Bill Pronzini: The Jade Figurine

I fought my way up onto the strip and ran in a low crouch toward the outbuildings, my muddied shoes slapping wetly on the concrete. I kept my mind blank, willing forward movement. Behind me, I heard the roar of the Eurasian’s pistol, and then a muffled, cursing shout from Van Rijk. I glanced back over my shoulder. The two hirelings were at the base of the embankment, just beginning to come up. I couldn’t see Van Rijk. And I couldn’t see the spot on the access road where we had left the English Ford. The automobile engines had died, though, and I heard car doors slam, someone barking orders in Malay and English.

I swiveled my head, looking frontally again. Almost to the outbuildings now. The closest building was a long, rectangular, low-roofed affair that had probably been used to quarter duty personnel during the Japanese occupation, and for storage by the aviation company. All the glass had been broken out of its several windows a long time ago, and some of the wooden side boarding had rotted or pulled away, leaving darkened gaps like pockmarks in its facing wall. Off to one side was a much smaller, ramshackle substructure-a shed of some kind-that listed dangerously to one side, as if it were contemplating collapse.

I cut toward there, looking back again. The Malay and the Eurasian were on the runway now, two hundred yards away and running. Still no sign of Van Rijk. Police whistles sounded shrilly from the swamp jungle. There were more shouts in Malay and English, and the sounds of men fighting their way through the morass.

I stumbled around the corner of the rectangular building and along the side of the shed. A semicircular, jagged-edged opening in the wood siding yawned black, like a small cave opening. I pulled up, dragging breath into my lungs, and dropped on my hands and knees; a couple of minutes, that was all I needed. I scrambled through the opening and inside the shed.

Thin shafts of moonlight made a pale, irregular Venetian blind pattern on the debris-ridden floor. I drew myself to the front wall, to where I could see the airstrip through one of the gaps in the boarding. It was close, humid in there-a pervasive heat like that in an orchid hothouse. An odor of decay permeated the heavy air. And there was another odor, too, subtler, mildly fragrant.

Sandalwood.

I was not alone in that shed. I hadn’t been the only one to seek refuge here. And the realization of those facts brought a tight, grim smile to the corners of my mouth. It was over now, no mistake. Fate had done an about-face. First Tiong, and now, right here in the confines of this little shed-trapped here in fitting irony-was the one person at the core of this whole business, the one person I had trusted and the one person I should never have trusted at all.

Marla King.

The real Marla King.

Alias Tina Kellogg.

She crawled out of the pocket of shadow against the far wall like a black widow out of a dark cellar corner. One of the shafts of pale moonshine fell across her face, and the facade was gone completely. The trusting, pleading, naive little girl had been stripped away like an actress’s make-up, and beneath the carefully constructed mask was a hardened and amoral face etched now in thinly controlled fury.

I thought of the sense of guilt and regret I had felt at what I’d expected to be our final parting earlier that day, and the taste of my own naivete was camphor-bitter in my throat. Oh, she had suckered me beautifully, all right-down the line, from the first minute I had set eyes on her in the Old Cathay. It had been a fine performance while it lasted, played just for me, played for one reason only; but after it was over, the way it happens with so many performances, you could see the flaws in it and you wondered self-critically why you didn’t detect them at the time…

I looked away from her face, to the gun in her right hand. It was of Belgian manufacture, a Browning. 25-caliber automatic with a two-inch barrel and a checkered, hard-rubber grip. I said, “Is that the gun you shot La Croix with, Marla?”

“So you know.” Flat, cold, empty.

“Yeah, I know. I’ve known for a couple of hours now, ever since I saw a copy of the Straits Times and found out that the woman I had thought all along was Marla King was really Penny Carlisle, the mistress of a Swede named Dinessen. Once I knew that, and that the real Marla King was still alive and unaccounted for, it didn’t take long to fit things together.”

“I should have killed you today,” she said. “But I felt sorry for you, just a little. I wanted to give you a chance.”

“Some chance.”

She moved a foot to the right, to the front wall of the shed, and looked out through a gap with one eye, watching me with the other. “What’s going on out there?”

“What do you think?”

“The police?”

“And Van Rijk. Some party, isn’t it?”

The sounds of shouts, of police whistles, drifted into the shed, much louder now. I looked out at the runway. The moon overhead made it seem as bright as the grounds of the New World Amusement Park. Van Rijk’s hirelings were drawn up out there, a hundred yards away; the Eurasian had his arm extended, crouching, and even at this distance I could see the gun in his hand. But before he could use it there was a short, sharp burst from an automatic weapon-a Sten gun, I thought. The Eurasian fell, spilling headlong. The Malay veered off to the right, running in a weave. The automatic weapon sounded again. He went off the side of the embankment feet first, like an Olympic broadjumper, and disappeared from sight.

Two constables came up onto the runway from the mangroves and started toward the outbuildings. There were undoubtedly more converging through the jungle itself. As I watched the two on the airstrip, pistol shots rang out, three of them in rapid succession, and then another burst from the Sten gun. After that, the whistles and shouts ceased and the night wrapped itself in silence.

I turned my head away from the opening. “They’ve got Mikko Field covered from all sides now, Marla,” I said. “It’s all over for you.”

“Is it?”

“You can’t get out of this shed without being seen, and the rest of the police will be down here pretty soon to conduct a thorough search; they won’t overlook us.”

“I’ve still got you.”

“For a hostage? You can forget that idea. The police don’t give a damn about me.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“Face it, Marla: you’re fresh out of time and luck.”

Her teeth shone like white bone through the red wound of her mouth. “If I don’t leave here, with the figurine, you won’t be leaving either. I’ll see to that.”

“Where is the figurine?” I asked her. “Still hidden where La Croix put it? Sure. You wouldn’t have had any reason to retrieve it until tomorrow morning. That’s when Shannon is due, isn’t it? He would have told you, when you contacted him this afternoon, that he couldn’t take you out until dawn tomorrow at the earliest. He’d need time to arrange things, and there’s no lighting facilities for a night landing here; moonlight alone isn’t enough on a strip like this one, even for an experienced pilot.”

“You know all the answers, don’t you?”

“Enough of them,” I said. “Listen, even if you did manage to get away tonight, with the Burong Chabak, the police will keep right on watching Mikko Field; they’ll know you were here for a reason, and it won’t take them long to figure out what it is. If Shannon comes in as scheduled, they’ll pick him up with no trouble at all. And you wouldn’t last two days alone and on the run, Marla-not on Singapore.”

“That’s what you think, you smart son of a bitch.”

“You’re a real sugarcake, aren’t you?”