Cambodia Noir (22 page)

“June.” Though I don't mean it to, it comes out heavy, like a prayer or invocation.

“That's right.” He settles his arms across his massive chest. “Interesting girl. She did a nice story.”

“I never met her.” Try to sound casual this time. I'm sure I fail, but he bites.

“Well, she was all right, I think. Not the kind who sees just what people tell her, you know? She was looking for what was really going on in this place, if you see what I mean? The real thing, the story behind the story.”

I have no idea what he's talking about, but I nod along, encouraging. “She find anything?”

“She was asking about smuggling. I know it goes on, but I don't know much about these things. You know, for a businessman, it is better not to know. But I told her to get Lon to take her to some of the Cham villages out in the mangroves, Koh Sraluav and those. They are very poor. People out there, they might have stories.”

I take another swig of vodka, pass the bottle back to him. “Word is she ran off somewhere,” I say, as he drinks. “Disappeared.” What can I say—I like to bury the lede.

He gets a funny look and hands the bottle back. “Well, this is Cambodia,” he says, like that explains everything.

I stagger back to the hotel; the world isn't spinning yet, but the tilt light is on. Maybe vodka wasn't such a great idea. The Dane drank a good whack of it, at least, while I quizzed him about Luke and Wendy and their NGO. They've been at it almost a year, and for an organization that's essentially a funding broker, they seem pretty hands-on. Luke is out in the swamp all the time with the locals, gathering info: Which areas should the government protect, which should it develop? Where are the openings for private investors? And he's secretive. Not surprising: that stuff can cause resentment. People start thinking the government's going to fence off the forests, take away their work—especially if their work is already not quite legal. The Dane thinks it's all some kind of World Bank plot, but he said most people here are so poor, any kind of development sounds good to them. But someone's always left out—I'd like to find out who.

The hallway by my room is unlit. I lean against the wall to open my door—

Listening to the dark.

Stumble inside, lock tight behind me.

Sitting on my pillow: a secondhand cell phone—no ID necessary—and a plastic bag stuffed with half an ounce of tarry, black grass. Well done, Phann. I think I like him better than Khieu.

I'm looking longingly at the bed, but despite the drink and the pills, I can feel the fever still clinging to me: a restless, hectic energy that won't let me sit still. Start to roll a joint while I call Gus.

He perks right up when he hears it's me.

“I don't know what trouble you're in, but it brought friends.” Yesterday's anger all blown away: now there's
news
: “Two bodies in one night, and one of them is another FUNCINPEC official: the third guy from His Highness, gunned down outside his office . . . seems like the old one-eyed dog is getting serious about the competition.”

“What's the other one?”

“Oh, that one was personal. You remember that singer, the one supposed to be Hok Lundy's mistress? She got hit with acid in the street. Didn't make it. They figure it was probably the wife, but . . .”

“There's more.”

“Eh?”

“The son of a police colonel got hacked to bits in a room in the Crane Hotel, along with an Australian backpacker.”

“I didn't hear about that.”

“Would have looked like a hate crime, or a personal beef. Given that he was found with his boyfriend's cock in his mouth, boyfriend not attached, I'm guessing Daddy kept it quiet.”

“You didn't see that on the news,” Gus says carefully.

“I got a little too close.”

“How close?”

“About five inches.”

“Hijo de puta.”

“That's two dead people who were close to high-ranking cops. Start looking, I bet you'll find more.”

“Right.” He pauses, and I can almost see him rolling his fingers into fists as he thinks. Old fighter's habit. I know what he's thinking: men in uniform with brown packages on their shoulders. “I assume General Peng didn't like the look of his cell.”

“He still in lockup?”

“No, he's out. What about the FUNCINPEC guy?”

“Could be separate. Peng kills Van and the singer, Hun Sen takes out Bunny and your official, for different reasons. What's he saying?”

“Hun Sen? He's claiming the murders are part of a conspiracy to discredit him.”

“That's not so far from what you said the other day. Maybe it's all Peng: taking on the cops and trying to pressure the PM at the same time.”

Gus whistles. “Then this is going to be a coup: it's too big for a turf war. Hun Sen won't like being pressed. Someone else doing that much killing in his city makes him look weak. He'll have to prove he's still in charge. One way or another, there'll be a show of force. Tanks in the fucking streets.”

I can smell it, coming over the wire: the smell of bloody murder, of demonstrations, the crack of police batons—and just over the horizon the riots, the city in flames. I should be there, in the smoke, shutter clicking, waiting for the crash or the flash or the pain before it goes dark—

Try to control my breathing, to fight the excitement creeping up my spine—

From the shadows, the dead Aussie smiles at me.
“Give it a go, eh, mate? Wat'cha got to lose?”

I see the rest, crowding in behind him. Feel sick. Shut my eyes, light the joint, inhale. When I open them, the corner is empty and so am I. The thrill is gone.

“You still there?” Gus says, distant.

I don't have an answer.

“Wheels within wheels,” that's what Gus would say. He's right about one thing: this is too big for just a turf war. Maybe Peng really thinks he can move himself into the big chair—but it's hard to picture. I keep seeing him in the back of that police car, eye swollen shut, leaking blood. Seems more like he's desperate to me. But why? Could Hok Lundy have him in that tight a corner? It doesn't feel like Cambodian politics as usual: people die, sure, but that's just PR. In the end, these things get worked out. A guy like Peng doesn't go all in.

