Hunters in the Dark (16 page)

Davuth had held up his hand and the frightened driver he could see behind the wheel had instinctively obeyed the silent command and stopped the car he was reversing. Davuth went up to him and showed him his badge and asked him what he was doing. It was in a cool, disdainful voice, the voice that stopped all comers, and there was no need to ramp up the pitch. He knew already that the driver had no ready explanation and he knew already what had happened because all the signs were there and logic dictated that Ouksa had done what he had done. He told him to park the car and come over with him to the Saber and he told him to do it slowly. Ouksa did as he was told and they walked together across the muddy open ground to the edge of the cane field. Davuth asked him his name, and all the rest.

“It's a barang, isn't it?” he said to him as they came to the ditch.

The policeman had a strong flashlight and shone it down as far as the white shirt and the paralyzed blue eyes. For Ouksa everything looked at once very different. The frogs sang right across the vast fields of cane and there was a gentleness in the rain.

“I didn't know him,” he said quietly.

“You followed him here from Moonrise. I know all about him.”

“He threatened me—we pulled over.”

“No, no. Nothing like that. Shall we go have a look at what's in your car?”

“You don't believe me,” Ouksa said.

“There's nothing to believe.”

Ouksa could do nothing but go with Davuth back to the car and show him everything that was under the seat. The policeman took the passports and the money and simply walked to his car and threw them in the back. He was feeling rather pleased with himself. It had been, after all, an extremely easy trap to load and spring and he had done no work but wait and observe. The driver was a simpleton. He told Ouksa to shut up and stay by the Saber and he went through the car himself until he found the clothes and heroin equipment and the dope itself. It was to the driver's credit that he had left it behind. He took that as well and threw it into his own car and then returned to the shivering and terrified youth.

“Where are you from?”

Ouksa spilled everything about himself.

Davuth said, “You're probably wondering what I'm going to do.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I'm not going to do anything. I'm going to give you a shovel and you're going to take all their belongings and your bat into the sugarcane and bury them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you're going to go home to your wife and shut up about everything you've done. It's not difficult to understand, is it?”

Ouksa shook his head, and his misery was tinged with relief. Davuth could sense his insolence and his fear jostling in the atmosphere between them. It was a small struggle and he had to impose himself more fully.

He said, “If you ever say anything I'll come down there and shoot you myself. I'll blow your head off like a chicken. I'll come and shoot you in the head and say you were a suspect in a murder and that's all, you'll be forgotten.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We're clear then.”

Davuth relaxed. The worm was a worm now, but he was not yet properly crushed.

What about the barang?

“Where did the barang get all this money?”

Ouksa said he had no idea.

“No idea? You're a liar, you—”

Davuth stepped up to him and took him by the throat. He had been a policeman all his life, since he was thirteen or fourteen. He knew how to make fear abundant. He knew how to shake them up and make them think of the afterlife in a mass grave.

“Where did he get it?”

Faltering, Ouksa said, “He stole it.”

“He stole it? Who was he? Who was that rich fuck?”

“He was a drug dealer, sir.”

“From where?”

“American.”

“American—”

“Yes, sir.”

“And he stole it from who?”

Now Ouksa found a petty courage.

“I don't know. From a barang.”

“You don't know? Then how do you know he stole it?”

“I heard from the boatman.”

“You're a liar.”

“No, it's true. They said—”

“What did they say?”

“—he took it from a barang.”

“Where is that other barang?”

“He left.”

“Who was that boatman, brother?”

“His name is Thy.”

To Davuth it seemed probable enough. He relaxed his grip and the tension ebbed. His point had been made and the driver had been shaken down.

“I'll give you a hundred,” he said. “For digging that hole and burying their belongings. It's fair.”

“It's not much of a deal,” Ouksa dared answer.

“You little worm. You're the one who did it. You deserve nothing. I could shoot you now—nothing would be said.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Shut up and get digging.”

Davuth went to his car and took out a shovel and threw it at him. He turned on the Saber's headlights and sat on the bonnet and lit a cigarette. In response, Ouksa looked up at the sky: three hours of dark remaining, maybe two or less. He didn't know what time it was. He went to the barang's car and took out all the stuff that was in it and rolled it into the suitcase and dragged it out. It was a task intended to humiliate him and he knew it. Before the belongings were disposed of, however, Davuth sifted through them one last time. There were two shirts and he turned the collars and saw that they were from a tailor in Phnom Penh called Vong.

