The Jade Figurine

by Bill Pronzini

  His lips curved in an unctuous smile; he was his old self again. “I accept your offer, Mr. Connell,” he said.

  “I thought you would.”

  “Where is the Burong Chabak?”

  “Mikko Field.”

  “The abandoned airstrip on the west coast?”

  “Yes.”

  “Exactly where at Mikko Field?”

  “I’ll show you where when we get there.”

  “It isn’t necessary for you to be along when we pick it up.”

  “Oh but it is. You’ll never find the hiding place without me, even with directions.”

  Van Rijk studied me for a long moment. Trap? he was thinking. But there was no way I could have set one up. He decided I was playing clean with him—just as I had known he would. “Very well, Mr. Connell,” he said. “We will all go to Mikko Field, and if you can produce the Burong Chabak, we will return here and I will give you twenty thousand Straits dollars. The passage will be arranged for tomorrow, to any destination within reason.”

  In a pig’s ass, I thought. But I said, “Let’s go then.”

  And we went.

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE WEST coast of Singapore island contains stretches of still-undeveloped mangrove swamps, a few Malay fishing kampongs, and little else. Mikko Field had been carved out of the swamps by the Japanese during their occupation in the Second World War, mainly for use as a supply dump; when they were driven out, the strip had been taken over by a private aviation company which had operated there until five years ago. They had gone into bankruptcy then, and the field had ostensibly been abandoned. But there were a few pilots—mysetf among them—who had made use of the strip, in spite of the deteriorating condition of its runway, for contraband drops and pickups.

  It took less than a half-hour for the ride out there from Van Rijk’s villa. The Eurasian did the driving, and the Malay sat in back with me, holding his Mauser a couple of inches from my belly. Van Rijk sat tensely on the passenger seat in front, staring with an almost childlike eagerness through the windshield. The moon was flushed bright orange in the black sky, and its shine illuminated the road enough so that you could have driven it without headlights. We met only two cars on Kelang Bahru Road, both heading into the city.

  The access road leading in to Mikko Field was badly scarred with chuckholes and heavily grown with tall lalang grass and tangled vines and creepers encroaching from the swampland on both sides. We crawled along for a quarter of a mile, and in the moonlight the stilt and prop roots of the mangrove trees looked like exposed networks of ugly brown veins extending into the muddy earth. A few thousand yards from the field, the road became impassable. The lalang grass was very tall and thick, and parasitic vines and grotesque thorn bushes braided together to form a barrier that was more effective than any man-made obstruction.

  The Eurasian braked to a stop and shut off the Ford’s headlamps. In the bright moonshine I could see the long, slightly pitted concrete runway, raised some ten feet on steep earth mounds from the mangrove jungle on both sides. At its upper end, to our left, were the rotting wooden outbuildings, and farther behind them the huge, broken-domed hangar.

  Van Rijk got out of the car first, backing away to watch the hirelings perform their professional ritual in getting me out. The night was alive with the buzzing hum of tiger mosquitoes and midges, and with the throaty music of the Malayan cicadas. There was the smell of decaying vegetation, of fetid swamp water, and, oddly, of wild gardenia blossoms.

  Van Rijk said, “Well, Mr. Connell?”

  “We follow the road to the outbuildings on foot.”

  He peered into the morass distastefully. “Very well, then.”

  The Malay put the Mauser into the small of my back and prodded me forward into the thick vegetation choking what was left of the access road at this point. The Eurasian hung back a couple of steps, and Van Rijk brought up the rear. We had gone just a few feet when Van Rijk said sharply, “Wait!”

  We stopped in single file. “Cars coming,” the Eurasian said, and in the ensuing silence I could hear the distant drone of automobile engines. There were no lights visible through the mangrove jungle; whoever it was had to be proceeding without headlamps.

  The Malay said, “Polis, tuan?”

  “How could the—?”

