Umbrella Man (9786167611204) Read online

  “Hello, sir. Welcome back.”

  Tay rolled his head toward the voice and found his Sergeant, Robbie Kang, sitting in a straight-backed chair to the left side of his bed. Kang had been Tay’s sergeant ever since he came to CID. He was tall and gangly for a Singaporean and he wore black glasses that were forever sliding down his nose.

  “How bad?” Tay asked.

  “They say you’ll be fine, sir. A week or so of rest and you’ll be right as rain.”

  “Not me.” Tay lifted a hand weakly and pointed a finger in the direction where he thought the outside world probably was. “Out there. How bad?”

  Kang took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with his free hand. Tay could see now how tired he looked.

  “Bad,” Kang said. “Really bad, sir.”

  Tay said nothing. He just waited for the rest.

  “They find more bodies every day,” Kang went on, rubbing his eyes some more. “Two days ago the death toll was about two hundred. Now it’s over three hundred with several hundred missing and a thousand more injured.”

  “Two days ago? How long have I been in here?”

  “Since Wednesday, sir. The night it happened.”

  “What’s today?”

  “Saturday.” Kang put his glasses back on. His mouth formed a smile, but his eyes didn’t join in. “You had us worried there, sir. The doctor said you’d be fine, but…well, when you didn’t wake up, we all started to wonder if—”

  “What hospital is this?” Tay interrupted.

  “Changi General.”

  “By the airport?”

  “Yes, sir. Mount Elizabeth was evacuated after the explosions and Singapore General and National University were both full, so…” Kang shrugged. “It’s a good hospital, sir.”

  One hospital closed, two others full?

  Tay took a deep breath. “Tell me about it, Sergeant. Tell me what happened. Tell me everything you know.”

  So Kang did.

  ***

  There had been four explosions altogether. The first three were the ones Tay had heard standing in his garden. The fourth was the one that got him.

  As the police had reconstructed events, around 7:45 pm on Wednesday night, two white, Mitsubishi L300 panel vans had driven south on Scotts Road from Newton Circus, one immediately in front of the other. At exactly the same time, a third identical Mitsubishi van had entered Orchard Road from the west, coming from the direction of the Botanic Garden.

  No one paid much attention to any of the vehicles. They were ordinary-looking Mitsubishi vans, identical to the hundreds of other similar vans that plied Singapore’s streets most every day. There was simply nothing memorable about them.

  The few witnesses police could find who might have remembered the vans at all described the drivers in widely varying ways. Young, dark, and ordinary were the three words witnesses used most often, but none of the descriptions were particularly helpful. The only thing on which almost everyone agreed was there had been no one visible in any of the vans except the drivers, although one elderly Chinese man had firmly insisted he had seen a second man in the front seat of the van heading for the Hilton.

  The lead van of the two driving southbound on Scotts Road turned into the driveway of the Grand Hyatt, drove straight up to the hotel’s entrance and stopped as if it were there to unload the luggage of some tour group recently arrived from the airport. The second van continued to the Marriott, which was just next door to the Hyatt. When it turned off Scotts Road into the Marriott’s driveway, it politely waited for a small band of blue-uniformed schoolgirls to cross, then pulled up a little further and halted in front of the Crossroads Bar. The Crossroads Bar was about the closest thing Singapore could muster to a genuine Parisian-style sidewalk cafe and it was a popular place. On this evening, as on most, it was jammed full of both locals and visitors who had gathered in the warm, liquid Singaporean dusk to enjoy a beer or two.

  The third van turned off Orchard Road into the Hilton’s driveway. It stopped under the hotel’s front portico and the driver cut the engine. It was only about two hundred yards west of the Hyatt and the Marriott.

  Less than a minute later, the vans parked in front of the Marriott’s Crossroads Bar and the entrance to the Grand Hyatt exploded almost simultaneously. And a few second after that, the van parked at the Hilton exploded.

