Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (23 page)

So Tay thought he might as well go home. He
liked being home. He felt secure there. And right now a little
security would go a long way.

“Emerald Hill,” he said.

“I’m going to Marina Bay,” Tay’s benefactor
said. “I could drop you off on Orchard Road right in front of
Centrepoint. Would that work for you?”

“That would be great. You’re sure I’m not
taking you out of your way?”

“Not at all, Sam. It’s my pleasure.”

Tay decided his suspicions had been entirely
misplaced. He had simply had the good fortune to encounter a
pleasant and generous man who held a genuine concern for his fellow
human beings and tried to help them out when he could. There were
still a few people like that around, Tay was pretty sure. He just
didn’t personally meet that many in his line of work.

Tay and his benefactor made small talk until
they cleared the Woodlands checkpoint into Singapore and were
rolling south on the Bukit Timah Expressway. The thought that there
was yet decency and generosity in the world continued to amaze and
warm Tay.

They were just passing the Upper Peirce
Reservoir when everything changed.

***

“We need to talk, Inspector.”

Tay’s head swiveled away from the
make-believe wilderness that separated the expressway from the
reservoir. He looked carefully at David Low. He couldn’t see the
man’s eyes behind the dark glasses he wore and for a moment he
wondered if he had even heard him correctly.

“I apologize for ambushing you like this,”
Low continued, “but I’ve been asked to tell you some things you
need to know and it was important to do it privately.”

Tay
had
heard him correctly. But he
still struggled for a moment to get his mind around what the man
was saying.

“So this isn’t just a coincidence?”

“No.”

“You were you following me when my car broke
down?”

“Your car didn’t break down. We arranged
that.”

“But you
were
following me.”

“Yes.”

“You’re ISD?”

The man chuckled at that.

“Hardly,” he said. “I work for John
August.”

If Tay’s head had been capable of doing a
couple of 360-degree rotations, he would have done them right then
and it would have looked just like a scene out of
The
Exorcist
.

The man said nothing more. It was plain he
wasn’t going to go on until Tay acknowledged in some way what he
had just been told.

“I don’t understand,” was all Tay could think
of to say.

It sounded lame and foolish, of course, and
the moment Tay said it he was sorry he had, but it was still pretty
much the truth.

***

The man drove on in silence for a few
moments. Now that Tay noticed, he seemed to be checking his mirrors
rather more than the level of traffic around them seemed to
warrant. What was he looking for?

“Here’s what I need to tell you,” the man
finally said after yet another check of his mirrors. “Jemaah
Islamiyah had nothing to do with the bombings.”

He glanced over at Tay as if he wanted to
reassure himself Tay was listening.

Tay was.

“ISD is trying to make JI the scapegoat.
They’re desperate to keep the truth from coming out, and that’s why
they’re shutting down your Woodlands case.”

“And I suppose you know what that truth
is.”

“Sure we do.” The man flashed a quick smile
in which Tay didn’t see all that much humor. “We know all sorts of
stuff. We’re not just some guys.”

“Then who are you?”

“Ah, well….”

The man trailed off and checked his mirrors
again.

“What has August told you about that?” he
asked.

“Not much. Nothing, actually. But from what I
know of what he does, I assume he must be CIA.”

“CIA?” The man chuckled again. “August would
love that.”

Tay waited. He wasn’t going to say something
dumb just to fill space.

This man, whoever he was, would eventually
tell Tay whatever he wanted to. So Tay just sat and waited.
Besides, they were doing seventy down an expressway in a Mercedes
with darkened windows. It wasn’t like he had a whole host of
alternatives.

“Please believe me, Inspector, when I tell
you this information August has asked me to share with you comes
from the highest levels of the government of the United States.
Levels that are far above the CIA.”

“Okay, I believe you.”

Now it was the driver’s turn to examine Tay
carefully. Tay offered up the blandest smile he could manage.

