Suddenly at Singapore (8 page)

I
N HER ROOM
at the Kuantan rest house Kate put her hands on my shoulders.

“I’m going to like it here. You can smell the sea, not Singapore drains. You want to go and see your old man, don’t you?”

“There’s no hurry for that.”

“I’m being sweet and understanding. We’re going to hold things like that for ever.”

“That’s right.”

“Say it louder.”

“That’s right!”

I kissed her.

“You need a bath, dear,” she said.

“I’m going to have one. I’ll order dinner for about eight-thirty or nine. We’ll sit on the veranda with drinks before it.”

Kate laughed.

“Everything for our evening beautifully worked out. Is that to salve your conscience for leaving me now? Don’t bother, Paul. I’m perfectly happy to be left. I’m going to lie down and have a rest on my bed. Though I will admit that I was a bit suspicious when you told me about your friend.”

“Suspicious of what?”

“Oh, that Kuantan meant something more to you than just a nice place to take me. You can’t blame a gal for being suspicious, not with your record. But I’ve got over it. I’ve got the feeling I’ll always remember this town as the place you brought me to. Are you going to remember it like that?”

“Yes, Kate.”

“Don’t force yourself too hard. I know it’s not easy for men to switch on the sentiment about place. You know something, I can remember seeing a revival of a Greta Garbo picture in which she goes round the room where she had been happy with her boy friend kissing bits of the furniture. I laughed myself silly”

“I hope you still would,” I said.

“Yes, I still would. I won’t waste time on the furniture. At the same time this is something terribly special for me, you’ve got to allow that. I want the feeling for just a little that this is our world that nothing can intrude on. That’s the way you want it, too, isn’t it?”

“Of course.”

“So long as I’m sure,” she said.

I went out, not feeling too happy, to have a bath. I changed into a clean shirt which had also come from Gemas and went down the stairs. There were three miners in the rest house from the tin place at Sungei Goloh back in the hills, in to the nearest bar for a couple of days. They offered their society at once and I had a drink with them. I told them I was an agent for de Vorwooerd’s chicle, an excuse I’d used before in the place.

“Don’t tell me that’s your secretary?” one of them asked.

“No, American journalist. Writing up chewing gum”

“Is she interested in tin mines? I could show her the deepest one in the world. I didn’t think girls who looked like that ever left Singapore.”

It took me twenty minutes to get away from them. I couldn’t see now that peaceful evening with drinks on the veranda. The miners would stay half sober this time and put on the gramophone and Kate would have to dance with them. I went up a street wondering how she was going to like that.

De Vorwooerd’s house was down by the river, with a garden that ran down to it. The whole place was surrounded by an enormous hibiscus hedge which he had planted and cultivated, perhaps from an urge to put a screen about what was left of his life. There was an arched wooden gate you couldn’t see through and from this a path straight up to the veranda steps.

It was a new house, but built in the old manner of wood and thatch, with a series of rooms falling back from the porches, all softly lit and the boy never put out any of those lights until de Vorwooerd went to bed. It was the kind of house which offers you choice the moment you go in, almost choice for moods, the verandas which were mainly screened and hung with plants and green lights, where you could hear the sea, or the main room with one wall of books, with an arch from it to a dining-room and beyond that de Vorwooerd’s study.

That was where I found the old man. No boy had met me, I had simply walked through rooms until I found him. He was sitting in a chair under a reading light beamed on to his book. His scanty hair was white and also his clipped Vandyke beard. His skin was wrinkled, but brown and nut-like, healthy looking, his eyes a bright blue. He looked at me, put in a bookmark and closed his book.

“Well,” he said. “I was hoping it was a mistake.”

“I hadn’t any choice.”

“You mean you were rattled?”

“No. Jeff told me he was expecting this. The whole of the straits are patrolled. There is no other way. I’d have come here even if I hadn’t heard from Kim Sung.”

“He told me about using the phone. Madness.”

“He’s been here?”

“Yes. Gone away again. Back to his junks. They’re in an estuary of the river.”

“He had no trouble getting the stuff off the
Misuni Maru
?”

“I didn’t ask him. Paul, this is madness!” He gestured with his hands. His beard twitched as though he was trying to control the movement of his face. “I’m still not over what happened to your brother. Sickened.”

