Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (27 page)

“We’re looking into some matters in
connection with a woman named Mayling Aw who killed her child.”

“Like hell you are. You’re still on the
Woodlands case. We’re not idiots.”

“Could have fooled me.”

Ferrero reached out and poked Tay’s shoulder
with his forefinger.

“You’ve already been told once,” he said.

Poke
.

“The Woodlands case is closed.”

Poke
.

“I’m not going to tell you again to drop
it.”

Poke
.

The first three times Ferrero poked him in
the shoulder, Tay held his temper. But the fourth time tipped him
over the edge.

Tay slapped Ferrero’s hand away, then stepped
forward and shoved him back toward the gate with both hands. It was
like shoving the Empire State Building. Ferrero didn’t move an
inch. Didn’t even lean.

“I told you not to put your hands on me, you
little shit. Now I’m going to make sure you never do it again.”

***

“Is there a problem, sir?”

Kang’s voice came from the direction of Tay’s
porch.

Ferrero shifted his eyes to Kang, and Tay
dropped his hands and took half a step back.

“No, Sergeant,” Tay said, “no problem at all.
This gentleman was just leaving.”

The three of them stood frozen that way for
what felt to Tay like an hour, but it was probably more like
fifteen seconds. Finally Ferrero nodded and shuffled slowly
backward until he was outside the gate. Tay gave the gate a shove.
It slammed shut and locked in Ferrero’s face.

Ferrero shifted his eyes back and forth
between Tay and Kang several times, then he lifted his forefinger
and shook it slowly at both of them.

“Stay away from the Woodlands case,” he said.
“Stay
completely
away from it. If you don’t, you’ll both
answer to me. And I’m not nearly as squeamish as those little girls
at ISD.”

“You crossed the line by coming here,” Tay
snapped. “You can’t harass a Singapore CID inspector in his own
home and get away with it. I’ll raise such a stink that no matter
who’s protecting you they’ll still hustle you out of the country
from sheer embarrassment.”

“That could be a problem. If I had been here.
But of course I never was.”

For the first time in his life, Tay was happy
to feel the weight of his cell phone in his pocket. Pulling it out,
he snapped a picture of Ferrero standing at his gate.

“I say you
were
here.”

Ferrero chuckled.

“You really are a bozo, aren’t you, Tay?”

Then then he chuckled again, shook his finger
at Tay one more time, and walked off in the direction of Orchard
Road.

***

When Tay turned around, he saw Kang’s face
had taken on an almost comically neutral expression.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what that was all
about, Robbie?”

“I figure it was probably just an angry
husband, sir.”

“No, you don’t.”

Kang said nothing.

“His name is Vincent Ferrero. He was with
Philip Goh, the ISD guy, when he came to my office to warn me off
the Woodlands case. Goh told me Ferrero was with the American
Embassy.”

“CIA, huh?”

Tay just nodded.

“What interest does the CIA have in the
Woodlands case?”

After what John August had told him, Tay
could guess pretty easily, but he still didn’t want to tell Kang
about John August, and he still didn’t really want to lie to him
either. So Tay said nothing

“Okay,” Kang went on when it became obvious
Tay wasn’t going to answer him, “then what was this guy doing here
at your house today?”

“He just wanted to give me a friendly
reminder that the Woodlands case was closed. He apparently got wind
somehow that you were asking Immigration about foreigners crossing
into Singapore through the Woodlands checkpoint and asking Customs
about some shipments coming into Singapore.”

“Didn’t you tell him we were just working the
Mayling Aw case?”

“I did.”

“But he didn’t believe you?”

“He didn’t.”

“Huh,” Kang mumbled. “Imagine that.”

“Thanks for backing me up, Robbie.”

“No problem, sir. Can we talk about the
ledgers now that I’ve saved your butt? I’d really like to go
home.”

***

After Kang left that night, Tay sat for a
long time in his garden thinking about what Kang had told him.

