Cambodian Book of the Dead (9 page)

 

BLUE, RED AND DEAD

 

Samnang had dropped a small anchor. The boat bobbed about in the clear water as Maier wrestled into his BCD, pulled his fins over his feet, donned his mask, checked the regulator and dropped backwards into the Gulf of Thailand.

The sea floor loomed barely ten metres below them. The water was warm and crystal clear. Maier could see about twenty metres. The water crackled in his ears as he descended and equalised. The dolphins had disappeared. Rolf hovered below Maier and waved to him to follow.

Maier had learned to dive in Cuba in the Eighties with a bunch of crazy KGB guys and after his last big case in Thailand he'd travelled on a liveaboard to the Burma Banks to dive with hammerhead sharks. But he'd never been on duty, on the job, so to speak, underwater.

Dark rocky pinnacles rose like stalagmites from the gently descending sea bed. Maier felt he was swimming through a park of miniature cathedrals. As soon as he reached Rolf, a solitary great barracuda came to check the visitors out and lay perfectly still next to them in the water. The predator looked like an expensive sports car. Maier got so close, he could almost count the razor-sharp teeth in its open jaws.

Rolf lost no time and followed his compass, swimming a few metres above the sea floor. Maier followed suit. While no coral grew here, the variety and volume of fish was surprising. Lobsters waved their long white feelers from the nooks and crannies of the rocks; a moray eel and countless small colourful reef fish vied for his attention. A shoal of squid suddenly appeared in front of them, lined up in formation like a squadron of fighter jets. Seconds later, they shot away into the deep blue, in one single coordinated movement. Maier paddled hard behind the young man from Hamburg and tried to concentrate on his breathing. They weren't deep, but he was going to have to do the second dive with the same bottle. He slowly inhaled, slowly exhaled, until he found his rhythm.

The sea floor began to fall away steeply below the two divers. They were about to slide into a cauldron-shaped depression, littered with rocks as large as minibuses. Rolf stopped at the edge of this abyss and moved closer towards one of the rock formations.

Suddenly, two dark shadows appeared out of the blue – and moved lightning-fast directly towards the two divers. That had to be the dolphins. But there was something wrong. The two animals seemed to be bumping into one another as they got closer. Rolf pulled Maier's wetsuit and pressed him against the rock.

The reef shark, its head swinging wildly back and forth, shot a few centimetres past the detective's arm. A young dolphin had pushed the predator off its course. Amidst an explosion of bubbles Maier briefly caught Rolf's eye. The young German was alert but remained completely relaxed. He moved further into the rock and pointed in the direction from which the shark had attacked.

Maier had dived with reef sharks many times, but he'd never seen one race towards a diver so aggressively. Reef sharks hunted more modest prey. There had to be blood in the water, a lot of blood. Perhaps another, injured, shark, hooked on a line, was driving his predatory brothers and sisters mad. Maier looked around, but the shark had not returned, not yet. The detective pointed to the surface, but Rolf shook his head and began to search the pockets of his BCD. Seconds later, he pulled out a red plastic hose, unrolled it and filled it with air from his regulator. The two-metre-long safety buoy shot to the surface like a rocket.

Rolf grabbed Maier's arm and they descended further into the cauldron. Maier checked his air, his bottle was half full and they were at twenty-four metres. No problem, yet.

Rolf urged him on, as close as possible to the large rocks that made the area look like an abandoned scrap yard. After twenty metres, the younger German stopped, slid, as best he could, into a narrow cave and pointed ahead.

They were very close. Maier suddenly felt cold. Fear spread through his wetsuit like ice water. The centre of the cauldron was a hellish place.

Twenty to thirty reef sharks had gathered and were nervously cruising around their find. Ten metres ahead of the two divers, a man floated, his feet chained to a stone, dressed in a torn shirt and jeans, upright in the water. One of the sharks had already ripped away his right arm and part of the shoulder. Blood formed small clouds around his injury.

The man was dead.

Maier was ready to retreat, but Rolf shook his head again and pulled Maier deeper into the cave he'd found.

The next time Maier looked up, the reef sharks had gone. The scene in front of the two divers was ghostly. The man hung in the blue water, all alone, almost elegant, as if waiting for something. Maier could not see whether the corpse was Khmer or foreign.

A large, dark shadow appeared at the opposite rim of the cauldron and descended, like a malignant avalanche, down the slope towards the dead man. Maier was not sure what they were facing – a blue shark, a tiger shark? He had no idea. Whatever it was, it was monster size. Definitely not friendly. Definitely wound up by the blood.

