Cambodia Noir Read online

Just like—

  Enough.

  * * *

  The sun is murder, and people keep shoving me. For a second I’m disoriented: What just happened? Christ, I must be getting heatstroke. There’s a crowd around me, pushing up to the barriers, shouting, shoving. An ugly scene, and getting uglier. Vans on the corners, pouring out more police, these in tac gear.

  Check the camera: film counter at twenty. I’ve been shooting, then. I keep it up, trying to edge my way out of the press.

  A man half-shouting at a cop over the barricade of an old wooden sawhorse; nervous eyes. Snap, snap.

  A gaggle of women watching the investigators, wringing hands with guillotine fingers. Snap.

  Through the lens, I see their frustration, their fear: It doesn’t touch me. I seal it in silver nitrate, for others. I am a blank, a film cell. I am the thing that records.

  The crowd surges and swells, and I breathe deep, forcing myself to go along. A young guy suddenly rises—he’s balancing on two police barriers and chanting something, I’m having trouble making it out. My brain feels like it’s made of cotton fuzz. Point the camera, wait until his head knocks the sun out of the frame. Snap, snap, snap. The police lieutenant, wondering how dangerous it will be to come over and knock him down. Snap.

  The crowd shifts, a few start chanting along. I’ve got to get off this street.

  There, on the corner opposite the station: an apartment under construction, five or six stories. That should do. I push my way through the last few feet of crowd.

  No one’s bothered with a fence, and as I duck into the ground floor, I see I’m in luck: the stairs are laid already, bare concrete with no railings. My heart’s pounding as I take them up through the shell. Reach the roof and look down at the street. Yes, there’s something there: the movement of the scene, the tension—onlookers straining against cops, security. It’s not a riot, yet, but it’ll do.

  In the left of the frame, a cop’s waving hand draws the eye to the dark red patch of earth where the body fell—

  They’ve taken it away already, so no shot there. I’ll give it ten more minutes here, see if a fight breaks out, then head for the morgue.

  Zoom in: snap, snap. Maybe time for another angle, but—

  A tickle in the back of my neck. Fingers pricking.

  Turn around. Slow.

  He’s sitting a few feet away, tucked into that little Khmer crouch next to a pile of two-by-fours. I couldn’t see him from the ground. Young guy, skinny, wearing a green tracksuit. Hard, flat eyes. I guess he was watching the street, but now he’s watching me.

  He is serene, expressionless. My stomach is doing backflips.

  “Hey,” I say in Khmer. “Just taking some pictures. For the paper.” Flash my badge. “You working here?” He doesn’t say anything. “Hope it’s okay I’m on your roof?” Nothing. “I’ll just go then. Sorry to bother you.” I take a last shot—aimless, trying to be nonchalant. Then up, slowly, head for the door.

  He moves so fast I barely see him, his leg swinging into my midsection like a baseball bat.

  On the ground, blood in my mouth.

  Cradle my camera—he grabs at it, I hang on. He launches two swift kicks at my fingers: cling tighter, so he plants his foot on my torn-up arm. My hands go numb—

  He starts on my face.

  Then he’s at the edge of the roof, dropping my camera over with a grin.

  I should get up—

  Then nothing.

  DIARY

  July 2

  There’s this place the guys go . . . it doesn’t have a name, it’s not even really a bar, just some plastic tables and chairs a Cambodian couple has set up in the street outside their garage. The boy likes the curry they make, so he goes when he’s been working late, and last night he dragged a bunch of us along. I was excited to be asked. (The other interns are big, jock-ish jerks from J-schools in the Midwest, and no one invited them.) The guys started us drinking early, never mind it was a school night, and then there was a better bar to go to, and another, and another until who knows when. . . .

  So we were all ruined in the office this morning, of course. Everyone was trying not to let on, but Gus is not an idiot and obviously he knew, he was glaring and growling, just waiting for us to slip up. But we were in it together. Even Barry, the business guy, who can be pretty surly . . . we were in the kitchen trying to make coffee, and we were too messed up to get the filter to work, and just kept spilling things everywhere and watching each other trying not to crack up.

