Bitter Orchids
An adventure for Calcutta PCs, working for the Great Detective Chatterjee.
Singapore anarchist Wong Sang puts on a maid uniform and sneaks into Carcosa House - the Malayan High Commissioner’s Kuala Lumpur mansion, seat of government for the Straits Settlements and the Federated Malay States.
Leaves a bomb in governor Laurence Guillemard’s wardrobe. It goes off an hour early, killing one servant and blinding another with shrapnel. Wong Sang is caught on the Penang train and sentenced to death. The press are fascinated by her flapper-style bob cut - a novelty at the time.
Her only defence is “I have a bad temper.” She goes confidently to the scaffold in Pudu Prison, still demanding immediate Communist world revolution. The hangman pulls the lever, and she drops.
Vomits a torrent of living purple orchids, crawling from her dead mouth. Dislodging her eyes from their sockets. The autopsy shows they’ve taken root all through her nervous system, her stomach and her brain.
Guillemard is stumped. Needs your help. Has two leads.
One - the anarchist magazine Zhen Sheng has, according to his sources, recently received some big anonymous donations. A trip to their print shop by the Singapore docks, run by a pedantic whip-smart woman named Yeong Soo, will reveal their new financial backer to be Ibrahim al-Masyhur, Sultan of Johor.
Two - a pair of corpses.
Triad-linked underground casino owner Fat Fish Leung. Circus manager Ong Boon Tat of the New World Amusement Park. Both men found dead in Singapore back alleys, bleeding orchids from their mouths, a few days after signing all their properties over to a holding company called Pan-Asian Investments. Jointly owned by the Mitsui zaibatsu, and Ibrahim al-Masyhur.
The Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel. Floor carpeted with peanut shells. Small boy upstairs on a sort of stationary bicycle, powering a ceiling fan. Ibrahim spends most of his time here, eating curry and drinking gin slings. He’ll offer you some.
Diamond-studded front teeth. Accomplished tiger hunter. Dragged Johor out of debt - now has a substantial fortune invested in rubber plantations. Likes to throw his glass against the wall once he finishes his drink. Spends so much money at Raffles that they don’t complain. Owns a palace full of jewelled swords by the waterfront in Johor Bahru.
Has two close friends. Marquis Yoshichika Tokugawa, the Japanese botanist, member of the Imperial Diet and wealthy heir to an old samurai family. Frank Buck, the Texan animal collector, who earns his bread by supplying exotic wildlife to circuses and zoos. Usually one man or the other can be found at the bar with Ibrahim.
A Buddhist temple complex on the slopes of Mount Sinabung, in North Sumatra.
Stupas pierced by the roots of gigantic trees. Vajrayana monks contemplating the mummy of an alien king - thirty feet tall, embedded in the jungle, a casualty of the prehistoric war that produced the Toba supervolcano eruption. Serpent Men deliberately bottlenecking our population.
Orchids twine through the king’s ribs. Parasitise local fauna - tigers, monkeys, hornbills. Take the shapes of human women - weave skin from velvety petals, silently invite a kiss. Eerily believable. The monks test themselves - slow down their brainwaves, see how long they can last in a state of contemplation before the flowers hijack their minds.
Local Batak cannibal tribes give the area a wide berth. Might let you climb the volcano, but will take a stab at killing anyone who comes back. They won’t eat the flesh of anything with orchids in its brain.
Ibrahim has a lifelong fascination with the Isle of Waqwaq - described by medieval Arabic geographers as the place where women grow on trees.
Owns a 16th-century manuscript of the Persian scholar al-Qazvini’s The Wonders Of Creation, and an even rarer copy of the navigator al-Ramhormuzi’s Indian Marvels, which describes a slave raid on East Africa by floral Sumatran amazons in the year 945. Collects similar texts.
Tracked down a lost Tang-era diary by the monk Yijing, who spent two years in Palembang, translating Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures into Chinese. The scroll describes a bushel of strange orchids, sent as a gift to the empress Wu Zetian from the floating city of Srivijaya, and burnt by jealous courtesans who didn’t want the flowers competing for attention.
Had Palembang’s Musi River trawled for Srivijayan relics. Found a strange bronze sculpture from the Pannai Kingdom - a four-armed praying woman wearing a flower crown. Coded inscription on its base tells you where to find the temple, warns you not to fall in love. Ibrahim keeps all this stuff in his suite at Raffles - it’s basically his home.
A few months ago he sponsored a long “tiger hunt” into North Sumatra, with Buck and Tokugawa. Came back empty-handed. Claimed the tigers got away.
The Orchid House in the Singapore Botanic Gardens.
Botanist Richard Holttum toils among the mist. Mat Zin, the Malayan shaman, hovers by his side, gripping a spray bottle full of water from the holy Zamzam well. Orchids of all hues - pink, yellow, orange, blue - climb over trellises, dangle in pots, snatch insects out of the air when they think you’re not looking. Macaques gibber as they swing from the iron rafters, flowers sprouting from their fur.
