The Jade Figurine

by Bill Pronzini

  “But the two of them did show up. They’d been watching me ever since that morning, when I brushed Van Rijk off; he’d figured I was hiding something. The hirelings saw the two of us in the Old Cathay, waited until we left, and then moved in; but they weren’t after me at all, the way I thought—they were after you, Marla, and you knew it immediately. So you let me stand them off while you got away.

  “You went back to the safe house in the Katong Bahru Estate, and you stayed there. The close escape at the Old Cathay must have shaken you up—and given you a new respect for Van Rijk’s capabilities—and you decided to remain in hiding until you could arrange for passage off the island. The Burong Chabak was safely tucked away where you could get it at any time, and until you were ready to leave, all you had to do was to keep to ground and work on me.

  “My refusal to help with your ‘article,’ after I’d responded to your note, infuriated you, didn’t it? My guess is that when you ran out of the apartment living room that night, it was to get the Browning. You were going to drop the little girl role then and there, and force co-operation out of me at gunpoint. I was your only link to freedom, and you couldn’t afford to let me walk out. Only I had already walked out when you returned with the gun.”

  I paused, watching her. She was grimly silent, stilt looking at both me and what was transpiring outside. I could hear movement nearby, at my back, but all I could see was one man armed with the Sten gun I had heard earlier, standing out on the runway. Tiong—I was still certain it was Tiong—and the others would be searching the hangar and the duty quarters; but it wouldn’t take them long to get around to here.

  I said, “You didn’t know what to do after I’d gone, did you, Marla? You were afraid I’d tumble to who you really were, what with Van Rijk, and the police sniffing around and asking questions. You could have come to my place directly, but the chances were good that Van Rijk was still having me watched and you didn’t want to play into his hands again, like you had at the Old Cathay. So you waited until the next afternoon and called me and gave me the little-girl routine again. I hung up on you. You knew you couldn’t sit in the apartment forever, and yet you were afraid to walk the streets for fear of being spotted by one of Van Rijk’s lookouts. You still hadn’t made up your mind when I showed up on your doorstep last night, ready and prime for plucking, and poured out my story to you.

  “If you’d known I was that deeply involved previously, you’d never have stayed where I could find you. And if I’d used my head, and gotten some luck, I’d have tumbled to you a long time ago. But as it was, circumstances worked in your favor—at least for a while.

  “When the Australian girl came to see me two days ago, claiming to be you, I took her at her word; I had no reason to doubt her, especially after Van Rijk confirmed Marla King’s complicity in the theft later that night. Dinessen had told his mistress about La Croix and about the figurine—or she’d been present when the Frenchman showed up; and when La Croix turned up dead, the two of them were certain I was the one who killed him, and that I was the one who had the figurine. They didn’t consider you for it because La Croix must have told them there was no way you could find him here on the island—another of the poor bastard’s mistakes—and because La Croix had said that I was the only other person who ‘knew’ where the figurine was hidden.

  “So Penny Carlisle convinced Dinessen that the best way to pry the Burong Chabak out of me was for her to pretend to be Marla King. I let her think I had it, to play her along and set her up for the police, and once she felt sure that I was going to deliver, she played your game and tried to double-cross Dinessen. He found out about it and killed her, and then came to me.

  “Christ, you must have been laughing inside when I turned up last night. It was perfect for you. You kept on playing little girl, and then nursemaid and sympathetic confidante—and I kept right on believing in you. You pried Shannon’s name out of me this morning, and when you went out to buy me some clothing, you called Shannon, got him to agree to an offer, and set up a rendezvous here at Mikko Field—where the figurine was cached, a perfect pickup and departure point. As soon as you finished talking to him, you called the police, no doubt anonymously, and told them you’d seen a man answering my description, wearing the clothes you’d bought for me, in the vicinity of Geylang Road and the housing estate. If they’d picked me up as you expected—”

  “Shut up!” she said suddenly in a fierce sotto voce. “They’re coming over here now!”

  I straightened slightly, placing my hands flat on my knees. “Jesus Christ, you’re a sugarcake, all right,” I said. “Oh, Dan, be careful, Dan, goodbye, Dan—and a Judas kiss so sweet and gentle I couldn’t feel the knife at all—”

  “Damn you, shut up!” She moved the automatic, and that was all I had been waiting for. I brought my left hand off my knee, swinging it out and up, palm open. My bunched fingers hit the barrel of the Browning, driving it upward and out of her hand. She made an ugly sound in her throat as the gun hit the far wall with a dull, empty crack, and came at me nails flashing. I hit her on the point of the jaw with my bunched left hand, a clean, sharp blow, and she went down into a loose heap on the littered floor.

  I looked at her for a moment, and when she remained motionless I turned away and crawled to the opening in the side wall. “Tiong!” I shouted. “This is Dan Connell, Tiong! I’m coming out unarmed and with my hands in plain sight!”