  I didn’t get into the drugs with them, of course. . . . There’s something else I’ve never written down before!

  Back in high school, the very rich and very bad girls would gather in the music-room closet and toke on little joints of Mexican grass, and a couple times I went in, too. They got high and giggled about menstrual blood and sex, but me the drug took, like some deep-sea creature come up beneath a swimmer in dark water. Three times I tried it, and always the same: a terrible sense that the world beneath my fingers was a dream. I could be dead, or lying in a hospital bed, eyes twitching away in a coma. . . . I could wake and discover I was someone else altogether.

  So now I roll a spliff with the best of them, but I definitely don’t inhale. Which, possibly, was why I was slightly less messed up than everyone else . . . so when the call came, there was Gus, waving the phone around and talking about “some NGO, claims they’ve been broken into and the government’s behind it,” and the crime writer could barely raise his head and the econ writer was asleep in his chair, so his eye fell on me . . . looking wrecked and wretched, I’m sure, but just conscious enough I might be able to turn around a story, and he stuck the phone in my hand:

  “Get directions and go. Take Khieu, just in case.”

  “Just in case of what??”

  As I was heading out, Barry woke up enough to catch my eye. “Khieu was with Gus in ’98,” he muttered. “Guy knows how to drive while being shot at.”

  Indeed, it turns out that Khieu, despite doing everything else at quite a leisurely pace, drives insanely fast. I tried to tell him that speed was actually irrelevant if you didn’t reach your destination alive . . . but the wind whipped my words away, and there was nothing to do but keep my arms wrapped tight around him and hang on. He was worse than the moto drivers. We reached the main boulevard, packed with cars, and rather than wait he just swung left into the wrong lane, and for nearly two blocks we dodged oncoming traffic until finally he saw his chance to cut right and get back to our side of the road. I’d just started to breathe again when traffic seized up and he started squeezing between cars, still going as fast as he could. Right when I thought we were going to get out, a white Toyota behind us tried to pull out, too, knocking us off-kilter against some SUV. Khieu kept us upright and I thought I was fine, until I realized the cool wind on my leg was carrying away little drops of blood. I ruined my scarf for a makeshift bandage, but I didn’t think it would do to show up at a crime scene bleeding.

  The NGO office wasn’t far from my house—a big grimy office block on the grassy swath near Independence Monument. The bottom floor was all glass windows, except the glass was all over the pavement and there were cops everywhere. Cops: I almost couldn’t get off the bike my heart was pounding so hard—but I remembered myself. I am a fearless reporter. I’ll take my notebook and stick my nose anywhere. The pain in my leg was actually kind of steadying. I just marched across the lawn to the busiest person, a tall Chinese-American guy with Frodo hair, and asked to talk to him.

  His name was Luke, and it turned out he wasn’t in charge, he was just a project manager. The real boss was a woman named Wendy, the one who’d called Gus in the first place. She was a major head trip . . . the whole thing had completely spun her out, and Luke was having to spend most of his energy calming her down, rubbing her shoulders and telling her it was okay. Hey, if I were his boss, I’d make him do that all day. . . . He’s not pretty like the boy, though he’s got all the right bumps in all the right places
—but he was handsome, like drown-you-in-testosterone handsome. Think ER-era Clooney, only Chinese. He reminded me of the men who used to hang around Father’s businesses: children of immigrants with hungry eyes, looking for a way into a world of glass. He had a smile that said: “You won’t believe the day I’ve had.”

  I took my time interviewing them. Their story didn’t make any kind of sense.

  Wendy thinks the break-in was an attempt at intimidation, connected with the NGO’s work out west. The local governors there are all into illegal logging and fishing: it’s incredibly destructive, but it’s the only game in town that pays. The NGO is promoting eco-tourism, but that’s seen as competition: the governors don’t want legitimate industries coming in and giving people alternatives.

  Luke doesn’t hold with conspiracy theories: he says it’s either a robbery gone wrong or a vendetta by a disgruntled staff member.

