Devil's Circle

Walter Woon

Description

The War is over, the Union Jack flies again over the Municipal Building. Life has come full circle. Or has it? The old certainties are gone and the British are not universally welcomed to take their former place.Malaya is in ferment and the day of reckoning has come for those who fought for the Japanese, with the Japanese and against the Japanese. The air is rife with suspicion and everyone's loyalty is in question. Racial tensions run high and there's no telling what will be the catalyst that will throw the country into disarray. Dennis Chiang and his friends are drawn into the chaotic world of post-war Singapore, where accounts must be settled and the colour of justice is not black and white but grey. This is the long-awaited final installment of Walter Woon's exceptional The Advocate's Devil trilogy.

Informations

• Publié par: MarshallCavendishM
• Date de parution: 15 août 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789814435819
• Langue: English

Extrait

Text 2011 Walter Woon
2011 Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited
Cover design by Opalworks Pte Ltd
This edition published 2011 by
Marshall Cavendish Editions
An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International
1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196
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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 li