The Devil's Circle Read online

  Text © 2011 Walter Woon

  © 2011 Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited

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  National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Woon, Walter C. M.

  The devil’s circle / Walter Woon. – Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2011.

  p. cm. – (The advocate’s devil trilogy ; bk. III)

  eISBN : 978 981 4435 81 9

  1. Singapore – History – 1945-1963 – Fiction. I. Title. II. Series: The advocate’s devil trilogy ; bk. III.

  PR9570.S53

  S823 — dc22 OCN742442518

  Printed in Singapore by Fabulous Printers Pte Ltd

  For my dear boys Adrian and Alex

  1

  FOR those of us who survived it, the War exists as a great gash in our memory. It was as if some giant hand had reached in, scooped out three and a half years of our lives and left a complete void. In the dim past was “Before the War”, when life was simple and well-ordered. “After the War” was different. I had watched the DUKWs filled with troops dispensing chocolates and cigarettes roaring down Joo Chiat Road a fortnight after the atomic bombs were dropped. European faces were to be seen in the town once more. After the triumphant Victory Parade at the Padang, the Union Jack again flew proudly over the Municipal Building. The British were back and it seemed that we had come full circle. But the circle wasn’t perfect. The Japanese had conquered Singapore; the British hadn’t. They had celebrated their triumph, but like Caesar they heard that small voice whispering in their ears that they were but mortal. The natives knew it, happy though we were to have them back after the oppression of the Occupation. They knew that we knew. The long-accepted colonial order was never the same again. All the old certainties were gone.

  We picked up our lives slowly, almost in a daze. After living so long on the edge of the sword, normality seemed strange. We were lucky of course. The Surrender spared Singapore the fate of Manila. If the Japanese had fought, there would have been precious few of us left to tell the tale. They wouldn’t have given up like the British had in 1942, not as long as there was a single soldier left alive to conduct a banzai charge. General Itagaki Seishiro, the commander of the 7th Area Army in Singapore, refused at first to surrender to the British. His troops were unbeaten in the field. It took a direct order from his superior Field Marshal Count Terauchi to induce him to comply. His code of Bushido pulled him in opposite directions. He would have rather died than given in to an enemy who had not bested him on the battlefield. But the loyalty owed by a samurai to his lord was paramount. He ordered his men to lay down their arms. Even then, three hundred officers committed hara-kiri rather than give up without a fight. The Surrender saved all of us.

  The firm of D’Almeida & D’Almeida had re-opened for business right after the British got back, even though the Courts were still shuttered. The British lost no time in instituting military tribunals and invalidating all pending proceedings before the Japanese courts. They invited the local Bar — those who survived — to apply to act as counsel. This we did immediately. With that formality taken care of, the d’Almeida brothers, Clarence and Cuthbert, went upcountry to settle the affairs of the Eurasian colony in Bahau. A year and half before the end of the War the Japanese thought it would be a good idea to start emptying Syonan of useless mouths. The food situation was dire and not likely to get better. Rice had disappeared and we were driven to eating tapioca morning, noon and night. So the Chinese went to Endau in Johore, where the New Syonan colony prospered. The Eurasians and Roman Catholics went to Bahau, deep in the ulu in Negeri Sembilan, lured by promises of Eden. The Fuji Village colony was badly conceived and worse resourced. It was miles from the railhead, in malaria-infested virgin jungle. When Archbishop Devals died the whole project fell apart. The War ended soon after, thankfully. It wasn’t long before the recriminations started. Clarence and Cuthbert were called in to help sort out the mess.

  They left the firm in the steady hands of my good friend George Singam, who had been made junior partner just before the Japanese took over, and the not-so-steady hands of Simon da Silva. Simon had left the practice before the War and become a journalist, but he had returned to support Clarence d’Almeida in his hour of need, or so he put it. Raja Aziz, the other partner of the firm, was dead. He was shot in Farrer Park with other officers of the Malay Regiment who had refused to forswear their allegiance to the British. Anyway, for good or ill (mostly ill), Simon was senior partner while the d’Almeida brothers were away. I was the senior legal assistant; in fact, I was the only legal assistant.

  Ralph Smallwood, the other legal assistant, was yet to be demobilised. He’d returned with the vanguard of the British forces, parachuting in heroically with his Gurkhas just after the atomic bombs had been dropped, to help restore order in the vacuum that the Japanese surrender left. But Ralph wasn’t sure he wanted to come back to the firm. Ralph, George and I had started off at the same time with d’Almeida. In fact, Ralph and George were exact contemporaries. Though he hadn’t said it, the fact that George was a partner rankled. George was in fact related to the d’Almeidas on his mother’s side, but that wasn’t why he had been made a junior partner. The fact of the matter is that George was smarter than all of us and we knew it. I had accepted my lot. Ralph hadn’t.

