A Nail Through the Heart (23 page)

“Probably stuck in traffic. It’s rush hour.”

“It shouldn’t be taking him this long.”

“He’ll be here.” Rafferty prompts the man back to his story. “You met Madame Wing in an interrogation center.”

“‘Met’ is an interesting choice of words. You could say I walked into her, in the sense that people sometimes walk into an airplane
propeller. You could say I was thrown into her, like a tree into a chipper. ‘Met’ is a little on the soft side. But I don’t want to talk about her yet. We’ll talk about her when the boy gets here.”

“I want a beer,” Rafferty says. In fact, he needs to escape the room: the thick, dark atmosphere and the darkness of Chouk’s past. They combine to exert a pressure that makes him feel like he’s been buried alive. “I’d offer you one, but it’d probably knock you out.”

“I don’t drink.”

“Hang on.” He goes out into the equally dark living room, snapping on lights as he goes. The illumination does nothing to lift his mood. A detour takes him to Miaow’s room, where she is bent over a schoolbook, copying something down. The tip of her tongue is pasted to her upper lip.

“Hello, Miaow.”

“Hello, Poke.” She does not look up from her work. “Where’s Boo?”

The old name seems appropriate for the first time. “On an errand.”

“Who are you talking to?”

“Someone who doesn’t feel well. I’ll tell you about it later.”

She squints down at the book. “What does ‘spontaneous’ mean?”

He hates this kind of question. “Um…sort of unplanned. You know, if you were a witch and you decided all of a sudden to turn me into a toadstool, that would be a spontaneous decision.”

“You’re too nice to be a toadstool,” she says without looking up.

“Thank you, Miaow.”

“I’d turn you into a mushroom.”

“Great,” Rafferty says. “I could be your pet mushroom. You could buy me a little hat.”

“Mushrooms already have caps,” Miaow says, dismissing him.

One-upped by an eight-year-old. There is something sane and warm in being one-upped by an eight-year-old. In the kitchen he pops a beer, draws a deep breath for strength, and goes back into the bedroom. On the threshold he hesitates and then decides against turning on the lights. Chouk rolls toward him, his face thrown into
relief by the light coming through the door until Rafferty pulls it closed behind him.

“You were in Phnom Penh,” Rafferty says, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Not for long. A few weeks. Then we were sent to the countryside. We grew rice. We dug ditches. We dug graves.” He pauses and swallows. “A great many graves. The killing never stopped. And the interrogations went on day and night.

“There were already interrogation centers all over the country, for those who didn’t plant rice fast enough, or grumbled about being worked sixteen hours a day, or starved with insufficient enthusiasm. Or people they should have killed the first time around but missed. People like me.”

“How did they find out who you were?”

“Somebody talked.” He takes a breath and holds it, then releases it. “Somebody always talked.” He turns to Rafferty, and his eyes glint in the darkness. “It might have been one of my daughters. They indoctrinated the children twenty-four hours a day.”

Rafferty says the only kind thing he can think of. “But you don’t know that.”

“And I don’t want to know. I think it would kill me.”

“So you were betrayed. What happened?”

“I was special, because I’d had some status before the revolution, so they sent me to Tuol Sleng. In the middle of Phnom Penh, they took over a high school and turned it into something new: an interrogation and murder facility for Khmer Rouge who had betrayed the revolution. Of course, nobody had betrayed the revolution. It was just craziness, paranoia. They used Tuol Sleng to torture confessions from people Pol Pot was afraid of, or just tired of. The basic idea was simple. Bring people in, torture them until they signed a confession, and kill them. Seventeen thousand people went in. Seven came out.”

The room is almost completely dark. The sound of traffic from the street is like an anchor to the life of Bangkok, going on all around them. “What were they supposed to confess to?”

“Anything. Collaborating with the CIA. Sympathizing with
Vietnam. Listening to Thai pop music. Eating weeds in the forest. One person confessed to not watering his houseplants. Whatever it was, people were tormented until they said what they were told to say, and then they were taken to the killing field at Cheung Ek in trucks and put to death. Beaten with hoes, usually, or chopped with machetes, because the revolution was short of bullets.”

