Cambodia Noir (15 page)

“I . . . I don't understand. Is this some kind of ‘Does anybody really know anyone' thing?” She gets suddenly worried. “Was June in some kind of trouble? Did she do something wrong?”

Still not a crack: she's going to play her bluff to the end, make me show my whole hand before she gives it up. So I do. Lay it all out: the dummy e-mail, the fake passport, the phone calls back to Northwestern to make sure it wasn't a crazy coincidence. “The girl you say is your sister is not Jun Saito. So you can't be Kara Saito. So, again: who are you, really?”

She looks down, deflated. Then up, hopeful:

“Do you need more money?” She's reaching for her handbag. No sudden moves—but if I let her pay me off, I'm pretty sure I won't leave this hotel alive.

“No,” I snap. “I know you think I'm dumb, but I'm not dumb enough to shake you down.” Take a breath, sell this hard. It's the truth, and I need her to believe it. “Whoever you two are, whatever you're involved in, I don't care. I guess you can tell that just by looking at me. You offered me a lot of money if I found June alive, I'm trying to earn it. But whatever she was really up to, that's the thing most likely to get her missing. You want her found? There's stuff I gotta know. Maybe you don't: maybe you just want it to look like you're looking. If that's the play, I'll go along: poke around, be just discreet enough to be noticed, and never bother you again. I just don't wanna be looking over my shoulder.”

She lowers her head into her hands, sighing deeply—like listening to me has exhausted her all over again. Then her fingers start to run through her hair: they move fast, expertly smoothing and straightening and twisting the unruly strands into a tight, shining knot behind her head. She stretches, and I can hear the joints in her neck pop; claws flex and retract. When she looks back at me, she's a different person, with a face carved from bone and eyes that slice like scalpels.

“It was a cheap pretense,” she says, in a voice that's brand-new. “June was always careless about details.” Her eyes flash. “We really did call her June, she got lucky with that girl in Paris. She is my sister; I do want her found. And you are definitely better off not knowing our real names. But I understand you might want more information. Who knows, you might even be able to use it. So, fine”—she leans in and smiles, wide and white and sharp: a tiger smile, her tongue playing gently across the back of her teeth—“let's play twenty questions.”

I give up on the idea of getting a grip on myself. Drain my glass, gesture for another.

“You shouldn't drink so much.” She's still smiling.

“You shouldn't lie so much.” Lean in, before I lose what's left of my nerve: “Was June involved in something criminal?”

“I don't know.”

“Does she have a record?”

“Not under her real name. I couldn't say about the aliases.”

“Was she into drugs?”

“I assume you mean ‘consumption of.' I never saw it, and I'd say it was unlikely.”

“What about ‘trafficking of'?”

“I don't know. I would be very surprised.”

Something's coming clear; I change tack. “Did June really miss her flight home?”

“No.”

“I'd say she wasn't coming home at all. And hadn't in a long time.”

“You might be right.”

“How long? Months?” There's at least a year in the journals.

“Almost five years.”

“How old is she?”

“She was twenty-three this summer.” Kara watches me do the math. “Yes: eighteen and out. She went to college—a good one. She was young for her grade. Did most of a year, then vanished.”

“Why?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Why didn't you find her?”

“She's good.”

“You're better.” Our faces are getting closer as we bat this back and forth, and now I feel, more than see, something flicker across Kara's mind: something dark and worried.

“We weren't trying that hard. I knew she could take care of herself, and I thought it would be better if she came back on her own terms.”

“She had money?”

“Plenty. She specialized in hiding it.”

“You said
we
a minute ago.”

“Me and Father.”

“What's he do?”

“He makes sushi.”

“An artist with a knife, then.”

She just grins. I think again about the cutting board: Kara never even glanced at her bodyguard. She looks after herself. I wonder where she'd hide a gun in that outfit—or if she's a knife girl, too.

“Get your mind out of my skirt,” she says. “That's not where I keep my weapons.”

“June's mother left when she was eight?”

“Six.” Dangerous eyes: the tiger knows a trap, wonders how I know. Be more careful.

“Why?”

“Her
mother
was a pill-popping refugee from the
Valley of the Dolls
who spent her life on a desperate quest to get more of things she already had too much of. Father caught on, finally, and firewalled her. So she bailed.” The bitterness is the first emotion to pierce the veil she's worn our whole game.

“Sounds like you didn't care for that branch of the family.”

“I could never hurt my sister.” There's something off in how she says that, but I don't have time to think.

“How much did June know about the sushi business?”

“I couldn't tell you. June was sheltered. Doted on. She was supposed to have a different life, but clearly she knew more than we thought.”

“Maybe that's why she left.”

A pause. Lies and truth both come easy, but now Kara is actually thinking about what to say. “June loved Father when she was young. She would follow him everywhere. After her mother ran off, they were closer than ever. But then . . . I don't know. June never found her place. In school, she excelled when she felt like it, but often enough she didn't. She'd go from one clique to another, every week she was someone new: no one got close to her. Student groups, environment groups, political groups: she joined everything, stayed with nothing. The only thing she was never willing to try was family.”

I resist the urge to lean back, to cross my arms or push my chair away: anything to put some space between me and the quiet rage in Kara's voice.

“So if she didn't miss her flight home, and you hadn't seen her in years, how did you find her?”