The man shook his head. “August told me you
could be a squirrelly little son of a bitch.”

“Coming from August, I take that as a
compliment.”

They blew by a truck towing a long trailer
piled high with pallets of red bricks wrapped in plastic
sheeting.

“The bombings were domestic,” the man
suddenly said. “Foreign terrorists weren’t responsible. It was
strictly a case of domestic terrorism.”

“I don’t—”

Tay stopped before he could say again that he
didn’t understand. He
didn’t
understand, of course, but it
would have sounded really stupid to say so.

“Singapore has always presented itself to the
world as something like the Switzerland of Asia,” the man
continued. “An island of stability in a sea of upheaval. Of course,
you’ve managed to pull that off by imposing relentless one-party
rule and effectively hounding the opposition out of politics or
sometimes even out of the country. The world’s only unanimous
democracy, huh?”

Tay said nothing. He didn’t know what to say.
The man was pretty close to right about that.

“Well, there’s an opposition
now
,” the
man said with a glance at Tay, “and they’ve decided to take a more
direct course of action than writing letters to the
Straits
Times
that no one will publish.”

“You’re telling me some Singaporeans blew up
their own city?”

“You can’t bottle up frustrations forever,
Inspector. Eventually, they boil over. Exclude people from
participating in their government and, when there are enough of
them, they’ll hurt you.”

“They hurt a lot of people who don’t care
about the government of Singapore one way or another.”

“You’ve got to break some eggs to make an
omelet.”

Tay had a deep personal aversion to clichés,
and normally would have greeted that one with a scornful rejoinder
of some kind. But he was so dumbstruck by what this man was telling
him that he hardly even noticed.

“So who did it?” Tay asked.

The man hesitated in his narrative for the
first time, and Tay thought he could guess what was coming
next.

“We’re not sure,” he said after a moment.
“They recruited Johnny the Mover to bring in the explosives for
them. So
he
knew. That’s probably why he’s dead.”

***

They rode in silence for a while after that.
Tay was waiting for the rest, but nothing was forthcoming.

The man slowed, shifted into the outside
lane, and exited on Stevens Road. They were just passing behind the
Shangri-La Hotel when Tay got tired of waiting and asked the
obvious question.

“Why would somebody working for American
intelligence deliver explosives to domestic terrorists in
Singapore?”

“Johnny wasn’t working for us. He hadn’t
worked for us for years.”

“So you say.”

“Yes, so I say. But it’s true.”

The man looked uncomfortable and Tay knew
something more was coming.

“Look, Inspector, this is going to sound like
I’m making excuses for Johnny, but it’s just a fact and you should
know it. He has a daughter. She has leukemia. Johnny was dying of
cancer. He wasn’t going to be able to look after her much longer so
he needed money to make sure she had something when he was gone.
Simple as that.”

“He needed money. So he sold explosives to a
bunch of nutcases who wanted to blow up Singapore in order to seize
political power?”

“No, Johnny was a smuggler. He didn’t sell
weapons and explosives. He just moved them. He was good at that
kind of thing. He couldn’t have known what they were going to do
with what he was moving.”

“He smuggled in God only knows how many
pounds of explosives to Singapore and you expect me to believe
he didn’t know what they were doing to do with it
?”

“He thought it was all being trans-shipped to
Iraq. No matter how badly he needed the money, he would never have
done it if he’d known they were going to use it in Singapore.”

“It sounds like he was a friend of
yours.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” The man hesitated
again. “He was a friend of mine.”

***

The next ten minutes passed in silence as
they threaded their way down Orange Grove Road into the top of
Orchard Road and right through the heart of the destruction. What
had always been a bustling city center thronged with tourists and
visitors was nearly deserted. Huge construction barriers had been
erected on both sides of the streets and painted in cheerful
colors, but above the barriers the bombed-out buildings loomed like
broken teeth that had to be pulled.

