Umbrella Man (9786167611204) Read online

  “So you think Mr. Ching is in the clear?”

  Kang hesitated. “In the clear, sir?”

  “Yes, I gather you think we should take him off our list of suspects.”

  Kang hesitate again, even longer this time.

  “He’s an eighty-three year old man, sir.”

  Tay said nothing.

  “And he’s been in Los Angeles for the last five months.”

  Tay said nothing.

  Suddenly Kang brightened. “You’re kidding me, aren’t you, sir?”

  “Yes, Sergeant Kang, I am indeed kidding you. I’m so happy you finally noticed.”

  Kang smiled uncertainly and Tay ticked off another box on Kang’s list of Singaporean national characteristics. Very little sense of humor.

  Tay took the FMB report from Kang and flipped through it. Nothing in it stuck him and he tossed it on his desk among all the other pieces of paper from which nothing had stuck him either.

  “So where does that leave you on the ID, Sergeant?”

  “Nowhere, sir. No hits on the fingerprints in our database, so he wasn’t a citizen or a PR here. And there was nothing to go on in the apartment or in his clothes.”

  “How about the neighbors? A Caucasian in that neighborhood would have been pretty conspicuous. Didn’t anyone know him?”

  “I haven’t found anyone yet, sir. But with everyone else assigned to the bombings, they won’t give me any extra manpower and I’ve had to do all the door knocking myself. I’ve only found a few people at home so far and nobody knew anything at all about a Caucasian in the neighborhood. If you could get me some more men and we had more thorough coverage—”

  “If he wasn’t a citizen or a permanent resident,” Tay interrupted, “he would have filled out an immigration card when he entered Singapore. Can’t you trace him that way?”

  “I’ve already asked for a list of all the male Caucasian entries who haven’t exited yet and the Singapore address they gave, but it’s going to be a long list. I’m not sure it’s going to be very helpful without anything to narrow it down. If he’d been carrying a wallet or something—”

  Tay abruptly slapped both hands on his desk and pushed himself up from his chair.

  “Well, better get to it, Sergeant. Sounds to me like you’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

  “Where will you be, sir? Just in case I need you.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Sergeant. You won’t need me. I’m absolutely certain about that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  TEN

  THERE WAS SOMETHING Tay wanted to do before he went home so he asked the cab driver to drop him off behind Ngee Ann City, which was about half a mile from where he lived on Emerald Hill Road.

  Walking first west and then turning north, he passed behind the closed-down Wisma Atria Shopping Mall and emerged on Orchard Road. The roadway was still closed to traffic other than that connected with cleaning up the aftermath of the bombings and a security barrier had been erected around the worst of the destruction. Tay showed his warrant card at the nearest opening in the barrier and was passed inside.

  At least I’m not on a banned list, Tay thought.

  He didn’t actually believe such a list existed, and even if it did he didn’t see how he could be on it, but he supposed either was at least possible. There wasn’t all that much that surprised him anymore.

  Most of the debris had already been cleared from the roadways and sidewalks, and presumably all the identifiable human remains collected, but it was evident at a glance even to Tay who knew nothing about such things that at least half a dozen buildings in the immediate area would have to be razed to their foundations. The Marriott and Tang Plaza underneath it, the Grand Hyatt, Scotts Square next to the Marriott, Shaw House across the road, Wheelock Place on the opposite corner, and the ION Orchard Centre all looked to him like total losses. There were a lot of windows blown out of the Orchard Residences Tower further back and, although he couldn’t see very far up Orchard Road, he imagined there were even more windows blown out up there. But all of those buildings looked as if they would survive. Badly damaged perhaps, but salvageable.

  Apparently in preparation for taking down some of the structures that could not be salvaged, the intersection of Orchard and Scotts was blocked off for a hundred yards in all directions and a security perimeter consisting of a three-foot concrete barrier with six feet of razor wire above it had been built around the whole area. Tay never thought he would see razor wire barricades in the streets of Singapore but, God help them all, he was seeing them now.

  There was heavy construction equipment everywhere, most of it painted bright yellow. Cranes so tall they could reach the top of everything around them, bulldozers so big they looked like they could scrape an entire building off the surface of the earth, an entire army of backhoes, and seemingly endless ranks of other equipment the function of which Tay wouldn’t even dare to guess at. And there were the dump trucks. Lines of dump trucks parked everywhere. Who knew there were so many dump trucks in the entire world, let alone right here in little Singapore?

  Just in front of what was left of the Marriott, Tay came upon two gray metal chests about the size of steamer trunks that looked like they contained equipment of some kind. Tay’s mother had stored his father’s clothes in trunks of about the same size after he died. Tay had never understood why she did that. It was as if she expected his father to return someday and need his clothes. Maybe she did.

  Tay tested whether the chest nearest to him would hold his weight and, when it was clear that it would, he settled himself on it, folded his arms, and took stock of the tumult around him.

  It looked like….

