Cambodia Noir (37 page)

She looks me up and down, those black eyes burrowing through clothes and skin. “Where's your white hat?”

“It made my head itch.”

She laughs, and the sound makes me want to claw my eyes out. “Karasu sent you.”

“I don't work for her.”

“No. You don't. And it's cost you.” She's still smiling as she lets her robe fall open. “I'm the one you really want. You think I'm lost, but you're wrong. You're the one who's lost. You're in pain. I can make it stop.” She takes another step forward. “That's why they come to me. The ones too damaged to go on. The ones for whom the only pleasure left is to be hurt. To be devoured. I give them what they need.”

I'm backing away, but it's like the whole room shifts and suddenly she's right in front of me, her hands on my chest. They're cold as ice, and for a second I'm covered with ants, flies, crawling centipedes, I feel them writhing up into my hair and down my collar. Pull away, slapping frantically at my skin—

There's nothing there. No bugs, just a pale girl with dead eyes.

“Tell me what happened to you,” she says.

For some reason, I tell her. It's so simple. The end of my life in fifty words.

“In Kabul, in the war, I met a girl. She loved me. I told her I was going to get her out, that we would get married. I didn't understand—I was careless. Her family found out and they murdered her, right in the street. I couldn't stop it, I . . . I took a photo of her lying there, and they wanted to give me a fucking prize.”

“So you ran.” She smiles like it's the sweetest thing she's ever heard. “Ran until you almost forgot.”

I'm shaking all over like I'm sixteen hours off the junk, sweat pouring down my collar. Any second my knees are going to buckle. Got to speak, I can't stay here much longer.

“You saw your mother die.”

She laughs. “I killed her. She was going to take me away; he found out. He put the knife in her, but I was watching at the door and ran in. And when I grabbed it, it pierced her heart and killed her.”

She recites it like a fairy tale—which is what it is, really. A grown man's gambit for a little girl's silence: convince her it's her fault.
“If anyone finds out, they'll come for you.”
So she hides what happened in the back of her mind and tells everyone her story about the night Mommy left—tells it until she believes it herself.

Almost believes it: something deep inside refuses to forget.

“Have you ever touched a dead body? Held it in your arms? It's so still it shocks you.” I blink and she's in front of me again, inches away, looking up into my eyes. “I still feel it. Every second. I still smell her perfume, and her blood. There is a piece of death inside me, like a seed. I hid it. Until I went to
that place,
and it began to grow.”

She touches my chest and now there are no visitations, just a hand cold as iron. She's opening the buttons on my shirt, but I'm looking past her, at the table.

On it, photographs. Her photographs. One I recognize: a flat, gray body of water, dark specks that might be trees in the distance. It's not the same as the one that led me there, not quite: the angle is slightly different, the light another shade of nothing. But it's the same place.

Next to it, a set of wavy lines: a curl of blond hair.

Now, with her icy fingers tracing patterns on my skin, I finally understand. She is a photographer the way the Enigma operators were writers. That day in the mangroves, I broke her code and never knew it.

Those aren't pictures in my pocket: they're trophies.

“How many?” I croak.

She smiles her empty smile. “Stay,” she whispers. “Stay.”

“Come back. I can get you help.” But I know there's no help for this. “You can still go home.” There is no home. There is no one to bring back.

I am going to die in this room.

She presses up to me, close, and her robe falls to the floor. She's not naked like a person but like a doll, hard and brittle as porcelain. She's so skinny, a collection of angles and planes.

Her right leg, from the ankle to the hip bone, is covered in scars—some razor thin, others bunched and white, patterned like tiger stripes. The side of the calf twisted by cut after cut into a shapeless mass of tissue. More scars on her belly, her chest. Two long slices nearly bisect her right nipple.

My mind recoils, but as I try to step away I feel my cock come alive, straining against my jeans—

They say you get an erection in the electric chair.

“Stay with me,” she says again. Her teeth are sharp against my lips, her tongue small and hard as it pokes its way into my mouth. She tastes like oiled metal. Behind her, I see them all crowding in: Number Two and Gabriel, Charlie and the Aussie, Bunny, Lon, and the whole damned crew. They wouldn't miss this.

I want to run, but I find myself reaching for her, fingers scrabbling at smooth bone. She opens my pants, reaches inside, her cold lips holding mine like she's going to suck all the air out. And I want her, the way I've always wanted her—to disappear inside her, to vanish in her depths. The other dead cheer me on.

June's nails bite my shoulder, draw blood. I'm going numb.

And I hear a voice in my head: Channi's voice, bright and yellow, like the sun coming up in this dark room.
“I am not a dream,”
she says.

Hard white lips on mine. Blood in my mouth.

“I'm not a dream.”

Her bare foot, stamping on sun-stained boards. Strange flowers bloom around me, and the ghosts vanish.

“I am real.”

I put my arms around June. Find her shoulder, spin and toss her across the room. She weighs nothing.

She comes up screaming, all teeth and nails, and she's on me in a flash. No time for anything fancy, I grab her hands as they reach for my face, and gasp as I'm shoved back against the wall. Pro wrestlers aren't strong like this. Her nails the color of old ivory, aiming at my eyes. The world spins, something cracks against my head—

I'm on the floor, arms up, still trying to hold her off, but those claws are inches away—

From nowhere, I start to laugh, and she recoils like I've slapped her. Then her hand breaks free and she tears my cheek open. The hand goes up again, I can't stop it, she's going to kill me—and then the door bursts open, a pair of crew-cut guards gaping in confusion. Guns drawn, but clearly not prepared for this.

