Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

15

"I really don't know what he's getting at," Phosy said, not for the first time. Even though his desk was directly behind that of his superior, Sihot shook his head in response. Phosy held a note from Dr Siri. Daeng had dropped it off after Siri's departure, a last-minute memo scribbled in Siri's barely legible hand. Against his better judgement, Phosy had done what the doctor had suggested. He'd listened to Neung's story. It had been very slick. It explained everything apart from why three victims, all known to the suspect, had been killed. Phosy was disappointed that the doctor could have fallen for it. Of course Neung had it all worked out. It was easy enough to do when the evidence has been handed to him on a plate. Even Phosy could have done that. He was furious that Siri could have been so naive, presenting the accused with the police department's entire case.

But Phosy had listened patiently and asked the appropriate questions at the end. "Who would want to frame you? Do you have any enemies? Has anybody threatened you?"

And all the answers had been negative. If Neung was about to go to all the trouble of inventing innocent relationships with the victims, surely he could have come up with a scapegoat to divert attention from himself. But, no. And, if it were possible, he made it worse for himself. Phosy had thought to ask whether the initial Z meant anything. And rather than deny it, Neung had the impudence to boast that they'd called him Zorro in Berlin. Something about his style, evidently. He'd been christened by his coach and the name had stuck with his students. Neung hadn't even the common sense to withhold that juicy fact. So, Phosy had his watertight case and had no doubts in his own mind that he had the right man. No serious doubts. Of course, all criminal cases leave some gaps. But Siri's note rankled him. It wasn't a list of chores so much as unanswered questions. And of course he knew the questions. He had them on his own summary paper. He didn't need Siri to remind him. Did Chanti suspect his wife was having an affair with Neung? Did he care? Why were the Vietnamese so reluctant to hand over the case to us? Did Kiang see her affair with Neung the same way he did? Did they fight? What was the timing of Neung and Jim's respective arrival in?departure from Berlin? Who was taking painkillers and why? (Does Neung have an injury?) Does Neung still have the knife used to cut out the signature? Does his father think Neung is guilty? Do you?

Certainly, a lot of it was merely the tying up of loose ends. As a good policeman he would have done that anyway…if they hadn't been so understaffed. Just him and Sihot and so many reports to write. And what was the point? They had their man, didn't they?

It was the post script to the note that had most riled the inspector. Just who did this little doctor think he was? Not satisfied with playing detective and telling him how to do his job, he had to interfere in Phosy's personal matters, too. Phosy, I'm sorry. I meant to tell you this earlier this evening but I was distracted by the visit to Neung. It would have been better face to face but I've lost my chance. It's quite simple. If you aren't having an affair, tell your wife, immediately. If you are, stop it.

Phosy scratched out the entire postscript with his black biro, slashed at it till the paper tore. Still not satisfied, he took a pair of scissors from his pencil drawer and snipped off the bottom of the page. He scrunched it up and threw it into the wastepaper bin.

"Interfering little bastard. None of your business," he thought. "Who are you to tell me what I should or shouldn't do? You aren't even a relative, certainly not my father. Too late now, Siri. Where were you forty years ago when I needed you?"?

There weren't any orphans in Laos, not government-sponsored or otherwise. And that was due to the fact that folks didn't give children enough time to think they were unloved. If you lost your parents, a relative would step in and fill their sandals as quickly as blood clotting on a wound, barely a scab. If you had the misfortune of losing your whole family, a neighbour would take you in, or someone in the next village. A local headman, perhaps. But, either way, you'd wake up next day with a new family and nobody would harp on your loss. They'd tell you what happened without drama and, no matter how poor, they wouldn't complain about what a burden you were. At least, that's the way it had been in Laos. That's the way it had been for Phosy.

He'd been studying at his primary school one day in the little northern village of Ban Maknow, Lemon Town. His mother and father just happened to be working in the wrong field at the wrong time and were mowed down in crossfire between this or that faction. Someone had come by the school and whispered in the teacher's ear. As Phosy had no uncles or aunts, he went home that evening with his friend, Pow. Pow's mother and father already had three other children living with them who had lost their parents in a civil war nobody really understood. It was such a clinical transition that it was several days before Phosy fully realised that he'd never see his parents again. He'd cried, of course. He missed them. But he was already safe and happy before loneliness had a chance to take hold.

His new father was a carpenter. He carved temple doors and fine furniture and all seven of the children, five boys and two girls, learned to use woodworking tools at an early age. There was no secondary schooling in those parts so Phosy had hoped his new father would take him on as an apprentice as he had done with his eldest son. But when Phosy was ten, a young man had come to the village. He was educated and well-spoken. In the open-sided village meeting hut, he explained to all the parents how he had been plucked from a place very much like this when he was a boy. How he'd been given the opportunity to study in the liberated zones in the north-east. He'd graduated from high school there and gone on to further education in Vietnam. He told them that they'd recently opened a new school and that they could take eight hundred new students. All food and board would be taken care of.

