by S. P. Hozy
For my mother
If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.
– Chinese proverb
Singapore
2010
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Chapter One
At the time Maris didn’t realize she was witnessing a murder. Peter seemed fine at first. Then he began slurring his words, which she thought was odd because he hadn’t even finished his first drink. Peter always liked a glass of Campari on the rocks before dinner. She had tried it once, years ago, but didn’t care for it. She preferred a gin and tonic. They would be having wine with dinner, probably white, maybe a nice Riesling. Peter’s face seemed to be going rigid and he was having a hard time speaking. Oh my God, she thought, he’s having a stroke.
“Peter,” she said, “smile. Can you smile?” It wasn’t really a smile. More like he was clenching his teeth. “Put your hands up in the air!” she shouted at him as she reached into her bag for her mobile. “Up, up.” This is serious, she thought. He was staring at her just the way the sea bass he was going to cook for supper had stared at her: a wide-eyed, fishy stare.
“What’s your name?” she asked, as she dialed 9-9-5. Don’t die, she thought. Please don’t die on me.
Those were the three things you were supposed to do when you thought someone might be having a stroke, weren’t they? Ask them to smile, to raise their hands in the air, and to tell you their name. Something about facial muscles, arm strength, and memory.
“Hurry,” she said when someone answered. “I think he’s having a stroke. He’s not responding to any of my questions.” She gave them the details, trying not to panic. There was white, foamy spit dribbling from the corner of Peter’s mouth. “Please hurry,” she pleaded. “I don’t know what to do.”
In the ten minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive, Peter sat slumped over on the tan coloured sofa that he prized above all the other art deco pieces he had collected over the years. It was made of a silky suede — the original covering — and worth twice what he’d paid for it. He had discovered it in a photographer’s studio just off Orchard Road and had offered to buy it immediately. The owner, an elderly Chinese man who was in the process of closing his business and retiring, was only too happy to sell it to Peter, along with a lamp and an end table that he had owned since the 1930s.
Maris didn’t know what to do. Why am I thinking about his furniture? she wondered. Peter appeared to be unconscious, his chin touching his chest, his hands palms up at his sides. He was still wearing his wire-rimmed Armani reading glasses. She couldn’t tell if he was breathing; there didn’t appear to be any movement of his chest under the butter-yellow silk shirt, but it was hard to tell because his head was blocking her view of the upper part of his body. It reminded her of the way penguins buried their heads in their chests to sleep. But she knew he wasn’t asleep.
Shouldn’t I be giving him CPR or something? she thought. But she didn’t know how to do that. She seemed to be riveted to the spot, on the opposite side of the low, curved coffee table (another art deco find of Peter’s) staring down at him, completely incapable of thinking of anything except art deco furniture. She was still clutching the mobile in her right hand, and her left hand was half-raised in a reaching gesture as if she were just about to give him benediction. She’d seen the Pope make this same gesture from his balcony in St. Peter’s Square.
It was so quiet. As if the power had just been cut and every humming appliance — refrigerator, air conditioner, laptop computer — had suddenly died. Maris realized she’d been holding her breath. She exhaled softly through her mouth and half expected Peter to do the same. But he didn’t. He didn’t move.
Where are they? she thought. What’s taking so long? Singapore was the most efficient city in the world. Why hadn’t the paramedics arrived yet? Would they be too late?
She heard a commotion in the hallway outside the apartment and realized that she hadn’t opened the door. Oh God, she thought, are these few wasted seconds the ones that will kill Peter? Was she, ultimately, going to be responsible for his death? She ran for the door and turned the safety lock to release the spring. She was fumbling with the cellphone, the spring lock, and the doorknob, and cursing her stupidity when the door swung open and two men with a gurney pushed past her.
“He’s in there,” she said, pointing to the living room. She ran after them. “I haven’t touched him. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to do the wrong thing.”
One of them had pushed Peter’s head back and was pulling his eyelids up to look at his eyes, which appeared to be staring up at the ceiling in surprise. Then the paramedic ripped Peter’s shirt open and the buttons flew onto the sofa. He’s going to be mad, she thought. That’s his favourite shirt.
She heard one of the men say, “No vitals,” and then they were laying him out flat and rubbing his chest. The paramedic closest to her was pulling something out of a suitcase and she saw it was those paddles they use to get people’s hearts going when they’re flatlining. She’d seen it on television on ER. Then the one who’d been rubbing Peter’s chest stood back and the one with the paddles drove his hands into Peter’s chest. She heard a buzzing, crackling sound, then nothing, then the buzzing, crackling sound again.
“He’s had a stroke,” she heard herself say, but they didn’t appear to be listening to her. The buzzing, crackling sound filled her ears again and then there was silence.
She looked at Peter’s bare chest. The red marks from the paddles were like two patches of sunburn on his pale skin. Then she looked at his face. He wasn’t wearing his glasses.
I’d better find them, she thought. He needs them to read.
