“Money? You want money? I get you big money!” I shouted at the walls. The men never replied. Their silence finally killed my timid heckling.
Grudgingly, saying “Noodoos,” banging the tin bowls down, they continued to feed me. Now and then they opened the shutters on the back window to let me empty my bucket. They didn’t manhandle me — they didn’t touch me. But they gave me no clue as to why they were holding me.
Confinement wasn’t revenge for fellers who lingered at a murder to dig out the corpse’s eyes or cut his pecker off, and risking arrest by wasting getaway time, dance triumphantly with it. I guessed they had kidnaped me, but if so — time and pain were shrouding me in the wadded gauze of sleep — something had gone wrong. Often I heard the Cedric start up and drive away, and each time it came back they conversed in mumbles. The Singapore police were poor at locating kidnapers. Even if the police succeeded, what rescue would that be? It would mean my arrest on a charge of living off immoral earnings. Some friend would have to ransom me. In those days wealthy towkays and their children lived in fear of kidnapers; they were often hustled away at knifepoint, but they were always released unharmed after a heavy payment. Who in the world would pay for my life?
A memory ambushed my hopes. On the Allegro a feller had told me a story I remembered in the hut. A loan shark had worked on a freighter with him. He called the feller a loan shark, but his description of the feller’s loans made them sound like charity of the most generous and reckless kind, and eventually everyone on the ship owed him money, including the skipper. One day at sea the loan shark disappeared, just like that. “We never found him,” said the feller on the Allegro, and his wink told me no one had ever looked.
The remembrance scared me and made me desolate, and I believed I would stay that way, in the misery that squeezes out holy promises. But that loneliness was electrified to terror the day my Chinese captors had a loud argument outside my hut. I had felt some safety in their mutters, in the regular arrivals of meals and in the comings and goings of the Cedric; and I had begun to pass the time by reciting my letters of glad news and my litany, Sir Jack, President Flowers, King John, Bishop Flowers. I drew comfort from the predictable noises of my captors and their car. My comfort ended with the arguing — that day they didn’t bring me food.
I heard it all. The dwarf’s name was Toh. He fretted in a high childish voice; the others bow-wowed monotonously. I listened at a crack in the wall, as my empty stomach scolded me and the argument outside grew into a fight. It had to concern my fate — those whinnyings of incredulity and snuffling grunts, smashings and bangings, and Toh’s querulousness rising to an impressively sustained screeching. Then it was over.
That night they put the bed back into my room, but I was so hungry and disturbed I couldn’t sleep. I was drowsy hours later when I heard the door being unlocked. The morning dazzle of the sun through the door warmed my face. I started to rise, to swing my feet off the bed.
“You stay,” said Toh.
Two fellers began tying me up.
“What’s the big idea?” I said. “You want money? I get you money. Hey, not so tight!”
I considered a fistfight, working myself into a fury sufficient to beat them off and then making a run for it. I decided against it. Any rashness would be fatal for me. They were small, but there were four of them, and now I looked up and saw a fifth. I had survived so far by staying passive; I was sensible enough to prefer prison to death — to surrender anything but my life. Something else stopped me: I was in my underwear and socks — they had taken my shoes. I wouldn’t get far. If I had been dressed I might have taken a chance, but seminaked I felt particularly vulnerable. I let them go on tying me.
They roped my ankles to the end of the bed, and then put ropes around my wrists and made me fold my arms across my chest. I was in a mummy posture, bound tightly to the bed. The fifth man was behind me. I rolled my eyes back and saw that he was stropping a straight razor, whipping it up and down on a smacking tongue of leather.
“Who’s he?” Numbness throttled my pecker.
Toh was checking the knots, hooking a finger on them and pulling. Smick-smack, went the razor on the strop. Toh pushed at my arms, and satisfied they were tight, said, “That Ho Khan.”
“Just tell me one thing,” I said in a pitifully unfamiliar voice. “Are you going to kill me? Tell me — please.”
Toh looked surprised. “No,” he said, “we not kill you.”
“Why the razor?”
“Shave,” he said.
The other fellers erupted into yakking laughter. I tried to shift on the bed to see them. It was impossible. I couldn’t move.
“You’re trying to scare me, aren’t you?” I heard smick-smack-smuck.
Toh leaned over and nodded, smiling. His dwarf’s face made the smile impish. “Scare you,” he said, “and scare udda peoples, too.”
“What do you mean by that?” Smuck-smuck. “Come on, this is silly. I’m an American, you know. I am! The American consulate is looking for me!”
“Mei-guo ren,” someone said, “an American.” Another replied in Chinese, and there was laughter.
“Now I give you but,” said Toh. He scrubbed the backs of my arms with a soapy cloth. The others leaned over for a good look. One was holding a bowl, eating noodles as he watched, gobbling them in an impatient greedy way, smacking his lips and snapping at the noodles like a cat, not chewing. He peered at me over the rim of his bowl. He gave me hope. No one would eat that way in the presence of a person about to be slashed.
Ho Khan fussed with the razor. He braced his elbows, one against my throat, one on my stomach; and then, scraping slowly, shaved the hairy parts of my arms that Toh had soaped, from my elbow to the rope at my wrists. To my relief he put the razor aside.
My relief lasted seconds. Ho Khan fitted a pair of wire glasses over his eyes and took a dart-shaped silver tool which he dipped into a bottle of blue liquid. He leaned on me again and with the speed of a sewing machine began jabbing the needle into the fleshy part of my arm. He was tattooing me — biting on his tongue in concentration — and behind him the others shouted, bursts of Chinese, seeming to tell him what to write in the punctures.
8
AT NEWTON CIRCUS, by the canal, they pushed me out of the car and sped away, yelling. I found a few wrinkled dollars in the clothes they had handed over, enough for a pack of cheroots and a meal of mutton chops at a Malay gag stand on the corner. I was grateful for the night, and glad too for the incuriousness of the Chinese who wolfed food noisily at tables all around me and didn’t once look at me. My arms appalled me; I examined them in the light of the stall’s hissing pressure lamp. The shaven backs of my arms were swollen and raw, the fresh punctures tracking up and down from elbow to wrist, the small half-exploded squares of Chinese characters, perhaps fifty boxes puffed up and blue and some still leaking blood. I felt better after a meal and a smoke, and left, swinging my arms, so that no one could see their disfigurement, down the canal path, past the orphanage, in the direction of Dunroamin.
I smelled the acrid wood smoke, the stink of violence, before I saw the damage; the strength of it, at that distance, telegraphed destruction. The house was gutted. The tile roof had fallen in and the moon lighted the two stucco roof peaks, the gaping windows, the broken and burned verandah chicks. The abandoned black house looked like an old deserted factory; the fire had silenced the insects and killed the perfume of my flowering trees. No crickets chirped in the compound, a smell of burning hung in the still air. Torn mattresses were twisted and humped all over the driveway and lawn. I was about to go away when, feeling the fatigue and pause of melancholy, I decided that I would enter the house, to try to find something in the ruins that belonged to me, anything portable I could recognize to claim as a souvenir, maybe a scorched clock or the German metronome Mr. Weerakoon kept in a cupboard drawer: There’s an interesting story behind this little thing…