Cambodia Noir (14 page)

The woman smiled at me and said something in Khmer. I smiled back. Then she led us back to the bus.

I thought that was the end, but five minutes away from that doomed town we stopped again, this time pulling off the road to a clearing in the woods with a concrete pavilion. The other journos seemed excited, but I was groaning inwardly: another slog through the mud to see nothing. Then I realized the pavilion was filled with tables, all set with bright silver and red satin napkins. This was lunch.

It must have taken three hours, course after course after course: spicy Tom Yam soup floating with fat prawns, chilled seaweed salad, crisp and salty. Fried noodles sweet with sesame oil, plates of brazed bok choi, chicken salad with mint and peanuts, pork spareribs Cantonese-style, hot-pots stuffed with steamed crayfish the size of small cats (the local delicacy), sweet pastries and mango sorbet and plates of chilled fruit . . . a couple of the Cambodians had brought their own beer and were getting sozzled down at the end of the table. Everyone, I suddenly understood, was going to go back and write about what a great project this was, and how much good it was doing for Cambodia.

Perhaps Gus was trying to show me something important, after all?

I have to figure out how to convince him. I feel so sure I could do something great . . . something
real
 . . . if I could just get the space. But lunch has weighed me down, and I'm having trouble thinking. The only thing keeping me awake is that cut I got on my leg—it's throbbing and itching like crazy.

It's nearly dark out now. Everyone else on the bus has drifted off—either sleeping, or smoking, or both. The only other person not in a coma is the guy in the seat behind me, a tallish Cambodian with a Ritchie Valens 'do and terrible skin—worse than mine. He's in the uniform: a short-sleeved shirt with an ugly pattern, no tie, shiny shoes. His camera and cigarettes stick out from a faux-leather fanny pack, and he's eagerly paging through a Khmer-English dictionary.

And as it did after Tuol Sleng, my mind keeps swinging back to the night my mother left. I don't understand—I seldom think about that time anymore, and I don't know why it keeps coming to me now. Was it something she told me? I was only six, but I can see her, face still tracked with tears, sitting beside my bed. I can see her lips move, but I don't know what she's saying.

I like to think she said she would take me with her (though Father would never have let that happen). Sometimes I imagine there was a clue she left, if only I could remember:
Here is the lock, break it. This is how you get out.

I don't remember her leaving. One moment she's there—the next she's gone.

Out the window to my right, the reeds part to reveal another great, shining stretch of water. Across it, on a tiny island or spit of land, I can see the first old thing that looks properly ancient and neglected. A temple of some kind—just a glimpse of crumbling gray stone wrapped with vines, like the head of some slumbering, cyclopean creature. On the pagoda top, instead of bodhisattvas, the faces are bug-eyed, tiger-mouthed. I can't turn away.

“Not look,” says a voice. I turn and there's Ritchie Valens, a cigarette caught between two long, yellowed fingernails. He's looking intently at me, dictionary open in his hand. I can't say anything. “Not good look,” he continues, then looks down at the page for the word he wants. “Demon,” he says. “Demon. Not look.”

In dreams, I'm following a blond shadow down dark alleys. She doesn't run, but she's always ahead. Can't tell if she knows I'm here. If I could just catch her eye, I'd know what she's running from, but she never looks back.

I drag myself out of bed and pour a whiskey, still chasing June in my head. Can't remember where I stopped reading: where real June ended and shadow June began. I remember nighttime walks, tropical fevers—

Drugs.

Malarone: it protects against malaria, but the price is dreams that are vivid, violent—dreams that hold so hard you can't wake up. If you're careless, or unlucky, they can follow you right into the waking world. June had bottles of the stuff in her bag, mostly empty. And she said she was unlucky with drugs—

“I could wake and discover I was someone else altogether.”

