Cambodia Noir (17 page)

This should have worked. He was on the verge of spilling—but he couldn't. Booze and drugs, they'll lower your inhibitions, make you suggestible, but no drug on earth can force the truth out of you, not if there's a stronger force keeping you quiet. Number Two is terrified of someone—someone he thinks could make June disappear. I can work against that kind of fear, but I need time or information or considerable amounts of plastic sheeting. I don't have good options.

Finish cleaning and give the place a quick search, but it's not much use: the piles of paper would take hours to go through. Story notes, newspaper clippings, UK bank statements—he's living paycheck to paycheck. Kitchen: empty chip bags on the counter, Coke and moldy pizza in the fridge. A couple pans in the cupboard. Not much of a cook. Bedroom: unmade bed, wardrobe full of clothes. No cash, no guns, no drugs except a little lump of hash under an ashtray.

It's well past three by the time I'm done. I consider swiping Two's keys: I could copy them, slip them back in the morning, before he wakes. But it's risky, and I'm exhausted. I'll find another way to take a run at him tomorrow.

Open the door, and—

“Morning, Will.”

Freeze. It takes me a moment to see him: a shapeless mass in the dark of the stairwell. The gun he's got is an ugly little .38 special, but it'll put a hole in me just fine.

Barry. He must have been there an hour or more, waiting. He's thought it through: too far for me to reach, too close for him to miss. Silhouetted in Number Two's door, I'm a paper target.

“Hey,” I say. “Trouble sleeping?”

He grins his best best-buddy grin. “Fucking get inside.”

Am I crying again? Why? Was it what he said, down by the river? I can't remember.

I thought I was strong; I thought I was different! I thought I knew myself . . . only to discover what a fragile, febrile thing I truly am: an image in a pool of water, shattered by a falling leaf.

I've made the club, but only halfway. I'm one of them, but now they think they own me—especially him. I end up back at his wretched little apartment every evening, chatting until he tires of my voice and turns on the television . . . I pretend to pass out and feel his fingers under my shirt. When he's too drunk and stoned to stand, that's when he wants me.

Tonight a friend of his came, and he literally picked me up and stuffed me in the bedroom, out of sight. He thought I was out then, too, but I watched through the keyhole. The visitor was an older man, Cambodian. Not well-dressed, but very dapper, hair and shoes highly polished. Curiously, he never seemed to blink. They talked for a while—I couldn't hear them with the TV going in the background, but it was probably about drugs—and then the man left. And I had to lie in the bed again and pretend to sleep as he came back, and his hand crept up under my skirt. Stifled my reaction as he grabbed me. Then he sat down in the corner, had his dose and fell asleep, leaving me to clean up and walk home alone.

I don't even want him. I don't know why I go. Why does Gogo come back to Didi, day after day? Better to wait together than wait alone? But even that simple act means giving away some of yourself.

You say to him: I want to go somewhere. He says go, if you're going. Turns back toward the seaside, where the children are launching fireworks, tossing sparklers into the churning water.

You say to him: I have an idea. He says better save it.

You say: I'm looking for something, he says what else do you need?

I could choose to forget tonight. I could let these sobbing hours drift into the white and vanish . . . black out these words, so that even if you did try, some day, to remember, you would be unable to. Perhaps you would recall this little room, seen as by a camera: the spinning fan, the shape that once was you, curled up on the naked bed. You would make up a story to explain what had so spun you. Of course it wouldn't be real, but you'd cling to it, so that you could see your life as singular, a true story, not a script that had been cut and changed and rewritten. . . .

I know better . . . I was you, remember?

Of course you don't. But I remain: the thing you've written out.

I was with you all those nights—all the way back to the night she left. I have kept them through the years, while you keep sunlight and warm air.

Shall I tell you what I remember?

No . . .

You don't want to read this. Black it out when you are done.

“You shoot that thing, it's gonna be loud.” I'm edging backward into Two's apartment. In the hall, there's nowhere for me to get out of the line of fire. “People will hear.”

“Yeah, I'm aware just how fucking loud my gun is, man.” Barry's in the doorway now, keeping pace with me. “I had a quieter one, but I sold it. Anyway, shooting you is really plan B.
Stop
.” I've almost reached the end of the hall, where it opens into the living room. I stand still: cornered. I am slow, tired, beat to hell. I don't like my options. But since Barry didn't gun me down in the doorway, I guess he really wants to talk—and I want to hear what he has to say.

“Can I turn that thing down?” I ask. On the TV, some blond chick is loudly kicking the crap out of Billy Idol.

“Sure. Move very slow.”

I do as told. Feels like a million years before I can reach the volume.

Barry edges out of the hall, gun always trained on me. He lets his eyes flick over to Number Two, passed out on the sofa. “So he's not getting up anytime soon, huh?”

“Unlikely. Mind if I roll?”

Barry laughs. “Make two.”

He's silent, watching, until I've tossed him his. Lights it one-handed, eyes and gun never leaving me. “I didn't do it.”

“Didn't do what?”

He doesn't quite react, but I see his hairy paw tighten around the gun. “Don't fuck with me, man. I know you're looking for the girl. I'm telling you it wasn't me.”

I take a deep drag off the joint.

“What makes you think someone did something to her? All I've seen so far is she's on a long vacation and not answering her phone.”

Barry is disgustingly pleased with himself. “Well, now we're making progress, aren't we? What we have here, Will my boy, is the basis of a negotiation. I have something you want: information. And I'm smart enough not to let you drag it out of me for free.”

I fucking hate business writers. “All right, shoot.”
Poor choice of words, Will.
“What do you want?”

