Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (39 page)

“Take two steps straight back,” Ferrero said.
“Then turn to your right and walk until you come to the wall.”

Tay did as he was told.

“Now turn around.”

***

Ferrero was standing about eight feet away
watching Tay with a half-smile on his face. He had moved Tay to the
other side of the room and had positioned himself carefully between
Tay and both of the staircases just in case Tay suddenly decided to
make a run for it.

“Handcuffs? You’ve got to be fucking kidding
me. You not only kick a door on an armed man when you’re carrying
nothing but a phone and a flashlight, but you do it while wearing
handcuffs?”

Ferrero chuckled.

“My guess is you must have been downstairs
somewhere and August tried to keep you out of the way.”

Tay said nothing.

“You should have listened to August, Tay.
You’re either the bravest man I ever knew or a complete moron. But
I’ve got to be honest with you here. My money’s on the moron
thing.”

Tay studied Ferrero’s face and he saw neither
fear nor anxiety. Ferrero looked like a man in command. And since
he was holding the gun, Tay had to admit that was pretty much the
case.

“What’s this all about, Ferrero? You broke
Johnny the Mover’s neck. You shot John August. What were you trying
to cover up? What’s all this
really
about?”

“Oh Christ, Tay, where would I even begin?”
Ferrero chuckled again. “?Draw up your chair to the edge of the
precipice and I’ll tell you a story.”

“F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The Crack Up.
I
wouldn’t have pegged you for a literary man, Ferrero.”

Ferrero laughed. It didn’t appear to Tay to
be for the effect of it, but genuinely.

“Damn, Tay, you are just
full
of
surprises. It’s a shame we can’t just hang around here and chat for
the rest of the night. We might become real friends.”

“I doubt it.”

“Why not? We’ve got a lot in common. We’re
both impetuous men who believe in ourselves. We both read
Fitzgerald.”

“Yeah, but I’m not likely to become friends
with the man who killed my father.”

Ferrero studied Tay with a puzzled expression
his face.

“How could August be your father?”

“For God’s sake, Ferrero, now who’s the
moron? My father was Duncan Tay.”

“That can’t be,” he said. “You can’t be
Duncan Tay’s son.”

Tay said nothing, which said everything.

Ferrero stared, the astonishment clear on his
face. “Tay is such a common name in Singapore it never occurred to
me there might be any connection between you and Duncan.”

Tay remained silent. He just stood there and
stared back at Ferrero.

“You know,” Ferrero started nodding his head
very slowly, “now that you say so, I can see it. That’s just
unbelievable.”

“Why did you kill my father?”

Ferrero didn’t bother to deny it or even to
ask how Tay knew. He rubbed at the back of his neck with his free
hand. But his other hand, the one holding the gun leveled at Tay,
never wavered.

“Oh man,” he said. “That was so long
ago.”

“Nevertheless, he’s still dead. Why,
Ferrero?”

Ferrero took a breath. Then he exhaled
heavily.

“Duncan, Johnny, and I started this business
together in Saigon back in the early 70’s. But Duncan got his dick
in a twist over some Vietnamese dolly bird and had it in his head
he was going to stay behind when we pulled out of Saigon right in
front of the North Vietnamese. I couldn’t let that happen. He knew
too much. He would have buried us.”

“So you buried him first. To protect your
business.”

Ferrero shrugged.

“And then forty years later, here in
Singapore, you killed Johnny the Mover, your other partner. And it
was for exactly the same reason, wasn’t it?”

Ferrero shrugged again. “There are worse
reasons for killing a man.”

“And now you’re going to kill me.”

Ferrero sighed heavily.

“I really hate to do it. It’s got to be seven
years of bad luck or some shit like that to shoot the son of some
guy you’ve already shot. But I don’t see what choice I’ve got. You
wouldn’t consider just sitting down somewhere and letting me walk
out of here, would you?”

“No. I wouldn’t.”

“Well then…there you are.”

