Supernotes (17 page)

Prey Sar Correctional Center, near Phnom Penh, Cambodia

February 2009

There are only eight of them in here. The privileged prisoners of Prey Sar.

“Not to worry, it didn't cost me very much,” the Chinese boss reassured him. “I opted for a lump sum contract,” he added with his usual irony as he was introducing Kasper to his new quarters and his new companions.

Besides Victor Chao, there are two former police officers, a tax official, and three common prisoners. People with money to spend. One of them is Mr. T.

They aren't very closely monitored, and there are even times when it's possible for them to use cell phones. They can also prepare their own food, and they have a bit more space at their disposal. Not a lot more, of course, but in any case more than any of the other prisoners have.

As far as Kasper's concerned, his new accommodations offer numerous advantages. There's only one downside: proximity to a giant black man who hates him.

Mr. T isn't happy to have the Italian as a roommate and immediately made his feelings known: “What the fuck is he doing here with us?” As he said this, he stroked the handle of a machete hidden inside his blanket.

Victor Chao intervened to make peace. Later he advised Kasper, “If he provokes you, pretend not to notice.”

No problem. He doesn't consider Mr. T an enemy. With Kasper so close, Mr. T's grudge does seem a little more intense. Nevertheless, Kasper gives him no encouragement. In fact, he considers him a resource that could, at the right moment, turn out to be useful.

In the meantime, Kasper is writing. He has already filled two notebooks, which with Chou Chet's help he managed to get to Brady and on to Manuela in Italy. At the right moment, she'll be the one who makes sure his lawyer makes proper use of them.

The right moment's not far away.

Two days ago Kasper received a visit from one of the Comboni Fathers. Just before his capture he was able to get several wealthy Westerners who live in the Cambodian capital involved in their work. He and Patty organized their distributions of food and clothing to the desperate masses on the outskirts of the city.

The padre who comes to see him in Prey Sar explains that the Comboni Fathers, on the other hand, can do very little for him. His situation is so complicated!

But Kasper makes no objection. He has only one request: “I'd like to receive extreme unction.”

The priest looks at him as though he's just asked for a mortgage. “What are you saying, my brother?”

“I'm asking you for the only thing you can give me. You can't refuse, Father.”

Mr. T has his cooking done for him by an inmate. Another comes twice a day to do the cleaning. They're his slaves and are treated as such.

From outside Prey Sar, his family is providing for him. His wife often comes to visit him and brings with her all sorts of good things to eat, which he gladly shares with his fellow prisoners. With all of them, except the Italian.

Kasper's resigned to missing the treats. He spends his days writing in his notebooks and talking to Victor Chao. He's able to use the new Nokia Chou Chet procured for him, so he can call home almost every day. He's tried to reestablish contact with Patty, but without success.

That afternoon, Victor Chao comes in with a gift for him. An inflatable air mattress.

“Look, I have no plans to go to the beach,” Kasper jokes.

“With all the pounding you've taken, you can't keep sleeping on concrete,” says Victor. “Please accept it.”

Kasper takes the mattress. That night, he sleeps on a softer surface than usual. But the change is short-lived. The next evening, when he returns to the room, the inflatable air mattress has been reduced to limp strips. Not far away, Mr. T is polishing the blade of his machete and seems to be in a particularly good mood.

Kasper rolls up what's left of the air mattress and makes it into a sort of pillow. He doesn't say anything. His prison mates exchange alarmed glances. He pretends not to notice them, but he understands their meaning. Mr. T is a pretty turbulent giant, but the Italian's no wimp either. The temperature in those few square meters of space is liable to rise dangerously, and so it's best to avoid those two.

But Kasper doesn't react. Not this time. He rests his head on his former mattress and concentrates on his writing.

Victor Chao loves to write too. “Tell me if you like what I've come up with,” he says. “This is the result of deep reflection.”

His tone is solemn. His expression is serious and focused. He clears his throat and says, “It's called ‘How to Get Up Better After You Fall.' ”

“I'm listening.”

