White Crocodile (15 page)

Sitting on the bottom step, staring out across the elephant grass to the string of red-and-white tape hanging limp and still in the early morning air, Lyda swung her legs from side to side. Her feet almost touched the ground. She glanced over her shoulder. Her mother was preparing breakfast; her father had gone to gather firewood; her baby brother, whom she adored and had promised to take care of for ever, was lying on the floor kicking his legs in the air. No one would notice if she slipped away, just for a while.

Lyda slid off the step.

Her parents had told her never to go near the minefield. She had been smacked once, viciously, by her father when she had returned to their hut holding the empty case of a land mine one of the men had given her. He had yanked the stump of her arm, sending searing, burning pain into her shoulder.

She had seen the boy with no legs, pale and silent, who had been attacked by the Crocodile. She had been there when they burned his body on the fire, had cried in fright at the sounds his mother had made. The Crocodile had come for her once, sunk its teeth into her arm, taken a piece of her. But she couldn’t remember what had happened. Couldn’t remember its face. Her body had been this way for as long as she could recall. She liked the men who came with their tools to work in the field. They knelt down and talked to her, face to face, as if she was important.

She liked the woman who had come too. The one with the green eyes and hair the colour of fire. She had smiled and been gentle, and listened when Lyda had tried to tell her what she had seen. She hoped the woman had understood.

The tyre tracks from last night were filled with rainwater. Lyda stepped into one and the soggy ground closed around her ankles. Mud oozed through her toes, and she clenched and unclenched them, enjoying the sensation of coolness. Then she stamped her foot, spraying muddy water over her old purple T-shirt.

She walked a little further, slopping along in the tyre tracks, wondering what the people who had come so quietly in the middle of the night had done. Everything looked the same. The elephant grass and soybean were motionless in the morning haze, undisturbed. In the jungle beyond, mist gathered between the trees, silent. The lonely tree, which looked like the trees she drew with a stick in the dirt of the village yard, was dense and still, its shadow stretched by the rising sun. She glanced behind her. Deserted – only the water buffalo watching her calmly through their heavy-lidded eyes.

The red-and-white tape was close now. Lyda didn’t want to make her father angry. She was about to turn back when she noticed something glinting on the ground ahead of her. Taking a few steps forward, she bent down.

It was a coin. A shiny silver coin.

Lyda knew how little her father earned collecting and selling firewood: ten dollars a month, if he was lucky, for work which left him broken and exhausted. Though they tried to hide it from her, she also knew her father and mother often went without food, so that she and her baby brother could eat.

The coin was cold and solid in her hand and Lyda held it tight, terrified of dropping and losing it in the muddy water. She sloshed a little further and her eyes widened. Another silver coin. Resting on the ridge of earth between the tyre tracks, just like the first. Lyda snatched that one up too, glancing quickly around to see if anyone was watching her. She was still alone.

She was very close to the red-and-white tape now, and she knew that she had to turn back. Remaining where she was – moving no further forward – balanced on the ridge of earth between the tracks, Lyda stood on tiptoes and craned her neck, solemn dark eyes searching the ground ahead of her.

Another glint of silver.

She felt a nervous thudding in her chest as she moved forward to pick up the third coin, but pushed it away. She could already imagine how her mother would react when she walked back into the hut and dropped this fistful of treasure into her lap.

She was right under the tape now; it sagged in front of her face. Her heart leaped at the sight. Shuffling back a few steps, she stopped and stared out across the scorched earth and grass of the minefield. She would go back to the village now. Even if there was another coin, she would leave it and go home.

Then she saw the butterfly.

A bright green toy butterfly, sparkling like a gem.

Lyda dropped to her knees and shuffled forward. She wouldn’t have to touch the earth below her, not at all. She could crane over it from here, so that only her fingertips came into contact with the butterfly. As the tape fluttered above her, something came into her mind. A memory. Faint. Something horrible and agonising and she didn’t know what it meant. The stump of her arm tingled. She looked at the butterfly. Then she heard something, voices, getting louder.

Glancing over her shoulder, she saw her father running towards her, waving his arms. His face was contorted, and he was shouting something, but he was still too far away for her to hear. He didn’t seem real somehow – like the hand puppet her grandmother had made for her from a bit of old T-shirt.

