Hunters in the Dark

TWELVE

In a dying hotel called the Tamarind Tree, Simon and Sothea also slept together in a fifteen-dollar room. It was a small and unremarkable settlement on the river and there was a temple on the far side of the motionless water with a gold-leaf stupa and a radio tower that cast its shadow over a pond filled with decayed hyacinth. They had seen it for a moment before night fell, a vision of bright modernized faith. Through the air fell delicate snowlike ash from a plant of some kind, a crematorium Sothea had said when they arrived, though he knew it must have been a kiln. Across the street stood an office of the Sam Rainy Party, where no one had been seen that day, and the padlocked shophouses had not been opened after their arrival. The little town seemed to have fallen into a sleep, though cats sat erect and sarcastic under the yellow flamboyants. The sun sliced across it and failed to rouse any life. Only the birds screamed.

When Simon woke he heard koel birds whooping in disheveled backyards and the half-abandoned park that lay against the river. He raised his hand to his eyes to block out the light. Where were they? He wrapped a towel around his middle and stumbled out onto a cement balcony, where a laundry line held their drying underwear and Sothea’s last good miniskirt. The owner of the hotel was in the mud yard below making tea with a hot plate, and a swarm of tanagers had come to pick off the pieces of bread that lay scattered around her. The woman looked up for a moment with amicable hostility. What did one say to such men first thing in the morning? A simple “Get lost” wouldn’t quite do. She smiled instead, and muttered the usual “Sous’dey” and her guest stepped back with his eyes squinting, as if still stoned from the night before.

He looked over the wall of the hotel into the street and saw the trees still wet from the rain and tractors dragging loads down it. He couldn’t even remember the name of the place — they had arrived in the middle of the night and taken their dope within an hour. They must have passed out before midnight and gone into an impenetrable enraged sleep. His eyes felt dry and his mouth had emptied of saliva. What day was it? Beyond the town there were mountains, green jade hills that he knew. Smoke rose in wisps from fires set in those hills, and he remembered those fires as well. They had seen them the previous day between the rains. His hand shook, a small vibration rather, and he went down to the ground floor in a cold fury to see if he could scrounge some coffee or, a worse option, venture into the street and buy some. The owner offered him tea and told him that they had Nescafé if he wanted to take that up to his girlfriend.

He woke Sothea with the Nescafé mixed with sugar and milk and they played some music for a while and made love in the glow of the thin orange curtains.

“Why are we here?” she kept saying. “What happened?”

“You don’t remember, baby? We got high after we arrived. We drove in our new car all the way.”

“Oh, the car,” she sighed.

“We still have the car. It’s down in the street.”

“Coffee is good.”

“I made it sweet like you like it.”

“It tastes like arabica.”

He laughed. “It’s Nescafé with Carnation.”

She was still half dressed in yesterday’s clothes, as he was, and after the shared coffee they took a cold shower while the radio played. Sothea then stepped out onto the balcony and recovered her miniskirt and dressed herself studiously in front of the bathroom mirror. She remembered nothing at all of the previous twenty-four hours. She thought Simon would remember it for her. If anything needed remembering, Simon remembered it.

While she did this, he packed their shared suitcase by simply throwing all the bits and pieces into it and placing the needles and junk at the bottom and the clothes on top of them. It was an inept concealment but it was instinct by now. They could wait until after lunch before taking a hit, or they could skip lunch and go into the forest when the heat came and get their juice. In the end, it would probably be neither. They went down at checkout time and threw the bag into the trunk of the car with the money and strolled down the lone main street to get some lok-lok and beers. The soil had dried so much that the constant wind kicked up a fine dust. They sat at a metal table in their heavy shades and ate morosely, trying to clear their heads and feel human again. Gradually everything came back to normal. They had taken off without much planning and now they still had no plan. Simon thought about making a run for the border and going into Thailand for a while. He had friends here and there, and they could score some nice stuff in Bangkok while living free. But soon he turned away from the idea. The border was always tricky. He didn’t know if the English boy had panicked and gone to the police. They wouldn’t care, but they might figure there was a bribe in it for them if they caught him at the border and made things unpleasant for him. They were malicious enough to do that. Instead, then, he thought of a place he knew in the mountains where he’d been before to lie low. It was a lodge owned by a Scot who used to be a British soldier. It lay up among the minefields in the Cardamoms, on a track that was hard to find. He was sure he could find it.

“I’ve got just the place,” he said to Sothea. “You’re going to love it.”

“Hotel with swimming pool?”

“Not exactly, honey. But we have to lie low for a few days.”

“Low?”

“Yes, we have to be very quiet.”

She sulked while he paid the bill and they walked back to the car. It was an old secondhand Saber and it was on its last legs.

They drove out of the town into the bright hayfields where the old field guns lay on their sides like toys. Soon they were on the road to Pailin, but they were not going to go there. They took a turnoff and plowed into low, rolling hills dotted with manilkara. They swept into a desolate village and stopped for a cold Coke at a tiny, swarming market. Thousands of flies descended upon them and they stood helplessly in the sunlight while cripples with blown-off legs, land mine victims, closed in upon them as well with an unerring instinct for barang money. “I don’t have anything,” he snapped at them in Khmer and they backed off a little, incredulous, before regaining their courage. Sothea swore at them and there was a stalemate. They went back into the car and drove on, up a long, wooded hill until the road divided and the left fork was a dirt track snaking between thorn trees. They took it.

“I remember the way,” he said, to reassure her. “Don’t worry, you’ll like it. It’s got a tree house. And a river.”

“I don’t care no river.”

“All the same…”

She thought he looked a little crazy in the English boy’s clothes. They didn’t suit him, and they didn’t even fit him, and he turned overnight from an elegant entrepreneur to a hippie on the run. He told her it was useful to change identities since he had stolen a lot of money and then he told her impatiently not to ask any more about it. She sensed at once that he was running away from a lot more than that. Whom, then, had he double-crossed? He must have double-crossed someone far more formidable than that English boy, but he wouldn’t say. He didn’t want to worry her. Now, however, he seemed agitated and lost and his temper was flaring. They bumped along the narrower track and soon they were rising steeply through fields bordered by yellow UN tape with signs warning not to walk across them.

There were little wood bridges with boys in kramas with weapons in their laps waiting to skin a wristwatch or a few dollars, and when they saw the Saber with the barang they perked up, stood and hoisted the weapons onto their shoulders and came into the sun squinting. It was two dollars a crossing. They had a famished, hollow look. They stared at the Khmer girl in the passenger seat and there was a tense unease in the standoffish attempts at humor on the part of the American. In reality he was alarmed. He drove through quickly and up into slopes of burned grass and then a forest like England, the trees tall and willowy and silent in the hot sun. The track climbed up past lonely houses on stilts, their mud yards carefully swept, past Vietnamese tanks stuck for eternity at the edge of ravines of wildflowers. The car pitched left and right and Sothea held onto the overhead strap with a grim annoyance. At the edge of a larger, denser forest they came to another roadblock, this one manned by a policeman.

It was now midday. The cop was reading a paper in a deck chair under the shade of a monkeypod and, lowering the paper, he looked up with a calm, cynical clairvoyance as the ancient car rattled its way toward his two-lane bridge. He stood, like the others, and sauntered out into the heat and held up his hand. His two men were off on an errand and he was alone for an hour — all the more reason to assert himself with a certain amount of firmness. He stepped in front of the Saber and brought it to a halt and, without smiling, induced Simon’s face to protrude through the opened window.

Davuth Vichea spoke enough English to wring a modest profit from a passing foreigner, and he knew enough to do it unobtrusively.

“Good morning,” he said, and dipped his head to catch sight of the Khmer girl in the seat next to the barang. So that was an inconvenience. “Where are you going?” he said in Khmer to Sothea.

But it was Simon who answered in that same language.

“We’re going to a lodge up the mountain.”

“You speak Khmer?”

Simon smiled and that was enough.

“What is that place called?” Davuth asked.

“It’s called Moonrise Lodge.”

“The Scot?”

“The Scot is my friend.”

“Ah, so the Scot is your friend.” The policeman rocked back on his heels and laughed. “His name is Michael, na?”

“Micky, yes.”

“Yes, Ta Mick. A dangerous man!”

“He’s a little odd.”

“And he is your friend?”

“Yes. Did you know — he has a piece of shrapnel lodged in his head?”

“A piece of shrapnel?”

