“Yes, sir.”
“—is check out of that hotel, but keep your luggage in your car. You have your passport?”
“Yes, sir.”
“There’s a foodstall at Changi named Wok Wok, do you know it?”
“I can find it, sir.”
“Good man. One o’clock. Be ready to travel.”
“Yes, sir,” Bennett said, thinking, it isn’t even ten now. I’ll have almost three hours to find them and deal with them, no problem, no problem.
“See you then.”
“Thank you, sir,” Bennett said, and hung up, and got to his feet. Pack first. Pack, check out, load the car, then come back in and deal with them.
He moved quickly, but not scrambling; he was very sure of himself. He packed his one large bag, carried it downstairs, paid the rest of his bill in cash, and took the bag out to the Honda, putting it where Diedrich had recently been. Then he was ready.
He wished he had a gun. The best he had was the length of iron pipe he’d used on Diedrich. Well, it had done the job with him, it would do the job with the other two. When he went back into the hotel, his shirt hung outside his pants, so that the pipe stuck under his belt would not be seen.
He’d kept his room key, and the clerk hadn’t thought to ask for it. He went through the lobby, quietly, attracting no attention, and took the elevator to the fourth floor, where his room had been.
It felt a little odd, to enter a hotel room after one has quit it. As though he’d been wrested, for just a minute, out of the normal movement of time, been jogged back or to the side, like a knight’s move in chess.
His former room was at the back of the building, overlooking a tumble of shed roofs and the rears of other buildings. The rooms of Rickendorf and Baldur were down one flight and also at the back. When he’d installed the listening device in the telephone, he’d come down the fire escape, a quick and simple route. The doorlocks were too good, beyond Bennett’s capacity to pick, but the windows at the back of the hotel had not been changed when the place was refurbished, and were locked with merely an old-fashioned latch that Bennett could open with a tableknife stuck between the sashes. That was the way he’d done it last time, and that’s the way he’d do it now.
The girl first. If she were there, Bennett would find some way to get in and kill her. If she weren’t there, Bennett would go in and search, maybe find out where she was, or wait for her to come back.
He opened the window, and leaned out, and one flight up two Chinese men in white coveralls were painting the fire escape. Painting it shiny black enamel. They saw Bennett and waved and smiled at him, and Bennett waved and smiled back, then withdrew into the room and shut the window.
Damn. Painting the fire escape; who ever heard of such a thing? Yes, fire escapes must be painted, like anything else, but no one’s ever seen a fire escape being painted.
So it meant he couldn’t do it that way, that’s all.
Another way. All right, let’s do it.
Bennett felt increasing urgency and increasing determination. He would do it, and now. He left his former room, now truly for the last time, and took the stairs down one flight.
He hurried to Baldur’s room, pulled the pipe out from under his shirt, and knocked on the door.
“Hello?”
Close to the door, imitating Diedrich’s voice and accent as best he could, he called, “Kim? Have you seen Luther?”
“Jerry?”
The door opened, and Bennett cocked the length of pipe up by his shoulder, and in the doorway was the girl. He hesitated, just a second—but in that second, she recognized him, and saw the pipe in his hand, and understood what he planned.
They lunged at the same instant, she to shut the door, he to push it open. She almost managed to slam it shut, but he wedged his foot in the space, ignored the pain when the door hit his foot, and shoved against it with his whole body.
She was strong, surprisingly so, and she was screaming helphelphelp! but he was stronger, and slowly he forced the door farther open.
Noise down the corridor. The elevator door was opening down there. Bennett heaved, and the door sprang open, and he leaped inside.
She was still screaming. She ran across to the bathroom as he slammed the front door and followed. She got into the bathroom before he could reach her, and he heard the snick of the lock, but he didn’t care. A bathroom lock?
Pounding on the door they’d just left. A male voice yelling KimKimKim! The German fellow? Deal with him next, deal with the one in the bathroom now.
