Cambodia Noir (13 page)

“Thanks.” I watch him sideways as I down my drink. He's playing it cool, but his face is full of trouble.

The InterContinental Hotel is in a neighborhood that's trying to be fancy, but settles for deserted. The sun is down, and steel grates already cover the glass windows of the Euro boutiques. The hotel is owned by a big Chinese-Cambodian businessman—one with more than a finger in the local heroin trade, and a habit of shooting up buildings when he gets mad. Rumor is, when the place opened, the guys from the parent company came for a visit and found him putting up a stage in the lobby, with dancing girls wearing number cards like marathon runners. Guests could order them up with room service. I can only pity the brand manager who had to come out from Oxbridge to tell his Uzi-toting franchise holder this wasn't the InterCon way.

It's quiet when I come in: all soap-slick marble and silk, off-white, and bland. Some dancing girls might improve it. The downstairs bar is like an out-sized conference room, huge and empty. Off in the corner, a group of singers in neon latex dresses are belting out the top hits of the eighties in Thai, accompanied by a Filipino with Metallica hair on a vintage Casio. They're on “Uptown Girl.” If Billy Joel doesn't already have a smack habit, this would give him one.

Double whiskey: I'll need it.

Senn wafts in like a cartoon character on a floating cloud: white pants, white jacket, radioactive-green silk shirt that he looks to have coordinated with his shoes.

“
Cool,
I
love
this band,” he gushes, draping himself on the stool next to mine. I've already got him a grasshopper; it matches the outfit. Got to make this quick, they're starting on “November Rain.”

“Know a kid named Van Chennarith?” I ask. “He might not use his real name. He's tallish for Khmer, maybe five-eight. About twenty-three. Has a diagonal scar on the corner of his mouth and an old bullet wound in his thigh. You definitely hate him.”

“
Hello,
how
are
you, so
nice
to see you.” Senn purses his lips around his cocktail straw. “You don't call for months, and now it's all business.”

I shrug. “Out of town.”

“That's what they
all
say when they mean shacked up,” he coos. “You look like shit, by the way.”

I don't respond, just tug at my whiskey.

Senn throws his hands in the air with an exaggerated sigh. “Yes,
yes,
I know him. He calls himself Charlie, I call him something else. So go on”—he rests one manicured nail on the back of my bruise-yellow hand—“you know I love it when you talk dirty to me.”

Senn is my connection to Phnom Penh's gay mafia. It's a strange little world: open enough to those in the know, invisible to everyone else. Cambo isn't known for tolerance—but most Khmers wouldn't recognize a screaming queen if one tried to pick their pocket, so Senn and his friends can vogue all they want, as long as the sex stays behind closed doors. In their back-stair bars and secret house parties, princes and sons of high officials rub shoulders (and other things) with boys right out of the provinces. Senn himself is the offspring of some big hoo-ha in the customs department. He has a degree in eighteenth-century French literature from the Sorbonne and no brothers, which means he's stuck here—useless at any local job, and forever complaining about the new anticorruption laws eating away at his family's income.

“Honey trap,” I say. “I gotta get him somewhere we can do a little photo shoot. Got any ideas?”

Senn feigns shock. “You want me to out a brother?
Tu me prends pour une racaille, ou—
”

“It's not for the papers. Someone wants info from Daddy and is willing to pay well for compromising pictures of the kid.”

“C'est ça—pour finir en petits morceaux dans un sac plastique au fond de la Tonlé Sap.”

I get the gist—something about dismemberment. “That's the client's problem.”

He sips his drink again, lost in thought. “With Charlie's taste in boys, I'd say we'd have to use you as the bait. But that's no good, with your face looking like something from Sophocles.” He pauses, lips pursed. “I know a guy, if you've got the place. But we have to do it
very soon
.
Garçon
—”

He screams for more drinks. The band strikes up “Eternal Flame.”

This can't possibly end well.

The river's bank is quiet. Saturday is somewhere else tonight. A few lifers droop outside the pizza joints. In the murky water, a splash and a shout, and the smell of it wafts over: urine, garbage that's been in the sun too long. The lights in the Edge are bright and yellow. I can see Channi smiling at me from behind the bar. Go in.

“Your face better.”

“Give it time. It'll get worse.”

The corners of her mouth turn down a bit as she slides me the peanuts. Laughing? Tom Waits on the stereo again.

I watch as she hands out beers and talks up the one other lonely punter in her broken English, Tom growling away behind her. She says she's nineteen, but the girls all know that's the magic number. From her face I might almost believe it, but her eyes say different. She could have five years on that, or fifteen—but they weren't all easy.

She watches me watching as she brings my drink.

“What you work?” she asks. Serious.

“I take pictures.”

“Where you camera?”

“Someone threw it off a roof.”

“They no like pictures?”

I laugh. “Guess not.”

She's silent a minute. “You no like take pictures.”

“I used to,” I say, surprising myself. “Guess I don't anymore.”

“What you do now?”

“I'm looking for a girl.”

I realize this sounds like a come-on, but she takes it as meant, her brow lining with concern. “What happen her?”

I shake my head. “She's lost.”

Channi's huge eyes are locked on me, expectant. I didn't want to think about this. Don't want to talk about it, so I reach for something else. “Do you like Tom Waits?” I ask, switching to Khmer.

“I'm in love with him,” she says, changing languages with me. She smiles, but her eyes are still worried.

“How do you know about him?”

“My friend Ruth played him for me. A long time ago. His voice was so sad. . . . He could have been Cambodian.”

