Cambodia Noir Read online

  The last toke. Watch the roach go spinning into the scummy water below.

  * * *

  Another joint, three cups of coffee, and two more pints of beer, and I’m back where I need to be: far from missing interns and demanding relatives. In the Dragon, the phantoms vanish back into the sunlight. The red ache is fading, but I still want something.

  I’ve watched a whole crew of chirping couples eat their pancake breakfasts by the time the girl comes out. Got America practically stamped on her: tank top from a party school in the Midwest, beige capris with cargo pockets. She’s spilling out all over. She sits a table away and I see her notice me. I start to skin up again, taking my time so she can see what I’m doing. She looks interested, so I pull my chair over.

  “Hate to smoke alone,” I lie. “Care to join me?” She giggles without thinking, throwing furtive glances over her shoulder. “It’s okay.” I light up. “They’re paid up with the right people.”

  I pass and she takes it, drawing down the heavy smoke without antics.

  “I’m Will. Photographer. Been in Iraq awhile. A friend told me Cambodia was the place to unwind, and I’m starting to think he was right.”

  “I’m Claire. I just finished school, so I’m backpacking from India to Japan before doing my master’s.” Her little smile says, I know that’s cheesy, but what can I do? She’s exactly what I’ve been waiting for.

  Getting laid in Cambo is risky: disease, jealous boyfriends, bosses, pimps. Locals are bad news. Foreign girls are safer and usually more athletic, but they’ll run if they know you live here: all the guidebooks helpfully point out that half the foreign guys in this country have AIDS. NGO girls won’t even fuck plastic, but backpackers are sometimes game—if they think you’re one of them. The Dragon is the best place to find them: Mama T weeds out most of the junkies, and the brats look for someplace with sheets.

  All Claire wants is a good time and a few weeks’ escape from Derrida. If I can keep from sweating and being obviously speedy, I should be all right.

  “Are you staying here?” she asks, glancing around the deck.

  “I’m staying with a friend.” Sometimes they catch on if you go to a house, but it improves the venue a lot. “I found this place yesterday, and I like the view. I got three days here, three in Siem Reap, then on to Koh Phangan.”

  “Wow, you’ll love it. I just came from there!”

  “You’ll have to give me some advice. I’m new.”

  * * *

  Claire has no plans.

  Four lines of yaba in the Green Dragon bathroom, then I take her to the National Museum—right across the street from my “borrowed” room. Getting her up the stairs is the toughest part, but not that tough. A joint and an OxyContin and a few drinks of sweet, imported wine and then she’s in my bed, sweaty in the midday heat, and I’m licking the salt sheen off those big, American breasts.

  She has a tattoo of a blue-and-yellow lizard on her right hip bone; its green eyes stare down into the reddish-dark patch between her legs. I lick it and she laughs, hips writhing their way into the creased white of the sheets, and the sun rays are bouncing around us, painting the walls with ripples like we’re underwater and hiding the dark forms that grow in the shadows.

  We fuck hard, fast; she pants and I push and she screams. Frantic kisses, like tiny bites—

  Then the quiet, euphoric and dizzy and sick all at once, and she goes to the bathroom naked, sunset caressing her so she glows like an image on a lightbox, transparent, and she comes back and—

  “You’re not staying with a friend, are you?”

  I just stare at her from the bed.

  “There’s only one toothbrush and the suitcases in the hall are a girl’s suitcases and—”

  Then I don’t listen because I can’t stop the room from spinning—

  —did she say there was a girl in the suitcases?

  “Jesus, fuck . . . lied to me . . .”

  “I’m not, come with me to the temple—”

  “Get lost! I can’t believe I’m here—”

  come with me, it’s sunset

  and she’s dressing, throwing clothes left and right

  and then she’s leaning over me and saying something even now it doesn’t make any sense but I just laugh because the thing in the suitcase has gotten out and I feel it creeping up behind—

  “When you find her, she’ll make you wish I’d torn you apart.”

  And then it’s finally dark.

