Once, I had one. It was a simple matter. Mr. Weerakoon said he needed new violin strings and could not find any in the shops. I knew the importer; I had fixed him up on several occasions. I gave him a telephone call.
“Hi, this is Jack Flowers. Say, I’ve got a little problem here—”
“I’ll ring you back,” he said quickly, and the line went dead.
That was the last I heard from him. I asked about him at his club.
“Why don’t you leave the poor chap alone,” one of his pals — also a customer of mine — said. “You’ve got him scared rigid. He’s trying to make a decent living. If you start interfering it’ll all be up the spout.”
That was the last I heard from the pal, too. I got the message, and never again asked for a favor. But they continued to be offered. They sounded sincere. Late at night, after the larking, the contented pink-faced fellers were full of gratitude and good will. I had made them that way: I was the kind of angel I expected to visit me. They said I should look them up in Hong Kong; I should stop over some day and see their ships or factories; I should have lunch with them one day — or the noncommittal, “Jack, we must really meet for a drink soon.” The invitations came to nothing; after the business about the violin strings I never pursued them. So I stayed at Hing’s, as his water clerk, both for safety and reassurance: it was the only job I could legally admit to having — and soon I was to be glad I had it.
A young Chinese feller came in one evening. It was before six, the place was empty, and I was sitting at the bar having a coffee and reading the Malay Mail.
“Brandy,” he said, snapping his fingers at Yusof. “One cup.”
Yusof poured a tot of brandy into a snifter and went back to chipping ice in the sink.
I knew from his physique that the Chinese feller did not speak much English. The English-educated were plump from milk drinking, the Chinese-educated stuck to a traditional diet, bean curd and meat scraps — they were thin, weedy, like this feller, short, girlish, bony-faced. His hair was long and pushed back. His light silk sports shirt fit snugly to the knobs of his shoulders, and his wrists were so small his heavy watch slipped back and forth on his forearm like a bracelet. He kept looking around — not turning his head, but lowering it and twisting it sideways to glance across his arm.
“Bit early,” I said.
He looked into his drink, then raised it and gulped it all. It was a stagy gesture, well executed, but made him cough and gag, and as soon as he put the snifter back on the bar he went red-faced and breathless. He snapped his fingers again and said, “Kopi.”
“No coffee. Cold drink only,” said Yusof.
The feller frowned at my cup. Yusof reached for the empty snifter. The feller snatched it up and held it.
I heard footsteps on the verandah and went to the door, thinking it might be Mr. Weerakoon. I faced three Chinese who resembled the feller at the bar — short-sleeved shirts, long hair, sunglasses, skinny pinched faces. One was small enough to qualify as a dwarf. He swaggered over to a barstool and had difficulty hoisting himself up. Now the four sat in a row; they exchanged a few words and the one who had come in first asked for a coffee again.
Yusof shook his head. He looked at me.
“We don’t serve coffee here,” I said.
“That is kopi,” the feller said slowly. The others glared at me.
“So it is,” I said. “Yusof, give the gentlemen what they want.”
At once the four Chinese raised their voices, and getting courage from the little victory, one laughed out loud. The dwarf hopped off his stool and came over to me.
“You wants book?” he asked.
“What kind?”
“Special.” He unbuttoned his shirt and took out a flat plastic bag with some pamphlets inside.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “Finish your coffee and hop it.”
“Swedish,” he said, dangling the plastic bag.
“Sorry,” I said. “I can’t read Swedish.”
“Is not necessary. Look.” He undid the bag and pulled one out. He held it up for me to see, a garish cover. I could not make it out at first, then I saw hair, mouths, bums, arms.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Look.” He turned the page. It was like a photograph of an atrocity, a mass killing — naked people knotted on a floor.
“I don’t need them,” I said. He shook the picture in my face. “No — I don’t want it. Yusof, tell this creep I don’t want his pictures.”
“Tuan—” Yusof started, but the dwarf cut him off.
“You buy,” said the dwarf.
“I not buy.”
Now I looked at the three fellers near the bar. The first had swiveled around on his stool. He held the brandy snifter out at arm’s length and dropped it. It crashed. Upstairs, a giggle from a girl in a beaverboard cubicle.
“How much?” I asked.
“Cheap.”
“Okay, I’ll take a dozen. Now get out of here.”
The dwarf buttoned the pamphlets into his shirt and said, “You come outside. Plenty in car. You choose. Very nice.”
I shook my head. “I not choose. I stay right here.”
Glass breaks with a liquid sound, like the instantaneous threat of flood. One feller shouted, “Yoop!” I saw Yusof jump. The mirror behind him shattered, and huge pieces dropped to the floor and broke a second time.
“Tell them to stop it!” I said, and went to the door. “Where’s your lousy car?”
A black Nissen Cedric was parked on Kampong Java Road, just beyond the sentry box where Ganapaty was hunched over a bowl of rice. He busily pawed at the rice with his fingers.
“In there,” said the dwarf, opening the trunk.
There were torn newspapers inside. I turned to object. My voice would not work, my eyes went bright red, and a blood trickle burned my neck; I seemed to be squashed inside my eyeballs, breathing exhaust fumes and being bounced.
Believe any feller who, captive for a few days, claims he has been a prisoner for months. My body’s clock stopped with the first sharp pain in my head, then time was elastic and a day was the unverifiable period of wakefulness between frequent naps. Time, like pain, had washed over me and flooded my usual ticking rhythm. I swam in it badly, I felt myself sinking; pain became the passage of time, pulsing as I drowned, smothering me in a hurtful sea of days. But it might have been minutes. I ached everywhere.
For a long time after I woke they kept me roped to a bed in a hut room smelling of dust and chickens and with a corrugated iron roof that baked my broken eyes. This gave my captors problems: they had to feed me with a spoon and hold my cup while I drank. They took turns doing this. They untied me, removing everything from the room but a bucket and mattress, and they brought me noodles at regular intervals. My one comfort was that obviously they did not plan to kill me. They could have done that easily enough at Dunroamin. No Chinese will feed a man he intends to kill. Anyway, murder was too simple: they didn’t want a corpse, they wanted a victim.