Cambodian Book of the Dead (4 page)

 

INTO THE HEART OF DARKNESS

By 9 o'clock, the city burnt out. For a few short hours the daily struggle for survival of almost all the city's inhabitants ground to a halt. As soon as the sun disappeared into the Tonlé Sap River, the shops closed and the pedestrians got off the river promenade. The opposite side of the slow-moving water had already fallen into silent, mosquito-sodden darkness. Perhaps the river was not to be trusted: after all it changed direction twice a year. Yes, Cambodia was a special place.

Even the one-legged entrepreneurs slowly faded from the sidewalks and soon only hardened
motodops
– pushing ketamine, brown sugar and girls, all at the same time if desired ­– cruised up and down Sisowath Quay. Homeless families, perhaps just in from the countryside looking for jobs in the construction industry, were camped in front of closing restaurants. These people had to share the concrete floor with cockroaches and rats, for as long as it took to find employment and a roof over their heads.

Maier sat on the back of Carissa's 250cc Yamaha dirt bike. The Kiwi journalist drove like the devil down Street 154 and didn't hesitate to take a cop's right of way on Norodom Boulevard.

“If you drive too slowly at night, you still get harassed by kids with guns.”

Phnom Penh remained a wonderful, frightening backwater. If the Cambodian capital had been safer, investors would have built a sea of chrome-and-glass monstrosities. But there were enough buildings from the French colonial days and the optimistic post-independence era of the Fifties left standing to get a feeling for the city's history, even at sixty miles an hour.

The Khmer Rouge had laid siege to and finally taken Phnom Penh in April 1975. In the following weeks, the victorious revolutionaries emptied the city of its people. The entire population was driven into the countryside onto collectives to work as rice farmers. The stone-age communists were trying to stop US imperialism in particular, and the entire capitalist system in general, in its tracks. Overnight, schools, post offices, banks and telephone exchanges were made obsolete. Money no longer existed. The Pearl of Asia became a ghost town. For three years and eight months, the city stood empty. Only S21, a school turned prison camp, showed any sign of activity. Here, more than seventeen thousand people were interrogated and tortured, before being taken to the Choeung Ek, farmland fifteen kilometres outside the city, where they were beaten to death with sticks and thrown into shallow graves. The Khmer Rouge kept just a few government ministries open and a handful of friendly countries including China, Cuba and Yugoslavia continued to maintain embassies. Apart from a handful of flights to Beijing every week, Cambodia was virtually cut off from the rest of the world. As a nation amongst nations, it ceased to exist.

The forced exodus of the Seventies and the lack of investment in subsequent decades saved the city's character from demolition. As neighbouring Bangkok grew into a
Bladerunner
-like cityscape, Phnom Penh remained provincial, because much of Cambodia's urban population had been butchered in the Killing Fields and many of the capital's current inhabitants were really landless farmers who'd drifted into town since the end of the war in search of work.

The side streets were deserted. After dark, dogs, cats and rats, all about the same size, ruled the garbage dumps, which spread across almost every street corner. Here and there, fairy lights glimmered in the darkness, beacons of hope and all its opposites to guide the night people towards countless massage brothels which could be found in the small alleys off the main strips. The red light was Phnom Penh's only vital sign at night. The best party going was at the Heart, as the
motodops
called the city's most popular bar, without a great deal of affection.

“How d'you want me to introduce you to Pete?”

“As your victim. And as a potential business victim. You can tell him that I am on the way to Kep and that I am planning to invest there.”

On Rue Pasteur, close to the nightclub, a small traffic jam clogged the road. Rich kids, the sons of the families who plundered the country, were trying to park their king-sized SUVs with horns blaring, while mouthing off to their compatriots. It appeared to be a fairly well-established and reasonably safe ritual – the children of the privileged were all surrounded by their personal teams of bodyguards. The street was in a permanent state of détente, yet just a few small steps short of apocalypse. With these people around, there would be occasional fuck-ups.