  Van Rijk had no chance to finish the sentence. As soon as the Malay had spoken—at soon as I knew at least part of his attention was drawn from me—I had pivoted around and up, right arm extended into a plane, fingers as rigid as the stiffened musculature would allow. I brought the bottom edge of the hand down on the Malay’s wrist, at the same time coming up with my left hand under the gun. Bright agony slashed the length of my arm, into my armpit, but I had sufficient force in the blow to drive the Malay’s arm violently downward. My grip on the Mauser gave me possession of it. His finger jerked on the trigger, and the gun discharged against my palm, burning; but the bullet traced in a harmless diagonal into the night sky. I drove the weapon upward into the Malay’s face, and the butt took him high on the forehead, snapping his head back. He staggered into the Eurasian, bawling, and I reversed the gun in my hand and plunged into the mangroves to the right.

  The Eurasian fired after me, missing high, and I heard Van Rijk scream, “Don’t kill him, not yet, not yet!”—still thinking of the Burong Chabak. I ran deeper into the swamp, dodging trees and bushes and shrubs; there was some five hundred yards of it between the access road and the runway, which paralleled each other at this point. The road itself, I knew, widened into a large cleared space roughly three hundred yards from the outbuildings—a thousand yards from where we were now. Even with the lalang grass, that area would be open all the way to the buildings. But the structures themselves were positioned so that I would have a shorter run along the airstrip than across the cleared space. I had to get to them, and in the bright moonlight I couldn’t afford prolonged exposure.

  Thorns ripped at my bare arms as I ran; unseen creepers tugged at my clothing; something brushed my face, whispering, cold. Throbbing in my head, in my right arm. The sweat of weakness on my body again. But the urge for survival—the thought of what lay ahead and what lay behind—summoned reserves of strength that enabled me to function, to maneuver, to run.

  I could hear movement behind me, muffled shouts; and I could hear the sound of the approaching automobiles, louder now, coming faster. The police, I thought; it can’t be anybody else. Tiong. Somehow, some way—Tiong.

  The ground was soft and sucking beneath my shoes, and the tangled mangrove roots were everywhere. I veered around one of the thick-trunked trees, and a snarled root trapped my trailing right foot. I stumbled and fell sprawling. The Malay’s gun jarred loose from my hand, and I heard it fall in the darkness. Damn, damn! It wasn’t over yet, not even with the police here; Van Rijk and his hirelings were close behind, running away from the oncoming vehicles as much as they were chasing me. But I couldn’t take the time to look for the Mauser. I struggled to my feet again, hurting, hurting, and ran on.

  The mangroves thinned, and I could see the runway a few yards on my right. I pushed my way through a clump of wild chekor shrubs to the base of the embankment. The mounded earth was a quagmire from the evening rain. I started up, digging the heels of my shoes into the mud, clawing at the mire with my left hand, fingers splayed, to keep my body from slipping backward. The cicadas were no longer singing now, and even the humming of the midges and the mosquitoes seemed to have abated; the heavy, ragged sound of my breathing was overloud on the still night air.

  I fought my way up onto the strip and ran in a low crouch toward the outbuildings, my muddied shoes slapping wetly on the concrete. I kept my mind blank, willing forward movement. Behind me, I heard the roar of the Eurasian’s pistol, and then a muffled, cursing shout from Van Rijk. I glanced back over my shoulder. The two hirelings were at the base of the embankment, just beginning to come up. I couldn’t see Van Rijk. And I couldn’t see the spot on the access road where we had le
ft the English Ford. The automobile engines had died, though, and I heard car doors slam, someone barking orders in Malay and English.

  I swiveled my head, looking frontally again. Almost to the outbuildings now. The closest building was a long, rectangular, low-roofed affair that had probably been used to quarter duty personnel during the Japanese occupation, and for storage by the aviation company. All the glass had been broken out of its several windows a long time ago, and some of the wooden side boarding had rotted or pulled away, leaving darkened gaps like pockmarks in its facing wall. Off to one side was a much smaller, ramshackle substructure—a shed of some kind—that listed dangerously to one side, as if it were contemplating collapse.