Are you his next of kin? they’d asked her at the hospital. No, she’d said. I’m a friend. We need to notify his next of kin. Well, she’d said, he has an ex-wife who’s in Germany right now and a half-sister here in Singapore. Dinah, she thought, I should have called Dinah. She searched for the number on her mobile and gave it to the hospital administrator, a no-nonsense Chinese woman in a severe grey suit with the jacket buttoned. The pointed collar of her white silk blouse laid flat against the worsted material of the suit. She wore no jewellery other than a pair of small pearl studs in her ears.
“Please take a seat over there,” she said pointing to a row of yellow plastic tub chairs bolted to the floor. “I’ll make the call from my office.”
There were very few people in emergency, maybe because it was dinnertime. Hospitals had their ebbs and flows of activity just like everything else, she guessed. She thought of the sea bass lying on Peter’s kitchen counter, staring at the ceiling the way Peter had stared at the ceiling when they’d pulled back his eyelids. Peter was lying on a gurney behind a dull beige curtain.
Maris hadn’t had time to find his glasses or pick up the buttons from his shirt. She’d have to go back to the apartment and do that later. And put the fish in the fridge. She tried to make a mental list of the things she’d have to do in the next day or two. She should call Angela in Berlin. It was only fair. She and Peter were no longer married but they were still business partners. Angela, she thought, pronouncing it in her head with the hard “g” so it sounded more like angle instead of angel.
She tried to figure out what time it was in Berlin. How many hours difference was it? And were they behind or ahead? No, no, she thought, they had to be behind. It would be earlier there, late morning, she figured, or lunchtime.
God, she was tired. She tried to remember if she’d locked the door to Peter’s apartment and then she remembered it had a spring lock so it would have locked automatically. Thank God, she thought. Peter had a lot of valuable stuff. He only bought top of the line. His laptop was only a couple of months old and it was fully loaded.
The plasma TV that hung on the wall facing the sofa was less than six months old. The Bang & Olufsen sound system was state of the art and included in-home theatre surround sound components. They were going to watch Scorsese’s The Departed after dinner. “Not the pirated version,” Peter had told her. “I paid full price for the real thing, with all the extra interviews and stuff.” That was one of the things that she and Peter had shared — a love of movies. They sometimes saw two or three a week, either on DVD at his place or in one of Singapore’s ultra-modern movie theatres with widescreen, THX sound, and super-comfortable seats with nobody in front of you blocking the screen.
That was one thing they did well in Asia: movie theatres. There wasn’t anything comparable in Vancouver. Not even close — and for a quarter of the price. And shopping malls: luxury shopping malls that sold all the designer labels, the real ones. You could get the knock-offs on the street and who could tell the difference? Of course, you knew that the shopgirl with the Gucci bag and the Prada T-shirt was probably not wearing the real thing. Maris looked down at her Versace handbag. Thank God she’d remembered to grab it on her way out the door. She’d paid about twelve bucks for it … worth every penny, too.
What was she sitting here for? Wasn’t she supposed to be doing something? Then she saw Dinah and she remembered.
“Oh God, Dinah,” she said, getting up and moving toward the small, slender woman with the Chinese face who was Peter’s half-sister. Maris put her arms around her and hugged her tightly for a few seconds before letting her arms drop to her sides. They felt like dead weights. She had no energy, as if she’d run all the way to the hospital instead of coming in the ambulance with Peter and the paramedics.
“Peter’s dead,” she said, but Dinah already knew. Her eyes were red from crying. I haven’t cried yet, Maris thought. What’s the matter with me? “He had a stroke,” she said. “I couldn’t save him. I didn’t know what to do.” And then she sat down on one of the yellow plastic chairs and cried.
Chapter Two
She and Dinah had gone back to Peter’s apartment that night so Maris could find his glasses and put the fish in the fridge. She couldn’t stop thinking about that fish. She’d half expected to smell it when they opened the door. Luckily Dinah had a copy of Peter’s key; otherwise they wouldn’t have got in.
“I wasn’t thinking too clearly,” Maris told Dinah. “I meant to bring Peter’s glasses because he’d been wearing them when he had the stroke. I should have brought his wallet and his keys, but I didn’t want to waste time looking for them. They didn’t tell me he was dead until we got to the hospital. It was all such a big rush, like maybe the paramedics thought I would hold them responsible.” She knew she was babbling, but she had to dispel that awful silence that still filled the apartment like stale air inside a balloon.
The apartment didn’t smell of rotting fish; instead, it had the cool, dank smell of the sea: slightly salty and a bit chilly. The air conditioning, she remembered. Peter always kept it a couple of degrees below her comfort level. Probably because he was always on the move and couldn’t sit still for more than a few minutes before he’d be jumping up to do something or check something in the kitchen. Or he would show her his latest find, a book or a piece of furniture or some artifact he’d scooped in Chinatown or Little India. He was always shopping, always looking for something different, some hidden treasure. It was probably why the gallery had been so successful, right from the beginning. He had an eye — he always said he had a nose for a bargain — but it was his eyes that did the work. They never stopped searching.
They found his glasses on the floor behind the sofa. The paramedics had probably thrown them there when they’d pulled back his eyelids. What value did a pair of reading glasses, even Armani, have compared to a human life? Maris picked them up and felt grief grab her heart like a fist. One of the arms was bent and there were fingerprints on the lenses. Peter would have been furious. He valued his possessions and took such good care of them. He didn’t take anything for granted. He’d worked hard for what he had; he’d never felt entitled to any of it. It had all been earned.
