Interpol agent Heller began by approaching the teachers at Eunos Primary School where Xavier Li had gone. She didn't expect much but it was doing her due diligence to talk to them. Even when you didn't get information that directly helped you with your case you got a fuller picture of a suspect. What was he really like to all different kinds of people. They might have insights to his character without having any idea that he was a thief.
She smirked to herself at how easy it was. The people in Singapore seemed even dumber than people in the States. No one challenged her cover. She presented herself as Heller from Dance Magazine, doing a profile story on rising ballet star Xavier Li. A cursory wave of the plastic card on the lanyard around her neck was all it took to sell it.
"He was one of your students, wasn't he," she asked each teacher to whom she spoke. She expected them to eagerly take credit for a boy who'd been valedictorian, to that point, of his class and was now sort of internationally famous. She expected to hear them all sing a hymn to a boy at the top of his class. Teachers always liked the top students.
But they hated him. To Heller's surprise they didn't use euphemisms or try to equivocate. They openly expressed loathing for him. They were glad he'd left their school to study at a ballet academy. A couple of the men snickered at it in delight. She wasn't sure how a kid at the top of the class could be hated by all the teachers but he was. But, along with not hiding it, they also didn't clearly articulate why.
One said he was "teaching staff enemy number one" another called him "the most willful little son of a bitch" she'd ever seen. Others said he stirred up all the other kids. Several said something to the effect that he "set a bad example". No one quite said what he did and she only thought she could probe so far in that direction as a supposed writer from Dance Magazine.
She got the names of a dozen kids from Xavier Li's class from the teachers, some finishing college, others at jobs and talked to them. The first thing she noticed was that they always called him "X". No one ever called him "Xavier". The way they told it, X, simply didn't respect any of the teachers and while he was always polite, he subtly made this clear at all times. They all laughed that he and his mother had somehow tricked the school's principal into signing some document that allowed him to wear what he wanted instead of the uniform all the other boys had to wear. A couple kids had pictures showing a bunch of boys wearing rather unimpressive uniforms of shorts and short sleeve shirts surrounding X wearing black pants and a white shirt. They said X never wore the school uniform, never, and that the teachers hated having to give him awards when he'd walk up and get them wearing his own clothes not what the school forced every other boy to wear. This was not what they wanted in the Singapore school system.
She had to keep up her facade of being from Dance Magazine and so she asked them about Li going off to dance ballet. They all said they were shocked that X had gone into ballet. Oh, sorry, they'd typically say, realizing they were implicitly insulting a writer for Dance magazine. Said one boy "He was the toughest boy in school, without doubt. To hear that he went into . . . ballet?! Oh my god!," the boy dissolved into guffaws then apologized.
She followed up on this. She pursued this question with all of the remaining kids to whom she spoke. "Was Xavier Li the toughest boy in school? Was he a fighter? Our readers love hearing about boy dancers breaking stereotypes."
The kids all responded with perplexed looks. Was he the toughest boy?!
Of course he was.
A couple kids still had stored video on their phones of him in fights. None of the footage was very good, but he had a striking air of both calm and intensity in each instance as he advanced on larger boys immediately off school grounds and quickly beat them up.
She asked if Xavier Li had been a bully. Most of them giggled. "X?! A bully?! He only fought protecting people. He was a hero," said one girl. Another looked at her like she was crazy. "X didn't particularly like me. I was sort of enemies with Yong and a bit with Hao and I didn't get along all that well with X either and I never feared being around him for a second. It always felt safer to be around X. X would never hurt anybody who didn't ask for it."
Heller sighed. There wasn't anything remotely criminal or even latent criminal about any of this. The closest was that a couple kids had mentioned, sort of offhandedly, that there was a rumor that X was in a gang. She was pondering how to investigate this as one interview was winding own and the girl she was talking to recommended that she speak to Hao Ong and Yong Peng, too. "Him and Hao and Yong were always together," said one girl. "You wanna find out about X, talk to Hao and Yong."
She found Yong Peng at Changi General Hospital off Simei Street in the east end of Singapore. Actually, she found him just outside of it. She'd gone to the desk at the main entrance and said she wanted to speak to Yong Peng. He was a new resident there and his shift was almost over. He was an average sized, dark haired kid whose loose scrubs didn't quite hide that he was out of shape. Still, he was making his way quickly out the door and down the stairs at dusk to a covered portion of the parking lot.
