While Luther got his wallet out and fished out a card, Kim said, “Something urgent happened, and he had to hurry away. He’ll expect us to go back to the hotel.”
“Yes, of course.”
“He’ll get a message to us there,” Kim went on, “as soon as he can. It could be there now, for all we know.”
“Yes. You’re right, Kim. I’m sure you’re right.”
There was no message at the hotel, nor did they see the hulking follower anywhere, either outside or in the lobby. As they rode up together in the elevator, Kim said, “Do you think we should phone the police?”
“Not yet,” Luther said.
She followed him into his room, his and Jerry’s. It was very messy, as always. She sat in the one chair, by the window, while he paced.
He said, “We could still hear from him.”
“Of course we could. How long has he been gone? Half an hour?”
“Closer to an hour,” he told her.
“He’ll call. Or he’ll show up.”
“What we’ll do, Kim, we’ll have dinner, we’ll spend the evening here, and in the morning—”
“In the morning! Luther...”
“If we haven’t heard from Jerry,” Luther went on, “then we’ll call the police.”
“Jerry will be back long before then,” she said, but it sounded stupid even as she was saying it.
14
Bennett did not dare think about the future. All he could possibly do was concentrate on the present, on the difficult tasks that faced him right now. Hitting the Diedrich fellow in the face with the iron pipe had been the easy part, almost the pleasurable part. But immediately after that, the job got complicated.
Quickly, before anybody else came into the men’s room, he had to stuff this suddenly heavy inert body through the narrow opening of the window into the narrow stone-floored alley outside. Not a dirty alley, though, a very clean alley. The Singapore authorities demanded cleanliness everywhere, and backed up their demands with fines: one thousand dollars Singapore for littering. So even the alleys are frequently swept, rubbish is never allowed to accumulate, and though Bennett’s victim was now bleeding from his cut forehead and his ears, and though he hit the alley stone hard, he didn’t get dirty.
“That’s good, then,” Bennett told himself. “Well begun is half done.” He clambered out the window after Diedrich, touched his throat for a pulse to be sure he was still alive, “You’re not worth much dead, are you, not at this point,” then hurried away down the alley to the side street where, fortunately, he had parked his car.
The alley was just barely wider than the Honda. Honking at the many pedestrians that jostled around him, muttering, “Can’t you see a man’s trying to do a piece of work here,” Bennett backed the little car into place, the rear of it filling the alley mouth. Just enough room left for him to squeeze by.
The Honda was a hatchback. Raise the rear, and now the car almost completely blocked the view of anybody passing by on the street. Not that anybody cared. After one disapproving glare at this car stuck halfway into the sidewalk, everybody just kept on going by, concerned with their own affairs.
Bennett loped like a gorilla back to the body, which hadn’t moved. “Hello, there, you still alive? Yes; good.”
He picked Diedrich up like a sack of flour over his shoulder, and ran half-stumbling back to the car.
At the Honda, he dropped Diedrich into the well, not gently, and pulled over him some of the old blankets and tarps he kept back there. “There you are, all tucked in, eh?” Then he shut the hatchback, squeezed around the car, got behind the wheel, and drove away from there. (He saw the other two, still at the same table, as he went by, and muttered a farewell.)
Very well, what now? Richard Curtis had two questions that must be answered by Colin Bennett before Curtis would leave Singapore in two days’ time. Only Jerry Diedrich knew the answers to those questions, and in trailing him Bennett had come to be convinced that he wasn’t going to answer those questions, not willingly. It seemed to him, if he could at least find Mark, the elusive Mark, then he could go and lean very heavily on Mark, and force him to tell why Diedrich had such a very special antipathy toward Richard Curtis.
But in a week, a full week, Bennett hadn’t even been able to accomplish step one. He could not fail Richard Curtis. Yet all he had left was today and tomorrow.
So the answer seemed obvious. He had to pluck Diedrich away from his friends, control him, and get the answers out of him directly, one way or another.
So he’d started, he’d begun, he’d gone this far. He had Diedrich unconscious and under control in the back of the Honda. But he couldn’t keep him in the Honda indefinitely. There had to be somewhere Bennett could deal with him at leisure, ask the questions and take the time to get the answers.
This was one of the crux points, when it was vital to concentrate exclusively on the present and think not at all about the future. There is no future, there is only this one step at a time, and the step now is to take this fellow home.
Well, that was the choice, wasn’t it? Bennett had access to no other indoor area, not where he could keep a prisoner. Singapore is a nation and a city, but it’s also an island, narrowly contained, heavily populated and cultivated. There were no remote lakes with seasonal lodges he could break into, no desert ghost towns, nowhere on the island that he could reach that wasn’t already observed and occupied. So it was his own home, and nothing else to say about it.
At last he turned off China Street into an alley, somewhat wider than the alley behind that bar. “Home sweet home, by God,” he announced, feeling grim.
On both sides of the alley, recently built but old-fashioned three-story buildings rose, neat but uninviting. Back here, the ground floors were open, parking for the residents who lived in the apartments above.
There was little pedestrian and no vehicular traffic back here. Bennett pulled Diedrich from the Honda, shouldered him with one blanket around him so that he was a bit less obviously a human body, and carried him up the two flights of narrow metal exterior stairs and along the outside concrete balcony to his door. It was hard to unlock the door, but Bennett didn’t want to have to put the body down and pick it up again, so he persevered, commenting to himself along the way, while Diedrich bobbed on his shoulder, and finally he succeeded.
The apartment was as narrow as his garage space down below, but it went all the way through to the front. In the back, where he entered, was his kitchen, with a small bath beyond that. Next to the bath, a narrow hallway led to his small living room, illuminated by a square skylight in the middle of the celling. A closed door beyond that led to an even smaller room, with his bed and dresser and the window overlooking the side street below. If he leaned out his window, he could see the traffic on China Street, passing by down at the corner.
In the car, he’d decided what to do. He would keep the door between the living room and the bedroom closed, and also the door between the hall and the kitchen. That would give him and Diedrich a small suite of living room and bath, with only the living room’s skylight and the bath’s exhaust fan. Diedrich would have no view out any window except the sky, so he wouldn’t be able to describe to anybody afterward even what neighborhood he’d been in.
Bennett considered. “Should I wear a mask, or maybe blindfold Diedrich?” He thought about it, the blindfold in particular, but he knew for sure they’d spotted him trailing them, they knew who he was. “Oh, they know it’s me, no question.” Curtis would simply have to—