“I like old hotels,” I said.
She gave the lobby another appraising glance. “You’ll be happy here.”
Our rooms were on the second floor, across the hall from each other. Just outside her door, Carla Lozupone turned to me as the Malay bellhop inserted a key in the lock. “I’m going to take a bath,” she said. “Then I’m going to get dressed and then you’re going to buy me a drink. A special drink.”
“What?”
“I didn’t fly nine thousand odd miles for nothing. I’m going to have a Singapore Sling in the bar of the Raffles Hotel. After that, we’ll do whatever we’re going to do. But we’ll do that first.”
“It’s as good a way to start as any,” I said. “Maybe even better.”
I followed the bellhop into my room which was high-ceilinged, large, and furnished in what I suppose could be called British Empire modern. At least the bed looked comfortable. I gave him a Singapore dollar, felt like a miser, and was relieved when he grinned and thanked me effusively. After I had unpacked, and shaved and showered in the enormous bathroom, I put on a lightweight suit, found the telephone book, looked up a number, and made a call to Mr. Lim Pang Sam, the only person whose name I knew in Singapore other than Angelo Sacchetti’s. I didn’t think that Angelo’s name would be in the book, but nevertheless I looked. It wasn’t. I had to go through two secretaries to reach Lim, but when I identified myself as Richard Trippet’s associate, he was exceedingly cordial and wanted to know how Dickie was. I told him that Dickie was fine and we agreed to meet at Lim’s office at ten the following morning. After I hung up I began to feel that asking a respectable Singapore businessman about an American blackmailer might not prove to be an auspicious beginning. Yet it seemed better than asking the Sikh doorman in front of the hotel. Better, perhaps, but not much.
Singapore, which has some aspirations of becoming the New York of Southeast Asia, is fairly new as cities go, having been founded by Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles in 1819. That, if you don’t count what was there before the Javanese leveled it during a raid in 1377, makes Singapore younger than both New York and Washington, but older than either Dallas or Denver. It likes to think that it offers “instant Asia” to the touring Garden Club from Rapid City, South Dakota. A more apt description might be “Asia without tears,” because the water can be drunk from the tap, the city is fairly clean, there are no beggars, but numerous millionaires, and almost everybody that a tourist encounters either speaks or at least understands English.
I was telling all this to Carla Lozupone as we sipped our Singapore Slings in the Elizabethan Room’s small, comfortable bar.
“What else has it got?” she asked.
“The world’s fifth largest port — or perhaps busiest, I’m not sure. A hell of a naval base which the British are giving up soon because they can’t afford it now, any more than they could afford it when they built it in the twenties and thirties—”
“That’s the one where the guns were all pointed the wrong way during World War II, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Towards the sea,” I said. “The Japanese walked and pushed their bicycles down through Malaya which was supposedly impenetrable and there wasn’t much that the British could do about it.”
“So what is it now?”
“What?”
“Singapore.”
“It’s a republic now. Eight or nine years ago it was a crown colony, then a self-governing state under British protection, then a member of the Malaysian Federation until it was kicked out in 1965. Now it’s a republic.”
“It’s a little small, isn’t it?”
“A little.”
Carla tried her drink again, lit a cigarette, and looked around the bar which, at three o’clock in the afternoon, was almost empty. “Do you think he ever comes in here?”
“Sacchetti?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t even know he was alive until four days ago. But if he can show his face, I suppose that he’d come here. It’s popular and stylish and Angelo, as I recall, always liked places like that.”
“I knew he was alive six weeks ago, perhaps even seven,” she said.
“How did you find out?”
“One of my old man’s associates heard about it. You can substitute anything you want for associates.”
“You didn’t choose your parents,” I said.
“No, but one of them tried to choose my husband.”
“He seemed to have had his reasons.”
“Reasons,” she said. “All the wrong ones.”
She was wearing a simple, yellow sleeveless cotton dress which was probably more expensive than it looked. When she turned in her chair to look at me the dress tightened across her breasts and I could tell that she still didn’t have much use for brassieres.
“Tell me something,” she said. “What happens when you find Angelo? Are you going to beat up on him, as the boys down on the corner used to say?”
“What good would that do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Therapy maybe. It might cure your St. Vitus dance or whatever it is that you’ve got.”
“I have to find him first.”
“When do you start looking?”
“Tomorrow,” I said.
“Fine,” she said and drained her glass. “That gives me plenty of time to have another one of these.”
I ordered two more of the drinks that I didn’t much care for but which seemed to be the thing to do the first day in Singapore. When they came, Carla took a swallow of hers and lit another cigarette. There were six of them in her ashtray and we had been there less than forty-five minutes.
“You smoke a lot,” I said, keeping up my end of the conversation.
“I’m nervous.”
“About what?” I said.
“About Angelo.”
“Why should you be? The way you tell it, you’re just along for the ride.”
“Angelo may not think so,” she said.
“So?”
“How well do you know him?”
“That’s what everybody asks me,” I said.
“All right. Now I’m asking. How well do you know him?”
“Not well. Not well at all. We worked together a few times. I think he once bought me a drink or I bought him one. I’m not sure which.”
She found a flake of tobacco on her tongue, picked it off, and flicked it into the ashtray. She did it as well as or better than any woman I had ever seen.
“So you don’t know him?”
“No.”
“I do.”
“Okay. You know him.”
“He has something going for him here in Singapore, doesn’t he? I mean he has a Sacchetti-type thing going.”
“So I understand.”
“And it’s making money,” she said. “Otherwise he wouldn’t stay.”
“I’ve heard that, too.”
“I know this about Angelo. If he’s making money, he’s not doing it legitimately. That’s number one.”
“What’s number two?”
“If anyone gets in his way, he’ll walk on them.”
“Don’t tell me you’re planning to get in his way?”
She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she looked at me and her face was no longer pretty. It was as if she had slipped on a pale mask that had been designed to portray only one emotion and that was an intense dislike that bordered on hatred. When she finally spoke, her voice was cold and somehow remote.
“I don’t know if I’ll get in his way or not,” she said. “It depends.”
“On what?”
“On what he says after I talk to him.”
“When do you plan to do that?”
“As soon as possible.”
“What do you plan to talk about, old times in New Jersey?”
She shook her head. “I have a few questions.”