Hunters in the Dark

TWENTY-SIX

A few moments later the longtail which had taken them over appeared, paddled in silence by the pilot who had been waiting by the closed-off bridge. The boat nosed up to the beach and Davuth stepped into it without a word. The boat rocked and he steadied himself; there was a stifling moment of awkwardness between them. The man was not afraid. He was merely unsure what to do.

By the same token he knew better than to ask any inconsequential questions and without explicit instruction he turned the vessel around and started up the motor. The sound shocked them both. Davuth took one last look back at the beach, where the clotted nets lay in wet piles on a mud as dark as cocoa. The Englishman had not followed him. They sped out onto the floodplain as the first drops of rain began to fall and the moon disappeared. He lay back in the boat with his hands behind his head and the spray washed over him. In a mere twenty-four hours, the long years of drudgery at his humble station had been left behind and he thought of his daughter asleep in her bed, unaware that he was at that very moment slaving on her behalf and safeguarding her future. She would discover it all later. Either way, it was fated and the fate that had chosen him had made no errors. He had done everything perfectly and the laws of the universe remained undisturbed and serene. At the quay of Takeo the lights were off and he took a roll of dollars and gave them to the pilot.

“If you talk to anyone, you’ll see me again. You don’t want to see me again.” He was sure that he had made his point because the man turned away and said nothing back.

Davuth then walked to the car still parked under the trees and drove through the deserted town. There were no karaokes here, no late-night bars, no nocturnal flimflam. The air was still. Just the needling, unrefreshing rain. It was as boring a town as a man could wish for. It would be fine in the early morning and never afterward.

Within minutes he was back on Route 2 and he was alone on the white-edged road with the gardens and orchards and paddies flowing by. He drove for two hours without thinking about anything. Finally he stopped in a lonely stretch and went into the fields to take a pee. He wanted to be back in the city before first light but he had a few hours to spare. As he stood there surrounded by the whispers of the crickets, however, he felt a strange desire to return to the island in the Mekong and take back everything he had done and said. It couldn’t be done, of course, but still he wanted to go back and make amends and let things take a different course. It was always the fields at this hour that took him back to the old days and the nights of executions which had gone virtually unrecorded. It was quite a thing to consider that he was the only man alive who remembered the last moments of many dozens of people. They lived within him still, he liked to think. But to whom had he ever made amends? To whom had he prayed for forgiveness? He had gotten away with it, and who was he to get away with it? Many of his comrades had also gotten away with it and when they were awake in their beds they reasoned to themselves that they had been young, far too young to be held responsible for anything. It was their extreme youth that explained their ecstatic sadism and skill at killing. It was a skill which only came from a knowing enjoyment, and therefore it was a youthful knowledge, a dementia of immaturity. But in the end he didn’t really believe it.

While he was there he went through their bags, finding nothing but clothes and toiletries and a hundred dollars in cash, and then he took the mobile phones and threw them into a canal running alongside one of the paddies.

He drove into Monivong and stopped at one of the late-night Viet places for some pho and nem. He was starving. At the family tables it was only young clubbers still high and wide-eyed. They gave him a curious jolt of energy. Restored in spirit, he drove back to Street 102 and parked the car a fair distance from Colonial Mansions, near the top of the alley by the boulevard. Then he walked calmly down to the property and passed unnoticed into the lobby, where everyone, as usual, was asleep at their post. He went up to his apartment, let himself in and turned on one light. His own orderliness reassured him and reminded him of a superiority which he had always known was his. An organized man, they used to call him.

He opened the safe and took out the bag with the banknotes and laid it on the bed with the passports and a few other things he had kept there. He was now ready to disappear forever from this oppressive residence. He assembled everything on the bed then turned off the light, closed the door quietly behind him and walked down to Robert’s apartment. It was now past three in the morning and the bureaucrats and corporate officers were asleep in their chilled rooms. He effortlessly opened the door and passed inside and then walked into the rear bedroom and turned on the light there. The curtains to the main room were already closed fast. He locked the door from the inside and then began his patient combing of the rooms, beginning with the safe, which he opened easily.

There was nothing inside. It was the first blow. He felt his face flushing with blood and fury, and he then ransacked the bedroom. He upended the bed, tore up pieces of carpet and emptied out all the cupboards. There was nothing even in the bathroom. The boy had taken everything with him and it now dawned on him — it had been inconceivable only a few hours before — that he had been telling the truth. The little bourgeois parasite had not been lying after all. It was a surprising thing. He gave up after half an hour and sat forlornly on the Englishman’s bed and let his hands dry slowly. It was now possible that it had all been for nothing. All he had was the money taken from the roadside in Battambang.

