Suddenly at Singapore (9 page)

Those two kept close, but not too close, all the time. I did what I was told and packed. We went downstairs and stood at the reception desk, settling up with a flustered-looking head boy who was also trying to cope with the party in the dining-room. If I had wanted to send him some signal he wouldn’t have got it.

I had no gun. The quiet man knew it. My things had been searched and it’s not easy to hide a gun when you’re wearing a white shirt and fairly tight slacks.

I was thinking of Kate and de Vorwooerd as I paid over money. The fear I had pushed me towards a kind of inner panic I’d only felt a few times before. There was no shape to things, nothing I could get hold of. Had they made Kate pack like this and go out into the night?

“Ready, Mr. Harris?”

We went across the empty lounge, the bruiser making a noise, but not the other. I could never be quite sure where the quiet man was. A miner shouted with laughter and the beat of that jive pounded on. Then, from the veranda, I saw Kate’s car. It was parked at the foot of stone steps. Light came down from a porch lantern to shine on the side of her face as she sat there behind the wheel.

“Kate!”

“Don’t hurry!” the quiet man ordered.

But I went down those steps two at a time. I was almost by the car when I felt the prod in my back, a jab.

“Foolish, Mr. Harris. It was nearly the finish for you.”

“Kate! For God’s sake, look at me!”

She was sitting with her hands on the wheel, but she didn’t turn her head. Then something seemed to explode in my brain. Kuantan! I’d told her where we were going. I’d told her that back in Singapore. And no one else!

“Kate! Turn your head, can’t you? Don’t sit there like that! Say you didn’t know about this. They came on you in your room, didn’t they? You’re being forced to drive …?” I took a long, slow breath. “Say it!”

She didn’t look at me. I only saw her lips move. Her voice was quite calm.

“I’ve nothing to say to you at all, Paul.”

The muzzle of the gun was cold in my back.

“Get in, Mr. Harris.”

The car windows were down. As we moved off one of the miners came out on the veranda. He shouted:

“I say, chaps. There goes that girl. Do you think we’ve driven them off?”

I was between the bruiser and the quiet man. There was another up in front beside Kate. No one said anything. I closed my eyes.

Kuantan. I’d told her days ago. Plenty of time for her to tip them off. And it was Kate who wanted us to come away together, who’d made the decision, for whom it was so urgent. She’d needed to take the plunge. All of it leading me on gently. Even the staged reluctance coming up here.

Kate was on the story of Jeff and me, to send back to her paper. Like hell! Kate got me out of Singapore. I’d thought I was using her to do that, and hated it, hated that part.

Anger spat in my mind. This was what you got one way or the other no matter how often you went back for it. It even happened in the suburbs to the little men, the wife with her hair still in curlers, pouring your coffee and watching the toast pop up, watching her man who was once again going out into the world to fight for her via the eight-ten train. She said she hated to see you working so hard and all the time was thinking about what your insurance would bring in spread out on the markets at five per cent. That was love, that was what they offered.

I was a little luckier, none of my women had been able to produce the money nag. But I’d seen it all around me. It was virulent in Singapore, all the little men with big salaries that wouldn’t stretch, hanging on to solvency by their teeth while their wives played bridge. Their wives talked about money at bars and at club dances, a kind of theme song leading to falling hair and thrombosis.

That’s what they offered. My mind shouted it. Better to be cheated like this and get it over than have the thing drag on, while you kept polishing your little hopes. Better to be handed over to the executioner.

She’d been clever about holding me off, too, the girl who came from Cape Cod where all the spinsters were virgins.

And then I felt sick, sick from the anger and the things I’d been saying to myself.

We got to the first ferry and had to wait for it, five people silent in a car, the engine off and the lights dimmed, and the darkness pressing in all round. The man in the front offered Kate a cigarette and she took it and lit it. There was a tiny oil lamp on the ferry as it came over towards us, with a faint clanking of chains. It was hot in the car, even with the windows down, no breeze, and three bodies packed in together.

