Now it happened that the next person to rent the room after the police had come to search the room next door where the American had stayed who had died, was a British ex-pat who frequently came to stay at the hotel because he knew the manageress and liked the old 1920's style of the hotel. Also he liked the fact that it was inexpensive and yet had air-conditioning and hot water and a private balcony.

When the Malay couple had skipped out without paying the debt the Management was angry, but the incident was soon eclipsed in importance by the discovery of the body of the American down the street and the tracing the American to the hotel where he had rented a room. The police had come up and checked the room and the hotel register two times, and officials from the American embassy had also come to inspect the register and to gather his belongings in the room.

The management did not make the connection between the Malays leaving and the American's sudden and mysterious death. Everyone dismissed his death as drug related when they found the hypodermic needle by the body, and the police did not bother to investigate the death further than that. It was surprising that no money was found with the body, as the manager remembered seeing a lot of cash with the American when he had checked in. The manager only figured that a policeman may have taken the money. They didn't tell the police about the Malay couple leaving the night before as they didn't like to involve the police in hotel matters.

So nothing more was made of the affair, except that they all speculated about how it was that the American had suddenly died under such capricious and strange circumstances. Rumors soon circulated that a young, bit American had died of a heart attack.

When the management found that the Malays were not coming back two days later, they found that the door was unlocked and the key sitting on the side-table. The hotel maid and an old uncle went in to clean the room thoroughly, as they had left it a mess, with one bed frame broken and the mirror all messy with fingerprints and lipstick. They cleaned the room and mopped the floors, changed the linen and then left.

That evening, the old British ex-pat, Tom, had arrived with his son, who was a teenage Anglo-Asian boy. The mother had died several years earlier and Tom was trying his best to raise his young son as best he could, even though he was now in his late seventies.

They checked into the very room that the Malay couple had occupied. They each carried a small suitcase and they laid their things on the bed. Tom was the first to notice that there was a little trash underneath the beds and a lot of dust. He decided to look behind some of the furniture to see the state of the room's health. He and his son moved the large closet away from the wall to reveal an empty whiskey bottle and a couple of clothes pins, and then they noticed the gold chain hanging from the nail.

They took it down and admired its beauty. Tom's first impulse was to take it to the hotel management as he thought that the person who had left it behind might come back to reclaim it. But then he thought about it a little while. He reasoned that the person who had left it behind would have already come back to reclaim such a valuable thing if it had been very long ago.

Then he thought that any other occupant of the room between that time and now might just as easily have taken the chain. He looked at the chain and saw how beautiful it and the pendant were, and the more he studied it the less he wanted to give it back to the hotel management, whom he suspected might just keep the chain for themselves anyway.

His son, who was a more than a little superstitious about such things, thought it was a good omen and that they should hold on to their lucky treasure.

Tom was not quite sure what to do with it and so wrapped it up in a handkerchief and put it into his pant's pocket. He would hold on to it until he could figure out the best thing to do with it.

His son went to take a shower and Tom sat down in the low legged Chinese chair next to the round table to feel the cool of the air-conditioner and ceiling fan at the same time. Though he was now getting old his memory was still good and he liked to think about the events that happened to him in his long life.

His dear wife had died several years earlier of breast cancer and since then he took it upon himself to raise their son well. She was a Malay woman and he had loved her dearly. He had lived in that country since before the war and had nominally converted to Islam though he still liked his scotch.

He had come as a young university educated man during the mid-thirties. He was teaching English and Math to the secondary school students of the British administrators and officers there. He enlisted before the war when war looked eminent and had been commissioned an officer.

He remembered fighting the Japanese when they invaded from the North, and of fleeing into the jungle to hide and fight a guerilla war. Then he had been captured by the Japanese and he was sent north to Burma to work on the railroad there.

Many people had died on that railroad and he wondered how he had survived it all when so many he knew had perished. He had contracted a case of acute malaria and was on the edge of death when the war ended and he was liberated by the American forces.

He made his way back to Malaysia and regained his health and strength in the military hospital there. The government was then in the emergency state and they needed his skills in the jungle to help fight the communist insurgents, some of the same people with whom he had been fighting the Japanese during the war.

He was older by then and had been put in command of a company of forces who patrolled the interior and that had frequent skirmishes with the guerillas.

He remembered the night he had almost been killed when they came up to the window of his hut and fired their submachine guns into the room. He rolled off the bed and threw a couple of grenades he kept under the bed out the window. Then he slipped out another window with his revolver and shot two more Chinese men dead as they came around the corner of the building after the grenades exploded.

