Saint Jack (19 page)

But I was the host. “Just settle your bar bill at the end of the month, thank you, and a very good night to you all.”

I got up early. In my pajamas at a sunny desk I totaled the previous night's receipts and checked to see that the bar was well stocked and the rooms were clean—in each room a girl would be brushing her hair before a mirror, a houseful of girls brushing: it cheered me. It was a strenuous round of ordering and overseeing, making sure the laundry was done, the pilferage recorded, the grass cut, the house presentable; then, I took my shower, cut across the cemetery to Lower Bukit Timah Road and caught the number 4 Green Line bus to Beach Road, and climbed onto the stool in my little cubicle and took orders from Hing.

In the days when I had hustled on the street and in bars, saying “Kinda hot” to likely strangers, I was glad of the safety of Hing's. I knew my job as a water clerk well enough to be able to do it easily. And though the money was nothing (any of my girls earned more in a week), the stool where I hooked my heels and pored over the shipping pages of the
Straits Times
was important. It was the basis for my visa, a perfect alibi, and a place to roost. But the success of Dunroamin made me consider quitting Hing's.

I continued to get friendly promises of attention from the fellers who came to Dunroamin, yet my relationship with them remained a hustler-client one. I was a regular visitor to the clubs and knew most of the members; in the shipping offices of the Asia Insurance Building and in the Maritime Building, fellers called me by my first name and said how nice it was to see me. But they never stopped to pass the time of day. The talks I had with them took place at prearranged times and for a specific purpose; and I was seldom introduced to their friends. I was careful not to remind them that I knew more about them than their wives—and seeing them with their wives, by chance after a movie or at a cricket match at the Padang, it amazed me that the fellers came to Dunroamin: their wives were beautiful smiling girls (it was about this time that I had my fling with the Tanglin Club wife whom I reported as being “ever so nice”). My quickness might have disturbed the fellers. My attention to detail in arranging for girls to be sent out to ships or for club members to make a discreet visit in a trishaw for a tumble at Dunroamin could have been interpreted as somewhat suspicious, a kind of criminal promptitude, I think, the blackmailer's dogged precision. Still, most of the fellers insisted I should get in touch if I ever had a problem.

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.

“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.”