White Crocodile (14 page)

The only remaining lead was Johnny. Luke had been afraid before he died, had obviously known that he was at risk. Did Johnny suspect, as Tess had discovered, that his own injury was deliberate? That he had now become a target for Luke’s murderer?

She was halfway across the hospital courtyard when she noticed the Land Cruiser parked under the trees by the wall.
Dammit. Alex.
She couldn’t go in to see Johnny with him there; didn’t even want Alex to know that she was here.

She turned to retrace her steps, and a movement on the common-room veranda caught her eye. Ret S’Mai was standing in the strip of darkness between two windows, talking with someone.

She started towards him, lifting a hand. ‘Ret S’Mai.’

He wheeled round. There was a man standing just behind him. Quickly, she took in the dark skin, the wide flat face, the high soft cheekbones, the crop of short, straight dark hair, the eyes, tiny, black, so similar to Ret S’Mai’s. A face staring out from the team-room wall.

Huan.

She broke into a run. Huan leaped off the veranda and sprinted across the courtyard into the darkness of the street. Ret S’Mai remained, big head bobbed forward, eyes cast to the ground.

‘Ret S’Mai . . .’

He backed away.

‘You know Huan?’

A tiny nod. ‘He my uncle.’

‘I need to talk to him.’

‘Talk to no one. No one at MCT.’

‘Why?’

But Ret S’Mai wouldn’t meet her gaze. She reached out and touched his arm; he looked up and their eyes met. There was a depth of venom in his gaze that shocked her. Cursing, she ducked away from him, across the courtyard and into the street. She stopped, looked left and right, left again. She couldn’t see anything – it was so dark – then a car drove past the end of the road and she caught sight of Huan, bathed for a moment in its headlights, slipping across the intersection.

She started to run. Keeping to the middle of the road. Skipping over the potholes, loose gravel skittering under her boots, calling Huan’s name between breaths. At the intersection, she paused – saw there was no traffic – and sprinted across. The street opposite was dark. The houses here were set well back from the road, their high, protective walls draped with foliage. She couldn’t see Huan, but she could hear the echo of his pounding feet. At the end of the road he turned right, joining a wider, better-lit boulevard which led towards the river. Tess reached the corner at a sprint, twenty metres behind him. There he was, running hard, bathed in coloured lights from the food stalls lining the riverbank. She sprinted after him, keeping to the side of the road so she didn’t get mown down by one of the mopeds. At the end of the road, Huan glanced behind him and dived into the crowd of Khmers thronging the stalls.

‘Fuck.’ She slowed and crossed the road at a walk, eyes scanning the milling faces. She pushed her way in amongst them, stood on tiptoes to scan over their heads. But clouds of smoke from wood fires and steam from cooking pots had massed above the stalls, held from dispersing in the night air by their plastic canopies; the fog reduced visibility to metres.

She gave up and began to wander among the stalls, gazing at the food, breathing in the smells, ignoring the eager faces and beckoning hands of stall owners, their customers squatting on stools, a steaming bowl in one hand, chopsticks pinched in the fingers of the other, some in groups, others alone, all staring up at her as she passed.

Tess emerged from the end of the food stalls into darkness, the sounds and smells fading behind her as she walked away. The storm had finally arrived. She hauled the collar of her shirt up around her face; rain melted into her hair and dripped down her neck. She jogged over to a tree by the side of the road and stood under it, gazing down at the river weaving through the darkness below her.

Standing under the tree, waiting for the rain to stop, Tess felt almost as if she was locked in a cage, the bars of rain fencing her in. She felt intensely frustrated – to have been so close to Huan and still not to have been able to reach him.

It was a feeling she had grown used to in Afghanistan. Always being one step behind: on the edge of achieving, of getting somewhere, but then never actually nailing the target. Securing a supply route, or clearing a village of IEDs – then hearing that the same route had been lost to the Taliban just a week later, or that most of the village had been razed in a Taliban mortar attack. The Afghan children she had seen watching the Engineers’ clearance operation from doorways, buried alive under tons of rubble.

What now? She didn’t want to go back to her room at Madam Chou’s. That would feel like failure, and she wouldn’t sleep well knowing that she’d spent most of the evening running in circles, chasing her tail.

Who could help her move forward? Alex was at the hospital, which put Johnny out of the picture, for the moment at least. MacSween was trying to keep the fear contained, and she was pretty certain that he wouldn’t open up. So that left Jakkleson. She was loath to have anything to do with him after those photographs she had found, but then she thought back to what he had said in the meeting the morning after Johnny’s accident.

