The Jade Figurine

by Bill Pronzini

  Dinessen had stopped moving now, and I knew that he was somewhere near the office door, listening, trying to pinpoint my location. The silence in the warehouse was acute and charged with tension. Until he moved, I knew I couldn’t take the chance of moving either. I felt trapped and helpless. I had no weapon, and in the ebon enclosure there was nothing I could see to use effectively against a handgun. It was a long way to the far end of the storage area; even if I could get there, I did not know the exact positioning of the loading doors, or of any other possible exit. And there was the strong chance that if I did manage to locate a way out, the door or doors would be locked in such a way that I wouldn’t be able to open them easily.

  I wondered how long it would be before Dinessen thought to turn on the lights.

  My mouth was dry, brassy, and the pain in my head had sharply intensified; the throbbing percussion seemed loud enough to be heard in the muggy stillness. Gently, I explored my right arm with the fingers of my left hand. The bullet had gone through the flesh and muscle just above the elbow, and there was a lot of blood. The arm had very little feeling left in it—the fingers were already useless—and I knew I would have to cradle it against my chest when I moved again, to keep it from flopping into something.

  “Connell!” Dinessen shouted suddenly. “Connell, you listen! You come out and we make a deal. I don’t kill you if you come out, Connell.”

  The words tumbled and echoed through the blackness. I held myself motionless. The silence grew thick again, and I knew Dinessen had realized the futility of calling out as he had. Another thirty seconds crept away, and then he began moving once more, the slap of his shoes seeming to retreat in cadence. The shipping counter, I thought. And the switches for the overhead lights.

  I crawled out from the skid of hemp rope, across the cleared space, and worked my body between crates of kiam chy water jars. Another narrow aisle—and this one bordered on the far side by ten-foot piles of empty pallets, stacked close together. There was no way I could get over them, and if I tried to go around them, into the main aisleway, Dinessen would spot me immediately. Unless I could get there before he came away from the shipping counter. . .

  The lights went on.

  Bright white illumination spilled down from the large-wattage bulbs suspended at regular intervals from the ceiling rafters. I paused, blinking against the glare, and I could hear Dinessen running across the concrete again, toward the main aisleway. I stood there, indecisive, holding my useless arm—and I saw the forklift.

  It was an ancient American-made model, painted a dull yellow. And it had been parked so that its rear end and the right-hand driver’s side were partially hidden behind the crates of kiam chy jars at the main aisleway. The twin iron blades jutted out waist high in front like opened and entreating arms.

  I went down to it in a humped-over position, trying to move as silently as I could, taking air with short, openmouthed breaths. Dinessen had stopped moving again, to listen, and I knew I didn’t have much time, that he would have to start down the aisleway pretty soon. He wasn’t going to play the waiting game all night.

  I came to the rear of the lift and got my left hand on the cold metal bar there, leaning in on the open side. The ignition key was in its dashboard lock. I released a silent breath and reached in to turn it to the On position. It made a small click that was barely discernible even to my own ears. There were no front or side-mount lights on the lift, nothing to show that I had switched it on.

  I looked at the gearshift. The machine was old enough and small enough so that it only had two speeds—forward and reverse. Whoever had driven it last had parked it in the forward position. I put my left foot into the rung set into the metal side plate and lifted myself prone across the seat. The high dashboard and the wide cylinder and crossbars of the lift forks were an effective shield between Dinessen and me.

  Still, I lay there for a long moment, not breathing at all now. The warehouse remained shrouded in silence, and the lights burned like miniature suns overhead. I was sweating heavily, covered with blood and filled with pain and rage.

  Dinessen began moving again.

  I could hear his shoes scuffling along the concrete as he started down the main aisleway—slow steps, careful steps, wary steps. I groped with my left foot until I found the lift’s clutch and then pushed it to the floor. It made no sound. I brought my right foot under and got it positioned on the accelerator, then lifted my left hand to the dashboard with my thumb poised on the starter button.