A food stall was mobbed by prostitutes – taxi girls. The young Khmer seemed to eat all day long – perhaps a reaction to periodic famine, which had many villages in its grip, even today. Ever since the Khmer Rouge had taken over the government and had begun to beat all educated Cambodians to death, there'd not been enough food to go around. Some Khmer had not had enough to eat for twenty-five years.

The music in the Heart of Darkness was loud. The bar was packed three deep. A small laser, the first in Phnom Penh, swished like a searchlight across the crowded dance floor to the sounds of Kylie Minogue's “Can't get you out of my head”
– the vaguely futuristic dazzle caused a slight culture shock. The Heart
was a different world. Backpackers, worn out, sleazy ex-pats – leftovers from the UNTAC years – and young, rich local thugs gyrated in front of the massive bass bins. Everyone danced in his or her own personal hedonistic movie. Taxi girls threw
Ya-ba
pills, cheap methamphetamines from Thailand, into each others' mouths. Bowls of marihuana graced the long bar. The smoke of a hundred joints hung above the cashiers like a storm cloud.

The Heart was a Cambodian institution, a collection point for all those who couldn't sleep at night and had money to burn.

Carissa made her way towards the bar. Maier followed her through the dense throng, her white head guiding him like a torch. The pool table was run by shredders, young and beautiful taxi girls who played the tourists for their wallets. On the wall above the table, a faded photograph of Tony Poe, a CIA operative who'd made his name collecting the heads and ears of his communist enemies during the Secret War in Laos in the Sixties, faced onto the dance floor. Maier had heard the stories from UN soldiers. Poe had been so awful, he'd eventually become the template for Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz in
Apocalypse Now
. Maier smiled to himself. That was how small and post-modern the world had become. The Heart of Darkness was probably the best-known watering hole in Southeast Asia.

But you had to take care in here. The squat Khmer bouncer who was in charge of bets at the pool table was not the only man who carried his gun more or less openly in his belt. Maier was keen to avoid trouble. After all, he'd only landed a few hours ago.

“Shit, it is loud in here.”

“You're getting old,” Carissa laughed over her shoulder and passed him an ice cold can of Angkor Beer.

Maier didn't like beer. Nor did he like
Ya-ba
and disco music.
Ya-ba
meant mad medicine. Just the right kind of drug for Phnom Penh.

“Holidays in Cambodia” by the Dead Kennedys blasted from the speakers. Maier could at least remember this one. Good sounds to kick back to and watch the dance on the volcano. And what a dance it was. Jello Biafra screamed “Pol Pot, Pol Pot, Pol Pot,” and the girls, who'd probably never heard of the man who'd killed their mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts, gobbled more pills as the sweat of three hundred drunks dripped from the ceiling onto the dance floor.

By the pool table, a life-size sandstone bust of Jayavarman VII, the greatest of the ancient Angkor kings, stood, softly lit, in an alcove. The thousand year-old god-king sucked up the chaotic scene in the room with empty eyes. Maier sympathised. In the Heart, he felt as old as a Khmer god-king. An even older French man, his shirt open to his belt buckle, had climbed the bar with two girls and waved at the crowd, a bottle of red wine spilling from his right hand. The hair on his head and chest stood in all directions and he looked like an electrified dancing bear. Perhaps he'd once been a butcher or owned a tanning studio in the
banlieu
. And one day that had suddenly felt like no longer enough.

Maier understood the man, though he had no desire to swap places. In the clouds of marihuana smoke behind the pool table, one of the young shredders began to open the trouser belt of a helpless, drunken and equally young tourist. Maier had just read in the
Phnom Penh Post
that the staff of the US Embassy were banned – by the US government – from entering the Heart. He had to laugh. Had this decision been made for security reasons or out of prudish concern for America's brightest?

“The English guy is already here, at a table behind the bar. And he's with bad company.”

“With some of these nouveau riche thugs?”

Carissa leaned heavily into Maier and tried to make herself understood above the din of the music. “No, with real gangsters. People who don't belong in here.”

Maier shrugged and pulled a face. “So what are we waiting for? Introduce me.”

“Hey, Pete.”

