Hunters in the Dark (10 page)

The maid then brought in coffee and some rice-ball desserts not unlike the Thai
boua loy
Robert had eaten in Bangkok. Sophal was next to him on the sofa with her legs crossed and their arms rubbed against each other as they used their spoons. It felt like centuries since he had felt anyone close to him. He could smell the rose talc under her T-shirt now turning faintly sour with the heat. Her father suggested they set up a time for an inaugural lesson and she said, “Well, I can come to Colonial Mansions the day after tomorrow if you like.”

“How about it?” the doctor said.

“If you like,” Robert replied, but now he had to think fast. “On the other hand,” he suggested, “we could just meet in town. You can take me somewhere.”

“All right,” she said slowly. “I can take you somewhere.”

The doctor and his wife exchanged a clearly delighted look.

“You two will figure it out,” Dr. Sar said with finality. “What about a Vietnamese lunch?”

“I'll come and pick you up at the Mansions,” Sophal decided. “We can just stay in the lobby there if it's convenient.”

“I'm not sure what I'm going to teach you,” Robert said. “Your English seems perfect as it is.”

“I need to practice—don't we all?”

“If you say so.”

“She gets her future tenses mixed up,” the wife said. “And her past tenses too.”

Robert put down his dish, looked at his watch and said, “Maybe I'd better be going. That driver has been waiting outside for two hours.”

“So he has,” the doctor said, and put his dish down as well. “Sophal, give Simon your phone number and you two are all set.”

The girl, in fact, walked him down to the outer gate in the rain. She seemed nonchalant about the lessons and said that all she wanted was some fun conversation, which her family was prepared to pay for. She saw no reason to pass it up.

“By the way,” she said, “my father said to give you this. He didn't want to give it to you himself. He's quite shy about things like this.”

It was an envelope, and it obviously contained money in cash, and she pushed it gently into his hand and shook her head as if to say, “Don't worry about it, it's normal—he likes you.”

He took it and there was no awkwardness at all.

“He needn't have,” he muttered and quietly gauged the amount inside.

“Tomorrow I can't,” she said as the gate came open, and they saw the driver sprawled inside his tuk-tuk, his bare feet balanced on the metal rail. “The day after, Colonial Mansions. About two is OK, isn't it?”

“Yeah, that's fine with me.”

“Goodbye then, Mr. Beauchamp. I forgot to tell you what a weird name that is—but I've heard it before somewhere. I can't remember where.”

“It's not a common name.”

“Is it an American name too?”

“I don't know. Maybe it is.”

She shook his hand, and there was a subtle mockery in her look.

He said,
“Bonne nuit,”
and went down to the tuk-tuk, whose driver had stirred. She waited by the gate and the driver peered out and then looked up at the rain. He saw that the electricity had not come back on.

“It's going to be a dark night,” Sophal called down to him. “I'd go straight home if I were you, Mr. Beauchamp.”

“I'll do that.”

“
Bonne nuit
yourself.”

And as the tuk-tuk pulled away she smiled and the gate closed and the driver shot him a knowing look. Robert asked him to drive to Street 102 and he slumped into the backseat and held the rails tight. The evening had been a success, but he couldn't really say why that success had happened.

They went down Norodom again and the lights came back on. He opened the envelope and looked inside, feeling slightly guilty that he had taken the unexpected gift without more of a protest. It was five hundred dollars which he had done nothing to earn and which the doctor had given him as an encouragement. Or else as some obscure gesture which could not be reciprocated. Five hundred. It was the windfall that changed the situation. It made no sense at all but, as he now thought, the lucky have great timing and he knew that he wouldn't think about it again.

He pocketed the bills and threw away the envelope. At Colonial Mansions, which was his destination, he found the boys scooping up the water that now formed a moat around the buildings and the night manager standing in a black suit with an opened umbrella. Robert jumped over the moat and went into the ice-cold lobby, where the air-conditioning seemed to have been on the whole time. The manager came to the reception desk with him and Robert asked him if he had any units he could rent him starting from the following day.

It took a while to find a smaller unit on the first floor that Robert could rent by the day or by the week, as he pleased. It was furnished and it was discounted because it had an obscured view and little natural light.

“All right,” Robert said, and laid down a hundred to hold it. “I'll take it from tomorrow afternoon. Does it have a table?”

“A table, four chairs and a sofa. And a king-size bed.”

“Kitchen stuff?”

“All equipped. It's a one-bed apartment.”

It was perfect.

Robert thought for a moment about whether he should see it first but then he let it go: if it was unacceptable he didn't much care.

