Umbrella Man (9786167611204)

by Needham, Jake

  “Done already?” Tay asked him.

  “Hardly, sir. My eyes are starting to cross. I just needed a break.”

  Tay nodded toward the book Kang was carrying. “Something in that one?”

  “Not really, sir. I just wanted to double check that these were your father’s initials. They look different to me from the others somehow, like maybe somebody else wrote them. Don’t you think?”

  Kang opened the ledger to the place he had marked with his finger and put it on the table in front of Tay. Then he pointed to some writing about halfway down the page.

  The writing was too small for Tay to make out.

  “You can read that?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. Can’t you?”

  Tay couldn’t, not really, but he wasn’t going to admit that to Kang if he could avoid it.

  He had wondered for the last year or so if he needed glasses. He had even gone into a shop once and tried on a few pair of frames, but he thought he looked ridiculous and left as soon as one of the sales girls started paying attention to him. The problem wasn’t just how he looked in glasses, Tay knew, it was that wearing glasses seemed to him to be inextricably bound up with growing old. And having to squint a little every now and then was a small price to pay for holding out just as long as possible.

  “The writing is very small,” Tay mumbled.

  “All accountants seem to write very small. It’s like they’re afraid of using any more ink than they absolutely have to.”

  Tay stared hard at the spot where Kang was pointing and willed the writing he saw there to come into focus. It didn’t respond to his demands.

  “It’s too small for me to see it clearly,” he finally admitted. “I just can’t tell.”

  “They’re your father’s initials, all right. DST. No doubt about that. There’s just something about the way they’re written here. Like maybe they were written by somebody else.”

  “I can’t tell,” Tay said, and changed the subject as quickly as he could. “What do you think so far? What are these ledgers all about?”

  “Well…” Kang hesitated, and something about the way he did it made Tay immediately wary.

  “What?”

  “I’d rather not say right now, sir. It’s just a vague thought. Let me keep at it for a while. I haven’t gotten through even half of the books yet.”

  Kang cleared his throat unnecessarily and quickly changed the subject.

  “Any chance of a cup of tea, sir?”

  “How about a Marlboro instead, Sergeant?” Tay held out the open pack. “It’s less trouble for me.”

  “No thanks, sir. A cup of tea will do me just fine. I’m sure you can manage.”

  ***

  Tay made tea for both of them and then took his mug and a new pack of cigarettes out to the garden. When the buzzer at his front gate rang, his tea was long finished and he was working on a fresh cigarette.

  Tay glanced at his watch. Just after six. He didn’t have many callers, and the few people he knew who were likely to come to his house wouldn’t have thought of doing so without being invited. He couldn’t imagine who it could possibly be. Stubbing his cigarette into a big glass ashtray that needed emptying, he walked to his front door to find out.

  When he opened the door and looked out to the street through the black ironwork gate across the garden, Tay was surprised to see Vincent Ferrero standing there. Actually, to be completely truthful, Tay could only see part of Vincent Ferrero standing there. Ferrero was so big he filled the gate and spilled over its edges like a badly framed photograph.

  “What are you doing here?” Tay called out.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

  “No. But I’d still like to know what you’re doing here.”

  Tay stepped onto his small front porch leaving the front door standing open behind him.

  “And how do you know where I live?”

  Ferrero snorted. “Come on, Tay. You’re not that naive, are you?”

  “I thought you said you were just some guy with the American embassy, but somehow you know where I live?”

  “It was Goh who said I was with the American embassy.”

  “Are you?”

  “Well…more or less.”

  “Which means, of course, you’re CIA.”

  Ferrero shrugged. “Think whatever you like, Tay. Doesn’t matter to me.”

  Tay took four paces down the short walkway and stopped behind his gate.

  “I’ll ask you again,” Tay said. “What are you doing here?”

  “We need to talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t much like the idea of having CIA men in my house.”

  “Are you afraid of me, Tay? Or are you just an all-around asshole?”

  That made Tay so angry he stepped forward and jerked the gate open without stopping to think what he was doing.

  “Afraid of you? Get the hell out of here.”

  “Whoa.” Ferrero raised both hands, palms out. “I think we got off on the wrong foot here, Tay.”

  “We don’t need any feet. We’re not going anywhere.”

  Ferrero took half a step forward and Tay put a hand in his chest. Actually, Ferrero was so big Tay’s hand hit closer to his belly button than his chest. “I told you to get the hell out of here,” Tay snapped.

  “Look, you little shit…” Ferrero swept his left arm up and brushed Tay’s hand away. “You’re your hand off of me.”

  There was a moment of stillness as the two men stood and glared at each other.

  “We told you the Woodlands case is closed,” Ferrero snarled. “And now you’ve got people poking around with both Immigration and Customs asking a lot of questions.”

  “We’re looking into some matters in connection with a woman named Mayling Aw who killed her child.”

  “Like hell you are. You’re still on the Woodlands case. We’re not idiots.”

  “Could have fooled me.”

  Ferrero reached out and poked Tay’s shoulder with his forefinger.

  “You’ve already been told once,” he said.

