Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (18 page)

“I don’t remember Johnny’s last name. He
moves things for us: money, weapons, people. He gets all kinds of
stuff to wherever we need it to be. At least he used to. He’s been
retired and out of the game for a while.”

“You knew him?”

“Sure. I’ve known him for ten or fifteen
years. He had a network like you’d never believe. That’s why we
called him Johnny the Mover. Nobody was better at delivering the
mail for us than Johnny.”

“Who is this
we
you keep talking
about?”

August ignored Tay’s question, which was
exactly what Tay had expected him to do.

“I haven’t seen Johnny in a few years,”
August continued instead. “He must be damn near seventy by
now.”

“Why was he in Singapore?”

“No idea. Even if I did know, I probably
wouldn’t tell you, but I don’t. Like I said, I haven’t seen him in
years.”

“How about the third guy? Who’s he?”

August glanced back at the photo. “You mean
the guy with the umbrella?”

Tay nodded.

“No idea. I’ve never seen him before.”

“You’re sure?”

August looked up with a small smile. “Come
on, Sam. I do tell the truth occasionally.”

Tay studied August and tried to decide if
this was one of those times. He was good at detecting lies, but
August was probably even better at lying. Tay couldn’t make up his
mind.

“Any idea how I could find out who he is?”
Tay asked.

August shook his head. “Maybe it’s just a
coincidence he’s in the picture. In real life, some things do turn
out to be coincidences.”

That was true enough, of course, but Tay
didn’t think this was one of those times.

The umbrella man was some kind of connection
between his father and the dead man at the Woodlands. If he could
figure out who the umbrella man was, Tay felt certain that would be
the start of unraveling all this.

But even if he did figure out who the
umbrella man was, then he still had to find him. Assuming he was
still alive.

“Piece of cake,” Tay said.

He didn’t even realize he had spoken out loud
until he saw August grinning at him.

WHEN TAY GOT to his office at the Cantonment
Complex the next morning, Sergeant Kang was waiting for him.

“I’ve got something on that accident for you,
sir.”

It took Tay a moment to figure out what Kang
was talking about since he had never been at his best first thing
in the morning, but then he remembered he had asked Kang to find
out about the accident in which Ethel Zimmerman had been killed
back in 1976.

“Does that mean you
don’t
have
anything on any of the other names I gave you?”

“They’re all such common names, sir, and it’s
been nearly forty years. I just don’t see how—”

“All right, Sergeant. Don’t whine. Just tell
me what you’ve got for me.”

Kang flipped a few pages in his notebook.

“Well, sir, the accident was on October 12,
1976. Ethel Zimmerman was driving a 1973 Mercedes north on
Woodlands Centre Road toward the causeway. She—”

“She was headed for the Woodlands?”

“No, sir. It looks to me like she was headed
to the causeway to JB. The Woodlands Centre Road was the old road
to Malaysia until the new Woodlands checkpoint was opened and then
they—”

“Never mind about all that, Sergeant. What
happened to Ms. Zimmerman.”

“It’s hard to tell all that much from the
report, sir. All it says is the car went out of control and hit a
tree. She was dead when the first fast response car got there.”

“Was anyone with her?”

“No, sir.”

“What time was the accident?”

Kang glanced back at his notebook again.
“According to the report, a call came in just after 11:00 pm. The
first fast response car didn't get there until 11:27 pm.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very fast response
to me.”

Kang said nothing.

“What were the road conditions?” Tay
asked

“I don’t recall anything special in the
report, sir. I guess they were normal.”

“Don’t guess, Sergeant. Find out.”

“Sir, how am I supposed to find out—”

“I’m sure you’ll think of a way. After all,
you’re a highly trained detective, aren’t you?”

Kang fidgeted in his chair and looked
uncomfortable.

“Out with it, Sergeant. What’s on your
mind.

“Well, sir, why are you so interested in
this? It was just an ordinary one-car accident that happened nearly
forty years ago.”

