Cambodia Noir (25 page)

As he turns away, I make a tiny gesture to Phann, a finger across the lips. He nods.

No, we're not going to ask this guy any questions. Not today. We're going to shut our mouths, take our pictures, avoid anything he tells us to avoid, and go back to our hotel. That's the smart move, and from here on in I'm going to need to be smart.

In the boat, heading back down the coast. Can't stop my hands from shaking.

I've got a head full of crazy, wild elation, like I've dodged a bullet or jumped from a crashing car. Now they've seen me, they know my name: Now there's nowhere safe.

The sky is still bright, but getting overcast again. We're flanking the island, heading home. Sea blue, streaked with purple.

The great machine that haunted my fever dreams is starting to come together, gears clicking into place—

“. . . they have boats in hidden coves and ride the waves after nightfall . . .”

I have a guess what's going on here—but it doesn't tell me what happened to June. I don't know what comes next.

Up ahead, a spit of land juts out, silhouetted in the late-afternoon glare. It's somehow familiar. I pick up the camera, track the frame over the horizon. Soften the focus and I see it:
a flat,
gray body of water, dark specks that might be trees visible in the distance.
Just like I've seen it before, in fuzzy black-and-white.

“Pull up to the shore,” I say to Phann. He stares at me, then translates.

The boat nudges into the shallows, between thick stands of mangroves. Up ahead a patch of dark, silty earth rises toward the forest. Lon pushes up to it and waits.

I lean over and test the water: not deep. Start taking my boots off. Phann mimics me, but I shake my head. “I'll just be a minute.”

The water is hot around my legs, the bottom sand and muck. Is this the place? I can't tell, but there's something—in my nostrils like lightning after rain. The earth tingles against my feet. For a second I think of land mines and my legs seize.

Come on, Will.
No one would lay mines in a swamp. Come on . . . left, right. That's it. The ground gets firm, and the sense of electricity in the air grows stronger. My fingers are tingling. Tiny insects whirl around me in stinging clouds. Up ahead, the trees close in. I look for a path: a shallow mud cliff, just a couple feet high, where the roots provide handholds. Pull myself up and stand a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the gloom.

A white spot in the dark: a cut branch. And another. A path has been cleared.

That electric feeling is almost overwhelming as I walk ahead.
It's here,
I think,
it's close,
and my eyes fall on a tree that grows in a low arch over the forest floor. Beneath, the ground is covered with fallen leaves and bark, but no plants: turned.

I get on my knees, brushing at the dirt with my fingers. It comes away loose, and then I'm digging, pulling up the soil in great handfuls. I don't have to go far: only a couple inches down, they start to come clear.

Bones, brown and muddy looking in the black earth. They're so small. Smaller than a whole person anyway. You think you'd be able to look at a skeleton and see that it's a man or a woman, but of course you can't, it's just bones.

I wonder if I just found her.

Back at the boat. I wash the last of the dirt from my fingers and climb aboard. Lon hands me an old shirt to clean my feet, and I wave to him:
Down the coast, go
. He starts the engine.

“What was it, boss?” Phann asks.

“I had to take a piss.”

He raises his eyebrows, but doesn't say anything.

Alone at last, in the hotel. I call Vy. She doesn't answer. I call again. And again.

Eventually she picks up. “What exactly do you want?” Enunciating every word. She sounds French, so she's pissed.

“I'm out west, and I need your help.”

“Forget it, Will, I'm not playing any of your games—”

“Vy, there's a girl missing. A twenty-three-year-old reporter. And I need that friend of yours: the one who does bones.”

For a moment she's got nothing to say.

There was more yelling—always is, with Vy—but she said she'd come. She sees an angle; trouble is, I don't know what. Can't think about it now, anyway. The afternoon buzz is wearing off, and I can feel the exhaustion creeping in.

I have to fortify my room. Bottles of vodka. Bed against the door. TV on, loud, so I won't hear their voices.

It's not the living I'm worried about: it's the dead. They'll all be coming for me tonight.

If I'm lucky, June won't be with them.

 . . . can soak their determination ANNOUNCEMENT: the 25-year plan to save Cambodia from EVERYTHING while somewhere and

she's back she's back she's back she's come for me
the chorus to carry it all underground and in the air-conditioned boardroom the man from the ministry points to his slides goes silent,

the night is everything in poison till it chokes you, but you will never even slow them in lost because we are out of balance . . .

run, run, it won't do you any good

while skinny men in shorts lean over sides of their narrow boats to drag them in

. . . Earth feels what they are doing and moves, mud gathers where there are no trees and slides down slowly into outside maybe just over

choking the fish that feed the people and the bombing into the muck on the edge of the water, tearing up the tree roots the sea

The whole country is slipping away a bit at a time brings the last of their corpses to the surface in great waves of bone and meat, but fewer every year . . .

. . . can I hear you calling when there is no darkness left?

Sun burning my eyelids.

Something stings my face.

“Jesus, Will. What have you been doing?”

The voice gets my eyes open: Vy.

She's the kind of tall, classic blonde you see in cigarette ads from the early sixties. I always forget how stunning she is. Now she's standing over me, all in white, practically glowing in the morning sun. The look on her face is the same one guys on a ten stretch in Rikers get from their wives. Phann hovers behind her, solemnly smoking.

Look around: the room is a wasteland of shattered glass, torn paper, decaying trays of hotel food, roaches and cigarette butts. The bed frame is upturned against the door: they've had to push it aside to get in. I'm in the corner, in some kind of nest made of the mattress and the bedclothes. I'm smeared with blood from my cut-up hands and feet, and I appear to be naked.