June drops me and goes for them. The first one fires, but I guess he misses, and then she's ripped the gun from his hands and spread his brains across the fan light. The second tries to turn, and she puts a half dozen bullets through his chest. He hits the floor with a wet squelch.

More guards rushing in—the backup station. They come in shooting, and she cuts them down, one by one. Ignore the pain ripping through me as I crawl across the blood-splattered floor. June drops the last one and turns to me. I come up with a fallen guard's gun. She fires.

I die.

I don't die: she's empty.

“Drop it.”

The look on her face is something I can't describe—it's so far from anything human. She gives a shriek like razors on slate, like metal torn until it breaks. Then she turns and hurls herself at the window.

She should hit the floor with a concussion, but the plate glass shatters like she's made of steel—maybe it got nicked in the firefight?—and then I'm up, staggering to my feet and across the room, and she's a white shape vanishing down into the lights.

It's so bright down there.

I can't see.

Alarms going off all around me. Footsteps in the hall. Get behind the couch, brace my arm, aim. A last guard runs in, gun out, and I drop him, three shots to body mass, like they say. He coughs some blood, then dies.

My dream was wrong: it's different when you do it yourself.

I head for the fire exit.

So here I am: in a taxi, with the lights of the city vanishing behind me.

Still alive. Still lost.

Dany wasn't waiting in the alley. Maybe she met a rich john and ran off. I don't want to think about the other possibilities. I walked around the front of the building, trying to be casual. Dropped the gun in the alley as I turned onto the main street, eyes watching for the flashing lights, the spattered blood and shattered glass where a body had fallen thirteen stories.

I didn't see anything. Just Hong Kong. Ten million people pressed together, breathing in sync. I kept moving. Got a SARS mask to cover my shredded face. Hailed a cab. Headed for the sky.

It's hard to say I haven't fucked up everything I possibly could. Steve. Vy. Gus. Dany. Gabriel, and Number Two, and Charlie and Phann and Lon and June . . . And Fatima, dear Fatima, always with me. If I live a thousand years, I could never be sorry enough.

Now it's time to disappear. Got a few dollars left in my pocket. There are still dark places in the world. Some South Seas island, maybe: cannibal shamans, kava and ganja and long, white beaches. I can find a way to get by. To forget. It's what I'm best at.

I'm not going.

I've spent my whole life running from the messes I've made. It's time to stop. Maybe I can't fix anything—but I'm tired of it. Cambodia has been through worse than any of us and has endured. We can endure.

And I miss her. I imagine walking her streets again, feeling her all around me: living, changing, dying—still living.

One more airport road. One more trip across the border between earth and sky. And then the wet tarmac, the sullen palms in the distance . . .

Home: The only one I've ever really known. The place that saved me, when by all rights I should have died. Somewhere back there, Channi is wiping down her bar. Laying out the peanuts. Thinking about what she'll do now, when life has offered her so many lies and disappointments. Still waiting for something.

If I'm careful, and lucky, maybe I can convince her it's me.

I have a legion of ghosts behind me, and they can never be appeased; but I will try to show them love and pray that they forgive.

This book is a work of fiction that attempts to capture what it felt like to be an American working in Phnom Penh in late 2003, but it draws inspiration from historical events that were all too real. Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party did, in fact, fail to secure a two-thirds majority in Parliament in the summer elections, resulting in a yearlong standoff with the opposition parties. There really were a number of large drug busts during this period, including one that implicated high-ranking army officials, although the real-life details differ significantly from those described here, and the book's explanation of the machinations behind the drug trade is pure invention. There was also a wave of (presumably) political killings, including that of Ta Prohm radio journalist Chuor Chetharith, who was gunned down outside his office on October 18, 2003. His murder remains unsolved.

The confluence of these events became the skeleton of my fiction, and I dreamed up a rather fantastical backstory to tie them together. In the process, I changed much, and the people and incidents that feature in that story are all products of my imagination, save the few exceptions noted here. Cambodia really has only two English-language newspapers, the
Cambodia Daily
and the
Phnom Penh Post
, which are mentioned briefly; Gus Franco's paper, and the questionable characters who work there, are inventions created to drive along the plot. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen and Chief of Police Hok Lundy are real people, but I have used them in a fictitious way and taken many liberties.

Kevin Doyle and Al Rockoff, who appear briefly in these pages, are also real people and inspiring journalists, and I owe them a debt for what little I understand of Cambodia, along with many others including Matt Reed, William Shaw, Dan Ten Kate, Phann Ana, Van Roen, and Nhem Chea Bunly. Many years after the fact, Iain Philip helped refresh my memory on the details of life in Phnom Penh and Battambang. All the errors and alterations of fact are mine, not theirs.

I am still amazed at the good fortune that led me to my extraordinary agent Noah Ballard, who has read this book nearly as many times as I have, and whose hard work, patience, and great instincts have shaped it into what it is today. John Glynn at Scribner has been a wonderful editor and an endless source of enthusiasm and encouragement.

I am also deeply grateful to the many friends who suffered through my early drafts with grace and kindness. James Luckard, Stewart Schulman, and Hugh Ryan gave close readings and great advice. Pamela Ball, Joy Harris, and Meredith Kaffel offered invaluable notes and guidance when this book was in its infancy. Russ Agdern, Nathan Baca, Bruce Boehrer, Sawyer Cade, Rebecca Dupree, Jibril Hambel, Hisham Kassim, Kevin McCloat, Michael Niederman, Shari Perkins, and Lavie Tidhar all lent me their eyes for a while. Geraldine Chatelard helped me with the French, and Jon Land honed my pitch. To all of them, I owe thanks.

This novel would not exist without the love and support of my partner, Kate Washington, who steered me through years of depression and frustration, and never stopped believing in happy endings.