Cambodian Book of the Dead (5 page)

“Beer?”

Pete had already ordered five cans of Angkor Beer and banged them on the table. Tep sat back down, a shadow of irritation shooting across his face, and turned to Carissa. The Antipodean journalist was waiting for him.

“Aren't you a former Khmer Rouge general? And aren't you the guy who blew up the Hotel International in Sihanoukville? Perhaps you remember: a tourist from New Zealand died in that attack, General Tep?”

For a split second, the old man's eyes burst into flames. Pete laughed nervously, “Wow, Carissa, babe, Carissa, we aren't here to reheat old rumours, are we? It's great to see you, babe.”

Pete, Maier decided, was capable of balancing a tray full of landmines, which was just as well in this place, at this moment.

A young Khmer with a skinhead, dressed in an immaculate white silk suit, dead drunk and sporting a slight similarity to the bust of the god-king, had pulled his gun at the next table. A flat-footed tourist had just stepped on his brand-new, imported Nikes. Enraged the young Khmer had spilt his beer onto a row of green pills he'd lined up on the table in front of him, which he now tried to rescue from the ash-sodden slop directly into his mouth. The hapless tourist had already disappeared into the throng.

There'll be trouble in a minute, was the only thing that came to Maier's mind.

The bald playboy swallowed his last pills and got up to scan the crowd for a likely scapegoat who was going to pay, one way or another, for someone else's clumsiness. Someone would have to pay. With a theatrical gesture he whipped his gun from his belt and waved it around the room.

Sometimes things happened quickly. The skinhead climbed onto his chair and began to scream hysterically. Tep nodded to his son and turned to Maier, “Don't make any problems in Kep. Investors are welcome, snoops and stupid people are not. You see.”

The first shot, the one to drive up the courage, went straight into the ceiling. The Heart stopped in its tracks. The DJ cut the music. The house-lights flashed on, illuminating a few hundred twisted, strung-out faces in mid-flight. Carissa grabbed for Maier's shoulder and pulled him to the sticky ground. Pete had already vanished. Punters rushed for the exit. The old general made no effort to move. His son had got up and walked a few feet away from the table, behind the fashionable rebel who stood on his chair, turning round and around, levelling his gun more and more towards the surrounding tables. From the floor, Maier had a perfect view of the young man's next moves.

Pop, pop, pop.
 

The tourists screamed in panic. The playboy skinhead was dead by the time he hit the table in front of Maier, which collapsed in a hail of bottles, cans and cigarette butts.

Tep's son had shot him in the back.

Blood, beer, pills and broken glass spread across the tiled floor. The dark red was striking on the immaculate white silk. That's how easy it was to die in Cambodia.

The boy helped his father get up and made a path for the old man to get behind the bar.

“Follow them.” Maier grabbed Carissa. “There must be another exit.”

 

The muggy night air felt good after the two beers he shouldn't have drunk and a murder he hadn't wanted to witness. But outside there was only Cambodia. Shots rang down the street. Car windows were smashed. A small gang of
motodops
raced down Rue Pasteur, into the darkness. Girls screamed. Saturday night in Phnom Penh.

“So this is the most popular nightclub in the country,” he said, more to himself than anyone around him.

The windows of the police station that stood, hidden behind a high wall, directly opposite the Heart, remained dark, despite the gunfire. No policeman who earned twenty dollars a month would get involved in this weekend orgy of adolescent violence unless there was money to be made. The situation would eventually bleed itself to death.

The general pulled his polo shirt straight and stared down the road, an expression of faint amusement on his flat features. The old man did not seem overly concerned about his son's state of mind, after the youngster had just killed a man in cold blood in front of several hundred witnesses.

“Thanks, Mr Tep, your son saved our lives.”

The general looked at Maier for a moment, his eyes fixed and devoid of message.

“Kep is a quiet town. You can relax. Come and visit on my island. Ask local fishermen how to get to my villa on Koh Tonsay. Germans always welcome. And forget what happen here tonight.”

His car pulled up.

Carissa had freed her 250 from the chaos of parked bikes in front of the Heart and Maier lost no time jumping on the back. A few seconds later, they crossed Norodom Boulevard.