  Poke.

  “The Woodlands case is closed.”

  Poke.

  “I’m not going to tell you again to drop it.”

  Poke.

  The first three times Ferrero poked him in the shoulder, Tay held his temper. But the fourth time tipped him over the edge.

  Tay slapped Ferrero’s hand away, then stepped forward and shoved him back toward the gate with both hands. It was like shoving the Empire State Building. Ferrero didn’t move an inch. Didn’t even lean.

  “I told you not to put your hands on me, you little shit. Now I’m going to make sure you never do it again.”

  ***

  “Is there a problem, sir?”

  Kang’s voice came from the direction of Tay’s porch.

  Ferrero shifted his eyes to Kang, and Tay dropped his hands and took half a step back.

  “No, Sergeant,” Tay said, “no problem at all. This gentleman was just leaving.”

  The three of them stood frozen that way for what felt to Tay like an hour, but it was probably more like fifteen seconds. Finally Ferrero nodded and shuffled slowly backward until he was outside the gate. Tay gave the gate a shove. It slammed shut and locked in Ferrero’s face.

  Ferrero shifted his eyes back and forth between Tay and Kang several times, then he lifted his forefinger and shook it slowly at both of them.

  “Stay away from the Woodlands case,” he said. “Stay completely away from it. If you don’t, you’ll both answer to me. And I’m not nearly as squeamish as those little girls at ISD.”

  “You crossed the line by coming here,” Tay snapped. “You can’t harass a Singapore CID inspector in his own home and get away with it. I’ll raise such a stink that no matter who’s protecting you they’ll still hustle you out of the country from sheer embarrassment.”

  “That could be a
problem. If I had been here. But of course I never was.”

  For the first time in his life, Tay was happy to feel the weight of his cell phone in his pocket. Pulling it out, he snapped a picture of Ferrero standing at his gate.

  “I say you were here.”

  Ferrero chuckled.

  “You really are a bozo, aren’t you, Tay?”

  Then then he chuckled again, shook his finger at Tay one more time, and walked off in the direction of Orchard Road.

  ***

  When Tay turned around, he saw Kang’s face had taken on an almost comically neutral expression.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what that was all about, Robbie?”

  “I figure it was probably just an angry husband, sir.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  Kang said nothing.

  “His name is Vincent Ferrero. He was with Philip Goh, the ISD guy, when he came to my office to warn me off the Woodlands case. Goh told me Ferrero was with the American Embassy.”

  “CIA, huh?”

  Tay just nodded.

  “What interest does the CIA have in the Woodlands case?”

  After what John August had told him, Tay could guess pretty easily, but he still didn’t want to tell Kang about John August, and he still didn’t really want to lie to him either. So Tay said nothing

  “Okay,” Kang went on when it became obvious Tay wasn’t going to answer him, “then what was this guy doing here at your house today?”

  “He just wanted to give me a friendly reminder that the Woodlands case was closed. He apparently got wind somehow that you were asking Immigration about foreigners crossing into Singapore through the Woodlands checkpoint and asking Customs about some shipments coming into Singapore.”

  “Didn’t you tell him we were just working the Mayling Aw case?”

  “I did.”

  “But he didn’t believe you?”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Huh,” Kang mumbled. “Imagine that.”

  “Thanks for backing me up, Robbie.”

  “No problem, sir. Can we talk about the ledgers now that I’ve saved your butt? I’d really like to go home.”

  ***

  After Kang left that night, Tay sat for a long time in his garden thinking about what Kang had told him.

  His father had been laundering money, Kang said. The ledgers were records of the movement of money among companies all over the world, movements of money that didn’t appear to be related to genuine commercial transactions. Kang thought the companies were mostly shell companies anyway, since they seemed to do their banking in places like Panama, the Channel Islands, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, and he said he had found a pattern of relationships among the companies. The only thing that wasn’t clear, Kang said, was who his father was laundering money for.

  Tay had no problem figuring that part out on his own.

  His father had been photographed in Vietnam with a man who was apparently a notorious smuggler working for the CIA. The daughter of one of his father’s employees at the accounting firm he was supposed to be running, a woman killed under rather strange circumstances to say the least, remembered her father saying her mother wasn’t really an accountant, but a spy. Tay’s father had made a great deal of money under mysterious circumstances and, right after he died, Tay’s mother had taken her share of it and gone to the United States. Tay had never before understood how his mother had gotten an American residence visa so easily. Now he did.

  Tay’s father had been a money launderer for the CIA. Maybe for others, too, but without a doubt for the CIA.

  Tay looked around the garden and in through the half-open French doors to the living room of the beautiful house that had been left to him by his father. He looked at all the furnishings and paintings and rugs that made his house his refuge, his place of safety. All of them bought with funds his father had left him.

  And now he knew his father had earned at least some of those funds by laundering money for the CIA.

  Imagine that, Tay thought. Almost everything I own I owe to the CIA.

  He lit another cigarette, leaned his head against the back of the chair, and closed his eyes.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  TAY SHUFFLED FORWARD in the line at the taxi stand. He was on his way to HSBC to see Henry Lee again and Lee had known his family for a long time. Maybe Tay would ask him what he knew about his father’s past. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t.

