Дональд Уэстлейк - Forever and a Death

Bennett picked up the three pages of faxed photos from the seat beside him, and studied them once again.

Jerry Diedrich. Always with his mouth open, always looking aggravated and aggrieved. The perfect look for those morons at Planetwatch.

“This is your lucky day, boyo,” he told himself, and smiled out at the endless herd of travelers, waiting for Jerry Diedrich to appear. “You’ll have no trouble pickin him out,” he assured himself, “and the next thing you know you’ll be fat and happy again, and damn well time for it, too. God bless Richard Curtis and keep him warm and content.”

Colin Bennett had started talking to himself two years ago, after the wife and kiddies left. He didn’t blame Brenda, he knew he’d turned mean and solitary after he’d lost his job, but there hadn’t seemed to be any way to break out of the pattern. Self-destructive, nasty, he’d become someone no one wanted to be around except himself, so that’s who he talked to.

He didn’t blame Curtis either, for firing him. Curtis had had damn good reason. And Curtis hadn’t even known the full extent of the mess Colin Bennett had made of things. He didn’t know a man had died.

Bennett was a construction man by trade, or had been, a big burly fellow — too large for this Honda Civic, for instance, which he seemed to wear rather than ride in — who had worked for RC Structural for nine years before he’d made his beaut of a mistake. In that time, he’d moved up from crew foreman to works manager, running the whole damn site for the engineers. In those days, he was outgoing and popular, a cheerful rowdy sort of man who claimed he got along with everybody because he looked like everybody, which was very nearly true. His father had been half English and half Malay, while his mother was half Dutch and half Chinese, and the mixture had created a big man whose squarish face featured slightly uptilted eyes, a gently mashed nose, a broad mouth and high prominent cheekbones. His ears lay flat to his skull, and his hair was straight and thick and black, now beginning to gray at the sides.

Bennett was Singapore born and bred, coming into this world when the island was still a British Crown Colony, and he could still remember the three moments of great national celebration during his schooldays, when he and all the other children filled the streets with tiny waving flags. Independence in June of 1959, then joining the Federation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963, and then leaving the Federation to declare itself a republic on August 9, 1965. By the time he was grown and ready to join the workforce, the desperate economic conditions of that republic in its early days had been successfully overcome, and Singapore was ready for the explosive growth that quickly made it a financial powerhouse among nations.

It was that growth which had first attracted Richard Curtis to Singapore, long before the question of the Hong Kong takeover. Thirteen years ago he’d opened the Singapore branch of RC Structural, with Colin Bennett among his first employees. A hands-on man, Curtis had met Bennett several times in the next years, and Bennett was sure Curtis had had a lot to do with his rapid advancement. Curtis had trusted him, and until Belize, Bennett had deserved and repaid that trust.

Belize. Well, it’s over now. Has a page been turned? Has a new day dawned?

When the phone rang this afternoon, in his shabby little apartment off China Street, Bennett had been hopelessly studying yet again the help wanted ads in the Straits Times . These days, he had one part-time job as a messenger, and another unloading trucks at a lumber yard, but the work was dispiriting and the pay meager. Still, without references...

Then the phone rang. Not knowing what to expect, and not expecting very much, he’d answered, and the astonishing voice had said, “Colin, this is Richard Curtis.”

“Mr. Curtis!” It was like getting a phone call from God, it was that impossible.

“I’m calling from an airplane,” the astounding Mr. Curtis said, “and I want to make this fast.”

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

“I’m wondering if you’re a more controlled person these days.”

“Oh, I am, sir! Honest to God.”

“If you do a little job for me, Colin, it might make me think better of you.”

“Oh, yes, sir. Just tell me what it is, sir.”

“There’s an annoying fellow from Planetwatch on this plane. Remember Planetwatch?”

“Oh, do I. Right buffoons.”

“Worse than buffoons, Colin. They can make trouble. This fellow, Jerry Diedrich, is determined to make trouble. Write that name down.”

“Yes, sir!” He already had the pen in his hand, hoping to find job offers to circle, and he wrote the name on the margin of the newspaper.

“When we hang up,” Curtis went on, “call Margaret, at my office there, tell her I said she should fax you whatever photos of Diedrich we have in the files. I’m sure there’s some, from newspaper pieces about us.”

Bennett had no fax himself, nor much of anything else, but the chemist out on China Street did, and would handle it for him. “Yes, sir.”

“Diedrich is traveling with two other people, a blonde girl in her twenties and a tall blond man of about thirty.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Our plane is to land at Singapore at six forty-five. Be outside the terminal. Find Diedrich and his friends and follow them, find out where they’re staying. Be sure it’s where they’re staying , so you’ll be able to find them again tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then come to my office at nine-thirty in the morning.”

“Yes, sir, I will. And... thank you, sir.”

So here he was, at crowded but efficient Changi, waiting in the little Honda Civic, watching those glass doors over there. In the sky, westward toward the city, the last of the rose daylight receded, and here, so close to the Straits, the air was softening, cooling from the day’s heat and humidity. The Honda’s air-conditioning had given up years ago, so Bennett sat here with the windows open, feeling the day’s sweat gradually rise from his face and the back of his neck, while over there the people kept streaming out, streaming out.

It was Curtis he saw first, the well-remembered solid bulk of the man, moving forward with that determined focused stride, following a Malay chauffeur laden down with a large suitcase and a thick garment bag, both in soft-looking tan leather. They crossed not far from Bennett, toward the line of limousines, but Curtis never looked away from the direct path of his progress, making a much straighter line than most of the pedestrians around him.

“A lesser man,” Bennett told himself in admiration, “would look around for me, want to know was I on the job. Not Richard Curtis. Richard Curtis knows what he wants to be done will be done, and that’s all there is to say about it.”

He looked away from Curtis, reluctantly, to concentrate again on the exit doors. Such a variety of persons came through those doors, a dozen races, speaking a hundred languages. Western clothing predominated, but there were saris and caftans and turbans and kaffiyehs as well, a great colorful sweep of people on the move.

Diedrich. Yes, that was him, and there was the blonde girl, “A damn pretty blonde girl,” he commented, feeling a brief wince of longing for Brenda, and saw the other one, the tall blond man, bony and angular, and said, “Now what the hell kind of boyo is that one?”

The three traveled light, the girl with no more than one fat shoulderbag, the two men each with vaguely military-looking shoulderbags and small gym bags. They joined the taxi line, and Bennett shifted into gear as he took note of the number of the cab they climbed into.

He led them out of the airport. There was only the one road, the one destination, and it seemed to Bennett he’d be less noticeable if he wasn’t behind his quarry the whole way. He had no idea, of course, if they knew about Curtis’s interest in them, but it was better to mind the details, all in all. “Mind the details, boyo,” he told himself, and felt another twinge of memory; the dam in Belize.