His units had been ambushed several times, but each time he had used a special tactic of a small group of men to follow the main body of soldiers and to attack the ambushers from the flank and rear with machine guns so that the main body could escape.

Now he sat under the cool of the fan and looked at himself in the cut-glass mirror that was chipped at the edges. The hotel was about as many years old as he had been in the country, and he felt a certain kind of attachment with the hotel. He first visited the hotel when he had been a teacher before the War, and he remembered that then there were not many hotels in the town and that this was a first-class one where many important people had stayed. Now it was a run-down place, clean but in need of repair. The furniture was exactly the same as he remembered it, though it had been arranged differently in the room. The tiles of the floor were the same. Now the rooms were painted yellow, but they were originally a light green color. Of course, then there was no hot-water heater or air-conditioner.

He had come back to stay here after the war and he learned that it had been bombed by the Japanese and that later the Japanese officers used the hotel as their residence. After that he came back to the hotel almost every year or so as he traveled between his residence in Thailand and Singapore where he managed some of his finances.

He thought about his wife. He had married late in life. He had met her when he started at a teaching post at the national university.

She was a young student of his. It was a time in his life in which he was feeling particularly lonely. She was a good student but had a difficult time with her English. He began giving her extra tuition outside of classes and they got to know and like each other very well, almost like a father daughter friendship. When she left the school to go abroad to medical school he helped her with her tuition and to gain admission to a good school. They wrote to each other almost every week and he found he missed her more than anything.

When she returned from her studies abroad, she was a mature woman and was one of the first woman doctors in the country. It was then that he asked her to marry him, and she consented. He willingly converted to Islam as religion really never mattered to him as much as scotch did.

He continued with his teaching post while she built up her practice in the capital. She had a hard time at first, but slowly was able to get a private clinic going which specialized in treating pregnancies and women's disorders. She was a woman ahead of her time and she fought for the place of women in Islam and in her own society.

They lived modestly and neither of them had owned a car or learned to drive before. They depended upon the bus to take them to their work, though between them they could easily have afforded a car.

Since she died he stopped taking care of himself very well. He still wore the old khaki pants that she would hem and hand sewn up the small tears for him. He thought about her often and it made him sad.

Since her death he had lost contact with his in-laws. They had lived in a Kampong and were never overly friendly with him, as they always expected him to help them out and to adopt a stronger Muslim way of life. After she died he bought a few acres of farmland for the family, and since then he had very little communication with them.

Now he was old and living on the pensions that both the British and the local government paid to him. He owned several properties still and he would travel between them. For the most part he educated his son himself, but was worrying that his son would soon need to go on in school to gain his certificates. Otherwise they did not have a lot of extra money.

Now he was old and tired and worried all the time about what would become of his son after he died. He had left all his properties and savings as well as her money to his son after he died. He was hoping to send his son back to England for college.

Things had changed a great deal since he had first come to live in that country. He could never have imagined when he was a young man coming down from the freighter that he would spend the rest of his life here. Now it was in his blood and it was all he knew. He would not know what to do if he had ever gone back to Whales, as it had been so long since he had seen it, and his own parents were long since passed away.

He was amazed by all the recent changes that had been happening in the country. He remembered that when he first checked into this hotel there were barely 500 cars on the whole island. Now there were thousands.

He went out to talk with the management. He spoke excellent Malay and they liked to sit around the big table and drink the spirits he always brought as a gift and joke and laugh. He found out that a big developer had bought the hotel and that they were soon going to tear it down and replace it with a more modern hotel. They had been losing a lot of business and the reputation of the hotel had recently gone down hill with the change of management among the shareholders. The original manager of the hotel who took the business over from his father had gambled away most of his shares in the hotel, and now other people had taken it over. The manager and manageress remained to run the hotel and take care of things, but they were not making much profit from it.

He asked them who had the room before him and they told him all about the Malay couple and their strange behavior and how they had skipped out without paying over half a month's rent. Then they told him about the American whom had stayed in the room just next door and had just died mysteriously the two days before he had come. Tom felt a little more uncomfortable about the gold chain in his pocket.

The subject of the conversation had switched to the world cup games that were then playing and they were talking about which teams had lost and which teams seemed to have a shot at the cup. The games had gone well, but teams expected to win had lost and mostly unknown teams were now in the finals.