“Did they do that to your hand?”

“This?” Chouk looks at Rafferty as though he hasn’t been listening. He lifts the hand as far as the chain will allow. “This was just a way of saying hello. It’s trivial. They wouldn’t even have bothered with it if they hadn’t known I was a violinist. They did it to hurt me inside and also, I think, because they just hated beauty. Beauty frightened them. They beheaded every Buddha at Angkor. This hand could finger the melodies of Beethoven and Bach, so they destroyed it.”

He gazes at the ruined hand regretfully but remotely, the way someone might look at a house that burned down years ago. “They did it with a hammer and pliers in one of the interrogation rooms. Classrooms, they had been, with blackboards and windows so the children could see the sky while they learned. They put an iron bed frame in each room and wired it to a hand-cranked generator. In one corner they put the knives and the bolt cutters and the pruning shears and the whips made out of heavy copper electrical wire, and the iron rods they used to break the long bones. They placed these things in the corner opposite the door so they were the first thing the subject saw when he came into the room. To the left of the door was a little table with a chair in front of it for the interrogator to use. The table and the chair were so neat, so
clean.
In some ways they were the worst things in the room. We were chained to the bed frame, filthy and stinking with our own piss and shit, and the table and chair were so clean. The interrogator sat there and made notes while his assistants did their work. They worked around the clock sometimes, in shifts. You could hear screaming all day and all night. For some reason it was worst at night.”

The door to the bedroom opens, and Superman comes in, framed in light, holding a file folder. His eyes are enormous, stunned, like
someone who has just survived a disastrous accident and doesn’t know why. He moves quickly to Rafferty and thrusts the folder at him as though it were an animal that bites. Then he turns to the bed and spits on Chouk.

“No,”
Rafferty says, rising to take the boy by the shoulder. “He didn’t do anything.”

“You haven’t looked,” the boy says. “Kill him.”

Rafferty is still standing. “You’ve got it wrong. Now beat it. Go sit with Miaow. And don’t talk about this. I’ll explain it after dinner.” He takes a napkin from the sandwich plate and wipes the spittle from Chouk’s face.

“Not hungry.” Superman has not taken his eyes off Chouk. He purses his lips, and Rafferty thinks he will spit again, but instead he stalks from the room, slamming the door behind him.

“A warrior,” Chouk says. “Is he yours?”

“Apparently.” Rafferty turns on the bedside light, squinting against the glare, and begins to open the folder.

“Wait,” Chouk says. “Before you look at it, let me tell you what it is.”

He shifts a little in the bed. “Just in case anyone still doubted that Pol Pot was insane, he declared war on Vietnam. This was the country that had just defeated America. They were better armed than the Russians. The war lasted two weeks, and then the Vietnamese came.”

“And bless them for it.”

“We were already in Tuol Sleng by then. When a subject was sent to Tuol Sleng, his family went with him. So my wife and children were there, too.” He stops, and his eyes go to the folder. “My wife and children,” he repeats.

“Tuol Sleng was a summer camp for monsters, but they were precise monsters. The precision took the form of exhaustive files on every prisoner who entered the prison: the charges against them, the forms of torture used during the interrogation, the confession, and the date of death. We were all going to die, of course. It was like the Red Queen in
Alice in Wonderland:
sentence first, verdict afterward. Every prisoner was photographed, sometimes just before they were
killed. The highest-ranking prisoners were photographed dead, as proof for Pol Pot and the other fat boys. There were thousands of photographs.”

“I’ve seen some of them.”

“A man named Duch headed up the operation, but the interrogators did most of the work. The head female interrogator was called Keck.”

The two men look at each other, and Rafferty says, “Madame Wing.”

“We had been there a week when she killed my wife and daughters. She killed my oldest daughter first, in front of my wife. She was trying to make my wife say I was a CIA agent. Tiara was a beautiful girl, so she began by cutting off her nose. She did it with a razor, and she made my wife sharpen the razor. She told my wife, ‘The sharper it is, the less it will hurt.’”

