I rubbed the back of one forearm across my eyes and thought about the taste of an iced beer when we were through for the day. It was a fine thought, and I was dwelling on it when Harry Rutledge came out of the godown and walked over to me.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“Another hour or so should do it, Harry.”
“Well, you’ve got a visitor, ducks.”
“Visitor?”
“Bit of a pip, too, for a bloody Aussie,” Harry said. “You Yanks have all the effing luck.”
“A woman?”
He nodded. “Fetch Mr. Dan Connell, she tells me. Urgent. Now I don’t like the birds coming round here bothering my lads when they’re on the job. But like I said, she’s quite a dolly. Young, too. Never could say no to them.”
“Did she give you a name, Harry?”
“Marla, she says. Marla King.”
I did not know any woman named Marla King. “Did she say what she wanted?”
“Not a word of it.”
I frowned a little. “Okay,” I said. “Where is she?”
“My office,” he told me. “You know where it is.”
“Thanks, Harry.”
He gave me a grin. “My pleasure, ducks.”
I picked up my bush jacket and put it on without buttoning it, and then went inside the huge, high-raftered godown and threaded my way through the stacked barrels and crates and skids to Harry’s small office. There was a window set into the wall beside the door, facing into the warehouse, but the glass was speckled and dust-streaked; I didn’t get a look at the woman until I had opened the door and stepped inside.
She was sitting in the bamboo armchair near Harry’s cluttered desk, wearing a tailored white suit and fanning herself with a jarang sun hat. Her skirt was very short, and she had her legs crossed at the knees; they were good legs, if a little heavy, and tanned the same odd sort of coffee-with-cream color as her face and arms. Thick butter-yellow hair, worn short and shag-cut, curled under small ears like beckoning fingers. Her eyes were a kind of sea-green, shallow green; she wore too much shadow on the lids, giving the eyes a veiled look that was at the same time sensuous and too-wise. She was on the near side of thirty, but she was coming up fast.
She sat watching me as I closed the door. The red oval of her mouth was stretched into a speculative smile. “Dan Connell?” She had one of these whisky voices-distinctly Australian in accent-that would sound fine and caressing in a bedroom, but which seemed only theatrical in the hot, airless space of a godown office.
I said, “That’s right. Miss King, is it?”
“Marla King.” She lifted her right hand, with the wrist crooked down, like a Southern belle greeting a suitor. All she would have needed was a frilly dress and a mint julep.
I took the hand and let go of it again. “What was it you wanted to see me about, Miss King?”
“The Burong Chabak,” she answered.
“The what?”
“The jade figurine, of course.”
“I don’t think I follow.”
She laughed softly. “You’re being careful. Well, that’s natural. It is all right to talk here, isn’t it?”
“If the conversation makes sense.”
“I think we can arrange a deal where the Burong Chabak is concerned,” she said. “Does that make sense for you?”
“No.”
The smile went away, and her face took on a brittle cast, as if she were entering a transitional state between quiet patience and cold fury. “The figurine belongs to me now.”
“Does it?”
“La Croix is dead, isn’t he?”
La Croix again. For Christ’s sake! I said, “Just who are you, Miss King?”
“A friend of La Croix’s.”
“What sort of friend?”
“We had a partnership agreement.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning the figurine.”
“What in hell is this figurine you keep talking about? Look, Miss King, we’re going around in circles.”
“You deny that you have it?”
“I don’t know anything about it ”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You think La Croix gave me this figurine, is that it?”
“Either that, or you killed him for it.”
I stared at her. She was the second person today who had all but directly accused me of murdering the Frenchman, and I was beginning to grow damned weary of it. Well, all right. It was time I found out what this was all about; you can only keep out of something, can only maintain your neutrality, if those who are involved allow you to-and nobody seemed to be willing to let me off the hook.
I said, “This figurine-tell me about it.”
“That would be pointless, under the circumstances.”
“Humor me.”
“The affair was reported in the Straits Times.”
“I make it a point never to read the newspapers.”
She stopped fanning herself with the sun hat and leaned forward on her chair, looking up at me with greed shining like firelight in the depths of her eyes. “All right, then. Early last week, a white jade figurine-the Burong Chabak — disappeared from an exhibit at the Museum of Oriental Art here in Singapore. The figurine is priceless, although it was insured for two hundred thousand Straits dollars. Double that can be gotten at the right source in the South China Sea, Connell. Four hundred thousand Straits dollars.”
“And you and La Croix were the ones responsible for the disappearance of this Burong Chabak.”
“He committed the actual theft.”
“Sure. What happened then?”
“Then?”
“How did La Croix get the figurine for himself? If you’re looking for it, the two of you had to have gotten mixed up on your signals somewhere along the line. Either that, or he tried to double-cross you.”
“Of course he tried to double-cross me!” Her hands gripped the bamboo arms of the chair, and the jarang hat dropped unnoticed to the dusty floor. “He was a fool, a stupid fool.”
“And so you killed him for it.”
“I killed him?” She laughed in a masculine, derisive way. “I had no idea where he was. But you knew, didn’t you? He’d been to see you.”
“How did you find that out?”
“There are ways.”
“And ways,” I said. “This is getting us nowhere.” I walked over to Harry’s desk and cocked a hip against it carefully, so as not to topple the farrago of miscellany perched precariously on its surface. “Let’s suppose I have this figurine of yours. What makes you think I’d pony it up for you? A one-way split is a hell of a lot more profitable than a two-way.”
“Quite true,” she said, and the smile was back now. She thought things were finally going to go as she’d expected. “But it’s unlikely that you have a buyer for the Burong Chabak, or could find one willing to pay much more than one hundred thousand Straits dollars.”
“But you do have a buyer.”
“Exactly.”
“Where?”
“In Bangkok.”
“How much?”
“Four hundred thousand Straits dollars.”
“Even split?”
“Of course. You produce the figurine and I produce the buyer. Fair exchange?”
“Sure,” I said. “If I had the figurine to produce.”
Anger smouldered in Marla King’s eyes, abrupt and barely contained. She was as unpredictable, and as volatile, as a vial of nitroglycerin. “Do you deny that you’ve got it, even now?”
I shrugged. “But maybe I can get it.”
Another change; the brightness was back in her eyes. “When?”
“I’m not sure. How do I get in touch with you?”
She smiled wisely. “You don’t. I’ll come to you.”
“When and where?”
“At a safe time and location.”
Impasse. I got a cigarette out of the pocket of my bush jacket and lit it and blew smoke at the electric punkah rotating sluggishly on the ceiling. “Tell me,” I said, “where does Van Rijk fit into all this?”
She reacted, but not in the way I had expected. The surface of her forehead crinkled, and she looked suprised and suddenly, inexplicably, unsure of herself. Blankly she said, “Van Rijk?”
“Jorge Van Rijk.”
“Who is he?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know anyone by that name.”