Free The Jade Figurine by Bill Pronzini

boys off my tail and off my neck. I wouldn’t want any more ‘mistakes’ like last night.”
    “There will be no further difficulties, I assure you. Unless, of course, such measures are warranted.”
    “You don’t have to beat it into the ground, Van Rijk. I told you I’ve got the message.”
    “Yes, so you did.” He stood up. “I believe we have discussed everything of mutual interest, Mr. Connell. I will bid you a good evening.”
    I made a gesture with my left hand and tilted the bottle of Anchor Beer. Van Rijk moved across the room, trailing curls of cigarette smoke, and went out without looking at me again and without saying anything else; you didn’t observe the amenities with hired rabble.
    I said, “Up yours, chubs,” to the closed door and drank off the last of the beer. I was beginning to feel a deep fatigue. The work I had done for Harry Rutledge had been physically exhausting, and it had been a long day in several other respects. Tomorrow promised to be an even longer one. I didn’t much care for the prospect of setting foot inside the walls of the Central Police Station, but that was the one sure way of getting out from under this whole goddam thing and I knew that I didn’t have much choice if I wanted to keep on living clean in Singapore.
    I was even going to enjoy it a little, the way the knitting ladies must have enjoyed the public guillotine executions during the French Revolution.
    Heads were going to roll, all right.
    And Van Rijk’s would be first in line.

Chapter Nine
    T HE LETTERING on the pebbled door glass said:
    KOK CHIN TIONG
    INSPECTOR OF POLICE
    It was located at the end of a long, narrow corridor in the Central Police Station, one of several similar doors with similar lettering. I opened it and walked in without knocking. Tiong had kept me waiting for better than a half hour in an anteroom before he had consented to see me, and I was in no mood to observe the proprieties.
    The office was small and spartan and meticulous. There were a metal desk and two metal visitor’s chairs and a wooden table with a gently whirring fan on its top, set under the only window. Venetian blinds were drawn against the glare of the early morning sun, but the fluorescent ceiling lights which illuminated the cubicle made it seem as hot and bright as noon in there.
    Tiong looked up from where he sat behind the desk, and a small frown dipped the corners of his brown mouth. I shut the door and went to one of the chairs and sat down without being invited. He watched me and said nothing, but I could feel his dislike as if it were something tangible created by his small, hard, alert eyes.
    I lit a cigarette and blew smoke a little to one side of him. He kept on watching me. There was a file folder open in front of him, and I knew without looking at it that it was my file. There were a lot of papers there—too many papers.
    Tiong said at length, “I have just been refreshing my memory as to your past activities, Mr. Connell. I am not enjoying what I read here.”
    I shrugged. “There’s nothing I can do to change what I once was.”
    “Once was?”
    “Once was.”
    “Leopards seldom change their spots, Mr. Connell.”
    “Listen, Inspector, I’m clean. I’ve been just another citizen for two years and you know it.”
    “I know nothing of the kind.”
    “If that file is half as complete as you’d like me to believe, you damned well do know it.”
    “The file is most complete,” he said. “There is very little about your past of which I am not aware.”
    I wondered how much truth there was in that statement. I wondered if he knew, or cared to know, about the scared young kid who had gone to Korea in 1954 to fly an F-86 sabrejet, and of the things he had seen and done that had too quickly, too cynically, turned him into a man; about the girl who had promised to wait for that boy-man in San Francisco, his home—and the three trite paragraphs on a single sheet of scented pink stationery received in