Cambodian Book of the Dead (18 page)

 

FREEZER

 

Maier pressed ten dollars into the hand of the man on duty. The lucky recipient pulled a stretcher from the ice box and disappeared. The mortuary in Calmette, Phnom Penh's barely functioning government hospital, was silent, dirty and cold. The hospital was a place to die in. A last way-station. The doctors bargained hard for every dollar. The medical equipment, such as it was, did not work and cockroaches ruled the grey building with impunity, day and night. During the UNTAC days, the hospital had gained the moniker “Calamity”. Patients and their families lay on mats in the corridors. In the yard, the sick slept under mosquito nets on the bare ground. Nurses demanded hard cash for every shot of morphine. No one who was admitted was expected to recover, but Calmette was the best hospital in the country. The place where they stored foreign corpses. Maier hesitated for a second before he pulled the cloth back.

 

The journey from Battambang to the capital had been wonderful. He travelled through Raksmei's country, a country whose stories he had absorbed for many years, and had written about in his articles. He felt very much alive. Raksmei had warned him that the roads and trains between Battambang and Phnom Penh would be watched. Maier preferred to remain dead for now. This had called for a journey on the Funny Train.

The French had brought the railroads to Cambodia, but since the end of the war, only one train a day commuted between the capital and Battambang and, after decades of neglect, the tracks were in pitiful condition. The three-hundred-kilometre journey took around twenty hours. Usually the train was so packed that every available bit of roof space of the gutted and rusty carriages was occupied.

Maier had suffered through the trip in the Nineties, during the UNTAC presence in Cambodia. In those days, the journey had been free for passengers prepared to ride in the first two carriages. This hadn't been a charitable gesture by the railway authorities. The front of the train had been regularly blown up by landmines that Khmer Rouge units had dropped onto the tracks during the night.

As the roads around Battambang were unnavigable during the rainy season and virtually useless the rest of the year, local people constructed their own trains – from old tractor axles, water pumps and a home-made wooden platform – the Funny Trains.

These unlikely and unsafe vehicles transported up to ten passengers at a time and moved down the tracks significantly faster than the regular train. When two Funny Trains met, one could be quickly dismantled, deposited next to the rails, until the tracks were free once more.

The young man who operated the unusual vehicle didn't say a word, which was fine with Maier. The detective spent the day in silence, a water bottle in his hand, dressed in a torn shirt and the pants of a Cambodian farmer, a
krama
around his head. He tried to process the events of the previous days. He didn't do too well. His thoughts turned back to his mission again and again. He knew Kaley's sister had been killed, but he had no idea why. This German Khmer had not seen her sister for years, decades even. He had to see for himself. He thought of Hort. Right now, the necessity of knowing felt like a yoke around his neck.

Village children ran along with them, waving and screaming at the top of their lungs, then Maier was left to his thoughts again. The driver stopped in Pursat and bought a bag of fried frogs. All that was left of the French-era train station was a single wall, against which the male passengers of passing trains urinated. Just like Battambang.

Maier ate nothing.

The Funny Train reached Phnom Penh Airport after dark. Maier jumped off, paid the driver and took a taxi into town. Every bone in his body seemed to have moved during the bumpy ride. He rented a cheap room in a guest house at Boeung Kok where he'd left money and a couple of phones. Then he waited for dawn.

 

Maier had seen, photographed and examined many corpses. Death made the human body unfamiliar. Whatever had made the person who'd left the body behind was no longer there.

There's wasn't much left of her head. Whoever had swung the golf club had wanted not just to kill. Daniela Stricker's face was totally disfigured. The lower jaw was missing. The back of her skull had also been bashed in. As if the murderer had wanted to obscure the identity of his victim.

After a while, he forced himself to search her torn clothes.

Her hands and arms were punctured by small round holes, which had become infected. She had been tortured, most likely by the three little girls. He turned the woman around. He could see
livor mortis
on her hip and along her back. The discolouring of her skin suggested she'd been moved a few hours after her death. He took another close look at her head. No doubt about it, Ms Stricker had been tortured, shot, moved from the scene of the crime, and then been beaten with a golf club. The police had covered up the true murder.

