The Ambassador's wife

more thought until he had been whiling away a rainy Saturday afternoon walking around Suntec City and saw a display of bicycles in the Royal Sporting House. They were all Chinese-made and not too expensive and he had to admit they looked pretty sharp. All at once the idea of biking by the sea out along the East Coast Parkway or maybe through the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve seemed quite enticing, even sexy. On a whim, he bought one of the bikes, a red one, but it had been sitting in a spare room upstairs ever since. He had been afraid to ride it for fear Cindy Shaw might think he had taken her advice and who knew where that would lead?

Tay took a sip of coffee, now gone cold, and gave the largely novel notion of physical exercise careful consideration. Would his smoking be a problem? He had heard that smoking reduced your lung capacity or something like that, but he had no idea what his lung capacity was supposed to be so he wasn’t sure what that meant. Of course, he realized that he couldn’t smoke and ride a bicycle at the same time — that would be too unseemly even to consider — but he could always ride slowly, and he could stop every now and then and take a smoke break somewhere discreetly out of view. That was starting to sound like a plan.

Yes, Tay abruptly decided, he would ride his new bicycle today and to hell with whether Cindy Shaw thought he was taking her advice or not. Actually, he guessed he was taking her advice, so the real issue was what she would make of that if she saw him. Maybe she wouldn’t see him. And if she did, he could deal with whatever came of it, couldn’t he? He certainly wasn’t going to be intimidated by Cindy Shaw, at least not to the extent that he avoided doing something he really wanted to do, and right now, for some curious reason, he really did want to ride his new bicycle.

The dead woman at the Marriott was weighing on Tay and he knew that was more than likely the explanation for his inexplicable motivation toward physical activity. A woman beaten to death at the Marriott would have been bad enough, but at least that could have been the result of a violent quarrel between lovers. A woman shot in the ear with an assassin’s pistol at the Marriott was a whole different ball game. That couldn’t have been anything but a carefully planned murder, but they still didn’t even know who the woman was, much less why anyone would want to murder her. On Saturday, he had been comfortable enough placing his faith in serendipity. Now, on Sunday, serendipity didn’t feel like much of a strategy any longer.

Sergeant Kang had a few more names left to check from the list the Immigration Department had given them, but so far he had come up with nothing and that whole process was starting to looklike it was going to get them nowhere. The woman’s fingerprints had gone to Interpol, too, of course, but God only knew how long it would be before they replied, if they ever replied at all. Still, there was at least the possibility that Interpol would get a hit on the prints from some country and they would get their identification that way. If they ran both the whole list from Immigration and the prints through Interpol and still came up empty, Tay didn’t even want to think about where that would leave them.

He glanced at his watch. Although it was nearly noon, he could walk up to Orchard Road, have some lunch, and still be out on the bike by two. Was eating before going on a bicycle ride a good idea? He thought it was swimming you weren’t supposed to do right after eating, but he wasn’t absolutely certain. Maybe biking was a problem, too. In any event he wasn’t going to worry about it. He would just do what he wanted to do and see how it went.

After all, if he felt bad after lunch for any reason, he could always leave the bike ride for another day, couldn’t he?

Tay felt fine after lunch. To tell the truth, he had lingered over it a bit and felt absolutely wonderful, and he hadn’t wavered in the slightest in his conviction that spending the rest of Sunday afternoon on his new bicycle was an inspired idea. Why, it might even be the beginning of a whole new approach to life for him, mightn’t it?

He pulled on a pair of khaki shorts and a plain white T-shirt and laced up a new pair of Nikes he had bought at the same time as the bicycle but hadn’t yet worn. Then he buckled the strap of his black bicycle helmet under his chin and tugged it tight. The first time he tried on the helmet, he thought it made him look stupid, but now he wasn’t so sure. There was something racy and vigorous about the elongated shape of it and the purple stripes along its sides. He liked the way he looked in it just fine.

Hoisting his bicycle to one shoulder, Tay carried it down the stairs and through the front door. He wheeled the bike out to the sidewalk and closed the gate behind him.

That was when the man waiting there spoke to him.

“You’re Sam Tay, aren’t you?”

Tay had been so absorbed in juggling the bike and the heavy gate without hurting himself that he hadn’t noticed anyone on the sidewalk. He turned toward the sound and looked the man over. Tay was reasonably sure he didn’t know him. If they had ever met, Tay certainly didn’t remember it.

The man was just over six feet tall and almost completely bald on top. He had an unruly fringe of silver hair, a lush silver mustache, oddly tiny ears, and a face that looked Irish: slightly red tending to pink with a soft, almost powdered look to his skin. His shirt was white oxford cloth, long-sleeved with a button-down collar, and he wore it tucked into sharply pressed khakis with a red necktie and black tassel loafers.

“I’m sorry to surprise you this way,” the man continued when Tay didn’t say anything. “I wouldn’t have bothered you if it weren’t important. Normally, by now I’d be teeing off on the back nine myself anyway.”

The man tossed out a grin he evidently thought illustrated the accidental camaraderie he and Tay had just achieved, two guys whose Sundays were both being loused up by the vicissitudes of an unreliable world. The grin didn’t do a damned thing for Tay.

“Who are you?” Tay asked.

“I’m Tony DeSouza. I’m the legal attache at the American embassy.”

Ah, Tay thought, the local FBI man. He had always wondered why FBI agents insisted on calling themselves legal attaches when they were posted abroad. It seemed pretentious to him.

“What are you doing in front of my house?”

DeSouza served up another grin and this time tried to put something rueful into it, but Tay still wasn’t biting.

“We need to talk,” DeSouza said.

“What about?”

“Look…” DeSouza hesitated. “Can I come in?”

“How is it you know where I live?”

“I’m a trained investigator.”

“So am I, but I don’t know where you live.”

“It wouldn’t be hard for you to find out.”

“Perhaps not, but I don’t really care.”

“Look, Inspector, until about seven o’clock this morning I didn’t give a damn where you lived either. That was about the time the duty officer at the embassy woke me up and told me to get my butt over there to look at an eyes-only cable from Washington. Well, I got out of bed, got dressed, went over, and read the cable. And all of a sudden I started caring a whole hell of a lot where you live. It’s Sunday and so I presumed you wouldn’t be in your office until Monday, but that cable made it pretty damned important for me to talk to you without waiting until Monday. Now can we go inside and talk or do you want to tango around in the street a little more first?”

“I have a telephone. I assume you could have gotten the number as easily as you got my address.”

“I have the number. This isn’t the kind of thing you talk about on the telephone.”

Tay nodded slowly a couple of times. He was still annoyed at being ambushed in front of his own house on a Sunday afternoon, but curiosity was beginning to work at him.

“May I see your identification?” he asked.

DeSouza pulled a slim, black case out of his back pocket, opened and held it out. Tay thought the ID looked authentic enough and the picture seemed to match the man, but then he really had no idea what FBI credentials were supposed to look like so he had no way to know for sure whether it was genuine or not.

“You got any coffee inside, Sam?”

What the hell was it with Americans? Did they really think that their overly affable behavior passed for charm? As far as Tay was concerned, the casual familiarity with which most Americans engaged everyone they met was their single most annoying character trait, the clear winner in a very large field of worthy competitors.