by Tom Clancy
“I’m trying, Kirst,” she said in a dry, scared voice. “Please believe, I’m trying my very best.”
“Truly, I consider the orchid to be the embodiment of our Asian heritage,” Fat B was saying. “Lasting yet delicate, its success, its flowering, dependant upon an exacting set of conditions.”
“Is that so?” Commander Sian Po of the Singapore Police Force said.
“Truly, truly,” Fat B said. “Nurtured in the rich soil of their evolution, orchids thrive in abundance, generation upon generation draping our hills, blanketing our heaths and gardens. Change what is essential to their natural state … go too far trying to cross cultures … spoil the purity of their time-honored lineage… and they wane like homesick souls. And while you may call me eccentric, I have always held to the belief that their colorful blossoms are inhabited by the spirits of our ancestors.”
“There is a widespread fancy that certain varieties may actually steal one’s spirit, you know. That their sublime beauty, drawing its energy from the feminine principle, may entrance a man and capture his essence, drain his very yin. ”
”No, no, I think that is ridiculous.”
“Well, I do, too. For that matter, I think this is all a pile of shit, so let’s drop it. You arranged this meeting. If you have something to say, say it.”
Fat B glanced at him and nodded.
They were looking out over the rail of a walking bridge that spanned a koi pond in the orchid gardens on Mandai Road in the north of Singapore Island, admiring the darting fish and the silver-tinged purple brightness of the bamboo orchids planted near the pond.
“Do the names Max Blackburn or Kirsten Chu mean anything to you?” Fat B asked.
The commander shook his head. “Should they?”
Fat B hesitated. “There was a disturbance on Scotts Road last Friday evening. Surely you’re aware of it.”
The commander did not shift his gaze from the orchids. A short, heavy man with rather mashed-looking features, - he had arrived here for their clandestine appointment sans badge and uniform, not wishing to be identified as a police officer, let alone one of high rank. It would, he knew, be very bad indeed if he were seen consorting with a disreputable character like Fat B.
“Scotts is Central… ‘A’ Division,” he said. “Not my jurisdication.”
Fat B found his brevity curious. He leaned forward with his elbows on the rail and gazed past the pond to where the flowers were quivering in a light breath of breeze, their glow in the copious sunshine surpassing even that of the hand-painted butterflies on his shirt.
“Your Geylang command encompasses thirteen neighborhood police posts and over three hundred officers,” he said. “The incident to which I am referring involved a scuffle on the street in front of a large hotel. A very busy location. My information is that there were witnesses. Do you mean to tell me there were no reports? No departmental bulletins?”
The commander turned his head toward Fat B and gave him a phlegmatic look.
“Assuming there were,” he said, “what connection do you have to the occurrence?”
“None, I assure you.” Fat B shrugged. “Like yourself, I try not to stray beyond my own purview. But on occasion people ask me things, and I do my best to give them answers.”
“And how generous are these people in their gratitude?”
“Very.”
The commander inhaled, then let the air rush out his lips.
“Something odd did happen outside the Hyatt, and maybe inside as well,” he said. “Exactly what, I’m not sure. But CID’s involved.”
“Criminal Investigation?”
“Yes. And more than one line element. Rumor has it that both the Special Investigation Section and Secret Societies Branch have their noses in this.”
“Tell me everything that is known about the incident.”
“There isn’t much. Or if there is, the CID hotshots are keeping it to themselves.” Sian Po shrugged. “I’ve heard a bystander gave us an anonymous call, and it was corroborated by another report. There was a confrontation at a taxi stand involving a quai lo, a woman, and some others. The woman rode off in a cab, and the white man stayed behind and is supposed to have been followed into the hotel lobby. We don’t know what happened afterward, but it was all over by the time a patrol car arrived. Everyone involved seems to have vanished, and few bystanders admit to having seen anything. But that’s the way it is.”
“Nobody wants trouble, lah,”
The commander nodded, and released another sigh.
