The Singapore Wink

Chapter XVII

I was awake when someone knocked on my door around eight o’clock the following morning. I was awake because my head ached, my stomach throbbed with each breath, there was a tightening vise on my right shoulder, and a large dump truck seemed to have rolled over my legs during the night.

The young Chinese doctor who clucked over me as he wound some tape around my ribs the night before had said: “You have a very low pain threshold, Mr. Cauthorne. What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a poet.”

“Ah, then that explains it.”

The knocking continued at the door and I yelled “all right” and started to get out of bed. I found that it wasn’t something one did without careful pre-planning. Consultants should have been brought in. A committee should have been appointed to determine how to ease the sheet back. A seminar on how to place one’s feet on the floor would have proved useful. Highly skilled technicians would have been invaluable in solving the problem of how to walk across the room and open the door.

He had on a different suit this time, a bottle green one that was turning slightly purple at the knees. He wore a cream straw hat with a faded blue band and a brim that rippled up and down as if it had been shoved too far back on the closet shelf when it was stored away at the end of last summer or the summer before. His shoes were an off white and the perforations in their toes attempted to resemble fleurs-de-lis without much success. He also wore a big smile on his face which still needed a shave. The face belonged to Dangerfield.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” I said.

“You still hanging in there, Cauthorne?” he said as he brushed by me and into the room.

“By my thumbs.”

“Where’s the booze?”

I started the long journey back to the bed. “Over there,” I said.

Dangerfield crossed to the bureau where the Scotch bottle rested, picked up a glass and poured his usual three fingers. He drank it down and for a moment I thought I was going to be sick.

“Hell of a long trip,” he said and poured himself another drink.

“Aren’t you a little off your usual route?” I said and eased myself back into the bed.

Dangerfield took off his hat and sailed it at the couch. The hat landed on the floor but he didn’t seem to notice. “Got a cigarette?” he said and I motioned towards the bureau again. He found the pack, lit one, and settled into an armchair.

“You got a nice room,” he said.

“Are you staying here?”

“I’m paying my own way, Cauthorne. I’m at the Strand up on Bencoolen Street. Six bucks a night, U.S.”

“Why won’t the Bureau pick up your tab?”

Dangerfield snorted. “I didn’t even ask. I just put in for a couple of weeks annual leave, cashed in my savings bonds, and took off. I got a little worried about you.”

“Why?”

“You don’t look too good.”

“I feel the same way.”

“What happened?”

“The Dangerfield Plan happened,” I said. “It’s a wonderfully brilliant scheme, special agent.”

“Okay; you’re funny. What happened?”

“Sacchetti had someone take a shot at me yesterday morning. Last night he had someone beat me up when I dropped by to see him on his yacht.”

“His what?”

“His yacht. The Chicago Belle. Only he wasn’t there.”

“Who was?”

“His wife and two of her friends. But don’t worry; I got the message across. I told her about the three guys in Los Angeles.”

“What else?” Dangerfield said.

“Well, there’s Carla Lozupone.”

“Where’s she?”

“Across the hall, I guess.”

“What about her?”

“She saw Angelo, she said. But she lies a lot.”

“When?”

“Yesterday. She wanted to pay him a million dollars.”

“Goddamn it, Cauthorne, tell it straight.”

“Okay. Sacchetti is not only blackmailing Charles Cole, he’s also blackmailing Joe Lozupone. The Lozupone girl flew here for one reason only. To pay off Sacchetti and to warn him that if he asks for another payment, he’ll be dead. She said that Sacchetti went along except for one provision and that provision is that I get out of Singapore in seventy-two hours — forty-eight hours now, I guess. Then she gave me some more advice. She said that if I caused anything to happen to Sacchetti, her father would take a very dim view of it.”

“What else did you find out?”

“Sacchetti’s got the fix in here.”

“How?”

“He married well.”

“And his father-in-law’s got the clout?”

“He has it.”

I told him the rest of it then in chronological order from the time I left Los Angeles until he knocked at the door. I talked for almost half an hour and when I was through Dangerfield rose and started to pace the room. He paced silently for almost five minutes. Then he stopped and stood by the bed.

“Don’t you ever get dressed?”

