The Ambassador's wife

enthusiasm as if they had been reciting the day’s closing prices on the stock market.

Christ, maybe they were right. Maybe he was crazy.

Tay caught the bartender’s eye and pointed at his empty glass. It was either that or flee and stick Dr. Hoi with the check, and he didn’t think that would be particularly dignified. Still, he knew perfectly well that preserving one’s dignity usually came with a price tag attached. He was not at all certain what that price would turn out to be on this occasion, and he had no idea whether or not he could afford to pay it.

Screw it, Tay thought, as he sipped at the fresh drink the bartender brought him. Why was he being such a pussy about this? So a woman, two women if he were being entirely honest about it, had made it clear they were interested in him and would be pleased to have his company. It was about bloody goddamned time, wasn’t it?

Tay threw caution, or something, to the winds and turned toward Dr. Hoi. He resumed their conversation as though nothing untoward had happened. And, so far at least, he guessed it hadn’t.

FOURTEEN

Arthur Elliot Munson III felt beaten up. As a matter of fact, he thought he might have felt better if he had been beaten up.

It was nearly two in the morning, local time, before he made it back from Washington. His diplomatic passport greased him through immigration and while waiting for his luggage he glanced out through the glass wall past customs and spotted Tony DeSouza waiting for him instead of his driver. He would bet his ass, he thought to himself, that didn’t mean anything good.

In the car DeSouza told him about the Interpol fingerprint inquiry; then he related the story of his Sunday visit with Inspector Tay and what he had learned from him. DeSouza laid out the details as dispassionately as he could and the ambassador didn’t say much. Munson was a bit surprised that an ID had come out of Interpol so quickly, although he supposed he shouldn’t have been. He was even more surprised how little he actually felt as he listened to DeSouza talk about Liz. Maybe it was because he was so tired, but then again maybe it wasn’t.

He asked DeSouza only one thing. Who else knew about Liz’s murder? And with that question he recognized he was thinking like an ambassador rather than like a husband. He needed to move quickly if he was going to get control of events rather than let them take control of him. That was his job. That was what he did.

DeSouza told him no one else at the embassy knew anything about the murder, at least not yet. Outside the embassy, of course, he couldn’t be certain.

“All I know for sure,” DeSouza said, “is that CID-SIS has the investigation and this Inspector Tay is in charge of the case down there.”

“CID-SIS?”

“Special Investigations Section of the Criminal Investigations Department. They handle the homicides and most of the other major investigations.”

“Do you know anything about…what’s this guy’s name again?”

“Inspector Tay. Samuel Tay. He’s a bit of an oddball, I hear. Frankly, he strikes me as a plodder, maybe even a little slow on the uptake, but he’s been with CID-SIS for a long time. He’s supposed to be about the best they have. Whether that’s saying very much is another question, of course.”

The ambassador thought that DeSouza sounded like one of those Americans abroad who habitually took the locals too lightly. That was a common form of American tone deafness, taking anyone who wasn’t American lightly, and he hoped this time that kind of a mistake wasn’t coloring DeSouza’s judgment.

He asked about the press coverage and DeSouza assured him there had been no press other than the few anonymous lines about a suicide in the Case File column in the Straits Times, but they both knew that wouldn’t last long. Even if the Singaporean police were discreet, and he imagined they would be discreet as all hell about the brutal murder of the American ambassador’s wife in a five-star hotel within the spotless confines of their fairy-tale city, he had no doubt the story would get to the international press quickly enough. Then those bastards would be all over his ass in a New York minute. It was too good a story for anything else to happen.

The ambassador let his thoughts drift while he examined the almost unnaturally perfect landscaping that bordered the motorway into the city. Lush and well watered, glazed to the color of money, it never failed to catch his attention. Perfectly trimmed carpets of thick grass, banks of red and purple bougainvillea so rich and dense that they threatened to spill out over the road, and perfect lines of identically trimmed trees of exactly equal height as far as the eye could see.

Sometimes it seemed to him that Singapore wasn’t a city at all, but a replica of a city, something that had been built just yesterday to impress visitors rather than as a habitat for actual human beings. Singapore bore about as much resemblance to the swarming, stinking, impoverished reality of Asia as San Diego did. Asia Light, some people called it. It always made him think of a gigantic movie set someone had built to represent a generic city. He had heard a lot of American television shows were actually filmed in Toronto because Toronto looked like everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Singapore was exactly like that. Everywhere and nowhere all at once.

Whatever Singapore really was, wherever it really was, it sure as hell was hard for him to think of it as being in Asia. Shoot, sometimes it was hard even for him to think of it as being on Planet Earth.

DeSouza took the ambassador directly to the residence. He showered and brushed his teeth and then he lay down for a while, but he couldn’t sleep. By five o’clock he gave up trying and got up and took another shower without thinking about it, then he sat in the study drinking coffee and pondering what it was he ought to be doing.

The study of the ambassador’s residence was a pleasant room where he had always felt at ease. His desk was a huge mahogany table that someone told him had come out of an eighteenth-century Philippine church and in the opposite corner were two deep, red leather chairs. He had spent his very best hours in Singapore sitting alone in one of those chairs, his feet up, Puccini roaring out of the stereo, and a glass of malt whisky in his hand.

His housekeeper knocked and offered him breakfast, but he sent her away. When he realized the woman might have been hurt by the way he dismissed her, he called her back and apologized and asked for some yogurt and toast. It tasted better than he expected and, almost in spite of himself, he started to feel okay.

Just before six he picked up the telephone and began making calls. That was one of the perks of being an ambassador. You could call anyone you wanted at six o’clock in the morning and no one would dare say a goddamned word to you about what time it was.

The thought caused him to speculate for a moment on what Liz’s death might mean to him. Would it push him down a new road entirely, perhaps even end his cushy ride as an ambassador and take him to a place he could not now even imagine? A sudden prick of apprehension ran over his scalp as real and as strong as a jolt of electricity, but then it was gone so suddenly he wondered for a moment if it had ever been there at all.

His first call was to Marc Reagan, his staff assistant, and his second was to Cally Parks, the Regional Security Officer at the embassy. He told each of them to be at the residence in an hour. He called their cell phones so he didn’t know exactly where they were, but Marc seemed more surprised at the first call than Cally was at the second, which started him wondering if the two of them were together when he called. No, he doubted that. Cally had been at the embassy less than a month. It was her first overseas posting and he doubted she and Marc would have hooked up that quickly. On the other hand, who knew anymore? As nearly as he could tell, all around him people were fucking like bunny rabbits these days. Pretty much anytime the urge hit, they did it. He had missed out on all that, damn it to hell.

Actually, the more he thought about it, the more he doubted Marc and Cally would have gotten together at all. He had known Marc a while, ever since he had come to work at his firm straight out of law school, and he had watched him grow from a college kid into a…well, what? He couldn’t be absolutely sure about that, he supposed, but he still thought he knew Marc well enough to guess what kind of women would appeal to him.

Cally was sharp and easy to look at, that was true enough, but she also struck the ambassador as a bit of a toughie, like the girls in school who joined up to play sports with the boys. Maybe she was really like that, or maybe she just thought she had something to prove. Female security officers still weren’t all that common in the State