“Thought you couldn't make it until Tuesday.”

Vy lifts an eyebrow. Guess that means it's Tuesday. “Get dressed.” She stalks out.

Phann rests the cigarette in his mouth and sticks out a hand to help me up: supremely unconcerned. He hands me my boots.

“Thanks.”

He shrugs, reaches behind his ear, and produces a joint. “I think you need it.”

Viola.

She used to be a lot of fun.

Now she dolls herself up in white chiffon and linen like something out of colonial Indochina, but she's still the high priestess of destruction. Her dad's a Nobel Prize–winning novelist; her mom was
the
star of 1960s French cinema. (I never read her dad's books, which drove her mad; it was her mom who first introduced her to smack.) She was born beautiful, empty, and damned. She came to Cambodia looking for Colonel Kurtz with a needle hanging out of her arm. When we met, it was all playtime. But things changed. She got the fear, cleaned herself up. Left Cambo in the mud while she climbed the ladder. Country director, regional coordinator, UN talking head. Start your own foundation so your jet-setting pals can give to a good cause. She spends more time in Paris than Phnom Penh now: visits here are strictly pity trips. She's the only one who can't see the cliff coming up ahead.

What Vy doesn't know is how much she still hates herself.

It's just after noon by the time I make it to the Dane's. I'm hungry as hell and my head is pounding, but I feel surprisingly solid. Guessing I did most of the damage in the first twelve hours, then slept for the next thirty.

I remember nothing.

I ask the Dane for a vodka tonic and whatever food he can get me in the next five minutes. Vy is waiting on the back balcony, smoking Gauloises and reading some magazine with a big-eyed child on the cover. With that much money, I guess you don't mind being a cliché.

“Thanks for coming.” I collapse into my chair. She doesn't speak. “Where's Bones?”

“She's waiting in the hotel.” No expression. British accent now: she's keeping her cool.

“Until you decide I'm on the level.”

She lifts her chin with practiced indifference, but her eyes grab me, electric green. “Well, what am I supposed to think? You call me out of the blue and tell me you've found—”

“Not here.” I hold up a hand. “Get the professor, we'll talk on the way.”

She's looking at my drink, lips pursed. “You sure you're in shape—”

“I'm fine. An—”
And you don't get to tell me what to do anymore.
“Anesthetic. You know I don't like boats.”

She's looking to delay, tries another tack. “You should call the police.”

“Sure, once I have a clue what I'm looking at.”

“And how will you explain how you found it?”

“I'll think of something.”

“Well, you had better at least tell
me
.”

I let that hang in the air. Finally: “You know how I found it.”

She looks at me, first angry, then scared, then like she's about to cry. She settles on angry. “No, Will, I don't.” Razor blades on glass. “It's one thing to jump on every city shooting and say you have a nose for trouble, but this”—it comes out “zis,” her fingers tangling a web of air—“this is unreal.”

There's the angle: she's looking for a fight. I thought she'd be tired of those, but some people never get enough. I'd hate to see her in the ring.

“You know better,” I say. Give her a minute to remember.

There's a moment I think she's going to walk out, that it's too much: I can see all the old stuff flooding through her head and nothing I can do to stop it. I have to let it play out.

I'm thinking of the day we first met: in the FCC a million years ago, smelling of opium and grinning at each other over cocktails like kids psyching themselves up to shoplift
Playboy
s from the corner mart. We had fun.

Try not to think about that: none of it was real, anyway.

She stays seated, so I figure I have a chance.

“I didn't call for old times' sake,” I say, once everything that could possibly happen hasn't. “I'm working.”

“Really? It looks like you're having a psychotic break. Or possibly just doing your best Burroughs impression.”

Grin. “Wanna play William Tell?”

“And you're drunk.”

“Not yet. What, you gonna arrest me?” I stick out my arms, wrists up like I'm waiting for the cuffs. Spill some vodka. She has a good long look, running her eyes from wrist to biceps, then back to my face.

“Let's go, then,” she sighs.

Vy's forensic scientist is named Bun My. She cuts up corpses for just about everybody—National Museum, Antiquities Ministry, United Nations. Plenty of work in Cambo if you're an expert in human remains. Folks still find mass graves from the Khmer Rouge days on a pretty regular basis. Bun My isn't the best around, but she's good enough, she owes Vy a lot of favors, and she's not in too deep with the cops. She's small as a child, but there's no way the boat takes five, so we have to leave Phann behind. That worries me some: I've got to like the old fighter, and I figure he'd be good to have if things get rough.

I don't mention that to Vy.

It's already hot by the time Lon pulls out onto the blue, and no one is saying much. We just hide under our hats and wait. I've poured some vodka into a water bottle, so the boat's stuttering and jerking is manageable—still, the ride seems to take hours.

When we reach the spot, Lon cuts the motor and we drag the boat to rest. Vy's in jeans now, but still rolls them up over her swamp boots to clear the muck. Bun My jumps straight out, not worrying about her clothes. She's wearing the same khaki outfit and sandals they issue all dirt hounds with their master's degree.

She looks puzzled. “How you find this?”

I settle on something close to the truth. “The person I'm looking for took a photograph of this spot. I recognized it and wanted to look around.” It's believable enough—if you haven't seen the photograph. Bun nods; Vy frowns.

Lon starts to follow, but I motion for him to stay with the boat. The rest of us go into the woods.