Cambodia Noir (12 page)

“We need to get the cops,” he says, at last.

I don't argue—not the way he's looking. “I'm going to see Steve in an hour.”

He nods again: good enough for the moment.

“What did you find?”

Silence: I realize he's embarrassed.

“Our man in Bangkok got into her e-mail last night, easy. But here's the thing: that account's been active less than six months. All that's in there is job applications. That's a bit funny, right? So I ring Paris, recheck her references. The study-abroad-program supervisor remembered her, he was the one who recommended her before. So I started to ask about the personal stuff—love life, drug problems, anything that might have set her running. That's when it started to fall apart.”

He pulls a folded sheet of paper from his pocket, lays it flat on the table. It's a photocopy of a US passport, printed from a fax machine. The photograph is of a stunning Japanese girl: straight black hair, apple cheeks, dimples. No glasses.

The name on the paper is Jun Saito.

“That's the real one. I people-searched her, her details check out. Our June said she was from LA, this girl is from Burlington, Vermont. I had to wait for the States to wake up so I could call. The real June is happily back at school at Northwestern. She had a lovely time at the workshop in Paris, then did her internship in Germany.” He stops, letting this all sink in. “We're not ready for this. We check references to make sure the kids have a work ethic, not to screen out identity thieves. Now we've got a girl missing, and we don't even know her real name. We need to kick this one along.”

“We can't,” I say, voice too sharp. “Not yet.” I'm still staring at the passport, like it's put a spell on me. June isn't really June—

So who the hell hired me to look for her?

Have I told you about the Heart of Darkness? A nightclub named after a novel about the corruption of the human soul, and without a stitch of irony anywhere. I know, I know: no surer sign of genetic un-fitness than writing in one's journal in a bar! Well, I'm glad I'm a beta. . . . And I needed a drink, didn't I, after that disaster? I'm embarrassed even thinking about it: sitting in my apartment, listening to the rain pound the roof and brooding over all that old childhood stuff. . . . I don't know what it is about this place that makes me think about those times.

As soon as the weather let up, I had to go out. Fortunately the drivers on my street all know where the Heart is. It's still Saturday, and I thought the guys would be here—but so far, I'm alone. Perhaps it's too early for them. They'll still be at the river or the Bar with No Name. I could look . . . but somehow I can never get over this place.

Tiny, no lights except for these red spots picking out faux-Angkorian carvings on the walls, a graffiti-covered back room with a pool table. It was throbbing when I got in—the whole place pulsing like a living creature, a real heart beating in the dark back streets of the city. Inside, it's girls, girls everywhere . . . little Cambodian girls smiling up at their men, hanging on their arms and hips and chests, laughing at jokes no one made.

If you weren't careful, you could think they were out having fun, like the girls on the Strip on a Saturday. On some level maybe they are . . . but I remember Ray's rule:

“If a Khmer girl is out after dark, she's a prostitute . . . one way or another.” The boy, who gets a list of arrests read to him every day, can reel off the ways like some exotic taxonomy: The bar girls and the taxi girls and the hostesses, the hookers in the midtown brothels and the Vietnamese whores trafficked into $5 sex shops on the edge of town, the sold children and the professional girlfriends . . . Who knew such a simple transaction could spawn such variety?

Those that inhabit the Heart are the elite. They smother their ocher skin with iridescent powders, until they assume the appearance of some species of giant butterfly larvae. Packed inside their vinyl dresses like department-store chrysalids, they await the moment of metamorphosis when the turgid form bursts wet and writhing into the world. Beautiful monsters, no rules but hunt, mate, feed—

I like to watch them.

They're different from prostitutes back home. These girls are mirrors and plastic, slick and pink and reflective. There is no bottom to them: ask a million questions, you will never find the real girl, just one Barbie doll nested inside another. They are dependent upon the role they play in a way few of us can comprehend: their inner life has been completely erased.

Can it be I feel jealous of them? I scratch absent-mindedly at my arm, hoping to see the skin part and shining chrome beneath. . . .

Thank GOD . . . the guys just came in.

No, funny . . . just him. And he doesn't seem altogether pleased to see me—

The Russian Tea Room isn't Russian and doesn't have tea. It's the nickname of a grisly tiki bar off Monivong owned by a four-hundred-pound Kazakh named Sergei. It's also a hangout for the pedos, which means Sergei never says anything to anybody about who was there. This can be useful to all sorts of people. Clean Steve is leaning against the doorjamb when I arrive, looking about as hangdog as a six-foot-seven ex–Special Forces guy can look.

“It's not empty,” he mutters.

“Flip you for them.”

Steve just shakes his head. He used to be more fun.

“Suit yourself.” I push past him into the gloom of the bar. It's lit only by Christmas lights and tiki torches, and the gleaming pig eyes of a couple of fat, sixtyish Europeans in sandals and shorts, huddled in a booth in the corner.

“They hit me, Sergei, they hit me,” I scream in sudden, forced hysteria. My face makes this pretty believable, if you don't know much about tissue damage. I knock over a stool as I stagger to the bar. “They looked like cops, but I don't think they were cops. They said I fucked an eight-year-old boy and they weren't going to let me get away with it. You've got to help me.” I lean across the bar until I'm right next to the fat Cossack's unshaven mug and stage-whisper, “They say they're going to attach wires to my penis. You can't let them, Sergei! Tell them I'm innocent—”

The other guests quietly exit through the kitchen.

“You are fucking asshole, Keller,” Sergei says. “With infection.”

