Cambodia Noir Read online

  “Can he do that?” she asks.

  “Well, we had to pay extra.”

  “I meant banging the women you’re supposed to be writing about, Goldilocks—”

  “Barry’s econ desk, what does he care?”

  “You telling me you went out there and didn’t ride the ride?”

  “Purely research.” Number Two’s guard is up now. His eyes are darting side to side, like he can’t tell if he’s being screwed with. “I mean, it’s the trip, innit? The whole fucking wretched, vile ambience. The red lights, the little nightgowns, the bloody duck eggs. It’s awful, it’s like being in a novel, which is much more interesting than a screw.”

  I wonder. Two is hard to figure—the way he jumps on all the sex-crime stories. Svay Pak brothels may woo clients with delicacies like fertilized duck eggs, but they’re also known among a certain class as the best places to find prepubescent girls in these trying times. What was our crime writer getting up to while Barry was being sick?

  Not your business.

  Meg’s had her laugh, but before anyone can move things along, the Khmer fixer decides to get into the act, putting a hand out and fondling Number Two’s blond curls. “Are you sure you are not secret woman?” Everyone goes quiet. Khmer humor: often not very funny.

  Two takes it in stride. “You should see my pubes.” He grins. “You could die choking on them.” He finally tires of looking for a razor and pulls the key to his Vespa out of his pocket. “Trusty scooter,” he says, dipping it in the bag and taking an enormous bump.

  “Glad to see it’s good for something,” Gus says.

  Two glares at him, hands me the keys. I take two bumps and the night snaps back into focus. Pass the bag to Gus.

  “No, no, don’t give that wanker any.” Two grabs it out of my hand and gives it to Meg, who snorts off her fingernail.

  “Cabron, te cagas en las cinco heridas de Cristo—” Gus says.

  “Don’t fuck with me, Argentina. You can mock my hair, but you cannot mock my bloody scooter. I’m bloody serious.”

  Gus stares at Two a second, then bursts out laughing. Now I’m laughing, too. I finish the bottle and let it drop on the tiles, thinking of Vy’s naked thighs as I lie next to her in the dying sun, fat with smack and feeling nothing at all.

  * * *

  By four, we’ve burned through the whole bag. The fixer has wandered off to chase foreign tail, and Gus and Meg are looking very preoccupied with each other, so Two starts scheming about where we can get more gear.

  “Sharky’s,” I say.

  “All they’ll have is yaba.”

  “Not gonna get much better at this hour.”

  A guy I don’t recognize comes out on the balcony and tells us we have to go. The music has long since died, and the sound of boats and distant motorcycles drifts up from below.

  “You get it, then,” Number Two says. “That place is vile, I honestly cannot go in there. It’s dark, mate.” He drawls the word, daaahk. “I might have an adverse reaction.”

  “I’ll go.”

  We wander down to the street, past the sleeping rickshaw drivers. The quicky-mart is the only thing still lit: windows glowing yellow in a city of silhouettes, shark logo blinking blue neon. I go in. Sharky’s can be dangerous at the wrong time—scary people hang out in the bar upstairs. Now it’s just sad and tired. A couple skinny guys in blue polo shirts sit by the front window, disconsolately smoking. Guess they’re doing the laundry, and the counters and coolers are covered with piles of the same shirts. The smell of cheap speed fills the room.

  “Hey, man,” one of the guys says. “You wan’ something?”

  “What you got?”

  “Girls, man.”

  He points to the front counter, and I realize there’s a girl lying pillowed among the drifts of blue, wearing nothing but a shirt about four sizes too big for her. She looks twelve.

  “No thanks.”

  “H, man?”

  I feel my eyes light up. Glare at him. “There’s no H in town. I’m not paying a heroin price for ground-up Norflex.”

  He frowns. “We got yaba.”

  I hand him a ten and walk out with a small bag of red pills. Number Two has walked his Vespa up to the door, and I wait while he stands astride it, tilting it sideways almost to the ground as he turns the ignition. After three or four tries, the motor catches and I get on behind him.

