Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (17 page)

Tay said he had a meeting, which he did. And
then he asked Kang if he remembered Lucinda Lim, which of course he
would. Tay hadn’t actually made any explicit connection between the
two, had he? He certainly hadn’t said he was meeting Lucinda. If
Kang had come to that conclusion…well, that was all just in his own
mind, wasn’t it?

Tay reflected for a moment on his
extraordinary facility for self-justification and realized he was
looking at it with an odd mix of embarrassment and pride. Tay
wondered briefly if he shouldn’t consider becoming a lawyer after
he retired from the police force.

***

Tay went downstairs and checked out a car
from the pool. It was a Volvo V70 that wasn’t too badly beaten up
and didn’t smell too overwhelming of dried chilies and
nasi
goreng
. He drove first to Emerald Hill to pick up the two photo
albums. Then, in a little less than a half hour, he was headed
north on the CTE.

The six-lane concrete ribbon called the CTE
would take him to another six-lane concrete ribbon called the SLE.
Singaporeans loved acronyms. Sometimes Tay thought if his fellow
countrymen were required to speak using complete words instead of
initials they would be struck entirely dumb. And that was not, in
his view, an entirely unappealing prospect to contemplate.

JB was more or less directly across the Jahor
Strait from the Woodlands and it wouldn’t take someone more than
twenty minutes to get from one to the other unless border traffic
was backed up. Did that mean anything? Probably not, Tay decided
after thinking about it for a few more minutes, but he made a
mental note anyway to have Kang get a list of foreigners who had
entered Singapore over the causeway in the twenty-four hours before
their corpse with the broken neck was found. It would probably be a
waste of time, but then maybe it wouldn’t. Perhaps the name that
went with his corpse would be on that list. It was just possible,
he thought, to hope for such things.

***

The further north Tay drove, the gloomier the
day became. Over Singapore the sky was a pastel blue, so bright
with sun that all the color had very nearly been washed out of it.
But to the north, dark clouds marbled the sky and the light turned
gray. The Jahor Strait was wrinkled with wind and Tay could smell
the brawny odor of a storm somewhere to the west. JB lay ahead of
him at the end of the causeway. It looked cheerless and morose,
badly disappointed that it wasn’t Singapore.

It took Tay another hour to get to the
Premium Outlet Center which was off the Kuala Lumpur highway to the
north. When he saw the big green overhead sign, he exited the
expressway and found himself in a spacious parking lot with ample
spaces for hundreds of cars neatly laid out among islands of
landscaped palm trees so perfect they looked as if they were made
of plastic. Tay had never been to Southern California but, if he
had, he was nearly certain it would look exactly like the Premium
Outlet Center in Jahor Bahru.

The center itself was low-slung and built in
an architectural style that was obviously meant to appear cheerful
and happy and encourage people to buy things, but Tay thought it
mostly evocative of a child run amuck with paper and crayons. The
signs were all large and their bright primary colors screamed out
the names of the usual suspects: Armani, Nike, Salvatore Ferragamo,
Coach, Lacoste, Brooks Brothers, Gap, Guess, Burberry, and
Timberland. The place was, for Tay, Exhibit A in the homogenization
and decline of contemporary culture.

The Polo logo was so familiar even Tay
spotted the big blue sign right away and parked the Volvo directly
in front of it. He collected the two photo albums and went inside.
He was more than a little curious what he would find.

John August was a hard man among hard men. It
was beyond the limits of Tay’s imagination to picture August
hanging around a clothing store in an outlet mall.

“MAY I HELP you, sir?”

The woman was very young, not more than
twenty-five, and very attractive. Tay of course wondered
immediately what her connection with John August was.

He didn’t want to look foolish to an
attractive woman by asking for August and having her say something
like
Look, old man, we sell socks here, not arrange
meetings
, so he glanced around quickly before he said anything.
All he saw were displays of colorful shirts that reached to the
ceiling and chrome racks supporting what looked like thousands of
pairs of jeans and khaki pants.

“Ah…” Tay finally stuttered because he
couldn’t think what else to do, “I’m supposed to meet…well, I was
asked to come here to—”

“You’re here to see John?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“He’s expecting you. Will you follow me?”

The woman threw out one of those dazzling
smiles that some women went around firing off like solar flares.
Tay tried to concoct some major witticism that would cause her to
fall instantly in love with him, but before he could think of
anything at all she spun on her heel and headed across the store.
Tay followed quietly. Maybe a major witticism had been a little
much to hope for.

She led him through an unmarked door in the
store’s back wall that was set between shelves holding packages of
underwear and some horizontal rails hung with ranks of identical
blue blazers. Inside was a short hallway paneled in blond wood off
of which opened another half dozen doors that matched the paneling.
The woman went straight to the last door on the right, knocked
briskly, then opened the door and gestured Tay inside. He offered a
smile of thanks and she hit him with another solar flare.

***

The room was on the small side and it felt
even smaller since the walls were covered in those faux-classic oil
paintings in heavy gold frames that depicted hunting parties, dead
ancestors, and the majestic landscapes that Polo stores used to
create their atmosphere of made-up tradition. John August was
seated at a mahogany table that took up nearly half of the room,
his feet thrown up on it and crossed at the ankles. He was reading
a Chinese-language newspaper.

The first time they met at the go-go bar
August claimed was his retirement gig, Tay had guessed August was
in his mid-forties. He still wore the same round eyeglasses with
what looked like steel frames that he had worn then, and he still
kept his dark brown hair long and brushed straight back against his
head. It made him look a bit old-fashioned to Tay. The man could
have been a university professor in his office preparing for class,
but Tay knew all too well August was anything but a university
professor.

The room smelled slightly of cigarette smoke
and Tay remembered August had smoked Camels the first time they
met. That was promising.

