Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (33 page)

Tay remembered he had once heard someone say
that the scariest line anyone could ever utter was,
We’re from
the government and we’re here to help you.
Now he knew that was
wrong.
I’m from the afterlife and I’m here to help you
was
far, far scarier.

“Help me how, Mother?”

“I thought you wanted to know about your
father. Who better to ask than me?”

Who indeed, Tay thought, although up until
now he figured his mother being dead constituted a bit of a hurdle
to make any direct inquiries of her.

“Ask me anything,” the voice continued.
“Anything at all.”

“Was my father a spy for the CIA?”

That brought complete silence.

“I thought you said I could ask you anything,
Mother. Aren’t you going to answer me?”

“Of course I am. I was just pausing a moment
to contemplate your regrettable lack of manners.”

“You don’t think that’s a reasonable question
for me to ask? When I talked to the daughter of that woman who used
to work for him—”

“I know who you talked to and what she told
you.”

Now it was Tay’s turn to fall silent. This
was a little like having a conversation with himself.

Hey, maybe that’s it. Maybe I
am
having a conversation with myself.

“Your father was an accountant, a very
good
accountant. While it’s true he did some accounting work
for American intelligence, he was
not
a spy.”

“So he was a money launderer for the
CIA.”

“Has anyone every told you, Samuel, that you
put things too bluntly?”

“Frequently. And yet I continue to do
it.”

“Your father and two of his friends—”

“Johnny the Mover and Vince Ferrero?”

“Yes. They started a company which provided
logistical support for the CIA.”

“What was it called?”

“It was called Paraguas Ltd.”

Of course it was.

“What did Paraguas Ltd do?”

“To tell you the truth, I’m not absolutely
sure. Your father always said it provided support services to
government agencies. Things like accounting and
transportation.”

“What government agencies? What
government
?”

That brought nothing but silence.

“Okay, then let’s try this one. What happened
to the company after my father died?”

“Vince and Johnny continued to operate it. It
was very successful. I got checks for years as a dividend on your
father’s shares, but then about twenty years ago I sold his shares
back to the company.”

Tay wasn’t sure he wanted to ask the next
obvious question, but he did anyway. “Is it still operating?”

“I have no idea. You’d have to ask Vince or
Johnny.” The voice paused. “Well…with Johnny dead now, I guess
you’d have to ask Vince.”

“I can’t find Vince. Maybe you could just ask
Johnny for me?”

“Very funny.”

“What’s funny about it? Both of you being
dead, I thought—”

“You think I see everybody who’s dead? That’s
not how it works.”

Tay was considering asking just how it
did
work when the voice started up again.

“Besides, finding Vince can’t be all that
hard.”

“Maybe not for you, but it is for me. I don’t
even know if he’s in Singapore anymore.”

“He is.”

“How do you know that?”

There was no answer.

“Okay,” Tay went on, “even if I believe he
is
still here, I still don’t have a clue where to start
looking for him.”

“Then let me give you one. Find the best
looking woman in Singapore and I’ll bet Vince won’t be more than
twenty feet away.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Vince could never resist the ladies. He
always had two or three stashed away somewhere. Lord, he spent
money on them like he was printing it. Nothing but the best
apartments, the best clothes…”

And just like that Tay knew.

“Mei Lin Lee,” he said.

“Is that a question?” the voice asked.

“Not really.”

“Good. I’m tired of giving you all the
answers. From here on, Samuel, you’re on your own.”

So that was why the Paraguas Ltd safety
deposit box was at HSBC. That was who was paying for Mei Lin’s
elaborate apartment. That was why Mei Lin had that peculiar look he
had noticed in her eyes every time he asked about the safety box
and the man who was signing in for access under the name Joseph
Hysmith.

But why would Mei Lin finger Ferrero to Tay
simply because he asked her to? Wouldn’t she have lied to protect
him? He would have to ask her about that. He’d bet it was a good
story.

***

“Thank you, Mother.”

No response.

“Are you still there, Mother?”

Silence.