"Excuse me? Yong Peng? Are you Yong Peng?"
He slowed up but didn't stop.
"Mr. Peng? I'm Lynn Heller from Dance Magazine. I'm doing a profile on your boyhood friend Xavier Li. I was hoping you could give me a few minutes of your time."
She flashed the fake card. He stopped. His eyes went back and forth calculating something for a couple seconds .
"Okay," he sighed. "I-I didn't really feel like working out today anyway. Um, how 'bout following me to a bar near here?"
She agreed and a few minutes later they were seated at the bar of True Heritage Brew. She pushed her story showing him the lanyard. Heller from Dance Magazine. She knew everything about him but pretended to be ignorant. He talked and talked but it was amazing how little he actually said. He said that he and X and Hao Ong were best friends. And he told some ridiculous story that, yes, they were "officially" gang members but only to stop these gang guys from bothering them. He also said that he and Hao weren't surprised when X suddenly became a ballet dancer. They said he'd always been crazy about dancing. Like all his other stories, he stopped short.
Walking away, she was struck at the contrast between the way this Yong Peng spoke, all effusive and seeming to want to tell her everything he could and the way he kept stopping sentences or paragraphs short of giving her the whole picture about his pal. It was nearly worthless to have spoken to him. She thought of that expression, that movement of his eyes going back and forth a couple seconds. At first she'd thought he was just trying to figure if he had enough time to stop and talk to her. Was it more than that? Had he seen through her cover? Did he plan on giving her this slippery response? She wasn't sure but that would be awfully cagey for a 21 year old with no history of dealing with the police.
Before she saw the other boy of the trio, Heller felt a little tired of lying to kids and decided to make one of her other absolutely necessary visits while in Singapore.
She didn't want to bring up Xavier Li in front of the other Singapore Police officers and bring more embarrassment on a guy who seemed like a good cop. So, she went to Singapore Police headquarters, flashed her Interpol badge to a captain in a back room and told him she wanted to speak to officer Lim Chen. Where is he?
She found the one time rising star in the department standing on a busy street corner at the intersection of Sims Avenue and Sims Way. He was stopping jaywalking pedestrians, one after another and writing out ticket after ticket. She was still 20 feet back of him when he called out, "What do you want, Miss?" at his left shoulder.
She glanced around. There were only men and boys around her but he wasn't looking back at her and she was pretty sure he'd never looked her way. He continued scanning the sea of pedestrians in front of him, looking left and right for another miscreant.
She frowned. He doesn't mean . . ?
"Yes, you," he half shouted and turned around enough to look right at her and then whipped his focus back around to all the pedestrians.
"You!" he shouted above the din and pointed at a tall, skinny blond teenage English boy crossing well outside the sidewalk and against the light because there was a momentary gap in traffic.
The boy didn't even flinch, earphones in both ears all the while, and continued sauntering toward the other side. Chen practically leaped at him in a couple loping strides, grabbed the shocked boy by the collar and physically dragged him on the pavement then roughly across the curb and back to the sidewalk just in front of Heller. He pulled both earphones off and told the stunned boy, "Identification now or you go to the station house!"
The boy was shocked and spluttered but complied. Like a seasoned pro, Chen had a $30 ticket written out in seconds. The boy marched off defeated and muttering under his breath but now carefully crossing within the marked sidewalk only when the light was with him.
"What do you want, Miss?" he repeated giving her just a moment's glance and then scanning the intersection again.
She approached him from the side and extended her arm to put her badge in front of him where he could inspect it without looking away from the intersection.
"What do you want . . Agent Heller from Interpol?" he corrected himself with a slight smile though never shifting his eyes in her direction.
"Officer Chen, I'd like to talk to you about a cold case . . . that of The Acrobat."
From the side she saw his jaw muscles slightly tighten but no more reaction than that and he said nothing at first.
"I was told about your theory of the actual perpetrator," she continued, "And I find it . . intriguing."
"Usually when . . my theory of the actual perpetrator is brought up, it's to laugh at me, Agent Heller. It is because of . . my theory," he held his arms out gesturing to the whole busy street intersection, "that I am here enforcing the Singapore code of traffic and pedestrian violations. Because they wouldn't even consider my theory. But none of their theories panned out, did they? Despite this, none of them were demoted, were they?"
