Voices rose in excited shouts on the porch outside, and I heard Tiong yell something in Malay. A heavy shoulder thudded against the wood of the front door. I fled down the hall, through the kitchen, and out onto the rear porch. The wind bells tinkled like crazed laughter as I hit the screen door head on, sent it wobbling and banging open, and tumbled down the steps onto the spongy ground beneath the willow tree.
A khaki-uniformed, white-turbaned Sikh constable came running around the side corner of the bungalow. He had a riot club in one hand, and when he saw me he came on in a rush, the club upraised, blowing shrill blasts on a police whistle. I ran toward him instead of away, and the movement surprised him enough to throw him off-stride. He swung the club awkwardly at my head, but I ducked under it and hit him across the chest with the stiffened edge of my left arm. Air spilled out of his mouth and nose in a muffled gasp of pain, and he went over on his back with his legs kicking like a beached sea turtle.
I veered away from him, under the drooping branches of the willow toward the rear perimeter of the property, my right arm fluttering at my side and as worthless as the dangling sleeve of a coat. A low stone wall stretched out in front of me, dividing the rear yard of the bungalow from another yard on the opposite side. I jumped it without breaking stride, but when I came down I lost my footing, staggered to one knee, and sprawled out face down on a cushion of leaves and grass.
I heaved up onto my knees, my feet. The rear door of the cottage facing me burst open, and a half-naked Chinese stood momentarily silhouetted against an oblong scintilla of yellow light. Then he shouted something in an angry, unintelligible dialect-Hokkein or Cantonese-and hurried down his rear steps. I pivoted away from him to the left, toward Jalan Tenah, but he was either one of these heroic types or drunk on rice wine.
He tried to head me off as I threaded my way between several canted chamadora palms, still yelling at me in Chinese. I let him get in front of me, stepped up beside him before he could contain his momentum and set himself, and kicked his legs out from under him. He went to his knees, bawling. I swiped at the back of his thick neck with the edge of my palm and left him face down in the weeds, his hands scrabbling at the earth like fat spiders.
The whistles seemed closer, louder, as I stumbled out onto Jalan Tenah. I took a step to my left, looking for the Citroen. It was fifty or sixty yards away, and a constable was abreast of it on the roadway, running toward me, blowing his goddam whistle. I reversed direction and went across the street in a diagonal trajectory, and each breath was the sharp jab of a needle in my lungs as I ran.
Before I reached the far side, headlamps made a wide turn onto Jalan Tenah from Tampines Road, sweeping cones of light. I heard the accelerated whine of the car’s engine, and I knew Tiong, or one of his constables, had gone back for pursuit wheels. The headlights stabbed brilliance at me as the car bore down. I gained the edge of the road, dodged into another yard and the protective shadows cast by a casuarina tree.
Western rock music pummeled the night with dissonant fists from within the bungalow there, and yellow illumination shone behind two of its windows. I ran parallel to its near side, looped around the rear corner and across the width of the cottage to where a woven bamboo fence blocked the way. The fence was too high to climb, but slender wooden stakes set at five-foot intervals held it in an upright position and it was not otherwise anchored to the ground. I hit it with my left shoulder, felt it yield, and ran over it infantry-style.
The music ceased abruptly inside the bungalow, and I could hear the police whistles again, the distant ululation of sirens. There were more excited shouts in Malay, footfalls somewhere behind me in the first yard. I angled left and battered down a second woven bamboo fence. A dog began barking loudly in a nearby enclosure. I started along the side of a cottage with a kind of attap-roofed porte cochere attached, and a woman wearing a Malayan kebaya darted out in front of me, waving her arms like a signalman.
There was no time to stop or to go around her. I hit her full on and knocked her sprawling into a bed of ferns. She began to scream in high-pitched tones, more in anger than pain or fear. Other dogs set up a barking in the area, creating with the whistles and the cries a cacophony of noise that battered at my head like the slash of surf against a rocky coastline.
A thin scarecrow of a man came racing past the screaming woman, shouting, “Bini saya; bini saya!” (“My wife, my wife!”) and plucked with curled fingers at my right arm. One of his nails raked across the wound there, and pain flashed through the numbness in a jagged blaze. I swung around savagely and clubbed him across the side of the head with my left fist. He staggered away, and I staggered away-two negative magnetic poles repelling each other.
I came out on another street, crossed it at a diagonal run, and pushed through a gate in a stone wall. Beyond it, and beyond a row of mangosteens laden with fruit, was an old Malayan villa with a sharply peaked tile roof over a lower tile-roofed porch. It was built on short wooden stilts set into white marble base blocks, and an ornate marble-framed set of stairs on the near side gleamed palely in the darkness.
I started toward it. A heavy, deep-throated growl came from the shadows of a mango before I had taken three steps, and a dark, blurred form came hurtling at me out of the blackness. I tried to turn, but heavy forepaws struck me in the chest. I staggered and went down, rolling immediately, dragging my left arm up to protect my face. The dog was big-a langsat mongrel-and its eyes glittered yellowly in the dark. Sharp fangs closed over my left wrist, bit into the flesh, and began shaking me like a bone or a stick. Fetid breath and flecks of saliva spattered my face. I locked my elbow and heaved the animal across my body, kicking at it, missing, kicking again, missing again, kicking a third time.
