Cambodian Book of the Dead (10 page)

 

THE CASINO

 

Maier rode ahead. There wasn't enough road left to be able to admire the landscape. He concentrated on the potholes and sandy ridges that had carved the old mountain road into a rutted graveyard trail.

The first thirty kilometres led through dense jungle. Maier didn't see a soul by the roadside.

He tried to circle each pothole, some of them half-metre craters, in order to get through the mud, gravel and sand as quickly as possible. Every now and then he could hear Rolf rev his bike behind him. Both sides of the road were hedged in by giant ferns and tall grasses. Small streams ran through the brush and underneath old, partly-collapsed bridges. The canopy threw long and deep shadows. A few tigers were said to survive here. The birds, unseen, managed to create enough song to occasionally filter through the roar of his machine. Politicians, business tycoons and the military, public servants of the finest order to a man, were depleting Cambodia's natural resources as quickly as the country's infrastructure would allow, but the jungles around Bokor had so far escaped this redistribution of wealth campaign.

On steep curves, the road had washed away altogether. During the rainy season, the red lateritic soil turned into an ocean of rust-coloured mud. Maier gripped the handlebars hard to avoid losing control of his machine and continued to slither up the mountain. Sweat ran down his back, despite the shade.

An hour into the drive, it got noticeably cooler. The wet, impenetrable forest loosened up, light looking like dirty milk poured through the trees. Quite suddenly, on a sharp corner in the road, the blackened ruin of a large house loomed into a grey sky. The sun had vanished behind thick wisps of cloud.

Maier stopped in front of the once handsome building and cut his engine.

The Bokor Plateau lay right ahead, a highland area of shrubs and low, gnarled trees, dotted with twisted rock formations. A cold wind made his vest stick to his sweaty T-shirt and blew black clouds across the sickly horizon. An old water tower and a copper-coloured chateau-style building stood on a barren cliff a few kilometres away. Beyond the two buildings, there was nothing. That had to be the end of the road. As Rolf pulled up next to him and killed his bike, Maier felt as if he'd gone deaf: the silence, but for a whisper of wind, had a finality, like death.

“This ruin here is the Black Villa. The building used to be one of Sihanouk's residences, when he visited Bokor in the Fifties.”

The royal villa stood empty and windowless, the floor tiles had been smashed and partly carted away, and the walls were covered in obscene graffiti. Nature was going about its business to reclaim all it could. The squat servants' quarters had already been swallowed by the jungle. Nobody lived here.

“Quite a trip up here, no? A vibe away from the beach.”

Rolf grinned and looked like a man without a worry in the world, as he used his
krama
to push his long wet hair from his face.

“The casino hotel over there was opened in 1924. Only the super-rich could afford to come all the way up here.”

Maier was taken by the landscape. The plateau, with its eerie remnants of long-faded frivolity and privilege, looked like a post-apocalyptic archaeological dig. The rolling monochromatic grassland lay dotted with concrete ruins as far as he could see. It did have a vibe. A malign current ran straight through this place. Maier was not a religious man, but the word godforsaken crossed his mind for the second time since getting off his bike. Bokor was perfect for burning a witch or two.

“You are the history expert, Rolf. Did the Khmer Rouge reside here as well?”

The coffee heir shook his head.

“The communists came in '75, but never stayed for long. In the Eighties, the Cambodian military occasionally had shoot-outs with the KR up here. The rebels would walk up through the jungle, kill a few soldiers, drop a few mines and disappear the way they'd come.”

Heavier, grey clouds crawled up the mountain behind them. Seconds later the view across the highland had been swallowed up by dirty white fog. The milky nothing brought the ghosts of war. He felt like he could almost hear them march. The ghosts of the French, the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese, the ghosts of victims and perpetrators. It was time to move.

Maier got back on his bike. Suddenly, he heard steps behind him. A young, broad-shouldered man in uniform, a machine gun casually slung across his shoulder, peeled out of the fog. Rolf approached him.

“
Soksabai
, Vichat. How are you?”

