Cambodia Noir (30 page)

It's Dead Charlie.

Behind him, the whole damned crew: the Aussie and Bunny, and the dead Afghans, and more. They fill the boat there are so many. Lon clambers over the side to join them, seawater pouring from his sliced-up guts.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“Just to the island,” says Charlie. “She's waiting.”

“Who's waiting?”

He just laughs and spins the wheel. The boat starts to sink.

I claw my way out of the sheets, gasping for air.

Light a cigarette. I can't drink anything—still expecting to wake up, my lungs full of warm water. It takes a while to believe I'm really in my hotel room, and not out there, sinking slowly into the Gulf.

Walking through the hotel lobby, backpack slung over my shoulder.

This is a test.

No one stops me as I head for the door. I'm outside and halfway to the row of motodops when I feel someone at my elbow—recognize the driver of the tour bus.

“Sir, I hope we have not offended you with our presence in your hotel. As an honored guest, I offer you free ride in our tours limousine.”

“No thanks. I prefer the bike.”

Big smile, deep bow.

“Of course, sir.”

One moto has nosed out of the pack and pulled up in front of me. I ignore him, slinging myself up behind the third guy in line and telling him to take me downtown. There's a bar I know from before, in an old Khmer house overlooking the Sangker River.

I don't see anyone following us on the ride down, but when I arrive, Miss Eyre is sitting at a table in the corner. She doesn't move as I find a space and order a drink. She doesn't even seem to be watching.

I know better.

I'm not getting out today—but that's not why I came here. It's afternoon, and getting on to hot. I order an Angkor. Drink it; order another. From my table on the balcony, I watch the Sangker creeping by below, sticky and slow as maple syrup. Clouds of midges and mosquitoes whirl over its surface. Finish the second beer.

It takes a half dozen of them for the girls in this hick town to start looking good—but the state I'm in, I don't mind the extra work. One keeps looking over at me: skinny as a twig, with a lopsided face and misplaced incisors that jut out like fangs. When she smiles, she looks half-jackal, and she smiles a lot—but she's the best of the bunch. I wave to her and she comes up to my table.

“What's your name?”

“Theary.” In Khmer, it means “helper.”

“Would you like to have a drink with me, Theary?”

It's 3:00 a.m. by the time Theary totters out of my room. Good God, how she can bend—like fucking climbing ivy. I fumble through the glasses on the end table until I find one with some booze left in it—suck it through a twisty straw and hope to sleep, too tired to dream.

I must doze off, because when I open my eyes, Keihatsu is standing over me.

“Miss Koroshi requires your presence. Please put clothes on.”

We march downstairs and he bundles me into the back of the Range Rover. After a few minutes, Kara shows up. She and Keihatsu get in front, and one of the assistants climbs in next to me.

I'm wondering if this is going to be my last ride. But it goes on and on—after a couple hours, I don't care enough to stay awake.

I open my eyes to see soldiers surrounding the car, and my chest seizes up: checkpoints are bad news at the best of times, and times now are pretty rough. I'm looking ahead for an exit, but there's none—they've got the road blocked with rolling barriers. My heart rate slows a bit as I realize this is a real security check, not just a bunch of thugs collecting tolls.

Only a bit, though.

The others seem unfazed, and we file out to let the soldiers search us, then the car, then us again.

All around is broad, flat countryside; tall grass and rows of palms. Where are we? We left Battambang going north, then turned east—we're past Siem Reap, most likely, but how far? Finally the soldiers seem satisfied and let us go. About 500 meters past the checkpoint, we turn off the road onto a narrow, well-paved lane, its entrance guarded by more soldiers, who make us go through the whole search business again. This happens about four more times before our destination appears: a mansion in shades of Pepto-Bismol, with pagoda tops in neon green, surrounded by heavy security walls and Jersey barriers.

Inside, a carefully manicured drive leads up to a grand main entrance, bordered by hedges trimmed like Christmas-tree ornaments. The
ancien régime
grandeur is spoiled by a pair of jeeps with mounted .50 cals lurking behind the topiary, inconspicuous as a gunshot wound on a wedding dress.