The man pulled to the curb just before the
Centrepoint Shopping Center and Tay got out. The car had hardly
stopped rolling before a uniformed policeman was trotting toward
it. Everyone was nervous now. People looked at stopped vehicles in
Singapore in the same way New Yorkers had probably looked at
aircraft flying over their city after September 11.
Could this
be the next one?
people wondered.

Tay held up his warrant card as the young
patrolman approached the car. That brought a salute from the
patrolman and he continued on by without speaking.

Tay’s benefactor lowered the passenger window
to say good-bye and Tay took the opportunity to ask him one more
question.

“Why didn’t August just tell me these things
himself in JB? Why go through all this?”

“ISD is all over you. You can’t be connected
with us. And we certainly don’t want to be connected with you.”

“All over me? What does that mean?”

“Look, Inspector, think this through. If you
find out who killed Johnny, you’ll find out who he was working for.
And that probably means you’ll find out who was responsible for the
bombings. ISD isn’t going to let you do that. They’re watching you.
They’re listening to you. They’re going to step in if you get too
close.”

“And exactly how are they going to step in?
Shoot me?”

“I imagine they have something more subtle in
mind, Inspector. Maybe a nice hit and run?”

“Oh, come on. You don’t expect me to believe
the Internal Security Department would kill an inspector in the
Singapore police just because he might learn something they don’t
want him to know, do you?”

“I hope you find out who killed Johnny,
Inspector. But, if you do, August and I very much hope you’ll still
be alive to tell us who it was. Please be careful.”

Then the man hit the button to raise the
window and put the car back in gear. Tay stood there on the
sidewalk in front of Centrepoint and watched him drive away.

As soon as the car was out of sight, Tay
glanced quickly over both shoulders. As far as he could tell, no
one was paying any particular attention to him.

He felt like a fool looking around and
checking, but he did it anyway.

TAY THREADED HIS way from Orchard Road
through the clogged pedestrian passageway to Emerald Hill. Was it
really only a couple of weeks ago he had made the same walk in the
opposite direction to search out what had caused the explosions he
heard? Now that felt more like something that had happened in a
prior life.

When Tay was almost to his front gate, he saw
Cindy Shaw emerging from her house a few doors up. His immediate
instinct was to turn and flee, of course, but he was too slow and
she spotted him before he could do anything to prevent it.

“Sam!” she shouted. “I’ve been looking for
you!”

“Hello, Cindy!” Tay shouted back. “Can’t
stop. A lot happening!”

To his relief, his key slid smoothly into the
lock on his front gate and he was through and into his house before
Cindy Shaw could get to him. Some neighborhoods had angry, barking
dogs. His had Cindy Shaw. He would have preferred angry, barking
dogs.

***

Tay went straight to his desk, found a pack
of Marlboros and some matches, and carried them out to the
garden.

As the sweet tingle of the smoke filled his
lungs, he could almost feel the tension draining out of him. How
was it, he often wondered, that the comfort he found in smoking had
become one of the great scapegoats of the twenty-first century? It
seemed an innocent enough act by itself, but these days people were
anxious to pile onto it all the social ills and injustices they
were otherwise afraid to talk about.

Slamming smokers had become a free shot. You
could give your high-mindedness and social outrage free rein to
strut its stuff and hear nothing but an energetic chorus of amens
from the gallery. Speak up about some other annoying aspects of
modern life instead — like people walking their dogs through the
crowds on Orchard Road or women pushing baby carriages down the
sidewalk as if they owned it — and people wrote you off as just
another crazy old fart always screaming at kids to get off his
lawn. But piss on some poor guy who wanted nothing more than to
enjoy his smoke in peace, and all you heard were the cheers.

Fuck ‘em
, Tay thought, and inhaled
another lungful of sublime, honey-coated smoke.

***

He slumped back in his chair, examined the
small patch of sky he could see over the rooflines of his
neighbors’ houses, and he thought about what John August’s
messenger had told him.