It was a fair sum but far short of the amount he had been hoping for. He had even hoped to be able to blackmail the Englishman, but he was sure now that it would yield nothing.

Well, he thought, it was worth the try. It’s always worth the try.

He cleaned up the unit and went back out into the corridor after locking the door behind him and keeping the key. There remained two hours of darkness and he considered simply walking out of the Mansions and driving home in defeat. He had, after all, lost nothing in the end, and for that matter he was still many hundreds of dollars in the black. Better to leave, then, and go back to his daughter. There would be more barangs floating in the river at a later time — they were inexhaustible bounty.

So he went back up to his room, locked the door and took a shower. The night was cool, he left the windows open. The water cold and reviving, the moths becalmed on the bathroom walls.

He had been a bit of a fool, and he didn’t relish the failure.

When he came out into the bedroom he felt tired and yet restless. His anger had risen and would not subside. He lay on the bed in his towel and thought and thought until his mind had exhausted itself and finally come to a standstill. He opened the bag and counted out the money and looked over the passports and resolved to throw them out on his way home. Two invisible men who didn’t matter to the world. Two crooks who didn’t even know they were crooks.

He dressed and combed his hair in the mirror. As he was patting the last jet-black strands there was a knock on his door. Carelessly, he had left the main room’s light on. Perhaps it was reception nagging him about his tab. But at four in the morning?

Going to the door he waited for a moment then sensed that the person on the other side of it had not gone away. He opened it then and saw Sothea standing by the rail of the corridor. She reclined casually against the rail and her eyes were cool and unhurried. Surprised, he opened the door wider and asked her bluntly what she was doing there. But then he reconsidered. Why not?

She came in.

“It’s a bit late,” he said, closing the door behind her.

“It’s never too late for this.”

“True.”

He calculated the time. What difference did thirty minutes make?

“I wasn’t expecting this,” he said all the same.

“All the better.”

She walked into the bedroom and sat on the bed. By now she knew the room quite well and she spotted at once the small signs of his imminent departure. His affairs were all packed, it would seem.

“You’re going away?”

“Yes, back to my job. I shouldn’t have stayed away so long as it is.”

“I see. In the middle of the night?”

“Why not in the middle of the night?”

“No reason. Still…”

“Still what?”

He came and sat next to her and his breath was cold and scented with a touch of whisky.

“The roads are empty.” He smiled. “I’ll need to leave within an hour.”

“Then there’s no point talking.”

There’s rarely any point talking anyway, he thought.

She took off her shirt and shoes and went into the bathroom. The mirror was misted and the tiled floor damp. She was wearing jeans and in her front pocket was a small screwdriver. She gripped it for a moment as she inspected her mouth in the mirror, then she washed her hands and let the hot water run a while. She was composing herself. Then she turned and went back into the room where the policeman was already naked and lying on the bed. How quickly he always dressed and undressed. There was an uncanny efficiency about him, even when it concerned nothing more consequential than his animal needs.

Sothea turned off the main light and they lay together for a while, saying nothing, until he said, “Why are your jeans still on?”

“I was just thinking.”

“Don’t.”

“All right, I’ll take them off.”

She put them on the floor beside the bed but kept the screwdriver in her hand. He had turned over on his front as if waiting for a back massage and his head was laid on his arm, his eyes closed. In reality, he was suddenly exhausted after the long drive. The futility of the whole thing had been sinking in moment by moment. He was disgusted and discouraged. The moths fluttered around the main room and he heard them knocking softly against the plastic shutters and the walls. Slowly, he fell into a semi-doze. It was an unexpected gift to her. It was now, indeed, that she wanted most to talk to him. She wanted, in the first place, to tell him everything she had seen and everything she had lost because of him and the filthy driver he was in cahoots with. But there was no time for that. She thought of Simon lying by the side of a sugarcane field on a nameless road. Was that really necessary? A policeman was supposed to report such things and then investigate them. It was only amazing that he had failed to recognize her after they had met that day on the way up to the Scot’s sinister hotel. He had desired her then — for a moment — and he desired her now. But he had failed to connect the two moments in time. Did he think she was two different women? It was a blind spot that was all the more surprising in a man like Davuth. She would make him pay for that oversight. She and Simon could have had a decent enough life together; it was one version of the future she had never given up on. It had been taken away from her by a disaster not of her own making.

