“I’ll tell you another thing about him,” said Shuck. He screwed up his face. “He’s got a finger in the B-girl rackets.”
“So he can’t be all bad,” I said. The Kachang, turning to port, pitched me close to Shuck’s face. “Ed, I’ve got a whole arm in those!”
“He’s a general in the U.S. Army,” said Shuck. “You’re not.”
Shuck then set out to describe what he took to be the darkest side of General Maddox, his operating a chain of Saigon brothels, and his involvement with the less profitable skin-trade sidelines—which I knew to be inescapable—wholesaling massages, pornography, exhibitions; forging passports, nodding to con men, and smuggling warm bodies over frontiers—for the servicemen. Without wishing to, Shuck convinced me that, murder apart, this general was a more successful version of myself, his charitable carnal felony a fancier and better-executed business than “Kinda hot,” the meat run, or Dunroamin. I hadn’t bargained on this; warm wretchedness thawed my resolve.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Your objection to this feller is that he’s ungallant.”
“He’s a creep,” said Shuck. “A disgrace.”
“Tut tut, you’re flattering yourself,” I said, and went on, “Still, he’s no stranger to me. If you called him a hero I’d find him ten times harder to understand.”
“That’s what you say.”
“Heroes aren’t my department,” I said. “You want to end the war, so you try to unmask the villain. Me, I’d unmask the hero—he’s your feller. Especially war heroes. If I was in charge I’d have them shot.”
“You’ve got some screwy ideas,” said Shuck.
“I haven’t had your advantages,” I said. “See, I don’t know very much about virtue.”
“I do,” said Shuck.
“Good for you,” I said. “Virtue is the distance that separates you from your favorite villain, right? It’s an annual affair—every year there’s a new American villain. Ever notice that? Virtuous people like you elect him, and then stone him to death. It’s a sign of something.”
“Maybe it’s because we’re puritanical,” said Shuck.
“I was going to say bankrupt, and pretty fickle.”
Shuck gave me a sour laugh. “So Maddox is an angel.”
“Maddox is a hood, obviously,” I said. “But you think he has a complicated motive. I know lots of fellers like him who behave that way because they’re middle-aged and have bad teeth.”
“Suppose he really is evil,” said Shuck. “Think what a service you’ll be doing by nailing his ass to the wall.”
“Don’t give me that,” I said.
“You know what I think?” said Shuck. “I think you don’t want to do this.”
“I don’t always want what I need,” I said. “Why else would I have so little?”
“You’re losing your nerve.”
“Only when you try to justify this lousy scheme.”
“Who’s justifying? I told you the whole thing stinks.”
“Now you’re talking!” I said.
Not a job—an exploit, blackmail, an irrational crime with an apt rotten name; it was what I needed, the guarantee of some evil magic I didn’t want to understand. Like a casual flutter at the Turf Club with an unpromising pony, and then a big payoff; the single coin in the fruit machine for the bonus jackpot; anything for astonishment, no questions asked. Then I understood my fantasies—they were a handy preparation for making me bold; little suggestions made my tattooed bulk jump to oblige. As a young man I often dreamed of a black sedan pulling up beside me as I sauntered down an empty street, the door swinging open, and the exquisite lady at the wheel saying softly, “Get in.”
My fantasies provided something else: method, and a means of expression.
So: “Follow that car,” I said to the taxi driver at the airport. The fantasy command, immediately suspicious to any native English speaker, I could use in Singapore. I had wormed a copy of the passenger list from May Lim, a fruit fly turned ground hostess. From behind a pillar near the Customs and Immigration section, not far from the spot where I had first recognized Leigh, I watched the general arrive—a tanned, well-shod, barrel-chested man who walked with the easy responsible swing of a man accustomed to empty hands. He strode past me, followed by a laden porter, and got into a waiting taxi. Now, in my own taxi, I was saying, “Don’t lose him—keep on his tail.”
