Cambodia Noir (36 page)

I meet Gus at a supermarket on Sihanouk Street. He hands me my passport and the journals, I give him a chunk of the cash I took from Gabriel. “For expenses. Look after her if you can.”

“Look after yourself.”

No more words. Heading for the airport, hoping the Americans haven't found a reason to stop me leaving. No plan. Nothing in my bag but a wad of cash and a history of despair in bad handwriting. The thought that it's done, that the choice has been made, even if I didn't make it, seems to banish June from my head, leaving my mind clearer than it's been in days. A part of me is almost hopeful: I might actually do what I set out to do.

But without June, there's only Channi, and the pain of leaving her fills all the empty spaces. I hear her voice in my head, and I try to go back to the beer or the puppet show or the first night in the Edge, but I'm stuck on those last few seconds:

“I'm real,”
she screams, over and over.

It isn't even love, just what might have been.

Everything still hurts.

The bike crawls through snarled traffic. This isn't a part of town I visit much: an ugly, commercial street, lined with cheap-built modern things, all glass and plastic. Garish ads for cell phone companies, supermarket signs, boutiques and camera shops and fast food. It could be anywhere.

People in fake Prada and Hilfiger rushing to appointments, heads down, chatting on phones and getting their hair cut. No one is hustling except the sandwich sellers, no one calling out about girls and guns and drugs. No one to call out to. The motodops wait on corners: no big smiles, no childish bowing and cajoling. Just cabbies looking for a fare. Just people, living—hard lives, perhaps, on the edge of an abyss, but living nonetheless.

June never saw this, either. Cambo only existed for her through the lens of those places we created: a world built to reflect us back at ourselves, a world of poverty and deference. She thought she was lost, that she had fallen outside of history—guess that was what she wanted. But history goes on. Even here, where so many have tried so hard to end it.

Kids lounge on the hoods of parked cars, smoking, and don't glance up as I ride past. As the bike turns onto the airport road, I say good-bye.

Hong Kong: neon city. It's too much. Needles of light piercing the sky—even out the window of the plane I can barely look at it.

Then the airport, a spiderweb of steel and glass. Thronged with people, it still seems empty. Everyone is wearing masks. Voices mumble low and I can never tell where they come from. Sounds muted, suitcases pushed on silent wheels. I keep looking over my shoulder—

Christ, I've been in the woods too long.

I realize I'm frozen in the middle of some silver concourse, head full of echoes and shivering from the air-con. Don't even see a bar. I take a deep breath and go looking for the subway.

The ride to the city isn't long. The car crowded with colors—a Chagall painting of limbs and suitcases and shirts. The silence is frightening: even the train just whispers as it rushes through the tunnels, and I can almost hear the sea pounding over our heads.

I've got to collect myself. Get a plan.

The first thing will be to find Chun Song. That should be the easy part. Getting in front of him: much harder. Got to lie low until I get the lay of the land—hopefully just a couple days. Find some way to make the approach—as a businessman, investor maybe. I still have a few favors left in Bangkok, I could get them to fake a paper trail for me—

Then what?

Depends on what I'm going to find.

A nameless flophouse in a nameless part of town. The cheapest thing I could get, and still far too much, but it's close to where I need to be. This city unsettles me. Cambodia was crowded, but never like this, this endless rush of bodies. Got to walk more, get the rhythm of the place.

Even going to the corner for newspapers is a scrimmage, and I'm aching for a fix the whole time. I can smell the drugs all around me, rolling in waves off the men on the curbs and the sullen barkeeps: uppers and downers and pot and glistening white powders—

Focus.

Back to the lobby, if you can call it that: red light and cheap tourism posters, and a hotel clerk dutifully reading the headlines off the pile of Chinese papers I've brought him. Fighting with the mainland over the Internet, energy policy, local crime—

That's it, I say, give me the metro section. He blinks.

“The city. Business, crime, anything.”

