Lion City

Chapter One

Tari checked to make sure Mr. Bilal wasn’t nearby before she leaned back from the desk, rubbing at the cramp in her hand. Stagnant afternoon humidity made her movements sluggish and dreamlike. The tall slatted windows would let in a nice breeze, were her employer to allow them opened, but Mr. Bilal disliked the noise of the busy street. He seemed unaffected by the heat, flitting from cabinet to shelf to desk at the other end of the office with the energy of a man half his age and a third his size. Despite her precaution and his apparent inattention, he somehow managed to notice her change of posture. “Finished with that contract yet?” he asked.

“One more page left,” she replied. The translation was slow going; her Dutch had never been more than passable, and she could only consult her glossary surreptitiously, else she would endure jibes that the ragged little volume should be her replacement. Although that old argument wasn’t worth revisiting, Tari sensed an opening for a different one. “It would go significantly faster if we had a typewriter.”

Bilal harrumphed. “Too expensive.”

“Modernizing takes investment,” Tari said. “I imagine they can be had for a better price in London. I’ve a friend who’s there now—”

“You wouldn’t be referring to that old scatterbrains Lady Alva, would you?” he replied without breaking stride. “Even presuming she were to follow through, it’ll be months before she returns to Singapore, if she ever returns at all. I certainly hope you’ll be done with that copy before then.” Before Tari could retort, he vanished up the staircase.

With a glower, Tari picked up her pen and returned her attention to the dry legal language. She should know better than to needle him overmuch. Few colonial businessmen had any interest in employing a young Malay woman, even one respectably widowed. The small shipping firm didn’t do quite enough business to justify an in-house translator; she worried that Bilal kept her on mainly out of charity, a sentiment that might change at any moment. As it was, she held onto her father’s house by only the most tenuous grasp, and continually feared the next ill turn that might take it from her at last.

The bell hanging over the front door clattered, interrupting her unhappy musings. Tari stood and smoothed her blue hijab, putting on a friendly smile that quickly turned bemused. A gust of wind and spattering of rain accompanied a knobbly bundle of tweed, which upon stumbling inside turned out to be a tall blond man. He wrestled the door shut and fumbled his bowler hat back into place, then turned and immediately snatched the hat off again when he spotted her. “I’m, um, terribly sorry,” he said, wearing a sheepish look on a pale face that was pleasant, if a bit angular. There was a hint of something continental in his accent that Tari couldn’t place: Austrian, perhaps, or Swiss. “Is this—” he consulted a slip of paper before stuffing it back in a pocket “—Hamidi and Bilal Shipping?”

“It is,” Tari said. “Mr. Bilal is just upstairs. I can fetch him if you’d like to wait.”

“Do you take passengers?”

Tari blinked, unused to being addressed so directly. Europeans tended to treat her as either a servant or a nonentity. “From time to time,” she said. “Where would you like to go?”

“It’s, um,” the man said. “Well, you see, I have this map...”

She suppressed a sigh as the visitor stepped closer. Another treasure hunter. She should have suspected as much. He rummaged around his person until he produced a larger, neatly folded sheet and smoothed it out on her desk, briefly hindered by the realization that he was still carrying his hat.

The lines of the map appeared too delicate to have been printed and too precise to have been hand-drawn. Tari puzzled over the unfamiliar symbols for a moment before she recognized the sinuous curves that cut across the page. “That’s the Serai River,” she said. “There’s not much up there. Just a pepper and gambier plantation, if I recall.”

“Yes, that’s where I—” He broke off as heavy footsteps sounded on the stair.

Tari jumped back from the desk like a child caught sneaking sweets, though Mr. Bilal’s eyes were on the thick stack of papers he carried. “Are you sure Ah Min turned in that manifest last week?” he said in Arabic, then looked up and stopped short when he spotted the man in the tweed suit.

In English, Tari said, “Mr. Bilal, this is Mister, um—”

“Messerli,” the stranger supplied.

“He seeks passage to the plantation on Sungai Serai.”

“How do you do?” Mr. Bilal said, eyeing Tari dubiously. She meekly stepped aside to make room around her small desk. “Serai, yes. We do a mail and supply run to all the settlements on the Johor. The next one is in, hmm...”

“Three weeks,” Tari finished.

“Ah,” Messerli said. His fingers tapped against the wooden surface like a hummingbird’s wings. “You see, the thing of it is, um... Well, I need to get there rather urgently. Within the next few days.”

Bilal stepped back from the desk, his attention already back on his pile of manifests. “I am sorry, sir,” he said, “but I will not have anything until then. You might try another firm.”

Messerli tried to block Bilal from leaving. “I’ve tried at least a dozen firms already. Please, I wouldn’t need to stay long, with luck just overnight.” Bilal turned the other direction to avoid the persistent gentleman. “I can make it worth your trouble,” the man added. “Say, two hundred dollars?”

This made Bilal pause. Tari’s eyebrows shot up her forehead at this young stranger who could casually offer such an outrageous sum. “I suppose I might be able to arrange something in a week or so,” said Bilal.

Meanwhile, Tari was doing some very quick calculations in her head. “Chung Ho said the Sumatra’s boiler should be done by this evening,” she said.

