“A man named Angelo Sacchetti.”
“Yes,” Lim said in noncommittal voice, drummed his fingers on the desk, and peered at me over his spectacles.
“By that I take it that you may know him,” I said.
“No, I don’t know him. Let us just say that I’ve heard of him. He—” Lim broke off and turned around in his chair to take a look at the harbor. He enjoyed the view for a few moments before he spun around and spoke. “Mr. Cauthorne, please excuse what you may consider to be my rudeness, but you are not with the CIA or one of those other intelligence organizations that the Americans and the British seem to be so fond of creating?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not with the CIA.”
There was a pause and Lim swung his chair around so that he could count the ships in the harbor. “I’m sure that Dickie would not have provided a letter of introduction if you were, but still I had to make sure.”
“Maybe the letter’s a fake.”
Lim swung back again and gave me another smile. “No,” he said, “after you telephoned yesterday, I called Dickie in Los Angeles. You are who you say you are. More tea?”
“Please. It seems strange that a businessman would go to all that trouble, but then I’d say that you are more than just a businessman.”
“Yes, it does seem that way doesn’t it?” Lim said as he poured my tea.
I decided that if Lim had something that he wanted to tell me, he would, so we sipped our tea and looked at each other over the rims of our cups until Lim made up his mind about what he wanted to talk about next.
“We are a small nation, Mr. Cauthorne. A tiny one of only two million persons and seventy-five percent of us are Chinese. We have great wealth here and also great poverty, although it is not nearly as severe as it is in other Asian countries. Next to Japan, I suppose, Singapore is better off than any other country. Asian, that is. We are southeast Asia’s major entrepot, or at least we like to think so and our economy rests primarily on this international trade, although we are making some progress in industrialization. Still, we have neither the time nor the money to engage in the full-time business of espionage. But we are curious about persons who come to Singapore and take up residence here. Not that we don’t welcome foreign capital — from virtually anyplace — but still we are, shall we say, rather curious.”
Lim paused and smiled again. “I suppose one could say that I am Singapore’s secret service.”
“Then it doesn’t seem to be much of a secret.”
“Oh, it isn’t. It isn’t at all. Everyone knows it and sometimes we all joke about it. But someone had to do it and the Prime Minister decided that I was the one.”
“Why you?”
“Because, I would say, I can afford it.”
I took a deep breath. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Lim, but does this bring us any closer to Angelo Sacchetti?”
He nodded. “Indeed it does. I became interested in Mr. Sacchetti when he turned up here a year and a half ago after he had drowned in our harbor.” Lim reached into his desk and brought out a manila folder and flipped through it. “I believe you were involved in that so-called accident, Mr. Cauthorne?”
“You know I was.”
“Yes. There’s a report on it here and then Dickie refreshed my memory when I spoke to him last night. Refreshed my memory! My word, I’m beginning to sound like a policeman or a spy or something equally sinister.”
“What about Sacchetti?” I said.
“He turned up here, back from the dead, as it were, a year and a half ago. He arrived on a flight from Hong Kong and his perfectly valid passport indicated that he had spent some time in the Philippines. Cebu City, I believe. Yes, here it is in the file.” Lim moved his finger down the page of the file he held before him. “He opened a rather large account with a draft from a Swiss bank, rented a luxurious apartment, and proceeded to become quite social.”
“Then what?”
“Then a most curious thing happened. It seems that almost everyone in Singapore began to select a combination of three numbers and wager small sums that this number would turn up the following day as the last three digits on the totalizators either at the Singapore Turf Club or the race courses in Malaya or even in Hong Kong.”
“Totalizators?” I said.
“Yes,” Lim said. “I believe you call them parimutuel machines in the U.S.”
“I believe we do.”
“Well, up until then our gambling (and we Chinese are incurable gamblers) had been dominated by our so-called secret societies. At last count, I think there were about three hundred fifty of them. They not only ran the gambling, but also prostitution, what’s left of the opium trade, most of the smuggling, and just about everything else that might be described as illegal — even a bit of piracy.”
“You said up until then.”
“Yes, I did,” Lim said. “It seems that these small bets on the combination of race course digits are now being collected by hitherto unemployed youngsters, juvenile delinquents, I think one could call them, who have banded together in packs and describe themselves as the Billy the Kid Gang or the Yankee Boys or even Hell’s Angels.”
“We try to spread our culture around.”
Lim smiled. “The films do it: that and television. At any rate, our Criminal Investigation Department has got onto it and they’ve found that an extraordinary amount of money is being collected daily by these youngsters.”
“How much?” I asked.
“Around one hundred thousand dollars a day.”
“That’s about thirty-three thousand, American.”
“Yes.”
“Are there payoffs?”
“I beg your pardon,” Lim said.
“Does anyone ever win?”
“Oh, to be sure. People win every day.”
“What are the odds?”
Lim turned to his file again. “I’ll have to look it up. Yes, here it is. The payoff, as you call it, is four hundred to one.”
“That’s low,” I said.
“How?”
“The real odds are about six hundred to one. Whoever’s running it is skimming about two hundred dollars off the top of each hit.”
“Interesting,” Lim murmured. “I’ll make a note of that.” And he did.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You found that the numbers racket was set up by Angelo Sacchetti.”
Lim nodded. “Yes, and he has it quite well organized. Not only that, but he’s gone into several other activities. For instance, if a merchant doesn’t pay a certain weekly sum, he finds his establishment vandalized.”
“What about your secret societies? Don’t they resent an outsider moving in?”
The Lucky Strikes were offered again by Lim and once again I accepted one because it made him feel better. “At first,” he said. “Then there were a couple of mysterious deaths and the societies’ opposition seemed to diminish. Considerably. The deaths were, I believe, most painful.”
“Why don’t you just throw him out?” I said.
“Sacchetti?”
“Yes.”
Lim inhaled his cigarette and blew out a thin stream of smoke. “I’m afraid, Mr. Cauthorne, that it’s not as simple as that.”
“Why? He’s a foreigner. Just don’t renew his visa.”
“Yes, he is a foreigner, but Mr. Sacchetti married just after he arrived here.”
“So I heard.”
“Did you hear whom he married?”
“No.”
“It was the daughter of one of our leading citizens who is quite active in politics. He has used his considerable influence to prevent any move being made against his new son-in-law.”
“What was it, love at first sight?”
Lim shook his head slowly. “No, I don’t believe so. I understand that Mr. Sacchetti paid a little over three hundred thousand American dollars for the hand of his bride.”