  * * *

  Head full of grenades: concussions pound me from sleep. Open my eyes, but everything stays black. For a moment I have no idea where I am, and I reach across the bed for a hand that isn’t there, hear strange voices whisper my name—

  Outside, a dog barks. Night wind comes warm through the windows.

  My apartment. Phnom Penh.

  Alone.

  I get up and pad to the door. Legs feel weak, shaky—like the fever that took me once in Battambang. Stumble across the landing, go to the bathroom in the dark. My head still pounds. Splash some water on my face and stand at the sink, listening: no motors on the street. No bats, just the distant barking of that dog. Smell of night rain over wood smoke.

  Back on the landing, I reach for the light switch—then think better of it. Tea lights are by the sink, for when the power goes, and I light a couple; even their dim glow burns my eyes.

  I haven’t eaten anything in two days except beer. Bread rolls in the freezer: I pull one out and halfheartedly heat it over the burner. Scorch the outside and give up, sucking on it frozen. For a moment, I feel better—then my knees buckle. Hang on to the countertop, let it hold me as I slide to the floor.

  I’m shaking too bad to stand up, so I reach over to the fridge. Two more frozen bread rolls. On the shelf, a packet of Styrofoam cookies, three left. I stay where I am, back against the cupboard as I work my way through them. Sugar helps, and the fit subsides.

  After a while, I realize what I’m looking at.

  June’s suitcases.

  They’ve been waiting here for days, weeks—who knows? For a moment I feel it again, like on the river: something rushing at me out of the dark. Then it’s gone.

  There are two cases: a black sports duffel, carry-on size, and a black, soft-sided roll-on, much larger. Too large: How much stuff do you need for three months in Phnom Penh in mid-summer? I open it. Inside: clothes, carefully rolled to maximize space. Underwear on top in a mesh bag. Sundresses and summer-weight pants: the things she’d need most, easily accessible. Under them, more layers. Skirts and tops; a pair of sneakers and a pair of summer sandals, carefully wrapped in plastic grocery bags. Either this girl is used to living out of a suitcase, or she’s a massive control freak. Likely a bit of both.

  By the time I get to the bottom, it’s clear she didn’t pack just for Cambo. There are sweaters, long underwear, a worn pair of Doc Martens. A heavy leather biker jacket, good for cold and rain. I hold it up: it would have been huge on her. She dresses like some kind of hippie punk. Blue jeans with flowers embroidered on them, salwar kameez shirts, loads of scarves. She doesn’t have any gear: no brand names, no microfiber or roll-up water bottles or any of the fancy crap the scum bring with them. This one isn’t reading catalogs: she just puts her stuff in a bag and she goes.

  No club wear, not even a little black dress: not a party girl, then.

  No birth control. No tampons.

  A few personal items are rolled up with the winter clothes: a carved figurine from one of the markets downtown, a small brass Eiffel Tower, a few strings of carnival beads. She wants mementos, but has no room for big things.

  Most interesting: a bag with a few dozen rolls of unshot 35 mm film, various speeds and stocks, including a couple I don’t recognize at all. Somewhere, there should be photos.

  Once the case is empty, I make sure nothing’s stuffed in hidden pockets or sewn into the lining. Check the clothes as I put them back in, especially the leather jacket. For a moment I can almost see her, wand
ering up St. Mark’s in a peasant skirt and a moth-eaten sweater, with the leather thrown over the top, her pale fingers clinging to the sleeves as she chews on a lock of that strange platinum hair—

  I turn to the second bag.

  More scarves, a light jacket. A cloth sling bag, rolled into a tiny tube. A makeup kit—the contents barely touched. A soft leather pencil case, filled with pens and markers in a dozen colors. A battered Walkman, a few unlabeled cassette tapes. A Graham Greene novel, a Lonely Planet Cambodia, a book of what appear to be ghost stories in Japanese. A round hairbrush. Spare glasses, two pairs. A Samsung phone charger.

  Four letter-sized, heavy-duty, spiral notebooks.

  These aren’t reporter’s notes. The covers are garish with ink and pictures pasted from magazines. No titles, no obvious dates. Inside—it’s hard to tell. Pages packed with colors and lines and glue and words. Tiny, ragged letters, jammed together, covering every inch of space. Drawings, photos, all overlapping. Part journal, part scrapbook, part art project? I set them aside and finish with the case.