“Dig the hole properly,” Davuth said, “and don't be lazy. Dig it a good way in and make it deep.”

The rain had now lessened but the ground was soft and sticky. Ouksa went into the cane a fair way and threw down the shovel, then went back to the ditch and began to drag the suitcase over to the same spot. It was an infuriating struggle. His feet slipped in the mud and he was not strong enough to drag it effectively. He couldn't understand why it was so heavy. It took him the better part of ten minutes to pull the thing out of view of the road and close enough to the shovel. He cursed the policeman and his devious and well-timed arrival and picked up the shovel and began to drive it into the sod between the thick sugarcane stalks. It was a bestial task even if the rain had ceased. When the hole was finished he was exhausted and wiped his face and stood still with his ears alert. Far out in the sugarcane he could hear a distant, tiny sobbing. It was almost like the wail of a small animal, but it was certainly human. The girl, lost and bewildered and alone out there in the sea of cane. He wondered if Davuth heard it too. It was only now, surprisingly, that he thought of the Ap and a cold fear gripped him and he rolled the suitcase into its grave with a furious urgency. He filled it in with the same earth, smacked it down with the back of the shovel and dragged himself to the verge as the light was beginning to change. The policeman was still sitting coolly on the hood as if lost in thought and around him lay a circle of cigarette butts. His cowboy boots had been polished and they had not lost their luster. Ouksa went up to the SUV and laid the shovel against its side and said that it was done.

“Did you pat it down?”

“It looks like nothing's there.”

Davuth threw the cigarette he was smoking to the ground and then said, “Pick up all the butts and put them in your car. Burn your shoes when you get home. I'm going to say I found a car by the roadside.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ouksa crawled about picking up the butts. Like a dog, the policeman thought. Like a vulture.

Davuth said, “Did you hear something out there?”

“I heard an animal—an animal was crying.”

“There it is again.”

The policeman slid off the hood and walked up to the cane. The sobbing, again. But now so far off they could hardly hear it.

“There was someone else,” he said sharply.

He went back to Ouksa, who had stood up, and slapped him hard in the face.

“There was someone else here.”

“Yes, a girl,” the driver stammered.

“She ran off?”

The driver nodded.

“That's not very good news.”

“She didn't see my face.”

“How the fuck do you know what she saw?”

Davuth remembered. The cute Khmer girl who was under twenty-five. Did it matter that she had seen Ouksa's wretched face?

He pulled out his pistol and walked yet again to the cane and thought about going in and finishing it. But it would be impossible to find her. It was going to have to be the way it was and by and large it would work well enough. It might be more practicable to dispose of Ouksa. He considered it. But no. It would only complicate things further. He reholstered the gun and strolled back to the SUV and smiled at the muddied youth and told him to just drive away and pretend that nothing had happened. He wasn't very smart, he said to him, but it was better than being the American. He should thank Buddha for being alive and with all his limbs.

“And a hundred dollars better off.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It could have been you,” Davuth said, looking down at the ground to make sure that Ouksa had picked up all the butts. “You'd be reincarnated as a cockroach.”

“I understand,” Ouksa said and bowed his head.

“Now help me carry the American into my car.”

They struggled down into the ditch. With difficulty they dragged the body back to the SUV and rolled it into the back. It had a leaden sadness, a pointlessness. Davuth covered it with a towel and then he walked Ouksa over to his car and shone the torch into his face. He saw how colorless and soulless it had become, how his fear had grown and was now uncontrollable. It was gentleness that would seal the affair now. He turned off the beam and sighed and gave Ouksa a cigarette.

He said, “That was a stupid thing you did. Now you'll have to live with it. Go to the temple and ask forgiveness. Pray and make merit.”

“I will, sir.”

Ouksa was now sobbing, his whole frame shaking.

“I didn't do it for me—” he began.

“It doesn't matter who you did it for. You have to make merit.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Make merit and think about your sin.”

“Yes, sir.”

It's pathetic, Davuth thought, and walked back to his car. Pathetic and necessary.

He took out the passports and looked them over. He had expected one to be the girl's, but it was not. An Englishman. He turned to Ouksa.

“Who is this?”

“Don't know, sir.”

“
Robert
. You know this one?”

