Bible of the Dead (27 page)

‘Chem, I keep having these dreams. Sometimes day dreams. Nightmares, just idiotic nightmares, but they are persistent, this image I see.’

He told her. About the head, the floating heads, his moth-er’s face.

As his story unfolded he watched her expression turn from curiosity to concern – to piercing anxiety.

‘The
krasue
.’ She said. ‘What you are seeing is, as far as I can tell, the
krasue
.’

She explained.

‘A
krasue
is a malign spirit, cannibalistic, ah, bloodsucking. It appears mainly at night. It manifests itself as a woman, usually young and beautiful, with . . .’ Chemda winced. ‘With her internal organs hanging down from the neck. Because she has no body. So she floats, with her spine and her organs trailing behind.’

‘OK.’ Jake swallowed a dry taste. ‘And what does she do? This demon?’

‘The
krasue
preys on pregnant women. It uses,’ she sighed, ‘she uses an extended tongue to catch the fetus, by, ah, probing inside, up the vulva and inside the womb to devour the foetus. This causes diseases during pregnancy. Or so many Southeast Asians believe.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Jake.’ She held his hand tighter. ‘I know you don’t believe this stuff, and it sounds like a cartoon, but this really is an
iconic
demon, all across my part of the world. The legend comes from ancient Hindu India but it is deeply rooted in Cambodia, and Cambodian voodoo, the Filipinos have their own version the Manananngal, the Balinese have the Leyak. Some call her the
arp
.’

‘What about Angkor? I saw something like this in Angkor. A sculpture on the wall.’

‘In Angkor they are called
kinarees
. Female spirits. But it is basically another
krasue
. They are everywhere. This icon is everywhere. There are legends and prayers about
krasue
, spells and stories. Hn. Even horror films.’

He stared at her. She looked at him. The train stopped, they had arrived. They had to disembark. Chemda said:

‘The thing I don’t understand is – this is my culture. Not yours. This is not your culture. So why are
you
dreaming of an
Asian
demon?’

Chapter 30

It took six or seven frantic jabs from the cattle prod for Boris to be dislodged, to be forced off Julia, and then to be slowly and cruelly tormented back into his cage. For a moment Julia lay numbed and flat on the wet and slimy concrete; but then she seized herself, and sat up. She was bruised but unharmed, terrified but unviolated, the orangutan had got no further than her thighs. But the ape had ravished her sense of herself: she could never forget this.

She stood brushing dirt from her long skirt and her top. Brushing and brushing. Yearning to shower. To wash the hot musky disgusting smell of the primate’s fur from herself. From her clothes. No, she would
burn
the clothes.

The Director was actually and luridly weeping as he gazed her way – weeping like a child, sobbing like a doll designed to cry.

‘What can I say – I am so sorry Miss Kerrigan.’ His sense of disgrace was obvious, he even lost conrol of his previously immaculate English: ‘Miss, sorry,
mne ochen zhal, etogo nikogda ne sluchalos ranshe!
I sorry
. Vy dolzhny byt gormonal nye. Opyat ya proshu proshcheniya
–’

‘Whatever,’ said Julia. ‘You stupid man. You . . .’

The curses dwindled to nothing. What was the point? Julia had seen and done enough. The orangutan was hunched once more in his cage, his long arms curved over his sad but guiltless face.

Guiltess.
Guiltless.
Guilt and conscience?

She had to
focus on this
. And she had to get out now. Julia had everything she needed from the Sukhumi Institute for Primate Pathology.

Making her way to the gate, not even talking to the red-eyed Director, she forced her mind to concentrate on the puzzle. Better that than relive what had just occurred. And Julia anyway sensed, as she passed through the laboratory gates, that she was now much nearer to a solution, being pulled nearer, even: it was almost as if the truth was a black hole, exerting some vast magnetic field, and she was spiralling around and in.

But the final descent needed clarity, she had to steer.

And before she could think straight she wanted a shower. And maybe another shower.

Scanning up and down the bleak Sukhumi streets, their off-season palms dripping in the autumn drizzle, she searched for a hopeful sign. Something neon, saying
Hotel
.

For once, she lucked out. There.
The Hotel Ritsa
. Its light was flickering in the drizzle half a kilometre down the hill, beside the rain-shiny tramlines, towards the Black Sea coast.

Julia almost ran down – dragging her reluctant bag – and checked straight in. The reception was dusty and run-down. The elevator was probably dangerous. The sheets in the bedroom were nylon. The shower-rose belched eccentric spurts of lukewarm water. It felt mildly paradisical. She showered twice and drank her bottle of duty free Georgian wine – using the bathroom tooth mug – and then she slept, in the nirvana of scratchy nylon, for many hours, and then she woke, and went down to a hotel breakfast of processed pink ham slices with pickled eggs.

Refreshed and revived, and trying not to remember the way, the
precise
way the ape had leapt from the cage, she got to work: putting the pieces together. The cave art. The trepa-nations. Guilt and conscience. The guiltless animality of the orangutan.