She raised herself up and realized that now he was asleep and noticed nothing. She whipped the screwdriver up high and then plunged it straight down into the back of his neck. She put so much force into the blow that there was no struggle. He gasped and stirred and before he could wake she had struck a second time and with even greater ferocity. His blood rushed up out of the two wounds and she straddled him and raised the screwdriver once more. This time with both hands, driving it into his neck as far as she could. His whole body shook like a pig impaled.

The moths in the next room still beat against the shutters. When she was exhausted in her own right she rolled off the squalid body and sank onto the floor for a while. She had already decided that it was all the result of Simon’s karma and of her own, and it was all foreordained. Against the unleashed consequences of karma one had no defense. The circle of samsara was mostly fixed; there was no liberation. Events piled up against each other like logs being thrown onto a pile. She would meet Davuth in a future life and with luck he would be a fly and she would be a gecko chasing him down and eating him. If, that is, she was lucky. She might not be lucky. The seeds laid by any given karma were not entirely known, the outcomes could not be foretold with any accuracy and it was likely, in any event, that one would remain floating and turning within the circle of eternal suffering.

TWENTY-SEVEN

She left the screwdriver on the bed after wiping down the handle and took — with a slow deliberateness — a cold shower to wash herself down. She felt nothing at all. She washed her hair and her fingernails scrupulously. She felt she was honoring her dead lover.

In the main room she got dressed without getting a spot of blood on her. Now the moths had stilled and there was a taste of dawn in the air. The Mansions were about to stir with weary life. She saw at once the bag that he had packed, stowed next to the bed. Inside it was her and Simon’s money, and the two passports. For a moment she was blindly elated and triumphant, and spotted too the amulet which Davuth always wore to protect himself and which, crucially, he had neglected to wear as he went to bed for his pleasures. It was the one thing she would leave untouched and it was surely fate that had made him forget it. If he had been wearing it the screwdriver would never have pierced, he would have sensed her intentions. The thought made her shudder finally. He had hunted her, and them, and now she had hunted him. Yet neither had really been hunting the other. There was another key on the table in the main room, with an apartment number tag attached, and she took it.

When she was finished she took hold of the bag, went over the room again carefully and then slipped out into the corridor, locking the door with the push button in the handle. The cleaners were scraping the surface of the pool below with nets. They did not look up. She went down to the apartment number on the key and opened the door and went in. This unit was plunged in darkness and she had to reluctantly turn on one of the lights. The place had obviously been ransacked, the floors strewn with damaged toiletries, and the violence of the pillage appalled her. She began to understand how the English boy had been wronged. First by them and then by Davuth. And who, in the end, had he harmed to deserve such a thing?

On the way down to the room she had still been sure of her intention, to run with the money after leaving the passports in Robert’s room as a small atonement. But when she opened the bag now and looked at the notes she felt that this was the wrong plan and had been all along. The disaster had happened because they had taken something that was not theirs. Recall, then, the first night after she and Simon had fled. They had stopped in a village by the river and the ever-superstitious Simon, who believed in Khmer folk magic far more than she did, insisted that they visit a fortune-teller together, a haor teay. He took with him one of the dollar bills from the stash and asked the man to look at it and “read” its future.

The haor teay lived alone in a hovel by the water. They sat together at dusk among the rubbish and reeds. Simon was slightly delirious and obsessed. He kept telling her that the money might be jinxed, it might be cursed by spirits and he wanted to find out if it was. He considered going to a rup arak to see if it could be connected to someone who was already dead. All money had once belonged to people now dead. It was not just paper; it transmitted things from the past and contained within itself an unknown future. It connected people but not in ways that they could understand. He had a feeling — he said he could feel that it was “bad karma” money because it came from a casino, from the world of criminals. It had a supernatural smell to it and he thought about having it exorcised. It was crazy of him, and yet now she remembered the visit to the haor teay and she was not so sure. The old man had fingered the bill and pressed it against his mouth. Simon became more excited and asked her to translate in case he had misunderstood anything. It was then that the first fear had gripped her. The man said, “Leave the money where it is and run as fast as you can. It is not yours and it will bring in spirits.”

“What spirits?” Simon burst out, gripping her hand.

“I can’t say what spirits.”

“Leave him alone,” she whispered into Simon’s ear.

But Simon was in a lather.

“Get him to tell me — we need to know! What spirits? What the fuck does he mean, bring in spirits?”

