"The phones being out of order," the boy said. "Full of spooks. "
"Spooks?" Laura said. "You mean spies?"
The boy muttered something in Malay. "He means demons," Ali translated. "Evil spirits."
"You kidding?" Laura said.
"It tell me they are evil spirits, said the boy calmly.
" `Uttering terrorist threats intended to sow panic and dissen- sion.' A felony under Article 15, Section 3." He frowned.
"But only in English, madam! It did not use Malay language although use of Malay is officially mandated in Singapore
Constitution. "
"What did the demon say?" Laura demanded.
" `The enemies of the righteous to burn with brimstone fire,' " the boy quoted. " 'Jah Whirlwind to smite the oppressor.' Much else in similar bloody vein. It call me by name." He shrugged. "My mother cried."
"His mother thinks he should get a job," Ali confided.
"The future belong to the stupid and lazy," the boy de- clared. He doubled up his legs and perched expertly on the bamboo strut of his rickshaw.
Ali rubbed his chin. "Chinese and Tamil languages-were these also neglected?"
A gust of wind blew in from offshore. Laura rubbed her arms. She wondered if she should tip the kid. No, she remembered-the A-L.P. had some kind of strange phobia against touching money. "I'm going back inside."
The boy examined the sky. "Sumatra monsoon coming, madam." He popped hinges and pulled up the accordioned canopy of his rickshaw. The white nylon was painted in red, black, and yellow: a Laughing Buddha, crowned with thorns.
Inside the godown, Mr. Suvendra squatted on a quilted gray loading mat under the watery light of the geodesics. He had a television and a pot of coffee. Laura joined him, sitting cross-legged. "I am not like this graveyard shift," he said.
"Your message, it is saying?"
"What do you make of this? It's from my husband."
He examined the paper. "Not English.... A computer cipher. "
A dock robot rolled in with a shipping container on its back. It stacked the box with a powerful wheeze of hydrau- lics. Mr. Suvendra ignored it. "You and husband have a cipher, yes? A code. For hiding the meaning, and showing the message is truly from him."
"We never used anything like that! That's Triad stuff."
"Triad, tong." Suvendra smiled. "Like us, good gemeineschaft .
"Now I'm worried! I've got to call David right now!"
Suvendra shook his head. "The telly say the phones are bloody down. Subversives. "
Laura thought it over. "Look, I can take a taxi across the causeway and call from a phone in Johore. That's Malaysian territory. Maphilindonesian, I mean."
"In the morning," Suvendra said.
"No! David could be hurt. Shot! Dying! Or maybe our baby ..." She felt a racing jolt of guilt and fear. "I'm calling a taxi right now. " She accessed the tourist data on her watchphone.
"Taxis," the phone announced tinnily. "Singapore has over twelve thousand automated taxis, over eight thousand of them air-conditioned. Starting fare is two ecu for the first fifteen hundred meters or part thereof .. .
"Get on with it," Laura grated.
.. hailed in the street or called by telephone: 452-5555..."
"Right." Laura punched numbers. Nothing happened.
"Shit!"
"Have some coffee," Suvendra offered.
"They've killed the phones!" she said, realizing it again, but with a real pang this time. "The Net's down! I can't get on the goddamn Net!"
Suvendra stroked his pencil mustache. "So very important, is it? In your America."
She slapped her own wrist, hard enough to hurt. "David should be talking here right now! What kind of jerkwater place is this?" No access. Suddenly it seemed hard to breathe.
"Look, you must have another line out, right? Fax machine or telex or something."
"No, sorry. Is a bit rough and ready here in Rizome
Singapore. Just lately we move into this wonderful palace."
Suvendra waved his arm. "Very difficult for us." He shrugged.
"You are relaxing, having some coffee, Laura. Could be message is nothing. A trick by the Bank."
Laura smacked her forehead. "I bet that Bank has a line out. Sure. Guarded fiber-optics! Even Vienna can't crack them. And they're right downtown on Bencoolen Street."
"Oh, dear me," said Suvendra. "Very bad idea."
"Look, I know people there. Old Mr. Shaw, a couple of his guards. They were my house guests. They owe me."
"No, no." He put a hand to his mouth.
"They owe me. Stupid bastards, what else are they good for? What are they going to do, shoot me? That'd look great in Parliament, wouldn't it? Hell, I'm not afraid of them-I'm going down there right now." Laura stood up.
"It's very late," Suvendra said timidly.
"They're a bank, aren't they? Banks are open twenty-four hours. "
He looked up at her. "Are they all like you, in Texas?"
Laura frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Can't call taxi," he said practically. "Can't walk in rain.
Catching cold." He stood up. "You are waiting-here, I get my wife." He left.
Laura went outside. Ali and the Party kid were sitting together in the back seat of the rickshaw, under the canopy, holding hands. Didn't mean anything. Different culture. Prob- ably not, anyway .. .
"Hi," she said. "Ummm... I didn't catch your name."
"Thirty-six," the boy said.
"Oh.... Is there a taxi stand near here? I need one."
"A taxi, is it," Thirty-six said blankly.
"For the Yung Soo Chim Bank. On Bencoolen Street?"
Agent Thirty-six hissed a little between his teeth. Ali dug out a cigarette.
"Can I have one of those?" Laura said.
Ali lit it and handed it to her; grinning. She took a puff. It tasted like clove-scented burning garbage. She felt her taste buds dying under a lacquer of cancerous spit. Ali was pleased.
"Okay, madam," said Thirty-six, with a fatalist's shrug.
"I am taking you." He elbowed Ali out of the rickshaw's back seat, then gestured to Laura. "Get on, madam. Start pedaling. "
She pedaled briskly out of the docks and a kilometer up
Trafalgar Street. Then the skies opened up like a water bal- loon, and rain came down in unbelievable pounding torrents.
She stopped and bought a nickel raincoat from a street-corner vending machine.
She turned up Anson Road, pedaling hard, steaming inside her cheap plastic. Rain sheeted from the wheels and steamed off the sidewalks and gushed down the spotless, trashless gutters.
There were a few old colonial-vintage piles by the docklands: white columns, verandahs, and railings. But as they neared downtown the city began to soar. Anson Road became a narrow defile into a mountain range of steel and concrete and ceramic.
It was like downtown Houston. But more like Houston than even Houston had ever had the nerve to become. It was an anthill, a brutal assault against any sane sense of scale.
Nightmarishly vast spires whose bulging foundations covered whole city blocks. Their upper reaches were pocked like waffle irons with triangular bracing. Buttresses, glass-covered superhighways, soared half a mile above sea level.
Story after story rose silent and dreamlike, buildings so unspeakably huge that they lost all sense of weight; they hung above the earth like Euclidean thunderheads, their summits lost in sheets of steel-gray rain.
Here and there the rounded tunnels of Singapore's mag-lev trains; she saw one flit silently above Tanjong Pagar, wheelless and bright, the carriages gleaming in Singapore's Coca-Cola white-and-red.
Agent Thirty-six guided her off the street through the auto- matic doors of a mall. Air conditioning gripped her wet shins.
Soon she was pedaling past rank after silent rank of clothing stores, video places, creepy-looking health centers offering cut-rate blood fractionation.
They drove on for over a mile, through ceramic halls thick with garish, brain-damaging ads. Meandering up and down empty ramps, pausing once to enter an elevator. Thirty-six casually popped the rickshaw onto its rear wheels, telescoped the front, and walked it along behind him like a luggage tote.