  I had worked for an import-export firm in Singapore for a while, and part of my duties there had been the moving of freight with a forklift similar to this one. It had constantly been in need of repairs, and I had had trouble starting it on occasion. If the engine on this one didn’t catch on the first or second try, I was through with it. Dinessen would be down on me in a matter of seconds once he heard the cough and grind of the lift’s starter.

  I worked wetness onto my lips and inhaled deeply—and then I raised up on the seat and hit the starter.

  The motor whirred, whirred, didn’t catch. Frantically, I pumped the accelerator and shoved the button in again, using my little finger to draw out the choke. This time the engine came to life with a guttural rumble. I wrapped my left hand around the wheel and snapped the clutch out. The undersize rear tires spun, smoking violently on the concrete, and finally took hold.

  The lift jumped forward, the engine roaring now, the rear end snapping around. My fingers were slippery with blood, and I had to fight for a firm grip on the wheel to get the machine straightened. Through the crossbars I could see Dinessen, his face a mask of surprise and sudden terror, crouching in the middle of the aisleway with the Lüger raised in his hand.

  He squeezed off twice, convulsively. The reports seemed popgun loud amid the rumbling in my ears. One of the bullets came through and sang past my right ear; the other pinged sharply and metallically off one of the crossbars on the lift frame. Dinessen turned and started to run, clumsily, his huge feet tangling with one another in his haste to get out of the way of the hurtling machine. I let go of the wheel and jumped out to the side, hit the concrete on my numbed right shoulder, felt only the shock of impact.

  I rolled over, and when I came up I heard Dinessen scream—a high-pitched, terrified sound over the amplified roar of the forklift’s motor. But then the scream was chopped off in a thundering, reverberating crash, and I knew the machine had slapped into the upper wall that separated the warehouse from the office.

  I got to my feet, painfully, and went down there. The lift lay on its side at the base of the wall, its rear wheels spinning. The stench of gasoline from its ruptured tank was heavy in the stagnant air. I took one look at Dinessen, and at the dripping red grooves the forks had made in the wooden wall, and turned away to keep from being sick.

  One of those gleaming metal forks had caught him just above the belt at the rear, carried him forward, and driven him into the wall as the lift collided with it. There was not much left of him now at all.

  Chapter Thirteen

  DINESSEN’S car was an old, primer-patched Citröen. I found it parked just outside the entrance to the office, the key in the ignition. That was something, at least. I wouldn’t have had the stomach to search the mangled thing there in the warehouse; it had been bad enough during the minute I had used to wipe my fingerprints off the surfaces I had touched on the forklift.

  That act had been automatic, and now I wondered why I had taken the time to remove the prints. It was, in a bitter sense, like closing the barn door after the horse had fled. But I still had some hope—the odds were a little better now—and I decided I had done the wisest thing. There was no point in tightening the noose around my neck.

  I slid in under the Citröen’s wheel, holding my stiffened right arm in my lap. There had been no time for cleaning up, and my bush jacket and khakis were stained with patches of blood; but the wound had stopped bleeding at least. My head still ached piteously, and my strength was flaggin
g from pain and exertion and loss of blood. And yet the urgency which filled me was like a narcotic, allowing me to function, compensating.

  I got the car started and brought it into a sharp turn, onto a short access lane. I had to shift the four-speed transmission awkwardly across my body with my left hand, using my shoulder to keep the wheel in position. The floodlit buildings, the small and darkened airstrip, receded and finally disappeared as I reached Bukit Timah Road and swung south along there, into the city proper.

  The Citröen had a dash panel clock, and its luminescent dial coincided with my wristwatch . . . 8:05. It would take me maybe twenty minutes to get to the Lavender Street area and Tampines Road . . . 8:25. Not much time—but I had to go there, I had to find whatever evidence Dinessen had planted with Marla King’s body; and if it could be accomplished, if there was enough time, I had to get rid of the body as well. Even with any evidence removed, I didn’t want Tiong walking in there and finding her dead.