It took her many hours, it took her several days. But she was getting closer. To break the monotony and refresh her mind, during these days, she took breaks to make phone calls on her mobile, which miraculously worked; and to send emails from a small dingy cafe which served Abkhazian tea with saucers of gooseberry jam.

Most of her calls were to Ontario, or to Alex, and full of lies
. I’m fine don’t worry about me.
She knew they would only tell her to come home; there was no way she was coming home, not when she was this close to The Truth.

Nearly all of her emails were to this man: Marcel Barnier. He, apparently, was the link. The next link. He was maybe the only man who could tell her if she was actually correct.

He didn’t reply. Not once.

Julia wasn’t surprised. She sat and sipped her gooseberry flavoured tea, and she surmised that Barnier was avoiding the world. All these western scientists and intellectuals, these Marxists who once visited Cambodia, must surely by now have realized what was happening to them: that they were all dying. Even the most isolated and friendless would have seen at least one or two news reports, especially of the spectacular later killings in France.

So if Julia wanted someone to confirm her theory, Marcel Barnier was the only one, because he was the only one left – yet he wasn’t replying. Perhaps, therefore, she should just go there? And see him? It had worked before. Yes, perhaps she would go there, when she had broken open the intellectual puzzle.

And on the third day she did it, she cracked it:
she had her theory
. Standing back from her laptop, which she was using in the hotel lobby, as the cleaners made their daily yet farcically half-hearted attempts to clean her room of forty years of Soviet grime, Julia almost gloated. It was just three pages of thoughts.
But it worked. It made sense.

It was surely the answer.

Julia had done it, at last. Made that amazing discovery; restored an extraordinary thesis to the world. The fifteen-year-old girl still inside her, the girl who almost wept at the terrible Hands of Gargas, was exultant, and gloating, and happy, despite it all, because of it all.

‘
Spassibo.
’ She accepted the bill from the lobby waiter for her canned and sweetened orange juice. Then she got up, walked across the tram-clanging boulevard to the internet cafe, and she booked the next flight from Adler to Moscow, and then Moscow to Bangkok. She had just enough cash left in her savings for a few more flights and cheap hotels. She was going to use this money to see Barnier, whether he wanted to see her or not. This was her life, her moment, after this nothing seemed to matter, if she ran out of cash, who cared. Not her, not anymore.

A valium let her sleep on the plane to Moscow, a xanax let her sleep on the plane from Moscow to Bangkok. She needed energy for this confrontation: she was spiralling into the black hole of the truth, where destruction and oblivion lurked, where the killer herself might be headed – but the risk felt almost good, she was unmoored now, floating on the tidal bore, surfing her success to the mouth of the river. Gloriously free.

Maybe the gravity in all this was her own pride, dragging her to danger. But she
was proud
. As the Thai Air plane landed at Bangkok she woke from a dream of herself receiving a prize: for a great discovery. The man giving her the prize was her father. Then Rouvier. Then Alex. Her mother was apparently locked out of the Nordic hall. The walls of the hall were covered with paintings of huge cats.

‘
Sawadeekap!
Thai Air would like to thank you . . .’

She stirred herself: stashing her new clothes in the hold-all, grabbing her laptop, filing out the plane and exiting customs. The heat outside the airport was welcome, a wet cocoon of humidity. After the chilly stale dankness of Sukhumi, this rich tropical Siamese closeness was better.

A cab? She got a taxi from Suvarnabhumi airport into the city.

Julia stared across the elevated motorway at the myriad skyscrapers as they sped into town: Bangkok, it seemed, was another lusty and furious Asian megalopolis, with wild skyscrapers and huge elevated freeways and vast adverts for Japanese cars and English language schools and South Korean TVs.

And Bangkok also had the answer to everything. Perhaps.

‘You say soi sick?’ The cabbie was talking. ‘Soi sick, Sukhumvit? Near Sukhumvit?’

‘Yes. I think so. Soi, er yes, soi six.’

She mumbled to a stop. What if the address on the card
wasn’t
correct?’

She had no choice.

‘Sorry sorry lady I pay money.’

The cabdriver was handing over cash at a tollbooth, but when the tollgate opened they merely inched ahead: they’d hit the real urban traffic, the cholesterol of sudden Asian prosper ity. The cab stopped again and started again, slowed and stopped. The endless traffic massed, and moved, and slowed, like an organic process, like peristalsis in the cervical canal.

She gazed across the city. Again. Flashes of distant lightning zagged silently between the skyscrapers and the imperious Hitachi adverts: a storm over the South China Sea.

Then at last the traffic parted and the taxi swooped left and over a disused railway track and they were in the florid and gristly urbanity of central Bangkok, with the streetside kebab stalls, the upmarket European shops, the amputees lying outside British pubs, sushi bars, Bookazine outlets, French restaurants, and enormous marble mega-hotels squeezed between Bangladeshi tailors and Chinese jewellery shops.

‘Soi sick! No soi eight? You sure? Sure sure?’

The cab driver’s smiling Thai face was a wry question.

She repeated her answer:

‘Yes, soi six.’

