… rushing, rushing, the strip rushes up, the wheels touch and bounce and touch again, we’re almost down but we hit something, the Dakota begins to roll, I can’t hold it, oh God, oh God, the world tilts crazily, lights spin and spin and spin, there is an impact, no, no, Pete screams, he screams, there is the stench of high octane fuel, no, I feel myself being lifted, lifted, no, blackness and screaming and blackness and screaming and blackness and screaming…
Wake up, wake up.
I’m awake. Or am I? Reality and illusion commingled, and I can’t separate them. I don’t know where I am. Yielding softness beneath me, the faint creak of springs-bed? Yes, bed, but a bed should be warm and I’m cold, cold, so cold. And trembling. My whole being vibrates, muscles spasm, appendages jerk like an epileptic in a clonic seizure. Sounds fumble incoherently from my throat. Cold, cold, trembling, cold.
A blanket floats out of nowhere and covers me. A second materializes from the darkness. I pull them tight around me, so cold, but the trembling does not stop. A voice shimmers into the half-reality. “Dan,” it says. “Dan.”
Female voice, Tina’s voice. “Tina,” I hear myself say. “I’m so cold.”
“… no more blankets…”
“So cold,” I say, “so cold.”
Springs creak louder, movement beside me, hands touching me, warm hands, oh warm hands, and warm flesh too, stretching out, fitting to me, warming me, the hands stroking my neck and shoulders, holding me, and Tina’s voice whispering words I can’t quite understand. I clutch the warmth. Soft flesh, naked flesh. I hold it, I pull it to me, I cover myself with it. Warmth, warmth. A breast, a thigh, a hip, a spinal ridge. Tina. Warm body warming cold body, easing the trembling, soft Tina.
“Sleep,” she whispers. “Sleep, Dan.”
“Sleep…”
Cold gone, trembling gone, warm flesh, warm Tina, warm…
… and silent black.
I opened my eyes.
Morning. Or afternoon. Sunlight filtered through louvered shutters on a window across the room. Room. I felt a brief moment of disorientation, and then it passed and I realized I was in bed-a big double bed in a small bedroom. The sheets above and beneath my body were twisted and sodden. A pair of blankets were bunched at the foot of the bed and half-draped onto the floor, where I apparently had kicked them.
I lay quietly, not moving. There was a curious odor in my nostrils, and after a time I managed to decipher it as three parts sour fever-sweat and one part sandalwood perfume. My thoughts seemed to be clear now, and I could remember the events of the previous night-and remember, too, the dreams and the half-dream with Tina that seemed to have been reality after all.
Weakness made my body ache faintly, but it was the weakness of a broken fever rather than that of debilitation. I wondered if the sleep had done it, or if Tina had fed me some kind of antibiotic. My right arm throbbed distantly, like a vague but annoying toothache-the same sort of throbbing that plagued my temples. I lifted the arm a few inches off the bedclothes, flexing the fingers gingerly; in spite of a cramped stiffness throughout the limb, the musculature was unparalyzed and functioning sufficiently to allow me limited use of it.
I leaned my weight on my left side and raised myself slowly into a sitting position. A thin wave of gray-black dots washed dizzyingly in back of my eyes-and vanished; nausea spread through my stomach-and vanished. I got my legs around and onto the floor, held a breath, and launched myself into an upright position, hanging onto the headboard of the bed for support. I stood there like that, breathing rapidly now, dressed in nothing more than a pair of shorts-and the bedroom door opened and Tina looked in.
She said, “Dan, be careful!”
“I’m all right,” I told her. My voice sounded thick and hoarse. “I just need a minute to get my bearings.”
“You’d better let me help you-”
“I can make it, I think.”
She worried her lower lip, watching me. She had her dark hair pulled into a horsetail, and in a pair of white hip-hugger slacks and a white blouse she still looked like somebody’s teen-age daughter. “How do you feel?” she asked.
“Not as bad as I should.”
“You gave me an awful scare last night, passing out the way you did.”
“I can imagine. How did you get me to bed?”
“I don’t know, really. You were very heavy. It must have taken me half an hour to get you in here and undressed.”
“It was a bad night all around.”
“You were trembling and half-delirious, and I knew you had a fever. There were some pills in the medicine cabinet and I forced some of them down your throat. I guess they worked.”
“I guess they did.”
“I tried to sleep on the couch,” Tina said, “but you were moaning and tossing so badly in here that I was afraid you were going into a coma or something. I’ve never seen anybody shake the way you were shaking. I put some blankets on you, but that didn’t seem to do any good.” Her cheeks colored faintly. “So I got into bed with you and held you until you calmed down and stopped trembling and slept.”
“I remember, vaguely.”
“Nothing happened. I just held you.”
“I didn’t think anything had, in my condition.”
“You kept saying a name, over and over. Pete.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Listen, what time is it?”
“About one P.M.”
“What did you do with my clothes?”