Tay ignored Kang’s question and asked another
of his own instead. “What did you find out about her family?”

Kang looked at Tay for a moment, then shifted
his eyes back to his notebook.

“Her husband died in 1982 of a heart attack.
One daughter, born 5 November 1965. Never married. She’s still
living here in Singapore.”

Tay’s eyebrows went up. That was a lucky
break. He figured he was entitled to a break every now and then,
but was always mildly surprised when he actually got one.

“Do you have an address? A telephone
number?”

Kang ripped a page out of his notebook and
passed it across the desk. Tay could have thanked him and
congratulated him on his good work in tracking down Ethel
Zimmerman’s daughter, but he didn’t.

“One other thing, Sergeant,” he said instead.
“That Woodlands apartment is only a few minutes from the causeway
to JB. Get me a list of all the male foreigners who entered
Singapore over the causeway during the twenty-four hours
immediately before the body was found.”

Kang closed his notebook and gave Tay a
baleful look. But he didn’t say a word.

***

When Kang had gone, Tay looked again at the
page from Kang’s notebook and read what was written there. Laura
Anne Zimmerman, followed by an address he thought was somewhere out
near Holland Village, and a telephone number.

Why did he think talking to this woman was
going to be any help at all? Her mother had worked in his father’s
office nearly forty years ago, it was true, but she had been only a
child when her mother died. What did he expect her to remember? He
had been almost exactly that same age when his father died, and he
could remember next to nothing about him.

Tay was beginning to get a sickening feeling
this was just a wild goose chase. Was he pursuing the idea of
talking to this woman just because he didn’t have any other ideas
to pursue, or did he really think it might get him somewhere? Tay
had to admit he wasn’t absolutely sure. Maybe if he went outside
and had a cigarette everything would become clearer.

Probably not, but he was going to do it
anyway.

Tay put the page from Kang’s notes into the
center drawer of his desk, collected his Marlboros and some
matches, and headed for the elevator.

***

As Tay walked north on New Bridge Road away
from the Cantonment Complex, he shook a Marlboro out of the pack.
He stopped, turned his body to block the breeze from the south, and
lit it with a match from a box he always carried. The act of
smoking had been stripped of all dignity by the public nannies who
gloried to instructing everyone how to live, and it was Tay’s
self-conscious act of rebellion against that always to have a box
of real matches on him. Not a matchbook of cardboard imitations
matches, not a plastic lighter, but a box of actual matches made of
real wood and sulphur. It didn’t matter to the cigarette what he
lit it with, he knew, but it damn well mattered to him.

New Bridge Road led Tay straight into
Chinatown, which was a place where he particularly enjoyed the
occasional stroll. He had always been slightly bemused that an
essentially Chinese city like Singapore had a neighborhood called
Chinatown, but then he assumed that had been done mostly to attract
tourists.

If it had, it certainly worked. Singapore’s
Chinatown was thronged year round with camera-wielding crazies of
what Tay thought to be extraordinary girth and uncertain origins.
For that reason, he generally avoided Temple Street with its rows
of preserved shophouses, the ground floors of which all seemed to
be filled with Chinese restaurants that Tay assumed sold sweet and
sour pork by the barrel. Instead, when he went out for a walk he
generally turned left on Pearl Hill Terrace and climbed slowly up
the slight hill between the People’s Park Complex and Pearl Hill
Park.

While he made the climb this time, he thought
about what he had so far, and what it meant.

***

First of all, of course, he had a dead man
who looked to be in his sixties, and the dead man had a key to a
safety deposit box stuck up his ass. In the safety deposit box, Tay
had found the accounts with his father’s initials, and that had led
him to search his father’s old things and discover the photograph
of his father with the dead man, apparently taken in Saigon just
before the city fell to the North Vietnamese.

