Perhaps richest of all was the deadline — the three days that I had to get out of town. I wondered why it was three days and not four or two, or even twenty-four hours. There seemed to be only one way to find out so I took a scrap of paper out of my pocket and called the telephone number that was on it.
A woman answered the phone and she had to shout over a Stones record that was blasting away in the background. She shouted “hallo” and I asked for Captain Nash.
“Who?”
“Nash. Captain Nash.”
“Oh, you mean Snooky. Here, honey, it for you.”
“Hello, Snooky,” I said. “This is Cauthorne.”
“I thought you might call.”
“You mentioned that you had a launch.”
“Well, it’s not really a launch, it’s more of a runabout.”
“Will it get us out to The Chicago Belle?”
“Sure. You want to go tonight?”
“I thought I might.”
“You got an invitation?”
“No.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What does that mean?” I said.
“Nothing. Just uh-huh. You on the expense account?”
“Isn’t everybody?”
“Well, we’re both Americans and all, but if you’re on the expense account—”
“How about a hundred dollars?” I said.
“U.S.?”
“U.S.”
“Tell you what,” Nash said. “I’m in Chinatown. You take a cab to the corner of Southbridge Road and Gross Street. Then get a trishaw and tell him you want to go to Fat Annie’s. He’ll know where it is.”
“All right. When?”
“Be here around eight o’clock and we’ll eat something first.”
“What’s Fat Annie’s, a restaurant?”
Nash chuckled. “It’s a whorehouse, pal, what’d you expect?”
“A whorehouse,” I said and hung up.
Singapore is never quiet really, and Chinatown, a square mile jammed with tiled-roofed buildings, seems to scream all night and all day. Packed into the mile are 100,000 persons and an old sweat who had been born in Shanghai in 1898 once told me that it reminded him more than anyplace else in the world of the China that he had known before the fall of the Chings in 1912. I suppose you can find anything you want in Singapore’s Chinatown, from an opium den to what may be the last of the wandering minstrels who will sing you a plaintive love song from the Tang for a dime. There is not much privacy there; every square foot is constantly in use and sometimes it is rented by the hour to those in need of a nap. The colors can almost blind you, and foot-high Chinese characters in searing red and gold and violet tout the merits of fresh young puppy and year-old eggs.
My pedicab driver pumped me down Chin Chew Street, yelling at the pedestrians who cheerfully yelled back. The family wash, impaled on long bamboo poles, almost formed a canopy across the street and the hawkers poked whatever they were selling into my face. Four Samusis walked by, dressed in their blue blouses and pantaloons, tough, broad-shouldered women who belong to a sisterhood that shuns men and embraces hard, manual labor instead.
It was all there: the stalls selling red and white cakes and squid and rice and monkey; the key makers and the goldsmiths pounding away on their metal, sometimes in rhythm to the music, Chinese, American and English, that growled out of the never silent transistors; the stench of dirt and sweat mingled with the more subtle odors of crushed frangipani, sandalwood, and charcoal fires, and always the sound of human voices endlessly calling to each other from balcony to street, and from street to unshuttered window.
Fat Annie’s didn’t look like much and I asked my human engine, a medium-sized Chinese who seemed to have lost most of his teeth, whether he was sure that he had the right place. He rolled his eyes as if to describe the thousand and one delights that awaited me inside so I paid a dollar for the quarter-hour ride, which was three or four times what I owed him, and pushed through an open red door into a small cubicle where an old woman sat on a low bench smoking a long-stemmed pipe.
“Captain Nash,” I said.
She nodded and pointed her pipe at another door. I went through that into a larger room where there were some tables and chairs, no customers, a rattan bar in one corner with some bottles behind it, and what seemed to be a brand new National cash register on top of its left end. Next to the cash register was an abacus and a woman who sat quietly on a low, sturdy stool. The woman weighed at least three hundred pounds.
She watched me walk towards her with black eyes that had almost disappeared into the fat folds of her round face. “I’m looking for Captain Nash,” I said.
“He’s in the parlor through that door,” she said and moved her head a half an inch towards a door to the left of the bar. It took her a while to move her head and even longer to get it back into place. Her voice was surprising, not just because of its American accent, but also because of its soft, even melodious tone.
“You from the States?” she asked.
“Los Angeles.”
She nodded. “I thought so. That’s why Snooky comes here, because I’m from the States.”
“San Francisco?”
She laughed and her whole body jiggled like a three-hundred-pound bowl of vanilla pudding. “Not even close. I was born in Honolulu. You want a girl? They’re not all up yet, but I can promise you a nice young one.”
“You must be Annie,” I said.
“Not Annie, Fat Annie!” she said and roared out another laugh as she clapped her hands to her stomach and jiggled it mightily. When she was through laughing and jiggling she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “What about a girl? Make you a hell of a good price with a young tricky one seeing it’s so early.”
“Later maybe. Right now I have to see Nash.”
“Like I said, through that door.”
I went through the door and into what Fat Annie had called the parlor and found that her description was accurate. It was a medium-sized room filled with dark Victorian furniture and lighted with softly glowing lamps that sat on marble-topped tables whose legs were carved into whorls and clefts and curlicues. The floor was covered with a dark oriental rug and the pale green walls held gilt-framed nostalgic paintings of rural England. In the center of the room was a small table of dark wood that held a chess set. Bent over the pieces were Nash and a very young, very pretty Chinese girl dressed in a miniskirt It apparently was Nash’s move and he didn’t seem too sure about what it should be.
“Hello, Cauthorne,” Nash said without looking up. “Be with you in a moment.”
He studied the chessboard and then moved a bishop. The girl shot her queen down the board and said: “Check and mate in two move.”
Nash studied the board a few moments and then sighed and leaned back in his chair.
“That’s three in a row,” he said.
The girl held up four fingers. “Four in row. You owe me four dollah.”
“All right, four,” Nash said and took the money out of his shirt pocket and paid her. “You run along now, Betty Lou.”
The girl rose gracefully, smiled at me, and left through the door that I had entered.
“Betty Lou?”
“It’s close enough,” Nash said.
“When can we leave?” I said.
“Let’s eat first.” He shouted something in Chinese and an old man dressed in a black blouse and black trousers shuffled in. Nash spoke again in Chinese and then handed over some money. The old man asked a question, Nash replied, and the man, who looked eighty, but may well have been forty-five, shuffled out.