"No."
"So, why do-Hey! You! Back in the sidewalk!-" he interrupted himself shouting at a Malay boy in a red t-shirt. "So why do you want to discuss it? Why is an Interpol agent from the United States here in Singapore?"
"Because we're getting nowhere pursuing this super thief Red X and I think maybe some of our assumptions are faulty."
His expression was a faint smile as he continued watching the sea of pedestrians, his presence cowing scores into obeying the rules, hushed voices frantically alerting others around them, pointing and whispering "Chen! Chen!" and people slowing and moving in accordance with the law.
"I will be off duty in another . . ," he turned his wrist in front of him to see the time while never stopping looking at the intersection, " . . forty two minutes. Meet me at the coffee house with the white and gold facade 50 meters behind your left shoulder."
Heller nodded. As she walked away she saw that he had turned the side mirror of the car nearest to him such that he could see those approaching him from behind. She stopped at another store along the way and browsed for a while then got a table shortly before the prescribed time. He walked in at two minutes after the hour, face expressionless but eyes ablaze with intensity. He took the seat opposite her and removed his policeman's hat revealing an only slightly thinning head of black short cropped hair. She also noted that, while his physique wasn't impressive, just average height and not especially muscular, he seemed to be in excellent shape.
"So, tell me again why you're here?" he opened.
She told him about being at the Interpol meeting to stop Red X. She told him about Xavier Li being the best physical match for Red X but having many alibis and she told him a sanitized version of what the agents from Singapore had told her about him.
When she finished, Chen shook his head, "You didn't explain why you still think Xavier Li is worth pursuing. Why would an Interpol agent want to waste time pursuing a suspect who has alibis for 31 of 47 events?"
Heller told him about her background in ballet, how she always loved it and she could recognize the movements of ballet dancers and how the way Red X moved was the way a ballet guy would move. "And . . I met him once. I-I got to go backstage at the Metropolis Ballet when he was a guest artist there dancing the role of Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet. He was so . . . charismatic. It's hard to describe. Not just handsome, not just pretty the way a lot of those guys are, though he was even prettier. There was something about him. It made the idea of dismissing him out of hand as a suspect ridiculous."
"You believe his . . charisma, as you call it, is a symptom of a great force of will and energy?"
"Yeah, that's one way of putting it. Everyone was drawn to him. You could see it. He was perfectly polite but you could just feel that this guy could do . . anything. It could have felt dangerous. It sometimes does with a guy like that. But you just knew that he wouldn't harm you. That was the sense I got from talking to all the kids who went to school with him. He could do anything. But he wouldn't hurt them. In fact, they all felt extra safe around him."
Chen said nothing. He had only the faintest smile of vindication. His career had been ruined and here was someone from Interpol telling him that maybe he'd been right all along. Heller was impressed by his control.
"So," she continued, "We attribute 47 major robberies to Red X and he has strong alibis for 31 of them. We-"
"What kind of alibis?"
"Time conflicts. The bank vault timers show 11 p.m. and 4,000 people were watching him bowing at curtain call in tights and a top as Romeo at 11 p.m. And location conflicts. The robbery took place in Metropolis or Frankfurt or Mumbai and he was in Jump City or . . some place else but he wasn't there."
"Do you have any blood, fingerprints or DNA?"
Heller shook her head. "Nothing."
"So, nothing with which to indict him but also nothing with which to exonerate him. Has anyone questioned him?"
"No. They looked into his whereabouts and realized that he had all these solid alibis and stopped."
Chen sighed. His eyes left her and rose off to one side deep in thought. "Unfortunately, he already knows you're coming," said Chen with a bitter smirk.
She shook her head. That's ridiculous.
"I told them years ago. They didn't understand what they were dealing with," sniffed Chen sliding back into silent calculation.
She frowned. No way. How . . how would he know I'm after him?
"Um . . did-did you know his father?" asked Heller wanting to get away from attributing almost supernatural powers to him and resume a normal pace of conversation.
