by Jake Needham
Tay looked around and an idea occurred to him.
Wait in a hotel room until ISD felt like calling, huh? Fat chance of that now. Finding this place gave him an opportunity to get back in the game and he wasn’t going to lose out on that. Goh would shit himself if he found out, but how would he?
Tay dumped his bags of junk food and cigarettes on an old desk that had been left pushed up against one wall, and then he headed to the Santa Grande to collect the rest of their stuff.
He had only been back at the Santa Grande for a few minutes and had just finished stuffing everything into the black backpack when he heard a soft knock at the door. He opened it expecting to see a maid or perhaps a room service waiter who had the wrong room, but Sergeant Kang and Sergeant Lee were standing there.
“We thought you might want some company, sir,” Kang said. “Sitting around a hotel room waiting for ISD to call can’t be much fun.”
Tay smiled in spite of himself.
“It isn’t, Sergeant, so that’s not what we’re going to do.”
Tay’s joy at stumbling over a place from which they might be able to cut themselves in on the action had worn off quickly. All they could see from their vantage point in the abandoned travel agency was the hotel’s emergency exit into the alley and not much was happening there.
The highlight so far came an hour or so back when a woman opened the emergency exit and stepped outside for a cigarette. While she smoked she walked down the alleyway for a few yards and then turned around and walked back again. Once she lifted her head and seemed to look straight at Tay while he was watching her through the field glasses and Tay had been so startled he jerked the glasses down and leaned away from the window. By the time he peered cautiously back outside again, the woman was knocking on the green door. It opened almost immediately and she went into the hotel.
She couldn’t have been looking at him, Tay knew, not really, no matter how much it seemed like she was. Besides, the woman obviously wasn’t Suparman’s sister. The photographs they had of the sister showed a middle-aged but pleasant-looking Indonesian, perhaps a bit on the plump side, with a coy smile and sparkling eyes. The woman he had been watching as she smoked outside the green door was probably a hotel maid on her break. She looked bent and tired, and she was elderly, likely in her sixties.
Tay winced even as that thought crossed his mind. The woman was probably no more than ten years older than he was and he was thinking of her as elderly? That was too sad to contemplate.
The radio crackled and all three of them glanced automatically at where Kang had left it on the desk next to the black backpack.
“Sit-rep, please, position one.” Goh’s voice emerged from the static.
“Position one?” Kang asked. “Is that us?”
“I think we’re four,” Tay said.
Tay hated the kind of military talk that men of a certain sort seemed to use whenever they got near a radio, and Goh was apparently a man of that certain sort.
Sit-rep? Why not just ask in plain English what was going on? Asking for a situation report would have been dumb enough, but asking for a sit-rep reached for a whole new level of dumbness. If only he could figure out how to send a smiley face back through the radio, Tay thought, that’s what he would do.
“All clear, sir,” a voice said. “No sign of him.”
“Position two?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Position three?”
“Clear here.”
“Position four?”
Kang looked at Tay. “You must be right sir. There’s nobody else left.”
Tay stood up, walked over to the desk, and picked up the radio. Having no better idea what he was supposed to do, he pushed a button on the front.
“I’m watching reruns of Law and Order,” Tay announced into the grill. “Try not to disturb me unless it’s important.”
Kang looked away to keep from laughing, but Lee giggled in spite of herself. After a moment the radio crackled again.
“Very amusing, Tay. I should have expected something like that from you. At least now I know you’re awake.”
“Roger wilco, over and out,” Tay said and dropped the radio back on the desk.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SERGEANT LEE TOOK over watching the emergency exit and Kang sat and fiddled with his telephone.
Tay pulled out his Marlboros, settled himself in a chair against the wall, and lit a cigarette. He wasn’t sure he wanted a cigarette, but he had nothing else to do so he lit one anyway. At least here no one would start screeching at him to put it out. Nobody was around but Kang and Lee and they knew better than to complain. Tay thought it was ridiculous there was almost nowhere anymore you could smoke in peace. He blamed the Americans for that, he really did. One more way the do-gooders of the western world had fucked up the universe.
Tay understood he would have to stop smoking someday. He had resolved to do it a hundred times already, but making resolutions was as far as he had gotten so far. He had never taken even a single concrete step toward really stopping. Maybe tomorrow he would. Or maybe not.
Clouds slid over the sun, the world darkened, and it started to rain. At first, the rain fell softly, tiny drops that barely dimpled the oily sheen of the alleyway. It was almost as if the whole city were being sprinkled with heavenly absolution. But at the very moment the notion crossed his mind, the rain abruptly changed into big, fat drops that thudded against the alleyway like globs of spit. So much for poetic musings, Tay thought. Back to the real world.
The vendors hurriedly threw plastic covers over their carts and the swarms of pedestrians clogging the alleyway vanished as completely as if they had never been there at all. If there was one thing Singapore knew how to cope with it was rain. There was hardly a day when it wasn’t either raining or the humidity was so high it felt like it was raining. Tay had lived all of his life in Singapore and he had never for a moment understood what possessed human beings to build a city in a place with such lousy weather. Hot and raining, humid and hot, humid and raining and hot. Thus had it been for all of Tay’s fifty years in Singapore, and thus no doubt would it always be.
