Hunters in the Dark (27 page)

They were mirrored in the floodplain and formed there dark, unmoving reflections. From across the water came the silent flickers of lightning and the sweet morning thunder. By seven that morning Robert and Sophal were back in Takeo, having persuaded one of the men in the village to take them over. She had convinced the boatman to call her father and, without explaining anything to him, had gotten the doctor to send a car down to pick them up with some money for the boatman. When they got to Takeo, therefore, they only had to wait an hour before the driver appeared. They had not spoken for some time and it was better to be isolated and silent as they sat in a café and watched the rain. She went into the establishment's bare toilet and washed her face and hands, dabbing paper towels onto the little cuts on her knuckles. Vast areas of her being had been snuffed out in a few moments of time, but she was still solid in the mirror. Her scabs still tasted saline and she still flickered in and out of life—just like that silent lightning. It's the ghost side of oneself that carries on.

During the night, huddled inside the prasat as the rain pounded down, she had poured out all her rage in a brief explosion. He had told her everything finally and when it was done there was no point talking any further and she went over the sudden catastrophe in her mind as they skimmed across the half-lit Mekong in the longtail until the lights of Takeo came into view. What was surprising was that she was not truly surprised: something had been wrong all along. When the family driver appeared she walked silently to the car and got in and waited for something to happen between them as they drove back to Phnom Pehn. His apologies, however, were pointless; it's in the nature of lies to catch up with the perpetrator and strangle him. But her? So, she kept thinking, I have to be destroyed for the sake of his lies. In the end they slept and it was past nine when they arrived back at Colonial Mansions. It began to feel like a small, nasty dream. She woke and told the driver that she didn't need to go back home. He was to tell her father that she was fine. They had simply forgotten the time at Phnom Da and they had forgotten their money, too, at a café in Takeo. All he had to do was cancel her credit cards and she would come home later.

The driver seemed to hesitate, as if he had received very different instructions from her father. But in the end he relented and let the young mistress do what she wanted. He gave her the envelope of cash her father had entrusted to him and was glad to let the master and mistress do what they wanted and go their merry ways.

In the lobby there was a paradoxically dreamlike normality to everything. The boys in their laundered white shirts, the Chinese women doing their dutiful laps in the pool and the maids patiently spraying the ornamental palms. The rain pattered on the windows and two American embassy officials took their morning coffees under the photographs of colonial Phnom Penh and Hmong tribesmen. The man on duty smiled when he saw Robert and his silent noting of the disheveled clothes and hair was kept under perfect control as he searched for the key that had been left there earlier and finally handed it over.

“One of our staff,” he said politely, “found it in the lobby earlier this morning. You must have dropped it on your way out.”

“Of course. Thank you.”

A stroke of luck, then, as the world sometimes throws your way when things have reached their end. He felt a sullen wonderment.

“You might consider,” the man went on, “leaving it at the desk from now on. People lose their keys all the time.”

“Yes, it's a good idea. Who found it?”

“One of the boys. It was lying on the floor.”

“On the floor?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I must have dropped it then.”

“Yes, sir.”

On their way to the apartment he glanced up at the third floor. There was something there, some riddle. He could feel it in his nerves. And yet he had come through the riddle unharmed. They went into the disordered room and he saw the bag on the bed at once and he opened it while she stumbled into the bathroom to have a shower and there was everything that he had lost a few weeks earlier. The first image that came into his mind was a boomerang whipping through the air: the usual cliché. Then he saw, too, the car keys laid next to the bag and, looking inside the bag itself, he found the two passports. She was in the shower now, sobbing and wailing, and he tried to think how the boomerang had found its way back to him; but that was impossible. He gathered up all his scattered and despoiled belongings and made them orderly and then he sat on the bed and waited for the rain to stop. When Sophal came out of the bathroom she had calmed down and what was left of the bitterness was a coldness that would last until something healed it. Time, he thought banally, and left it at that. His own actions had ceased to mean anything.

