The Jade Figurine Page 5

  “There are ways.”

  “And ways,” I said. “This is getting us nowhere.” I walked over to Harry’s desk and cocked a hip against it carefully, so as not to topple the farrago of miscellany perched precariously on its surface. “Let’s suppose I have this figurine of yours. What makes you think I’d pony it up for you? A one-way split is a hell of a lot more profitable than a two-way.”

  “Quite true,” she said, and the smile was back now. She thought things were finally going to go as she’d expected. “But it’s unlikely that you have a buyer for the Burong Chabak, or could find one willing to pay much more than one hundred thousand Straits dollars.”

  “But you do have a buyer.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Where?”

  “In Bangkok.”

  “How much?”

  “Four hundred thousand Straits dollars.”

  “Even split?”

  “Of course. You produce the figurine and I produce the buyer. Fair exchange?”

  “Sure,” I said. “If I had the figurine to produce.”

  Anger smouldered in Marla King’s eyes, abrupt and barely contained. She was as unpredictable, and as volatile, as a vial of nitroglycerin. “Do you deny that you’ve got it, even now?”

  I shrugged. “But maybe I can get it.”

  Another change; the brightness was back in her eyes. “When?”

  “I’m not sure. How do I get in touch with you?”

  She smiled wisely. “You don’t. I’ll come to you.”

  “When and where?”

  “At a safe time and location.”

  Impasse. I got a cigarette out of the pocket of my bush jacket and lit it and blew smoke at the electric punkah rotating sluggishly on the ceiling. “Tell me,” I said, “where does Van Rijk fit into all this?”

  She reacted, but not in the way I had expected. The surface of her forehead crinkled, and she looked suprised and suddenly, inexplicably, unsure of herself. Blankly she said, “Van Rijk?”

  “Jorge Van Rijk.”

  “Who is he?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “A fat, soft, well-dressed little man who travels with a pair of armed bodyguards. He’s supposed to be a tobacco merchant.”

  “No. Why do you mention him?”

  “He tried to pry information out of me about La Croix yesterday, and I told him to lump off. Last night he sent his bodyguards to take a couple of shots at me.”

  “Shots?”

  “Shots.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “How would this Van Rijk know about La Croix?”

  “Maybe La Croix agreed to sell him the figurine.”

  “No.” She shook her head positively. “He would have gone to the buyer in Bangkok. He couldn’t have gotten anywhere near the price in Singapore.”

  “Well, Van Rijk figures in somewhere,” I said. “He knew La Croix, and he was after La Croix; it doesn’t add up that it would be for any reason except the figurine.”

  “Do you think Van Rijk killed him?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Then . . . Van Rijk has the Burong Chabak?”

  “Maybe.” I smiled at her. “And maybe I’ve got it. At any rate, I know where I can get it.”

  She swept up the sun hat and got to her feet in a single motion. There was confusion and uncertainty in her face and in her motions, as if she didn’t know what to say or do next. She looked at me, worrying a corner of her lower lip with sharp white teeth—and somebody rapped out shave-and-a-haircut on the door.

  I turned and the door opened and Harry Rutledge put his head inside. He glanced at me, fastened his eyes on the swell of Marla King’s breasts, and said loudly, “Here, here, this ain’t the afternoon tea, y’know. Sorry, miss, but we’ve got a shipment to offload.” He was smiling, but there was an edge to his voice; Harry had some Scottish blood in him, and he wanted full value for the lousy wages he paid.

  “Miss King was just leaving.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I was just leaving.”

  “Will I see you later?” I asked her.

  “I’ll call you.” She stepped past me, moved around Harry, and started away toward one of the godown’s side entrances. I went out and watched her; her hips rolled sensually beneath the tight white skirt, and the wide brim of the jarang hat flopped up and down like the wing of a bird about to take flight. When she had gone through the entrance, into the bright sunshine beyond, Harry looked at me a little enviously. “Love-ly,” he said, and rubbed the side of his peeling red nose with a forefinger. “Your current dolly, ducks?”

