Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (24 page)

Was he really under surveillance by ISD? His
phones tapped?

That seemed a little hard to believe. ISD
wasn’t exactly a reincarnation of the Gestapo. It was just some
guys at the Ministry of Home Affairs. Okay, paranoid guys, maybe —
Tay could see that easily enough — but did ISD really go around
trying to shut up anyone who threatened to do something or say
something the government didn’t want done or said? That was a lot
harder for him to buy.

On the other hand,
somebody
had pushed
their way into his house, hit him over the head, and taken those
ledger sheets he had found in the safety deposit box. That could
have been ISD, couldn’t it?

Yeah right. And the Los Angeles police
planted the bloody glove and framed OJ.

He was taking all this way too far. ISD
wasn’t going to attack an inspector in the Singapore police just
because they wanted to see something he had found in connection
with a case. They would just ask him for it, wouldn’t they?

Still…

If ISD
did
have him under
surveillance, if they
were
monitoring his phones, wouldn’t
they have searched his house at some point, too? Like, maybe when
he was driving to JB to try and find John August?

Maybe he should look around then and see if
his house had been searched. Of course, if the searchers were any
good, he probably wouldn’t be able to tell they had been there,
would he? But then maybe he would. He was a trained law enforcement
officer, after all. He had searched an awful lot of houses and
apartments himself in his career. He would know a search when he
saw it.

Probably.

Tay stabbed his cigarette into the ashtray
next to his chair and stood up.

***

He found nothing out of the ordinary on the
first floor. He thought one of the pictures in the hall might have
been a little crooked, but he could have brushed against it
himself. That didn’t prove anything.

Nothing upstairs caught his attention. He
walked slowly through his bedroom and bathroom letting his eyes
sweep over everything. Then he went back and opened every drawer
and every closet and examined their contents.

Nothing.

He stuck his head in the first of his spare
bedrooms, but didn’t even bother to go inside. There was nothing in
the room except some old furniture. The bed wasn’t made up and the
closets and drawers were empty. Even if the room had been searched,
there wasn’t anything there that would show it.

The other bedroom that he used as a storeroom
was so cluttered it left Tay with the opposite problem. Someone
could have moved things around in there and he would never notice.
He didn’t even know exactly what was in the room, let alone where
it was supposed to be. Except for when he went through his mother’s
old trunks and found the photo albums, he hadn’t been in the room
in years.

Tay crossed the room and pulled up the lid on
the closest trunk. It was the one that held his mother’s things and
they all appeared to be exactly where they had been before. He
closed it and turned to the other trunk, the one in which he had
found his father’s photo albums.

He opened the lid and he knew immediately
that John August’s messenger had been right.

At a glance, the contents seemed to be just
as he had left them. The only things missing were the two photo
albums he had at the office.

It was the blazer that gave it away. An old
blue blazer that had belonged to his father had been folded and
laid across the ledgers. It was still there, but the collar was to
the left. When Tay had closed the trunk, it had been to the
right.

Tay stopped and thought. Could he be wrong
about that? No, he couldn’t. He could picture the scene clearly in
his mind’s eye. He had replaced everything in the trunk except the
photo albums, and then he had lifted the folded blazer off the
table where he had put it aside. It smelled slightly, and he
started to unfold it but he didn’t because he was afraid the smell
might get worse. So he had placed it back on top of the ledgers
without unfolding it.

And he had placed it with the collar to the
right.

***

Tay went back to his seat in the garden, lit
another Marlboro, and thought about what he knew now that he hadn’t
known before.

For starters, he knew somebody had been in
his house and had searched it thoroughly enough to go into trunks
in his storage room. Could ISD have done it? He didn’t want to
think so, but who else could it have been?

Okay, say ISD
had
searched his house.
What did they find? Tay couldn’t think of anything that might have
any bearing either on the Woodlands case or on the bombings. The
original ledger sheets with his father’s initials on them, the
stack of old papers that had started him down this rabbit hole, had
been taken by whoever had forced their way in after he came back
from the hospital. His father’s photo albums and the safety deposit
box key were in his desk at the Cantonment Complex.

Were they safe there? Tay wondered about that
for a moment. Could ISD walk into the Cantonment Complex, go to his
office, and search it?

The police had always been slightly
suspicious of ISD. No doubt it was much the same way the FBI viewed
the CIA or Scotland Yard viewed MI5. Would the CIA try slipping
into FBI headquarters or would MI5 attempt to search an office at
Scotland Yard? Of course not. And it was just as inconceivable that
ISD would try to search the office of a senior CID inspector at the
Cantonment Complex. If they were caught at it — and Tay was
confident they
would
be caught at it — the blowback would be
intense.

Tay took a long pull on his Marlboro and
consulted the sky again.

So what did this all mean?

ISD had ordered him to drop the case of the
dead man at the Woodlands. And now they were doing their best to
make sure he had.

What were they going to do if he
didn’t
drop it? Was he actually prepared to believe ISD
would do bodily harm to shut him down?

Tay had seen so many inexplicable things in
his years as a policeman that he was prepared to believe almost
anything was possible. Except that.

Singapore was the only home Tay had ever
known, and his illusions about it had long ago faded away. He hated
the stultifying demands for conformity, the smug authoritarianism
of the government, and the mass of the population that had
willingly traded its freedom for affluence. Most of all he hated
the political system that offered a comforting illusion of popular
government without the fact of it.

