Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (20 page)

It matters because the past is not really
past. Just when you least expect it, the past returns for you. You
can never bury the past. It is always there, just waiting for you
to turn your back. And when you do, the fingers of the past rise up
out of the ground right at your feet and wrap themselves around
your ankle.

Forget Laura Ann Zimmerman.

What was bugging Tay was that he knew the
past was just on the verge of returning for
him
. It was
already teasing him with glimpses of secrets he had never known it
held. He could feel its fingers reaching for him now.

***

Duncan Tay had been his father, a man of whom
Tay now had only the vaguest memories. He remembered he was an
accountant, of course. And he remembered what he looked like. At
least he thought he did. But that was about it.

Now Tay had a picture of his father taken
more than thirty-five years ago with another man he knew had worked
for American intelligence most of his life. A man who was
apparently a skilled smuggler and who had been found dead in
Singapore, his neck broken, three days after terrorist bombings had
gutted the city. Tay might have written that off as a coincidence,
one of those odd happenstances that occasionally do occur in real
life. But after the ISD goon and his CIA sidekick turned up asking
questions about his investigation, he realized it wasn’t going to
be nearly that easy.

Then, out of nowhere, this woman tells him a
story about her long-dead father claiming that her mother, a woman
who once worked for Tay’s father, was really a spy.

What, Tay asked himself, was he supposed to
think now?

That his father was somehow connected to
American intelligence, too? That he might not have been an
accountant at all? That his accounting firm had been just some sort
of front? And if it had been a front, what had it been a front
for
?

The past. Rising right out of the ground at
his feet. Secrets Tay hadn’t even known were buried were coming
back to torment him.

***

The taxi stopped at a light just past Raffles
Place and the driver shot a quick look over his shoulder at Tay.
Tay wondered if he had spoken out loud without realizing it. He
hoped he hadn’t said something he shouldn’t.

The driver was small and dark, possibly a
Bangladeshi, and not young, probably in his sixties. When he saw
Tay looking at him, he half turned in his seat.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said to Tay, his face
wearing a beatific smile. “I am a Christian. Have you found Jesus
Christ in your life?”

Tay felt trapped. He didn’t want to be rude,
but wasn’t about to sit there and pretend to listen to the man’s
evangelical pitch. Why did people do that? He knew they meant well,
but didn’t they have any respect for his privacy? He was just
taking a cab ride, for God’s sake, and now here he was the target
of a religious pitch. Why couldn’t people just leave him alone?

Tay was suddenly aware of a strong odor of
curry coming off the man’s skin.

First a religious pitch and now this.

He didn’t want to look like a racist, but he
had to get out of the cab. The smell of curry was making him
sick.

***

Tay walked the rest of the way back to the
Cantonment Complex. It wasn’t far and it only took him about
fifteen minutes, but it was hot and humid and the exertion made him
sweat. It was worth it. Anything was better than listening to a
religious pitch from an evangelical Christian who stank of
curry.

Robbie Kang was at his desk in the squad room
and Tay waved him into his office.

“Have you got the list of entries through the
Woodlands checkpoint?”

“No, sir. Immigration says it will take
another day or two.”

“Isn’t it all in some kind of a database?
Can’t they just push a button?”

“They say they’re busy, sir. I think ISD has
them running around like crazy.”

Tay drummed his fingers on the desk.
Annoying, of course, but it probably didn’t matter. He doubted his
dead man would have entered Singapore under a passport that gave
his name as Johnny the Mover, and that was all he had. So what good
was the list of entries going to do him anyway?

***

That night at home, Tay suddenly got a crazy
idea. He resisted it at first, but then he gave in. He picked up a
pack of Marlboros and some matches and walked out to his little
brick-paved garden.

It was a nice night, at least it was by
Singapore standards which meant it wasn’t actually raining. Still,
the air was so heavy with humidity Tay thought the sheer weight of
it might cause water to start draining from the air at any moment
the way a sponge starts dripping when it can’t hold any more
water.