Ouksa shook his head.

“Why was his passport under your seat?”

“I found them together in the barang's car. I don't know—”

The face was open. It was childish and blond, with wide-open slightly crazy eyes, those of a man who did not believe what had just happened to him. Was he alive or dead?

“Why did he…?”

Davuth stared out at the sugarcane as if the answer might be there.

One can feel a human heart from a great distance; the hunter feels his prey even in a great darkness.

“They must be friends,” he murmured. “In any case—you don't know.”

“No, sir.”

“It doesn't make sense. But you can go. I'm getting sick of looking at your miserable face. Wash your damn hands when you get home. Don't talk to your wife. Don't talk to your children. I'll know if you do.”

Davuth waited for Ouksa to drive away before walking thoughtfully around the scene. Tire marks and footprints, yes, but that day's rain would wash them away quickly. There was just the Saber. It was best left where it was, untampered and abandoned. It was a rusting hulk anyway, it would be scavenged by midday. He walked down to the cane again and listened for the sound he had heard earlier.

The stalks, defying him, waved back and forth in the breeze and disclosed nothing. The horizon was lit. Everything had returned to normal. He thought it all through as slowly as he could and soon he realized that the less he did the better. There was no one above him in the police hierarchy at that local level who might look over his shoulder or ask him an inconvenient question. He was magnificently alone.

He drove down to the river amid the cock crows and went to a sand spit he knew and dragged the body down there and let it go gently into the water and waited until the current shifted it and bore it out into deeper water where it could move. He felt a quiet satisfaction doing it. He was familiar with death, there was nothing magical or awesome about it. It appeared and it disappeared and in that respect it was very much like life.

Davuth's station lay seven miles downriver from that place. It was an old French schoolhouse with perforated cement windows in some rooms and a dusty yard shaded by dying trees. There were two cars and a motorbike and a servant cleaned the rooms and made the two men meals when his other officer was there. There was a desolation about the road the station stood on. A few women had food stalls there during the day and by the gates there was always a tray of split chicken pieces and fish roasting slowly in the sun. The pale blue sign with the words
Police Station
in English and Khmer was slowly rusting at the edges and beginning to look unimposing. He sat alone for many hours in his office with the blinds down smoking bad cigars and reading horoscopes in the local papers.

When the Internet was up he played online poker and lost small amounts week by week, but indifferently and with a kind of method, and when it was down he played patience with himself and talked on the phone with the business owners he shook down now and then. He called his daughter at her school and told her to be home on time and thought for five minutes every day of his dead wife and then rode around the area in the SUV looking for what he called “signs.” His days were usually empty and serene. On most of them, he went to the river and sat there quietly with a packed lunch and waited for the bodies of barangs to show up. It was quite a rare occurrence but there was one every month and then he would be busy.

They were mostly young, early middle age. Europeans, Australians, a few Americans and Canadians, people drifting eastward, doping up in Laos and Luang Prabang and coming down in the dry season to the places in the kingdom where they could winter for a few dollars and party among themselves. They picked up Khmer girls and Yaa Baa and Burmese heroin and went their merry way en route to enlightenment. The curious thing was that he had seen more of them in these last years.

They were middle-class and unemployed, or so it seemed, their education now of little value, and they seemed to be able to scrounge enough money to take leave of their senses for months on end. Once upon a time, the Khmers had been in awe of them. But now their dirtiness and scruffiness and unruliness had dimmed their image at the very moment that the Chinese and the Thais had come into considerable amounts of money. The barangs no longer seemed as formidable as their grandparents, even if their grandparents had been hippies in the sixties. At least the hippies back then had class—though the sixties were an age that seemed prehistoric from the perspective of a Khmer of fifty-four, precisely because he remembered its peaceful wonders. Back then the kingdom had been a paradise on earth. The king upon his throne, the guerrillas far away in their jungles, the war in Vietnam not yet close and callous in the day-to-day. The streets were filled with girls in miniskirts. But he, to tell the truth, had mightily enjoyed the Revolution.

The barang grandchildren of that age now wandered the East with no prospects and they dropped like drunken flies into his river, forcing him to scoop them out. Naturally he knew all about the American (though he had pretended otherwise to the gullible Ouksa), but even the American could not pay for all the cremations. He, Davuth, did his best. He went through the possessions that were left behind—usually little more than a few rags and useless books but with a family heirloom ring here and there—and then went through all the desultory procedures. The call to the relevant embassy, the filling-out of the report forms, the inventories and then, lastly, the sad and lonely cremation at the wat with only himself present.

