While she tried to recline in the cramped economy-class seat of a Singapore Airlines jet, Liz experienced the longest sleepless night of her life, as she traveled westward over the international dateline, and into the next day in the process. In Singapore, a city that savvy travelers dubbed “Asia Lite,” Liz was whizzed from the airport to her hotel in air-conditioned ease. After leaving a message for Nadia announcing her arrival, she fell into a deep sleep.
Seven hours later, a room service meal she had not ordered was delivered to her door, along with a ticket for the cable-car ride that overlooked the city and its harbor. A small vase of orchids on the tray bore a card that read, “Let me show you Singapore! Let’s meet at the cable-car station at 4:00 p.m.—Nadia”
Liz ate a leisurely meal of tropical fruits, an egg-white omelet, and coffee, then showered and dressed for tropical heat and humidity. After riding the elevator downstairs to the hotel’s expansive, marble-floored lobby, she took a taxi to the cable-car station. With a picture of Nadia and Ellen in hand, Liz had no trouble recognizing Nadia. Before much could be said, the two were seated in their own cable car, which lifted off on a trip across Singapore Harbor to Sentosa Island.
Distracted by the vista of the huge Merlion statue—a half-mermaid, half-lion mythological beast that is said to guard the port of Singapore—Liz nonetheless managed to fill Nadia in on her efforts to find Ellen, and she made sure to let on that she had paid for this trip out of her own funds. “Beyond that, I’m not certain how to convince you that I care about her well-being,” Liz added. “I know it appears she left of her own volition, but if that is so, I would like to know why. Yes, solving this case would be a boon to my career. But more important is my promise to Veronica. I told her I would find her mother.”
“Your traveling this far is proof enough that you care, Liz. Ah, here we are on the landing station. You’ve come so far. Let me make your trip memorable.”
Although Liz was itching to learn more about Nadia’s insights into Ellen, it was clear the Palestinian woman would not talk about this in public. So Liz dutifully—and with increasing pleasure—accompanied Nadia through the interactive Singapore History Museum, then climbed the Merlion statue to get a view from the observation window that was also its mouth, and strolled through the tropical gardens on the island. As she answered many questions from her companion, Liz realized Nadia was trying to learn as much as she could about the reporter. Liz was glad to cooperate in hopes of winning the woman’s trust. In return, however, the Palestinian woman revealed little about herself.
Back in the cable car, Liz mentioned how she had tried without success to reach Nadia through the United Nations and said she guessed Nadia was an international consultant with a mission other than translation.
Nadia looked her straight in the eyes and said, “Let’s just say my translation skills are necessary to my work and leave it at that. There is much static these days that must be sorted out, for the good of us all.”
“You mean international misunderstanding?”
“Worse than that.” Nadia turned her attention to the panoramic view until the cable car reached its station. “Now, let me take you along to the Raffles Hotel. The bar there is quite famous, you know.” Nadia waved a cab away and signaled for a rickshaw instead. “I always promised Ellen I’d take her on a rickshaw ride here when Veronica is grown up and Ellen has the time to travel.”
The British-built, white colonial edifice that was the Raffles Hotel screamed “Raj,” and there was no denying it was elegant. Fronted by a circular drive lined with traveler’s palms—so-named, Nadia explained, because they held water cupped in the base of their fan-like display of leaves—the hotel looked like an imperialist’s dream come true. At sunset, the long bar was mostly populated by Japanese tourists, the men in white suits and Panama hats and the women well coiffed and dressed in long, sleeveless frocks.
Nadia steered Liz to a pair of plush-cushioned rattan chairs with high backs that curved over their heads. Then she ordered two Singapore Slings, sweet alcoholic drinks that arrived in martini glasses. Only after the waiter stepped away did Nadia lean forward and say, “I have debated at length about this, and I hope I am making the right decision. I do not break confidences easily and I hope you won’t break mine without serious cause, either.”
“Are you saying I cannot report what you tell me?”
“Yes, Liz, I am saying that. Unless it will help to save Ellen’s life.”
“You have my word.”
“Good. Then I will tell you. While we were in New York, Ellen confided that she had been experiencing some frightening flashbacks to an incident from her girlhood.”
“When a boy exposed himself to her? Yes, I know about that.”
“It was not a boy.”
“Perhaps it was a different incident then.”
“Perhaps. She said the flashbacks began after she received a phone call, a year ago just before Christmas, and the speaker hummed some unknown but oddly familiar gibberish to her. ‘A tuneless hum,’ she called it. The caller never phoned again until just before she met me in Manhattan, but the flashbacks kept coming nevertheless. They always began the same way, with the tuneless hum and a visual image of a topiary garden she loved, a place with trees pruned into marvelous shapes. But although she loved that place, the hum made her extremely uneasy. She told me that when she remembered it, she said she broke out into a cold sweat.
“The flashbacks seemed to have something to do with tea, she said, because after Veronica broke a teacup, she started to experience them more frequently and at greater length. Each time they overtook her, more was revealed.
“First there was the hum and the sculpted trees and the uneasiness. Then the hum and the trees and the uneasiness and a kind of umbrella of pine needles. Then, she said, there was the humming and the sculpted trees and a shadowed figure under an umbrella of pine needles. Then there was all of this and the dark figure was revealed to be a man. Then there was the humming and the shaped trees and the needles and the man in the shadows stroking himself. He was forming a word, Ellen said, the ‘f-word.’”
“‘Fuck.’”
“These flashbacks were disturbing enough in themselves, but what worried Ellen most was a certainty that the identity of the man would inevitably be revealed to her. She did not want to know who it was. And yet she did. To protect her daughter. After she received the phone call, she felt the man was targeting her home. She was afraid for Veronica. You see now why I must consider that Ellen might have had good reason to flee from her home? She was protecting her child by drawing the perverted man’s attention to herself.”
“Why didn’t she tell her husband about this?”
“She planned to do that. Just as soon as the man’s face was revealed to her. Until then, she thought it sounded mad, crazy.”
“The tuneless hum, did she repeat it for you?”
“No, but she told me that something in her cab ride in New York City called it to mind. The driver was an Arab, as you discovered. He made her uneasy, she said, talking on his short-wave radio in salacious tones about a girl named Tina. I told her, in Arabic
“Then it makes sense that he followed her home? She walked straight into the path of a classic stalker.”
“That seems likely, but then what about the phone call she received a year ago and then again before she met me in New York, before she met the taxi driver? Doesn’t it seem extremely unlikely that two men were stalking our friend?”
“Yes, but it’s slightly more believable than the notion that the taxi driver and the man who called are one and the same. How could a taxi driver plant himself in the position to pick up a particular woman at Penn Station? It’s just too impossible to engineer. But the caller could well have been Ali, the tongue-tied boy from her past who, I learned, exposed himself to her in the incident she is calling to mind in her flashbacks. Olga told me someone mumbling a tuneless hum phoned her at the same time every year until last year. She feared he’d turned his attentions to Ellen instead. I discovered where Ali lives and works, but he went missing two days after Ellen did. Now
“The fact that both men are Arabs is suggestive. I wonder if a common expression, or simply words spoken in the flowing Arabic language, might have been used by both.”
