Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (15 page)

The attachment between this girl and his
father was plain to Tay. As he turned the pages of the album, he
could not help but wonder if his mother had seen these photographs.
Of course she had seen them, he reminded himself. How else would
these albums have gotten into the trunk?

Tay had a feeling that all the pictures had
been made in Vietnam, although he couldn’t put his finger on the
specific reason he thought so. From his father’s age and
appearance, he would guess they had been take about 1974 or 1975,
right before his father had his heart attack. Could the office with
the flag be the office of the American Ambassador to Vietnam? Tay
went back and examined that photograph again. He had read several
photo histories of the Vietnam War and, although he couldn’t
remember the name of the American ambassador right off the top of
his head, he thought he would recognize him if he saw him. He was
pretty sure none of the people in the photograph with his father
was the American Ambassador to Vietnam during that period.

Besides, what would his father be doing
posing with the American Ambassador to Vietnam in the years right
before Saigon fell? His father wasn’t a diplomat or a soldier. His
father was just an accountant. Unless the Americans hoped to bury
the North Vietnamese in ledger sheets, he didn’t see what use they
would have for his father.

Tay was still thinking about that, and still
feeling a certain amount of embarrassment knowing what his mother
must have felt when she saw the photos of his father with this very
young woman, when he came to the final page of the album and the
world tilted sideways.

***

The last page held a single black-and-white
photograph, a 5x7 print mounted in four white photo corners. There
were three young men in the shot standing against what looked like
a concrete wall. At the far left edge of the photograph was what
might have been the beginning of a gate constructed of metal bars
set close together. All three men were dressed plainly in dark
slacks and light-colored, short-sleeved shirts. Their arms where
looped informally around each other in the way friends did when
they posed together for photographs. None of that was
remarkable.

What was remarkable was that Tay recognized
two of the men immediately.

The first man he recognized was the one on
the right side of the photograph. It was his father.

Tay knew his memories of his father’s
appearance were not really his own. He had been far too young when
his father died to have many memories of anything and so many years
had passed since then that the few he had were dimmed like old
photographs from which decades of sunlight had bleached out all the
color and detail.

He knew he recognized his father at all only
because seeing him in other photographs had created the illusion of
memory. And it was in that illusion where Tay found the only real
knowledge of his father that he realized he would ever have. With
that thought, a wave of sadness washed over Tay and he sat and
waited for it to pass. Then he turned his attention to the second
man he recognized, the man in the center of the photograph.

It was the dead man from the Woodlands.

Thirty or thirty-five years younger and forty
pounds lighter, but it was the man whose body they had found in
that shabby Woodlands apartment. Tay had no doubt about it.

He didn’t recognize the third man, the one on
the left, so he pulled the photograph from its mounts and turned it
over. To his disappointment, there was nothing on the back.

Tay turned the photograph over again and
studied the third man once more. Had he ever seen him before? No,
Tay didn’t think he had.

The man was very tall and slightly stooped.
He wore very dark aviator-shaped sunglasses with metal frames and
his dark hair was trimmed very short, so short he looked almost
military and, for all Tay knew, he was. Like his father, the third
man had one arm looped familiarly around the shoulders of the dead
man from the Woodlands. But where his father’s free arm was lifted
in a sort of half wave at the camera, the other man’s free hand
held an umbrella.

The umbrella was open and the man’s arm was
extended above his head and across his body so that the umbrella
appeared to shelter both him and the man from the Woodlands. Yet he
was wearing sunglasses, and it wasn’t raining.

Perhaps the man holding an open umbrella on a
sunny day was the source of the hilarity that was responsible for
the broad grins all three men were sporting.

But what was the joke?

And, more important, who in the world was the
umbrella man?

***

Three hours later, when the rest of Singapore
was only beginning to wake to the new day, Tay had finished his
task.

He had taken both albums downstairs to his
kitchen table and drunk more coffee while he carefully examined
every photo in both of them. Tay had searched each face in every
photograph, staring long and hard at each until he was sure, but he
found no further trace of either his corpse from the Woodlands or
the umbrella man. Their only appearance in his father’s memories
seemed to be that single 5x7 print mounted on the final page of the
album.

When Tay found names written on the back of
any of the photographs, he jotted them on a pad. Most of those from
the office had names on the back, but almost none from the Asian
location did. In particular, the backs of photographs in which his
father posed with the beautiful young woman about whom Tay was now
very curious were all frustratingly blank.

Tay looked at his pad and reviewed the
sixteen names he had accumulated. None of them meant anything to
him, but he hadn’t expected them to. He had been only twelve when
his father died. He couldn’t remember anyone his father knew or had
worked with.

Tay did remember going to his father’s office
a few times. It had been in a white shophouse with green iron
balconies that was down at the end of a narrow alley just off of
Bugis Street. That had once been a notorious part of Singapore,
world famous for the transvestite prostitutes who strutted their
wares up and down the sidewalks every evening, but both his
father’s office and Bugis Street itself had long ago been bulldozed
by the faceless men who struggled tirelessly to bury Singapore’s
past and construct on its ruins a fully sanitized future.

Tay went to the sink and rinsed out both his
mug and the coffee pot. Then he ripped the page with the list of
names off the pad and went upstairs to take a shower.

It was time to get to the Cantonment Complex.
He had a lot to do.

TAY HADN’T EVEN been in his office long
enough to throw away the accumulated flood of junk —
The
featured lunch in the cafeteria today is chicken rice!
— when
his door opened a few inches and Sergeant Kang’s head appeared.

“Have a minute, sir?”

“You’ve got an ID on the Woodlands body?”

“Uh…no, sir. No ID.” Kang hesitated. “There’s
something else I need to talk to you about.”

