Cambodian Book of the Dead (3 page)

The old good-bye rap by the deputy captain was barely understandable. The stewardess passed his row, wearing her most professional smile. There was no way to get through now. Maier sighed inwardly and turned to the window.

Cambodia was down there, a small, insignificant country, in which the history of the twentieth century had played out as if trapped in the laboratory of a demented professor.

French colony, independence in 1953, a few years of happily corrupt growth and peace under King Sihanouk, followed by five years of war with CIA coups, Kissinger realpolitik, US bombs, a few hundred thousand dead and millions of refugees – the most intense bombing campaign in the history of conflict was the opening act for the communist revolution of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, that managed to kill off a quarter of the country's population in less than four short years. The genocide was choked off by the Vietnamese, unwelcome liberators, and almost two decades of civil war followed. Finally, UNTAC, the United Nations Transitional Authority of Cambodia, had shown up, organised elections of sorts and had then fled the burnt out, tired country as quickly as possible. The last Khmer Rouge fighters had thrown in their blood-soaked towels in 1997 and joined the county's government troops. Maier had stood right next to them. It had been a painful process.

Since then, Cambodia had known peace – of sorts.

The women were beautiful. It had always been like that, if you were to believe the silent stone reliefs of countless
apsaras
, the heavenly dancers of the Angkor Empire that graced thousand-year-old temple walls in the west of the country. The highly paid UN soldiers had noticed the sensuousness of the women too and had promptly introduced AIDS, which now provided the only international headlines of this otherwise forgotten Buddhist kingdom – a kingdom that had ruled over much of Southeast Asia eight hundred years ago. Past, present and future, it was all the same, every child in Cambodia knew that. Maier was looking forward to it. All of it.

The plane made a wide curve and barely straightened for its landing approach, descending now with the coordination of an uncertain drunk towards the runway. The sky was gun-metal grey. Dark, heavy clouds hung low to the east of the city over the Tonlé Sap Lake. The country below looked dusty and abandoned. Here and there Maier spotted a swamp in this semi-arid desert, an old rubbish-filled fish pond or a clogged-up irrigation canal. Dots of sick colour spilled on a blank, diseased landscape.

The aircraft abruptly lost altitude. Glittering temple roofs amidst the grey metal sheds of the poor that spread like a cancer around the airport, shot past. Beyond the partially collapsed perimeter fence, children dressed in rags raced across unpaved roads or dug their way through gigantic piles of refuse. The Wild East. This didn't look like Prague or Krakow.

The Cambodian Air Travel flight began to shake like a dying bird and Maier could not help but overhear one of the passengers in the seats behind him, a dour but voluptuous Austrian woman. What was he thinking?

“Gerhard, are we crashing? Will we die, Gerhard?”

Maier was just able to spot a few skinny cows grazing peacefully on the edge of the runway. Then they were down.

Welcome to Cambodia.

 

THE PEARL OF ASIA

 

“Vodka orange, please.”

The Foreign Correspondents Club, the FCC, was Maier's first port of call in Phnom Penh. As the sun set, Maier sat on the front terrace on the first floor of the handsome French colonial-era corner building and watched the action along Sisowath Quay, the wide road that ran along the banks of the Tonlé Sap River. Since his last visit three years earlier, things had changed. Some of the roads in town had been resurfaced and in the daytime, the city was safe. Amnesties and disarmament programs run by the government and international aid organisations had wrestled the guns from the hands of the kids.

Sisowath Quay woke up in the late afternoon and made a half-hearted attempt to resurrect the flair of the Fifties, when the Cambodian capital had been known as the Pearl of the East. Half the establishments along the river road were called something like L'Indochine, Pastis was served on the sidewalks and the cute young waitresses in their figure-hugging uniforms had learned to say
bonjour
. The bistros, bars and restaurants did brisk business with the tourists who had, looking for temples, somehow got lost and ended up in the city. A few galleries had opened, offering huge and garish oil paintings of Angkor Wat to less discerning visitors. Too loud for the waiting room at Mrs Müller-Overbeck's dentist back in Blankenese, but just right for the current batch of visitors.

And the anarchy of the recent past remained visible. Small groups of cripples, most of them men, victims of a few of the millions of landmines that had been buried across the country, waiting to blow someone's, anyone's foot off, were gathering on the footpaths. Those with crutches limped up and down the broken pavement, carrying hawkers' trays filled with photocopied books about genocide, torture and the terrible human cost of landmines.