  “No,” I answered. “Just the friend of a friend.”

  “You ought to get next to that. She’s prime for a bit of slap and tickle. The Aussies are all bunnies, y’know.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He shook his head sadly. “You bloody Yanks have all the effing luck, I swear it.”

  I said, “Yeah,” again, and then I left him there and went out into the midday heat and got back to work with the barrels of palm oil.

  But I couldn’t put Marla King and La Croix and this Burong Chabak out of my mind. Some things made sense now. I knew what it was La Croix had been involved in, and I knew why he had wanted me to fly him to Thailand, and I knew at least part of the reason he had been killed. Poor La Croix. A petty crook in way over his head, hooked up with a green-eyed cat like Marla King. He should have known better than to get into it in the first place, and once in, he should have known better than to think he could pull off a double-cross. But La Croix’s kind never learned; they went blind and witless when you dangled big money in front of them, the same way Pavlov’s dogs began salivating at the ringing of a bell.

  I wondered whose idea it had been for the theft of the jade figurine from the Museum of Oriental Art. La Croix had never been an idea man; he was a pawn, an android, somebody you programmed to carry out orders. And Marla King was too emotional, too easily flustered, to make much of a plotter. It was very possible that somebody else had put the two of them up to stealing the Burong Chabak. But who? Van Rijk? Marla’s surprise had seemed genuine when I’d sprung his name on her. If it was true that she didn’t know him, just where did he fit?

  The hell with it, I thought. Let Inspector Tiong have what I had found out. I didn’t owe Marla King anything, and maybe she knew more than she was telling about La Croix’s death. Let Tiong work it out; that was what the city paid him for. The hell with it.

  It was the same thing I had been saying for two days now.

  And it was beginning to sound emptier and less convincing each time . . .

  Chapter Seven

  WHEN THE LAST barrel of palm oil was offloaded, and Harry had settled my day’s wages and promised me more coolie work for the next day, I went round to the Seaman’s Bar for a couple of iced beers. I lingered there until after five, stopped in at an Indonesian place for their special curry, and then walked back to Chinatown and my flat in Punyang Street.

  There was a folded square of white paper wedged between the closed door and the jamb. I removed it, opened the door with my key, and stepped into the thick, faintly damp mugginess that always seems to gather in any room in Singapore closed off during the day. I opened windows and shutters first, then the folded square of paper.

  Tiny feminine handwriting read: Dan—I tried to call you several times today but there was no answer. I’ve been so worried about you, after last night, and I feel so terrible for having run away as I did. I’m sure you’re all right, but I would feel much better knowing for certain. Won’t you come by to see me this evening, if you can?

  Below that was a private-residence address out near the old Kallang Airport, and the signature Tina Kellogg.

  I smiled a little. It had been a long time since anyone cared whether Dan Connell lived or died—except, sometimes, Dan Connell. A lot of the girls who come to Singapore are filled with the fiction-amplified notion of Southeast
Asia as an area of exotic intrigue, and they find a certain adventurousness in associating with men like I am now and men like I once was, in sampling the lives we lead; but when genuine menace presents itself and they find their own security threatened, the glamour fades and the excitement turns to apprehension and fear—and you never see or hear from them again. Tina Kellogg seemed to have more courage and compassion than most; either that, or she was one of these girls who got some sort of thrill out of becoming involved with desperate men and desperate situations, so that the more danger there was, the better they liked it.

  Well, Tina hadn’t struck me as that type—but you never know. In any event, she had asked to see me, and I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t oblige. In a way, I owed it to her; if it had not been for me, she wouldn’t have had the scare she obviously had had on Betar Road the night before.