Chen nodded. "Not well but then no one did. I worked a couple cases with him. I've never seen an officer as indifferent to getting credit. He made other officers feel like little boys wanting their parents' favor. He wanted to catch bad guys. He cared about that and his wife and his son. Nothing else. There was no one quite like him in the whole department. He didn't care about promotions. They meant nothing to him. He didn't see how being a police captain or higher behind a desk would help him catch bad guys. They really fell down on the job when Xuezhi went missing. An undercover cop is killed on the job, well, presumed killed, not like those 17 guys he tore apart, but presumed killed on duty and what do they do about it? Nothing. No further investigation. Nothing. What the hell was that?"
"Do you think Xavier Li has it in for the department because they didn't really investigate his father's death?"
Chen gave a small but emphatic nod. "In a way, we brought it on ourselves. Tell me what other problems you have with this case."
Heller smiled as she furiously wrote notes. "We can't find any of the loot! None of it! None! Not a dollar, not a diamond, not a speck of gold, not a painting. Nothing. This guy, this Red X takes at least a half a billion dollars, maybe more, maybe almost a billion worth of cash, bullion, paintings and other things from all these banks and super rich guys and it all just disappears! The guys who do these kinds of things these extraordinary jobs are sometimes disciplined but they never have that kind of discipline. Where is it?"
"We never found any of The Acrobat's loot either. How does he live?"
"How do you mean?"
"He has a nice apartment but nothing outstanding, right? He never seems to spend much money. He seems to live simply, humbly. He's the most polite boy all these super rich patrons of the ballet have ever met. He has this incredible fire within him and he lives in a way that doesn't seem to let any of it loose. Maybe some of it shows in that-that . . . ballet dancing?"
Heller nodded. "It does. He has the most amazing leaps and spins. Everyone's eyes are drawn to him on stage. Afterward, they all go backstage to meet him and see him. That body! That face! And so charismatic. Yet, he's the very soul of courtesy and modesty. That's what they all say."
"If he's not spending it. If he's not using it. If it never goes anywhere, what's the point of the loot, Agent Heller?"
She blinked. Why hadn't she thought to ask it that way? She opened her mouth to say something but thought better of it.
Chen spoke a little louder. "Why would a master thief commit robberies if he is not motivated by the acquisition of the proceeds of the thefts?"
Agent Heller was puzzled. She shrugged.
Chen looked at her clearly disappointed.
"Agent Heller!" he shook his head and fell into chuckling.
"It's so obvious! He is motivated by revenge. That's why he steals incredible sums of money but doesn't seem to have any interest in that money. He did not commit the crimes so that he would have the money. He committed the crimes so that his victims would not! The money is largely irrelevant to him. And you say it continues to be largely irrelevant to Xavier Li.
She took a few moments to consider this. She gave a slight nod.
"That is why you cannot find any of the loot. You did not understand the motives of the thief. You, and everyone else, just assumed that he had the same motives as they always do."
He went on. "There was an officer sent to prison last year on corruption charges, a certain Lieutenant Ling. Oh, he was guilty. I always suspected that he was bent. He'd been at it for years. I was assigned to guard him on one of the days when he was being interrogated in the box at headquarters. They always fear that one of these broken men will have a last surge of will and try to run or something. But Ling was completely broken. There was no threat of that. And I could tell that Ling felt remorse.
"Toward the end of the day he looked at me. I'd been there all day but he only seemed to recognize me then in those last few minutes. And he turns to me and says, 'I think you might have been right about that Li boy'. He told me a story about having to be the officer to tell Xuezhi Li's wife about her husband's disappearance. And his son Xavier was there too and the boy got angry and called Ling and all of us cowards, all of us, the whole department and . . the boy was 8 years old mind you, stared at every gorefest picture in the file like he was memorizing it all and when Ling moved to slap this insolent boy, he flipped Ling on his back. An 8 year old boy and he had a grown man down."
"Could we see that file?" asked Heller.
Chen nodded. "I think I can arrange that."
They parted ways and Heller gave him her contact information. He said he would get access to the file about Xuezhi Li's disappearance and call her when he had.
With a feeling of progress now, of understanding Xavier Li, Heller went off in another direction the next day, deciding to approach the other boy of the trio, Hao Ong, first thing the next morning and she vowed to not let him squirm off the hook like she suspected Yong Peng had.
But Agent Heller found that where Yong had been easily accessible if an unsatisfying interview, Xavier Li's other pal, Hao wasn't even that.