As the world outside the window darkened, Tay caught a sudden glimpse of his reflection in the glass. It was a dim, wavering image superimposed over the building across the alleyway and it looked almost spectral. For a moment Tay saw himself with a terrible objectivity, helpless to dissemble as most people do when they look at their own reflection. In that moment all his sense of personal loyalty to himself vanished, and he stared at his reflection with cruel clarity.
He thought he looked a hundred years old. Bags under his eyes, fleshiness under his chin, flecks of gray scattered through his hair like a sprinkling of salt. He didn’t remember being that gray. Had it just happened, or had it happened so slowly he had never noticed? Maybe he should get his hair died. How much did something like that cost?
He contemplated his reflection for a moment as if he were observing a stranger.
You’re getting old, son. Getting old.
He almost said it out loud, but he stopped himself just in time. He had heard that senility began with talking to yourself and at least he damn well didn’t do that yet. Well, hardly ever.
Tay pulled his shoulders back, sucked in his stomach, and looked himself in the eye, but it didn’t do any good. He just didn’t much like what he saw.
Even if he dyed his hair or lost some weight, he knew it wouldn’t really matter. He was never going to like himself very much. He retained his self-respect only by doing the best work he could and striving to be someone who was valuable to the world. Even when senior officers pushed back on him, he just let them take their best shots. Up until now they had always missed. Maybe they wouldn’t always miss.
He knew it didn’t matter. If he stopped doing the best he could regardless of how they pushed him, he would have no self-respect left. It was as simple as that.
The radio crackled again and a voice said, “We have a
subject approaching the hotel from the east who’s the right height and build. He could be Suparman.”
“Could be?” Goh snapped. “Does the subject resemble the drawing or doesn’t he?”
“He’s wearing a hoodie, sir. Because of the rain. I can’t see his face.”
“Is he alone?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let me know if he enters the hotel.”
There was a long silence and Tay felt the tension building. He kept his eyes on the radio while he waited for more. It was stupid to look at the radio, of course, but he did it anyway.
“Ah…this is position one again,” the same voice said after a minute or two had passed. “The subject is by the hotel. I don’t think he’s going in.”
“Position two,” Goh said, “do you see the subject?”
“Yes, sir. He’s coming straight at us and I can see his face now. He does look like the drawing…well, a little. But it’s not Suparman. He’s too old. Repeat, not Suparman.”
“Roger, positions one and two. Stay alert. Out.”
Tay lit another cigarette and went back to staring out the window. Perhaps he would sit here until he smoked himself to death. Eventually they would find his corpse with an empty pack of Marlboros in one hand and a box of matches in the other. That had to be about as good a way to go as any.
The thought took Tay back to the barely human pile of flesh he had seen in that tent at the side of the Singapore River. Now that was a horrible way to die. Who was that man? Did anyone miss him, or had he been forgotten already? The lesson was pretty clear, Tay told himself not for the first time. Never be a victim. Make your own choices, do what you have to do, but never be a victim.
Tay smoked quietly until his cigarette was finished. When it was, he dropped it on the floor and ground it out with the toe of his shoe.
The radio clicked on again.
“This is position two. We have three males approaching from the west. There is a subject in the center of the group who might be Suparman.”
Tay’s eyes flicked first to the radio then to the window, but of course he couldn’t see the three men from where they were.
“The whole group is stopping about twenty feet from the entrance. Subject is still in the center. Stand by.”
The silence stretched on so long after that Kang got up and walked over to check the radio. The moment Kang put his hand on it, Goh’s voice boomed out of the speaker and he jumped slightly.
“What’s happening, position one?”
“Ah…nothing, sir. They’re just standing there.”
“Are they checking for surveillance?”
“I don’t think so, sir, but their backs are to us so I can’t be sure. Subject is wearing a light jacket with the collar up and a baseball cap. I can’t really see him very clearly.”
“Do you have them, position two?”
“Yes, sir. The subject in the center has very short hair and pale skin. I don’t see how he could be Suparman.”
“Can you see his face clearly?”
“Uh…not really, sir.”
“All three men are moving again,” the first voice interrupted. “They’re past the hotel entrance now and proceeding west.”
“This is position two. They’re coming toward us now and I can confirm the subject is not Suparman. Repeat. Not Suparman.”
“Okay, positions one and two,” Goh said. “Stay on it. Out.”
As suddenly as the clouds had appeared they vanished, the rain stopped, and the sun came out. Tay’s reflection vanished from the window and he stood up and looked down at the green door across the alleyway. It looked exactly the way it had looked an hour ago, two hours ago, four hours ago.
“This is bullshit,” Tay said.
He yawned and stretched.
“This is complete bullshit,” he repeated. “We’re stuck in a damned alley while all the action is out front.”
“It doesn’t sound to me like we’re missing much, sir.”
Tay shrugged. He supposed Kang was right.
