Cambodia Noir (2 page)

There's blood all over.

“Now feel me,” I shout to him, in Khmer. His lips move, but I'm having trouble hearing him. “See if I'm hit.” I could be bleeding to death and not even know it. Prik looks puzzled, so I reach out and put his hands on my chest, and he gets the idea. Pain shoots through me as he touches my left arm, and his hand comes away red and shiny. He grabs again, harder, and the world goes dark at the edges—

“You okay,” he shouts. “Just skin.”

My arm is a raw, red thing, but the camera looks all right. I take a test shot: there's no light back here, but I hear the shutter snap and the screen comes on. I gesture to Prik to stay put, and I crawl to the edge of the house. Put the camera out first, watch what's happening on the screen:

Car headlights, muzzle flashes. Fire and smoke. Hard to see anything clear. Glimpses of the cops running, sometimes shooting—they look focused on the house. I step out onto the street, camera held high over my head. I'm still a block away, well behind the firing line, but I can see it now: uniformed figures crouching, moving, guns out, hide—shoot—hide. That officer still shouting, but I can't hear him. No one even looks my way.

Take a few steps forward: line up my shot. Crank the ISO. I'll get heavy grain, but I can't use my film camera—it's loaded for flash and I can't risk it, not until they know I'm there.

Through the lens, shadowed figures. About a third of the guys are in helmets and tac vests, the rest are just uniforms. I hold the shutter: long bursts,
clickclickclickclickclick,
hoping to catch faces lit by the shooting. Get one huddled behind a car, gun over his head, firing at random—he looks about sixteen. Just a kid: the older guys know a car won't stop a bullet.

Another step closer. The air stinks of melting upholstery and CS gas.

Zoom in on the wreckage of the car. Men on the ground—three at least; one is screaming, one maybe unconscious. Blood on the pavement. Uniforms rushing to pull them clear, put pressure on wounds. Lucky: A grenade against a whole line of cops? Could have been a lot worse.

The officer's voice, louder now he's got his bullhorn back:

“Stop, stop, stop!”

A last few gunshots in the direction of the house, then quiet.

I walk right up to the cops—careful, deliberate steps. Focus on the guy with the megaphone: small, wiry, a captain by his stripes. Snap. Pan my lens down the line: tired faces, puffy eyes, lips tight with tension.

Snap.

Men rushing to help the wounded.

Snap.

The kid who was firing his AK over the car sees me. He waves to the captain, shouts something I can't catch. The officer makes a dismissive gesture.

The kid comes over. “Off-limits.”

“I'm with the paper.” Hold out my press badge.

He looks at it, frowns. “Off-limits.”

I slide out the $20 bill I keep tucked behind the ID card. The kid takes both. After a second, he gives the badge back with a shrug:
Your funeral.
Turns away, already bored.

With the guns quiet a moment, I switch to the real camera: better resolution. The tactical guys are lining up, ready to bust down the front door, and I shoot a few as they get ready. No one stops me. Then they're up the steps, battering through the lock and tossing in a couple more tear-gas canisters. I get as close as I can, clicking away as the armored figures vanish in the smoke.

Then it's quiet.

People are coming out of their houses. Motos buzz by on the nearby streets, and a few stop at the ends of the block to stare. The jerk from the AP shows up, parking his big dirt bike with a flourish, tossing back his hair and looking around to see who's watching. He glares at me for being here already, then makes a big show of passing his papers around to the cops, who don't exactly care.

Somewhere in here, my knees start feeling wobbly. I'm covered in blood. The whole left side of me is torn up. Ripped jeans, leaking red. Thoughts held down by shock and adrenaline start bubbling over. It occurs to me I almost got shot for a picture no one wants. Light a cigarette and wait for the jitters to pass.

In the house, shouting. Footsteps. One of the tac guys comes out and waves to the captain, who follows him inside with another officer, and the street goes still again: everyone's watching. After a while, they get tired of it. People are just starting to mutter and turn away when the brass come back out. Behind them, the tac guys are frog-marching two middle-aged men down the steps: loafers, shirts with alligators on them, hands cuffed behind their backs. They look about as unmilitary as it gets. Was Khieu way off base?

The cops hustle the men into the back of a waiting van, and I move in quick with the digital. They wince and turn away from the flash: haggard faces, unreadable under fresh bruises. One has blood coming from his eye. I'm about to ask who they are, but the captain steps in, face clear as day:
That's enough.
I back off, hands up, but he's already moved on, barking orders.

The van drives off.

More journos are showing up now, crowding around the wreckage, pestering the cops as they go through the long, boring business of searching the house. One more guy gets hustled out—a young thug, bleeding pretty bad. From the scraps of chitchat I hear, there's more won't be coming out standing.

I've smoked through my whole pack by the time Khieu shows up. Even at this hour, his trousers are perfectly creased, his hair pomaded into a curl. If they put five-foot-three Cambodian guys on the cover of
GQ,
he'd be it. I can see my reflection in his shoes—it's not pretty.

“Nice of you to come,” I say.

“I'm all the way across town.”

“You just didn't wanna get shot at.”

He gives me an enigmatic little smile. I pull out the camera, show him the guys in the van, but he shakes his head: doesn't know them. “I be back.” He wanders off before I think to ask him for a cigarette.

Hell.

But I'm not waiting long. After a minute I see him pushing back through the crowd, with Bunny from Radio Ranariddh limping behind him, grinning like a maniac. I can't help grinning back.

