The lettering on the pebbled door glass said:
KOK CHIN TIONG
INSPECTOR OF POLICE
It was located at the end of a long, narrow corridor in the Central Police Station, one of several similar doors with similar lettering. I opened it and walked in without knocking. Tiong had kept me waiting for better than a half hour in an anteroom before he had consented to see me, and I was in no mood to observe the proprieties.
The office was small and spartan and meticulous. There were a metal desk and two metal visitor’s chairs and a wooden table with a gently whirring fan on its top, set under the only window. Venetian blinds were drawn against the glare of the early morning sun, but the fluorescent ceiling lights which illuminated the cubicle made it seem as hot and bright as noon in there.
Tiong looked up from where he sat behind the desk, and a small frown dipped the corners of his brown mouth. I shut the door and went to one of the chairs and sat down without being invited. He watched me and said nothing, but I could feel his dislike as if it were something tangible created by his small, hard, alert eyes.
I lit a cigarette and blew smoke a little to one side of him. He kept on watching me. There was a file folder open in front of him, and I knew without looking at it that it was my file. There were a lot of papers there-too many papers.
Tiong said at length, “I have just been refreshing my memory as to your past activities, Mr. Connell. I am not enjoying what I read here.”
I shrugged. “There’s nothing I can do to change what I once was.”
“Once was?”
“Once was.”
“Leopards seldom change their spots, Mr. Connell.”
“Listen, Inspector, I’m clean. I’ve been just another citizen for two years and you know it.”
“I know nothing of the kind.”
“If that file is half as complete as you’d like me to believe, you damned well do know it.”
“The file is most complete,” he said. “There is very little about your past of which I am not aware.”
I wondered how much truth there was in that statement. I wondered if he knew, or cared to know, about the scared young kid who had gone to Korea in 1954 to fly an F-86 sabrejet, and of the things he had seen and done that had too quickly, too cynically, turned him into a man; about the girl who had promised to wait for that boy-man in San Francisco, his home-and the three trite paragraphs on a single sheet of scented pink stationery received in Inchon, South Korea, that had shattered what idealism remained in him and destroyed all his desire to return to the place of his youth; about the aimless wandering for two years following his discharge, looking for something, for roots, for peace of mind, looking and never finding; about the Belgian who ran a small air freight line out of Kuala Lumpur, and who had offered excitement and the fast dollar flying weapons into Indonesia during their struggle for independence with the Dutch; about the substitutes of easy living and big money for the things that should have counted in his life over six years and seventy-nine nighttime runs across the Straits of Malacca, dodging bullets, soldiers and himself during Sukarno’s konfrontasi with the Federation of Malaysia; about the prospect of even more of the bitch goddess Money, and the graduation to the black market smuggling of contraband and illicit art objects, and the contacts this lucrative hauling made for him; about the move to Singapore and the purchase of a couple of DC-3s and his own freight line in partnership with a quiet, honest young guy named Pete Falco, whom he had known in Korea — simply because Pete had a solid reputation with the government, and it had seemed like a very good idea to bring him in on the legitimate end of things; about the warm and genuine friendship that had grown and prospered between him and Pete, and the way he had thought he would be helping his friend by bringing him in on the smuggling angle he had so carefully concealed previously; about Pete’s refusal, and the way he had kept after him and finally convinced him to make that one run to Penang with the load of contraband silk; about Pete’s protests and the crash and the waking up in a hospital in Wellesley Province three days later with a broken leg and a few minor burns, hearing Pete’s scream of terror echoing in his mind, finding out that Pete was dead; about dying a little inside, and understanding what he was, what he had become, and giving it all up because the bitch goddess meant nothing to him any more-there was not much of anything that was meaningful in his life any more…
I realized Tiong was speaking to me, and again I pushed the memories back into the dark corners of my mind. “What did you say?”
“I asked you, Mr. Connell, why you came here this morning.”
“To get you off my neck, that’s why.”
“I do not believe I understand.”
“I can put the principal suspect in the death of the Frenchman, La Croix, right in your lap,” I said. “And in the process, I can tie Van Rijk into it-and into the theft of the Burong Chabak from the Museum of Oriental Art.”
Tiong’s back stiffened into a regimental pose. “What do you know of the Burong Chabak?”
“I know that La Croix was one of the ones who stole it,” I told him. “The other was a woman named Marla King. Your friend the tobacco merchant was involved, too-I’m not sure how.”