The butterfly was so pretty. So green. Like the green of that lady’s eyes.

And she had the coins. Her father wouldn’t be angry with her when he saw the coins.

She didn’t have anything pretty. Anything new and perfect. Anything to call her own at all. Just the hand puppet, now old, tatty and torn. She looked longingly at the shiny green toy someone had discarded so carelessly.

Placing the coins carefully in a little pile next to her, she reached out and closed her tiny fist tight around the butterfly.

The field radio flooded the room with the crackle of white noise. Jakkleson sat at his desk, sifting through heaps of paper. Bills. Lots of them, many the red sort with capitals and generous amounts of underlining. Jakkleson knew far more than MacSween realised about the parlous state of MCT’s finances. He’d stood listening to MacSween on the phone to the biggest potential donors over the past few months, heard the big Scot struggle to find the right tone, jammed between his natural belligerence and the necessity to pay obeisance. They had trickles coming in from organisations who had supported them for years, but that wasn’t enough to keep their heads above water for long.

Jakkleson sat back and tuned his ear to the radio. He could hear all the field radios on this one. One of his many jobs was to listen for any problems out there, give advice when it was needed, keep schtum when it wasn’t; call the helicopter in if things got really messy. The babble was pretty much constant today. Nerves, lots of chatter.

‘I’m not sure I should have sent the teams back out there so soon,’ MacSween had said to him yesterday. Jakkleson had replied with soothing platitudes. He ran Mine Clearance Trust – whatever MacSween thought to the contrary – and he hated not working.

He carefully straightened out a paperclip and began to pick at a speck of dirt trapped under a thumbnail. Not that he had done only that these past couple of days. He had paid a few visits to Akara. But he had been irritable and short-tempered, and had wanted to foreshorten their usual routine. Her caresses, the compliments he had taught her: all of it had felt irritating and cloying. Instead, he had made her crouch on all fours and, clutching her breasts in his hands to stop them from swinging, had fucked her quickly and silently from behind, so that he didn’t have to look into her eyes.

Pushing his chair back, he stood and went over to the window. A light breeze had picked up, stirring the leaves of the frangipani outside. Fine, white petals floated sideways on the breeze like snow. The thought of snow reminded him of home. He hadn’t been back in three years.

He had been in the Swedish army once, a Major in the Engineers. He had been very good at it. He had always been good at things, ever since he was a kid. He wasn’t popular, but that was fine: it was inevitable that envy would stifle popularity. Friendships weren’t important to him anyway. But then stories about him started to circulate, that he was using his position to hold relationships with younger officers – female
officers. It was all rumour. At least until he had been caught screwing a junior officer over his desk one evening, when he thought everyone else was at the regimental dinner. He was given a dishonourable discharge, and that was the end. No job, no position, no money coming in. His wife, who was already suspicious of his antics, had left him, taking the kids with her.

He was still looking out of the window, his mind off in a small, wooden cabin beside a lake in Värmland where he used to go fishing for the weekend, when he heard his computer ping. Pushing himself away from the window, he went over to his desk.

A ‘new message’ icon floated in the mouth of a skull and crossbones, a copy of the blood-red ‘Danger!! Mines!!’ sign he had chosen as his wallpaper. He clicked on the icon and the screen filled with white – only one line of neat black type.

Jakkleson let his eyes hang closed for a moment, exhaled slowly.

Finally.

He had got in touch.

She was still moving when he reached her, his beautiful little girl. Her eyes were open, her face amazed.

He couldn’t see where she was hurt, there was so much blood. Her purple T-shirt, his filthy T-shirt, was drenched; the soil around her slick and black. He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to grab her and never let go. But he didn’t want to touch her, to hurt her more. Sinking into the cool mud, he slid his hands gently underneath and tried to raise her. Her little chest hollowed in a gasp of agony, and then he saw the ragged gash, the coil of guts spilling over the sopping cotton. His throat constricted and he couldn’t catch his breath.

She was trying to whisper something. He raised a trembling hand to his lips. ‘
Sngat
.’
Quiet.

She was looking past him, trying to focus. She lifted her arm, gesturing; a gush of fresh blood pulsed from the wound in her chest.

‘
Sngat, Lyda
.’