At the Belvedere I stood next to him while he checked in. He signed the register with a flourish, then straightened up. He untangled the springy wire bows of his military sunglasses from his ears and glanced around the lobby: that look of lust, the prompt glee of the man about to deliver a speech. I caught his eye.
“Kinda hot.”
He agreed. “Muggy.”
“This way, sir,” said a costumed porter to him. He said, “See you around,” and overtook the porter with long scissor steps.
I scribbled my name in the register, noting that Maddox had omitted his rank, that he was in room 913 and was staying for a week.
“Here I am again,” I said to the Chinese clerk. “Remember me?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, without looking up. He was scribbling on a pad. “So you like Singapore? Clean and green.”
“A great little place,” I said.
“Don’t mention,” he said, still scribbling.
“And this is a mighty fine hotel,” I said. “I wouldn’t stay anywhere else. I got sorta attached to that room you gave me before—nine-fifteen. Can you put me in the same one?”
“If it is empty.”
“I’ll make it worth your while,” I said softly.
“Can,” he said, glancing at the pigeonholes behind him.
I congratulated myself on knowing that odd-numbered rooms were on one side of the corridor, evens on the other. After all, it had only been a matter of weeks since I had fixed up Gunstone with Djamila here; over there, in the bar lounge, I had pretended to be Bishop Bradley.
“This way, sir,” said the porter, at the elevator door.
“Put my suitcase in the room,” I said, when we got to the ninth floor. “I’m just going to have a word with my friend here.”
The elevator operator’s face creased with terror. He shut, his mouth.
“You look like a smart feller,” I said. “Do you know how to keep your eyes open?”
“Do,” he said, and widened his eyes.
“That’s it,” I said. “You’re destined for big things. If you want to make a little extra money, just listen—”
After an hour my buzzer rang.
“Yoh?”
It was the elevator operator, grinning. “I take him down to lobby. He walk outside. I come straight back.”
“Beautiful,” I said, handing him five dollars. “Keep up the good work.”
“Okay boys, this is it,” I said into the phone, and five minutes later, Mr. Khoo, Jimmy Sung, and Henry Chow were in my room, sitting on the edge of the bed, straining to understand the plan. The boys, the room, the plan: the labels had an appealing sound.
What was most touching was the way the patient fellers listened, gaunt, threadbare, unblinking: my shabby gang of Chinese commandos. It was pleasing to conspire with a makeshift army, skinny sharpshooters in cast-off clothes. I had always served the rich by depending on such people, putting trust in the only helpers I could afford, the irregulars, the destitute, the socially famished—silent Karim, crooked Ganapaty, limping Gopi, the whispering urchins who stood sentry duty outside the blue-film sheds off Rochore Road, my girls. Poverty made them invisible, and I saw how much their devious skills resembled mine. I picked them for cunning and loyalty. I liked the drama: the rumpled middle-aged blackmailer in the elegant but smoke-fouled hotel room, saying, “Okay, boys—” to his team of ragged disciples who might have had nicknames like Munkypoo, Broomface, and The Ant.
In his lap, Mr. Khoo cradled an electric drill, like a nickel-plated Tommy gun; Jimmy Sung held a tape recorder, Henry Chow a camera. They hadn’t asked w
hy, and wouldn’t—Chinese: the people with no questions.
“You know what you’re supposed to do,” I said. “Let’s get moving.”
Henry Chow flipped the lever on the camera; he had removed the ratchet from the spools: it wound noiselessly. Mr. Khoo speedily drilled and reamed a hole through the baseboard, into the next room, just under the general’s bed. We took the additional precaution of disguising the microphone as a light socket. The positioning of the camera was next. Henry took a bucket and window washer’s squeegee and crawled from my balcony to the general’s, and giving the glass doors a good splash, estimated the angle for a shot at the bed. He returned, white-faced and shuddering, heaving himself slowly over the parapet, holding lightly to the balcony rail.
“Can we sling a camera up?”