June was a fake—but her diary feels real. She cared about her work at the paper. I'd been focusing on what she wrote about Cambodia, but after what I learned yesterday, I went back to see what came before. In Paris, she describes going to a university—or at least hanging around one, it's not clear she was studying anything. That must have been how she came across Jun Saito. Something happened while she was there. I don't think she says what, but I get the impression it gave her a fright.

Before that, it was Italy, where she was helping out on some archaeological dig. In Greece, she was feeding the homeless. She traveled around South America for a while, as some kind of assistant to a documentary filmmaker named Rafe. It doesn't make any damned sense.

But it will. I'm learning her like a foreign language. I see how her stories dance around the edges of the real story—like in her photographs: the real subject is always just out of frame.

You're looking in the wrong place.

Hell. For all I know, I'm reading scenes from her great American novel. Maybe her ma's really a schoolteacher in Pasadena. What I need is facts. And I know where I could get them
—

No.

I'll find another way. Anyway, it's seven in the morning—not much I can do now but think, and I'd rather not.

Head downstairs to see if Gus has anything to eat. Find him perched in the kitchen; he's picked up fried fish and noodles on his way back from the club, and he's eating them out of a paper bag. I start going through his fridge, find the remains of a stir-fry and a Black Panther.

“You could at least shower,” he says.

“Buy me dinner first.”

“I'll make you a coffee if you change your shirt. I think you've been in that one since Thursday. It's still got blood on it.” He's fucking chipper. Beating the hell out of somebody usually puts him in a good mood. “Then maybe you can shoot the opposition protest out by the monument.” Say nothing. He pauses, looks over at me as he puts the coffee on. “You recall having a job, right?”

“A job.”

“Yes. You take pictures, and I pay you.”

“And the girl?”

The look he gives me is dangerous. “I thought you'd got Steve on that.”

“All Steve can do is try to ID her. Could take days.”

“Then we go to the Americans—”

“How do you know she's an American?”

“This much trouble, of course she's a fucking American.”

“And you think more of 'em are gonna make it better?” He glares at me. “Until Steve comes up with something, we're on our own.”

“Then leave it.”

“Whoever this Kara woman is, I don't think she's gonna let it lie.” There, I said it. Hell.

Gus is still frowning, but he knows I'm right. We don't know what June was mixed up in. I can't sit around here reading her diary, hoping she'll hand me the answer.

Like it or not, I've got to talk to Kara Saito.

I stall until ten, pacing Gus's room and hoping the harsh light of day will banish whatever irrational paranoia has got into me since that morning on the quay.

Really, I'm looking for a better option.

Kara wanted this whole thing hush-hush. That might have nothing to do with June: maybe Kara was afraid of being recognized herself. I've toyed with asking around, but that seems even riskier: word could get back to her. Whoever she is, she's dangerous. I've got to figure out my approach. I'll only get one shot.

She's staying at Le Royal, the most expensive hotel in town—the gangsters like it because it's got good security and private entrances. A couple guys there owe me favors from the Vy days, and I've thought up a dozen ways to catch Kara off guard, get myself some advantage from the location—

The memory of the quay stops me. Kara's running this show: the most dangerous thing I can do is try to take away her control. Tricks and pretenses won't help.

The only way to come at her is straight on.

The bar in Le Royal is a sun-lit alcove filled with tasteful rattan furniture, high colonial ceilings, and wide, arched windows that open onto a garden patio. The waiter gives a deep bow when I arrive and silently sweeps me into a chair. If my appearance troubles him, he doesn't let it show. Nhem, the bartender, hovers in the background. When I come in, he busies himself chopping limes, careful not to look my way. Kara's not here yet, so I order a bourbon—then change my mind and go for some expensive Scotch with a lot of syllables in the name.

Who knows, could be my last drink.

I finish it in three long swallows; order another.

Fine: my second-to-last drink.

