The Jade Figurine

by Bill Pronzini

  The smell of blood was thick and brackish in there.

  Near the bamboo-shaded front windows, I could see the outlines of a low Chinese table. On its top I thought I could make out the form of a telephone through the gloom. I started in that direction—and an inert shape materialized in the shadows behind one of the large chairs, took on the contours of a female body.

  I saw as I reached her that she was dressed in a thin silk robe. It had fallen away from her legs and upper thighs, and one of her breasts was exposed. The whiteness of her skin had an eerie, unreal quality. I knelt beside her, turned her a little. The back of her head was crushed, and her butter-yellow hair was streaked with black ribbons that would be dried blood. There was blood on the floor, too, a coagulated blot of it like a Rorschach form on the whiteness of the ersatz marble. She had fallen or been thrown to the floor, and had struck and caved in the back of her head that way; or Dinessen had knocked her down and straddled her and battered her head repeatedly against the unyielding surface. Judging from the amount of damage to her skull, it had happened the latter way.

  I searched her body and the area near it as efficiently as I was able in the darkness; I couldn’t take the chance of putting on a light, or even of striking a match. There was nothing for me to find—nothing that linked me with Marla King’s death, nothing that Dinessen had planted there. I felt a return of the impotent rage I had known earlier. It looked now as if the bastard had been planning to frame me for his murder, all right, but only after he had finally killed me too. He hadn’t planted any evidence to link me originally, he had simply gone foxy on me in the office in an attempt to pry loose the location of the Burong Chabak. Well, I’d let him convince me it was the truth, but in one way I wasn’t sorry I had come here to find out it was a lie. There was still the problem of Marla King’s body, and I knew that I had to try to get her out and hidden somewhere, buried somewhere. That would buy me more hope and continued freedom and time to figure a way out from under once and for all; otherwise, Tiong would have me jailed, and the possibility existed that he’d find some way to put the murder on my neck despite previous co-operation and lack of evidence . . .

  I ran into the kitchen again, caught up a dishtowel, wet it in the sink, and took it back into the front room. I spent a precious minute cleaning the blood off the floor. Maria King’s skin was cold when I touched her, and her limbs had stiffened in rigor mortis. I pulled at her, sweating, cursing my flopping right arm, and finally managed to get her into a sitting position. Her face was flaccid in death, and yet she looked sixty years old and completely ugly.

  I wrapped the bloodied towel around her head, and then struggled with her body, maneuvering her and myself so that I could get her up onto my shoulder. My eyes stung with inpouring sweat, but I could see the dial of my wristwatch; it was 8:48. I got her onto my shoulder at last, gathered strength, and heaved up, staggering under the deadweight, sidestepping a chair. I regained my balance, turned, started for the archway.

  And froze.

  There were footsteps outside, footsteps on the gravel path leading up to the porch, footsteps on the wooden stairs and on the floor of the porch. Two sets, maybe three. For some reason of his own, Tiong had decided not to wait for Van Rijk at all. He was moving in early, without taking any chances; he’d had whatever cars he’d brought parked down the street, and he and his men had come up silently on foot.

  Fists hammered against the wood paneling of the door.

  Tiong’s voice, demanding and officious, called out, “Open this door. We are the polis.”

  I stood there with the body of Maria King draped across my shoulder, motionless, trapped. Time had finally and abruptly run out, and there was no way I could get free with the dead girl. The panic came in a spiraling rush, and before I could fight it off with cold reason, it had taken me beyond the point of commitment. I dumped Marla King brutally onto the settee, heard her stiffened form hit the back, heard the settee tilt up and crash over backward under her weight—and I was running.

  Chapter Fourteen

  VOICES rose in excited shouts on the porch outside, and I heard Tiong yell something in Malay. A heavy shoulder thudded against the wood of the front door. I fled down the hall, through the kitchen, and out onto the rear porch. The wind bells tinkled like crazed laughter as I hit the screen door head on, sent it wobbling and banging open, and tumbled down the steps onto the spongy ground beneath the willow tree.

