Cambodian Book of the Dead (15 page)

A voice, a German voice, ancient and thin, like cold clear soup, hissed behind him, “He never worked for the Stasi. A man like him would have been noticed in the Runde Ecke right away. But we can never be one hundred percent sure.”

Tep let go of Maier's hands. The detective tried to turn, but it was too late. He felt the thin white hand on his shoulder more than he saw it. For a few seconds, Kaley's smile crossed his inner eye, then everything went dark.

 

PART 2 - THE WHITE SPIDER

 

THIRIT'S WISDOM

 

You could rely on the Germans, even when it came to death.

They'd phoned Dani Stricker immediately after Thirit, her turtle, had died. Dani wasn't surprised. Her time in Germany was coming to an end. Without Harald, she felt more like a stranger every day, more than she'd felt for the past twenty years.

She hurried through the rainy park to the Mannheim Botanical House.

Harald had brought her here at the beginning. The heavy, humid air reminded Dani of the rainy season back home. She got homesick every time she entered the huge building, but she'd never told Harald. And they'd come back, as often as Harald had found the time, to admire the crocodiles in the entrance hall, and the Mongolian gerbils racing about in their enclosure, or they walked through the butterfly garden, before they drifted across to the reptiles who lived in several rows of glass tanks. Only the large turtles lived outside.

Citizens could support one of these slow creatures and for her twentieth birthday, Harald had registered Dani as the godmother of Thirit, a tortoise from Southeast Asia.

In the years that followed, Thirit had become the closest connection Dani had to home. Once she had mastered some German, she'd taken the tram to the park every month and had told Thirit about her childhood. Thirit had known all of Dani's secrets, had listened to the young Cambodian woman for hours, as she had told her of her unfortunate sister Kaley. Thirit had had to listen to terrible stories, of murdered monks Dani had seen lying on the road in her village, of communes where people only worked and never ate, of friends' parents who had been picked up for ‘training' by Angkar one night and had never been seen again. Thirit had never commented or thrown in a critical remark. In Cambodia, a real friend never did that.

The guard of the Botanical House, a young man in a muscle shirt, welcomed Dani. He was utterly taken by her, she noticed. Some western men were fascinated by Asian women and the park employee probably had no idea that she was ten years older than him. For a moment she felt something like longing, but the feeling was quickly swept away by thoughts of the coming weeks.

“Very sorry, Frau Stricker, but Thirit died last night. These animals have a life expectancy of ten to fifteen years. Yours was almost twenty years old.”

Dani was not sure how she was to react. The Germans expressed their commiserations like other people, but surely no one expected tears for a turtle.

Dani did not have any.

“Can I see Thirit one more time?”

The young man shrugged his shoulders in embarrassment and looked at the floor.

“Unfortunately one of my colleagues already disposed of the animal. We had hoped that you might want to sponsor another turtle…”

Dani shook her head sadly.

“I am leaving Mannheim in a few days. Thanks for informing me.”

She left the man standing there, admiring her, and walked through the doors of the Botanical House.

Her life in Mannheim was over.

But where next?

Her phone rang. She ran to a nearby closed café and stood under the awnings.

“You asked me to call once more. I have found your sister. And the man you are looking for. Everything is going as planned. Do you have any further instructions?”

Dani's heart beat all the way into her skull.

“My sister is alive? You have no doubt?”

“Absolutely sure. There is no doubt. She lives in Kep, on the coast.”

Desperate thoughts raced through her mind. She had sworn not to return to her country. She had tried to become a German for twenty years. But it only took a few seconds to change her mind.

“I am coming to Cambodia.”

For several seconds, there was no answer.

Finally the man answered calmly, “Don't come here. The situation is complicated and dangerous.”

“I want my sister. Where is she?”

“Perhaps you should wait a week or two. But I would really advise you not come.”

Dani resented the man's advice. She had to see her sister.

