“A few hours.”
“Can’t you make it sooner?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, what time then?”
“Nine o’clock.”
“All right.”
“When do we see the buyer?”
“As soon as we can figure a way to get the figurine out of Singapore. We’ll have to smuggle it into Thailand.”
“I can handle that part of it.”
“Just remember-the three of us go together.”
“You, me, and the Burong Chabak.”
“That’s the deal, Connell.”
“Fair enough. Where do I meet you tonight?”
“I’ll be at Number Seven Tampines Road. Do you know where that is?”
“Out by the New World Amusement Park, isn’t it?”
“That’s right-just off Lavender Street.”
“I’ll find it.”
“Don’t be late, Connell,” she said, and the line clicked and began to buzz emptily in my ear.
I called the Central Police Station immediately and asked for Tiong. He was still there. When he came on the line I said, “I just heard from Marla King. She’s expecting me at nine tonight, at Number Seven Tampines Road. I don’t know if that’s a private residence or not-I didn’t want to press her-but judging from the area it probably is.”
“What else did she say?”
“Not much. I’m supposed to be bringing the Burong Chabak, and we’re to work up a way to get it-and us-out of Singapore and into Thailand to the buyer.”
“She apparently does not have the figurine, then.”
“That’s how it would seem.”
“Has Van Rijk called you as yet?”
“No. He said seven o’clock.”
“You will tell him nothing more than the time of the meeting.”
“Of course not.”
“Very well. Please present yourself at my office at nine tomorrow morning. We will talk further at that time.”
“I’ll be there. But just remember, Tiong: I’m co-operating one hundred percent on this.”
“For your sake, Mr. Connell, I hope you are.”
I dropped the receiver into its cradle. The room had grown darker, muggier, and I went over to the window to look at the sky. The near horizon was thickly restless with black-veined clouds. The smell of heavy rain permeated the air, and thunder rumbled faintly in the distance like angry native drums.
I returned to the bedroom and put on a fresh change of clothes and went out for a walk. I had better than two and a half hours until Van Rijk’s call, and it would be considerably cooler in the streets following the impending thundershower. The rains came down in a cascade of water for a while, as if the sky had been cracked open like an egg, and then abated as quickly as they had come; the heavens would be a hot and shimmering blue again within an hour, and the sidewalks and streets would dry like a shirt under a steam press twenty minutes after the sun reappeared.
I walked down to Telok Ayer Basin and stood on the seawall, looking out at the ships lying in the Inner and Outer Roads of the Harbor. There was a humming wind now. The gray water rolled and churned under the force of it, rocking the freighters and lighters and sampans and junks like bathtub toys. In the basin itself, where small boats and pleasure craft were berthed, the water was calmer and the Malay and Chinese boatmen paid little or no attention to the clouds which had now consumed all of the day’s brightness.
When the rains began, I found shelter in Raffles Quay and watched the slanting sheets of water drench unsuspecting tourists dressed in shorts and halters or bright silk shirts. The sight pleased me, as it always did, in a perverse sort of way.
The deluge dissolved into a light drizzle after half an hour, finally ceasing altogether. The gray-black clouds shifted and separated as if they were pieces in a huge jigsaw puzzle, and patches of radiant tropical indigo shone through. The air was fresh and cool, the sweetness of frangipani and jasmine softer, less overripe; beads of water dripped gently from awnings and balconies and the fronds of royal and chamadora palms. This was the nicest time of any day in the Lion City.
I walked back to Chinatown and Punyang Street. The sun was out again, and steam rose in wispy spirals from the drying pavements. I crossed through the jostling crowd that had regathered in the narrow expanse, squeezed past a hawker selling ornamental jadam trays, and stepped under the Five Foot Ways to enter the semidark vestibule of my building.
I had one foot on the bottom step in the set of stairs leading to the upper floors when I heard or sensed the movement in the shadows behind me. The hair on the back of my neck prickled, and I started to turn, bringing my hands up instinctively. I had a quick, subliminal glimpse of a whiteness that may have been a face or an article of clothing, and then something hard and unyielding hammered into the side of my head just above the right temple. The pain was white and black and red fragments, like shrapnel bursting through my head, paralyzing my muscles and shriveling my groin, and I went hard to my knees.
I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think. There was a thick redness just in back of my eyes, undulating, curdling, like oil paint swirled through water, like blood stirred with a stick. It was as if the force of the blow had reversed the pupils of my eyes, so that I could see inward but not outward, see what lay behind my eyes instead of what lay without.
I knew he was going to hit me again. I knew there would be another blow, more pain fragments. I knew there would be black emptiness, but I was powerless to prevent it, powerless to move, and then it
Chapter Eleven
There was light, and there was heat.
The light was the effulgent glare of the tropical sun, or of a naked lamp bulb, pressing against my closed eyelids; the heat was the stale mugginess of a closed room, thick and harsh in the lungs like invisible steam. A third awareness came three or four heartbeats later, and it was of pain-a rhythmic ebb and flow, savage in my temples and in back of my forehead even though I lay completely motionless.
A long time passed, days and weeks passed, and finally I was fully conscious and able to make the muscles in my neck obey the command of my brain. I turned my head a little, to bring my eyes out of the glare. The movement unleashed a new flood of agony. My cheek touched the rough surface of a floor matting-rattan, probably-and the odor of dust was acrid in my nostrils.
I lay still again, waiting for the pain to subside. When it did, I forced my eyelids upwards, into slits. I had double vision for a moment, and then the room settled into focus and I could see part of a wall, bare except for a cork-type bulletin board some three feet in diameter; various-sized sheets of paper were thumb-tacked to the cork, with no particular attempt at neatness. A chipped metal file cabinet had been backed into the right-angle of that wall and another, just beyond the board.
Carefully, I rolled my head in a reverse quadrant and looked up at an acoustical tile ceiling with cobwebs like gray moss in the two visible corners. Another pause, another breath, another quadrant to the light again. Its source was a lamp, all right, a goose-necked thing that had been set at the edge of an old teak desk so that the glare was tilted full on my face. Behind the desk was a third wall-hung with a nude calendar and a relief map of Southeast Asia, containing a door which seemed to stand an inch or two ajar. Between the door and where I lay, set slightly away from the right-hand corner of the desk, was an old cane-backed chair.