  He hadn’t decided whether to stay in the Colony or return to Perth, where his wife and daughter were. Ralph had married my cousin May. Baby Grace had come along just before the war. Surrounded by Mak, Ah Sum and four doting aunts, Baby Grace had been the centre of the family. She was the little sun around which all revolved. When the shooting started, May went back to nursing. She worked first with the British and then with the Indian Army Field Hospital at Tyersall. The Japs had destroyed that in the last days before the surrender. The nurses were ordered to leave rather than trust to the tender mercies of the invaders. I gave Ralph my ticket so that he could be with his family. They had gotten out practically on the last boat from Singapore. That parting was the hardest of all for Mak to bear. We all prayed that he would bring May and the baby home now that the war was
over. But he needed a job, and a job serving under George was not what he wanted.

  As for the rest of the firm, we were sadly depleted in numbers. Moraiss, the Chief Clerk, was missing. He had gone up to Bahau with his whole family. They hadn’t prospered. Carving out a township in the middle of the jungle wasn’t the healthiest of pursuits. The land was marginal and barely suited for agriculture. Disease was rife. Food was scarce. There had been deaths in the clan. I heard that Moraiss himself came down with cerebral malaria. It was touch and go. We hadn’t any news of him.

  Our chief interpreter, Tan Peng Ann, died early in the Occupation, of a broken heart when his only son didn’t come back from the Sook Ching operation. That left a gaping hole in the firm, as he was the one that we all depended on to translate from Chinese to English. I was in fact the only Chinese lawyer in the firm, but when it came to dialects they might as well have asked me to speak Phoenician. Tan was our constant prop. With him gone, we were deaf and mute.

  D’Almeida’s syce Ahmad had gone back to his kampong when the island fell and no one knew where he was now, or if he was even still alive. But there were still many old faces in the musty rooms of the firm. And Singh, the jaga, was there. His quiet bulk at the door was reassuring. Life could go on.

  “HAVE you had a look at the obituaries today?” asked George early one morning, barging into my room without so much as a by-your-leave.

  “No,” I replied grumpily, “if your name’s not there I’m not interested.” Generally, I could only take George in small doses before breakfast.

  “Well, have a look,” he said, “It’s our friend Lao Leong Ann. He’s finally popped off.” He tossed the newspaper over to me. My cousin June, who had joined us as a general do-it-all during the war, deftly caught it and scanned the page eagerly. June had decided that she would like to be a lawyer and took every opportunity to improve her education.

  “So?” I responded callously. Death left me unmoved. We had seen too much in the preceding four years.

  “So we shall soon have a visitation, I imagine,” said George. “He died intestate. There were no children. But there will be relatives, lots of them.”

  “He died intestate. There were no children,” said June slowly, as if trying to understand something. “Does that mean that he had no … he had no … no …” Her cheeks reddened.

  “He had no will,” I interposed shortly.

  “Oh, so that is what ‘intestate’ means,” she said, with apparent relief.

  “Why, what did you think it meant?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” she replied, quietly repeating to herself, “intestate … no will.”

  “No will, plenty of money, a gaggle of relatives,” said George, “There will be business for the courts, you mark my words.”

  “Consider them marked and leave me in peace,” I responded, moodily flipping to the obituaries. George left me to it. The obituaries filled pages and made grim reading. Mostly, they recorded deaths that had occurred months or even years before but had only just been confirmed. Lao Leong Ann’s obituary stood out, recording as it did a fresh death.

  Lao Leong Ann was one of those rare people who had profited from the Occupation. He had made an indecent pile buying property left behind by those who had escaped or disappeared. I had met him in the course of my work during the War. He had moved in exalted social circles and was treated by the Japanese as a friend; as much as any Chinaman could be a friend. When the Surrender came, so did retribution. A MPAJA death squad had caught him during the interregnum before the British returned. Whether by design or not, they hadn’t finished him off at once. He had lingered on in hospital since then. I couldn’t truthfully say that I was sorry.

  GEORGE was prescient, as he usually is. Within a week, Simon had dumped the file into my lap for action.

  “Mr Lao Leong Ann’s Clan Association has been in touch. There is a son,” said Simon. “They want us to protect his interests.”

  “I thought Mr Lao had no children,” said June, “He died intestate.”

  A look of puzzlement flitted across Simon’s brow, but that soon passed. “No natural children,” he explained, “but he and his late wife adopted a boy before she passed away. All nicely legal, you understand, none of this informal customary adoption business. Cuthbert d’Almeida handled all the formalities. It was after I left the firm, you see.”

  “So the son gets everything under the law of intestacy,” I said, “what’s the problem? Why drag us into it?” I wasn’t particularly keen on the administration of estates. If I must deal with dead people, I’d rather have a murder any time.