“Only two dollar” was the call that followed tourists brave enough to walk as night fell. Most of the unfortunates merely followed the wealthy visitors with their dead eyes, tried to sell drugs or simply begged for something, anything to get them through the night. To survive in this country could be called fortunate – or not. Those who no longer had eyes were guided in mad circles by orphaned children as they played sad songs on the
srang
, a small, lamenting fiddle whose body was tied off with the skin of a cobra. Emaciated, dried-up cyclo drivers moved their pedal-powered rickshaws along the quay in slow motion as if in funeral processions, while the motorised transport rolled like a dirty wave around them. Thousands of small mopeds, driven by
motodops
, provided the only public transport. Toyotas smuggled in from Thailand, with the steering wheel on the wrong side – you drove on the right in Cambodia, on the left in neighbouring Thailand and any which way you preferred on Sisowath Quay after dark – or huge four-wheel-drives that had, for the most part, originated with the many NGOs in town – now driven by heavily armed young thugs, the children of the corrupt upper classes, of government cronies and the upper echelons of the military – rarely displayed number plates. Some of the drivers were too young to look above the steering wheel. The countless bars on the side streets branching off from the river were filled with young women in tight clothes. For a few dollars you could take any one of them back to your hotel.

Directly above the steep banks of the river, the municipal authorities had built a wide promenade where the inhabitants of Cambodia's capital could enjoy the fresh breeze while the tourists could get excited about photographing the resident elephant. The US dollar was still the main currency in circulation, if the price list on the FCC's was anything to go by. The riel, the country's currency, wasn't worth much. Only the poor used it.

Maier found himself getting depressed. Here on Sisowath Quay, as the sun sunk into the slow moving, broad river, dotted with small fishing barges, a shoot-out before dinner was wholly imaginable, just as it had been four years earlier. Some change.

“Hey, Maier, long time no see, mate. You're missing the boom.”

Carissa Stevenson had once been the best and most attractive foreign journalist in Phnom Penh. After UNTAC had packed up its tanks, the media types had left and the country had slipped from the international front pages, Carissa had stayed on. She had stayed, after Hort had died and Maier had said goodbye to his old life. Now, as he got up and put his arms around his former colleague and sometime partner, he noticed that the four years in the sun of a country the world had forgotten had given her a positively golden bloom. Carissa radiated life force.

“Hey, Carissa, you look great, better than anyone I've seen lately. The heroin must be getting better in these parts.”

“Well, it's getting cheaper all the time, Maier.”

The woman from Nelson, New Zealand broke into a slightly lop-sided and gorgeous smile. Rings around her fingers and bags under her dark eyes, lined with kohl. Dressed all in red. The skirt was tight and short. The long frizzled hair was white.

White!

Maier remembered Carissa as ash blonde.

“I don't suppose you've come to Phnom Penh for a holiday? And you're not here for me either. And there's no big story to be scooped. Apart from the daily rapes and murders, rampaging elephants and the occasional drug overdose by some third-tier member of the European aristocracy, it's pretty quiet. The good old and wild times, when Cambodia could shock the world are long gone. Hollywood's coming in the shape of Angelina Jolie soon. I don't suppose you have become a reporter for the stars? So what are you doing here?”

“I haven't worked as a journo for years, Carissa. I'm a private detective now. And I'm here on business.”

Carissa laughed drily and, with a languid, studied gesture, waved for service. The waiter, at the far end of the teak top bar, nodded. It was as it had always been. Everyone knew what Carissa wanted. For a moment Maier remembered the exciting weeks in Phnom Penh – nights on the terrace of her colonial-era villa, crushed by sex, amphetamines, alcohol and marijuana, as gunfire rattled through the darkness around them. Life had been uncomplicated then. You just had to react to whatever had been going on.

The trips up-country were just as vivid in his memory. He'd often travelled with soldiers loyal to Hun Sen, the country's new leader, a young and ruthless ex-Khmer Rouge who had gone over to the Vietnamese, had helped liberate the country from the madness of stone-age communism and had since reigned with a single eye and an iron fist, most recently in the name of democracy. The soldiers had gone out to hunt Khmer Rouge. Looking danger in the eye had become habitual, like smoking, and had given Maier the illusion of eternal life. Somehow he'd lost that later. On the day the bomb with his name on it had killed Hort, it had disappeared altogether. Now, as he looked at his old partner, he could see his past in her familiar, so-familiar, face clearly.