“Yes, a piece of shrapnel. It is why—”

Davuth rubbed his chin. “I did not know that Ta Mick had a piece of shrapnel in his head.”

“In his frontal lobes, na. It is a war wound.”

“A piece of shrapnel — in his head. It would explain his behavior.”

They exchanged a manly laugh.

“Well,” Davuth went on, “what is your name, friend of Ta Mick?”

“My name is Robert O’Grieve.”

“Are you going there with your girlfriend?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is she legal age?”

“Of course she is. She’s twenty-five.”

“And you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Well, you’ll have to pay the toll anyway. It’s ten dollars this time.”

Simon didn’t object at all.

“Are you staying the night at Moonrise?” Davuth asked.

“Maybe a night or two. We like the nature. My girlfriend likes the woods.”

“Is that right?”

Davuth smiled at the girl. She was, indeed, quite pretty and definitely under twenty-five.

“Is that right, miss?”

“Yes,” she said, not looking back at him.

“Well, isn’t that fine?”

Pocketing the ten dollars, Davuth stepped back from the car and looked down its length, taking in the scratched doors, the dusty hubs and the fenders about to fall off. There was a smell of drugs about the whole thing. He thought for a moment of making this wretch open the trunk and show him the contents and he was sure he would find the goods. The bribe then would be astronomical. The barang would beg and sweat. It would be gratifying, but the sun was now on his back and he felt an angry weariness and an indifference even to the prospect of quick money. The irritation of heat and weariness. One never knew with these people. They often had the strangest connections in higher places, one had to tread lightly with them. Whites were bags of tricks. They could die like a fly or kick up a fuss. His commander back in the day had killed one once with a pickaxe and it did not feel right. Now they were still rich but Davuth made his calculation and stepped back from the provocation. He waved at the road, and there was a curt permission in his hand, a tired relaxation of his authority. Yet his eye didn’t miss anything.

“He’s the bastard to watch,” the girl said as they went past him and she looked quickly over her shoulder and caught the sun shining on his pitted face and the leather of the holster.

The man even smiled at her.

“Never mind him,” Simon said.

“No, he’s watching us.”

“He’s just a cop like all cops. They don’t pay them.”

The girl knew better, she knew her own people better.

They came into the upland woods. The road ran past a large house with a dog tethered in the yard and shiny black chickens and a Land Rover too grand for its surroundings. Farther on there was a sign for Moonrise. The road there was like a mud footpath, the trees vaulting it.

At the top the forest cleared and they could hear the sound of a forceful river. In the clearing were a handful of wooden buildings and a tree house with vines falling down from it. When the engine cut they heard the river even more clearly, its rippling suddenly loud in the silence, and they saw the main house which must have been made from scratch by the owner himself. It was wide open with a kind of loggia festooned with wind chimes.

The Scot was in the sunlight in the middle of his property cutting blocks of wood with an axe. He was naked but for a Khmer sarong and his sweat glistened on the tattoos covering his white skin. He had noticed them but continued with his task. The axe came down and the splinters flew and then finally he stopped and turned and looked over at the Saber now parked at the edge of the clearing.

—

They got out and walked over to the loggia and the Scot came over with his axe and, after a delayed reaction, smiled at the American whom he now recognized. It was the shabby outfit that had thrown him. He took in the lovely but run-down Khmer girl and he got the picture at once and called over to his maid to make some tea and bring it out onto the loggia.

“We need to hang out for a couple of days,” Simon said matter-of-factly. “I can pay this time.”

“I’m glad of that.”

“I got a lucky break and some cash.”

“Did ye now?”

“Yeah, I got a lucky streak at the Diamond.”

“Fuck ye, I cannae believe it.”

The bright heat of the day had reached its climax and now the rain would come back. They sat on cushions, in a vast woodland loneliness, and Sothea looked up at the homemade lamps that were hung above the tables. They were made out of old tank shell casings.

“Aye,” the Scot said to her, “everything’s made from munitions I found on my land.”

“You’re crazy,” she said in Khmer.

“That’s the truth,” he said in the same language.

“Look, Mick,” Simon began at once, “I got some stuff as well which I might want to keep here. Are you gonna mind?”

“The wife says no to drugs from nae on.”

“The wife? You’re married?”

“Got married last month to a farm girl. She’s a right-on Buddhist.”

“Fuck. You don’t say.”

“I do say and she says no drugs on the premises.”

“Well, Christ, Mick, look — I can’t risk running around with bags of that shit, not after my win at the Diamond. You know how word gets around. Every punk in the neighborhood will know it’s me. It’s like having a price on my head. You know that. Explain that to your missus.”

“There’s no explaining anything to her. No drugs is no drugs.”

“All right, so you want us to die?”

Mick had his laugh and eventually so did the other two.

“Who’s talking about dying, ye little prick? Just cart it around with ye. And don’t get high every fooking day.”

“At least we can stay here two nights, no?”

“As ye can see, there’s no one here. Though we’re expecting an English couple tonight.”

“An English couple?”

“Aye, in case ye didn’t notice, it’s a fooking hotel.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter. They’re foreigners anyway.”

“You can stay as long as ye like. Just keep a lid on it.”

“Is there a cabin by the river we can have?”

“Aye, Robert Louis Stevenson is available.”

“What about Rob Roy?”

“Nay, it’s for the missus.”

“All right, we’ll take Stevenson. Is there a mosquito net?”

“Obviously there is. There’s air con in the wee hours too.”

“Luxury. How much?”

“We’ll talk about it later.”

The tea came and they relaxed. Sothea flirted with the Scot, and the Scot softened as if succumbing to the spirit of the place and soon the warm gin was out and they were recalling the last time they went to Phnom Penh together.

“But,” Mick said, “ye’ve not been down there in a while.”

“No, I was renting a place on the river and liking it. Sothea here persuaded me not to go down and she was right.”

“Aye, women always are.”

They were now aware of a group of Khmer girls and older women sitting by the kitchen and watching them while they peeled vegetables with knives. There was a cool sarcasm about them. The Moonrise was not, in the end, a casual or relaxing place. It had desperation written all over it, a desperate attempt to make a little paradise on land bought from a Khmer Rouge warlord. The bowls on the tables were, like the lamps, made from shell casings and the ashtrays too. Simon had always wondered how the mad Scot lived here with his Khmer groupies and his bastard children but it was not a question that ever needed to be answered. It was happiness of a kind and one had to end up somewhere. He had not done so badly for himself. Then he thought of the heroin and the cash in the car and he considered that the best thing to do was just carry them over casually to the cabin and not say a thing. He could see the path that led down to the river with the yellow tape on either side and the same warnings about land mines. The whole property was still mined and most of it was off-limits. One had to be careful about getting too liquored up at night and wandering back to one’s cabin outside the marked paths. It was the place to be because it was so remote and so safe. It was alarming about the English couple arriving but one could, presumably, dance around their cluelessness.

Before the rain, Mick walked with them down to the cabin on the river. It stood on a steep bank surrounded by papaya trees. Its wooden terrace looked straight down into the black and ominous river, along which grew what looked like prickly poppy flowers. There was a musty scent in the air, a smell maybe of distant fire smoke.

They laid the suitcase on the terrace and the Scot opened the door for them and turned on the rickety AC to take the edge off the stifling heat. Inside it was bare enough: a bed and a rocking chair.

“Dinner at six. I hope the English aren’t here yet.”

“Me too,” Simon said. “When are they supposed to be?”

“Nae way of saying. They’re coming overland from Thailand.”

“Bloody bad manners. All right, we’ll come up for dinner.”

“The wife is making haggis.”

“Christ.”

“Just joking, ye bastard. It’ll be omelette with chilies.”

When he had gone, Simon and Sothea stretched out on the bed and decided not to shoot up. They could have sex instead. The calm and torpid river seemed to encourage this gentler course of action, its sounds now so close that they subdued all others. The windows had no curtains and so they watched the sky and fell asleep for some time. But Simon, in reality, was thinking continuously. How had his life fallen so low from such heights? He was not a bad person judged by ordinary measures; he had never harmed anyone physically. He had taken Robert’s money, and indeed his name, but Robert had not worked for that money, he had chanced upon it by luck while gambling in a warlord-owned casino. It was hardly clean. A man who wins dirty money is not in a position to defend it from a moral position, he will do so only from self-interest. And so self-interests collide. So what? There will be merely a winner and a loser, those most inevitable of archetypes. One might as well be the winner.

