Shin’s voice was icy. “He’s an ass if he can’t tell you’re obviously a virgin.”
I was so humiliated that I didn’t know where to look. Ears scorching, my face blazing. I supposed I ought to be pleased that Shin had never doubted my chastity, since chastity was so prized in a woman, but the way he was doing things was so high-handed, I wanted to slap him. “It’s none of your business,” I snapped, jumping up.
Shin grabbed me by the arm, pulling me down. “Of course it is,” he said through gritted teeth. “I don’t like it. I don’t like you doing a job like that at all. It’s stupid and dangerous and you’re lucky that nothing’s happened—so far.”
“I didn’t have a choice!” How dare Shin tell me off, when he’d nothing to worry about other than studying and having a good time in Singapore? I buried my face in my knees.
Shin put his hand lightly on my head, as though he was afraid I’d shrug it off. “Why didn’t you write and tell me you needed money?”
“How could I, when you never wrote back?”
“That was because—” he bit his words off. Whatever it was—another girl, another world I didn’t know—he clearly didn’t want to say, and I didn’t press him. “I had a feeling you were doing something like this.”
“What do you mean?” My voice was muffled.
Shin shook his head. “Some sort of shady job. Mother told me about her mahjong debts, after the miscarriage. She said you were paying them for her by dressmaking, but there was no way you were making enough money.”
“Is that why you came today?”
“No, I’d no idea where you were working. It was Y. K. Wong who took me there.”
I straightened up. “Why?”
“Don’t know. But he’s been asking about you in a roundabout way. And also if I’d noticed any of the specimens in the pathology room were missing. I played dumb, of course. Told him that I hadn’t finished counting them.”
So Y. K. Wong hadn’t said anything to Shin yet about locking me into the storeroom. Was bringing Shin to the dance hall a way of putting pressure on me? A housewife came out from a neighboring gate and gave us a sideways glare. It was Saturday afternoon and able-bodied young people shouldn’t be sitting on the pavement like this, so we started walking again in a desultory way. If we hit a main street, we were bound to find a bus stop, and then, I supposed, Shin would go back to Batu Gajah. The thought filled me with desolation.
“He also asked whether I’d heard about a weretiger’s finger.”
“A what?”
“Apparently, the hospital is supposed to have the finger of a weretiger in its collection.”
My mind leaped to the night of the party and Ren’s peculiar reaction, how he’d bolted out into the darkness when he’d heard about the tiger. I frowned. “Koh Beng mentioned it when we were cleaning out the pathology storeroom.”
“Well, Y. K. said that people always wanted to buy it.”
We’d reached a bus stop. There were other people, so we had to stop talking about severed fingers and weretigers, but I wondered if Y. K. Wong was secretly selling off pathology specimens. I’d heard that the hard stone from a tiger’s eye and the bezoars formed in the bellies of goats and monitor lizards fetched outrageous sums on the black market. They were said to bring good fortune, bewitch a lover, or charm an enemy to death. I thought about the withered, blackened finger that had mysteriously returned to me and was, even now, rattling in my handbag.
“Shin,” I said, opening my bag so he could glimpse it.
His eyes widened. “Where’d you get that?”
At that moment, the bus arrived. We were lucky enough to find two seats and as it rattled onward, I told him everything that had happened. Everything, including the dreams and Ren and his lost twin, Yi, across the river. I had to lean over and speak softly in his ear so that no one else would hear. Sometimes I think I will never forget that journey across town. The baking heat of the afternoon sun, the dusty breeze blowing in on us, smelling like the crushed Kaffir lime leaves in the lap of the woman in front of us. Shin’s sharp profile as he gazed out of the window, listening intently to my words. I would never get tired of looking at him, I thought.
* * *
As luck would have it, this bus went across town to the Ipoh Railway Station, a white and gold imperial folly in the afternoon sunlight.
“I’ll see you off,” I said, trying to look cheerful.
“And where are you going?”
I clutched my handbag tighter. “Back to Mrs. Tham’s.”