A week later, Phosy, Pow, and their sister, Beybey, were in a covered truck heading across the country. Phosy felt something in his stomach that he would later come to recognise as betrayal. They'd given him away. The family he'd loved had handed him over to a stranger. He couldn't understand it but life was travelling too quickly to analyse. They taught him things in the liberated zones. He learned how the French colonists had stolen their land. He learned how the rich landowners had taken advantage of the common people. He learned how to be angry and to punch his fist into the air and shout, "Liberation!" He learned how to shoot guns and kill. And, by the time he reached seventeen, he and his false siblings were junior officers in the new Lao People's Liberation Army. All three of them were so entangled in the revolution they hadn't found time to go back to visit the family that had raised and cared for them…and given them away.

Phosy rose fastest through the ranks. He had an inquisitive mind and, once he reached the position of colonel, he was transferred to military intelligence and trained in the art of espionage just outside Hanoi. With a new identity, he arrived in Vientiane in 1965 and began work as a carpenter. Other LPLA men and women had been trickled into the mainstream of royalist society, spreading their beliefs subtly from the inside, passing on intelligence, preparing for the day revolution would come. They became known as the mosquitoes inside the net, these sleeper agents, ready to sting when the time was right.

But, while he was waiting, something occurred that Phosy hadn't prepared for. He fell in love. There was probably a whole chapter in the Indochinese Communist Party spy handbook detailing the dangers of falling in love whilst engaged in subversive activities. But Phosy was emotionally lost and in need of confirmation that someone might want him. He married and they produced first a boy, then a girl, and that old feeling of family returned to him. That warm comforting glow of belonging took over Phosy's life. At times it seemed more important than nationhood. The revolution took a back seat to Phosy's family.

But the revolution came anyway. It came swiftly on the heels of the Vietminh victory in Saigon and without the wholesale bloodshed that had been envisaged. And the Pathet Lao moles in their burrows in Vientiane celebrated quietly. The status quo had changed but there were still enemies. The new socialist government couldn't decide what to do with its spies. Under the guise of re-education, Phosy and his colleagues were recalled to the north-east and new roles were allocated. He was away for three months and when he returned to the capital, his wife and children were gone. Gone, the neighbours said, to a refugee camp on the Thai side. They'd paid a fisherman for a night passage to Nong Kai. Gone because his wife was afraid of the communists. Afraid of what they might do to her. Gone because Phosy hadn't been able to tell her he was the enemy.

Phosy left Vientiane and rejoined his unit in the northeast. Three families had deserted him. Phosy was a serial orphan. Love crumbled in his hands like hearts moulded from fine sand. Why invest? Why waste all that emotion? He'd met nurse Dtui. He'd liked her. He'd made her pregnant. He'd offered to marry her. She'd asked him if he could love her and he'd told her no, but he was prepared to marry her anyway. That had been good enough for Dtui and for him, companionship without fear of heartbreak. Then Malee had come along, the sweetest button of a babe. She had smiled and he'd remembered all the other smiles that had trapped him. He watched them together, Dtui and her baby, and he'd seen treachery in their eyes. He watched how she controlled the mind of the little girl. How would they break him, these two? Every day he was afraid he'd come home and find them gone. And the conflict was killing him, splitting him apart. On one side was the feeling that there was nothing on the earth so full of wonder as the love of a family. And on the other was the certainty that they would desert him. Either in death or in deceit they would go away and leave him without hope. How dare he tell them he loved them??

Siri tapped on Civilai's door at eighteen thirty Mexico City time. Civilai's voice carried dully from the bathroom.

"Come in if you're carrying food."

Siri walked into the room. From the crumpled sheet and deformedly dented pillow, it appeared his friend hadn't slept any better than he had. He walked to the window. The view was similar to that from his own. Grounds that had once been landscaped were now jungle. A giant lucky hair tree craved attention not two metres from the glass. The city wasn't visible. Civilai walked from the bathroom wearing only shorts. He looked like a medical school skeleton with a paunch.

"I bet with a couple of chopsticks we could get a decent tune out of those ribs, brother," Siri laughed.

Civilai ignored the taunt.

"Did you get your early-morning call?" he asked.

"I thought it was my imagination. It was a gunshot, wasn't it?"

"Pretty close too, by the sounds of it. Perhaps they were killing something for breakfast."

"Good. I prefer my breakfast dead. I'm starving. Do you suppose the restaurant's open?"

"It's on the itinerary." Civilai picked up the single sheet of paper they'd given him in Vientiane. "'Seven a.m. morning meal at House Number Two.'"

"Good, hurry up and put on a shirt so we don't frighten anyone."?

Breakfast in the spacious dining room was uncomplicated but tasty. Other delegates sat at other tables minding their own business with great deliberation. The only noise was coming from the three Chinese tables whose breakfast banter bounced around the dusty restaurant like early morning ping-pong balls. Mr Chenda, their guide, joined the Lao at their table but refused food. He had a copy of their itinerary and he proceeded to read through it, expanding politically in one or another direction from notes he'd made on the sheet.

