Bible of the Dead (26 page)

‘Do you mind if I write these details down, Mister Yakulovich? Barnier would be an interesting person for me to talk to. About Ghislaine.’

‘By all means. Barnier is a very clever man, a veteran like me, determined that the best of communist science should not be discarded by history along with the less good aspects.’

‘OK.’ Julia felt the time had come. ‘About Ghislaine. There’s one particular question I thought you might be able to help with. I mentioned it in the emails, but as you say you needed to meet me to talk.’

‘And here we are. Please ask.’

‘
The Journal of French Anthropogenesis
. Do you remember it?’

The Director frowned, and shrugged, and said:

‘Not so much. A little. It was . . . just some minor journal in the late 1960s, sympathetic to our Marxist-Leninist principles.’

‘But you were the editor!’

‘Was I indeed? Aha.’ Yakulovich’s smile was still slightly stained with jam, ‘Yes, I believe I was the token Soviet!
Da!
I did no real work for them, it was an honorary position. I may have read some of the contributions.’

She felt her hopes revive. Tentatively.

‘So you might recall a particular essay, something you might have selected, got peer reviewed – by Ghislaine Quoinelles, when he was very young. In the early 1970s. As essay on guilt and conscience?’

A pause. A heartbeat of a pause.

‘Well now.’ Yakulovich sighed. ‘I don’t know. We would have welcomed an essay from Ghislaine Quoinelles of course, simply because of his name. His patronym? His surname I mean.’

‘His grandfather?’

‘Yes yes! Ghislaine was the grandson of Albert Quoinelles, who was a true comrade in arms! A communist, and also a great scientist, a specialist in our field. So yes if Ghislaine Quoinelles sent us an essay maybe we would have read it with interest. This is true.’ He hesitated, delicately. ‘But this magazine published many essays, I believe. And . . . I am trying hard, but I am afraid I cannot recall this
particular
essay.’

‘But –’

‘Please! Do not chastise me! I can barely remember my wedding anniversary, as my wife will confirm, let alone an essay written fifty years ago. Hah. My friendship with Ghislaine developed later, in the later 1970s.’ The smile was now entirely mirthless. ‘So is that it? Is that all you came to ask? It is perhaps a long journey for so few questions.’

Julia sensed she was failing. And yet she also sensed, paradoxically, that she was clueing into something. Ghislaine’s essay was, for now, a cul de sac. But what was this about Barnier? Marcel Barnier was the man in the photo. Why was he here?

It seemed the pieces of the puzzle were scattered, but they
were
somewhere here, or hereabouts.

‘Mister Yakulovich, why did Barnier want to talk with you?’

‘He wanted to know how far our work had proceeded by the 1970s. We discussed what the Chinese wanted from us, and so forth.’

‘How far had it gone, your work?’

There was a long long pause. The old man glanced at the darkening window, then back at his guest. His mouth was shut and his lips were thin. His wisps of remaining grey hair hung lankly to the side, uncombed. But then he shrugged, in a beyond-caring manner.

‘Journalists always like to ask about this. Usually I never reply, ever, it is so very controversial. But you are a scientist, a fellow scientist, I can trust you. You have made the effort of visiting us. I can be much more open, as we are on the same team!
Nyet?
The same side, yes?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘And we are also alone now! – the laboratory has closed for the day. So let us be frank and open and transparent, as scientist to scientist!’ He sipped his tea and grinned. ‘This is how science proceeds, is it not? The scientific method, the open exchange of data. And I am proud of what we achieved here.’

Julia was desperate for him to get on with it. She wanted the truth, she could
feel
the truth near at hand yet obscured, like a shadow passing behind baffled glass.

Picking up and toying with his teaspoon, he continued.

‘We had a little more luck with impregnating human females. Eventually.’

‘Luck?’

‘At first there was no success at all, with the artificial insemination of primate sperm into humans. We faced complete failure. So we asked ourselves: Why the failures? We decided that artificial insemination
itself
was part of the problem, that we needed actual coitus to produce viable embryos.’

