Fat B glanced at him and nodded.
They were looking out over the rail of a walking bridge that spanned a koi pond in the orchid gardens on Mandai Road in the north of Singapore Island, admiring the darting fish and the silver-tinged purple brightness of the bamboo orchids planted near the pond.
'Do the names Max Blackburn or Kirsten Chu mean anything to you?' Fat B asked.
The commander shook his head. 'Should they?'
Fat B hesitated. 'There was a disturbance on Scotts Road last Friday evening. Surely you're aware of it.'
The commander did not shift his gaze from the orchids. A short, heavy man with rather mashed-looking features, he had arrived here for their clandestine appointment sans badge and uniform, not wishing to be identified as a police officer, let alone one of high rank. It would, he knew, be very bad indeed if he were seen consorting with a disreputable character like Fat B.
'Scotts is Central… 4A' Division,' he said. 'Not my jurisdication.'
Fat B found his brevity curious. He leaned forward with his elbows on the rail and gazed past the pond to where the flowers were quivering in a light breath of breeze, their glow in the copious sunshine surpassing even that of the hand-painted butterflies on his shirt.
'Your Geylang command encompasses thirteen neighborhood police posts and over three hundred officers,' he said. 'The incident to which I am referring involved a scuffle on the street in front of a large hotel. A very busy location. My information is that there were witnesses. Do you mean to tell me there were no reports? No departmental bulletins?'
The commander turned his head toward Fat B and gave him a phlegmatic look.
'Assuming there were,' he said, 'what connection do you have to the occurrence?'
'None, I assure you.' Fat B shrugged. 'Like yourself, I try not to stray beyond my own purview. But on occasion people ask me things, and I do my best to give them answers.'
'And how generous are these people in their gratitude?'
'Very.'
The commander inhaled, then let the air rush out his lips.
'Something odd did happen outside the Hyatt, and maybe inside as well,' he said. 'Exactly what, I'm not sure. But CID's involved.'
'Criminal Investigation?'
'Yes. And more than one line element. Rumor has it that both the Special Investigation Section and Secret Societies Branch have their noses in this.'
'Tell me everything that is known about the incident.'
'There isn't much. Or if there is, the CID hotshots are keeping it to themselves.' Sian Po shrugged. 'I've heard a bystander gave us an anonymous call, and it was corroborated by another report. There was a confrontation at a taxi stand involving a quai lo, a woman, and some others. The woman rode off in a cab, and the white man stayed behind and is supposed to have been followed into the hotel lobby. We don't know what happened afterward, but it was all over by the time a patrol car arrived. Everyone involved seems to have vanished, and few bystanders admit to having seen anything. But that's the way it is.'
'Nobody wants trouble, lah.'
The commander nodded, and released another sigh.
'Even so,' he said, 'trouble comes.'
They were silent a while. Fat B's eye caught a compressed medley of color flitting under the surface of the pond — a large rainbow koi. It darted into the shade of a water lily and stopped abruptly, its long body hovering in perfect stillness.
'Should Missing Persons reports be filed on either the quai lo or the Chu woman, I would very much appreciate being apprised of their sources,' he said. 'Also, my inquisitive friends would find any clues I could pass along about the woman's present whereabouts to be of special value.'
Their eyes met.
'Your friends,' the commander said. 'What will they do if they locate her?'
'I don't ask.'
The commander looked at him for a full minute without saying anything, then slowly nodded.
'I'll see what I can do,' he said.
Fat B grinned with satisfaction. 'And I'll make it worth your while.'
The commander lingered on the rail another moment, then turned to leave. Fat B didn't move. He did not think Sian Po would be inclined to stroll from the garden in his presence.
The commander took two steps up the bridge and paused, motioning toward Fat B's shirt with his chin.
'Those butterflies are quite splendid,' he said. 'They are of the Graphium species, are they not?'
Fat B nodded.
'I've heard they survive by sucking the piss of higher animals from the ground,' the commander said.
Fat B controlled his reaction.
'Thank you for sharing that with me,' he said. 'Outwardly we are very different types of men, you and I, but love and knowledge of nature is our bond.'
The commander looked at him and grinned unpleasantly.
'The money helps,' he said, and strode away.
Chapter Seventeen
'This,' Noriko cousins said, 'is one amazing room.'
Nimec reached for the little blue cube of chalk on the bridge of the pool table.
'So people tell me,' he said, rubbing the chalk on the tip of his cue stick with a circular motion. 'It's where I come to loosen up, get my thoughts right.'
They were in the billiard parlor on the upper level of his San Jose triplex, a painstaking recreation of the smoky South Philadelphia halls where he'd spent his youth ducking truant officers, while pursuing an education of a sort that certainly wouldn't have moved them to reexamine his delinquent status. But in those days Nimec had only cared about one man's approbation, and in attempting to gain it had been a most attentive student… or, as he liked to put it, if SATs and grade-point averages could measure one's aptitude at bank shots, combinations, and draw English, he'd have been a shoe-in for a full college scholarship.
At any rate, he'd captured every detail of the old place — at least as filtered through the subjective lens of his recollection — from the cigarette burns on the green baize tabletops to the soda fountain, swimsuit calendars, milky plastic light fixtures, and Wurlitzer juke stacked with vintage forty-fives circa 1968, a machine he'd picked up for a song at an antique auction and which, after some minor repairs, could still shake and rattle the room to its ceiling beams with three selections for a quarter.
Right now it was belting out Cream's cover of the old blues standard 'Crossroads.' Clapton's improvised guitar lead slipped around Jack Bruce's bass line like hot mercury, taking Nimec back, conjuring up a memory of his old pal Mick Cunningham, a few years his senior and newly back from a hitch in Nam, bopping between rows of regulation tables, raving about Clapton being fucking huge in Saigon.
Mick, who'd had a problem with junk, which had also been fucking huge in Saigon, had been shivved to death in a prison exercise yard in '75 while doing a nickel for attempted robbery, his first offense, a heavy sentence by anyone's standards.
'One ball, over there,' Nimec called, waggling his stick at the left corner pocket in the foot rail. He had won the opening break.
Noriko nodded.
He leaned over the side of the table and set the cue ball down within the head string, just shy of the center spot. Then he placed his right hand flat on the table's surface and slid the cue into the groove between his thumb and forefinger. Sighting down the length of the stick, he stroked twice in practice, then drove for the cushions on