"Before lunch," he said, staring towards the door, "you will have the opportunity to visit your embassy. There, your ambassador will brief you on your country's relationship with Democratic Kampuchea and the ongoing role we expect the People's Democratic Republic of Laos to play in our development. You will sample a lunchtime meal of fresh food supplied directly from one of our cooperatives and then you will join representatives from other legations to visit our model collective in District Seventeen. You will return in time to change, whence you are invited to attend our grand May Day reception where you will have the great honour of meeting our respected and glorious leaders.."

"Including number one brother?" Civilai dared ask, not really expecting a response. But the guide became enlivened at the mention of the great leader.

"Brother Number One will most certainly be in attendance," he beamed. "Our leader is excited at the prospect of exchanging views with our respected allies."

"Does Big Brother have a name?" Siri asked. He noticed indications of a short circuit deep in the guide's brain. His face shut down for a few seconds then rebooted.

"Tomorrow you will have the opportunity to visit a truly spectacular irrigation project where you will see what our peasants have been able to achieve, working hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder…"

"…heel to toe, thumb to nose," Siri mumbled. He was becoming frustrated by the boy's inability to answer questions.

"What?" The guide seemed angry.

"Nothing. Go on."

"As I was saying. The irrigation project is an example of what it's possible to achieve with nothing more than a love of Angkar, determination and hard work."

"And Chinese funding," Civilai added.

"They don't believe in money," Siri reminded him. "Isn't that right, little comrade? You see? I was paying attention. But I didn't catch Big Brother's name. What was it again?"

The guide put both his palms on the table and pushed himself stiffly to a standing position. He still hadn't looked either of the old Lao directly in the eye, but he glared menacingly at the condiment tray.

"You must be ready to leave from reception in ten minutes," he told the fish sauce.?

Considering the fact that Siri's old map showed Hotel le Phnom to be no more than five city blocks from the embassy section of Boulevard Manivon, the limousine drive was curiously circuitous. As they pulled out of the hotel grounds, the first landmark his map said they'd pass was the Catholic cathedral. He'd visited it with his wife. It was gone. All that remained was a pile of rubble. They proceeded past the railway station which stood like a deserted castle and cut through a number of streets, none of which had signs. At every corner stood a sentry in black pyjamas with an AK47. They were men and women, old and very young, but all of them slouched and glared at the passing car. The limousine swung around the gangly Olympic stadium, one more example of the royal family's nouveaux Khmer architecture of the sixties, and headed along an empty Sivutha Boulevard. Its old sandalwood trees pointed their dead or dying fingers as they passed. The streets and buildings they saw were all immaculately clean, windows smiled reflections of the early sun. The journey might have given a guest the feeling the roads had been closed off for their safety, the people told to remain in their homes, but Siri had goose pimples as he looked out of the window. Something was wrong here.

They eventually entered the diplomatic section of Boulevard Manivon from the south. The entire road had been partitioned off with a heavily guarded barrier blocking the entrance.

"We provide maximum security for our foreign representatives," the guide told them.

"Who from?" Siri asked.

"I'm sorry?" Every time the doctor interrupted, the guide became more impatient.

"Who are you protecting them from? Didn't you say you were at peace?"

"We are, indeed, a peace-loving nation, and the population has joined hands with us to form a unified democratic state. But there will always be insurgents out to embarrass us. We have enemies jealous of our successes. We need to remain vigilant."

The limousine drove into the newly created compound and pulled up in front of an old sand-coloured colonial house. It was surrounded by a white wall like a temple. For the first time that day they saw people walking along footpaths, sitting on benches, locked in conversation. All of them foreigners. But Siri noticed the others; the silent, unmoving ones. They stood in strategic positions in their black pyjamas watching, minding. They reminded him of the ghosts who hung around temple fairs. They never joined in, were never seen, were not really there.

Both Siri and Civilai knew the Lao ambassador, Kavinh. They had fought campaigns together. He was only slightly taller than Siri and he too had been a fearless warrior. Yet they noticed immediately, as he walked along the path to greet them, that time had sandpapered the ambassador down to a spindle of the man they remembered. He had no spring in his step, no truth in his smile. Beside him was his own black-suited minder, a short-haired peasant with a sun-blistered face.

"Comrades," said Ambassador Kavinh. "It's been a long time." They shook his unsteady hand and reminded each other of when and where they'd last met. But he was less than enthusiastic, not at all warm. He didn't introduce the man at his side. He turned and led them back inside. Siri caught Civilai's eye. Nothing was relaxed here. Nothing natural.

There followed a two-hour briefing, not from the ambassador or his diplomatic aides, but from the Khmer minder. He read from a prepared sheet. His Lao was heavily accented, comical at some points. But the old men found it prudent not to make comment. They sat on a circle of chairs in the front room of the embassy with their guide, the ambassador, two Lao aides and two more Khmer. Time became a heavy log towed by an ancient elephant. Siri could do no more than merely will it all to end. He took advantage of the opportunity by going over the case of the three epees in his mind. He had time to look at the circumstances through the eyes of each of the victims. And it was from the perspective of one of them that a completely different picture presented itself. He played a new hypothesis through to its gory conclusion and all the parts fitted. Only one question remained to be answered and, by the time they announced lunch, he was just a breath away from solving the mystery.