Julia ignored the revulsion inside her; she smiled falsely and asked:

‘Coitus, you mean actual . . .
sex?’

‘Yes! Intercourse! It is well known that artificial insemination between humans has less chance of producing viable offspring than actual intercourse. We do not know the precise reasons for this, but intercourse acts as an ovarian stimulant, vaginal peristalsis is greater, all sorts of complex chemical and anatomical processes take place in sexual congress which surely aid the successful fertilization of eggs and the creation of viable embryos, so it was speculated that we should try coitus across the primate human barrier.’

She asked, dryly as possible:

‘How?’

He set the teaspoon down.

‘The idea that we slaved women from Guinea or Guyana or some old French colony is absurd. No. We had volunteers.’

‘Women
volunteered
for this?’

‘Why not?’ Sergei laughed a high, wheezing, old man’s laugh. ‘The women were not expecting to . . . bring up their half-breed babies, just go to full term, parturition. I have letters here in my desk,’ he slapped the wood, ‘from women happily and bravely offering themselves, they were good young communists in the good old days. They were happy to lend their wombs to Stalin. Or Khrushchev. Or even Brezhnev.’

‘What happened?’

‘We realized it was a question of accustomizing the primate rather than the human. The woman can of course rationalize her situation, and lubrication can be artificial, but the primate has to be aroused. We experimented on denying apes sexual outlet, that is to say, denying them mating or masturbation, then giving them olfactory stimulation with human pheromones, then allowing them to copulate with a fitting receptacle, a human female shaped doll. This was promising. So then we moved on to primate-human couplings, to coition with the live subjects, the human volunteers.’ He smiled wistfully in the semi darkness. ‘We also learned from the Romans, yes it is true! They used to have a spectacle at their great circuses where they would herd virgin Christian girls, girls condemned to die, into the Colosseum. The girls’ genitals were drenched with the urine of chimps and mandrills, then the Romans would unleash a troop of sex-starved apes into the arena, and the beasts would rape the girls to death. Of course, the depravity is distasteful. But also very useful! Why should we not learn from this?’

His face was pale with sincerity. ‘So we realized we could maybe drench the vaginas of a female human volunteer with some chimp or orangutan urine and that could work. And we came close, we were coming close, we achieved fertilizations, which were swiftly followed by abortions. Who knows what we might have achieved if we had been given just a few more years.’ He sighed. ‘But there it is. We ran out of money and time, after that came Gorbachev and the war and here we are, helpless, feeble, impoverished. No one wants our science. That is why it is good to meet you. A real scientist with proper perspective, not this modern, sentimental hysteria.’

Sergei Yakulovich paused. Like a man semi-proud of something very secret. Dying to tell, yet wary.

‘Would you like to see the last of the donors, the ape who came closest? Then we can conclude our discussion of Ghislaine Quoinelles. Poor Ghislaine.’

Julia said: ‘Why not.’ Even as the puzzle dragged her further in, her mind yearned to escape. This ghastly place
. She wanted to burn it down.

The Director pushed back his chair, and led them through the offices. He stopped at a cupboard, opened a door, it contained guns, or maybe stun guns; and cattle prods, and rope, and neck irons. Yakulovich selected an electric prod.

‘Don’t worry, we won’t need it, he is too old, but we have rules on safety.’

It was dark outside, but harsh lights illuminated the laboratory compound. Yakulovich was bumbling along in his brown suit, humming a tune. He paused at the cage of the sobbing orangutan.

‘Boris!’ he crooned through the cage bars. ‘Boris!
Boris u nas posetitelyei!’

The old man found a key in his pocket, he opened the cage door.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ said Julia.

‘No, no, it is no problem. I want to show you that we are still treating our primates well, they are not unhappy, they are friendly. And the friendliness is key, they need to be accustomed to humans, to like us, and trust us – the reason we managed to mate Boris with human females is that he trusts humans – from birth he was trained to like us, therefore the coitus could take place.’ Sergei found a mandarin in his pocket, he waved the fruit at the squatted creature. ‘
Boris, moi drug, ya prinesti plody
!’