Her eyes pleaded with him. He turned to see what she was trying to tell him and there on the ground were three silver dollar coins. Three dollars: more than a week’s wage. And now he realised what had led her to defy him. And he hated himself, despised himself for their miserable existence, for his failure to give his child anything good out of life, to find a way of protecting her from the Crocodile.

How could there be so much blood? She was so tiny.

‘
Sohm toh, Lyda. Sohm toh
.’
I’m sorry.

He raised himself to his feet, clutching her body. She was as light as air. He could feel the flutter of her heart against his chest. He was walking at first, slowly, trying not to stumble, cradling her in his arms and talking into her hair.

The fluttering was fading. He could feel blood soaking into his shirt and trousers. He could hear something now, and he looked down and saw that her teeth were chattering, the sound dry and loud. Her face was pale, her eyes closed.

Her grip slackened, she went limp in his arms, and suddenly he was running.

Thirty minutes later, Jakkleson parked the Land Cruiser at the base of the limestone outcrop on which the Sampeau Temple was built. It was half past nine, and already hot. He took his light jacket off, tossed it in the driver’s seat, pulled a baseball cap on and started to walk, ignoring the small pack of emaciated kids skipping around him, hands outstretched for ‘riel’ or better still ‘dollar’: let me show you temple, beautiful wat, Mr Barang, let me carry bag, stupa, very holy mister, must see Buddhist stupa, watch out for land mines, Mr White Man, I show you where, keep you safe.

He had visited Sampeau only once before, early on in his time in Battambang, when he had had nothing better to do at weekends. The weather had been cooler then, late afternoon, rain clouds sweeping in from the west, but even so it had felt like a long climb up the seven hundred steps carved into the steep limestone hillside. There were several different routes, he remembered now. He chose the track that snaked through the thick jungle: it was longer, but the gradient was shallower and the path shaded. He had time, half an hour still, before he was due to meet Huan, but even so he set off quickly, outpacing the kids, leaving them behind in a small cloud of disappointment and dust.

The jungle closed around him as he walked. Ancient shadows. This was an
old
place – he’d felt it all those months before. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the stinging sweat from his forehead. It was like standing fully clothed in a steam room. The Israeli-made Jericho 941 revolver secured in a quick-draw holster in the small of his back – within easy reach, but out of sight – chafed his skin with each step, a presence both irritating and reassuring. But there was no one else on the track.

The thick vegetation that had given him some shade on the climb began to thin as he approached the summit. He stopped and looked around. The sun was so bright after the twilight beneath the canopy of trees that, even with his sunglasses on, his vision was blurred. It made his head ache. The roof of the small hilltop wat was visible a couple of hundred metres above him. Just off to his right he could see the mouth of a cave under a rocky bluff. He had visited it the last time he was here. It was famous locally. The Khmer Rouge had turned it into a killing place. A small staircase led from the cave opening to a floor made entirely of human bones and skulls. A single shaft of light lanced down from above. Men, women and children had been bludgeoned by the Khmer Rouge soldiers above, their bodies tossed through a narrow hole to the echoing space below. Jakkleson had found it difficult not to wonder how many of them had still been conscious as they fell into that blackness.

A man was waiting for him at the top of the hill, as if he had known that Jakkleson would choose the easier jungle path. He was wearing cotton chinos and a white long-sleeved shirt, and he was leaning nonchalantly against one of the wat’s crumbling towers, like a tour guide waiting for the coach to unload.

Jakkleson reached behind him and rested his fingertips on the rubber grip of his revolver, slick with sweat, as he walked the last few steps. A couple of metres away, he stopped. Squinted against the bright sun.

‘I thought you’d come alone. Never one to share the glory, Jakkleson.’

Jakkleson was stunned into silence.

‘Thought you had it all worked out, didn’t you?’

Finally Jakkleson spoke, his voice hoarse with the effort of getting the words out. ‘You sent me the email? From Huan’s email account?’

‘I don’t think Huan has an email account. Who the hell would he email?’ The man gave the suggestion of a smile. ‘Actually, I’m wrong. He has one now. I’ll give him the log-in details when I next see him.’

Jakkleson’s mouth gaped; his brain clunked through the possibilities and ended up with only one. ‘Those women?
You
killed them. You killed them all.’

The other stood watching him, his head tilted to one side, a quizzical expression on his face, as if he was studying a colourful insect that had just crawled from the jungle.

