The Ambassador's wife

The invitation was so unexpected Tay didn’t immediately know what to say.

“You do drink, don’t you?” she asked when he said nothing at all. “You’re not one of those boring people who go to meetings and devote their lives communing with some higher power are you?”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Then is there a problem with today?” Dr. Hoi continued. “If there is, just say so. We can meet another time.”

“No, sorry. I just suddenly thought of something else. Today’s fine. Did you have a place in mind?”

“How about Harry’s Bar in Boat Quay? Six o’clock?”

Tay hated Harry’s Bar.

“Fine,” he said. “I love Harry’s Bar.”

Harry’s Bar was all dark wood and ceiling fans, a place that Tay figured was some local entrepreneur’s idea of what an American bar was supposed to look like but didn’t. Why would anyone think building such a place in Singapore was a good idea? Tay didn’t have a clue. Worse, it was usually full of Australian tourists. Either that or it was full of self-important local yuppies doing something or another in the financial district and wearing suspenders they thought looked classic but were actually twenty years out of date. He loathed the place.

“Harry’s Bar at six it is then,” Dr. Hoi said.

“Right,” Tay said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

After Dr. Hoi hung up, Tay thought about what it was she might want to tell him while he sat staring out the window at a British Airways 747 drifting over the towers of the city in the direction of Changi Airport. All at once he thought of a day twenty or more years earlier when he had stood on a street not far from where he was now and watched a supersonic Concorde, looking like a colossal prehistoric falcon, on almost exactly the same flight path. Back then, supersonic air travel had seemed a glorious vision of the future, but time passed and all thought of it ceased, and now the Concorde was nothing more than a vague historical oddity.

Could it have really been only that short a time ago that mankind had dreamed so extravagantly of taming time itself and bending it to our will? And why in God’s name had we given it all up so meekly, surrendering such huge dreams with so slight a struggle?

The thought caused Tay to wonder for a moment if he hadn’t surrendered his own dreams exactly the same way, so quickly and completely that he could hardly remember them now. If he had, like the Concorde, he supposed it really didn’t matter that much to anyone anymore.

He took a notebook out of a desk drawer and put it in his shirt pocket. Then, after a moment of hesitation, he took an unopened box of Marlboros and some matches, too, tucking them into his pocket with the notebook.

Tay stood up, slapped his open palm against his desk, and went to lunch.

TWELVE

Tay walked down New Bridge Road, turned right on Temple Street, and took his usual seat in a Chinatown dim sum place where he liked to eat whenever he had the time.

The idea came to him just as he was finishing his third char siew pau. He poured himself another cup of black tea and when he spotted a passing waitress with a tray of steaming hot egg tarts said to hell with tormenting himself about cholesterol and took two. As he ate the first, he cautiously turned his sudden inspiration over in his mind and tested its implications.

It had been nearly a year since Tay had seen Lucinda Lim, a divorcee he had once gone out with occasionally. Their relationship — Christ, how he hated that word — had not ended badly so much as it had just run out of gas and coasted to a stop.

Most of the people Tay knew thought Lucinda was quite a catch for him. She was young, gorgeous, spirited and, as if to demonstrate yet again the fundamental unfairness of life, the only daughter of one of Singapore’s wealthiest men. Those were exactly the same reasons most of Lucinda’s friends thought she could do a lot better than Sam Tay. It was true Tay had inherited some money, but Lucinda had no use for money. What she needed, her friends said, was a worthy companion for her excursions through Singapore’s world of the socially important and the culturally fashionable. Samuel Tay was a policeman. That ruled him out right there.

There were other reasons he and Lucinda hadn’t come to anything, of course. Tay preferred quiet evenings at home, sitting with his feet up reading a book, where Lucinda preferred to hit the party circuit with the chic and glamorous. It was on one of those excursions into what passed for high society in Singapore, one into which Tay had been drawn much against his better judgment, that he stumbled into the most embarrassing experience of his life.

Lucinda had coaxed him into going to Singapore Tatler’s anniversary ball, and as they entered the Four Seasons she positioned them directly in front of the mob of photographers who were recording the parade of arriving guests. When the strobe lights started firing, Tay reacted like a deer caught in headlights. He froze at the first flashes then, when the second volley fired, he turned his head and jerked away. The resulting photograph, inexplicably featured in the magazine’s next issue, had shown Tay looking as if he were trying to bury his face in Lucinda’s gloriously displayed cleavage. Tay couldn’t remember for sure how many months it took for people to stop pinning copies of that picture to bulletin boards around the Cantonment Complex, but it was far too many.

Tay wasn’t really sure he wanted to see Lucinda, or if she wanted to see him. He certainly didn’t want her to jump to any inaccurate conclusions as to why he was calling again after all this time, but he didn’t know anyone else he could ask about Elizabeth Munson. Lucinda loved gossip and whatever she knew or even thought she knew about what local social circles had to say concerning Elizabeth Munson she would probably tell him. For that, Tay decided, it was worth taking his chances on the possibility of personal complications.

Pulling his cell phone out of his pocket, he turned it on. He fumbled with the buttons until he remembered how to get into the address book and then fumbled some more until he found Lucinda’s telephone number. When he called the number, he got a mechanical voice telling him that Madam Lim was not able to take the call at the moment but would return it as soon as possible. Tay started to hang up since it was something of a religious principle with him not to talk to a machine, but then he bit his tongue and left a brief message asking Lucinda to ring him.

Tay polished off the second of the two egg tarts, finished his tea, then walked slowly back up New Bridge Road toward the office smoking a Marlboro. Unless you were in your own home, walking on the street was about the only place you could smoke in Singapore anymore and he had no doubt that some goddamned bureaucrat in some goddamned government ministry was plotting right at that very goddamned moment to stop him from doing that, too. He used to think of Singapore as a bastion of self-reliance and independence, but somewhere along the way it had turned instead into a nitpicking, overregulated nanny state where some government weenie tried to run every detail of your life. The whole idea upset him so much that he lit up a second Marlboro.

He was strolling past the delightfully named Horse Brand Birds Nest Company when he heard a cell phone ringing very close by. He looked around in annoyance until he realized that it was his own phone that was ringing. He had forgotten to shut it off again.

“My God, it is Sam Tay!”

Lucinda’s voice jumped out of the earpiece with all the alarming assertiveness Tay remembered, although he had to admit there was something quite nice about the sound of it after all this time. “I thought someone was playing a joke on me. How have you been, Sam? How in the hell have you been?”

“I’m fine, Lucinda. How are you?”

“Ah, Sam, I’m still in mourning for you. Wearing black every single day since you dumped me.”

“I thought you dumped me.”

“Yes, well, maybe I did, but being left makes for better drama than doing the leaving, don’t you think?”

In spite of himself, Tay chuckled. “Lucinda, I need to talk to you. Is this a good time?”

“For you, Sam, I am as free as a bird, always and forever.”

Tay knew he was supposed to say something witty to that, but he couldn’t think of anything so he settled for getting straight to the point. “It’s important and it may take rather a long time. Can I come around to your place?”