Authors: Bill Pronzini
T
HERE WAS light, and there was heat.
The light was the effulgent glare of the tropical sun, or of a naked lamp bulb, pressing against my closed eyelids; the heat was the stale mugginess of a closed room, thick and harsh in the lungs like invisible steam. A third awareness came three or four heartbeats later, and it was of pain—a rhythmic ebb and flow, savage in my temples and in back of my forehead even though I lay completely motionless.
A long time passed, days and weeks passed, and finally I was fully conscious and able to make the muscles in my neck obey the command of my brain. I turned my head a little, to bring my eyes out of the glare. The movement unleashed a new flood of agony. My cheek touched the rough surface of a floor matting—rattan, probably—and the odor of dust was acrid in my nostrils.
I lay still again, waiting for the pain to subside. When it did, I forced my eyelids upwards, into slits. I had double vision for a moment, and then the room settled into focus and I could see part of a wall, bare except for a cork-type bulletin board some three feet in diameter; various-sized sheets of paper were thumb-tacked to the cork, with no particular attempt at neatness. A chipped metal file cabinet had been backed into the right-angle of that wall and another, just beyond the board.
Carefully, I rolled my head in a reverse quadrant and looked up at an acoustical tile ceiling with cobwebs like gray moss in the two visible corners. Another pause, another breath, another quadrant to the light again. Its source was a lamp, all right, a goose-necked thing that had been set at the edge of an old teak desk so that the glare was tilted full on my face. Behind the desk was a third wall—hung with a nude calendar and a relief map of Southeast Asia, containing a door which seemed to stand an inch or two ajar. Between the door and where I lay, set slightly away from the right-hand corner of the desk, was an old cane-backed chair.
The room was an office—cluttered, functional, somewhat shabby. I had never seen it before. And as I lay there, I began to realize that I wasn’t its only occupant just now. The sense of
aloneness
you have when there’s no one near you was missing, and I had the feeling of being watched from somewhere close at hand.
I ran my tongue over dry lips and over the roof of my mouth. There was the faint, brackish taste of blood. I set my teeth and rolled over onto my belly, and the pain became more acute inside my skull, conjuring amorphous images to distort already muddled thought processes. Vomit boiled in my throat. I rested a moment, breathing dust, gathering strength. Then I put the palms of my hands flat on the rattan matting and lifted myself onto my knees like a praying bishop.
Somehow, I had expected to come face to face with Van Rijk, or one of his bodyguards. I was looking, instead, at a tall, well-set-up Swede with muddy blond hair and a sun-darkened ledge of a forehead under which colorless eyes hid in cavelike sockets. His chest and shoulders were immense, and the rumpled white cotton jacket he wore hung straight up and down, the way it would on a clothes hanger. He had one hip cocked against a wooden shelf that ran beneath a bank of windows in the room’s fourth wall; a closed entrance door was on his left, shuttered with the same type of bamboo blinds covering the windows. The gun in his right hand was a heavy black German Lüger.
His name was Dinessen, Lars Dinessen.
And he was a pilot, a mercenary, a smuggler for hire and profit—less scrupulous, less knowledgeable, less successful than I had been, but nonetheless a carbon copy of Dan Connell two years ago, operating the same kind of small air freight concern to camouflage his real activities.
He was also the man whose name I had given La Croix just before the Frenchman left my flat two mornings previous.
I said aloud, “What the hell?”
Dinessen parted thick lips, revealing two rows of clean white teeth in a smile that wasn’t a smile at all. He said, “You know what the hell, I think,” in heavily accented English.
“Yeah, maybe I do.”
My right cheek felt stiff, and when I lifted my hand to touch it my fingers encountered a mat of dried blood that had trailed down from the area just above my temple. The area was soft and painful, but it was no longer bleeding. I looked at the watch on my left wrist: 7:20. I had been out less than two hours—but long enough, though, too damned long.
I looked around the office again, and it wasn’t difficult to figure where we were. Dinessen’s freight line was located in a semi-isolated area off Bukit Timah Road. He had a hangar housing a couple of surplus crates that needed forged safety certificates in order to remain operative, and a large corrugated building that served as a warehouse for the legitimate goods he ferried in and out of Singapore. The office would be in the latter structure. He must have had a car near Punyang Street, and had brought me here in that. It was a hell of a chance, taking an unconscious man out into the streets in broad daylight—even in Singapore’s Chinatown, where strange sights are an integral part of the way of life.
I said, “What was the point of putting the slug on me, Dinessen? If you wanted to talk, you could have done it without getting rough—and without the gun.”
“We talk better here, this way, with nobody around. If you don’t want to talk, I put a couple of bullets in you. Maybe your legs, maybe your belly, maybe I shoot off your balls. Then you tell me where the figurine is, I think.”
“I don’t know where it is.”
“Ya, you know.”
“What makes you think so?”
“La Croix told me.”
“The hell he did.”
“The hell he didn’t.”
“You killed him a little too soon, Dinessen.”
He looked surprised. “I don’t kill him.”
“No? Then who did?”
“Maybe you.”
“Crap. Can I get up off this floor?”
“I think you stay right there.”
“You’ve got the gun.”
“Damn right.”
I rubbed my palms slowly over my thighs. “So La Croix told you about the figurine when he came to you three days ago, is that it?”
“Ya. I don’t take him to Bangkok until I know what he’s carrying, and he wants to get there too much so he don’t lie to me. You don’t think about that when you give him my name, hah? We make plans to fly out that night, but first he says he has to pick up the figurine where he put it. Only you and him know where it is.”
“La Croix said that?”
“Sure he said it. But I was stupid. I let him go himself and he don’t come back. Maybe you killed him, maybe you didn’t. But you know where the figurine is.”