The former commander of Eagle Force reads Kasper his composition:

“What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

When the road gets tough, only the tough can travel it.

He who knows how to take a punch will last longer.

He who can fall gracefully will live longer.”

Victor stops and looks at him. “What do you think?”

“Well, those seem like…interesting thoughts.” Kasper nods, drawing on the small store of tactful Florentine diplomacy still at his disposal. He approves decisively. “All good common sense.”

“I knew you'd like them. Listen to the others:

“The right direction isn't always the fastest.

The integrity of the inner spirit must never be destroyed.”

He pauses, scrutinizes Kasper, and announces, “Now listen to this one.” He inhales as though he's about to dive into deep water. Then he reads, “Our weaknesses are the real enemy. Fight them every day.” He fills his lungs again for the conclusion: “By the fallen Victor Chao, drummer commander of Eagle Force.”

He gives Kasper the sheet of paper. “It's yours. In memory of these days.”

“You keep it. You can give it to me when you get out of here,” Kasper replies.

“No, my friend,” the smiling Victor says. “You'll leave before me. I dreamed it last night.”

The cell phone vibrates just as Kasper's finishing dinner. He answers and recognizes her voice at once.

Patty.

“Hang on a minute, please,” he says, heading for the farthest corner of the room. It's just a few meters away, but the distance gives the illusion of an acceptable level of privacy. He turns his back on the others and bends over, making himself small. The phone makes his ear hot.

Patty explains that she couldn't leave him with just a letter. She tells him she loves him, but she can't handle it anymore. Not the way things are. She repeats the things she wrote in her letter: family, friends, the environment she lives and works in—it's all unbearably difficult.

Patty talks, he listens. Word after word, pauses, sighs. And he thinks his girlfriend's right. He thinks everything she's saying is true. It's all ruthlessly logical, pitilessly fair.

He asks only that she give him some time. “Don't make any rash decisions. Let me resolve this thing. Give me time to get out of here. When I get back to Italy, I'll explain everything. I'll leave this world behind me, I swear I will. I want kids too. I want a home and a normal life….”

For the first time Kasper has the courage to admit the possibility of becoming a different man. A normal man. Who comes home in the evening and sits at the table with his family. Who helps make dinner, run the household, plan budgets and holidays. A man like so many other men, not an explosive military device with delusions of invulnerability.

“That's not true, I don't believe it. I don't believe you.”

“Just give me a chance.”

Patty starts to cry. A chance. What chance? What solutions is he talking about? Her desperate weeping, thousands of miles away, is the sound track of his failure.

Kasper recalls the day he told her, “I may suddenly disappear one day. But wait for me. I'll always come back.” How vainglorious, reckless, selfish. Now it's easy for him to point the finger at himself. At his own faded superman image. In the mirror misted over by the breath of misfortune, what he now sees is the profile of a ghost, ever more fleeting. “That's what I am from now on,” he says aloud. “A ghost and a memory.”

But Patty has to be free to go if she wants. Free to live her own life.

“Maybe you're right,” he suddenly says. “Maybe we should both find our own way. At the moment, mine goes nowhere. Listen, let's end it here. Don't call me again. Delete this number. Delete me.”

He ends the call and squeezes the cell phone shut with both hands, as though he wants to crush it into a mound of dust. He bows his head between his knees and puts his arms around them in a resigned embrace.

Kill me now, God, is his silent invocation. Strike me with something swift and definitive. With a meteorite, say, a direct hit on Prey Sar, a direct hit on my head.

And the meteorite promptly arrives.

“What's the matter, Italian, your girl left you?”

Mr. T's voice quiets the murmur of the other prisoners. The ensuing silence is gaping.

“Don't let it get to you. She must have finally realized you aren't worth a fuck.”

“You've got that wrong, shit-ball,” Kasper replies, getting to his feet.

His movement is decisive but slow, slow enough for him to spot Victor Chao, who raises both hands to stop him, signaling that he shouldn't respond to this latest provocation.

Too late.

The time has come for Kasper to settle his accounts. All his accounts.

