The Cannonball Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu

Author:Ovidia Yu [Yu, Ovidia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery & Detective - Singapore
ISBN: 9781472132048
Google: kL3wDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2021-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

Flyers

I set up my printing press – a tray of agar-agar jelly. I’d had the idea from Hideki Tagawa telling me about ukiyo-e, which were mass-produced with a technique using woodcut prints.

‘Why are you doing this, really?’

It was funny seeing de Souza so nervous. ‘You’re changing your mind now? After I got all this set up?’

‘No. I mean I’m committed. But the risk if we get caught – I shouldn’t have dragged you into it. You’re doing this for me, for old times’ sake. It’s not fair. I shouldn’t have asked you.’

‘I’m doing this because I think you’re more likely to get caught without my help.’

We were alone in the kitchen. It was a fine afternoon and I’d sent the maids and house-boys out to catch longkang fish and clean them for salting.

‘I have no right to … If anything happens to you I’d better hope the Japanese kill me before Le Froy gets to me!’

‘And because maybe this way the news will get to Le Froy. And because it may compensate for all the false information I’m putting out in the paper.’

De Souza’s news was carefully written in block capitals on a piece of paper with a 6B graphite pencil. The paper was then placed on the agar-agar jelly and the words carefully carved into the jelly with a sharpened satay stick. Then I brushed food colouring (a beautiful blue made from butterfly pea flowers) over the jelly and pressed the flyers on top. White letters on a pale blue background. Not striking from a distance but easily read.

That first time, we made about a hundred.

‘I’ll take care of the flyers. But you’ll have to get rid of that before someone sees it.’

‘You can help me with it. Make sure they’re dry before you stack them.’

Quickly I poured and smoothed a thick layer of coconut icing on top of our agar-agar press. Once it set and the jelly was cut into cubes, we would eat enough of the evidence so that even if they were scraped and arranged together the letters wouldn’t make sense, or even words.

I can remember that first post almost word for word. And the one after that, with the news that General Eisenhower had taken command of Allied forces in Europe. And the one after that: the RAF had dropped more than two thousand tons of bombs on Berlin, attacked Magdeburg and was beginning to land on the Italian mainland.

And I understood why it was so important to de Souza to pass on the news. If the Germans were not invincible, it gave us hope that the Japanese, their partners in the East, were not either.

Getting the news out became important to me too.

Luckily, Colonel Fujiwara liked sweets: I needed no excuse to make agar jellies and tapioca cakes for him and his guests.

De Souza left the flyers at tram stops, in the bottom of baskets, and especially around the fencing of the PoW prison yard where they could be reached by a hand that stretched through.

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