Cambodian Book of the Dead (16 page)

 

BIG SISTER

 

Dani Stricker could hardly believe it. She did not recognise a thing. The country looked utterly foreign to her.

The new airport was different to what she had expected. What had she expected? The buildings were practically shining and the arrival hall was as neat and clean as the departure lounge in Frankfurt. Everything smelled new. The immigration officer wore a real uniform, hardly looked at her and, once she'd paid the twenty US dollars for a tourist visa, he stamped her German passport without pulling a face or asking for a bribe.

Her arrival card read “Welcome to Cambodia”.

Fear and pleasure, a strange euphoria shot through her. The war, which she carried in the back of her head like the memory of an absent child, was nowhere to be seen. Outside, the taxi drivers hustled around her and carried her bags to a waiting car. For a moment she felt like she knew all Khmer people. After all, they were her people. Then she flushed, acutely aware that she had been away for twenty years. And that almost all the people she had once known were dead. Only her sister, Kaley, remained alive. And that man.

It was hotter and more humid than the Botanical House back in Mannheim. The air smelled sweet and heavy, saturated by the smells of blooming flowers and cheap talcum powder, the way Dani remembered from her childhood. The scene in front of her flickered from foreign to home, from alien to familiar, back and forth, rapidly.

She looked around, perhaps expecting her hired assassin to emerge from the crowd to hand her the head of the man whose death she had wished for all these years. But of course she didn't know the man and she couldn't see anyone who might have fitted the bill.

A family of Scandinavians, with five blonde children, tried to lift several heavy suitcases from their cab. The children screamed excitedly, the parents looked stressed. A tour group, Japanese, living up to the cliché, their necks bent forward, straining against several huge cameras, filed past her into the sun. A huge and pale
barang
in a loud Hawaiian shirt stood near the taxi rank and gesticulated into his telephone. The man had an impossibly red face and briefly looked distractedly in her direction. Who were these people? Who came here voluntarily? And why? Dani had bought a travel guide, but she was still surprised to see so many tourists. Her last impressions of her homeland, her overland escape, on foot, through a ruined and vicious country, were hard to connect with the reality of this new Cambodia.

In early 1979, she had fled her commune, had walked along the heavily mined road leading west, had forced herself not to drink from ponds filled with the corpses, sometimes entire families, who'd been butchered or poisoned. Again and again she had lain hidden in the brush for hours to avoid patrolling Khmer Rouge units. Most of these soldiers had been undisciplined children with murder in their eyes. Again and again she'd thought about her sister whom she had left behind. Her life was worth nothing. Once she'd eaten a dog, a piece of dog that she had found, half cooked by the heat, on the broken tarmac. A man had appeared and tried to kill her with a stone until she gave up the carcass and ran. The man had had a leg missing. He had not been able to follow her. She had passed pagodas that had been turned into pigsties. In Sysophon, she had seen five shorn heads lined up on poles. The Buddha statues, those that hadn't been smashed to pieces, had cried in their temples. On the way between the small town and the Thai border, she had not managed to eat again, despite the fact that she had a little old rice and dog in her pocket.

The land she had walked across was silent. Throughout her entire month-long journey, she had not heard or seen a single motorised vehicle. Every now and then she had heard a young Khmer Rouge soldier laugh, despite the fact that Angkar
had forbidden laughter. But she'd also heard the footsteps of ghosts preceding and following her, all the way to the border.

Countless times, she had passed dead soldiers and civilians. The victims had been young and old, male and female, Buddhist and Muslim, Cambodians and Vietnamese. Cambodia had become a country where cannibalism had become commonplace. She'd noticed that the killers had often cut the livers from their victims and grilled and eaten the organs right next to the corpses. Intestines, swollen by fat black maggots, had burst from slit stomachs. Others had lain in the brush, tied together and beaten to death. Yet others, many more, had lain in open ditches, half buried and half left to the elements. The wild animals had long left this cursed land and migrated into Thailand or Laos. The Cambodians had rotted in their pits, untouched. Dani had walked on, even though she had hardly a will to live left. She had kept thinking about her little sister whom she had abandoned to the Khmer Rouge. What was the point of survival if everything one experienced was the suffering and death of others? There had been no future. The future had been forbidden by Angkar, along with everything else.