You know that Johnny’s a complete bloody liability, MacSween.
In response, MacSween had exploded, she remembered, silencing him immediately. Jakkleson clearly had strong opinions about Johnny, so what had formed those opinions? He was also the admin man. He had written both reports – on Johnny’s accident and Luke’s death – and was the centre of information at MCT.

The Riverside Balcony Bar was a bar-restaurant on the second floor of an old wooden colonial building by the edge of the river. It was a favourite haunt of expatriate aid workers, and she had recognised it, from MacSween’s description, as the backdrop to a couple of Jakkleson’s more harmless photographs. It was surrounded by trees and open on three sides, giving it the feel of a treehouse in the jungle.

The bar was full, mainly locals. A smattering of middle-aged Western men: a few sitting around a table drinking, one sitting by the bar, his hand cupping the bottom of a young Khmer girl wearing tight white leggings and a flamingo-pink bra top. Beer girls in their skimpy dresses weaved through the tables, trying to sell their particular brand of beer with their charms. A few Khmer soldiers in uniform were crowded around two tables, pushed together, in the centre of the room.

She noticed Jakkleson immediately, sitting alone at a table in the far corner. He had his back to the room, so didn’t see her enter. She slipped through the wicker tables and chairs to the bar and ordered an Angkor beer. Then she walked to the wooden balcony railing, close to his table, and leaned over it, staring at the dark snake of river below, sipping her beer. A few moments later, over the jumbled hum of conversation, she heard her name called. She turned.

‘Jakkleson!’

He beckoned her to join him, standing and pulling out a chair for her. Sitting down, she met his pale gaze with a smile.

‘I didn’t realise you were here,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m . . . well – thank you. And what are
you
doing here?’

‘I was just up at the hospital. Visiting Johnny. I decided to grab a beer on my way back home. I haven’t been to central Battambang at night before.’

‘You shouldn’t either. Not alone.’

‘I’m sure I’ll survive.’

He didn’t answer her.

‘How
is
Johnny?’ he asked, after a moment.

Tess shrugged. She wasn’t about to explain to Jakkleson that she hadn’t actually seen Johnny, or the reason why. ‘I don’t think he’s the type to take an accident like that, a disability like that, in his stride.’

‘No. No, he’s not the type. I don’t think he’s ever had to face real adversity.’ Leaning across, he touched her arm. ‘Did you find what you were looking for in my office the other day?’

The question was so sudden that she was caught off balance. ‘I was using the internet. I should have asked, but it was after office hours and you weren’t there. I needed to email my father, let him know that I’m OK. He’s not a fan of telephones.’ She waited, almost holding her breath, wondering if he would press her on why she had been there so late at night.

He nodded. ‘That’s fine. You’re welcome to use it when you need to. All the troop commanders should have offices, but there isn’t the space, or the money.’ He gave a short, hollow laugh. ‘Johnny liked spending time in my office, too. He found my photographs interesting.’

Tess’s heart leaped into her throat. She had put them back exactly as she’d found them. Hadn’t she? And locked the drawer.
Hadn’t she?
Now – on the spot – she couldn’t think, couldn’t remember.

‘My family amused him,’ Jakkleson continued, and she felt relief wash over her. ‘It amused him to think that I was married. I’m not sure why.’ He gave a thin smile.

Tess nodded; she didn’t trust her voice enough to respond. Shifting her chair, she turned to survey the room, as Jakkleson was. The middle-aged man at the bar had been joined by another, also in the company of a teenaged Khmer girl wearing a strapless white minidress. The men were laughing together, the women cuddling up to them diffidently. The Khmer soldiers were drunk now, lolling in their chairs, their tabletop a riot of dirty plates and empty bottles. Space had formed around them, as if some imaginary line was forcing everyone else – even the Westerners – to keep a distance.

‘You come here to do good,’ Jakkleson said suddenly. ‘And then—’ He gestured irritably towards the room. ‘Then this world takes you over.’

Tess twisted to face him. ‘This world?’

He nodded, but didn’t elaborate. After a moment, she turned back to the jumble of tables and bodies. The military men were getting to their feet now. One swayed and knocked the table as he stood, sending a couple of bottles crashing to the ground. Another said something to him, something that made him straighten immediately. Tess looked from him to the man who had admonished him. He was tall, a head taller than the rest, pale skin accentuated by jet-black hair, aquiline nose, his eyes so black their irises merged into the pupils. He had five stars on his epaulettes. An officer then.