“I’m telling you, I don’t.”
“Then why you say you do?”
“I didn’t say it.”
“La Croix said it, you bet.”
“Then he was lying.”
“Listen, I don’t play no more games. I got some sense now. I bring you here and make you talk, like I should of done right away.”
“Why didn’t you, right away? Why did you wait?”
“I am a big dumb Swede, ya? I let a woman tell me what to do, and I do it. She makes it sound like the best way. But this is the best way, the only way.”
“What woman?”
“What woman you think?”
“Marla King?”
He laughed—a flat, humorless sound. “Aussie bitch.”
“So the two of you are teamed up in this.”
“Not any more.”
“What does that mean?”
“She think she take the figurine for herself and get out of Singapore. No big dumb Swede to share it with—she don’t care about me at all. Well, I don’t stand for a double-cross.”
I worked saliva into the dryness of my mouth. Another double-cross—just one of the multitude. This was a fine, sweet bunch of Judas thieves, all right. “How do you know she’s double-crossing you, Dinessen?”
His face congealed with dark anger. “I go to see her this afternoon, about four,” he said. “I come in and hear her on the telephone—with you, Connell, talking about smuggling the figurine to Thailand. I know then, you bet. We are supposed to fly there, her and me, to see the buyer La Croix says is waiting in Bangkok. Damned Aussie bitch.”
“What did you do? Did you hurt her?”
“You liked her, maybe? You’re worried for her?”
“Listen, what did you do to her?”
“I fixed her, that’s what I did.”
“How did you fix her?”
“That don’t matter.”
“You killed her, didn’t you?”
“I kill you if you don’t tell me where the figurine is.”
“You son of a bitch, you killed her at Number Seven Tampines Road.”
“Maybe that’s right,” he said. “Ya, and maybe I make it look like you did it, too.”
I stared at him. “Did you?”
He laughed emptily, and his eyes glistened like lacquered pebbles.
I said, “How? How did you do it?”
“I got my ways.”
“What ways?”
“You never mind. You tell me where the figurine is, we fix it up. Maybe I even give you some of the money. What you say, Connell?”
“Even if I knew where the figurine was, you’d kill me the minute I told you. You’re a scavenger, Dinessen, and you’re not about to share four hundred thousand Straits dollars with me—especially not if you’ve framed me up for your goddam killing.”
His face grew darker. “You don’t tell me, I kill you very slowly, Connell. Like I said before. Then I take your body and put it with hers.”
“You’ll never get away with it.”
“That’s what you think. Maybe I shoot your balls off, hah? How would you like to die with no balls?”
A trembling, impotent rage, borne of fear and futility, rose inside me to wash away some of the pain in my head. Dead man, I thought. You’re a dead man, Connell. I had been pulled and shaped and molded, by circumstances and mistaken conceptions, into the exact center of this whole treacherous business—and it no longer seemed as if there were a way out. All the avenues of escape were blocked now, all the roads to freedom and noninvolvement effectively barricaded; I was dead from three different directions.
Dinessen was a small-time mercenary who had gotten enmeshed in something that was far out of his league—just like La Croix. But unlike the Frenchman, Dinessen was a predator, a fighter, a hardcase. One look at the flat, fixed, scavenger eyes that lay beneath the overhanging ledge of his forehead told you that he would kill and kill again for this one big chance at the brass ring; four hundred thousand Straits dollars was more money than he could ever hope to see in his lifetime running second-rate cargo and smuggling second-rate contraband, and human life mattered not at all stacked against that kind of fortune. He had murdered Marla King, apparently had framed me for it as a future precaution, and with or without the
Burong Chabak
he would carry out his threat to maim and then kill me.
That was one roadblock.
And even if I managed to get free of Dinessen somehow, there was Tiong. When he walked into Number Seven Tampines Road at nine tonight, and found Marla King’s body, and found Dinessen’s frame—whatever it was—I would be as good as hung. With concrete evidence, and despite the fact that I had given him the address in the first place, he would rationalize in that righteous cop’s mind some reason for my having killed her.
Two roadblocks.
And then there was Van Rijk. I had missed his telephone call tonight, and because I had, he would suspect something—still another double-cross-and he would put his bodyguards down on me for fair. With Marla King dead, he would want me as badly as Tiong.
Three roadblocks.
And no more roads.
Dead man, any way you looked at it.
But you don’t give up, you can’t give up. The rage and the injustice burn inside you, scream inside you, and you know you’ve got to make some kind of effort, no matter how small or how useless. Self-preservation demands it, the spark of hope demands it. You’re not dead and you can’t give up until the final breath, until the one bullet bores hot and bright through your brain, until you face the ultimate darkness—or the ultimate light . . .
Light.
The lamp on the desk.
There was sweat in my armpits, and I could feel it rolling in cold-hot streams down my sides. My heart fluttered and jumped in irregular tempo. I kept looking at Dinessen, but I could see the lamp now, too, at the periphery of my vision. It was just at the edge of the scarred teak desktop, some three feet to my right, and the bulb was exposed under a flared ceramic shade. It was the only illumination in the office; night was full-born outside, and neither moonshine nor whatever night lighting Dinessen used for his buildings penetrated the bamboo blinds.
I couldn’t see it from where I knelt on the floor, but I was thinking of the door in the wall behind the desk—the door which had seemed to be a couple of inches ajar when I had looked at it minutes earlier. It would lead into the warehouse, I thought, and the warehouse would have another entrance, another way out under a concealing sable cover. The door was some distance away, and a big gamble —but it was not as far away, nor as big a gamble, as Dinessen and a forward rush in an effort to disarm him; you don’t run into the muzzle of a German Lüger, not at point-blank range, not even in sudden darkness.