Cambodian Book of the Dead (6 page)

 

ON THE BEACH

 

Maier was the day's first drinker in the Last Filling Station. The ramshackle bar stood on the edge of a beach in a palm orchard, a few hundred metres west of what was left of Kep-sur-Mer. More than a hundred villas slowly crumbled into the brush along the coast towards the Vietnamese border. Kep was a ghost town about to be reconquered by the jungle. Even the Angkor Hotel, near the crab market, was in a pitiful condition, its pockmarked walls protected by downwardly mobile shards of sheet metal. Maier had taken a room right under the roof. During the night, the rain had roared all around him, loud enough to drown out the noise of the television, which, powered by a car battery, had run at top volume in what passed as a lobby until dawn. Just as well all good roads in the world led to a bar. And the Last Filling Station was special. It was the only bar in Kep, and in the mornings, it served the desperate.

“This town has seen better days.”

“It has. But the impression of total collapse is misleading, buddy. Kep has had a demanding history and it ain't done yet.”

The old American behind the counter gave a friendly nod and lit a joint. The moist and pungent smoke rolled through the heavy air towards Maier. The proprietor was a small, fat man with hairy, tattooed arms that stuck out of an old, sleeveless Bruce Springsteen T-shirt. Born in the USA, no doubt about it. His lumpy face, in which two beady eyes threatened to drown, descended to several ridges of double chins. His voice had crawled out of a Louisiana backwater and forgotten to dry off. The thumb on his right hand was missing. He was a character.

The establishment's décor perfectly reflected its owner's personality. In the Last Filling Station, the Vietnam War was celebrated like a nostalgic road trip. Behind the counter, the shelf crammed with mostly empty liquor bottles had been welded together from machine gun parts. A torn cloth of the Rolling Stones' tongue hung like a pirate flag from a wooden pole that had been lodged, with the help of a couple of CBU bomb cases, into the ground in the centre of the small square room. The ceiling fan squawked like a tired seagull and barely managed to turn the air in the bar. Around the fan, spent mortar shells and hand grenades hung suspended from the ceiling.
Willie Peter
canisters, once the receptacles for white phosphorus, which burned through skin like napalm, served as ashtrays.

It was too early to smoke and drink. Maier had only just started working.

“First time in Kep?”

“Yes.”

“But not the first trip to Cambodia, right?”

The American had a good eye for people.

“No, I was here a few times between '93 and '97, came as a journalist.”

The American's tiny eyes lit up.

“Is there anything to report from Kep that the world might be interested in?”

“No idea. I no longer work in the media business.”

The man behind the counter shrugged.

“That's probably for the best. Folks who ask too many questions around here end up floating in the soup pretty damn soon.”

“You've already asked me three questions, be careful.” Maier laughed and offered the American his hand. The bar owner's thumbless paw was huge and badly scarred.

“Maier.”

“Les. Les ‘Snakearm' Leroux.”

“Really?”

“Really! My momma called me Lesley Leroux. And they called me Snakearm in Vietnam.”

“Snakearm?”

“Because I could squeeze the life out of a python with one hand.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. Made a heap of money in some dark places in Saigon, right up to the day we abandoned ship and honour. That was three questions, buddy. One more and I'll shoot you dead.”

“Vodka orange?”

“Bang.”

The war vet was an instantly likeable guy. And the Last Filling Station was the perfect place to drink your troubles away on a lonely near-equatorial morning. Not that Maier had anything to be mournful about. Not yet. He was only just getting started on this case. Perhaps, in the absence of empathy or depression, he could drink his soul's soul.

“So what happened here? Was the town destroyed in the war?”

The American shook his head.

“Kep was the Saint Tropez of Cambodia. The French showed up in the late nineteenth century and started it off with a few hotels, churches and brothels between the jungle and the sea. In the Fifties, Kep became popular with Khmer high society who came down from Phnom Penh and built weekend villas. They had it all just the way they wanted it – waterskiing and cocktail parties, barbecues and rock'n'roll bands on the beach. But the good life ended with Sihanouk's departure. Rich folks boarded up their houses and stopped coming. The KR were here from '71 to '77 and they did kill quite a few locals, but there wasn't much fighting here. Then in '79, when the Nam invaded, the harvest didn't happen. People broke into the houses and stripped them, even chiselled the steel out of the walls. Whatever they got, they exchanged with the Vietnamese for rice. Hard times.”

