Bible of the Dead (20 page)

Chapter 21

The head was floating. Another floating woman’s head, with a funereal veil of black gauze, or was it hair? The head was disembodied by dark, and it was sucking him, sucking his penis,
Kali Kra
, white toothed and drooling, fanged and desirous, with her two tongues black and blood-red, licking his erection, painfully, exquisitely, making him cry out.

He didn’t want the woman to stop, the witch, the spider witch, the
apsara
, to stop; surely it was Chemda who was blowing him, giving him pleasure, waking him with fellatio once again: and it was beautiful, Jake fought the beautiful feeling in his dreams, he was half awake now, yes he could see her, it was Chemda’s head above his groin in the darkness of the shuttered room above the
krama
shop in old Siem Reap.

‘Chemda, Chemda . . .’ He wanted real sex. Penetration. He grasped her head. He lifted her head from his erection, and she looked up at Jake, and her eyes flashed and smiled,
and it was his mother, sucking him. His mother, smiling up.

He woke with a myoclonic jerk, rigid with horror. Properly awake this time. It was just a dream, a lucid dream. He shuddered and looked around. The day had barely dawned: ladders of pale and unfading blue showed the slatted shutters of Sonisoy’s apartment.

Where was Chemda?

Jake swept a hand across the empty bed.

‘Chemda . . .’ he could sense the fragments of the dream fleeing him. Yet he kept seeing the image, of his mother, a head, disembodied, blood dripping from somewhere, the image of Kali, the Mother of Dissolution.

‘Hello.’

Chemda had walked into the room. She was dressed, and frowning.

‘Chemda. Are you OK?’

She shrugged.

‘Couldn’t really sleep. Ah. Not after hearing that about my father. We talked, me and Sonisoy.’ Her hands were hovering on her hips, impatient or wary – like a Western sharpshooter approaching a gunfight. ‘He wants us to see something in Angkor Wat, to tell us something.’

‘And?’

‘We’re gonna meet downstairs in ten minutes. Pack everything.’

Obedient, he threw a towel over his shoulder and walked for the shower. He really needed a shower.

Chemda loitered by the door, watching him, she looked at his nakedness as he walked. And lust flashed for a second in that gaze, he saw it: fleshly hunger. Kali, the devourer, with her seven black tongues.

She waved a dark hand at the bathroom.

‘Please, Jake, we need to be quick –’

‘I thought you said we’d be safe here. For a night.’

‘I did – I thought we would – until I heard that about my father. Now I wonder: is my whole family cursed, do they want us all dead? I don’t know. But this means everything is worse than we imagined –’

‘So. Let’s get to Thailand!’

‘But first I want to hear Sonisoy’s story. Then we go to Thailand.’

‘But what
about
Sonisoy?’

‘He’d have turned us in by now, if he was with them. I told you. I trust him more than anyone. Apart from you.’

Her eyes fixed on his. She continued:

‘Quick, ah, please, be quick. Sonisoy will take us to Angkor. Ten minutes.’

The shower took him two minutes: towel, clothes, socks, boots. Then he loitered in the bedroom packing his pitiful bag: two pairs of jeans and tee shirts bought from Siem Reap nightmarket, passport, cards, little camera, and a mobile phone. Jake stared at the phone, and took it out of the bag.

He dialled a number. Right now he needed a friendly voice, a western voice, an English speaking voice, a white voice. He felt so lost and isolated.

‘Yyyyyo?’

It was Tyrone at his groggiest. Just waking up, probably just assessing his hangover.

‘Ty. It’s Jake.’

Immediately, his friend sharpened.

‘Jake, for fuck’s sake where are you? The whole of PP is looking for you, you and Chemda.’

As concisely as possible Jake explained the situation – the grandfather, the firebomb, the janitor, the escape to Siem Reap. Tyrone cussed, urgently, a couple of times. Then Jake told his friend about Chemda’s father. Also lobotomized.

‘Fuck.’ Tyrone said. ‘How did she take
that?
’

Jake paused. He walked to the window and looked down at the unbusy streets of Siem Reap. He could see a street cleaner with a wicker hat and a municipal jerkin, brushing indolently – and a waiting tuk-tuk close to the front door.

‘Apparently it happened a few years after her family fled to California. She was young, nine or ten. All she remembers is that her dad was very depressed a lot of the time, drank too much. Silent. Taciturn.’

‘Sure, but a lot of Khmers were, like, traumatized by the genocides . . .’