“I don't fucking believe it. A private detective? I'll call you Holmes from now on.”

“There are better private detectives.”

He gave her his card.

“Marlowe is probably more appropriate.”

Carissa expelled a short, mocking laugh. She had lost none of her charm, or cynicism. She smelled good too. She leaned dangerously close to Maier and for a second he turned his eyes away from the street and fell into hers, like a fever.

“And how can I be of assistance to solve the great detective's case?” she whispered with the broadest Kiwi accent he'd heard in years.

“I am not sure I can let you in on the confidential aspects of this case,” he replied just as softly.

Carissa pulled a face and began to search through her handbag, until she'd found a half-smoked joint.

“You won't convince me with that. Is Cambodia the only country left in the world where smoking weed is still legal?”

“No longer, at least not on paper. The Americans put the heat on and Cambodia has passed the relevant laws. But what does that mean here? There are three restaurants in town that have happy pizza on their menu. One slice is enough to take you straight back to the good old UNTAC days. You can even choose, appropriately for the consumer age – happy, very happy and extremely happy. I've just covered it for
High Times
.”

“Shame, that's not why I came back. But it's great to see you.”

Carissa looked at him impatiently and passed the joint.

“So tell me what brought you back to Phnom Penh. I'll promise not to publish a word without your permission.”

“I am looking for a young man who runs a scuba diving business in Kep. You know, the beach place near the Vietnamese border.”

“Yeah, I fucking know the place. We had sex in an old ruined church there once, remember? A pigeon shat on your arse.”

Maier did remember.

“There's only one dive place. It can only be Rolf or Pete. Rolf's German, Pete's a Brit. The outfit is called Pirate Divers or something original like that. Pete's in town at the moment. Those two aren't hard to find.”

Maier took a quick drag and passed the joint back to the journalist.

“Well, if Pete is here already, I would like to meet him. Where does he go at night?”

“The English guy? But your case surely has to be about the German? Has he done anything wrong? I hope he's not a child molester, but I suppose he wouldn't have slept with an old lady like me if he went for the young ones.”

“As far as I know, he is nothing of the sort. But I don't know much and that's why I am here.”

“Is there a warrant out for him in Germany?”

“No. How long have you known Rolf Müller-Overbeck?”

Carissa grinned with only a modicum of embarrassment.

“Don't sound so formal, Maier. I picked Rolf up in the Heart of Darkness bar. On his first night in town. That was six months ago, in April, around New Year. You know, when everyone throws water and talc at each other and everyone gets wet. Rolf's the kind of guy who's straight in there, no hesitation. He poured a bucket of ice water over my head and I took my revenge. The Heart of Darkness is a pick-up joint.”

“How did he seem to you?”

Carissa laughed, “Quite flexible for a bloke, especially for a German. Spontaneous, friendly and naïve – as far as Asia's concerned. He hadn't caught yellow fever yet. Then I was down in Kep in May to celebrate my birthday. I saw Rolf again that night and he still hadn't been infected. But that has, as far as I know, changed now. What do you want from him?”

“Confidential. But as far as I know, he has not committed a crime. Yellow fever?”

“Oh, you know, the unhealthy fixation on Cambodian women so many male foreigners acquire here. They think that Cambodian girls are the most beautiful females in the world, which has a lot to do with the fact that they don't talk back. As long as the money keeps rolling in. Once the boys become infected, I'm out of the race, completely. Naturally. I talk back.”

“And the English guy?”

“…is kind of a smooth operator, a wide-boy as they'd say where he comes from. But the dive business seems to be going good since Rolf got in as a partner. He invested and manages to get German customers via their website. The dive industry's in its infancy here. Those two are real pioneers.”

Maier was suddenly exhausted. The long flight and the short joint, the unfamiliar heat and the city air, saturated with petrol fumes, the anarchy on the street, and on top, his old lover (he liked to keep the word girlfriend locked up deep inside); it was simply great to be back in Cambodia and float in clouds of nostalgia. This case would be more fun than Mrs Müller-Overbeck had had in her entire life.

Carissa raised her glass. “So, Mr Private Detective, if you don't come home with me tonight, I'll do everything in my power to make your case more complicated.”