  Tay looked back in the direction of the house he had inherited from his father. He couldn’t help but wonder how many people knew who his father really was, and how many of them knew how he had made his money.

  As a son, was Tay in the same category as those husbands everyone says are always the last to know? Tay had never been a husband, so he had no idea how much truth there was in that popular cliché. Come to think of it, he didn’t have much experience as a son either — he had only been one for the first eleven years of his life — so he was equally unsure how sons were supposed to feel when they stumbled over their father’s secrets.

  Did they really want to know if everyone else already knew? What would he say if he asked Lee and Lee looked astonished and said, You mean you didn’t know?

  Then there would be nothing for him to do but sit there like a fool, would there? Life was full of questions people didn’t really want to know the answers to. Maybe one of those questions for Tay was whether he was the last to know who his father actually was.

  ***

  Tay looked out the window as the taxi passed the Raffles Hotel and turned right on Nicoll Highway toward the central business district.

  He could feel it all coming together now. He was close. He just didn’t understand yet what he was close to.

  Ferrero was even more desperate to scare him away from the Woodlands investigation than ISD had been. What was it about Johnny the Mover that ISD and the CIA didn’t want him to find out?

  According to August, ISD knew the bombings had really been domestic terrorism and the Singapore government was scrambling to cover that up. But how was the CIA involved? Surely they wouldn’t go out on a limb just to keep the secret that everybody in Singapore didn’t love the government. There was something else here. Something he was missing.

  Tay was convinced the answer was in that safety deposit box. Somewhere. He just hadn’t seen it yet.

  Surely Johnny could have gotten rid of that safety deposit key if that was what he was trying to do. After all, shoving it up his ass hardly amounted to getting rid of it. He had done that because he wanted someone to find it. Someone other than his killer. In Tay’s experience, which admittedly was pretty limited with respect to shoving things up his ass, he couldn’t believe Johnny would have done that without having an awfully good reason. Now it was up to him to find out what that reason was.

  Lee had told him the only person who had accessed the safety box in three years was someone who always signed in as Joseph Hysmith. It seemed to Tay that Joseph Hysmith was really Johnny the Mover. Who else could it be?

  And so he had called Lee and told him he wanted to show a picture of Johnny to the woman who signed people into the bank’s vault to access the safety boxes. If she recognized Johnny, he would at least have that nailed down. Then all he would have to do would be figure out what the hell it meant.

  In his briefcase he had one of the autopsy pictures of Johnny. Just a close-up of his face, not one of the scary ones. He also had the picture taken in Vietnam thirty-five years ago of Johnny, his father, and the umbrella man. It was possible the woman wouldn’t recognize Johnny from a thirty-five year old picture even if he was Joseph Hysmith — more than possible really, Tay thought — so he was inclined to go with the picture of dead Johnny.

  Tay didn’t like to show pictures of dead people around. It bothered him on some primitive level. He thought the dead were entitled to their peace, no matter who they were or how they got dead. None of us was entitled to all that much out of life, so it seemed only fair to Tay that, in
death, people were entitled at least to their peace.

  Maybe, Tay thought, he would show the vault attendant the picture from Vietnam first after all. If she didn’t recognize Johnny, then she didn’t. He could always pull out the autopsy photo and try again. But if she did recognize him, Tay would have his ID and Johnny would have his peace. Win-win, as the cliché masters like to say.

  The taxi crossed the Singapore River where the bum boats had been tied three abreast to the old wooden wharfs back when he was a boy. It passed the Fullerton Hotel that had been the General Post Office back when he was a boy. And they pulled to the curb in front of the Collyer Quay branch of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank that had been a row of shophouses back when he was a boy. Shaking his head at man’s never-ending attempts to defeat the past, Tay paid the driver and went inside.

  ***

  For the second time, Tay was shown straight into Harry Lee’s office. While he was pleased not to have to wait, he was beginning to wonder if Lee had anything else to do other than talk to him.

  They shook hands.

  “Well, I think I’ve found your girl, Sam. Mei Lin generally handles the vault for us. She says she’s pretty sure she remembers Joseph Hysmith. Apparently he’s a hard man not to remember.”

  Tay wondered what that was supposed to mean while Lee picked up his telephone, called someone, and asked them to send in the woman he was talking about. Almost immediately there was a knock at Lee’s door. It sounded to Tay as if the woman had been standing out there all along just waiting for her five minutes in the spotlight. He already disliked her.

  “Sam, this is Mei Lin Lee. No relation.”

  Tay glanced over his shoulder toward the door. And, in spite of his best efforts to stop it from happening, his mouth slowly opened all by itself.

  Standing in Lee’s doorway was the most beautiful woman Tay had ever seen.

  She was of average height and dressed professionally in a dark gray skirt that stopped just above her knees, a white blouse with a high collar, a short black jacket, and black pumps with medium heels. Her shiny black hair was cropped very short and shaped to her head in a cut that was both practical and stylish at the same time.