Jakkleson’s soft voice pulled her back. ‘You go to Phnom Penh and you see fifty-year-old Western men with eleven-year-old Khmer girls. Many of these men are from aid agencies. Their wives will be back home – their eleven-year-old daughters – thinking Daddy is off saving the world.’

Tess tried to catch his eye, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was still staring across the bar. She thought of the family smiling out from their silver frame on top of his filing cabinet. ‘What leads people to behave like that?’

‘Lack of respect. Power. Opportunity – knowing that they can behave in a way they wouldn’t in their own countries and get away with it. Precedents set by others who came before. Perhaps, a combination of all four.’ He spread his hands, nodding towards the military. They were leaving now, laughing at the waiter who had brought their bill, waving it away. ‘They have power and they use it to exploit their own countrymen. We foreigners come to help and we see this going on. See that people have no respect for each other. When some people see that, I imagine, it is hard for them not to think—’ He shrugged, gave a harsh half-laugh. ‘Not to think, why not? I’m working hard to help them, so perhaps . . . perhaps I should take a little for myself.’ He brushed a thin hand across his brow. ‘When you justify in those terms, it becomes easy.’ He dropped his hand and touched her arm. ‘Be careful, Tess,’ he warned softly. ‘Human nature is a dangerous thing.’ His hand felt cool on her skin. ‘Johnny – Johnny was,
is
, a good example of that.’ He squeezed, the tips of his thin fingers pressing into her flesh. ‘Don’t walk around on your own at night again.’

The sun hadn’t yet climbed above the horizon when Tess parked the Land Cruiser by the river and crossed the road to the Psar Nat market. She hadn’t been here before – only passed it a couple of times – but she needed to stock up on food.

The market occupied a vast, warehouse-like space on the ground floor of an art deco-style building in central Battambang. Inside, countless wooden tables were crammed together and piled to unfeasible heights with every kind of produce: anise star fruits, pineapples, papaya, bamboo, firewood, sacks of rice, a stall bearing cages of skinny, flapping, squawking chickens – most of them destined for egg production at least, she consoled herself, because the majority of Khmers were Buddhists and therefore vegetarians – wicker baskets filled with spices of every conceivable colour. A nanny goat wandered down one of the narrow twisting aisles, knocking a couple of papaya from a teetering stack with a swish of its tail. The level of noise – haggling, barter, chatter – was deafening.

Tess followed a corridor that cut between rows of stalls, slopping through the muck of rotten vegetables and litter on the floor, taking a right, then a left, another right, zigzagging her way into the depths of the market.

The smell of barbecuing meat filled her nostrils, and she turned towards it. Charred crickets lay on a metal grill above a wood fire in an oil drum. The stallholder, an elderly woman, her thinning grey hair swathed in a checked krama scarf, held up two fingers.

‘Crickets, madam. Very tasty. Only twenty cents one cricket.’

Smiling, Tess shook her head and stepped back, came hard up against someone.

‘Cambodian speciality, Miss Hardy,’ said a voice.

One of her section commanders, Mao, was standing behind her.

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean startle you, ma’am.’

Mao was in his early forties, older than the average age of the clearers by a good decade. He had a scar running across his cheek, from the corner of his mouth to his left ear, which made him look as if he was always smiling. He had argued with a man holding a machete when he was a boy, he had told her the first time they’d met. ‘I think I arguing with the man. But really I arguing with the machete. Never argue with a machete, ma’am, I learn this.’ He had a moon face running slightly to fat, and solemn dark eyes.

‘It’s fine, Mao. I just didn’t expect to bump into anyone I knew.’

He was dressed, like she was, in MCT uniform. Smiling, he held up his hands: he was clutching a paper cup of chai and an unlit roll-up in the other. ‘I run out of food too.’

‘Only twenty cents, madam. Very cheap.’

Turning back to the stall, Tess shook her head. The thought of eating one of those at any time of day made her queasy, but at six in the morning it was an impossibility.

‘Ten cents for one,’ the stallholder said. ‘Only ten cents big bargain. Crickets are lucky lucky.’ She laid a flat palm on her heart and grinned, showing teeth stained burgundy by betel nut, the front two missing. Tess noticed a chunk of betel tucked inside her cheek. ‘You eat cricket. You lucky inside.’

