Cambodia Noir (31 page)

“Keep it. But if you go hunting her, be careful.” She's staring right down to the bottom of me now, and I feel the room falling away as June's words come out of Kara's mouth: “There are still dark places in the world.”

Then she smiles again. Sips her drink.

We finish the bottle in silence, sitting there on the floor with the cries of bats outside the windows for music. When it's done, Kara goes back to her paperwork. She doesn't look at me as I get up. I can't help giving her a last glance from the door: wondering if I've slipped the trap, or if it's still closing silently all around me.

Then I go. June is waiting.

I remember the Killing Fields.

There are so many things about my time here that I can't seem to get to—memories that elude me, as if I'd been sleepwalking—but that day is crystal clear. I stood on a path under giant palms, and on either side the earth fell away, leaving me walking along a raised hummock between pools clotted with bright green ferns and waterlilies. Farther down, they went from brown to blue as tentative fingers of water reached out to join the river. On the far shore, I could see the peaked roofs of Phnom Penh.

I remember watching red and yellow dragonflies wheel over the flowers. I wanted to learn their names, but there are no names here.

It is hard to recall what brought me. I think I was looking for history. I wanted a museum, filled with careful, scholarly descriptions of what happened and how it was discovered, of what was known and what unknown, and what still awaited knowing somewhere in the soil. I wanted an explanation. But there was only a tiny monument stacked with skulls, with a few panels in mock-English, decrying the brutality of the Khmer Rouge.

I remember looking at it, and thinking of my mother.

I have read all the books. No one who writes about this place manages to convey anything about it: Cambodia is the opposite of meaning. Yet our shelves are lined with dozens of volumes repeating the same pat phrases, carefully worded to make tautology sound like understanding. The brutality occurred because the regime was brutal. Even Pol Pot is an invention: a fake name placed over a fabricated history. The dragonflies are nameless because no one has ever named them—unless perhaps the namer lies beneath, and the flowers they feed on put roots over her bones. And what do parents tell their children at night, except tales of the ghosts waiting in the ground to come and get them. . . .

No. Let me say it another way . . . if there is a way to say it at all.

You and I, we live in a world of words. They give us shape, they bend time into an orderly line, progressing from “long, long ago” and “once upon a . . . ,” up through “the modern era” and “now, today,” and then on to “tomorrow,” and “some day, when . . .” A great chain of history, forged of language.

I always knew who I was, and I knew that I was going somewhere.

Then I came here, where there is no history. No stories left, just skulls in nameless piles. No traditions, their keepers were murdered. No time, or if there is, it is not a river but the sea, vast and gray and on every side the same. Here I am neither measured against the past nor connected to the future, for past and future are interchangeable. Here, I am free.

I am beginning to understand who I really am.

So now it is time for you and I to say goodbye. You will never exist to look at these pages and laugh at your youthful follies. You were only a dream, and now is the time for me to wake up.

It's time to remember.

In a van, headed back to Phnom Penh, courtesy of Koroshi International Inc. Unfortunately I'm out of drugs—nothing to put between me and the diaries:

Red lights . . . pillars of fire . . . they scuttle as he comes, the Bad Lieutenant, wreathed in smoke, his human face barely attached . . . the eyes don't work why he never blinks!

He looks my way, must pretend to not know him but my leg burns for the sharp taste of his knife—

I'll think I'm reading, then realize I'm actually rooting through my bag, searching for some lost shred of weed I can smoke to get it all out of my head.

June's story has no ending. It's not even clear where it stops: she's writing over the same pages again and again, like a Renaissance painter reusing old canvases. Not one picture over another, but dozens, interlocked: Maybe you like the figure you drew last week, so you just leave it, paint around it, incorporate it into the new work. Then do it again, and again—

Time itself is collapsing.

Now, awake and sober with nothing but time, I can finally trace the threads that eluded me before:

He is careless with me now. If I have let slip too many secrets, then so has he: lying naked and white, sex shriveled as a snail, veins in his arms swollen and black as bruises, while I draw my nails along his chest and fill my imagination with razorblades.

I know where he goes—I've wondered ever since that night so long ago (years, I think) when he thought no one was watching. I have photographed him, when he was too far gone to notice . . . developed them in secret in the office darkroom . . . and now I show him:

“Aren't they beautiful,” I say, “portraits of you?” I'm picturing an art installation.

He screams, then threatens. . . .

Then he listens:

“I want to meet the man,” I say, “your Bad Lieutenant. I have a proposition for him.”

There were plots and conspiracies, but none of them made much difference: if it hadn't been this, it would have been something else.

She came here to get lost, and she did.

The locks on Number Two's apartment were all made in China. Easy enough to get past, if you know the right guy. His name's Roen, and he's waiting in the hall while I check the stairs: no lights under the doors, no sound I can hear over the din outside. It's the king's birthday, and the whole damn city's out partying along the river. Everybody loves the king.

A round of firecrackers goes off down the way. The real fireworks won't start until later, and they'll go on for hours. All the activity is good for me. No one knows I'm here yet, and the longer that can go on, the better. Maybe I can get what I need from Two and get gone before I have to deal with any of the shit I've started. I could use some luck.

A nod down, and Roen goes to work. I light a cigarette.

Number Two may not know what happened to June—but he's the piece that connects all the others. No games this time: I just want him alone.

He'll be out drinking; I'll wait.

Getting dark fast, but Roen doesn't seem to mind. Voices from outside echo up the stairs; distant music. Finally he looks up at me: door's open. I hand him some bills and he counts them, nods.