  The intimidation theory does seem far-fetched—are we really supposed to believe Luke and Wendy and their little project are enough of a problem for some corrupt governor to take an interest? But who tries to rob the office of an aid organization doing eco-tourism development? Stupid criminals, that’s who. Still, when you break into a building, even if it’s not the score you hoped for, you take what you can get. Right? There were laptops, hard drives, cell phones—stuff you could get cash for if you needed it—so why was nothing missing except $100 from the petty cash kitty? Option two is, you trash the place. But nothing was smashed aside from the window, one PC monitor, and the cabinet drawers, which were all jimmied open.

  So I see two possibilities. A) The break-in wasn’t about robbery or vengeance, it was about reconnaissance. Someone wanted a look at something in that office—the files, the employee lists, the access to another building—and they wanted it bad enough not to care if they made a mess getting their look. B) Perhaps more interesting—Luke and Wendy aren’t telling everything, and something was taken: something the police wouldn’t notice, and that the NGO wouldn’t want to admit was missing.

  I ran all this by Gus, of course—he laughed and said I was thinking too much. This kind of stuff happens every day. But even if he didn’t see a story in it, I didn’t care. . . .

  I think I’m starting to enjoy this gig.

  In the office, I grinned and flicked lit matches at the boys, who yelped and fought and gave me Indian rubs. Today was nothing—just a little touch of Cambo in the night—but I felt like I’d made the club. I had scars.

  WILL

  OCTOBER 5

  Gus gapes at me as I stagger through the door. He’s on the couch in his apartment, laying up for a siege. Bottle of Kentucky rye on the coffee table—his good stuff, about two inches left in the bottom. Next to it: the battered old 9 mm the NYT correspondent left after his last trip. Ignore the gun; pick up the whiskey and take a long swallow. My cut mouth burns. I take another.

  “Jesus, Keller. The fuck happened to you?”

  “Ran into my ex.”

  “Vy wouldn’t hit you, hijo. She’d have you shot.” His face gets redder as he realizes what he’s just said, and he stands and grabs the whiskey back from me. “Jesus Christ.”

  The day’s injury list so far: one black eye, one swollen jaw, one very bloody nose. Possibly a couple cracked ribs, but hopefully no internal bleeding. Likely concussion. Can’t move my right hand very well, not sure what that is. A bad sunburn on the side that was up when I passed out. One plastic sack, donated by a shopkeeper, filled with broken camera parts, and one roll of partially exposed film. The goon didn’t bother with my bag, so the digital is okay.

  Apparently my state is pathetic enough to warrant another drink: Gus passes me the bottle again. “Drink this, I’ll drive you to the hospital.”

  “Later.” I lower myself onto the couch.

  Gus’s look is pity and worry and unacknowledged contempt. “You should see a doctor.”

  Ignore him. Feel my eyes start to close again. That’s no good.

  “Stimulants,” I say. “Then you’re gonna tell me what I’ve got myself into.”

  * * *

  Gus.

  No one knows why he’s still in Cambo. It’s not the sort of question you ask. I know that sometime during the Dirty War his family decided Argentina was too dangerous and sent him to school in the States. I don’t know who they thought was after him. Argentina got better, but Gus never went back.

  When he came out here he was working for the wires, but he got fed up and started his own paper—the Post and the Daily had just got going, and he hated them both. He’s kept the thing running for years on guts, coke, and an endless string of free interns.

  When I landed, we hit it right off. Same interests: drugs and kickboxing and military coups. He got me work, and the upstairs room in Mun’s house. We spent our mornings fighting, our nights chasing the dragon—but Gus always held back. He’s a different kind of addict: his fix is answers. He doesn’t want the headline, he wants the solution. That kind of desire takes you strange places. I think he stayed in Cambo because he couldn’t figure it out.

  It means he’s going to die here.

  I wonder if he’s figured that out yet.

  * * *

  Two cups of coffee, half a pack of cigarettes, and a candy bowl full of Sudafed and 800 mg Advil, and I’m ready. Gus’s girl is long gone, but we’re still talking in whispers. It’s hot, and even with the balcony doors open the room is an oven. Jammed with plants and stacks of books and boxing gear and caged lovebirds, it feels like the jungle. Pain creases my face when I wipe away the sweat.

