“I understand what you’re saying. But I’m sure Angelo will see an old friend — especially an old friend who once helped him die for a while.”
I was looking for a cab in Raffles Place, not too far from Change Alley, a kind of a joyous Thieves Market, when a four- or five-year-old Chevelle sedan that looked like a cab pulled over towards me. The driver slowed to three or four miles an hour and the passenger in the back seat rolled down a window. The closed car indicated air conditioning and I was just getting ready to say how happy I would be to share it with him when I saw the revolver pointing at me. A voice behind me said, “Watch it, buddy!” but he needn’t have bothered. I was already dropping and the shove that I got may have helped. I hit on my right shoulder with my hands breaking the fall and my chin tucked down into my chest. I landed hard, but that was all right. I had landed hard lots of times before when the star was too hungover to try it. The revolver went off and something seemed to smack into the pavement beside me, but it may have been my imagination. I continued the roll and came up on my feet. There weren’t any more shots and the cab, with the window rolled back up, was busy losing itself in the thick traffic. I brushed myself off while the pedestrians flowed around me on the sidewalk with only an occasional curious glance. No one said anything; no one yelled for the police; no one wanted to know whether I’d torn my slacks. But then they may have thought that the shot was a firecracker. Firecrackers go off night and day in Singapore and the citizens there, like every place else in the world, put a very high premium on personal involvement.
“You did that real nice,” a voice said behind me. It was the same voice that had told me to watch it. I turned and saw a compact, deeply sunburned man who could have been either thirty-five or fifty-five. He wore a faded khaki shirt with officer epaulets, white duck trousers that were held up by a wide leather belt with a brass buckle, and grimy white tennis shoes, the kind that come up to the ankles.
“You give me the shove?” I said.
“You didn’t really need it.”
“I’m not so sure. An inch or two either way could have made a difference.”
The man jammed his hands in his trouser pockets and squinted his green eyes up at the sun. “I was just heading across the square for a beer. You look as if you could use one.”
“You’re probably right.”
We settled ourselves at a table in a bar that was air-conditioned, not too brightly lighted, and almost empty. The waiter brought us a couple of beers and then went back to his newspaper. The man in the khaki shirt ignored the glass and drank his out of the bottle, a long, gulping drink. When he finished he put the bottle back on the table and took out a flat tin of tobacco, some papers, and rolled himself a cigarette. He rolled it quickly, not concentrating on it, just doing it as automatically as I would if I were to shake one out of a pack. When he had the cigarette going, he squinted at me through the smoke and I noticed that the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes didn’t disappear when he stopped squinting. I put his age at closer to fifty-five than thirty-five.
“I’m Colonel Nash,” he said.
“Colonel in what?” I said and told him my name.
“The Philippine Guerrilla Army.”
“That goes back a few years.”
He shrugged. “If you don’t like Colonel, you can call me Captain Nash.”
“Of the Philippine Guerrilla Navy?”
“Of the Wilfreda Maria.”
“What’s that?”
“A kumpit.”
“And a kumpit is a what?”
“It’s an eight-ton ship. I bought it from a Moro pirate. I’m a smuggler.”
“We all have to make a living,” I said, “but I don’t know if we have to be so explicit about how we do it.”
Colonel or Captain Nash took another drink of beer from the bottle. “What the hell,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “we’re both Americans, aren’t we?”
“You have me there.”
“Anyhow, I don’t smuggle anything into Singapore. I just sell stuff here.”
“What?”
“Timber, mostly from Borneo, out of Tawau. I load up a cargo of copra in the Philippines, sell it in Tawau where I get a good price for it in U.S. dollars, take on a cargo of timber, and sell it here. They use it for plywood.”
“When do you find time to do your smuggling?” I said.
“When I get back to the Philippines. I load up here with watches, cameras, sewing machines, English bikes, cigarettes, and whisky and then run it into either Leyte or Cebu.”
“You ever get caught?” I said.
“Not any more. I’ve got four engines in the Wilfreda Maria now and she’ll do thirty knots easy. I can always duck around in the Sulu Islands if things get too hot.”
“Where do you live in the Philippines?” I said.
“Cebu City.”
“For how long?”
“Twenty-five years. I was with the guerrillas from forty-two on and then I was liaison between the Americans and the guerrillas towards the end of the war.”
“I knew a guy who was in Cebu City about two years ago,” I said. “An American.”
“What’s his name?”
“Angelo Sacchetti.”
Nash had his beer bottle halfway up to his mouth when I mentioned the name. He stopped, looked at me with green eyes that suddenly seemed wary, and said: “Friend of yours?”
“An acquaintance.”
Nash took his interrupted drink of beer, a long, gurgling draught that emptied the bottle. “You looking for him?”
“In a way.”
“Either you’re looking for him or you’re not.”
“All right. I’m looking for him.”
“Why?”
“A personal matter.”
“I don’t think he wants to see you,” Nash said, and signaled for another beer.
“What makes you think so?”
Nash was silent until the waiter served the beer and returned to his newspaper. “Sacchetti dropped into Cebu City about two years ago and he didn’t have a dime. Well, he may have had a couple of bucks, but he wasn’t eating filets and his name wasn’t Angelo Sacchetti then either.”
“What was it?”
“Jerry Caldwell.”
“How long was he there?”
“About three or four months. He looked me up with a proposition. Loan sharking. You know, borrow five pesos and pay back six. I told him I wasn’t interested so he put the touch on me for a couple of thousand.”
“Why you?”
“Hell, I was an American like him.”
“Sorry. I forgot.”
“So I loaned it to him and he loaned it out to a couple of gamblers. For one week. They were supposed to pay him back twenty-five hundred, but they didn’t get around to it. Caldwell or Sacchetti didn’t push them too hard, at least not for a couple of weeks. Then he went downtown and bought himself a baseball bat. You know what he did with that bat?”
“No, but I can guess.”
“He got those two gamblers and broke their legs with it, that’s what. They paid up real quick after that and I don’t know of anybody else who borrowed from him who was late.”
“Why did he leave?”
“Cebu? I don’t know. He hung around the race track mostly. Gamblers were his best customers. Then one day he comes by my place. I wasn’t home, but my old lady was and she told me he took out a roll the size of a cabbage and paid off the two thousand he owed me. Then he left town. Just like that. Disappeared. The next time I see him is about two or three months later. He’s in the Hilton here with this good-looking Chinese doll. I was supposed to meet a guy there but he hadn’t showed up, so I go up to Caldwell and say: ‘Hello, Jerry.’ He just looks at me like this.” Nash made his face go cold and blank. “Then he says, ‘Sorry, mister, you’ve got the wrong party. The name is Sacchetti. Angelo Sacchetti.’ So I said, ‘Okay, Jerry, any way you want it.’ Then he turned around and walked off. So later I checked him out with this guy I’m supposed to meet in the Hilton and this guy tells me that Sacchetti is the latest local power. He’s in everything, even numbers. So I keep track of him.”