“Wow, Carissa, babe, you look stunning, as always. May I introduce to you, gentlemen, Phnom Penh's classiest import from New Zealand.”

Maier immediately saw that all the chairs were occupied by problems. The skinny Brit with the bright red hair and the sunken cheeks, a tough little pirate, had jumped up and embraced Carissa. Maier guessed him in his mid-thirties. Perhaps he was from Essex or some shitty London suburb, where he had probably burnt all his bridges. The silver chain around his wrist was heavy enough to sink a water buffalo. He wore a Manchester United shirt, with the collar up, and moved in a cloud of cheapish deodorant. He counteracted this with a strong-smelling Ara, the cigarette of choice for taxi girls and
motodops
, stuck in his nicotine-stained fingers. Two full packs and three mobile phones lay on the table in front of him. So this was the business partner of Rolf Müller-Overbeck: the wide-boy from the mean streets of Britain. Not completely unlikeable, but definitely not trustworthy.

The other two men at the table, both Khmer, were of a different ilk – one was young, the other old, though they came from the same dark place. They were smoking Marlboros and looked at Carissa as if she were a piece of meat. These days, Maier did not encounter men like these very often. There weren't that many. Both of them had been defined and moulded by war. They were men who killed and thought nothing of it.

Maier noticed that his presence had been registered. He could almost physically feel being observed and judged. Was he a potential danger or an opportunity to further their interests? What was the English guy doing with guys like this in a cosmopolitan filling station on a Saturday night?

The older man was in his mid-sixties. He had glued his short hair to his square, box-shaped head with gel. His neck was non-existent. He wore a black polo shirt and looked too casual in a grey pair of polyester slacks. Like a toad on a golf course. This man had worn a uniform for most of his life.

The youngster next to him was his son, mid-twenties, wide hip-hop jeans, a Scorpions T-shirt, and a baseball cap, worn back to front on his equally square head, his thick, hairless arms defaced by backstreet tattoos. The boy had been born and had grown up during the civil war, a stark but no less assuring contrast to his formerly revolutionary father.

Luckily, all the chairs were taken. It was better to stand, around people like this.

Carissa exchanged kisses with Pete. “My old friend Maier is on the way to Kep, guys. He wants to poke around down there, see if there's anything worth investing in.”

Pete's handshake was hard and dry. His dark eyes sparkled frivolously in his sunken face, which seemed deathly pale, despite a deep suntan. Pete looked like a guy who had nothing to lose and loved playing for huge stakes. Maier thought him largely pain-free.

“Maier, mate. Come and visit. An old friend of Carissa's is always welcome. And my partner is a Kraut too, just like you. At least you look like a Kraut.”

Pete winked at him as if they were secret co-conspirators and whispered in a hoarse tone, “Kep was made for people like us. Nice beach town, built by the French, who are long gone, thank fuck. It's a bit shambolic down there, but things are getting better. Haven't you heard? Cambodia's booming. Now's a great time to get your investments in, mate.”

The old man had got up. Pete threw him a few clunky chunks of Khmer. The son had also stood up, showing off the pistol in the belt of his low-slung ghetto pants. The older man bowed slightly.

“My name is Tep. I am number one in Kep. My friends call me Tep.”

Maier couldn't imagine that this man had friends. The handshake was soft and moist, like creeping death. Did number one expect a round of laughs? Maier extrapolated a little – the man had Khmer Rouge and genocide written all over his face. The old comrades from the politburo, those who had survived the vagaries of history, had become investors. The price of peace.

The younger man with the gun did not introduce himself, but that was OK.

For a long moment, Tep smiled silently at Maier. The sonic sins of a Britney Spears song hung suspended between the two men, creating a strange, trivial backdrop to the encounter. What was a man like that doing in a place like this? Tep should have died in the jungle a long time ago.

“I run a few businesses in Kep. I can help you if you need anything in Kep. Come to visit on my island. And bring your girlfriend.”

The old man's English was simple and barely understandable. Carissa pulled at Maier's sleeve, as the detective tried to look as uninformed as possible.