Bill Pronzini: The Jade Figurine

Van Rijk was waiting in a large bilek dudok just off the entrance foyer. It was furnished with a mahogany desk, mahogany-and-leather settee and chairs, a mahogany-and-leather bar. The walls were inlaid, alternate-grained panels of Philippine mahogany, lined with bookshelves on one side, expensive-looking Javanese wood carvings on a second, and jade statuettes and figurines on the remaining two. The rug was Thai-crafted and intricately patterned. Thievery and violence still paid well, and still bought the very best.

Van Rijk was standing beside the bar wearing a dove-gray suit and a pink ascot and holding a glass in his hand. But his eyes were glacial chips, and there was nothing gingerbread about him tonight. He was no different now from the two guns-for-hire standing behind me; shrewd and educated, which allowed him to assume the role of leader and the whims of wealth, but intrinsically there was no difference at all.

He said to the hirelings, “The Burong Chabak?”

“No, tuan,” the Malay answered. “He carried nothing.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes, tuan.”

“And he was alone?”

“Yes, tuan.”

Van Rijk looked at me. “The figurine-where is it?”

“I don’t know where it is. If I did, do you think I would have gone to Wong Sot’s tonight without it? Would I leave Singapore without it?”

He couldn’t ignore the logic in that. He slapped his glass down on the bar and paced the Thai rug in front of it. Then, abruptly, he stopped and put his eyes on me again. “Suppose we discuss Marla King.”

“There’s nothing to discuss. She’s dead.”

“You did kill her, then. I thought so.”

“I didn’t kill her. A Swede named Dinessen killed her.”

“For the figurine?”

“For double-crossing him.”

“Then why did you kill Dinessen?”

“I had no choice. It was self-defense.”

“And in spite of all these deaths, you still maintain that you know nothing about the figurine.”

“That’s right.”

His head and upper body seemed to oscillate rigidly, as if he were undergoing a violent inner battle to maintain control of his emotions. He caught up a folded newspaper lying on the bar and came over to stand in front of me. “I think you’re lying,” he said. “You know something. You have to know something.”

“I don’t know-”

He slapped me with the paper. His face was flushed, his teeth bared; the predatory instincts had won the internal struggle. “You’ll talk,” he said. “You’ll talk.” He slapped me again, and again. “You’ll talk.”

I made a convulsive lunge at him. He scuttled backward, dropping the paper, and shouted, “Khee!” in a shrill voice. One of the hirelings hit me on the back of the neck with his forearm, and I went down onto my hands and knees with my vision momentarily out of focus. Van Rijk was spitting gutter Dutch at me from in front of the bar, like a man unhinged. The Burong Chabak was more than a profit with him; he was obsessed with it.

I shook my head and regained my vision, and I was staring at the newspaper lying just in front of me on the rug. It had fallen open to the front page, and my picture looked back at me from across three columns-a grim thing taken shortly after the crash on Penang and the death of Pete Falco. There was a headline, too, that said: EX-PILOT SOUGHT IN SLAYINGS. I started to look away, to get back onto my feet, and my eyes went over the lead paragraph of the news story below the headline.

Coldness fled along the saddle of my back, and I didn’t immediately believe what I saw. I reached out and grabbed up the paper and read the story through, my fingers tightening reflexively at the edges of the newsprint, crumpling it, tearing it. I believed it then. Facts in black-and-white. Irrefutable facts. And irrefutable implications. Jarring my mind. Connections, progressions, answers. Things that had been said, and things that had not been said, and things I had taken for granted that should not have been taken for granted at all. Complexity and treachery far exceeding my original conception.

Jesus, I had been stupid-monumentally stupid all along! The key was right there on the front page of the Singapore Straits Times, and right there, too, was my chance to clear myself with Tiong-my only chance, a chance the existence of which I hadn’t even known. All I would have had to have done was to buy an edition, but I never read the papers and the thought hadn’t even occurred to me; I had presumed to know, without consideration, what would be said. But I hadn’t known at all, I had had no idea. I was a goddam babe in swaddling clothes after two years, a sucker, a sap, a fool, and stupid, stupid, stupid..

Van Rijk had stopped shouting, and when I looked up at him he was sucking breath through ovaled lips, getting himself under control again. I left the paper on the floor and got slowly to my feet. The Malay and the Eurasian were standing one on either side of me, poised, watching me with one eye and Van Rijk with the other, waiting for instructions. I had it all together in my mind now, and I was no longer berating myself. There was still a chance for me, if I could get away from the three of them; but if I had succeeded in escaping Singapore without seeing a copy of that paper, the one chance to clear myself would have been lost completely. Blundering into Van Rijk’s trap might not have been such a bitter twist of fate after all- if I could get free. But this wasn’t the place to try it; there was a better place, a much better place.

“One last chance, Mr. Connell,” Van Rijk said thinly. “You know something and you will either tell me of your own volition, or I will allow Khee and Tulloh to extract the information. Both are expert in the art of interrogation.”

“So you’ve told me,” I said, and I let my face begin to show fear and indecision. “Listen, Van Rijk, maybe we can make a deal.”

“You have lost the opportunity to bargain.”

“You want the figurine, don’t you?”

Greed made his eyes shine wetly. “You do have it, then.”

“All right, I’ve got it. There’s no point in playing games any more, I can see that. I killed the others for it, sure, and I’ve got it cached in a safe location on the island. I didn’t want to take it to Sumatra with me because of the risk; there are too many men like Wong Sot in Southeast Asia, men who’d cut your throat for a few dollars, and if anyone found out I was carrying something as valuable as the Burong Chabak, I would have been a dead man two minutes later. I figured to get clear in Sumatra or one of the Malayan states, and then shop around for a buyer; I thought I could sell the location of the figurine as easily as the figurine itself, if the buyer wanted it badly enough.”

I watched Van Rijk’s eyes as I spoke, and he was buying it; it was exactly what he wanted to hear. He took a step forward, working his tongue over fat, red lips. “Where is it, Mr. Connell?”

“Do we deal?”

“Under the present circumstances, bargaining seems unnecessary.”

“Does it? Suppose I’m one of those men who can withstand torture? Suppose I die before revealing the location of the figurine? Where would you be then, Van Rijk?”

The room was silent while he thought that over. At length he said, “Perhaps I should listen to this deal of yours.”

“Perhaps you should.”

“Well then?”

“I’ll take you to the Burong Chabak in exchange for twenty thousand Straits dollars and safe passage out of Singapore.”

“No more?”

“No more.”

“And why not?”

I smiled tightly. “I figure it this way, Van Rijk: the odds are stacked against me, all the way down the line; you’ve got me, and there’s nothing to stop you from killing me once I put the figurine in your hands. If I ask for half or even a quarter of the value of the Burong Chabak, it’s a certainty that you’ll kill me. I know the kind of man you are, Van Rijk. But twenty thousand Straits dollars and safe passage isn’t much, and maybe you’ll honor a bargain for those stakes. I don’t want to die, and this is the only way I can see to beg off my life.”