‘And that’s what she presumed but last night she told me she dimly recalls a scar, on his head, under his hair. And very deep deep depressions.’

‘So he killed himself?’

‘No. He walked under a bus, very drunk, Chemda says. An accident. At least that’s what she was told at the time, by her mother. Madame Tek. But of course now she wonders if it wasn’t a total accident. There was some volition there, an act of self destruction, or at least nihilism. A brain damaged man in terminal despair.’

‘Jesus,’ said Tyrone. ‘No wonder grandfather Sen hates the Khmer Rouge so much, they did frontal lobotomies on half his family. Fuck. Fuck.
Fuck.
And now you’re going to Angkor on some Indiana Jones malarkey, nice timing –’

‘Sonisoy insists he has important evidence. We’re going to see it.’

‘And then?’

‘We will escape. Thailand.’

Tyrone drew breath.

‘That ain’t gonna be easy

–’ ‘Of course,
I know
– how can we do it? Any ideas?’

A pause. Then an answer.

‘When you’re finished in Angkor – head for Anlong Veng. Most remote border crossing. Chong Sa. I got friends there, from when I did my Ta Mok story. Might be able to help you. But just get there, as stealthily and as quickly as you can. Anyone repeat
anyone
could be a danger. Anyone at all.’

‘Anyone? Surely we are a little safer, this far out of Phnom Penh –’

Tyrone whistled impatiently.

‘Thurby,
you’re not getting me.
You don’t understand what’s fucking happening here in PP. It’s mayhem. The police are
hunting
for you, it’s all over the FCC, everywhere. Grandfather Sen has an advert in the
Post
this morning, asking for help in locating his granddaughter. And the article is worse, it has quotes from the Phnom Penh police, claiming you have kidnapped Chemda Tek. There’s even a fucking price on your head. You’re actually
wanted. Like in a Western
.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘I’m sorry Jake. It’s true. Why don’t you just go? Fuck the evidence. You need to get out now, Jake. Just go.’

‘But Chemda wants to see –’

‘Leave Chemda behind. Go now. You’re better off without her. Fucking safer.’

The idea was sensible, the idea was ludicrous.

‘I can’t leave her, Ty. You know that . . .’

He groaned.

‘But they’re after your ass! With guns. This is not a rehearsal. The chief of police says it, literally:
any means necessary may be used to rescue Chemda Tek from the kidnapper
, i.e. they can take you dead or alive as far as the authorities are concerned.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘And knowing this is Cambodia, what that really means is –’

‘I can’t leave her.’

Tyrone sighed.

‘I know you can’t. I know.’

Chapter 22

Julia pressed herself into a corner, a kind of vestibule between the office and the main doors of the archives of the archives of the Musée de l’Homme. Perhaps the killer would walk straight past, not see her, walk on.

Then she could run for it. If the killer walked straight down the lobby into the study room or the main archives she would have a few seconds to flee, without even being spotted.

The door swung open.

The killer stood there, looking left and right. Julia was hidden behind some coats and a stack of boxes, crushing herself backwards against the wall. She could feel her heart beating in her
lungs and her spine
: that’s how hard she was pressed to the brickwork.

Again, the killer glanced left, and then right. The face of the young murderer was pale to the point of unearthliness. There was something wrong with it, something strange.

Now the killer was staring directly into the gloom of the vestibule. Squinting. Surely she had seen Julia. Surely this was it.

But then the woman walked on into the hallway, and she tapped on the glass. She wanted to speak to the curator. The grouchy old Frenchman.

Julia quelled her despair. This was another vortex of anxiety. Assuredly, the French curator would say, ‘Oh there is someone here looking for you, she is in the building, she was here a minute ago,’ and then – then the killer would turn and narrow those dark eyes and she would see Julia and the knives would come out or worse.

The curator appeared to be asleep, or disappeared. There was no response to the woman’s persistent tapping.

Tap, tock, tap.

‘
Bonjour
? Hello? Anyone there?’

No reply. The small lithe woman had a soft deep voice. Maybe an American or Canadian accent. Yet the face was not European. Maybe it
was
Asian. Oriental. Yet bewilderingly pale.

The murderer leaned close to the glass, cupping a hand to her eyes to see better, to see through. Where was the curator?

Tap, tock, tap.

‘Bonjour?’

Julia assessed her chances. She could just run now, run right past, out of the main door; it might take seconds for the murderer to realize what had happened; to turn and see the door swinging, see Julia sprinting away. Would the killer even come running after? Would she take the risk? Attack Julia in bright daylight?