“I am Khmer. I know my country is dangerous. You work for me and I will come to pick up my sister.”

The man chuckled, “OK, don't say I didn't warn you. Send me your flight details by SMS to this number. Be patient. You hired me to get rid of the man. Has that changed?”

“No.”

Dani shook the ice-cold rain from her hair. The man had hung up.

 

 

SHADOW PLAY

 

Maier lay on a bunk covered with a straw mat. He couldn't move anything but his eyes. It was almost dark. The room in which he lay smelled of old stone, of moss, of wild animals. A suite in a luxury hotel it wasn't.

Outside, from somewhere unimaginably far away, he could hear birdsong, perhaps a few insects. No people, no engine noises. Maier felt incredible and assumed his mental well-being to be the result of the drug they had given him. Or perhaps his euphoria had something to do with the fact that he was still alive. Wherever he was now, his life couldn't be worth much to anyone but himself.

Shadows moved around him. He tried to turn his head – to no avail. He was paralysed.

“You see, Maier, it's my mission to find out who you are. I will not let you go. You can no longer walk anyway. The general told me that you might want to invest in us, but I am convinced it is too late for that. Things have gone too far. Our relationship is not transparent and unnecessarily complicated. For this reason, I will take you back to 1976, metaphorically speaking, and I will interrogate you before you are disposed of. I am sure you understand. Tried and trusted methods.”

Maier could almost see the man, not directly see him, but feel his presence. He spoke German.

Maier was not scared. It was too late for that. It was probably too late for Müller-Overbeck and Kaley as well.

He was alone again. Shadows brushed through space for long seconds. Time had slithered into a black hole. The back of Maier's head hoped that they had given him Flunitrazepam, Ruppies, R2s, Ropys, Flunies or something similar. He couldn't remember a thing, but his head was clear.

Had he been permanently damaged? He wasn't worth much if he remained paralysed. He tried to laugh. After a while, the mosquitoes attacked. Maier groaned; he was the perfect meal.

Children's voices. Serious children's voices. No laughing. Light. Shadow. Orders. Maier managed to turn his head. His eyes were swollen, but he could see that he lay under an old mosquito net. Caught in the net of a huge spider. The room in which he lay was bathed in soft late afternoon sunlight, which flooded through an open, stone-framed window, like the blood of a freshly slaughtered buffalo. The walls were constructed from huge carved blocks of stone. He'd been taken to an old temple ruin of the Angkor Empire.

Someone removed the net. Three young girls, their hair cut short, all of them dressed in black uniforms, looked down at him. Their oblique expressions, perfectly synchronised, made him feel like a victim.

“Maier, were you born in Leipzig?”

The voice was old and tired, yet sharp and focused at the same time. Full of cold, bureaucratic routine. The man spoke a peculiar German. Maier thought he could detect a faint Eastern European accent. Whoever was outside his field of vision, in the process of deciding what would happen to him, had conducted thousands of interviews like this.

“Yes.” He found himself about to talk in spite of the paralysis of the rest of his body.

“Maier, are you working for an intelligence service?”

“No.”

The girl nearest to him drove her fist into his face.

Maier cursed.

“Maier, did you study political sciences in Berlin and Leipzig between 1976 and 1982?”

“Yes.”

“You worked as a foreign correspondent in the GDR? You travelled abroad?”

“Yes.”

“That means you were trusted not to defect, trusted at the highest level?”

“That's true.”

“I don't see any reason why the relevant offices would have had so much trust in you.”

Maier did not know what to say. The second girl hit him hard on his right thigh. The child was good at her job, with immovable face and trauma rings around her eyes. The pain was terrible, a good sign as far as Maier was concerned. A little more beating and he would be able to walk again. He didn't say anything for a while.

“I was a good journalist.”

“Did you work in Cambodia at the time?”

“No.”

“You absconded to the West before the Wall came down?”

“I had an offer from dpa to work as a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe and South Asia.”