‘Eat one,’ Mao said. ‘For luck, like the lady say.’

She glanced across. ‘Do I need luck?’

‘We all need luck.’

‘What do they taste like?’

‘Cambodian delicacy.’

Tess laughed. ‘Yes. But what do they actually taste like?’

Mao smiled. ‘Taste like nothing. Like you eat burnt wood.’

‘OK. I can do burnt wood.’ Tess gave the stallholder twenty cents and picked up two of the charred crickets. Turning, she held one out to Mao. ‘For luck – and because there is no way I’m eating one of these on my own.’

‘Thank you.’ He gave a little bow.

‘Now is there any chance you can find me a coffee in this maze?’

Popping the cricket into his mouth whole, Mao turned away. ‘Follow me, ma’am.’

He led the way through the warren of stalls towards the front of the marketplace, where a young man was selling coffee and chai from two tin tea caddies perched on a small wooden handcart. A few people squatted on upturned plastic crates, drinking, chatting and squinting against the early morning sun. Buying two cups of coffee, Mao passed her one and they found a seat on a pile of old sacking. Tess was still holding her cricket, cold now, in the palm of her hand.

Mao nodded to the cricket. ‘You eat.’

She pulled the cricket in two, wincing at the slight resistance before it gave, and put the back end on to her tongue. Mao was right. It tasted of barbecue, nothing else.

Mao glanced at his watch. ‘We need be going, ma’am. It’s fifteen minutes after six, and ten minutes’ walk to MCT House.’

‘I’ve got one of the Land Cruisers parked outside. We can be there in a couple of minutes. There’s no rush.’

She wondered if he felt uncomfortable in her company. She had noticed some of the other Khmers at the chai stall casting Mao looks, as if they were wondering how he came to be in the company of a Western woman, even though they were wearing the same uniform.

‘Would you tell me the story of the White Crocodile, Mao?’

He looked surprised.

‘The real myth. Not that mad myth that’s got everyone going crazy.’

His eyes found the floor, but he nodded. ‘What do you know?’

‘Probably nothing. Certainly nothing sensible.’

He smiled faintly.

Someone was dragging a metal-wheeled trolley across the concrete floor of the marketplace. The sound of the wheels screeching cut over the ambient hum of barter and chatter, made Tess wince.

‘So the White Crocodile is a bad omen?’

Mao’s response was quick and clipped. ‘The White Crocodile is bad omen in Cambodia, this is sure.’ He folded his hands in his lap. ‘Cambodian people place a white cloth with a crocodile drawn on it outside their home when someone in their family dies. This White Crocodile is a sign of death. We call it
Tong Kroper
– Crocodile Flag.’

‘So in Cambodia the White Crocodile does signify death.’

He nodded. ‘Five hundred year ago, Kropom Chhouk, daughter of King Chan Reachea, was eaten by a huge white crocodile when swimming in Tonle Sap River – the river that joins Lake Tonle Sap to our capital city, Phnom Penh. The king order his men to find the crocodile and bring him. After many many weeks of looking, the crocodile found in a river in Ratanakkiri province—’ He drew his arm in a wide arc, pointing off across the chaos of stalls into the depths of the marketplace. ‘Far in the northeast of Cambodia, a hundred miles from where the princess eaten. The king kill the crocodile and take the body of his daughter from its stomach. Then he order that a Buddhist stupa be built to bury his daughter. The king also order twenty women be executed and buried around the stupa so their souls haunt the stupa and protect it from destruction for all time. Ever since, Cambodian people draw picture of a crocodile on white flags to signify death in family.’

‘I was hoping for something a little more cheery than that.’

Mao was gazing at the floor, his expression serious, closed off. ‘Cambodians are frightened of many things.’ He tugged at the collar on his shirt, flapping it against his skin; there was a large sweat stain on the fabric. ‘Bridges even, can you believe.’

Tess smiled. ‘How can anyone be frightened of bridges?’

‘During the reign of another of our kings – always it is the kings – people believed that to execute and bury dead bodies beneath bridges or temples would help to protect these places from being destroyed. Many Khmers, even to this day, are scared of bridges. So we must swim across the Sanger to get back to MCT House.’

‘How about we just lock the doors instead and I won’t stop for anything until we’re on the other side?’

Mao nodded. ‘Deal.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Now we must go. They will be waiting for us.’