But the haor teay wouldn’t say. They left in a mood of high hysteria. Simon wouldn’t calm down and he paced about for hours gibbering to himself about spirits and exorcism. But how could money be exorcised?

It was she who needed to be exorcised now. She changed her mind then and decided to leave the bag on the bed with everything inside it. That was the best karma she could obtain. The spirits would then leave her alone and move on to someone else, if spirits there were. Either way, she was superstitious about the money. She left it there and everything with it, along with the keys to Davuth’s car, which she had found as well, and let herself out of the apartment, taking the key with her, however, and leaving it by the desk of the receptionist. The boy was fast asleep with his head laid upon his folded arms and as she dropped the key quietly on the floor next to him he did not wake up. Robert would be handed the key when he returned and his surprise would turn everything upside down. She walked down the steps, then, and into the street, where it was raining and nothing could be heard but the pools and the trees bending slowly under the onslaught. She was one of those people — and they are rare, even in that fluid and shifting place — who know how to disappear within a few moments, within a few paces. She passed Davuth’s car on the way, and on the seats she saw old newspapers, a hat and a sprinkling of glittering small change. Above her, at the same time, the massive clouds had begun to form towering pillars which had suddenly become faintly visible: their rise had about it an irresistible determination and slowness, a fantastical inevitability and negative brilliance.

TWENTY-EIGHT

They were mirrored in the floodplain and formed there dark, unmoving reflections. From across the water came the silent flickers of lightning and the sweet morning thunder. By seven that morning Robert and Sophal were back in Takeo, having persuaded one of the men in the village to take them over. She had convinced the boatman to call her father and, without explaining anything to him, had gotten the doctor to send a car down to pick them up with some money for the boatman. When they got to Takeo, therefore, they only had to wait an hour before the driver appeared. They had not spoken for some time and it was better to be isolated and silent as they sat in a café and watched the rain. She went into the establishment’s bare toilet and washed her face and hands, dabbing paper towels onto the little cuts on her knuckles. Vast areas of her being had been snuffed out in a few moments of time, but she was still solid in the mirror. Her scabs still tasted saline and she still flickered in and out of life — just like that silent lightning. It’s the ghost side of oneself that carries on.

During the night, huddled inside the prasat as the rain pounded down, she had poured out all her rage in a brief explosion. He had told her everything finally and when it was done there was no point talking any further and she went over the sudden catastrophe in her mind as they skimmed across the half-lit Mekong in the longtail until the lights of Takeo came into view. What was surprising was that she was not truly surprised: something had been wrong all along. When the family driver appeared she walked silently to the car and got in and waited for something to happen between them as they drove back to Phnom Pehn. His apologies, however, were pointless; it’s in the nature of lies to catch up with the perpetrator and strangle him. But her? So, she kept thinking, I have to be destroyed for the sake of his lies. In the end they slept and it was past nine when they arrived back at Colonial Mansions. It began to feel like a small, nasty dream. She woke and told the driver that she didn’t need to go back home. He was to tell her father that she was fine. They had simply forgotten the time at Phnom Da and they had forgotten their money, too, at a café in Takeo. All he had to do was cancel her credit cards and she would come home later.

The driver seemed to hesitate, as if he had received very different instructions from her father. But in the end he relented and let the young mistress do what she wanted. He gave her the envelope of cash her father had entrusted to him and was glad to let the master and mistress do what they wanted and go their merry ways.

In the lobby there was a paradoxically dreamlike normality to everything. The boys in their laundered white shirts, the Chinese women doing their dutiful laps in the pool and the maids patiently spraying the ornamental palms. The rain pattered on the windows and two American embassy officials took their morning coffees under the photographs of colonial Phnom Penh and Hmong tribesmen. The man on duty smiled when he saw Robert and his silent noting of the disheveled clothes and hair was kept under perfect control as he searched for the key that had been left there earlier and finally handed it over.

“One of our staff,” he said politely, “found it in the lobby earlier this morning. You must have dropped it on your way out.”

“Of course. Thank you.”

A stroke of luck, then, as the world sometimes throws your way when things have reached their end. He felt a sullen wonderment.

“You might consider,” the man went on, “leaving it at the desk from now on. People lose their keys all the time.”

“Yes, it’s a good idea. Who found it?”

“One of the boys. It was lying on the floor.”

“On the floor?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I must have dropped it then.”

“Yes, sir.”