The fish and vegetables they served were fresh and, they had to admit, delicious. But the lunch table conversation was torturous. Every topic was a slow drip of water onto the forehead. Whenever light and jovial threatened, the Khmer would step in to redirect the mood in the direction of sombre and dull. There were no servants. The Lao diplomatic staff delivered the meals and collected the dishes without speaking.

It was during the distribution of the pumpkin custard slices that one young diplomat dropped a spoon on Siri's lap. It was a minor inconvenience as there had been nothing on the spoon at the time. Siri reminded him that, as far as he knew, they didn't teach the dishing up of pudding at the foreign diplomats' school, but the young man made a terrible fuss. He bowed and threw his hands together in apology and berated himself. And, as he leaned over to right whatever wrong he thought he'd done, he dropped a folded napkin into the doctor's lap and engaged his eyes briefly.

Siri finished his dessert, asked where the bathroom was, and excused himself. There was no lock on the bathroom door so Siri leaned against it and unfolded the white cloth serviette. In laundry pen were written the words:

Siri. Find an excuse not to go on the a.m. trip. Stay here. Urgent. Kavinh.

Siri pulled the chain, climbed onto the porcelain toilet and dropped the napkin into the overhead cistern. He waited a few minutes before returning to the table. His rendition of a man suffering from diarrhoea and stomach cramps was spectacular. He'd obviously seen his fair share of victims. The noises he somehow produced from his bowel region were frightening enough to make everyone in the room fear they might forfeit their own lunches. Siri was led to a camp bed in a back room, covered in a blanket, and left to groan. Knowing his friend's solid constitution, only Civilai saw anything suspicious about the attack and he kept his doubts to himself.

"I'm not really feeling too well myself," Civilai announced. "I'm wondering whether something in the lunch was off."

"I assure you — " the short-haired minder began.

"But, at least one of us should make the effort," Civilai decided. "I'll carry our flag to your collective, comrades. Let's hope my colleague is well enough to attend the reception this evening. I'd hate for this to turn into a diplomatic matter."

He told them he wouldn't push the issue with the Chinese as long as the doctor was given care and rest for the afternoon. The guide seemed almost relieved to leave Siri there. And so it was that Civilai and Comrade Chenda boarded the bus to District Seventeen and Siri did not.

Phnom Penh, under whatever tyrant or warlord, had always observed the colonial French custom of sleeping after a good meal. Those two hours during the hottest part of the day belied the claim that Kampuchea did not know worklessness. Comrade Ta Khev, the sun-blistered cadre attached to the Lao embassy, was no exception. As soon as the man began his customary afternoon nap, and the bestial sounds of his snoring could be heard behind the door of his room, the embassy came alive. One diplomat was posted in front of the cadre's room. Ambassador Kavinh was kneeling on the floor at Siri's cot, hugging him like a newly deceased relative. It was a desperate and unexpected gesture.

"Siri, Siri, my old friend," he whispered.

"Kavinh? I thought you'd forgotten me."

"My past is the only thing I can think fondly of," he replied. It was a curious comment but Siri instinctively understood it.

"Come, we don't have much time," Kavinh said, climbing slowly to his feet. "And there's a lot to do."

Siri was led through the house to the larder. In the corner stood a stack of wooden crates. Those on the top contained cans of meat and fish. The lower boxes were apparently empty. Two of the junior diplomats quickly slid the stack to one side and revealed a large metal ring on a hinge embedded in the wooden floorboards. They prised the ring upwards and pulled. A heavy trapdoor lifted slowly and without sound and Siri found himself staring down into a black pit. The embassy staff looked at him and gestured that he should go down. Siri, it had to be said, had a problem with black pits. Some of his worst living nightmares had taken place in such places. He baulked.

"Really, Siri," said Kavinh. "We don't have much time before the bastard wakes up."

"Oh well."

A metal ladder led down into the darkness. Siri took a deep breath and began to descend. The ambassador followed close behind. Siri arrived at a concrete floor He stood aside and Kavinh stepped down. The trapdoor closed and Siri could hear the rearrangement of the crates overhead. The darkness was total and overwhelming.

"Bien," said the ambassador.

There came a tinkle of glass, the strike of a match, and Siri saw a disembodied hand suspended in mid-air. It carried the flame to a wick and a dirty yellow light from an oil lamp bathed the cellar. Twenty eyes looked out of the ochre shadow.

"Good afternoon," said Siri.

There was a long moment of hesitation before four men and six women stepped up to him, smiling, taking his hand, squeezing his fingers. None of them spoke.

"This is the real briefing," Kavinh whispered. "It will have to be quick. But this is the information you need to take back to Vientiane when you leave."