He lifted his foot and kicked the bathroom door next to the knob, and at the same time he heard the German kick at the front door. But that door was much stronger than this one. He could finish here with plenty of time to take care of the German.
He kicked the bathroom door again, and it snapped open, and he sprang forward, and she sprayed hairspray into his eyes, pressing hard with both hands on the top of the aerosol can, spray shooting into his startled eyes and into his nose and into his open mouth.
He couldn’t see! It burned his eyes and he couldn’t see, but she was still in the confines of the bathroom, and he moved forward, arms spread, and she kicked him between the legs.
He felt her brush past him, but could do nothing about it. Bent, the pipe dropped, he scraped at his face, turning, trying to see, wiping at his eyes, and the first thing he saw was the girl opening the door, and then some man he’d never laid eyes on in his life before came running into the room.
Bennett raced out of the bathroom to the window, flung it open, rolled over the sill and out onto the fire escape just before the man could reach him. Rolling on his back on the fire escape, he kicked up with both feet into that face as the man started out after him, and the man fell back into the room.
Bennett tore down the fire escape and in among the sheds, running the maze, finding a way out of here to the street, while the Chinese painters watched him in amazement.
18
George Manville?
Kim stared at him, this apparition, as astonished by Manville’s presence as by that other man who’d suddenly attacked her with an iron pipe. She stared at him as he chased the other man across the room, the man diving out the window, George trying to go out after him, the other man kicking him back, kicking him in the face, George falling backward.
Only then did she come out of her momentary paralysis, start to move. Dropping the hairspray can on the bed, she hurried over to George, went to her knees beside him, called his name.
He was stunned, and there was a fresh scrape on his right cheek, bleeding a little, like four shallow claw scratches. He focused on her, or tried to: “Where is he?”
She moved to the window, looked out and down, and saw the man just dropping from the bottom of the fire escape into a jumble of lean-tos and sheds down there. Hearing chatter above her, she looked up and saw two painters pointing at the fleeing man. Seeing Kim, they pointed at her, and started to laugh.
What did they think was going on here, what did they think the story was? Kim smiled weakly at them and turned back to the room, to find George shakily getting to his feet, propping himself with the bed. “Sit down, George, sit down,” she said, holding his arm, helping him to sit on the side of the bed. “I’ll get a cloth.”
She hurried back to the bathroom, now with its broken door, and ran warm water over a washcloth. Bringing that out to George, she bent over him to dab at the scratches, to clean away any dirt there might have been on that man’s shoes, and found herself meeting George’s eyes, three inches away.
He smiled at her, crinkling the area of the wound.
“God, it’s good to see you,” he said.
* * *
In the police van, he explained some of what had been going on, and how he happened to be here. “After Curtis smeared me,” he said, “I had to go along with him, at least for a little while, so he’d clear my name.”
“I thought that was the reason,” she told him, although in fact s
he hadn’t been at all sure.
The police van was large and roomy, meant to carry a dozen officers at a time. In it now were only the police driver and a second policeman in front, plus Kim and George in back. They were traveling without siren or flashing lights, crossing Singapore toward Tanglin police station on Napier Road. “Your friend Luther’s there,” George had told her, “he was telling the police about Jerry when I came in.”
Now, on the way, he said, “I was being held at a station Curtis owns in the middle of Australia, very isolated. When I found out Curtis wasn’t keeping his part of the bargain, that he was still trying to send that man of his to kill you, the one who came out to the boat—”
“Him,” she said, and shuddered, remembering the man. “Don’t tell me he’s in Singapore.”
“He’s dead,” George said, the word coming out very flat. She would have asked him to explain more, but he went straight on, saying, “I got away from there and made my way back to Brisbane, and went to see the lawyer again. Brevizin. That was Wednesday. At first, he didn’t want to see me at all. Curtis had been to him—”
“Curtis is everywhere,” she said.