The ancient orangutan unhunched the long arms from his hairy face. His streaked eyes gazed from the dark depths of his prison. Then the ape shambled with painful slowness across the cage to the open cage door, into the brightness of the compound lights. The orangutan’s eyes expressed a sadness deeper than anything Julia had witnessed. A black black sadness, unfathomable, like coal mines of sadness. Sergei Yakulovich was stroking the ape’s forehead.

‘See, perfectly tame. Of course very old now. No longer interested in the girls!’ The Director laughed. ‘But before, when he was sub-adult, he was our most promising ape, he fertilized three human wombs, we came closest with him. But that was before everything was shut down. Such a tragedy.’

The orangutan looked at Yakulovich. He was sniffing. The ape was sniffing the air. The ape turned its wide sad face and sniffed at Julia. Sniffing in the direction of her face, her stomach. She inched away.

The ape inched forward.

‘Do not worry,’ said Yakulovich, ‘Boris is not a threat.’

Julia was gazing in disgust at the ape’s groin. A small erection was visible.

The Director gazed quizzically at Julia.

‘Miss Kerrigan, you have strong pheromones? Perhaps you are pre menstrual? This is an unusual reaction. He is reacting to you.’

She shook her head.

‘Please. This is disgusting.’

He bridled. ‘But why? What is so disgusting?’ His ex pression was an uncomprehending sneer. ‘
This is just science!’
His expression affronted. ‘If you are offended by this then you should talk to the Chinese.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’

Yakulovich shrugged: ‘Exactly what I say? The Soviets sold all our data to the Chinese in the 1980s, when we were too poor to defend ourselves. Indeed I asked Barnier what had happened to our research, how it had progressed in the east. He could not be explicit, he refused. But this is what Barnier told me.’ The Director sighed, expressively. ‘Barnier said simply this:
the Chinese took it much further
. Who knows what they did, Miss Kerrigan, who knows. The Chinese! They are entirely without scruple, they are the new Roman Empire, who will govern us all!’

Sergei Yakulovich turned back to his favourite prisoner, and stroked the orangutan’s forehead. Crooning in mumbled Russian. Julia stared at the bleakness. The drizzle was falling again, the stench of shit was pervasive, the orangutan was stroking his scarlet penis, and the little rhesus monkey was still shrieking, running to one side of the cage, and screaming, and running to the other side, and screaming. Julia gazed at the sad eyes of the orangutan. Sad and crying, yet guiltless. There was no conscience there: just suffering.

Suffering. And libido. And rage.

Shoving Yakulovich aside, with brutal force, the orangutan jumped from the cage. Julia had barely a second of warning, she backed away and began to run. But the ape had her, it grabbed at her neck and pulled her to the floor. She tried to struggle free, writhing on the damp ground, skidding her heels against the rain and urine and concrete, but the animal was enormous: huge, and pungent.

Now she could feel the inhuman hands ripping up between her legs. Ripping her panties away. Julia gasped.

And the little monkey was still screaming, running across the cage, and screaming.

Chapter 29

The blow didn’t come. He waited. Still nothing. Khmer voices rose to a clamour, more voices: many voices, shouts even. Jake opened his eyes, looked left: beside him the soldier was still holding the rusty iron bar, ready to kill him and Rittisak.

But the iron bludgeon was hanging, unused, and the soldier himself was gazing offstage, with a distinctly nervous expression.

Why?

Villagers.
Dozens of them.
Coming down the path from the main road, shouting and yelling and clutching ugly long knives and hatchets and machetes and old Russian rifles. Even pitchforks.

He glanced Chemda’s way, the tiny fledgling of hope in his heart. Chemda had shrugged off the uncertain grasp of her captors, and she was marching to greet the mob. Desite her ragged flip-flops and her muddied skirt and her dirty hair she still looked like a Khmer princess, bold, proud, self possessed: she was talking with the villagers, they were smiling at her, waving their fists in triumph and anger, gesturing furiously at the soldiers: the captors.