My junks would be coming up past this point as the moon was going, their diesels chugging. That is, if they got this far. There was no one to warn Kim or the old man in his house built as a refuge. Maybe there was no real need for a warning and Kim would get away again. That might be what they wanted, to see how we did it, to follow and watch and find out everything.

They might leave de Vorwooerd alone. I could hope.

The ferry touched our bank. Kate switched on the engine and eased the car down. The Japs had dive-bombed this ferry once, in the dark like this, but accurately, pasting us for about an hour, while I waited in a slit trench. A lot of men had been killed. It was something to think about, the good men who had been killed, while you went on for years, and blundered.

I had the feeling then that with Jeff gone so had my luck, as though he’d held the key which turned everything, which let me take chances and get away with them. I was out in a corridor of living on my own now, without Kate, without anything. And perhaps that was best, it didn’t leave you so vulnerable.

We left the ferry, bumping up on to the roadway again. I was certain now that the little man beside me had orders not to kill if he could help it. De Vorwooerd had been right, there were things planned for me, quite big things. The gun that nuzzled my ribs there in the car wouldn’t go off unless there was real provocation. There was a slight inhibition on the impulse to pull the trigger which I just might be able to use.

The man in front ordered Kate into a turning. His English wasn’t very good, the man obviously lacked the educational advantages which we’d been so lavish with in these parts. It could be, of course, that he spoke Dutch well.

I looked out as we bumped over a rough track. This part was like a map in my mind and I remembered the air-strip and this shattered road leading to it. There were no trees about us now, just the lalang grass, some of it as high as the car.

We’d left a lot of these air-strips in Malaya for the jungle to attack but not entirely vanquish. They sat in strange wildernesses, with about them the mouldering attap huts once used as living quarters. Everything metal like the green painted hangars had been carted away, but on this field the car headlights picked up a rusting fire cart sunk down on to rotten rubber tyres. It must have been there all of those fifteen years while I had been so busy.

I recognised the plane. A lot of them had been sold as part of the British export drive, jobs with a wonderful angle of climb and able to land almost anywhere. The headlights showed that the plane was painted jungle green, but with no visible markings. It was a fifteen seater. I wondered if it had come in with all its seats occupied, and if it had, where the rest of the men were now. There were only three standing by the aircraft.

We went close to it. Kate was driving like someone who doesn’t need orders what to do, only has to be told a turning sometimes. She brought the car right in, almost to an open door in the plane’s belly.

I needed a diversion, and had to make it myself. The quiet man had heaved himself out and was waiting for me with the gun. I put my hands on the back of Kate’s seat and pulled myself forward, looking at the back of her head as I shouted:

“Maybe you’ll get insomnia back on Cape Cod. Maybe you’ll sweat this out a lot of nights!”

It might have been the anger in my voice, the real anger, which made the quiet man do what I wanted. He stepped in and clouted me with the butt of his pistol, and even moving my head quickly I got half the force of that, a crack at the base of my neck. But it meant he didn’t have a finger on the trigger. I hit him in the stomach, as high up as I could get.

Then I ran for the lalang grass. There was a moment I could use before their reaction, a moment of shouting and blundering about the car. If one of them had a torch in his pocket I’d had it, I knew that. But I got to the grass, falling into it, before the lights came on.

There was no wild firing behind me. They didn’t waste their bullets, these ones, or maybe they didn’t want the noise. I was safe enough in there for the moment, threshing my way, hidden.

Lalang cuts when you move through it fast, the long blades of it with an almost knife-like rigidity, slashing at you. You use your hands and feel them gashed at once.

I stopped after a bit and it was the silence beyond which made me do that. They weren’t coming in after me, just placing my position by the sounds I made. It brought me to a kind of panic that, the man on the edge of his escape who isn’t getting the reaction he expects from his pursuers. I tried to control my breathing and see a plan.

It ought to be lalang almost to the highway, then a bit of mangrove I could splash my way through. I would cross the road and work south, then reach the river bank down below the ferry. With luck I could stop Kim’s junks coming up.