He walked around the garden for a minute or
two, poking at a plant here and collecting a fallen leaf there. He
was stalling, of course, and he knew it. Finally he settled himself
in one of the green-cushioned chairs around his small teak table.
Then he shook out a Marlboro, lit it, and dropped the pack and
matches on the table.

He held the first mouthful of smoke for a
moment as he always did and thought about how it tasted sweet and
bitter at the same time. He didn’t smoke because he was nervous or
because he needed something to do with his hands. And he was
reasonably sure he wasn’t addicted to nicotine. He smoked for the
same reason other people ate cheeseburgers. He liked the taste. He
figured he could quit if he wanted to and switch to cheeseburgers,
but he doubted that would make him a whole lot better off. So he
took another long pull on his Marlboro and stopped thinking about
it.

Tay smoked quietly for a moment, but the
longer he stalled the more annoyed he became with himself. Abruptly
he stabbed out his cigarette in the heavy glass ashtray sitting in
the middle of the table, then leaned back and folded his arms.

***

“Hello, Mother?” he called. “Are you
there?”

He felt like a complete idiot doing it, of
course, so the sound of his voice came out somewhere between a
whisper and a mumble, but he screwed up his courage and tried it
one more time.

“Mother? Can you hear me?”

There was no reply.

Has it really come to this?
Tay asked
himself.

Here he was, sitting in his garden on a
reasonably pleasant night, and was he enjoying a drink and smoke
and wondering about his life the way he usually did? No, he was
trying to summon up a ghost. And not just any ghost, but the ghost
of his mother.

It was ridiculous, he knew, but…well, his
mother
had
known there was some connection between the dead
guy at the Woodlands and the bombings. Somehow. He couldn’t have
hallucinated
that
, could he?

And if she knew about that, and particularly
now that he could connect the dead guy to his father, he figured
questioning his mother was the next logical thing to do. He had
talked to her, hadn’t he? So what was the big deal? He would talk
to her again.

Of course, the fact that she’d been dead for
two years raised the bar a bit in trying to work out exactly how to
do that. Raised the crap out of it actually.

“Mother? Would you answer me please?”

But all Tay heard out there in the night was
the swishing of the two big coconut palms in his neighbor’s garden
rubbing against each other in the warm breeze.

“Fuck it,” he muttered after a moment.

Then he scooped up his cigarette and matches
and stalked inside.

TAY WAS NOT an early riser. He had never
understood why such virtue attached to rising at dawn while going
to bed late implied nothing but involvement in unsavory
pursuits.

If one slept for seven or eight hours out of
every twenty-four, what difference did it make which seven or eight
hours it was? But the plain fact was it did make a difference in
the eyes of most people. Which seven or eight hours you slept was
nothing less than a reflection of your character. And the seven
hours Tay slept were ones that made his character suspect. It was
all so damned unfair. He always seemed to be on the wrong side of
these things.

He was in the Cantonment Complex just after
nine the next morning, early for him, so he was in no mood for
small talk when the young uniformed officer intercepted him before
he made it to the safety of his office.

“What is it, Corporal?”

“Excuse me, sir. I’ve been waiting for
you.”

The young man’s face was round and earnest
with large dark eyes set deep in slightly brown skin. It was the
kind of face that spoke of generations of Singaporean mixed
marriages among Chinese, Malays, Indians, and God only knew how
many other races. Tay searched it for any sign of a rebuke over his
late arrival at his office, but saw none. Of course he saw none.
Singaporeans were obedient to a fault. To rebuke someone of higher
rank, even obliquely, was unheard of.

“I’ve been ordered to bring you to Phoenix
Park immediately, sir. You had an appointment there at
eight-thirty.”

That was news to Tay. Had he forgotten? No,
of course he hadn’t. What was going on here?

The young man consulted his watch although
Tay was pretty sure he already knew exactly what time it was. “I’ll
get you there as quickly as I can, sir.”

