Authors: Bill Pronzini
And froze.
There were footsteps outside, footsteps on the gravel path leading up to the porch, footsteps on the wooden stairs and on the floor of the porch. Two sets, maybe three. For some reason of his own, Tiong had decided not to wait for Van Rijk at all. He was moving in early, without taking any chances; he’d had whatever cars he’d brought parked down the street, and he and his men had come up silently on foot.
Fists hammered against the wood paneling of the door.
Tiong’s voice, demanding and officious, called out, “Open this door. We are the
polis.”
I stood there with the body of Maria King draped across my shoulder, motionless, trapped. Time had finally and abruptly run out, and there was no way I could get free with the dead girl. The panic came in a spiraling rush, and before I could fight it off with cold reason, it had taken me beyond the point of commitment. I dumped Marla King brutally onto the settee, heard her stiffened form hit the back, heard the settee tilt up and crash over backward under her weight—and I was running.
V
OICES 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 Citröen. 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 . . .
I
AWOKE trembling, drenched in cold-hot sweat.
I had no idea how long I had slept—been unconscious —but the silence seemed deeper somehow, the way it gets well past midnight. Mosquitoes crawled and fed on my face, and I had no strength to brush them away. The fever burned brightly inside me. Rhythmic pain pulsated in my temples, my right arm.
What now, dead man? I thought.
I had gotten away from Dinessen, and I had gotten away from Tiong and his men, and I was still free and still alive—if just barely. But where did I go from here? I was wrapped up, imprisoned, in a web of circumstance so neatly and so beautifully that there was no way out, no way to prove my innocence. Dinessen had killed Marla King, and Dinessen was dead; and I had been found with Marla King’s body to top it off. There was simply nothing I could do to convince Tiong of the truth—especially after the way I had run. He would put the whole bundle on my head, too; he would decide I had the figurine, and that I had killed La Croix, and if he was able to dig up a connection between Dinessen and Marla King, he would revise the toll upward to three murders once the Swede’s body was discovered.
By this time he would have posted men at the harbor and on the Johore Causeway and at the airport, and he would have dozens of others out combing the island for me. I was trapped on Singapore and trapped in the web, with no real choice except to keep on running. The odds were too great with any other alternative. There was the slim possibility that if I could find the
Burong Chabak,
find out who had killed La Croix, and lay them both in Tiong’s lap, I would be able to talk my way out of most of the jam. A prayer. But if Marla King had killed the Frenchman, I was still a loser; and if Van Rijk had killed him, I had no illusions that I could get to Van Rijk, force a confession out of him, before either he or the police got to me. And, in spite of what La Croix apparently had told Dinessen, I had no idea where the figurine was secreted. No, my only chance was to run, to pick up the pieces somewhere else once I was free of the island, to swallow the bitterness of injustice and begin all over again with a new identity and a new hope.
But before I could even think about making preparations for getting out of Singapore, I had to have my wounds attended to, and fresh clothes, and time to rest and time to think. I couldn’t stay where I was—and yet, I had nowhere else to go, no friends I could trust, no . . .
Tina Kellogg.
The name popped into my mind, and instantly I tried to push it away. No. No—I had no right to drag her into a thing like this, not after the way I had treated her, not in
any
case. Christ, she was just a kid, a bright-eyed little girl, and I could jeopardize her future by going to her, by involving her; if Tiong found out about it, he would jail her without compunction for aiding and abetting.
But Tiong didn’t have to find out. All I wanted was some medical attention from her; a place to spend the night. I would leave in the morning, and the pain in my arm, the fever, the possible infection, I needed help, I
had
to have help, and there was nobody else and I wanted to live, I was innocent and I wanted to live . . .
I knew I was going to do it.
You stop being noble and unselfish when your life is at stake—it was as pure and simple as that.
I thought about the Citröen, and wondered if it was still parked on Jalan Tenah. There was nothing at this point to tie Dinessen to me, and so there was no reason why Tiong would have paid any attention to the Citröen, why he would have had it removed from the area. If it was still there, if I could get to it, I would have transportation to the Katong Bahru Housing Estate; the key to the car was still in my pocket. Two things were certain: I couldn’t walk to the estate, and I couldn’t take any public conveyance. The only other alternative was to steal a car, and in a conscientious and wary city like Singapore, that wouldn’t be simple.
