Cambodian Book of the Dead (2 page)

 

PART 1 - THE GOLDEN PEACOCK

 

THE WIDOW

 

Dani Stricker crossed the Paradeplatz and walked down the Planken, towards Mannheim's historic water tower. It was an old tradition. With Harald, she'd walked down the south German city's shopping mile every Saturday afternoon, no matter what the weather had been like. For twenty years.

The Cambodian could still remember her arrival in Mannheim in 1981. The shops had dazzled her and she'd thought that the fountain in front of the Kaufhof, the biggest mall in town, sprayed liquid gold instead of water into the air. She'd been sure of it. The people were huge. And rich. Today she could see the differences in incomes and lifestyles, but in those early months, she'd almost believed that money grew on trees in Germany. Of course, money did not grow on trees anywhere, unless you owned the tree. She knew that now.

Everything had been strange. Dani had never seen a tram, never mind an escalator. Such things did not exist in Cambodia. In the supermarket, she'd been overwhelmed by the enormous variety of cats and dogs available in tins, which crowded the shelves of an entire aisle. The first
Bretzel
that Harald had bought her had tasted disgusting. She'd felt she was going to suffocate on the heavy, salty dough. But she'd forced herself to eat it anyway, for Harald.

As scary and foreign as her new home had been then, she had not wanted to return to Cambodia. There, death lived in the rice fields and would be able to find her people in their flimsy huts even a hundred years from now, to drag them from their homes into the darkness and make them vanish forever. Dani had been homesick, but she'd understood even then that the country she called home no longer existed. No one had ever returned from the long night that had covered Cambodia like a suffocating blanket for decades. Only ghosts flourished in the rice paddies. Harald had saved her life. Harald was Dani's hero. Everything she had seen and learned in the past twenty years had come from Harald. And now, Harald was dead.

Sometimes, they'd taken the tram from the city centre to Harald's house in Käfertal. Sometimes she'd taken the tram into town all by herself, as Harald had never been keen on public transport. She'd never learned to drive. Now she really needed the tram, was dependent on it for the first time in her life. Now she was alone. She would sell the BMW straight away.

Dani boarded a number 4 in front of the water tower. An inspector silently took her ticket, looked at it with deliberate, antagonistic care and handed it back, having switched the expression of his sallow face to trained boredom. A couple of rows behind Dani, two youths with coloured hair and buttons in their ears raised their voices against the police state. After the funeral, she would put the car in the local newspaper and hope for a buyer.

The tram slowly passed the city cemetery. Harald had died on October 11th, just a week ago. The poplar leaves blew around the pavement like shiny, copper-coloured bank notes. That looked pretty disorderly by Mannheim's standards, but a municipal employee would soon come with a machine and hoover the leaves out of this world and into another.

One day, Dani's coffin would be laid to rest here as well, thousands of miles from home. She'd promised Harald. Nevertheless, the idea of a burial remained unsettling. How would she fare in the next life if she was not cremated? But promises had to be kept. She'd learned that as a young girl, working alongside her mother in the family's rice paddy. Without keeping promises, life wasn't worth a thing. It wasn't worth much anyway.

Her parents and her sister had not been cremated either. Perhaps, if she returned to Cambodia, she would be able to locate the mass grave in which they'd been dumped. Her contact had suggested starting some investigations, but Dani had turned his offer down. Too many old bones belonging to too many people lay in those graves and she would never really be certain.

Her mobile rang. The foreign number. The call Dani had been waiting for. She had been waiting for more than twenty years. It was time to let her past bleed into her present life. The past, the present and the future coexisted next to each other. Every child in Cambodia knew that. But here, in Germany, in the West, everything was separated. Now she could finally take steps to take control, to bring closure. Revenge could do that. Anonymous and ruthless revenge.

Dani took a deep breath and answered the call.

“Hello?”

“Everything is ready. Tomorrow I will be in Bangkok to catch a flight to Phnom Penh.”

Dani was surprised. The man spoke Khmer, albeit with a strong accent. A
barang
. Dani was shocked at her own reaction. After all, Harald had also been a
barang
, a white man. As a child she'd never asked herself whether the term the Khmer used for Westerners had positive or negative connotations. During the Khmer Rouge years,
barang
had meant as much as devil or enemy. She forced herself back into the present.

“Find him and get in touch when you have learned what has happened to my sister. Force him to talk. When you have proof of what happened to her, kill him.”