  There were scurrying movements without. I waited. A voice called at length, “Come, then. Slowly.” Tiong, all right.

  I eased my body through the opening, into bright moonlight, and gained my feet with my arms upraised. Tiong and two of his constables were there, pistols drawn. I stood unmoving and let them shake me down for weapons; then I said, “Marla King is inside the shed. She’s unconscious, but you’d better get handcuffs on her before she comes out of it.”

  He looked at me for a time, his face impassive. Finally, he said something in Malay to one of the constables. The officer nodded and moved away to enter the shed.

  I said, “Have you got Van Rijk?”

  “We have him.”

  “And the other two?”

  “Both dead.”

  “Then you’ve wrapped it up, Tiong. Or you will have when you’ve got the Burong Chabak. If you’ll let me tell my story, and try to understand the circumstances, I’ll put the figurine in your hands right now.”

  “It is here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “A drop point I used to use in the old days. I did a couple of jobs for an organization fronted by La Croix, and he would leave payment for me there in the beginning.”

  “I sere.”

  “Will you give me a fair hearing, Tiong?”

  “As far as facts warrant.”

  “That’s all I ask.”

  I led Tiong and the remaining constable past the rectangular building and around to where the huge, broken-domed hangar was located. At its rear were two large, heavily corroded tanks that had been used during the Japanese occupation for the storage of water. I went to the nearest one and put my back to it and counted off fifty paces in an easterly direction. I stood then in a flat area grown with lalang grass. There was evidence, when you looked closely, that someone had been there recently; several of the stalks were bent, others crushed. I knelt and scraped away foliage with my hands, revealing an oblong wooden cover flush with the ground. Beneath it was a wooden box set deep into the earth, housing rusted emergency regulating valves for the airstrip’s oil and gas supply lines.

  There was also a small, canvas-wrapped bundle, about the size of a shoebox.

  Tiong lifted it out and removed the canvas carefully. A cushioned foam-rubber sheeting was under that, and inside the sheeting was the Burong Chabak.

  It was not as large as I had envisioned it. Intricately, painstakingly carved, it depicted a night bird—a burong chabak—in full flight, wings spread, head extended as if into a great wind. The bird itself was of
white jade—the purest, most valuable of all jade; the squarish pedestal upon which it rested was of a dark green jade that glistened almost blackly in the moonlight.

  Under normal circumstances it might have been a thing of great beauty. Here, now, it seemed malevolent, repellent, with no esthetic qualities at all. I looked away.

  From the direction of the ramshackle shed I could hear Marla King screaming obscenities. They were like the shrieks of night birds in the lush and fragrant stillness.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  LATER, much later, in Tiong’s office at the Central Police Station.

  I sat on the metal chair in front of his desk and told him my story seven times, outlining the events as I saw them, as I had done to Marla King in the shed at Mikko Field. I explained what had happened with Dinessen, and how his death had come about. I recounted in detail my reasons for going to Number Seven Tampines Road, and why I had run when he and his men arrived. I told him how, after seeing the copy of the Straits Times at Van Rijk’s, I had remembered Mikko Field and the drop point La Croix and I had used in the old days. I explained that I had led Van Rijk out to the strip because I had suspected that was where Marla King had gone to await Shannon’s arrival from Johore; if I hadn’t been able to effect an escape from him there, I said, he would likely have found the girl—and some justice, at least, would have been done as a result.

  Tiong listened patiently to everything I said, interrupting occasionally to ask a question. His face was as inscrutable as ever, and I couldn’t read his eyes; I had no idea whether or not he believed me, and if he did, whether or not he cared. He said nothing one way or the other.

  I ventured a few questions of my own, and he answered them tersely but without reluctance. He had had a carefully placed stakeout on Van Rijk’s private villa for some time—preferring that method to direct questioning—and the stakeout had been in radio contact with Tiong just prior to the raid on Number Seven Tampines Road; when the stakeout reported that Van Rijk was still at his villa fifteen minutes before nine, Tiong had known he was not going to keep the appointment and had come in early. The stakeout had also seen the two hirelings bring me to the villa that night and had summoned Tiong. Tiong had arrived just in time to follow the four of us when we left for Mikko Field, and the gunshot which had discharged when I’d taken the Mauser away from the Malay had decided them to move in when they had.

  My third question had to do with Marla King. Her real name, Tiong said, was Tina Jeunet, and she was an American citizen born in Hawaii. Her father had been French, and a thief, and he had died by police bullets in Honolulu six years before; she had apparently learned the finer points of the trade from him, because she had been implicated as far back as four years—without proof—in several large-scale thefts in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. She had finally been irrevocably linked to a major robbery six months before—the disappearance of priceless literary documents in Macao; a warrant had been issued for her arrest through Interpol by the Portuguese authorities there. Her background explained why Van Rijk had brought her in to help steal the Burong Chabak, and the Interpol warrant explained her illegal entrance into Singapore. And since Macao had been La Croix’s home for the past three years, it had apparently been there that she’d met the Frenchman.

