“Can we sling a camera up?”
“Can,” he said, “but curtains—”
“It’s no good,” I said. “If he goes out to the balcony he’ll see it and the jig’s up. We can’t do it that way.” I was stumped. How did you take pictures in a feller’s room without his knowing it? After I had spoken to Shuck I imagined myself, tape recorder slung over one shoulder, camera over the other, in a blackmailer’s crouch, by a keyhole or window, listening, watching, pressing buttons, and then hopping away on tiptoe with the damning evidence.
The simplicity of that had struck me as cruel, but it wasn’t so simple. This was a technical problem, a dilemma which in the solving made the cruelty slight, and as an executioner might think of himself as an electrician, absorbed in the study of watts and volts, a brainwasher a man concerned with candlepower, my sense of betrayal was soon forgotten in my handyman’s huffing and puffing over the matter of wires, lenses, drilling, and testing — so complicated the general no longer seemed vulnerable. He was safe; I was the victim.
“Now, let’s see here,” I said. “We can’t put the camera on the balcony. What about in his air conditioner? Make it look like a fuse box.” My boys were silent. I replied to my own question. “That means we have to get into the room.”
“Get a key,” said Jimmy Sung.
“If only the bed was on the other side of the room,” I said. “Then we could cut a hole up there, stick the camera through, and bingo.”
“Move the bed,” said Henry.
“He’ll see the mike if we do that,” I said. “Gee, this is your original sticky wicket.”
Jimmy Sung suggested an alternative. He had once been hired to spy on a towkay’s wife, to get evidence of adultery. He followed the wife and her lover to a hotel. He bribed the cleaning woman to give him a key and had simply burst through the door at an opportune moment, taken a lightning shot of the copulating pair, and run.
“That’s okay if you want one picture,” I said. “But one’s not enough. There must be another way.”
I paced the room. “Henry says the general’s room is just like this one, right? Bed here, chair there—” The three men looked from object to object as I named—“bureau there, desk over there—wait!”
Over the desk was a large rectangular mirror, reflecting the room; Mr. Khoo, Jimmy Sung, Henry Chow, seated uneasily on the bed. A mirror, distracting for anyone using the desk, made it useful as a woman’s dressing table.
“We can’t photograph the bed,” I said, “but we can make a small hole in the wall and aim the camera at that mirror. It’s right across.”
“Wide-angle lens,” said Jimmy.
Henry Chow smiled.
This time Mr. Khoo used his drill like a chisel, to loosen plaster and scoop out brick from our side of the wall. He made a niche for the camera and punched a small lens hole through to the other side. Jimmy Sung fitted the camera with a plunger on a long cable, and fixed the camera against the hole, bandaging it into the niche with adhesive tape.
“I guess that wraps it up,” I said.
Mr. Khoo wiped his drill with a rag.
“This calls for a drink.”
Henry said no. Mr. Khoo shook his head. Jimmy Sung scratched his head nervously and said he had to take his wife shopping.
“Come on, I’ll treat you,” I said. “They’ve got everything at this hotel. We could have lunch sent up. Anything — you name it. No charge!”
Mr. Khoo muttered something in Chinese. Henry looked embarrassed. Jimmy said, “Seng Ho want money,” and winced.
“Anything you say.” I paid them off, and when I did they edged toward the door. I said, “What’s the rush? It’s early. Stick around.”
There is a Chinese laugh that means “Yes, of course!” and another that means “No, never!” The first is full of sympathy, the second is a low mirthless rattle in the throat. They gave me the second and were gone.
“So long, boys.” I was alone. It was bright and noisy outside, but waiting I felt caged in the dim cold room of the Belvedere’s ninth floor. On the far wall was the print of an old water color, Fort Canning, ladies with parasols, children rolling hoops, the harbor in the distance. I became aware of the air-conditioner roar, and shortly it deafened me and gave me goose flesh. In my bedroom in Moulmein Green I had a friendly fan that went plunk-a-plunk and a scented mosquito coil; a fig tree grew against the window. An old phrase came to me, my summing up: Is this all? I looked at the completed handiwork and hated it. The problem of eavesdropping had been complicated and nearly innocent. The solution was simple and terrible, the sticky tape, the wires, the mirror, the black contraptions, the violated wall.
4
CRASH, BANG. The general went to his room after lunch, and my tape recorder amplified the racket of his entry to a hurried blundering. The door banged, the fumbled bolt was shot. Footsteps and belches and undressing noises, the flip-flap and yawn of a shirt being stripped off, coins jingling in lowered trousers, the bumps of two discarded shoes. Then bedsprings lurching, sighs, yawps. I stood on a chair and peeked through the camera’s view finder. No girl; he napped alone, his arms surrendering on his pillow. He slept, snorting and shifting, for over an hour, awoke, changed into a green bathing suit, scratched his chest, made a face at me in the mirror, and went out in clunking clogs, with a towel scarflike around his neck — I guessed he was going to the swimming pool on the roof.
He needed tempting. But I had a sprat to catch this mackerel.
“Madam Lum? Jack here. Thelma busy? Yeah, right away. You’re a peach—”
Thelma Tay goggled at the room. “Smart,” she said, pronouncing it smut. She tossed her ditty bag on the bed and went over to the window. She worked the Venetian blinds and said, “Cute.”
“It’s great to see you,” I said, giving her cheek a pinch. “I’ve been going out of my gourd.”
She glided up and down, sniffing, touched the ashtray, turned on the bedside lamp, felt the curtains. She was no beauty, but I knew she was capable and had the right enthusiasm. Her glossy black hair was carefully set in ringlets and long curls and crowned with a small basket of woven plaits; she had the lovely hollows in her face that indicate in a Chinese girl small high breasts. She kicked off her shoes and smoothed her shiny belted dress. She posed and said, “Wet look.”
“It’s catching on,” I said. “Very classy.”
She undid the belt and pulled the dress over her head, and then, in her red bra and red half-slip, walked over to me and leaned her soft stomach into my face. “You ready?”
“Wait a sec, Thelma,” I said, looking up. “It’s next door.”
She stepped back. “You not want?”
“Not me — the feller in there,” I said, pointing to the broken wall. “He just stepped out, but he’ll be back pretty soon.”
“Oh,” she said. She sat on the edge of the bed and found something on her elbow to pick.
“How’s Madam Lum?”
“Is okay. Not so busy.”