  I went into the half-bath, coaxed some rust-colored water out of the ancient shower unit and washed away the film of dried sweat that covered my body. My hands were better, in spite of the manual labor I had done at the godown that day; I put small Band-Aids over the two deepest gashes, salve on the rest. Then I dressed in a pair of white ducks and a fresh bush jacket, ran a comb through my hair, locked the door of my flat, and walked out into the noisy confusion that was Punyang Street eighteen out of every twenty-four hours.

  The sky to the west was a deep, spreading pink, as if the dying sun were arterially pumping anemic blood in great spumes across the heavens. There is no real twilight in the tropics—the transition from day to night can be startlingly quick at times—and I knew that it would be dark in a matter of minutes. It was still very hot, and it would remain hot for several hours yet unless one of the frequent thundershowers came and went in the interim.

  Taxi service is relatively inexpensive in Singapore, and I decided to take one out to the address Tina had written out on her note. A block from Punyang Street, I hailed a yellow H.C.S. diesel driven by a bearded Sikh; by the time we got onto East Coast Road it was full dark and there was a big white-gold moon sitting lopsided above the beaches and resorts to the east.

  The address turned out to be a building in the Katong Bahru Housing Estate, between Geylang and Tua Peh Roads. It was less than ten years old, part of Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s extensive program to provide adequate housing for the island republic’s ever-increasing population. Constructed of bricks and hollow cement blocks, faced with granite and capped with a red-tile roof, it had forty-eight small, low-rent, self-contained units, each with its own private grillwork balcony.

  Apartment 34, according to the mail slots in the vestibule, belonged to C. Rahman. The inner door was unlocked, and I thought as I climbed winding stone-and-cement steps to the third floor that Tina was lucky to be staying with a friend while she was in Singapore. The hotels in the Lion City, with the rise of tourism in recent years, had jacked up their prices proportionately and there was no longer any such thing as “inexpensive accommodations,” unless you were part of a package tour.

  I found 34, at the rear, and rapped on the paneling. Footsteps sounded inside, a peephole in the door opened, and a gray eye looked out at me. I smiled at it. It went away and the door swung inward.

  “Hello, Tina Kellogg,” I said.

  There was a mixture of relief and shyness in her smile, and something else, too, a kind of nervous agitation that I couldn’t quite interpret. “Oh, Dan, I’m so glad you’re all right.”

  “Sure, I’m just fine.”

  “Please come in.”

  She stepped aside and I went into a tiny sitting room with a brightly designed linoleum floor, a blue-and-white ersatz leather settee with matching chair, a single vinyl-topped end table that had a polished Chinese wood sculpture on it, and a metal-legged half-table set into a wall niche. But it was clean and neat and smelled pleasantly of sandalwood perfume.

  Tina closed the door. “Sit down anywhere, Dan.”

  I took one end of the settee. She sat on the matching chair and tugged the hem of a short white-linen skirt down on her knees. In addition to the skirt she wore a tight green high-collared samfu blouse that did nice things for her youthfully rounded breasts and made her look a little more Sybaritic than she had the night before. I supposed it had been either the blue-lighting in the Old Cathay or my consumption of Anchor Beer that had given her that previous virginal look of innocence. The sexual quality, however, made her even more beautiful.

  “Would you like something to drink?” she asked. “There’s whisky and soda in the kitchenette—or what passes for the kitchenette in this place. It’s really terribly small, and if Chana were here we’d be sure to bump into each other every time we turned around. But she’s visiting some relatives in Sarawak for the month, and so the arrangements are fine.”

  “I don’t care for whisky and soda much,” I said. “Thanks anyway.”

  She looked at me seriously with her large gray eyes. “Those two men last night . . . who were they, Dan?”

  I shrugged. “Old enemies, maybe.”

  “They didn’t hurt you?”

  “No.”

  “How did you get away from them?”

  “I’m good at climbing fences.”

  “I heard gunshots . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  She shivered. “I guess I shouldn’t have run away, but I was really very frightened. I just didn’t know what was happening.”

  “You did the right thing.”

  “Well, I began thinking after I got back here that I should have tried to help in some way.”

  “There was nothing you could have done.”

