Bill Pronzini: The Jade Figurine

I reached Geylang Road, crossed it with a stream of pedestrians at the corner light, and entered Andrews Road; Geylang was too well-traveled, and I thought that my safest course would be to take one of the narrower parallel streets. As I approached the first of these, Merapoh, one of the sleek new city buses pulled to the curb and discharged a clot of passengers. I slowed to make my way through them. In the outside lane on the street a car bearing the insignia of the Singapore Police appeared around the bus, moving without haste. There were four helmeted constables in the car, and they were watching the ebb and flow of foot traffic on both sides of the street.

I turned abruptly, instinctively, and pushed my way into a small store advertising Malay arts and crafts. The police car stopped for the light at the corner. I moved deeper into the store and pretended to examine a display of silver trinkets, watching instead Andrews Road through the shop’s long front window. The light changed finally and the car pulled ahead, still without hurry, and then disappeared from my view.

My mouth was dry, and I worked saliva through it. It could have been nothing more than a random patrol; and then again, it could be that Dinessen’s body had been found and Tiong had made a connection between the Swede and me, and a bulletin on Dinessen’s Citroen had located the car farther along Geylang Road, where I had parked it the night before. If the latter was the case, the city vehicle I had just seen wouldn’t be the only one patrolling the area. I would have to be more careful-very careful; if it had not been for that bus…

A smiling Malayan girl in a brightly colored sarong walked toward me from across the shop. I made a negative gesture with my head and moved to the door. Plenty of vehicular and pedestrian traffic, but no one and no machine with official markings. I wiped oily moisture from my forehead and went out to join the throng on the sidewalk.

Up to the corner and across Andrews Road and west on Merapoh, past the southern greensward of the block-square Royal Palms Hotel. Two blocks, three, four. My head began to ache pulsingly again, and the garish sports shirt was matted to the bare skin on my back and stomach; rancid perspiration burned in my crotch. Heat blurred the edges of my vision. I felt as if I were shambling like a drunk, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it all the way to Victoria Street on foot.

I stopped under a corner awning to rest, keeping my back to the street. A bus, I thought; I’ve got to take a chance on a bus. I waited there until one came along, and boarded it, and stood among the sweating bodies of the natives and the tourists crowded at the rear. It was oppressive, stifling in there. Nausea churned in my belly. I held onto the overhead strap and kept my eyes shut and my head down, enduring the lethargic lurch and sway of the bus.

A long time later we crossed the Kallang River and entered Victoria Street. I got off at Rochore Road, a block from Bugis Street and the teeming open-air food stalls. The thought of food increased the nausea. I bypassed Bugis Street and went along Victoria for another half-block, and there was a small theater with a huge multicolored marquee shading the sidewalk in front.

I stepped under it and up to the box office, averting my face from the old man inside the cage without being furtive about it. But I needn’t have bothered; he was a sleepy-eyed Oriental who spoke and acted like an android on low charge. He told me in a by-rote voice that there was a telephone in the restrooms, and I bought a ticket. The lobby was air-conditioned, all right. I sucked hungrily at the refrigerated air as I crossed the deserted expanse to a door marked with a Chinese character and with the Malay word Laki and the English word Men. At one of the basins I doused my head with cold water and drank a little to ease the rawness in my throat. The nausea receded. Better now, a little better. The bus ride, in my memory, seemed almost as dim and half-real as last night’s dreams.

The wall phone was just that: a wall phone, with no facilities for privacy. But the toilet was empty. I found one of the coins the old man had given me in change, and then fumbled through the Singapore directory hanging from the bottom of the telephone unit until I located the number of Wong Sot’s godown.

A voice answered in Chinese on the fourth ring. I said, “Wong Sot?”

The voice said, “Yayss?” in sibilant English. If a reptile born in China had the power of speech, it would sound just like that, I thought.

“I’m a sailor looking for a ship,” I said. Catch-phrase.

Pause. Then, “Yayss?”

“I want to go to Sumatra.”

“Yayss?”

“Tonight.”

“You ’Melican?”

“What difference does that make?”

“No diff-lence. Plice one hund-ed fifty dollah.”

“The hell it is.” Americans are prime in Southeast Asia, all through the Orient; when the natives see one coming, the price doubles. Wong Sot was no different from his more legitimate counterparts. “I know the going rate. I can pay seventy-five.”

“One hund-ed.”

“All right.” I would need a few dollars when I arrived in Sumatra, and I had no intention of giving Wong Sot all my money; but this was not the time for haggling. I could talk him down to seventy-five, I was certain, when I met him vis-a-vis. “When and where?”

“Nine o’clock. You come round heah.”

“On the river?”

“Yayss.”

I put the receiver down and went out into the lobby and bought a half-package of cigarettes from the machine there. Then I entered the darkened screening area, and there weren’t many customers. When I glanced up at the screen I saw why: Japanese Samurai warriors, in full color, swinging red-stained swords at one another in ritualistic slow-motion. I found a seat along the near wall next to one of the exit doors, slumped down, and laid the helmet and sunglasses on the empty chair beside me.

The first two hours were interminable. I watched every second of them pass on the luminescent green face of the clock recessed into the support pillar next to the screen. But it was cool in there and I was sedentary, and I began to feel as well as I had earlier. I needed to gather as much strength as I could for the crossing to Sumatra; once we were into the Straits, the crew of whatever junk Wong Sot stowed me aboard would allow me out of the hold and I could ride the decks; but twelve hours’ time hidden belowdecks was a fair estimate, and twelve hours in the stench and darkness and airlessness that constituted the bowels of a Chinese junk was no picnic for a man in the best of health, and a taste of hell for one in my condition.

The clock said 5:50.

Sleep a little, I thought, unwind a little. But it was no good. I would half-doze and then jerk out of it. I tried watching the screen, but that was no good either. I couldn’t concentrate on the bright, flickering movements of the characters-this was another Japanese film, one of those supernatural-detective things-and the English subtitles seemed to come and go so quickly that they were like subliminal messages registering in the subconscious but not the conscious mind.

A small gnawing began under my breastbone, and I remembered that I hadn’t eaten anything except for a few bites of the scorched eggs Tina had prepared; nothing of substance since the previous afternoon. The gnawing persisted, in spite of a half-hearted effort to drive it away with cigarette smoke. Hunger. Well, that was a healthy sign. A dying man is never hungry, somebody had told me once. I couldn’t remember who or where. The words had remained, but the source had been swallowed and digested by Time. I wondered if he had been a wise man or a fool. I wondered the same about myself and what I was about to do.