  A constable knocked on the door, finally, and came in to tell Tiong that he was wanted elsewhere in the building. Tiong went out without speaking to me, leaving me alone in the warm, bright office.

  I wanted a cigarette, but I had lost the half-pack I had bought at the movie theater and it was obvious from the lack of ashtrays in there that Tiong didn’t smoke. I sat on the chair and stared at the silent walls and wished for a place to lie down. Fatigue lowered my chin to my chest, and increased the aches and pains throughout my body. They had taken me to the infirmary shortly after we’d come in from the airstrip, and a police doctor had rebandaged the wound on my arm and the one on my temple. He had given me a couple of capsules to take and pronounced me fit for interrogation.

  I thought of the lumpy old bed at my flat, under the tattered mosquito netting, and wondered if I would ever see it again. I thought of an iced Anchor Beer and wondered if I would taste it again. I thought of Pete Falco and Penang Island, and the reputation which two years of straight living had failed to dim, much less obliterate. And I thought of the search for inner peace, of the progress I had made, and the progress I could keep on making if I were given the chance.

  Which way would it go? Tiong was a hard man, an uncompromising one—but he had cleared up more than a few deaths on this night, and recovered the Burong Chabak, and broken at least two smuggling operations—Dinessen’s and Wong Sot’s. He didn’t need me, too, unless he refused to believe my story and my innocence; unless he wanted to be shut of a man he considered to be in no way an asset to the internal harmony of his city and his island.

  Which way would it go, now that we had come to the end of it? Fate would decide, as it had decided everything else which had happened in the past few days. We are all children of fate, I thought—right or wrong, good or bad. It will be fate that makes the final decision.

  Soon, though. Please make it soon.

  And the door opened and Tiong came back into the office.

  He went behind his desk and sat down without looking at me. I got my head up, waiting. A long time passed, and he said, “I have spoken with Van Rijk and with Marla King. Van Rijk maintains it was you who murdered the Carlisle woman.”

  “Only because I told him I had done it,” I said. “He wanted to believe it, and I needed a story to get him out to Mikko Field.”

  “So you told me.”

  “What does Marla King say?”

  “Very little, at the moment.”

  “Did she try to implicate me too?”

  “She mentioned your name not at all.”

  “Doesn’t that prove something to you?”

  “Perhaps,” Tiong said. His black eyes roamed my face. “I also spoke with the police laboratory. The technicians discovered a quantity of skin under the fingernails of Penny Carlisle; the skin was that of Lars Dinessen. There were two long scratches on each of his upper arms.”

  I let breath out softly between my teeth.

  “With that evidence, and your co-operation, I have decided that your account of what happened yesterday and last night is the truth. There is still, however, the matter of property damage on Tampines Road, and resisting arrest, and striking a police officer and several civilians, and failure to report a violent death—among other charges.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I know.”

  “I cannot ignore them.”

  “I don’t suppose you can.”

  Tiong looked down at his desk top. He sat there like that for some time, motionless, like a Buddhist monk in religious contemplation. Then, finally, he raised his head. “Go home, Mr. Connell,” he said.

  I stared at him. “What?”

  “You’ll be summoned before a magistrate shortly. I see no reason to hold you until that time. I will notify you of your appearance, and I will recommend leniency and a mild fine in court. I shouldn’t think, in view of my recommendation, that you will have to worry about deportation.”

  “I don’t understand, Tiong.” There was honest wonder in my voice. “Why the change of heart? Yesterday morning, and today too, you were ready to hang me for the slightest transgression. And now you’re willing to testify in my behalf in court. Why?”

  “The Asian mind is perhaps difficult for the Westerner to understand. Yesterday morning I did not believe that the death of one person, even a close friend, could completely change a man who had scorned the law all his life. Tonight I do believe it, and because I do, I am willing to offer you the opportunity to continue to make amends for your former life. I cannot persecute a repentant man, Mr. Connell.”

  “I . . . don’t know what to say.”

  “Say nothing. And do nothing to bring you back to this office. Remain a repentant man. Selamat jala
n, Mr. Connell.”

  I got on my feet and we looked at each other for several seconds of deep silence. I thought: The twain have met; Kipling was full of crap. But it was fate, of course—just as it had been fate all along. Making fools of wise men, and wise men of fools. Ensnarling and unsnarling. Bringing fear and offering hope.

  “Selamat jalan, Tiong,” I said, and I turned and went out of his office and out of the building and into the quiet, moon-drenched streets—of the Lion City, of the Pearl of the South China Sea, of home.

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