She looked her driver in the eyes. He was about her age. He would not meet her curious gaze and turned his head. A shock ran through Dani Stricker. No question, the horror was still here. People remembered in silence. It was embarrassing. It was still there, beneath the glittering surface of the new Cambodia. It did not fit in with this new life, but it served as a foundation for everything she was trying to absorb right now. For a moment she wished she had Harald with her, but he had died with her old life. She was alone.

Dani took a deep breath and got into the old beaten-up Toyota. How many lives could a person experience in the few short years one lived consciously? She shook her head. That was truly a
barang
question. No wonder her home had become an alien place. She had become so German.

As a young woman, she had once visited Phnom Penh. She remembered a sleepy, clean town with wide boulevards. Not much of that city had made the jump into the twenty-first century. All hell had come out to play on the airport road into town. Cambodia was waking up. After the dark years, the process looked a phenomenal challenge.

The traffic was hair-raising. Hundreds of mopeds, many loaded with families or impossibly large piles of goods, drove on both sides of the road in all directions. No one wore a helmet. Mothers clutched two or three children, riding side-saddle behind their husbands. New temples, new apartment blocks and new businesses sprouted from every street corner. The taxi passed the university. The buildings looked overgrown and run down, but the young students, dressed in pressed white shirts and blue trousers or skirts, were streaming through the entrance gates into the road, laughing and kidding each other like students in other countries. Cambodia screamed
new
. Huge billboards promoting the country's three political parties lined the roadside. Policemen stood in small clusters at busy crossings, machine guns casually slung across their shoulders, and dared each other to stop a vehicle and rob the driver for the coming weekend's drinking money. Some things hadn't changed.

“You want me to take you to a good hotel? I can find a very cheap room for you.”

Dani, tired, shook her head.

“I have a reservation at Hotel Renakse. Please take me there. You know, the hotel in front of the Royal Palace.”

The driver gazed at her in the rearview mirror with empty eyes. She had not forgotten her mother tongue, but the man could tell that she did not belong here.

Dani's mobile phone rang and she dug it out of her handbag.

“Rent a car, a four-wheel drive if possible, and come up to Siem Reap. Take a room and wait for my call. My last call.”

“Your last call?”

“Yes, in a few days it will all be done. When you have found your sister, leave the country immediately. No one will follow you beyond Cambodia's borders.”

“So far you haven't done anything for the money I paid you.”

The man laughed drily and said in English, “That's how it is in this business. The clients want unmentionable things done and at the same time they demand information.”

He hung up. Dani Stricker wound down the window, leaned back and stared into the traffic, lost in her thoughts.

 

THE NEEDLE

 

He still lay on the bunk when he woke the next morning. The hallucinations of the previous day had receded. He could hear birdsong in the jungle. Maier still existed. He lay in a thousand-year-old temple in the dark heart of Cambodia, alive and mentally intact. But he was no longer in the mood for it. Today would be his last day. A knife, a bullet, an injection, he didn't care which. It just had to be quick.

“Do we know each other?”

The White Spider. Maier recognised the man immediately, despite the fact that he had never seen him before.

Today he was wearing his human shape. The man was at least seventy, as tall as Maier, but twenty kilos or so lighter. He wore khaki jeans, a thin white cotton shirt and a tie. He stood, slightly bent, over the detective. The Omega on his wrist was probably accurate, to the second. He probably had leather wings under his shirt. His face hung back in the shadows, Maier could not make him out clearly.

“Who am I?”

“I have never seen you before. And now that I have seen you, I never want to see you again.”
The White Spider smiled thinly. He combed through his thin silver hair. His hands were huge, his fingers long and thin like hairless bones.

He stared down at his prisoner with narrow blue eyes that sparkled in a thin face. He looked like someone who enjoyed a good bottle of wine, who read the right books and who never sat in the sun. Culture had never saved anyone from themselves.

“I can have you killed straight away, without further discussion. Would you not like to cling to the hope that you can talk yourself out of this for a little while longer? Don't you have a will to live, Maier? Are you even a real German?”