“Look, Dangerfield, we’ve only gone through phase one of your plan and it got me shot at and knocked silly. I’m just resting up for phase two. If my guess is right, that’ll call for the water torture and the bamboo shoot that grows right up the ass.”

“When are we going to eat?”

“Always to the point at hand; that’s what I like about you. Just ring the bell over there and give your order to the man when he comes.”

“You want something?” Dangerfield said.

“Coffee,” I said. “Lots of coffee. But right now I’m going to get dressed. That’s after I get out of bed. Then I’m going to take a shower and if it still seems like a good idea, I’ll brush my teeth, and after that, if I’m still conscious, I might even shave. So you see I haven’t been idle. I have the entire morning planned.”

Dangerfield went over to ring the bell for room service. “You sure they didn’t hit you on the head?”

“The only thing I’m sure of,” I said, “is my wild anticipation of events yet to come.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Such as phase two of the Dangerfield Plan and how we put it into operation.”

“Simple,” Dangerfield said and borrowed another cigarette from my pack. “We tell Angelo what I told you we’d tell him.”

“We?”

“You get in trouble, Cauthorne. You need a chaperone.”

“I won’t argue that. But where do we find Sacchetti if he doesn’t want to be found?”

“He lives on that yacht, doesn’t he?”

“So I understand.”

“Then we go out to the yacht.”

I was sitting on the edge of the bed by then. Another hour or so and I’d make it into the bathroom. “All right,” I said. “We go out to the yacht. They don’t like visitors out there, but we go anyway. What makes you think they’ll let us aboard?”

Dangerfield sighed and then yawned. “Sometimes, Cauthorne, I think you’ve got shit for brains. He knows about the three guys and the telegram. You told his wife about that, right?”

“Right.”

“He won’t believe it. But he’ll want to know why we want him to believe it.”

“So he’ll see us?”

Dangerfield cast an exasperated glance at the ceiling. “I swear to God they must have hit you on the head last night.”

It took me a while in the bathroom. The shower drove needles into my back and the razor seemed to weigh ten pounds. When I finally came out Dangerfield looked up from the remains of what seemed to have been an immense breakfast.

“You look real pretty,” he said. “Clean, too. I signed your name to the bill.”

“With a little more practice, you can sign my checks. Any coffee left?”

“Plenty.”

The telephone rang and I crossed over to answer it. When the voice said “Mr. Cauthorne?” I recognized it immediately. It belonged to Mrs. Angelo Sacchetti, and she didn’t bother to identify herself.

“I gave my husband your message,” she said.

“I got his after you left last night. It was just as you promised: most sincere.”

That didn’t seem to require any comment from her. “My husband has changed his mind, Mr. Cauthorne. He would like to see you as quickly as possible.”

“This morning?”

“If possible.”

“It is,” I said. “Where?”

“At my father’s house; it’s more convenient than the yacht.”

“All right. What’s the address?”

She told me and we set the time for eleven o’clock. After I hung up the phone, I turned to Dangerfield who was pouring himself another drink.

“That was Sacchetti’s wife,” I said.

“He wants to see us, right?”

“Right.”

“The Dangerfield Plan,” he said with a contented smile. “It seems to be working out just fine.”

After Dangerfield borrowed my razor and poured himself another drink we caught a cab at the hotel and headed out Orchard Road past the Instana Negara Singapura.

“Who the Christ lives there?” Dangerfield said.

“It used to be the residence of the British governors, but now it’s home to Singapore’s president.”

“That’s not this guy Lee, is it?”

“No. He’s the prime minister. The president is Inche Yusof bin Ishak.”

“How do you remember all that?”

“I like foreign names.”

“That’s some lawn,” he said.

Another mile or so and the driver turned around and said, “This is Tiger Balm King’s house. Over there.”

It was a huge, white, two-story house that featured round Moorish turrets on either end and some Corinthian pillars to hold up the roof. It perhaps was the most flamboyant mish-mash of architecture that one could hope to see. On top of the roof were two-foot-high letters that read: “Tiger Balm House of Jade.”

“What’s Tiger Balm?” Dangerfield asked.

