Cambodia Noir (7 page)

No club wear, not even a little black dress: not a party girl, then.

No birth control. No tampons.

A few personal items are rolled up with the winter clothes: a carved figurine from one of the markets downtown, a small brass Eiffel Tower, a few strings of carnival beads. She wants mementos, but has no room for big things.

Most interesting: a bag with a few dozen rolls of unshot 35 mm film, various speeds and stocks, including a couple I don't recognize at all. Somewhere, there should be photos.

Once the case is empty, I make sure nothing's stuffed in hidden pockets or sewn into the lining. Check the clothes as I put them back in, especially the leather jacket. For a moment I can almost see her, wandering up St. Mark's in a peasant skirt and a moth-eaten sweater, with the leather thrown over the top, her pale fingers clinging to the sleeves as she chews on a lock of that strange platinum hair—

I turn to the second bag.

More scarves, a light jacket. A cloth sling bag, rolled into a tiny tube. A makeup kit—the contents barely touched. A soft leather pencil case, filled with pens and markers in a dozen colors. A battered Walkman, a few unlabeled cassette tapes. A Graham Greene novel, a
Lonely Planet Cambodia
,
a book of what appear to be ghost stories in Japanese. A round hairbrush. Spare glasses, two pairs. A Samsung phone charger.

Four letter-sized, heavy-duty, spiral notebooks.

These aren't reporter's notes. The covers are garish with ink and pictures pasted from magazines. No titles, no obvious dates. Inside—it's hard to tell. Pages packed with colors and lines and glue and words. Tiny, ragged letters, jammed together, covering every inch of space. Drawings, photos, all overlapping. Part journal, part scrapbook, part art project? I set them aside and finish with the case.

I'm thinking of what I don't see. No laptop, no power cords or adapters. She could have taken all that stuff with her, but it'd be a funny choice for backpacking: I'm guessing she didn't have a computer. No documents—medical records, insurance cards, all the stuff you're supposed to have when you think your life is worth something.

Stuffed into an outside pocket are two bottles of Malarone. One is empty, one has a couple pills left. Another puzzle: you don't worry about malaria in Phnom Penh. Was she spending a lot of time out in the woods? Did she take the pills with her? But then why not the bottles?

No empty space.

These cases don't match the storyline, and an unpleasant thought is forming in my head: Assume there's no laptop, and she doesn't carry personal documents. Then the only things missing are the phone and the camera.

Then it starts to look like June didn't expect to be leaving at all.

The duffel has a semi-concealed zip pocket; inside are two small photo envelopes.

I get the tea lights from the counter and sit cross-legged, spreading the pictures on the floor: squares of black and white on the tile. The candles I've lit make them orange.

I sit there a long time, trying to push down the dizzy feeling I get when I look at them. Everything else in her cases makes sense in some way, but these don't:

A bit of a finger on a table, next to something white.

A blurred form that might be a bug on the edge of a sink.

A field of gray, white lines—light reflecting on water?

No parties. No friends. No architecture. Just these frames of nothing, out of focus. Most give no clue as to location. A couple seem to be from Europe: muddy shots of nameless heaths in half light. Others are clearly Cambodia. A shudder runs through me as I realize two were taken from my bedroom: the balcony rail in grainy black and white, the landscape beyond just a haze of reflections, but the silhouette of the museum roof is unmistakable.

A couple bits of riveted iron, part of some structure I can't make out.

A flat, gray body of water, dark specks that might be trees visible in the distance.

Who would take pictures like this?

Maybe she thinks she's an artist—but these just look like mistakes. Still. There's something about them—unsteady, unsettling in their painstaking carelessness. They make you wonder what she was really trying to shoot.

The image is a distraction: what you want to see is somewhere else.

Only two photos of her. They're different from the others—typical snapshots, taken by a friend or fellow tourist. In one, she's on a tour boat. I'm guessing Paris, though I can't make out any landmarks. She's standing too far away and staring out at the water, all you get is hair and glasses. In the other, she's on a street I've seen somewhere in the city, but I can't place it. Khmer writing around her, a neon halo. It's night, but she's lit by something behind the shooter that makes her features pop. She's making a face, a mock snarl at whoever's holding the camera, one hand held up like a claw.