Besides, he had done the English boy a favor. Simon could spot a would-be deserter a mile away. They usually just didn’t have the courage to follow their less conscious desires. They needed a nudge and he had given Robert that nudge. It hadn’t harmed him at all.

He kissed Sothea’s naked arm with its dark superstitious tattoos. They had been living together for a year, brought together by dope, but he still didn’t know anything about her. She had been a waitress in a bar in Battambang but she had ambitions to go to school and become a vet. Was it possible for her to become a vet? He didn’t know. The country was an enigma to him, a forest of confusing signs. And yet it seemed like the easiest of passages from his life in New York to his life here — a matter of a few years during which he had managed to go through a large part, if not all, of his inheritance while doing little more than spinning in the dark. But for Sothea it was a different matter. For her, his self-indulgence was a ticket to somewhere else, though where that was, she had not figured out. Still, she could smell with an infallible instinct his family money, his ease and his self-confidence. There was no mistake about him — he was good luck.

How wrong she was, he thought. The only thing he had going for him was a good education and that was far in the past and as useless as everything else in the past. What a shame he had never taken her to Montauk or the lighthouse at the far end — or to a party overlooking the park. As it was he had to tell her about it over and over. She could not understand why he had left that world for hers.

—

Soon, an electric bell rang out over the darkening forests. It was the Scot’s eccentric dinner bell. He shook the drowsy girl awake and they dressed and went out into a heavy, rainy dusk with a mist rolling down the snaking river. At the loggia, the English guests had still not arrived.

“The driver called,” Mick said, “they’re still at the border.”

Let’s eat quickly then, Simon wanted to say.

“They won’t be here for an hour,” he did say. “Let’s eat now, if it’s all right with you.”

The military lamps came on and the girls laid out mosquito coils. From the wall of trees the frogs barked unseen and raindrops fell from the higher branches with a commotion of their own. They ate a creamy coconut curry made with chicken legs and jasmine rice and with it tall Lao beers. Mick told him, for the thousandth time, how he had come to buy the land from a crony of the former regime strongman Ta Mok and how he had come to make all these handsome furnishings from military material. That piece of shrapnel — it came from a mine in Angola. He knew all about mines. Just as he explained this there was a distant, muffled detonation from far off in the forest and Mick and the girls began laughing. His wife came over and showed them their new baby and the baby was laughing too.

“It’s just a deer,” he said to the other two. “We hear one or two every twenty-four hours. They step on the mines and turn into clouds of blood. It’s quite a sight in the day.”

Sothea turned a wary eye upon her protector. She didn’t like it that deer were blowing themselves up.

“It’s all right,” Simon said into her ear. “They don’t feel a thing. Just pop!”

“Aye,” the Scot said, “a deer is not the smartest.”

“Clouds of blood?” she said.

Simon shrugged. Such was life.

He could sense that she was growing more nervous. She needed her hit and he had withheld it from her. Before long, however, they heard the drone of an approaching motor and a flash of headlights cut through the trees and lit for a moment the side of the main house. It also lit the lines of rain and the sweating bark of the ironwoods and one could see that it was a large, filthy local taxi. Mick stood up with a grunt and moved off to greet the car which had just arrived, bringing with it that rarest of gifts, paying guests. There was a hopeful spring in his step. He whipped a hand over his hair. Simon was furious but held his tongue, and he thought about how he could withdraw from the scene without too much fuss. It was, obviously, too late now and he would have to go through with a certain amount of formalities.

The doors of the car slammed and the figures of two shabby English tourists appeared in the confusion of shadows, and behind them the Khmer driver holding their bags. They came in a group toward the loggia and the whites had a look of frigid alarm, as if their calculation to trust the lush images of a website had suddenly been shown to have backfired.

“It’s just a wee lodge in the mountains — nothing really,” the proud owner was saying, leading the way.

Simon and Sothea were obliged to get up and greet the newcomers and as they did so the driver put down the bag, at Mick’s suggestion, and hung back at the edge of the light thrown down by the crazy shell-casing lamps. Simon looked down at him briefly and a shock went through his body, as if physically. He recognized Ouksa at once. Their eyes did not meet and Simon half turned and took Sothea’s hand and pulled her to one side, to the rail which was darker than the table they were seated at. He was not sure if she would understand or even if she would recall the driver. There was no sign that Ouksa had looked over at them or recognized him. The barangs were busy making their arrangements and the man was paying him. The confusion of the rain might have helped. The transaction was completed and the driver turned away quickly and stepped back toward the car. He had left the engine running and appeared anxious to be on his way without ado. As the visitors struggled onto the loggia Mick stood at the foot of the small flight of steps and watched the car recede, lifting his hand once by way of farewell. It was entirely possible that he knew Ouksa or had had dealings with him in the past. Who could say? Simon came back to the table and they were introduced to Bill and Sarah Miles.

“Robert,” he said to introduce himself, “Robert O’Grieve. This is my wife, Sothea. She’s a vet.”

“Oh, a vet,” the Englishwoman cried.

“Yes,” Sothea said to her in Khmer, “not a whore.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she’s pleased to meet you.”

They were forced to eat all together and the meal therefore dragged on interminably. The visitors rehearsed all the tedious and entirely predictable dramas of their voyage overland from Bangkok. Was there not even one mishap that had afflicted them which he had not heard a hundred times before? Gradually, though, the rain died down and he suggested to Sothea that they go back to the cabin and get to bed early.

“It’s one of those things about living in the country here,” he said to the Mileses. “One goes to bed extremely early. It’s like it can’t be helped.

“At seven?” Mr. Miles said, wide-eyed.

“Sometimes even earlier.”

“I’ll be damned. It’s worse than Chalvington with Ripe.”

“I am sure Mr. Mick will offer you some of his homemade brandy. We call it Khmer brandy but it’s nothing of the sort.”

“It’s a fine drink,” Mick protested. “And it’s on the house!”

“Will it kill us?” Mrs. Miles asked.

“It’s been known tae happen.”

“Maybe it’ll keep the mosquitoes away,” her husband suggested.

“That it will,” Mick said triumphantly.

Simon and Sothea rose and said their good-nights.

“Just don’t go wandering about after four brandies,” Simon said. “That’s my recommendation.”

“Why?” from the Englishwoman.

“You might be mistaken for a deer in the dark.”

They walked back down to the river between the lines of yellow tape and Simon held Sothea’s hand and then held her closer. Suddenly, for some reason, he felt a rush of tenderness for her, a desperate need to know that she loved him back and needed him as much as he needed her.

“Who are those awful people?” she said quietly.

“We call them limeys. English. They’re all right.”

“Are they angry?”

“I don’t know. Did they seem angry?”

“They seemed like they were going to explode.”

“Maybe they will explode.”

Now, more than previously, he wanted to leave before morning. He had always gotten a strange feeling from Ouksa and seeing the driver again had raised an alarm deep within him. It was, like so many other things, an omen — and Simon believed categorically in omens. There had to be a meaning in such a coincidence. Naturally, it might not be a coincidence at all. It was a small region and people crossed each other’s paths all the time. But still, there was something about Ouksa that was not blind. He seemed to know what he was doing at all times. He was someone who kept his ear close to all grapevines. That little slithering dark-eyed snake. He had come into the forest and seen them.

They lay on their bed and shot up with clean needles and then lay quietly in each other’s arms listening to the tree frogs and the cicadas until the lights went off outside and the darkness augmented so that the river itself gave off a kind of black luminescence.

“Are we alone?” she said, thinking that she could hear things in the night.

“Of course we’re alone,” he answered.

Though he was not sure.

“I don’t want to stay here tomorrow,” she said.

“Nor do I. Maybe we’ll leave.”

“Can we leave when the sun comes up?”

“We won’t sleep anyway.”

“Then let’s leave.”

He lay awake wide-eyed. The Cambodian jungle had never made him feel at ease. It had a depth and velvety density that suggested something being concealed and withheld. The birds speaking to him but not saying anything he could find pleasurable. A realm of dinosaurs and reptiles, musical and lilting but also filled with ghosts. It gripped him and yet it left him cold, mentally suspended.