  I cut toward there, looking back again. The Malay and the Eurasian were on the runway now, two hundred yards away and running. Still no sign of Van Rijk. Police whistles sounded shrilly from the swamp jungle. There were more shouts in Malay and English, and the sounds of men fighting their way through the morass.

  I stumbled around the corner of the rectangular building and along the side of the shed. A semicircular, jagged-edged opening in the wood siding yawned black, like a small cave opening. I pulled up, dragging breath into my lungs, and dropped on my hands and knees; a couple of minutes, that was all I needed. I scrambled through the opening and inside the shed.

  Thin shafts of moonlight made a pale, irregular Venetian blind pattern on the debris-ridden floor. I drew myself to the front wall, to where I could see the airstrip through one of the gaps in the boarding. It was close, humid in there—a pervasive heat like that in an orchid hothouse. An odor of decay permeated the heavy air. And there was another odor, too, subtler, mildly fragrant.

  Sandalwood.

  I was not alone in that shed. I hadn’t been the only one to seek refuge here. And the realization of those facts brought a tight, grim smile to the corners of my mouth. It was over now, no mistake. Fate had done an about-face. First Tiong, and now, right here in the confines of this little shed—trapped here in fitting irony—was the one person at the core of this whole business, the one person I had trusted and the one person I should never have trusted at all.

  Marla King.

  The real Marla King.

  Alias Tina Kellogg.

  Chapter Twenty

  SHE CRAWLED out of the pocket of shadow against the far wall like a black widow out of a dark cellar corner. One of the shafts of pale moonshine fell across her face, and the façade was gone completely. The trusting, pleading, naive little girl had been stripped away like an actress’s make-up, and beneath the carefully constructed mask was a hardened and amoral face etched now in thinly controlled fury.

  I thought of the sense of guilt and regret I had felt at what I’d expected to be our final parting earlier that day, and the taste of my own naivete was camphor-bitter in my throat. Oh, she had suckered me beautifully, all right—down the line, from the first minute I had set eyes on her in the Old Cathay. It had been a fine performance while it lasted, played just for me, played for one reason only; but after it was over, the way it happens with so many performances, you could see the flaws in it and you wondered self-critically why you didn’t detect them at the time . . .

  I looked away from her face, to the gun in her right hand. It was of Belgian manufacture, a Browning .25-caliber automatic with a two-inch barrel and a checkered, hard-rubber grip. I said, “Is that the gun you shot La Croix with, Marla?”

  “So you know.” Flat, cold, empty.

  “Yeah, I know. I’ve known for a couple of hours now, ever since I saw a copy of the Straits Times and found out that the woman I had thought all along was Marla King was really Penny Carlisle, the mistress of a Swede named Dinessen. Once I knew that, and that the real Marla King was still alive and unaccounted for, it didn’t take long to fit things together.”

  “I should have killed you today,” she said. “But I felt sorry for you, just a little. I wanted to give you a chance.”

  “Some chance.”

  She moved a foot to the right, to the front wall of the shed, and looked out through a gap with one eye, watching me with the other. “What’s going on out there?”

  “What do you think?”

  “The police?”

  “And Van Rijk. Some party, isn’t it?”

  The sounds of shouts, of police whistles, drifted into the shed, much louder now. I looked out at the runway. The moon overhead made it seem as bright as the grounds of the New World Amusement Park. Van Rijk’s hirelings were drawn up out there, a hundred yards away; the Eurasian had his arm extended, crouching, and even at this distance I could see the gun in his hand. But before he could use it there was a short, sharp burst from an automatic weapon—a Sten gun, I thought. The Eurasian fell, spilling headlong. The Malay veered off to the right, running in a weave. The automatic weapon sounded again. He went off the side of the embankment feet first, like an Olympic broadjumper, and disappeared from sight.

  Two constables came up onto the runway from the mangroves and started toward the outbuildings. There were undoubtedly more converging through the jungle itself. As I watched the two on the airstrip, pistol shots rang out, three of them in rapid succession, and then another burst from the Sten gun. After that, the whistles and shouts ceased and the night wrapped itself in silence.

