Singapore Noir

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.

Her area was privileged even in this context, at Nassim, nestled off the Bukit Timah canal, and right across from the Botanic Gardens, the green and ordered legacy from colonial times. Her apartment building was one of the newest and most prestigious, designed by some world-famous name, and developed by a company that targets only the uppermost elite. Its price could be matched by only a few other neighborhoods in the world. The rent is far beyond what she earns at the office, where I observed her at work, learned her job title and responsibilities.

She was either from a rich family or else a kept woman, I surmised — without judgment — but kept by whom? Possibilities and theories are useful, I have learned, but in the end can only be resolved by surveillance.