It was not the violence Tay saw before him that caused the bile to rise in his throat at crime scenes. It was the violence he feared he had not yet seen, the violence that might even be hiding deep within himself. He had wondered many times if he could consciously bring about the death of another person and he had always answered that he could not. But he was not absolutely certain that was true. Whenever he was in the presence of unreasoning brutality, Tay found himself driven to examine his own soul; and he did not much like what he found there. He did not know exactly what it was, but he was sure of one thing. It made him afraid.
When Tay was done with his cigarette, he stubbed it out in the ashtray and pocketed both the box he had been smoking and the unopened one. On impulse, he left the purple lighter on the table next to the ashtray. He wasn’t entirely certain why he did that. Perhaps it was some sort of gesture of atonement for his weakness.
When Tay got outside he waved away the hotel doorman and stood for a moment watching a jagged, gray-green cloud rise in the west. It looked like a mountain range on the move, dark and dense and frightening. It seemed to be on the verge of overwhelming the city.
The sun was setting behind that seathing mass of clouds and it looked to Tay as though it would never come up again.
FIVE
The first and most important truth about Singapore is this. It is hot. It is nasty, stinking, sweaty hot.
Although it was barely six the next morning when Tay opened his front door and stepped out onto his small porch, he could already feel the heat rising. The air was so heavy that the moisture was draining right out of it. Or maybe it was raining. In Singapore, sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.
Tay had been born in Singapore and he would no doubt die in Singapore, but he had never come to an accommodation with the savage heat and the sadistic humidity. If he owned both Singapore and hell, he would rent out Singapore and live in hell. How had people managed to survive there before air conditioning was invented; and why had they even tried? He had wondered about that for as long as he could remember and he still had absolutely no idea.
A storm had hit early in the morning hours and wakened Tay from a sleep so uneasy he almost welcomed the intrusion. The thunder made it sound as if massed cannon were shelling the city and the banana trees in his small garden had bent back and forth in the swirling winds, swishing over his bedroom windows like huge brushes against a snare drum. Sometime around six o’clock he gave up trying to sleep and got up and dressed.
Samuel Tay was not an early riser. He did not greet the new day cheerfully, anticipating the delights it might hold in store for him. Instead, he welcomed it warily, resigned to the new frustrations and the fresh disappointments it would surely bring.
Coffee generally improved his disposition in the morning, but this time it was so early that he doubted even it would help. Nevertheless, he made some anyway and drank two cups while he watched the BBC news channel on television. When he got bored with the news and shut it off, he saw that he had been absolutely right. The coffee hadn’t improved his disposition one damn bit.
For nearly a half-hour, Tay successfully avoided lighting a cigarette to go with his coffee, but then he began to wonder who he was trying to impress with his restraint. He found the trousers he had dropped on the floor the night before and fished the open pack of Marlboros out of a front pocket. That was when it came back to him he had abandoned the lighter in the Marriott coffee shop in a gesture of moral atonement.
Why on earth had he done an idiotic thing like that? Exactly whom was he trying to convince of his sincere remorse and good character? Tay wondered briefly if he had matches somewhere in the house, but knew he didn’t. He had thrown them all away along with his cigarettes the last time he had quit smoking.
He finally gave up, both on the cigarette and on trying to make himself feel better, and decided just to get dressed and go to work. Maybe he would even walk part of the way and stop somewhere for breakfast. Eat a nice greasy banana fritter. Maybe two. Yes, that sounded good. A sugar fix and another hit of caffeine. That might be just the ticket.
Standing now on his front porch, he saw the storm had passed and it had stopped raining. Or maybe it hadn’t. Tay eyed the sky with mistrust and took an umbrella out of the stand next to his door. Still, if this was rain, it had none of the drive, none of the interest it had shown during the night. The clouds seemed old and tired. Tay knew exactly how they felt.
He walked down to Orchard Road, crossed over, and followed it west toward the Mandarin Hotel until he came to a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. He bought a double espresso and two banana fritters and sat down at a table on which someone had thoughtfully abandoned a copy of that morning’s Straits Times. Taking a long pull on the espresso and biting into the first of the fritters, he glanced around the room. He was surprised to see it was almost full.
Four schoolgirls in green skirts and while blouses giggled and squealed in a back corner as they exchanged confidences. A darksuited man with a round Chinese face sat at a small table holding his coffee in one hand while with the other he methodically emptied his briefcase onto the table and then repacked it again. Three men and a woman conversed earnestly at a table covered with files, papers, cell phones, and empty coffee cups. Two young women came in wearing hip-hugging jeans slung so low that they threatened, or promised depending on your point of view, to reveal all at any moment.
What were all those people doing here? Tay wondered. Were so many people generally up and around Singapore at this godforsaken hour? Surely not.
Tay finished the first banana fritter and realized that, against all odds, he was beginning to feel moderately human. He took another long hit from the espresso, then started on the second fritter and unfolded The Straits Times.
As a rule Tay did not like reading newspapers in the morning. He thought their everlasting recitations of the tragedies, atrocities, and scandals that had occurred while he slept were a poor recommendation for the coming day, the one just past having turned out so revoltingly. If he read a newspaper in the morning at all, he tried to stick strictly to the sports pages and the supermarket ads. He found they passed the time without awakening his sense of foreboding.
This morning however, he had something specific on his mind. Public Affairs had told The Straits Times that the woman at the Marriott was probably a suicide and had asked them not to make too much of it and embarrass the hotel unnecessarily. There was nothing on the front page and Tay perked up. Apparently, the paper had bought it. Thank Christ for small favors.
Tay kept turning the pages until he eventually found the story. It was the third item in the Case File section, played after a piece about a policeman who had been using a hidden camera to take pictures up women’s skirts and another piece about a raid on a night club in Mohamed Sultan Road that resulted in twenty-three kids being arrested on drug charges. Well, that explained it. Who wanted to dig into something as mundane as a suicide at the Marriott when there were so many more interesting things going on around town? He refolded the paper, put it down, and let his eyes drift while he finished his espresso.
For the first time Tay noticed a woman at a table in the back. She was reading a copy of the International Herald Tribune and sipping from a large takeaway cup without a lid. She wore a black suit that looked expensive and small gold-rimmed glasses pushed halfway down her nose. As he watched her, she uncrossed her long legs and then re-crossed them in the opposite direction. He allowed his eyes to linger long enough to register three things. The woman was extraordinarily attractive; she was young enough without being too young; and perhaps most important, she was alone.