“Carelessness. Nostalgia. I'm not sure.”

Don't respond, just look. Kara continues:

“She put Kara Saito down as her emergency contact. The phone number was mine. Maybe she'd been doing it for years, but this time she ended up in the hospital, and I got a call saying June Saito had an accident in Cambodia, but she'd be fine.”

I can just see it. This woman gets a call from someone she's never heard of, halfway around the world, saying that someone else she's never heard of is in the hospital. She doesn't say “Wrong number” and hang up. She plays along. Finds out who she's supposed to be and inserts herself into the story.

“Did you talk to June?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“I waited. Your boss told me when she was supposed to leave, and I came to try and convince her to come home—but she was already gone.”

“You said before you weren't looking for her. Why now?”

“Father's dying. It's time. She should come home.”

I play a hunch. “He doesn't know, does he? ‘Father.' He thinks you're in Saint-Tropez, doing whatever a girl like you does. But you're out here.”

She smirks. “Tempe, depressingly enough. I'm in Tempe, meeting vendors about quality assurance.”

I don't want to know what this woman's idea of quality assurance is. “Just one more thing. Why me?”

“Why not?”

“ 'Cause it stinks. Whoever you are, you've got money. But you show up here without a cop or a lawyer in tow and hire a washed-up photographer to play Sherlock while your sister is missing? You should have the army out.”

She laughs, and I'd swear it's real this time, because it makes the hair on my arms stand up.

“Mr. Keller, I think you underestimate yourself. You have been far more difficult to play than most people, which, I have to say, has turned out to be a relief. And I don't think you realize how limited my options are. The police don't love me—sushi is a bit rarefied for their tastes. The embassy is entirely populated by the kind of boys I went to college with. Private detectives in LA are usually scam artists, and inevitably lowlifes—I have nothing against lowlifes, but these all sideline for the tabloids. I could use my own staff, but the good ones, like Miss Eyre”—Kara makes no gesture to the woman by the door; she knows I know—“well, my sister would recognize them in a heartbeat, and she would move on. And anyway, this country is . . . different. I wanted someone who knew the territory. For better or for worse, you're my man.”

I almost believe it. It's close to the truth, close enough she means it. But it's not everything. Thinking fast: I don't know what to believe out of what I've just heard, but I believe Kara really doesn't know what happened to June. And that means she doesn't know how close it gets to her, or “Father,” if he exists, or whatever business they're in.

She wants the digging done by someone disposable.

And now, just watching me, she knows I know. “So, Mr. Keller,” she says, still with that playful edge in her voice, but I can feel the steel underneath, “what do
you
think happened to my sister?”

Gus said yes!!

It wasn't even all that hard, it's just not like in the movies. You have to figure out the rules: An editor is like a banker, he won't give you a story unless you already have one. (All right: I got some help from the boys at the paper! Barry was particularly good for the outlining. I didn't tell him why I wanted it, of course. . . . ) In the end, all I had to do was figure out why Luke and Wendy's NGO was
already
a story.

They work in this beautiful area out west, Koh Kong. Apparently it has amazing coastline, acres of mangrove marsh, it could totally be a paradise . . . but it's just a bunch of dirt-poor villages full of people who are slowly tearing it all down just to stay alive. A couple years back, the government built a huge bridge connecting it to Thailand across the gulf. Some Thai mogul put a casino right next to it, everyone expected the money to start rolling in, and soon enough Koh Kong would be Monte Carlo. But nothing happened . . . those pesky trickle-down economics just didn't trickle.

Maybe it was poor planning: Koh Kong just didn't have the infrastructure to support big resorts or hotels: the electricity is sporadic, there's no proper port, the roads there are a shambles and there's no direct route to Phnom Penh, you have to go south almost to Sihanoukville. Gamblers would come over the bridge for the day, then go home, and no one benefited but the casino owners. Maybe there was a bit of corruption thrown in as well. And bad luck: relations with Thailand haven't exactly been swimming along. So the people stay hungry, and keep over-exploiting the environment, which only makes life harder in the long run. . . .

That's the story: the years of money and effort that have gone into trying to develop this place, and the reasons they've all failed. Paradise lost. Throw in a few paragraphs about a plucky little group of photogenic Americans who are trying to break the cycle of poverty, and you have exactly the kind of story an editor will go for.

That's how I sold it to Gus, anyway, and after about fifteen minutes of maybes and eye rolling, he agreed. Of course I have to wait until after the elections—that's going to take up the whole week. But he'll let me go down with the boy and help him do the election stuff in Sihanoukville, and then I can go up to Koh Kong afterward.

My conscience is clear: it will be a good story. It's just not the point. I know there's something strange going on out there in that swamp. Now I'm going to find out what it is.

It takes three beers to get anything close to steady.

I flagged a moto, had it take me to the river—by the time I got off, my legs were rubber and my hands were shaking. Kara worked me hard, but I think I kept my edge. She doesn't know about the diaries. I told her the truth about June: that there were too many angles to pick one. That I was pretty sure that she hadn't gone to Siem Reap, but I didn't know where. That there were stories she was chasing that might have got her in trouble, as well as strange relationships with coworkers. I stalled on specifics, said I didn't want anyone garroted until I had a good reason.

“Garrotes are for Mexicans,” she said.

I've still got a head start. A narrow one—but I'll need it. Staying alive means finding June first.