  I look over as we pass the Edge, half hoping for a glimpse of Channi. Like all the bars, it’s shuttered and dark. Phnom Penh is a late-night city, so it always surprises me to see it in the gray furrow of morning, wide streets faced with row on row of steel grates, locked tight against something. The junkies and gangsters are nodding out or asleep; maybe it’s ghosts they’re scared of.

  My place. Work through the padlocks and the security grate in silence, and we slip into the garage, edging carefully around the bad art.

  Up the narrow stairs. Sky starting to get light: a pale glow streams into the landing. Open the cupboard, looking for tinfoil.

  “So do you think it was Hok Lundy?” Number Two asks. “That’s what Gus says.”

  “Gus says all sorts of shit.”

  “I don’t buy it. This has to go higher up. This place can’t afford to be a shithole forever.”

  “Why not?” I’m half listening—finally, tinfoil. There’s nothing here but a wok and two broken knives, so I’m not sure how I lost it. Drop a pill on the sheet, pull out a lighter.

  “The guys at the top, right, they want the drugs out, so they can get rich off sweatshops,” Two says. My lighter’s dead. He goes for his. “So they set the dealers up to wipe each other out. Even the corruption here is corrupt—”

  “No decency left.”

  “Least they’re committed, eh?”

  Laughter. Fire in the hole.

  * * *

  Somehow I’m walking back down the river, watching the morning with high-contrast eyes. Even in full light, everything has the bright grain of a night photograph. Faint ghosts dance around the kids on bikes and the twisted silhouettes of rooftops. Number Two’s gone back to his place, and I’m alone in the growing heat. A few of the riverfront bars are opening—I stop in the first one that’ll let me. Looks like it used to be a garage, and they haven’t redecorated much. A pretty girl with a rag wipes the motor oil off a plastic tablecloth; I sit and order an Angkor.

  “You are welcome,” she says.

  The beer is icy, in a frosted mug. The first sips fill me up and I let myself drift. Here’s the Cambodian educational system in three lessons: cocaine at night; yaba before dawn, sucked down in acrid curls of smoke; beer and blinding sunrise. I understand this place perfectly.

  Then I see her: a silhouette in the glare off the water, growing solid as she comes toward me—like Venus out of the sea. Sun on black hair. Skin like antique ivory, unlined: she’s fourteen or she’s forty. Her Japanese eyes say nothing, but they’re looking straight into mine.

  I’m still floating—check my pulse to make sure it’s not permanent.

  She stops next to my table, watching me the way a Vermeer watches you. Her clothes are traveler chic: tan Mao coat in microfiber, matching slacks, running shoes. I can’t place her perfume, but she’s close enough I notice it. Guessing it’s not cheap. Her style says LA, and something else. LA girls are all trying to be mysterious or exotic—this one doesn’t have to try.

  “You’re William Keller?” she says, like she doesn’t want to believe it.

  Don’t answer: clearly she knows who I am. Try for a smile instead. Gesture for two more beers and the waitress scurries. I can feel the perspiration on my brow and the wrinkles in my shirt. This woman doesn’t look like she wants me to buy her a drink. She gazes down, lips pressed into a worried line. “I apologize for disturbing you, so”—she pauses—“so late into yesterday. But I’m told you can help me.”

  “Can’t imagine how.”

  “I find it hard myself. But I need help.” Now there’s the tiniest crack
in her voice, and I see it: the steely calm is her armor, but she’s hanging on by her fingernails.

  This is work, then. And this girl is money all over. Should be good news. So why am I feeling it again—that pricking in my fingers?

  She takes her time sitting down, lighting a cigarette from a black lacquer case, but her hands are trembling. Her shirt is open just enough, and as she leans in, I see tiny beads of sweat slick the brown space between her breasts.

  She sees me staring and holds out the cigarette case. I take one. She doesn’t light it.

  “I just . . . don’t know where else to go.” Beautiful, scared, alone.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Karasu.” A single word in Japanese makes her a different person. When she goes back to English I can still hear it, buried somewhere deep under Beverly Hills. “You can call me Kara. Kara Saito.”

  Saito. Something ticking in my head, but I can’t place it. “How did you find me?”