A locked glass dome full of hybridised orchid women.
Holttum is pathetically addicted to his floral harem. Waters them twice a day. Obsessively manages their nutrient intake. Terrified they’ll all die of cold, or their roots will be attacked by some unknown fungus. Spends nights in the dome with them. Will bring out his shotgun if he thinks you plan to hurt the flowers. Mat Zin has a goblin zombie fetus in a bottle that will do his bidding, but he doesn’t like to use it - honestly, it creeps him out.
Holttum relays Ibrahim’s orders to the hungry Orchid Queen.
Four arms. Ten feet tall. Made from thousands of flowers. Soft to the touch. Smells amazing. Sits cross-legged in warm dirt at the centre of the dome, a faint smile on her face. Incapable of speech. Nods politely as Holttum tells her what to do. Transmits his instructions to her orchid slaves.
Ibrahim plans to marry her.
He invites you to have a drink with him in the Raffles Hotel. Slips powdery orchid seed into your drink, with the bartender’s connivance. Orchids infest your body, destroy your free will. It’s comfortable. Like drifting into a warm sleep. You feel very loved. The Orchid Queen has total control over you - can kill you at any time by commanding the orchids to choke your brain. Burning her breaks the spell.
More bodies are found. British plantation owners. Chinese triad guys. Indian managers of small import-export firms. Ibrahim is taking over the whole Singapore economy - the docks, the trading houses, the rubber and tin warehouses, the gambling dens.
He’s working with the Mitsui zaibatsu, which is a front for the Black Ocean Society. They plan for all Asia to be ruled by Imperial Japan.
Frank Buck’s compound in the suburb of Katong.
A walled tropical garden. Cages everywhere. Sheds full of animals and birds. Cool shaded space underneath the elevated bungalow - home to orangutans, birds of paradise, proboscis monkeys. Tapir in a pit. Enraged Bengal tiger. Dozen Burmese pythons and long wooden tubes for moving them around. Neighbours complain of the noise - you can hear the tiger roaring from a dozen blocks away.
Chinese servants leaning on rakes. Surveying the landscape. Smoking cigarettes. They’re concerned about the boss. Dahlam Ali, Frank’s right-hand man, a tall fatalistic Malay, isn’t worried about anything but keeping the animals clean and fed. He answers all questions by shrugging and wrinkling his nose.
Frank’s been putting orchid seed in the animals’ food.
Delivered three fully-grown Indian elephants to the big top at the New World Amusement Park - the clowns are amazed by how obedient they are. Sold a Komodo dragon to Fat Fish’s old casino, now run by Yakuza, who can use a giant hungry lizard that follows all their commands. Uses cockatoos as spies. Trains monkeys to shoot guns.
Unscrupulous. Bombastic. In over his head. American patriot. Thinks he and his buddy Ibrahim are engaged in a regular criminal enterprise. Never heard of the Black Ocean Society. Will be disposed of quickly if he develops qualms.
Keeps an orchid princess in the largest shed. Ivory skin pockmarked with kiss-coloured hieroglyphs. Guarded by two black leopards and a half-blind Sumatran rhino. Delegated by the Queen to rule the menagerie, and send animal assassins after Ibrahim’s foes. Burn her and the beasts go mad - attack everything in sight.
A pirate stronghold in the Riau Islands, near Singapore’s coast.
Kampong huts on stilts. Vacant-eyed Malays. Orchids blooming everywhere. Tattooed Yakuza overseen by Tokugawa, unloading tramp steamers. Rifles. Cocaine. Grenades. Golden Bat cigarettes, secretly impregnated with will-sapping opium - only to be sold within the British Raj.
A palm-thatched pavilion with a tall pointed roof. In the style of North Sumatra. Watched closely by Yakuza.
Contains the Sinabung mummy’s half-metre-wide head. Top of the skull cut off - orchids sprout from the brain, climb the pavilion. Encircled by quiet monks - one topples over, dead, already disintegrating into a heap of blooms.
Tokugawa wears samurai robes. Wields a katana. Attended by a white tiger and two orchid geishas whenever viable. Lives aboard ship - building a Japanese-style castle among the mangrove swamps. Legally owns the land. Zero compunctions about enslaving Malays.
Dreams of restoring the Tokugawa shogunate. Knows a war is coming. Will plant spies in key industries, establish drug networks, unleash a wave of targeted assassinations across the British Raj. Lay siege to Singapore, take India, conquer the Pacific. America is next.
Doesn’t trust the orchids. Sees them as a tool. Once his spies are established, will dissolve the mummy’s brain and watch the whole orchid psychic network wither up and die. Keeps a drum of acid on hand for the occasion. Doesn’t feel the tendrils piercing his frontal lobe.
