The Secret Pilgrim (32 page)

That was the last speech Henry made that night, for the next thing he knew, Hansen had pushed the back of Henry's driving seat so hard that Henry's head nearly went through the windscreen. Hansen got out of the car and hauled Henry into the street. After that, Hansen lifted Henry to his feet and flung him across the road, to the dismay of a group of sleeping beggars, who began whimpering and clamouring while Hansen strode to where Henry lay and glared down at him.

“You tell Rumbelow, if he comes for me, I'll kill him.” he said in Thai.

Then he led the girl up the road in search of a better cab, one arm round her waist while she dozed.

By the time I had heard the two men's story to the end, I was suddenly dreadfully tired.

I sent them away, telling Rumbelow to call me next morning. I said that before I did anything else I was going to sleep off my jet-lag. I lay down and was at once wide awake. An hour later, I was presenting myself at The Sea of Happiness and buying a ticket for fifty dollars. I removed my shoes, as custom required, and moments later I was standing in a neon-lit cubicle in my stockinged feet, staring into the passive, much painted features of girl number 19.

She wore a cheap silk wrap with tigers on it, but it was open from the neck down. Underneath it she was naked. A heavy Japanesestyle make-up covered her complexion. She smiled at me and thrust her hand swiftly towards my groin, but I replaced it at her side. She was so slight it seemed a mystery that she was equal to the work. She was longer-legged than most Asian girls and her skin was unusually pale. She threw off her wrap and, before I could stop her, sprang on to the frayed chaise longue, where she arranged herself in what she imagined to be an erotic pose, caressing herself and uttering sighs of desire. She rolled on to her side with her rump thrust out, draping her black hair across her shoulder so that her tiny breasts poked through it. When I did not advance on her, she lay on her back and opened her thighs to me and bucked her pelvis, calling me “darling” and saying “please'. She flung herself away from me so that I could admire her back view, keeping her legs apart in invitation.

“Sit up,” I said, so she sat up and again waited for me to come to her.

“Put on your wrap,” I said.

When she appeared not to understand, I helped her into it. Henry had written the message for me in Khmer. “I want to speak to Hansen,” it read. “I am in a position to obtain Thai papers for yourself and your family.” I handed it to her and watched her study it. Could she read? I had no way of telling. I held out a plain white envelope addressed to Hansen. She took it and opened it. The letter was typed and its tone was not gentle. It contained two thousand baht.

“As an old friend of Father Vernon,” I had written, using the wordcode familiar to him, “I must advise you that you are in breach of your contract with our company. You have assaulted a Thai citizen and your girlfriend is an illegal Cambodian immigrant. We may have no alternative but to pass this information to the authorities. My car is parked across the street. Give the enclosed money to the Mama San as payment to release you for the night, and join me in ten minutes.”

She left the cubicle, taking the letter with her. I had not realised till then how much noise there was in the corridor: the jangling music, the tinny laughter, the grumbles of desire, the swish of water down the ramshackle pipes.

I had left the car unlocked and he was sitting in the back, the girl beside him. Somehow I had not doubted he would bring the girl. He was big and powerful, which I knew already, and haggard. In the half darkness, with his black beard and hollowed eyes and his flattened hands curled tensely over the back of the passenger seat, he resembled one of the saints he had once worshipped, rather than the photographs on his file. The girl sat slumped and close to him, sheltering against his body. We had not gone a hundred metres before a rainburst crashed on us like a waterfall. I pulled in to the kerb while each of us stared through the drenched windscreen, watching the torrents of water swarm over the gutters and potholes.

“How did you get to Thailand?” I yelled in Dutch. The rain was thundering on the roof.

“I walked,” Hansen replied in English

“Where did you come over?” I yelled, in English also.