—

On their way to the apartment he glanced up at the third floor. There was something there, some riddle. He could feel it in his nerves. And yet he had come through the riddle unharmed. They went into the disordered room and he saw the bag on the bed at once and he opened it while she stumbled into the bathroom to have a shower and there was everything that he had lost a few weeks earlier. The first image that came into his mind was a boomerang whipping through the air: the usual cliché. Then he saw, too, the car keys laid next to the bag and, looking inside the bag itself, he found the two passports. She was in the shower now, sobbing and wailing, and he tried to think how the boomerang had found its way back to him; but that was impossible. He gathered up all his scattered and despoiled belongings and made them orderly and then he sat on the bed and waited for the rain to stop. When Sophal came out of the bathroom she had calmed down and what was left of the bitterness was a coldness that would last until something healed it. Time, he thought banally, and left it at that. His own actions had ceased to mean anything.

They went down together as the sun broke out and, as previously suggested, he left the key with reception but with no intention of ever recuperating it. In the room, they had merely decided to leave.

“I have the keys to his car,” he had said.

“How do you know it’s his car?”

“I just do.”

“Where is he then?”

“I don’t know.”

They had stared at each other for some time.

“How do you have the keys?” she had spat at him.

“I don’t know, but I have them.”

“They were just in your room?”

“Yes.”

It was so inexplicable she had given up.

“I don’t want to go home,” she had said. “I want to go away somewhere.”

“All right, we’ll go away.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Back the way I came.”

She had looked at the bag.

“What’s that?”

“The money. It’s all there.”

“Throw it away.”

He had nodded.

“All right. I’ll throw it away.”

“I mean it.”

“I said I would, didn’t I?”

Down in the street they saw the car parked under mango trees, the windscreen covered with drops of dried mud and crushed flies. The merriness of a Sunday morning flooded the streets around the day markets, the dogs running in packs, the drivers squatting in the shade of the magnificent trees. The sun brought a bright lucidity. They stood in it for a moment basking and warming themselves, and without knowing why they sensed that Davuth was not around and that someone had made them a mysterious gift. They climbed into the car and their mood lifted. A great zone of porcelain-blue sky had opened up at the apex. As they drove slowly out of the city the river was lit by the sun and the frangipanis seemed to turn into foam. Soon, the city had thinned and they moved along tattered roads among the trucks and the bikes with their angry dust. The rain had soaked everything but the man-made things had dried in an hour. “We’ll go back to Battambang,” he said quietly. “We can stay there a few days. Is that all right?” She said nothing, and it was her assent.

Through the whole afternoon they drove without speaking, until the river flashed in the distance and the billboards rose up by the road and showered them with images of a France that no longer existed. They came into Battambang as the dust dried and they stopped and went for a walk along the stagnant, softly luminous green river.

—

Here once again was the building of Electricité de Battambang and the old French mansions ranged along the road. The same boys lounged on the step banks, lulled by the chugging generators. They too lay down in the grass and they slept a little with their bodies close together. Small white clouds sailed across an open sky and he stared up at them and felt the crickets in the grass whispering as if from afar. Vaguely, he was considering crossing the border again if she would agree. They could spend a few days together in Bangkok perhaps. They could go to an island somewhere and her father could wire them some money when they ran out. Or he could keep the money he already had. He looked over and saw that she was lying serenely with her face upturned as if still deep in sleep. The sound of a fairground of some kind came wafting across the little bridge nearby. The faint call of a mosque, the mosque he remembered standing over the river upstream. He raised himself on his elbows and squinted at the sun. How long had it been since he had last been in this very spot? A few weeks, a few months — he couldn’t really say anymore. He had long ago stopped counting his days and the longer he stopped counting them, the faster they passed. He was not even sure why he had returned there. He didn’t know why he had the car and the money he had won long ago at the Diamond Crown in Pailin. It had been taken away from him and then returned to him, but by whom and why? It was like a wheel that had shifted in the dark, but so slowly that one didn’t notice it turning. He saw little spiders scattering through the grass as if alarmed by his shadow. We’ll go over the border, he thought. He roused Sophal and she opened her eyes and there was no emotion in them whatsoever. Down in the river the boys had jumped into the water with nets and fishing rods and some of them were swimming under the bridge, engulfed in its shadow. The sight of them made him think of his parents, far off in their wintery realm. In their heart of hearts they knew that he was alive.