He shakes his head, keeps reading. SARS, Christ, and more SARS. Move on. Filipino maid on trial for killing her employer. No. Some foreign mother of three bashes in her husband's skull. Dark stories, but not mine. Then:

“Gangster death house was torture den.”

What the hell is that?

Oh, yes, a big criminal, he ran brothels, found dead in his bath, arms and legs slashed open. Suicide? Or not. “Investigating all angles.” Now some anonymous police source talking about a room in the house full of shackles, cages, torture implements. Tabloid bullshit? Maybe. But my fingers are itching even before he says the name:

“Chun Song was . . . not arrested, known for being power force in Wan Chai prostitution set . . .”

Chun Song
was
. Now he's a fucking Jackson Pollock.

Nineteen days I've been in Hong Kong, and every one of them felt like a year.

When I saw Chun Song was gone, I knew I'd need more time. Found an even grimmer place to stay than the first hotel. After that I found a squat. Hunkered down in the crappiest part of town I could find, living off noodles from street stands, and still I've burned through all my cash—all I can spare if I plan on leaving.

But I know where she is.

I'm in the diner, with Dany, trying to wait. My plate of dumplings cost about thirty bucks but I can't bring myself to eat it. Poke at it with a chopstick. Light another cigarette, order more coffee, watch the lights in the window.

“Boss.”

Everything here glows, lit from all sides. It's so bright, it makes the rest of the world seem dim.

“Boss.”

I look up.

Dany taps the table with one elaborately painted nail. “Almost time.” That low, smoky, Judy Garland voice. “You sure you okay, boss?”

“Fine.”

“You gonna eat that?”

“No.”

I found Dany outside my second hotel, working in ten-minute increments. We haggled a bit and fixed a salary. She's trying to pay for her operations and hates getting on her knees in alleys, so she gouged me. But she's cute as a button, and can talk the balls off a donkey. She opens doors I need opened. I don't like taking her with me tonight—tried paying her off, but she wouldn't have it. She wants in on the big rescue.

I check the clock again: twenty more minutes.

Song's penthouse was in a building in the financial district, a splinter of glass so tall it makes your eyes hurt. And right across Victoria Harbour: Wan Chai. The red lights always on. I knew June was there, somewhere: lost and invisible in the growling belly of the world.

We've spent two weeks prowling every brothel, strip joint, and street corner. I check the front, Dany the back. I scope out places she won't dare go, she waltzes into ones I can't afford to set foot in. Hasn't been hard to avoid notice—Song's death has introduced a type of chaos into the air. Everyone is on edge, looking for their next paycheck or their next angle. There are so many scouts and spies and independent operators trying to move in, we just vanish into the crowd.

There were days and days of this: phony appointments and bogus tourism and US dollars stuffed in G-strings or hungry pockets, but now we've found her—or think we have—in a highly exclusive hotel for men with a taste for blood and tears. By appointment only: I had to get myself recommended by another client. Dany managed that for me. I was impressed by her stamina. My Bangkok friend worked the background check, and I stiffed him—another city I can't go back to, unless I come into a surprise inheritance.

But I have an appointment. Tonight. It's not much of a plan: Go in, get her, get out. Try not to get seen by the bouncers. If she still has her fake passport, I can bring her back. More likely Song had it hidden somewhere. I won't be able to take her out of the country, but I can get her to the consulate. Fortunately it's right next to the red-light district. I get her there, she'll be safe.

But now it comes to it, and I'm sitting in this stinking noodle shop with cold hands playing piano on my spine. Will she be scared, sobered by what she found in the dark? Will I find her drugged out, ruined, and in pain? Or will she still be looking?

It comes to the same thing: me and her, and a door.

Her photos are spread out in front of me, innocuous on the Formica tabletop. You hardly even see them. She's taken the void inside her and made it real in black and white. Pictures without story: That's the truth. We deceive ourselves with words. Reality is these images, out of focus and unconnected.

I thought learning her trick would help me understand her. Now I want to forget it. If I get her out, maybe I can.

I think of Gabriel:
“Just look over your shoulder.”