  There was a considerable amount of traffic on Bukit Timah Road, and the headlights of the oncoming cars were like streaks of yellow-white paint on the black canvas of the night. Tall palms and Jamaican peppers and fruit-laden mangosteens dotted the landscape, occasionally illuminated by the headlights, occasionally drenched in the clinical white shine of the moon when it drifted free of a rolling pattern of clouds. I drove too fast in spite of the traffic, with too much exigency and too little concentration.

  I kept thinking of Marla King, and of Dinessen, and how the two of them fit together in this thing. It could be that she had killed La Croix, and that the Frenchman had given her Dinessen’s name—but not the exact location of the Burong Chabak. Van Rijk had told me she was on the island illegally, and so Dinessen might have seemed like her way out to Thailand and the buyer. He already knew about the figurine from La Croix, and she had had to promise him a slice of the pie in order to get him to go along with her plans. Then she had come to me, and when she was sure that I was going to pony up the figurine, she had tried to double-cross Dinessen the way La Croix had double-crossed her—and had gotten the same reward for her greed; she would probably have tried to cross me if she’d had the chance as well. It could also be that she had been planning a double-cross of La Croix from the beginning—Jesus, the treachery involved in all this—and had enlisted Dinessen’s help almost immediately, without telling him of the Burong Chabak; he had discovered its existence, and its worth, from the Frenchman, confronted her with the knowledge, and been ostensibly brought in as a partner. If that was the answer, then Marla King might not have killed La Croix. I liked it better with the first explanation, because that answered a lot more of the questions which until now had had no answers. But I had no way of knowing, one way or the other.

  I had no way of knowing, either, why La Croix had told Dinessen I was aware of where he had secreted the Burong Chabak. A ruse of some kind? No, that didn’t add up; what possible reason could the Frenchman have had for that kind of smoke screen? He hadn’t known he was going to die, and he had expected Dinessen to fly him to Thailand that night. Had La Croix really thought I knew where he’d put the figurine? That seemed impossible . . .

  I reached Jalan Besar, ran a traffic light at the intersection there, and turned east across the bridge spanning the Kallang River. Thai romvong music filled the car with false gaiety as I passed the multicolored lights of the New World Amusement Park, and it increased my urgency somehow, caused me to bear down harder on the accelerator. The Lavender Street intersection came up finally, and I veered south there, toward the harbor, and began looking for Tampines Road.

  Lavender Street had once been a wide-open sin center in Singapore, before the Japanese invasion in 1942 and during their occupation of the island. You could have had a woman in one of the brothels or dance halls, an opium pipe in one of the Chandu shops under distinctive black-and-white signs, a chance at Dame Fortune in one of the fan-tan parlors. The opium dens had been pretty much closed down at the end of the war, and the People’s Action Party had made an attempt to clean up Lavender Street in recent years by urban renewal and vice crackdowns. They hadn’t quite succeeded. It was still the place to go in Singapore for a quick lay or a quick way to lose your money.

  I found Tampines Road, finally—a short side street lined with small cottages squatting in uneven rows on both sides, a great many of which would belong to the people who worked on Lavender Street. Along the road and in the front yards grew tall palms and ferns and blood-red Javanese Ixora plants; but they were deceptive in their lushness, like fine silks and laces concealing the tired bodies of middle-aged washerwomen.

  The dash panel clock read 8:23.

  There were a few cars parked along the road, but none of them were marked with police insignias, or looked to be anything other than private vehicles. I drove slowly along the darkened street, looking left and right, watching for some sign of Tiong or his men, for a constable staked out to watch Number Seven. I saw nothing. I had gotten here first, then, but I knew that he could be a minute, two minutes away. So damned little time . . .