They went to a place called Pomme d’Amour and had a quick dinner washed down with Chilean wine. Still they didn’t speak. The streets became ominous and still. There was a small meeting of the Cambodian People’s Party at a street corner near the restaurant, the voices amplified through the cheap megaphones somehow dulcet and detached from the usual menu of political angers. They sat outside, close to the bustle of passersby. The warmth of bodies unconcerned by the secret dramas of others. The delivery girls from the restaurant itself came out with enormous plastic bags which they balanced on the handlebars of their bikes before riding off. Along the top of a roof the silhouette of a cat appeared; Sophal pronounced it bad luck. “Rubbish,” he snorted.

“Let’s go into Thailand and find a place in Bangkok. No?”

“Do you mind?” she asked, as if she had been wanting this all along, but without mentioning it to him.

“Of course I don’t mind. I wouldn’t suggest it if I minded. I’m glad you want to as well.”

“I just need to get out of this country for a while.”

“I know what you mean. Then we’ll get out.”

“Can we take the car over the border?”

He laughed grimly. “Of course we can’t take the car over the border. Why would we want to anyway? The car is evidence — we’ll dump it.”

“Really?”

“Obviously. We’ll take a taxi on the other side.”

So that’s how it’s done, she thought.

“Then what?”

“Then nothing. We’ll let everything calm down.”

“But the very fact that we’re not there—”

He rolled his shoulders and looked away.

“What does it matter? We haven’t done anything wrong. We don’t know where that bastard is. I don’t care where he is.”

“Who is he?”

“How do I know? I’d never seen him before I met him in the lobby. Anyway…”

Robert turned it over in his mind but there was no way of accounting for it. It felt, to him, like a coincidence that he would just have to leave by the side of the road.

She sipped at her wine and soon she began to feel more resolved.

“All right,” she said, “we’ll go to Bangkok and then the sea. Maybe we can come back through Trat. One can cross the border there.”

“It’s a plan.”

He tried to telegraph an encouragement through a better smile than the last one.

“The situation’s not as bad as all that,” he went on. “It’s just confusing more than anything.”

“And what about your American friend?”

“No idea. He’s not my friend though. He’s probably selling dope to some hippies somewhere.”

But he didn’t know, he couldn’t imagine.

After dinner she got a new seven-dollar mobile phone with a SIM card and called her father. There was a small uproar. Her mother came on the line.

“I’m perfectly fine,” she hissed. “Simon and I are going to Bangkok — oh, for God’s sake stop worrying. We’ll call tomorrow night.”

Her mother spoke.

“No, no, leave us be, we’re fine. I’ll call tomorrow.”

They went for Vietnamese coffee at the White Rose and suddenly they didn’t care as much. The border closed at eight and they just had to be there by seven thirty. There was a little time. They wandered down to the fairground which they had heard from the river. It was rustic and loud and they went on one of the machines as the light dimmed and the ancient bulbs large as grenades came on and began to steam. The whole town stirred into nocturnal illumination, or so it seemed to them. The villas, the utility buildings, the rows of shophouses by the river, the French cement buildings which looked, for once, like the monuments of tenuous conquerors. Bats swirled around the riverbanks and the hospital, too, was lit up. Was it a celebration neither of them had heard of? He had the feeling — it could not be verified — that the population was turning through the grid of streets in a wheel-like formation. Cabarets on the pavements, the old ladies with their tea and shots laughing uproariously and holding their hands up to their faces where the makeup had streaked. The cats sat still and watched. Girls in bridal dresses came down the street they were navigating, their heads covered with plastic flowers. And, a few streets away, moving within that same crowd, Ouksa was walking with an ice cream, morosely picking his way from street to street looking for openings.

—

His wife was now in the hospital and he had been to see her an hour earlier. Finally, exasperated and drawn outdoors by the sound of music in the streets, he had gone wandering along the lit-up river and turned into the maze of streets. It was here that he came upon Davuth’s car parked next to a barber’s shop. He recognized it at once and yet continued walking as if nothing had happened, then stood at the corner looking back down the street and licking his ice cream. He was not sure, in fact, if running into that demonic personality was such a good idea. But at the same time, he had a secret he could maybe cash in and now that he was more desperate than he had been, he was more prepared to risk it. So he waited until the night was almost upon them and he was sure that eventually Davuth would appear and this time the odds would not be stacked against himself. They would just be two men in the street, almost equals. In that context he would no longer be afraid of the policeman. He would act friendly and surprised and Davuth would find it awkward to get away easily. He would ask him for money, and if he refused he would suggest a bribe, a threat.

Wild, and on the spur of the moment! But the man who came down the street to reclaim the car was not Davuth.

