The Jade Figurine (4 page)

Tiong digested the information. Then he said slowly, “I see.”

“I take it you’re familiar with Van Rijk,” I said.

“We know of him, yes.”

“Just who the hell is he?”

“Ostensibly, a tobacco merchant.”

“Ostensibly?”

“We have reason to believe he has other, more profitable —and less legal—interests.”

“He can’t have been on Singapore long.”

“As a matter of fact, no. Less than a year.” He studied me clinically. “How did you know?”

I shrugged. “Lucky guess.”

“Yes?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Look, La Croix was pretty damned shaken up when I talked to him yesterday. He wanted to get out of Singapore in a hurry. Judging from that little incident last night, I’d say it was Van Rijk he was frightened of. And that he had good cause.”

“Perhaps,” Tiong said noncommittally. “You still maintain the French national told you nothing other than his wish to hire you to transport him to Thailand?”

“I still maintain it,” I said, “because it’s the truth. Listen, Inspector, I’ve told you everything I know. I’ve co-operated with you right down the line. I’m sorry La Croix is dead—he was a lot of things, maybe, but he was also something of a friend of mine once—and I’d like to see you get your hands on whoever killed him. I know the kind of reputation I’ve got with you, and there’s nothing I can do to change it—except to stay clean the way I’ve done for the last two years. Am I making my position clear?”

“Quite clear, Mr. Connell.”

“Fine. Now if there’s nothing else, I’d like to get dressed. I have to be at work in less than an hour.”

“You are employed where currently?”

“Harry Rutledge’s godown, on Keppel Road. At least for today, anyway.”

Tiong nodded slightly, studying me, and then he stepped across to the door, opened it, turned again. “You will, of course, make yourself available in the event your assistance is required in the future.”

“I’m not planning to go anywhere.”

“Then,
selamat jalan
for now, Mr. Connell.”

When he had gone, I stood there for a time in the quiet heat of the room. I had the feeling he had not quite believed me, that he thought I was holding back on something; reputations die very hard in Southeast Asia—as hard, sometimes, as men like La Croix, who help to build them in the first place. I also had the feeling that my assistance would be required again, all right.

And soon—very soon.

T
WO O’CLOCK.

The sun bore down with burning fingers on the bared upper half of my body, and the back of my neck felt blotched and raw from the
roote hond.
Thick sweat had chafed my crotch beneath the khaki trousers I wore, had formed beneath the bandages on my hands; the barbed wire cuts burned hellishly as I worked.

I set my teeth and rolled another barrel of palm oil from the deck of the
tongkang
across the wide, flat gangplank and onto the dock. One of the Chinese coolies took it there and put it onto a wooden skid. An ancient forklift—belching smoke in rancid cumulus, operated by a barefoot Tamil —waited nearby.

I rubbed the back of one forearm across my eyes and thought about the taste of an iced beer when we were through for the day. It was a fine thought, and I was dwelling on it when Harry Rutledge came out of the godown and walked over to me.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“Another hour or so should do it, Harry.”

“Well, you’ve got a visitor, ducks.”

“Visitor?”

“Bit of a pip, too, for a bloody Aussie,” Harry said. “You Yanks have all the effing luck.”

“A woman?”

He nodded. “Fetch Mr. Dan Connell, she tells me. Urgent. Now I don’t like the birds coming round here bothering my lads when they’re on the job. But like I said, she’s quite a dolly. Young, too. Never could say no to them.”

“Did she give you a name, Harry?”

“Marla, she says. Marla King.”

I did not know any woman named Marla King. “Did she say what she wanted?”

“Not a word of it.”

I frowned a little. “Okay,” I said. “Where is she?”

“My office,” he told me. “You know where it is.”

“Thanks, Harry.”

He gave me a grin. “My pleasure, ducks.”

I picked up my bush jacket and put it on without buttoning it, and then went inside the huge, high-raftered godown and threaded my way through the stacked barrels and crates and skids to Harry’s small office. There was a window set into the wall beside the door, facing into the warehouse, but the glass was speckled and dust-streaked; I didn’t get a look at the woman until I had opened the door and stepped inside.

She was sitting in the bamboo armchair near Harry’s cluttered desk, wearing a tailored white suit and fanning herself with a
jarang
sun hat. Her skirt was very short, and she had her legs crossed at the knees; they were good legs, if a little heavy, and tanned the same odd sort of coffee-with-cream color as her face and arms. Thick butter-yellow hair, worn short and shag-cut, curled under small ears like beckoning fingers. Her eyes were a kind of sea-green, shallow green; she wore too much shadow on the lids, giving the eyes a veiled look that was at the same time sensuous and too-wise. She was on the near side of thirty, but she was coming up fast.