She found out where he worked. Like Yong, he had graduated a semester early. Hao Ong now had a business degree and he worked at a company in a small glass and steel building not far off the Singapore waterfront and with ambiguous commercial focus but apparently mostly import-export. At 8 a.m., she called to try to schedule a face to face meeting with him. His secretary offered her five minutes six weeks from that date. She stared at the phone. Seriously?!
She tried to call him directly but they would never put her through. She tried showing up at the office and simply asking to see him. The secretary at the building entrance told her, at 9 a.m., to have a seat and that "Mr. Ong will get to you when he can."
At 6 p.m. she was still there. She was never invited in. The secretary turned off her computer and told Heller she had to go. Heller complained bitterly to the secretary before leaving. The secretary told her that she had an appointment for six weeks from that date. That's when she'd been informed he could get to her. If she was so foolish as to want to spend all of the interim in their lobby, that was her problem.
Heller could see that this organization was a well oiled machine when it came to protecting the staff. At 10 a.m., a woman had come out from the door behind the secretary Heller couldn't get past. She'd had a little boy with her and she took a couple pictures of the little boy with a giant lollipop in hand. But Heller later realized that she'd been directly in the background of a couple of the shots. She suspected there were two suckers in those photos.
She tried showing up next day, too, as though persistence would, for some reason, be rewarded. Quite the opposite.
Once through the door she announced herself. "Lynn Heller of Dance Magazine here to speak to Hao Ong."
The secretary didn't say a word, didn't even motion or point with her hand. She glanced over to the leather chairs by the entrance. Heller sighed and took a seat. She watched the secretary very closely. She didn't react at all, only picked up the phone, pressed a button and then repeated the exact same words, "Lynn Heller of . . . " and put down the phone. She said nothing else and didn't touch a single key on the keyboard in front of her. Her expression never changed.
Not two minutes later, at the exact same moment, two security guards came hustling out from behind the secretary and two squad cars screeched to a halt at the edge of the pavement 20 feet from the building entrance and four officers came rushing out of the cars toward her.
Oh shit.
The two security guards stood over her and once the cops were in the door pointed at her and shouted to the cops that "This woman is trespassing and we have reason to believe that she's engaged in industrial espionage against our company!"
Heller stood up, holding her hands up innocently. "What?! That's not true!"
Suddenly there was Hao Ong, behind the guards, looking just like his file photograph, a little better looking than Yong Peng and in better shape.
"We want her out of here, now," he said to the cops in a quiet commanding tone. "She made up some phony identity and story to try and get in here."
Heller sputtered a bit. She hadn't been ready for this. Everyone else had bought it so easily. In a moment she'd been frogmarched out the door into the Singapore heat and humidity. That made her feel weak enough.
Then, Hao Ong handed the cops an affidavit from the secretary, one that was corroborated by the lanyard around Heller's own neck. The affidavit said that this woman had claimed to be Lynn Heller of Dance Magazine here to speak to Mr. Hao Ong about his boyhood friend and famous ballet dancer Xavier Li. In fact, he said, there is no Lynn Heller who works for Dance Magazine. He also handed the cops an email statement from Dance Magazine that they had no such employee.
"There's a-a good reason for that," she said trying for a fallback position. She explained that it was true she wasn't a direct employee of Dance Magazine. She'd done several freelance articles for them and this was to be another. She was writing an article about how ballet was becoming more popular with boys. She wanted to cite Xavier Li and his experience in the article. Mr. Ong was a boyhood friend of Mr. Li so I wanted to speak to him about his pal.
To her humiliation, Hao Ong then handed the police the results of a Nexus computer system search showing that there had never been any articles in any magazine anywhere written by Lynn Heller. The thought flitted through her head briefly that, damn, these guys are good.
While she was sputtering badly trying to figure out a story besides revealing herself as an Interpol agent, Hao Ong proceeded to recount for the police how, six months before, a woman ostensibly working for a temp agency had gotten into the building and stolen information on several large international contracts. The company had lost at least one multi-million dollar contract to an American company after confidential information had gotten out to them. Now this American woman lies to us.
Heller chose silence from that point on. "You're gonna have to come with us," said the cops leading her to a squad car. She was brought to the local police station. There, in an interview room she admitted that she worked for Interpol. She never got to say a word to Hao Ong. She was sure that word of this encounter was being relayed to him and that it would go from him to Xavier Li.
Even if he hadn't been right before, Chen was right now. Xavier Li would know she was coming.