They went down together as the sun broke out and, as previously suggested, he left the key with reception but with no intention of ever recuperating it. In the room, they had merely decided to leave.

“I have the keys to his car,” he had said.

“How do you know it's his car?”

“I just do.”

“Where is he then?”

“I don't know.”

They had stared at each other for some time.

“How do you have the keys?” she had spat at him.

“I don't know, but I have them.”

“They were just in your room?”

“Yes.”

It was so inexplicable she had given up.

“I don't want to go home,” she had said. “I want to go away somewhere.”

“All right, we'll go away.”

“Where?”

“I don't know. Back the way I came.”

She had looked at the bag.

“What's that?”

“The money. It's all there.”

“Throw it away.”

He had nodded.

“All right. I'll throw it away.”

“I mean it.”

“I said I would, didn't I?”

Down in the street they saw the car parked under mango trees, the windscreen covered with drops of dried mud and crushed flies. The merriness of a Sunday morning flooded the streets around the day markets, the dogs running in packs, the drivers squatting in the shade of the magnificent trees. The sun brought a bright lucidity. They stood in it for a moment basking and warming themselves, and without knowing why they sensed that Davuth was not around and that someone had made them a mysterious gift. They climbed into the car and their mood lifted. A great zone of porcelain-blue sky had opened up at the apex. As they drove slowly out of the city the river was lit by the sun and the frangipanis seemed to turn into foam. Soon, the city had thinned and they moved along tattered roads among the trucks and the bikes with their angry dust. The rain had soaked everything but the man-made things had dried in an hour. “We'll go back to Battambang,” he said quietly. “We can stay there a few days. Is that all right?” She said nothing, and it was her assent.

Through the whole afternoon they drove without speaking, until the river flashed in the distance and the billboards rose up by the road and showered them with images of a France that no longer existed. They came into Battambang as the dust dried and they stopped and went for a walk along the stagnant, softly luminous green river.

Here once again was the building of Electricité de Battambang and the old French mansions ranged along the road. The same boys lounged on the step banks, lulled by the chugging generators. They too lay down in the grass and they slept a little with their bodies close together. Small white clouds sailed across an open sky and he stared up at them and felt the crickets in the grass whispering as if from afar. Vaguely, he was considering crossing the border again if she would agree. They could spend a few days together in Bangkok perhaps. They could go to an island somewhere and her father could wire them some money when they ran out. Or he could keep the money he already had. He looked over and saw that she was lying serenely with her face upturned as if still deep in sleep. The sound of a fairground of some kind came wafting across the little bridge nearby. The faint call of a mosque, the mosque he remembered standing over the river upstream. He raised himself on his elbows and squinted at the sun. How long had it been since he had last been in this very spot? A few weeks, a few months—he couldn't really say anymore. He had long ago stopped counting his days and the longer he stopped counting them, the faster they passed. He was not even sure why he had returned there. He didn't know why he had the car and the money he had won long ago at the Diamond Crown in Pailin. It had been taken away from him and then returned to him, but by whom and why? It was like a wheel that had shifted in the dark, but so slowly that one didn't notice it turning. He saw little spiders scattering through the grass as if alarmed by his shadow. We'll go over the border, he thought. He roused Sophal and she opened her eyes and there was no emotion in them whatsoever. Down in the river the boys had jumped into the water with nets and fishing rods and some of them were swimming under the bridge, engulfed in its shadow. The sight of them made him think of his parents, far off in their wintery realm. In their heart of hearts they knew that he was alive.

They went to a place called Pomme d'Amour and had a quick dinner washed down with Chilean wine. Still they didn't speak. The streets became ominous and still. There was a small meeting of the Cambodian People's Party at a street corner near the restaurant, the voices amplified through the cheap megaphones somehow dulcet and detached from the usual menu of political angers. They sat outside, close to the bustle of passersby. The warmth of bodies unconcerned by the secret dramas of others. The delivery girls from the restaurant itself came out with enormous plastic bags which they balanced on the handlebars of their bikes before riding off. Along the top of a roof the silhouette of a cat appeared; Sophal pronounced it bad luck. “Rubbish,” he snorted.