“I had to put them in the garbage. They were torn and caked with blood and mud.”
“Do you think you could go out and buy me some new ones?”
“I suppose so.”
“Good girl.”
“But I’d better make you something to eat first.”
“All right. I should have some food, I guess.”
“Eggs and coffee?”
“Fine.”
She watched me solicitously as I released my hold on the headboard and took a step, and another, and a third. My legs wobbled a little, but they did not give way under my weight. When Tina saw that I could get around without assistance, she backed out and closed the bedroom door. I shuffled across to a tiny bathroom, moving like a coronary patient, and leaned on the heart-shaped basin to have a look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror.
Not bad, not good. There was a swelling on my right temple, and the bandage Tina had applied only partially covered the discolored area there. A bruise of unknown origin made a faint, inverted half-moon on my left cheekbone, and my lips were cracked and puffy. My cheeks seemed hollow, the skin parched and dry. The heavy black beard stubble coating each gave me the look of a derelict, and the wild tangle of my hair, the blood-veined whites of my eyes, added substance to the image.
Tina had swabbed iodine on the puncture marks on my left wrist where the langsat mongrel had gripped me with its teeth, and there was no pain in the vicinity. I couldn’t see the bullet wounds in my right arm because of the bandages, but there was no swelling and no localized pain. Infection seemed unlikely.
I found a washcloth and filled the basin full and washed myself awkwardly with my left hand; there was a stall shower in there, but I didn’t think it a wise idea to get any of the bandages wet. Inside the cabinet was a bottle of mouthwash, and I used some of that to dispel the dry, bitter, after-fever taste in my mouth. There was also a Japanese razor with a new blade. I lathered my face with soap and spent ten minutes trying to shave. I couldn’t move my right arm enough to maneuver the razor, and using my left was slow and clumsy. The result was a patchy shave and a couple of bleeding nicks that I covered with moistened shreds of toilet paper.
The shorts I wore were soiled and malodorous, but I decided to leave them on anyway. I wrapped a bathtowel around myself, brushed my hair down, and took my time walking through the bedroom and into the small living room of the apartment. The weakness in my legs seemed to have abated; all things considered, I wasn’t doing badly.
Tina had a plate of brown-crusted eggs and a mug of thick coffee waiting on the half-table. The apartment contained a scorched-food smell. “I’m not much of a cook,” she said apologetically.
“These look fine.”
“So do you. Much better.”
“I’ve got a tough and durable hide.”
“Dan-have you thought about what you’re going to do?”
“Yeah, I’ve thought about it.”
“And?”
“I’m not sure yet. Most of the ways off Singapore by plane or a fast boat cost a hell of a lot more than I’ve got or could get on short notice-unless I want to commit a robbery or two, and I’m not up to that yet.”
“Couldn’t you get somebody to fly you out, say, on credit?”
“No way. Credit is the honest man’s albatross. The men who deal in human cargo can’t afford the luxury.”
“But there must be somebody…”
“One man, maybe-but you’d have to have collateral, and be willing to pony up both the fee and a bonus not long after he delivered you out. I don’t have anything for collateral, and I couldn’t make immediate payment.”
“Maybe if you went to him, pleaded with him…”
“Christ, little girl, do you think people like him are in the smuggling business for charitable reasons? He’d laugh in my face and kick my ass out the door.”
“Is he an American?”
I gave her a sharp look. “Why?”
“Well, I just thought-”
“It’s that goddam article again, isn’t it? You’re still trying to pump me for information.”
“Not…”
“The hell you’re not.”
“Oh all right!” she said with defensive anger. “I suppose I am, a little. I’ve helped you, after all, when you had no one else, and I don’t want much in return, just somewhere I can start on my article, and you flare up and act righteous like you’re my father or something! Well, I’m not as stupid as you think I am! I know what smuggling is and I’m prepared to take the chances involved. Now I think you owe me a favor and I don’t think what I’m asking is too much, Mr. Connell; you said yourself that smuggling was a dirty business in Singapore and if I can do my part to-”
“All right, Jesus, all right! You want a name, God damn it, I’ll give you a name: Steve Shannon, Irish-American, Johore Bahru. He’s killed two men that I know of in cold blood; he’s smuggled everything from heroin to Communist guerrillas; he’s a bastard and a lecher and half a dozen other things. Go to him, ask him questions; hell laugh in your face if he doesn’t rape you first. And he’s one of the better ones. All right? Are you satisfied?”
She clamped her mouth tightly closed, and a thick silence settled in the room. I took a couple of deep breaths. I knew I shouldn’t have told her about Shannon, even though I had laid it on about him a little heavy, but I was in no mood for pressured argument and I still needed her help with fresh clothing. And she was a big little girl now and I wasn’t her father and what the hell was the point in trying to act the saviour? My own life was in jeopardy, I couldn’t afford to concern myself with hers or anybody else’s.
