From his instructor, an Israeli who had found the continual state of war on his nation’s borders to be aesthetically distasteful and had emigrated the day after he was of age, Noortman gained, among other things, a working knowledge of two more languages, Hebrew and Arabic. The instructor was moved to say, “There is a real future in government for a young man with your talents.”

Noortman, to whom double-entry bookkeeping did not come naturally, reported this to his father that evening-his father had decreed that he would pursue his studies from home, not from a room in a dormitory on campus-with the admittedly faint hope that he might be allowed to take his future into his own hands. The elder Noortman had replied calmly, “There is a real future in the customs service as well.”

Resentfully, Noortman went back to school and continued to wrestle with interest rates and amortization and debentures. When he graduated he made a second bid for freedom, requesting permission to pursue a master’s degree in languages. This, too, was denied, and his resentment, festering beneath a dutiful facade, grew into a bitter anger. Still dependent on his father’s largesse, he accepted an offer of employment in the customs service. If he was not quite under the direct supervision of the elder Noortman, then he was close enough for his father to critique his job performance every evening after dinner. Which he did, with a devastating eye for every tiny error and a dispassionate manner of speaking that was withering in the extreme. The younger Noortman endured these critiques with outward calm, but he was already looking for a way out.

By this time his clothes occupied half the closet and drawer space in the Israeli instructor’s home. He told his father the instructor was continuing to tutor him in languages, which was technically the truth. The elder Noortman, in the magisterial way that his son had come to detest, decided this was acceptable. Freighters, containerships, bulk carriers, tankers, military vessels of every size and shape, cruise ships, they all docked at Singapore, and they carried multinational crews. Many languages could greatly enhance one’s future in the customs service.

One day, a year into full-time employment in the family business, he was told by his father that he had located a suitable bride for his son, a well-connected young woman whose father was a relation of the Goh family, a scion of which currently occupied the prime minister’s office. The Goh family’s reservations over allying themselves with a half-breed had been overcome by the general respect with which the elder Noortman was regarded by people who mattered. The matter was fully explained to the younger Noortman, who walked out of his father’s study that evening with the sound of a cell door slamming in his ears.

The following week, a wiry Chinese man in his late thirties had appeared in the customs office. He asked for Noortman in Mandarin.

“I am Noortman,” the young man replied, in that same language.

The Chinese looked at him with an indifferent gaze. “Not you.”

At that moment his father appeared and shepherded the Chinese into his office and closed the door behind them. They were in there for quite some time, and when the Chinese left the elder Noortman escorted him to the door and all the way out to his car, an honor usually accorded only to high government officials on fact-finding missions.

“Who is the Chinese man you spoke to today?” Noortman asked his father over dinner that evening.

His father returned an impassive stare. “He is nothing and no one to you. Do not speak of him again.”

The next day the younger Noortman noticed a great deal of activity on and around a freighter moored three docks down from the office. When he went to take a closer look, he was waved off by a man with an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder and no uniform.

He sat on a crate just outside the perimeter created by perhaps a dozen such men, the majority of them Indonesian and Filipino, he thought, all with the same flat, steady regard. This regard was trained outward, away from the ship they ringed, ignoring the cranes and trucks moving around them as container after unmarked container was unloaded, settled onto the back of a flatbed, and moved off the dock. The men were rough-edged and muscular. They continued to ignore him so long as he did not breach their perimeter, but when he appeared the next day the Chinese man he had seen in his father’s office came down the gangway of the freighter and walked up to him. “What do you want?”

Noortman rose to his feet without undue haste, a nice blend of deference to elders and a display of self-confidence. “I am the son of Noortman, the customs agent.”

“I know,” the Chinese said. “What do you want?”

“I have been watching you. Over the last thirty-six hours, you have off-loaded almost one hundred containers of freight and reloaded them on a freighter bound for the port of Tokyo.”

The Chinese did not change expression.

“I notice that my father passed all of the containers from your ship through customs, even when he had to work overtime to do so.”

“And?”

“My father is a creature of habit. He goes home to sit down to dinner with his family at six P.M. every day of his life.”

The Chinese watched him with a menacing gaze meant to intimidate, very similar to those of the guards posted round his ship.

The younger Noortman continued to speak. His father would have been proud of his careful, detached manner. He hoped he didn’t look as frightened as he felt, but he could either wait for his doom to be pronounced or he could try to build a future of his own. Desperation was a highly motivating force. “I notice that the identification numbers on the containers have been very recently renewed. I notice also that they have been reinforced to carry heavier loads.”

“You’re a very noticing fellow,” the Chinese said.

It was not a compliment. “Very,” Noortman agreed, not without an increase in heart rate. There was something very initimidating-and not a little exciting-about the Chinese’s cold eyes. “And then I remembered reading in the newspaper one month ago of the taking of a ship loaded with aluminum ingots in the Makassar Strait. Pirates boarded her at four in the morning, shot the captain and crew, and tossed their bodies overboard, and vanished into the night.” Noortman paused. “One of the crew survived. He was pulled out of the water by a fisherman the next day, and he lived long enough to tell the authorities that the head pirate was a Chinese man in his thirties or forties, wiry, with a very dark tan and black hair cut very short, like American soldiers in the movies.”

He paused, and let his eyes wander over the Chinese’s brush cut. “The ship has not been found. Neither has its ten-million-dollar cargo.”

The Chinese said nothing, calloused hands remaining loose at his side, but there was an alert set to his head and a thoughtful expression in his eyes that had not been there before.

“It was an interesting story, and I looked for more, but there was nothing. The ship and its cargo simply disappeared.” He stopped to consider, and added, not without admiration, “It must have been very carefully planned, to be able to make a ship of that size disappear. Not to mention, Mr. Fang, seventy metric tons of aluminum ingots.”

Fang’s expression did not change. “Supposing I was this Chinese pirate,” he said. “According to the story you read, I made a ship disappear, and I made its crew disappear, and I made seventy metric tons of aluminum ingots disappear. How hard would it be to make you disappear as well?”

“True,” the younger Noortman said, nodding. It required an effort to keep his expression as bland as his voice, but he thought he succeeded quite well. “Very true. But I was able to figure out who you were and what you were doing here the first time I saw you and your ship. If I could do so, so, too, could others.” He let Fang think this over.