“That tug is not fit for passengers,” Bilal said with a dismissive wave. “Besides, Chung Ho is on his way to Bangkok. All of my pilots are away from the city now.”

She recognized the steel in his tone, but couldn’t stop herself from saying, “Maybe I could—”

Bilal cut her off by resting a hand on her arm. Smiling apologetically at Messerli, he said, “Would you give me a moment with my clerk?”

Without waiting for a response, he dragged Tari away from her desk toward the corner of the room. “I am not going through this with you, Lestari,” he hissed in Arabic.

“Two hundred dollars!” she whispered back. “That’s more than you clear in a week!”

“That’s none of your concern.”

“Be reasonable, sir. I know the route, and it’s only a few hours away—”

“Enough!” He glanced over at Messerli, who was studiously ignoring them. In a slightly softer tone, Bilal said, “I am trying to help you and your family, girl, but you must know your place. You’re no longer a child stowing away with the real crews.”

Tari turned from him sullenly, willing away the pricking tears. This was already humiliating enough without them. When she made no further objections, Bilal went back to their visitor. “I am very sorry, sir,” he said, speaking English once more. “I wish I could help.”

“I see,” Messerli said. Tari thought he cast a troubled glance toward her, but she turned aside before she could meet his eyes and thus couldn’t be sure. “Well, I’m, um, sorry to have bothered you, then.” He bowed to them both and saw himself out, closing the door behind him.

For a moment, there was no sound but the wind and the muffled clattering of wheels outside. “Child,” Bilal began gently.

“He forgot his map,” Tari said. Before Bilal could protest, she snatched the rumpled paper from her desk and bolted out the door.

Out in the street, she scanned the passing faces until she spotted a lanky tweed suit about to board a rickshaw a little further up the road. “Mr. Messerli!” she called.

Messerli gestured to the puller to wait as she hurried to catch him up. “Yes?” he said eagerly.

“Your map.”

“Oh. Right. Thank you.” He pocketed the folded page, then, with a furtive look around, drew her into the shelter of the five-foot way, behind the pillar that supported the overhang. “Is there any chance he might change his mind?”

“We have no pilots,” she said sadly.

“Except you.”

Bilal’s rebuke still stung in her mind—a rebuke this stranger had apparently understood, just to make the situation that much more pleasant. “You wouldn’t put your life in the hands of a woman,” she said to the patterned tiles of the walkway.

“I do it every day.”

She looked up at him sharply. “One might almost think you were serious.”

“That would be an odd thing to joke about,” Messerli replied.

Tari bit her lip and glanced back toward the office. Bilal might come out at any minute, wondering where she’d gotten off to. “If something were to change, how quickly could you be ready?”

“At a moment’s notice.” He checked several of his pockets until he found a calling card. While he rummaged for a pen to scribble down an address on Club Street, Tari’s mind whirred. The Sumatran Adventuress surely wouldn’t be missed, and perhaps Wira might help... “I don’t think I caught your name,” he said, offering the card.

“Lestari binte Jaya.”

His wide smile was so sunny Tari almost thought the rain had stopped. “Truly a pleasure, Miss Lestari.” The rickshawman stepped into view and waved impatiently. “I should, um, I have to go,” Messerli said. “I’ll await your word.” He tipped his hat and ducked back into the rain.

Tari watched him go, the crisp linen card still in her hand, not quite able to believe what she’d just agreed to, what she’d just suggested. Then she shook herself and scurried back the way she had come. There was work to do.

***

Rafael Messerli settled gratefully into his sheltered seat as the rickshaw joined the flow of traffic. As uncomfortable as it made him to force some other poor soul to haul him around, someone of his apparent position wouldn’t be afoot, especially in this blasted weather. He never could get the hang of the tropics. The last assignment had been in the Atacama, which may not have had much to recommend it, but at least it was dry.

He reached under the cuff on his left sleeve and pressed a finger against his wrist, holding it until the tiny subdermal sensor activated. Amorphous lights flickered at the edges of his vision as Kala booted up. The lights gave way to a heads-up display, which helpfully advised Raf that he was in Singapore in 1896, that he had eighteen unread messages, and that his system was now analyzing the chronotic signature of the rickshaw puller.

Before he could get to his inbox, the image of a middle-aged man, with blue-black skin and the pinched smile peculiar to institutional headshots, popped up. He grimaced. Korbin always got tetchy when he went offline. He’d lecture Raf when he got back to base on the importance of staying connected in the field. Raf would counter that he’d be happy to comply as soon as he got a mobile unit that didn’t throw distracting display glitches every time a storm blew in, and that would be the end of it.

With a flick of his eyes, he opened the message, which hung in the air next to Korb’s photo.

>ANY UPDATE?

The boss was not going to be happy about the expense, and probably would have preferred that Raf continue trying to find more standard passage. But they didn’t have the luxury of the time that would take, quite aside from the fact that Raf really, really didn’t want to.

He muttered a silent reply, duly translated by the complex system of electrodes in his mouth and throat and displayed in the chat window.

>WE’VE GOT A RIDE