  The explosive mechanism in all three vans was the same: a commercial grade gel explosive called Tovex enhanced with gas, probably bottled propane. The bombs had been constructed inside of layers of marble in order to direct the maximum force of the blasts directly upward into the structure of each hotel. They weren’t particularly sophisticated devices — not much different from the truck bomb that destroyed the American Marine Corps barracks in Beirut almost thirty years before — but they were still extraordinarily lethal.

  The positioning of the three bombs and the use of the marble slabs to direct the blasts had been almost perfect. The explosions cracked the Marriott like an egg, peeled the front off the Grand Hyatt, and gutted the Hilton. The intersection of Orchard and Scotts Roads disappeared in a cloud of smoke and a storm of debris.

  The fourth explosion didn’t occur for another ninety minutes, not until hundreds of civilian and military personnel had gathered in the area and were clawing desperately at the rubble in an ultimately futile search for survivors. That explosion, too, originated in a Mitsubishi L300 panel van, but this van had been parked for some time in the loading dock just underneath the ION Orchard shopping mall. That blast travelled upward just as the explosions at the three hotels had. For hundreds of yards around, it turned the debris from the hotel blasts into a lethal tornado that shredded whatever human flesh it encountered.

  ***

  “Who did it?” Tay asked.

  Kang took a deep breath and let it out again. “We don’t know, sir.”

  “No claims of responsibility yet?”

  “No, sir. None.”

  Why would anybody have wanted to set off four truck bombs in Singapore? Tay asked himself. What had his tiny little country done to anyone that would cause them to retaliate against innocent people just going about their daily business?

  Well, he knew the answer to that. Nothing. Singapore had done nothing.

  No country was safe anymore. Not even an insignificant place like Singapore.

  “Who’s in charge of the investigation?”

  “The Commissioner of Police.”

  Tay looked at Kang in surprise. “Really?”

  “I’m not sure, sir. That’s the official story, but I know it’s probably not true.”

  The security establishment in Singapore was ferociously efficient and the police were only the visible part of it. The police force was a part of the Ministry of Home Affairs, but the really heavy hitter was another part of the Ministry of Home Affairs called the Internal Security Division. ISD was officially acknowledged to exist, but that was about all the public knew of it. It didn’t even appear in the Singapore Government Directory. Officially, ISD’s job was to collect intelligence and protect Singapore against threats to its internal security like espionage, terrorism, and subversion of all kinds. Unofficially, ISD was a sort of Singaporean secret police.

  “What are you telling me?” Tay asked. “That ISD is running the investigation and we’re fetching coffee?”

  Kang looked uncomfortable. He was a good policeman, but candid discussions of how power was actually wielded in the tiny island state made him uneasy. They made most Singaporeans uneasy.

  “I’m not sure, sir. Maybe you’d better ask the chief.”

  Tay said nothing. He was sure he would be doing that soon enough, of course, but right at the moment he was so tired he couldn’t turn thoughts into words anymore. He closed his eyes, just for a moment, and almost immediately he was fast asleep.

  One minute he was talking to Kang and then the next minute he wasn’t. His last thought before he slipped into oblivion was that he should have thanked Sergeant Kang f
or coming to the hospital to see him. But he hadn’t.

  FIVE

  TAY’S DOCTOR WAS an Indian whose name was Gupta. He and Tay argued every day until Tay finally badgered Dr. Gupta into letting him check out of the hospital.

  Tay kept telling Gupta he felt fine and that his hearing had come back and was perfectly normal now, but Gupta lectured him on the hidden effects of head injuries and refused to release him. Gupta would have kept him there even longer, Tay was certain, but he was such an obnoxious patient the hospital wanted to get rid of him just as soon as they were absolutely certain it wouldn’t kill him.

  The hospital had insisted Tay call a friend to take him home, but he told them he didn’t have any friends. He noticed they didn’t seem surprised. Eventually they gave up arguing with him and just called him a taxi.