The shark was bigger than many of the rocks in its way and seemed in no hurry to reach its prey. But its slack movements were deceiving. Within seconds, the huge creature had passed the dead man and was gliding straight towards the two divers. Maier could feel the blood pumping in his temples. The shark had reached the cave. Black, dead eyes. Mouth, jaws, teeth. Maier had heard that some sharks closed their eyes seconds prior to taking a bite while dislocating their jaws. But this shark kept its eyes open. It must have been close to four metres long, as large and as heavy as the hammerhead sharks in the Burma Banks. And a lot meaner.

As the shark reached the narrow cave, Rolf pressed the buttons of both his regulators and the water filled with clouds of bubbles. The shark, irritated, changed course and disappeared behind them. Maier thought he could hear the boat engine above them, but Rolf grabbed hold of his jacket and shook his head. Maier understood, they could no longer ascend safely. They had dived too deep for too long to go to the surface without safety stops. Rolf checked Maier's bottle and shook his head again. Maier no longer had enough air.

Maier tried to bend his head back. The fissure into which they had squeezed led deeper into the rock and widened above them. Rolf had the same idea. They pumped up their BCDs and slowly ascended while pushing deeper into the rock. Rolf had found Maier's alarm buoy, filled it with air and let it rise to the surface.

At eight metres, they had reached the upper lip of the rock. Maier could see the boat clearly above them, but he did not dare raise his head above the rock. He turned slowly.

The large shark had forgotten about the two divers and was slowly circling the man below them. A few reef sharks had returned, but they kept cautiously to the rim of the cauldron. A metal clunk distracted Maier. Samnang had lowered a full bottle, tied to a weight-belt, onto the rock. Rolf carefully pulled the precious air into their crevice. Maier's bottle was almost empty and he changed regulator. Rolf had enough air and calmly watched the drama below them. Maier sucked on his new bottle greedily.

The shark swam in a wide curve and coiled, like a tightened spring. As the huge fish came face to face with its victim, it sped up. Then it was upon the dead man. In the last moment before impact, the shark turned on its side and shot forward like a rocket. Maier had no idea whether the fish shut its eyes or dislocated its jaw. The water filled with blood.

Rolf pulled him up then, his computer had indicated a safe ascent. The reef sharks were back and fought over the legs of the man.

Maier had never climbed into a boat as fast. Samnang pulled him out of the water. The young tattooed tourist from Frankfurt asked, “So, are we going in now, or what?”

 

ONE HOT, ONE COLD

 

“You still want to invest here, Maier?”

Rolf Müller-Overbeck leaned drunkenly into the bar of the Last Filling Station. His long hair dripped with sweat. The young German's question did not sound sarcastic. Maier was counting his dollar bills for the next round of drinks. There had been many rounds already.

The Last Filling Station
was packed. Even Les “Snakearm” Leroux served beer tonight. It looked like the entire foreign community was present. Maier looked around – a pretty strange life you led here, isolated from the locals; but, he knew, that was the norm all over Asia. Unbridgeable culture gaps and huge income disparity precluded integration. The Khmer sat on the floors of their huts and drank illegal rice wine that had been distilled in the jungle. The foreigners sat on plastic chairs and drank beer. To make things worse, Kep's resident expatriates sat in segregated clusters, divided by nationalities, at several metal tables.

Still, the entire room had murder on its mind. Murder talk in at least four languages. And with every translation, the details became increasingly sketchy, the truth more flexible, the shark ever larger.

The French, including M and Mme Maupai, sat in the centre of the action. A second table was occupied by a noisy group of Scandinavian tourists. They had heard about the killing from the German kids and kept away from the local
barang
. As if murder was contagious. Perhaps it was in Cambodia.

“What kind of shark was it?” was Maier's first contribution in a while, a change in subject without changing the subject.

He'd decided by now that he would have to keep his true intentions in Kep secret. He had a feeling the murder in the Gulf was in some way connected to his new young friend, the coffee heir from Hamburg. Luckily, nothing brought men closer together than the shared survival of dangerous adventure. Hanging out with the man he was hired to shadow now came natural.

“It was a tiger shark. I've done more than four hundred dives off the coast of Kep, but I've never seen a monster like that. Tigers don't usually show up in such shallow water, but perhaps El Niño has something to do with it.” Rolf swallowed hard. “A friend told me that he saw a big shark off the west coast of Thailand a few months ago, while snorkelling! I didn't believe it then. Maier, we were fucking lucky. A tiger shark! Luckily, I didn't see how it finally mauled Sambat, poor bastard. But I'm still in shock.”