They were being rescued.
The would-be executioner dropped his cudgel to the ground and backed away. Raucous shouts apparently demanded that Jake and Rittisak be unhandcuffed.

The youngest soldier nodded, and humbly shuffled up, and turned a key behind Jake’s back.

He was uncuffed. Rubbing his raw wrists, he stood in the hot sun and stared at Chemda. The incense from the offerings to Pol Pot perfumed the smiles they exchanged, frightened smiles. Rittisak was also released. Jake crossed to Chemda’s side, walking around the low grave.

‘Why . . .’ he was almost dumbed by the reversal.

Chemda told him, ‘Your friend. He did this.’

‘Tyrone?’

‘Yes. Ah. So they say, these people. He has contacts here and he called them last night and asked them to help us, to watch out for us, and he said they
should
help us
because of what I do.
’ She gestured at the triumphant crowd of Khmer peasants in their vests and
kramas
and dirty sandals.

‘They know I am trying to get the Khmer Rouge im prisoned, and they want me to go on with my work. They want me to bring the tyrants to
justice.
’ Her dark eyes upturned to his. ‘I thought they were going to kill you. Jake, I thought they were going to
kill you.’

‘Trust me,’ said Jake, ‘so did I.’

So he had Tyrone to thank for his life. Of all the people: laconic, selfish, hard-assed, sardonic old Tyrone. Jake felt a surge of love for his cynical friend, and he smiled at his own sentimentality.

But he was also swallowing the vinegary aftertaste of his intense fear. He breathed deep and long. His leg muscles were still weakened from the terror, he felt like he might just crumple to his knees, right here and now, by Pol Pot’s graveside. He had been oddly calm, the moment that Death had approached, Death the dull functionary, Death who casually took his sister and his mother, Death the offhand commander of the killing fields.

But now he had survived, Jake was suffering the emotional aftershocks. Palpitations. The sweats. He tried to assert control over his own reflexes. Breathing deep.

A few metres away, the Khmer villagers were yelling at the soldiers, who were now dumbed, and cowed. One of the locals walked up to the apparent leader of the squad, and simply took the sub machine gun from the soldier’s weakening hands.

The large eyes of the young Khmer soldier blinked rapidly, in anger or terror, or cowardly relief. But he did not move. He was rigid. Jake realized the soldiers were now, probably, in fear of
their
lives: outnumbered a hundred to one, caught by an entire village in the act of brutal, Khmer Rouge style execution, in a region riven with loathing for the Khmer Rouge. The troopers knew they could die, any minute.

‘We mustn’t let them kill them.’ said Jake, to Chemda. ‘The locals, they can’t kill the soldiers.’

Her face was contorted with disgust, but she nodded. ‘You’re right. Ah. They don’t deserve to live, but you are absolutely right. We need to be . . . inconspicuous.’

‘And we’re still
stuck
, Chem. There’s no way we can just sneak down the ravine, not now, there are other policemen around –’

She shrugged, impatiently:

‘So we’ll have to cross the border, at the official frontier.’

‘No way. Come on. They’ll stop us and send us to Phnom Penh.’

Her frown was fierce. Jake gazed around, at their rescuers. A possibility evolved in his mind.

‘I have an idea. We could ask these people . . . to help? To come with us? With all of them we have a chance.’

Chemda didn’t even reply: she turned, and she talked with the villagers. The villagers nodded and yelled, urgent and keen. And Chemda was smiling a half smile.

‘They’re going to help.’

The crowd moved as one. Jake realized it was working.
They were being escorted to the frontier.
The soldiers were left behind, guarded and disarmed. The huge crowd of locals was now walking boldly up the burning sunlit road to the frontier, just a few hundred metres away.

As the mob approached the frontier, Jake saw the look of astonished alarm on the faces of the Khmer customs officers in their little glass kiosk. The officers had obviously been briefed to watch for escapees matching Chemda’s and Jake’s description; they had surely been told to stop them and arrest them at once, to prevent their crossing of the border. But they obviously hadn’t expected Jake and Chemda to be accompanied by half of Anlong Veng.