  Dr. Gupta equipped Tay with a bag of medications and gave him so many different instructions for taking them that Tay didn’t even try to remember what they all were. As soon as he got into the taxi, he just chucked the whole bag out the window without bothering to look inside.

  ***

  Tay knew what little food he had in the house would probably be spoiled by now and he had no cigarettes at all. The ones that had been in his pocket were gone, doubtless seized by the hospital and destroyed specifically to make his life more difficult. He told the taxi driver to take him to the Cold Storage market in Centrepoint on lower Orchard Road where he usually bought his food and his cigarettes so he could get enough stuff to tide him over for a few days.

  “Closed,” the driver said.

  Tay looked at his watch. It was only a little after five. A supermarket wouldn’t be closed at five o’clock, would it?

  “Cold Storage is closed?” Tay asked, thinking he must have misunderstood somehow.

  “Don’t know. But Orchard Road closed.”

  Tay struggled to get his mind around that. How could one of the city’s major thoroughfares be closed?

  “Orchard shut down from Napier Road all the way to Queen Street because of the bombs,” the driver went on. He twisted around and regarded Tay suspiciously. “Where you been?”

  Where had he been, indeed?

  “Just get me as close to Centrepoint as you can,” he told the driver.

  Then he leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.

  ***

  About twenty minutes later, the taxi stopped on Penang Road next to Istana Park. Tay paid the driver and walked across the small park to Orchard Road. Sure enough, the roadway was deserted.

  About a half mile to the west he could see heavy equipment and vehicles scattered in the road among piles of debris and building materials. The gathering didn’t appear particularly sinister. It just looked like somebody was building another of the huge shopping malls for which Singapore was famous and had for some unaccountable reason decided to position it right in the middle of the intersection of Orchard and Scotts Roads.

  Where Tay was, nothing moved except for the occasional pedestrian scurrying to cross Orchard Road as if it were a place they didn’t want to be caught out in the open. Tay just stood there and looked both ways in utter amazement. Traffic lanes that were normally jammed with cars, buses, and trucks no matter the time of the day or night were now utterly deserted. He thought if he lived to be a hundred — and right at the moment that concept sounded particularly unlikely to him — he knew he would never see anything like that again.

  It was only a short walk up Orchard to Centrepoint and Tay was relieved to find the Cold Storage Market was open. There was something about the market that never failed to lend him comfort, and comfort was something that was in short supply right about then. He liked the wide, clean aisles, shimmering in the blindingly white florescent light, but most of all he loved the orderliness of everything. It was almost enough to convince him there was planning and purpose in the world, and that we lived in a rational and logical universe after all. Almost.

  He bought coffee, a bag of bagels, cream cheese, a few frozen dinners, and two pints of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. Then, seized by a sudden fit of nutritional guilt, he tossed four apples and a bag of dried mangos into his basket, too. At the check-out counter he added six boxes of Marlboro Reds, which was the real reason he had gone to the market in the first place, and asked the cashier to give him several of the packs of matches he saw tucked into the bottom of the rack below the cigarettes. He could find a restaurant somewhere if he got hungry, but he hadn’t had a cigarette in over a week. Priorities were priorities.

  ***

  Tay’s house in Emerald Hill Road was just around the corner from the market so he was home in a few minutes. He took the shopping bag into the kitchen and fished out all six boxes of Marlboros and the matches. He thought about unpacking the other things he had bought, but he couldn’t be bothered so he shoved the entire shopping bag into the refrigerator and took one of the boxes of Marlboros and a pack of matches outside to his little garden.

  Stretching out on a teak lounge chair, he shook out a cigarette and lit it. The first puff was harsh and bitter and for just a moment Tay thought about throwing the cigarette away. But then the rush of the nicotine hit him and he couldn’t imagine why he would even consider doing something ridiculous like that.

  Tay finished the first cigarette and immediately lit another. For a long while, he sat and he smoked and thought about what he knew about the attack. And what he didn’t know.

  ***

  Four large and sophisticated truck bombs. A meticulously coordinated operation. No claims of responsibility. No obvious motive.