  No, it looked like nothing Tay had ever seen anywhere else. Not even in the pictures of New York in the aftermath of September 11. The scale of it was just so big, so spread out, it was difficult to grasp it was real. It was more like Tay had suddenly found himself inside an extraordinarily realistic disaster movie, one in which the images were entirely computer generated.

  A little later — in might have been ten minutes or an hour, Tay wasn’t sure — a man in a yellow hardhat that had KAJIMA printed across the front in black letters came over and sat on the second metal chest next to the one on which Tay was sitting. He looked Indian or perhaps Bangladeshi, and his dark skin was streaked with sweat. His eyes were empty.

  Neither man spoke nor acknowledged the other. Tay didn’t feel like a conversation, and it was obvious the other man felt exactly the same way. The two of them just sat there together in silence watching the turmoil around them, each alone in his own thoughts.

  When the other man abruptly stood and walked off, Tay was strangely disappointed. He watched until the man mounted three wooden steps outside the door to a construction trailer near the entrance to the Marriott’s driveway and disappeared inside.

  Down by the Hyatt a half dozen skip loaders scooped debris from a huge mound, pivoted toward a line of dump trucks, and emptied their buckets into the trucks’ dump beds. The sound of the loaders’ engines rose and fell as they strained to handle the weight and the chorus of throaty roars was punctuated by the thunder of debris crashing into the truck beds.

  Where were they taking all that debris, Tay wondered? When the Twin Towers had come down in New York, he remembered reading that the debris had been sifted and taken away on barges to somewhere in Staten Island. All of Singapore wasn’t much bigger than Staten Island, and they certainly had no Staten Island of their own where they could collect the residue of their tragedy to keep it out of sight. The logistics involved in getting Singapore back to normal would be mind-boggling.

  Forget normal.

  Forget normal for a very long time.

  Maybe forget normal forever.

  It had taken the famously efficient Americans with all of their expertise and resources well over a decade to clear and even begin to rebuild a much smaller area in lower Manhattan. What chance did little Singapore have of doing the same kind
of thing over a much larger area in less time, or for that matter in twice the time?

  Would his city ever be the same again? Would the scars be healed in his lifetime?

  Tay thought he knew the answers to those questions, but he didn’t want to give them voice. Maybe if he refused to admit how terrible the wounds were, they would heal sooner.

  ***

  No one had claimed credit for the destruction, not as far as Tay knew at least. The Chief had said ISD had already tied the bombings to Jemaah Islamiyah, but he hadn’t told Tay how ISD had done that and now he found himself wondering if the Chief even knew.

  Were they just rounding up the usual suspects, or did ISD actually have hard evidence that JI was involved? There is a grisly act of terrorism and the immediate suspect is the best-known terrorist organization in Asia? Maybe. But it all felt too easy to Tay.

  Whether JI was involved or not, nothing had leaked to the effect that ISD suspected them, if they actually did. That was why everyone was still asking who was responsible.

  But the longer Tay sat there, and the longer he looked at what had happened to his city, the more he understood that was the wrong question.

  Why had it happened?

  That was the right question.

  The Americans claimed the bombings had been a terrorist attack on them. But whatever happened in the world and whoever it happened to, that was what the Americans generally claimed. While it was true the point of attack for three of the bombs had been hotels with American brand names, Tay didn’t come to the same conclusion.

  The three hotels were Singaporean owned, not American. They just operated under American names. And all three hotels were major pillars of the Singaporean visitor industry which was, in turn, a mainstay of the Singaporean economy. While it was true the guests had largely been foreigners, he would wager very few had been Americans. Besides, most of the dead and injured weren’t hotel guests. They had been employees or passers-by, and virtually all of those were Singaporeans.

  So…was this an attack on America?

  Tay didn’t think so. That wasn’t what it felt like to him.

  It felt more like an attack on Singapore.

  But then that raised a difficult question. Who would want to attack Singapore? The country was engaged in no conflicts, no adventures. It had no foreign enemies that Tay could think of. If Jemaah Islamiyah was actually responsible in some way for the bombings, why would they want to attack Singapore?

  Tay could think of no reason at all.

  That left only one other possibility and Tay was reluctant to voice it, even to himself.

  That left the possibility that the bombings were some form of domestic terrorism.

  For all of its short life as a nation, essentially the same small group of men had governed Singapore. They had been decent and honorable men on the whole, and they had no doubt acted for forty years in the sincere belief they were making the best choices for the country, but they were also cautious men who had acted to nip opposition in the bud before it could sprout roots. Singapore had been a one-party state since independence and the channels for expressing opposition were few and carefully regulated. The election process was heavily weighted to protect the governing elite. The press was tame and ineffective.

  What if there were people out there somewhere who had grown tired of waiting for real democracy to develop in Singapore? What if the bombings were an effort to sow fear and instability and destabilize the only government Singapore had ever had?

  The Americans claimed the attacks were part of their international war on terrorism, of course, and aimed at them.

  But what if they were wrong?

  What if these attacks were aimed squarely at Singapore? And what if those responsible were willing to continue killing people in great numbers until fear and dread took over the country and the government lost control?