Ouksa dropped the ice cream at his feet and rushed down to greet Robert and a nice-looking girl he had with him. They met right at the car itself, in a whirl of teenage boys in party hats.

“You!” Ouksa shouted, and his mood had to change into a different gear. Robert, stunned, simply shook his head.

“It’s Ouksa,” he said to the girl. “My driver from the first day.”

They shook hands and the driver began to think as fast as he could. In the first place, he said nothing about recognizing the car.

“I was just walking down the street,” he said, smiling his smile.

“My friend and I are just leaving.”

“Leaving? Leaving where?”

“Back to the border.”

“In that Khmer car?”

“It’s what we have.”

“But why didn’t you call me? I could have driven you!”

“I didn’t have a number.”

Ouksa felt a keen anxiety now.

“Shall we have a drink?”

Robert tried to remember the hour.

“We haven’t got time. The border closes in two hours.”

“You’ll never make it.”

“Of course we’ll make it. It’s not that far.”

“A quick drink—”

“Sorry, it’s impossible.” Robert turned to Sophal. “Isn’t it?”

“Totally,” she said.

“No, no, you can’t leave like this. Not after such a coincidence!”

Robert opened the car and the driver became a little frantic.

“Just one drink—”

“I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you drive us to the border then? We don’t need the car anyway. You can keep it.”

“What?”

“You can keep the car.”

“Keep the car?”

“Yeah, you can keep it. I want you to keep it.”

It was a huge windfall and Ouksa blinked and picked at his mouth.

“Then I’ll drive you!” he cried.

They all laughed and Sophal got into the backseat.

“I can’t believe I ran into you,” Ouksa rambled on in Khmer. “It’s because I prayed to Buddha last night. I was in the hospital and I prayed. Buddha listened this time. He didn’t ignore me.”

He took the driver’s seat and Robert sat next to him. As he turned to speak to Sophal he noticed the bag sitting next to her and he recognized that as well. So it was a bonanza, and the Lord Buddha had laid it at his door. He felt suddenly elated and hopeful about his wife. Such a large bounty and in the space of a few minutes — he was reentering the loop of luck. Soon, moreover, they were out of the town and on the road to Pailin, where the monkeypods were now red from the dried dust again. It was a ninety-minute drive.

It was a road he traveled daily in his taxi searching for fares at the border and he knew every inch of it. He knew all the villages and bars on the way and he knew how long it took to get to the border from any given point. As he drove it now he kept an eye on the position of the sun and he wondered where he could force a stop en route. In fact, he knew just the place. A village to one side of the road where drivers often stopped for a drink. They made such good speed that when they came to it, he told them out of the blue that they could easily stop for fifteen minutes and go to the toilets. The Khmer girl was unwilling but Robert relented. He was sure the Englishman wanted to stop.

They went into a shack bar a few yards from the road and Sophal stayed outside to look at the dusk. Behind the bar was a field, and around it tall sugar palms and ponds. There was no one there and the great music of the dusk-lit fields overwhelmed them. Ouksa offered Robert a cigarette and they stood at the bar for a while smoking and Ouksa thought of a sudden act of violence. Something there and then. The idea for it had come suddenly. He tensed and it was as if he was falling through empty space, his senses scattering and his temples beginning to sweat. Across the fields swallows dipped and whirled and he felt his hands clenching around a long-bladed penknife he always had in his pocket for self-defense. He thought of the sordid injustice he had suffered at the hands of Davuth, the humiliation and the abjection. He had not killed anyone for the pleasure of it, it was fate and nothing but. Not a moment of hatred or spite. A man killed to feed his wife and buy her antibiotics. But now he would do it again just to seize his moment — and why should a man not seize his moment? If he didn’t he was just a dog.

He said, “Shall we walk out a bit into the field? I like this time of day.”

“It’s the best time,” Robert agreed.

They began to walk out along the bank between two paddies.

The buffaloes knee-deep in water looked up and their expression was mild and murderous at the same time, their horns as if pricked like ears.

“I hope you are coming back soon,” Ouksa said when they were halfway to the far side and they were outside the zone of light cast by the café. It was surprising how quickly darkness moved in, snuffing out the usual securities. As it grew darker, Ouksa became mentally bolder. His mind went wild and reckless and he felt invincible.

“I hope so too,” Robert said.

He was enjoying the fresh onset of dusk and the wind coming in from the higher ground nearby. For the first time in weeks he felt that nothing could happen to him now.

“When you do, you call me, OK?”

“Sure, I’ll call you.”