  The investigation was going to be a shit storm. ISD had no doubt already taken control and Tay imagined he and his fellow police officers would soon be reduced to running errands and fetching coffee for the people doing the real work of finding the bombers. Worse, the Americans would be right in the middle of everything, no doubt trying to take over the investigation themselves. Three American hotels reduced to rubble? The American embassy and the FBI would have already decided it was their case to solve.

  Americans seemed to think terrorism anywhere in the world was their personal territory. The last time Tay had a case in which the Americans had an interest, they had decided that was terrorism as well; and it all had been a bloody mess. His boss had wanted to give the Americans the case and walk away, but Tay knew the Americans would sweep it under a rug if they got control of it and he wasn’t about to let that happen. Eventually he had found a way to serve up a little justice in spite of the politics involved, Tay remembered with a good deal of satisfaction. Not many people knew Tay had been personally responsible for what had happened, thank heaven. But he knew, and that was all that mattered.

  Perhaps this time it would be different, he told himself. This was too big, too brutal. It was a direct attack on Singapore, so this time it had to be different, didn’t it? This time his boss wouldn’t let people walk all over Tay and his fellow policemen. Not ISD, and certainly not a bunch of Americans with no last names.

  Tay told himself that with all the conviction he could muster. There was even, he honestly thought, at least some remote possibility he might be right.

  Tay smoked quietly and looked around his garden. The brick pavers were littered with pieces of plant debris. Several huge, flat leaves had broken off his banana trees and hung grotesquely from their stalks. There must have been a storm while he slept in the hospital, Tay thought. He wondered why Kang hadn’t mentioned it.

  It occurred to Tay then that he was in the same spot where he had been when everything had begun, at least for him. He had been in this very spot in his garden when he heard the sounds he couldn’t identify, the sounds that turned out to be the three huge truck bombs obliterating the Marriott, the Hyatt, and the Hilton.

  And now he was back in the same place and, but for some broken limbs and scattered leaves, everything was exactly the same for him now as it had been then.

  Except, of course, it wasn’t.

  Thing
s would never be the same again for anyone in Singapore.

  ***

  Tay didn’t go inside until it was dark. When he finally did, he searched through the kitchen cabinets until he found a bottle of Bushmills he remembered he had and an unopened bottle of mineral water. He poured a couple of fingers of each into a glass, then he took the glass into the living room with him, settled into a brown leather club chair, and lit another cigarette.

  He sat like that for a long time, sipping the whiskey and smoking, and when he was finished he went to bed.

  ***

  Tay had no idea what time it was when he eventually slipped off to sleep, but he woke in the night to the sound of rain splashing against his windows and bouncing off the brick pavers in his garden.

  He had just had that dream again.

  There had been lights. There were always lights. They swirled in the air likes pieces of a shattered mirror propelled by a whirlwind. And his mother had spoken to him from somewhere outside in the rain.

  It was a dream he had had several times since his mother died, but when he woke he could never remember what she had said to him. Nothing good, he imagined. His mother had never been happy with his career choice and after he became a policeman she gradually seemed to lose interest in him altogether. After she moved to New York and remarried, he seldom heard from her at all, but to be fair she seldom heard from him either. Over the last fifteen or twenty years they had just gradually slipped out of each other’s lives. It seemed impossible that a man could lose track of his mother, or a mother could lose track of her son, but that was exactly what had happened.

  Tay figured he and his mother had communicated more in his dreams over the last year than they had in life during all of the twenty years that had come before. The only problem was, when he woke from his dreams, he could not for the life of him remember what it was they had communicated about.

  Tay hoped, at the very least, he had finally said some of the things he should have said to his mother before she died, some of the things he knew now he had wanted to say to her all along. It was a phenomenon he found himself experiencing more and more often recently. People kept dying before Tay could tell them the things he wanted to tell them. The older he got, the more distant his connections to the world became, and the more people there were whom he knew he had failed to communicate with as well as he should.