The Singapore Wink

Chapter XI

It is about 9,500 miles from Los Angeles to Singapore and Pan American Airways doesn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to get there. I understand that other flights are offered from Los Angeles, but the only one for which Carla Lozupone and I could get first class reservations was number 811 which left at 9:45 P.M.

I had spent most of that Saturday getting the tickets and a smallpox shot so that my International Certificate of Vaccination could be brought up to date. A call at a travel agency had given me vague assurance of two rooms at the Raffles Hotel providing that the wire got to Singapore before we did and providing that two rooms were available.

Carla Lozupone, with Tony bringing up the rear as well as the luggage, met me in the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire. She was dressed for travel in a lightweight black and white checked pants suit and her pout was back in place. “What do we do,” she said instead of hello, “fly all night?”

“All night and part of the day after tomorrow,” I said.

“San Francisco’s better. There’s a direct flight out of San Francisco.”

“We’ll try that next time,” I said.

Tony joined us after he paid Carla Lozupone’s bill, entrusted her luggage to a bellhop, and ordered his rented car to be brought up from the hotel’s garage. “Had your fit yet?” he asked.

I looked at my watch. “About two hours ago, thanks.”

“That drink in the face crap,” he said. “I seen that on television lots of times.”

“That’s where I learned it.”

He nodded pleasantly enough. “You didn’t hurt me bad though. I been hurt worse than that.”

“I pulled them,” I said. “If I hadn’t, you’d have been in the hospital with your jaws wired together and your neck in a cast.”

He thought about that for a moment. “Thanks for pulling them then.”

“You’re welcome.”

“But my stomach still hurts some.”

“I didn’t pull those,” I said.

“No,” he said, “I didn’t think you did.”

The car that Tony had rented was a new Chrysler and he drove it well. There wasn’t much conversation until we reached the airport and he pulled up in front of the Pan American entrance. Then he turned around in the seat. “Not much use in me coming in, is there, Carla?”

“None,” she said and started gathering up her purse and cosmetic kit.

“What’ll I tell the boss? I’m flying back tomorrow.”

“Tell him whatever you want to.”

“I mean do you want I should tell him you’re okay and everything?”

“Yes,” she said. “Tell him that.”

Tony looked at me. “I wouldn’t want you to make me out a liar, friend. Take good care of her.”

“You sure you wouldn’t like to come along?” I said. “You could look after both of us.”

“I’m not kidding, friend,” he said.

“I didn’t think you were.”

We touched down at Honolulu International a little after midnight, some fifteen minutes late, switched to Flight 841 which took off at 1:45 A.M., another fifteen minutes late, and then flew forever until we reached Guam. After they picked up the milk there we flew for what seemed to be another couple of weeks until we landed at Manila International. From Manila we flew to Tan-Soh-Nhut, which is four and a half miles outside of Saigon where all the fun goes on, and then, finally, a month or so later, we landed at Paya Lebar International Airport at 1:10 P.M. Monday. We were seven and one half miles from the center of Singapore and only forty minutes late.

Carla Lozupone, I discovered, didn’t care much for airplanes. She had three martinis in quick succession after we left Honolulu, tossed down a couple of red capsules, and fell asleep. She awakened in Manila, asked where we were, ordered a double martini, and promptly went back to sleep. Vietnam failed to interest her and thirty minutes out of Singapore she departed for the ladies’ room with her cosmetics kit and the comment: “I’m a mess.”

It was a long, long flight and it gave me time to think, more time than I really needed. I thought about Charles Cole for a while and decided that his summoning me to Washington had been the desperate, or even frantic, act of a thoroughly frightened man who would do anything if it would let him live a little longer, a year, a month or even a day. He apparently was convinced that his only hope was for me to recover the blackmail kit from Angelo Sacchetti. The only way that I could do that was to use the scheme advanced by the rumpled and unlikely FBI agent, Sam Dangerfield. I thought about what I had come to regard as the Dangerfield Plan for a few moments, but not many, because it was too much like wondering if I had six friends who would serve as pallbearers only to discover that I didn’t Essentially, Dangerfield and Cole wanted the same thing and that was the information now in Angelo Sacchetti’s hands or his safe-deposit box or under his pillow — information that could put Joe Lozupone away in Leavenworth or Atlanta to either run a sewing machine or grow vegetables in the greenhouse for years to come. But if the girl with the pout, who slept next to me on the plane that flew over the Pacific, were telling the truth, Joe Lozupone was the only thing that stood between Charles Cole and a bullet, a knife, a one-way excursion on Chesapeake Bay, or whatever was in style that year.