“Even so,” he said, “trouble comes.”
They were silent a while. Fat B’s eye caught a compressed medley of color flitting under the surface of the pond—a large rainbow koi. It darted into the shade of a water lily and stopped abruptly, its long body hovering in perfect stillness.
“Should Missing Persons reports be filed on either the quai lo or the Chu woman, I would very much appreciate being apprised of their sources,” he said. “Also, my inquisitive friends would find any clues I could pass along about the woman’s present whereabouts to be of special value.”
Their eyes met.
“Your friends,” the commander said. “What will they do if they locate her?”
“I don’t ask.”
The commander looked at him for a full minute without saying anything, then slowly nodded.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
Fat B grinned with satisfaction. “And I’ll make it worth your while.”
The commander lingered on the rail another moment, then turned to leave. Fat B didn’t move. He did not think Sian Po would be inclined to stroll from the garden in his presence.
The commander took two steps up the bridge and paused, motioning toward Fat B’s shirt with his chin.
‘Those butterflies are quite splendid,” he said. “They are of the Graphium species, are they not?”
Fat B nodded.
“I’ve heard they survive by sucking the piss of higher animals from the ground,” the commander said.
Fat B controlled his reaction.
“Thank you for sharing that with me,” he said. “Outwardly we are very different types of men, you and I, but love and knowledge of nature is our bond.”
The commander looked at him and grinned unpleasantly.
“The money helps,” he said, and strode away.
SEVENTEEN
SAN JOSE / PALO ALTO
SEPTEMBER 25/26, 2000
“THIS,” NORIKO COUSINS SAID, “IS ONE AMAZING ROOM.”
Nimec reached for the little blue cube of chalk on the bridge of the pool table.
“So people tell me,” he said, rubbing the chalk on the tip of his cue stick with a circular motion. “It’s where I come to loosen up, get my thoughts right.”
They were in the billiard parlor on the upper level of his San Jose triplex, a painstaking recreation of the smoky South Philadelphia halls where he’d spent his youth ducking truant officers, while pursuing an education of a sort that certainly wouldn’t have moved them to reexamine his delinquent status. But in those days Nimec had only cared about one man’s approbation, and in attempting to gain it had been a most attentive student… or, as he liked to put it, if SATs and grade-point averages could measure one’s aptitude at bank shots, combinations, and draw English, he’d have been a shoe-in for a full college scholarship.
At any rate, he’d captured every detail of the old place—at least as filtered through the subjective lens of his recollection—from the cigarette bums on the green baize tabletops to the soda fountain, swimsuit calendars, milky plastic light fixtures, and Wurlitzer juke stacked with vintage forty-fives circa 1968, a machine he’d picked up for a song at an antique auction and which, after some minor repairs, could still shake and rattle the room to its ceiling beams with three selections for a quarter.
Right now it was belting out Cream’s cover of the old blues standard “Crossroads.” Clapton’s improvised guitar lead slipped around Jack Bruce�
��s bass line like hot mercury, taking Nimec back, conjuring up a memory of his old pal Mick Cunningham, a few years his senior and newly back from a hitch in Nam, bopping between rows of regulation tables, raving about Clapton being fucking huge in Saigon.
Mick, who’d had a problem with junk, which had also been fucking huge in Saigon, had been shivved to death in a prison exercise yard in ‘75 while doing a nickel for attempted robbery, his first offense, a heavy sentence by anyone’s standards.
“One ball, over there,” Nimec called, waggling his stick at the left comer pocket in the foot rail. He had won the opening break.
Noriko nodded.
He leaned over the side of the table and set the cue ball down within the head string, just shy of the center spot. Then he placed his right hand flat on the table’s surface and slid the cue into the groove between his thumb and forefinger. Sighting down the length of the stick, he stroked twice in practice, then drove for the cushions on the opposite rail, giving the cue some left English and follow. The ball banked off the cushion at a slightly wider angle than he’d intended and hit the one thin, but still pocketed it neatly and scattered the triangular rack, leaving him with a couple of easy setups.