The rest of his reply is from the standard anthology, directly from the brawls of his youth. “You see, you big bastard, the thing is, every now and then I do your wife. Because it turns out you have no balls, you ugly piece of shit, and get this: the news has spread all the way to Italy.”

What Mr. T makes is not so much a movement as a cyclonic displacement. Howling a curse, gripping his machete in one hand, he hurls himself at Kasper. He shouts again, but this time it's an incomprehensible, cavernous roar.

A warrior's death. That's as good as it gets, here and now, Kasper thinks.

The man advancing on him at the moment is certainly the proper opponent. And so Kasper awaits him unmoving. He'll be able to put up a respectable fight against this war machine before succumbing to it.

The other prisoners are still trying to get out of the way, pressing themselves against the walls of the room, which is about to turn into a slaughterhouse. Nothing and no one can prevent the imminent impact.

No one except Victor Chao.

The Chinaman is slender and extremely agile. He jumps at Mr. T and grabs his machete arm with both hands. A twig clinging to a monster in motion. Victor manages to stop him momentarily but winds up on the floor himself. And in his homicidal fury, the monster no longer makes distinctions. He swings his machete down at Victor Chao, missing him by inches and putting a gash in the concrete. He yanks the machete up again immediately. He won't miss a second time.

And that's no good, Kasper thinks.

Something lights up again in him. A broken circuit is repaired. A flame reignites. And his resignation dissolves into rage.

Kasper charges at Mr. T, fakes a blow to the face, bends down, spins, and delivers a roundhouse kick to the inside of his right knee. It's like kicking a bronze column. Kasper feels a stabbing pain in his bare foot. But the giant staggers, shouts. His balance has suddenly become precarious.

Kasper grabs the communal wok, which still contains vegetable scraps, and brings it down on the arm wielding the machete. Three blows with the side of the wok, until the weapon falls to the floor. Victor Chao darts out and quickly recovers it.

Mr. T yells in pain and makes a ferocious effort to start over. The other inmates are shouting, calling the guards. Kasper howls too, a primeval force within him that can no longer be contained.

The wok crashes down on his opponent's head. Repeatedly. Spurts of blood and fragments of skull fly in all directions, spattering the ceiling and the walls, until Mr. T lands facedown on the concrete floor.

The guards who burst into the room find a bloody hulk, barely breathing. Not far from him, there's a highly strung man with a wok in his hands who looks like he's just stepped out of a horror movie.

The other prisoners ask only to be allowed out of there as quickly as possible.

The only one who doesn't leave the scene is Victor Chao. “The Italian,” he says, indicating Kasper, “saved us from that madman and his machete. I'm a witness.”

Later he helps Kasper wash up and tries to make him sit down. Kasper shakes his head. He's panting, his lips are quivering unstoppably, and the rest of him is shaking too.

Victor Chao gives him a joint to smoke. “Inhale this, don't talk,” he orders. “Don't say anything.”

“Why did you jump in?” Kasper asks him with the remnants of his voice.

“There are two situations where you can find out who your real friends are. When you're sick in bed, and when you're confined in prison.”

“What the fuck is that?”

“A Chinese proverb. It isn't mine. Not yet, at least.”

“You saved me….”

“This world's a disgusting place, brother. You would have done the same for me.”

Prey Sar Correctional Center, near Phnom Penh, Cambodia

March 2009

The French diplomat can't be found.

Disappeared.

Kasper has tried various avenues, including Brady. He sent his mechanic friend directly to the French embassy, but all he got was some funny looks. They never heard of any Louis Bastien. They had Brady write out in detail the reasons for his request and leave his telephone numbers. You never know, a Monsieur Bastien might eventually pop out of some office or other.

The French, Kasper thinks. “The premier people in the universe,” said Flaubert, with the humility typical of our snail-eating cousins.

Maybe Louis Bastien is simply a ghost, one more clever little trick played on Kasper by whoever dragged him into this trap.

Then again, the Americans lack the imagination to invent a phony French diplomat who introduces himself and then says, first thing, “I play the guitar, and I'm even pretty good.” They don't waste time on niceties, as a rule.