There seemed to be only one constant and that was Angelo Sacchetti, and while I was wondering about him, somewhere past Guam, I fell asleep and dreamed a dream that I couldn’t recall, but which had me sweating when I awakened as we landed in Manila, the town that they once called the Pearl of the Orient.

At Singapore airport they sent a bus to transport us from the plane to the Arrivals Building. It was hot, but then it’s always hot in Singapore. We breezed through the health and immigration authorities, recovered our baggage from customs, and found a smiling Malay porter who located us a cab while I changed some American Express checks into Singapore dollars.

The cab was an old yellow-topped Mercedes whose Chinese driver wove it in and out of the traffic on Serangoon Road, turned left with a certain amount of flair on Lavender Street, then right on Beach Road, and dropped us off before the white colonial facade of the Raffles Hotel that fairly glistened in the hot sun. I paid him his three Singapore dollars, tipped him another fifty cents to show that I was a sport, and followed Carla Lozupone into the dim, cool interior of the hotel where a beaming Chinese clerk happily informed us that our reservations were in order. Carla Lozupone’s only comment during the ride from the airport had been: “It’s hot.”

In the lobby she looked around at the century-old building. “I’ve heard about this place ever since I was a kid,” she said.

“I like old hotels,” I said.

She gave the lobby another appraising glance. “You’ll be happy here.”

Our rooms were on the second floor, across the hall from each other. Just outside her door, Carla Lozupone turned to me as the Malay bellhop inserted a key in the lock. “I’m going to take a bath,” she said. “Then I’m going to get dressed and then you’re going to buy me a drink. A special drink.”

“What?”

“I didn’t fly nine thousand odd miles for nothing. I’m going to have a Singapore Sling in the bar of the Raffles Hotel. After that, we’ll do whatever we’re going to do. But we’ll do that first.”

“It’s as good a way to start as any,” I said. “Maybe even better.”

I followed the bellhop into my room which was high-ceilinged, large, and furnished in what I suppose could be called British Empire modern. At least the bed looked comfortable. I gave him a Singapore dollar, felt like a miser, and was relieved when he grinned and thanked me effusively. After I had unpacked, and shaved and showered in the enormous bathroom, I put on a lightweight suit, found the telephone book, looked up a number, and made a call to Mr. Lim Pang Sam, the only person whose name I knew in Singapore other than Angelo Sacchetti’s. I didn’t think that Angelo’s name would be in the book, but nevertheless I looked. It wasn’t. I had to go through two secretaries to reach Lim, but when I identified myself as Richard Trippet’s associate, he was exceedingly cordial and wanted to know how Dickie was. I told him that Dickie was fine and we agreed to meet at Lim’s office at ten the following morning. After I hung up I began to feel that asking a respectable Singapore businessman about an American blackmailer might not prove to be an auspicious beginning. Yet it seemed better than asking the Sikh doorman in front of the hotel. Better, perhaps, but not much.

Singapore, which has some aspirations of becoming the New York of Southeast Asia, is fairly new as cities go, having been founded by Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles in 1819. That, if you don’t count what was there before the Javanese leveled it during a raid in 1377, makes Singapore younger than both New York and Washington, but older than either Dallas or Denver. It likes to think that it offers “instant Asia” to the touring Garden Club from Rapid City, South Dakota. A more apt description might be “Asia without tears,” because the water can be drunk from the tap, the city is fairly clean, there are no beggars, but numerous millionaires, and almost everybody that a tourist encounters either speaks or at least understands English.

I was telling all this to Carla Lozupone as we sipped our Singapore Slings in the Elizabethan Room’s small, comfortable bar.

“What else has it got?” she asked.