“You know what you’re doing,” Noriko said. When he’d shot, she thought, his eyes had shown the steely concentration of a marksman.
‘1 ought to,” he said. *‘My father was the sharpest hustler in Philly. Shooting pool is what he did. His dream was that I’d carry on the family trade after he was gone, and I worked hard at learning it.”
“Your mother have anything to say about that?”
“She wasn’t around, maybe wasn’t even alive. Blew the nest when I was three or four. Guess she wasn’t impressed that I could count all my toes and fingers.” He took his stance again. “Three ball, center pocket.”
He aimed and shot, kissing his ball off the eleven. It pocketed with a solid chunk-chunk-chunk.
Noriko looked at him with mild wonder, waiting, twirling her stick vertically between her palms, its butt end on the floor. Nimec had always seemed the epitome of the straight-arrow cop—or ex-cop as the case happened to be. The side of her chief she was seeing was a revelation.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” she said, “how’d you wind up wearing a badge?”
Nimec faced her and shrugged.
“There was no dramatic turning point, if that’s what you’re curious about,” he said. “Besides playing pool, our other favorite sport in the old neighborhood was hanging out on street comers and getting drunk and starting fights. Everybody wailed on everybody else, seven days a week… grown men pushing teenagers through windshields, teenagers pounding on little kids with trash cans, kids smashing bricks down on alley cats. It was hierarchical like that.” He shrugged again. “I got tired of it after a while, and suppose the structure and the pay and the benefits of being a police officer appealed to me. One very typical day I took the exam and passed. A few months later I got my appointment, figured I’d see how it went at the Academy.”
“And it went well,” Noriko said.
“Yes,” he said. “It did. And sort of killed my budding career as a pool shark.”
He turned back to the table, called his next shot, and put it down the chute. On the juke “Crossroads” ended and Vanilla Fudge’s rendition of “Keep Me Hangin’ On” keyed up. Noriko waited.
“You know Max Blackburn?” Nimec asked, his eyes moving over the table.
“Only by reputation,” she said. “He’s supposed to be the best at what he does. Ever since Politika, everybody’s been talking about him like he’s Superman.”
Nimec saw a possible combination rail shot at the eleven ball, and lined up for it.
“Max is a good man, no question,” he said. “Enjoys connecting the dots to solve a problem, which is why I often use him as a troubleshooter. The past six months he’s been assigned to the Johor Bharu ground station, taking care of a range of things, some of which were, shall we say, not for the record. And dicey.” He looked over his shoulder at Noriko. “Almost a week ago he dropped out of sight in Singapore, and nobody’s heard anything from him since.”
She watched him without saying anything.
‘ ‘Max would never stay out of contact this long unless something were very wrong,” Nimec went on. “He’s too dependable a man.”
He took his shot, but his wrist tensed at the last instant and he stroked the cue harder than he’d wanted. The ball missed the hole and caromed off the cushion, too fast, its angle too narrow.
‘The dicey stuff Blackburn was doing,” Noriko said in a slow, considering voice. “Is it something we can talk about?”
“Later, certainly,” he said. “First, though, I need to know if you’d be willing to head out to where he is. Or was. And help me track him down.”
“I get a team?”
“Just me,” Nimec said. “If we need support we can get it from the Johor crew.”
She looked at him.
“I’d understand if you don’t want to get involved,” he said. “Your participation would be strictly voluntary.”
“And off the record,” she said.
“Right.”
There was a pause.
“One question,” she said. “Was I asked on this job because I won’t stick out in a crowd of Asians, or because of my experience in the field?”
“You sensitive about your ethnicity?”
“Sensitivity has nothing to do with it. I’m half Japanese. It’s a logical question. Was it my slanted eyes or my ability?”