If Bastien exists, and if he really is what he says he is, Kasper feels this is a chance he can't afford to miss. You can talk to the French. And Kasper's got something to offer. His story.

Kasper has also sent out feelers for Sylvain Vogel, but the professor's traveling. Between Pakistan and Afghanistan, as usual. When Sylvain will return to Phnom Penh, and whether he'll be able to help him when he does, is difficult to say.

Theoretically, the best person to put Kasper in touch with Louis Bastien would be Marco Lanna, so Kasper asked Brady to try to find him too. But the Italian honorary consul, it turns out, is in Italy. He'll be back in a matter of days.

“Why don't we try to reach him by phone?” Kasper's mechanic friend suggested.

Terrible idea, Kasper thought. Lanna's surely being spied on. The Americans spy on everybody these days. I have to wait until he comes back to Phnom Penh and talk to him in a safe place.

Meanwhile, Kasper has been anything but short on company.

On a recent Saturday morning he received a visit from Darrha. The CID lieutenant had taken advantage of the prison director's absence and forced Kasper to meet with him. Their interview was brief but intense.

“Fifty thousand dollars and I get you out of here,” Darrha said.

“I don't have any more money.
Finito.
”

“Bullshit. And don't play smart with me, motherfucker. I heard you nearly killed the big black stud. I like you like that, the fucking tough guy. You remember our little games with the pistol? I always knew you had balls, motherfucker. But…now they're going to make you pay. You can't go around beating the shit out of Cambodians like that, even if they're half-African. You're gonna croak in here, my friend.”

Kasper didn't respond. He let him talk. And when Darrha threatened him and promised to return soon, Kasper just listened.

A few hours later, he was called to another interview.

With the Visitors, this time.

Grumpy and friend had found out he'd placed himself under Victor Chao's protection.

That won't last long, the Americans warned him. “Your Chinese pal's dirty,” they said. “He traffics in bad luck. Sooner or later, someone's going to come and get him, and then what will you do, poor little orphan, all alone?”

They reminded him that nobody in Italy cares very much about what happens to him. That his elderly mother's on her way out, and that his girlfriend has dumped him. Other choice items from their repertoire followed.

Kasper listened to them in silence. No reaction.

He stared through them as though they were transparent, and beyond them he could see a totally different world. Less fake, less depressing, more normal. A place he wants to be.

Because he doesn't want to die. Not anymore.

That's what he realized in the days following his fight with Mr. T. Mr. T, it seems, has been useful for something.

Kasper's victory promoted him from “the Animal” to “the Beast.” The looks he gets are downright fearful. The kind of fear that cements alliances.

He's the ferocious brute prowling around the village. A danger.

And a future trophy.

Mr. T's friends are waiting.

They won't let Kasper get away with beating a fellow Cambodian half to death. Even one with black skin. Especially one with money on the outside.

Sooner or later, it'll happen. Darrha's right. He won't always have a shield. Victor Chao's protection won't last long.

The Americans warned him they'd be back to attend his autopsy if he didn't accept their offer to get him out. They're right too.

They're all right.

Including the Comboni Fathers, who returned to tell him that only the Lord can help him. They'd pray for him, they said, in their beautiful church in Phnom Penh.

Amen, brothers.

Kasper sleeps on it. Or at least he tries.

“I want to go home.”

“Vouloir, c'est pouvoir,”
Louis Bastien says with a smile. Then, switching to Italian,
“Bene. A quanto vedo stiamo facendo progressi.”

No way this guy's not secret service, Kasper thinks.

Bastien has reappeared unexpectedly, just when Kasper had lost hope of contacting him. He doesn't say whether he received the message Brady left for him at the embassy. He says only that he's just returned to Phnom Penh.

He was out of the country, he explains. On tour.

“On tour?”

“With my group…my band,
voilà.
Musicians. We're two Europeans, an American, and two Cambodians. We do rock and pop covers. Our repertoire's mostly songs from the '80s—still very popular in these parts. And so we have to go on the road a bit. We have a good time.”

