Figurehead (2 page)

Finally, the vehicles passed through a narrow gap in the barricade. Nirom butted his cigarette on the dashboard and manoeuvred so that Kiry could step straight from his seat to the villa’s front door. As they alighted, Kiry tried to sneak a glance at the crowd. As staged events went, he thought, these actors had passion. Ol pushed him inside. Sok followed close behind, leaving Nirom and the bodyguards to gather the baggage and evade flying stones.

Kiry was tired. He wanted to lie down before the evening reception at the palace, perhaps even snooze. Then he wanted to sit quietly with a gin and tonic and check his speech, or plan what he might say to the media. He wanted to phone Kolab, his wife, and tell her that he was really here. He wanted to read the newspapers or even a few pages of that Kissinger biography. He desperately wanted to wash his silver hair.

He greeted Son Sen, the Khmer Rouge’s defence minister, who had quietly entered Phnom Penh a few days earlier. They shared a few words, a private moment, surrounded by lesser beings who contrived not to listen. Kiry nodded at the various aides and the villa staff, who stood in a line trying to look cheerful. He shook hands with a couple of French photojournalists, who had been waiting since dawn to record this moment. He inspected the villa, pronouncing it pleasant, comfortable and, but for the protesters, perfectly acceptable. He briefly posed for a photograph with Son Sen, the two colleagues cajoling tense smiles out of each other.

As he began to climb the stairs, tailed by Sok and his bodyguards, a car battery came through a window, shattering the glass into thousands of diamonds. He turned and watched the battery bounce end on end until a table leg stopped its progress.

‘I think that’s ours,’ Nirom said.

Kiry sighed. ‘I’m going to rest. Somebody sort this out.’

Outside, the crowd surged forward. The barricade buckled. The crowd came at it again. The barricade did not merely collapse, it exploded, and some in the crowd armed themselves with its shattered remains. They ran to the villa, peering through the windows and beating on the walls.

Inside, Kiry unlaced his shoes. They were too tight. The leather was so new and hard that he was sure that his toenails would blacken and drop off. He stretched out on a bed. Sok brought him a damp cloth to cover his face.

Outside, the prime minister, Hun Sen, arrived in a bulletproof limousine. He made his way to the first-floor balcony of the villa across the street. ‘Calm down. Go home,’ he yelled into a megaphone. ‘There is no use in killing them now. Go home. Go home. Go home and remember not to vote for them.’

‘He got here quick,’ Sok said. ‘What was he doing, waiting around the corner?’

‘Oh well.’

‘He’s responsible for this. He planned it.’

‘Probably.’

‘Why are you so calm?’

‘All this is to be expected.’ Kiry sat up. ‘Do you have a comb?’

As Kiry poured water from a jug into a glass, adding a slice of lime, some in the crowd smashed the door of the villa and spilled inside. Others climbed the outside stairs and banged on the door and window of Kiry’s room. Across the street, police congregated. Their uncertain leader, unwilling to fight the people, sought guidance from a walkie-talkie. From above, Hun Sen pleaded, ‘Please be calm. Please control yourselves.’

Some of the rioters attacked the pyramid of suitcases sitting near the door. They ripped them open and flung clothes and documents and passports around. Some of them slashed the furniture, threw it against walls, carried it outside. One man swung on a chandelier. When it broke from the ceiling, landing on him and leaving tiny cuts on his body, he lay on the Indian rug roaring. He then carried the metal skeleton outside, holding it above his head like a trophy, bleeding triumphantly.

Some of the rioters ran up the stairs, looking for Kiry. When they burst into his room he was waiting on a sofa, arms folded in his lap, legs crossed at the ankles, his face arranged at its most serene.

‘Hello,’ he ventured, before his bodyguards formed a shield in front of him. The French photographers, trying to locate a panoramic view, instead found themselves book-ending Kiry’s line of defence, staring down an angry mob.

The protesters packed the small room so tightly that their attack on Kiry seemed to occur in slow motion. First, they dealt with the bodyguards. Someone shoved Ol against a wall. He hit his head on the sharp edge of a windowsill and slid to the ground with a groan. The other bodyguards fell down or flailed about amongst the throng.

