Cambodia Noir (10 page)

Christ: getting paranoid. Too long in the dark. Got to get to the river—

Two blocks feels like two years.

The Edge is a mirage, glowing. Channi's eyes go big when she spots me, and she runs out from behind the bar to take my ruined face in her hands.

“What happen?” Her voice is husky with concern.

“I thought I'd try kickboxing,” I say, in Khmer.

“You're even dumber than most foreigners,” she snaps. She's older when she speaks her own language. Tougher. I try to laugh, and my face twists in pain. She puts her hand on my shoulder, smiles like she knows the feeling. For a second, she's another person. Then she switches to English, and the pixie girl is back: “I get you beer.”

“Food,” I mutter, and collapse in a chair. It's getting cooler. The rain must have come while I was inside, and a breeze sweeps away the day's stale heat. Beer helps. I want a burger, but my face won't move much, so I settle for rice and fish soup. Pop the last of my Advil. The place is empty, and Channi sits with me while I eat. She doesn't ask any questions, just watches as I ladle the broth onto the rice and chew, painfully.

I take a good look at her. She's as dark as the polished wood of the bar, and her profile has the placid curves of a stone Apsara. She dresses to keep the wolves off—no halter tops and cutoffs for her. Tonight it's a loose white blouse with a plunging neck, over skinny jeans and simple black flats. It says,
No, really, I'm a waitress
. Lacquered bracelets clatter at her wrists. Her eyes are huge and bright, and when she turns them on me I forget who I am for a minute.

She's got Tom Waits on the stereo. The drums dance with the twinkling lights of the bar, and some of the knots in my head come undone. I could sit here forever, just watching—but I'm going to crash soon. I need to get back to the house.

Order another beer.

Channi gets it and goes back to cleaning glasses.

For as long as I can, I just sit, aching fingers tracing the wicker strands in the arm of my chair. I'm realizing I don't want to go back. I might even be avoiding it—avoiding
her
. June and her journal. For some reason I can't put my finger on, they frighten me.

But it's too late: nothing else left.

I give Channi a tip as I leave, and she reaches out and presses my good hand: gentle, unsmiling.

“Be careful,” she says in Khmer.

My bedroom. Bats screaming outside the window; June's notebooks on my desk. I take the one on top of the pile. On the cover, a Raphaelite sort of angel, drawn in ink: pendulously male, limp wrist and bloody sword. Radiating out from him, a starburst of color, razored from magazines in tiny strips, so only hints remain of the original image—glimpses of desert, sea, of strange machinery.

Now, with June's history in my hand, the feeling is stronger than ever: I don't want to read it. Whatever happened, I don't want to know.

I could walk away. Turn around and dump this all on Gus's doorstep, find some way to pay back Kara; I could come up with a reason—

The reasons make no sense. The only way out is to go on.

I open the book.

It's worse than I thought.

The pages are thick with pasted-in pictures, tickets, notes—little tokens, fetishes. Words go up, down, any way that fits: written between lines and in margins and over other entries in different colors, even different languages. I see English, French, Italian . . . characters that must be Japanese. In places, great chunks of text are blacked out with marker. She doesn't say where she is, or when: time and place come as Paris metro fares and Brazilian train tickets. I find Cambodia by the newspaper clippings; it takes up most of two volumes. Her boarding passes are right there, the stubs glued to the page.

“A tiny plane, smelling of cigarettes . . .”

She arrives late, on the last Saturday of June. In thirteen weeks, she will be gone.

Except for this.

God,
God,
why do I do this to myself? I knew, I must have known, what waited here—did I really think I could steer my way past all the bitter, sharp, and poisonous things that give this place its reputation? And yet I let myself be drawn, again and again, to these . . . these excrescences of death.

It only took a week for them to get me to the torture chamber.

On Saturday afternoon, I hired a moto driver to take me around the city. It was only supposed to be a tour. I remember the rest of it like some distant dream: cruising through the beautiful old parts of Phnom Penh under a blue sky, around buildings in a hundred states of gorgeous decrepitude, pagodas and temples with roofs guarded by naga, the nine-headed snake-angels that are supposed to protect against evil spirits. I visited the wat in the center of the city, and it was like a tiny slice of forest, quiet and serene, while in the nearby streets angelic monks wandered through traffic unscathed with their tame elephant. When the driver told me the name of the last stop, I didn't understand it, I just nodded and let myself be taken to Tuol Sleng.

The name means “poisoned hill,” and when properly pronounced it sounds like a curse. At first it was a school, now it's a monument . . . but for a time in between, it was Hell.

In 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over this country, instituting radical agrarian communism. They called it Year Zero: history ended and began anew. Overnight they emptied the cities, sending whole populations on a forced march back to their home villages—villages they might not have lived in for generations. How many died on that march? Thousands? Tens of thousands? They slaughtered anyone with any kind of education, and when it came time to build their agrarian paradise there was no one left who knew how to build, or dig a sewer, or run a functioning farm. Over the next three years, millions succumbed to famine and disease. Leaders grew desperate for someone to blame, and supposed spies and enemies of the state were taken to Tuol Sleng, and places like it, where they were interrogated about imaginary conspiracies, tortured and executed. Their piled skulls reach the ceilings.

By the time the Vietnamese invaded and drove the Khmer Rouge back to the hills, a third of Cambodia's population had been killed. Those who survived were changed: their identity was bound up in death. They had nothing left, save the knowledge that something terrible happened to them. You cannot understand us, they say, unless you have been to Tuol Sleng. Unless you have seen our skulls in grinning piles; seen the iron bed-frames to which our uncles chained our parents for torture; seen the flesh still hanging from the hooks like leather, the blood still on the floors . . .