The park ranger answered something in Khmer. The closer he got, the smaller and less dangerous he looked.

“This park full of poachers and ghosts,” the Khmer laughed, when he saw Maier looking at the gun.

Vichat was around twenty. His uniform was worn and he wore cheap plastic sandals. His weapon was in working order though.

“The poachers shoot deer, boar, sometimes the elephant. Or they come with chainsaw and steal the tree. But ghosts very bad. Last week one ranger disappear. Before, he tell me he talk to three young girl, all dress in black.”

The young ranger whispered, “Like Khmer Rouge.”

Vichat pointed to Rolf's bike and into the fog.

“My bike break down. Take me to ranger station. Not safe out here, alone.”

A few hundred metres along the road, they came across the ranger's motorcycle, marooned in a ditch with a flat tyre.

The fog got denser the further they rolled across the plateau. Maier opened his throttle and slithered across moist rocks and broken tarmac. For a moment the clouds lifted around them and Maier spotted a church tower ahead. A few hundred metres on and the road split once more. The fog had already swallowed Rolf. Maier could no longer hear the young German's engine and took the right turn. He passed several overgrown plots of land, fronted by opulent gates that appeared to lead nowhere.

Bokor must have once been one of the most exclusive and beautiful holiday destinations in the world. More than a thousand metres above sea level, the colonial rulers of Indochina had forced their subjects to build a magnificent, almost paradise-like resort, a French Shangri-La, surrounded by tropical forests teeming with tigers and elephants.

There wasn't much left of that glory now.

The road ended abruptly and a huge, dark shadow loomed out of the fog. He got off the bike, pushed it to the side of the road and walked the last fifty metres to the Bokor Palace. As he got closer, the casino peeled out of the mist like a Victorian ghost ship. He slowed and stopped. This was some building. It had personality. The black, cavernous windows of the erstwhile luxury hotel stared at Maier like the dead eyes of long-fallen soldiers. The roof was topped by four crumbling towers. A wide moss-covered stairway led up to the main entrance. The grey, bullet-riddled walls were overgrown by a red, luminous fungus, which looked like a torn and bloody carpet hung out to air a hundred years ago and forgotten about. Spent gun cartridges, evidence of past wars, crunched underneath his feet as he stood at the foot of the stairway.

Maier had not planned to go in, but he suddenly thought he could hear someone walking. He looked around. There was no one within his limited field of vision. A few crows circled above Maier, the first animals he had noticed since emerging from the jungle. A dog barked behind the building.

Maier began to ascend the stairs. He felt exhausted. It was hard to take each step, as if walking uphill against a strong wind. This building was tired of visitors. At the same time, the yawning entrance door at the top of the stairs appeared to try to suck him into the building.

A half century ago, people had lost their money and perhaps their lives in Bokor Palace. During the war, hundreds if not thousands had certainly lost their lives here. He reached the top of the stairway and passed the threshold.

The lobby was smaller than the detective had expected. The reception lay behind a kicked-in dark window, a tiny and barren office. Lamps and fittings, light switches and furniture had long been removed. From both sides of the lobby, long corridors stretched away into darkness. The yellowing, damp walls were covered with the traces and thoughts of earlier visitors. A few obscene drawings could still be made out. Maier stepped into a ballroom. Some joker had carved the sentence “Everyone will die” into the moist plaster above the door frame. The heavy, cast-iron fireplace lay smashed by the door. Otherwise, the room was empty. Fog haemorrhaged through the large broken windows on the opposite side of the cavernous hall. No one had danced on the tiled floor for decades.

The wind picked up and began to whistle through the old building. He could hear a girl call. On the first floor. Suddenly he heard a loud bang.

Bang, bang, bang, bang.
 

The noise came from above. It didn't sound like gunshots. Maier walked back to the entrance door and looked up the stairs. The narrow, worn steps were deserted. The afternoon light was fading. Soon it would be dark.

Bang, bang, bang, bang.
 

