Little Mountain (30 page)

         “I can’t take this anymore, Sam.” Her voice sounded like sandpaper, and her eyes were red and moist. “When I married you, I never bargained for being your stand-in at a shooting gallery.”

         Sam felt as though he’d been lashed in the face with the thorns from Julie’s roses. “I’m very sorry you were caught in the middle of this,” he said.

         “Oh, it isn’t your fault. You know that. But I’ve always worried about you, and now I worry about our whole family.”

         “Do you want me to quit the force?”

         Her voice softened a notch, and her eyes glinted in the overhead light. “I know that’s not what
you
want--”

         “I don’t have another job.”

         “I make enough to pay the rent while you look. This isn’t the kind of life I want us to have.”

         “You’re a teacher, and it’s what you like. I’m a detective, and it’s what I like.”

         “Do you know the difference, though? Do you? The difference is that
my
teaching didn’t get
your
ass nearly shot off.” She covered her face with her hands.

         Sam’s fingertips glided across her hands and paused at the pair of rings she
wore,
the engagement ring with a small diamond, and the gold wedding band that had been his mother’s.

         “Do you really like your work?” she finally asked.

         “I don’t have to like
it,
I just have to do it. Dealing with Wilkins is a problem for me. Callahan says that Wilkins wants me to fail.”

         “Is he right?”

         “Cal says a lot of things that don’t make sense, but this does. And I’m afraid I’m taking this case personally.”

         Julie looked at him with a curious expression.

         “I finally saw Bin Chea’s picture, and I recognized him from Cambodia.”

         “He was an old acquaintance?”

         “Some people said he was a teacher before the war.
Mathematics or something.
Exactly the type Pol Pot tried to eliminate. Whatever he had been, he managed to hide his past and join the communists. When I knew him, he ran the camp where I worked. My sister was already dead; my mother had just disappeared. And my father--”

         Sam took a deep breath, and Julie gripped his hands. How was life ever possible without her?

         He lay next to her warmth, his mind drifting like skeleton-ribbed clouds across his past.
The boat floats idly on Tonle Sap, and his uncle pushes a pole into the shallow water. The skinny legs of a twelve-year-old splash alongside the raft and disturb the mirrored surface that reflects the herons overhead. Thunder comes out of the cloudless sky from miles to the east, and white streaks mark the paths of airplanes, the sun glinting off their bodies.

         Please forgive your father’s harsh words, Uncle says. Your father feels a great deal of pressure, trouble he cannot talk about. Sambath wonders if it has anything to do with the bombs that pound the other side of the Mekong River.

        
“I never told you how he died,” Sam said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

It was 1978.

         Little Mountain was a wart on the face of the landscape, a bump on the road to hell. Comrade Bin stood in the ashes on the summit, a snake still sizzling in the embers underneath his boot. It had all been very efficient: the worker who poured the gasoline lay in the smoky blackness next to a charred can.

         He was one less person eating the camp’s precious food.

         However, the comrade who had thrown the torch was the luckiest boy alive. Comrade Sambath escaped with no more than singed hair, wet trousers, and a scarred soul. That was good; Sambath was a steady worker who never stumbled or fell ill.

         With the trees scorched from the hilltop, Comrade Bin finally had a clear view for at least five kilometers in every direction. No one could surprise him now.

         On the west side of Little Mountain
lay
the camp: a stucco headquarters building, a lake, a soccer field, a mango orchard. On the east and south sides lay forest where workers could find firewood, or if they strayed too far, land mines.

         On the north side
lay
the highway that stretched eastward into the heart of Cambodia. A single truck sputtered toward the camp, trailing a cloud of red dust. Comrade Bin walked back to the camp to meet the truck.

         The soldiers swarmed like ants around the truck and pulled the criminals to the ground. A hundred teenage boys swept the courtyard, gathered mangoes from the grove on the far side of the pond, dug the pits, carted away the bodies, and filled the pits. But they could not carry away the stench of death from the fouled lake.

Sambath had been sweeping the courtyard when the truck pulled in. The gray plume of smoke had disappeared, but the smell drifted toward the courtyard as though pulled along by Comrade Bin. Bin had disappeared briefly into the cover of trees halfway down the hill.

         Shame corroded Sambath’s spirit like battery acid. “Go ahead and throw it,” Comrade Bin had called from the bottom of the hill. “No one else is up there anymore.” So that morning Sambath had thrown the torch, and the hilltop had gone up in flames with a
whump
and a scream.

         As prisoners tumbled off the truck, Sambath scanned every bruised face, the way he had done with every fresh supply of victims for months. With luck, he would never see his father here at Little Mountain. With luck, Father had slipped into the forest and headed for Thailand on the western border.

         With luck, Sambath’s eyes deceived him now.