  “Gus Franco. He says you’ve been in Cambodia a long time. That you know how to get things done here.”

  The waitress brings the drinks, and I find myself pressing my hand hard to the cold glass. Be careful—I can feel the metal hook in my mouth. “I’m a photographer.”

  “Gus says you find people.”

  “Who’ve you lost?”

  “My sister.”

  Hell. I expected traveling buddy, boyfriend, dealer maybe. Family is rough—but still, I hold back. “Have you gone to the police?”

  “You know they won’t help me.” Her hands are clenched together, white knuckled. “I need someone on my side. Someone who will actually look for her, and”—she notices her hands and teases them apart; sets them flat on the table, so close her fingers almost touch mine—“quietly,” she almost whispers.

  For a moment there’s nothing in the world but her hand, just millimeters away: I feel it there like a blazing coal. In my head, her voice, her lips—

  Grab my beer and take a long swallow, trying to talk sense into myself, but it’s too late. This is where I bite down. “And what happened to . . . your sister?”

  “June,” she says. At least I think that’s it, there’s that strange something in her voice again. She’s looking at me like I just asked what color the sky was. There’s something I should have figured out, but I have no clue what. “She never came home.” Kara’s still giving me that half-puzzled look. The silence drags on. After a minute she gives up and slides a wallet-sized photograph across the sticky plastic tablecloth: a soft-focus glamour shot of a sour-looking blond girl in a high school graduation gown. It hits me like I’ve stepped into a right cross.

  I know this girl. I met her—

  “Jun?”

  “It’s Japanese, whatever. . . . Everyone calls me June.”

  —in my own goddamn house. She’s the American: Gus’s fucking intern, the one whose suitcases I keep tripping over.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck—

  June fucking Saito. She’s gone—and she’s all over me. She’s on my doorstep in a pile of mismatched luggage. The pricking in my hands is like fire, telling me this is bad. My pleasant morning buzz has vanished and I’m choking back nausea. The beer smells acid. I realize how much I’m sweating—I want Gus, or Number Two; I want Rockoff to wander over and tell this woman to fuck off, but of course he doesn’t.

  I go to push the photo back across the table, No, thank you, I don’t want this job, and as I do, I look up at Kara—

  It’s the speed, Christ, I’m losing it, but—

  When I was a teenager, backpacking across Asia taking pictures, I saw a tiger. Not a tired old thing in a zoo or safari park: a real tiger, so close it could have reached out and ripped me open. It was supposed to be a safe trail, a tourist track half a mile outside the little hill station where I was staying. I had a girl with me and I pulled her off into the brush—it felt like just a few feet—and there it was, half-sleeping on a rock. It opened its eyes a lazy sliver, and that was enough to turn my guts to water and set every hair on my body on end. The girl pissed herself.

  I have done too many drugs.

  I don’t understand anything except that this is not a woman I can say no to. I cast a glance down the street, looking for the watchers I’m sure are lurking in the shadows. There’s no one: just me and her. We’re alone in the sunlit darkness an hour after dawn, and there are no doors, no exits.

  The only way out is to go on.

  Find words.

  “I’m five hundred a day, plus expenses. And I’ll need an advance.”

  DIARY

  The night is hung in black velvet, torn through by bright neon and Chinese lanterns. Iron balconies cling to crumbling façades, and garages gape like shocked mouths. No one uses them for cars, they all have motorcycles, so most have been re-shaped into strange, cave-like rooms. A few are still lit:

  A workshop crammed with broken machines, where a man strokes a greasy lathe under a naked bulb . . .

  A sitting room where a family crowds together on a ragged couch, watching television in the flicker of fluorescent tubes . . .

  The ground is muddy and full of holes. A big brown sedan crawls up beside me, and a fat-faced Cambodian man looks out the window.

  “Taxi?” he says. “You want taxi? Anywhere, five dollar.”

  “Okay,” I say, getting in.

  I’m here to get lost.

  WILL

  OCTOBER 4–5

  Kara is gone, but it’s too late: everything’s got way too real. I’m trying to hold off the paranoia, but I’ve done way too much yaba and my nerves are like hangnails. I can feel the craving welling up, red and in my bones. Need something to get me through the day. Two more yaba to hold off the crash, and I flag down a moto.