***

Propelled by sheer fury, Tay took a sudden
step toward Ferrero and Ferrero fired a shot into the floor in
front of him. The sound was deafening.

After Tay’s ears stopped ringing, he said,
“What did you do with your silencer?”

“The silencer is on
my
gun, the one I
used on August. This gun belonged to him. I figured using it on you
and then leaving it behind would confuse everybody all to hell.
Might help keep me out of this altogether. I guess you never
know.”

***

The crash from someone kicking open the back
door startled Ferrero. He spun away from Tay toward the staircase,
but the line of heavy filing cabinets blocking his view meant he
couldn’t get a shot off at whoever had come through the door until
they made it to the top of the stairs.

That gave Tay just enough time.

He twisted his hands to his right and hauled
the Glock out of his pants pocket. He had chambered a round
downstairs and the Glock has no safety, so all he had to do was aim
at Ferrero’s broad back and pull the trigger.

That was exactly what he did.

He pulled the Glock’s trigger and he kept
pulling the trigger until the clip was empty and the slide locked
open.

WHEN KANG REACHED the top of the stairs he
dived to the floor and swept the room with the muzzle of his
gun.

He saw Ferrero down and bleeding. Then,
beyond Ferrero, he saw Tay.

“Are you all right, sir?” he screamed.

“I’m perfectly all right, Sergeant. Please
stop shouting.”

Kang jumped up, took three quick strides
toward Ferrero, and kicked the gun out of his hand. He bent down
and put two fingers against Ferrero’s neck.

“Is he still alive, Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then call this in and get an ambulance here
as quickly as you can. Make that two ambulances. There’s another
badly injured man downstairs.”

“You shot somebody else, too?”

“No, Ferrero shot the other man.”

“Who is it?”

Tay hesitated. “Just go down and check on
him, Sergeant, and get those ambulances here.”

***

Kang disappeared downstairs and Tay bent over
Ferrero and checked his pulse for himself. When he laid his hand
against Ferrero’s neck, Ferrero’s eyes suddenly popped open and he
looked straight at Tay.

“I would never have thought you had it in
you, Tay.”

“Don’t try to talk. My sergeant is calling an
ambulance. You’ll be okay.”

“No, I won’t be okay and you know it. But
don’t blame yourself, man. I’ve had something like this coming to
me for a long time.”

“Just stay quiet.”

“I don’t want you to feel guilty about this,
Tay. You were doing your job. All mankind consists of the pursued,
the pursuing, the guilty, and the tired.”

“Fitzgerald again.”

“Yeah.”

A coughing fit shook Ferrero’s and blood
sprayed out of his mouth. It spattered the worn rug on which he was
lying.

“I used to be one of the pursuing. Now I’m
just one of the tired. I’m ready for it to be over.”

Tay could hear Kang’s footsteps on the stairs
so he said nothing.

“To tell the truth, Tay, it seems fair to me
that it ended this way. You deserved it.”

Ferrero coughed again, then he fell silent.
Tay could see that he was gone.

***

When Tay rose to his feet, he saw Kang
standing in the doorway.

“Where is this other injured man supposed to
be, sir?”

“On the floor, right at the foot of the
stairs.”

“There’s no one there.”

Tay thought about that for a moment.

John August really
was
a ghost. Always
there, but never there. And now, even with two bullets in his
chest, he was somewhere else.

Who
was
that masked man?

Kang nodded toward Ferrero. “Is he dead,
sir?”

“Yes.”

“Then can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Why are you wearing handcuffs?”

Tay wasn’t sure how to answer Kang without
talking about John August, and he wasn’t going to do that. Maybe
Kang would just assume it had something to do with Ferrero,
something he might be embarrassed about, and let it go.

“It’s a long story, Sergeant, and I’m too
tired to tell it. Do you have your key?”

Kang nodded and fished in his pocket. He came
up with a cuff key and it opened the clasps. Tay lifted the cuffs
off and stood quietly rubbing his wrists.