“It was very powerful medicine that was manufactured by Aw Boon Haw,” the driver said as he nipped past a Honda. “He made many millions of dollars. Then he bought newspapers and when he died they turn his house into a museum.”

“Why is it called ‘House of Jade’?” I said.

“Over one thousand pieces of jade inside. Very, very valuable. Very ancient, too.”

The house of Angelo Sacchetti’s father-in-law, Toh Kin Pui, was about a mile and a half past the patent medicine king’s mansion and located in the Tanglin residential section which, the driver informed us, featured more millionaires per square mile than anyplace else in the world. He may have exaggerated, but the neighborhood looked as if it were trying to live up to the reputation. Toh’s house, set well back from the road, was a rambling white two-story stucco structure with a red tile roof and a five-sided cupola that stuck up an extra story for no apparent reason at all except that the architect may have thought that it would lend a nice touch. The lawn was smooth and green and well-tended, and flowers bloomed everywhere. The asphalt drive curved up to a covered verandah across from which a fountain played lazily into a rocked-in pool. A Rolls-Royce Phantom V limousine was parked in the driveway and a chauffeur was running a dust cloth over its antelope brown finish. I don’t know why he bothered because it looked as if it were going to rain.

I paid the driver and Dangerfield followed me up the three steps of the verandah. I pushed a button and I suppose that a bell rang somewhere in the house because the door was opened almost immediately by a Chinese man in a white jacket.

“I’m Mr. Cauthorne,” I said. “Mrs. Sacchetti is expecting me.”

We followed the man in the white jacket down a hall and despite the air conditioning the palms of my hands began to sweat and I felt drops of perspiration form in my armpits and trickle down my sides. I held out my right hand to admire its quiver. The pain came in short stabs with every step and breath, but the pain didn’t cause the tremor or the perspiration. That came from my obsession, which was finding Angelo Sacchetti so that I could collect whatever it was that he owed me. The end of my obsession, I thought, lay just behind the door that the man in the white coat opened.

I went through the door first with Dangerfield following. “Don’t be so eager, pal,” he said. “He’s not going to run away.”

It was a living room and the furniture was ordinary, impersonal and utilitarian. There were a couple of sofas, some armchairs, a rug on the floor, and some pictures on the wall.

Several tables held vases filled with flowers, the only bright spots in the room. Angelo Sacchetti’s wife sat in one of the armchairs, much as she had sat the night before, leaning slightly forward, her hands resting on the chair’s arms, her knees together and her feet crossed at the ankles, as if it were a lesson she had learned in finishing school and she wanted to demonstrate how well she remembered it. A middle-aged Chinese in a white shirt and dark slacks, the island’s universal business uniform, rose as we entered.

“Mr. Cauthorne, this is my father, Mr. Toh.”

He bowed slightly, but did not offer to shake hands. “My associate, Mr. Dangerfield,” I said. “Mrs. Sacchetti and Mr. Toh.”

Dangerfield wasn’t much for formalities. “Where’s your husband, Mrs. Sacchetti?”

She ignored him and directed her next remark at me. “You didn’t mention that you were bringing an associate, Mr. Cauthorne.”

“No, I didn’t, did I? But Mr. Dangerfield has a rather personal interest in this matter. In fact, his interest runs almost as deep as mine.”

“In what matter?”

“The matter of stolen property,” I said. “I mentioned it last night. As soon as Angelo arrives, we can discuss it in detail.”

“I’m afraid that you are going to be disappointed,” Toh said in a curiously deep and resonant voice.

“Why?”

“Because, Mr. Cauthome,” Mrs. Sacchetti said as if mentioning her plans for next Tuesday’s bridge game, “the police are looking for him.”

“Why?” I said again.

“There was a murder last night. A woman was killed and the police say that they have found evidence that my husband committed the murder. Ridiculous, of course.” Even then there was no emotion in her voice.

“And Angelo ran?” Dangerfield said.

“Not ran, Mr. Dangerfield,” Toh said. “He simply thought it best to become incommunicado until he could clear the matter up to everyone’s satisfaction.”

“Who was the woman?” I said, but I didn’t really have to ask.

“An American, I believe,” Angelo Sacchetti’s wife said. “Her name was Carla Lozupone.”