The room was an office-cluttered, functional, somewhat shabby. I had never seen it before. And as I lay there, I began to realize that I wasn’t its only occupant just now. The sense of aloneness you have when there’s no one near you was missing, and I had the feeling of being watched from somewhere close at hand.
I ran my tongue over dry lips and over the roof of my mouth. There was the faint, brackish taste of blood. I set my teeth and rolled over onto my belly, and the pain became more acute inside my skull, conjuring amorphous images to distort already muddled thought processes. Vomit boiled in my throat. I rested a moment, breathing dust, gathering strength. Then I put the palms of my hands flat on the rattan matting and lifted myself onto my knees like a praying bishop.
Somehow, I had expected to come face to face with Van Rijk, or one of his bodyguards. I was looking, instead, at a tall, well-set-up Swede with muddy blond hair and a sun-darkened ledge of a forehead under which colorless eyes hid in cavelike sockets. His chest and shoulders were immense, and the rumpled white cotton jacket he wore hung straight up and down, the way it would on a clothes hanger. He had one hip cocked against a wooden shelf that ran beneath a bank of windows in the room’s fourth wall; a closed entrance door was on his left, shuttered with the same type of bamboo blinds covering the windows. The gun in his right hand was a heavy black German Luger.
His name was Dinessen, Lars Dinessen.
And he was a pilot, a mercenary, a smuggler for hire and profit-less scrupulous, less knowledgeable, less successful than I had been, but nonetheless a carbon copy of Dan Connell two years ago, operating the same kind of small air freight concern to camouflage his real activities.
He was also the man whose name I had given La Croix just before the Frenchman left my flat two mornings previous.
I said aloud, “What the hell?”
Dinessen parted thick lips, revealing two rows of clean white teeth in a smile that wasn’t a smile at all. He said, “You know what the hell, I think,” in heavily accented English.
“Yeah, maybe I do.”
My right cheek felt stiff, and when I lifted my hand to touch it my fingers encountered a mat of dried blood that had trailed down from the area just above my temple. The area was soft and painful, but it was no longer bleeding. I looked at the watch on my left wrist: 7:20. I had been out less than two hours-but long enough, though, too damned long.
I looked around the office again, and it wasn’t difficult to figure where we were. Dinessen’s freight line was located in a semi-isolated area off Bukit Timah Road. He had a hangar housing a couple of surplus crates that needed forged safety certificates in order to remain operative, and a large corrugated building that served as a warehouse for the legitimate goods he ferried in and out of Singapore. The office would be in the latter structure. He must have had a car near Punyang Street, and had brought me here in that. It was a hell of a chance, taking an unconscious man out into the streets in broad daylight-even in Singapore’s Chinatown, where strange sights are an integral part of the way of life.
I said, “What was the point of putting the slug on me, Dinessen? If you wanted to talk, you could have done it without getting rough-and without the gun.”
“We talk better here, this way, with nobody around. If you don’t want to talk, I put a couple of bullets in you. Maybe your legs, maybe your belly, maybe I shoot off your balls. Then you tell me where the figurine is, I think.”
“I don’t know where it is.”
“Ya, you know.”
“What makes you think so?”
“La Croix told me.”
“The hell he did.”
“The hell he didn’t.”
“You killed him a little too soon, Dinessen.”
He looked surprised. “I don’t kill him.”
“No? Then who did?”
“Maybe you.”
“Crap. Can I get up off this floor?”
“I think you stay right there.”
“You’ve got the gun.”
“Damn right.”
I rubbed my palms slowly over my thighs. “So La Croix told you about the figurine when he came to you three days ago, is that it?”
“Ya. I don’t take him to Bangkok until I know what he’s carrying, and he wants to get there too much so he don’t lie to me. You don’t think about that when you give him my name, hah? We make plans to fly out that night, but first he says he has to pick up the figurine where he put it. Only you and him know where it is.”
“La Croix said that?”
“Sure he said it. But I was stupid. I let him go himself and he don’t come back. Maybe you killed him, maybe you didn’t. But you know where the figurine is.”
“I’m telling you, I don’t.”
“Then why you say you do?”
“I didn’t say it.”
“La Croix said it, you bet.”
“Then he was lying.”
“Listen, I don’t play no more games. I got some sense now. I bring you here and make you talk, like I should of done right away.”
“Why didn’t you, right away? Why did you wait?”
“I am a big dumb Swede, ya? I let a woman tell me what to do, and I do it. She makes it sound like the best way. But this is the best way, the only way.”
“What woman?”
“What woman you think?”
“Marla King?”
He laughed-a flat, humorless sound. “Aussie bitch.”
“So the two of you are teamed up in this.”
“Not any more.”
“What does that mean?”
“She think she take the figurine for herself and get out of Singapore. No big dumb Swede to share it with-she don’t care about me at all. Well, I don’t stand for a double-cross.”
I worked saliva into the dryness of my mouth. Another double-cross-just one of the multitude. This was a fine, sweet bunch of Judas thieves, all right. “How do you know she’s double-crossing you, Dinessen?”
His face congealed with dark anger. “I go to see her this afternoon, about four,” he said. “I come in and hear her on the telephone-with you, Connell, talking about smuggling the figurine to Thailand. I know then, you bet. We are supposed to fly there, her and me, to see the buyer La Croix says is waiting in Bangkok. Damned Aussie bitch.”
“What did you do? Did you hurt her?”
“You liked her, maybe? You’re worried for her?”
“Listen, what did you do to her?”
“I fixed her, that’s what I did.”
“How did you fix her?”
“That don’t matter.”
“You killed her, didn’t you?”
“I kill you if you don’t tell me where the figurine is.”
“You son of a bitch, you killed her at Number Seven Tampines Road.”
“Maybe that’s right,” he said. “Ya, and maybe I make it look like you did it, too.”
I stared at him. “Did you?”
