Ah Long sprinkles finely chopped green onions on top and fans out a few tomato slices on the side. Setting it on a tray with a starched white napkin, Ren trots off with it. All the way down the long, polished wooden hallway and upstairs, where he knocks at the master’s bedchamber.
Like all the other rooms in the house, the airy, high-ceilinged room is painted white and is quite bare except for the four-poster bed in the center, hung with mosquito nets. The slanting afternoon sun, green and gold through the treetops, gives Ren a sudden feeling of déjà vu. It’s just like the old doctor’s room, back in Kamunting. Except it’s not Dr. MacFarlane sitting at a table by the window, but William, who is writing a letter.
“Thank you,” he says, with a guilty start as Ren sets the tray down.
“Did they find the tiger yet?” Ren asks.
“Not yet. It may be miles away by now.” William takes a bite. “Who made this?”
The worried look returns to Ren’s face. “I did, Tuan.”
“It’s very good. I’d like you to make all my omelets from now on.”
“Yes, Tuan.” Emboldened by this, Ren asks, “May I have permission to take leave soon?”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Back to Kamunting. Just for a few days.”
William considers this. Ren has been working here for only a short while. By rights, he hasn’t accumulated enough leave to go anywhere, but he looks so hopeful. “To see your old friends?”
“Yes.” Ren hesitates. “And to pay my respects to Dr. MacFarlane’s grave. I’d like to go before the mourning period is over in twenty days.”
“Of course.” William’s expression softens. “You may take three days off if you like. Check with Ah Long about the dates—there’ll be a dinner party here. You’d better wait until afterwards. Do you need train fare?”
Ren looks confused at this offer. William sighs. “I mean, I’ll pay for your trip. Put some flowers on poor MacFarlane’s grave for me.”
* * *
Dismissed, Ren walks back to the kitchen. Since the gruesome discovery of the body, Ren has frantically stepped up his search for the finger. He has now explored every room and opened every drawer in the house. Sometimes he thinks that Ah Long suspects him, as more than once, the cook surprised him with his silent approach. He’s like an old, grizzled cat, a resemblance even more pronounced when Ah Long sits on the kitchen steps, slitting his eyes against the sun. Still, Ah Long hasn’t said anything.
Ren has the uneasy feeling that the finger isn’t in this house. Has never been, perhaps. There’s no way to explain it, just a tingling twitch of cat whiskers. When Yi was alive, he often felt this sixth sense. People said it was magic, but Ren knows it’s because they were a matched pair. Chinese say that good things come in pairs, such as the character for double happiness, cut out of red paper and pasted on doors for weddings, and the two stone lions that guard temples. As children, Ren and Yi were perfect doubles of one another. Seeing them, people would break into smiles of delight. Twins, and boys—how fortunate! But all this came to an end when Yi died. If a chopstick breaks, the other is discarded. After all, half of a broken pair is one: the unlucky number of loneliness.
Dr. MacFarlane once explained radio signals to him, saying they needed both a transmitter and a receiver to work. Ren immediately understood what he meant. He and Yi always knew where the other was, so much so that the matron at the orphanage would send one boy on an errand and keep the other with her. At any delay, she’d ask the remaining twin how far away his brother was. It was a useful skill, though no more marvelous than Pak Idris, the blind Malay fisherman by the Perak River who caught fish by hearing them underwater.
“What is it like?” Ren had asked.
“Like pebbles dropping,” he’d said. “Like a mirror, in which the fish are reflected.”
A mirror full of fish. Over the years, Ren has often thought about that phrase. What were the fish like to Pak Idris, who couldn’t see them? Were they like stars, moving in a dark firmament, or a field of flowers blowing in the wind? With Yi’s death, Ren has lost his beacon in this world. He no longer has a good sense for distances, nor does he know what’s happening in a different location. Instead, his ability has dwindled so that he can only sense imminent events, like the crack of a branch that collapses just as Ren leaps out of the way. There have been many near accidents. Too many, perhaps.