The manager gave him a receipt then took him around the ground floor to show him the facilities. There were two wings to the property, one with the handsome old pool and one with a sleek new pool. Both were lit from below and the rain puckered their surfaces.

“Most of our guests are long-term residents,” the manager said. “They work at the embassy next door or with the Korean construction company up on the boulevard. It's very quiet.”

“I was looking for a quiet place. I'm having good luck today.”

“We are getting more Chinese now.” The manager lowered his voice. “They like to swim late at night.”

At the center of the old pool was a woman's head patiently making its way along its length, beaten by the rain but calm-looking, the hair trussed up above it. A strangely nightmarish sight, with the goggles and the rhythmically gasping mouth.

Robert stood just out of range of the rain dripping from the eaves and looked up at the balconies stacked on top of each other with their foliage and waxy flowers. The French windows darkened and yet open here and there, the resumed glare of the city glowing against low-hanging clouds. Every step of the way things had been laid out for him, from the very moment he stepped across the border. It was neither good luck nor bad, just luck in itself. Phnom Penh was a city that encouraged such things. He could see the tight discretion which had come over the manager's inscrutable face as they turned and walked back into the lobby, upon whose walls old photographs of colonial Indochina made an unnecessary case for a difficult romanticism. Robert told him that he would be around after lunch the following day.

“You can try it for a week and see if you like it,” the manager said gallantly.

“I don't think I won't like it.”

He went back out onto Street 102 and he saw at once glimmers of welding torches high up within the skeleton of the half-built skyscraper rising on the far side of the street. The Hangul characters burned into the plastic sheets that covered the building, undulating slightly as the elements tormented them. So they didn't stop work even for a storm or a blackout. They found a way to keep slaving for their masters.

The same driver was waiting for Robert and the tuk-tuk wheeled around in the great scummy pool that still divided the hotel from the rest of the street. Seeing which, the staff had a low laugh as they lay on the hoods of the cars parked under the trees. It was not a difficult laugh to understand. There was a magisterial tolerance and indifference in it, as well as centuries of clandestine observation. As Robert clambered into the tuk-tuk, moreover, the driver turned with exactly the same laugh and said, with an iron evenness, “Boum boum, mistah?”

He arrived back there earlier than he had predicted and on that now dry street swarms of dragonflies played around the clumps of weeds and the still-damp datura. Like the day itself, the hotel seemed completely different. The ground-floor restaurant was serving its bistro lunch and the old pool was filled with paunchy white people who appeared to be on some kind of antagonistic holiday. His room was not yet ready and he sat by the pool windows and ordered a steak and fries with a glass of Coke and kept his shades on because he had slept badly and his eyes were fragile.

The men out in the pool all had shaved heads, the concentration camp look, with tattoos hard-edged on painfully white skin. The girls were immensely fat and arrogant and loud, and carrying much the same tattoos though on different parts of their bodies. They disported themselves through those blue waves like elephant seals, and the Asians coolly dressed at the restaurant in their pressed white shirts and cufflinks looked at them with a kind of despairing amazement and a quiet certainty that the economic decline of these beasts was somehow legible in the obscure codes of their tattoos and the weight of their belly fat. They were no longer the lean aggressors and masters of yesteryear. Robert felt the same way.

He ate his steak slowly then ordered a tarte tatin and a double espresso since he no longer had to worry about money, at least for a few days. The day manager then came to his table and said that his room was now ready, and left the key politely on the table. She asked him if he had any luggage and he shook his head and said something about having his things brought on from somewhere else. She nodded and wished him a pleasant stay, then turned as she was about to move off and asked him how long he was going to stay. He said he hadn't decided but at least a week. Afterward he would see. It was all that needed to be said.

While he enjoyed his coffee, he called a few more of the numbers he had taken from the Language Tuition site and set up some more private lessons as best he could. There was a Khmer lawyer who offered him a few hours a week and a female musician who needed English to write songs. It didn't seem that difficult to make a few bucks doing this sort of thing and he calculated that with five or six clients combined with the generous Dr. Sar he could do quite well for himself.

All it needed was time and patience and application. He already knew how to teach, it was second nature to him. It was a city where people didn't ask many questions, certainly not as many as Dr. Sar had asked.

He would not need to repeat his performance of the previous evening. He could sense that it was like a giant wall of coral through which thousands of mutually ignorant fish swarmed night and day going about their secrets and evasions. There was no surveillance here, very little police presence and almost no puritanical curiosity or disapproval. The Khmers, thankfully, didn't seem to be driven by a tormenting and malicious need to know everything about their curious visitors, the barangs whom they found faintly ridiculous but undeniably lucrative. The core Occidental principles of nosiness and constant outrage were not their thing. They simply went about their lives without mentally harassing everything and everyone around them. They lived in their coral and tormented each other in different ways, no doubt, but their history had at least taught them the terror of destroying privacy and individuality. With Westerners, it was going in exactly the opposite direction. In the body language of the human seals, with its lack of discretion and tact, you could see the retreat of privacy and the individual. It was curious.

