Hunters in the Dark (25 page)

Halfway across they lost sight of land altogether. Here the trees sticking out of the surface were white as bone and draped with creepers. Driftwood floated idly past them, a few household items, broken birds' nests and strands of dark yellow flowers like garlands tossed from an abandoned wedding feast. The pilot asked no questions above the roar of his engine. Shaded by his jungle hat, Davuth watched everything pass by: the dead fish lying on their sides in the sun, the crowns of interlaced branches. As they approached Angkor Borei he saw the red roofs of distant houses on dry land and now they seemed improbable and exotic. The land there was under shadow. The rains were coming back, but they were doing so incrementally. They swept into a wide, obviously ancient canal that curved around. On the banks lay upturned little boats, knee-high shrines and men fishing with poles at the edge of pale and impenetrable mangroves.

Angkor Borei was little more than a municipal museum with stone replicas of Vishnu statues standing in a shabby garden. While Davuth remained with the pilot at the jetty, Sophal and Robert walked around it wondering why they had been taken there. From the back wall they looked down, however, at an idyllic river scene which might not have changed much in centuries. Children swimming naked in the shallows, boats tethered within the reeds; the sun blazing on the water. They went into the dark and stuffy museum and peered at a few exhibits of prehistoric artifacts. There were aerial photographs made in the 1930s by a French archaeologist named Pierre Paris showing the canals of the ancient city which had been called Vidhapurya. A guide appeared out of nowhere and began to beguile them. He told them about the mysteries of the lost kingdom of Funan, whose capital they were now standing in. “One dollar,” he asked politely in the middle of this discourse, holding out an even politer hand. Robert paid him and the young man shadowed them as they went from case to case. He seemed to understand that they didn't really want to be there.

There were exhibits of piled human bones from funerary sites, beautiful pottery and stone friezes depicting Vishnu.

“I feel a little claustrophobic,” Sophal said at last, and Robert thanked the guide to dismiss him and took her back outside. The sun had ripened and the skies were half clouded. Next to the museum stood a decomposing French colonial mansion of moss-thickened vaults and balconies, not dissimilar to an antebellum plantation house of the American South. They walked around it and mosquitoes came and nipped their necks and they found themselves wanting to go back to Takeo.

“But the temple will be special,” Robert said at last. “Let's just go there now.”

“Let's. I'm being bitten alive.”

The mosquitoes, in fact, launched a major assault as they clambered back into the longtail and the pilot uttered a ritual cure aimed at these well-known belligerents.

“The mosquitoes of Angkor Borei—they are the worst!”

They crossed the floodplain in about half an hour.

Before they arrived at Phnom Da, however, the conical hill appeared with the dark ruined prasat at its summit. At the bottom was a dark mud beach with a few shacks scattered in the jungle behind it. There was a small bridge over an estuary, a few fires in the clearings, woodcutters or fishermen squatting under thatch. It looked like a dozen people and no more. The pilot left them there and Davuth made an abrupt sign for him to leave, but the man simply hung back near the bridge and waited. Davuth knew he would not depart without a return fare. He turned back to his charges and cheerfully pointed to the path that led up from the beach through the woods toward the stone steps of the temple. He said it would be a long, sweaty hike up to the top, and it looked likely that it would be. They saw that the hill was now an island entirely surrounded by water. The dry-season roads that connected it to land had disappeared and there was just the little bridge.

It was Sophal who led the way. By the time they were at the foot of the steps the forest had closed in all around them and the heat, though now decreasing, made the prospective climb forbidding. Bringing up the rear, Davuth encouraged them. It was not, he said, as bad as it looked. They climbed for half an hour and then rested.

Davuth told them a few stories he had cribbed from a guidebook and they listened as if he knew what he was talking about. He sat with his hands hanging between his knees. Already the hamlet by the water seemed a long way off. The sun began to dip toward the horizon as they soldiered on toward the summit. When they got there it was shining almost horizontally through the jungle into the prasat and its tumbledown shrine.

Two human figures were there. A young cowherd stood in the long grass at the edge of the clearing with four or five animals grazing. At the door to the temple an old man with disfigured ears sat begging in a monk's robe. They walked around the prasat. Its bricks were as dark as brewed tea. The interior shrine was made of concentric rectangles of cracked stone rising to an open skylight. Wildflowers washed against the outer walls, dark gold and blue.