I got nothing to say to that. Tom's singing about girls who look like Cadillacs, and Channi's fingers are lingering next to mine on the counter, like she's waiting for me to take her hand. It's a bar-girl move—I didn't think she'd be the type.

I'm paying way too much attention.

The other customer has vanished, and Channi unfolds her story: the neighborhood she grew up in, out on the edge of Phnom Penh where it's not really city, just what happens to farmland when it dies. Ruth and her folks fixed up a little school in one of the old houses—they used song lyrics to teach the girls English. Religious stuff, or pop hits if they were lucky, Celine Dion and Faith Hill. The girls loved that. But Ruth had a bit of rebel in her, and when her parents weren't there, she'd play Tom Waits and Bob Dylan and the Eagles, and Channi fell for them because the songs were hurt and lonely and strange, and here in Cambodia we understand those things.

She was sixteen when she became a Mormon. Ruth's parents told the girls that when they were twenty-one, they could go to the States as missionaries, and it was an easy sell.

“I wanted to see the moon in America,” Channi says. “I was sure it must be a different one to the one we have here. A whole different sky. Better, maybe.”

But she's still here. Wonder why? Things changed after 9/11, maybe the missionaries just couldn't deliver. Or it was the usual: a sick relative, a sister needing school fees—something she had to work for, something she couldn't leave behind. What a number they've done on this girl's head. Cambodia, the Mormons, the tourists in this damn bar—

I realize she's taken my hand as she talks. Tom says he's irresponsible, and he's ruined everything he does.

“In America you never see the sky.” I drink deep. “They light up everything like it's Water Festival all year round, and there's nothing up top but black.”

She smiles, some sadness in her eyes I can't understand. “Let me read your palm.” She pulls my hand across the backs of the carved snakes and studies it like an archaeologist. I take it back.

“I don't wanna know my future.” But there's a strange expression on her face, and I wonder what she saw. The intro to “Jersey Girl” comes on. Outside, the rain starts again.

“You want beer,” she says, in English, and slips away to get it. I feel something big and dangerous happening, just past the corners of my vision.

I don't move. Sit hunched at the carved bar, waiting for something I can't explain. Sip my beer.

Just until the rain stops.

Another late night.

The uneasy feeling that came over me in the Edge has followed me up the stairs to my room. I open the cage door and stand a minute, looking at the unmade bed, the white walls, the bare bookshelf. Nothing there—nothing but the journals on the desk.

My room is full of
her
. I'm barely here at all.

Damn Gus, and his damned judgments and instincts. It's one thing if he doesn't want to listen to me, but to
punish
me with this picayune nonsense? I had been doing exciting stuff, with the break-in at that NGO, and then the heroin in Australia, and those customs officials getting arrested . . . I was sure I was onto something good.

But for the past week, he's been sending me to every pointless press conference and NGO ceremony celebrating another year of achieving nothing. Now I'm spending the entire day on this press bus with a dozen Cambodian reporters, headed down to a village on the Mekong to check out some Red Cross project. . . .

The road to the southeast is pretty much a dirt track, and we had to crawl along at 15 miles per hour, rocking back and forth like a carnival ride. All around us, water country: stippled with ribbons of reeds and cattails, houses rising on stilts and tiny islands of hills. Even the poorest villages had temples: wats hundreds of years old whose roofs glistened with new yellow paint, the eyes of their giant bodhisattva faces brilliant lime-white. Religion is life, and spirits and devils are to be feared. How could it not be so?

The town, when we finally got to it, seemed to have been sucked down into the thick brown mud of the riverland. Just a few reed houses, poking their way through silty earth on either side of the road. We got off the bus, all the reporters' shiny shoes squelching in the mud, and the Red Cross woman started talking in Khmer about the project, whatever it was—Samean was supposed to be translating for me, but he just stood there, smoking and occasionally chatting with a photographer from one of the Cambodian dailies. No one was listening. Perhaps there was no project. The Red Cross here is run by the prime minister's wife, and the boy says it's pretty much a front organization for political propaganda.

A little way up the road, a couple villagers, naked except for their
kromah
-sarongs, were struggling to get a donkey to pull a two-wheeled cart out of the mud. The animal struggled, the men sweated; the cart moved half an inch. It was piled high with what appeared to be the exact same brown dirt it was stuck in. There's an economics lesson in there somewhere. That, I felt sure, was the story I ought to have been writing. . . .

The Red Cross woman kept talking. I pushed up to Samean and asked him what was happening.

“She saying . . . the project,” he said, with a shrug, and offered me a cigarette. I found myself wishing I smoked. It seemed to pass the time, so I took one and lit it, then coughed and dropped it in the mud in a wave of nausea. No one even looked at me.

The woman started walking, and we followed her to the edge of the river, where her excited chatter ramped up a notch. She was gyrating like a cheerleader now: either her Ritalin just kicked in or we were about to see something very important.

“What's that about?” I whispered to Samean.

“Big water,” he said, and walked away.

The river was narrow enough to throw a stone across, but deep and fast. A farmer in Nike shorts was trying to coax a half-submerged donkey onto the bank. Skinny men pushed skinny boats into the frantic current. Their tiny outboard motors looked like the things you use to trim weeds in your driveway back home.

The Red Cross woman gestured proudly to a tall concrete cylinder on the river bank, and we all lined up to look inside—apparently whatever they'd made or built was in there. Even the Cambodians had to stoop to peer in, then nodded sagely to the woman and moved along. A few made comments with the tone of congratulation. I was last, and when my turn came I bent down and squinted into the darkness like all the rest. There was nothing there.