Anton, dumbfounded, chuckles uncomfortably. “Well, I—”
The sight of a scrawny Kling halted his speech. The Kling passed by the doorway, and having seen Anton, floundered into the ward. He was carrying a small wicker basket and looking a little flustered.
“Amal!” cried Anton. “How’d you find me?”
The Kling ran his fingers through his oiled, curly locks. “Can’t find you in your house lah.” He made little wavering movements of his head as he spoke. “Got people say bomb kena somebody near your place and the ARP ambulance brought him here. So just come and check out lah. Sekali you really here! So what happened?”
“Shrapnel. Nothing serious.” Anton gestured at Vivian. “Amal, meet Vivian.”
Amal looked astonished. “Hey!” he cried, taking Vivian’s hand. “You? A nurse?”
“Long story, Amal.”
Anton shifted his gaze from one to the other. “You knew each other?”
Someone along the corridor shouted for a nurse, and Vivian’s flight couldn’t have been timelier. She took the opportunity to gainfully excuse herself. “I’m so sorry. We’ll speak again.” She gave an apologetic frown and flitted out of the ward, much to Anton’s and Moustache Monty’s dismay.
“Excellent timing, Amal,” said Anton.
Amal wiggled his head. “So your flirting habis lah?”
“You knew her?”
“She help us with the liquor, remember?” said Amal. “She help open the backdoor and transfer the payment as a buffer mah. At the cabaret where we sell the goods, remember? You even danced with her.”
“I did?”
Amal retrieved a cracker from its thin, filmy wrapping, popped it into his mouth and dusted off the crumbs on his shirt. “Drink my syrup and you will remember better.”
Anton rejected a cracker. “I don’t think the syrup’s working, Amal.”
Their conversation was interrupted by a series of three successive thuds—the third having rattled the window louvers. Everyone fell silent and turned their eyes to the windows but quickly lost interest and resumed their activities. There were two more heavier-sounding thuds, then they started coming farther and fewer in between.
“Cannons,” said Amal. He meant artillery. “Don’t know Japs or ours.” He seemed to have recovered from a reverie and resumed his speech in earnest, “Yes, drink the syrup. You know I always bring you good stuff. Remember, don’t see a doctor.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“I tell you many times the ang moh medicine no good for your body lah. Last time you see doctor your memory got better? No? So try mine lah.”
Amal spent the rest of the time before lunch nattering about the benefits of an emerging black market and how they could profit from it, if only they could get their wits around obtaining raw supplies from merchants with a war going on. He said that with Anton’s mixed looks they could even run businesses for the Japanese if they occupied this country. Strictly business, he was fond of saying. It’s about serving one master or the other, and that their ethnicities could be advantageous since the Japanese were known to be more tolerant towards Indians and Malays than the Chinese.
Lunch was watered-down rice, tapioca and cabbages. A large Caucasian nurse with a bright, rosy smile ladled the food on metal dishes while a glum-looking lady followed behind and dropped off little tapioca buns.
The shelling resumed. This time the rounds landed closer though they did not sound as large as the earlier ones. Moustache Monty told everyone that they were likely mortar rounds. One of them almost struck the Sisters’ Quarters and probably did some damage because they heard glass shattering. It turned the mood sombre. Moustache Monty tried to read but ended up slipping into a reverie propped up on his bed. Amal was the only one who nattered on.
It was almost one pm when the corridor outside began to stir with a little more activity than usual. A doctor hurried in and conferred with a group of nurses and a superintendent who wore a white blouse with three pips on the shoulders. Vivian however, wasn’t with them.
Amal at last fell silent when the nurses began evacuating the patients on the ground-floor wards, wheeling them out one after another depending on the severity of their wounds. Those on the floor abandoned their litters and shambled after them. Moustache Monty held a brief conference with a few patients and seemed to have decided to stay, contrary to the counsel of the hospital administration.
The sound of gunfire got Amal leaping to his feet and rushing out of the ward.
Moustache Monty tracked him with condescension in his gaze. “I say it’s safer to stay put,” said he. “We’re protected by the Geneva Convention and the Red Cross. Follow my lead and you’ll live. For a start—” more gunfire drew his attention briefly to the corridor— ”bow to them. Show them reverence and they’ll leave you alone. If you run they’ll shoot you.”
No sooner had Moustache Monty spoken Amal returned, his face gloomy. “They’re fighting in the balconies,” he reported. “No good running to the tunnels because Indian soldiers also hiding there. Japs will shoot them all.”
“My point, exactly,” said Moustache Monty.
As it turned out a regiment of the Indian Division had retreated from Ayer Rajah Road and taken cover at the Military Hospital with Japanese troops in pursuit. Amal led them through the western set of windows for their escape. Then they were in the hospital’s backyard—a forested bluff that offered excellent concealment. But from where he stood Anton could see squads of Japanese soldiers crouching behind trees and shrubs along the incline, waiting to execute any escapees.
Somehow he had to find a way.
“Don’t get jumpy or you’ll get us killed,” Moustache Monty told Amal warningly. “Follow my lead and you’ll be fine.”
But Amal appeared not to have heard him. He moistened his drying lips, crouched beside Anton and leaned over to him. “No one is allowed to leave the hospital,” he said in a grim whisper. “They’re killing anyone who can’t walk.”
There was nothing Anton could say to it. He was watching the doorway just as Vivian entered, looking anxious but not frightened. Their gazes met briefly and Anton was surprised when she pulled Amal away.
They got into an adjacent room and she pressed an object of considerable weight into Amal’s hands. It was a Nambu pistol— the standard sidearm of a Japanese officer. She pointed at a film of transparent tape attached to the weapon’s butt and Amal realised with a start that it was a neuro-transmitter.
“You’re CODEX,” Amal whispered.
Vivian did not reply. She took out a palm-sized touchpad and remotely programmed the neuro-transmitter in a series of taps. She showed the readings to Amal and then stowed it.
“That’s all I can do for you.” She also gave him a toy cricket clicker. “Keep him alive and destroy it when it’s over.”
They left the room. Vivian clapped briskly down the corridor and disappeared around a corner. Bizarre as it seemed there was little time to ponder. Amal tucked the weapon in his trousers and returned to the ward. He stood by the doorway and peeked down the corridor, now alive with shouting and cracks of gunfire. Against the daylight he saw Japanese soldiers in steel helmets, their silhouettes bristling with the leaves and branches they’d stuck on as camouflage. He could make out the long, spindly tips of their bayonets.
A doctor, hoisting a white flag and a Red Cross armband high, rushed to meet them. A Japanese soldier uttered some kind of war cry and speared him through the thorax. The doctor crumpled to the ground and there he lay unmoving.
“What’s happening?” asked Anton.
Amal raised a hand to silence him. With remarkable composure he went on observing the marauding soldiers skewering a patient hobbling with a leg cast. Screams coursed down the corridor. Even Moustache Monty was turning white; the sheets drawn up to his chest, his opened book lying upside down on his belly.