Дональд Уэстлейк - Forever and a Death

Would some of those people be looking for her? Would they have her picture? Would that awful man, that killer from the boat who’d chased her in Brisbane, be here now in Singapore, waiting for further orders from Curtis? He’d accidentally stumbled on her once; could it happen again? Could she be walking peacefully along a well-lit city street in Singapore and suddenly have a car stop beside her, that man appear again, with his friends?

“All right,” she said, “I’ll take the taxi.”

At the hotel, the cab was just pulling up to the curb when someone came bustling out of the gaudy entrance, waving his arm. “You have another customer,” Kim told the cabby, and climbed out, leaving the door open.

It was the man with the Polaroid camera. He hurried into the cab, looked quickly over at her, then shut the door and rolled the window up before telling the cabby where he wanted to go.

Oh, for God’s sake, I’m not snooping, she told him inside her head. What do I care where you’re going, it’s nothing to do with me. She turned away as the cab sped off, and went into the hotel, and up to her room.

The television set offered two channels in English, 5 and 12. Kim, restless, switched back and forth between the two for a while, then turned it off and went looking for the magazine she’d started reading on the airplane and never finished, a three-month-old copy of Scientific American .

At first, she couldn’t find it. She knew she’d put it on top of the free tourist magazine that had been in the room when she’d arrived, but it was no longer there. Nothing was on top of that magazine. Had she moved it somewhere else?

She searched the room, failed to find the Scientific American , then decided to see if there could be anything at all to read in the tourist magazine. She picked it up, and the Scientific American was underneath.

That’s not right, she thought. She’d never touched the tourist magazine before this second, so how could hers be under it? The maid hadn’t been in here since they’d gone out to dinner. No one was supposed to have been in here.

She searched the room once more, carefully, the drawers and the closet, and when she was finished she was sure. There was no doubt in her mind. Someone had searched the room.

The White Swallow, where Jerry and Luther were to meet Mark, was off Orchard Road not far from Istana Park, a quieter, more restrained place than many of the discos in Singapore, most of them awash with light and noise. British expats came to the White Swallow, and discreet bureaucrats and traveling businessmen. Downstairs were the dark bar in front and the dance floor in back, while upstairs was a quiet dining room.

Jerry and Luther had eaten dinner here before, but not tonight. Tonight, all they needed from the White Swallow was an after-dinner drink and a conversation with Mark.

But they only got the former.

They’d arranged to meet at nine-thirty. Jerry and Luther had arrived fifteen minutes early. They sat at the bar, a long crescent moon, its facade decorated with chrome swallows in flight. The bird theme was maintained throughout the place, upstairs and down, but most completely at the bar, where the counters and shelves along the backbar were covered with representations of swallows, brought here or sent here by customers from around the world. They looked at the birds, they drank their drinks, and at ten to ten Jerry said, “Something’s wrong.”

“Maybe he fell asleep,” Luther suggested.

“Do you think so? I’ll go phone him.”

Jerry did, and when he dialed Mark’s number he got Mark’s answering machine. He told it, “Jerry here, and where are you?”

Then he went back to Luther: “Answering machine.”

“Then he’s on the way.”

But he wasn’t. At ten-thirty Jerry said, “Maybe he thought we said ten-thirty,” but by ten forty-five that was looking untenable, too. “Something’s definitely gone wrong.”

Luther said, “We should go back to the hotel, we’ll find out tomorrow what happened.”

“This is very frustrating,” Jerry said.

“It is.”

“And worrisome.”

“That, too.”

They taxied back to Race Course Court, where the desk held two messages for them. The first was from Mark, and it read: “Empress Place 12:30 tomorrow.” The second was from Kim, and it read: “Whenever you get in, call me. I’m awake, and I want to hear everything.”

“Oh, God,” Jerry said. “ You call her, Luther, I don’t think I could go through it twice.”

Richard Curtis had many projects afoot, in many parts of the world, but his days seemed to be increasingly filled by the one project he couldn’t admit to in public. Wednesday morning was supposed to be devoted to the first consultation with the architects on the Kanowit Island construction, but there were two interruptions that morning, both having to do with this other matter, which seemed lately to be consuming more and more of his life.

Well, that was only right, in a way. Of all the projects, this was the only one that could save his life.

He’d been meeting with the architects, in the large conference room, for less than fifteen minutes, looking at the rough sketches, the general plans, placement of the airfield, the tennis courts, the offshore protected scuba area, when Margaret came in with a note: “Mr. Tian in your office.”

“Thank you, Margaret,” Curtis said, and to the architects he said, “I beg your pardon, this won’t take long, but I do have to see this gentleman.”

He left them huddling over the plans, muttering together, and returned to his office, where Jackie Tian stood at the windows, looking out. He nodded at Curtis and, by way of greeting, said, “You do like views.”

“Some of them,” Curtis said. “Sit down, Jackie, how’s Hong Kong?”

“Pestering,” Tian said, and joined Curtis at the L of sofas making up the conversation area.

Jackie Tian was a tough Hong Kong Chinese, a blunt short man with a hard-muscled compact body and heavy bony forehead, who had been an official with a rather corrupt trucker’s union when he and Curtis had first met, years ago. He’d been one of Curtis’s more useful contacts in Hong Kong, part of that web of influence and power he’d had to leave behind when the mainland bastards took over. Though the city’s new rulers had cleaned up that union pretty well, nothing had ever been proved against Tian, and he was still there.

When this plan had come to Curtis, he had known that Jackie Tian was the perfect man to put together the work on the ground. Because of various criminal convictions from his early days, Tian couldn’t get permanent residence for himself anywhere in the world outside Hong Kong (or, now, China), and he had as much reason as Curtis to hate the city’s new rulers, so he’d been very willing to listen to Curtis’s scheme, and to become an active part of it. He was the one who’d found the crews in Hong Kong, had put together the front corporations, had started the construction.

Tian didn’t know the whole scheme, of course. If Tian were to find out what the end result of all this labor was meant to be he wouldn’t for a second go along with it. He wouldn’t be able to go along with it. So he knew only what he had to know; he knew about the gold.

This was their first meeting in a month, and Curtis was anxious to know how Tian was progressing, so when they sat at right angles to one another on the sofas he said, “How are we coming along?”

“Slow,” Tian said.

Curtis frowned. “Jackie, we have to get moving on this. The longer it takes, the greater the chance somebody will notice something.”