  ***

  Later Tay would wonder how long he sat there thinking. It had been afternoon when he passed through the barrier into the security area, and it was nighttime before he passed out of it again. In between those times, he came to a decision.

  “Robbie?”

  “Is that you, sir?”

  Tay shifted his cell phone to his other hand and sidestepped someone taking pictures of the devastation with an iPhone.

  “I’m not giving up. And if I’m not giving up, then you’re not giving up.”

  “Ah…giving up on what, sir?”

  “We’re going to find out who did this, Robbie. I don’t give a fuck what cases the OC assigns us to. We’re still going to find out who did this.”

  “Did what, sir?”

  Tay was so astonished at Kang’s question that he stopped where he was and turned around. He examined the wreckage behind him just to make certain it was actually there. Then all at once he realized Kang had no idea where he was and couldn’t possibly know what he was talking about.

  “I’ve just come from the Marriott, Robbie.”

  Kang cleared his throat. “But, sir, the SAC told you he doesn’t want us on that case. That’s why he assigned us the body at the Woodlands.”

  “But what if the two cases are connected?”

  “Connected? How are they connected?”

  “I have no fucking idea.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t understand.”

  “Then I suggest you come down here and sit where I’ve been sitting for the last few hours. Look at what these people have done to our country, and then tell me you don’t understand.”

  Kang fell silent. That was what he usually did when Tay took off on one of his flights of fancy. He had long ago decided that was the safer course for him to follow.

  “They are not going to take this case away from me. I’m not going to let them put us out to pasture when the worst crime in the history of Singapore has to be solved. We are going to find out who did this and then I’m going to wrap it all up in a pretty package and shove it right down their fucking throats. And they can choke on it for all I care. Do you understand me, Robbie?”

  There was a short silence, and then Sergeant Kang cleared his throat again.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “I understand you.”

  “Good,” Tay said.

  Then he turned off his phone, shoved it in his trouser pocket, and walked slowly east toward Emerald Hill and the house where he had lived for all of his life.

  ELEVEN

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER Tay was sitting in his garden lighting his first Marlboro of the evening. His city lay in ruins, hundreds were dead, thousands were injured, and he was investigating a single dead man found in an apartment at the Woodlands HDB estate. That seemed to him about as important as what he was doing right then: smoking a cigarette.

  He had wanted a cigarette the whole time he was sitting on that metal chest in the middle of the security area and struggling to take in the destruction all around him. But it had seemed wrong to smoke there, disrespectful somehow, and so he hadn’t. He was ready now to make up for lost time.

  While he smoked, he thought about the dead man in the Woodlands apartment. He pictured the man’s face. Did he know him?

  He did. He was sure of it.

  But then again, he didn’t.

  And at exactly the moment he was thinking that, he heard a woman’s voice.

  ***

  “Of course, you know him, Samuel,” she said, startling him out of his reverie. “You’re not senile. Not yet, at least.”

  Tay looked around, but he was alone in the garden. Of course, he was alone in the garden. Had a neighbor spoken from beyond his wall?

  “You don’t even recognize my voice, do you?”

  He did, but how could he? His mother was dead.

  “A son who forgets his own mother’s voice. What kind of a son is that?”

  Tay looked around again. Was this an elaborate prank of some sort? Surely not. No one pulled pranks on Sam Tay.

  “My God, Samuel, are you just going to sit there like a moron? Spe
ak up, boy.”

  “Uh…hello, Mother.”

  He felt like an idiot, but something made him afraid to keep silent.

  “That’s better. How are you, boy?”

  “I’m fine,” Tay offered, his voice tentative. “How are you?”

  “How am I? I’m dead, Samuel. That’s how I am. Dead.”

  “So…how is it?”

  “How is it to be dead? Is this your idea of small talk, Samuel?”

  “No, I just don’t know what to say and—”

  “If you must know, it’s not a barrel of laughs. But you’ll find out for yourself soon enough.”

  Tay’s heart began to beat faster. Was that what this meant? Was he about to die and this is how it happened? Someone from your past appeared to you and told you that you were about to die?

  “Are you telling me I’m going to die, Mother.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” The tone in his mother’s voice was one he remembered all too well. “Of course, you’re going to die, Samuel. But probably not tonight. How should I know? I’m dead, not clairvoyant.”

  “I just thought—”

  “Stop talking, Samuel. I don’t have much time here so I want you to listen to me carefully.”

  Tay said nothing. Were the dead given something like a cosmic phone card which provided them only limited minutes to communicate with the living, or was his mother just following her usual pattern of trying to keep their conversations as short as possible?

  “Are you listening, Samuel? Are you listening carefully?”

  “Yes, Mother. I am listening carefully.”

  “What you are doing is important. Because he was only one man, do not think finding out what happened to him, and why it happened, is any less important than finding out why the many died.”

  Tay had no idea what to say to that. He wasn’t even sure what it meant.

  “It’s all connected, Samuel. All of it.”

  “What’s connected?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Samuel, listen to yourself! Pay attention, boy!”