  “I suppose not. But I was . . . well, concerned for you.”

  “I didn’t know I’d made that strong an impression.”

  “Oh, you did,” she said. “I should have called you last night, but there’s no telephone here and I didn’t want to go out again. I was pretty shaken up. This morning I looked up your name in the directory and it wasn’t listed—but when I called Information they said you had a phone and gave me the number. Then, when I couldn’t reach you, I sent a boy around with that note . . .” She stopped speaking and bit at her lower lip for a moment, as if she were arranging in her mind what she was about to say next and was embarrassed by it. Finally, in a rush, “Oh damn, I’m a selfish person, Dan, it wasn’t just that I was concerned about you that I asked you to come here tonight, there’s another reason. . .”

  I waited, and when she didn’t go on I said, “What would it be, this other reason?”

  “Well . . . you said you were once a smuggler, and I thought . . . I mean, I told you about the series of articles I’m planning to do on this area and how I want to use them to get on with one of the U.S. magazines. But people are always doing travel pieces and you have to have some kind of different slant or fresh human interest topic to interest an editor these days . . .”

  “So you thought you’d do one on smuggling.”

  “Yes. It would be perfect, Dan! I mean, you said last night that it was an ugly, dirty business and you know what’s going on inside it from your past experiences and you could name names and quote figures and things. Maybe you could even introduce me to some of those men who are smuggling now, right here on Singapore, on some pretext or other, so that I could get some sort of firsthand impression . . .”

  A pair of louvered doors stood open across the room, beyond which was the private balcony for this apartment. I got up and went there and looked out at the lights of Singapore silhouetted against a black tropical sky. I could feel Tina’s eyes on my back, and after a time I turned and faced her again.

  “Look, little girl,” I said, “most of the people I used to deal with would cut your heart out for a hundred Singapore dollars—and mine for nothing at all. Remember what happened last night; that’s the way these people play. I wouldn’t expose you to them, in any way, shape, or form—in the first place because I couldn’t guarantee your safety; and in the second place, Singapore is my home and I l
ike it here and if I wanted to stay alive I’d have to move, fast and far, long before any article like the one you suggest came out in print.”

  “But I wouldn’t use your name.”

  “You wouldn’t have to.”

  “Dan, if this article sells it could mean a lot of money—and half of it would be yours.”

  “I had a lot of money once,” I told her. “It doesn’t mean much to me any more.”

  She spread her hands in an exasperated way. “Won’t you at least give me the name of someone I can interview on my own?”

  “No. And I’ve already told you why.”

  “Dan, I can take care of myself.”

  “Sure you can.”

  “Then won’t you—?”

  “No, I won’t. Look, forget about it, will you? That’s the best thing you can do. Just forget about it.”

  “But I can’t!” She took a deep breath, and her eyes lidded slightly and she drew her shoulders back, so that her breasts arched in sharp relief against the samfu blouse. Oh Christ, I thought. She came toward me in a loose, sensual walk. “Dan, an article like this could mean a great deal to me, to my career. I . . . I’d be willing to do anything for the kind of help I need . . .”

  I stepped away from her. “You can turn off the sex, little girl. I don’t want your fair young body, at least not for something I can’t and won’t deliver in exchange. I’ll tell you again, flat out, in plain English: I won’t help you write an article on smuggling on Singapore or anywhere else in Southeast Asia, and if you try it on your own, a little girl like you, the jackals will very probably pick you apart and fight over one another doing it. Take my advice, Tina: write something nice and innocuous on Singapore as the Pearl of the South China Sea, and then go home where you belong.”

  She stared at me for a long moment, her small jaw trembling, her gray eyes flashing with emotion, and then she turned and fled the room through a doorway beyond the settee. I stood by the louvered doors, and I could hear her in the bedroom. I wanted to get out of there. There was no point in staying, no point in facing her again. I had said what had to be said, and it was up to her from here on in; nothing else I could do or say would matter much.