They sat on pieces of stone and waited for the dusk to come down. But the sea could only be seen through gaps in the dense jungle. Soon, the old man and the cowherd moved off, as lethargic as the longhorn cows. They could hear the bells of the latter tinkling as they receded down the hill. When they were alone, Davuth offered them a sip from his whisky flask and they watched the sun decline into a rising bank of rain cloud. Farther down the hill, Davuth said, stood a small seventh-century temple known as Ashram Maha Rosei, or the “sanctuary of the great ascetic.” Built of laterite, it was considered architecturally unique in Cambodia because of its remarkable Javan and Indian style—it was thought that parts of the Mekong were once ruled by Java. He seemed to know all about it. And indeed, Davuth had spent half the night reading up on the matter.

“Let's go and see it,” he said, standing and brushing off the dust from his seat. “Then we'll go down and find the boat.”

Robert, however, was feeling tired of the place already and refused to move.

“It's all right,” he said. “Sophal, you go and look.”

Reluctantly, she agreed. “I'll just be ten minutes. I'll take some photos for you.”

“I'll be here.”

“All right,” she said. “We'll be back in a minute.”

She felt awkward leaving him, and she didn't want to be alone with Davuth, but it was only a few hundred yards down the hill and there was no one else there.

Davuth led the way and he plucked out a switch from the undergrowth and playfully flicked it left and right as they made their way down a forest path. “Over there,” he said vaguely, pointing toward the east, “is Vietnam.” She wondered why guides always felt the need to point out the most mundanely obvious things, as if they were in danger of being left out of consciousness. When the path dipped more steeply on its way to the forgotten temple she looked up through the gaps in the trees and saw a soaring dusk cloud rising into the indigo sky. Its edges were brilliantly lit as if electrified from within, its apex snow-white and supremely elegant as it evolved ever upward. How far did such formidable clouds reach in their ceaseless straining for height and power? They seemed to be driven by awareness and desire for dominance. At its core, the cloud was almost black and one could taste the imminent rain on the lips. Davuth, too, stopped for a moment and looked up at it and his eyes went pale and empty and languid. For him, everything in the sky was an omen. Signs became material in the heavens and they were fashioned by multitudes of gods.

Robert also watched it, lying on his back on a carved plinth that must have been well over a thousand years old. He shaded his eye to look at it directly. One last slowed-down flash of light before dusk. A flicker of lightning from somewhere else. The forest quivered. He was glad to be alone for a while, to be cut off from living things. From a fair distance he could still hear the tinkle of the cowbells, the animals lumbering downward.

The recent days had been the loveliest so far and now he could see a little more clearly the uphill and pleasant path that might lie before him. His prospects, it was true, had no solid footing, but did they need to have one in this place? He could stay here until the ground solidified under his feet a bit. Sooner or later other doors would open to a charming and undesperate young man. The doctor was right: it was a country fast becoming rich and corrupt in novel ways. There would be unexpected openings in the years to come and those who stuck around and were patient would be able to profit from them almost unnoticed.

Gradually, he had lost his bearings in the face of these temptations. He had come to appreciate the power of secrecies and dissimulations practiced on a daily basis. Below him, vast as a labyrinth in a nightmarish myth, an ancient and subtle culture that the whites had settled on like flies on the surface of oily water, trembling and nervous and falsely righteous. The con men and the opportunists were little different from the pasty evangelicals and NGOs and savers of souls who you saw next to them huddled around tables in expensive restaurants every night. Indistinguishable to the Khmers. He was one of them and he no longer minded; con man or Baptist hustler saving children, it was not a chasm separating the two. The motives behind the two were not as dissimilar as either assumed. They both wanted a better life in a country where they could do what they wanted, where they remained unexamined. They were both frauds in their way, interlopers exploiting their whiteness. It was disgusting and comic, but in the end no one was going to punish either of these eternal types. The Samaritan and the criminal.

He himself could spend a lifetime here living off other people's money. It could be done. He could be Simon for the rest of his life, living off that man's unstable identity, and eventually he would actually
become
Simon. Unless, one fine day, Simon actually showed up. But he had an intuition about that. He sensed that it would never happen. Once a man cons you, he avoids you.

Then what if he was safe from now on?