“Can,” he said, “but curtains—”
“It’s no good,” I said. “If he goes out to the balcony he’ll see it and the jig’s up. We can’t do it that way.” I was stumped. How did you take pictures in a feller’s room without his knowing it? After I had spoken to Shuck I imagined myself, tape recorder slung over one shoulder, camera over the other, in a blackmailer’s crouch, by a keyhole or window, listening, watching, pressing buttons, and then hopping away on tiptoe with the damning evidence.
The simplicity of that had struck me as cruel, but it wasn’t so simple. This was a technical problem, a dilemma which in the solving made the cruelty slight, and as an executioner might think of himself as an electrician, absorbed in the study of watts and volts, a brainwasher a man concerned with candlepower, my sense of betrayal was soon forgotten in my handyman’s huffing and puffing over the matter of wires, lenses, drilling, and testing—so complicated the general no longer seemed vulnerable. He was safe; I was the victim.
“Now, let’s see here,” I said. “We can’t put the camera on the balcony. What about in his air conditioner? Make it look like a fuse box.” My boys were silent. I replied to my own question. “That means we have to get into the room.”
“Get a key,” said Jimmy Sung.
“If only the bed was on the other side of the room,” I said. “Then we could cut a hole up there, stick the camera through, and bingo.”
“Move the bed,” said Henry.
“He’ll see the mike if we do that,” I said. “Gee, this is your original sticky wicket.”
Jimmy Sung suggested an alternative. He had once been hired to spy on a towkay’s wife, to get evidence of adultery. He followed the wife and her lover to a hotel. He bribed the cleaning woman to give him a key and had simply burst through the door at an opportune moment, taken a lightning shot of the copulating pair, and run.
“That’s okay if you want one picture,” I said. “But one’s not enough. There must be another way.”
I paced the room. “Henry says the general’s room is just like this one, right? Bed here, chair there—” The three men looked from object to object as I named—“bureau there, desk over there—wait!”
Over the desk was a large rectangular mirror, reflecting the room; Mr. Khoo, Jimmy Sung, Henry Chow, seated uneasily on the bed. A mirror, distracting for anyone using the desk, made it useful as a woman’s dressing table.
“We can’t photograph the bed,” I said, “but we can make a small hole in the wall and aim the camera at that mirror. It’s right across.”
“Wide-angle lens,” said Jimmy.
Henry Chow smiled.
This time Mr. Khoo used his drill like a chisel, to loosen plaster and scoop out brick from our side of the wall. He made a niche for the camera and punched a small lens hole through to the other side. Jimmy Sung fitted the camera with a plunger on a long cable, and fixed the camera against the hole, bandaging it into the niche with adhesive tape.
“I guess that wraps it up,” I said.
Mr. Khoo wiped his drill with a rag.
“This calls for a drink.”
Henry said no. Mr. Khoo shook his head. Jimmy Sung scratched his head nervously and said he had to take his wife shopping.
“Come on, I’ll treat you,” I said. “They’ve got everything at this hotel. We could have lunch sent up. Anything—you name it. No charge!”
Mr. Khoo muttered something in Chinese. Henry looked embarrassed. Jimmy said, “Seng Ho want money,” and winced.
“Anything you say.” I paid them off, and when I did they edged toward the door. I said, “What’s the rush? It’s early. Stick around.”
There is a Chinese laugh that means “Yes, of course!” and another that means “No, never!” The first is full of sympathy, the second is a low mirthless rattle in the throat. They gave me the second and were gone.
“So long, boys.” I was alone. It was bright and noisy outside, but waiting I felt caged in the dim cold room of the Belvedere’s ninth floor. On the far wall was the print of an old water color, Fort Canning, ladies with parasols, children rolling hoops, the harbor in the distance. I became aware of the air-conditioner roar, and shortly it deafened me and gave me goose flesh. In my bedroom in Moulmein Green I had a friendly fan that went plunk-a-plunk and a scented mosquito coil; a fig tree grew against the window. An old phrase came to me, my summing up: Is this all? I looked at the completed handiwork and hated it. The problem of eavesdropping had been complicated and nearly innocent. The solution was simple and terrible, the sticky tape, the wires, the mirror, the black contraptions, the violated wall.
