Cambodian Book of the Dead (8 page)

 

DOG LOVER

 

The policeman was in his mid-fifties. Maier was standing on the first floor of a dilapidated villa when he saw him approach on a small motorcycle. He was fat and every time he drove through a pothole, the rusty vehicle beneath him bounced around like a balloon. An old German shepherd ran behind him.

The ruined villa stood on oddly angled concrete pillars, had round windows and a spiral staircase with aspirations that extended beyond the first floor. The building, which stood in the centre of a long-abandoned palm orchard, looked like an unlikely prop from a war movie.

The policeman, now stationary and sweating heavily, waved up to Maier. He took his cap off to wipe his broad forehead, and with these few gestures, he managed to convey the impression of an officer who'd not worked this hard in a long time. Maier jumped down the broken stairs and met the man halfway.

The handshake was moist, almost wet, like his eyes. The man sweated so hard that he seemed to cry permanently. He also chewed betel – periodically, he spat huge blood-red gobs of juice onto the floor. A well-oiled side-arm hung from his belt. Otherwise, this cop looked scruffy.

The dog had caught up and sniffed his way around Maier. Maier liked dogs and the policeman's companion quickly lost interest.

“Police dog. Very good dog.”

The policeman patted the head of the exhausted animal. People in Cambodia rarely showed this much affection to their domestic animals. Maier got the impression that the cop and the dog were very close.

“
Soksabai
.”

“Do you want to buy this house?”

His English was not bad, nor was it very clear.

“I am just looking around.”

“This property for sale. But you go quick. Prices go up every year. Fifty percent.”

The officer of the law swayed back and forth in front of Maier and for a second it looked as if he was about to embrace the German detective. The two men stood, silently facing each other. The cop looked at Maier with crying eyes. He'd lost the plot.

“Where you from?” he managed after a while.

“From Germany.”

“Germany is rich country.”

It sounded like “I want to fuck you”. Maier let the statement stand.

“My name Inspector Viengsra.”

“My name is Maier.”

Inspector Viengsra pulled a small red pill from his breast pocket and pushed it into his mouth. His teeth were almost completely black, perhaps that's why he didn't smile much.

“
Ya-ba
?” Maier asked innocently.

The policeman nodded gently and grinned, without showing teeth.

“You are friend of Mr Rolf?”

“No.”

The inspector pulled a face and then pulled Maier onto a broken stone bench in the shadow of an old mango tree.

“If you want to buy land in Kep, you need friend. No friend, no land. Very difficult. Many people not honest, many document not right.”

Maier shook his head in shock.

Inspector Viengsra was recovering from the ordeal of his very recent activities, somewhat. Maier did not feel the need to ponder what this man did in his spare time. The public servant nodded solemnly and, wincing and with some difficulty, pulled a document from his hip pocket.

“Here you see. This is real. For this beautiful house.”

Maier turned around. The ruin which he had just wandered through was about to collapse. The armed real estate man next to him was going the same way.

“Just fifty thousand dollars. Good price. The
barang
buy. We build Kampuchea again. Every year more.”

“I will think about it.”

The policeman leaned over a little too far towards Maier. “And be careful if you see the beautiful woman with the cut on her face.”

Maier nodded respectfully.

“I fight many years. I fight Khmer Rouge. I fight many battle and massacre.”

Maier sat, waiting for more.

“Death is a lady, monsieur, I tell you. Every time I fight the enemy, I see the woman. Death is a lady. Every time she come, we all know, someone die. But you never know who goes with the lady. Sometime the enemy, sometime my friend. Maybe me next time.”

The policeman yawned and scratched his balls.

“Why is the woman with the scar so dangerous? The war is over now.”

Maier was not going to get an answer. Despite his intake of amphetamines, Cambodia's finest had fallen asleep on the broken bench.

Maier left quietly. The dog didn't budge.

Police dog.

Nice dog.

 

THE REEF PIRATES

 

Reef Pirate Divers was an appropriate name for Kep's only scuba-diving outfit. Tourism in Cambodia was limited to the temples of Angkor. Beyond the magnificent ruins, the country was still waiting for wealthy foreigners. You could tell in this shop.

The office of the dive business was located in a small traditional family home that rested on high stilts on Kep's main beach. A few hundred metres to the east, a long stone pier stretched into the shallow water of the Gulf of Thailand. A large sculpture of a nude woman, recently painted in glistening white, rested regally at the end of the pier.