I said, trying to keep the tightness out of my voice, “Have you got a cigarette?”
“In my purse.”
“I could use one, if you don’t mind.”
She got up from the table and went into the bedroom and came out again with a package of Marlboros. I broke the filter off one and lit the shortened cigarette with one of her matches. Watching me, Tina said, “Dan… I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m more concerned about you than my article, I want you to believe that.”
“Sure, I believe it.”
“What are you going to do if you can’t get help from this man Shannon?”
“There’s another way. Not good, but then not too bad either.”
“What is it?”
“It’s better that you don’t know what it is. For your sake as well as mine.”
“Where will you be going?”
I shrugged. “As far as I can get on the money I’ve got.”
Tina folded and unfolded a paper napkin between her long fingers. “Are you sure you’re doing the right thing? I mean, wouldn’t it really be the best thing to just turn yourself in to the police? Innocent men don’t go to jail in this day and age.”
“Don’t they?” I asked sardonically. “You’ve got a lot to learn about life, little girl. Listen, I’m doing the only thing I can do under the circumstances. I don’t like the idea of it, but I’ve got no alternative. I want to keep on living, and if I have to run to do that, I’ll run.”
She sighed and pushed her chair back again. “I won’t try to change your mind,” she said. “It wouldn’t do any good anyway. Shall I go and buy those clothes for you now?”
“I think you’d better,” I told her. “Get me a gaudy sports shirt and one of those cheap jungle helmets and a pair of sunglasses. If you don’t want to attract attention in Singapore, the safest way to dress is like a tourist. Nobody pays any attention to tourists.”
Tina had removed my wallet and the few other things I had had in the pockets of my khakis and bush jacket. She produced them for me. There were one hundred and forty Straits dollars in the wallet-more than I usually carry, as a result of my two days of coolie labor at Harry Rutledge’s godown. I gave Tina thirty of that, and my clothing sizes, and she left for the small shops which line Geylang Road.
I propped myself up on the settee, wrapped in the goddam towel, and thought about Wong Sot.
A shriveled Straits Chinese with a face like a yellow prune, he was the owner of a small godown on Singapore River; and for seventy-five or a hundred dollars-depending on how well you bargained-he would hide you among the cargo on one of the small junks he serviced, bound up the coast of Malaya, or across the Straits of Malacca to Kundur Island or Rangsang Island or the coast of Sumatra. That was the extent of his aid; you were on your own once the junk put you ashore. But Wong Sot was a careful man-the inscrutable Chinese-and his operation was unknown to the Singapore authorities; they would have closed him down immediately if they had been aware of his lucrative sideline. And Wong Sot didn’t ask questions. If you had his price, he would smuggle you out. Period.
There was nothing in Sumatra for me, and yet, what was there anywhere else? In any place I would be an alien without valid identification. But I could get by in Sumatra; there are ways. Construction or road crews working the jungle hire men regularly, without demanding background or identification. I could get by-and I could live with myself, knowing that, essentially, Inspector Tiong had been wrong about me all the way down the line.
I got up after a while and had another of Tina’s cigarettes, then slowly paced the hot and silent room to keep the weakness from settling in my body. What I really wanted to do was to lie down, to sleep; my wounds and infirmities needed more time to heal. But time was something I didn’t have just now. Time was something I had not had in the past eighteen hours. I kept on pacing the room in slow cadence. You can endure a considerable amount of pain and discomfort if the situation warrants it; it’s surprising just how much you can endure..
Tina returned twenty minutes later carrying a large shopping bag. She had bought an ostentatious yellow-and-red batik shirt, the kind of white jungle helmet I had asked for, white duck trousers, and a pair of dark wraparound sunglasses. I went into the bedroom to change. The shirt had medium-length sleeves, and as long as I didn’t stretch my arms the bandaged wound above my right elbow was covered. The helmet, cocked low to one side, hid the patch above my temple.
“You really do look like a tourist,” Tina said when I came out again.
“I hope so.”
“Are you still feeling all right?”
“Sure. I’m fine.”
“Do you have to leave now? Wouldn’t it be better if you waited until dark?”
“It would be, but I can’t. I’ve got to make a telephone call as soon as possible.”
“Then-I guess you have to go.”
“The quicker I’m out of here, the better it is for you.”
“I suppose so.”
We went to the door. “Be careful,” she said, and it was one of those trite old lines that seem humorous seen in films or read in books but which are something else again said in earnest parting.
“Sure.”
“We won’t see each other again, will we?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry for that,” she said, and she moved up against me, with her hands gently on my shoulders, and kissed me — soft, moist, warm. “Goodbye, Dan.”
“Goodbye, little girl. Take care of yourself.”
I turned away from her and went out and down the stairs. All the way down I felt an odd sense of regret at the finality of our parting-and a feeling of having used Tina Kellogg without giving anything of substance or importance in return, the way you feel after spending the night making love to a nice girl you care nothing about at all…