  I’m thinking of what I don’t see. No laptop, no power cords or adapters. She could have taken all that stuff with her, but it’d be a funny choice for backpacking: I’m guessing she didn’t have a computer. No documents—medical records, insurance cards, all the stuff you’re supposed to have when you think your life is worth something.

  Stuffed into an outside pocket are two bottles of Malarone. One is empty, one has a couple pills left. Another puzzle: you don’t worry about malaria in Phnom Penh. Was she spending a lot of time out in the woods? Did she take the pills with her? But then why not the bottles?

  No empty space.

  These cases don’t match the storyline, and an unpleasant thought is forming in my head: Assume there’s no laptop, and she doesn’t carry personal documents. Then the only things missing are the phone and the camera.

  Then it starts to look like June didn’t expect to be leaving at all.

  The duffel has a semi-concealed zip pocket; inside are two small photo envelopes.

  I get the tea lights from the counter and sit cross-legged, spreading the pictures on the floor: squares of black and white on the tile. The candles I’ve lit make them orange.

  I sit there a long time, trying to push down the dizzy feeling I get when I look at them. Everything else in her cases makes sense in some way, but these don’t:

  A bit of a finger on a table, next to something white.

  A blurred form that might be a bug on the edge of a sink.

  A field of gray, white lines—light reflecting on water?

  No parties. No friends. No architecture. Just these frames of nothing, out of focus. Most give no clue as to location. A couple seem to be from Europe: muddy shots of nameless heaths in half light. Others are clearly Cambodia. A shudder runs through me as I realize two were taken from my bedroom: the balcony rail in grainy black and white, the landscape beyond just a haze of reflections, but the silhouette of the museum roof is unmistakable.

  A couple bits of riveted iron, part of some structure I can’t make out.

  A flat, gray body of water, dark specks that might be trees visible in the distance.

  Who would take pictures like this?

  Maybe she thinks she’s an artist—but these just look like mistakes. Still. There’s something about them—unsteady, unsettling in their painstaking carelessness. They make you wonder what she was really trying to shoot.

  The image is a distraction: what you want to see is somewhere else.

  Only two photos of her. They’re different from the others—typical snapshots, taken by a friend or fellow tourist. In one, she’s on a tour boat. I’m guessing Paris, though I can’t make out any landmarks. She’s standing too far away and staring out at the water, all you get is hair and glasses. In the other, she’s on a street I’ve seen somewhere in the city, but I can’t place it. Khmer writing around her, a neon halo. It’s night, but she’s lit by something behind the shooter that makes her features pop. She’s making a face, a mock snarl at whoever’s holding the camera, one hand held up like a claw.

  It’s a lucky shot, or a good one: an unfeigned moment in perfect light. The graduation photo Kara gave me made her ugly and mean. Here, she’s charming: the innocent abroad.

  Trying to imitate her care, I repack the second case—all except the photos and the journals, those I carry back to the desk in my room.

  The floor by my bed is covered with shattered glass. My shaving mirror. What happened? Must have been the girl . . . Claire? I step cautiously around the pieces. Mrs. Mun will never ask when she cleans them up.

  As I go through the pockets of my jeans, I realize the money is gone. Everything I had on me—including my advance. Bitch must have taken it: payback for lying to her. Shit. Doubt I can go back to Kara begging for more. I’ll have to find another source of cash, at least for now.

  The graduation photo is still there; I set it next to the other on my desk. Pick up one of the notebooks. The page I open to is so jammed with colored scrawl it’s unreadable. A few words remain:

  Once again I stay, when I should have disappeared . . .

  . . . was I thinking? That they mean something? Who . . .

  . . . nothing to do for it . . .

  . . . ever escape . . . this?

  . . . told me, then . . . sorry, I said. I didn’t mean to be, what . . .

  . . . like that again.

  I close the book. I don’t want to read this. My head hurts. I need to piss.