“I need the room.”

Clean Steve.

He earned his nickname in Lebanon in the early nineties. Back then it was ironic: he was Australian military, part of the UN peacekeeping force, working every angle there was and a few they didn't have names for yet. I was a kid, jaunting through the Bekaa to hang out with Hizbullah, waiting for things to explode. God knows how we got to be friends—I think drinking was involved.

Eventually I moved on to places where the wars were hotter. Steve quit the army before his sidelines caught up with him—got a job with the Australian Federal Police, part of one of those international drug-enforcement “assistance” programs. A couple years back, they posted him here.

He's trying to live up to his name these days—even on a barstool he sits arrow straight. He's got two daughters who don't talk to him, and child-support payments his ex-wife won't let him forget, but he's not a corrupt junkie bastard like all the other narcs in this town. You could say we're friends—but if there's one thing he hates about Cambo, it's me.

I'm from the old days.

Right now, though, Steve is my best play. I need to know who June was, and why someone would be hunting for her. Whoever “Kara Saito” is, she's got my home address. Steve can get me information and will hopefully agree to do it on the DL. I order us Zombies: you can't sit in the Russian Tea Room without a shitty fruit drink. We finish them in silence; order two more.

Finally he speaks: “We off the record?”

I nod.

“Say it out loud.”

“Off the record.”

He gives me a sour smile. “You said this was important?”

“One of our interns, June Saito, wrote a story about that heroin bust in Sydney a few months back. Did she talk to you?”

His face gives me the answer, even as he puzzles out the question. “I don't usually talk to journalists about which other journalists I've talked to, even if they do work at the same paper. Why do you wanna know? She get something wrong?”

“Her name, among other things.”

Steve's eyes go black, under knitted brows. “What do you mean?”

“I mean we don't know who she is. She was using a fake passport, with a stolen identity. She's up in Angkor now, and we'd like some answers before she gets back.”

I can see him struggle. His cop instincts are screaming call the police, the embassy: make it official—and someone else's problem. But his brain is churning through what June might have been doing here, and why she was asking him questions. What he might have let slip; how much trouble he could be in.

I help him along: “What did you tell her?”

“Christ,” he mutters. “Nothing sensitive—who am I going to be more careful around than a kid reporter?” He pauses. I wait. “You're right, she was asking about heroin. But she had most of the story already. She thought those customs guys had nothing to do with anything, wanted me to confirm it, off the record, so she could kill a piece that was barking up the wrong tree. She seemed like a conscientious type, so I did.” He gives a little snort.

“How did you know the customs guys were innocent?”

“Because that was our op. We've been telling the Cambodian police to get smart about this stuff for years, do some controlled ops, maybe get something bigger than just street punks. Well, now they got a special unit, anti-corruption, hand-picked by Hok Lundy. In July they caught wind of a big shipment going out, so they flagged it for us. We checked it out, got an eye on everyone, and then let it go ahead to Sydney, where they grabbed it. I understand it was quite successful.”

“So did that lead to the big bust last Friday?”

“That's the Cambodians' bag, mate. We shared what we learned, that's all. But it seems pretty likely, doesn't it?”

“Right. So how do the customs guys get into it?”

“They don't. It's this bloody legal system. They got this ‘investigating judge' business here, you know. From the French. These guys are cop, judge, and jury—but most of 'em can't find their bums with both hands and a flashlight. Totally useless. So while Sydney was working on getting information from the people they'd pulled in over there, one of these judges sees the signatures of some customs officials on the shipping manifest and thinks, ‘Hey, we've caught the smugglers!' Fuckwit. Never mind those guys sign off on hundreds of containers a day and probably look at less than one percent of the cargo—they just arrest them.”

I'm getting the drift now: “So you have a few words with the interior minister, and they cut the guys loose. Causing a ruckus.”

“They could have been a bit softly-softly about it, eh? Anyway, that makes it sensitive—no one wants to give the impression foreign powers are pulling the strings here.”

“That would be terrible.”

He glares. “It's not really very hot stuff. I don't see where your girl could go with it, even if she was . . .” He trails off. Who knows what June was?

Now Steve's spilled, it's time for softball—before he comes back to calling in the authorities. “I don't think she was up to anything. I've looked through her stuff, talked to folks at the paper. Sounds like she was just trying to do her job. It was an accident we even found out about the fake ID.” I can see him softening. “She's a kid, Steve. Says she's twenty-one, we're not sure—we're only assuming she's not still a minor. Maybe she's scared, on the run from something. We want to know, before we throw her to the dogs.”

Steve can see where this story goes: a stolen identity means no idea which embassy should be involved. They'll all stand back with their hands up. She'll be called stateless and tossed to the Cambodian police. Steve doesn't like the picture—he has daughters.

After a minute he waves Sergei over. Starts to order another Zombie, then changes his mind. “Fuck this. Gimme any Irish whiskey. No ice.” He looks at me. “Make it two.”

After the drinks come, and he's had a long pull, he speaks. “It's hard without a name. You can't just get a mate to do a lookup, those kind of searches take effort. Bright side is, your girl stands out. What's she, just over five feet?”

“About that, yeah. Can't be more than eighty-five pounds.”

“And a natural blonde, but East Asian descent?”

“Yes. Said she was from LA, I'd bet she at least lived there. She knows the city.”

“Well, should be easy to ID. If she's got a record, I'll see if I can find it without getting official. Anything pops up, you'll hear me shouting.”