When fear came to him, indeed, Simon always relished it in some way. Fear was the most intense feeling by far, and the most complex. But he was not sure what he was afraid of now. It was just the smallness and madness of the room itself. His life had boiled down to rooms, it was spent entirely in rooms on the roads, but mostly in rooms. A suitcase stuffed with money that was not his, a few items of unwashed clothes and his “happiness gear.” It was vagrancy taken to a fine level.

All his life, considered from a certain perspective, had been leading up to such an outcome. Vagrancy had become second nature to him from an early age. His dropping out from Yale had been the warning sign which even he had not heeded. His family had merely taken it to mean that their pessimism about him — formed during his early years — had proved to be accurate. Old New England families had a strong and tight-lipped fatalist streak. They were personality realists.

They were a bit like Buddhists in that regard. His father had not argued much with him about it; Simon had made the argument that he was better suited to scriptwriting out west. It was not a very original aspiration but he had duly gone out west and written some garbage in a rented house in Twentynine Palms and then moved to Los Angeles and gradually discovered that he had even less industriousness at his disposal than he had talent. Those, however, were the fun years. He went through all the prescribed experiments of the American middle classes. He circled around the Burning Man trust-fund girls in San Francisco, he did the peyote inductions and the Esalen retreats. It was better than nothing.

He tired of it only when his internal restlessness produced the inevitable surfeit and the drugs had begun to wear him down and make him desultory. At twenty-five he found himself in Mendocino making olive oil and living with an Iranian girl. He had plans to write a screenplay based on the life of Carlos Castaneda and his harem of deranged groupies; but it frittered itself away among the olive stills and the garden dinners sweetened with home-grown marijuana. It was hopeless, he realized.

Life was far too enjoyable to waste it working at the mid-level of things. He gave up the idea of writing and wondered instead about traveling for five years, dropping everything and folding up the wigwam. But even that required too much planning. When the old man called him a “worthless sonofabitch” he internally agreed and wondered if there was a remedy to being one.

It was rumored among his horrified family that as a boy of eleven he had tried to burn down a dorm at his prep school in Vermont. Through a series of hysterical confrontations he had gradually persuaded them that it was a lie, a defamation on the part of his hated schoolmates, but the reality was that he had tried to burn down the dorm and kill all the sleeping boys, whom he loathed. The strange thing was that through those hysterical confrontations he had come to doubt his own memory of the event and to start believing that he really was innocent and persecuted. Moreover, he enjoyed this slippage, this moving from one version (the true one) to another one (the false one) which cast him in a better light. It seemed to him more truthful to the spirit of things, not the letter of things. He was not a real arsonist, any more than he was a real dropout from Yale.

He had suffered a mental breakdown during his second year. He was diagnosed with clinical depression and began to take the medications. But the chemistry did not agree with him; he was going down to New York every weekend and hiding out in a place on Rivington which he kept secret from his family. He began going over to Brooklyn to score his smack and “China white” in the streets around the Gowanus projects.

It soon became his favorite area of the city — he sometimes picked up from his dealer on the Carroll Street footbridge overlooking the canal or on Butler nearby where there was always a strong smell of roasting coffee from the warehouses. He would sit in the Thomas Greene park after hours, watching the trucks shooting down Third Avenue and the crack whores walking alone up from the darkness of Douglass Street. He was always there, half high or mostly stoned but with enough money to keep them happy.

When he went down Nevins they called out “Skinny” to him, because everyone on the street had to have a name. They took him onto the warehouse rooftops for blow jobs or into the empty Douglass and Degraw swimming pool. Years later, when he first arrived in Phnom Penh, it made him think of that half-forgotten place.

That was his secret life at Yale. On other weekends he went to family dinners out on Long Island or at the Pierre Hotel. He insulted his sisters after a few bottles of champagne and then he took the last train back to New Haven. There must have been something about these extremes that he relished. It was easy for an upper-class boy to slum, many of them did, but eventually they grew out of it and took the jobs desperately being offered to them on Wall Street by their alarmed kin. He had no intention of doing the same.

When his grandfather died, the old ladies’ footwear manufacturer from Worcester unexpectedly left him a sizable amount of money. There was nothing his father could do to thwart the transfer, and Simon packed up his bags and left Mendocino without a second thought. He always left without a second thought. He was always free to roll in a leisurely fashion downhill, as he thought of it. For how can you roll uphill?

He drifted back to New York, then Paris and Barcelona and a few other cities suitable for rich boys who didn’t need to engage with the local economy. His funds began to diminish but he had not paid attention. His fleeting businesses rose briefly and then failed predictably, and as each one failed he moved on to a new one with his own money and then his grandfather’s money and then, at long last, the money of an uncle here and half-forgotten cousin there. His family began to think of him as a wastrel, though the word was old-fashioned relative to what he actually was. But throughout it all he never lost his taste for reading and beautiful things and his careful, attentive visual snobberies, which were applied to everything from female makeup to chessboards and bespoke shoes. He knew that such things didn’t save you, but they did pass the time. It was only in the East, however, that he had finally come to understand that he was good at nothing and that being good at nothing did not prevent him from being a success. He had learned to make money in new ways, he had adapted to his own failure and turned it into a way of being happy.

—

They did not sleep, as he had foreseen, and during the night a storm broke over the mountain and they came outside onto the cabin’s porch and smoked. They dressed and packed the suitcase again and Simon wrote a quick note to his friend. Pressing matters, no time to explain. He left money for a night’s stay with the note and left it on the bed and then they whiled away the dark hours coming out of their high. Simon had no idea where they would go next. It was just a matter of disappearing for a few days and it was likely better to move than stay in one place.

Perhaps they would go to the north and find a village to hide in. He had done it before after a drug sale had gone wrong. He had once sold cocaine to a Khmer club owner who had decided to kill him because he thought it wasn’t pure — a jolly caper. He had learned all the tricks of evasion, the thousand and one ways of disappearing.

He wondered what his dead father would think seeing him in this pitiful condition. That thunderous and silky Wall Street man would have been amazed more than outraged, but deep down he would not have been surprised. He told all his friends that Simon was “scum.” His only son had never worked properly for a living and his tastes had always been dubious. A violent death in Cambodia would not have struck the old man as unexpected, Simon thought bitterly. It would have seemed logical. A body floating in the river at dawn in a pair of Brooks Brothers socks.

It was about five when they got going at last. The rain came down with a lazy savagery as they struggled up to the house and threw the suitcase into the back of the car. Everyone was asleep, and the cicadas roared in the forests that Mick had reputedly bought from Ta Mok, Pol Pot’s most trusted man. They sat in the front seats for a moment and began to laugh. They were still half stoned and the effects of the heroin had not cleared from their senses. Nevertheless, they started the car and drove quietly back down the slippery hill toward the track that curved down the mountain’s side. The first light was about to reveal the papaya trees stark and burned in the near distance.

THIRTEEN

Ouksa drove down the same track with a stunned disbelief in his own luck. Standing by his car and staring into the loggia he had noticed and recognized Simon at once, but controlling his instinct to make himself known or extend a greeting he had turned away as if nothing had happened and driven away as coolly as he could manage. In the driving, bestial rain the act had been easy. But he shook with excitement.

So the barang con man had made it up to the Moonrise Lodge. It was a place which all the cab drivers around the border knew, even if they had few reasons to ever go there. He had come up there with his girl to hide out while the landlord went through his abandoned rental by the river and the locals whispered about the scandalous goings-on which had gone rippling through their lives for months.

It was said the American had thrown a man into the river while high on Ecstasy. They said, too, that he went asking for the bodies of barang suicides so he could pay for their funeral expenses in exchange for going through their pockets. No one could imagine how much money he had made this way. Thousands. People had seen ghosts walking around his property, the souls of the dead walking through the wild fields that surrounded Beauchamp’s house and sloped down to the river. It was an evil business; he was an evil man in his way. Gently spoken and mannered but off on the devil’s business. The Ap was close to him. Now he had ripped off the nice young Englishman and he had heard about that too. The boatman who took Robert south had returned north and talked about the matter high and low. Paid to keep his mouth shut, he had duly opened it for nothing.

It was one hot Sunday that Ouksa had heard about it in Battambang and he drove down to the river to seek that man out. The boatman was drunk in a run-down bar and he bought him a drink and took him down to the water so they could talk.

“Hey, brother,” he said to him, “can’t you keep your voice down a bit? Just let me buy you some drinks and talk to me. Just you and me.”

“What’s it to you, brother?”

“It’s something I should know about. I know that barang kid.”