His father had been laundering money, Kang
said. The ledgers were records of the movement of money among
companies all over the world, movements of money that didn’t appear
to be related to genuine commercial transactions. Kang thought the
companies were mostly shell companies anyway, since they seemed to
do their banking in places like Panama, the Channel Islands,
Luxembourg, and Switzerland, and he said he had found a pattern of
relationships among the companies. The only thing that wasn’t
clear, Kang said, was who his father was laundering money
for
.

Tay had no problem figuring that part out on
his own.

His father had been photographed in Vietnam
with a man who was apparently a notorious smuggler working for the
CIA. The daughter of one of his father’s employees at the
accounting firm he was supposed to be running, a woman killed under
rather strange circumstances to say the least, remembered her
father saying her mother wasn’t really an accountant, but a spy.
Tay’s father had made a great deal of money under mysterious
circumstances and, right after he died, Tay’s mother had taken her
share of it and gone to the United States. Tay had never before
understood how his mother had gotten an American residence visa so
easily. Now he did.

Tay’s father had been a money launderer for
the CIA. Maybe for others, too, but without a doubt for the
CIA.

Tay looked around the garden and in through
the half-open French doors to the living room of the beautiful
house that had been left to him by his father. He looked at all the
furnishings and paintings and rugs that made his house his refuge,
his place of safety. All of them bought with funds his father had
left him.

And now he knew his father had earned at
least some of those funds by laundering money for the CIA.

Imagine that
, Tay thought
. Almost
everything I own I owe to the CIA.

He lit another cigarette, leaned his head
against the back of the chair, and closed his eyes.

TAY SHUFFLED FORWARD in the line at the taxi
stand. He was on his way to HSBC to see Henry Lee again and Lee had
known his family for a long time. Maybe Tay would ask him what he
knew about his father’s past. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t.

Tay looked back in the direction of the house
he had inherited from his father. He couldn’t help but wonder how
many people knew who his father really was, and how many of them
knew how he had made his money.

As a son, was Tay in the same category as
those husbands everyone says are always the last to know? Tay had
never been a husband, so he had no idea how much truth there was in
that popular cliché. Come to think of it, he didn’t have much
experience as a son either — he had only been one for the first
eleven years of his life — so he was equally unsure how sons were
supposed to feel when they stumbled over their father’s
secrets.

Did they really want to know if everyone else
already knew? What would he say if he asked Lee and Lee looked
astonished and said,
You mean you didn’t know?

Then there would be nothing for him to do but
sit there like a fool, would there? Life was full of questions
people didn’t really want to know the answers to. Maybe one of
those questions for Tay was whether he was the last to know who his
father actually was.

***

Tay looked out the window as the taxi passed
the Raffles Hotel and turned right on Nicoll Highway toward the
central business district.

He could feel it all coming together now. He
was close. He just didn’t understand yet what he was close
to
.

Ferrero was even more desperate to scare him
away from the Woodlands investigation than ISD had been.
What
was it about Johnny the Mover that ISD and the CIA didn’t want him
to find out?

According to August, ISD knew the bombings
had really been domestic terrorism and the Singapore government was
scrambling to cover that up. But how was the CIA involved? Surely
they wouldn’t go out on a limb just to keep the secret that
everybody in Singapore didn’t love the government. There was
something else here. Something he was missing.

Tay was convinced the answer was in that
safety deposit box. Somewhere. He just hadn’t seen it yet.

Surely Johnny could have gotten rid of that
safety deposit key if that was what he was trying to do. After all,
shoving it up his ass hardly amounted to getting rid of it. He had
done that because he wanted someone to find it. Someone other than
his killer. In Tay’s experience, which admittedly was pretty
limited with respect to shoving things up his ass, he couldn’t
believe Johnny would have done that without having an awfully good
reason. Now it was up to him to find out what that reason was.

Lee had told him the only person who had
accessed the safety box in three years was someone who always
signed in as Joseph Hysmith. It seemed to Tay that Joseph Hysmith
was really Johnny the Mover. Who else could it be?

