Cambodia Noir (20 page)

My hands won't stop shaking.

We pull up to a club I don't recognize: run-down, set back from the road behind a fence. A dirtier, less prosperous version of the semi-brothel I just left. I offer the driver another 250 riel to make a call on his mobile. Senn's phone is off, so I send a message:

GET OUT
.

I take another Dexedrine and head for the bar. Buy a drink from the girls, then another. They ignore me: they can see there's no business there.

Whatever happened, this town isn't safe. I still have the other half of the Aussie's money—enough for a plane ticket. I could go, grab the next flight to anywhere—

“Airports kill me.”

I look up, half expecting to see June leaning over me, trying to open me up with those cold, inquisitive eyes—

“Do you like what you've found of me so far?”

Get out of my head, June. This is it: I'm in too deep, and so are you, but you're on your own now. Gus has your books, he can try to find you, if—

Fuck.

Gus.

I grab the arm of the girl behind the bar and shout in Khmer, “I need your phone.”

Seven rings and a heart attack later, Gus picks up. “The fuck?” he groans.

“Where are you?”

“In bed. What fucking time do you call this?”

“Never mind. Just get out of the house—now. Meg with you?”

“No.” His voice is different: alert, waiting.

“Go see her. Or a hooker, whatever. But first there's something I need you to bring me.”

At 6:00 a.m. the Central Market is already heating up. Shops are opening, traders carting in cookware and vegetables and garment-store seconds. I take the chance to buy another change of clothes, then head for the butchers' section.

The air is heavy with the sugary smell of animal blood. Under the huge modernist dome, a hundred stone tables drip red as the day's flesh is hacked and sawed and hung on hooks.

After last night, this is not comforting.

Plenty of customers already—restaurant buyers, procuring for the afternoon menu. I wind through the aisles to one wide, white counter where a fellow in a stained apron is stringing up sausages. Gus stands watching, a sour look on his face and my carry bag slung over his shoulder.

“Sometimes I'm sorry I know you,” he says, handing me the bag.

“Me too.” I pause, looking through it. Everything's there. “Were you followed?” He shakes his head. “If nothing happened last night, I think you're clear. As long as I get out of town for a while.” It's lame, and he knows it. “I'll call you if I'm coming back.”

“Better still, don't.”

Look for a cab. Should check again I'm not being tailed. I don't: Even if Gus did lead someone to me, I'd be too tired to do anything about it now.

Outside the dome, the drivers gather, singing their old tune—

“Where you go?

“Mister!”    “Mister?”

“Anywhere you like—”

I mutter profanities in Khmer and they step back. A few feet from the scrum there's a battered, white Toyota four-door, with a guy leaning on the hood: thin, rectangular face, long coke nails on his pinkies.

He'll do.

Push through the crowd until I'm standing in front of him. “How much to take me to Koh Kong?”

He quotes a price. It's good, but I come back lower; they get suspicious if you don't. Plus it gives me a minute to suss him out. He speaks Khmer with a heavy, backwoods accent, but doesn't look like a farmer. I'm guessing at some point he was a fighter, and not for the army. Good: outsiders got no one to tell tales to.

When he makes his third offer, I take it, with a nod.

“You need to get anything?” he asks.

Shake my head. “Let's go.” Koh Kong is four hours at least, over rough road—but I don't want to hang around.

I should be running. Instead, I'm following June. If I need to lie low, Koh Kong seems as good a place as any.

Might as well die someplace with a view.

For the first half hour or so, I look out the window, chain-smoking to keep my eyes open, watching the sun push higher in the sky. The driver—his name is Phann—is going on about how he started fighting for the KR as a kid, got hooked on yaba and meth:

“—my whole life. For ten years, I can't work, because of the drugs. But I needed them, for the pain. My family died, in the work camps, you know, everybody died there, so they took me and made me a soldier . . .”

Everyone over thirty has stories like these. I'm struggling to stay awake, at least long enough to make sure we're heading in the right direction. We merge onto the southwest highway, and in seconds the dark takes me.

Sihanoukville.

The guys at the paper hate this place. I came expecting a sewer or an abattoir, or at least some grimy, run-down port city—Cambodian for Long Beach, and hot as hell. But it's the riverside, writ large. Acres and acres of sprawling entertainment: open-air restaurants and beckoning girls and music everywhere, a different tune from every bar and outdoor stage, Thai radio pop and gamelan and the Greatest Hits of the Eagles, over and over again until it's one big song. A market jammed with stalls and counters and carts selling every kind of food imaginable. And (of course) brothels, all along Victory Hill, where the women in the street grind and beckon to cars full of men, and the 60-year-old sex tourists walk hand-in-hand with their 14-year-old conquests with no shame. . . .

You'd think the guys would like it, but perhaps it's too naked for them.

Sihanoukville lives in constant danger of being devoured by the jungle. Trees and vines wrap the houses, flow into the streets and over the hills where creepers climb the bridges and telephone poles, and flowers find purchase on iron gates and billboard scaffolds. Over it all, the heat: damp and stifling, scented with rot like an orchid greenhouse. The afternoon rains just make it hotter. If the jungle doesn't tear this city down, the heat may melt it. Sihanoukville doesn't care. It floats above . . . it lives, breathes, eats, dances, has sex. At night its streets crawl with urgent life, looking for release.

If it stopped moving for an hour Cambodia would swallow it whole. . . .