“Were you
ever
there, Mother?”

Silence.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Tay shouted at the
banana trees. “I’ve been sitting her like an absolute idiot and
talking to myself this whole time, haven’t I? There was never
anyone there at all!”

Tay’s cell telephone rang. He had forgotten
he had left it lying on the table next to his chair, and it
startled him. His phone almost never rang, not even in the
afternoon or evening, and this was the middle of the night. He eyed
it suspiciously for a moment, then he snatched it off the table and
punched the answer button.

“Hello?”

But there was no one there.

He listened to the empty buzz of the dial
tone and after a moment he very slowly hung up and returned the
telephone to the table.

***

For what might have been five minutes or
forty-five minutes, Tay sat there in the dark of his garden without
moving. There was no wind and the silence was nearly absolute. Once
he thought he heard a car pass somewhere far away, but he might
have been mistaken.

Eventually he gave up listening to the
darkness, and he stood up, stretched, and looked over at the banana
trees from where he thought he had heard the voice.

“Good night, Mother,” he said.

Then he turned away, went inside, locked the
French doors behind him, and climbed the stairs to bed.

The banana trees, they said nothing at
all.

THE NEXT MORNING, Tay took a small kitchen
ladder out to his garden and opened it up. He pushed some banana
trees aside and sat it next to the back wall. He felt like a fool
doing it, but he did it anyway.

The ladder was just tall enough to allow him
to scramble over the wall and drop into the narrow alleyway behind
his house. From there he walked out to Hullet Road and then west to
Cairnhill Road where he almost immediately found a taxi.

Tay had no idea if ISD still had him under
surveillance or not. Goh had denied it, of course, but then what
else was he going to do? Regardless, Tay saw no reason to take a
chance. If ISD was there, they would be set up somewhere out on
Emerald Hill Road waiting for him to emerge from his front gate.
Tay was pretty certain it would never have occurred to them he
might make his morning departure over the garden wall instead.
Until today, it had never occurred to him either.

***

Tay told the cab driver to drop him on Farrer
Road just in front of St. Margaret’s School. Crossing over the busy
thoroughfare on a pedestrian bridge, he turned right on Woollerton
Park Road and strolled slowly toward Gallop Green. The road
dead-ended directly into the security gate at Gallop Green so that
approach gave him the longest possible view of Mei Lin’s apartment
complex without hanging around outside in the street and being
painfully obvious about it.

And he figured he needed all the time he
could get.

Because he didn’t have a bloody clue what he
was going to do when he got there.

***

To Tay’s astonishment, he caught a break.

He was about a hundred yards from the
guardhouse at Gallop Green’s security gate, an odd little structure
that looked to Tay like a glassed-in mushroom, when one of the
guards came out, slipped a light-colored cotton jacket over his
uniform shirt, and began walking up the street directly toward
Tay.

Keeping the same meandering pace, Tay turned
left into the driveway of a house set back from the road where the
gates had been conveniently left open. With the odd glance back
over his shoulder, he walked slowly toward the house trying hard to
look as innocent as he possibly could. After the guard passed the
foot of the driveway, Tay turned around, walked back out to
Woollerton Park Road, and followed the guard at a distance of about
a hundred feet.

And the breaks just kept on coming.

The guard walked straight up to Farrer Road
and went into a restaurant on the corner that appeared to cater to
locals. Like a lot of similar places in Singapore, it was
unairconditioned and open to the street on two sides, shielded from
the sun and rain only by wide aluminum awnings painted bright blue.
The guard settled himself at a table by the sidewalk and lit a
cigarette. Tay walked a bit more slowly and watched the guard give
his order to an elderly woman in a shapeless gray dress.

As soon as the woman left the table, Tay went
straight to the table and seated himself on an orange plastic chair
opposite the guard. Giving the man his very best dead-eyed look, he
removed a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and lit one
without taking his eyes off the man.

Tay took a deep draw on his cigarette, and
leaned forward slightly. “I’m from ISD,” he said. He kept his voice
low and tried to imbue it with a certain degree of menace.

