“I’m sorry to hear.” Landon tucks his hands in his pockets and scratches the back of his ear, as he habitually does whenever he feels tenuous about something. “I thought if you’re part of this conspiracy maybe you could help me with my identity problem. I’m beginning to look a little too young for someone over fifty.”
“CODEX has got all eyes on you now. A new identity won’t hide you.”
“I guessed. It’s just so hard these days.”
“It’s always been hard,” says John. “In the old days when we had censuses and registration ordinances CODEX had systems in place to make sure identities were as legit as they could. They had this crackpot idea of getting Chronomorph-operatives to raise a child as their own, have them registered with a legitimate identity and then take it over when it matured.”
“What happened to the child then?”
“Silenced.”
A profanity slips from Landon’s lips. “Where did they get them? They couldn’t possibly have abducted all of them?”
“Orphanages. It’s easy if CODEX ran it. They worked like farms.”
“Isn’t it easier to forge documents?”
John coils a length of cable and shakes his head. “They thought forging documents left trails, involved too many greased hands. It was supposedly easier to dispose of bodies. No one would bother with twenty or thirty missing children when there were hundreds of homeless corpses out on the streets.”
“Bloody nefarious… when did this happen?”
“At the turn of the century. It didn’t last. They called it off after a fifteen-year trial. One generation. It was a wrong move but what’s new? History’s full of wrong moves and innocent killings. Like I said—cracked.”
“Cracked as hell,” Landon says.
John bends over to zip up a compartment in his backpack and a pair of dog-tags strung with a silver cross jangle out of his shirt. He grabs them and shoves them back in.
“I didn’t know you were religious,” Landon gibes. “For spiritual protection? Or to profess your faith?”
“Neither,” says John. “It reminds me of who I am.”
“A holy man?”
“A follower of Christ.” John corrects. “Rather, I’m trying to be one.”
“Did you do it to please someone? Your wife?”
“It grew into a conviction.”
“My mother used to talk like that,” says Landon. “Couldn’t remember much of it but I always thought that’s what this thing’s supposed to do—gets you hooked.”
John shakes his head, points to his temple. “You have to work in a lot of sense to get yourself into it.”
“Why even bother?”
“Because I’m convinced it’s the truth.”
“Truth is what you make of it,” says Landon. “And faith is always blind.”
John slings his backpack over his shoulder. “How blind is mine, do you think?”
“Very. If it isn’t empirically justified.”
John gives a slight sigh, as if he is about to launch into an explanation he has repeated many times over. “You’re making the mistake of assuming that faith and the empirical negate each other. In reality they don’t. There is a kind of Truth unattainable by the empirical. That’s where faith comes in.”
Landon shrugs. “All believers claim their brand of mumbo jumbo is Truth.”
“I’ve got the only mumbo jumbo telling us we’re so depraved that it’s the Almighty who had to make the first move by nailing himself to a piece of wood for our damned sakes so we won’t burn in hell. If there truly is a God you would’ve expected this much of him, wouldn’t you?”
Landon pulls out a pipe from his pocket and tries to light it with shaky fingers. “It’s the first time I heard you curse,” he says. “You said ‘damned’.”
“I promised Ginn I’d cut back on it. And the cigarettes.”
“Ginn your wife?”
“No, a prehistoric relative.”
Landon chuckles and ejects a stream of smoke. “I almost believed you.”
John checks his watch, picks up two black briefcases and shoulders past him on his way out. “I’ll be remotely observing the property so don’t call me at the slightest shadow or sound. It’s just a precaution, nothing more.”
Somehow John’s reassurance sounds like juvenile wheedling. Landon examines the hardy little transmitter in his hand and surveys the length of wires running across the ceiling and corridor, and the tiny red lights of sensors and monitors planted amongst the antiquated clutter. Someone is out to murder him and the reality of it hits him like molten surf.
“I’ll see myself out.” John raises a hand in farewell and treads soundlessly downstairs.
Landon doesn’t follow. He stands morosely by the doorway of his bedroom, pipe in hand. The screech of a car engine rises and falls away into silence. Against the stillness he hears the ticking of the clock. It reads one in the morning. A gust of wind fills the curtains. A few minutes later, the first drops of rain amplify into a downpour. He rushes over to the windows and slams them shut. He checks all the rooms and makes it doubly certain that all openings are latched and doors locked. Twice he conducts a tour of the house and finds a note on the dining table:
You forgot our durian date.
Left you a pack and some mangosteens in the fridge. I drop by tomorrow night with nasi lemak from Boon Lay market. Hope you feeling better. Very worried when I saw accident on TV—Cheok.
He berates himself and promises to make it up. As a final measure he tucks a kitchen knife under his mattress and another beneath his pillow. He reads a few journal entries by lamplight. Even then the adrenaline continues coursing through his body, denying him sleep. Over the next hour he leafs through the pages, paying particular attention to entries from the 1960s.
One entry describes a visit to the Van Kleef aquarium with a child on his fourth birthday. The child was given a tin of biscuits and ended up sharing them with whoever came his way because he wanted the empty tin more than anything else. They devoured sugared ice balls and watched the bumboats off Clifford Pier at dusk, then they romped about the lawn and fired off firecrackers left over from the Lunar New Year celebrations. The accounts of the child ended abruptly in March 1965.
And the memory of that fateful day surfaces.
Landon presses the journal to his chest and a teardrop smudges the ink. “Oh Poppy…” He shudders with waves of grief. “I’m so, so sorry…”
26
MAY 1955
FOUR ROWS OF women, most of whom were driven by penury, knelt on burlap sacks and sorted coffee beans by their colour and appearance. The beans lay in furrows on the warehouse floor, and the women would remove defective ones not picked up during hulling. Everyone worked quietly.
The sounds of the riot came from afar—a cacophony of Mandarin slogans and frightful, belligerent shouting. They ebbed and flowed like roars from a distant football game. When they fell away that meant the water jets were being employed. If the rioters took their cause here they’d torch the slums and the police wouldn’t lift a finger. It would only have been convenient.
A round of irascible shouting sounded unnervingly close. The workers looked so nervous that Arthur decided to send them home while there was still daylight. He then chained up the large barn-doors just as the exterior came alive with the clatter of booted feet, accompanied by the hollow shrill of a police whistle. The din drove Arthur behind a timber column below the mezzanine deck. A shape rushed across the vertical slits between sheets of zinc cladding.
He picked up a shovel and hid in a shadowed corner. The chained doors erupted in a hail of frantic pounding.
Indecision gnawed at him, and as he dithered the pounding fell to a series of slow, infuriated beats. Arthur wanted to harden his heart and wait it out, hoping that the rioter would give up. But a pang of pity drove him to approach the door.