
connected?”

“Connected? How are they connected?”

“I have no fucking idea.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t understand.”

“Then I suggest you come down here and sit
where I’ve been sitting for the last few hours. Look at what these
people have done to our country, and
then
tell me you don’t
understand.”

Kang fell silent. That was what he usually
did when Tay took off on one of his flights of fancy. He had long
ago decided that was the safer course for him to follow.

“They are
not
going to take this case
away from me. I’m not going to let them put us out to pasture when
the worst crime in the history of Singapore has to be solved. We
are going to find out who did this and then I’m going to wrap it
all up in a pretty package and shove it right down their fucking
throats. And they can choke on it for all I care. Do you understand
me, Robbie?”

There was a short silence, and then Sergeant
Kang cleared his throat again.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I understand you.”

“Good,” Tay said.

Then he turned off his phone, shoved it in
his trouser pocket, and walked slowly east toward Emerald Hill and
the house where he had lived for all of his life.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER Tay was sitting in his
garden lighting his first Marlboro of the evening. His city lay in
ruins, hundreds were dead, thousands were injured, and he was
investigating a single dead man found in an apartment at the
Woodlands HDB estate. That seemed to him about as important as what
he was doing right then: smoking a cigarette.