  A khaki-uniformed, white-turbaned Sikh constable came running around the side corner of the bungalow. He had a riot club in one hand, and when he saw me he came on in a rush, the club upraised, blowing shrill blasts on a police whistle. I ran toward him instead of away, and the movement surprised him enough to throw him off-stride. He swung the club awkwardly at my head, but I ducked under it and hit him across the chest with the stiffened edge of my left arm. Air spilled out of his mouth and nose in a muffled gasp of pain, and he went over on his back with his legs kicking like a beached sea turtle.

  I veered away from him, under the drooping branches of the willow toward the rear perimeter of the property, my right arm fluttering at my side and as worthless as the dangling sleeve of a coat. A low stone wall stretched out in front of me, dividing the rear yard of the bungalow from another yard on the opposite side. I jumped it without breaking stride, but when I came down I lost my footing, staggered to one knee, and sprawled out face down on a cushion of leaves and grass.

  I heaved up onto my knees, my feet. The rear door of the cottage facing me burst open, and a half-naked Chinese stood momentarily silhouetted against an oblong scintilla of yellow light. Then he shouted something in an angry, unintelligible dialect—Hokkein or Cantonese—and hurried down his rear steps. I pivoted away from him to the left, toward Jalan Tenah, but he was either one of these heroic types or drunk on rice wine.

  He tried to head me off as I threaded my way between several canted chamadora palms, still yelling at me in Chinese. I let him get in front of me, stepped up beside him before he could contain his momentum and set himself, and kicked his legs out from under him. He went to his knees, bawling. I swiped at the back of his thick neck with the edge of my palm and left him face down in the weeds, his hands scrabbling at the earth like fat spiders.

  The whistles seemed closer, louder, as I stumbled out onto Jalan Tenah. I took a step to my left, looking for the Citröen. It was fifty or sixty yards away, and a constable was abreast of it on the roadway, running toward me, blowing his goddam whistle. I reversed direction and went across the street in a diagonal trajectory, and each breath was the sharp jab of a needle in my lungs as I ran.

  Before I reached the far side, headlamps made a wide turn onto Jalan Tenah from Tampines Road, sweeping cones of light. I heard the accelerated whine of the car’s engine, and I knew Tiong, or one of his constables, had gone back for pursuit wheels. The headlights stabbed brilliance at me as the car bore down. I gained the edge of the road, dodged into another yard and the protective shadows cast by a casuarina tree.

  Western rock music pummeled the night with dissonant fists from within the bungalow there, and yellow illumination shone behind two of its windows. I ran parallel to its near side, looped around the rear corner and across the width of the cottage to where a woven bamboo fence blocked the way. The fence was too high to climb, but slender wooden stakes set at five-foot intervals held it in an upright position and it was not otherwise anchored to the ground. I hit it with my left shoulder, felt it yield, and ran over it infantry-style.

  The music ceased abruptly inside the bungalow, and I could hear the police whistles again, the distant ululation of sirens. There were more excited shouts in Malay, footfalls somewhere behind me in the first yard. I angled left and battered down a second woven bamboo fence. A dog began barking loudly in a nearby enclosure. I started along the side of a cottage with a kind of attap-roofed porte cochere attached, and a woman wearing a Malayan kebaya darted out in front of me, waving her arms like a signalman.

  Th
ere was no time to stop or to go around her. I hit her full on and knocked her sprawling into a bed of ferns. She began to scream in high-pitched tones, more in anger than pain or fear. Other dogs set up a barking in the area, creating with the whistles and the cries a cacophony of noise that battered at my head like the slash of surf against a rocky coastline.

  A thin scarecrow of a man came racing past the screaming woman, shouting, “Bini saya; bini saya!” (“My wife, my wife!”) and plucked with curled fingers at my right arm. One of his nails raked across the wound there, and pain flashed through the numbness in a jagged blaze. I swung around savagely and clubbed him across the side of the head with my left fist. He staggered away, and I staggered away—two negative magnetic poles repelling each other.

  I came out on another street, crossed it at a diagonal run, and pushed through a gate in a stone wall. Beyond it, and beyond a row of mangosteens laden with fruit, was an old Malayan villa with a sharply peaked tile roof over a lower tile-roofed porch. It was built on short wooden stilts set into white marble base blocks, and an ornate marble-framed set of stairs on the near side gleamed palely in the darkness.