“What does anyone who comes out here want?”

“To be left alone.”

“Bingo. That's it, okay? I like it here. Nobody cares that I'm a fat fuck, or that I like computers too much, or that I'm not fucking executive material.”

“I definitely think you're executive material.”

“You always were a dipshit, Keller. But I don't actually care what you think, anyway. It's
them.
” I must look blank, because he goes on, “The women, man. Back home, they could fucking control us. We were nothing without them.”

“That why you set them on fire?”

“Ah, see, Marie: perfect example, thank you! I wondered if you'd found out about Marie yet. I mean, you're a dumbass, but it was just a matter of time, it was in all those damn newspapers.” Through all of this, he's never stopped smiling: it's a great joke, and we're all in on it. “Marie is the perfect example. She was a drunk fucking whore who made that retarded kid in the McDonald's ad look like a Nobel Prize winner, okay? But she still managed to control me. For years. Back home she was the best a guy like me could hope for. Everyone said so, you know? My family, my friends. My
mom.
‘Oh, she's a prize,' ‘She's a keeper,' ‘Best thing that ever happened to you.' Like I didn't know what that meant: ‘You're not good enough for anyone except this fat, sloppy cunt.' For a while, they really got me believing it. So I put up with her shit, day after fucking day after fucking day. Then one night, I come home and she's hammered out of her goddamn mind, screaming about how I only want her to cook and clean. Fine, she says, she'll cook me dinner. She can barely stand. She's falling all over the kitchen, grabbing shit out of cabinets, sticking it on the stove.” He giggles. “I should actually have smacked some fucking sense into her, y'know? If I had, cunt would still be alive. But I just walked away. And the dumb fucking whore passed out with the stove still on and put me through a federal indictment and five years of fucking bullshit. Even dead, that bitch was controlling me, you see what I mean? Then I came out here. Fucking paradise. It's all out in the open here. Back home, I was worthless cuz I couldn't get a girl. But out here, I see some rich, slick bastard with shiny hair and a beautiful chick on each arm? Hey, it's cool. He's no better than me: he's paying for it. I want those girls tomorrow, I can have 'em. This place shows pussy up for what it is: a commodity.”

I know better than to interrupt someone this fucking crazy, but if he does not get to the point soon, I am going to go for that gun no matter how slow I am.

“So you see: I'm finally free. I don't want some other bitch fucking it up. I want this as far from my fat ass as fucking possible, okay? And you, as it happens, can do that for me. This is the deal: I tell you what I know, and you spin it so however it goes, they don't come near me.”

“You had to hold me at gunpoint for this?”

“Motherfucker.” He laughs. “Everyone knows it doesn't pay to get close to you. You're kind of an emerging market. So, y'know, of course I need a hedge.”

“So, I do what you want or you kill me?”

“Hey, this is a good deal.” He sounds genuinely offended. “But look, if you wanna be that way . . . Obviously I can't keep this gun on you twenty-four/seven. So, just in case”—he leans in, like that makes him think I'll listen closer—“I know why you're out here. I got it out of Gus one time, when he was drunk. Thought it might come in useful someday.”

A shiver runs through me; he sees it.

There are things I'm not allowed to think about.

So I think about the deal: the only reason Barry would make this trade was if he was sure something led back to him. It's not the diary, he doesn't seem to care. So something else: something he was seen to do, something he gave her—

“Sure,” I say. “I'm curious. But if I find out you're lying to me, it's right back on your doorstep.”

“That's fine. Just remember it's not in my interest to lie, any more than it's in yours to betray me.”

“So tell me: What am I covering up? What am I going to find that points to you?”

“The reason I know June was in trouble, capital-
T
kind of trouble, is that before she left, she asked me to get her a gun.”

Hell.

Gotta hand it to Barry, he sees the angles. It's no secret he likes to shoot stuff. After fifty years of war, this country is drowning in hardware. One of the less savory aspects of the tourist trade:
barangs
pay well to go out in the woods and fire off AK-47s and grenade launchers. Sometimes the guys running the tours give them cows or goats to shoot at. Sometimes, I've heard, they give them people. Never tried to find out. Barry loves these excursions, and he's in tight with a couple of the guys who run them. Even someone new, like June, would know that if she wanted firepower, she could go to him. So if a gun came up or was found, someone would sooner or later look to Barry. His past would get dragged out, and someone with a badge and a low IQ would certainly assume he killed June.

“What kind of gun?”

“She was very specific about what she wanted—something small, that she could silence. Knew makes and models and everything. My guy didn't have exactly the thing, but he came pretty close.”

“When?”

“Early August. I got it over a weekend, but she'd asked me a couple days earlier—maybe the fourth or fifth.”

Interesting: Just a few days after she comes back from Koh Kong.

“She didn't say why she wanted it?”

“I really didn't ask.”

“Do you know who she spent time with?”

“Other than us at the paper, I wouldn't know. She was closest to Two.” Grin. “But I guess you've already asked him.”

“Did she say anything to you about her past? Family?”

He snorts. “This is Cambo.”

“The Khmer you saw her arguing with—was that real, or bullshit?”

“That was real. I don't know what it was about, I couldn't hear them. It wasn't a blowup-fight kind of argument, more a very intense discussion.”

“How'd you come to see it?”

“Drank too much. Passed out, woke up.”

“Who was he?”

“I don't know. But I've seen him around, somebody has to know him: middle-aged, pot belly, shitty wardrobe and expensive haircut. He had that look: he was ex-cop, ex-military, some shit.”