“Fucking hell, Maier, as soon as you turn up, the bullets start flying. The article I'm going to write about this tomorrow will be sensational. Son of former KR general shoots son of oil executive in Cambodia's most cosmo nightclub. That'll make waves. You'll have to drink beer without me tomorrow.”

“I don't like beer.”

 

 

CHRISTMAS BAUBLES

 

Carissa's heavy breasts floated above Maier's equally heavy head, as seductive as the baubles that his mother had fastened to the Christmas tree forty years ago. In his drunken state this absurd association made passing sense, a few heartbeats before sunrise. Gram Parson's “Hickory
Wind” was playing on Carissa's laptop. The song, which she'd always liked, took Maier back to his early assignments in Cambodia. Another job, another life. Dangerous thoughts percolated in his mind.

“The nights were never long enough with you.”

“What nights, Carissa? Mostly we did it on the roof of your villa in the mornings, because we were working at night or because we were too wasted.”

“Nothing much's changed with ten years having passed then.”

“Probably not.”

“Then I still turn you on?”

“Yes, you do.”

“Everything's alright then.”

Carissa rolled out from under the mosquito net and stretched in front of the open window of her apartment.

Life wasn't easy in the tropics, but a sunrise that you could never witness in Europe was about to point its first light fingers across the horizon, and get caught up in a decadent play of glittering sparks on the golden roof of a neighbouring temple before beginning to dance around Carissa's neck and shoulders. Maier groaned.

“Why didn't you stay?”

“For the same reason I will go to Kep alone.”

Carissa turned towards Maier in the faint light. Now she looked like the Hindu goddess Kali, irresistible and merciless.

“Why?”

“Because I do not like to watch my best friends die. And this country finishes off even the best. Especially the best.”

“So you expect problems on the coast?”

“I do not expect anything. I don't even really know why I am here yet. But I am sure that the son of my client is up to his neck in shit.”

“I survived quite well without you for the past ten years, Maier. You're just commitment-shy.”

“That I am. But that has nothing to do with me going to Kep alone.”

“Then you love me a little bit and want to save me from the evil in this world?”

Maier sensed the sarcasm in her voice and replied as calmly as he could. “That I do and that is what I want to do.”

“All men are the fucking same,” she hissed, lifted the net and fell towards him.

 

Maier was alone in his dream, crossing the country on foot. Everything was on fire. The air was filled with the stench of burned flesh. The smell was so bad that he seemed to be permanently retching. The corpses of lynched monks, policemen who had been skinned alive; dismembered teachers; postal workers, rotten and hollowed out by maggots; of engineers who'd been half eaten by stray dogs; artists who'd been shot; judges who'd been beaten to death and decapitated students whose heads grinned from thousands of poles that had been rammed into the rice fields, piled up by the roadside and slowly slid into shallow graves that they themselves had dug earlier. Except for a few farmers with closed faces, virtually all the adults had been killed. General Tep and his horde of undernourished, angry humans, clad in black pyjamas and armed with blood-soaked machetes and sticks, marched with torches across the dying land and burnt one village after another to the ground.

Maier reached one of the villages, a typically dysfunctional cooperative on the verge of starvation, destined to fail, because no one had any tools and all the tool makers had been killed.

Tep had caught a woman who'd been grilling a field rat over a smouldering, badly smelling fire. Angkar, the mysterious and powerful organisation that fronted and obscured the communist party of Cambodia, had forbidden the private preparation and consumption of food. What Angkar
said was law. And all those who opposed the laws or broke them, were taken away for re-education or training and were never seen again. Angkar
could not be opposed.

There was good reason for this. Those who ate more than others were hardly exemplary communists and were not completely dedicated to help Kampuchea rise from the ashes of its conflicts. Those who ate in secret had other things to hide. With traitors in its midst, Kampuchea had no chance to fight the imperialist dogs. The enemy was without as well as within. And the CIA was everywhere.

Tep had no choice. He beat the woman to death with a club, split her head right open. As the woman's skull cracked, a small noise escaped, “Pfft,” and the world lay in pieces.

The woman had two daughters. The girl in the rice field had watched her mother's murder and was running towards her father who was working under a hot sun with his second, younger daughter.