Maier would have to travel to Kampot to talk to the man in jail there. He heard voices approaching the door of the mortuary. The detective pushed the dead woman back into her cooling slot.

The employee burst in and gesticulated wildly. Maier didn't lose a second, pressed another twenty dollars in the man's hand and followed him through the only door, up a set of stairs and into a small office. Seconds later he saw the boy, Tep's son, his baseball cap turned backwards as usual, pass the door, followed by three young girls. The girls wore jeans and T-shirts today. They wore their hair short and their expressions left no doubt that they'd come from the temple Maier had been held at. The boy carried a revolver.

The hospital employee behind Maier shook like a leaf and started mumbling to himself. The small room they were in had one window. Maier told the man to close the window behind him, and escaped into the bright morning sun.
Who had known that he'd be at Calmette Hospital today? Was the appearance of the boy and his three angels a coincidence or had he been betrayed?

The detective tied his
krama
around his head and marched, his head bowed, through the entrance gate of the hospital and disappeared in the crowds on Monivong Boulevard.

 

 

ROLF

 

The German's handsome looks had all but faded. Maier almost didn't recognise the young coffee heir, who lay sprawled in an armchair in the back of Restaurant
Edelweiß
. Rolf Müller-Overbeck didn't react as Maier threw himself onto a sofa opposite and pulled off his
krama
.

“Hello, Rolf.”

“Hello, Maier. Thought you'd been fed to the fish in front of Koh Tonsay by now. Almost feel like I'm meeting an old friend, after not seeing him for many years. Time flies.”

The young German dropped the filter of a burnt-out cigarette into an overflowing ashtray and stared blankly at Maier. His clothes were dirty. His shirt was ripped across his right shoulder. He looked almost as desperate as the legless beggars who moved up and down Sisowath Quay.

“You don't seem to be particularly happy about my survival.”

Rolf shrugged.

“It's all over, Maier. My business has been stolen and my woman has disappeared, probably kidnapped, probably not to be saved. Your appearance doesn't make much difference in the larger scheme of things.”

“Perhaps I can help you.”

The younger man laughed bitterly. “Help me? Everybody wants to help me. Help me to buy land, help me to start a business, an honest business, help to cheat the locals, to pull them across the table and to rape them. I don't know why you turned up in Kep, but since you did, things have been going downhill. And now you want to help me?”

“What happened?”

Rolf pulled another cigarette from his crumpled shirt and began fiddling with a cheap plastic lighter.

“Why should I tell you anything? You make it all worse.”

“After what you have just told me, it cannot get much worse. I can assure you that I have nothing to do with the problems in Kep.”

Maier knew that he didn't sound very convincing. Rolf said nothing.

A smiling waitress arrived with two cans of beer.

“Vodka orange,” Maier ordered and handed one of the cans back to the young woman.

“Last week we found out that the land documents most of the
barang
in Kep hold are fakes. Tep cheated us and then offered generously to transfer our investments to the casino. Otherwise it would all be gone and we could leave Kep. And if that was not acceptable, the general's little killer girls would chase us away. As expected, my partner Pete signed the new contract with Tep. Without asking me.”

“And where is Kaley?”

“Disappeared. Inspector Viengsra came and took her. After I refused to invest in the casino, I received a letter. I found it under my door at the dive shop office.”

The younger German pulled a piece of paper from his breast pocket.

Maier scanned the page, which had been torn from a child's exercise book. If Rolf wanted to see Kaley again, it read in broken English, he'd have to pay fifty thousand US dollars. The deadline for the drop had already passed.

“I don't have fifty thousand US dollars. Anyway, this doesn't mean anything. Who knows what would have happened if I'd paid.”

Maier looked into Rolf's eyes. The coffee heir was all the way down. The moment had come to push forward, directly into his heart.

“What happened to Kaley's daughter?”

Rolf brushed the long hair from his gaunt face and looked at Maier with a hostile expression.

“You're telling me that you have nothing to do with what's going on in Kep and you ask me so personal a question?”

“Why is the question personal?”

“Because I killed Poch, Kaley's daughter.”