“They always this nervous?” I ask.

No one answers. Black-jacket security guys appear to usher us inside, down a bunch of hallways and into a courtyard that would go well at Versailles, if Louis had been into disco. We sit drinking iced tea for another half hour, until two men in suits come out and join us. The first is tall and angular, with a drawn, hungry kind of face. Reminds me a bit of Phann. Context being what it is, it takes me a second to recognize him as the prime minister.

Kara stands and bows deep, Japanese-style. Hun Sen gives her a brief Cambodian
nop,
then takes her arm. They walk around the courtyard, chatting like old friends.

The second man, a little fellow with a round face, sits next to me and offers a hand-rolled Russian cigarette from a gold case.

“Such is the life of a factotum,” he says, in faintly accented English. “Always in attendance. Still, it is good to have you and your friends here. We can bring this stupidity to an end quickly.” I nod like I know what he's talking about. “Everyone thinks we are fools out here, just gangsters taking all the profit we can. But it's not so. We are serious about change, but you know, with all our country has been through, it is difficult to move on.” He leans toward me. “Why should we want Americans using us to traffic their drugs? Everyone knows the days of smuggling won't last.”

“Drugs last.”

The fellow laughs, gestures toward his boss. “His Excellency has bigger plans for this country. All our projections indicate that within two decades, the Western nations will give up the drug war. The cost is too high, and the benefits of legalizing and localizing the trade are too great. By 2025, New York will be getting its heroin from Colorado, not Cambodia. You'll need the money for the real wars you'll be fighting. The cash crops of the next century won't be coca and poppies, they'll be rice and wheat.” He smiles. “Banking, finance, development: these are things you can . . . sink your teeth into, you say?”

“In five years, Cambodia will be completely legitimate?”

He gives me a big, gold-toothed grin. “Five may be optimistic. Twenty. The prime minister would like to leave his children a country better than the one he saved from Pol Pot.” He pauses, still smiling at me, reading my face as I look over at the mad dictator, standing there laughing with Kara. “You have trouble seeing such a human emotion on our leader? Perhaps you don't understand this place as well as you think.”

Maybe I don't, at that.

No tanks in the streets, anyway. Assuming I get back alive, I get to tell Gus he was wrong.

The next morning, there's a newspaper waiting on the table in my hotel room. Hok Lundy has died in a helicopter crash.

Afternoon: long and hot. Nothing changes. The Sangker still creeps by below, sticky as maple syrup. The midges and mosquitoes go on with their dance. I sip my Angkor.

Battambang.

Two weeks now I've been up here, like a fly in amber. The world has stopped.

I'm on beer number five when Theary struts in, swaying on heels like circus stilts. She stops next to my chair, and I run my fingers up under the fringe of her daisy dukes. Get a little hard as I imagine her pulling her blue tank top over her head, brown nipples popping free above gently heaving ribs. I follow that thought with another, chase them with the rest of my beer.

“You gonna sit down?”

She smiles and runs her nails down my leg, slowly tracing magic words in Khmer. They do spells like that.

I give her hand a squeeze. “Did you bring them?” She nods. “Did anyone ask about them?”

“No.”

Good. I still can't say why I've kept the journals secret all this time—why I moved them from hiding place to hiding place, why I smuggled them out for Theary to keep safe. Maybe I want the answers all to myself.

As I feel Kara's claws in me, maybe I just want something that's mine.

Theary leans in and whispers in my ear. She wants to go to the hotel, she's found a new position on the Internet and wants to try it out. She kisses me, breath sour under the sweetness of rum.

“Let's go,” I say.

But as we walk away I glance back at the river, and for a second I think I see that shadow, waving silently to me out of the glare.

I wake up gasping.

Theary is still asleep. She grew up in a one-room house with four brothers and five sisters: nothing can wake her if she doesn't want it to.