It's not even death, death was something that happened long ago. Cambodia is what remains: the place of the skull . . .

. . . Dried bones in salt earth . . .

. . . Sun on black water . . .

. . . Rivers of mud . . .

No shelter.

How could I expect the journey to end anywhere but here?

Everything hurts. I drift for hours through dreams of being kicked by hobnail boots. Eventually I wake up enough to crawl out of bed. It's 7:00 a.m.

Make a packet coffee. It doesn't help, so I pour some whiskey in it, chase it with a handful of 800-proof Advil, and curse myself for giving Gabriel all my Percocet.

June's diary: face down on the floor. How long was I reading? I can't remember. I stayed as long as I could, trying to follow her story through those tangled lines. Read the end first, hoping for an easy clue: nothing that made sense. The last legible entry was an essay about visiting the Killing Fields. So I started at the beginning. It was hard going, easy to get lost among the overwritings and interruptions—and when I did, sleep took me.

I pick the book up and set it back on the desk, smoothing out the creased pages.

My apartment feels strange. I keep looking at the door, like I'm expecting her to walk through it. The way she talks about this place—

My life, with someone else living it.

It makes me edgy—but what have I really learned from her monologues about airports and descriptions of the city? June is like all the new scum: she thinks she's got a place in the world, and she's dead set on finding it. She's full of clever ideas, so she thinks she's a writer. She's got a morbid streak. But she's not telling me what happened to her. Most likely she doesn't know herself—even if she is still alive.

I finish my coffee in a long gulp. No more losing sleep trying to suss this girl out. I'll find June the same way I find anything else: by looking. And the first place to look is the river.

After the first hour of showing June's picture around the boat companies, I've stopped wincing at every step—I think maybe my body is warming up. After the second hour, I feel like there's a drill bit stuck in my ribs on low speed; I'm out of Advil and out of leads.

June told Gus she was going to Angkor. The drive is hours of slow-motion misery on dirt roads with potholes like swimming pools. Flying is expensive. For most folks, that leaves the boats. The companies that do the run up to Siem Reap, they copy your passport when you buy a ticket. A few bucks in the right hands will get you a look at the manifests. If June really went north like she said, I could find the boat, the arrival time—I'd have a trail to follow.

But there are no hits on her passport, no one believable remembers her, and as the pain in my side gets worse, and one company after another comes up empty, I try to ignore the obvious: I knew this was a dead end. Air travel is harder to check if you're not the law, but Gus has a friend who can do it. I'll call in that favor, but it'll be a bust, too. June didn't pack for a tourist jaunt. She was planning to go
somewhere,
though—somewhere the river doesn't know.

At least by now the office will be open.

The moto ride isn't long, but it nearly breaks me in half. I'm gasping as I stagger up the stairs—reception area still jammed with boxes of last week's issues, so I sit on one to catch my breath. Listen to the chatter from around the corner.

Bland sixties rock on the radio. Phones ringing, overtired scum answering and trying to sound cheery. Number Two and Barry debating whether Cambodia's leaders really want to trade in organized crime for garment factories and call centers.

Could be any morning, ever.

I stay in the hall. The archive is here, slotted into three-ring binders on floor-to-ceiling shelves. Ten years of paper, but I only need the last twelve weeks. I carry the binders back to the photo office; start flipping through, looking for June's byline.

Her first week, there was another big drug story. On July 8, a Jakarta-registered cargo ship docked in Sydney harbor with a load from the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. Aussie police were waiting. They jumped in and found twenty-two kilos of Burmese heroin, and a bunch of guys from a local syndicate busy unloading it. Bit of a black eye for Cambo, but everyone played it cool: law enforcement agencies will cooperate, all that. Then, out of nowhere, a court in Sihanoukville arrested three customs officials, saying they were responsible for the smuggling. Three days later the prime minister let them out of prison with official pardons. All the opposition groups went nuts, screaming that Hun Sen was protecting the drug trade. The police stayed quiet.

June isn't the only byline, but she gets some play. The timing interests me, too: it couldn't have been long after this that the local drug market started drying up. Was the Sydney operation the start of something? But June never gets to it: she does three or four pieces as the whole mess is developing, then the story dies. With no one talking, the paper just runs out of stuff to print. June moves on to other things.

She's ambitious, I can see that. Lots of enterprise, lots of features: she's going out and finding stories, making them hers. They can be about anything: business, the environment, sports, archaeology. She's got a gift for it. Young yet; her style is still rough around the edges. She indulges in purple prose, and Gus, for some reason, lets her. I guess he saw what I'm seeing: June knows what questions to ask. She'll start with something simple—say, an environmental assessment in a coastal town—and over twelve column inches she'll tie it into everything: the collapsing economy in the provinces, political corruption, urbanization, globalization. She does her legwork. The stories aren't brilliant, just promising. But give her a few more years—

Hell.

What I don't see here is a red flag: a conflict with some local figure, a sensitive political story she's sniffing around—the standard stuff that gets reporters in deep water. After three hours flipping through back issues, I'm not sure I'm any further than when I started. Her last byline is a goddamn press release, about the graduation ceremony at a school for kids injured by land mines.

Shove the binders away, light a cigarette. Desk covered with ash. I stare at it for a while, but nothing's happening in my head. Finally I head back to the newsroom. It's mostly empty—everyone's out interviewing. I don't see Gus.