The taxi swerved right, down Soi Nana: the commercial sex district. Middle-aged western and Japanese men sat with unfeasibly teenage girls outside bars pounding Rolling Stones and AC/DC into the twilit street. Female flesh exhibited itself – everywhere, languid, brown, sheened and exposed. Painted toenails. Vivid lipstick. Girls from Isaan ate fried cockroaches and fried beetles and sweetened coconut rice with chunks of fresh mango.

It was dark now, and the streets were bright. Julia saw Coyote Bars. Man4man Massage. Lolita Sauna. Bangcockney Pub.

Pachara Suites. Right in the middle of the red light district.

‘Here,’ said Julia, the tension accelerating with her pulse. She alighted, and tipped the taxi driver.

Pachara Suites was a gleaming tall condominium, with elegant slate fountains and a wall-eyed man begging outside using a Yum Yum pot noodle jar as a cup. The man’s blind eye looked like a mung bean.

The lobby of the building was deserted. Glossy and empty. She used the lift; she found the door; she knocked.

A silence. An eyehole opened for a second. Was someone behind the door? Checking them? Had Barnier already fled? Was this the most absurd chase of very wild geese?

Julia knocked again.

The eyehole flipped clear, and then it shut.

Finally the door opened, just an inch: the door was chained with three chains. An oldish intelligent face peered out. Julia recognized an aged version of the young smile in the Phnom Penh photo.

It was Marcel Barnier.

His wild liverish eyes looked at Julia. He was holding a long knife in his hand. But as he absorbed what he was seeing – he seemed to relax.

‘Fuck. You are Julia Kerrigan! The archaeologist? I Googled you. Yes. Yes yes. I got your emails. Forgive me for not replying but . . . Why the hell did the doorman let you through?’

‘Erm.’

‘Why? I told him not to? Was he not there?’

‘No.’

‘Fuck.’ The face concealed behind the door swore twice, and sighed. ‘Fucking noodle head, Supashok. They shoulda kept the last doorman. Ai. Maybe he went for a pipi. OK . . .’

Dropping the knife on a table to his side, he unlatched one chain, then two, then three. He opened the door and gazed at her creased jeans and jetlagged face.

‘You understand that I am being very fuckeeeeng careful. Come in.’

‘Thankyou.’

Nervous, hopeful, quite terrified, she stepped inside.

The apartment was in chaos. Cardboard boxes sat on the floor, full of books and paintings. Furniture was partly dismantled and stacked against the wall. Half empty bottles of Johnnie Walker and completely empty bottles of Jacobs Creek Grenache Shiraz stood on tables and in corners, next to copiously overfilled ashtrays.

‘I am moving. Yes. And yes I am an alcoholic. For reasons I am sure you understand. To escape, to save my life. I used to escape through fucking liquor, now I have to escape for real?’

He looked in Julia’s eyes. She nodded and said:

‘I think I know why.’

‘That’s good. That’s good-good. Save a lot of horseshit talking.’

His French accent had been entirely erased, and replaced by a kind of coarse, slangy, slightly bizarre Anglo-American-Oriental English; his breath smelt of whisky and cigarettes and garlic. Presumably, decades of living out here, speaking the only western language anyone understood – English – had beaten the Frenchness out of him.

‘You look stressed. We can have a fucking drink, no? The fridge will be the last thing I empty.’ He laughed, angrily. ‘But so what – I like a drink, it keeps me cheerful – what is it they say about the French, a Frenchman is an Italian in a bad mood? Hah.
Ein bier, meine freunde?
I will have wine!’

Julia said yes. Barnier laughed again and slipped into his kitchen and returned with a beer and a glass. He looked at her inquisitively as she sipped the Tiger beer.

‘You want to know everything I know. Yeah?’

‘Well. As I also said, um, I have some ideas of my own. I wanted to see if I was . . .’ The beer was refreshingly cold. She drank. ‘See if I was right.’

‘The great mystery? Maybe we can inform each other. Trouble is, I do not know everything. You may know more than me.’ Wariness and mischief and anxiety mixed in his gaze. ‘But maybe not. Maybe I know quite enough already. And someone ought to hear my story, before I escape.’ He gestured at the boxes. He took a glass of red wine from somewhere and swallowed a huge gulp. He lit a cigarette and said:

‘So, ask me your questions.’

‘But. It needs time. And you seem, sorry, I mean – you must be very on edge. When are you going to go?’

Barnier paused, and exhaled smoke, before he answered. He slurped once more at the wine. His hair was thin and brownish grey, his clothes were relaxed and youthful, though not in the embarrassing way of Ghislaine: just jeans and a grey tee shirt, stained with drops of red wine. Loafers. No socks. A suntan. A man keeping himself reasonably in shape apart from the alcohol. But the face was frightened and the lips were stained with red wine tannin.

Then he said:

‘I’m going. Somewhere, very soon, where that witch of a killer, that
krasue
, won’t find me. I have read all the newspaper reports. I have read the shitty police emails, but not replied. I do not trust anyone. Fuck. Course I am on edge. She’s coming for me – here.’