"Who are these people?" Siri asked.

"They're Khmer. All of them. Some we found. Others found us. This room is ventilated and sound doesn't carry. But we have to be careful. If they're found we'll all be killed."

"But, why are they here?"

"Siri, you're going to learn a lot today that will stretch your belief. Things so horrific you won't sleep well for a year. We haven't had direct contact with Vientiane for eight months. We have no phone here. We can't travel without our minders. Every document passes through censors at the foreign ministry. So I haven't been able to alert our government as to what's happening. When I learned there would be a May Day reception and that a Lao delegation was invited, I knew it would be our best chance. Perhaps our last. I was so happy when I saw your name on the list, Siri. You're exactly the type of man I need to fight for us, for the Khmer."

The situation seemed somewhat ridiculous to Siri, far too melodramatic. A lot of film extras overacting. Anne Frank-like whispers in the attic. So the Khmer Rouge were paranoid. Weren't their own Pathet Lao? Didn't they also over-regulate Laos into a societal straitjacket? But, 'we'll all be killed'? Come on. Siri was tempted to smile and would have done so but for the serious expressions all around him. A girl, probably no older than twenty, brought over two stools. She gave one to Siri and sat on the other. Ambassador Kavinh and all the pale dwellers of the cellar sat on the ground with their legs crossed and their backs straight.

The girl was paler than the others. Siri wondered how long she'd been here in this sunless place. She was pretty but her young face was drawn now and her eye sockets were hollow and grey. She began to speak in French.

"My name is Bopha," she said. "My father was the curator of the Khmer national museum." Her voice was like thin ice disturbed by the rippling of a pond. Her grammar was perfect. Her accent suggested she'd lived in France for some time. She spoke carefully, searching for exactly the right words.

"I was his assistant," she continued. "I studied museum sciences at the Sorbonne. On April the seventeenth, 1975, my father and I were given an hour's notice to pack our belongings and join the exodus from Phnom Penh along with two and a half million other people. The Khmer Rouge told us we were all to go to the countryside to work. My father had been entrusted with the safety of our heritage, our national identity, our treasures. He refused to leave and asked to speak to a commanding officer. A young soldier spat at my father and cut off his head with a machete. I was standing beside him."

She spoke for exactly thirty minutes, this brilliant, fluent, destroyed young person. She told tales and recounted scenes so awful that if a listener considered for one moment they might be true, he would never be able to trust another human being. He would be left with the impression that there was nothing in the world save hate and evil. Hundreds of thousands executed, abused, left to die by the roadside. The genocide of intellectuals. A one-sided war against pale skin, Chinese faces, soft hands and spectacles. Two thousand years of Khmer history erased like a pencil sketch from the compendium of time. She spoke so bluntly of atrocities that she might have been a newsreader. At the end of her account she apologised for her poor French. As a sort of ironic afterthought, she mentioned that she'd been there in the cellar for four months. She said they had received no credible news of the world for four years and was wondering who had won the Nobel prize for literature in 1975. She had been following the judging when…

Siri couldn't give her an answer to her question. Nor could he speak. His stomach was a sack of lead shot. She had crushed his heart with her story, this innocent girl. When he eventually found words, his voice wasn't one he recognised.

"How did you get back to Phnom Penh?" he asked.

"I'd worked for two years carrying earth at the irrigation site," she said. "Digging latrines. Pleasing cadres. But they had my autobiography. They knew who I was. Somebody decided they needed to be seen to preserve our birthright. Incredibly, they had locked our treasures away. They brought me back to supervise the museum. I had no heart for it. It wasn't just the messages the Khmer Rouge had beaten into us, that rich is bad, poor is pure and good. I looked around me at all the opulence in the museum. The statues, the paintings, the gems. They had taken on a new meaning to me. They were the spoils of other warlords, other oppressive regimes who had stolen enough treasures to make their mark on history. They were symbols of tyranny. I hated it all.

"I knew Ambassador Kavinh. He had supported some of my father's projects. I ran away from the dormitory and came here. He has risked his own life to look after us. I am grateful to him and some days I think I am lucky to be alive. But mostly I regret that they didn't bury me out there with my sisters. I know these years will live inside me until I am old. All of us here, by the Lord's good grace, we all survived, but the killing fields will not leave our hearts. We are all charred by the flames of hell."?

Comrade Ta Khev, the Khmer Rouge cadre, awoke from a blissful sleep. As usual, it took him a few seconds to recall where he was. Good bed. Nice room. This was the life. Enough of all that jungle living. He'd endured poverty all his life and it was shit. This was what they'd dreamed of back then. A cushy city job, good food, and power. The high life and whatever it takes to get there. He rose from his bed, put on his black shirt and walked through the house to the little alcove that had once been the servants' sewing room. A room exclusively for sewing. He laughed. Those French. They certainly knew how to spend it. If he had money he'd build himself a counting room. A room where he kept all his money and he'd sit there all day counting it. He'd drink classy French wine and he'd count his money. He rubbed his full belly and opened the door. The cot was there in the middle of the little room but it was empty.