Maier went for a mild smile. He knew he'd driven Rolf into a corner, exactly where he wanted him. The pressure to confess, to communicate, to share his suffering had to be overwhelming.

“You don't look like someone who kills small children. What happened?”

“Yes, I'm a child killer and everyone in Kep knew that and knows that and they keep their mouths shut because Tep makes them. I am the child killer of Kep. That's the secret of our little community.”

Maier said nothing. He was waiting for more.

“I was driving our jeep between Kampot and Kep. Pete sat next to me. Suddenly, a black shadow ran across the road and it went bang.”

The young German finished his beer and waved the can in the direction of the waitress.

“We stopped. A small girl was lying in front of the car in the middle of the road. She was alive for a few more minutes, but she didn't say anything. Just this little bundle of suffering and death. Her name was Poch. She was Kaley's daughter.”

“She wore black pyjamas?”

Rolf nodded distractedly.

“She had short hair?”

“Yes, just like her girlfriends who stood by the side of the road a few minutes later. I can remember exactly what they looked like. They were angry, angry as I've never seen anyone. They had murder in their eyes. I almost had the feeling that it wasn't directed at me, but at their little friend. As if Poch had been running away from them. But that didn't make sense. And then her mother came.”

Rolf swallowed hard.

“You see, Maier, I can't leave Kaley behind. And now it looks like I can't take her with me. As I said, everything is broken. Just read the paper.”

“Are you sure that Kaley would leave the country with you?”

Rolf wouldn't make eye contact with Maier. He stared silently across Sisowath Quay.

“I'm not sure.”

The younger man was about to break into tears. Instead he lit his cigarette and hid behind a cloud of smoke. He pushed the current edition of the
Cambodia Daily
across the table at Maier and stabbed his finger angrily at the main feature.

“Kaley is only the tip of the iceberg that's drifting around Kep. She never asked me to take her with me. But who, in her situation, would say no?”

Maier understood that the young man had no clear idea of the priorities of his girlfriend. If she still had priorities.

“You remember what Vichat, the park ranger in Bokor, told us about his colleague who'd disappeared, and the girls he'd seen in the ruins?”

 

ACTIVIST FOUND DEAD AT HOME
 

 

Preah Sim, well-known human rights activist and director of the Cambodian Human Rights Society, was found yesterday in his room on Street 278. Sim was 28 years old. Neighbours confirmed to a correspondent from the Cambodia Daily that three young women had visited the activist in the afternoon.
 

The homicide department of the Phnom Penh police force initially insisted on suicide, but a demonstration by hundreds of workers of the garment industry in front of the Rue Pasteur police station and pressure from the opposition Sam Rainsy Party forced the authorities to reconsider the case. Prime Minister Hun Sen, at a CPP party function in Stung Treng, regretted the death and promised a swift resolution to the case.
 

 

“If you have money you can do anything here. It goes all the way to the top. You can cover up murder and accidents as if they'd never happened. But someone somewhere always gets caught up in this. Do you understand what's happening here? And why you can't help me?”

Maier read the article again.

“You have money in Germany. Ask your family. Your mother would send you the money straight away.”

Rolf rose angrily, “What do you know about my mother, about my life, Maier?”

“I am a private detective from Hamburg. Your mother hired me–”

“To spy on my life, because she thinks I can't do it alone. Or because she can't bring herself to sell the family business to a stranger. Unbelievable. You're a bastard, Maier.”

The younger German had gone pale with anger. He was on a roll, his voice heavy with sarcasm and malice.

“So Detective Maier already knows that a German woman has been killed near Bokor, and that he is one of the suspects. All your own fault, Maier. Or my mother's, who won't let go of her son.”

“But you won't manage to get out of here by yourself. I can help you to find Kaley.”

Rolf laughed.

“You are wanted for the murder of a German tourist and now you want to save my girlfriend. Maier, don't cross my path again.”

The young man threw a few bills on the table and disappeared in the throng on Sisowath Quay. Rolf was well informed. But not well enough to know who the dead German tourist was. Maier stayed behind, alone, enveloped in dark thoughts.