He shook his head and said, “It seems like that sometimes. Anyway, Curtis had hired him to take care of any legal problems with his yacht and with Captain Zhang killing himself. You see, the whole point was, if Curtis is his client, I can’t be.”
“He is everywhere,” she repeated.
“Well,” George said, “ultimately I did convince Brevizin to see me, and I told him what had been going on, everything I knew, and he finally agreed to look into it. Friday afternoon he called to tell me we were going to meet a police inspector named Tony Fairchild, which we did.”
Kim said, “And had Curtis been to him, too?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” George told her. “He interviewed Curtis because of Zhang’s suicide, and Curtis told him I was not only back working with him but was here in Singapore. He had somebody, God knows who, pretend to be me and talk to Fairchild from Singapore and convince him it was all a tempest in a teapot.”
Kim said, “Why go through all that?”
“Because otherwise Fairchild and Brevizin were going to meet, and they would have found out right away they’d been told conflicting stories, and they’d have known there was something there to be investigated. This way, everyone just let it drop.”
“With you stuck in the middle of Australia.”
“Right. So Friday the three of us met, Brevizin and Inspector Fairchild and me, and we untangled some of the lies, and Fairchild said he’d look into it all very quietly, which I suppose he must have done over the weekend, because yesterday, first thing in the morning, we had another meeting, the three of us, and made some phone calls, and the end result is, Fairchild and I took a late flight here last night.”
Surprised, Kim said, “Both of you?”
“Yes. Brevizin paid for it—he doesn’t take kindly to being played for a fool. Fairchild has no jurisdiction here, of course, but Brevizin felt, to get the Singapore authorities to take this question seriously, Fairchild would need to be here, to give an unbiased take on events.”
Kim said, “What question do you mean?”
“The basic question,” George said. “What is Richard Curtis going to destroy, and when is he going to do it?”
19
Tony Fairchild thought his Singaporean opposite number was more or less an ass. Wai Fung, inspector of police, the exact identical rank to Fairchild, was a slender man of middle years who seemed determined not to let anything at all ruffle the orderly progression of his day, his life, his career. He seemed to believe that he was not in his position as police inspector to solve crimes, bring malefactors to justice and affirm the rule of law (all of which Fairchild believed in passionately), but was here merely to maintain calm, as though he were an usher at a cinema on a Saturday afternoon.
Which meant, of course, that Wai Fung was having a great deal of trouble accommodating the notion that he should go out and ruffle the existence of a prominent Singaporean businessman like Richard Curtis, nor that he should concern himself with the cares and woes of a provincial policeman from far-off Australia, nor that he should want to involve his island nation in the murk of international intrigue, particularly if it might at all have any bearing on Hong Kong, which is to say, China. So all in all, Wai Fung was being a smiling obstructionist.
On the other hand, Fairchild had to admit to himself that a part of his antipathy to Wai Fung was no doubt caused by his own unease. First, he was uneasy because he was out of the world he knew and into a world where he had neither insights nor standing. But even more importantly, he felt unease, even embarrassment, because he had already once before fallen down on this job so miserably and completely.
It had taken no more than three minutes of the first meeting among himself and the lawyer Brevizin and the real George Manville for Fairchild to realize he’d been snookered, by the smooth-talking Curtis and by the false Manville, telephoning him from Singapore (and even that wasn’t certain) to say he’d had minimal dealings with Kim Baldur and in fact actively disliked her.
If Fairchild hadn’t allowed himself to be lulled into inactivity by that phone call, he’d have kept his original appointment with Brevizin and the whole plot would have unraveled right then, or at least begun to. Instead of which, they’d lost a week, more than a week, and Fairchild blamed himself.
As an overachiever from the Sydney slums, a bright boy who’d always had to provide his own impetus in life, Tony Fairchild was a stern taskmaster when it came to his own actions. He didn’t like to fail, he didn’t like to be sloppy, and he didn’t like to be cozened, and all of those things had happened in the Richard Curtis affair. So he was (and grudgingly he knew this) taking it out on the unaccommodating Wai Fung.