And so he had called Lee and told him he
wanted to show a picture of Johnny to the woman who signed people
into the bank’s vault to access the safety boxes. If she recognized
Johnny, he would at least have that nailed down. Then all he would
have to do would be figure out what the hell it meant.

In his briefcase he had one of the autopsy
pictures of Johnny. Just a close-up of his face, not one of the
scary ones. He also had the picture taken in Vietnam thirty-five
years ago of Johnny, his father, and the umbrella man. It was
possible the woman wouldn’t recognize Johnny from a thirty-five
year old picture even if he
was
Joseph Hysmith — more than
possible really, Tay thought — so he was inclined to go with the
picture of dead Johnny.

Tay didn’t like to show pictures of dead
people around. It bothered him on some primitive level. He thought
the dead were entitled to their peace, no matter who they were or
how they got dead. None of us was entitled to all that much out of
life, so it seemed only fair to Tay that, in death, people were
entitled at least to their peace.

Maybe, Tay thought, he would show the vault
attendant the picture from Vietnam first after all. If she didn’t
recognize Johnny, then she didn’t. He could always pull out the
autopsy photo and try again. But if she did recognize him, Tay
would have his ID and Johnny would have his peace. Win-win, as the
cliché masters like to say.

The taxi crossed the Singapore River where
the bum boats had been tied three abreast to the old wooden wharfs
back when he was a boy. It passed the Fullerton Hotel that had been
the General Post Office back when he was a boy. And they pulled to
the curb in front of the Collyer Quay branch of the Hong Kong and
Shanghai Bank that had been a row of shophouses back when he was a
boy. Shaking his head at man’s never-ending attempts to defeat the
past, Tay paid the driver and went inside.

***

For the second time, Tay was shown straight
into Harry Lee’s office. While he was pleased not to have to wait,
he was beginning to wonder if Lee had anything else to do other
than talk to him.

They shook hands.

“Well, I think I’ve found your girl, Sam. Mei
Lin generally handles the vault for us. She says she’s pretty sure
she remembers Joseph Hysmith. Apparently he’s a hard man
not
to remember.”

Tay wondered what that was supposed to mean
while Lee picked up his telephone, called someone, and asked them
to send in the woman he was talking about. Almost immediately there
was a knock at Lee’s door. It sounded to Tay as if the woman had
been standing out there all along just waiting for her five minutes
in the spotlight. He already disliked her.

“Sam, this is Mei Lin Lee. No relation.”

Tay glanced over his shoulder toward the
door. And, in spite of his best efforts to stop it from happening,
his mouth slowly opened all by itself.

Standing in Lee’s doorway was the most
beautiful woman Tay had ever seen.

She was of average height and dressed
professionally in a dark gray skirt that stopped just above her
knees, a white blouse with a high collar, a short black jacket, and
black pumps with medium heels. Her shiny black hair was cropped
very short and shaped to her head in a cut that was both practical
and stylish at the same time.

It was the woman’s face that stopped Tay
dead. It reflected no single ethnicity, but was one of those
Singaporean faces that spoke of generations of multiracial
inbreeding. At the base of her features was an unmistakable dose of
Chinese ancestry, but Tay could also see tweaks and flourishes that
were Malaysian, Indian, and even Caucasian. And her face simply
glowed. There was no other expression for it. From somewhere deep
inside this woman rose a luminescent warmth that flooded the room.
It made Tay think of the mysterious radiance of the Mona Lisa.

Tay lurched to his feet and stuck out his
hand. “I’m Inspector Tay,” he said. “CID.”

And immediately, of course, he felt like an
asshole.

When meeting a beautiful woman for the first
time, Tay always felt like an asshole. He suspected most men did.
Those that didn’t, he was certain, really
were
assholes.

“Sam is conducting a national security
investigation, Mei Lin.” Lee’s voice had suddenly taken on the
bonhomie of a game show host. Even he was apparently affected by
this woman’s radiance. “He needs to ask you a few questions.”