Bill Pronzini: The Jade Figurine

I got on my feet and put it out of my mind. It was, I thought, time for another iced beer.

The old Cathay Bar, on Jalan Barat, is one of Singapore’s many enigmas.

It is an ancient, single-story building with an unpretentious facade that gives it the distinctive look of a Chinatown tenement. Its barnlike interior is perpetually hot and stifling, even at night, and the smell of joss-perfumed incense-permeates the smoke-died air. There are scarred wooden tables scattered throughout with no semblance of schematic placement; the bar, which is set along the rear wall, ends abruptly two-thirds of the building’s width-for no apparent reason, since the other third is blank. Over the backbar and on the walls of the room, fat pink ladies, naiads in diaphanous wisps of silk, pose obscenely amid blue names-an unintentional caricature of a scene from Dante’s Inferno. Eerie blue light from tiny lanterns on each of the tables gives an odd and ethereal quality to the people and to the furnishings.

You would think, then, with all of this, that the clientele of the Old Cathay would be of a singular type-the lower, native class, perhaps, such as the habitues of the Seaman’s Bar-and that it would be relatively quiet, and never quite full even on the weekends. But you’d be wrong, and therein lies the enigma.

Inexplicably, the Old Cathay attracts almost everyone in Singapore at some time or other. On any given night of the week, you consider yourself most fortunate if you can find a place to stand, let alone sit. And if by some miraculous stroke of luck you manage to get a table, it is an unwritten but strictly adhered to rule that you share it with the other patrons. You can, as I have, find yourself sitting next to a very proper and very drunk official in the British Embassy (“The Ambassador and I were discussing the Common Market situation this forenoon; about the bloody time something was done, don’t y’think?”); or a group of middle-aged, spinsterish schoolteachers from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A., laughing nervously and casting furtive looks into shadowed corners (“We found the most marvelous wood carving today-a pair of hands, can you imagine, but they were from the Ratanakosin Dynasty, seventeenth century, and genuine, of course, I just couldn’t believe it when the man told me they were only…”); or a small, doe-eyed Dutchman with no fingers on his left hand, who will tell you, smiling proudly, that he once killed two men in a fight over a stolen pocketbook in an Amsterdam slum (“Mijnheer, I barely escaped with my life, do you know they are still looking for me and it has been ten years now…”); or a tall, handsome, splendid-bosomed Chinese prostitute, ludicrously named Gussie, who wears a brightly colored cheongsam and is adorned with every conceivable type of costume jewelry, and who smiles coquettishly with scarlet lips in a chalk-white face (“Five Straits dollars, Joe, what you say? I teach you all the tricks I know for five Straits dollars, you never be the same man again, eh, Joe?”).

The Old Cathay caters to them all-and more. They flock there, night after night, to drink tall, cold stengahs, or Malayan arrack, or gin-and-quinine, or an oily, foul-tasting and cathartic native wine, or-in my case-an iced Anchor Beer that is so cold you can taste the ice crystals. And they pay, depending upon which, outrageously expensive or surprisingly moderate prices for the privilege. I go there mainly because Anchor Beer falls into the latter category, and because the atmosphere and the people you meet are never dull.

It was midafternoon when I arrived. Even at that time, it was crowded with customers and alive with noise-the clink of glass against glass, the excited, high-pitched call of the multilingual Chinese waitresses as they shouted their orders to the three barmen, the heavy buzz of conversation. All of the tables were occupied, but I found an empty chair at a corner table. The two men there were drinking beer, and judging from their boisterous laughter and slightly thick voices, they had been at it for some time.

I ordered my Anchor from one of the waitresses, and my choice of beverage solicited immediate approval from the two men. We introduced ourselves, and they were Allenby and Wainwright, two English tin miners down from Kuala Lumpur on a holiday. We told a lot of off-color stories and traded lies about our virility with the women we had known, and the beer flowed freely. They paid for most of it; I didn’t object.

Wainwright and Allenby became very drunk finally, and they decided with much gravity that it was time they found a couple of sundals with which to spend the night. They wanted me to go with them, but I begged off and wished them luck and they staggered out arm in arm, leaving me with one full bottle of beer and a second on the way.

Their seats were taken immediately by an Irishman and his rail-thin wife, who drank whisky over ice and kept pretty much to themselves. It was almost seven then, and I thought that I would be very wise to leave if I didn’t want to show up at Harry Rutledge’s godown in the morning with a throbbing head and a queasy stomach. I was not drunk, but I did have the beginnings of a fine edge. It was such a fine edge that I decided eventually to remain where I was for a while so as not to lose it, and when the two bottles of Anchor Beer that Allenby and Wainwright had paid for were gone, I ordered another.

After a time the Irishman and his wife left, and a short, very fat man in a bowler hat and a young dark-haired girl wearing a white peasant blouse and a short multicolored skirt took their places. I thought at first the two of them were together, but when the fat man leaned over and said something in a low voice to the girl, she gave him a frosty look and told him to keep his nasty thoughts to himself. He got a very pained expression and instructed one of the Chinese waitresses hovering nearby to bring him a double gin. The girl ordered a stengah, which surprised me slightly because she did not look like the whisky-and-soda type.

I was feeling pretty friendly by then, and I edged toward the girl, smiled and said, “You don’t look like the whisky-and-soda type.”

She let me have the same frosty look she had given the fat man. “I beg your pardon?”

“Sure,” I said.

“What?”

“You can beg my pardon if you like.”

That got the beginnings of a smile. She would be, I thought, very beautiful when she smiled. She was a tall girl, finely proportioned, and her face was small and symmetrical in a dark frame of luxuriant shoulder-length hair. I couldn’t tell the color of her eyes in the smoky blue light, but I decided they would probably be gray, or maybe hazel. Her voice had a Western inflection, with faint Oriental or Polynesian overtones, and that made it difficult to guess her homeland. She was perhaps twenty-one or — two and had an air of virginal innocence about her, and if I had been fully sober I most likely would not have spoken to her at all. As they say, she was almost young enough to have been my daughter.

The waitress came by with the fat man’s double gin and the girl’s stengah. The fat man had had his courage buoyed by my limited success, and he offered, smiling, to pay for her drink. She ignored him pointedly as she opened her beaded handbag and gave the waitress two bills from inside.

I said to her, “You’re almost young enough to be my daughter.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You certainly do beg a lot of pardons.”

She studied me seriously. “Are you a bum or something?”

“Not professionally.”

“Well, you look a little like one.”

“It’s nice of you to say so.”

She took a small sip from her stengah. “Are you trying to pick me up?”

“Not at all.”