Umbrella Man (9786167611204)

by Needham, Jake

  ***

  Tay went straight to his desk, found a pack of Marlboros and some matches, and carried them out to the garden.

  As the sweet tingle of the smoke filled his lungs, he could almost feel the tension draining out of him. How was it, he often wondered, that the comfort he found in smoking had become one of the great scapegoats of the twenty-first century? It seemed an innocent enough act by itself, but these days people were anxious to pile onto it all the social ills and injustices they were otherwise afraid to talk about.

  Slamming smokers had become a free shot. You could give your high-mindedness and social outrage free rein to strut its stuff and hear nothing but an energetic chorus of amens from the gallery. Speak up about some other annoying aspects of modern life instead — like people walking their dogs through the crowds on Orchard Road or women pushing baby carriages down the sidewalk as if they owned it — and people wrote you off as just another crazy old fart always screaming at kids to get off his lawn. But piss on some poor guy who wanted nothing more than to enjoy his smoke in peace, and all you heard were the cheers.

  Fuck ‘em, Tay thought, and inhaled another lungful of sublime, honey-coated smoke.

  ***

  He slumped back in his chair, examined the small patch of sky he could see over the rooflines of his neighbors’ houses, and he thought about what John August’s messenger had told him.

  Was he really under surveillance by ISD? His phones tapped?

  That seemed a little hard to believe. ISD wasn’t exactly a reincarnation of the Gestapo. It was just some guys at the Ministry of Home Affairs. Okay, paranoid guys, maybe — Tay could see that easily enough — but did ISD really go around trying to shut up anyone who threatened to do something or say something the government didn’t want done or said? That was a lot harder for him to buy.

  On the other hand, somebody had pushed their way into his house, hit him over the head, and taken those ledger sheets he had found in the safety deposit box. That could have been ISD, couldn’t it?

  Yeah right. And the Los Angeles police planted the bloody glove and framed OJ.

  He was taking all this way too far. ISD wasn’t going to attack an inspector in the Singapore police just because they wanted to see something he had found in connection with a case. They would just ask him for it, wouldn’t they?

  Still…

  If ISD did have him under surveillance, if they were monitoring his phones, wouldn’t they have searched his house at some point, too? Like, maybe when he was driving to JB to try and find John August?

  Maybe he should look around then and see if his house had been searched. Of course, if the searchers were any good, he probably wouldn’t be able to tell they had been there, would he? But then maybe he would. He was a trained law enforcement officer, after all. He had searched an awful lot of houses and apartments himself in his career. He would know a search when he saw it.

  Probably.

  Tay stabbed his cigarette into the ashtray next to his chair and stood up.

  ***

  He found nothing out of the ordinary on the first floor. He thought one of the pictures in the hall might have been a little crooked, but he could have brushed against it himself. That didn’t prove anything.

  Nothing upstairs caught his attention. He walked slowly through his bedroom and bathroom letting his eyes sweep over everything. Then he went back and opened every drawer and every closet and examined their contents.

  Nothing.

  He stuck his head in the first of his spare bedrooms, but didn’t even bother to go inside. There was nothing in the room except some old furniture. The bed wasn’t made up and the closets and drawers were empty. Even if the room had been searched, there wasn’t anything there that would show it.

  The other bedroom that he used as a storeroom was so cluttered it left Tay with the opposite problem. Someone could have moved things around in there and he would never notice. He didn’t even know exactly what was in the room, let alone where it was supposed to be. Except for when he went through his mother’s old trunks and found the photo albums, he hadn’t been in the room in years.

  Tay crossed the room and pulled up the lid on the closest trunk. It was the one that held his mother’s things and they all appeared to be exactly where they had been before. He closed it and turned to the other trunk, the one in which he had found his father’s photo albums.

  He opened the lid and he knew immediately that John August’s messenger had been right.

  At a glance, the contents seemed to be just as he had left them. The only things missing were the two photo albums he had at the office.

  It was the blazer that gave it away. An old blue blazer that had belonged to his father had been folded and laid across the ledgers. It was still there, but the collar was to the left. When Tay had closed the trunk, it had been to the right.

  Tay stopped and thought. Could he be wrong about that? No, he couldn’t. He could picture the scene clearly in his mind’s eye. He had replaced everything in the trunk except the photo albums, and then he had lifted the folded blazer off the table where he had put it aside. It smelled slightly, and he started to unfold it but he didn’t because he was afraid the smell might get worse. So he had placed it back on top of the ledgers without unfolding it.

  And he had placed it with the collar to the right.

  ***

  Tay went back to his seat in the garden, lit another Marlboro, and thought about what he knew now that he hadn’t known before.

  For starters, he knew somebody had been in his house and had searched it thoroughly enough to go into trunks in his storage room. Could ISD have done it? He didn’t want to think so, but who else could it have been?

  Okay, say ISD had searched his house. What did they find? Tay couldn’t think of anything that might have any bearing either on the Woodlands case or on the bombings. The original ledger sheets with his father’s initials on them, the stack of old papers that had started him down this rabbit hole, had been taken by whoever had forced their way in after he came back from the hospital. His father’s photo albums and the safety deposit box key were in his desk at the Cantonment Complex.

