Росс Томас - The Singapore Wink

“What was it?”

“It was, ‘Once, I pay; twice, you’re dead.’”

“As you say, it’s simple.”

“Angelo understood it.”

“So everybody’s happy.”

“Everybody but Angelo. As I said, he wants something else.”

“What?”

“He wants you out of Singapore.”

“Why? I’m harmless.”

“Angelo doesn’t think so.”

“What does he think?”

“He thinks you’re in Charles Cole’s pocket.”

“And that bothers him?”

“It makes him nervous.”

“Angelo was never nervous in his life.”

Carla made an impatient gesture with her left hand. “All right, Cauthorne, we can sit here and have some more of this bright and brittle conversation, but it’s beginning to drag. Angelo won’t give me what I want until you’re gone. I don’t know the real reason why you want to see Angelo and I don’t really care. I suspect that it’s as he says, you’re Charles Cole’s heavy, either for money or because you have to. I don’t care about that either. But if you are after Angelo, I mean really after him, either for your own reasons or because dear Uncle Charlie has you in some kind of a box, I strongly advise you to forget it. You see, if anything happens to Angelo, if he were to get shot or drowned or run over, then a copy of the information he has goes to Washington and my father goes to jail which really means that he goes to his grave because prison would kill him.” She paused and stared at me again. “But not,” she said, “before somebody killed you.”

“You know, Carla, you’re really rather good.”

“At what?”

“At passing along secondhand threats. What’s more, you seem to enjoy it. But I’m not at all interested in what you say that somebody else says that they’re going to do to me because, first of all, you’re a liar — a good one — but still a liar. And second, I’m in Singapore for one reason and that’s to find Angelo Sacchetti.”

“Why?”

“Because I owe him something.”

“What?”

“I won’t know until I’ve paid him.”

“Angelo doesn’t want to see you.”

“I won’t interfere with his plans for the weekend.”

She rose and headed for the door, but turned just before she got there.

“You say you don’t like secondhand messages, but I have one more for you. From Angelo.”

“All right.”

“He said you have three days. He said to tell you that. He said you would understand.”

“What happens after three days?” I said.

She looked at me thoughtfully for several moments. “He didn’t say. I asked him, but he didn’t say. Not in so many words at least.”

“What did he do?”

“He winked,” she said. “That’s all. He just winked.”

Despite its pretensions of multi-racial hegemony, Singapore remains essentially a Chinese city. Many of its citizens have realized only recently, as history goes, that they won’t, after all, retire on their savings to a comfortable old age in Shanghai or Canton or Fukien Province or northern Kwangtung.

But these are the older Chinese and more than half of the population of what Somerset Maugham once called “the laughing city” is under twenty-one and has forgotten, or never knew, the old ties with the mainland whether it was China, Malaya or India.

However, old and young alike remember when their prime minister, the ebulient Mr. Lee, who sometimes talks of a third China, wept when he was forced to announce that Singapore was, almost overnight, because of racial and political conflict, no longer a part of the Malaysian Federation. It was then that the new republic emerged, untried and shaky, to find itself balancing alone on a political tightrope that stretched from east to west.

From what Lim Pang Sam had told me, the father-in-law of Angelo Sacchetti could make that tightrope vibrate dangerously because of his tight control over Singapore’s militant far left elements who apparently were quite willing to start a race riot at a nod from the father-in-law, Toh Kin Pui. A prolonged riot among Chinese, Malays, and Indians could wreck Singapore’s economy and crush its government. So, in essence, Angelo Sacchetti, who got his name from a box of noodles and whose father died young, with only Sonny from Chicago engraved on his tombstone if, indeed, there were one, now had the fix in at Singapore. And I had to agree with Lim Pang Sam. It seemed unlikely that Angelo Sacchetti would be heading back to the United States anytime soon.

Still there was hope for Singapore. A Lochinvar from the hills of Hollywood had arrived in town, equipped with a bad case of the shakes and the horrors. In addition, Lochinvar had the Republic’s four-man secret service on his side, providing they weren’t too busy totting up the books, and there was also a friendly smuggler standing by to lend assistance because, after all, he and Lochinvar were both Americans.

But it was an even richer scene than that, I thought There was the nervous counselor for the mob, or whatever it was called, roaming through the empty rooms of his mansion on Foxhall Road and wondering if his years of playing the informer had finally caught up with him. There was Joe Lozupone, so alone and friendless and frightened that the only person he could trust to pay off his blackmailer was his daughter, the comely Carla, whose attitude towards sex might be described as comfortably casual, and finally, there was Sam Dangerfield of the FBI who after twenty-seven years in the bureau, still seemed astonished that crime actually paid. I wondered what Dangerfield was doing that evening and I decided that he was probably drinking somebody else’s whisky.

Perhaps richest of all was the deadline — the three days that I had to get out of town. I wondered why it was three days and not four or two, or even twenty-four hours. There seemed to be only one way to find out so I took a scrap of paper out of my pocket and called the telephone number that was on it.

A woman answered the phone and she had to shout over a Stones record that was blasting away in the background. She shouted “hallo” and I asked for Captain Nash.

“Who?”

“Nash. Captain Nash.”

“Oh, you mean Snooky. Here, honey, it for you.”

“Hello, Snooky,” I said. “This is Cauthorne.”

“I thought you might call.”

“You mentioned that you had a launch.”

“Well, it’s not really a launch, it’s more of a runabout.”

“Will it get us out to The Chicago Belle? ”

“Sure. You want to go tonight?”

“I thought I might.”

“You got an invitation?”

“No.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What does that mean?” I said.

“Nothing. Just uh-huh. You on the expense account?”

“Isn’t everybody?”

“Well, we’re both Americans and all, but if you’re on the expense account—”

“How about a hundred dollars?” I said.

“U.S.?”

“U.S.”

“Tell you what,” Nash said. “I’m in Chinatown. You take a cab to the corner of Southbridge Road and Gross Street. Then get a trishaw and tell him you want to go to Fat Annie’s. He’ll know where it is.”

“All right. When?”

“Be here around eight o’clock and we’ll eat something first.”

“What’s Fat Annie’s, a restaurant?”

Nash chuckled. “It’s a whorehouse, pal, what’d you expect?”

“A whorehouse,” I said and hung up.

Singapore is never quiet really, and Chinatown, a square mile jammed with tiled-roofed buildings, seems to scream all night and all day. Packed into the mile are 100,000 persons and an old sweat who had been born in Shanghai in 1898 once told me that it reminded him more than anyplace else in the world of the China that he had known before the fall of the Chings in 1912. I suppose you can find anything you want in Singapore’s Chinatown, from an opium den to what may be the last of the wandering minstrels who will sing you a plaintive love song from the Tang for a dime. There is not much privacy there; every square foot is constantly in use and sometimes it is rented by the hour to those in need of a nap. The colors can almost blind you, and foot-high Chinese characters in searing red and gold and violet tout the merits of fresh young puppy and year-old eggs.