John August had taken one look at the picture
and identified his victim as an old-time smuggler everyone called
Johnny the Mover, a man who apparently worked for decades for some
branch of American intelligence — maybe
all
the branches,
for all Tay knew — and who had presumably retired years ago.

But even John August couldn’t identify the
third person in the photograph: the umbrella man. At least he had
told Tay he couldn’t. Tay didn’t know whether to believe him or
not.

Tay’s father had been dead nearly forty years
now. And Johnny the Mover had been found on the floor of a shabby
apartment in the Woodlands, just as dead, barely a week ago. The
only person Tay could identify who had worked with his father was
dead as well. The accident sounded suspicious as hell to Tay, but
what did it mean even if he was right about that? Was he really
thinking somebody had killed his father, then a year later had
killed Mrs. Zimmerman, and then forty years later had killed Johnny
the Mover? Good Lord, what sense did that make?

It was beginning to feel like a long shot to
Tay that the umbrella man, whoever he was, was still alive. It was
beginning to feel like
no one
involved this case was still
alive.

Tay dropped his cigarette, ground it out with
the toe of his shoe, and kicked the butt into the gutter. That was
probably against the law in Singapore — almost everything else was
— but right at that moment he truly didn’t give a damn. He turned
around, jammed his hands in his pockets, and started walking slowly
back to the Cantonment Complex.

***

There was a connection of
some
kind
between Tay’s father and the dead man. Tay had no doubt of that.
But what kind of a connection was it? And had Tay ever met the
victim? He had no idea. None. Even if he
had
met him once
when he was a child, what good would that do him now in trying to
figure out who had killed him forty years later?

Then there was the other feeling Tay had, and
it was what was really driving him.

Johnny the Mover was somehow connected to the
bombings.

Tay had absolutely nothing to support his
feeling, but the sudden appearance of ISD in his office accompanied
by an American spook had left him with no doubt that it was
true.

It certainly seemed more than possible. The
man had been killed at about the same time the explosions were
ripping apart the Marriott, the Hilton, and the Hyatt. His body had
been found in an apartment near the border a few days later, one
that lay on the most direct route out of the country.

Tay was so startled to realize where that
line of reasoning was taking him that he abruptly stopped walking.
An elderly Chinese woman ran into him from behind with her shopping
basket and started muttering what Tay took to be curses in some
obscure Chinese dialect. He muttered his apology and stepped out of
the woman’s way.

Tay lit another Marlboro and thought some
more.

If he was thinking Johnny the Mover was
somehow connected to the bombings, and his father had known Johnny
the Mover, then was he thinking his father was somehow connected to
the bombings, too? No, that was nonsense. Just because his father
had known someone forty years before, and then that man had done
something terrible forty years later, it didn’t mean his father had
any connection with it. Well, not really. His father did have a
connection, he supposed, in the broadest sense of the word, but
certainly not in the sense of sharing any degree of responsibility
for what Johnny the Mover had done. If he had done anything.

All that brought Tay right back to where he
had started. He knew of only one person who might understand what
the connection actually was. That was the umbrella man. And Tay
didn’t have a damned clue how to figure out who the umbrella man
was.

So what was Tay’s very best idea at the
moment?

He was thinking of asking the daughter of a
woman who used to work for his father if
she
had known
either Johnny the Mover or the umbrella man, which really didn’t
make that much sense since, when the woman’s mother died, she had
been about the same age Tay had been when his father died. He was
already up to his ass in dead people and children who didn’t know
anything about them. What good was one more going to do him?

Still, it was all he had, wasn’t it?

Tay dropped his cigarette, ground it out with
his foot, and started walking briskly back to his office to
retrieve the page of notes Kang had given him. It sounded crazy,
even to him, but he was going to call Laura Anne Zimmerman and
arrange to talk to her. He would ask her what she remembered about
the people her mother had worked with, including his father.

If she remembered nothing, she remembered
nothing. But he had no other ideas at the moment, so why not
ask?