  When I have, I’m tired again. Lie on the bed and wait for dawn.

  * * *

  Sun in my eyes. Traffic noise from the street, and a voice in my head saying something’s wrong.

  “Really?”

  Not in my head: on the stairs, the landing below. Gus. He’s on the phone, I heard it ringing, but it was his voice that woke me: a whisper loaded with anxiety . . . sadness?

  “Fucking hell,” he says. “Fucking hell . . . all right. All right . . . I’ll find someone. . . . No, definitely not. No . . . mierda.” Then silence.

  My head still hurts. I dress without thinking and walk downstairs.

  Woman’s voice: “Should we tell—” Australian accent. The dreadlocked girl from the party—I’ve already forgotten her name. Gus hushes her:

  “I’ll let Khieu sort it. Christ, I don’t—”

  They’re in their landing-cum-kitchen, eating breakfast, and their faces look worse than the fry-up Gus is wolfing. He’s leaning against the bathroom wall, eating with his fingers from a cracked plastic plate. She sits on the counter, staring at the floor.

  “Who died?”

  They look up like I’ve caught them screwing in church. “It’s nothing,” Gus says, grabbing a chunk of fried egg and sucking it down. Neon yolk stains his fingers.

  “Don’t take up poker.”

  He sees my face: knows he’s busted. What’s so bad he’d try to hide it from me?

  “Journo got shot.”

  First thought: I’m late again. “Where?”

  “In the face,” the girl says, snagging a huge chunk of tomato off Gus’s plate. Her nails bite its skin and it bleeds on her.

  Gus glares: we’ll dance on every other grave, but this is one of our own. “Outside his office. Two guys in helmets got off a moto and shot him. They grabbed his wallet, so officially it’s a mugging gone bad.”

  “How does a mugging go good?” the girl asks.

  Gus is still hiding something, I can see it all over him. He hasn’t answered my question.

  “Where?” I say again, louder.

  It costs him something to answer, but he knows the alternative is violence. I think he considers it anyway, but the girl sitting there changes his mind.

  “Radio Ranariddh,” he says softly.

  “Who is it?” They wince like I’m screaming—maybe I am.

  “We don’t have a name yet,” Gus says, and it’s another goddamn lie. I’m heading for the stairs, not listening to wh
atever else he’s shouting after me.

  I wish to hell I could say I ran for the door, but I didn’t.

  I ran for my cameras first.

  * * *

  Radio Ranariddh runs out of a converted house on a suburban side street. It’s usually quiet: today it’s something out of Breughel. Uniforms setting up sawhorse barriers, pushing against seething knots of angry FUNCINPEC sympathizers, gawking neighbors, restless kids. Private security swarming the station office, facing off with the cops. AP and the Welshman are here already, along with some of the local stringers, pointing their cameras at anyone who’ll mug for them: stirring things up. It’s not gunpowder-tense yet—but it could get there with a few bad moves.

  I’m late, but not too late: Prik drives fast. My head is still screaming, and I have to force myself not to shove people out of the way. Keep my press badge and camera visible: don’t want to get beat up today. Not that they’ll help if something sets this thing off.

  I reach the barrier and look out over a sea of red, mud and blood baking dry in the morning sun. The potholes in the road glisten scarlet. In the middle, there he is. Someone’s thrown a tarp down, but no mistaking who’s under it: I can see the shape of his hunch against the fabric. One stunted hand pokes out from under the edge, twisted in the dirt.

  Bunny, you dumb asshole. You said you were safe. You said you were lucky.

  It’s the money shot, and I raise my camera. Find his hand in the frame, but all I see are his eyes laughing at me in the gray morning:

  “A pest like me? Not worth the candle.”

  I can’t push the button. Suddenly I’m shaking because this reminds me of something, it’s happening again—that’s the thought that keeps going through my mind: It’s happening again, but I can’t think what, and I just keep staring through the lens.

  All that blood.

  A slow gush, spreading over the road: It wasn’t a clean shot. Caught him in the neck, maybe, and he’d have lived a minute or two, gasping in the dirt while his heart kept pumping, watching as the life poured out of him—