She lies curled up like a dead spider, brittle and brown. Beneath her left shoulder blade, a patch of dark, rough skin extends halfway down her back: a birthmark of some kind, like a place where wings started to grow and gave up.

I reach between her legs, feel the roughness of her hair, the lingering dampness. Her eyes don't open, but she shifts her hips, spreading her thighs. She must have been dreaming of sex. Her hand comes down to move in sync with mine, and we slide our fingers back and forth, letting them grow wet. Carefully I kneel on the bed, bend down, and slide inside. Still, she keeps her eyes closed, and I wonder what she's imagining. Her fingers knot themselves in the sheets. As gently as I can, I place a hand alongside her face. She turns her head and her mouth finds it, working slightly against my palm as we move together in slow undulations, like the waves. She doesn't scream, but sighs, deeply, three times, and then we're done. For a moment I think she's going to open her eyes, say something—but she only reaches up and places a finger to my lips, then subsides back into the depths of whatever dream she was having.

I cross to the little window and have a final cigarette, looking out at the trees under a darkened sky.

When I'm done, I pull on a pair of jeans and go out into the hall.

The lights are dim. My feet make no sound on the oxblood carpet. I have to go all the way across the building and up to the top floor to get to Kara's room. I don't meet anyone.

Knock lightly on the door. After a moment, it opens and she's there. I've never known her to sleep. She's wearing some kind of transparent, black nightdress thing, giving me a good long look at a body men would go to war for. She might have just got out of bed, except her hair's perfect and she's carrying a machine pistol.

She doesn't say anything, just leaves the door open and turns around. I shut it behind me. The big coffee table in the main room of the suite is covered with papers, and she drops the gun there and goes back to sitting cross-legged on the couch, looking over them. I go to the bar. Pour myself a drink; she frowns.

“Want one?”

She doesn't seem to hear—but she did, and the answer is no.

“It's time.”

She knows exactly what I mean. “It's no good. I've got dozens of guys scouring this country now.”

“Lot of broken collarbones.”

Kara's expression doesn't change. “No one's turned up anything. She walks out of your paper and off the face of the earth. I'm not spending the next two decades sticking posters on telephone poles. She's lost; that's the life we're in. The one she wanted to get away from.” I'm surprised, again: so much bitterness in her voice. “On the remote chance she's alive, she's been drugged and sold into slavery, or she's gone up the Mekong to work on her collection of human skulls. But she's not going to be found.”

“You don't have to help. There's no harm in letting me keep trying.”

She gives me a surprisingly soft look, for a woman whose eyes are razors. “You've done your job, Will. You'll get paid, if that's what you're worried about. This is an operational area now, there's money to burn. You don't have to go on with some hopeless quest.”

“You've paid me enough. I'll get my bonus if I find her, no more.”

“Are you afraid to be in my debt?”

“Yeah.” Simple enough to say, really.

She takes it a bit hard. “You don't have to be afraid of me.” I raise an eyebrow. “Well, not much.” She gets up and goes to the bar, which appears to have been imported straight from Sardi's, and starts making us manhattans. It takes a while: everything just so. Finally she hands one over, looks me up and down. “You're a decent guy to have around, Keller. More so when you're sober enough to stand, but not exclusively. Why don't you come back with me? I'd have plenty of uses for you in LA.” The way she says it, I guess they might not all be professional. “And the drugs and arm candy are much higher quality.” She smirks. “What do you say, Will? Come home.”

“That speech ever work on June?”

For half a second I think the look on her face is fury: she barely seems human. Then she laughs, laughs so hard she spills her drink and has to sit down on the floor. I sit across from her.

“No,” she says. “No, it never did.”

When the manhattans are done, Kara grabs the rye from the counter and pours us two doses. We drink again.

“Why do you really want to find her?” she asks.

“What else have I got to do?”

She smiles. Refills our glasses and then looks at me, serious now, hard and icy like when she first came out of the surf. She's appraising me, and my skin grows cold as I wonder what she sees.

“You think you know something I don't,” she says. “It's all over you.”

I'm struggling to make my face blank.