“You do — how’s that?”

“I was his driver for a day.”

“That English kid?”

“Yeah, the shy one. So you took him downriver?”

“The boss paid me to take him.”

“The American?”

“Him. We carried him out and put him in the boat.”

“Funny business. Where’d you drop him off?”

“A place I know. He went into the city.”

“How’d you know that?”

The man looked at him with cold and vapid eyes.

“The drivers told me at the jetty. Where else could he go?”

Ouksa bought him a second Saeng. The man was tottering, the sun in his face, and flies danced around them and shimmered against the water.

“Was he able to walk?” Ouksa said.

“He walked. He woke up during the ride.”

“What was it all about, brother?”

The man laughed. “How the fuck should I know?”

“He must have said something.”

“The American didn’t say anything. The English kid asked for his bag on the boat, but it wasn’t there.”

“A bag?”

“Yeah, his bag was missing.”

Ouksa bit his lip and looked down at the river.

“Did you come back to the American’s jetty after?”

“I did. The American and his girl were there. They were getting into their car.”

“A sweet job for you.”

“I’ll say. I didn’t have to kill anyone.”

The joke went nowhere.

“No,” Ouksa said grimly. “You didn’t have to kill anyone.” Then he said, “What’s your name, brother?”

“Thy.”

He walked back to his taxi and thought. It was clear enough to a clear mind. The man had followed him and pestered him for another drink so he gave him a buck and got into his taxi. He then drove off angrily, feeling that he had missed out on something. He had gotten to the two grand first but he had let it slip through his fingers like a fool. The American had not been so stupid. Eagle eyes, that one. He remembered the blue eyes that had tracked him, dismissed him and yet knew everything about him.

For days he lay by the river in the afternoons watching the boats go by. When it rained he lay on the backseat of his car and slept and when the evening was dry he went to a bar he knew and sat there impassively slinging back brandy shots and following the girls with his eyes.

He trawled the temples looking for soft touches, preferably elderly Europeans always ready to overpay. Campy blond girls who might be up for some extra fun. They never were. They didn’t come here for sex. And the sights were not visited much in the rainy season.

One day that week he had a Buddhist group from Vancouver who wanted to see Wat Sampeau and he took four of them there for an exorbitant price. He walked up with them to the sinister caves and took them down to see the carved Buddha where the dead were remembered and the shrines sitting on top of their spurs of rock with prayer ribbons fluttering in lines all around them. He didn’t like going there, or any haunted place, but the money was good. It was not, however, enough for him or his crippled wife. She could no longer work and for six months he had been driving the roads every day to make enough money to keep them sane. What use had the prayer flags for her? She had smashed her leg in a metal workshop.

The Buddhists would never understand such a thought, though they would certainly empathize with it. So he walked with them down the winding path that looked over a sea of dark green jungle with the loudspeakers of the wat by the road echoing up, and he talked amiably about all the temples he knew while his mind raced ahead into a dark and sinister future that would certainly be his. His wife’s smashed leg seemed insignificant next to the memorials to the thousands murdered on top of Wat Sampeau but he had not even been born in that period and it didn’t mean as much to him as it apparently did to the rich Canadians. They gave him a handsome tip for the day and bought his wife a pair of new shoes which she could hardly wear.

He thought about her asleep in their house at the edge of the fields as he waited in the bend of the road below the mountain where Moonrise stood. It was still raining and he turned off the car’s lights and waited with all the patience of which he was remarkably capable. He had called at eleven and told her to go to sleep, he was on a job for wealthy Chinese. She knew he was often with the Chinese, even though he loathed them. They were essential to his fortunes but they disgusted him.

Often, in fact, his clients filled him with a bottomless and directionless contempt. Especially the gamblers who rolled around Pailin while he waited for them for hours outside casinos and karaoke joints. Those parasites who thought his country was a genocide museum and a playground but nothing too serious. Who behaved as if he didn’t exist. He hated the way they threw money at him, with a flick of the wrist, as if he was an extra in their shimmery theater of lust and poker. Well, I exist all right, he said aloud as he sat behind the wheel of his taxi. I exist a lot. A car’s lights had appeared.

It was the Saber, which had reached the bottom of the mountain track and had nosed its way onto the main road. It hesitated and Ouksa heard the engine tick as the driver let it idle and dithered. Finally it turned toward Pailin on that lightless road and when it did so he saw the red taillights move off at a fair clip. He started his own engine but left the lights and followed. The rain helped him, because nothing could be seen in a rearview mirror without lights.

Simon drove at about fifty toward the east and Sothea soon fell asleep on his shoulder. They had the radio on and it was old Khmer pop from the seventies. Ouksa followed a quarter of a mile behind and when the Saber slowed he slowed as well, judging the distance expertly. The Saber was slowing again as if it was about to stop. Simon indeed was looking for a spot to pull over so he could pee and take a breather. Sothea had woken and he told her he was going to stop for a few minutes and they could clear their heads. She rubbed her eyes and felt with a quiet instinct that something was behind them and turned to look through the muddy rear window. Seeing nothing, she was half reassured. They then pulled over into a muddy verge, beyond which stood tall sugarcane. They turned off the engine but kept the lights on and got out into the rain, which had lessened, and walked to the edge of the cane, which trembled gently in the rain. She went on a little ahead and entered the glade of cane that reached above her head. She was exhausted but she needed to pee as well and her head was still spinning from the dope. It was, from Ouksa’s perspective, the moment of opportunity.

He had stopped his own car down the road and crept along the hard shoulder until he was behind the parked Saber. He had taken out of his trunk a baseball bat he always kept there. Every driver in that semi-lawless place had a weapon of some kind and his was a mild one. He saw the white man standing with his back to the road at the edge of the sugarcane and the girl slipping into the thicket ahead of him. He crept up to the car and hid behind it and then moved silently around it — still covered by darkness — and like a classical dancer aimed his pitch with the bat with an elegance that surprised himself.

Simon, at last, sensed that something was amiss and began to turn, his eyes wide, and the bat smacked against his head and sent him reeling downward into the ditch that separated the verge from the plantation. He rolled down there with a wild grunt and his arms flailed about for a moment and then he lay quite still as the blood poured into his eyes and he saw something for a moment — the clouds, of course — and Sothea, seeing the whole thing, let out a cry that reached his ears just as they were disappearing.

Ouksa knew that he had achieved everything with one blow. He jumped over the ditch and plunged into the cane in pursuit of the girl. The stalks were so pregnant with water that as he crashed through them he was showered with drops. But soon, as the girl shot ahead of him, surprisingly fast and nimble and quiet, he passed out of the beam of the Saber’s headlights and the total darkness gradually got the better of him. He began to curse and lash out at the sugarcane with the bloodied bat. He could not afford to leave the two cars and the body like that by the side of the road, visible to anyone who happened to pass by. Soon, therefore, he slowed down and felt short of breath and dizzy and he dropped the bat and rested his hands on either knee while he caught his breath. He listened as he straightened himself up and he knew the girl was faster than him and had disappeared entirely into that sea of vegetation. He couldn’t hear her but he knew that she was still running, because the prey will always try a little harder than the predator. He wanted then to call out to her softly, in their language, and tell her lies, recall her and draw her back in. He had nothing against her, after all. He wanted to tell her sensibly that he was only doing this for his crippled wife, and it was no one’s fault that she had broken her leg in a metalworker’s shop. It had nothing to do with her, but by the same token it had nothing to do with him either. It was circumstances, little one.

Abandoning the hunt, he returned to his car and threw the bat back into the trunk. Then he looked up and down the empty road and went over to the Saber and turned off the lights. All the doors were open and he went through the car thoroughly. He found the passports and the suitcase, which was on the backseat, and when he opened it and tipped out the clothes he found the money wrapped in a plastic bag and the heroin equipment. There was some dope he could sell but some instinct told him to leave it well alone and just take the dollars. It was the simpler path. He also had a distaste for drugs and their culture. He therefore left everything except the cash and the passports — they indeed might be valuable — and he went back to his car and put them all underneath the front passenger seat. He rested again, drenched in rain and perspiration and anxiety, and then returned to the Saber, closing its doors. He went back down to the ditch and stood above the body and wondered what he should do with it. This, at least, he had not thought through very well. He could leave it there with the heroin in the car — the local cops would likely shrug — or he could drag it back into the car. Or he could drag the body far into the sugarcane. In this way it would not be discovered for a while longer, though it would imply the existence of a person who had dragged it there.