Sometimes Ren thinks that he hasn’t lost his long-range ability at all. The signal is faint simply because Yi is so very far away. But where that is, he can’t say. He’s crossed over to another country, the land of the dead. In Ren’s search for the missing finger, his invisible cat whiskers have twitched only once in this house—at the tiger-skin rug in the study. But that’s not surprising, given the old doctor’s obsession with tigers and which, as Ren feared, William seems to share to some extent. Hurrying down the hallway, it occurs to Ren that there’s one more place to search: the Batu Gajah District Hospital. The place where William has an office.
Time is running out: there are only twenty days left before Dr. MacFarlane’s forty-nine days of the soul are over. If by then he can’t find the finger, he’ll have failed. How will his old master rest? Ren remembers Dr. MacFarlane’s last days, the shivering fevers. And then the dreams, the waking nightmares in which the old man would cry for mercy, or crawl slavering on all fours. If Auntie Kwan had still been with them, she would have taken charge, but in the end there was only Ren.
A gust of wind shivers through the house, banging all the doors simultaneously. To Ren, peering out of the window at the top of the stairs, the trees are a waving green ocean surrounding the bungalow. It’s a ship in a storm, and Ren is the cabin boy peeking out of a porthole. Clutching the windowsill like a life buoy, Ren wonders what secrets lurk in the jungle surrounding them, and if his old master is in fact doomed to roam this vast green expanse forever, trapped in the form of a tiger.
14
Ipoh/Batu Gajah
Saturday, June 13th
A shrill whistle sounded. Up and down the track, doors began closing as steam billowed over the platform. It was so exciting that I glanced at Shin, laughing. He raised his eyebrows and grinned back. There was a jerk, then a bigger jolt as the train pulled slowly out of Ipoh Station. The platform slid away. People waved at departing passengers and I couldn’t resist waving back.
Shin rolled his eyes. “You don’t even know them.”
“Why not?” I said defensively. “The children like it.”
I remembered my dream of the little boy at the train station. That had seemed so real, though it had been nowhere near as grand as Ipoh’s palatial white railway station, now rapidly receding behind us.
The trip to Batu Gajah was fifteen miles or about twenty-five minutes, Shin told me. Sometimes though there were wild elephants on the track, or seladang, the huge jungle oxen said to stand six feet at the shoulder. Cool air rushed in from the open window, and I closed my eyes blissfully.
“That’s a yes, then?”
Shin’s glance burned through my lashes, making me feel self-conscious. Had he noticed the makeup I’d applied to hide my black eye? Well, it didn’t matter if my hair looked like a bird’s nest. It was only Shin.
“Yes to what?”
“To cleaning out the pathology storeroom this weekend.”
I opened my eyes. “As long as I get paid, too. But what makes you think we’ll find anything?”
“That finger definitely came from the hospital,” said Shin, “If you unscrew the bottle cap, it has the same mark as the other specimens in the hospital pathology lab. We should look through the records and see if there’s anything about amputated fingers.”
“Where’s the finger?”
In answer, he patted his pocket. The gesture reminded me of the salesman, and my spirits sank. That shadow again, staining the bright day. Why was Shin so enthusiastic about tracking down its owner, anyway? Perhaps we could just quietly replace the finger in the hospital. It occurred to me that I should also do some research for myself—tour the hospital, talk to the staff. I didn’t want to admit it to Shin, but if I couldn’t go to medical school, maybe I could become a nurse or a clerk. Anything was better than my current dismal prospects.
“You’re plotting something, aren’t you?” Shin said with a snort. “I can tell—you’re so predictable.”
“Nobody else says that,” I said crossly, thinking of the starry-eyed schoolboys and old men who lined up to dance with me. Nirman Singh had claimed that I was “shrouded in fateful mystery,” though I was fairly certain he was talking about the real Louise Brooks and not me—and also that he was all of fifteen years old and shouldn’t be spending his pocket money at a dance hall.
“Whom have you been keeping company with?”
I’d forgotten how sharp Shin was; it was the flip side of being on good terms with him again.
“No one.”
Shin was watching me with a thoughtful expression. “Do you like boarding at Mrs. Tham’s?”
“Well, you’ve seen what she’s like,” I said. “But it’s not that bad.”