"Arrogant Lao," he said to himself. "I knew you were going to be a problem as soon as I — "

He heard a cistern flush across the hall and a tap run. He went out in time to catch the old doctor stagger out of the bathroom. He looked in a bad way. He used the wall to hold himself up and tottered across to the sewing room. Comrade Ta Khev stepped out of his way. He asked the old Lao how he was but Siri ignored him and stumbled to the cot. It croaked like a toad as he lay on it. The cadre smiled and muttered in Khmer;

"Good. Serves you right. Arrogant Lao."

Siri listened to the footsteps walking off along the hallway and rubbed his face with his palms. The girl's voice still crackled in his mind. He didn't want to believe her. He didn't want to think he could be one of a species that had no respect for its own kind. He'd dedicated fifty-odd years to preserving life. It was precious. Every one he saved and every one he lost. They all had value. Yet, if she were to be believed, lives here were being squashed and trodden underfoot. There was no logic to it. No sense.

Ambassador Kavinh had heard the Khmer Rouge leaders describe it as an experiment. An experiment in human engineering. But to Siri's ears it was jealousy, pure and simple. The have-nots wiping out the haves. The country poor had swept across the land like a black-suited plague and exterminated the rich and the educated. Then they'd moved against the middle classes, the not-so-rich and the semi-educated. And, when there was nobody left to hate, the Khmer Rouge had begun to turn on itself. And here, what was left of the administration, hanging by a threadbare noose. A still-kicking corpse, living in fear and paranoia.

Siri couldn't allow himself to believe it. If it were true, what was there to stop the plague from spreading across the northern border? Why shouldn't it take hold in the souls of his Lao brothers and sisters? Why shouldn't his country become a laboratory for its own inhuman experiment? If collectivism was an ideal state, then why not slavery? Why not kill those infected with the capitalist disease and be left with pure socialist man toiling eight hours a day with no ambition and no dreams? If death proved a convenient way of culling the populace here, why should his own leaders not…?

He opened his eyes and spoke aloud.

"What if it's started already?"

With so little news and such a poor communication system, how could he really be sure there was no systematic slaughter in his own country? What became of all those members of the old regime sent for re-education in the north? What became of the missing hill tribe people attempting to escape to Thailand? Surely the Lao couldn't…It was all too much to take in. He felt as if his head was a pot and he was attempting to fill it with all the water from a village reservoir in one journey. He began to drown in the small room. He needed air. He needed evidence of normality. Children playing in front of their homes. Old ladies smiling from windows. Pretty girls ignoring the bawdy comments of street-corner youths. He didn't mind if they were the country poor brought to the city and crammed into rich people's houses like fast-breeding rats. It wasn't important. He just needed to feel humanity around him. For his own sanity he had to be sure that at some level, life went on in this country.

The life he was looking for would not be found behind the barricades of the embassy ghetto. It wouldn't be amongst the prisoners of diplomacy with their huge concrete flower pots and their street cleaners and their ghost minders. He would have to break out of this wonderland and see what genesis of a future he could find in the dirt-poor suburbs.

He went through the back kitchen door and into the garden. He knew that the people in the cellar hadn't walked in past the sentries at the main gate. There had to be another way in and out. The original white wall around the garden was two metres high but another metre of breeze blocks had been crudely cemented on top of that. That in turn was garnished with ugly broken glass. The breeze-block barrier crossed the side street beside the embassy and climbed another garden wall on the far side before snaking off into the distance like the great wall of China. Siri had no doubt it blocked in every yard and every building in the quarter. The embassy compound was East Berlin.

Siri was certain that with a pick and ten minutes he could have a hole in that jerry-built wall big enough to climb through. But he'd have every minder in the street on his back before he could remove one brick. No, he had to believe that those who built the wall saw it as a symbolic representation of power. They wouldn't have imagined anyone in the embassy with the gall to challenge them. He strolled around a muddy garden still lovingly cared for by the Lao. He inspected the original white wall. Where it formed the border to the adjoining yard it was overgrown with a hysterical wisteria. An ornamental rockery leaned against the display with ledges of pansies and other effeminate border plants. From top to bottom ran a sculptured waterfall which no longer spouted.

Siri climbed to the top of the pile, crushing plants underfoot, and looked into the neighbour's property. At one time it had been a mechanic's yard or the car park for some rich man's automobile collection. It was one large oil-stained slab of concrete. But it had its own brick wall. It ran parallel to that of the embassy and was only a metre and a half tall. Why the neighbour would need a wall of his own and why it wasn't built flush with the embassy wall he had no idea. But there was a gap, no more than sixty centimetres, between the two. That, Siri was certain, was the way out. He leaned casually onto the top of the wall, glanced back towards the embassy; then, certain there was nobody standing behind him, he slipped over the wall into the gap.