  I turned my head away from the opening. “They’ve got Mikko Field covered from all sides now, Marla,” I said. “It’s all over for you.”

  “Is it?”

  “You can’t get out of this shed without being seen, and the rest of the police will be down here pretty soon to conduct a thorough search; they won’t overlook us.”

  “I’ve still got you.”

  “For a hostage? You can forget that idea. The police don’t give a damn about me.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “Face it, Marla: you’re fresh out of time and luck.”

  Her teeth shone like white bone through the red wound of her mouth. “If I don’t leave here, with the figurine, you won’t be leaving either. I’ll see to that.”

  “Where is the figurine?” I asked her. “Still hidden where La Croix put it? Sure. You wouldn’t have had any reason to retrieve it until tomorrow morning. That’s when Shannon is due, isn’t it? He would have told you, when you contacted him this afternoon, that he couldn’t take you out until dawn tomorrow at the earliest. He’d need time to arrange things, and there’s no lighting facilities for a night landing here; moonlight alone isn’t enough on a strip like this one, even for an experienced pilot.”

  “You know all the answers, don’t you?”

  “Enough of them,” I said. “Listen, even if you did manage to get away tonight, with the Burong Chabak, the police will keep right on watching Mikko Field; they’ll know you were here for a reason, and it won’t take them long to figure out what it is. If Shannon comes in as scheduled, they’ll pick him up with no trouble at all. And you wouldn’t last two days alone and on the run, Marla—not on Singapore.”

  “That’s what you think, you smart son of a bitch.”

  “You’re a real sugarcake, aren’t you?”

  “And you’re a blundering ass. God, I should have put this gun to your head right at the start!”

  “Why didn’t you, Marla?”

  “La Croix was a coward, but from what he told me about you, I wasn’t sure I could handle you with a gun. The other way seemed better.”

  “He picked some partner when he picked you, all right.”

  “He was the one who double-crossed me to start all this.”

  “Not until after the two of you together double-crossed Van Rijk,” I said. “He hired you and brought you onto Singapore to steal the figurine from the Museum of Oriental Art, didn’t he? But you decided to keep it for yourselves, and then La Croix got fancy and went you one better; a triple-cross, his one big gamble. The two of you had arranged for the flat in the Katong Bahru Housing Estate, and you went to ground while La Croix went out to make arrangements for leavin
g the island. The poor bastard took the Burong Chabak with him, cached it here at Mikko Field, and then came to me, thinking that I would fly him out alone. I refused. So he went to the Swede immediately after leaving my place, and Dinessen agreed to take him to Bangkok, where the two of you had set up a buyer to replace Van Rijk. La Croix went to pick up the figurine, but he never got to it. You found him first.”

  “I found him, all right.”

  “How?”

  “He’d rented a car for the two of us, and he still had it when he disappeared on me. I found a place where I could watch the rental agency, thinking that maybe he’d come back there to turn it in. It wasn’t much of a chance, but it was all I had. And he did show up there, but not for that reason; the rental had been giving him trouble, and he wanted another one for the drive out to Mikko Field to pick up the Burong Chabak.”

  “So you surprised him with the gun and forced him to drive you out to the lonely stretch near Bedok—and once there, to tell you where he’d hidden the figurine. He must have told you that I had refused him, too, and why—but before he could tell you anything else, such as whether or not he’d been able to make other arrangements for safe passage and the name of the man if he had, something happened. Maybe he tried to run. Or maybe he found a spark of bravery buried under his cowardice and tried to take the gun away from you.”

  “He clawed me like a woman. I didn’t want to kill him yet, but I didn’t have any choice.”

  “And so you pumped the rest of the clip into his face in frustration.”

  She said nothing.

  I went on, “You still had no way off the island, and no contacts here except Van Rijk—and you obviously couldn’t go to him. There was nobody but me. Not to take you out directly, but to provide you with the same name I’d given La Croix, or another one just like it. You came to the Old Cathay and went to work on me, and if Van Rijk’s hirelings hadn’t shown up so abruptly, you’d probably have made your little-girl-journalist pitch sometime that night.