It's a lucky shot, or a good one: an unfeigned moment in perfect light. The graduation photo Kara gave me made her ugly and mean. Here, she's charming: the innocent abroad.

Trying to imitate her care, I repack the second case—all except the photos and the journals, those I carry back to the desk in my room.

The floor by my bed is covered with shattered glass. My shaving mirror. What happened? Must have been the girl . . . Claire? I step cautiously around the pieces. Mrs. Mun will never ask when she cleans them up.

As I go through the pockets of my jeans, I realize the money is gone. Everything I had on me—including my advance. Bitch must have taken it: payback for lying to her. Shit. Doubt I can go back to Kara begging for more. I'll have to find another source of cash, at least for now.

The graduation photo is still there; I set it next to the other on my desk. Pick up one of the notebooks. The page I open to is so jammed with colored scrawl it's unreadable. A few words remain:

Once again I stay, when I should have disappeared . . .

. . . was I thinking? That they mean something? Who . . .

. . . nothing to do for it . . .

. . . ever escape . . . this?

. . . told me, then . . . sorry, I said. I didn't mean to be, what . . .

. . . like that again.

I close the book. I don't want to read this. My head hurts. I need to piss.

When I have, I'm tired again. Lie on the bed and wait for dawn.

Sun in my eyes. Traffic noise from the street, and a voice in my head saying something's wrong.

“Really?”

Not in my head: on the stairs, the landing below. Gus. He's on the phone, I heard it ringing, but it was his voice that woke me: a whisper loaded with anxiety . . . sadness?

“Fucking hell,” he says. “Fucking hell . . . all right. All right . . . I'll find someone. . . . No, definitely not. No . . .
mierda
.” Then silence.

My head still hurts. I dress without thinking and walk downstairs.

Woman's voice: “Should we tell—” Australian accent. The dreadlocked girl from the party—I've already forgotten her name. Gus hushes her:

“I'll let Khieu sort it. Christ, I don't—”

They're in their landing-cum-kitchen, eating breakfast, and their faces look worse than the fry-up Gus is wolfing. He's leaning against the bathroom wall, eating with his fingers from a cracked plastic plate. She sits on the counter, staring at the floor.

“Who died?”

They look up like I've caught them screwing in church. “It's nothing,” Gus says, grabbing a chunk of fried egg and sucking it down. Neon yolk stains his fingers.

“Don't take up poker.”

He sees my face: knows he's busted. What's so bad he'd try to hide it from me?

“Journo got shot.”

First thought:
I'm late again
. “Where?”

“In the face,” the girl says, snagging a huge chunk of tomato off Gus's plate. Her nails bite its skin and it bleeds on her.

Gus glares: we'll dance on every other grave, but this is one of our own. “Outside his office. Two guys in helmets got off a moto and shot him. They grabbed his wallet, so officially it's a mugging gone bad.”

“How does a mugging go good?” the girl asks.

Gus is still hiding something, I can see it all over him. He hasn't answered my question.

“Where?” I say again, louder.

It costs him something to answer, but he knows the alternative is violence. I think he considers it anyway, but the girl sitting there changes his mind.

“Radio Ranariddh,” he says softly.

“Who is it?” They wince like I'm screaming—maybe I am.

“We don't have a name yet,” Gus says, and it's another goddamn lie. I'm heading for the stairs, not listening to whatever else he's shouting after me.

I wish to hell I could say I ran for the door, but I didn't.

I ran for my cameras first.

Radio Ranariddh runs out of a converted house on a suburban side street. It's usually quiet: today it's something out of Breughel. Uniforms setting up sawhorse barriers, pushing against seething knots of angry FUNCINPEC sympathizers, gawking neighbors, restless kids. Private security swarming the station office, facing off with the cops. AP and the Welshman are here already, along with some of the local stringers, pointing their cameras at anyone who'll mug for them: stirring things up. It's not gunpowder-tense yet—but it could get there with a few bad moves.