Bunny is probably four foot six, with squat, uneven legs, a hump on his left shoulder, and dangling arms that end in stubby, shortened fingers. His real name is Bunly, but he simplified it for the foreigners. He doesn't mind not being taken seriously. The radio station he works for is the mouthpiece for Prince Norodom Ranariddh's FUNCINPEC party: they're the strongest opposition to Prime Minister Hun Sen—not that that's very strong. Prince Ranariddh spends a lot of time at posh embassy parties, and half of Bunny's job is to go along and soak up the gossip. His looks make people uncomfortable, but they also make him harmless. He smiles and wisecracks, and folks tell him where all sorts of bodies are buried.

“Keller,” he crows in his strange accent, a mix of Khmer and Oxford. “Glad there's someone still trying to be a pain in everyone's ass.”

“I hear you're keeping up,” I say. “You got told by the man himself.”

He laughs. “You know, now he doesn't have a government, he's not really prime minister, is he? So it's no harm to the national interest if I point out a few little things.”

“Doubt he'd agree with you.”

“He's too big.” Bunny laughs again. “A pest like me? Not worth the candle.” He wiggles his eyebrows. “I'll keep my head down a bit, it'll blow over.”

“Good luck with that.”

“I'm a lucky guy.”

“Better than smart.”

“You'd know, Keller. Now give us a look-see, eh?” He's excited: his sources haven't told him who was in the house yet.

I hold out the camera, screen zoomed in on that beat-up face.

Bunny lets out a low whistle. “That is
General
Peng Lin. Four stars, head of international cooperation at the defense ministry.” Shit: Khieu was right, after all. Big rank to get stuck in the back of a police van. In chinos and a polo shirt, he looks like he should be running a laundry.

“Why's he here?”

“Police say this drug house,” Khieu says, trying to keep up with the English.

“Sure,” I say. “But that could be a cover. Maybe someone just wanted Peng out of the way.” I look at Bunny, who shrugs.

“Drugs wouldn't be a shock. I've heard rumors about a crew in ICD calling the shots.”

“Yeah?”

“The army's basically a cartel, eh? Someone's gotta run it. Not the guys at the very top, the political figures: they don't want to be too close to anything. The bottom ranks just do as they're told. Somewhere in the middle are the guys who actually make the decisions.”

“And you think Peng's on the list?”

Bunny grins. “Could be. At his level, he'd be number one, maybe number two in terms of operational control of the drug traffic for the whole damn country.”

“Maybe not for long. The political guys won't like this.”

“We'll see. We still don't know why the police would move on him. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to try to find out.” Bunny lurches off to talk to the brass, still grinning, with Khieu trailing after.

I am drained, empty. Still out of cigarettes. Thinking about leaving, but something stops me. A change in the air? I push back toward the house—see the guy from AP watching me funny, like he wonders what I know. More cops have arrived now and staked out a perimeter. Just inside, the captain and his officers huddle together, talking low. Now and then one of them throws a glance up at the door of the house, face hard and tight. I get them in frame and take a shot—waiting for what's next.

They head up the steps, standing on one side in a line. A uniform comes out; on his shoulder, a flat, brown bundle the size of a cinder block. I hit the shutter and freeze him in the flash, carrying what looks like eight, ten kilos of junk.

My mouth starts to water.

This town has been dry since I got back, and now here's the fuzz with an exact metric shitload of the stuff. It's still wrapped in that waxy yellow plastic, dark red stamps on the side: a dragon in a triangle, laced with twining script—Burmese or Thai, can't be sure. Straight from the factory, barely cut. I'm snapping frantically, my palms tingling like they're scalded.

Slow down.

Think about the shot, not about the junk.

The uniform starts down the steps, and behind him comes another, with another bundle. Then another. They just keep coming. The cops around me are statues, staring. Half these guys probably deal on the side, but they've never seen shit like this.

The shutter clicks, recording stony faces, frozen eyes, and nervous fingers. Everyone thinking the same thing. This isn't some scrap over territory, or a put-on for the foreign donors.

This is a goddamn war.

The world can surprise you: it is so very big. Fly far and fast enough, and when you stop you can actually feel it curving away beneath your feet. A new country always feels like a fresh start.

Here's what it's like:

A tiny plane, smelling of cigarettes.

Heavyset men in suits—Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai—squeezed into the seats like overstuffed toys. What are they traveling for? Shiny hotels and business lunches? Or unspeakable appointments in Phnom Penh's dancehalls and massage parlors?

Seat pockets stuffed with newspapers in a dozen scripts, none of them Latin.

Purple velvet outside the windows. We fly low.

And then landing, tumbling out of the sky in jerks and stalls, through clouds of evening rain.

No one respects the fasten seatbelt sign . . . bodies tangle in the aisles and soak me in their tarry smell. . . .

When the door opens, the heat slams into me like a fist, a physical blow—then gives way, suffocating and wet. I have stepped into the maw of something, I am breathing its air.

Metal steps down to the tarmac, still glistening from the monsoon. The runway is a narrow ribbon of black; beyond, darkness and wet grass. In the distance, hot wind whips a row of palms against a sky of looming violet cloud. Lightning in the distance flashes red, like a scar.

Cambodia.

The new scum are swarming the office when I arrive. A fresh batch, but they're always the same: greedy fucking American twentysomethings, sniffing around a newsroom for the stink of human tragedy. They're huddled under the AC now, scrubbed pink and shiny with sweat, pretending to listen to Ray as he goes on about ethics or something, but they don't give a shit: it's blood they want. They fly halfway across the world for it; now it's in the air.

I'm in no mood for interns, and I fix my eyes on the carpet, hoping to slip past before they see me. No chance, the newsroom barely holds ten people, and they're on me like fat, white leeches:

“Mr. Keller—”

“Was it Hun Sen?”

“Are you all right? We heard—”