“He ready?” Nash said.
“He’s waiting,” she said and looked at me. “You were here the other night. Got time for a quickie?”
“Not tonight,” I said.
“How about your goodlooking friend?”
“Thank you, no,” Trippet said and smiled politely.
Nash was moving towards a door that led to the rear and we followed. “You boys come back,” Fat Annie called.
The door led to a dingy hall. We went down that and through another door and found ourselves in a narrow cul-de-sac that was just wide enough for the waiting trishaw whose thin-faced driver was perched on the bicycle seat smoking a cigarette.
“Somebody’s going to have to sit on somebody’s lap,” Nash said. “I didn’t know there was going to be three of us.”
“I’ll sit on yours,” Trippet said to me.
“Who’s following us, Nash?” I said.
“Cops, I guess.”
“Think this will fool them?”
“Annie will stall,” he said and climbed into the trishaw and said something to the driver in Chinese. I got in next to Nash and Trippet gingerly crawled onto my lap and his rear pushed the Smith & Wesson against my taped stomach and I bit my lip so that I wouldn’t yell. The driver said something to Nash who barked back in Chinese and we were off, the driver’s thin leg muscles bunching into hard knots as he pushed at the bicycle pedals.
He turned left at the entrance to the cul-de-sac and wound his way through packed streets. A few people tittered at the sight of three in a trishaw and Nash muttered something about how goddamned ridiculous it was for Trippet to be along anyhow. Some ten minutes later the trishaw turned down a street that I remembered led to the Singapore River. At the quay the driver stopped and Nash jumped out.
“Any time,” I said to Trippet.
“Sorry,” he said as he eased himself off my knees.
After a few moments of debate Nash paid off the trishaw driver and walked down the steps of the quay and kicked the sleeping Indian with the yellow teeth. He woke up smiling and began to untie the line that ran from his big toe to the runabout.
“Get in,” Nash said.
We got in, the Indian, too, and Nash started the motor and backed out into the river. He turned the boat upriver this time and wove in and out of the anchored tonkangs. We were well over fifty yards upriver when I looked back at the quay. Two men stood on its bottom step and they seemed to be staring at us, but I couldn’t tell who they were in the dusk.
We must have gone a mile upriver before Nash headed the runabout towards the right bank. He pulled up to the steps of the quay and the Indian jumped out and fastened one line to a metal rung and another, smaller one, to his big toe. He grinned his yellow teeth at us once, then curled up and went to sleep.
We went up the steps of the quay, crossed the loading area, and moved down another narrow alley. At the end of the alley Nash stopped at a building that looked like a garage, took out a key, and felt in the dark for the lock. He twisted the key, put it back in his pocket, and then slid the door open. It was a wide, high door and he grunted when he pushed at it Neither Trippet nor I offered to help.
Inside the garage was a fairly new Jaguar 240 sedan. “Yours?” I said.
“Mine.”
“The smuggling business must be good.”
“It’s okay,” Nash said. He handed me the key to the garage door. “Close it and lock up when I drive out.”
He started the Jaguar and backed it slowly out of the garage. I closed the door, locked it, and climbed into the back seat. Trippet sat in front. Nash switched on his lights and turned into a one-way street, traveled three blocks, and turned right. He was a rotten driver.
We wound our way through the commercial section of Singapore until we hit Upper Thomson Road. Nash made a left turn, barely missed a Volkswagen, and kept the Jaguar in second gear too long.
“How far?” I said.
“About eleven, maybe twelve miles to where we’re going,” he said.
We drove in silence for fifteen or twenty minutes except for when Nash cursed at fellow motorists who invariably were in the right. After fifteen minutes or so I looked back for the fourth time and noticed that the lights of the car behind us had still not moved any closer or any farther behind for a good quarter of an hour. I shifted the revolver in my waistband to what I hoped would be a more comfortable position and when that didn’t work out, I shifted it back.
At Yio Chu Kang Road a black Chevelle sedan cut in front of us, momentarily illuminated by the lights of the Jaguar. For once Nash didn’t curse.
“Friend of yours?” I said.
“Not mine.”
“How about the one behind us?”
“Who?”
“We’ve had a tail for the last twenty minutes,” I said. “Mrs. Sacchetti said she didn’t want any tails.”
Nash looked into his rear view mirror, probably for the first time that night, and the Jaguar veered to the left. Trippet grabbed for the wheel and got it back into line.
“Ill lose him,” Nash said.
“Let me out first,” Trippet said.
“Think you can do any better?”
“Anyone could.”
“Well, just watch, fellah.”
Nash pressed down on the accelerator and the Jaguar jumped ahead. He pulled up until he was only thirty or forty feet behind the black Chevelle, then blinked his lights three times in rapid succession. The Chevelle lights blinked twice. Nash cut the Jaguar lights completely and slammed on his brakes and the car skidded to a stop on the left-hand verge of the highway. He turned off the ignition.
“That doesn’t make you invisible,” Trippet said.
“Watch,” Nash said.
The only thing that I could tell about the car that had been following us was that it was painted a dark color and it had two men in the front seat. Neither of them wore hats and I couldn’t see their faces because they turned their heads as they sped past the parked Jaguar. Another car, also containing two men, roared by a few moments later. It looked like a Ford, but I wasn’t sure.
Nash started the engine again, switched on his lights, and pulled back onto the highway. “They didn’t stop, you notice,” he said. “They didn’t want us to think they were tailing us.”
“You can follow from the front as well as from the rear,” I said.
“Watch,” Nash said.
Ahead of us we could see the taillights of the two cars that had passed while we were parked. The tail-lights of the lead car flashed as its brakes came on and the lights veered to the right, crossed the center line, then skittered to the left. The brake warning lights went off and suddenly the regular taillights rose up in the air, turned over three times, and went out. The car that was following pulled sharply to the right, slowed, and then sped on. The four-door black Chevelle was nowhere in sight.
“See what I mean,” Nash said.
We were almost abreast of the car that had gone off the road. It had rolled three times and it had come to rest on its top, prevented from rolling any farther by the splintered palm tree that it had crunched into. A crowd was beginning to gather. “Stop,” I told Nash.
“I’m not stopping,” he said. “We’re late now; you want to see Sacchetti or not?”
“Stop or I’ll break your goddamned neck,” I said.
“Don’t tell me what to do, Cauthorne.”
I leaned forward, slipped my right arm around his neck, and pressed my wrist against his adam’s apple. “Stop,” I said again, and eased off the pressure.
Nash stopped the car and I got out and hurried back towards the wreck. Trippet was close behind. It was almost a fifty-yard walk back to the car and by the time we got there the occupants had been pulled from the wreckage. The car was a Rover sedan and it looked to be a total loss. Gasoline trickled from its tank. The crowd chattered away in Chinese and Malay and one bystander shined a flashlight on the faces of the two occupants of the car who had been carried or dragged to the side of the road. One was Detective-Sergeant Huang who had lost an eye somehow. The other was Detective-Sergeant Tan whose legs were folded under him in an impossible position. Both of them were dead.