  “Ah, but the boy is an infant. He’s five. He needs to be guided and advised. Lao Leong Ann left instructions with the Clan that they should get in touch with Cuthbert to take care of young Gim Huat should anything happen to him. He must have had a premonition, the poor fellow.”

  I forebore to say that the poor fellow had it coming to him and took the file resignedly. As always when I have no idea where to start, I went to George.

  “The first thing we do, my son,” he said, “is to have a dekko at the body in question. I’m told on good authority that they are having some sort of ceremony for the old villain at his place today. It’s at 3 o’clock. We can make it if we leave now.”

  “What’s the rush?” I asked, “He’s not going anywhere.”

  George clicked his tongue. “Always remember that when attending a wake one should arrive dead on time and looking very grave.”

  2

  LAO LEONG ANN did not live in ostentatious style, despite his wealth. It would have been tempting the gods to be seen to splash out too much; or, more prosaically, tempting the Japanese and the Communists. He had been moderately rich before the War, trading in this and that. It was during the Occupation that his fortune was made. He started off selling tyres and other army surplus items to the Japanese army. There were piles just lying around for the taking when the British and Australians left so precipitately. Lao had been quicker off the mark than most and got his hands on the good stuff. The Japanese were ever ready to acquire extra food, bedding, shoes and whatever. The less scrupulous ones just took what they fancied from the dead and living. But there were enough honest ones to make Lao’s business profitable.

  From his contacts he got the opportunity to cheaply snap up several shophouses whose owners were no longer to be found. Some were dead no doubt, but several were Chinese whose names were on the Kempeitai death-list as members of the China Relief Fund. They had gotten out before the Fall. Lao knew a good thing when he saw it. He made sure that his contacts were kept well supplied with black-market goodies and other amusements. They returned the favour by tipping him off whenever there was an opportunity to pick up a house or shop. All the conveyancing had been handled by D’Almeida & D’Almeida. Lao Leong Ann was a good client, whatever his merits as a human being may have been.

  His wake was held in one of the shophouses he owned in Jim Chuan Place. The whole row was his, rented out to various tenants. They were crammed six, eight, ten to a room, one body piled above another like firewood. Whole families shared a single windowless cubicle, taking turns to lie on what passed for a bed. A single terrace unit might have had forty people in it, sharing a communal kitchen and one toilet. Not the least profitable among his other activities was the comfort house that he kept for his Japanese clients, staffed by women from Korea and China — some willing but mostly press-ganged. They had a little more room, as their trade demanded. Lao Leong Ann had lived alone with his son in the flat above his shop. Compared to his tenants and employees, his living quarters were palatial.

  The first thing that assailed me when we stepped through the shophouse portal was the smell of burning joss sticks. The place was dark, hot and crowded, with small knots of people sitting around tables, drinking, smoking and playing cards and mah-jong. The air was thick with incense and tobacco smoke. A desultory wailing filled the room. It had an odd theatrical quality to it, as if the mourners hadn
’t quite got their hearts in it. The huge wooden coffin dominated the room. It was of expensive mahogany polished to a silken sheen, with a richly embroidered blue cover. An elaborate wooden funeral arch draped with silk curtains stood in front of the coffin. On a table laden with offerings was a photograph of the late lamented deceased, flanked by two gigantic candles in ornate bronze holders. It was apparent that no one had told Lao that you can’t take it with you. Piled high in front of the offering table were intricately-made paper models of houses, cars, gold bars and other worldly paraphenalia. And not just any old house or car, but at least one mansion complete with Sikh jaga and what clearly was meant to be a Rolls-Royce. He evidently intended to live it up in the afterlife.

  We arrived just in time for the ceremony. A priest in white robes appeared and began to chant. His acolyte punctuated the chanting by striking a little gong every now and then. The crowd fell silent at first, but as no one seemed to be paying much attention to the service they soon resumed their chatter and games, the clack of the mah-jong tiles making a counterpoint to the gong. The priest continued regardless, his monotonous voice ululating in incomprehensible tones. June nudged me in the ribs.

  “There,” she said, pointing, “the little boy. He must be the son.”

  The boy, dressed in white sackcloth, was quietly sucking his thumb and looking bewildered. He seemed rather scrawny, but then so did all of us after the privations of the previous years. Next to him sat a black and white amah, holding his free hand. We threaded our way between the tables towards him.

  We were halfway there when a commotion started. A young woman and some rough-looking types had moved up to the boy. This evidently had not met with the approval of another group, also centred around a young woman. Her equally unsavoury entourage advanced menacingly. Then a third woman appeared, with her own group of goons. They started arguing in loud voices. The bonze continued chanting imperturbably, but the acolyte missed a couple of beats on his little gong.