He mentioned a town. It sounded like “Orania Prathet.” The downpour ended and I drove for three hours while the girl dozed and Hansen sat guard over her, alert as a cat, and silent. I had selected a beach hotel advertised in the Bangkok
Nation.
I wanted to get him out of his own setting, into one that I controlled. I drew the key and paid a night's lodging in advance. Hansen and the girl followed me down a concrete path to the beach. The bungalows stood in a half ring facing the sea. Mine was at one end. I unlocked the door and went ahead of them. Hansen followed, after him the girl. I switched on the light and the air-conditioning. The girl hovered near the door, but Hansen kicked off his shoes and placed himself at the centre of the room, casting round him with his hollowed eyes.

“Sit down,” I said. I pulled open the refrigerator door. “Does she want a drink?” I asked.

“Give her a Coca-Cola,” said Hansen. “Ice. Got any limes in there?”

“No.”

He watched me on my knees in front of the refrigerator. “How about you?” I asked

“Water.”

I searched again: glasses, mineral water, ice. As I did so, I heard Hansen say something tender to the girl in Khmer. She protested and he overrode her. I heard her go into the bedroom and come out again. Climbing to my feet, I saw the girl curled on the daybed that ran along one wall of the room, and Hansen bending over her with a blanket, tucking her up. When he had finished, he switched out the lamp above her and touched her cheek with his fingertips before striding to the French window to stare at the sea. A full red moon hung above the horizon. The rainclouds made black mountains across the sky.

“What's your name?” he asked me.

“Mark,” I said

“Is that your real name? Mark?”

The surest knowledge we have of one another comes from instinct. As I watched Hansen's figure framed in the window and gazing out to sea, and the moonlight picking out the lines and hollows of his ravaged face, I knew that the lapsed priest had appointed me his confessor.

“Call me whatever you like,” I said.

You must think of a strong but uneasy English voice, the tone rich, the manner shocked, as if its owner never expected it to say the things he is hearing. The slight accent is East Indian Dutch. The bungalow is unlit, designed for fornication, and gives on to a tiny illuminated swimming pool and concrete rockery. Beyond this nonsense lies a superb and placid Asian sea, with a wide moon-path, and stars sparkling in the water like sunspots. A couple of fishermen stand upright in their sampans, tossing their round nets into the water and drawing them slowly out again.

In the foreground you must set the jagged, towering figure of Hansen as he prowls the room in his bare feet, now pausing at the French window, now perching himself on the arm of a chair before slipping soundlessly away to another corner. And always the voice, now fierce, now ruminative, now shaken, and now, like his body, resting itself for minutes on end while it gathers strength for the next ordeal.

Stretched on her daybed, the Cambodian girl lies wrapped in a blanket, her forearm crooked Asian style beneath her head. Was she awake? Did she understand what he was saying? Did she care? Hansen cared. He could not pass her without stopping to gaze down at her, or fiddle with the blanket at her neck. Once, dropping to the floor beside her, he stared ardently into her closed eyes while he laid his palm on her brow as if to test her temperature.

“She needs limes,” he murmured. “Coca-Cola is nothing for her. Limes.”

I had sent out for them already. They arrived, by hand of a boy from the front desk. There was business while Hansen squeezed them for her, then held her upright while she drank.

His first questions were a vague catechism about my standing in the Service. He wished to know with what authority had I been sent, with what instructions.

“I want no thanks for what I have done,” he warned me. “There are no thanks for bombing villages.”

“But you may need help,” I said.

His response was to tell me formally that he would never again, in any circumstance, work for the Service. I could have told him that too, but I refrained. He had thought he was working for the British, he said, but he had been working for murderers. He had been another man when he did the things he did. He hoped the American pilots had been other men as well.

He asked after his sub-agents—the farmer so-and-so, the rice trader so-and-so. He asked about the staybehind network he had painstakingly built up against the certain day when the Khmer Rouge would break out of the jungle and help themselves to the cities, a thing that neither we nor the Americans, despite all the warnings, had ever quite believed would happen. But Hansen had believed it. Hansen was one of the warners. Hansen had told us time and again that Kissinger's bombs were dragon's teeth, even though Hansen had helped direct them to their targets.

“May I believe you?” he asked me when I assured him there had been no pattern of arrests among his sources.

“It's the truth,” I said, responding to the supplication in his voice.

