At the corner of Trengganu, Alan stopped and looked around. A young Chinese woman spoke to him from a doorway. “Chuang?” she said, opening her kimono a few inches.
Alan shook his head. “Bu” he replied. The fleeting thought of going to bed with her made him think for some reason of Wendy. Irritably, he purged his mind of the thought. “Shu ben shi chang?” he asked the woman in the doorway. She closed her kimono and pointed down the street. Alan nodded. “Xie xie ny,” he said, thanking her.
Walking down to the bookstore he had inquired about, Alan entered. It was a musty little shop, barely four square meters, with no shelves, its books all stacked on several tables as if the owner was prepared to abandon the premises. An old Chinese man in a mandarin coat sat in one corner on an upturned wooden box with a cushion tied to it, smoking through an ivory cigarette holder. He looked sixty, but because Chinese men age so slowly, Alan judged him to be at least seventy-five.
“Wan an, Fu qin,” Alan said respectfully. Good evening, Father.
“My humble shop is yours, my son,” the old man replied in precise English.
“I seek a gentleman named Dao,” Alan said.
The old man shook his head. “You are too late. He is dead. He died from being jiu. Jiu meant very old.”
“I was sent here by the jing ly named van Leuck,” Alan said, referring to the Dutchman as a boss or manager.
“In that case, I am not dead,” the old Chinese admitted. He smiled slyly. “I am jiu, however, and will probably die shortly, but that need be no concern of yours.” He rose and offered his hand. Welcome. I am Dao.”
Alan shook hands and followed him into a curtained corner where there were two more box-and-cushion seats and a small table. “Cha?” the old man asked. Tea?
“Boleh.” Please.
The teapot was set over a burning candle in the well formed by an arrangement of three bricks, keeping it constantly hot without boiling. From a closed wicker basket inside the box on which he sat, Dao removed two beautiful, delicate teacups, each fashioned with symbolic tigers etched in gold, with ruby chips for eyes. Alan, who knew of such things, judged them to be at least one hundred years old. He watched the old Chinese fill them with herbal tea.
The two men sipped their cha in silence until the cups were half empty. Then Dao asked, “Do you know the meaning of my name?”
“I believe it means ‘knife,’ ” said Alan.
“Yes. In my youth, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, I was called Nan Ren Dao. Man of the Knife. An undeserved tribute to a very modest talent. There are those who insist that I could split a swinging pear at fifteen meters. Not being a vain man, I myself never measured the distance. The years, of course, have taken their toll on my eyesight, and my arms have become flaccid and feeble. Fortunately, I have a grandnephew to whom I passed on what little skill I had. He is now the eyes and arms of the man once called Nan Ren Dao. Loyal and respectful young relatives are a blessing to the aged, do you not agree?”
“I do, yes,” said Alan. The old man’s warning was unmistakable: betray me and my grandnephew will throw a knife into you. Alan heard the shop door open and a moment later a young Chinese woman came around the curtain. She was the same woman who had solicited Alan at the corner.
“My grandnephew’s wife,” Dao said. “I am happy to know you are not a man who is easily tempted, even after five years of enforced abstinence.”
Alan bowed his head an inch. “And I am happy to have passed your test, Fu qin. Please tell your grandnephew that it was not easy. His wife is a mei li funu.”
The young woman suppressed a smile at being called a beautiful lady. As she took her coat from a peg and left, Alan had a fleeting thought of Wendy again. She and the Chinese woman carried the same touch of heaviness in their hips. Why, he wondered, could he not get Wendy out of his mind? Was it desire? It was true, as Dao had said, that he had been away from women for five years. Plus a week, as a matter of fact, because he still had not had any sex since his release. That fact was a little disturbing to him — he was beginning to wonder if the years in prison, the beatings and other brutalities, the inadequate diet, the occasional sicknesses, the parasites, the constant close exposure to unrelenting dampness during the monsoon seasons had all conspired to make him impotent?
Dao interrupted Alan’s brief moment of worry by striking a stick match to light a fresh cigarette in his ivory holder. Then he said, “So. You are interested in joining a modest venture we have planned?”
“Yes.”
“Did Herr van Leuck give you any details of the project?”
“No.”
“Ah. Well, as I said, it is a modest venture. We are going to rob the Singapore mint.”
Alan stared incredulously at the old man. Dao smiled and reached for the teapot.
“More cha?” he asked.
The next day, Alan rode one of Singapore’s immaculately clean buses out toward Jurong Town, on the western end of the island where the mint was located. From the road along one side of the compound, where he got off the bus to walk, he was able to take a good, leisurely look at it without arousing suspicion.
Actually, there was not all that much to see. It looked a bit like a small prison — unadorned buildings set some distance back from an electrified cyclone fence topped with accordion wire, with gun towers at the corners. Pretty much impregnable, Alan decided, as far as an armed robbery assault was concerned. Their plan, however — he was already thinking of it as partly his — did not involve assault or arms. As with drugs, the mere possession of cartridges, much less a weapon in which to use them, carried a mandatory death penalty in Singapore. One had to be a fool to tempt such easily administered capital punishment, and Dao was anything but a fool. No, their plan was devoid of violence — much less dangerous and considerably less offensive to the Singapore government. They were not even planning to steal Singapore money, only Malaysian notes printed under contract by the Singapore mint. That way, Dao reasoned, if they were caught the Singapore courts might be a little more lenient.
As for their method, it was quite simple: they were going to execute the robbery through a tunnel, at night.
As Alan walked along the road, surreptitiously scrutinizing the mint, he recalled Dao’s words of the previous night. “The tunnel was already there when the mint was built above it,” the old Chinese had explained. “When the Japanese occupied Singapore during World War Two, in addition to the notorious prison camp at Changi on the eastern end of the island, they also had a smaller camp, for women, at Boon Lay. Prisoners there were nurses, nuns, British officers’ wives and daughters, unmarried Occidentals who had been employed in the city at the time it fell, and a smattering of Eurasian women who qualified for confinement as a result of their mixed blood.
“These women knew their camp was very close to a narrow inlet that came in from the south coast of the island. Many of them had been on family outings around there in happier times and were quite familiar with the area. They reasoned that if they could get out of the camp and reach the inlet, they could, with jewelry many of them had concealed in their hair, barter with the rural natives to acquire dugout boats. With those boats they could sail to any one of the isolated southern islands, which in those days were not developed at all. There they intended to live off wild game and fruit, and possibly cultivate vegetable gardens of some kind. Whatever conditions they encountered, they were unanimously convinced that they would be better off than in their present circumstances, which were resulting in scurvy, rickets, dysentery, and numerous other trying physical problems.