I wished I knew the time. If it was late enough, Tiong might have called off the search of the area and things would have settled down and become quiet again. There was still the chance that he had left one constable, or two, to watch Number Seven Tampines Road—but after the removal of Marla King’s body, he wouldn’t expect me to have a reason to return there.
I knew I had to get out of this mangrove brake now, that I couldn’t afford to wait. Unless I moved soon, I would be too weak to move at all. I leaned away from the palm bole and lifted my body onto my knees. The thunder began inside my head again, raging. I set my teeth and began to crawl out the way I had come in.
When I reached the edge of the bank, I parted some of the resilient bamboo stalks and peered across the stream and across the road at the bungalows on the other side. No lights showed anywhere, and there was no discernible movement. The moon was high and bright amid brilliantine stars, the clouds completely gone. In the creek below, the rushing water had shrunk to half its earlier size—and that in itself told me a considerable amount of time had passed since I had crawled into the brake.
I worked my way down the bank, crossed the stream, and crept up to the roadway. It took me a minute to get to my feet, but once standing I seemed to be all right. I tried a couple of mincing, experimental steps. My knees buckled, stiffened, held my weight. I shuffled across the road, to the left, keeping in the shadows. When I reached the corner, I turned right on the street paralleling Tampines Road; every house was shrouded in darkness, and there was only the singing of cicadas to intrude on the quiet.
Before I came to Jalan Tenah, I had to pause several times for rest. My face felt hot and flushed, and oily sweat formed thick pustules on my forehead that broke like thin blisters and ran down over my cheeks. Weakness turned my legs into rotted tree stumps, my arms into sapless branches.
I saw the Citröen as soon as I turned right on Jalan Tenah, still and dark where I had parked it earlier that evening. Luck seemed not to have deserted me completely. I moved toward the car, slowly and carefully, on the near side of the road. Moonshine washed the street, but the darkness was thick among the trees and fences and shrubbery. I paused several times to watch, to listen. Nothing moved. Distantly, a dog barked softly and then was quiet once more.
I drew abreast of the Citröen and hunkered down beneath a casuarina tree, looking across the moonlit roadway. I got the key out of my pocket, clenched it tightly against my left palm. Stillness. If Tiong had a man posted to watch Number Seven, he was either well-hidden somewhere along Jalan Tenah or Tampines Road, or staked out inside the bungalow itself. I knew the possibility existed that the car was a trap, that Tiong had somehow discovered its connection with me and had left it in position as bait; but the chances of that were slim. Dinessen’s body wouldn’t have been discovered yet, and there was nothing to link the Swede to me, his car to me.
Get it over with, I thought. You’re dead on your feet, in more ways than one.
I levered up and ran stumbling through the moonlight to the Citröen, jerked open the door. No whistles, no shouts. I lowered my body under the wheel, eased the door to, and fumbled the key into the ignition lock, awkwardly, with my left hand. The starter made a soft grinding noise when it turned over, but the engine caught immediately. I released the clutch, looking up at the rear-vision mirror; the street remained dark and empty.
At the first intersection, I swung the wheel right and went half a block before I touched the switch for the headlamps. With the dash lights on, I could see the pointers on the clock there; it was 2:28. I could also see my left hand as I returned it to the wheel, and the way it was trembling . . .
The streetlamps in the Katong Bahru Housing Estate glowed a dull amber, mingling with the shine from the swollen face of the moon to brighten the empty streets. I drove two blocks distant, on Geylang Road, and left the Citröen in a public parking slot. I wanted to park directly in front of Tina Kellogg’s building, but that hadn’t seemed wise; once Dinessen’s body was discovered, there would be a bulletin out on his missing automobile, and I had no way of knowing when that would be. The two-block walk would be a long haul—and a dangerous one, in my blood-spattered condition—but it couldn’t be helped. I had enough strength to make it, and enough sense to keep to cover.