         The prisoner straightened his bearing, ready to accept his fate with dignity. He looked toward Sambath; their gazes locked for a moment, absorbed in their fears for each other. What could they make of their mutual discovery in the moments before the prisoner’s execution?

         And what had caught the attention of Comrade Bin’s best worker? Sambath never stopped working without a compelling reason. Here perhaps was a diversion to lift Comrade Bin from his boredom.

         “I see you have picked someone out of the crowd.” Comrade Bin spoke barely above a whisper, but every muscle tensed in Sambath’s body. Bin crooked a finger at the prisoner, who approached slowly. A round-faced soldier followed with his AK-47 unslung.

         “Ah, I see,” said Bin. “He has your walk. And look, Comrade. He has the same mouth, the same coffee-brown eyes. He’s a solid-looking man, just like you.”

         Sambath gulped. “He would be an excellent worker.”

         “I will decide that. Is he your father?”

         “He’s not my son,” the prisoner said.

         “No, he was my neighbor,” Sambath said.

         Comrade Bin looked at the prisoner’s features carefully,
then
turned to Sambath.
“A neighbor who slept with your mother, perhaps.
Where did you grow up?”

         Sambath hesitated; the prisoner mouthed the word “Poipet.”

         “I grew up in Poipet,” Sambath said.

         “That’s where the prisoner claims he’s from,” the soldier said. “But he’s a police chief from Battambang.”

         “You know what
Angka
thinks of liars, Comrade Sambath. If you admit the truth, I will let your father join your work group.” Comrade Bin smiled, his eyes glinting with compassion, honesty, and understanding.

         His tongue darted like a snake’s.

         What could Sambath do? Deny Father’s identity and condemn him to certain death? Or admit it and possibly condemn them both?

         “He--he is my father. He would be an excellent--”

         “You are not my son,” the prisoner said. “You are
not
my son.”

         “You have nothing to fear from honesty,” Comrade Bin said. “But I’m surprised that you can’t agree on this. I think I know how to find out the truth.”

         That evening, the work camp settled into shadows beneath treetops that glowed like golden embers from the sun’s dying flame. Father hung on a pipe cross made of plumbing ripped from the stucco building. Beneath his feet, the kindling waited for a spark. For a moment, the two were alone.

         “Father,” Sambath pleaded. “The others are dead. Admit who you are. Maybe Comrade Bin will keep his word.”

         “He already knows who I am,” Father said. “He wants to know about you. Here they come.”

         “Yes, here we come.” Comrade Bin held up a sheaf of dry grass while a nameless aide toyed with a cigarette lighter. “Comrade Sambath, you turned that boy to charcoal on the hill this morning. This will be nothing different: take a life and save your own.”

         “No! He’s my father!”

         “He is a criminal. If you are his son, then you are a criminal too.”

         The aide flicked the lighter; the end of the straw burst into yellow flame. Comrade Bin extended the torch to Sambath.

         “No!”

         “No is a dangerous word, Comrade.”

         Father spoke softly. “I wish to make a confession.”

         Comrade Bin stepped closer, the light flickering across his face. He loved to hear confessions.

         “You don’t have the courage to light it yourself,” Father said, and he spit in Comrade Bin’s eye.

         Bin stood still for a moment,
then
thrust the torch into the kindling. He wiped the spittle from his face and stared at the flames, willing them to grow. Tongues from hell licked at the soles of Father’s feet, and he sucked in a deep breath.

         Sambath choked back a scream.

         Red and yellow light flickered across Comrade Bin’s face. “You will stay here and watch Comrade Father die,” he told Sambath, “however long it takes.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“I buried him, Julie.” Sam’s voice caught briefly. “I buried my father. When I came to America, I tried to shut the past out completely. I had never expected justice for
his
death, but it made me sick having to look for Bin Chea’s killer.

         “Meanwhile, the whole case file has disappeared. Wilkins said the FBI identified the prints on the shooting victim as Bin Chea’s. When I saw Chea’s picture, I was only too anxious for him to burn in hell.”

         “We need a few days’ vacation, Sam. You have two weeks coming. Let’s go up to Sunapee.”

         “Your father wouldn’t let me near his cottage.”

         “I’ll just smile sweetly. He won’t say no to his little princess.” She batted her eyes and winced, as though she’d hurt herself blinking.

         They hadn’t gone to New Hampshire since he’d received his patrolman’s badge. Her folks’ cottage on Lake Sunapee would be a good place to decompress. Teach Trish to swim. Hold Julie’s hand while they stood ankle-deep in the water and watched Trish try to cup minnows in her hands.

         “I’ll take you and Trish up there,
then
go back to work. You both need to get away from here, and I’ll come up when I can.”

         Julie made the arrangements with her mother, then
lay
down next to Sam and fell asleep. His mind began to drift, and Sarapon’s voice echoed in his mind: