Alias Tina Kellogg.
Chapter Twenty
She crawled out of the pocket of shadow against the far wall like a black widow out of a dark cellar corner. One of the shafts of pale moonshine fell across her face, and the facade was gone completely. The trusting, pleading, naive little girl had been stripped away like an actress’s make-up, and beneath the carefully constructed mask was a hardened and amoral face etched now in thinly controlled fury.
I thought of the sense of guilt and regret I had felt at what I’d expected to be our final parting earlier that day, and the taste of my own naivete was camphor-bitter in my throat. Oh, she had suckered me beautifully, all right-down the line, from the first minute I had set eyes on her in the Old Cathay. It had been a fine performance while it lasted, played just for me, played for one reason only; but after it was over, the way it happens with so many performances, you could see the flaws in it and you wondered self-critically why you didn’t detect them at the time…
I looked away from her face, to the gun in her right hand. It was of Belgian manufacture, a Browning. 25- caliber automatic with a two-inch barrel and a checkered, hard-rubber grip. I said, “Is that the gun you shot La Croix with, Marla?”
“So you know.” Flat, cold, empty.
“Yeah, I know. I’ve known for a couple of hours now, ever since I saw a copy of the Straits Times and found out that the woman I had thought all along was Marla King was really Penny Carlisle, the mistress of a Swede named Dinessen. Once I knew that, and that the real Marla King was still alive and unaccounted for, it didn’t take long to fit things together.”
“I should have killed you today,” she said. “But I felt sorry for you, just a little. I wanted to give you a chance.”
“Some chance.”
She moved a foot to the right, to the front wall of the shed, and looked out through a gap with one eye, watching me with the other. “What’s going on out there?”
“What do you think?”
“The police?”
“And Van Rijk. Some party, isn’t it?”
The sounds of shouts, of police whistles, drifted into the shed, much louder now. I looked out at the runway. The moon overhead made it seem as bright as the grounds of the New World Amusement Park. Van Rijk’s hirelings were drawn up out there, a hundred yards away; the Eurasian had his arm extended, crouching, and even at this distance I could see the gun in his hand. But before he could use it there was a short, sharp burst from an automatic weapon-a Sten gun, I thought. The Eurasian fell, spilling headlong. The Malay veered off to the right, running in a weave. The automatic weapon sounded again. He went off the side of the embankment feet first, like an Olympic broadjumper, and disappeared from sight.
Two constables came up onto the runway from the mangroves and started toward the outbuildings. There were undoubtedly more converging through the jungle itself. As I watched the two on the airstrip, pistol shots rang out, three of them in rapid succession, and then another burst from the Sten gun. After that, the whistles and shouts ceased and the night wrapped itself in silence.
I turned my head away from the opening. “They’ve got Mikko Field covered from all sides now, Marla,” I said. “It’s all over for you.”
“Is it?”
“You can’t get out of this shed without being seen, and the rest of the police will be down here pretty soon to conduct a thorough search; they won’t overlook us.”
“I’ve still got you.”
“For a hostage? You can forget that idea. The police don’t give a damn about me.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“Face it, Marla: you’re fresh out of time and luck.”
Her teeth shone like white bone through the red wound of her mouth. “If I don’t leave here, with the figurine, you won’t be leaving either. I’ll see to that.”
“Where is the figurine?” I asked her. “Still hidden where La Croix put it? Sure. You wouldn’t have had any reason to retrieve it until tomorrow morning. That’s when Shannon is due, isn’t it? He would have told you, when you contacted him this afternoon, that he couldn’t take you out until dawn tomorrow at the earliest. He’d need time to arrange things, and there’s no lighting facilities for a night landing here; moonlight alone isn’t enough on a strip like this one, even for an experienced pilot.”
“You know all the answers, don’t you?”
“Enough of them,” I said. “Listen, even if you did manage to get away tonight, with the Burong Chabak, the police will keep right on watching Mikko Field; they’ll know you were here for a reason, and it won’t take them long to figure out what it is. If Shannon comes in as scheduled, they’ll pick him up with no trouble at all. And you wouldn’t last two days alone and on the run, Marla-not on Singapore.”
“That’s what you think, you smart son of a bitch.”
“You’re a real sugarcake, aren’t you?”
“And you’re a blundering ass. God, I should have put this gun to your head right at the start!”
“Why didn’t you, Marla?”
“La Croix was a coward, but from what he told me about you, I wasn’t sure I could handle you with a gun. The other way seemed better.”
“He picked some partner when he picked you, all right.”
“He was the one who double-crossed me to start all this.”
“Not until after the two of you together double-crossed Van Rijk,” I said. “He hired you and brought you onto Singapore to steal the figurine from the Museum of Oriental Art, didn’t he? But you decided to keep it for yourselves, and then La Croix got fancy and went you one better; a triple-cross, his one big gamble. The two of you had arranged for the flat in the Katong Bahru Housing Estate, and you went to ground while La Croix went out to make arrangements for leaving the island. The poor bastard took the Burong Chabak with him, cached it here at Mikko Field, and then came to me, thinking that I would fly him out alone. I refused. So he went to the Swede immediately after leaving my place, and Dinessen agreed to take him to Bangkok, where the two of you had set up a buyer to replace Van Rijk. La Croix went to pick up the figurine, but he never got to it. You found him first.”
“I found him, all right.”
“How?”
“He’d rented a car for the two of us, and he still had it when he disappeared on me. I found a place where I could watch the rental agency, thinking that maybe he’d come back there to turn it in. It wasn’t much of a chance, but it was all I had. And he did show up there, but not for that reason; the rental had been giving him trouble, and he wanted another one for the drive out to Mikko Field to pick up the Burong Chabak.”
“So you surprised him with the gun and forced him to drive you out to the lonely stretch near Bedok-and once there, to tell you where he’d hidden the figurine. He must have told you that I had refused him, too, and why-but before he could tell you anything else, such as whether or not he’d been able to make other arrangements for safe passage and the name of the man if he had, something happened. Maybe he tried to run. Or maybe he found a spark of bravery buried under his cowardice and tried to take the gun away from you.”
“He clawed me like a woman. I didn’t want to kill him yet, but I didn’t have any choice.”
“And so you pumped the rest of the clip into his face in frustration.”
She said nothing.
I went on, “You still had no way off the island, and no contacts here except Van Rijk-and you obviously couldn’t go to him. There was nobody but me. Not to take you out directly, but to provide you with the same name I’d given La Croix, or another one just like it. You came to the Old Cathay and went to work on me, and if Van Rijk’s hirelings hadn’t shown up so abruptly, you’d probably have made your little-girl-journalist pitch sometime that night.