The best would be to dispose of it in a grave but he didn’t have a shovel. He turned and walked to the Saber and took the keys and toyed with the idea of taking it instead of his own car, but the stupidity of that move dawned on him and he put the keys back. He returned to his own car and the urge to just drive off took hold. There was no trace of him at the scene, nothing connecting him. Sometimes it was better to leave things as simple as possible, and he knew too that the girl had not even seen his face. He was about to take off, but as he opened the car door a pair of lights came into view on the road and he was caught in a moment of doubt.

It was a car moving quite quickly up the road toward him and there was not time to do anything but get into his taxi and try to get away before it caught up with him. He turned the key, the engine started, but it was already too late. The other car, a black SUV of some kind, had already drawn level and then swerved brusquely into the verge and interposed itself between the taxi and the Saber.

Ouksa backed his car into the road but a man had already descended from the SUV and was walking around the front of his vehicle and into the road ahead of him, his hand extended. He could sense from this authoritative gesture alone that it was a policeman and the life went rushing out of him. Everything in him went slack and despondent and he let go of the wheel and slammed on the brakes and wild thoughts moved through him. A few miles away, his crippled wife woke up suddenly and opened her eyes and for a moment she had a premonition of disaster, a certainty that things would turn out badly for both of them.

FOURTEEN

Davuth had held up his hand and the frightened driver he could see behind the wheel had instinctively obeyed the silent command and stopped the car he was reversing. Davuth went up to him and showed him his badge and asked him what he was doing. It was in a cool, disdainful voice, the voice that stopped all comers, and there was no need to ramp up the pitch. He knew already that the driver had no ready explanation and he knew already what had happened because all the signs were there and logic dictated that Ouksa had done what he had done. He told him to park the car and come over with him to the Saber and he told him to do it slowly. Ouksa did as he was told and they walked together across the muddy open ground to the edge of the cane field. Davuth asked him his name, and all the rest.

“It’s a barang, isn’t it?” he said to him as they came to the ditch.

The policeman had a strong flashlight and shone it down as far as the white shirt and the paralyzed blue eyes. For Ouksa everything looked at once very different. The frogs sang right across the vast fields of cane and there was a gentleness in the rain.

“I didn’t know him,” he said quietly.

“You followed him here from Moonrise. I know all about him.”

“He threatened me — we pulled over.”

“No, no. Nothing like that. Shall we go have a look at what’s in your car?”

“You don’t believe me,” Ouksa said.

“There’s nothing to believe.”

Ouksa could do nothing but go with Davuth back to the car and show him everything that was under the seat. The policeman took the passports and the money and simply walked to his car and threw them in the back. He was feeling rather pleased with himself. It had been, after all, an extremely easy trap to load and spring and he had done no work but wait and observe. The driver was a simpleton. He told Ouksa to shut up and stay by the Saber and he went through the car himself until he found the clothes and heroin equipment and the dope itself. It was to the driver’s credit that he had left it behind. He took that as well and threw it into his own car and then returned to the shivering and terrified youth.

“Where are you from?”

Ouksa spilled everything about himself.

Davuth said, “You’re probably wondering what I’m going to do.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m not going to do anything. I’m going to give you a shovel and you’re going to take all their belongings and your bat into the sugarcane and bury them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you’re going to go home to your wife and shut up about everything you’ve done. It’s not difficult to understand, is it?”

Ouksa shook his head, and his misery was tinged with relief. Davuth could sense his insolence and his fear jostling in the atmosphere between them. It was a small struggle and he had to impose himself more fully.

He said, “If you ever say anything I’ll come down there and shoot you myself. I’ll blow your head off like a chicken. I’ll come and shoot you in the head and say you were a suspect in a murder and that’s all, you’ll be forgotten.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’re clear then.”

Davuth relaxed. The worm was a worm now, but he was not yet properly crushed.

What about the barang?

“Where did the barang get all this money?”

Ouksa said he had no idea.

“No idea? You’re a liar, you—”

Davuth stepped up to him and took him by the throat. He had been a policeman all his life, since he was thirteen or fourteen. He knew how to make fear abundant. He knew how to shake them up and make them think of the afterlife in a mass grave.

“Where did he get it?”

Faltering, Ouksa said, “He stole it.”

“He stole it? Who was he? Who was that rich fuck?”

“He was a drug dealer, sir.”

“From where?”

“American.”

“American—”

“Yes, sir.”

“And he stole it from who?”

Now Ouksa found a petty courage.

“I don’t know. From a barang.”

“You don’t know? Then how do you know he stole it?”

“I heard from the boatman.”

“You’re a liar.”

“No, it’s true. They said—”

“What did they say?”

“—he took it from a barang.”

“Where is that other barang?”

“He left.”

“Who was that boatman, brother?”

“His name is Thy.”

To Davuth it seemed probable enough. He relaxed his grip and the tension ebbed. His point had been made and the driver had been shaken down.

“I’ll give you a hundred,” he said. “For digging that hole and burying their belongings. It’s fair.”

“It’s not much of a deal,” Ouksa dared answer.

“You little worm. You’re the one who did it. You deserve nothing. I could shoot you now — nothing would be said.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Shut up and get digging.”

Davuth went to his car and took out a shovel and threw it at him. He turned on the Saber’s headlights and sat on the bonnet and lit a cigarette. In response, Ouksa looked up at the sky: three hours of dark remaining, maybe two or less. He didn’t know what time it was. He went to the barang’s car and took out all the stuff that was in it and rolled it into the suitcase and dragged it out. It was a task intended to humiliate him and he knew it. Before the belongings were disposed of, however, Davuth sifted through them one last time. There were two shirts and he turned the collars and saw that they were from a tailor in Phnom Penh called Vong.

“Dig the hole properly,” Davuth said, “and don’t be lazy. Dig it a good way in and make it deep.”

—

The rain had now lessened but the ground was soft and sticky. Ouksa went into the cane a fair way and threw down the shovel, then went back to the ditch and began to drag the suitcase over to the same spot. It was an infuriating struggle. His feet slipped in the mud and he was not strong enough to drag it effectively. He couldn’t understand why it was so heavy. It took him the better part of ten minutes to pull the thing out of view of the road and close enough to the shovel. He cursed the policeman and his devious and well-timed arrival and picked up the shovel and began to drive it into the sod between the thick sugarcane stalks. It was a bestial task even if the rain had ceased. When the hole was finished he was exhausted and wiped his face and stood still with his ears alert. Far out in the sugarcane he could hear a distant, tiny sobbing. It was almost like the wail of a small animal, but it was certainly human. The girl, lost and bewildered and alone out there in the sea of cane. He wondered if Davuth heard it too. It was only now, surprisingly, that he thought of the Ap and a cold fear gripped him and he rolled the suitcase into its grave with a furious urgency. He filled it in with the same earth, smacked it down with the back of the shovel and dragged himself to the verge as the light was beginning to change. The policeman was still sitting coolly on the hood as if lost in thought and around him lay a circle of cigarette butts. His cowboy boots had been polished and they had not lost their luster. Ouksa went up to the SUV and laid the shovel against its side and said that it was done.

“Did you pat it down?”

“It looks like nothing’s there.”

Davuth threw the cigarette he was smoking to the ground and then said, “Pick up all the butts and put them in your car. Burn your shoes when you get home. I’m going to say I found a car by the roadside.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ouksa crawled about picking up the butts. Like a dog, the policeman thought. Like a vulture.

Davuth said, “Did you hear something out there?”

“I heard an animal — an animal was crying.”

“There it is again.”

The policeman slid off the hood and walked up to the cane. The sobbing, again. But now so far off they could hardly hear it.

“There was someone else,” he said sharply.

He went back to Ouksa, who had stood up, and slapped him hard in the face.

“There was someone else here.”

“Yes, a girl,” the driver stammered.

“She ran off?”

The driver nodded.

“That’s not very good news.”

“She didn’t see my face.”

“How the fuck do you know what she saw?”

Davuth remembered. The cute Khmer girl who was under twenty-five. Did it matter that she had seen Ouksa’s wretched face?