His voice was as thin as the fingers on his pale hand. A voice that came to Maier from far away. A voice that knew no resistance and no doubt.

“Why were you sent to Cambodia?”

Maier looked past the man now into the clear sky, towards freedom. Then he pulled back into the cell. Where he belonged. Outside, everything would be different.

The world he had left no longer existed. In his absence, everything had continued turning, without his input, his hopes and his fears. He embraced the darkness now. Here he would make his deal with the devil that stood in front of him now.

“I can see neither life nor hope in your eyes. I don't really know why I am here. I don't know what it is to be German. You are German. Me too. Still, someone should dig a ditch in a rice field and throw you in it, along with your friends. That's where you belong. I belong to the world. Not just Germany, but the world.”

The man was silent.

“I assume my kidnapping and imprisonment is down to the paranoia of a few crazy holdovers of long-gone wars. You must think I have stumbled upon some dark secret from your past.”

Maier gasped for air. A voice in his head was trying to make him panic and chanted “Shitty cards, shitty cards” over and over.

Maier lay, the man stood. He seemed to contemplate something. Maier tried to relax. Just a little. He could not ask this man to continue torturing him. His capacity to absorb pain was exhausted. Freedom or death made preferable alternatives. Sometimes, the same was different, but mostly, it was just the same. Maier had thought to the end. Losing was better than hesitating.

The White Spider turned towards the window. For him too, there was no way out. The deal was on the table. Perpetrator and victim had united into an organism called brute. The interrogation had ended. All that was left was the clean-up.

Raksmei had appeared next to the White Spider. Maier had the feeling he'd met the girl somewhere before. But her eyes were the same as on the previous day. Pale blue and far away. A Khmer with blue eyes?

He couldn't reach her. She held a syringe in her right hand.

“Tell me why you are here and I may let you live.”

Maier could detect a faint expression of hope in the old man's face.

“You know why I am here. You have always known.”

He was alone with Raksmei. He could not move. The sun fell through the window the same way it had done the previous day.

A day without Maier.

It had all gone so quickly, this life.

The young woman knelt next to him, tied him off, found a vein and stuck the needle into his arm. Maier smiled and opened his eyes wide enough to let her look inside.

The world was full of shit and gasoline, baby.

 

 

HOMECOMING

 

Dani Stricker had tears in her eyes. She couldn't help it after sitting in a crab shack in Kep all afternoon. She had discarded her assassin's advice. Siem Reap could wait. Once, a long time ago, in another life, she had come here, with her sister. They had run away from the paddy fields for a day to see the ocean. Their parents had never allowed them to go so far from the village. Dani's sister had been very young then, before the Khmer Rouge had changed their lives forever. With the few riel Dani had taken from the family purse, she had bought steamed crab for her sister.

Her cell phone rang.

“Where are you?” the feminine voice with the strong
barang
accent enquired without a word of greeting.

“At home. I have come home. I am in Kep.”

She hoped that she didn't sound tearful. She could still taste the lemon sauce which came with the crab on her lips. The man said nothing for a moment.

“You are an idiot,” he said finally, “I told you not to come back to Cambodia. I told you I had found your sister. Now you are in Kep and in danger and so is she. The man you want dead is not dead yet.”

She didn't like the tone of the man's voice. She was paying him well. Before she could protest, he carried on, “If you have transport, leave immediately. Go back to Phnom Penh and wait for me to get in touch. And I mean immediately. I will call you back when it is safe for you to have a beach holiday. You are jeopardising your sister's life.”

The line went dead. Dani was furious. Who did he think he was? Cambodia was her country. No one could be of any danger to her here. No one was even likely to recognise her. She ordered a pot of green tea. She could still return to the capital tomorrow. The man was clearly paranoid. She so missed her sister.

Dani watched the mellow surf lapping against the rocks below the shack. She heard steps approaching beside her and looked up expecting the waitress and her tea. A girl with short hair, dressed in black pyjamas approached quickly and grabbed her roughly by the hair. She jerked back in surprise, but it was too late. The girl plunged a needle into Dani Stricker's throat and pushed the plunger.