  Were they safe there? Tay wondered about that for a moment. Could ISD walk into the Cantonment Complex, go to his office, and search it?

  The police had always been slightly suspicious of ISD. No doubt it was much the same way the FBI viewed the CIA or Scotland Yard viewed MI5. Would the CIA try slipping into FBI headquarters or would MI5 attempt to search an office at Scotland Yard? Of course not. And it was just as inconceivable that ISD would try to search the office of a senior CID inspector at the Cantonment Complex. If they were caught at it — and Tay was confident they would be caught at it — the blowback would be intense.

  Tay took a long pull on his Marlboro and consulted the sky again.

  So what did this all mean?

  ISD had ordered him to drop the case of the dead man at the Woodlands. And now they were doing their best to make sure he had.

  What were they going to do if he didn’t drop it? Was he actually prepared to believe ISD would do bodily harm to shut him down?

  Tay had seen so many inexplicable things in his years as a policeman that he was prepared to believe almost anything was possible. Except that.

  Singapore was the only home Tay had ever known, and his illusions about it had long ago faded away. He hated the stultifying demands for conformity, the smug authoritarianism of the government, and the mass of the population that had willingly traded its freedom for affluence. Most of all he hated the political system that offered a comforting illusion of popular government without the fact of it.

  The People’s Action Party was the only government Singapore had ever had. It had overwhelmingly won every election since Singapore became a nation, seldom permitting the nominal opposition to gain more than a tiny handful of parliamentary seats. Singapore had had only three Prime Minister’s in its entire history, two of them being father and son who t
ogether had held the office for nearly forty years and counting. Tay’s native land had become synonymous with order, efficiency, cleanliness, and complete intolerance of even the slightest hint of nonconformity.

  It was ISD’s job to keep a lid on. It was ISD’s job to prevent any threat arising to the continuation of Pax Singapura. Their primary tool for doing that was the Internal Security Act which was modeled on a similar law the British had used to prevent the growth of any meaningful opposition in Singapore when they were in change. It permitted the government to do a lot of things in the name of protecting the security of the country, which in practice meant protecting the right of those who governed it now to continue governing it as they saw fit in the future.

  Most notoriously, it permitted the government to hold people for two years without charges and without a trial, and then to renew their detention for another two years if they saw fit. Section 55 was the pertinent section of the Internal Security Act, and the government could Section 55 as many people as it liked without anyone saying a word, because talking about it could also be construed as a threat to Singapore’s security.

  Would ISD Section 55 him, a senior inspector in the Singapore police? Tay didn’t think so. The scrutiny it would bring them would be intense.

  Maybe that was why August’s messenger had made that crack about a nice quiet hit and run. Still, as far as Tay knew, ISD did not go around physically harming other Singaporeans just because they were doing things that might prove embarrassing to them. They weren’t thugs. They were just guys who maybe got a little aggressive from time to time about advancing what they saw as the best interests of the country. And, of course, they did tend to forget that men of good will might have honest differences about what the best interests of the country actually were.

  Tay considered all that while he watched a cloud chase the moon.

  If August had been right about Tay being under surveillance by ISD, had he been right about the rest of it as well? Was ISD really trying to cover up one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism that had ever been perpetrated in any country by blaming it on radical Muslims in Indonesia? Were some people that terrified to admit the government of Singapore wasn’t a jolly uncle unanimously loved by every man, woman, and child in the country?

  And if ISD was trying to cover up a monstrous act of domestic terrorism, what did covering up the murder of Johnny the Mover have to do with that? Unless, of course, August was right about the rest of it, too, and Johnny had been responsible for bringing the explosives into Singapore, then murdered to keep him from talking.

  ***

  It suddenly occurred to Tay he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast and he was famished, so he got up and went inside to see if he could find something in his kitchen from which he could make a meal. He didn’t, so he made do with a bar of Toblerone he had forgotten was in the refrigerator. Sitting at the kitchen table, he methodically bit off and chewed one section of the bar after another while he thought about what was, for him at least, the real nub of the problem.

  His father.

  He had a photograph of his father with Johnny the Mover and a third man he couldn’t identify, someone he had begun calling the umbrella man. That didn’t necessarily mean his father had been involved in something all those years ago that had led directly to the bombings that had ripped the heart out of his country. But it did mean his father was connected to somebody who worked with American intelligence. Which, of course, at least opened up the possibility that his father, too, had been somehow connected to American intelligence.

  And what about the story Laura Ann Zimmerman had told him about her mother being a spy? Her mother had worked for Tay’s father. Did that mean his father was a spy, too?

  Either one of those connections could have been a coincidence, of course. But both of them? Tay couldn’t buy that.

  What’s more, Laura Ann Zimmerman’s mother had died suspiciously in an automobile accident for which the reported facts didn’t add up. And if the accident that killed her hadn’t been accidental, did that also call into question everything Tay knew, or thought he knew, about how his own father had died?

  Tay broke the last two section of this Toblerone bar apart and positioned them on the table right next to each other.