He pulled out his pistol and walked yet again to the cane and thought about going in and finishing it. But it would be impossible to find her. It was going to have to be the way it was and by and large it would work well enough. It might be more practicable to dispose of Ouksa. He considered it. But no. It would only complicate things further. He reholstered the gun and strolled back to the SUV and smiled at the muddied youth and told him to just drive away and pretend that nothing had happened. He wasn’t very smart, he said to him, but it was better than being the American. He should thank Buddha for being alive and with all his limbs.

“And a hundred dollars better off.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It could have been you,” Davuth said, looking down at the ground to make sure that Ouksa had picked up all the butts. “You’d be reincarnated as a cockroach.”

“I understand,” Ouksa said and bowed his head.

“Now help me carry the American into my car.”

—

They struggled down into the ditch. With difficulty they dragged the body back to the SUV and rolled it into the back. It had a leaden sadness, a pointlessness. Davuth covered it with a towel and then he walked Ouksa over to his car and shone the torch into his face. He saw how colorless and soulless it had become, how his fear had grown and was now uncontrollable. It was gentleness that would seal the affair now. He turned off the beam and sighed and gave Ouksa a cigarette.

He said, “That was a stupid thing you did. Now you’ll have to live with it. Go to the temple and ask forgiveness. Pray and make merit.”

“I will, sir.”

Ouksa was now sobbing, his whole frame shaking.

“I didn’t do it for me—” he began.

“It doesn’t matter who you did it for. You have to make merit.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Make merit and think about your sin.”

“Yes, sir.”

It’s pathetic, Davuth thought, and walked back to his car. Pathetic and necessary.

He took out the passports and looked them over. He had expected one to be the girl’s, but it was not. An Englishman. He turned to Ouksa.

“Who is this?”

“Don’t know, sir.”

“Robert. You know this one?”

Ouksa shook his head.

“Why was his passport under your seat?”

“I found them together in the barang’s car. I don’t know—”

The face was open. It was childish and blond, with wide-open slightly crazy eyes, those of a man who did not believe what had just happened to him. Was he alive or dead?

“Why did he…?”

Davuth stared out at the sugarcane as if the answer might be there.

One can feel a human heart from a great distance; the hunter feels his prey even in a great darkness.

“They must be friends,” he murmured. “In any case — you don’t know.”

“No, sir.”

“It doesn’t make sense. But you can go. I’m getting sick of looking at your miserable face. Wash your damn hands when you get home. Don’t talk to your wife. Don’t talk to your children. I’ll know if you do.”

—

Davuth waited for Ouksa to drive away before walking thoughtfully around the scene. Tire marks and footprints, yes, but that day’s rain would wash them away quickly. There was just the Saber. It was best left where it was, untampered and abandoned. It was a rusting hulk anyway, it would be scavenged by midday. He walked down to the cane again and listened for the sound he had heard earlier.

The stalks, defying him, waved back and forth in the breeze and disclosed nothing. The horizon was lit. Everything had returned to normal. He thought it all through as slowly as he could and soon he realized that the less he did the better. There was no one above him in the police hierarchy at that local level who might look over his shoulder or ask him an inconvenient question. He was magnificently alone.

He drove down to the river amid the cock crows and went to a sand spit he knew and dragged the body down there and let it go gently into the water and waited until the current shifted it and bore it out into deeper water where it could move. He felt a quiet satisfaction doing it. He was familiar with death, there was nothing magical or awesome about it. It appeared and it disappeared and in that respect it was very much like life.

FIFTEEN

Davuth’s station lay seven miles downriver from that place. It was an old French schoolhouse with perforated cement windows in some rooms and a dusty yard shaded by dying trees. There were two cars and a motorbike and a servant cleaned the rooms and made the two men meals when his other officer was there. There was a desolation about the road the station stood on. A few women had food stalls there during the day and by the gates there was always a tray of split chicken pieces and fish roasting slowly in the sun. The pale blue sign with the words Police Station in English and Khmer was slowly rusting at the edges and beginning to look unimposing. He sat alone for many hours in his office with the blinds down smoking bad cigars and reading horoscopes in the local papers.

When the Internet was up he played online poker and lost small amounts week by week, but indifferently and with a kind of method, and when it was down he played patience with himself and talked on the phone with the business owners he shook down now and then. He called his daughter at her school and told her to be home on time and thought for five minutes every day of his dead wife and then rode around the area in the SUV looking for what he called “signs.” His days were usually empty and serene. On most of them, he went to the river and sat there quietly with a packed lunch and waited for the bodies of barangs to show up. It was quite a rare occurrence but there was one every month and then he would be busy.

They were mostly young, early middle age. Europeans, Australians, a few Americans and Canadians, people drifting eastward, doping up in Laos and Luang Prabang and coming down in the dry season to the places in the kingdom where they could winter for a few dollars and party among themselves. They picked up Khmer girls and Yaa Baa and Burmese heroin and went their merry way en route to enlightenment. The curious thing was that he had seen more of them in these last years.

They were middle-class and unemployed, or so it seemed, their education now of little value, and they seemed to be able to scrounge enough money to take leave of their senses for months on end. Once upon a time, the Khmers had been in awe of them. But now their dirtiness and scruffiness and unruliness had dimmed their image at the very moment that the Chinese and the Thais had come into considerable amounts of money. The barangs no longer seemed as formidable as their grandparents, even if their grandparents had been hippies in the sixties. At least the hippies back then had class — though the sixties were an age that seemed prehistoric from the perspective of a Khmer of fifty-four, precisely because he remembered its peaceful wonders. Back then the kingdom had been a paradise on earth. The king upon his throne, the guerrillas far away in their jungles, the war in Vietnam not yet close and callous in the day-to-day. The streets were filled with girls in miniskirts. But he, to tell the truth, had mightily enjoyed the Revolution.

The barang grandchildren of that age now wandered the East with no prospects and they dropped like drunken flies into his river, forcing him to scoop them out. Naturally he knew all about the American (though he had pretended otherwise to the gullible Ouksa), but even the American could not pay for all the cremations. He, Davuth, did his best. He went through the possessions that were left behind — usually little more than a few rags and useless books but with a family heirloom ring here and there — and then went through all the desultory procedures. The call to the relevant embassy, the filling-out of the report forms, the inventories and then, lastly, the sad and lonely cremation at the wat with only himself present.

He would wait for weeks for relatives to appear; they rarely did. The remains were forwarded to the embassy and nobody looked very seriously at the paperwork. But he was paid nothing and it was expected of him. Over the years he had taken advantage of the situation. The missing rings and wallets and brooches and credit cards were never a subject of inquiry by his superiors. Quietly, he sold them on the black market and saved up for his daughter’s college fund. Everyone has to live, no matter how they do it.

He made himself a coffee in the station kitchen and called the maid and told her she could stay home that day. He knew that someone would call from the river in about two or three hours and he waited patiently for that call while he sipped his coffee and watched the sun rise over the dust-blown road. His officer was away for the morning having a medical examination. He went out into the first rays of the sun and sat in a chair and looked over at the SUV, which he had cleaned thoroughly. While it was still dark he had driven to his house, burned the towel and the newspapers from the back and then taken the money and the passports and put them in the safe in his room. Before coming to the station he took out the passports, looked them over again and decided to take them with him to the station. He looked at them again now. The American’s was covered with stamps from many countries. The Englishman’s had nothing in it. They looked like men who were polar opposites and yet their passports were together. They were not together for reasons he yet understood, but the face of the Englishman had something sympathetic and unnerving about it. The eyes were so straight, there was no deviance in them, and he was only twenty-eight. His passport had been issued in London that same year. He did not look like the usual drifters who passed through Battambang — far from it. He looked like a wide-eyed innocent from a small town somewhere, but even the innocent can be driven mad by experience.

Now the American was dead, and where was the Englishman? No one would ever give up their passport willingly.

The American and his girl — he had seen them somewhere. At one of the bars on the water, maybe, long ago. A man spinning in his happiness in expensive clothes. He remembered the clothes, as one does in this country. A well-tailored man stands out.

“They all die like that,” he said aloud. Casually, as if it were nothing.