“Can I ask you something else, sir?”

Tay didn’t say anything. He had no idea how
he was going to answer any of the questions he knew Kang and others
were going to have for him. No idea at all.

“What did Ferrero mean?” Kang asked him
anyway. “Before he died I heard him say,
You deserved it.
What did he mean by that, sir? What was it you deserved?”

Tay looked at Ferrero’s body lying on the
dirty rug in that rundown shophouse and he thought for a moment
about all the possible answers he could give Kang. But the more he
thought, the more certain he became there was really only one
answer he could ever give anyone who asked him that.

“I have no idea what he meant, Sergeant. No
idea at all.”

***

Tay pushed August’s Glock into one pocket and
the handcuffs into the other. Then he scooped his cell phone off
the floor and walked out of the room and back downstairs.

He went out through the carport and sat down
facing the street on a low concrete ledge next to the red front
door. He fished a crumpled pack of Marlboros and a book of matches
from his shirt pocket, but the first cigarette he shook out was
broken so he threw it away and took out another. It was broken,
too. He emptied the rest of the cigarettes out on the ledge and
sorted through them, but he couldn’t find even one that hadn’t been
crushed or broken.

Maybe, Tay thought, this would be a good time
to quit.

He brushed the mangled cigarettes off the
ledge onto the sidewalk, wadded up the empty pack, and dropped it
on top of them.

Then lacing his fingers around one knee, Tay
leaned back and waited quietly for the circus to begin.

THE END

The book that introduced Inspector Samuel
Tay

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WHEN HIS CELL phone rang, Inspector Samuel
Tay considered ignoring it. But then he always considered ignoring
it and he almost never did, so he answered it just as he usually
ended up doing.

The caller was a sergeant Tay didn’t know. He
told Tay the Officer in Charge of the Special Investigations
Section of CID wanted him to come the Singapore Marriott urgently.
Tay asked what was going on. The sergeant said he didn’t know.

Oddly enough, Tay was at that moment only a
few blocks from the Marriott. He was stretching his lunch hour a
bit browsing in Sunny’s, a used bookstore whose cheerful disorder
was almost an act of public rebellion in tidy little Singapore.
Sunny’s was on the third floor of Far East Plaza only a couple of
hundred yards up Scotts Road. Was that just a coincidence, Tay
wondered, or was he being summoned because the OC somehow knew he
was at Sunny’s? He doubted his personal habits were that well
known, but in Singapore you could never be absolutely certain about
a thing like that.

Tay took the steps down to street level and
walked quickly up Scotts Road. As he dodged through the sidewalk
crowds he tried not to think too much about where he was going. He
didn’t just dislike the Marriott, he loathed the goddamned
place.

The Singapore Marriott was a thirty-three
story octagonal-shaped tower crowned by a gigantic Chinese-style
roof that loomed over the corner of Scotts and Orchard Roads, the
busiest intersection in the city. The roof was no doubt supposed to
soften the building’s appearance by making it look vaguely
reminiscent of a traditional Chinese pagoda. Tay thought that was
ridiculous. What it really made the building look like was a giant
dildo. Worse, the stupid roof was green with something right at its
peak that resembled a red pom-pom. The Marriott not only looked
like a giant dildo, it looked like a giant dildo wearing a green
rubber with a red tip on it.

Merry fucking Christmas everybody
.

It broke his heart sometimes, this city of
his. Back before the Marriott had been built, there was a
traditional Chinese department store on that very same corner. It
was a glorious building, each of its five floors wrapped in
graceful, iron-arched galleries supported by tiled colonnades. Tay
remembered the mysterious air they had cast over the structure, the
way they had obscured its interior in dim shadows and enveloped it
in an unnaturally soft, almost dreamlike light. Parallel lines of
dark green shutters bordered every floor of the store and, as
Singapore’s warm winds blew in and out of the half-open windows,
the shutters clicked and clattered together with a sound that came
back to him now with absolute clarity even after almost forty
years.