He went up to his room unnoticed. On the landings he paused and glanced down the tiled corridors at the rows of doors and the garden tables on the balconies where the more discreet Chinese girls liked to sunbathe with their books. It was like a hotel where people spent their whole lives instead of a few days. The unit was right under the roof and there was a smell of disuse about it. He went in, turned on the AC and the single fan and waited for the two rooms to cool down. It was obvious no one had occupied it in weeks. Why then had he waited for it to be readied? While the place cooled he wandered up to the roof. There was a Jacuzzi there and a small ornamental garden. It looked over a good portion of the city, including the nearby fortified American embassy. The scraps of park burning in the afternoon heat with their piles of scattered refuse, the radio towers and the Hangul characters of the skyscraper where the welders were still hard at work. A single white girl lay on a sunbed under the little frangipanis, her face covered and oblivious to his presence. It was a genial hideout for him. He went back to his room, locked the door and unpacked a bag of groceries which he had bought earlier in the morning at the Sorya Mall.

Cartons of lychee juice, shampoo, soap, paper towels and both razors and a pair of scissors. He had also bought some cheap local hair dye in a dark blond color. He showered and then dried off and began to cut his hair carefully with the scissors. He cut his fringe straight and then shortened the hair around his ears. He mixed the two elements of the dye in the washbasin and applied the emulsion with a toothbrush to the top of his hair, making streaks which he toned down by rubbing them at once with a towel. He went back into the shower, washed off and waited for the hair to dry. It came out a dull blond-brown which was what he wanted. A gradual, barely noticeable change. Then he clipped his eyebrows.

He looked again at the label on the back of the shirt Simon had given him and he saw, as before, that it was a place called Vong with the street number. Street 200. It should be easy to find.

At five he left the Mansions and walked across Kossamak and the Freedom Park toward the street market at the far end. He walked in the direction of the river and then turned south onto the quay. He had decided to spend thirty dollars on two new shirts and when he was abreast of the hustle-bustle streets behind the river he turned into 130 and wandered aimlessly until he was on Street 19. Here he caught a motodop and told him to go to Street 200. It was a quiet street with little to recommend it. There was a row of cream-colored shophouses with metal grilles and above them balconies with plants. He quickly spotted the sign for Vong that he was looking for. It was next to another tailor called Beary. He had not stopped to think why he was going to the place where Simon had gone. It was more a dark curiosity than a rational move. He went in, and a Viet man of about seventy rose from a newspaper, a glass of tea and a pipe. There was, of course, no recognition in his eyes but neither was there any surprise. Robert simply said, “Are you Vong?” and the man said that he was. There were Vietnamese calendars all over the walls and a blood-red Buddha in the corner with electric candles. Bales of cloth stood in the shadows with colored pins stuck into them.

“A friend recommended you to me,” Robert said, and he closed the door behind him.

The old man was in a collarless Viet shirt with a tape measure draped around his neck. A bamboo cloche hat hung on the wall behind him and there were paper chits all over the counter, seemingly in disorder. Vong asked him who his friend was.

“An American—I met him here.”

“I have a lot of Americans I make shirts for.”

“Well, I'd like a replica of this one—can you do it by tomorrow?”

Vong touched his mouth with his thumb and there was a sly irony in the air.

He said, “If you leave it here.”

“Well, I can't leave it here.”

“All right, I will measure you up now.”

“Can you make it from linen like this one?”

“I got it.”

“If you measure me up can you do it by tomorrow?”

“I can do by three p.m.”

“Make it twelve and I'll give you two bucks extra.”

“You're in a hurry.”

“Yeah, I'm in a hurry.”

“What's the hurry?”

“What does it matter to you?”

“A man in a hurry—”

“I lost my other shirts,” Robert blurted out.

“Lost them?”

“Yeah, I lost them. A drinking party.”

Vong laughed. “You jumped in the river?”

“Yeah, I jumped in the river. Can you do it?”

The tailor said he could and stepped out from behind the counter with the tape already extended.

“All right, good,” Robert said, and he felt, suddenly, the sweat pouring down his face and into his neck.

He held out his arms and Vong measured him.

“You're not NGO,” the affable Vong bantered. “NGO don't jump in the river and lose their shirts.”