He scrambled up the stairs as quickly as possible, trying to avoid garbage and loose tiles. Empty rooms, dirty and dead. The tubs and washbasins had all been smashed. The tapestry had peeled off the walls. Traces of war lingered everywhere – many rooms were connected by holes, large enough for a man to step through. Rusty cartridges and shotgun parts lay amongst other debris. Dark water stood in muddy puddles everywhere.

The noise came from the west wing of the sprawling building. As Maier stopped in one of the rooms, catching his breath, he heard a noise, very close, behind him and spun around. Out of the corner of his eye, he sensed, more than he saw, a shiny purple sarong rush past, but he'd been too slow. He stepped into the corridor. Maybe it had been a child. He couldn't see anyone. But something was wrong. He walked towards the noise, towards a large dark room next to the stairway, towards its door and the black beyond. Now it sounded like a machine, though not regular enough.

Bang, bang, bang, bang.
 

Maier stepped through the door.

The room was empty. Large holes had been hewn into the floor.

Maier could see down to the ballroom below. A weak light flickered nervously through the holes. At the far end of the empty room a second door opened into a second darkness. The noise which had turned the empty room into an echo chamber originated in the next room.

Maier crossed the broken floor carefully and looked into darkness. A cold night wind blew in his face.

The last room was empty.

A plastic bag had been caught up in the tiny bare place and blew jerkily from wall to wall.

Bang, bang, bang, bang.
 

Maier let the plastic bag continue its madness-inducing racket and returned to the first room. He lay down by the largest hole and tried to peer down into the ballroom. He could still see the flickering light and began to crawl forward in order to push his head further through the unlikely window to the scene below.

A light flashed and suddenly he could see clearly for a split second, but there was no time to take in what he saw. Someone yanked him from his lookout with massive force. He tried to turn and kick, but it was too late. He felt his ear rip open as he passed the rim of the hole, a second later the proverbial blunt object connected with the back of his head.

 

Loud voices woke Maier. He could not have been unconscious for long. It was pitch dark and the wind had calmed, but the detective could hear heavy raindrops hitting the roof of the casino. He still lay in the room in which he'd been attacked. He slowly turned on his back and touched his head. Nothing broken. His ear was still there as well.

Voices poured up from the ballroom. Maier looked around. He was alone. Whoever had clubbed him over the head was an amateur assassin or no friend of the people in the ballroom. They certainly wouldn't have left him alive if they'd caught him spying. What he'd seen for just an instant was hard to digest. Life-changing. But not for the better.

Maier, riding his stubborn streak, crawled up to the hole a second time while trying to keep an eye on the door behind him.

The ceremony, if that's what it had been, had ended. Tep's son and Kaley stood together, talking. The woman had washed the blood off her chest and now wore a white T-shirt. He couldn't see anyone else. Maier had a headache. The plastic bag behind him began to do the rounds once more.

Bang, bang, bang, bang.
 

Kaley looked up to the ceiling, towards Maier, before quickly dropping her gaze again. She had seen him. He snuck out of the room as quietly as possible and felt his way along the corridor to one of the stairways in a far wing of the casino.

The stairs he found had partially collapsed, but he had no choice. He had to get out, but escaping via the main stairway he had come up on was too risky. Maier climbed as carefully as possible into the gloom below him. Metal bars reached like petrified snakes out of the torn walls, ready to impale careless passers-by. On the ground floor, Maier saw another shadow rush from the corridor into a room as he emerged, but by the time he'd come to a halt and held his laboured breath, he couldn't hear a thing. He turned and carried on until he reached the basement. The water stood up to his ankles. Something stank, but he wasn't sure what it was. A few metres ahead, Maier could see another set of stairs that led out into the open. He waded slowly towards the weak light, trying not to stumble in the cold, dead water. Several times he bumped into large soft objects. He didn't stop, but tried to remember why he'd come.

Maier climbed the slippery stairs as quietly as possible. As he emerged from the basement, he spotted Inspector Viengsra, the policeman he had met in Kep, on the balustrade that encircled the casino property, sitting in the rain, next to a four-wheel drive. He had his back turned. The dog sat between the policeman's legs.