Fairchild and Wai Fung and a few of Wai Fung’s younger staff and the German, Luther Rickendorf, now sat together in a conference room in the station, waiting for George Manville to return with Kim Baldur. Jerry Diedrich had gone missing, presumed kidnapped, possibly dead, and that meant Kim Baldur was very likely also at risk; it had been agreed that the circumstances might now be too risky for Kim to travel by herself around Singapore, so rather than just telephoning her at the hotel and telling her to get a taxi, Manville had gone to fetch her. When Fairchild thought about the alacrity with which Manville had volunteered to be the one to go get the Baldur woman, he could only wince at his gullibility when he’d accepted the sneers of that other ‘Manville’ as genuine.
The hall door opened, and Manville came in, with a distraught-looking Kim Baldur, and a police escort. Kim turned to Rickendorf, seated near the door, to say, “Oh, Luther, he attacked me!”
Rickendorf and Manville both started to speak, but Wai Fung surprised Fairchild by slicing through them with a suddenly steely voice: “Who attacked you? You say you were attacked?”
She looked around briefly, but clearly understood that Wai Fung was the person of importance in this room. She said, “The man who’s been following us. Didn’t Luther tell you about him?”
Rickendorf said, “I told them, Kim.”
“The man from Richard Curtis,” Kim said, sounding contentious and bitter.
“From Richard Curtis,” Wai Fung echoed. “Mr. Rickendorf made a similar assertion, but unfortunately lacked proof. May I hope you have brought the proof? The proof,” he said, “may be of any sort. Fingerprints, documents, eyewitnesses—”
“George saw the man, he can describe what happened.”
“Very well,” Wai Fung said, and gestured at the conference table. “Why don’t we all sit down?”
They did, and Fairchild pulled out his small notepad and black-ink pen.
Manville said, “When I got to the hotel, when I got out of the elevator, I saw this man forcing his way into Kim’s room.”
Wai Fung said, “You knew he was forcing? She was not inviting?”
“She was screaming for help,” Manvil
le said.
Wai Fung said, “Very well.”
“I ran down there,” Manville went on, “and pounded on the door, but he’d closed and locked it. Kim was still calling for help. Then I heard a crashing sound. I didn’t know it then, but—”
“No, no, please, Mr. Manville,” Wai Fung interrupted. “Tell it to us in the order in which you knew it.”
“All right,” Manville said. “I heard a crashing sound. I was trying to kick down the door, but it took a few tries. When I finally got it open Kim was there, looking very frightened. She was holding a can of something—”
“Hairspray,” Kim said.
“The bathroom door was broken and the man was coming out of there, rubbing at his eyes.”
Fairchild looked up from his notepad. “Well done,” he told Kim.
Manville said, “He ran for the window. I chased him, but he got out the window and when I tried to follow him he kicked me.” He touched an angry-looking scrape on his right cheek.
Wai Fung looked around at them all. “I take it that is it? You don’t know this man? His name?”
Kim said, “He’s been staying at our hotel. A Eurasian man, big and bulky. He carries a Polaroid camera.”
Rickendorf said, “Inspector,” and Fairchild automatically turned toward him, but of course it was Wai Fung he meant. “Inspector,” he said, “we believe he put bugs in our telephones. They’re probably still there.”
“Interesting,” Wai Fung said, and turned to Kim to say, “This man. When he attacked you, did he have a weapon of any kind?”
“A piece of pipe,” she said, “Like an iron pipe, I don’t know, six inches long?”
“And do we still have this pipe?”
“I gave it to your people downstairs,” Manville said.
Wai Fung said, “Is that it? No witnesses?”
Manville, with a very slight edge, said, “I’m the witness.”
“From the mark on your face, Mr. Manville,” Wai Fung told him, “you were a participant. A witness is an outside observer. I take it there were none of those?”
Forever and a Death Page 28