The man at the other end of the conversation said nothing. He had been recommended by a fellow Cambodian whom she had met on the long journey from a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border to Germany, some twenty years earlier. The
barang
had apparently done jobs like this in Cambodia before.

“If that doesn't work, please kill him immediately.”

The miserable ticket inspector passed her again. He was in another world. A world she had learned to love. A world in which you were not pulled out of your house in the middle of the night, to be butchered, because you allegedly worked for the CIA. For a moment, she was back in the rice paddy behind her farm. The feeling of displacement was so intense, she was sure she was able to count the clouds above her family home if she only looked up. She could almost taste
prahok
: the pungent, fermented fish paste, which her mother prepared every day, the best
prahok
in the village. Then the Khmer Rouge, the Red Khmer, had come and killed everyone who had worked for the CIA. Only after she had lived in Germany for some years had Dani learned what the CIA was.

She was flustered and tried to find the right word to continue the conversation.

“I mean, that's what I hired you for.”

“Yes, you did,” he answered.

She had no idea what else to tell a contract killer, an assassin. There was nothing to say.

“Be sure to get the right man.”

“I have received your money and the information. I will only call you one more time. Please do not worry.”

The man had a gentle, almost feminine voice. She knew that was meaningless of course. In the past week she had transferred some fifty thousand euros, a large part of her inheritance, to the various accounts of this man. Harald would have understood. Or would he? He would have accepted it. But Dani had never dared to tell her husband about her plan. And now it was too late.

The man hung up. She stood motionless and stared at the silent phone for a long moment, unable to disconnect from what she'd just said and heard. Six thousand miles east of a small town in southern Germany, death would stalk through the rice paddies once again, in search of the red devil that had destroyed Dani Stricker's life. She almost forgot to get off in Käfertal.

“Last stop, all change,” the miserable inspector shouted. She smiled at the man. He wouldn't beat her to death.

 

 

 

MAIER

 

Maier, private detective, forty-five years old, 190 cm tall, perfectly trilingual, single, handlebar moustache, greying locks, currently cut almost short, leaned back in his economy seat, as much as he could, and smiled at the Thai stewardess who was coming his way. Maier had broad shoulders and green eyes and he looked a little lived in. Light boots, black cotton pants, a white shirt with too many pockets and one of those sleeveless vests with yet more pockets – he'd never quite managed to shake the fashion crimes of the war correspondent. At least he'd knocked the cigarettes on the head.

His father had turned up in Germany, from somewhere further east, sometime in the early Forties, despite the Nazis. He'd had green eyes and blond hair, and he had been an attractive man, so attractive that the German girls, who had lost their husbands at the front, fell in love with him. Even in Hitler's Germany, the Other seemed to have its attraction. At least as long as the Other called itself Maier and travelled with the correct, possibly fake papers.

He had survived the war in the arms of young women and had fled to England in the closing months before returning to post-war Germany. In the mid-Fifties he had washed up on Ruth's doorstep in Leipzig, told her just that and hung around. But not for long. After eleven months, he'd disappeared and had never been heard of again.

Sometimes Maier asked himself how many siblings he might have. He wondered whether his father was still alive. And whether he might have worked for the Soviet secret service during the war? And whether he had worked for the Stasi later? Maier had never met his father. His love of women, his restlessness and his looks were the sole assets he had inherited from his father. That's what Ruth Maier had said.

His mother had been right of course. Maier did not enjoy staying put very much. After he'd finished his studies in Dresden, he had worked as an international correspondent in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. How he got the job without too much manoeuvring, he never found out. Perhaps his father had had something to do with it.

When East Germany had begun to collapse, Maier had fled across Hungary to West Germany and had eventually ended up in Hamburg. After the Berlin Wall had fallen, Maier had expected to see life with different eyes. Finally he'd be able to write what he wanted. He had been yearning for a new joy, an entirely new existence and he had almost found it. In the new Germany he had, after many years of working abroad, the right connections in the media and was soon hired by the news agency, dpa.

But Maier rarely woke up in his small, impersonal apartment in Altona. He was on the road for the most part, on assignment – German holidaymakers from Mallorca to Vegas, German investors in Shanghai, German footballers in Yaoundé. There was always something to report some place. And Maier didn't feel at home anywhere. He'd fallen in love a few times, but somehow he'd never hung around.