  I started toward it. A heavy, deep-throated growl came from the shadows of a mango before I had taken three steps, and a dark, blurred form came hurtling at me out of the blackness. I tried to turn, but heavy forepaws struck me in the chest. I staggered and went down, rolling immediately, dragging my left arm up to protect my face. The dog was big—a langsat mongrel—and its eyes glittered yellowly in the dark. Sharp fangs closed over my left wrist, bit into the flesh, and began shaking me like a bone or a stick. Fetid breath and flecks of saliva spattered my face. I locked my elbow and heaved the animal across my body, kicking at it, missing, kicking again, missing again, kicking a third time.

  My shoe scraped across lean ribs, and the snarl transformed into a howl of pain. The jaws released their hold on my wrist, and I scrabbled away, turning onto my back as the mongrel charged again, pulling my legs back to my chest. The dog was in midleap when I pistoned them forward, felt the solid impact with the thick-furred musculature of its chest; it flipped over backward through the air, howling and whimpering, and I rolled again and got my feet under me. Sweat blurred my vision as I stumbled up, and my lungs screamed in protest. My thoughts were jumbled fragments soaked in the raw fluid of fear and blind panic.

  A vegetable garden, fashioned with wooden stakes, grew on one side of the villa. I blundered through it, heard the dog snarling and barking once more, coming after me. Someone inside the villa was shouting in Malay, and I heard the word senapang—gun. I reached another stone wall that served as a side boundary, threw myself on top of it with the dog snapping at my heels, and pitched over onto the other side.

  Up again, running again. Another Malayan villa, more shouts, more lights. Down the side, over another wall, into another yard. The smell of red jasmine, of hibiscus, like perfume-drenched vomit in my nostrils. Pain. Fire in my lungs. Thunder in my ears. Run, run, run . . .

  Another street, seen through a wet haze of astringent sweat. Across it in another diagonal. No bungalows there, no villas. A small creek, some ten feet below the level of the street, running parallel to the road on that side, half-filled with swollen, muddy run-off from the afternoon’s heavy thundershowers.

  I slowed, gagging on my breath, and pawed my eyes clear. The near bank of the creek was a tangled mass of ferns and creepers and white syringa bushes. A thick, junglelike profusion of palms and mangroves and green bamboo formed a high black wall on the opposite bank. Sanctuary, escape . . .

  I looked back over my shoulder. I could still hear the sounds of pursuit, but no one had emerged as yet from the darkness in the yard across the street. I left the road and scrambled down the bank, leaning on my left hand to try to hold my footing. But my legs went out from under me and I fell, rolling through the wet ferns toward the rushing stream of water.

  I banged into a katumpagan—Artillery Plant—and heard the stamens burst with small explosions that sounded almost like infantry fire; clouds of pollen dust, like puffs of smoke, bit into my nose and eyes. Then the lower part of my body struck the water and submerged. It was cold, and the shock of it took away what little breath I had left. I clawed frantically at the vegetation on the bank, missed a handhold, and felt myself sliding deeper into the stream. My head went under. Muddy, foul-tasting water poured into my mouth, my throat, and the current carried me forward several feet before I could get my head clear and my fingers free to clutch a shrub on the bank and halt my momentum.

  Somehow I managed to pull my body higher onto the bank and I lay there, spitting up water, sucking in breath, praying for just a little more strength. Finally, I was able to draw myself up, to stand swaying on the rocky bed. I looked up at the road. No one there yet, but I could hear them coming closer. I pivoted and forded the stream, my shoes slipping on the polished stones of the creek bed, and the water swirled just below my waist like clutching fingers trying to drag me off balance again.

  I lurched onto the far bank, digging at the spongy earth with the hooked fingers on my left hand, and struggled upward on my knees and into the cover of the mangroves and the bamboo. Wings flapped angrily above my head as I crawled deeper into the trees and undergrowth, and a hornbill scolded me shrilly for disturbing its sleep. I glanced back once, and through the vegetation I could see one man standing across the roadway, looking both ways along it; he hadn’t seen me come into the thicket, I was sure of that.

