“I take it you’re familiar with Van Rijk,” I said.
“We know of him, yes.”
“Just who the hell is he?”
“Ostensibly, a tobacco merchant.”
“Ostensibly?”
“We have reason to believe he has other, more profitable — and less legal-interests.”
“He can’t have been on Singapore long.”
“As a matter of fact, no. Less than a year.” He studied me clinically. “How did you know?”
I shrugged. “Lucky guess.”
“Yes?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Look, La Croix was pretty damned shaken up when I talked to him yesterday. He wanted to get out of Singapore in a hurry. Judging from that little incident last night, I’d say it was Van Rijk he was frightened of. And that he had good cause.”
“Perhaps,” Tiong said noncommittally. “You still maintain the French national told you nothing other than his wish to hire you to transport him to Thailand?”
“I still maintain it,” I said, “because it’s the truth. Listen, Inspector, I’ve told you everything I know. I’ve co- operated with you right down the line. I’m sorry La Croix is dead-he was a lot of things, maybe, but he was also something of a friend of mine once-and I’d like to see you get your hands on whoever killed him. I know the kind of reputation I’ve got with you, and there’s nothing I can do to change it-except to stay clean the way I’ve done for the last two years. Am I making my position clear?”
“Quite clear, Mr. Connell.”
“Fine. Now if there’s nothing else, I’d like to get dressed. I have to be at work in less than an hour.”
“You are employed where currently?”
“Harry Rutledge’s godown, on Keppel Road. At least for today, anyway.”
Tiong nodded slightly, studying me, and then he stepped across to the door, opened it, turned again. “You will, of course, make yourself available in the event your assistance is required in the future.”
“I’m not planning to go anywhere.”
“Then, selamat jalan for now, Mr. Connell.”
When he had gone, I stood there for a time in the quiet heat of the room. I had the feeling he had not quite believed me, that he thought I was holding back on something; reputations die very hard in Southeast Asia-as hard, sometimes, as men like La Croix, who help to build them in the first place. I also had the feeling that my assistance would be required again, all right.
And soon-very soon.
Chapter Six
Two o’clock.
The sun bore down with burning fingers on the bared upper half of my body, and the back of my neck felt blotched and raw from the roote hond. Thick sweat had chafed my crotch beneath the khaki trousers I wore, had formed beneath the bandages on my hands; the barbed wire cuts burned hellishly as I worked.
I set my teeth and rolled another barrel of palm oil from the deck of the tongkang across the wide, flat gangplank and onto the dock. One of the Chinese coolies took it there and put it onto a wooden skid. An ancient forklift-belching smoke in rancid cumulus, operated by a barefoot Tamil — waited nearby.
I rubbed the back of one forearm across my eyes and thought about the taste of an iced beer when we were through for the day. It was a fine thought, and I was dwelling on it when Harry Rutledge came out of the godown and walked over to me.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“Another hour or so should do it, Harry.”
“Well, you’ve got a visitor, ducks.”
“Visitor?”
“Bit of a pip, too, for a bloody Aussie,” Harry said. “You Yanks have all the effing luck.”
“A woman?”
He nodded. “Fetch Mr. Dan Connell, she tells me. Urgent. Now I don’t like the birds coming round here bothering my lads when they’re on the job. But like I said, she’s quite a dolly. Young, too. Never could say no to them.”
“Did she give you a name, Harry?”
“Marla, she says. Marla King.”
I did not know any woman named Marla King. “Did she say what she wanted?”
“Not a word of it.”
I frowned a little. “Okay,” I said. “Where is she?”
“My office,” he told me. “You know where it is.”
“Thanks, Harry.”
He gave me a grin. “My pleasure, ducks.”
I picked up my bush jacket and put it on without buttoning it, and then went inside the huge, high-raftered godown and threaded my way through the stacked barrels and crates and skids to Harry’s small office. There was a window set into the wall beside the door, facing into the warehouse, but the glass was speckled and dust-streaked; I didn’t get a look at the woman until I had opened the door and stepped inside.
She was sitting in the bamboo armchair near Harry’s cluttered desk, wearing a tailored white suit and fanning herself with a jarang sun hat. Her skirt was very short, and she had her legs crossed at the knees; they were good legs, if a little heavy, and tanned the same odd sort of coffee-with-cream color as her face and arms. Thick butter- yellow hair, worn short and shag-cut, curled under small ears like beckoning fingers. Her eyes were a kind of sea- green, shallow green; she wore too much shadow on the lids, giving the eyes a veiled look that was at the same time sensuous and too-wise. She was on the near side of thirty, but she was coming up fast.
She sat watching me as I closed the door. The red oval of her mouth was stretched into a speculative smile. “Dan Connell?” She had one of these whisky voices-distinctly Australian in accent-that would sound fine and caressing in a bedroom, but which seemed only theatrical in the hot, airless space of a godown office.
I said, “That’s right. Miss King, is it?”
“Marla King.” She lifted her right hand, with the wrist crooked down, like a Southern belle greeting a suitor. All she would have needed was a frilly dress and a mint julep.
I took the hand and let go of it again. “What was it you wanted to see me about, Miss King?”
“The Burong Chabak,” she answered.
“The what?”
“The jade figurine, of course.”
“I don’t think I follow.”
She laughed softly. “You’re being careful. Well, that’s natural. It is all right to talk here, isn’t it?”
“If the conversation makes sense.”
“I think we can arrange a deal where the Burong Chabak is concerned,” she said. “Does that make sense for you?”
“No.”
The smile went away, and her face took on a brittle cast, as if she were entering a transitional state between quiet patience and cold fury. “The figurine belongs to me now.”
“Does it?”
“La Croix is dead, isn’t he?”
La Croix again. For Christ’s sake! I said, “Just who are you, Miss King?”
“A friend of La Croix’s.”
“What sort of friend?”
“We had a partnership agreement.”