  Hang on tight.

  Wind cools the sweat on my face, and I force the panic down. Try to think back: the night I met June Saito. No chance I’d forget, it was the night I left for Vientiane. I was hanging around Gus’s apartment, drinking and waiting for my flight, when Number Two showed up with this girl in tow.

  What was she like?

  She got my attention. My first thought was she was sick, maybe dying. Couldn’t say why: she was cancer-ward thin, but there was something else—some asymmetry to her features, maybe? Unwholesome. She had this baby face, where nothing seemed to go with anything else: tiny, flat nose, downturned mouth, almond eyes set too wide and blue like empty sky. Big cheeks, acne scars. No eyebrows, and silver-blond hair. My second thought was to go for my camera: I could have shot her all year. I guess I wondered if I could fuck her. Whatever she was, it wasn’t boring.

  But what was she like? I know we talked—I can see the way she held her wine glass next to her face as she spoke, the practiced cock of her eyebrow. What did she say? Was there something that could have warned me?

  Beyond the image, nothing.

  She’s disappeared.

  The bike turns off at the graffiti-tagged wall of pink cinder block that surrounds the mosque, and the road narrows. Walls of pressed tin and ragged wood crowd in on every side; graffiti in English. The shacks and shanties have grown along the lake for years, spreading into each other, merging and dividing until the neighborhood has become a living thing, unplanned and trackless. The back doors of little guesthouses open into the storerooms of tiny shops that share bathrooms with the neighboring cafés. Rough structures weave together through makeshift passages and temporary walls: a maze of back rooms, alleys, and nameless, interstitial spaces. Easy to get lost. Down in the guts of it are dark places, but the main street is safe enough. Foreign money grew it: a slice of exotic for the backpacking crowd, slums for tourists.

  The driver pulls to a stop in the rutted dirt, and the touts close in.

  “Pizza, happy pizza—”

  “Girls!”

  “Hash—”

  “Pizza—”

  “—very pretty!”

  Elbowing to the front is a cheery, one-eyed pusher I’ve known for ages. “Wah you wan�
��, man?” He grins. Never use a sullen dealer, you’ll get catnip and coriander seeds. “You wan’ happy?”

  “Yeah, gimme happy.”

  I pass him a five, and he slaps a bag the size of a cigarette pack in my hand. I pocket it and walk down the track, past the pizza joints and the tattoo parlor and the secret things that live behind them. Stop for rollies at a window stocked with razor blades and cans of skin-lightening cream, and slide down an alley to the Green Dragon Excellent Traveler Hotel. A hall that’s shoulder width, paste-wood doors leading to guest rooms. Most are shut, silent, but a few offer desolate snapshots of occupation: a black toilet bag spattered with toothpaste, dust-stained flip-flops on a dirty towel.

  End of the hall, through the bead curtain: a sitting room full of tattered couches, and a deck over the lake, set with tables. Thankfully it’s empty. Mama T is sitting at her counter in the corner, chewing peanuts and watching some Cambodian soap opera on the TV. She doesn’t say hello, just looks me up and down and vanishes into the kitchen. I take a table next to the water, and a minute later her son, Sammy, comes back with beer and black coffee. Mama T always knows what you need. I start skinning up. You can’t just get off a trip like this, your only choice is ride it out. Coffee versus beer, yaba versus pot: get the ratios right, you can work your way almost back to human.

  “You all ri’, Mr. K?” Sammy asks. He’s in his thirties, but his moon face and wisp of mustache make him look like a kid.

  “I’m okay, Sam.”

  “You not lookin’ so good. You sick?”

  “Nothing a little happy can’t cure.” He spies the joint rolling itself between my fingertips. “You want some?”

  “Yah, okay.” Lots of Khmers won’t touch the stuff: it’s a painkiller for old men, not a recreation. But years in the guesthouse have given Sammy barang habits. He sits, and we smoke the first one of the day together.

  “You look like . . . not here,” he says, after a while.

  “It happens.”

  “Maybe you wan’ go back to America?”

  Anything but that.