Two cars passed as I made my way through the landscaped grounds of the buildings in the estate, but neither of them was a police vehicle. I saw no one. I was breathing heavily when I reached Tina’s building; I had just about reached the limit of my endurance as well. Once into the vestibule, I tried the interior door. It was locked. I leaned heavily against the bank of mailboxes on the far wall, found the button for Apartment 34, and put my finger on it, leaving it there.
A long time passed, and then an intercom unit mounted to one side clicked and hummed static. Tina’s voice said guardedly, metallically, “Yes? Who is it?”
I put my mouth close to the speaker. “Dan Connell.”
“Dan! My God, what—?”
“Let me in, can you? I have to see you.”
“What is it?”
“I need help, Tina. I’m hurt.”
“Hurt? What happened—?”
“Let me in and we’ll talk,” I said. “But prepare yourself. I’m in pretty bad shape.”
The unit clicked and hummed again, and the inner door buzzed softly, like a giant mosquito. I shoved it open and pulled myself up the stairs to the third floor, hanging onto the hand railing. Tina had her door open on a night chain, peering out at me when I came down the hallway, and I heard her gasp audibly when she saw my face, my body, my clothing in the pale light from a domed wall fixture.
She snapped the chain free and opened the door, and I stumbled into the apartment past her and sank into one of the chairs at the half-table in the wall niche; I didn’t want to bleed all over her girlfriend’s settee. Tina closed the door, locked it, and ran over to me, her face white, her eyes wide. She wore a flowered Chinese robe, held closed by a pair of buttons, and it was obvious, even in my condition, that she wore nothing beneath it. Her hair was tousled, her face scrubbed free of make-up. She looked like somebody’s teenage daughter.
Soft fingers probed at the dried blood on my right arm, gently. Then, without speaking, Tina hurried out of the room—and came back half a minute later with iodine, gauze, adhesive tape, a bottle of wood alcohol, a package of absorbent cotton. She set everything on the table, still silent, her face grimly concerned, and then poured alcohol on a wad of cotton and began swabbing at the caked blood. Twisting my head to watch her, I could see the puckered bluish edges of the entrance hole on the near side, just above the elbow, and the exit hole on the far side when she turned the arm over. The alcohol burned coldly, like an ice abrasion.
I said, “Listen, Tina, I had no right coming here—I know that. I’m six kinds of bastard, and if you want to throw me out after you bandage that arm, I’ll go without argument. But I’d like to stay the night; I need sleep and I need it badly.”
Her lips pursed slightly. “Why
did
you come here?”
“I had nowhere else to go.”
“Are you in trouble with the police?”
“Yeah. But trite as it sounds, I happen to be innocent.”
“How did you get shot?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I looked up at her, but her eyes were cast downward at my arm. “You’re entitled to know what I’m involving you in just by being here now,” I said. “All right, it’s this way—” and I told her all of it, about the
Burong Chabak
and about Van Rijk and Dinessen and Marla King and Tiong, and what had happened on this long, long night.
She listened without interruption, her fingers busy with the alcohol-soaked cotton. When I had finished speaking, she said, “That’s a fantastic story.”
“The truth isn’t always simple.”
“I suppose not.”
“I’m not lying to you, Tina.”
“I think I believe that, God knows why.” She paused, as if she wanted to say something else, and then moved away to enter the kitchenette. She came back with a clean dishtowel. “I’m going to put iodine on your arm,” she said. “You’d better bite onto this.”
I put the towel between my teeth and bit down on it, and the iodine set fire to my entire right side, bright and hot and lingering in my armpit. But the pain wasn’t all that bad; I had lived with agony too many consecutive hours.
Tina put gauze pads over the puckered wounds and unrolled adhesive tape tightly over them. When the arm was bandaged she poured alcohol on a fresh cotton ball and went to work on the pulpy spot over my temple. She asked then, “What are you going to do?”
“That depends on you.”
“I . . . won’t turn you out.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
She sighed softly. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
“I’m going to try to get out of Singapore. I don’t have another choice.”
“But where will you go?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Do you have money?”
“A few dollars.”
“I . . . don’t have much myself, but I can let you have about a hundred or so if it will help.”
“It’s nowhere near what I really need,” I said. “Keep your money, little girl.”
“But how will you get off the island?”