Enough of a plan to be going on with. Let them listen, damn them! I could move as fast as they could through this, faster. And I had a good start.

It was very still, and dark. But I could hear the river at a distance, as a guide. The current is fast and it makes an endless low mumbling. I put down my head and went on, fast, using my closed fists against the grass, not really seeing where I was going at all, not caring. There was still no noise behind me, no shouts and this was somehow frightening, though I tried to keep that out of my mind.

The grass stopped and I fell. I hadn’t thought about the irrigation ditch which would almost certainly parallel the air-strip, the whole length. I went down into it, heavily.

There was a light somewhere and the quiet man’s voice saying:

“If you move, Mr. Harris, I’ll let you have every bullet in this gun.”

I didn’t move, not until they were ready that I should, four of them standing over me looking down. I got up then and limped down the ditch feeling the anger that comes to a fool.

I don’t know where Kate was when they marched me past the car, I looked for her behind the wheel but she wasn’t there. In the plane they tied me into a seat by a window and ten minutes later we took off in the lights from Kate’s Ford shining down over the cracked surface of the landing-strip.

I
N THE PLANE
there was plenty of time to think, too much. I thought about Jeff and de Vorwooerd and Booney and Ruth, diving back into my life, but beyond that point which let Kate in. Kate mustn’t come in again. There wasn’t anything about her left, not even the anger. I had the feeling that in what was to come I wasn’t to care much about anything, just keep it all pushed away. That way they could only really get at your body, which was what I was expecting now. You could hope to keep the mind not its slave. A thin hope sometimes.

I was well trussed up, my feet and hands bound, with a simple padlock fastening the safety belt which held me into the seat. My seat was up front in the cabin, near the pilot’s door, and behind me were four men playing cards. It sounded like poker, a game apparently not repudiated for all its Western origins.

We bumbled along at about a hundred and sixty, up over the main range and then into moonlight over the plain beyond, with a pewtercoloured sea waiting for us. There were junks moving on that sea, as innocent looking as mine. Sumatra came slowly up at us, a huge island a thousand miles long. We went over the flat lands behind the coast towards mountains, as far as I could estimate in the direction of the great Toba lake.

The plane had never been up more than about six thousand, but when we started to drop from this the poker game stopped. Talk stopped, too. I got the feeling of tension in the cabin and turned my head to see four men all at windows looking down.

It was easy to understand why when you saw the field. It was an oblong patch cut out of jungle, and clearly not long ago. The cracked tarmac at Kuantan offered reasonable landing compared with this strip.

The selling line for these planes was that they could land on any reasonable grassy bit of padang, but there wasn’t any grass waiting for us down there, just the raw red earth which looked to me still strewn with only half burned out tree roots. The pilot circled twice, banking horribly on sharp turns, then he ran in to it, as though he knew exactly what he was doing, but it seemed far too fast to me for a job with a low landing speed. Perhaps he had learned that he needed power to take off again if the third bounce was too violent.

We certainly knew when we had touched down. It was like being driven in a bus at speed straight into a road excavation. Every rivet in the machine screamed. I tried to hold my head against the seat back and nearly got my neck broken. For a moment or two, half stunned, I was only conscious of the vibration. Then a man screamed, thin and high, pure terror.

Sparks were streaming past my window. I looked out in time to see a wing tip touch, and crumple. The whole plane seemed to lift again, then slew round, with that noise of ripping metal which could so easily mean jagged pieces coming straight at you.

I shut my eyes and dropped my head on to my chest, as far down as I could get it, feeling another lift, the weight of my body suddenly thrust forward against the seat belt. There was a hideous, shattering jolt which loosened some of the chairs at the back, one of them occupied, from the howling that started up quite near me.

Then only small things went on falling and I knew we were down, even if you couldn’t call it a satisfactory landing. A sudden quick settling silence was broken by a miserable whimpering. Someone said, in Malay:

“Fire!”

At the back of the cabin they began battering at the door and my whimperer joined them, crawling past me up the aisle, which had a gradient like a mountain path.