They came to the sugarcane at the far side and from there, surprisingly, the café looked quite tiny and remote. Had they really come that far?

Ouksa gripped the handle of the knife and silently opened the blade inside his front pocket. The café’s jukebox started up and a thin Khmer pop song came floating across the emptiness. They were surrounded by darkly reflective water touched by orange sun. It was the only moment Ouksa would have to recuperate all his losses and make good. He stepped closer to Robert and pretended to gaze back at the café. One movement and it would all change and he would be the victor.

But then, out of the blue, Robert began to talk. Ouksa could not be sure, in fact, that the barang had not been reading his mind all along. Was there not an air of sorcery about these people?

Robert was talking very calmly.

“Ouksa, listen to what I have to say. You remember the money I won at the casino that day? I still have it, it’s in the car. But I’m not going to take it into Thailand. I’m going to leave it here. I want you to have it. All of it. It’s in the bag on the backseat of the car. I’ll leave it there and you can have it. Do you understand what I’m saying? Just take all of it for yourself.”

“Why?”

“Because the girl says it’s haunted.”

“She does?” Ouksa guffawed and rocked back on his heels. “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

“But you told me about the Ap. You believe in that, don’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, she doesn’t want it and neither do I. If you believe in the Ap you can believe anything.”

“Why does she say it’s haunted?”

Robert shrugged and turned to him and smiled. He didn’t know himself. But in fact he was now speaking as much for himself as for Sophal. In the dark of his own mind he had come to believe it. Karma swirled around all things, lending them destinies over which mere desire had no control. It made one’s little calculations irrelevant. If they took the money and went to Bangkok something inherent in those soiled notes would follow them there and an unpredictable outcome would play out. He was now so sure of it that he was anxious to get rid of the money.

It’s your country, he wanted to say.

“Then maybe it is haunted,” Ouksa muttered. “Maybe I am entering a magic place.”

He thought it over. Yes, maybe — he would have to spend it as quickly as he could. It was possible that it was evil money. He threw his cigarette far out into the ponds and watched it go out with a hiss. All one could do was hunt in the dark, there was no other course of action.

They walked back to the car and the first stars had come out. The girl was sitting on the hood of the car and looking upward at the luminosity. She was thinking, for some reason, of the man who hanged himself in Paris long ago. They drove in silence to Pailin. They passed the Hang Meas with the life-size deer shining on its roof. The red lanterns were still out and the girls in long dresses walked across its car park. Dead leaves swirled through the air, lit rose by the lanterns. At the border the crowds had thinned out and the drivers on the Cambodian side, who waited there all day for fares, were beginning to walk reluctantly back to their idle cars. The lamps that exposed the no-man’s-land between the two sides were still lit, however, and the last departures for Bangkok, in their crocodile shoes and plastic umbrellas, ambled over it with an air of exultant financial defeat. There was a gambling bus waiting for them on the far side and it seemed to Robert and Sophal that they might as well join it if they could. Ouksa parked the car and Robert reached back into the bag on the backseat and took out his British passport, leaving Simon’s behind. He met Ouksa’s cool eye and the two men were curious about each other.

“Whatever happened to Simon?” Robert asked as he got out of the car. “Did you ever see him again?”

“Never. I wondered about him too.”

“What do you think?”

All three walked slowly toward the visa line, where the gamblers were laughing in a vodka-fueled way.

“Can never say with barang like that. They come and go. You know what I mean? They come and go like clouds.”

“Maybe the Ap got him.”

But Ouksa didn’t laugh as Robert had expected.

“Perhaps she did, yes. It’s possible.”

“You think so?”

“Yes, I think.”

“Well, if you see him, please give his passport back to him. I don’t feel any ill will toward him. He was just being who he is.”

“OK, I will do that. If I see him.”

“Do you think you will?”

“It’s possible. But maybe not.”

They shook hands in the half-light and Ouksa remained with the car as they walked over toward the uniformed men with pitted faces who would see them off. He leaned back against the side of the car and wondered how a man could remain so beautifully ignorant and innocent. It defied belief. He thought, too, of the days that would come now. The amazement and gratitude of his wife when he showed her the money, the medical treatments for her that he would now be able to afford. Life would be good again for a few weeks or even a few months. And if one night the ghost of Simon appeared at their door demanding atonement, he would apologize and explain everything to him. And then, most probably, life would return to its normal darkness. The rains and dry seasons, the silent lightning and the clouds which rose every night at certain times of the year — as they were doing now in the night sky above the border — into towering shapes that suggested demons and spirits.