  Number Seven was an attap-roofed bungalow on the near corner, with an ell-shaped garden grown heavy with weeds and ferns and wild flowering shrubs; a gravel path extended from the street to an open, slant-roofed porch. Its location was a point in my favor. The cross street was Jalan Tenah, and that would release into Serangoon Road. When I left the area I wouldn’t have to double back along Tampines to Lavender Street.

  I made the turn onto Jalan Tenah and parked the Citröen fifty yards beyond a wooden fence which marked the side boundary of Number Seven. I stepped out of the car, and my legs felt rubbery for a moment, as if they would not support my weight. Sweat encased my body in thick, hot mucus. I leaned against the side of the car for a time, taking deep lungfuls of the cooling night air. A pervasive odor clogged the stillness, a combination of damp green foliage and the heady perfume of flowers.

  Time, time, time . . .

  The word seemed to throb in cadence with the pain inside my skull. I moved away from the car, jerkily, and went to the side fence. Beyond the palms on that side of the ell, Number Seven looked as dark and still as it had moments earlier. Bamboo blinds shaded the two visible windows on that side of the bungalow; the front entrance was on Tampines Road.

  I glanced quickly up and down the street. No cars, no lights in the nearest cottage, no strollers. I went into the yard and made my way through the heavy grasses, the tangled vines, the flowering shrubs. I stood in the shadows at the side walls of the bungalow, listening. A bird sang somewhere nearby, softly, and a chichak lizard, exposed momentarily in a patch of moonlight, peered at me with bright terror before it darted away among the vegetation. There was no sound at all from within the dwelling.

  I started toward the rear, stepped around the corner. A wood-framed set of stairs was tacked off-center to the back wall, shaded by a huge weeping willow that drooped its leafy fronds on the ground and on the stairs like long hair on the bowed head of an old woman. I moved to the steps and up them, to where a screen door barred admittance to an enclosed rear porch. I pulled on the handle. It gave slightly, with a soft rattling sound—enough to tell me that it was locked with an eye hook.

  My watch said 8:33.

  Taking a firmer grip on the handle, I jerked the door sharply outward. It made a hellish amount of noise, but the eye hook held fast. Fresh beads of sweat broke and ran on my face and neck. I yanked on the handle again, viciously this time, bracing my left foot against the bottom of the door. The eye pulled free of the wood with a sound like fingernails dragged across a blackboard, and the door wobbled open in my hand.

  I went in quickly, because there was no more time to think about Tiong or about any of the neighbors having been aroused by the amount of noise I’d made. The screen slapped shut behind me, and glass wind bells, suspended from the ceiling, tinkled musically in the rush of air as I moved across the porch toward the rear door. It was locked, but it had two rectangular panes set side by side
in its upper half. I looked for something I could use to break the glass, and there was one of those old-fashioned metal watering cans on a dusty table to the left, set under a wall-bracketed planter containing the corpses of long-dead plants.

  I caught up the can and took it to the door and broke one of the panes with the round, pinholed metal spout. Shards of glass tinkled like the wind bells as they fell onto the floor inside. I got my hand through without cutting myself and fumbled at the latch on the inside; there was a heavy key in the lock, and I turned that and opened the door.

  The kitchen. An extended wooden drainboard covered most of the side wall, and moonlight washed in through a window above it, giving substance to the shadows of an icebox, a stove, a dinette table, a row of storage cupboards. There was another door directly across from me. I went to it without hesitation, pushed it open, and looked into a short hallway. At its far end, an arch gave on a room filled with shadows.

  It seemed likely that that was the living area, and that Marla King had made her call to me from there. I stepped through and traversed the hallway, passed under the arch. It was a large room containing several rattan chairs, a rattan settee, a writing desk, and huge brightly colored batik pillows whose hues seemed almost phosphorescent in the darkness. I moved deeper into the room. The floor was comprised of blocks of what looked like Ipoh marble but was probably some ersatz composition.