The Singapore Wink
- Автор: Томас Росс
- Год: 1969
- Язык: английский
- Год: William Morrow
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «The Singapore Wink». Краткое содержание книги:
“Outside of what?”
“What do you think?” she said.
“I think you’re clannish.”
“I’m doing what I have to do.”
“And getting me shot at is part of it.”
“That’s your hard times.”
“You seem to have some of your own,” I said.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll spell it out for you. Angelo has something that belongs to my father. I’m here to buy it back.”
It all fell into place then. I could almost hear the click. Angelo was not only blackmailing Charles Cole for having furnished incriminating information about old friends and acquaintances to the proper authorities, he was also blackmailing Joe Lozupone with the letters or records or whatever it was that he had stolen from his godfather’s safe. Angelo Sacchetti, I decided, must be making a great deal of money.
“Why you?” I said.
“Because there wasn’t anyone else.”
“You mean that there was no one else that your father could trust to make the payoff and not keep whatever it is that you’re trying to buy back.”
“That’s right.”
“How much?” I said.
“A million.”
“Where do you keep it, in your cosmetic kit?”
“You’re not funny, Cauthorne. It’s in a Panama bank. They’re better than the Swiss ones; they ask fewer questions. All I have to do is give Angelo a letter and he’ll be a million dollars richer.”
“Then it sounds simple. You could have done that last night, picked up whatever it is that he has, and caught the first plane out this morning.”
“That was the plan.”
“But something came up?”
“That’s right,” she said.
“Angelo wanted something else. More money, I’d say.”
“No. He’ll settle for a million.”
“He will this time, but what about next time?”
“There won’t be a next time,” she said.
“If it’s blackmail, there will be. Your father seems like an easy touch.”
“My father,” she said in a thin, hard voice, “is not easy about anything. And that’s something that Angelo knows. He’ll risk it this time; never again.”
“Blackmailers are strange,” I said. “Their victims make it simple for them and their greed is almost pathological, otherwise they wouldn’t be blackmailers.”
Carla stared at me. “My father gave me a message for Angelo. He made me memorize it. That wasn’t hard to do because it was a simple message. I gave it to him last night.”
“What was it?”
“It was, ‘Once, I pay; twice, you’re dead.’”
“As you say, it’s simple.”
“Angelo understood it.”
“So everybody’s happy.”
“Everybody but Angelo. As I said, he wants something else.”
“What?”
“He wants you out of Singapore.”
“Why? I’m harmless.”
“Angelo doesn’t think so.”
“What does he think?”
“He thinks you’re in Charles Cole’s pocket.”
“And that bothers him?”
“It makes him nervous.”
“Angelo was never nervous in his life.”
Carla made an impatient gesture with her left hand. “All right, Cauthorne, we can sit here and have some more of this bright and brittle conversation, but it’s beginning to drag. Angelo won’t give me what I want until you’re gone. I don’t know the real reason why you want to see Angelo and I don’t really care. I suspect that it’s as he says, you’re Charles Cole’s heavy, either for money or because you have to. I don’t care about that either. But if you are after Angelo, I mean really after him, either for your own reasons or because dear Uncle Charlie has you in some kind of a box, I strongly advise you to forget it. You see, if anything happens to Angelo, if he were to get shot or drowned or run over, then a copy of the information he has goes to Washington and my father goes to jail which really means that he goes to his grave because prison would kill him.” She paused and stared at me again. “But not,” she said, “before somebody killed you.”
“You know, Carla, you’re really rather good.”
“At what?”
“At passing along secondhand threats. What’s more, you seem to enjoy it. But I’m not at all interested in what you say that somebody else says that they’re going to do to me because, first of all, you’re a liar — a good one — but still a liar. And second, I’m in Singapore for one reason and that’s to find Angelo Sacchetti.”
“Why?”
“Because I owe him something.”
“What?”
“I won’t know until I’ve paid him.”
“Angelo doesn’t want to see you.”
“I won’t interfere with his plans for the weekend.”
She rose and headed for the door, but turned just before she got there.
“You say you don’t like secondhand messages, but I have one more for you. From Angelo.”
“All right.”
“He said you have three days. He said to tell you that. He said you would understand.”
“What happens after three days?” I said.
She looked at me thoughtfully for several moments. “He didn’t say. I asked him, but he didn’t say. Not in so many words at least.”
“What did he do?”
“He winked,” she said. “That’s all. He just winked.”
Chapter XV
Despite its pretensions of multi-racial hegemony, Singapore remains essentially a Chinese city. Many of its citizens have realized only recently, as history goes, that they won’t, after all, retire on their savings to a comfortable old age in Shanghai or Canton or Fukien Province or northern Kwangtung.
But these are the older Chinese and more than half of the population of what Somerset Maugham once called “the laughing city” is under twenty-one and has forgotten, or never knew, the old ties with the mainland whether it was China, Malaya or India.
However, old and young alike remember when their prime minister, the ebulient Mr. Lee, who sometimes talks of a third China, wept when he was forced to announce that Singapore was, almost overnight, because of racial and political conflict, no longer a part of the Malaysian Federation. It was then that the new republic emerged, untried and shaky, to find itself balancing alone on a political tightrope that stretched from east to west.
From what Lim Pang Sam had told me, the father-in-law of Angelo Sacchetti could make that tightrope vibrate dangerously because of his tight control over Singapore’s militant far left elements who apparently were quite willing to start a race riot at a nod from the father-in-law, Toh Kin Pui. A prolonged riot among Chinese, Malays, and Indians could wreck Singapore’s economy and crush its government. So, in essence, Angelo Sacchetti, who got his name from a box of noodles and whose father died young, with only Sonny from Chicago engraved on his tombstone if, indeed, there were one, now had the fix in at Singapore. And I had to agree with Lim Pang Sam. It seemed unlikely that Angelo Sacchetti would be heading back to the United States anytime soon.
Still there was hope for Singapore. A Lochinvar from the hills of Hollywood had arrived in town, equipped with a bad case of the shakes and the horrors. In addition, Lochinvar had the Republic’s four-man secret service on his side, providing they weren’t too busy totting up the books, and there was also a friendly smuggler standing by to lend assistance because, after all, he and Lochinvar were both Americans.
But it was an even richer scene than that, I thought There was the nervous counselor for the mob, or whatever it was called, roaming through the empty rooms of his mansion on Foxhall Road and wondering if his years of playing the informer had finally caught up with him. There was Joe Lozupone, so alone and friendless and frightened that the only person he could trust to pay off his blackmailer was his daughter, the comely Carla, whose attitude towards sex might be described as comfortably casual, and finally, there was Sam Dangerfield of the FBI who after twenty-seven years in the bureau, still seemed astonished that crime actually paid. I wondered what Dangerfield was doing that evening and I decided that he was probably drinking somebody else’s whisky.