“The fact that such a big fish came into shallow water must have had something to do with the victim and all that blood. Sharks can smell blood for miles. Who was the victim?”

“Guy called Sambat. Worked with his sister for an NGO in Kampot, a few miles down the coast. The NGO looks after orphans. The two of them were orphans themselves – and one of their parents was a
barang
. They were born shortly after the Vietnamese invasion in '79. It's a kind of miracle they survived at all. I didn't know Sambat well, but he was a nice guy.”

“A great guy,” Les added.

“He often came on his half-dead Yamaha from Kampot for a beer. He was really a serious man, reflective and pragmatic, really amazing for his age. Just like his twin sister. In fact, he dropped in yesterday and talked about abductions of children to Bokor.”

“Bokor?”

“The old French hill station, stuck up on a plateau in the Elephant Mountains, buddy. Maier, if there's a building in this world that's haunted, the Bokor Casino is it. As I said, built by the French as a pleasure palace in the Twenties and full of ghosts, just crammed with em, like no Hollywood haunted house ever could be. The area around it is a national park.”

Maupai suddenly stood next to Maier. “And today it is all fucked.
Ca m'enerve
. Bokor was a French institution and one of the most exclusive hotels in l'Indochine. Guests came from all over the world to lose their money in Le Bokor Palace.”
He leaned past his wife towards Maier. “If Kep-sur-Mer was once the Côte d'Azur of Asia, then Bokor was the Monte Carlo of Indochina.”

The Frenchman's eyes had glazed over, he was badly drunk.

“Believe me, M Maier. Bokor is a monument to our greatest days. And perhaps to Cambodia's greatest days too.”

“Chérie, please sit down with Hervé and Celine, otherwise they will think that we don't want them here. They came all the way from Paris.”

Madame Maupai did look poorly. She was about ten years younger than her husband and might once have been a great beauty. Now she was in her mid-fifties and she'd probably bought her skin-tight dress in a children's clothes store in Paris. The high heels didn't help, as she had the legs of a stork. Her face was deeply lined, the march of time barely disguised by a thick coat of make-up underneath which she sweated. Her eyes lay deep in dark caverns beneath darker brows and she wore her hair short. Her illness had progressed so far that the attempts to hide it were pathetic. Despite all this, she exuded more dignity than her husband.

Maupai gestured impatiently.

“Let me drink my beer in peace, Joséphine. You hassle like a bloody Arab.”

Madame was obviously used to the tone and, without another word, she returned to the table of their friends.

“Everything is broken.
C'est comme ça
,” Maupai groaned, without turning around.

The silent Vietnamese girl pushed two cans of beer across the counter at him. Maier waved briefly to the young woman. A few seconds later he had another vodka orange in his hand.

Rolf did not look as if he wanted to talk to the Frenchman and turned his back on him.

“Maier. Let's drive up to Bokor tomorrow. Great place. Change of scene. My customers from Frankfurt have left for Kampot. After our experience yesterday, they aren't going to dive in Cambodia. I could do with a break from the business; working is hard work. And I have to go visit Mikhail.”

“Mikhail?”

“Mikhail. Mikhail is a true original, an exceptional guy and a free spirit. A Russian who has been doing guided tours through Bokor Casino for the past weeks. Nothing official, but I'd like to offer his service to my clients, as long as there's no development up there. That man is an enigma. Never answers a question directly. Knows more about Kep than all of us put together, even though he has only been here once, and very briefly. But he tells a good story. He's an interesting guy. Sits in the clouds and drinks with the park rangers. And no one knows whether he's a real Russian. He does seem Russian though. He drinks like a Russian.”

Maier drifted away, wondering about what abductions of children might have to do with his case. He was missing far too many pieces to form any assumptions. And Maupai didn't like being ignored.

“You probably want a break from your luxury slut? Isn't that a bit of an extreme swing, from Kaley to the homo Russian on the hill?”

Rolf suddenly looked stone cold sober.

“Waiting for the Man” by the Velvet Underground came to an end and for a second one could have heard a pin drop in the Last Filling Station.

“Maupai, you're a drunken asshole, a real pig. My ‘luxury slut' told me that a guy like you would never get near her, not even for a thousand dollars. So shut up, my friend, before you really offend someone.”