I think of Two:
“I couldn't just walk away.”

I think of Channi, the way she held my hand that day in the park.

Put the photos back in their envelope, tape it shut. Stub out my cigarette. No more delays. “Let's go.”

We step out into the street.

Hong Kong—so tall it makes my head spin. I spend my days looking at the concrete, afraid to glance up. Dany takes my hand, leans against me like we're on a romantic stroll rather than a march to the scaffold. I try to pretend.

We walk that way to the end of the line.

The hotel is a squat, soot-stained monolith from the eighties. Access is through a bar off an underground mezzanine, and the bar is something out of a nightmare—if your nightmares are directed by the local youth group and involve a lot of Karo syrup. Walls painted like dungeon stone, women chained up dripping fake blood. Women in cages. Women tied up on the floor acting as tables while guys in suits eat off them. Up front, a couple in pleather and rayon doing scenes from
Venus in Furs,
while rapt peepers jizz their pants. Gomorrah on the cheap, packed with folks who don't know the real thing is just behind the curtain.

Here and there, I see guys among the suits who clearly aren't here for jollies. Cropped hair and bulging jackets. They don't have the triad look, they're just security, but tougher than I'd like. Note to self: don't try to walk out the front. I think of Dany, hanging out in the side alley, ready to make a distraction if I take too long—push the thought away. She can handle herself. Probably make a grand while she's waiting.

I try to look like I'm enjoying the scenery as a girl in a chain-mail bra and steel chastity belt comes up to me and says something in Chinese.

I smile at her. “I have an appointment, love.” Give her the password.

She answers with a bow and a big smile. “Straight to back door, sir. All the way to back and take elevator to number fourteen. It will be door on the left. Number four door, on left.”

The elevator is small, and it rattles. Silence in the hall upstairs. Mirrored walls stained with handprints, red carpet frayed in the center.

I try not to count the doors: just makes me think of what's behind. Mine is 1482. I stand outside a minute, breathing hard, with the things I've done to get here crowding my head—

Don't act suspicious. Don't think. Go.

I open the door and there she is.

Immediately I realize what a terrible idea this was, but it's about a hundred thousand years too late.

The door clicks shut behind me.

The room is large and dark: the dimness hides the squalor and the stains. Across from me, a huge picture window overlooks the harbor. Walls covered in eggshell foam, plastic-wrapped mattresses on the floor. A tiny, curtained closet. Wide benches against one wall, their tops covered in black vinyl padding. Opposite, a wooden cross, a square wooden chair that makes me think of executions. Leather restraints hang from a board on the wall. Below that, whips. Then knives.

In the center, a low table, and in front of it a wide settee, old wood and red velvet cushions. She's sitting when I come in, staring out at the sea of lights. A thin robe of black-and-red silk, style hinting at a kimono. Her white-blond hair swept back with chopsticks. She turns to me and says something in Mandarin so perfect, I can almost believe I've made a mistake.

But I know her eyes. They are like the photographs that only she could take: utterly empty. She is different. Everything girlish has burned away, replaced by something hard and white and impassive.

“Ju-on.” I use her real name for the first and last time. “It's me.”

She cocks her head like a bird—like a snake—like anything but a human. I open the briefcase I've brought with me and take out the notebooks. I can't seem to make myself move any closer, so I set them on the floor. “These are yours.”

She looks at them with something like curiosity. “Go back.” A recorded voice over a long-distance line. “You've got the wrong girl.”

“I don't think so.”

She stands now, every movement sudden as a knife thrust. “She's gone. It took me seventeen years to get rid of her, but I did it.”

I'm struggling to breathe—to quell the fear that's rising around me, like the warm water of the Gulf in my dreams. “Do you remember what you wrote, the night you met me? You said you wanted someone to protect you. I can help. I don't care what you've done. I'll get you out—anywhere you want to go—but you have to trust me and come now.” I'm supposed to take her arm, but I can't make my hand move: like trying to pick up a spider.