The compressors were located in a concrete shed. The bottles, wet suits, buoyancy control devices, regulators, masks, fins, snorkels and weights hung in a long wooden pavilion, underneath a grass roof that didn't look like it would survive a rainy season. Reef Pirate Divers was a modest enterprise.

A few tourists, geared up to dive, were just clambering onto a long-tail fishing boat. A young Khmer was loading the bottles.

Kaley stood on the beach, talking to Pete, who was shouting into two mobiles simultaneously until he recognised Maier.

“Our German hero and investor! Hello, Maier. Hey, Rolf, the other Kraut I told you about has turned up.”

With his Porsche shades, his torn T-shirt and a pair of faded shorts that sported stark prints of white skulls on black cloth, Pete looked like a man intent on spending the rest of his life on a beach. Rolf on the other hand looked the stereotypical involuntary heir to an industrial fortune. Maier couldn't imagine this instantly likeable, good-looking young man sitting in an office to count coffee beans. But he was no pirate either.

Rolf was more than ten years younger than Maier, and he looked like he'd enjoyed a healthier life. He had a deep golden tan from working outdoors. A couple of decent tattoos of sharks circled one another between his shoulder blades. His dark straight hair fell just over his broad shoulders. Around his waist, he'd wrapped a red karma, like a belt. He was half a head taller than his English partner. A tiny earring sparkled on his left lobe, but that didn't make him any less acceptable for a visit to grandmother. Rolf Müller-Overbeck was one of those who'd always been lucky in life. Until the day he had decided to visit Cambodia.

“Hello, Maier. Pete already told me about the mayhem at the Heart. You're an old friend of Carissa's? I'm Pete's partner, Rolf.”

Strong handshake, chiselled features, open smile, steel-blue eyes. He looked more like Till Schweiger than his mother. With long hair. Maier's gaze drifted to Kaley, whom Pete had not introduced. For a second Maier could detect a moment of insecurity in the eyes of the young German who continued, “My girlfriend, Kaley. She's helping us with our business.”

Seeing the girl for the second time, Maier was still mesmerised.

Kaley had changed her sarong and now wore cool silvery green. She had put up her hair with a couple of wooden chopsticks. She looked like a mermaid, so beautiful that men might construct a pier in her honour. Kaley nodded politely and offered a cool hand. How could she have such cool hands in this heat?

“Nice to meet you, Maier. I hope Cambodia is beautiful for you,” she said in broken English. She smiled as you smiled when meeting strangers. Maier smiled back, hesitantly. He was finding it hard to get used to the young woman's hypnotic eyes.

“Hey, Maier, we have a spare space on the boat, why don't you hop on? Know how to dive?”

“I have not dived for a couple of years. But yes, of course, that could be fun.”

For some reason, the Englishman was upset and lit a cigarette before throwing it into the surf a few seconds later. Rolf on the other hand was relaxed, almost glacial. The very definition of the successful German. Perhaps he was trying to make a good impression on his clients, three girls and a boy from Frankfurt, barely out of their teens and heavily tattooed on legs and shoulders.

“You can dive with me; I don't have a dive buddy. We go out beyond Koh Tonsay; there are some good rock formations and swim-throughs.”

 

Ten minutes later, Maier sat, zipped into a wetsuit, next to Samnang, the captain, in the stern of the open boat which slowly slid out into the Gulf of Thailand. He tried to remember how to operate his equipment. Koh Tonsay was the largest island off the coast off Kep, partially forested and almost uninhabited. King Norodom Sihanouk had called it L'Île des Ambassadeurs – the Island of Ambassadors – and thrown extraordinarily decadent, private parties on its beaches. Countless criminals had later been imprisoned on this speck of paradise and were then called upon to defend the coast from pirates. Today, a few families, the former inmates' offspring, lived in a modest fishing community on the main beach. The island's royal residence had long been swallowed up by the jungle.

The locals called Koh Tonsay Rabbit Island. Apparently, seen from the air, it looked like a rabbit. How the fishermen knew this was a mystery, but Maier had a harder case to crack.

“Where do you come from in Germany?” Maier asked Rolf, who sat on a wooden plank in front of him and was playing with his dive computer.

“I was born in Hamburg where I grew up and where I started and terminated my university education. Prior to coming here, I'd never really been anywhere by myself.”

That sounded almost like a crime, but the young German grinned across the water, barely a worry on his face.