“Liar,” he said, without rancor. “Where are you really going?”
There was no use dissembling. “I’m going to Taiping. There’s an afternoon train.” I couldn’t bear to go back to Mrs. Tham’s, lest Robert should turn up, all red-faced and indignant. Or worse, full of apologetic recriminations. Besides, there was something else I’d promised to do.
To my surprise, Shin just looked at me. “How much money do you have?”
A fair amount, as a matter of fact. The Mama had handed me not only the money from the party but also my back pay.
“I’ve got money, too. Let’s go.” He started walking swiftly, long legs eating up the tiled floor of the station. “Time to do some grave-robbing.”
* * *
Of course we weren’t going to be digging up corpses, I said indignantly, after Shin had bought us tickets. We were going to put something back, so it was more like grave-restoring. Shin said it was pretty much the same thing. I didn’t know how to explain it, this urgent conviction that if I did what Ren asked, perhaps he wouldn’t die.
“Yi said that the order was all messed up, and that we should try to fix it.”
“What order?”
“The way things have been done. Like a ritual.” I frowned, trying to recall what I knew about Confucianism.
“Has it occurred to you that you might just be hallucinating all of this?”
We got on the northbound train this time. Another third-class carriage with hard wooden seats, but my spirits rose. I loved trains.
“But what else can I do? And how do you explain the dreams, and Yi?”
“He only tells you what you already know,” said Shin maddeningly. “It’s like a conversation with yourself.”
“What about Ren, then? He looks exactly like Yi, only older. And he recognized me that night.”
“Coincidence. All small Chinese boys look the same.”
“Dr. MacFarlane and his finger? The five of us and our names, and how everything fits together—how do you explain all of that?”
He shrugged. “I can’t.”
“If Ren dies, at least I’ll have done what he asked.” I shivered. Yi’s words, his master’s business, echoed in my head. Darkness. Rustling leaves. I thought of the newspaper article about a headless female torso discovered in a plantation. Who, or what, was Ren’s master?
“And the thumb from Pei Ling’s parcel?”
“You should tell Dr. Rawlings about it. Say that you suspect someone, maybe Y. K. Wong, is stealing body parts.”
Shin said, fierce and low, “I’m going to kill Y. K. when I see him again. Locking you in like that.”
“Don’t!” Alarmed, I glanced at him. “But you ought to report him. If he’s been selling weretiger fingers and goodness knows what else as amulets, that explains why the salesman had a finger in his pocket. They were friends—Pei Ling said as much, that her lover had a friend at the hospital who she didn’t much like.”
“And what about the rest of Pei Ling’s package?”
That was more complicated. Perhaps it was blackmail, or they’d had a falling out of sorts. Dimly, I was aware that the patterns were moving, shifting into a new configuration, like the image of fingers I’d had in my head. Five fingers, playing an unknown tune. I had the uneasy feeling that it was a dirge.
* * *
The note next to the name J. MacFarlane on the handwritten list in Pei Ling’s package had said Taiping/Kamunting. I was sure that he must be the person Ren had referred to when he’d run out into the darkness that night. And I was equally certain that he was dead, since Ren had mentioned a grave.
Taiping was a quiet little town, the state capital of Perak though there was talk that Ipoh would soon receive that honor. I wasn’t quite sure where Kamunting was. Perhaps it was one of the satellite villages around Taiping, just as Falim was to Ipoh. If Dr. MacFarlane was a foreigner who’d died in that area, there was only one place he could be: the Anglican cemetery.
I explained this to Shin, and he nodded, which made me suspicious. He was being far too docile about this spur-of-the-moment trip.
“Do you have work tomorrow?” I asked. Taiping was more than forty miles from Ipoh by rail, but it would take a while to get there because of the winding track and all the stops at Chemor and Kuala Kangsar. At this rate, we wouldn’t arrive until five o’clock in the afternoon. There was a late train starting back at eight, more than enough time to visit the cemetery, but I was worried about Shin.