The attackers momentarily froze with indecision, stunned by the ease of their raid and intimidated by the reputation of the man who gazed at them demurely. Then one man, a road worker, stepped forward. Kiry straightened, still believing the whole event was for show. He was so surprised when the road worker’s crowbar connected with his eyebrow that he felt no pain. He slumped in the armchair, confused, and in the moment of stunned peace that followed he sought to reassess his situation and rearrange his face. He stopped considering the implications for the peace process, or the wording of his letter of complaint, or the propaganda possibilities. He took note instead of the blood dripping off the end of his nose, and the loathing in the man’s face as he took aim to strike again. His façade cracked and, trying to stand, he collapsed. He grabbed the ankle of one of the photographers, looked up at her and said, ‘Don’t let them kill me.’ She nodded and patted his shoulder, but not before she snapped the photograph that later adorned page three of
Le Monde
: Nhem Kiry as if dug from dirty ice, eyes glassy, skin pallid, deep lines of fear running across his face.

The road worker swung again but missed. Kiry bounced on his buttocks and scrambled on all fours into a wardrobe. Sok dived in after him, making it a tight squeeze, and pulled the door closed.

‘Kill him,’ someone cried, and then the chant commenced, down the stairs and into the street. ‘Kill him, kill him, kill him.’

They ripped the wardrobe doors from their hinges and dragged Kiry into the middle of the room. One man pulled a reading lamp from a power point and cut its electricity cord free. He threw it over the ceiling fan and fashioned a crude noose.

Kiry’s bodyguards fought back. Ol pushed Kiry into the bathroom, where the photographer vacated a chair for him. Government soldiers, in riot gear and now armed with instructions that Nhem Kiry must not die, rushed the stairs. They forced those engaged in the lynching down the staircase and into the street, where the crowd lauded them and Hun Sen counselled, ‘There is a better way.’

Blood flowed from the cut on Kiry’s head. ‘It looks worse than it is,’ he assured Sok. Bruises already rose from his elbow, his buttocks, his side. His shirt was ripped and bloody. His wristwatch was cracked. Ol, concussed and confused, berated Nirom for driving into a tree. The other bodyguards nursed minor wounds. One of the photographers reported a dislocated finger.

The crowd fuelled a bonfire with the villa’s furniture, the paintings from the walls, the long table from the kitchen, the dried f lower arrangements, the shredded luggage. They burnt Kiry’s passport. They burnt his toiletries – Marie Weston’s No. 5 Replenishing Lotion bubbled and spat as its container melted. They burnt his ripped jacket and, within, Brendan H. Margaretti’s letter. They burnt his briefcase, including his speech:
I cannot express how very
happy I am to be here at the beginning of a new peaceful era for our country.
I hope to be here for many years to come. I pledge to work with all parties
who truly have the interests of the Cambodian people in their hearts.

One by one, Kiry and his entourage climbed down the outside stairs and into an armoured personnel carrier. As Kiry descended, Ol stood staring up with his arms outstretched to catch him should he fall … and gallantly fainted.

* * *

Ted Whittlemore was not in Phnom Penh on the day Nhem Kiry flew in and flew out. He did not, as he wrote, throw a rock at a window; he did not storm any stairs. He was in neighbouring Vietnam, in Ho Chi Minh City, where he’d based himself for the last few years.

Ted woke early that day, early enough that he could have – had he been capable of it – hitched a lift to Phnom Penh on a dawn flight and been at the Royal Hotel in time for the first sitting of breakfast. He could have walked the streets to gauge the mood of the city, something he always liked to do when he arrived in a place. He could have loitered outside Nhem Kiry’s villa and watched the crowd form. He could have taken his time selecting the very best rock to throw: not too light, not too heavy, something to make a decent impact but not kill anybody.

Instead, he spent most of the day sprawled on an old settee on the balcony of his apartment. When he slept he moaned; when he was awake he grumbled and swore and clenched his fists. Occasionally, he struggled to his feet and shuffled into the apartment to fill up his water jug (‘Don’t get dehydrated,’ his doctor had told him) or to urinate sweet yellow nectar. The apartment was quite spacious, for one person at least, but it gave the illusion of being tiny because all four of its rooms were crammed with old furniture from the Núi Café, the bustling establishment above which Ted lived. That day, tables, chairs, sofas and ice chests seemed like mines laid out in his path.