‘I did.’

‘Why?’ Jakkleson spluttered.

‘Because they deserved it. Simple as that.’

‘What do you mean, “deserved it”?’ Jakkleson asked, in a voice which broke with tension.

‘The life they lived. The choices they made.’

‘Why is that your business?’

‘This is about morality. I don’t expect you to understand.’

Jakkleson’s face flushed. ‘What about the ones who’ve disappeared? What have you done with them?’

‘You don’t need to worry about them,’ he said, smiling. ‘They’re making themselves useful.’

Jakkleson stared. ‘And Johnny?’

‘Johnny. It’s all a game to Johnny.’

‘And to you?’

‘I am enjoying myself.’

‘Johnny’s your friend.’

‘Johnny’s a prick.’ A hard light shone in his eyes. ‘He always has been.’

‘And that’s enough?’

‘Come on, Jakkleson. I’m not that much of a bastard.’ He smiled again, but didn’t elaborate.

Jakkleson kept his voice composed, as affable as he could given the circumstances. ‘Killing people isn’t a game.’

‘Ever done it? You should try it some time.’ He reached to scratch at his forearms. ‘The heat. It’s a bitch. I should have just met you in the Balcony Bar for a beer, but it didn’t seem to have the same symbolic significance as this place.’

The screech of a baboon rang from the jungle, and the man in front of Jakkleson raised an arm, gestured far over to the left. Without moving his head, Jakkleson glanced quickly out of the corner of his eye, caught sight of the slopes of another hill in the distance, through the haze.

‘Crocodile Mountain. It was a Khmer Rouge stronghold during the civil war. They had some big guns up there. Used it to rain shells down on the peasants to keep them in order. I thought it was an appropriate location considering. Meeting under the eye of the crocodile.’

‘You’re mad,’ Jakkleson muttered, regretting the words as soon as they were spoken.

‘Without doubt,’ the other said with a slight lift to the corners of his mouth. ‘We’re all a little mad though. You’re mad for believing those sad little whores you fuck don’t despise you.’

Jakkleson winced. The man in front of him smiled. ‘Everyone knows, Jakkleson. It’s one of the world’s worst-kept secrets. That Jakkleson is a dirty old bastard.’

Jakkleson mopped a hand over his brow. He was sweating profusely, more than on the climb to the summit.

‘You should not have started interfering, Jakkleson. Burning Huan’s personnel file. Trying to protect my scapegoat. You’re spoiling the game.’

Jakkleson slipped his hand around to his back, made it look as if he was having a scratch while closing his hand around the solid butt of his Jericho 941, lifting it slightly to make sure it wouldn’t catch on the belt of his shorts if he needed to draw it quickly. He concentrated on speaking slowly and sparingly. ‘You chose a strange place to meet me, irrespective of the significance. Top of a mountain, surrounded in jungle, no access to any vehicles. And it’s a tourist destination. There’ll be hikers along in a minute.’ His gaze, which he held unwavering, was met with a smirk.

‘Feeling nervous? That famous Jakkleson cool shaken?’

‘Not at all.’ His skin felt clammy as a corpse’s.

The man facing him glanced at his watch. ‘It has been nice talking to you, but I have to leave in a minute. I have things to do. Places to be, people to catch up with.’ He gave a short, harsh laugh. ‘The thing about killing people, Jakkleson, that’s different from killing animals, is that they can imagine things turning out differently. An animal will fight, but at a certain point they give up, switch off. People are different. They always beg. Everyone begs at the last moment. Because they all think there’s a chance that you’re going to let them go. They want it so much. That’s the last thing you see. Not just fear, but hope. Do you think anyone will miss you, Jakkleson?’

Jakkleson saw that the other man’s bare hands, hanging down, were empty. His chinos were tight and in the bright sunlight his thin linen shirt was almost translucent: nowhere to hide a weapon. Despite his sedentary lifestyle, Jakkleson was still in good shape, kept himself fit. His reactions were fast and he had learned some solid hand-to-hand combat techniques in the army, which he still practised occasionally. He could draw his Jericho 941 in a split second. It was loaded and cocked, the safety off, and he had never missed a target in his life, stationary or moving.

He realised, nevertheless, that he was shaking.