My shoe scraped across lean ribs, and the snarl transformed into a howl of pain. The jaws released their hold on my wrist, and I scrabbled away, turning onto my back as the mongrel charged again, pulling my legs back to my chest. The dog was in midleap when I pistoned them forward, felt the solid impact with the thick-furred musculature of its chest; it flipped over backward through the air, howling and whimpering, and I rolled again and got my feet under me. Sweat blurred my vision as I stumbled up, and my lungs screamed in protest. My thoughts were jumbled fragments soaked in the raw fluid of fear and blind panic.
A vegetable garden, fashioned with wooden stakes, grew on one side of the villa. I blundered through it, heard the dog snarling and barking once more, coming after me. Someone inside the villa was shouting in Malay, and I heard the word senapang — gun. I reached another stone wall that served as a side boundary, threw myself on top of it with the dog snapping at my heels, and pitched over onto the other side.
Up again, running again. Another Malayan villa, more shouts, more lights. Down the side, over another wall, into another yard. The smell of red jasmine, of hibiscus, like perfume-drenched vomit in my nostrils. Pain. Fire in my lungs. Thunder in my ears. Run, run, run..
Another street, seen through a wet haze of astringent sweat. Across it in another diagonal. No bungalows there, no villas. A small creek, some ten feet below the level of the street, running parallel to the road on that side, half-filled with swollen, muddy run-off from the afternoon’s heavy thundershowers.
I slowed, gagging on my breath, and pawed my eyes clear. The near bank of the creek was a tangled mass of ferns and creepers and white syringa bushes. A thick, junglelike profusion of palms and mangroves and green bamboo formed a high black wall on the opposite bank. Sanctuary, escape…
I looked back over my shoulder. I could still hear the sounds of pursuit, but no one had emerged as yet from the darkness in the yard across the street. I left the road and scrambled down the bank, leaning on my left hand to try to hold my footing. But my legs went out from under me and I fell, rolling through the wet ferns toward the rushing stream of water.
I banged into a katumpagan — Artillery Plant-and heard the stamens burst with small explosions that sounded almost like infantry fire; clouds of pollen dust, like puffs of smoke, bit into my nose and eyes. Then the lower part of my body struck the water and submerged. It was cold, and the shock of it took away what little breath I had left. I clawed frantically at the vegetation on the bank, missed a handhold, and felt myself sliding deeper into the stream. My head went under. Muddy, foul-tasting water poured into my mouth, my throat, and the current carried me forward several feet before I could get my head clear and my fingers free to clutch a shrub on the bank and halt my momentum.
Somehow I managed to pull my body higher onto the bank and I lay there, spitting up water, sucking in breath, praying for just a little more strength. Finally, I was able to draw myself up, to stand swaying on the rocky bed. I looked up at the road. No one there yet, but I could hear them coming closer. I pivoted and forded the stream, my shoes slipping on the polished stones of the creek bed, and the water swirled just below my waist like clutching fingers trying to drag me off balance again.
I lurched onto the far bank, digging at the spongy earth with the hooked fingers on my left hand, and struggled upward on my knees and into the cover of the mangroves and the bamboo. Wings flapped angrily above my head as I crawled deeper into the trees and undergrowth, and a hornbill scolded me shrilly for disturbing its sleep. I glanced back once, and through the vegetation I could see one man standing across the roadway, looking both ways along it; he hadn’t seen me come into the thicket, I was sure of that.
At the bole of a tall palm I stopped finally and lay prone, my head cradled in the crook of my good left arm, wheezing and panting and crying a little from the pain and exertion. Deep silence enfolded me, broken only by the chittering of cicadas, the buzzing of mosquitoes, the occasional rustling movement of an animal or a lizard or a bird in the surrounding growth. I could still hear shouts and police whistles, but they seemed a long way off now, nothing more than dying echoes of the originals.
Time passed, slowly or quickly. I had no sense for it now. I looked once at the dial of my wristwatch, but the crystal had been smashed sometime during my flight; the hands were frozen at 9:02. I drew myself up and leaned my back against the trunk of the palm, with my legs splayed out in front of me. I was exhausted, drained, and even though the panic was gone now, my thoughts remained jumbled and confused. My tongue felt like a swollen thumb filling my mouth, half-gagging me, and my throat was parched shut. I had some feeling in my right arm-the same hellish throbbing that raged inside my head-and I wondered dimly if the wound was already infected from the dirt and the water and the digging nails of the Malay scarecrow.
I had to do something about that, and about the pulpy bruise on the side of my head, and about the stinging marks on my wrist where the langsat mongrel had sunk its teeth. But first, I needed rest, sleep, a void where there was no pain and no confusion. I could afford that now, I was safe here, they wouldn’t find me here.
Rest.
Rest…