New Phoenix Park was the real headquarters of
the Singapore Police. The Cantonment Complex housed only CID, the
Central Narcotics Bureau, and some local policing functions. New
Phoenix Park was on the north side of the city in the
heavily-secured compound of the Ministry of Home Affairs along with
some of the other agencies MHA supervised such as the Immigration
and Checkpoint Authority. Perhaps, it suddenly occurred to Tay,
Sergeant Kang’s inquiries about crossings at the Woodlands
checkpoint immediately before the murder had turned up something
interesting after all.

Tay would have liked to have an hour or so of
quiet in his own office sipping a coffee and bringing his blood
circulation slowly up to its normal speed before having to face the
bureaucrats of New Phoenix Park, but that was apparently not to be.
Still, he supposed progress was progress, no matter what the hour,
so he would take it when he could get it.

He thought briefly about asking the corporal
to stop at a Starbucks on the way across the city, but he knew that
was out of the question. The young man would probably be scarred
for life by having to deal with a conflict between his orders and a
request from a senior officer. And he seemed nice enough. Tay just
couldn’t do that to him.

***

When Tay made his entirely uncaffeinated
arrival at New Phoenix Park a half hour later, the first thing he
learned was that his assumption of progress in the investigation
had been unwarranted. His meeting was not at the Immigration and
Checkpoint Authority. It was at the Internal Security
Department.

The Internal Security Department cultivated a
certain air of mystery in Singapore. Tay had always thought it a
little silly, for example, that the identity of the Director of ISD
was kept a secret while he held his position, although after he
left office he was quickly identified so he could be showered with
congratulations for a job well done. Tay assumed he could find out
who the current director was easily enough, but the truth was he
didn’t really care.

Officially, ISD was the domestic intelligence
agency of the Ministry of Home Affairs. It was charged with keeping
Singapore safe from terrorists, domestic and foreign, and it had
extraordinary powers under the Internal Security Act to detain
people more or less indefinitely without charges. Those were
exactly the sort of powers that would never have been given to
any
government agency under American or British law, the
kind of government powers of which real democracies were deeply and
justifiably suspicious.

Unofficially, ISD was…well, Tay would just as
soon not
know
what ISD did unofficially.

Philip Goh was waiting in the conference room
on the fourth floor of Block C to which the young corporal guided
Tay. He was drinking from a bottle of water when Tay walked in just
before ten and he didn’t look happy.

“This meeting was scheduled for
eight-thirty,” he snapped.

“Not by me,” Tay said.

In the absence of a formal invitation to have
a seat, Tay picked out a chair on the side of the table opposite
Goh and settled into it. He wanted to arrange his body into a
posture that adequately reflected his contempt for Goh’s summons,
but he wasn’t entirely sure how to do that.

He also wanted to have some coffee, although
he could readily see from Goh’s expression he clearly wasn’t going
to be offered any. He thought of asking for coffee anyway, just to
annoy Goh. But Goh already looked so annoyed that Tay was pretty
sure the next stage of annoyance would involve him pulling his gun
and shooting people, starting with Tay, so he let it go.

“This case is closed,” Goh abruptly
announced.

It took Tay a moment to process that. “Do you
mean the Woodlands case?”

Goh nodded.

“What are you talking about? It’s anything
but
closed.”

“We’ve closed it.”

“
You’ve
closed it?”

This time Goh didn’t even bother to nod.

“Look, Goh, you people may be able to go
around locking up anyone you want without charges, but you can’t go
around closing CID cases. Even for ISD, that’s way over the
top.”

“Check with your boss, if you like. But the
case has been officially closed as a suicide.”

“
Suicide?
The guy hit himself over the
head with a Maglite and then broke his own neck?”

“Look, Tay, I don’t give a fuck about your
smart-ass jokes. We’ve closed the case and that’s the end of it.
It’s a matter of national security.”