He would wait for weeks for relatives to appear; they rarely did. The remains were forwarded to the embassy and nobody looked very seriously at the paperwork. But he was paid nothing and it was expected of him. Over the years he had taken advantage of the situation. The missing rings and wallets and brooches and credit cards were never a subject of inquiry by his superiors. Quietly, he sold them on the black market and saved up for his daughter's college fund. Everyone has to live, no matter how they do it.

He made himself a coffee in the station kitchen and called the maid and told her she could stay home that day. He knew that someone would call from the river in about two or three hours and he waited patiently for that call while he sipped his coffee and watched the sun rise over the dust-blown road. His officer was away for the morning having a medical examination. He went out into the first rays of the sun and sat in a chair and looked over at the SUV, which he had cleaned thoroughly. While it was still dark he had driven to his house, burned the towel and the newspapers from the back and then taken the money and the passports and put them in the safe in his room. Before coming to the station he took out the passports, looked them over again and decided to take them with him to the station. He looked at them again now. The American's was covered with stamps from many countries. The Englishman's had nothing in it. They looked like men who were polar opposites and yet their passports were together. They were not together for reasons he yet understood, but the face of the Englishman had something sympathetic and unnerving about it. The eyes were so straight, there was no deviance in them, and he was only twenty-eight. His passport had been issued in London that same year. He did not look like the usual drifters who passed through Battambang—far from it. He looked like a wide-eyed innocent from a small town somewhere, but even the innocent can be driven mad by experience.

Now the American was dead, and where was the Englishman? No one would ever give up their passport willingly.

The American and his girl—he had seen them somewhere. At one of the bars on the water, maybe, long ago. A man spinning in his happiness in expensive clothes. He remembered the clothes, as one does in this country. A well-tailored man stands out.

“They all die like that,” he said aloud. Casually, as if it were nothing.

He looked at his watch, and as he did so, the phone rang and it was the owner of a riverside café saying there was a body near the piers under the temple at a place he knew a mile downriver. He drove there calmly. The body had become entangled in the beams of the jetty and hung there while a swarm of construction workers fussed around trying to disentangle it. Finally they succeeded and the limp rag doll was brought to terra firma. The American's skin had changed color and something had taken a bite out of his left shin. They laid him on the mudflat and Davuth stood there and took notes and asked everyone to clear off and go stand farther away. Then he had an ambulance called and the body was transferred to the police station. There it was laid in the garage while a few photographs were taken and the coroner came and he and Davuth talked alone in the field behind the station. The man was an old collaborator and they saw eye to eye in these matters. Autopsies were obligatory but sometimes they were slyly overlooked. The man observed that the American seemed to have suffered damage to the head but it might have happened in the water. Indeed it might, Davuth agreed, and they had a smoke and talked about other things and soon they walked back to the garage and Davuth suggested they cremate the body that day and have done with it. The coroner was in agreement. Another barang who had gotten high and thrown himself into the river in a moment of ecstasy or despair—for were those two states not often one and the same? They would quietly split any proceeds between them and life would flow on and the usual busybody from the embassy would drive up and ask about those same belongings. “We couldn't find anything,” Davuth would say and life, yet again, would flow on nowhere toward its mysterious and nihilistic destination.

Late in the afternoon he took the body to a wat and had it cremated by the monks he knew. They said prayers and he gave them a small donation out of the money he'd made and then he waited patiently while the ashes were packaged and he asked them to keep them there for a week while the paperwork went through. He had his customary cheroot and walked back out into the early evening and he saw that at the top of the hill the young monks were lounging about outside their dorms and looking down—as if at a sport—at the bridge that was being built across the river. He went up there out of curiosity and sat on a wall and looked at the same thing. The half-built bridge, the curve of the river. Women washed clothes in the shallows, their long hair unfurled. A horse stood there with them, its head dipped toward the water, and young boys swam in a deeper pool near the bridge. The workers were drifting away at their day's end. Some had built fires and were cooking fish in the open. He looked up at the huge trees that towered above the dorms and one of the boy monks offered to show him something unusual for a little tip.