“Enjoy the party,” I say, and slip inside.

The apartment looks different: the dust and clutter somehow thicker. In the main room, the piles of papers are scattered, strewn everywhere. Two was looking for something, and in a hurry.

The bedroom is worse. Drawers pulled out, clothes rumpled over the bed. Wardrobe hanging open—half-empty, hangers on the floor. Jumbo suitcase in the closet, but no other bags.

On the frayed carpet by the foot of the bed: a .38 round, live.

I give the place a quick toss, check drawers and hidey-holes: no money, no drugs, no laptop, no phone charger. No sense waiting, then. Number Two is gone.

Back on the river. Everything lit up for a carnival, paper lanterns on the buildings and streamers in the air. Dressed-up scum filling the cafés, prowling the street in hungry packs. Khmer couples, holding hands. Fireworks and a fug of marijuana smoke. I've given up trying to stay low: finding June means finding Two, and for that I need help. I've been scoping some of his haunts, just to make sure I'm not grabbing the wrong end of this thing. Howie hasn't seen him in days. He's not on the river. Eventually, I have no choice: call Gus.

He's drunk and genial, shouting over the noise of the crowd. “Keller?
Hijo de puta,
Keller! Where the fuck have you been? We thought you were on KR holiday!” He means it in the nicest way. But he'll be good and pissed at me when he sobers up. I talk fast.

“Nearly was. Long story, just got in—”

“Vy is fucking mental—have you seen her?”

“Later,” I shout. “I'm looking for Number Two, you know where he's at?”

“Took a couple days off. Said he had a friend visiting, was going up to Siem Reap.”

I've heard that one before. “Fuck Siem Reap, he split. Place is cleaned out.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? I'm down another writer?”

“Don't think of it as losing a reporter. Think of it as gaining a headline.” Applause in the background. “Where are you?”

“I'm by the palace. Some rock band is gonna play! Where are you?”

“Just up the street.”

“I'll meet you at the FCC—”

“No, I'll see you at the house, later. I gotta think.”

“Right.”

I hang up and edge through the crowd, past the restaurants and their liquefied patrons—but as I reach the turnoff that goes to my house, a strange impulse hits me and I keep walking. I can hear the music now, from the stage down the street: feedback, gritty and grinding, like Lou Reed in the nineties, then bursting suddenly into chords. Before the revolution, Cambo had a scene, doing amazing psychedelic rock. The KR took out all the musicians, but some folks are bringing it back.

I wander farther down the river, until I see the stage clear. The front man is all stringy muscle, wearing low-slung jeans and a skintight yellow T-shirt that leaves half his abs exposed. Not Lou: Keith. He's got this old autumn-red-and-white electric guitar, and he's wrestling with it, and the chords he's making shiver through the crowd and out across the water into the dark. Along the river, everything has stopped: families standing rapt, motos pulled over, food vendors resting their knives to watch. Looking at what they've lost.

No: it's what they've managed to claw back.

June never saw this. If she had, maybe things would be different.

Headed back to the house. Three blocks from the river and it's gone quiet—the shouts and music just a hum in the background, punctuated by fireworks. No business here tonight: the park is empty, the tourist shops shut tight, plates of corrugated steel chained over the entrances.

I hear them before they come at me: a crackle of broken glass from the gutter. Turn: two of them, young. Baggy jeans and sports jerseys. Wool knit cap, aluminum baseball bat. Cambodian kids from the States, the ones who got deported after 9/11.

If these were locals, I'd be dead by now.

Most of these guys got pinched for small-time stuff, but fell into serious crime here pretty quick: only thing on their résumés.

I take a cigarette from my pocket. “Whaddaya want?”

“We come from heaven,” says the one in the cap. “I guess you could say we're angels.”

“Yeah, yeah. Spill.”

“You took a job for our boss. Got paid 'n' everything. 'Cept the job never got done. So, we're hoping you have our boss's money. If not”—the guy with the bat steps forward—“we're here to remind you to get it. Soon.”

Really? This is who he sends? I light the cigarette. “Why are you here again? I forget.”

The kid with the bat takes a run at me. I step into him and lock his arm, spinning him fast and tossing him straight back at his buddy in the cap, who's fumbling around in his waistband. Aluminum clatters on gravel, and they go down in a heap.

Pick up the bat.

The first one is still trying to untangle himself when I put his lights out. The one in the cap makes another grab for his gun. I let him get it. As he tries to take the safety off, I ram the end of the bat into his nose. Now he's busy bleeding. Put my foot on his gun hand and he looks up at me: broken face and scared-rabbit eyes.

“Way I remember, that job got done. Not my fault someone decided to take a machete to the guy I'm following. But you can't blackmail the dead.” I shift my weight; bones crunch under my foot. The kid screams. “I also seem to remember being owed something for the work done. Quite a bit. So why don't you tell Gabriel to start finding
my money
. Before someone sets fire to that rathole of his.”

Crunch. Scream. Nod.

“And tell him to get better thugs.”

I take the gun apart as I walk home, toss the pieces in the sewer drain. Gabriel's going to be a problem. He wants to get rough, I can play, but it's a headache I don't need.

In fact, my head is pounding as I unlock the garage gate. My eye aches and itches under its patch. The stairs make my ribs burn. By the time I get up three flights, everything hurts.

Finally, my room. A little dusty, but nothing new—except the two guys with guns. They're a recent addition.