“Yes.”

“I couldn’t write. An old man sitting here. I couldn’t write. What could I have said on paper?”

“Don’t talk about it, de Vorwooerd.”

“No. We won’t talk about it. Send them away. Send your junks away.”

“I can’t.”

“You could easily enough. You’ve only to give the order.”

“It’s too late. I phoned up from Gemas. The lorries will be here.”

“You trust a Chinese contractor?”

“This one, yes. There’s enough money involved.”

“There’d be more money for selling you out.”

“This man won’t do it. There’s as much at stake for him as me. I’ve used this overland route twice before.”

“Yes, but now they’re much nearer, they’re watching. Don’t ask me how I know, I do. They’re stronger, Paul. I’m an old man. What you’re doing isn’t going to stop them. You know that yourself.”

“Perhaps.”

“Then why go on?” He paused. “No, no, I don’t ask you that. Mix yourself a drink.”

I went over to a table thinking that our security wasn’t too good, this talk in a room that opened into another and then another. His boys might be spies, though that wasn’t likely, they were Malays from Trengganu. He’d had experience of spies amongst his servants and knew what to look for.

“What for you?” I asked.

“Nothing. I can’t take it any more. That’s what our doctor says. He’s a Tamil and a fool, but I obey him. I fan my little life.”

“I hope you go on doing that a long time.”

“Yes, yes. Paul, it took away a lot of my courage, what happened to your brother. Not for myself. I don’t mind what happens. Why should I? But you should mind. You know what I say to you now? Get out of Malaya!”

“Where do you suggest? A nice island in the South Seas? I daresay I’ve got the bank account to be a desirable citizen in Tahiti. Ever been there?”

“No.”

“It’s preserved. It’s a monument.”

“Paul! Are you looking for Jeff’s killer … this way?”

There was a stool near the old man. I took my drink over and sat on it.

“That’s not easy to answer. I mean to find the killer. But I’m not rushing it. I thought about how Jeff would have approached this if it had been me instead of him. He’d have gone slowly, he always did. He’d have taken a deep breath and gone on quietly about his business, waiting. That’s what I’m trying to do now.”

“Have you thought that it might be a hired assassin who simply came into this country to do the job and then went out again?”

“Then why not get both of us together?”

“That might have been the intention!”

“No. Whoever killed Jeff knew his habits. He would also know mine, and that we were rarely together in Jeff’s apartment. I haven’t had a drink with him at that hour twice in a year.”

“But there’s another thing,” de Vorwooerd said. “They may have wanted Jeff dead and you a prisoner.”

“I’ve thought of that. It’s what I’m watching for.”

“Paul! I don’t feel you’re watching for anything. I know I’m an old man. I’m subject to fears and tremors which don’t come when you’re younger. My fear tonight … ever since I knew you would be coming here … it’s like something I felt in Java in those last months. Something against which I was helpless. There was no use mustering strength to fight because the time for that was over. You can call this superstition if you like. I don’t know. I just know it’s here.”

The old man thumped a thin chest. It was rather horrible to watch. He was trembling. I thought what a mistake it had been for Jeff and me to use him, even in this minor way as a kind of signalling post. He was of an age to be uncommitted and he’d earned this, a peace in rooms designed by himself, to be alone with a dream of a whole world now being forgotten, as though it had been wiped out. I felt ashamed that Kim Sung had been free to come here, to make use of de Vorwooerd.

“It’ll be all right,” I said. “You’ll see. It was all right before. Look, I’ll go out and find Kim Sung. I can get to the estuary all right. You have a boat …”

“No! Let him come here. I’ll tell him what you have to say. What is it?”

“The lorries are coming over on the last ferry at Jerantut. They’re waiting in the jungle until an hour before dawn, when they’ll go down the track Kim knows near the ferry here. The bank there is like a dock. Kim knows what to do. When the junks are unloaded they’re to clear off. It’ll be light by then, but they can go downstream without their motors.”

“What about coming up? They have to use the motors then, don’t they? What if they’re heard?”

“They weren’t last time. Besides, launches use the river.”

“Your junks have diesels, it isn’t the same sound at all. Paul, you are chancing it again.”