“Let's go into Thailand and find a place in Bangkok. No?”

“Do you mind?” she asked, as if she had been wanting this all along, but without mentioning it to him.

“Of course I don't mind. I wouldn't suggest it if I minded. I'm glad you want to as well.”

“I just need to get out of this country for a while.”

“I know what you mean. Then we'll get out.”

“Can we take the car over the border?”

He laughed grimly. “Of course we can't take the car over the border. Why would we want to anyway? The car is evidence—we'll dump it.”

“Really?”

“Obviously. We'll take a taxi on the other side.”

So that's how it's done, she thought.

“Then what?”

“Then nothing. We'll let everything calm down.”

“But the very fact that we're not there—”

He rolled his shoulders and looked away.

“What does it matter? We haven't done anything wrong. We don't know where that bastard is. I don't care where he is.”

“Who is he?”

“How do I know? I'd never seen him before I met him in the lobby. Anyway…”

Robert turned it over in his mind but there was no way of accounting for it. It felt, to him, like a coincidence that he would just have to leave by the side of the road.

She sipped at her wine and soon she began to feel more resolved.

“All right,” she said, “we'll go to Bangkok and then the sea. Maybe we can come back through Trat. One can cross the border there.”

“It's a plan.”

He tried to telegraph an encouragement through a better smile than the last one.

“The situation's not as bad as all that,” he went on. “It's just confusing more than anything.”

“And what about your American friend?”

“No idea. He's not my friend though. He's probably selling dope to some hippies somewhere.”

But he didn't know, he couldn't imagine.

After dinner she got a new seven-dollar mobile phone with a SIM card and called her father. There was a small uproar. Her mother came on the line.

“I'm perfectly fine,” she hissed. “Simon and I are going to Bangkok—oh, for God's sake stop worrying. We'll call tomorrow night.”

Her mother spoke.

“No, no, leave us be, we're fine. I'll call tomorrow.”

They went for Vietnamese coffee at the White Rose and suddenly they didn't care as much. The border closed at eight and they just had to be there by seven thirty. There was a little time. They wandered down to the fairground which they had heard from the river. It was rustic and loud and they went on one of the machines as the light dimmed and the ancient bulbs large as grenades came on and began to steam. The whole town stirred into nocturnal illumination, or so it seemed to them. The villas, the utility buildings, the rows of shophouses by the river, the French cement buildings which looked, for once, like the monuments of tenuous conquerors. Bats swirled around the riverbanks and the hospital, too, was lit up. Was it a celebration neither of them had heard of? He had the feeling—it could not be verified—that the population was turning through the grid of streets in a wheel-like formation. Cabarets on the pavements, the old ladies with their tea and shots laughing uproariously and holding their hands up to their faces where the makeup had streaked. The cats sat still and watched. Girls in bridal dresses came down the street they were navigating, their heads covered with plastic flowers. And, a few streets away, moving within that same crowd, Ouksa was walking with an ice cream, morosely picking his way from street to street looking for openings.

His wife was now in the hospital and he had been to see her an hour earlier. Finally, exasperated and drawn outdoors by the sound of music in the streets, he had gone wandering along the lit-up river and turned into the maze of streets. It was here that he came upon Davuth's car parked next to a barber's shop. He recognized it at once and yet continued walking as if nothing had happened, then stood at the corner looking back down the street and licking his ice cream. He was not sure, in fact, if running into that demonic personality was such a good idea. But at the same time, he had a secret he could maybe cash in and now that he was more desperate than he had been, he was more prepared to risk it. So he waited until the night was almost upon them and he was sure that eventually Davuth would appear and this time the odds would not be stacked against himself. They would just be two men in the street, almost equals. In that context he would no longer be afraid of the policeman. He would act friendly and surprised and Davuth would find it awkward to get away easily. He would ask him for money, and if he refused he would suggest a bribe, a threat.