Tep, soaked in blood, the liver of the woman in his fist, followed the girl. He listened as the father shouted to his daughters to flee. When he finally reached the man, he tried to kill him with a hammer, the last hammer in the village. Tep hit the man in the face, again and again, but he would not die. Tep began to sweat. Maier stood next to Tep. He was sweating as much. He was witness. He couldn't stop a thing. The younger daughter stood a little to the side. She wore her hair short and like the rest of her insignificant family, wore black pyjamas. She was a product of Angkar and had grown up in a children's commune. She hardly knew her father. She was a child of Angkar.

“What is your name?” Tep smiled gently at the girl.

“My name is Kaley.”

“Your father is an enemy of Angkar, Kaley. He works for the CIA.”

The girl smiled and looked down at the broken man, who lay beside her, breathing in hard spasms. Tep handed the hammer to the girl. She might have been twelve years old. After she'd done as ordered, he shouted for his men to cut the man open and devour his liver.

The older girl had run and reached the edge of the forest beyond the paddy fields. Maier was also running. The teenager had left her younger sister behind, a daughter who had stayed next to the father she had just killed. Maier looked back across his shoulder.

Tep's men were queuing up to rob the little sister of her innocence, life and liver. Some had leathery wings and hovered above their victim like attack helicopters.
Flap-flap-flap-flap.
 

A white spider, as tall as a house, appeared on the edge of the village. The men shrank back and made a tight circle around the girl and her dying father. The white spider moved slowly towards the circle. It did not hesitate, it just took its time. Maier ran on, his mind locked in terror. He no longer dared to turn. The fire rolled across the family, the village and the land. Maier's tears were not sufficient to put out the flames.

 

“Maier, are you crying in your sleep? Have you missed me that much or did you go soft back home in Deutschland?”
The morning breeze ran coolly across his sweat-soaked back and he crept deeper into the arms of the girl who'd become a woman. Carissa lifted her head, her white hair alive like the tufts of the Medusa.

 

SELF-DEFENCE

 

Pete's hair looked more fiercely red in bright, merciless daylight than it had in the damp flickers of the Cambodian night. It didn't look natural. The Englishman was just devouring his very English breakfast at the Pink Turtle, a pavement restaurant on Sisowath Quay – scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, baked beans, toast and grilled tomatoes, all of it swimming in a half centimetre of fat.

Despite the previous evening's shooting and a royal hangover, the dive shop owner was in a good mood. A can of Angkor Beer sat sweating next to his delectable culinary choice.

“So this French guy walks into a bank the other day. The newest bank in town. Just opened. Air-con and all. And he walks up to the cashier and pulls out a shooter. There are three security guys in this bank, armed with pump actions. But they don't know what to do, they're so fucking surprised. A
barang
robbing a bank? How mad is that? But then the French geezer makes a mistake. As the cashier hands him a bag full of dollars, he puts his gun down on the counter. He just lost it for a sec. That's when they jump him. It's just too easy. Fucking prick's in jail, looking at twenty. Had gambling debts and they threatened to cut his girl's throat, only she was in on it. Great Scambodian fairy tale, so fucking typical.”

Carissa ordered two coffees. Pete was on a roll.

“The dive business is going good, mate, it really is. We have great dive sites a half hour from the beach by long-tail boat. Our customers get to see turtles and reef sharks, and there's plenty of titan trigger fish and large barracuda out there. As long as they don't overdo the dynamite. But I'm an optimist. We're searching for new dive spots all the time. There are hundreds of wrecks down there. And every year, more and more tourists come here. The first real beach resort only just opened. That's Tep's of course.”

“And what else does Tep do?” Maier asked, his eyes recovering behind a pair of mirror shades.

Pete shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Yeah, I agree, mate, that didn't look too cool last night. It was well ugly. But luckily, this kind of thing doesn't happen too often. Almost never.” The Englishman must have noticed a shadow of doubt cross Maier's face. “It was virtually self-defence.”

Maier smiled. “Virtually.”

Carissa laughed throatily. “The boy shot the bald guy in the back, Pete. Only in Cambodia is this called self-defence, and only if you know the right people and have sacks full of cash.”

“You were always very principled, babe. You know exactly how things stand and fall here. In a small dump like Kep everyone knows and respects the boss. Otherwise you can't run a business or do anything. In Cambodia, you need good connections and a strong will to live.”

Carissa, resigned boredom painted across her face, shrugged lazily.

“Always the same excuses. And you screw the taxi girls because you are really humane employers who believe in equal opportunities and don't want to see them exploited by Gap in the garment factories.”