Not a huge crowd at half past eleven. A pair of fiftyish white guys are chatting over peanuts. They're dressed in the same ready-for-the-jungle casual: rumpled safari shirts, blue jeans, tastefully chosen indigenous jewelry handmade by the tribes of wherever. They look like UN, or government—the kind who used to be aid workers and never quite got over it. In the far corner, a heavyset, nervous-looking businessman eats a late breakfast, making increasingly urgent-sounding calls on his cell phone in Chinese. By the door, a slender, gray-haired woman in a pristine white walking outfit and expensive sandals has stationed herself with her cappuccino and
Lonely Planet,
a huge white sun hat tossed across the table.

No reason to think Kara is here alone: any of these people could be working with her. I watch them sideways, keeping my eyes on the brochure I've picked up about Angkor tourism.

She's ten minutes late coming down. Here in the hotel, she's ditched her street clothes for a thigh-length yellow sundress and fashion-forward flats. I'm struck by how young she looks: with her legs bare and hair scattered, she could pass for a schoolgirl on holiday, except for the exhaustion hanging around her eyes.

“I'm sorry,” she says, out of breath. “I've been on the ph— my God, your face! Are you okay?”

Feel myself flush as I fumble for an answer. “Art critic. I'll be all right.”

She sits, and her brow furrows as a thought hits her. “Was that from . . . ?”
Was that from looking for June?

“No.” I try to be reassuring. “Nothing to do with your sister. Just a rough day at the office.”

“Oh.” She lets out a sigh of relief—then stares at her fingers. “I've been so worried.” How did I think this girl was a threat?

From across the room: a sudden, sharp bang.

That's what saves me.

Everyone jumps—Kara practically falls out of her chair. We all turn to look for the source of the noise. All but one: for a tiny moment, the woman in white is looking the wrong way. She's watching Kara. Her hand has slipped underneath her sun hat.

Behind the bar, an embarrassed Nhem is saying sorry, holding up the wooden cutting board he just carelessly dropped into a steel sink. Not a gunshot, but it was loud. The aid cowboys actually clap.

But I'm awake again.

Kara's face had gone pale; now her cheeks are starting to flush with embarrassment. “Wow. High-strung, I suppose!” Self-deprecating laugh, then her eyes grow tired again. “You can imagine what this has been like.”

Fucking hell, she's good. That breathless entrance, the schoolgirl look: making herself vulnerable. Without a word, she's been begging me to protect her, cutting off my questions before I even ask them—and I've been falling for it. Three sentences in, I'd already half convinced myself the quay was just the speed talking. Another five minutes, I'd have told her anything she wanted.

I'd even forgotten about asking Nhem to make something go bang. At least my surprise was genuine. He played it well—make a mental note to get something nice for his wife.

“So,” Kara says, “what did you want to talk to me about?”

“I'm sorry.” I shake my head as if I've lost my train of thought. Tack left: try to recapture the breathless idiocy of my first reaction to her. “Sorry, it's been a long week. You said you were on the phone?”

“God, all morning. Our parents are going completely
insane
. They keep threatening to come out here, and I'm trying to tell them to wait. Our dad has been sick, and I don't want to put him through the stress—”

Most liars are lousy at it, cruising by on bluster and people's desire to believe. The woman across from me is something else: an artist, spinning fantasies so real they show in her hair and her complexion and the curl of her toes. Even now, when I know she's toying with me—because she wasn't fooled for a second by my trick with the cutting board—there is nothing in her face or voice or posture except Kara Saito, worried big sister. Every second, I have to fight the part of my mind that says I've somehow made a mistake.

“I can't imagine what you must be going through,” I say.

The waiter slides over to our table, hovering. Kara orders her tea without looking at him, her eyes still fixed on me.

“Beam, no ice,” I say.

I am miles from good enough to play with her. I'm pretty sure I can't even stall her, she'll smell me lying a mile off. That leaves one option.

“What was June to you, really?”

“What do you mean?” No bogus shock, just confusion. “Okay, fifteen years, we're pretty far apart, I don't know. . . . Are you asking if we were best friends and whispered secrets to each other in our beds after dark? No, of course not. But she's still my sister.”

“You know that's not what I mean. She's not who she says she is.”