Les coughed thick clouds of smoke across the dark, scratched wood of the bar.

“But that was all a long time ago. Now we got three hotels in Kep and the first scuba diving outfit opened some while ago. At weekends it gets really crowded with locals who come for the crabs. The crabs are fucking delicious, you should try them. About a dollar a kilo. Otherwise, backpackers, weekenders from Phnom Penh, adventurers and lunatics. Which crowd d'you run with, Maier?”

A young Vietnamese woman with a closed face and short black hair that was trying to grow in several directions at once appeared silently in the door between the bar and kitchen and handed Maier his vodka orange. Les had his hands full with his joint.

“That's the fashion in Vietnam these days. The girls want to look like the guys in the boy bands.”

Van Morrison's “Brown-Eyed Girl” poured from the speakers that hung amongst the ordnance from the ceiling. The wall facing the sea had been almost completely destroyed and replaced by thin wooden slats. The other walls, in which various calibres had left their marks, were covered with framed photographs of the American wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Les pointed at a faded image of a young man in jeans, sporting a huge moustache, posing in front of a helicopter. “I was a pilot. First I flew Hueys out of Danang for the Navy. Later I worked for Air America in Laos. Black Ops. Top Secret. This shot was taken in Vientiane. We flew weapons, troops and drugs for the CIA. Then, from '73 on, I was here, until the KR took over.”

“You must have been on one of those last buses full of foreigners to leave Phnom Penh, which the Khmer Rouge accompanied to the Thai border?”

“No, wasn't there. Just prior to that, I evacuated employees from our embassy. I flew an overloaded Huey to one of our ships. After the last flight, we tipped the bird off the ship and into the sea, just like my colleagues did off Saigon. You can't imagine how that felt.”

“So why did you come back?”

Les “Snakearm” Leroux looked around his bar as if he'd just entered it for the very first time.

“I ain't a historian or anything. But I saw a lot in the war. I saw a lot of war. Not all of us were junkies, at least not all of the time. I knew even then that politics was behind the rise of the KR. We ran an awesome air campaign against suspected Vietnamese positions inside Laos and Cambodia. We killed thousands of civilians and carpet-bombed their fields. How is a Khmer farmer supposed to understand that a plane drops from the sky and burns his village to the fucking ground? Just think, one payload dropped from a B-52 bomber destroyed everything over a three square kilometre area. Everything. Nothing's left after that. We atomised people. We vaporised them. Hundreds of thousands died. And that was before the KR ever took over.”

Les lit the next joint. Maier was sure that the pilot had shared his story, his trauma, his life, with anyone who came through his door with open ears. It was a good story.

“Anyway, buddy, the war years were my best. We lived from day to day, hour to hour. We drank through the nights and learned Vietnamese, Lao, Thai and Khmer from the taxi girls. Many of us also consumed industrial quantities of opium, heroin, LSD, amphetamines and marihuana, uppers and downers. And in the morning we were back up in the mountains to pick something up or drop something off, to set fire to some village, to carry on killing. As I said, my best years.”

A bout of coughing interrupted his nostalgia. “When it was all over, I had no desire to go back home. The New Orleans that I'd left more than ten years earlier no longer existed. That's how it goes in war, I guess. It changes the perspective, and stands everything that you learn about life on its damn head. Back home everything was too much and too little at the same time. And every fucking hippy I passed in the street shouted abuse at me. I had to ask myself whether I qualified as a war criminal or not. How much of your responsibility can you shift to others? I had changed into something else in the East. I was burnt out from being burnt out. I couldn't face queuing up in a supermarket. Never again.”

Maier nodded and lifted his glass.

“I would like another vodka orange.”