“What do you play?”

“Mostly Queen, Genesis, some Toto, some Dire Straits…”

A rock 'n' roll diplomat with a repertoire of old favorites. That's all I've got at this point, thinks Kasper.

But despite himself he likes Bastien. They're pretty much alike, Kasper believes, transalpine counterparts. In fact, Bastien reminds him of a colleague from his IFF days in Paris in the '80s.

A business lunch in a Montparnasse brasserie. The first in a long series of such encounters. Kasper and the director collaborated on a unique scenario: the physical elimination of a South African enemy of NATO who was planning terrorist attacks. The performance was to take place in Paris. Nonfiction. Real weapons, a few involuntary extras. An authentic setting.

“I believe that was all a little before my time,” Bastien says, stroking his dark mustache when Kasper mentions the resemblance. “In those days I was thinking seriously about becoming a musician. I sang in a band, I wanted to go to the U.S., and I had girls on the brain. I was going to school and studying, too.”

The '80s, Kasper thinks, laughing. The crazy stuff he used to do in those days. Every now and then, they come back to him in his dreams. He tells Bastien about a nightmare he had a couple of nights ago. The epic bender, the Montreal–Turin flight, the little nap at 30,000 feet. With Dire Straits in his headphones.

“Incredible,” Bastien declares. “If you hadn't heard that radio call…”

“We would have crashed. Or British fighter jets would have shot us down, more likely.”

“So it was a flight controller who woke you up?” he asks.

“No way! It was the captain of a Boeing, a TWA jet on a flight to Europe, several thousand feet above us. I thanked him and blamed it on instrument failure. I don't know how, but we managed to land. In Reykjavík. Completely out of fuel.”

“Always living on the edge,” the French diplomat says.

“Yeah…But now I want to go home,” Kasper repeats.

“You didn't seem to feel that way two weeks ago.”

“I almost killed a man. Sooner or later, somebody's going to kill me.”

Bastien nods. He's heard about the prisoner who ended up in the hospital. He's heard that the other prisoners defended the Italian, bore witness on his behalf. “You've made a friend or two in here,” he says.

“Out there is where I'm a little short of friends,” Kasper says, smiling. “You know how it is. For friends you need radar.”

“Which means you'd like to know whether I'm your friend. And if so, how much of a friend.”

“Marco Lanna asked me for some information he could pass on to someone who might help me. If you really are that someone—”

“The stories I got from Lanna weren't all that helpful,” Bastien interrupts him. “I already knew most of the things he told me.”

“So what is it you want?”

“All I needed was to know who you are. Who you really are.”

“And you think you've figured it out now?”

“Let's say I've made some progress recently. I'll try to help you get out of here. Assuming you want me to, naturally.”

“You get me out of here, and I'll tell you everything. Fair swap.”

“I'll try. It won't be easy, but I have a few ideas….Although I wouldn't call it a swap.”

“So why are you doing it?”

“Because we're Europeans, we're cousins, no?” Bastien asks. He's smiling, but then he suddenly turns serious: “Because I was asked to do it.
Voilà.
”

“It wasn't Lanna who asked you. The consul's only a link.”

Bastien allows himself another brief laugh. “But naturally you're experienced enough not to ask me who it
was.
I would have told you already if I could have.”

Kasper nods. “Have you got a plan?”

“I've always got a plan. But I'm not completely convinced it's a good one. Not yet, at least. We'll talk about it soon.”

“I'll tell you what happened to me,” Kasper says insistently. “And why.”

“It isn't necessary.”

“I have to. Someone has to know. If I don't make it…if I don't get back home…I just don't want to think I'm taking it to the grave. What I saw, I mean. What I uncovered.”

“As you wish,” Bastien assents. He stands up and tells Kasper good-bye. “I'll see you tomorrow. In the meantime, watch your back. Not one word to your friends. And…I'm curious. What's your favorite Dire Straits song?”

“ ‘Brothers in Arms.' ”

“Mine too.”