“You have to a lot of times in this game.”

“Ach!” de Vorwooerd said, like a sigh. “Give me a schnapps after all. A small one. What about Kim? You’re not seeing him this time?”

“There’s no need. I’ve got everything laid on. I want him to clear off and he’s not to go near Pulao Tioman. The Jap ship may have been spotted anchored there. Keep well away. In ten days he’s to bring his junks to Singapore and anchor. He can come up to my office. If the local police seem interested he’s not to mind. Can you remember all that?”

“Of course. I think he’ll be pleased to do some normal trading. And he never liked going to that
pagar
of your brother’s.”

“Neither did I much. De Vorwooerd, can I bring a friend to see you to-morrow?”

“A friend? What is this? An excursion for pleasure?”

He looked almost angry, that beard stuck out at me.

“In a way. I think you’ll like her.”

“
Haut ver dammer
! A woman! No! I’m too old for parties.”

“I’m bringing her for lunch. All this will have been over for a long time by then. You can serve a good hot curry.”

When I got back to the rest house the tin miners were eating in the dining-room, and being noisy about it. They had the gramophone playing jive which blared out into the hot night. There wasn’t going to be any place where you could get away from that din. Another thing we wouldn’t get away from easily was that sense of three men with tongues hanging out for a woman. They’d probably spend the evening bellowing and then go off to the bazaar. It wasn’t quite the setting I’d thought about.

I went up the stairs slowly, and along to Kate’s door, knocking on it. There was no answer. I knocked again and then tried the handle. The door opened into emptiness.

For a moment I thought I’d made a mistake. It couldn’t be her room at all, the bed tidied and not a trace of her things, no case, nothing on the dressing-table. I stepped in and closed the door.

She might have moved, of course, hearing the din from below and wanting to be away from it, some place at the back. Then something made me turn my head.

There was a man standing in the opening to the bathroom. He was small and compact, black haired, white suited, dark skinned. He had a gun in his hand, pointing at me. He was even smiling. When he spoke his voice was low, a little nasal and droning.

“I think, Mr. Harris, that we can say we have caught up with you.”

He lifted his hand a little, the one with the gun.

“Don’t move, please. Nothing foolish. I’m not alone in this. I have my assistant.”

I saw the assistant from a corner of my eyes, a figure stepped out from behind a curtain. I knew he also had a gun. They were taking no chances.

“We don’t want any noise if it can be avoided, Mr. Harris. Though we’re not afraid of it, you understand?”

“Who the hell are you?”

He came a little into the light from a bright central fixture, as though to let me see for myself. He had the composure of the trained killer, that was what I thought then.

Malay? Javanese? Not easy to say. A little European blood perhaps, but not too much, just enough to be conscious of it all the time, to be on the defensive in his world where that was no asset. I knew where he came from. And where the other came from, too, a bruiser, with a professionally mangled face, no smile and no manners. The boss had the manners, and used them softly.

“I would like you to listen to me very carefully, Mr. Harris. We’re going to your room now. You’re going to pack.”

“Where’s my friend?”

“I can promise that you’ll find that out soon. Meantime, listen to me, please. I have said that I don’t want noise, but that I’m not afraid of it. If I have to I will shoot you in this building. That means that many people will be involved. It will then become a matter for the Malay police. I think, when you consider it, you won’t want that, Mr. Harris. There’s your friend, Mr. de Vorwooerd, for instance. An old man. A pity to involve him.”

“De Vorwooerd is a personal friend, that’s all.”

“You underestimate us, Mr. Harris. The Dutchman is a link in your chain. But he doesn’t interest us greatly at the moment. Not if we get things our way, that is, with quietness. You see, we don’t want to involve anyone in this country. It’s really against our interests at the moment that we should. And yours too, perhaps?”

“Where’s Kate? What have you done with her?”

“Please keep your voice down. There is certainly a great noise going on downstairs, but one of the boys might be passing. It would be a pity if he heard you shouting. We want to give the impression that everything is quite regular, that only a change of plans has made you decide to leave the rest house. The best way for us … and for you. Do you get my meaning? You are going to sign out and pay your bill. And all the time both of us will be beside you, Mr. Harris, your friends, but quite ready to shoot.”