“Then I didn't betray them,” he muttered in marvel. For a moment he sat and cupped his head in his hands, as if holding it together.

“If you were captured by the Khmer Rouge, nobody could expect you to stay silent, anyway,” I said.

“Silent! My God.” He almost laughed. “Silent!” And, standing sharply, he swung away to the window again.

By the moonlight I saw tears of sweat clinging to his great bearded face. I started to say something about the Service wishing to acquit itself honourably by him, but halfway through my speech he flung out his arms to their fullest extent, as if testing the limits of his confinement. Finding nothing to obstruct them, they fell back to his sides.

“The Service to hell,” he said softly. “The West to bloody, bloody hell. We have no business making our wars here, peddling our religious recipes. We have sinned against Asia: the French, the British, the Dutch, now the Americans. We have sinned against the children of Eden. God forgive us.”

My tape recorder lay on the table.

We are in Asia. Hansen's Asia. The Asia sinned against. Listen to the frenetic chatter of the insects. Thais and Cambodians alike have been known to bet large sums on the number of times a bullfrog will burp. The room is twilit, the hour forgotten, the room forgotten also; the moon has risen out of sight. The Vietnam War is back with us, and we are in the Cambodian jungle with Hansen, and modern comforts are few, unless we include the American bombers that circle miles above us, like patient hawks, waiting for the computers to tell them what to destroy next: for instance, a team of oxen whose urine has been misread by secret sensors as the exhaust fumes of a military convoy; for instance, children whose chatter has been mistaken for military commands. The sensors have been hidden by American commandos along the supply routes Hansen has indicated to them—but unfortunately the sensors are not as well informed as Hansen is.

We are in what the American pilots call badland, though in the jungle definitions of good and bad are fluid. We are in a Khmer Rouge “liberated area” that provides sanctuary for Vietcong troops who wish to attack the Americans in the flank rather than head-on from the north. Yet despite these appearances of war, we are among people with no collective perception of their enemies, in a region
unmapped except by fighters. To hear Hansen speak, the region is as close to paradise as makes no difference, whether he speaks as priest, sinner, scholar or spy.

A few miles up the trail by jeep is an ancient Buddhist temple which, with the help of villagers, Hansen has excavated from the depths of vegetation, and which is the apparent reason for his being there, and for the notes he takes, and the wireless messages he sends, and for the trickle of visitors who arrive usually just before nightfall, and depart at first light. The kampong where he lives is built on stilts in a clearing at the edge of a good river, in a plain of fertile fields that climb in steps to a rain forest. A blue mist is frequent. Hansen's house is set high up the slope in order to improve his radio reception and give a view of whatever enters and leaves the valley. In the wet season, it is his habit to leave the jeep in the village and trudge up to his house on foot. In the dry season, he drives into his compound, most often taking half the village children with him. As many as a dozen of them will be waiting to clamber over the tailboard for the five-minute ride from the village to his compound.

“Sometimes, my daughter was among them,” Hansen said.

Neither Rumbelow nor the file had mentioned that Hansen had a daughter. If he had hidden her from us, he was gravely in breach of Service rules—though heaven knows, Service rules were about the last thing that mattered to either of us by then. Nevertheless he stopped speaking and glared at me in the darkness as if waiting for my reproof. But I preserved my silence, wishing to be the ear he had been waiting for, perhaps for years.

“While I was still a priest, I visited the temples of Cambodia,” he said. “While I was there, I fell in love with a village woman and made her pregnant. In Cambodia it was the best time still. Sihanouk ruled. I remained with her until the child was born. A girl. I christened her Marie. I gave the mother money and returned to Djakarta, but I missed my child terribly. I sent more money. I sent money to the headman to look after them. I sent letters. I prayed for the child and
her mother, and swore that one day I would care for them properly. As soon as I returned to Cambodia, I put the mother in my house, even though in the intervening years she had lost her beauty. My daughter had a Khmer name, but from the day she came to me I called her Marie. She liked that. She was proud to have me as her father.”