Les seemed to be adrift in reminiscences, and stood nervously fumbling with the napkins on his bar. Was there a signal or did the Vietnamese have the ears of a bat? Maier was not sure, but seconds later, he had a second glass in his hand and the young woman was already disappearing back into the kitchen.

“You know the rest. We never forgave the Vietnamese and that's why we supported the KR in the Eighties – embargo, famine, civil conflict – that's the American way of war. Until UNTAC turned up, with guys like you in the luggage.”

The American laughed without malice.

Maier'd had enough history lessons and changed the subject.

“And how long have you been in Kep?”

Les looked into his eyes for a second and lowered his voice.

“Black op, buddy, you catch my drift. I may be an alcoholic, but I ain't stupid. You're no tourist and in a second you're gonna tell me that you've come here to buy land. And then you carry on asking questions.”

Maier did not think too long about his answer. It was too early to make enemies in Kep.

“I am looking for a piece of land. I have heard that Kep will soon participate in the national economic boom.”

“Soon.” The old vet laughed. “Maier, if I stumble across a piece in the dark, I'll keep it warm for you. Ha-ha. You're alright, aren't you?”

“I am alright. And an old friend of Carissa Stevenson.”

Les passed Maier the joint.

“If you'd told me that earlier… Carissa celebrated her last birthday in this shack, back in May. Carissa is my soul sister. As long as my joint is open, she's got credit.”

A
barang
entered. Within a split second, the light in Les' eyes faded.

“Howdy, Maupai.”

The new arrival pulled a sour face. He looked like a man who'd recently retired to a life of leisure and had not yet worked out what to do with free time at his disposal. He was about the same age as Les, in his mid-sixties, but he was a different type altogether. A man who'd probably spent his entire life in the same job and the same marriage. If such people could live here – the man was obviously not a tourist, he was wearing a worn but reasonably clean linen suit, a white shirt, the three top buttons undone – then Cambodia was on its way. But where?

Maupai had thick grey hair that fell in a lock that was too heavy for its own good across his forehead. A gold chain hung around his neck. A French bank director perhaps, used to the good life, who had aspirations to be a bit mid-career Belmondo or late-career Cassel. More like Belmondo with a season ticket for the opera.

“My wife is not well. And the doctors talk about the sea breeze.”

“Your wife's not well, cause you're always in a foul mood and because you screw the local girls.”

“A beer.”

Les shrugged. The Vietnamese woman handed the man a can of Angkor. “
My Country, My Beer
” it said on the can. He looked across at Maier, lit an Alain Delon, Cambodia's fanciest cigarette, and raised his can.

“Be careful if you are considering buying land in Kep, monsieur. Many of the documents of the old properties which you will be shown are fakes.”

Maier tried his most respectable smile.

“Is real estate the only subject people talk about?”

The man nervously brushed his hair from his eyes and laughed defensively. “The only subject that is safe to speak with strangers about. Everything else our little community talks about is so evil, you will not want to know.”

He put special emphasis into the evil, like a real estate salesman or a priest talking up an unspeakable product to keep consumers tied to their own shoddy wares.

“Maier.”

The handshake was slack and moist. His English was perfect, but for the pronunciation. His voice was full of the pride he took in his own importance.

“Henri Maupai, from Paris. I was regional director of Credit Nationale, but I got out of the rat-race early. Life is too short for working only,
n'est-ce pas
?”

Maier grinned at the Frenchman. That's exactly what he looked like. Like a man who wanted to get something out of life, but had somehow missed the boat. Really a good-looking guy, but way too boxed in. Here, he could let go. Maier tried to imagine Madame Maupai.

“Well, you don't look like much of a backpacker, Monsieur Maupai.”

“Ha,” the man laughed drily. “This
Lonely Planet
, the
Guide de Routard
, they should be banned. The people who travel with a book like that, they leave their brains at home. The little bastards come and destroy everything. They fuck on the beach and upset the locals. They drive their bikes too fast and sleep in the old villas, so they are not paying anyone anything. They hardly bring any money into the country anyhow and they bargain for every riel, and if the room price in the guidebook is lower than offered, they have a fit. This generation is a weird one, incomprehensible. And just think, we put them into the world. We gave them life, everything.”