Bill Pronzini: The Jade Figurine

Up again, running again. Another Malayan villa, more shouts, more lights. Down the side, over another wall, into another yard. The smell of red jasmine, of hibiscus, like perfume-drenched vomit in my nostrils. Pain. Fire in my lungs. Thunder in my ears. Run, run, run..

Another street, seen through a wet haze of astringent sweat. Across it in another diagonal. No bungalows there, no villas. A small creek, some ten feet below the level of the street, running parallel to the road on that side, half-filled with swollen, muddy run-off from the afternoon’s heavy thundershowers.

I slowed, gagging on my breath, and pawed my eyes clear. The near bank of the creek was a tangled mass of ferns and creepers and white syringa bushes. A thick, junglelike profusion of palms and mangroves and green bamboo formed a high black wall on the opposite bank. Sanctuary, escape…

I looked back over my shoulder. I could still hear the sounds of pursuit, but no one had emerged as yet from the darkness in the yard across the street. I left the road and scrambled down the bank, leaning on my left hand to try to hold my footing. But my legs went out from under me and I fell, rolling through the wet ferns toward the rushing stream of water.

I banged into a katumpagan — Artillery Plant-and heard the stamens burst with small explosions that sounded almost like infantry fire; clouds of pollen dust, like puffs of smoke, bit into my nose and eyes. Then the lower part of my body struck the water and submerged. It was cold, and the shock of it took away what little breath I had left. I clawed frantically at the vegetation on the bank, missed a handhold, and felt myself sliding deeper into the stream. My head went under. Muddy, foul-tasting water poured into my mouth, my throat, and the current carried me forward several feet before I could get my head clear and my fingers free to clutch a shrub on the bank and halt my momentum.

Somehow I managed to pull my body higher onto the bank and I lay there, spitting up water, sucking in breath, praying for just a little more strength. Finally, I was able to draw myself up, to stand swaying on the rocky bed. I looked up at the road. No one there yet, but I could hear them coming closer. I pivoted and forded the stream, my shoes slipping on the polished stones of the creek bed, and the water swirled just below my waist like clutching fingers trying to drag me off balance again.

I lurched onto the far bank, digging at the spongy earth with the hooked fingers on my left hand, and struggled upward on my knees and into the cover of the mangroves and the bamboo. Wings flapped angrily above my head as I crawled deeper into the trees and undergrowth, and a hornbill scolded me shrilly for disturbing its sleep. I glanced back once, and through the vegetation I could see one man standing across the roadway, looking both ways along it; he hadn’t seen me come into the thicket, I was sure of that.

At the bole of a tall palm I stopped finally and lay prone, my head cradled in the crook of my good left arm, wheezing and panting and crying a little from the pain and exertion. Deep silence enfolded me, broken only by the chittering of cicadas, the buzzing of mosquitoes, the occasional rustling movement of an animal or a lizard or a bird in the surrounding growth. I could still hear shouts and police whistles, but they seemed a long way off now, nothing more than dying echoes of the originals.

Time passed, slowly or quickly. I had no sense for it now. I looked once at the dial of my wristwatch, but the crystal had been smashed sometime during my flight; the hands were frozen at 9:02. I drew myself up and leaned my back against the trunk of the palm, with my legs splayed out in front of me. I was exhausted, drained, and even though the panic was gone now, my thoughts remained jumbled and confused. My tongue felt like a swollen thumb filling my mouth, half-gagging me, and my throat was parched shut. I had some feeling in my right arm-the same hellish throbbing that raged inside my head-and I wondered dimly if the wound was already infected from the dirt and the water and the digging nails of the Malay scarecrow.

I had to do something about that, and about the pulpy bruise on the side of my head, and about the stinging marks on my wrist where the langsat mongrel had sunk its teeth. But first, I needed rest, sleep, a void where there was no pain and no confusion. I could afford that now, I was safe here, they wouldn’t find me here.

Rest.

Rest…

I awoke trembling, drenched in cold-hot sweat.

I had no idea how long I had slept-been unconscious — but the silence seemed deeper somehow, the way it gets well past midnight. Mosquitoes crawled and fed on my face, and I had no strength to brush them away. The fever burned brightly inside me. Rhythmic pain pulsated in my temples, my right arm.

What now, dead man? I thought.

I had gotten away from Dinessen, and I had gotten away from Tiong and his men, and I was still free and still alive-if just barely. But where did I go from here? I was wrapped up, imprisoned, in a web of circumstance so neatly and so beautifully that there was no way out, no way to prove my innocence. Dinessen had killed Marla King, and Dinessen was dead; and I had been found with Marla King’s body to top it off. There was simply nothing I could do to convince Tiong of the truth-especially after the way I had run. He would put the whole bundle on my head, too; he would decide I had the figurine, and that I had killed La Croix, and if he was able to dig up a connection between Dinessen and Marla King, he would revise the toll upward to three murders once the Swede’s body was discovered.

By this time he would have posted men at the harbor and on the Johore Causeway and at the airport, and he would have dozens of others out combing the island for me. I was trapped on Singapore and trapped in the web, with no real choice except to keep on running. The odds were too great with any other alternative. There was the slim possibility that if I could find the Burong Chabak, find out who had killed La Croix, and lay them both in Tiong’s lap, I would be able to talk my way out of most of the jam. A prayer. But if Marla King had killed the Frenchman, I was still a loser; and if Van Rijk had killed him, I had no illusions that I could get to Van Rijk, force a confession out of him, before either he or the police got to me. And, in spite of what La Croix apparently had told Dinessen, I had no idea where the figurine was secreted. No, my only chance was to run, to pick up the pieces somewhere else once I was free of the island, to swallow the bitterness of injustice and begin all over again with a new identity and a new hope.

But before I could even think about making preparations for getting out of Singapore, I had to have my wounds attended to, and fresh clothes, and time to rest and time to think. I couldn’t stay where I was-and yet, I had nowhere else to go, no friends I could trust, no…

Tina Kellogg.

The name popped into my mind, and instantly I tried to push it away. No. No-I had no right to drag her into a thing like this, not after the way I had treated her, not in any case. Christ, she was just a kid, a bright-eyed little girl, and I could jeopardize her future by going to her, by involving her; if Tiong found out about it, he would jail her without compunction for aiding and abetting.

But Tiong didn’t have to find out. All I wanted was some medical attention from her; a place to spend the night. I would leave in the morning, and the pain in my arm, the fever, the possible infection, I needed help, I had to have help, and there was nobody else and I wanted to live, I was innocent and I wanted to live…

I knew I was going to do it.

You stop being noble and unselfish when your life is at stake-it was as pure and simple as that.