Tiong stared at me for a long moment. Then he folded his hands on top of the papers in my file and said patiently, “You will please explain how you came by this information.”
I told him about Marla King’s visit to the godown the previous afternoon, and about the talk I had had with Van Rijk in my flat. I said then, “I don’t think there’s any doubt that the girl will get in touch with me sooner or later. When she does, I’ll set up a meeting with her, just as Van Rijk wants me to do. Then I’ll wait for him to call, and tell him the location of the meeting, and you can be there waiting to catch the two of them together. That way, you ought to be able to get one or the other to incriminate himself.”
Tiong sat in silence, studying his folded hands in a speculative way. At least two minutes had crawled away before he raised his head to look at me again. “Why have you told me all of this, Mr. Connell?”
“Because I want to be left alone. Everyone keeps trying to involve me in this thing, and I don’t want to be involved.”
“That is the only reason?”
“Yes.”
“You realize, there is no reward for the recovery of the Burong Chabak.”
“I’m not interested in rewards or jade figurines, or even that a great amount of justice gets done,” I said. “I don’t like Van Rijk and I don’t owe anything to Marla King. The way I see it, one of them killed La Croix-and because he was a friend of sorts, I’d like you to have his killer. That’s the sum total of my motivations.”
“I find it somewhat difficult to believe that a man of your background would turn his back on twenty thousand Straits dollars. That is the sum you said Van Rijk offered you, is it not?”
“That’s it. And it doesn’t interest me in the least.”
“Why not?”
“Money doesn’t mean much to me these days.”
“Money means something to every man.”
“In varying degrees.”
“You would have me believe that a man such as you, a man who smuggled arms and contraband for high prices, a man who once cast money about Singapore as if it were leaves on a pond-you would have me believe that man has no interest in money?”
“Why do you think I gave up my villa on Ponggol Point, and the Eurasian women, and the parties, and the smuggling? Why do you think I live in a Chinatown tenement and work coolie labor on the river?”
“Primarily because your commercial license was revoked, and you were forced to sell what remained of your possessions after the government seizure. It is also my theory that you had a falling out with certain of the men with whom you dealt, that you came into their disfavor.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
“Yes? What is your version, then?”
“Pete Falco is my version, though I doubt if you’d understand. But you can understand this: I don’t work the black market any more, I don’t fly any more, I don’t play games with the government any more. Those are facts, and because they are you can’t discredit them. It’s also a fact that I don’t give a damn for money, except what I need for food and shelter, and that’s why Van Rijk’s twenty thousand Straits dollars is so much sawdust as far as I’m concerned.”
Tiong’s eyes searched my face and found nothing he wanted. His own features were completely expressionless, but behind the mask lay doubt and suspicion. He was certain, in his one-track Asian cop’s mind, that I had some kind of underlying monetary motive for coming here as I had done. Once a penjahat, always and forever a penjahat — his philosophy was as simple and unyielding as that. And that righteously implacable certainty made him a dangerous man where I was concerned. If I had been trying to con him in any way, I would have been worried; as it was, even when he finally realized that I was being completely open and honest with him, his insular beliefs wouldn’t allow him to apologize to me, or to judge me in any different light. In his eyes I bore the indelible mark of Cain.
He said finally, his mouth thinner than it had been, “Van Rijk is a man who cannot be trusted-a vicious man behind a genteel facade. Perhaps you fear him, Mr. Connell, and rightly so after his alleged attack on you the other evening. Perhaps you thought that your payment for helping him locate the girl would not be the twenty thousand Straits dollars, but a death sentence instead. That would be a good reason for coming to me, would it not? A simple matter of self-preservation.”
“All right, there’s a little of that involved too-but not as much as you’d like to think. Van Rijk could be a snow bunny and I wouldn’t take a cent from him.”
“Self-preservation,” Tiong said again, as if he liked the sound of the words. Then abruptly he leaned forward, and I knew even before he spoke that he had finally succeeded in dredging up an underlying motive for my visit. “If you had murdered the French national in order to obtain the Burong Chabak, and you found the others involved in the theft beginning to apply pressure, what would you do, Mr. Connell?”
“You tell me,” I said thinly.
“You would want to eliminate them,” Tiong answered. “And the simplest method of doing that would be to turn them in to the polis. Then you would be free to dispose of the figurine at your leisure.”
“You’re forgetting that you didn’t connect me or La Croix to the theft of the Burong Chabak until I came into this office and told you he and Marla King had stolen it. Now wouldn’t I be a damned fool to make that connection for you, with the reputation I’ve got, if I’d committed murder to get the thing in the first place?”
