Furthermore, she felt vaguely as if she'd betrayed him by calling the authorities after he had specifically told her to wait for him to contact her, and had tried giving her the name of someone else to reach if he didn't. But he'd never finished getting it out of his mouth — either that or she hadn't heard him clearly from inside the cab — and though she was guessing the person might be someone at UpLink. her sister and brother-in-law had advised her not to call there, insisting it wouldn't do until she had a clearer idea of what Max had been into. For all she knew, they'd repeated endlessly, the Americans had dragged her into some kind of dishonest business. And without evidence to the contrary, it had been impossible for her to dismiss that possibility without seeming unreasonable.
Which left her with Anna's question. How, then, would she describe her psychic and emotional state? How to express the incommunicable?
She looked at her sister from the entryway, thinking.
"I feel," she said at last, groping for words, "as if the sky is upside down and world is in the wrong place. The wrong place, you understand?"
Overwhelmed, Anna started raising her hand to her lips in a gesture of mute distress, but caught herself at the last moment and let it drop back onto her lap.
"I'm trying, Kirst," she said in a dry, scared voice. "Please believe, I'm trying my very best."
"Truly, I consider the orchid to be the embodiment of our Asian heritage," Fat B was saying. "Lasting yet delicate, its success, its flowering, dependant upon an exacting set of conditions."
"Is that so?" Commander Sian Po of the Singapore Police Force said.
"Truly, truly," Fat B said. "Nurtured in the rich soil of their evolution, orchids thrive in abundance, generation upon generation draping our hills, blanketing our heaths and gardens. Change what is essential to their natural state… go too far trying to cross cultures.. spoil the purity of their time-honored lineage… and they wane like homesick souls. And while you may call me eccentric, I have always held to the belief that their colorful blossoms are inhabited by the spirits of our ancestors."
"There is a widespread fancy that certain varieties may actually steal one's spirit, you know. That their sublime beauty, drawing its energy from the feminine principle, may entrance a man and capture his essence, drain his very yin.''
"No, no, I think that is ridiculous."
"Well, I do, too. For that matter, I think this is all a pile of shit, so let's drop it. You arranged this meeting. If you have something to say, say it."
Fat B glanced at him and nodded.
They were looking out over the rail of a walking bridge that spanned a koi pond in the orchid gardens on Mandai Road in the north of Singapore Island, admiring the darting fish and the silver-tinged purple brightness of the bamboo orchids planted near the pond.
"Do the names Max Blackburn or Kirsten Chu mean anything to you?" Fat B asked.
The commander shook his head. "Should they?"
Fat B hesitated. "There was a disturbance on Scotts Road last Friday evening. Surely you're aware of it."
The commander did not shift his gaze from the orchids. A short, heavy man with rather mashed-looking features, he had arrived here for their clandestine appointment sans badge and uniform, not wishing to be identified as a police officer, let alone one of high rank. It would, he knew, be very bad indeed if he were seen consorting with a disreputable character like Fat B.
"Scotts is Central… 4A' Division," he said. "Not my jurisdication."
Fat B found his brevity curious. He leaned forward with his elbows on the rail and gazed past the pond to where the flowers were quivering in a light breath of breeze, their glow in the copious sunshine surpassing even that of the hand-painted butterflies on his shirt.
"Your Geylang command encompasses thirteen neighborhood police posts and over three hundred officers," he said. "The incident to which I am referring involved a scuffle on the street in front of a large hotel. A very busy location. My information is that there were witnesses. Do you mean to tell me there were no reports? No departmental bulletins?"
The commander turned his head toward Fat B and gave him a phlegmatic look.
"Assuming there were," he said, "what connection do you have to the occurrence?"
"None, I assure you." Fat B shrugged. "Like yourself, I try not to stray beyond my own purview. But on occasion people ask me things, and I do my best to give them answers."
"And how generous are these people in their gratitude?"
"Very."
The commander inhaled, then let the air rush out his lips.
"Something odd did happen outside the Hyatt, and maybe inside as well," he said. "Exactly what, I'm not sure. But CID's involved."
"Criminal Investigation?"
"Yes. And more than one line element. Rumor has it that both the Special Investigation Section and Secret Societies Branch have their noses in this."
"Tell me everything that is known about the incident."
"There isn't much. Or if there is, the CID hotshots are keeping it to themselves." Sian Po shrugged. "I've heard a bystander gave us an anonymous call, and it was corroborated by another report. There was a confrontation at a taxi stand involving a quai lo, a woman, and some others. The woman rode off in a cab, and the white man stayed behind and is supposed to have been followed into the hotel lobby. We don't know what happened afterward, but it was all over by the time a patrol car arrived. Everyone involved seems to have vanished, and few bystanders admit to having seen anything. But that's the way it is."
"Nobody wants trouble, lah."
The commander nodded, and released another sigh.
"Even so," he said, "trouble comes."
They were silent a while. Fat B's eye caught a compressed medley of color flitting under the surface of the pond — a large rainbow koi. It darted into the shade of a water lily and stopped abruptly, its long body hovering in perfect stillness.
"Should Missing Persons reports be filed on either the quai lo or the Chu woman, I would very much appreciate being apprised of their sources," he said. "Also, my inquisitive friends would find any clues I could pass along about the woman's present whereabouts to be of special value."
Their eyes met.
"Your friends," the commander said. "What will they do if they locate her?"
"I don't ask."
The commander looked at him for a full minute without saying anything, then slowly nodded.
"I'll see what I can do," he said.
Fat B grinned with satisfaction. "And I'll make it worth your while."
The commander lingered on the rail another moment, then turned to leave. Fat B didn't move. He did not think Sian Po would be inclined to stroll from the garden in his presence.
The commander took two steps up the bridge and paused, motioning toward Fat B's shirt with his chin.
"Those butterflies are quite splendid," he said. "They are of the Graphium species, are they not?"
Fat B nodded.
"I've heard they survive by sucking the piss of higher animals from the ground," the commander said.
Fat B controlled his reaction.
"Thank you for sharing that with me," he said. "Outwardly we are very different types of men, you and I, but love and knowledge of nature is our bond."
The commander looked at him and grinned unpleasantly.
"The money helps," he said, and strode away.
Chapter Seventeen
"This," Noriko cousins said, "is one amazing room."
Nimec reached for the little blue cube of chalk on the bridge of the pool table.
"So people tell me," he said, rubbing the chalk on the tip of his cue stick with a circular motion. "It's where I come to loosen up, get my thoughts right."