The power of money in the new Germany first disorientated him; later it became an irritation. He still felt as if he'd been catapulted in slow motion from the fantastical dereliction of the old system into the depressing realities of the new one. Maier became ambivalent, despite the fact that, for the first time in his life, in the new Germany, he had the freedom to work. But life was too short to wash cars, watch TV or rent a video from the shop down the road. Maier chose the quickest, most radical way out of the German workaday life he could think of: he became a war correspondent.

After eight years down the front of the nasty little wars of the late twentieth century – from the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories to the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia and the high-altitude conflict in Nepal – he'd filed his last story four years earlier in Cambodia, had flown home and, after some soul-searching and a little retraining, had joined the renowned Hamburg detective agency Sundermann. Since then, Maier had been entrusted with cases all over Asia. He had tracked down the killers of an Australian climber who'd apparently had a fatal accident in one of India's most remote valleys; negotiated the release from Bang Kwang Prison, Thailand's most notorious jail, of a man who had fallen foul of the country's draconian lèse-majesté law; and uncovered a paedophile ring amongst Singapore's judiciary, though this most disturbing case had been stopped in its tracks by higher powers before the detective could wrap up his mission. He thought of himself as a fish, passing in silence through a big sea, catching prey here and there, occasionally unable to take a bite out of it for fear of being swallowed whole by more powerful predators. He hardly missed the near-death adrenaline rush he had been addicted to in his last life.

And yet, in his new job, Maier was a pro. The years as a correspondent had left him with contacts in every major city in South and Southeast Asia. He was determined, obsessive even. He always went down to the wire to get his case solved. His work as a crisis journalist had left him hardened, and determined as the hounds of hell. Maier could walk over corpses to get to the heart of his cases. The truth, even if neither palatable nor publishable, was everything to him. Sundermann had not been disappointed by his new detective.

When he was off work, Maier was a directionless romantic with desert sand in his shoes, a homeless stare and a modicum of vanity in his eyes. That's how he imagined his father had been.

“A vodka orange, please.”

The stewardess's hand touched his arm as she placed the plastic glass on the collapsible table in front of him. The slight, barely noticeable gesture made him smile.

She was young, beautiful and, for a few bucks, she risked her life day in and day out. Cambodian Air Travel, the only airline that currently flew from Bangkok into Phnom Penh, ran overworked and ancient Russian propeller planes, dying wrecks long past retirement that barely managed to clear the Cardamom Mountains. Planes that crashed over the remote and heavily mined forests of Cambodia were rarely found. The pilots were Russian, vets from Afghanistan, who'd once flown attack helicopters against barely armed resistance fighters. In Cambodia air space, the Russians' worst enemy was alcohol.

But a cursory glance at his fellow passengers suggested that the almost forgotten kingdom he was heading for had changed since Maier's last visit. Young, self-confident backpackers in search of post-war adventures, a French tour group in search of temples, and a few old men in search of women, or children, or anything else that would be available in hell for a few dollars, had replaced the soldiers, gangsters and correspondents who alone dared to fly into Phnom Penh a few years earlier.

In those days, he had travelled by helicopter into a darker place, where men had routinely barbecued the livers of their enemies on open fires, sitting on the edges of paddy fields in the shadows of solitary palm trees. They, men that Maier knew well, had travelled and lived with, had wolfed down the organs in the belief that they were ingesting their enemies' souls, as their victims had watched, holding their eviscerated stomachs, slowly bleeding to death. Just one of a myriad of reasons why the dead could never rest and the country was beset by ghosts and demons, some of them his very own.

“Do you live in Phnom Penh, sir?” the young stewardess asked him, as she, with her best bit of barely trained elegance, which was breathtaking, placed a small carton, in which Maier could see an old-looking biscuit and an overripe banana, covered in cling film, next to his empty plastic glass.

“No, I am on holiday.”

“Another drink perhaps?”

Maier hesitated for a second, and then opened his eyes wide enough to guess his thoughts.

“Vodka orange?”

The stewardess's gaze dropped to the floor of the aisle before she rushed off.

A strange case. A case without a crime.

The detective let the one and only conversation he'd had with his client run through his head once more.

 

“I want you to visit my son and find out what he is up to. You have to understand that Rolf is the black sheep of the Müller-Overbeck family,” she had said without greeting or introduction. Her voice had been dead flat.