Unless there's someone we haven't seen yet: an outside player, pushing at this thing, stirring up trouble. But what for?

Sometimes simple answers are best.

Simple like Charlie?

He had a target on his back all along. Gabriel wanted him photographed because of his dad's position in the police: it was clear from the start that it was tied up somehow with the heroin trade, the big bust at Peng's house. Gabriel thought Charlie's dad could tell him something, maybe do something for him if properly motivated, and Charlie was a weak spot. But if Gabriel could see a vulnerability, others could, too. So when Peng decides to strike back at the cops, who does he go after? Not the bosses, yet: the weak links. Hok Lundy's mistress. A police colonel's gay son. The guys who did it could be military, easy. They'd have been watching for hours, maybe days. When Charlie ditched his guards and his thug friends and went to that crappy hotel with a boy, he was a perfect target.

And I put him there.

From the shadows, he grins.

“Better lucky than smart,”
says a voice behind me.

Bunny.

“You'd know, asshole,” I say.

Stagger to my feet. The Aussie is leaning against the door, dripping blood on my backpack. Shove past him, out into the dark hall, and slam the door on the whole fucking lot of them.

The night clerk has off-brand vodka in little miniatures. It's rotten stuff, from some Muslim Central Asian country with no business making it. Tastes enough like lighter fluid that I'm scared to smoke while I'm drinking, but it does the trick. I take them back to the room and empty one after another, pausing for joints. When the dead show up, I pitch bottles at them. Get Charlie square in the eye, and he actually winces before disappearing in a fit of pique, which is fucking hi-larious.

Open the next and toast his health. Poor, lonely, dead Charlie. Sure, he was the kind of guy who'd fire automatic weapons into crowds for fun, but he didn't get much choice in the matter. He never went looking for this shit; his family was playing blood poker long before he was born. Of any of us, he has the best excuse.

“You're not one of us,”
Joost mutters in my ear.
“Not yet.”
He always was a dour fucker, even before I got him killed. The Aussie cackles and steals the spliff out of my hand.

I shouldn't even be here. I should be in some suburb of Hoboken with a car and a brat and a family photo studio; an idea for a coffee-table book I'll never finish. But I screwed that up. Wanted to see the world—went too far. You scratch the surface, and faster than you'd think, you're out here in the swamps with Charlie and his friends.

You cross that line, it always ends in death. I learned that long ago.

So why am I doing it again?

Sihanoukville.

Shit.

I still can't sleep. Can't hardly think.

At first I thought it was the heat, settling over me like a blanket, heavy and wet, so I made the hotel boys bring me a fan . . . but it doesn't help: when it hums I can't hear the music.

I can't sleep, so I write. Even after these endless days, I never seem to stop: the lights go out and my head is crowded with the past, old memories pushing their way in with the voices of bats and frogs and night-born insects. In lieu of exorcism, I have this diary.

I have told you most of what I remember of my mother, but there is still the final thing, the most important. The night she left. I was standing outside in the rain, watching through a window. I remember I had gone out there because I heard voices, but when I recall the scene, now, I hear nothing. All I see is my mother's face: she is screaming at my father, cheeks red and eyes swollen with tears. I cannot see him: I remember his presence, the feel of him in the air, the smell of his breath—but I do not have any memory in which I can recall his face until after she was gone.

Only years later did I begin to understand the story, to piece together the clues: phone conversations I wasn't meant to overhear, whispered talk among the men. The little hints I could squeeze out of my sister, each one earned by days of painstaking interrogation: laying barbs, setting snares, waiting for her guard to slip just enough that one might catch on her and drag some truth out with it.

They say Mother married Father for his money. She, herself, never spoke of it, except obliquely.

“You don't get to know where a path leads before you take it,” she told me. Perhaps it was in that little room, I can't remember now. “Sometimes the path will seem terrible, but when you walk it, it is no different than any other.”

I don't know what Father was in it for. Once, listening through the door to the men who watched outside my room at night, I heard one say Father was under a spell, that Mother was a white witch. The other said she was just a whore, and it made an aging man feel good to have a beautiful, young blonde on his arm.

I had different guards after that. I never heard those two again.

The general wisdom was that Father was desperate for an heir, and if there is any story I believe, it would be that. Father, after all, valued strength, fearlessness and cunning, and the foul names they call my mother suggest she was all these things. She was the kind of woman he would choose to give him the son he craved . . . but the son never came, and in those years of waiting, whatever my parents had began to rot away. There was talk of a miscarriage, maybe several. I know everyone was excited when my mother finally got pregnant: twins, a boy and a girl. Everything was going to be OK.

I don't know what happened to my brother. There was just me: scrawny, white and hideous. For years I did my best with what I had, but it was never enough.

Saturday afternoon I grab Phann from the hotel, and we go looking for Luke's office.

The town feels flat and empty, a studio set after hours. No one in sight. Overcast sky, two roads lined with gray shacks. Swirling dust; it hasn't rained here in a while. Flashes of color where laundry flutters in the breeze, no one tending it.

We hike around for forty minutes, Phann asking directions. My body is stiff and shattered, my head hollowed out from another night fighting something I can't remember. I should really try not to drink today.

Everything has hurt so long I hardly notice anymore.

Eventually we find Cambodia EcoCare, Luke's local partner. It's nothing, just a room on the second floor of an apartment building, but a Khmer woman answers when we knock. Western-dressed, a bit overdone—probably from Phnom Penh. Surprised to have visitors.