He felt rather foolish pinned between the two walls and had no idea what he'd do if his theory proved to be wrong. But he sidled to his left to where the Khmer Rouge wall towered above him. The intersecting angle was bricked also but it was apparent that the blocks were not cemented, merely piled one atop the other. From a distance nobody would have noticed. Siri began to disassemble the temporary wall. Brick by brick the far side revealed itself to him. The contrast between the view ahead and the oasis behind was as drastic as that between heaven and hell. The entire block immediately at the back of the embassy compound had been levelled, apparently by a bomb. Rubble and shattered glass and broken lives were strewn fifty metres in either direction. Beyond that, the surviving buildings stood bruised with soot and dejected like mourners around a grave.

Siri stepped cautiously into this other world and carefully replaced the blocks behind him. It was a peculiar Alice Through the Looking Glass feeling. He had the overwhelming sense of being behind the set at a film lot. Backstage, there was no pretence, no need for flowers and new paint. He picked his way through the debris until he was on a dirt street. There were no body parts amongst the rubble. No flies in search of lunch. The only sounds were far off and there was no movement. No birds, no dogs, no life. The buildings on either side seemed to stoop forward with curiosity to watch him pass. Some doors were open, others were padlocked. Those windows with glass were shattered. Every building had its own unique display of dead plants: dead orchids in half-coconut shells hanging from an awning, dead crown-of-thorns in a row of coloured pots, dead vines climbing a three-storey building, losing their grip, hanging over the street suspended in free fall.

Another street, open doors and front yards with small cemeteries of dead consumer goods. A toaster oven. A television. A rice cooker. Like fish washed up on a river bank, no life source. No point. Embarrassed cars stripped bare, left with only their carcasses. A dove in a rattan cage, unfed, feathers on a white ribcage. Broken bone china cups crunching underfoot. At each intersection a pyre of the questionably valuable. The sooty smile of a piano keyboard. A child's high chair in charcoal. The black shadow of an antique French bureau, once priceless, now worthless.

Siri walked slowly along the unpaved lanes, his hands clenched into fists. He stepped into unlocked apartments and found himself in interrupted lives. The subliminal message, 'Had to pop out for a minute. Be back soon' was pinned somewhere in the air around them. They sat humble and faithful like stupid dogs waiting for their owners to return. A letter, half-written, undisturbed on a desk. A plate of putrid fruit on a kitchen table. Toy cars parked in front of a Kellogg's packet garage on the floor.

He heard a noise.

He was at a row of two-storey Chinese shop-houses and, illogically, he walked from one to the other trying to locate the sound. His instincts and the amulet at his neck told him to walk away. But the ghostly loneliness of his promenade so far had been unnerving. Noise was a welcome ally. Even if it was a stray cat, or an orphan child, or a cheetah escaped from the Phnom Penh zoo, it made no difference. He could use the company. He stood below a balcony and heard the unmistakable sound of drawers being opened. No animal he knew of had perfected the art of opening and closing drawers.

He walked in through the shopfront. They sold baskets there, finely woven bags and purses, stacks of place mats and coasters. All too delicate to be pilfered by an army. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed or destroyed. The till tray remained open, bank notes were pinned inside it under wire clips. Siri walked up the staircase at the back of the shop noisily, he thought, in his leather sandals. He followed the sounds into a kind of study with cabinets and bookshelves against one wall and bank upon bank of chests of drawers. And, on his knees rifling through them was a child of thirteen or fourteen. He had already amassed a small pile of booty on the floor beside him, mostly ballpoint pens and coloured pencils. He was so engrossed in his search that he hadn't heard Siri enter.

The doctor smiled. He was about to turn and leave the child to his treasure hunt when he noticed the muscles on the boy's neck tense. It was as if he sensed a presence. He turned his head and saw the old man standing there. He seemed to tremble. His eyes widened and he fumbled around him for something on the floor. He found what he was looking for on a shelf in front of him. His pistol was fat and clumsy in his hand, but holding it seemed to give him confidence. He was no longer afraid. His face hardened and it was then that Siri recognised him. He'd looked into those eyes every night for more than a week. This was the young assassin from his nightmare. The boy was real. So was the gun. He climbed to his feet with the weapon in front of him and snarled and spat out words Siri didn't understand. The gun was the child's courage, his image, his personality. Siri knew it had killed before. The boy swaggered up to the old man and levelled his personality at Siri's forehead.

It was a performance that had never failed. Siri was certain men, women and other children had quaked with fear at this same show of strength. Siri knew the boy would have no qualms about pulling the trigger He smelt death on him like the scent of gunpowder on a shooter's hand. Siri knew that if he spoke just one word of Lao it would be his epitaph. So he kept quiet. He smiled and raised his right hand and he slapped the little boy hard across the cheek. The blow snapped the boy's head to one side and the gun suddenly looked more like a plaything in his hand. He stared at Siri in amazement and the doctor glared calmly back into those young eyes. What thoughts, what memories passed through the child's head in those few seconds? Confidence was suddenly replaced with indecision which rapidly became humiliation, and the boy began to cry. Tears rolled down his cheeks and he huffed back the sobs. At that moment, the little soldier was three years old again, and helpless, and just a child.