A few days earlier Ted had collapsed in the Núi Café. This came after weeks of unease that he had self-diagnosed as mental rather than physical, with symptoms so vague he tried to ignore them. But in the café Ted had suddenly fallen so ill that he slid off his chair and passed out on the floor in a pool of warm jasmine tea. He sprang back to life a moment later, appalled at this public show of mortality, but in the ensuing days the dizziness came – and passed – in waves, and he endured, in a pattern so random he felt sure it must mean something, a sharp stabbing pain to a bewildering variety of body parts.

Ted was disgusted by his body’s sudden and pathetic weakness. He was dismayed that he was missing Nhem Kiry’s homecoming. It might have been a mere footnote in history, but it was big news in Ted’s world. Late in the afternoon he made the mistake of tuning into the BBC World Service and heard that he had missed a riot. He lost all sense. I’ll get the next plane to Phnom Penh and view the scene, he told himself, and then I’ll fly to Bangkok and I’ll demand that Nhem Kiry show me his wounds.

Ted packed a bag and got halfway down the stairs when dizziness overwhelmed him. He grasped the railing as the world circled faster and faster. Finally a passer-by – one of the boys who repaired Hondas and sold dope from a hole in the wall a few blocks over – noticed him swooning and helped him back to bed.

Late in the afternoon Ted’s friend Hieu, who ran the café, brought him a bowl of beef noodle soup. Ted found eating hard work but afterwards he felt much better – well enough, in fact, to pour himself a glass of armagnac (he knew it was fake, but they’d done such a good job, with whatever chemicals and colours they’d thrown into the alcohol, that he didn’t mind). He settled in at the typewriter and began work on his weekly column.

Yesterday I woke up expecting to be repulsed but instead I witnessed a
scene
. . .

Ted stopped writing and pondered this blatant lie. As if in punishment, a wave of light-headedness forced him to close his eyes. Nausea rose up from his gut then fell back. His tongue felt huge in his mouth. He had an image of bile spilling all through his body, flooding his organs. The thought of it made him retch into the empty soup bowl. He began shivering so hard that he wondered, as he fought to control himself, if this was epilepsy.

After a moment he opened his eyes and stared at the words on the near-blank page:
Yesterday I woke up expecting to be repulsed but
instead I witnessed a scene
. . . Although his hands were shaking so hard they were blurred, he tapped out the rest of the sentence. . .
that so filled my heart with hope that I felt I might pass out
.

Finally, the shivering passed. Ted wandered his apartment, splashed water on his face, wiped deodorant under his arms for the fourth or fifth time that day and brushed his teeth. He pulled the piece of paper from the typewriter and grabbed a pen. With one hand gripping the railing, he made his way very slowly down the steps.

The Núi Café was busy and full of noise. Ted’s favourite table was occupied by four men playing cards. He limped past them and Hieu ushered him to a seat near the kitchen.

‘Tea, Ted?’

‘Coffee.’

‘Coffee bad. Doctor said coffee bad.’

‘Coffee,’ Ted said.

Snot began to pour from Ted’s nose. He wiped it clean, ignoring the smattering of blood that appeared on his handkerchief. Hieu wanted to chat, wanted to know how he was feeling, but Ted waved him away and settled back to compose his eyewitness account of the attack on Nhem Kiry. He wrote it in a single burst. The coffee was still hot when he read it back to himself.

He was pleased. Very pleased. For a moment, he felt healthy. This shocked him, for suddenly he grasped how awful he had been feeling. And at that moment, right there and then, he decided that the column about Nhem Kiry would be his very last. No matter how horrific an idea it was, his doctor was right: he had to retreat or die.

He asked Hieu for a glass of red wine. ‘Make it a bottle.’ When Hieu refused – ‘Doctor’s orders!’ – Ted burst into tears. All conversation in the Núi Café ceased – even the card game went into hiatus – as Ted howled then whimpered then fell asleep.

I should have been there, that time in ’91. Of all the bloody shit-holes I’ve
dragged myself to in my life for the sake of a story, for the sake of being an
eyewitness, I missed Nhem Kiry getting the shit beaten out of him. But I had
to respond somehow because they – the useless bloody spineless UN – were
treating Kiry like royalty. I don’t mind telling an out-and-out lie if there’s
no other way, so I wrote the column. Said I was there. Really, when you
think about it, what difference does it make? Everybody tells stories their
own way. Everybody sees what they want to see. What they need to see. I
hear people say, ‘I know my history.’ But what is history? Some nameless
faceless disembodied voice thrusting his own partisan beliefs at the world.
History isn’t rain. History is a water cannon, loaded, aimed and fired.