It was the best option.
Do it now.
Before the curator returned and pointed down the way and the woman turned.

Sweat trickling. Sweaty and immobile. She was sticky and hot and terrified and immobile but she had to do it, she was about to do it, to run, when she heard a voice, the curator, heard him sliding back the glass partition.

‘Ah Mademoiselle, pardon, bonjour.’

‘Vous êtes occupé?’

‘Non. J’étais en train de parachuter un Sénégalais!’

The Asian woman nodded, unsmiling.

‘OK, I am going to continue my research. You understand?
Je vais poursuivre mes recherches
. OK?’

‘
Oui oui
!’ The curator was grinning, feebly, submissively, like a supplicant; Julia realized with a shiver: even this big and grumpy man was frightened by this small, menacing woman, this thing, this killer, the presence she carried with her was so mesmerizing, so unsettling.

The killer turned left. This was it. The danger was passing. Julia was going to survive. To make it through. The curator had said nothing. The killer was unaware of Julia’s presence five metres away –

‘Une moment,’ said the curator, leaning out through the glass partition. ‘Il y avait deux personnes qui vous cherchaient!’

There were two people looking for you.

The woman swivelled, lithe and tautened, in trainers and jeans and a dark dark tee shirt under a fashionably scarred leather jacket:

‘When?’

The curator mumbled.

‘Ce matin . . .?’

The reaction was instant. The rest of the curator’s sentence was truncated by a brash clattering of glass. Then a grunting noise. Then a fearsome groan. Julia could not see what exactly was happening. The killer was in the way, muscling and tugging. The grunting was horrible, it was pursued by a pissing noise, a hissing, and another low groan, then silence.

The killer then turned on a bloodied heel and ran from the building, straight past Julia’s hiding place, not even seeing her, running out into the car lot and the drizzle and the cold and the concrete Algerian slums. The killer was gone.

For five minutes Julia remained crouching. Half sobbing, half panting, in relief and fear. She texted Alex.
Go home, go to the apartment now. Please trust me.

He texted back: OK.

Her back aching, her heart protesting, she stood. And stepped. And saw. The killer had punched a hole in the glass partition; then she had evidently pulled the curator’s head through the hole, and slammed his neck down, onto the jagged shark teeth of the glass. The broken glass had severed arteries and veins, it had almost severed the entire head. His head was stuck on the spikes of glass, like a pig’s head on the counter of a butcher’s shop. Grinning.

The man was dead, his blood spooled across the floor, a luxurious shellacking of tacky red varnish. Julia shivered, and grasped at her fears. She used her phone and called Rouvier.

The French policeman picked up the phone at once and listened to her story in brisk silence. Then he told her to go the apartment immediately where he would send men to interview her. He told her to lock herself in the apartment and answer to no one but him or the Paris police. He was sending cars to the archives of the archives of the
Musée de l’Homme.

Julia did as she was told. Tensed and trembling, she walked out into the cold and the wind of peripheral Paris, where greasy old
shwarma
wraps went tumbleweeding across the car lot.

She was almost too numb to be frightened. Quickly but without panic she made for the nearest Metro station, where Arab kids loitered on their mountain bikes, openly selling drugs,
le chocolat, la poudre.

The metro journey to their central apartment in the Marais was long. Julia needed to distract herself, to distract her pounding heart, and her obsessing memories. She remembered the paper in her bag. The paper, the essay that had been requested by the killer.

Taking the page from her bag, she read the title; then she sat back, between two silent commuters, opposite a couple of dozing American tourists.

The essay’s title was sonorous and even pompous, pure Ghislaine Quoinelles.

Julia thought; she cogitated deeply. The stations whizzed by.
Carrefour Pleyel. Marie de Sainte Ouen. La Fourche.

The origins of guilt?

The train stopped and started. She didn’t notice any of this. She didn’t notice the people getting on and off, the couple violently arguing under the advert for Banque Paribas, she didn’t notice any of this – because she was remembering the sensation she had felt by the stones, the Cham des Bondons.

Guilt. She had felt some kind of guilt. Mournful guilt.

There
was
a link between the skulls and the murders –
and maybe the cave paintings too
? And if there was a link, it was something deep and serious, it had to be. She could sense the outlines of something, in a tactile way; she was like a blind man touching an abstract bronze sculpture. Art. Bones. Wounded skulls.

The stations whirred by, in a disregarded blur.

Guy Moquet, Place de Clichy, Saint Lazere.