“And how long have you been in Cambodia?”

“Well, about six months or so. It's hard to believe, but I was at the dentist a while back, sitting in the waiting room and reading these articles about Germans who emigrated. One story was about a man from Bottrop who settled in Kampot. Kampot is a small town thirty kilometres up the coast towards Sihanoukville. That read a lot better than my studies and the constant hassle from my mother to take over the family business. It's not easy growing up in one of the typically traditional Hamburg trading families. I mean, they, we, are just very conservative,” Rolf explained. “I had some money and I basically dropped everything – my girlfriend, my studies, my apartment, and my mother… especially my mother. And now I'm the owner of a dive shop in Kep.”

“The dream of the German emigrant has come true?”

Rolf turned again and looked past Maier, across the water back to the receding shore.

“Well, not quite.”

Maier saw conflicting emotions cross the prominent features of the young coffee heir from Hamburg. But Rolf said nothing more and began to tap away at his computer again. “I live in Hamburg as well. I rent a flat in Altona. But I am hardly ever there. I have come down to Kep to talk to the local expats about the economic climate. I might even buy something. Plenty of nice properties around.”

The young man was himself again and swivelled around.

“To be really honest, I wouldn't bother,” Maier said. “Kep is a little brothel town, a seedy hole on the beach.”

Rolf laughed, his voice filled with undisguised bile. “A ghost town turned into a whorehouse. The dead rise again to get in on the boom. Can you understand that? I thought about selling my shares in Reef Pirates, but what would happen to Kaley, if I closed shop and disappeared?”

“Ah, women, always complicated.”

The younger German turned towards Maier, his face twisted with worry, his eyes drilling into the detective like dark blue, dying stars. “I can't leave her. Impossible. That would be the end of her. And, morally speaking, me as well.”

That sounded almost like a confession or some long-learned, infinitely melancholy statement. Maier kept his thoughts to himself. He decided to provoke the younger man. “Well, you don't have to take it so seriously, I am sure. She would not be the first Cambodian girl a white man has left behind. Women get over this kind of thing. And the way she looks, she would find a new friend soon, no?”

Rolf replied angrily, “You want to fuck my girlfriend, Maier? You another sleazeball washing up in Cambodia? Kaley is not a taxi girl, she no longer works in that business.”

Maier raised his hands in defence. “Hey, Rolf, sorry, I misunderstood completely. You have a serious relationship here and you can't just leave her.”

Maier felt a little cheap. But only a little. Of course, under different circumstances, he would have attempted to bed Kaley in an instant. But the moment of opportunity already lay in the past.

A pod of dolphins played in the dark blue ahead of the boat. The tourists from Frankfurt craned their necks in excitement and Samnang revved his engine in order to keep up. The dolphins were game and dived under the boat, jumped clear of the placid water and did pirouettes ahead of the divers. They had no problems outrunning the long-tail.

Koh Tonsay lay just a few kilometres off the Cambodian coast. A little further east a much larger island loomed from the sea – Phu Quoc. Rolf pointed to the fog-laden ridges of the huge landmass.

“The Khmer say it's theirs. The Vietnamese say the same thing. But the Vietnamese have the upper hand, as usual.”

The colour of the water was changing as the boat got closer to Rabbit Island. And Maier, who was looking over the side of the boat, could see the sandy sea floor broken up by small rock formations. Rolf got busy checking his customers' equipment. A few hundred metres ahead, a small fishing boat had just pulled anchor and was leaving.

Rolf shook his head in frustration. “No one is allowed to fish around here. Even the governor is keen to save the coral and I will report these idiots later.”

Samnang slowed down and let the boat slide on under its own momentum. The dolphins had followed them into the shallow water and were now circling the spot the fishing boat had just abandoned. What was there to see for a dolphin?

Rolf was asking himself the same question.

“Friends, we have reached the first dive site, but before we all jump into the water, I'll check with my friend Maier what the dolphins are so curious about. They must be attracted by something down there. Otherwise they would not be circling over one spot. So make yourselves comfortable for a few minutes. Our captain, Samnang, will put up an umbrella. Drinks in the cool box. On the house.”

The young coffee heir had already checked his gear and opened Maier's bottle.

“Everything OK? Ready for the jump into the unknown? No fear?”

Maier shook his head, “No problem, scuba diving is like cycling… Once you have learned it…”

“Let's go.”