“Your ideological turn-about presented no problems for you?”

“There was no ideological turn. I was a journalist in the GDR, then in the reunited Germany. And then I stopped.”

“Yes, yes, Battambang, '97. A bomb that killed a Cambodian colleague. A man called Hort, through whom you met your girlfriend Carissa Stevenson.”

“I don't have a girlfriend. The man was my fixer, my employee. Ms Stevenson is an old colleague.”

The third girl stepped up and hit him in the face. Maier's brain had started to crank up properly and he could make a pretty good guess at the next questions. As well as at the attached trap. He saw no way out.

“Carissa Stevenson is not your girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Then you have no real interest in whether she is dead or alive?”

“Of course I have an interest, professional as well as motivated by friendship. We have known each other since the UNTAC years. Hort introduced her to me, as you said.”

“Didn't you just tell me that you no longer work as a journalist? How can your interest be professional? Are you lying to me, Maier?”

“No.”

The first of the three girls had stepped very close to Maier, holding a long acupuncture needle. She gently lifted his right arm and pushed the needle through the palm of his hand.

Maier passed out.

 

“Maier, were you born in Leipzig?”

“Yes.”

“Maier, are you working for an intelligence service?”

“No.”

The second girl hit him in the face.

“Are you Christian?”

Maier tried to shake his head.

“That's a shame, Maier. I would always give a second chance to a German Christian. You have another ten days of interrogations ahead of you. Choose your answers carefully and the young ladies will keep the needles away from your testicles.”

Slow, scuffled steps receded. Maier hadn't seen his interrogator. The three girls continued to watch him, their faces twisted by nameless resentment. Maier tried to breathe slowly and evenly to get his heartbeat back under control. Borderline experiences in Cambodia. He coughed with exhaustion and closed his eyes. Perhaps it was better to be tortured with eyes closed. The detective knew he was on the verge of burn-out. Short and sharp panic attacks shot like black pinballs from one corner of his drug-addled brain to another. He heard a cockerel crow outside. He felt like screaming himself, but he was not that far yet. Or perhaps he'd already passed the screaming stage. He let himself slide downwards.

 

Maier lay on the wide stone terrace of a temple ruin. He knew he was badly injured. Dense jungle reached to the horizon ahead. Dark green, light green and a thousand shades in between for which there were no words. Not a soul down there. He couldn't move. He could only stare at the green hell beneath him, above him, all around him. He managed to lift his right hand. The breeze almost pulled it away. As he looked past his dismembered thumb he could see the blue evening sky.
 

 

Maier noticed that the walls of the room he lay in were covered in bas-reliefs. A gigantic battle unfolded around him. He gazed at the scene for some time without understanding. Then he slowly remembered what the thousand year old carvings represented.

Gods and demons pulled at opposite ends of a
naga
, a mythical snake, which had curled around the sacred Mount Mandhara. Through the labour of gods and demons, the ocean of cosmic milk which surrounded the sacred mountain grew more and more stormy and eventually gave up
amrita
, the nectar of immortality.

Heavenly
apsaras
– sacred celestial nymphs with perfect breasts and swaying hips – floated above the scene and gazed down at him with serene expressions.

This old Hindu myth could also be found on the walls of Angkor Wat. But Maier had never seen this version of the masterpiece he was now looking at, despite feeling rotten and depressed. There was nothing left to do but look.

 

Carissa had gone ahead and rounded a curve in the forest road. He'd just heard her voice, then she'd been swallowed by the jungle. Unarmed and curious. Greedy for the new. Maier ran up the mountain as fast as he could. Animals that no white man had seen lived in the huge trees along the roadside. But Maier could not see animals. He didn't want to see or hear them.
 

Where was she? His woman?
 

Carissa lay on the road, sleeping peacefully.
 

Maier took in every detail of the crime scene. An army of ants had constructed a highway across her naked belly. Her white hair obscured most of her face. He could not read her last scream.
 