Mrs Müller-Overbeck, whose husband, a man who could trace his north-German ancestry back for several centuries and who had made his fortune with the first post-war coffee empire in the
Bundesrepublik
, had shot him a nervous, imperious glance. Ice cold and in her mid-sixties. Just like her gigantic villa in Blankenese, built by some Nazi before the war. With a haircut that could have dried out an igloo – silver, stiff and expensive – the woman had simply looked ridiculously affluent. What the rich thought of as low key. The skirt, fashionable and a touch too tight, and the blouse, uniquely ruffled, and finally the many thin gold bracelets dangling from her pale right wrist, almost loud like trophies, had not helped. Yet his client had not projected properly. There'd been something unscripted in her performance, which Maier had supposed to be the reason for his presence in the Müller-Overbeck universe. She'd been agitated. It was hard to be ice-cold and agitated at the same time. How did the Americans say? It was lonely at the top. Life was a lottery. Maier had instinctively understood that this woman's expectations of service were in the rapacious to unreasonable bracket.

“You know the country?”

“I am the expert for Asia at Sundermann's. And I worked in Cambodia as a war correspondent for dpa.”

Mrs Müller-Overbeck had winced. “There is war over there? Rolf is caught up in a war? I thought he ran some kind of business for tourists there?”

“The war finished in 1998. The country is currently being rebuilt.”

Listening had not been one of the strengths of Hamburg's coffee queen. Another reason for Maier to say as little as possible.

“I do not understand why he wanted to go there. To a country at war. I can remember the post-war years in Germany all too well. I don't understand why he would want to go and look at the suffering of others. But Rolf has always been difficult. An A in English and an F in Maths, everything had to be extreme… Of course the family is hoping that he will come back and take over the reins.”

She hadn't offered Maier a drink. Not even a promotional gift, a politically correct cup from Nicaragua perhaps. He pondered whether she ever drank coffee. She had seemed a woman who had never done anything that involved the acceleration of the inevitable ageing process.

“You will find him and watch him. I am paying your usual rate for two weeks. Then you will call me. And I will, on the basis of your meticulously detailed and inclusive report, which you will have sent me by email, prior to our call of course, decide whether you will be recalled to Germany or whether I will make further payments so that you may make additional enquiries.”

Mrs Müller-Overbeck had smelled of money and avarice, but not of coffee. It looked as if Maier would become the babysitter to Hamburg's rich heirs. There had been moments when he had wished the Wall back. In his thoughts he had cursed Sundermann, his boss.

“Mr Maier, my expectations are very high and if I get the impression that you are unable or unwilling to fulfil them, then I will mention your agency to my friend, Dr Roth, who sits on the city council.”

His eyes tuned to truthful and trustworthy, Maier had nodded in agreement, and had let Mrs Müller-Overbeck work on him, her scrawny, pale and lonely hands covered in blue varicose veins, fragile as thin glass, held together by gold, coming up and down in front of him to emphasise the message.

“If my son is involved in any illegal or dangerous business over there, then please have his business uncovered in such a way that he is immediately deported back to Germany.”

“Mrs Müller-Overbeck, that kind of action can be very dangerous in Cambodia.”

The coffee queen had reacted with irritation. “That's why I am not sending a relative. That's why you are going. I expect results, solutions, not doubts. I want to see my son where he belongs.”

“I can't force your son to come back home.”

“Tell him he is disinherited if he won't budge. No, do not tell him anything. Just report to me. And please be discreet. Rolf is my only son. You never know, in these countries, so far away…”

Maier had only then realised that Mrs Müller-Overbeck was crying. The tears would surely turn to ice in seconds. She'd patted her sunken cheeks with a silk handkerchief.

“Preliminary investigations have told us that your son is a business partner in a small dive shop in a beach resort. He appears to be reasonably successful at what he is doing.”

Mrs Müller-Overbeck had abandoned all efforts to save her face and blurted in despair and with considerable impatience, “I could have told you that myself. I want to know with what kind of people he is doing business with, whether he has a woman, what kind of friends he has. I want to know everything about his life over there. I want to know why he is there and not here. And then I want him back.”

“You don't need a private detective to find that out. Why don't you just fly over there and visit him?”

“Don't be impertinent. You are being well paid, so ask your questions in Asia, not here. Goodbye, Maier. Please remember every now and then that your agency's licences are granted by the city of Hamburg. That will keep you up to speed.”

 

“This is co-pilot Andropov speaking. Please return your seats to upright position. We are about to land at Phnom Penh International Airport. The temperature in Phnom Penh is thirty-three degrees, local time is 6.30. We hope you enjoyed flying Cambodian Air Travel. Look forward to welcoming you on our flights again soon. On behalf of captain and the crew, have a pleasant stay in Cambodia. Hope to see you 'gain soon.”