He is looking at the blanket now, and tears are falling from his downturned face. “She murdered them all. She saved my wife for last and killed her with me in the room. She made it go on for two days. I was shackled hand and foot while she worked. There was nothing personal in it as far as Keck was concerned. It was what she did, eight hours a day. She took pleasure from it, but it wasn’t personal. They could have been anyone, as long as they had nerves and tears and blood and bone. I could have been anyone, as long as I loved them, as long as it hurt me to watch. It wasn’t enough to maim us, to kill us. First they had to drive a nail through our hearts.”

Rafferty draws a couple of deep breaths. “Why are you alive?”

“Pol Pot’s war against Vietnam. The Vietnamese invaded Phnom Penh, and the guards and interrogators ran. They had just started on me. I guess you could say I was lucky. After my first session, they returned me to the group cells. As soon as the Vietnamese entered Phnom Penh, the interrogators killed everyone in the interrogation rooms, and then they went to get the files. When the Vietnamese arrived, they found bodies everywhere and seven of us alive. In one room there were two filing cabinets full of photos. One drawer was empty. It had held pictures of the interrogators at work. Keck emp
tied it. I saw her leave with it.” He glances down at the folder in Rafferty’s lap. “With that.”

“This is hardly a drawer’s worth.”

“I don’t know what happened to the rest. She may have thrown them away. She may have sold them, one at a time, to the people who were in them. Those are the pictures of her. You can look at them now.”

The folder opens too easily for what it contains.

The first thing he sees is Keck’s eyes. They look out of a gaunt younger woman’s face. The flesh beneath the skin has been burned away by the rage that animates the face. The eyes could be looking at a barren landscape, a blasted tree, the face of the moon. They have no time for anything living.

The other pictures are unendurable. Flesh tears, bones snap. Keck’s long fingers slice and probe. The luminous eyes look down as from a great altitude, as though the living beings she is driving mad with pain are as distant as ships slipping below the horizon.

Rafferty looks at the top sheet and closes his eyes. While they are still closed, he shuts the folder. When he opens his eyes, Chouk is studying him to assess his reaction. “Why would she keep these?”

“The same reason people keep photos from their school days, or of their families. It was the best time in her life. She was happy.”

“How did you find her?”

He shakes his head. “It was easy. It took some time, but it was easy. She had been stealing money for years, taking everything people owned—cash, gold, art, everything—and promising them freedom. Then she had them killed. She put it all in Thai banks, millions and millions of baht. With that kind of money here, I knew she’d buy a house. She needed the security of a house, someplace she could hide in, someplace with open space around it, where she could see people coming. Where she could have guards. So it had to be a house, a big house. With walls. She needed a prison. From one prison to another.” He sighs. “I searched the city records. Not that many expensive houses are registered in women’s names. I found about forty that had been bought fifteen to twenty years ago. Out of those, only a dozen
were walled off. I went to those one at a time, waiting outside until I saw a woman of the right age. She drove out of the ninth house I watched, the second day I was there. I knew her the moment I saw her.”

“The eyes,” Rafferty says.

“Of course.”

“Did she see you?”

“It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t have recognized me anyway. I was one of thousands. When she was finished, she forgot us instantly. We were interesting only while she had us chained to the bed frame.”

“Well, shit,” Rafferty says. “It’s a shame you didn’t get her before I found you.”

“Nothing to be done,” Chouk says. “I took too long. This is what I deserve. It wasn’t right for me to want her to suffer that way.”

“Yeah, but it’s not what
she
deserves. Why not give the pictures to the cops or send them to the newspapers?” He knows the answer as he asks the questions.

“The papers wouldn’t print them without proof the woman in them was Madame Wing. The police would just go to her and demand more money. There’s no way to prove who she is, and she’s got enough money to satisfy even them.”

“A little while ago, you said it was too late for you to finish. What did that mean?”

“I made myself a promise,” he says. “Two days from now is the twenty-seventh anniversary of my wife’s death. I vowed that one of us would be dead by then.” He lifts the chained hand and lets it drop again. “And now look at me.” The tears start to flow again. “So she lives to a ripe old age.”

Rafferty automatically picks up the plate and the empty bottles. His mind is working so fast he doesn’t know what his hands are doing. “Well,” he says, “let’s not leap to conclusions.”