The bullet had entered the skull from behind and emerged below the lower jaw. Carissa would never say another word. Everything, almost everything was blown away. The ants began to consume her eyes. The tiny soldiers danced around her dark unreachable pupils like kohl.
 

 

A girl with short frizzy hair washed him. She was older than his earlier tormentors, around twenty perhaps. She was different. She did not smile, but she did not look as numb as the black creatures with the needles. She kept her pale blue almond-shaped eyes low. Maier recognised that in another life she would be beautiful. But one couldn't choose. Perhaps in the next life.

“My name is Raksmei. Eat something, Maier.”

Maier expected another beating when he didn't answer. He did not want to eat. Not even a Vodka Orange would have helped right now. He could smell shit and old leather. He could hear something hovering, flapping its wings, outside, beyond his reach.

Kaley sat next to him and held his injured hand.

“My name is Raksmei. Eat something.”

“I have not found your sister yet.”

“That does not matter. You have done your best.”

Had his best been all that good?

“Have you come to Cambodia to arrest the German?”

“No.”

“The old man is sure you here because of him.”

“Who is he?”

“He is very old. He comes and goes. For more than twenty years.”

He felt himself drift in shallow water. The current was slow. He could stretch out and drift away, like a message in a bottle. He was embedded in silence, as if submerged in cotton wool, or fresh snow. In the absence of peace of mind, this was pretty good. There was no fresh snow in Cambodia. The water was tropically warm. Something moved in front of him. A white spider, as big as a car, sat on the water's surface. Long white legs bopped up and down, gnarled like ancient tree trunks.

The spider turned towards Maier.

“Maier, do you work for a security service?”

“No.”

“Are you Christian?”

“No.”

“What do you know about Project Kangaok Meas?”

His legs began to get caught up in the net of the spider. He felt himself slowly sink. People could drown in just thirty centimetres of water. He needed answers.

He was a detective, a journalist, an adventurer, a ladies' man, a lone wolf. All just shells.

Maier screamed into the room, “You smell like a Stasi spook. Why haven't you cut my nose off yet? Why haven't you bugged my cell? Why haven't you asked me whether I work for the CIA? Or the KGB? Or the IRA, the PLO or al-Qaeda? I don't need to look at you to identify you. You smell of old files and the sweat of the dead you have on your conscience.”

Exhausted, Maier fell back onto his bunk.

Kaley and Raksmei had disappeared.

The spider sat in the corner of the room and laughed blood.

“What, what, what?”

“If I told you that I know something about the sun and the moon, I would be lying.”

“The sun and the moon? You are working for the sun and the moon? Maier, we are not on the same team.”

Grey spittle dropped from the lower jaw and spread across the stone floor like something indescribable, searching out Maier's cold flesh.

“The only thing I know is what I will do with you.”

Maier started singing to himself. The smell was unbearable, like rotten, atrophied flesh. The three girls, dressed in black bikinis, floated into the room on a long black surfboard, made from old car tyres and wrapped in barbed wire. The scarred, bent back of the spider burst open and thousands of tiny black spiders wearing black rubber shoes flooded the cell. In seconds, floor, walls and ceiling were covered in cold, black energy.

Then they began to crawl up his legs. Maier was caught. Maier was composed. This is what the end looked like, felt like.

“Sometimes the same is different, but mostly it's the same.”

The Khmer Rouge had forbidden everything. Shopping, music, gossip, prayer, love and even laughing and crying had been punishable by death or worse. But in the moment of dying, prohibitions did not apply. Maier did not feel like praying, so he laughed. Insanity was the solution. That seemed perfectly reasonable. It was part of being human.

Maier got up and pushed the three girls aside.

What was his small suffering in comparison to the decades-long chaos Cambodia had experienced?

He stepped to the window, and, without turning, without searching for the eye of his tormentor, without bothering with the small spiders that were eating the world, he let go and rose into the clear blue evening sky.