When the first stars appeared he shook himself out of his reverie and sat up and saw behind him the moon which had risen over the Mekong. Shadowy longtails skimmed silently across the waters. He had forgotten the time a little and he realized now that almost an hour had passed. So they had not returned from Ashram Maha Rosei.

He went to the edge of the clearing and called out. Then he thought about the boat waiting for them on the mud beach far below. Would the man really wait for them so long and in the dark? He noticed how quickly the light was draining out of things and he wondered to himself if a certain urgency might be called for. Nevertheless, he ventured onto the path with an annoyed reluctance, not wanting to climb down merely to have to climb back up. And the mosquitoes were now out in force. He clucked and called out again and then cursed quietly and resolved to go find them. He swept down the overgrown path occasionally calling her name and feeling an increasing surprise that nothing came back at him. They must be inside the shrine, then, buried in masonry and out of earshot.

At the temple there was no one. He peered inside the unlit core and caught a whiff of stale incense and ash. He quickly looked around. It was a nuisance that they had gone off without telling him, leaving him alone in the jungle. But perhaps the best thing was to wait there.

He sat on the threshold of the shrine and soon he heard a clicking sound from a little farther down the hill. He got up and went back to the path and looked down into the gloom. Almost at once he saw a flicker of light, like a lighter being flicked on, and when it repeated he called out. It was now too dark to see anything but the vague shimmer of the Mekong below and the spark of light going on and off. A wave of fear came over him and he plunged down toward it with a hoarse yell, which to his surprise was simply her name. He came down into the thick undergrowth and when he was close enough to see that it was indeed a lighter he saw that they were sitting together under a tree, and that Sophal had her back to him and that she was sobbing.

Davuth sat facing the other way, toward Robert, and his thumb flicked the lighter on and off. When it was on, his face was lit from below, calm and smiling. He seemed to have been sitting like this for some time, waiting for the Englishman to show up. In his lap lay a regulation police pistol with the barrel against his knee but not pointing at anything. It looked like something carved from soapstone. Davuth left the lighter on now and then he invited Robert to sit down as well. The latter understood everything within a few seconds and his mind went wild with rage. He looked around for a heavy stone to use, to launch himself into an attack and smash the policeman's head. But in that flicker of instant calculation he realized how lost the cause was. Even if he managed the move in a second he would be too late. He was snared, and Sophal had been snared already. They had walked into it blind. They had walked off a cliff and it was too late. The policeman, then, knew that Robert understood and he smiled peaceably. Let's be reasonable, Davuth seemed to be saying, and after a few moments Robert did sit down and Davuth talked for a while.

“I know who you are,” Davuth began. “The easiest thing is you just give me your apartment key. I am going back to the city. By the time you get there yourselves I will be”—he made a strange gesture with his fingers, like falling snow—“long gone.”

It was said very gently. Nobody would come to any harm and since he, Davuth, had his passport it would be a foolish thing to pursue him or go on his own account to the police. Nobody would listen to him anyway.

“Also, what is the code to the safety box in your apartment?”

Robert gave it, and he handed over his phone at the same time.

“This is absurd,” he said, and took out the key and threw it over to Davuth. “You didn't have to do all this just to get a key.”

“No, I thought it through very carefully. I want to be invisible—and you want to be invisible as well. This way you can carry on being invisible. I don't care what you do. You are nothing to me.”

“There's nothing in my room.”

“You've been throwing your money around. There's enough to keep me happy.”

“There's nothing there at all.”

“Well, I am not going to believe that now. You can say what you want. I know you went to the Diamond and won a lot of money.”

“All right, whatever you say.”

“You barangs. You think you can get away with it.”

Robert talked to Sophal but she said nothing back. Her shirt was ripped and her hair was tangled. There had been a struggle. The policeman offered him a cigarette and he declined. Davuth got up and dusted off his trousers and walked off nonchalantly until he was at the path and the forlorn couple were plunged in darkness. He felt it was appropriate to say a few more words but he could not think what they should be. People talked far too much anyway. He felt the key in his pocket and memorized the code and was happy that it had all gone so smoothly for him. He had enjoyed the girl as well, she had not put up much resistance in the end. Those types were always soft at their core. They had not had to struggle to survive. He looked down at them from the slight advantage of the path and he felt a twisting, momentary pity. But at least they were alive and, in his case, unharmed. They had gotten off lightly.