The People’s Action Party was the only
government Singapore had ever had. It had overwhelmingly won every
election since Singapore became a nation, seldom permitting the
nominal opposition to gain more than a tiny handful of
parliamentary seats. Singapore had had only three Prime Minister’s
in its entire history, two of them being father and son who
together had held the office for nearly forty years and counting.
Tay’s native land had become synonymous with order, efficiency,
cleanliness, and complete intolerance of even the slightest hint of
nonconformity.

It was ISD’s job to keep a lid on. It was
ISD’s job to prevent any threat arising to the continuation of
Pax Singapura
. Their primary tool for doing that was the
Internal Security Act which was modeled on a similar law the
British had used to prevent the growth of any meaningful opposition
in Singapore when they were in change. It permitted the government
to do a lot of things in the name of protecting the security of the
country, which in practice meant protecting the right of those who
governed it now to continue governing it as they saw fit in the
future.

Most notoriously, it permitted the government
to hold people for two years without charges and without a trial,
and then to renew their detention for another two years if they saw
fit. Section 55 was the pertinent section of the Internal Security
Act, and the government could Section 55 as many people as it liked
without anyone saying a word, because talking about it could also
be construed as a threat to Singapore’s security.

Would ISD Section 55
him
, a senior
inspector in the Singapore police? Tay didn’t think so. The
scrutiny it would bring them would be intense.

Maybe that was why August’s messenger had
made that crack about a nice quiet hit and run. Still, as far as
Tay knew, ISD did not go around physically harming other
Singaporeans just because they were doing things that might prove
embarrassing to them. They weren’t thugs. They were just guys who
maybe got a little aggressive from time to time about advancing
what they saw as the best interests of the country. And, of course,
they did tend to forget that men of good will might have honest
differences about what the best interests of the country actually
were.

Tay considered all that while he watched a
cloud chase the moon.

If August had been right about Tay being
under surveillance by ISD, had he been right about the rest of it
as well? Was ISD really trying to cover up one of the worst acts of
domestic terrorism that had ever been perpetrated in any country by
blaming it on radical Muslims in Indonesia? Were some people
that
terrified to admit the government of Singapore wasn’t a
jolly uncle unanimously loved by every man, woman, and child in the
country?

And if ISD was trying to cover up a monstrous
act of domestic terrorism, what did covering up the murder of
Johnny the Mover have to do with that? Unless, of course, August
was right about the rest of it, too, and Johnny had been
responsible for bringing the explosives into Singapore, then
murdered to keep him from talking.

***

It suddenly occurred to Tay he hadn’t eaten
anything since breakfast and he was famished, so he got up and went
inside to see if he could find something in his kitchen from which
he could make a meal. He didn’t, so he made do with a bar of
Toblerone he had forgotten was in the refrigerator. Sitting at the
kitchen table, he methodically bit off and chewed one section of
the bar after another while he thought about what was, for him at
least, the real nub of the problem.

His father.

He had a photograph of his father with Johnny
the Mover and a third man he couldn’t identify, someone he had
begun calling the umbrella man. That didn’t necessarily mean his
father had been involved in something all those years ago that had
led directly to the bombings that had ripped the heart out of his
country. But it did mean his father was connected to somebody who
worked with American intelligence. Which, of course, at least
opened up the possibility that his father, too, had been somehow
connected to American intelligence.

And what about the story Laura Ann Zimmerman
had told him about her mother being a spy? Her mother had worked
for Tay’s father. Did that mean his father was a spy, too?

Either one of those connections could have
been a coincidence, of course. But
both
of them? Tay
couldn’t buy that.

What’s more, Laura Ann Zimmerman’s mother had
died suspiciously in an automobile accident for which the reported
facts didn’t add up. And if the accident that killed her hadn’t
been accidental, did that also call into question everything Tay
knew, or thought he knew, about how his own father had died?

Tay broke the last two section of this
Toblerone bar apart and positioned them on the table right next to
each other.

On the one hand, he thought — placing the
index finger of this left hand on the left-hand triangle of
chocolate — ISD was trying to cover up a murder of a former
smuggler for American intelligence and perhaps the truth about the
bombings, too, all to serve the government’s wish to protect the
myth of Singapore as a contented country, untroubled and at ease
under the only government it had ever had.

What could he do about that? What
should
he do about that?

He should save these people from their own
idiocy by finding out the truth and making certain everyone knew
what the truth
was
. Then that would be the end of it. ISD
would have nothing to hide any longer. Some people would be unhappy
about what he had revealed, of course, but the world would continue
to spin and eventually Singapore would find its feet again.

On the other hand — Tay placed the index
finger of his right hand on the right-hand triangle of chocolate —
there were all those questions he had stumbled over about his
father. Who
was
his father? And what involvement had his
father once had in the shadowy beginnings of a road that had led
eventually to Singapore’s destruction? Did the umbrella man know?
And if he did, was the umbrella man even alive? And if he was still
alive, could Tay find him and ask him what he knew about all
this?

Tay moved his fingers and pushed the two
triangles of chocolate together to form a single rectangular
shape.

Sometimes it didn’t matter how hard you tried
to separate things, their connections survived everything you could
do to break them apart.

The truth about exactly what those
connections were in this case was out there somewhere. No matter
how deeply they had been buried, someone who wanted badly enough to
know what they were could dig them up again.

But to do that, Tay would have to stir up
that past, and that was a dangerous thing to do. You never stir up
the past if you can help it. Stirring up the past is stirring up a
hornet’s nest.

Tay knew all that. He knew it perfectly
well.

But he was going to do it anyway.

He scooped both squares of chocolate off the
table, popped them into his mouth, and went upstairs to bed.