Kang looked uneasy, which tickled Tay’s
curiosity so he waved him into a chair.

“What’s on your mind?”

“That’s what I really wanted to ask you,
sir.”

Tay thought about that for a moment. “You
wanted to ask me what’s on your mind?”

“No, sir, I want to know what’s on
your
mind. Something’s going on that you’re not telling
me.”

Suddenly Tay was glad his desk was covered
with a fresh accumulation of paper because fiddling with it gave
him something to do while he was trying to decide how to answer
Kang.

If he had been at home, he would have lit a
cigarette, of course. The whole ritual was generally good for a
solid minute or more of downtime when he was stuck for what to say.
But even Tay wasn’t enough of a social misfit to contemplate
lighting a cigarette in the Cantonment Complex. He wasn’t certain
what would happen if he did, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if
the prime minister showed up personally and threw a bucket of water
over him, then confiscated his passport and exiled him to
Indonesia. Assuming Indonesia would have him.

“What do you mean?” Tay eventually asked Kang
when he ran out of pieces of paper to move around his desk.

Kang didn’t even dignify that with a
response. He just sat and looked at Tay and waited for him to say
something that wasn’t completely stupid.

So Tay tried again.

“Look, I’m sorry if I’ve been hard to get
along with recently, Robbie. I know everyone is under a lot of
stress, but being cut out of the bombing investigation has been
hard on me and—”

“Sir, I’m not a moron. You know perfectly
well that’s not what I’m talking about. Ever since we walked into
that apartment and you saw that man’s body lying on the floor,
you’ve been keeping something from me. You acted like you knew who
he was right off, but you’ve still got me running around like an
idiot trying to identify him.”

“I don’t know who he is.”

“You may not know exactly, but you know
something about him. What is it, sir? What is it you don’t trust me
enough to tell me?”

Tay leaned back in his chair and knitted his
hands together behind his neck.

“It’s not a matter of trust, Robbie,
it’s…”

But then Tay realized it probably
was
a matter of trust, at least of a sort, and he trailed away into a
slightly embarrassed silence.

“You’ve never really trusted me, have you,
sir? Even when you were on your own and needed help and I got it
for you. Danny Ong, Sergeant Lee, and I worked half the night on
our own time, week after week, until you apparently had what you
wanted. But you didn’t trust us enough to tell us what you did with
what we found.”

A year or so back, Tay had been trying to
find the killer of an American woman whose body had been found in a
suite at the Singapore Marriott. But he had run into a wall.
Neither his bosses in CID nor the Americans seemed to want him to
succeed. He had gone behind their backs and done it anyway, and
Sergeant Kang and two other cops who were friends of Kang’s had
done the legwork. He would never have pulled it off without
them.

“I couldn’t tell you, Robbie. I couldn’t tell
anyone.”

“Yes, you could have, sir. You could have if
you wanted to, but—”

“So what are you asking me for now? A
confession?”

“I guess what I’m asking, sir, is—”

“When people confess to you, Robbie,
sometimes they tell you things you don’t really want to know.”

“Then you’re saying I’m good enough to do the
grunt work, but not important enough to be in on the finish?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Robbie, let it go.
They almost got away with what they did to that poor woman, but
because of what you did they got the punishment they deserved.
Believe me, that’s all you want to know.”

“We worked eighteen hour days to help you,
sir,” Kang repeated doggedly. “And when you had what you wanted,
you shut us out.”

Most of the time Tay wished he didn’t have to
ask for help from anyone, but that simply wasn’t possible. Except
in the movies, Tay knew lone wolves didn’t solve cases. Blinding
flashes of insight did occur, Tay had had quite a few in his
career, but mostly police work was dogged and detailed. It took
manpower to get almost anything done.

“Do you ever wonder what makes people like us
do what we do, sir?”

“I’ve wondered about very little else for
twenty years now.”

“It’s because we believe what we do matters.
Because we believe the law matters.”

“I used to believe that, but I don’t
anymore.”

Kang couldn’t keep the surprise and
puzzlement out of his voice. “You don’t, sir?”

“Last year I found out something about myself
that changed a lot of things.”

Tay reached out and picked up a stack of
inter-office memos and moved them carefully from the left side of
his desk to the right.

“I found out I care about the law a lot less
than I thought. But I care about justice a lot
more
than I
thought.”

“I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

“That’s okay, Robbie. Sometimes I don’t
either.”

***

A silence fell after that. It was a
companionable silence, and Tay found something lurking in it that
he liked quite a lot.

After a while, Kang cleared his throat.

“I admit you’re the best we’ve got, sir. The
very best. But you’re not
all
we’ve got.”

Tay said nothing.

“You’re not in this by yourself, sir. Some of
us stuck out our necks for you before and we’d do it again. I told
you back then you’ve got a lot of friends here, but you didn’t seem
to hear me. Or maybe you just didn’t
want
to hear me. Maybe
you want to see yourself as being in this by yourself and I’m just
spoiling it by telling you you’re
not
.”

“Look, Robbie, I appreciate what you did
then, but that doesn’t mean—”

“I trust you, sir. Because I know you’ll do
the right thing. But I’m entitled to something in return. I’m
entitled to
your
trust. And I’m entitled to your respect.
I’ve earned it.”

Kang was right. And Tay knew it.

So why had he withheld so many things from
him about this investigation?

He knew the answer to that perfectly well,
too, of course. He had started withholding things from Kang after
they found the dead man at the Woodlands because the things he was
withholding felt somehow personal to him, even if he still couldn’t
figure out exactly how they could be.

He was withholding things because he didn’t
want Kang to know too much about him. He didn’t want anybody to
know too much about him. He didn’t share personal things, not with
anyone. Perhaps he should, but he didn’t.