Nimec gave her a small, tight smile.
“Both,” he said. “Your background might open some doors a little quicker. It might make certain things easier for us in certain situations, and with certain people. It’s a leg up. But I wouldn’t want you without knowing absolutely that I could trust you with my life, no matter how thick it gets.”
She looked closely at his face a while, then nodded.
“I’m in,” she said. “What’s our game plan?”
“Step one, we finish playing pool. Step two, I clear our trip with Gordian. Step three, we go get our suitcases.”
“And if the boss doesn’t give us the go signal?”
Nimec considered that a moment.
“Max is my friend,” he said. Firmly. “Which means we’d have to skip right on ahead to step three.”
Early on the day Roger Gordian was scheduled to depart for Washington, he was joined by Chuck Kirby and Vince Scull in the glass-enclosed veranda of his Palo Alto home. The three of them were seated at a large cane table talking seriously over their breakfast, drinks, papers, and open briefcases. The morning was bright and warm, and there was a flower-scented breeze wafting in through the louvered panels. On a freestanding easel near the table was a chart Gordian had prepared for their meeting. His daughter Julia had stopped by to wish him luck in D.C., and brought the greyhounds with her, and she and Ashley were running them outside on the grass.
Gordian had just finished summarizing his plan, and could already see the unhappiness on Chuck’s face. He waited until the attorney wasn’t looking and checked his watch, thinking he had a good half hour before his third visitor showed, time enough to deal with Kirby’s inevitable objections. Not that it would be easy.
He glanced out at the yard, bracing himself. Whipping downhill in pursuit of a tossed plastic rabbit, the dogs were curves of graceful motion against the greenness of the sprawling lawn. As usual Jack, the brindle male, had outsprinted Jill, the teal-blue female. Though both had been bred for the dog track, and Jill was sleeker and younger, her skittish temperament had disqualified her from competition, while Jack had run a great many races before he’d been retired.
Julia had gotten the dogs from a greyhound adoption program out of Orange County about six months ago. Had they not been rescued and placed, they would have been euthanized, which was the common practice of racetrack owners when their dogs were no longer competitive, whether for reasons of age, dis
position, or any physical deficit that hampered their coursing performance. Gordian had been originally amazed to learn from his daughter that, on average, unadopted track dogs were retired and put down when they were five years old, having barely reached a third of their natural life expectancy… and always when he watched their spirited and energetic play, the amazement returned in its fullness.
After all the acts of inhumanity he’d seen people carry out on other people, all the personal losses he’d accumulated as a result of war and terrorism, Gordian didn’t know why such waste—lesser by far in the grand scheme . of things—ought to surprise him anymore. But it did, and somehow he felt that was better than if it hadn’t.
He took a sip of his coffee, and listened to Kirby begin arguing that he was about to commit the worst blunder of his life.
“Gord, I’ve heard every word you’ve spoken and tried my damnedest to keep an open mind,” Chuck said. “But to do what you’ve proposed before considering a less extreme strategy—”
“Sometimes you have to lose a limb to preserve the health of the body,” Gordian said. “Sometimes survival itself depends on it.”
Kirby shook his head. “You’re talking about wholesale dismemberment,” he said. “Not the same.”
Gordian’s clear blue eyes were so calm it was almost unsettling. Like Moses after receiving the Ten Command-mentSy Kirby thought.
“Chuck, I haven’t said this would be painless. And because you’re my friend, I believe that pain is the thing you’re trying to spare me,” he said. “But I’ve already accepted it, you see. Mentally and emotionally, I’ve already let go.”
”Let go? Of everything you built up over a decade? Everything you’ve worked your ass off to—”
“If you stop for a second you’ll realize you’re overreacting,” Gordian said with unassailable forbearance.
Chuck turned to Scull. “Vince? Is that what you think? I know your analysis is that Gord’s plan is doable, but my question is really whether it ought to be done. Whether you’re endorsing it.”