They walked in among the trees and it was as if night had arrived here first, bringing with it the stirred nocturnal insects and the stillness. Yet the sky was blue; there was no rain. The boy took him to the densest part of the trees and made him stand still and look up and then he abruptly clapped his hands and there was a generalized stirring in the treetops and, as if with one will, the thousands of bats hanging there erupted into life and rose into the air with a noise like locusts.

The boy turned to see his reaction and the policeman rolled back on his heels for a moment and a dark superstition came into his mind and wrecked everything there.

But then he let out a laugh and shook his head. The monks were watching them and their faces, by contrast, were immensely grave. To them it was not quite a joke or a stunt. Davuth controlled his fear as the bats then came whizzing down into the lower parts in a crazed confusion and when they had finally calmed he strode back out to the embankment and walked down to his car with something resolved in his mind. He drove back to his house and saw that his daughter had returned from school. She was seated at the kitchen table doing her schoolwork. Calm and self-contained, like many girls at that age.

He kissed her forehead and she looked up for a moment and he passed into his room where the safe was and closed the door. He took a quick cold shower, then opened the safe and looked at the money and then at the passport of the Englishman. It was not avarice he felt as he went through the possibilities that had now opened before him. Something told him that a road lay ahead of him and that the road was made for him and no one else. The Englishman was also on the road and the money Davuth had inherited was not the end of the money that could be had. That barang was now a nonperson, a man who had ceased to exist. Did that not make him uniquely vulnerable? He, Davuth, on the other hand, would be invulnerable when hunting him down. The idea gave him a twisted pleasure.

Then he locked everything in the safe and went into the kitchen and made his daughter dinner. They had a housekeeper who could come whenever needed and the old woman often looked after the girl when he was away on cases. He would call her in the morning. For now he made fried rice heavily sauced with
prahok,
the fermented fish paste. His daughter looked up and watched him with big cool skeptical eyes. She sensed everything about him.

“What did you do at school today?” he asked.

She told him, unconvincingly.

“I might be going away for a few days,” he said as he sat down with the rice and the
prahok
. “It's just another job.”

“Are you looking for a bad man?”

“Not really. It's just a job.”

“But is it a bad man?”

He shrugged. “What is a bad man?”

They ate in silence and he glanced through her exercise book. It was filled with figures of algebra, simple calculations, diagrams he could not understand. His own schooling had been interrupted by the Revolution and never resumed, but those abstractions, he always felt, were reprieves from the relentless realities of life, small delusions that paid no dividends. They had never been of any use to him, but later they would be of use to her. Education was a magic that some could use.

“Never mind about bad men,” he said, and stroked her hair. “You don't need to think about that.”

He closed the book and gave her permission to watch television for a while. As she did so he took a beer from the fridge and went out into his little garden. He sat there looking at the clear moon and its portentous halo—a sign, surely, of ominous things to come. He felt the pressing smallness and meanness of that garden now, the evidence that he was just scraping by for all the perks he creamed from his profession. It was never enough. He wanted a house with a swimming pool and an iron gate, many things that did not come easily to lowly men. He would have to retire soon and then his slowly augmenting fund for his daughter would come to a standstill. It was not far off and he had to make the most of his remaining days of corruption and opportunity and profit. They were numbered like the fingers of his hands and as his commander had taught him to do long ago, one had to chop those fingers off one by one without thinking too much about the pain.

He thought about this later, too, when he was alone watching DVDs after his daughter had gone to bed. An HBO series called
Vikings,
which he had grown fond of. The Vikings, barangs of the far north in a distant time, went about with their axes assailing the English, cutting into their flesh with pleasure. Had it really been like that, the killing days? The men with blades smiling like the Vikings—seemingly all the time—and wading through fields and villages of wattle with an intention that was, after all, inscrutable. How they hated the English Christians. They loved to spit on their crucifixes. It was fascinating—the pleasure of the desecration. Did they really enjoy the releasing of blood and the insolent disturbance of Dhamma?

He had to think this over since it had been such a theme in his own life. And it was at night that his memories came alive again and when he became aware that the ghosts of the murdered came alive as well and roamed across the land. It was known to everyone in the villages. His own past, too, was reenacted nightly in this way. He sometimes thought that in a demented way his past was very short, almost nonexistent. He had been a child in the sixties, in the happy time. But what did he remember of that?