She sat watching me as I closed the door. The red oval of her mouth was stretched into a speculative smile. “Dan Connell?” She had one of these whisky voices—distinctly Australian in accent—that would sound fine and caressing in a bedroom, but which seemed only theatrical in the hot, airless space of a godown office.

I said, “That’s right. Miss King, is it?”

“Marla King.” She lifted her right hand, with the wrist crooked down, like a Southern belle greeting a suitor. All she would have needed was a frilly dress and a mint julep.

I took the hand and let go of it again. “What was it you wanted to see me about, Miss King?”

“The
Burong Chabak,”
she answered.

“The what?”

“The jade figurine, of course.”

“I don’t think I follow.”

She laughed softly. “You’re being careful. Well, that’s natural. It
is
all right to talk here, isn’t it?”

“If the conversation makes sense.”

“I think we can arrange a deal where the
Burong Chabak
is concerned,” she said. “Does that make sense for you?”

“No.”

The smile went away, and her face took on a brittle cast, as if she were entering a transitional state between quiet patience and cold fury. “The figurine belongs to me now.”

“Does it?”

“La Croix is dead, isn’t he?”

La Croix again. For Christ’s sake! I said, “Just who are you, Miss King?”

“A friend of La Croix’s.”

“What sort of friend?”

“We had a partnership agreement.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the figurine.”

“What in hell is this figurine you keep talking about? Look, Miss King, we’re going around in circles.”

“You deny that you have it?”

“I don’t know anything about it ”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You think La Croix gave me this figurine, is that it?”

“Either that, or you killed him for it.”

I stared at her. She was the second person today who had all but directly accused me of murdering the Frenchman, and I was beginning to grow damned weary of it. Well, all right. It was time I found out what this was all about; you can only keep out of something, can only maintain your neutrality, if those who
are
involved allow you to—and nobody seemed to be willing to let me off the hook.

I said, “This figurine—tell me about it.”

“That would be pointless, under the circumstances.”

“Humor me.”

“The affair was reported in the
Straits Times.”

“I make it a point never to read the newspapers.”

She stopped fanning herself with the sun hat and leaned forward on her chair, looking up at me with greed shining like firelight in the depths of her eyes. “All right, then. Early last week, a white jade figurine—the
Burong Chabak
—disappeared from an exhibit at the Museum of Oriental Art here in Singapore. The figurine is priceless, although it was insured for two hundred thousand Straits dollars. Double that can be gotten at the right source in the South China Sea, Connell. Four hundred thousand Straits dollars.”

“And you and La Croix were the ones responsible for the disappearance of this
Burong Chabak.”

“He committed the actual theft.”

“Sure. What happened then?”

“Then?”

“How did La Croix get the figurine for himself? If you’re looking for it, the two of you had to have gotten mixed up on your signals somewhere along the line. Either that, or he tried to double-cross you.”

“Of course he tried to double-cross me!” Her hands gripped the bamboo arms of the chair, and the
jarang
hat dropped unnoticed to the dusty floor. “He was a fool, a stupid fool.”

“And so you killed him for it.”

“I killed him?” She laughed in a masculine, derisive way. “I had no idea where he was. But you knew, didn’t you? He’d been to see you.”

“How did you find that out?”

“There are ways.”

“And ways,” I said. “This is getting us nowhere.” I walked over to Harry’s desk and cocked a hip against it carefully, so as not to topple the farrago of miscellany perched precariously on its surface. “Let’s suppose I have this figurine of yours. What makes you think I’d pony it up for you? A one-way split is a hell of a lot more profitable than a two-way.”

“Quite true,” she said, and the smile was back now. She thought things were finally going to go as she’d expected. “But it’s unlikely that you have a buyer for the
Burong Chabak,
or could find one willing to pay much more than one hundred thousand Straits dollars.”

“But you do have a buyer.”

“Exactly.”

“Where?”

“In Bangkok.”

“How much?”

“Four hundred thousand Straits dollars.”

“Even split?”

“Of course. You produce the figurine and I produce the buyer. Fair exchange?”

“Sure,” I said. “If I had the figurine to produce.”

Anger smouldered in Marla King’s eyes, abrupt and barely contained. She was as unpredictable, and as volatile, as a vial of nitroglycerin. “Do you deny that you’ve got it, even now?”