Siri turned away from the shaking gun barrel, shook his head, and walked back down to the street. He paused by the front shutter to catch his breath. He didn't know why he wasn't dead. Perhaps, being elderly and white-haired, it was conceivable he was one of the mysterious brothers of the Red Khmer. The boy might have seen the old man in a motorcade or heard him talk at a training seminar. Everyone over sixty looked the same. But, more likely, it was because the doctor had shown no fear, and it was fear that satisfied the blood lust of the little killer. Without it, the kill meant nothing. There was no power-fed adrenalin. Nothing to disguise the fact that every day was a trauma for the child.

A block away, Siri's legs began to wobble and he caught hold of a tree trunk, hanging on to it for dear life until the shakes worked their way out of his body.

"Not the way you'd planned to go, Siri," he said. "Not in the script. A Douglas Fairbanks ending for you, old boy. A fitting hero's exit. Not popped by a little lad with a grownup's gun. No, sir."

He often talked to himself when he was overwhelmed with fear. He saw it as a more dignified reaction than wetting himself. And, invariably, it helped. With his legs back under control he walked one more short block, looking over his shoulder the whole way. He was at the intersection of a wide street. It was one he knew well. One he recalled often when searching for happy thoughts. This was Boulevard Noradon, named after the fickle regent, the mood-swing prince who rented out his soul to any passing devil. Siri was no fan of royalty but if only half the stories he'd heard today were true, he wouldn't be at all surprised to find Sihanouk's head on a pole on his own street. He couldn't imagine Brother Number One chumming up with the little regent.

He stepped onto the deserted tree-lined boulevard. This was where he and his wife had walked hand in hand back in the forties. It was one of his golden scenes. Those moments had become fewer and farther between as Boua became fanatically entwined in the struggle for independence. He needed to hold on to that Phnom Penh for as long as he could. But there were no smiling faces now. No lovers on benches. No impossible beds of tulips and roses. This was a morning-after Boulevard Noradon. Most of the imported trees had withered through lack of care. There was litter everywhere and evidence of vandalism. One street lamp was bent like a boomerang. Across the street stood half the national bank. A large dented strong room, open and empty, peeked from between destroyed brickwork.

Siri began to walk along the central reservation in the direction of Phnom Temple. He passed a porcelain toilet and, twenty metres further on, waded through slippery puddles of French piastre coins. To his left the central market, the old Chinese quarter, was a graveyard of wrecked umbrellas and shredded awnings. It gave off none of the market scents, no rotten vegetables, no stale cereals, no putrid meat. This was a market lifeless for three years. It was about now that Siri began to hum. There was certainly nothing to hum about. The last dregs of joy at being alive in this world had been drained out of him in the cellar of the Lao embassy. But it was the type of annoying ditty you might pick up from the radio or Thai TV commercials. He couldn't shake it off.

He still had that 'last man after the atomic bomb' feeling as he walked past the impressive Ecole Miche where he and Boua had attended night classes beneath ceiling fans vast as helicopter blades. He reached the European quarter. He had no idea how long he'd been walking but recently he'd been stepping to the tune in his head. He tried to find words for it but nothing came. It was lulling him into a bloated sense of security and self-confidence. Making him think that it was perfectly all right to be walking the streets of a hostile city all alone. He reached Le Cercle Sportif. To his right the Phnom Temple stood defiant at the top of its lion-guarded steps. Across the square was the national library. He knew he was only a block away from his hotel. All being well he could stroll past the guards and nobody would say anything.

Such was his aim. He had survived. He headed off across the untended grass and could see the roof of house number two in the distance. But when he reached the lawn of the national library he stopped cold. His sadness for a beautiful defiled city turned to a bitter acid in his gut. Strewn across the grass were the soggy remains of thousands of books. Tens of thousands. Some old tomes had been set alight and had melded together. Illustrated pages flapped in the breeze.

Precious and priceless volumes providing mulch for the next generation of plants. He crouched and paid reverence to the victims of ignorance and wondered whether anyone else in this city had been able to mourn the death of culture. It was then that he believed it all. If Big Brother could destroy literature and history, he could destroy lives.

He walked back through the overgrown grass of the lawn and raked his fingers through his hair. He had to get out of this place, this country. He was in the dead centre of a dead city. He had to convince somebody of what was happening here, but he had no proof. One more block and…The song was playing loudly in his brain now, confusing his thoughts. And finally the lyrics came to him. Not to his mind, exactly, but to his ears. He could hear the male tenor voice as clearly as from a radiogram. It was even more hauntingly beautiful than he remembered it from his dreams. It came to him not from the giant speakers in front of the Ministry of Information, nor from the prayer room of the empty temple, but from the ground beneath his feet.

This was the spot. This was, in some inscrutable way, the answer. He dropped to his knees, put his hands together to show respect and, without once considering the ramificartions, began to dig into the rain-softened earth.