Pete stopped concentrating on his beans for a moment and winked at Maier. “Some get bitter as they get older. Others realise what they've missed. Life's a short and meaningless trip crammed with suffering and emptiness. I knew that when I was five years old. You don't need the Buddha to realise that. I think it's best to fish for as much money and pussy as possible. Come on, babe, Carissa, you're not so different.”

The journalist rolled her eyes in silence and lit a crinkled joint she had fished out of her handbag. How quickly you get used to the small rituals of friends, Maier thought.

“Does Tep have enough connections upstairs in the government to suppress the incident in the Heart completely?”

“Yeah, he does. He's got a few old mates in government. The bald playboy in the Armani suit went mad on drugs and shot himself. There are witnesses who swear he took a bunch of pills before he pulled his gun, put it to his chest and pulled the trigger. Over and over, apparently. That ketamine is strong.”

“Then I don't have a real story. Just a suicide on drugs won't do,” Carissa complained.

The Englishman grinned at her.

“No you don't, unless you want a shed load of trouble.”

“So what else does your influential friend do?”

“Tep's a businessman. He knows he can't be too greedy. He needs us foreigners as much as we need him. And unfortunately the country also needs can-do guys like Tep. Together we create employment opportunities. And not just for taxi girls, as Carissa likes to think.”

“This doesn't really answer my question.”

“You're a pretty curious type, Maier. Normally the Krauts are a bit more reticent.”

Maier let the remark pass, almost.

“Before I invest anything here, I want to know how much disappears in the quicksand. And that didn't look too good last night. I have read good things about Kep, but I have also heard good things about Koh Samui in Thailand.”

Pete relaxed, pushed his plate away, lit an Ara and laughed drily. “Maier. Don't be so German, so pessimistic. Come down to the coast and meet my partner, Rolf. He's just as much a true human being as you two, and still, he's happy. And anyway, people shoot each other on Samui all the time. Every month, people go AWOL and are found later, half-eaten and drifting in the Gulf. I know, cause most of them are countrymen of mine. That's how it is in these parts. That's why we're here and not at home.”

Pete beamed at his breakfast companions.

“But in contrast to the overcrowded, unfriendly beaches in Thailand, Kep is stunningly beautiful and quiet, just totally fucking idyllic. We have a few hours of electricity a day, no traffic, no disco, no Internet. And on top of that, Kep has plenty of traces of this country's sad history, something you Germans usually go for, no?”

Maier had gotten tired of the Englishman's jokes and had withdrawn into himself. “Two world wars and one world cup” appeared to define Pete's idea of Germans. He was hardly unique. Southeast Asia was a favourite destination for the UK's piratical and lawless white trash underclass. But the little red-haired, wrinkled man had still not finished.

“Just one thing, mate, a friendly piece of advice. People who get too curious about how things work in Cambodia, people who ask too many questions, are in danger of giving the impression that they might not be around for the reasons they say they are. If Tep gets this impression of visitors, it can have really heavy consequences for them. It's better to let life roll along at its natural pace down there and to roll with it, then most questions will be answered anyway. I'm sure you understand me.”

“I must be lucky then that I let life roll at its natural pace last night.” Maier laughed.

Pete reached across the table and slapped Maier's shoulder like an old friend. “You're a fun guy to be around, Maier. That's why my advice comes flowing your way. Our community down there in Kep is so small that every newcomer is looked at, like under a magnifying glass. It's just a local reflex. We don't mean anything by it. And anyway, you come with the best of references.”

Maier looked across at Carissa. Was this skinny little Englishman threatening him or was it all just talk? Maier did not want to fall in love with his old colleague again, but now he was worried and that was never a good sign. The detective rarely worried. Worries made life, this short and meaningless journey of suffering and emptiness, more complicated. The Buddha had been right about most things.

But Maier had no time to philosophise. The young waitress of the Pink Turtle appeared with a tray, loaded with three whiskeys, on the rocks.

Just like the freebooter he was, Pete had remembered the most important thing of all. “I know, Maier, you don't like drinking beer. I already noticed that. It makes you very likeable somehow. Let's drink Jack Daniels to the man who doesn't like beer! Cheers.”

Maier did not like whiskey much either, but he lifted his glass. He was on duty.