“The world’s fifth largest port — or perhaps busiest, I’m not sure. A hell of a naval base which the British are giving up soon because they can’t afford it now, any more than they could afford it when they built it in the twenties and thirties—”

“That’s the one where the guns were all pointed the wrong way during World War II, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Towards the sea,” I said. “The Japanese walked and pushed their bicycles down through Malaya which was supposedly impenetrable and there wasn’t much that the British could do about it.”

“So what is it now?”

“What?”

“Singapore.”

“It’s a republic now. Eight or nine years ago it was a crown colony, then a self-governing state under British protection, then a member of the Malaysian Federation until it was kicked out in 1965. Now it’s a republic.”

“It’s a little small, isn’t it?”

“A little.”

Carla tried her drink again, lit a cigarette, and looked around the bar which, at three o’clock in the afternoon, was almost empty. “Do you think he ever comes in here?”

“Sacchetti?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t even know he was alive until four days ago. But if he can show his face, I suppose that he’d come here. It’s popular and stylish and Angelo, as I recall, always liked places like that.”

“I knew he was alive six weeks ago, perhaps even seven,” she said.

“How did you find out?”

“One of my old man’s associates heard about it. You can substitute anything you want for associates.”

“You didn’t choose your parents,” I said.

“No, but one of them tried to choose my husband.”

“He seemed to have had his reasons.”

“Reasons,” she said. “All the wrong ones.”

She was wearing a simple, yellow sleeveless cotton dress which was probably more expensive than it looked. When she turned in her chair to look at me the dress tightened across her breasts and I could tell that she still didn’t have much use for brassieres.

“Tell me something,” she said. “What happens when you find Angelo? Are you going to beat up on him, as the boys down on the corner used to say?”

“What good would that do?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Therapy maybe. It might cure your St. Vitus dance or whatever it is that you’ve got.”

“I have to find him first.”

“When do you start looking?”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“Fine,” she said and drained her glass. “That gives me plenty of time to have another one of these.”

I ordered two more of the drinks that I didn’t much care for but which seemed to be the thing to do the first day in Singapore. When they came, Carla took a swallow of hers and lit another cigarette. There were six of them in her ashtray and we had been there less than forty-five minutes.

“You smoke a lot,” I said, keeping up my end of the conversation.

“I’m nervous.”

“About what?” I said.

“About Angelo.”

“Why should you be? The way you tell it, you’re just along for the ride.”

“Angelo may not think so,” she said.

“So?”

“How well do you know him?”

“That’s what everybody asks me,” I said.

“All right. Now I’m asking. How well do you know him?”

“Not well. Not well at all. We worked together a few times. I think he once bought me a drink or I bought him one. I’m not sure which.”

She found a flake of tobacco on her tongue, picked it off, and flicked it into the ashtray. She did it as well as or better than any woman I had ever seen.

“So you don’t know him?”

“No.”

“I do.”

“Okay. You know him.”

“He has something going for him here in Singapore, doesn’t he? I mean he has a Sacchetti-type thing going.”

“So I understand.”

“And it’s making money,” she said. “Otherwise he wouldn’t stay.”

“I’ve heard that, too.”

“I know this about Angelo. If he’s making money, he’s not doing it legitimately. That’s number one.”

“What’s number two?”

“If anyone gets in his way, he’ll walk on them.”

“Don’t tell me you’re planning to get in his way?”

She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she looked at me and her face was no longer pretty. It was as if she had slipped on a pale mask that had been designed to portray only one emotion and that was an intense dislike that bordered on hatred. When she finally spoke, her voice was cold and somehow remote.

“I don’t know if I’ll get in his way or not,” she said. “It depends.”

“On what?”

“On what he says after I talk to him.”

“When do you plan to do that?”

“As soon as possible.”

“What do you plan to talk about, old times in New Jersey?”

She shook her head. “I have a few questions.”

“Only a few?”

“Three. Maybe even four.”

“And if his answers are correct?”

She stared at me again, this time as if I were some stranger who had made her a particularly indecent proposal.

“You don’t understand, Cauthorne.”

“Understand what?”

“There aren’t any right answers to my questions. There aren’t any right answers at all.”