“Want me to take over?” Kang asked Lee.
She nodded. “Thanks.”
Kang took the field glasses from Lee, nudged around the chair where she had been sitting until he was happy with its position, and then put the glasses up to his eyes. “We’ve only got another forty hours until this woman is supposed to check into the hospital,” he observed cheerfully.
Tay shot Kang a look and saw he was grinning behind the field glasses.
Forty more hours, Tay thought. Or until I have a complete mental breakdown. Whichever comes first.
Instead of lighting another cigarette, Tay opened one of the books he bought at the 7-Eleven. He had recently discovered the American novelist Don Winslow and was methodically working his way through his books. Finding one he hadn’t read in a rack at the 7-Eleven was a stroke of luck.
Winslow wrote mostly about Southern California, a place Tay had never been and never wanted to go, but he had still found himself drawn into the almost apocryphal way Winslow described it. California was the future, Tay had heard for most of his life. Maybe it was. But that was only one of the many reasons Tay figured the past had so much to recommend it.
Tay read while Kang watched the green door and Lee sat in a chair and looked at something on her phone. The silence they shared had a quality to it that Tay rather liked.
After a while Tay closed the book and yawned. He walked over to the window and looked over Kang’s shoulder. A fat, yellow cat had appeared from somewhere and Tay followed it as it stopped next to the green door, rubbed its back against something, and then slowly meandered away.
No more than a dozen feet down the alley the cat abruptly turned around, strolled back to the green door, and rubbed up against it again. Did the cat have an itch it couldn’t scratch, or was it just wandering aimlessly, doing the first thing that came to mind? Either way, Tay knew how that cat felt. The story of his career in CID was exactly like that: half unscratched itch, and half pure aimlessness.
Despite collecting more than his share of commendations over the years, Tay had never really fit in. He knew a lot of his colleagues attributed that to the fact that his father was American. Tay was too independent, too individualistic, too…well, American. A good Singaporean kept his mouth shut, followed orders, and never stepped out of line. By that standard, Tay was not a good Singaporean.
Somehow, though, he had survived. His senior officers seemed as surprised as Tay was to find that, year after year, he was still around. He had put down roots in CID, he supposed, at least roots of a sort. He was like a tree growing out of a concrete parking lot. Stable, but not thriving.
Tay went back to his chair and picked up his book, but he didn’t open it.
Three days was a long time to hang around an abandoned travel agency doing very little but watching a door through which almost no one either came or went, listening to false alarms over the radio. You ending up thinking about a lot of things at times like that, and Tay didn’t really want to.
Surveillance was simply mind-numbing. Gloom and boredom were your unremitting companions because nothing happened.
Until it did.
“I may have something here, sir.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
KANG’S VOICE WAS a merciful interruption to the plummeting spiral of Tay’s increasingly dreary meditations. He got up and stood behind Kang who was bent forward bracing his elbows on his knees to steady the field glasses.
“I think it’s her. The sister.”
Kang handed the glasses back over his shoulder. Tay lifted them and studied the woman leaning on the wall next to the green door. Her arms were folded and she was looking up and down the alleyway.
“She just came outside,” Kang said. “Maybe she’s there for a smoke like that old woman we saw before.”
Old woman? Tay lowered the glasses and looked at the back of Kang’s head. He thought about telling Kang the old woman was only about ten years older than he was, but he k
new he would sound ridiculous saying that so he didn’t.
“What do you think, sir? It’s her, isn’t it?”
Tay swallowed his annoyance and went back to studying the woman.
Was it the same woman ISD identified as Suparman’s sister? He wasn’t sure.
Sergeant Lee came over to have a look and Tay handed her the glasses. “What do you think?” he asked.
Lee studied the woman. “She looks better than she does in the photographs,” Lee said. “But I think Sergeant Kang is right. It’s her.”
“At least we know now that she’s really here, sir,” Kang said. “Do you want me to put it on the radio?”
“Not yet,” Tay said. “Let’s see what she does.”
The woman hadn’t taken out a cigarette so she hadn’t come outside for a smoke. Besides, she was a guest at the hotel, not an employee, and in four hours of watching they hadn’t seen a single guest use the emergency exit for any reason. What was this woman doing? She was just standing there looking up and down the alleyway.
Like she was waiting for someone.
Tay took the glasses back from Lee and trained them on the woman. She was wearing a light gray golf shirt, long black shorts which came to the center of her knee, and white athletic shoes. In her left hand she held a straw purse large enough to park a Volkswagen. She looked a little heavier than in photographs ISD gave them. Her skin was more sun-browned, and she even appeared a little younger. The longer Tay studied the woman, the more it seemed to him something here was not right.
Goh told them Suparman was slipping into Singapore to visit his sister because she was dying from cancer. Tay knew he ought to be cautious about offering a medical diagnosis from fifty yards away after watching the woman through field glasses for a few minutes, but there simply was no doubt in his mind.
This woman leaning against the wall outside the emergency exit wasn’t dying from cancer or from anything else. At least not anytime soon. From what Tay could see, he was willing to bet she would outlive him.