Our hotel is on the edge, almost in the jungle, a pink cinder-block palace strangled by creepers and bougainvillea. Inside is clean enough, but totally Motel 5. It's achingly hot. Still, I'm glad for time alone to write. I couldn't on the trip down, not with the boy right there, sitting next to me in the back of the car, smirking and making jokes . . . he thinks I asked for this assignment because he's irresistible.

Sure, he's a pain . . . but I don't understand why just the sight of him makes me want to vomit, these days. It's got so bad, I almost tried to get out of this trip. Of course I didn't. Getting to Koh Kong meant coming here first, covering the election with the boy, letting him try to put his hand in mine in the car and smiling as I took it away. . . .

I don't mind. I am on the trail of something extraordinary.

Even at 3 a.m. the night is alive with the buzzing of locusts and mosquitos, the shrieking of bats and complaining of frogs. On and on, calling to each other in the dark. A different music, this, from a different city—hidden city, shadow city—give me a note and I could open my window, tear free the bars and vanish into your chorus. . . .

Soon, there will be no dark places left in the world.

Wake up soaked in sweat.

Was I followed? Is it safe?

I look around, panicked, head spinning: I feel sick. The sun is high and hot, beating through the car windows. I've been sleeping with my backpack clutched in my arms, and I rip it open with the sudden terror of a junkie checking his stash: June's diaries are still there. Her photos in neat packets, taped shut. Camera, muffler, extra lens, memory cards. Wadded-up clothes, soaked with sweat. Cigarettes: crushed.

I roll the window down. Hot outside—we're not going fast enough for a breeze. A narrow dirt road, hemmed in on both sides by hills covered in thorny shrub and cell-phone aerials. Ugly. From the terrain, I guess we're about halfway to Koh Kong—could be two hours left, or three, depending on the crossings.

I light a crooked smoke and try to think through the buzzing in my head.

I'm well past anything making sense. June and Kara—who are they, what are they doing here? Number Two and Barry—what are they hiding? And what about Dead Charlie and his dad and Gabriel, and the war still coming—

They churn in my mind like gears in some huge machine, I'm trying to make them fit together—

Could the killers have been after me and got Charlie and the Aussie by mistake? No: I was in the wrong room. Did Gabriel double-cross me? But Gabriel didn't know the details of the plan. Senn? His dad is in customs—he might even know the Sihanoukville customs guys June wrote about, who got arrested after the Sydney heroin bust. Is that where this is going?

—I can't see it, never quite, the gears keep spinning and each time they almost fit they fall apart again, and the engine rumbles on—

Something is wrong with my head.

We jolt to a stop: a line of dust-caked cars runs down to where a little stream cuts across the track. The first is getting chained onto a rust-chewed barge barely big enough to carry it. The barge-men power up a row of little motors, creeping across the water. We could be here days.

“You wan' Coke, something?” Phann asks.

“Sure. And aspirin.”

“I think you wan' food.”

I nod—can't remember when I last ate. “Anything in a package.”

He cuts the engine and stalks off to a dingy lean-to offering candy and snacks and sodas. I catch myself peering out the back window, looking for men with machetes.

Think about something else.

“Something else” always seems to mean June. I root through the bag, find the journal where she talks about going south.

Maybe it's a long shot, following her. I can't tell anymore. June seemed so sure something was going on in Koh Kong—but she visited in early August and came back just fine. She didn't disappear until weeks later. Still, trouble could have followed her back: it was just after that she got the gun. Or maybe she found something in Koh Kong and kept it quiet, then slipped back on the sly, telling everyone she was in Siem Reap? Expected a quick trip, left her luggage behind. Possible.

I haven't read all the journals yet, but some things are starting to come clear. Before her trip the entries are dateless, packed with minutia, full of interposed fragments or scraps of conversation you have to read around to follow the story—but they make sense. Somewhere along the line, that changes.

She goes south first, to Sihanoukville, to cover the elections with Number Two. That's a weird trip. She's not sleeping. Maybe it's the heat, maybe nerves. She wanders the city until late—then stays up writing, filling page after page with scrawled monologues. Something's eating at her. Time and again she returns to the same images: devouring, infection, decay. Something bubbling under the surface, waiting to emerge:

In the night, the cut on my leg starts burning again

. . . think I need a doctor?

. . . still not healing, despite my midnight efforts—wear long skirts so no one sees . . .

. . . something like a mouth, wide and white-lipped and ugly. Angry red tentacles . . . climbing up my leg . . . think it's going to start talking soon.

. . . I've got a little bit of this place inside me.

There's something in my head, something I'm not thinking of—something I've seen, in the journals? Can't remember.

I feel someone watching me, jerk up in sudden panic—

Just Phann, coming back. He gets in and hands me a Coke, a single-serving Tylenol, and three Tiger Tails. Packets all sealed. I tear into them, suddenly ravenous.

The sense of being watched stays with me. Cars behind us now; the driver of the first one has a shifty look. I turn away, fast. My mind won't settle.

After Sihanoukville, June's diary gets worse. There's a chaos, a frantic energy to her writing. More and more things seem to be blacked out or obscured, entries written on top of each other so they're nearly illegible.

I pull up the stories she did about Koh Kong for the paper.

DESPITE PROMISES, LITTLE DEVELOPMENT IN KOH KONG

By Jun Saito

KOH KONG—Lon Chmmol's tiny boat is one of only two vessels offering “ecological tours” of the magnificent mangrove swamps that surround the town of Koh Kong and the island of the same name. The boat is barely big enough for three people, with a plank for a seat and no life vests—Mr. Lon says there are none available in town.