Soon his son came down and they went out to get some makan and to do some shopping down at the new shopping center. The son liked the new mall and knew his way around it well, but his father preferred to go in the old shop houses and bargain and speak Malay with the shopkeepers. The shops all seemed old and anyway his father was very stingy and almost never bought anything for himself. He just liked to talk to the people and tease all the girls.

Now he was thinking about buying his son a new computer. He knew absolutely nothing about computers and mistrusted them. He didn't believe in all the new sciences and thought them basically impersonal and inhuman. For him Shakespeare had been the beginning and end of all proper education, and he had published several critical studies of Shakespeare's plays.

But he thought that perhaps his son would do well to get a computer. He had been taking computer lessons from an acquaintance who knew a lot about computers and his son had really become enthusiastic. His son was now dragging him down to the mall so that they could look in the computer stores and find a computer magazine by which to compare and price all the different kinds. It was exhausting and confusing for the old man, and he ended up allowing his son to figure it all out for himself. He would buy whatever computer his son decided upon if it was inexpensive enough.

He loved his son a great deal and would do anything for him. His son reminded him of his wife, as he looked more like her, he thought, than himself. But he had spoiled his son, giving in to him on just about anything, and he was always hesitant to punish him too severely. But his son was a good boy and worked hard in his studies.

Because he was handsome all the young girls were infatuated with him and flirted with him where ever he went, and a lot of young men were jealous of him. His handsome, beautiful "kopi-susu" son was finally growing up, becoming a young man he mused, as he remembered how he looked in his dirty diapers screaming at the top of his lungs.

Now he was old and he didn't talk a lot with people. He liked to go to the barbers once a week and have his haircut and to sit in the coffee shops and listen to all the aggressive young Towkays talk business.

He used to know quite a few people in this town, whom he would visit whenever he came to stay. But now most of them were either dead or gone away, and there were just a few of them left that he knew about. He saw a billboard for a charity dinner and auction that was asking for donations at the old recreation club. He remembered this place and thought he would like to go to the dinner just to get to look at the old clubhouse where he had spent so much of his time recuperating after the war.

At first he thought about giving cash for the charity fund, but then he remembered the gold chain in his pocket and thought that it would make a fitting contribution to put up for auction.

So he made reservations for two to attend and the next evening he and his son took a taxi to the old club house that had since then been renovated and converted into a Chinese restaurant. Outside there were mostly fancy Mercedes-Benz's and BMW's and a couple of limousines with chauffeurs waiting and talking with one another.

The facade of the building was the same, and the layout of the floor plan inside was little altered, with a small stage for performers and a small dance floor in the center. But otherwise nothing else looked the same. It was all in a modern decor that he detested and it made him feel uncomfortable. When he and his son walked in all the people, mostly Chinese businessmen, stopped and just stared at them and spoke under their breaths about them. But nobody seemed to recognize him or remember him and he didn't seem to recognize anybody there except for one old Chinese gentleman who sat over by a wall and just looked at him and smiled.

After they seated themselves, he took the gold chain which he had put into a nice black jewelry box he had bought downtown for the occasion. He walked up by the stage and gave it to the master of ceremonies and auctioneer who were arranging things back stage and getting ready to do the bidding. The MC looked at the box and opened it and was surprised to see what was inside. He asked Tom who it was that was giving such a nice gift for the charity drive but Tom told him that it was an anonymous donation and walked back to his table near the back wall of the great central hall. A disk jockey was performing and playing music on center stage and people were so busy eating and talking that no one noticed his coming or going along the back wall.

They ate good Chinese banquet dinner, with fried beehoon and roast duck and rice and soup. They were served warm tea for drinks. After a few minutes the disk jockey stopped talking and the MC and auctioneer came on stage to start the bidding. Mostly rich looking Chinese Towkays and their families sitting in the tables nearest the stage took part in the bidding.

Soon the gold-chain in its black box that he had donated was being put up for bid by a person in the audience who wished to remain anonymous. It immediately got a bid of 1000 dollars, and soon was up to 2000 and then 3000. One older Chinese man was bidding against a middle aged Chinese woman at another table. Finally the bidding stopped at 4000 from the Chinese lady.

Tom felt good that his gift had fetched such a good price and after the dinner he and his son went out and waited by a nearby bus stop to go back to the hotel.

The next day, with the new computer for his son and a new set of clothes for himself, they left the hotel and went back to their home. It was the last time that Tom ever stayed in that hotel.

Blanket Copyright, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.