Tay had never thought about that very much, but now that he was thinking about it he decided he did indeed see himself as a straightforward man.
“I try to be,” he said.
Cally tilted her head and looked at Tay very carefully, almost as if she was seriously weighing the truthfulness of his reply. He watched her and decided that she was doing exactly that.
“Yes,” she said after a moment. “Yes, I think you probably are, Sam. I think you may actually be who you appear to be.”
At just that moment, a burst of tinny music sounded from somewhere very close by. Tay couldn’t figure out where it was coming from or what it signified until Cally pulled the tiny telephone from a pocket and flipped it open.
The sound of a telephone had become another one of those fundamental divisions between the old and the young that Tay thought might never be bridged. The old generally had telephones that rang like…well, like telephones. The young had telephones that rang with unsettling blasts of something that was presumably supposed to be recently recorded music. Of course, Tay had to take that largely on faith since he was pretty certain that he couldn’t identify any music recorded after 1980.
“Hang on a minute,” Cally said into the telephone.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Tay, “but I’m going to have to step outside to take this.”
No need to be sorry,” he said. “I hate listening to people talk on cell phones.”
Tay speared a bit of hardboiled egg out of the remains of his salad and allowed his eyes to follow Cally as she walked away.
Get a grip, Sam Tay, he told himself. This attractive young woman is just doing her job and chatting you up. It’s nothing more than that. She’s playing the good cop and letting DeSouza play the bad cop, which was really the only way they could have cast the parts anyway.
Tay poked through the salad bowl again and this time came up with some beetroot. His eyes drifted over the room as he chewed on it and caught those of a woman at another table picking at a melting cup of ice cream. She didn’t react, her expression one of practiced boredom, and she appeared to have no interest at all in him. Still, he had caught a glimpse of an earpiece partially concealed by her hair and couldn’t help but wonder about it. Perhaps the woman was just listening to an iPod during her lunch break. Perhaps she was waiting for a call on her cell phone. Perhaps she was part of a super-secret unit of spies tasked with the surveillance of any Singaporean policeman who appeared in the cafeteria of the American embassy. Perhaps his imagination was running amuck.
Tay finished his salad and pushed the bowl away. He looked at his watch and was surprised to see that it was now nearly one. He was drumming his fingers on the table and was just beginning to wonder if he should go look for Cally when she came back to the table.
Cally sat down without saying anything. Tay could tell that something had happened by the way she was looking at him.
“We’ve got another one,” she said after a moment.
At first Tay didn’t get it.
“Another body,” Cally said when she realized that he didn’t know what she was talking about. “Another woman beaten and posed.”
“Where?” Tay asked. “Oh my God, not at the Marriott again?”
“No, not in Singapore at all. In Bangkok. In an apartment in Bangkok.”
Tay was frantically trying to refocus his thoughts from his cafeteria-table infatuation with Cally to what she was telling him.
“Bangkok?” he repeated stupidly, struggling to get his mind working again.
Cally nodded. “I don’t know much yet. They called me because I’m the acting security officer for the embassy in Bangkok. The guy there just retired and they haven’t been sent a replacement yet. Until then, I’m it.”
“Are you saying there’s some connection with-”
“I don’t know,” Cally interrupted, glancing at her watch. “The way they’re describing the scene to me, it sounds like the same kind of thing. They’re trying to get me on a two o’clock plane to Bangkok. I’ve got to get going.”
She pushed her chair back so abruptly that the legs squealed over the floor and the few people left in the cafeteria all looked at them to see what was going on.
“Say,” she said, pointing her forefinger at Tay who was still sitting, “you want to go with me?”
“Me? What for?”
“What for? Don’t you think it looks like we may have a serial killer on our hands here?”
“
Cally gave Tay a long look.
“Are you coming or aren’t you?” she asked.
“Look,” Tay said, getting to his feet, “aren’t you rushing this a little? You don’t even know whether there’s any connection.”
“The Thai police got an anonymous call this morning and went to this apartment in Bangkok. The door was unlocked and they walked in and found a woman’s body. She had been beaten and posed in exactly the same way as Mrs. Munson.”
“I guess I still don’t understand. What has the American embassy got to do with this dead woman in Bangkok?”
“When the Thai cops found the body, they called the American embassy immediately. Why wouldn’t they?”
“Why
“Oh, didn’t I tell you?”
Tay examined Cally’s face for signs that he was about to be the butt of some kind of elaborate joke. He found none.
“Let me guess,” he said. “Another ambassador’s wife?”
“No. It’s worse than that.”
Dear God, Tay thought to himself, what could be worse than finding another ambassador’s wife murdered the way Elizabeth Munson had been murdered?
The answer, of course, occurred to him at exactly the same moment Cally said it.
“This time it’s an ambassador, Sam. The dead woman is Susan Rooney, the American ambassador to Thailand.”
TWENTY-ONE
Tay had rehearsed what he was going to say to the OC before he went into his office. He had rehearsed it several times in fact, but he still hadn’t gotten it quite right. Now he was sitting in front of his boss’s desk feeling like a schoolboy who had just screwed up his recitations.
“You want to go to Bangkok?” the OC said after a pause of suitable length to suggest reflection on Tay’s request.
“Yes, sir.”
“Bangkok?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Aren’t you a little old for that sort of thing, Sam?”
Tay consulted his shoes. They told him to bite his tongue and so he did.
“This can’t be a coincidence, sir,” he said after a moment. “The two murders are almost certainly related.”
“How are they related?”
“That’s why I want to go to Bangkok, sir. To find out.”