The Frenchman had gone pale and looked ready to counter with another hate speech, but Hervé, Céline and Mme Maupai pulled him back to their table. Dylan's “Subterranean Homesick Blues” started up and the Scandinavians paid and left.

Maier felt like relaxing after his dive, but he hesitated about taking his glass to the beach and letting them fight it out. He'd find out more if he stayed around until the community began to throw punches at itself.
Pete had chosen the right moment to arrive. The wiry Englishman stood in the door of the Last Filling Station, flanked by two young women.

“Yes, friends, my old lady couldn't make it tonight, so I brought my secretaries, Mee and Ow. I will be giving some language lessons tonight.”

Pete propelled the two girls, both Vietnamese, towards the bar.

“Only joking of course. They already know more than enough English. What would you like to drink, dears? Beer, whiskey, Coke, juice or maybe a glass of soya milk?”

The silent waitress pushed two glasses of Coke across the counter at the two girls. She had nothing to say, even to her compatriots.

Les leaned across to Maier. “My girlfriend hasn't said a word since she was five years-old. She saw the ghost of her mother in her father's bed. The next morning the father was dead. Since then, she's been stumm.”

“How do you communicate?”

“Ah, well, you know, buddy. She's been working for me for the past three years and she sleeps in my bed. I provide a roof over her head. She doesn't have anyone else. I think we communicate OK. If it's something important, she can write some English. And I do remember some Vietnamese.”

The two young girls began to dance to the sounds of the Doors. For an instant Maier felt transported into a bad American war film. Capitalism had won. Capitalism had won anyway. So this was what the Wall had fallen for.

“Pete, where did you find these two fine ladies? Did you drive all the way to Kampot to get them?”

“Maier, mate, you haven't had much of a look-see, have ya? Seen the two huts above the Angkor Hotel? That's our very own village brothel, poorly disguised as a barber's shop. One large, one small. You must have seen the handmade signs. The large hut is home to my two friends and a few of their compatriots. In the small hut, we had Kangaok Meas, our very own peacock girl. But she's not present now.”

“Kangaok Meas?”

“Yes, Maier, the golden peacock. Never heard the story? You are usually pretty quick, aren't ya?”
Somewhere in the back of his head, new wheels began to spin, but Maier wasn't sure whether they were turning in the correct direction. The redhead had not finished yet.

“Probably the same Kangaok Meas that caused poor Sambat to drown. The police in Kep have decided to ignore the incident as there's no corpse, no crime scene. No need to make statements. And the dive business is saved. Long live Cambodia.”

Rolf stared angrily at Pete. Maier gently held the young man's arm and said quietly, and in German, “Obvious that would happen. Whoever wanted to get rid of the young man had already cleared it with the local authorities. They dropped him right on a dive site. Don't start an argument with your business partner over this.”
Marvin Gaye came on and Pete became distracted by the bored gyrations of his companions. With the girls in his arms he looked ten years older. One of the girls wore a jacket.

“Are you cold or do you have a machine gun under there? A machine gun?”

The girl did not understand a word.

“One hot, the other one cold, not bad, eh?”

Before Rolf could open his mouth, Pete stepped forward and embraced his partner. “Come on, Rolf, it's Friday night. The night is warm, the girls are willing and if you screw one of these two, it won't rain.”

He winked at Maier. “The entire village goes there. The fishermen can only afford short time on a wooden bunk under a leaky roof. Our good friend Maupai, on the other hand, could enjoy a Friday night sandwich, just like me, if he only understood that his covert afternoon excursions aren't particularly discreet.”

Maupai had been listening to the Englishman and now stood up, dropping his Alain Delon.

“Here, Maupai, one hot and one cold,” Pete taunted.

Before the furious Frenchman could lash out, Les had already stepped around the bar and grabbed Maupai from behind. The old American looked ready to crush the Frenchman. Maier almost burst out laughing – old men impatient as young pups, doing a hundred eighty miles towards their own demise. The return of Snakearm Leroux, gambler of a thousand Saigon nights. The bank director itching for a fist fight. You only got that here.

Les squeezed until Maupai had gone red like an overripe peach. Maier looked across at the French table, but there would be no help for the village racist from his own quarter.

Les finally let go, disgusted, “No fights in the Last Filling Station. And you're much too old for this.”
He turned to Pete. “Take your guests away with you. No one likes you today.”

“Why, are you going to shoot me with your M-16 if I don't?”

The American laughed, “Of course, buddy. I've been looking for a good reason ever since you first came into my bar. Now I got one.”