Without being invited, Tay sat down in one of
the two green upholstered side chairs across the table from August
and took out his Marlboros. August folded the newspaper, fished a
gold lighter out of one trouser pocket, and flipped it to Tay. Tay
lit his cigarette and tossed the lighter back to August, who by
that time had a cigarette between his lips as well.

August lit it and exhaled a long stream of
smoke, but he didn’t say anything.

“I liked the go-go bar better,” Tay said
after a moment.

“No, you didn’t.”

August had him there.

“So,” Tay said, “you…what, own a Polo shop
now instead of a go-go bar?”

August looked amused.

“I just work here when we need a base in the
area. I’ve still got the bar in Pattaya. It’s a hell of a lot more
fun than a Polo shop, I’ll tell you.”

August had never before admitted to Tay he
was acting in some kind of an official capacity. In the face of all
provocation, he had always maintained he was retired from the State
Department. Tay didn’t believe him, of course, and August knew Tay
didn’t believe him, but he had stuck to the story, regardless.

“Who is
we
?” Tay asked.

August said nothing, but then Tay hadn’t
really expected him to.

“I think you fit right into this place,” Tay
continued after a short silence. “You’re tanned and fit. You’re
thin. You could be one of those models on the posters outside.”

“You’re looking good, too, Sam. At least you
are for a guy who’s right in the middle of the biggest shit storm
ever to hit Asia.”

“I’m not in the middle of anything. I can
barely see a storm from out where they stuck me.”

“Then count yourself as one lucky man. I
am
right in the middle of it, and the view isn’t so great
from where I am either, let me tell you.”

Tay had never thought of August as an
investigator, as a man who patiently dug out the facts and brought
the guilty to justice. He knew him as a man who executed plans made
by others. Although with reference to John August, perhaps the
world
execute
was best avoided.

“Do you know who was responsible for the
bombings?” Tay asked.

August shook his head.

“Not Jemaah Islamiyah?”

August made a snorting sound. “Is that what
your people think?”

“I already told you. I’m not involved with
the investigation so I don’t know what they think. But…well, yeah,
Jemaah Islamiyah is what I hear.”

“Round up the usual suspects? Something like
that?”

“So you’re saying JI wasn’t responsible?”

August said nothing, but his expression spoke
volumes. Tay and August sat and smoked in silence until August’s
curiosity finally got the better of him.

“You said there was some connection between
these photos you have and the bombings, Sam?”

“Yes.”

“So…what’s the connection?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“Then all we’re really talking about here are
the famous Inspector Tay instincts?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

August nodded and drew on his cigarette, but
he didn’t say anything else.

So Tay told August about the body at the
Woodlands, and he told him about the feeling he got at the crime
scene that he knew the dead man even if he had never met him. He
also told August about his father’s initials on the accounts in the
safety deposit box, and he told him about the pictures in his
father’s old photo albums.

“My best guess,” Tay continued, “is all of
these photos were made around the mid-seventies. I think some of
them were taken at my father’s office in Singapore and the rest of
them were taken in Vietnam just before the war ended.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve never been to Vietnam and
maybe I just think they look like they were made in Vietnam because
I’ve seen too many movies.”

“When did your father die?”

“In 1975.”

“August’s eyebrows went up slightly. “In
Vietnam?”

“Saigon. The day of the evacuation. So his
body was never returned.”

“He was killed in action?”

“No. He wasn’t military. He was just an
accountant and he had a heart attack. But it was the wrong day and
the wrong place to have a heart attack.”

“How old was he?”

“Thirty-three.”

August did the thing with the eyebrows
again.

“Pretty young for a heart attack,” he
said.

Tay shrugged. “It happens.”

“So what do you want from me?” August
asked.

“I just want you to look at the photographs
and see if anything jumps out at you. A familiar place or face or
anything that might give me a way to start tying all this
together.”

Tay laid the two photo albums on the desk in
front of August. Then he leaned back and waited.

***

August opened the Singapore album first. He
flipped a couple of pages while Tay sat in silence, then stopped
and put a finger on one of the photos.

“This is your dad?”

Tay looked to see where August’s finger was
resting and nodded. “How did you know?”

“You look just like him.”

Tay didn’t know exactly what to say to that
so he said nothing. He just sat and watched August as he went back
to turning the pages of the album. Once or twice Tay thought August
was about to say something, but he never did. When he reached the
last page he closed the album and set it aside.

“The other one has the Vietnam pictures?” he
asked.

Tay nodded and August pulled the second album
across the desk toward himself and opened it. Tay noticed he turned
the pages more slowly than he had turned the pages of the Singapore
album. After a moment he looked up.

“It’s Vietnam all right. Probably the
mid-seventies just like you thought.”

Tay nodded.

“Who’s the broad?”

“No idea. But it seems obvious she and my
father had a relationship.”

“You mean your dad was banging her.”

Tay didn’t know how to respond to that so he
didn’t, and after a moment August went back to turning pages. He
didn’t speak again until he got to the last page, the one that held
the black and white print of Tay’s father, the corpse from the
Woodlands apartment, and the umbrella man.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” August chuckled.

Tay was pretty sure he had never heard August
chuckle at anything before so he paid close attention.

“God, he looks so young there.” August
reached out and put his finger on the photo and Tay leaned forward
to see where he had rested it.

It was right in the chest of his corpse from
the Woodlands.

“Your father knew Johnny the Mover.”

“That’s the dead man,” Tay said.

That seemed to stop August for a moment.

“Johnny’s dead?”

“The man you’re pointing to is dead. If
that’s Johnny, then…yes, Johnny’s dead. Who’s Johnny the
Mover?”

August tilted his head away and consulted a
corner of the room. He pursed his lips and Tay could see him
thinking about what he ought to say. Tay just waited to see what it
turned out to be.