What I do see now when I look around is this: We are guilty. The germ of a terrible crime is already in your mind.
3. Stolen Under a Thief’s Moon
I work at the DSI — the Directorate of Surveillance and Inspection. We are an agency no one has ever heard about but that has been around since the founding of the state, reporting directly to the leader. There are other departments that do so, including those that look at internal and external threats and the bureau to investigate corruption; in the early years, even the pollution-monitoring department.
At the beginning of our country’s history, our leader gave much attention to details, and the DSI’s mandate — surveillance and inspection — was to assist in that oversight of all things, to provide the many eyes that could quickly and shrewdly scan so that when the alarm bells rang and the red lights flashed, the leader and those he trusted could dive down into the muck and fix whatever was wrong.
These days — as the city has grown in pace and complexity — that may seem quaint and quite impossible. I don’t know if anyone looks at the details anymore. Sometimes it seems like everything is too sophisticated, on auto-pilot. But in case anyone cares, we still do what we used to do.
We continue to watch and listen and survey and investigate. We continue to do so quite without attention — not just from the public but even within the state apparatus. If I meet you, and if I should give out my name card, it would simply say, Deputy Assistant Director (Special Duties), Public Service Division, Prime Minister’s Office.
This is me, at least as much as I would like to say about myself. How about her?
When we first met, there was a thief’s moon — what I learned as a child to call that night when the moon is at its ebb and things are darkest. It was in a Japanese restaurant, an izakaya along the Robertson Quay stretch of the river — small eats, many drinks — and the lights allowed us to accept the darkness. Someone I somehow knew asked me along for the opening of the restaurant, hosted by the owners; I sat on a high stool at the end of the counter, with a person on my right more interested in the person on his other side, so I didn’t have to talk too much.
I drank my super-dry Asahi. The beer was icy and the dishes were hot from the furnace, with a squeeze of lemon and a dusting of salt. Okay, I thought, even if I don’t talk to anyone, at least the food’s good.
Then she bumped into me. Literally. Turning the corner, the idiot waiter with the tray of cold beers gets too near her, and so she moves to one side and bumps into me as I’m putting the beer down. It spills a little on my black T-shirt but I respond quickly enough so no more than a bit hits the floor and counter. I don’t get soaked and the glass does not empty or fall and break. No big deal.
But she turns, says “So sorry” more than a couple of times, and finds a napkin to dry me, dabbing the drops along my chest, while I just stand and look at her, and tell her, “No problem, it’s okay, please don’t worry.”
Then she pauses, glances up at me, and realizes that we are standing close and she is touching my chest, the chest of someone she does not know and has not been introduced to, and she looks down, embarrassed, and takes a step back, bumping into her stool. She stumbles and I reach out and hold her so she steadies.
Our host comes over. He asks if everything is okay and I nod, while she says nothing. I withdraw my hand from the small of her back. He introduces us. I look her in the face.
Her features can be simply stated, drawn on an identi-kit in a police station: a long, straight, narrow nose; wide-set, rounded eyes; and a wide mouth, neither too full nor stretched and thin.
But the impact, the way it all adds up, cannot be mathematically or clinically summarized. This woman is immediately beautiful. Her skin glows, soft as the moon that was missing from the night sky that evening we met. Hers is a face no one can forget.
I thought that I would never see her again. She was seated next to the person beside me, and we spoke a little but she was nice to everyone there, neither too effusive nor aloof. She asked something about me and my work and said nothing about the usual lies I provided, but she also engaged others around the table. She was not loud or intrusive, and spoke modestly, with polite interest in what others did or thought. I only realized later that she asked about us much more than she talked about herself. I did not say too much about myself. I never do. But from her simple questions asked in a clear, mild voice, I learned more about the others around us than some officers I know could have from interrogating them for an hour under harsh lights in a cold room.
All I knew about her by the end of the evening was that she was half-Japanese, and part American and Chinese, and had lived in Singapore for some years as a child, and again for the past few months. Then the evening was over and the large group of people who sort of knew each other but didn’t really have much to do with one another dispersed and I thought I would never see her again, even if I wanted to.
In the weeks after our meeting, the thief’s moon grew to a crescent and then waxed full. There was a murder in Singapore, late at night, in an alley outside a karaoke lounge in Chinatown. The police traced it to two men who bumped into each other inside, earlier, when one — a Mr. Wong — was preoccupied with a hostess from Hangzhou, famous for its beautiful women, and accidentally walked into the other man, who was already tipsy. Mr. Wong was, for some reason the detectives could not find out, carrying his own tray of shot glasses to the table when the collision occured.
The spill was not so bad, the hostesses said. It splashed the other man later identified as Weng on his cheek and the collar and top part of his shirt. It splashed the woman too, a little across her bosom. She shrieked at first but saw the glare that Weng, her customer, gave to Wong, and so decided to try to cool things down by laughing and inviting Weng to lick her bosom dry.
She was, she later reported at the Central Investigation Bureau, scared when he continued to stare at Wong, while his buddies stood up and circled the hapless guy who was still holding the half-empty tray and stammering apologies, red-faced from both the alcohol and embarrassment. The man called Weng took up her wanton invitation, and happily licked away at the drops of whiskey that beaded in the cleft of her ample, enhanced bosom, but she reported that when she looked down, she could still see the hatred in his bloodshot eyes.
That face, she said, that was a face she would never forget.
As reported in the New Paper, just hours later, after Weng had paid a reported $1,500 for a quickie with a girl at the rear of the karaoke bar, he and his gang surrounded Wong once more and punched and kicked him to the ground, carrying on with their beating even after he was dead from the fall, having hit his head on the edge of the pavement at an odd angle.
A face you cannot forget can mean many things.
A chance collision and a spilled drink can mean many things.
The week after we met at the izakaya, I followed her.
I followed her to Bukit Timah, where the rich people of the city live and so many others aspire to live. This is a quieter, greener sector of the city, sprung up around a river that has been concretized into a large canal, off a road that during World War II the Japanese took to get from the north directly into the city, like an artery carrying blood or poison to the heart. Except that this place where the rich people live is only an artery, and there is no heart.