“Sure they do.”

“But you're not NGO. I wonder who your friend was. I might remember him.”

“His name was Simon. Tall and blond.”

Vong continued measuring, a pin between his lips. When he removed it, he said, “Don't remember that one.”

“Never mind, I was just curious.”

“I make a hundred shirts a week.”

When the measurements were done they looked over the available linens. Robert picked out a pale green and a sand color. They came with mother-of-pearl buttons and trimmings. He went for soft collars and three buttons on the cuffs to make them look a little dressier.

The tailor stepped back and looked at the shirt he was wearing.

“One of mine,” he said immediately.

“I didn't say it was one of yours.”

“I know my own shirts when I see them.”

“It was a gift.”

“From your friend?”

Robert realized now that he had made a mistake.

“Never mind. Shall I pay you up front?”

“That's the way usually.”

Out came the thirty dollars.

“Thank you,” Vong said. “What about trousers?”

“I'm all right for trousers.”

“Your trousers look a bit beaten in. But they're mine too.”

“Excuse me?”

“They're my trousers too. No way I wouldn't recognize my own trousers.”

Robert looked down helplessly at the trousers, which were indeed looking a bit beaten in.

“Maybe they are,” he stammered.

“Lose those too?”

“It's a long story.”

“You seem to like Mr. Vong's clothes!”

The tailor wasn't really curious, he was more amused, and that kind of amusement could be brushed aside if Robert held his nerve and laughed along.

“But I like them so much I decided to get some more.”

“Good, good! So how about some trousers?”

Blackmail, then, Robert thought.

“All right, I'll get one pair. Just like these.”

Vong measured him again and they picked out the very same material.

“They'll look nice,” he said affably. “Twenty-five for you.”

It was more than Robert had wanted to spend but he had to let it go. His irritation burst out, however.

“Have those ready tomorrow as well. You may as well.”

“Yes, sir.”

Vong rolled up his tape.

Robert paid the extra twenty-five and Vong wrote him out a ticket for the three items.

“You want to have many Vong clothes,” he said. “Don't be one of those barangs who look like homeless people.”

“I'll try.”

“Everything will be ready tomorrow at noon. Is your friend Simon in town?”

They were at the door now and Vong had opened it and his body had moved into a small bow.

“I don't know—why do you ask?”

“So you can tell him to come by and get some more shirts, of course.”

“I'll tell him if I run into him.”

And then Robert's curiosity returned and he asked Vong once again if he remembered the tall, blond American's face.

“Not at all,” the tailor said. “But I might remember it by tomorrow. I might.”

“I hope you do,” Robert said.

His voice was dry and slightly hostile but he couldn't help it. He felt victimized and he wanted to know where his predator was.

That night he went to Street 136 and ate on the outdoor terrace of a place called Okuncha. Salmon tartare salad and a cold Angkor. Sitting there he looked up at the first-floor balcony of the Candy Bar opposite, and the girls under the propeller fans looked down at him and smiled and cocked their heads like spaniels. What an easy life it was. Just moments randomly pieced together. Then he walked over to the Sorya and played pool by himself among the open-air bars. The rain swept in at about nine. For a long time he sat brooding close to the street and the puddles and the drunks with umbrellas and the white college boys dumbfounded by the easy sex and the way the middle-aged men didn't move on their perches for hours. The bars were playing Psy that night and girls danced around the tables with quiet, spinning motions that were footsure and elegant and distant. He thought about Vong. It had clearly been a mistake to get involved with him and he cursed himself for his stupidity. Tailors are always shrewd. They are observers of men. Robert had bought some postcards in the supermarket and now he wrote one to his parents and one to Yula. He wrote that he was having a good time and that nothing was out of the ordinary. The phrases were trite and typical of the things he wrote home. It might be the last thing he wrote to them in a long time, and he wondered if he could rise above the clichés he had scribbled. But the less dramatic he was, the less they would feel suspicious or become alarmed. His parents would shrug and criticize his irresponsibility, but Yula was the tricky one. She would pore over every word for hidden meanings. She was already suspicious, he could sense it even from a distance of five thousand miles. They had no commitment to each other now, but she would be hurt by his silence.

He wondered if he should send either postcard after all. He finished them anyway, then put them in his pocket and thought it over. Perhaps not, then. Disappearance ought to be an event that is thought through carefully. One ought to take it seriously. It couldn't be undone flippantly, and in any case he didn't want to undo it. Surely she had known how miserable he had been when she knew him. It wasn't her fault, but then it wasn't his either, and in his mind it was only a temporary situation. He might be gone for a year, or two, or three, and then he would see.