"I have a shipload of cargo leaving Pontianak tomorrow afternoon," he said. "It will be crossing the Straits of Melaka en route to points west."
Nga looked at him.
"Ah," he said. "The open sea… is a lonely place."
Kinzo nodded.
"Were a man to fall overboard on such a voyage," Nga said, "I would imagine he might never be found."
Kinzo moved his shoulders. "Even should the currents wash him ashore, the ravages of the sea and fish upon his body would make it hard for anyone to identify him. Or conclusively establish the cause of his death."
Nga smiled a little.
"As always, my friend, you make perfect sense," he said. "Give me the ship's name and exact place of departure, and I can arrange for the luckless one we have discussed to be brought aboard tonight."
Kinzo saw the uneasiness at the edges of Nga's smile, and decided to reinforce it with a cautionary word. He disliked the banker and resented his outrageous imposition… and apart from that wanted to be sure Nga realized this was no minor impropriety of the sort his father had been covering up his entire life.
"Since you seem to value my thoughts, I feel obliged to share some with you," he said. "If a man with no friends were to disappear without explanation, his loss would be a blank space that goes unnoticed and unfilled. But things rarely occur in a void, especially when it comes to human affairs." He paused, then leaned forward. "If there are people left behind to miss him, an investigation is a foregone certainty. Should it turn out to be persistent, even the total absence of physical remains might not be enough to keep the circumstances of his 'accident' from being unearthed. Attention must therefore be given to all possible eventualities. Do you understand?"
Nga stared at him. The smile had fled his lips.
"Don't worry," he said. "I'm taking care of everything."
Unconvinced, Kinzo didn't answer.
Kirsten stood looking at her sister in the kitchen of Anna's home in Petaling Jaya, neither woman speaking, their faces gravely serious. On the butcher block between them were neat piles of chiles, water spinach, bok choy, white radish, and other ingredients for the stir-fry they had been preparing for dinner. A bamboo steamer filled with bean sprouts sat on the stove top, the burner beneath it still unlit. Behind Kirsten, an electric rice cooker worked quietly.
Her face pale, Anna was trembling with distress, the knife she had been using to chop her vegetables forgotten in her hand.
"Maybe you ought to put that down before you cut yourself," Kirsten said, nodding her chin slightly toward the knife. She gave Anna a strained smile. "Or me."
Anna stared at her as if she hadn't heard a word she'd said. The faint hiss of the rice cooker was all that broke the stillness in the room.
Kirsten opened her mouth to say something else, thinking even another tortured attempt at humor would be preferable to the silence… but then she decided to leave it alone. What had she expected anyway? Surely not sympathy. She had been staying with Anna and her family for several days now, having arrived with a concocted tale about needing to get away from things because of a romantic breakup, an emotional situation that had pushed her to the edge, all of it complete drivel.
It wasn't that she had meant to keep the truth from Anna and her husband, certainly not for this long, but whenever she'd started to share it with them, the words had refused to come. And so she had continued the deception until it had gotten out of hand — like everything else in her life recently.
At times, Kirsten had thought her guilty conscience and dreadful worries about Max really would drive her out of her skull, and by this morning had realized she couldn't bear her freight of secrets anymore. Her resolve firmed, she had planned to wait until her brother-in-law got home from work, sit him and Anna down in their living room, and tell them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help her God.
But as a surgeon at a government hospital in KL, Lin was often detained with some emergency or other, and when he'd phoned to say that might be the case this evening — well, she had feared her determination might crumble before he arrived, and decided it might be best to make her confession to Anna alone rather than chance putting it off again.
Still, Kirsten hadn't been looking forward to it, and choosing the right moment had been difficult. Oddly enough, however, her mind had been on something else entirely as they'd started their dinner preparations a half hour ago, just before she came out with her story… or rather, before it had leaped from her mouth all on its own.
The incident she'd been remembering had occurred the previous day, when she was babysitting Anna's two kids, Miri and Brian. They'd been out in the condominium's small backyard playing, and Miri, who was five, had caught a grasshopper while poking around a flower bed, then started shouting for her older brother to find a jar to put it in. He'd run into the house in search of one, leaving her to stand there with her small hands cupped around the insect… but when he'd taken longer than Miri expected, her initial excitement over capturing it had turned into a sort of jittery dismay.
"It's getting away," she'd yelled, her eyes wide and frantic. "It's too big\"
In fact, it had been very big — that the local bugs were always of the king-sized variety was one of the harder things to which Kirsten had needed to get reaccustomed upon her return from England — even harder than the bloody Singlish — and what had presumably gotten her niece so upset was feeling the creature ricochet wildly around in her hands, beating its hard carapace against her palms as it strove to free itself, something that seemed much too large and alive to be contained for very long without inflicting a painful bite or sting.
Becoming aware of Miri's agitation, Kirsten had dashed over from where she'd been clipping a hedge across the yard, and had reached the poor kid just as she'd thrown her hands wide open to release the grasshopper, which had shot into the air like a rifle shell, escaping with a sort of ticking, clicking, fluttering sound that caused had Miri to jump with a shrill cry of startlement. It had taken Kirsten a while to get her settled down, and she'd only accomplished that after repeatedly assuring her the bug had gone away, far away, and would not be returning to exact some hideous insectile revenge upon her.
In a sense, Kirsten guessed that her own struggle to keep the truth locked up inside her had been akin to what happened to her niece — she had found herself scared and helpless, dealing with something that had proven much, much more of a handful than she'd bargained for.
And what in the world had she feared from Anna and Lin, anyway? How could any reaction be worse than letting them remain ignorant of the confusing, dangerous mess into which she'd gotten herself?
"Anna, please, listen to me," she said now, fumbling for words. "I'm so sorry…"
"Sorry?" Anna emitted a burst of harsh, pained laughter. "What am I supposed to say to that? What am I supposed to do?"
Kirsten was shaking her head.
"I don't know," she said. "All I can tell you is that I never intended to bring any of this into your home. And that coming here was a terrible mistake. I'll be out by tonight if it's what you—"
"Shit, will you stop making things worse?" Anna said sharply. "Bad enough you've been lying to us the entire time you've been here, letting us believe you're nursing a broken heart. Then I hear it's all about you being involved with spying on your employer, and this craziness about men ambushing you on one of the busiest streets in Singapore like something out of James Bond. And now, to make matters worse, you're saying dzai-jyan, good-bye, as if you think we'd be eager to see you walk out the door and get kidnapped, even killed, God only knows. I'm not sure whether to be angry, frightened, or insulted."