I'm late, but not too late: Prik drives fast. My head is still screaming, and I have to force myself not to shove people out of the way. Keep my press badge and camera visible: don't want to get beat up today. Not that they'll help if something sets this thing off.

I reach the barrier and look out over a sea of red, mud and blood baking dry in the morning sun. The potholes in the road glisten scarlet. In the middle, there he is. Someone's thrown a tarp down, but no mistaking who's under it: I can see the shape of his hunch against the fabric. One stunted hand pokes out from under the edge, twisted in the dirt.

Bunny, you dumb asshole
.
You said you were safe. You said you were lucky.

It's the money shot, and I raise my camera. Find his hand in the frame, but all I see are his eyes laughing at me in the gray morning:

“A pest like me? Not worth the candle.”

I can't push the button. Suddenly I'm shaking because this reminds me of something, it's happening again—that's the thought that keeps going through my mind:
It's happening again,
but I can't think
what
,
and I just keep staring through the lens.

All that blood.

A slow gush, spreading over the road: It wasn't a clean shot. Caught him in the neck, maybe, and he'd have lived a minute or two, gasping in the dirt while his heart kept pumping, watching as the life poured out of him—

Just like—

Enough.

The sun is murder, and people keep shoving me. For a second I'm disoriented:
What just happened?
Christ, I must be getting heatstroke. There's a crowd around me, pushing up to the barriers, shouting, shoving. An ugly scene, and getting uglier. Vans on the corners, pouring out more police, these in tac gear.

Check the camera: film counter at twenty. I've been shooting, then. I keep it up, trying to edge my way out of the press.

A man half-shouting at a cop over the barricade of an old wooden sawhorse; nervous eyes. Snap, snap.

A gaggle of women watching the investigators, wringing hands with guillotine fingers. Snap.

Through the lens, I see their frustration, their fear: It doesn't touch me. I seal it in silver nitrate, for others. I am a blank, a film cell. I am the thing that records.

The crowd surges and swells, and I breathe deep, forcing myself to go along. A young guy suddenly rises—he's balancing on two police barriers and chanting something, I'm having trouble making it out. My brain feels like it's made of cotton fuzz. Point the camera, wait until his head knocks the sun out of the frame. Snap, snap, snap. The police lieutenant, wondering how dangerous it will be to come over and knock him down. Snap.

The crowd shifts, a few start chanting along. I've got to get off this street.

There, on the corner opposite the station: an apartment under construction, five or six stories. That should do. I push my way through the last few feet of crowd.

No one's bothered with a fence, and as I duck into the ground floor, I see I'm in luck: the stairs are laid already, bare concrete with no railings. My heart's pounding as I take them up through the shell. Reach the roof and look down at the street. Yes, there's something there: the movement of the scene, the tension—onlookers straining against cops, security. It's not a riot, yet, but it'll do.

In the left of the frame, a cop's waving hand draws the eye to the dark red patch of earth where the body fell—

They've taken it away already, so no shot there. I'll give it ten more minutes here, see if a fight breaks out, then head for the morgue.

Zoom in: snap, snap. Maybe time for another angle, but—

A tickle in the back of my neck. Fingers pricking.

Turn around. Slow.

He's sitting a few feet away, tucked into that little Khmer crouch next to a pile of two-by-fours. I couldn't see him from the ground. Young guy, skinny, wearing a green tracksuit. Hard, flat eyes. I guess he was watching the street, but now he's watching me.

He is serene, expressionless. My stomach is doing backflips.

“Hey,” I say in Khmer. “Just taking some pictures. For the paper.” Flash my badge. “You working here?” He doesn't say anything. “Hope it's okay I'm on your roof?” Nothing. “I'll just go then. Sorry to bother you.” I take a last shot—aimless, trying to be nonchalant. Then up, slowly, head for the door.