What could five border policemen do against hundreds of angry people with knives, guns and rusty machetes?

The crowd fell silent as it met the white wooden boom that marked the Cambodian frontier. Jake saw the blue and red stripes of the Thai flag fluttering languidly from a flag-pole, a hundred metres further on; he saw Thai faces leaning to the window in the glass and steel office, observing the strange scene unfolding on the Khmer side of the border. Behind the Thai officers, he could just make out the kindly portrait of a bespectacled King Bumibhol of Siam, hanging on the wall.

Jake wiped the sweat from his eyes and assessed the situation. He knew they would have little trouble getting
into
Thailand. Their passports were in order: British and American citizens could enter Thailand freely, and get a visa any time.

But Jake and Chemda still had to cross the Khmer border first. Would his plan work?

The Cambodian officers inside their kiosk were making frantic phone calls. Two of the officers had guns drawn – the revolvers were laid significantly and blatantly on the counter before them. But the crowd, still ominously silent, moved closer, gathering around the kiosk. The sheer weight of numbers threatened to topple the little building; the sad little office, with its sad men inside, rattled and vibrated.

Victory came quick. The guards surrendered: behind their grimy panes of glass they did deep submissive bows, with their praying hands high above their heads: they were doing the
high wai,
the deep inferior
samphae
of total submission.

The fattest Cambodian border guard urgently beckoned Chemda and Jake to his little hatch, past the white barrier. His hands were shaking and sweat was dripping in long rivulets down his chubby, frightened face.

Wordless, he took their passports. He glanced at the crowd behind the barrier.

He stamped Chemda’s passport, he stamped Jake’s passport. With the same weak unspeaking demeanour he waved them on. His face said Just go, please. Go.
Now.

But Jake lingered for a second, savouring the moment, this tiny refreshing moment of his victory, in all the recent tragedy of flight and defeat; Chemda walked over to Rittisak, who was smiling, at the front of the crowd, she hugged him.

Then she ran back and she took Jake’s hand and they walked the hundred metres of no-man’s-tarmac, to the bigger glassier office on the Thai frontier.

‘
Sawadee kap!
’ said the Thai border guard. He glanced down at their passports. His smile was brief, but subtly meaningful. ‘Thirty-day visas?’

‘Yes,’ said Jake, ‘thirty-day visas.’ He clutched Chemda’s hand. ‘
Kappunkap
.’

They caught a cab to Surin, an hour’s drive through the cane fields. Their mutual good mood, their sense of wide-eyed astonishment, at their own gruesomely belated good fortune, lasted until they got to the train station, whence they had decided to catch the night train to Bangkok. To Bangkok and Marcel Barnier and the next clue in this ineluctable and inescapable mystery. The mystery of Cambodia’s history that Chemda was determined to solve, that Jake was determined to record. He still had his precious camera with the precious photos.

Jake picked up a copy of the morning’s
Bangkok Post
from a newsagent stand in the station; he was surrounded by Thai workers reading manga. Half interested, half anxious, he flicked the pages as Chemda bought the tickets.

But he soon stopped flicking pages.

The
Post
had an article about him and Chemda. UN worker missing from Phnom Penh . . . granddaughter of Sovirom Sen, noted Chinese-Cambodian businessman . . . photo-journalist linked to the disappearance . . .

The article was very small, and tucked away, and neutral in tone: it didn’t accuse Jake of anything, but it did mention the reward for Chemda’s return, and the mere fact that the article was printed in the most important Thai English language newspaper brought the rest of Jake’s unease sweeping back. Who might try and claim that reward? And how?

The afternoon hours ticked until the night train’s depart ure. Jake drank bottled water and cans of cold Japanese coffee and sat nervously on a station bench, next to Chemda, both of them trying to be inconspicuous. He telephoned Tyrone.