  “There are wheels within wheels here,” Gus says. “The obvious thing would be that Bunny, que en paz descanse, just pissed off the wrong guy. You heard what he’d been saying about Hun Sen’s so-called reconciliation plan.”

  “Only heard.”

  “Well, it was bold. Not just the usual insults, y’know, calling him a one-eyed dog. Bunny used logic—took apart the speeches to show how Hun Sen was promising everything to everyone and could never live up to it all. It was dangerous stuff. Before you got back, Hun Sen warned Radio Ranariddh they should shut up. Bunny toned it down, but maybe it was too late.” He’s watching me like a kid who’s thrown a bag of M-80s into the campfire and is waiting to see if they’ll explode.

  “But you don’t buy it.” I suck on another Advil. My teeth feel like glass.

  “Well, there are other angles, eh? Hun Sen hasn’t got the seats to form a government, right—not without either FUNCINPEC or Rainsy throwing in with him. Rainsy says fuck you, obviously, he lives off being opposition. But FUNCINPEC? They’re nothing without favors to trade. So they’re dropping hints like mad, saying they’ll give him his coalition, but they want stuff in exchange: dissidents let out of jail, better posts in the cabinet, assurances it won’t be ’98 all over again . . . The list just gets longer. What if Hun Sen got tired of it? He wants his job back, and he wants it now, so he starts sending a few royalists on Khmer Rouge holidays—just a little reminder where this thing could go if they keep pushing him.”

  “Royalists, plural?”

  “A minor FUNCINPEC figure was shot and killed in Kampong Cham a couple days back. Someone took his head as a souvenir. Everyone thought this was a local grievance . . . but maybe not. Then, a week ago, in Siem Reap, an organizer was stabbed—”

  “I get the idea. All a bit public to just be bargaining with Ranariddh, though.” My head aches. “Is it just coincidence this happens today? With the army and the police about to kill each other?”

  He has to stop and chew on that one awhile. It’s not so far-fetched: bad stuff happens every day in Cambodia, so the odds go all to hell. When he looks up, I see the idea glowing in his eyes. He’s chasing his fix now, and even Bunny doesn’t faze him.

  “How about this, then: darker powers at work, right? Hun Sen is letting some big army guys hang out to dry in this heroin-bust thing. Embarrassing, that, eh? A four-star general trafficking junk? Makes them all look like pushers and thie
ves. So how hard would it be for General Peng, or someone even higher, to say, ‘Fine: embarrass us, we’ll embarrass you.’ ”

  “And because he’d threatened the radio station last week, everyone knew Bunny was in Hun Sen’s crosshairs. Anything happens to him, that’s where we all look.”

  “Exactly.” Gus is so jazzed, he’s actually grinning. “The prime minister looks like a murderer in front of all the nice people who think he’s reformed. Aid money could start pulling out, investors—could hurt his position a lot.”

  “And it could explain why the scene was being watched.” I touch my face to see how much it hurts. “Find out who took the bait.”

  Gus nods. Reaches for the whiskey—as he does, I see it all come back to him. The excitement dies. He pours until it’s done. “How shit would that be? If it was all just a distraction? I suppose it’s no difference to Bunny, but I’d rather Hun Sen killed him. At least it would mean he shook things up.” He downs his glass, winces.

  I say nothing.

  Finally: “There’s another option. What about the girl?”

  Gus looks blank: What girl?

  “The one who’s missing: June Saito.”

  He didn’t see that coming: you’d think I’d hit him in the teeth. Then he laughs. It’s a raw, hurt laugh, but he’s got nowhere else to go. “Hija de puta. The girl.” He starts to say more, but he’s laughing again. I breathe a bit easier: with everything else going on, Gus forgot all about June. He still thinks whatever happened to her is a mistake or a misunderstanding; that soon enough she’ll come wandering back with a sheepish grin on her face: So sorry for the trouble.

  It means he had nothing to do with it.

  “So she found you,” he says, when he’s calmed down. “The sister.” He’s looking at my cigarettes: bad sign. “I meant to warn you, but the day was so . . .”

  “You needed a drink first.” He nods. “Tell me everything she said.”