“Shrewd men often adopt the guise of a fool.”
“Not in the Lion City.”
“The Burong Chabak is worth the chance.”
“For men like Van Rijk, maybe. Not for me.”
“Ah yes, you no longer care for money or material riches.”
I made an effort to control the anger mounting inside me. “Listen, Tiong, do you want my help in getting Van Rijk and Marla King, or don’t you? I’m tired of your goddam insinuations, and if you keep twisting things around so you can satisfy yourself that I’m up to something, I’ll walk out of here and you can go to hell after Van Rijk and King and the jade figurine before you’ll get any more co-operation out of me.”
He tried to stare me down, failed, and got to his feet and came around his desk to stand over me. I sat still, watching him without blinking; if he thought the psychological advantage of looking down on me was going to get him anything, he was sadly mistaken. “Very well,” he said, “I will assume for the moment that your intentions are as you stated them. We will question Van Rijk and Maria King, but I warn you, Mr. Connell, that if it develops you are more deeply involved in the theft of the Burong Chabak and the death of the French national than you profess, I will personally see to it that you spend the rest of your life with bars separating you from the decent citizens of Singapore.”
I said, “Okay, you’ve made your point.”
“I hope I have.”
“Do you want to work a setup the way I suggested?”
“It would seem to be the best way,” he agreed grudgingly.
“Then I’ll call you when Marla King makes contact.”
“And when do you think that will be?”
“Maybe tonight.”
He put a forefinger to his upper lip. “She denied knowing Van Rijk, is that correct?”
“She said she’d never heard of him.”
“How do you explain that?”
“I can’t explain it. Unless she’s a damned good actress, for reasons of her own.”
“Van Rijk obviously knows her.”
“Obviously.”
“How is that possible?”
“Maybe La Croix double-crossed the girl and, in spite of her assurance to the contrary, made a deal on his own for the sale of the figurine to Van Rijk. If so, La Croix could have mentioned his partner in the theft; that would answer your question. It would also define his part in this business.”
“Do you believe he killed the French national?”
“I like him for it more than Marla King.”
“Then you think he is the one who has the Burong Chabak?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“The girl, then, in spite of her denials?”
“It could be. But she seemed to think I’ve got it.”
“And Van Rijk did not.”
“No. According to him, King has it and she killed La Croix to get it. That’s the reason why he tried to get me to sell her out to him-or so he wanted me to think.”
“It is also possible that neither of them has it,” Tiong said.
“Meaning me again?”
He shrugged.
I said, “There’s another angle too: La Croix might have hidden the figurine somewhere before he was killed, and his killer was unable to determine the location. If that’s the case, you’re going to play hell finding it.”
“The Museum of Oriental Art would not like that,” Tiong said. “And neither would I.”
“It isn’t my problem either way.”
“That remains to be seen.”
“God damn it, Tiong-”
He turned away from me and walked behind his desk again. “Is there anything else you wish to tell me?”
“I don’t know anything else.”
“Very well. I will expect to hear from you again shortly. Selamat jalan, Mr. Connell.”
I stood up. The muscles in my neck and shoulders were bunched tightly with anger. Tiong was sitting now, peering at the papers in my file; he had dismissed me, and I was simply no longer there. I wanted to say something to him, but I was afraid that if I opened my mouth I would make things worse than they already were. I turned and went to the door and through it, slamming it shut behind me just hard enough to rattle the pebbled glass.
When I came out of the building, into the hot bright glare of morning, I paused to light a cigarette. The meeting with Tiong had not gone at all as I expected, and I wondered if I hadn’t made a mistake in coming to the Central Police Station today. But what choice had I had, really? I wanted nothing to do with Van Rijk, or Maria King, or the Burong Chabak, and since each of them had kept insistently touching my life the past couple of days, my only alternative had been to dump the whole thing in Tiong’s lap.
It would work out all right, I thought, if he forced a confession out of Van Rijk or Marla King and recovered the jade figurine intact. He would have no recourse, then, but to let me off the hook. If he didn’t get a confession-and more importantly, if he failed to recover the Burong Chabak — I had the uneasy feeling that he would focus his attention entirely on me, that I would end up the scapegoat. I was marked lousy in his book, and there was just nothing I could do to alter his fixed opinion.
The irony of it all was bitter: I had gotten myself into what could be the deepest trouble of my life simply by trying to stay out of trouble, by trying to do the right thing.