I shrugged. “But maybe I can get it.”

Another change; the brightness was back in her eyes. “When?”

“I’m not sure. How do I get in touch with you?”

She smiled wisely. “You don’t. I’ll come to you.”

“When and where?”

“At a safe time and location.”

Impasse. I got a cigarette out of the pocket of my bush jacket and lit it and blew smoke at the electric punkah rotating sluggishly on the ceiling. “Tell me,” I said, “where does Van Rijk fit into all this?”

She reacted, but not in the way I had expected. The surface of her forehead crinkled, and she looked suprised and suddenly, inexplicably, unsure of herself. Blankly she said, “Van Rijk?”

“Jorge Van Rijk.”

“Who is he?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t know anyone by that name.”

“A fat, soft, well-dressed little man who travels with a pair of armed bodyguards. He’s supposed to be a tobacco merchant.”

“No. Why do you mention him?”

“He tried to pry information out of me about La Croix yesterday, and I told him to lump off. Last night he sent his bodyguards to take a couple of shots at me.”

“Shots?”

“Shots.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “How would this Van Rijk know about La Croix?”

“Maybe La Croix agreed to sell him the figurine.”

“No.” She shook her head positively. “He would have gone to the buyer in Bangkok. He couldn’t have gotten anywhere near the price in Singapore.”

“Well, Van Rijk figures in somewhere,” I said. “He knew La Croix, and he was after La Croix; it doesn’t add up that it would be for any reason except the figurine.”

“Do you think Van Rijk killed him?”

“It’s possible.”

“Then . . . Van Rijk has the
Burong Chabak?”

“Maybe.” I smiled at her. “And maybe I’ve got it. At any rate, I know where I can get it.”

She swept up the sun hat and got to her feet in a single motion. There was confusion and uncertainty in her face and in her motions, as if she didn’t know what to say or do next. She looked at me, worrying a corner of her lower lip with sharp white teeth—and somebody rapped out shave-and-a-haircut on the door.

I turned and the door opened and Harry Rutledge put his head inside. He glanced at me, fastened his eyes on the swell of Marla King’s breasts, and said loudly, “Here, here, this ain’t the afternoon tea, y’know. Sorry, miss, but we’ve got a shipment to offload.” He was smiling, but there was an edge to his voice; Harry had some Scottish blood in him, and he wanted full value for the lousy wages he paid.

“Miss King was just leaving.”

“Yes,” she said, “I was just leaving.”

“Will I see you later?” I asked her.

“I’ll call you.” She stepped past me, moved around Harry, and started away toward one of the godown’s side entrances. I went out and watched her; her hips rolled sensually beneath the tight white skirt, and the wide brim of the
jarang
hat flopped up and down like the wing of a bird about to take flight. When she had gone through the entrance, into the bright sunshine beyond, Harry looked at me a little enviously. “Love-ly,” he said, and rubbed the side of his peeling red nose with a forefinger. “Your current dolly, ducks?”

“No,” I answered. “Just the friend of a friend.”

“You ought to get next to that. She’s prime for a bit of slap and tickle. The Aussies are all bunnies, y’know.”

“Yeah,” I said.

He shook his head sadly. “You bloody Yanks have all the effing luck, I swear it.”

I said, “Yeah,” again, and then I left him there and went out into the midday heat and got back to work with the barrels of palm oil.

But I couldn’t put Marla King and La Croix and this
Burong Chabak
out of my mind. Some things made sense now. I knew what it was La Croix had been involved in, and I knew why he had wanted me to fly him to Thailand, and I knew at least part of the reason he had been killed. Poor La Croix. A petty crook in way over his head, hooked up with a green-eyed cat like Marla King. He should have known better than to get into it in the first place, and once in, he should have known better than to think he could pull off a double-cross. But La Croix’s kind never learned; they went blind and witless when you dangled big money in front of them, the same way Pavlov’s dogs began salivating at the ringing of a bell.

I wondered whose idea it had been for the theft of the jade figurine from the Museum of Oriental Art. La Croix had never been an idea man; he was a pawn, an android, somebody you programmed to carry out orders. And Marla King was too emotional, too easily flustered, to make much of a plotter. It was very possible that somebody else had put the two of them up to stealing the
Burong Chabak.
But who? Van Rijk? Marla’s surprise had seemed genuine when I’d sprung his name on her. If it was true that she didn’t know him, just where
did
he fit?