4
CRASH, BANG. The general went to his room after lunch, and my tape recorder amplified the racket of his entry to a hurried blundering. The door banged, the fumbled bolt was shot. Footsteps and belches and undressing noises, the flip-flap and yawn of a shirt being stripped off, coins jingling in lowered trousers, the bumps of two discarded shoes. Then bedsprings lurching, sighs, yawps. I stood on a chair and peeked through the camera’s view finder. No girl; he napped alone, his arms surrendering on his pillow. He slept, snorting and shifting, for over an hour, awoke, changed into a green bathing suit, scratched his chest, made a face at me in the mirror, and went out in clunking clogs, with a towel scarflike around his neck—I guessed he was going to the swimming pool on the roof.
He needed tempting. But I had a sprat to catch this mackerel.
“Madam Lum? Jack here. Thelma busy? Yeah, right away. You’re a peach—”
Thelma Tay goggled at the room. “Smart,” she said, pronouncing it smut. She tossed her ditty bag on the bed and went over to the window. She worked the Venetian blinds and said, “Cute.”
“It’s great to see you,” I said, giving her cheek a pinch. “I’ve been going out of my gourd.”
She glided up and down, sniffing, touched the ashtray, turned on the bedside lamp, felt the curtains. She was no beauty, but I knew she was capable and had the right enthusiasm. Her glossy black hair was carefully set in ringlets and long curls and crowned with a small basket of woven plaits; she had the lovely hollows in her face that indicate in a Chinese girl small high breasts. She kicked off her shoes and smoothed her shiny belted dress. She posed and said, “Wet look.”
“It’s catching on,” I said. “Very classy.”
She undid the belt and pulled the dress over her head, and then, in her red bra and red half-slip, walked over to me and leaned her soft stomach into my face. “You ready?”
“Wait a sec, Thelma,” I said, looking up. “It’s next door.”
She stepped back. “You not want?”
“Not me—the feller in there,” I said, pointing to the broken wall. “He just stepped out, but he’ll be back pretty soon.”
“Oh,” she said. She sat on the edge of the bed and found something on her elbow to pick.
“How’s Madam Lum?”
“Is okay. Not so busy.”
“It’s hard all around,” I said. “Not like it used to be. These people from the package tours—they’re all ninety years old. God knows why they come here.”
Thelma wasn’t listening. She made a meowing sound in her nose—a Chinese pop song.
> “Seen any good films lately?”
“Dracula,” she said. “At Cathay.”
“How was it?”
“I was scared-lah!” She laughed.
I poured myself a neat gin. “You want one?”
“Soft drink,” she said. “Got Green Spot?”
“Thelma, anything you want—”
Crash, bang.
“It’s him,” I whispered. “Wait here. The lift boy’s going to introduce you.” I tiptoed over to the chair and looked through the viewfinder.
A dark Chinese girl in a frilly bikini walked past the mirror. The door banged, and my tape recorder spoke: No, really, I think you were getting the hang of it. You’ve just got to remember to keep your legs straight and kicking and paddle like this—
“You dirty devil,” I mumbled, fiddling with the volume knob.
“I go now?” asked Thelma. She held her shiny dress up.
I drew her over to the bed. “Apparently,” I said, “it’s all been fixed.”—
—no, keep your fingers together. That’s right. Here, hop on the bed and I’ll show you—
“I’m sorry about this,” I said. “Wait a minute. I’ll explain.” I grasped the plunger and snapped a picture, then went back and sat on the bed next to Thelma. “It looks like I got you up here for nothing.”
“You no want fuck?”
“I’ve got my hands full,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll pay you just the same. In the meantime let’s watch our language?”
“Mushudge?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said.
—lift those arms up! Like this—keep kicking! Sort of move your head—
Thelma started kneading my shoulders, working her way down, and then pinching my backbone. It was soothing. I got down on the bed and she took my shirt off and straddled me, hacking at my shoulders and back with the sides of her hands, rubbing, clapping, like someone preparing a pizza.