Maris looked over at Dinah, who was picking up the yellow buttons from where they’d scattered across the sofa. She counted them, then looked to see if there were any wedged between the cushions.
“I’d better put that fish away right now,” Maris said, “or I’ll have nightmares about it.”
“Maybe you should take it home,” said Dinah.
“What am I going to do with a whole fish?” she said.
“Then throw it out. It’ll only go bad in the fridge.”
“I can’t throw a whole fish away,” said Maris. “It’ll stink. Maybe I should freeze it.”
“Good idea,” said Dinah. “We can deal with it later.”
Maris went into the kitchen and looked for some plastic wrap. She found it right where it should be: third drawer down on the right. Peter was so predictable. She stared at the fish. Why can’t you just disappear? she thought. The fish was beginning to exhaust her. She tore off a length of the plastic wrap, which immediately began to cling to itself at the corners. She laid one end against the fish and realized it wasn’t wide enough to cover the whole fish so she picked up the wrap and laid it lengthwise. She tried to pull the corners free so it would lay flat and then thought, Why? She shoved the wrap under the fish, unrolled another metre and wrapped it around the fish. She did this three times until all of the fish was covered in plastic wrap. It looked like a postmodern acrylic sculpture of a fish. Then she put it in the freezer.
“Goodbye,” she said. “I never want to see you again.”
She tidied up the counter and put the sliced lemon, ginger, and onion Peter was going to poach the fish with into the fridge. She noticed he’d already made a salad and she put that in the fridge, too. A nice meal that nobody was ever going to eat. But she didn’t have the heart to put any of it in the garbage. Not tonight.
She went back into the living room and saw Dinah sitting on the sofa, staring at the buttons in the palm of her hand.
“We have to call Angela,” Maris said.
“Oh, God,” said Dinah. “Do we have to?”
“Yes,” said Maris. “It’s still daytime in Germany. She’ll have to arrange a flight and all that. It’s going to take her a couple of days to get here.”
“Peter wanted to be cremated,” said Dinah.
“How do you know that?” asked Maris.
“He told me. We talked about it after our father died. He said he definitely didn’t want to be buried in the ground in a box.” She shivered. “He was adamant.”
“I guess you and I will have to take care of all that.”
“Yes. Angela won’t care one way or the other whether he’s buried or cremated.”
“They are divorced, aren’t they?” Maris asked.
“Yes. But legally she’s still his business partner,” said Dinah. “I’m not a partner. I just work for them.”
“Do you think she’ll want to keep the gallery going?” Maris thought of her own paintings that had sold so well under Peter’s careful auspices.
“I don’t know,” said Dinah. “I hope so. She makes a lot of money from the gallery and we have such an established customer base. Although, I don’t know. Without Peter …” She didn’t finish her sentence. She looked down at the six yellow buttons in her hand, and then slipped them into her jacket pocket.
“Why?” she asked softly. “He was only forty-five. He seemed so healthy.”
“I don’t know,” said Maris. She sat beside Dinah on the sofa and ran her hand over the soft suede. “They’re going to do an autopsy. Apparently they have to when it’s a sudden death like this.”
Dinah shook her head. “He wouldn’t like that,” she said. “People cutting him open and looking at his insides. You know how fastidious he was about everything, especially his body.”
Maris thought of that damn fish again. Shit, she thought. Shit, shit, shit.
; Chapter Three
By the time Angela arrived from Germany, they had the results of Peter’s autopsy.
“Poisoned?” said Maris. “But that’s impossible.”
“Not Peter,” said Dinah. “Nobody would poison Peter.”
“Ridiculous,” said Angela. “There must be some mistake.”
In time the initial shock wore off, but not the astonishment. Who would want to poison Peter? And why? The investigation soon told them how it had been done. The poison was in Peter’s Campari — not just his glass of Campari, but the whole bottle. It was chloral hydrate, a depressant used in sleeping medications — usually harmless, but lethal in an overdose, especially when combined with another depressant, alcohol.
“I was so sure he was having a stroke,” said Maris.
“Of course you were,” said Dinah gently. “Why would it occur to you that Peter had been poisoned? I probably would have thought the same thing.”
“You are both too kind,” said Angela. “I would have thought he was playing a trick to get attention. I probably would have told him not to be stupid and then I would have ignored him.” She crossed her arms in a self-satisfied gesture that was meant to absolve her of any compassion for her ex-husband.
Dinah smiled nervously at her and Maris glared. Angela worked hard at being uncompromising, and Maris supposed it had served her well in the cutthroat world of art and antiquities. But on a personal level, Maris thought her unkindness was despicable because it was so deliberate. She worked just as hard at it as at the other disagreeable aspects of her personality.
“You know,” she began, “you could show an ounce of compassion, Angela. If not for Peter, then at least for me and Dinah. We loved him, even if you did not.”
“Sorry, sorry,” said Angela, in a way that showed she was not. “It’s just my way of showing grief: by burying my true feelings under a mountain of rock. Okay?”