When Tay saw the frightened-rabbit look in
the man’s eyes, he almost laughed out loud.

A bus rolled past, its engine grinding
noisily, which gave Tay a chance to get himself under control. The
ISD thing was becoming intoxicating. He had been a policeman for a
long time and had never before experienced the kind of response he
got from people by simply muttering those three initials. If
someone asked for identification, he figured he would just produce
his CID warrant card and then put it away again before they got a
careful look at it, but he knew that was unlikely to happen anyway.
When confronted by a man identifying himself as being from the
Internal Security Department, not one Singaporean in ten thousand
would have the balls to do anything but tug on his forelock and
lower his eyes.

The guard was a dark-skinned older man who
looked somewhat Indian. He was nearly bald with a deeply lined face
and heavy brows. He didn’t have a forelock to tug, but he did lower
his eyes.

“I have some questions for you,” Tay
said.

The man nodded, but stayed silent.

“How long have you worked at Gallop
Green?”

Tay saw the man’s Adam’s apple bob up and
down as he swallowed once, hard. Now he understood that Tay knew
who he was. This wasn’t just some kind of random stop.

“About six months, sir.”

“Like your job?”

The man nodded slowly. Tay could see him
trying to work out what was coming.

“Want to keep it?”

Tay watched the Adam’s apple move up and down
again.

“Do you know Mei Lin Lee?”

Tay could see in the man’s eyes his first
thought was to deny it. In Tay’s experience, when asked a question
like that by someone in authority, nearly everyone’s first thought
was to deny it. But then the man realized that, of course, Tay
already knew he did or they wouldn’t be having this
conversation.

“I know who she is, sir.”

“How about Mr. Lee. Do you know who he
is?

Now the man looked genuinely confused. “Mr.
Lee?”

“Her husband.”

The elderly woman shuffled over and banged a
bottle of Tiger beer on the table in front of the guard. She looked
at Tay. He gave her his best version of a dead-eyed stare and said
nothing. She gave it right back to him and shuffled away. Okay, Tay
thought, maybe it doesn’t work on everyone.

“There no Mr. Lee. No, sir. No Mr. Lee. Least
not at Gallop Green.”

“She’s not married?”

“Don’t know, sir,” the guard said, but Tay
thought he could see traces of something like a snicker around the
corners of his mouth.

Tay pulled out his telephone, located the
photograph of Vincent Ferrero, and turned his phone so the guard
could see it.

“Do you know this man?”

The guard licked his lips. Now he looked
uncomfortable. The snicker, if it had ever been there, was long
gone.

“Who is he?”

“The name on our list is Mr. Hysmith, but I
don’t think that’s really—”

“What list?”

“The owners’ list, sir.”

“This man owns an apartment at Gallop
Green?”

“Yes, sir.”

Tay was certain he already knew what the
answer to his next question would be, but he asked it anyway.

“What apartment does Mr. Hysmith own?”

The guard cleared his throat and looked away.
“It’s D12. The unit where Ms. Lee lives.”

Tay thought about that for a moment.

“Is he there now?”

“No, sir. He not come in long time. A week?
Maybe two?”

“But Mrs. Lee is there now.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tay leaned slowly across the table toward the
security guard, gave him another dose of the dead-eyed stare he was
getting pretty close to perfecting, and said, “I going to make a
telephone call. You will not move from that chair until I return.
Is that clear?”

The man nodded quickly and Tay stood up,
walked out to the sidewalk, and pretended to make a call. He had no
one to call, of course, but he did need time to think.

So now he knew for sure Vince Ferrero was
keeping a beautiful woman in an expensive apartment. So bloody
what
?

Tay was almost certain Ferrero killed Johnny
the Mover, but he still had no idea why. Did Mei Lin know?
Possibly, but he doubted it. She had been involved with Ferrero’s
access to the safety box at the bank, that was true, but that
didn’t make her his partner or his pal. She was probably his
current punch and that was about it.