He looked at his watch, and as he did so, the phone rang and it was the owner of a riverside café saying there was a body near the piers under the temple at a place he knew a mile downriver. He drove there calmly. The body had become entangled in the beams of the jetty and hung there while a swarm of construction workers fussed around trying to disentangle it. Finally they succeeded and the limp rag doll was brought to terra firma. The American’s skin had changed color and something had taken a bite out of his left shin. They laid him on the mudflat and Davuth stood there and took notes and asked everyone to clear off and go stand farther away. Then he had an ambulance called and the body was transferred to the police station. There it was laid in the garage while a few photographs were taken and the coroner came and he and Davuth talked alone in the field behind the station. The man was an old collaborator and they saw eye to eye in these matters. Autopsies were obligatory but sometimes they were slyly overlooked. The man observed that the American seemed to have suffered damage to the head but it might have happened in the water. Indeed it might, Davuth agreed, and they had a smoke and talked about other things and soon they walked back to the garage and Davuth suggested they cremate the body that day and have done with it. The coroner was in agreement. Another barang who had gotten high and thrown himself into the river in a moment of ecstasy or despair — for were those two states not often one and the same? They would quietly split any proceeds between them and life would flow on and the usual busybody from the embassy would drive up and ask about those same belongings. “We couldn’t find anything,” Davuth would say and life, yet again, would flow on nowhere toward its mysterious and nihilistic destination.

—

Late in the afternoon he took the body to a wat and had it cremated by the monks he knew. They said prayers and he gave them a small donation out of the money he’d made and then he waited patiently while the ashes were packaged and he asked them to keep them there for a week while the paperwork went through. He had his customary cheroot and walked back out into the early evening and he saw that at the top of the hill the young monks were lounging about outside their dorms and looking down — as if at a sport — at the bridge that was being built across the river. He went up there out of curiosity and sat on a wall and looked at the same thing. The half-built bridge, the curve of the river. Women washed clothes in the shallows, their long hair unfurled. A horse stood there with them, its head dipped toward the water, and young boys swam in a deeper pool near the bridge. The workers were drifting away at their day’s end. Some had built fires and were cooking fish in the open. He looked up at the huge trees that towered above the dorms and one of the boy monks offered to show him something unusual for a little tip.

They walked in among the trees and it was as if night had arrived here first, bringing with it the stirred nocturnal insects and the stillness. Yet the sky was blue; there was no rain. The boy took him to the densest part of the trees and made him stand still and look up and then he abruptly clapped his hands and there was a generalized stirring in the treetops and, as if with one will, the thousands of bats hanging there erupted into life and rose into the air with a noise like locusts.

The boy turned to see his reaction and the policeman rolled back on his heels for a moment and a dark superstition came into his mind and wrecked everything there.

But then he let out a laugh and shook his head. The monks were watching them and their faces, by contrast, were immensely grave. To them it was not quite a joke or a stunt. Davuth controlled his fear as the bats then came whizzing down into the lower parts in a crazed confusion and when they had finally calmed he strode back out to the embankment and walked down to his car with something resolved in his mind. He drove back to his house and saw that his daughter had returned from school. She was seated at the kitchen table doing her schoolwork. Calm and self-contained, like many girls at that age.

He kissed her forehead and she looked up for a moment and he passed into his room where the safe was and closed the door. He took a quick cold shower, then opened the safe and looked at the money and then at the passport of the Englishman. It was not avarice he felt as he went through the possibilities that had now opened before him. Something told him that a road lay ahead of him and that the road was made for him and no one else. The Englishman was also on the road and the money Davuth had inherited was not the end of the money that could be had. That barang was now a nonperson, a man who had ceased to exist. Did that not make him uniquely vulnerable? He, Davuth, on the other hand, would be invulnerable when hunting him down. The idea gave him a twisted pleasure.

Then he locked everything in the safe and went into the kitchen and made his daughter dinner. They had a housekeeper who could come whenever needed and the old woman often looked after the girl when he was away on cases. He would call her in the morning. For now he made fried rice heavily sauced with prahok, the fermented fish paste. His daughter looked up and watched him with big cool skeptical eyes. She sensed everything about him.

“What did you do at school today?” he asked.

She told him, unconvincingly.

“I might be going away for a few days,” he said as he sat down with the rice and the prahok. “It’s just another job.”

“Are you looking for a bad man?”

“Not really. It’s just a job.”

“But is it a bad man?”

He shrugged. “What is a bad man?”

They ate in silence and he glanced through her exercise book. It was filled with figures of algebra, simple calculations, diagrams he could not understand. His own schooling had been interrupted by the Revolution and never resumed, but those abstractions, he always felt, were reprieves from the relentless realities of life, small delusions that paid no dividends. They had never been of any use to him, but later they would be of use to her. Education was a magic that some could use.

“Never mind about bad men,” he said, and stroked her hair. “You don’t need to think about that.”

He closed the book and gave her permission to watch television for a while. As she did so he took a beer from the fridge and went out into his little garden. He sat there looking at the clear moon and its portentous halo — a sign, surely, of ominous things to come. He felt the pressing smallness and meanness of that garden now, the evidence that he was just scraping by for all the perks he creamed from his profession. It was never enough. He wanted a house with a swimming pool and an iron gate, many things that did not come easily to lowly men. He would have to retire soon and then his slowly augmenting fund for his daughter would come to a standstill. It was not far off and he had to make the most of his remaining days of corruption and opportunity and profit. They were numbered like the fingers of his hands and as his commander had taught him to do long ago, one had to chop those fingers off one by one without thinking too much about the pain.

He thought about this later, too, when he was alone watching DVDs after his daughter had gone to bed. An HBO series called Vikings, which he had grown fond of. The Vikings, barangs of the far north in a distant time, went about with their axes assailing the English, cutting into their flesh with pleasure. Had it really been like that, the killing days? The men with blades smiling like the Vikings — seemingly all the time — and wading through fields and villages of wattle with an intention that was, after all, inscrutable. How they hated the English Christians. They loved to spit on their crucifixes. It was fascinating — the pleasure of the desecration. Did they really enjoy the releasing of blood and the insolent disturbance of Dhamma?

He had to think this over since it had been such a theme in his own life. And it was at night that his memories came alive again and when he became aware that the ghosts of the murdered came alive as well and roamed across the land. It was known to everyone in the villages. His own past, too, was reenacted nightly in this way. He sometimes thought that in a demented way his past was very short, almost nonexistent. He had been a child in the sixties, in the happy time. But what did he remember of that?

The devious King Sihanouk in white and the music of Ros Sothea. The song called “Venus.” But the Angkar said it was all an illusion. There was no happiness then, it had all been a facade.

Later, it seemed that his life had begun with the Revolution and many men had said the same thing. Their lives began on April 17. It began then on that day, but when would it end? Where would his soul migrate to?

I’ll be an ant, he sometimes thought. I’ll be crushed by the heel of a schoolgirl on her way to school. I’ll be the size of a crushed seed.

“The blood debt must be paid with blood,” the Angkar used to say. “To show you mercy is no gain, to destroy you is no loss.”

Even before 1975, before he had become a kamabhipal for the Angkar, visions came to save and destroy him. They lay in the fields in terror when the B-52s came upon them. They avoided touching the ground with their faces so that the vibrations of the bombs would not give them nosebleeds. On the far horizons of those summer days the red dust rose in a wall to the height of half a mile. Beautiful, astonishing. Silent and somber beyond the cassava fields. It was like the oncoming of Vishnu, destroyer of worlds.

Through his village in the midst of these dust storms of bombs came the spindly boys in black with their weapons. The servants of the Angkar. So it had begun for him a long, long time ago, the eradication of his heart. Long before the war and the camps and the triumph of the Angkar. Life, then, was a mystery, but it was a cheap one. “We are all under one sky,” his father used to say, meaning that all suffer the same in the end. But it was not true.

When he became a kamabhipal he saw every day that the “old people” survived and the “new people,” the “April 17 people,” the doctors and the university people, the ministers even and their families, were crushed and dissolved with whips and their throats were cut with palm fronds. He worked for months at a secret camp in the forest, learning the new ways. He learned to lie under floorboards and listen to the conversations of villagers. The next day they could be denounced, dragged down to the river and cut apart with machetes. Their bodies went downriver.

Davuth was a peasant and so he had been one of the “old people.” His class were the builders of Angkor long ago, the salt of the earth, the wielders of threshers and fish traps. The ones whose faces were carved in stone a thousand years ago. People were not all under one sky.

The ghosts now walking quietly through the tobacco knew that better than anyone. The killers lived under a different sky. He looked up now and saw that the stars had reappeared and their glacial brilliance made him frown. It felt as if he could look right through them into the meaningless chasm beyond, and when he did he felt strangely reassured. It was not nothingness that instilled fear in him, it was the morbid idea that life had meaning after all.