  On the one hand, he thought — placing the index finger of this left hand on the left-hand triangle of chocolate — ISD was trying to cover up a murder of a former smuggler for American intelligence and perhaps the truth about the bombings, too, all to serve the government’s wish to protect the myth of Singapore as a contented country, untroubled and at ease under the only government it had ever had.

  What could he do about that? What should he do about that?

  He should save these people from their own idiocy by finding out the truth and making certain everyone knew what the truth was. Then that would be the end of it. ISD would have nothing to hide any longer. Some people would be unhappy about what he had revealed, of course, but the world would continue to spin and eventually Singapore would find its feet again.

  On the other hand — Tay placed the index finger of his right hand on the right-hand triangle of chocolate — there were all those questions he had stumbled over about his father. Who was his father? And what involvement had his father once had in the shadowy beginnings of a road that had led eventually to Singapore’s destruction? Did the umbrella man know? And if he did, was the umbrella man even alive? And if he was still alive, could Tay find him and ask him what he knew about all this?

  Tay moved his fingers and pushed the two triangles of chocolate together to form a single rectangular shape.

  Sometimes it didn’t matter how hard you tried to separate things, their connections survived everything you could do to break them apart.

  The truth about exactly what those connections were in this case was out there somewhere. No matter how deeply they had been buried, someone who wanted badly enough to know what they were could dig them up again.

  But to do that, Tay would have to stir up that past, and that was a dangerous thing to do. You never stir up the past if you can help it. Stirring up the past is stirring up a hornet’s nest.

  Tay knew all that. He knew it perfectly well.

  But he was going to do it anyway.

  He scooped both squares of chocolate off the table, popped them into his mouth, and went upstairs to bed.

  THIRTY-TWO

  A VIOLENT STORM swept through Singapore that night pushing curtains of rain across the city. Gusts of wind bent and twisted the banana trees in Tay’s garden so violently that the big leaves slapping out the rhythm of the storm against his bedroom windows waked him repeatedly from an uneasy sleep. Lightening cracked and thunder boomed. Singapore felt like a city under siege.

  Tay finally gave up tossing and turning and dragged himself out of bed when it was barely light. He felt more tired than he had the night before, but he made some coffee anyway and took a cup out to the garden to inspect the broken stalks of his banana trees.

  The dawn was electric. Tay thought that if every day in Singapore began like this he might even become an early riser. There was a coolness to the air and a dim golden light painted the pastel shophouses of his neighborhood with a warmth he could never recall seeing before in the hard, white light that was Singapore’s usual lot.

  So energized was Tay by the delights of the morning he decided to walk to the Coffee Bean on Orchard Road for breakfast. He showered and dressed as quickly as he could. He didn’t want to waste a moment of the brief breath of coolness the morning had brought.

  Tucking in his shirt, he turned sideways and looked in the mirror. His stomach was larger than it had been the last time he had looked, wasn’t it? He was pretty sure it was, but by how much? He still had that bicycle he had ridden once or twice the last time he had been overcome by a burst of healthy living. Maybe it was time to haul it out again.

  Tay was nearly fifty, and every time he thought about that he found it hard to believe. He had
begun to ask himself sometimes how many years he had left. It was not a morbid question, just one of fact. At fifty, he was unquestionably closer to the end of his life than he was to the beginning. But how much close was he? He wasn’t obsessing about death, he told himself. He was merely curious. Still, he had to admit he had been thinking about death quite a lot recently. For some reason, every time he sat on the toilet he thought about death. Taking a crap had become a Woody Allen movie for him. Maybe he was obsessing just a little.

  ***

  Tay left his house and walked up to Orchard Road. The smell of honey roasted chestnuts drifted from a stainless-steel food cart tended by a young, dark-skinned girl with a large silver ring in her nose. Propped against the front of the cart, a hand-lettered signed announced the price as two dollars a dozen. That seemed very cheap to Tay and the roasting nuts smelled so good in the cool morning air he would have stopped and bought a dozen or two, but something put him off and he kept walking. Was it the ring in the girl’s nose that had done it? Yes, probably it was. He was a little embarrassed to admit it, even to himself, but he had no doubt that was exactly what put him off.

  At the Coffee Bean he got a large black coffee and two apple fritters which had been warmed to exactly the right temperature. While he ate, he thought about Paraguas Ltd and Johnny the Mover and the umbrella man and his father. He didn’t really want to think about any of them — the morning was far too nice to spoil by sliding back into that swamp — but they were all hovering somewhere out there just over his shoulder. A Greek chorus that refused to speak to him.

  Tay tried to divert himself for at least a few minutes by listening to the conversations he could hear around him, but that wasn’t much fun either. The staccato rhythms of spoken English in Singapore were anything other than the soothing sounds Tay would have preferred at that hour. English words in Singapore were not really spoken at all, but hurled and spit. Many Singaporeans spoke Mandarin at home, and Tay had always assumed that was why Singaporeans spoke English the way they did. They used English words, after a fashion, but they spoke them with Mandarin tones and inflections. No wonder tourists mostly looked confused.