Tyrone told him to shut the fuck up and stop being so ‘minty’ when Jake tried to say
thankyou you saved my life
. Tyrone listened to the epic story of their escape from Siem Reap and Tyrone swore and even chuckled and his good humour helped dispel the darkness, just a little.

Tyrone asked:

‘So you’re going to Bangkok?’

‘Yes.’

‘To find Barnier. You don’t give up, do you?’

‘Not after all this, Ty, no I don’t. You said I had a good story and I’m on it. I want it. And Chemda wants the truth. What happened to her family. But we need somewhere to stay, incredibly discreet. Near this guy’s apartment, Nana. You know Bangkok. Any ideas?’

‘Yes . . . The Sukhumvit Crown, soi 8, you can only find it if you go the wrong way down soi 6.’

‘Anything else? Any other advice?’

‘Stop walking across lakes filled with corpses.’

‘Ty. Please God. Ty!’

‘You should buy new sim cards for you and Chemda, now you are in Thailand . . . use True, no, DTAC, just give a few people the numbers. Use the phones sparingly.’

‘Thanks.’

‘
Mai pen rai
. Stay in touch. And remember, you are still in serious shit. People will come after you in Bangkok, they won’t do it openly, but they will try. Be very very very very careful.’

As instructed, Jake went straight to the nearest convenience store, at the front of the station, and bought new sims for himself and Chemda; they swapped numbers, he texted the number to Tyrone. He sat down on the bench again. Waiting. Passengers came and went, eating fishball noodles at the fishball noodle stalls. Amputee beggars lifted their stumpy arms, pincering plastic cups of loose change. Commuters yawned. Policemen patrolled. Their train was ready. They climbed on the carriage.

They had bought first class berths mainly because first class berths had a tiny shower. The shower was risibly small but Jake didn’t care: as the train rumbled out of town he stepped straight in and he rinsed away all the mud of the Butcher’s lake, and all the grease from Pol Pot’s house, and all the dust from Preah Kahn where Sonisoy was caught, he only wished he could sluice away the terrifying memory of kneeling there, in the dirt, by a shrine to the ghost of an atheist dictator, waiting for a man to casually smash his brain through his mouth with a rusty iron bar.

Crack.

Chemda was already fast asleep in the bottom bunk. She had held his hand as she fell asleep, but now the hand was limp and unconscious and he folded it on to her breast, and he climbed the bunkbed steps to slide between his own crisp clean white cotton sheets. The sensation was unfathomably blissful.

The train was rattling through the dark Isaan countryside. The comforting rattle of a train, ta-chakkating over the points, soon lullabyed Jake into sleep.

Most of his sleep was undisturbed. He woke just once when they pulled into a hick little station with moonlit palm trees, at about five a.m. Hushed voices muttered outside in the tropical stillness. Jake sweated in the airlocked compartment. Who was that? Outside? Someone quietly passed down the train corridor, seeking a berth, whispering. He waited, tensed with fear. But nothing happened. Chemda’s un conscious breathing was regular and low.

The train pulled out. At length he fell asleep again and this time he dreamed – he dreamed of someone hitting his head and his head being smashed off his body, and then somehow he was looking down at his own head fallen to the ground and the head rolled over and it was his mother’s head, smeared with violet lipstick.
The eyes opened, the head smiled, an eye winked.

Jake woke with a jolt. Their compartment was bright with morning sun, and skyscrapers and motorways paraded past the uncurtained window. Chemda was awake and dressed.

‘We’re here, Bangkok.’

She leaned and kissed him.

His returning kisses were slurred, reluctant. The dream had been so vivid; why did he keep seeing this image, the disembodied head?

‘Chemda.’ He wanted to confess, to share, to divide his anguish. He’d had enough of lonely wondering. And he had been through so much with this girl, why not tell her?

He felt he was falling in love with her. He had no idea what falling in love meant or felt like but if it was something like this then he was happy to call it love, so yes he was falling in love with Chemda Tek. But love meant he had to be truthful. He wanted to be truthful.