  At the bole of a tall palm I stopped finally and lay prone, my head cradled in the crook of my good left arm, wheezing and panting and crying a little from the pain and exertion. Deep silence enfolded me, broken only by the chittering of cicadas, the buzzing of mosquitoes, the occasional rustling movement of an animal or a lizard or a bird in the surrounding growth. I could still hear shouts and police whistles, but they seemed a long way off now, nothing more than dying echoes of the originals.

  Time passed, slowly or quickly. I had no sense for it now. I looked once at the dial of my wristwatch, but the crystal had been smashed sometime during my flight; the hands were frozen at 9:02. I drew myself up and leaned my back against the trunk of the palm, with my legs splayed out in front of me. I was exhausted, drained, and even though the panic was gone now, my thoughts remained jumbled and confused. My tongue felt like a swollen thumb filling my mouth, half-gagging me, and my throat was parched shut. I had some feeling in my right arm—the same hellish throbbing that raged inside my head—and I wondered dimly if the wound was already infected from the dirt and the water and the digging nails of the Malay scarecrow.

  I had to do something about that, and about the pulpy bruise on the side of my head, and about the stinging marks on my wrist where the langsat mongrel had sunk its teeth. But first, I needed rest, sleep, a void where there was no pain and no confusion. I could afford that now, I was safe here, they wouldn’t find me here.

  Rest.

  Rest . . .

  Chapter Fifteen

  I AWOKE trembling, drenched in cold-hot sweat.

  I had no idea how long I had slept—been unconscious —but the silence seemed deeper somehow, the way it gets well past midnight. Mosquitoes crawled and fed on my face, and I had no strength to brush them away. The fever burned brightly inside me. Rhythmic pain pulsated in my temples, my right arm.

  What now, dead man? I thought.

  I had gotten away from Dinessen, and I had gotten away from Tiong and his men, and I was still free and still alive—if just barely. But where did I go from here? I was wrapped up, imprisoned, in a web of circumstance so neatly and so beautifully that there was no way out, no way to prove my innocence. Dinessen had killed Marla King, and Dinessen was dead; and I had been found with Marla King’s body to top it off. There was simply nothing I could do to convince Tiong of the truth—especially after the way I had run. He would put the whole bundle on my head, too; he would decide I had the figurine, and that I had killed La Croix, and if he was able to dig up a
connection between Dinessen and Marla King, he would revise the toll upward to three murders once the Swede’s body was discovered.

  By this time he would have posted men at the harbor and on the Johore Causeway and at the airport, and he would have dozens of others out combing the island for me. I was trapped on Singapore and trapped in the web, with no real choice except to keep on running. The odds were too great with any other alternative. There was the slim possibility that if I could find the Burong Chabak, find out who had killed La Croix, and lay them both in Tiong’s lap, I would be able to talk my way out of most of the jam. A prayer. But if Marla King had killed the Frenchman, I was still a loser; and if Van Rijk had killed him, I had no illusions that I could get to Van Rijk, force a confession out of him, before either he or the police got to me. And, in spite of what La Croix apparently had told Dinessen, I had no idea where the figurine was secreted. No, my only chance was to run, to pick up the pieces somewhere else once I was free of the island, to swallow the bitterness of injustice and begin all over again with a new identity and a new hope.

  But before I could even think about making preparations for getting out of Singapore, I had to have my wounds attended to, and fresh clothes, and time to rest and time to think. I couldn’t stay where I was—and yet, I had nowhere else to go, no friends I could trust, no . . .

  Tina Kellogg.

  The name popped into my mind, and instantly I tried to push it away. No. No—I had no right to drag her into a thing like this, not after the way I had treated her, not in any case. Christ, she was just a kid, a bright-eyed little girl, and I could jeopardize her future by going to her, by involving her; if Tiong found out about it, he would jail her without compunction for aiding and abetting.

  But Tiong didn’t have to find out. All I wanted was some medical attention from her; a place to spend the night. I would leave in the morning, and the pain in my arm, the fever, the possible infection, I needed help, I had to have help, and there was nobody else and I wanted to live, I was innocent and I wanted to live . . .