The Lost Goddess

9

The plane was waiting for them, parked on the muddy airstrip. From two hundred meters away Jake could count the seats. Four. Just a little four-seater: tiny and old and functional. Jake wondered precisely what function the plane had, normally: Crop spraying? Drug dealing? Arms smuggling?

He didn’t have time to ask. Already the propeller was turning, and the Hmong rebels escorting them to the tarmac wore extremely frayed and anxious smiles, keen to see them gone.

Jake stared at Tou and Yeng, who were talking quietly. He felt a tingle of suspicion. Someone had betrayed them back at Phonsavan: the police had known where to find them. Could it be that Yeng had betrayed them? Tipped off a policeman? Twenty dollars was a lottery win in Laos. Maybe they had bought his loyalty.

But that didn’t make sense at all. Why go through all the pain of the last twenty-four hours, rescuing Tou and Chemda and Jake from the police, if Yeng’s immediate or even ultimate intention was to turn them over? So, no, it wasn’t Yeng.

They were approaching the airfield proper, passing a barricade of rusted, empty Budweiser kegs. Jake marveled at all the emptiness. What had once been the busiest airport in Indochina was now a museum of tropical weeds and concrete decay, surrounded by shacks adorned with ancient Coke signs rusted into a purple-red: vintage and resonant.

The whole place vibrated with memories, with jungly and luxuriant nostalgia: the air was moist with ghosts of young Yankee pilots and dead Hmong heroes, and the whiff of marijuana and china white heroin, and big slangy guys in jeeps and talk of Charlie and LZs and Willy Peter, and cartridge players blasting The Doors—

He glanced back at Chemda. Her brown eyes were full of gratitude and weariness. Not the alertness she had shown, staring in the jars at Site 9.

Jar. Site. Nine. This partial answer to the puzzle slid into place in Jake’s mind with a satisfying exactitude. Site 9! The Laos government knew perfectly well what had been discovered at Site 9. And they were still protecting it. A Communist government protecting what fellow Communists had discovered in the 1970s. A final site that had been kept untouched, maybe for this American. Fishhook.

This made perfect sense. Jake and Chemda had already been conspicuous on the streets of Ponsavan — he was virtually the only white guy in the city. Tourists were scarce. Then someone — it could have been anyone — had spotted them heading south, toward the Plain of Jars. This person told the police. Paranoid and dangerous, the thin and smiling Ponsavan cops did their job, protecting Site 9. They came after them.

But why did it mean so much to the authorities, and to Samnang, then and now? A bunch of old skulls and burned ribs in a jar?

Jake scanned the horizon, as if the answer would be hanging from the mango trees. There was no answer. Just a monkey hooting in the jungle; vaguely human, yet distinctly inhuman. A macaque? A gibbon? A langur? The jungle thronged with life. And there were Laotian soldiers in there, too, chasing down the last Hmong rebels. Not conscripts: real soldiers. Trained soldiers. Killers. Aiming their guns this way.

Now.

“OK, OK,” Tou said, turning and calling to Jake. “Hurry. Please?”

They paced quickly across the concrete. Jake’s anxieties were winding ever tighter. They needed to be gone. But who had organized this? How were they going to repay the Hmong?

“Chemda,” he said, eyeing the plane, “how do we sort this out? I only have about a hundred bucks—”

“My grandfather,” she answered. She lifted her phone. “I have talked with him. Grandfather Sen is helping us…. He has persuaded the Hmong—”

“Come,” Tou interrupted. “Come quick, please quick.”

As they ran the last yards, Jake remembered. And turned. “Yeng?”

The old man had halted. He shook his head. He was standing on the broken asphalt: he was not going to accompany them to the plane; instead he grasped Jake’s hand, and then Chemda’s, and then he cracked a weary smile and said, “Sabaydee.”

His conscience tolling, Jake grabbed a fistful of dollars, virtually all of the dollars he had on him, and thrust them into Yeng’s hand. Yeng refused. Jake tried again.

Yeng accepted just ten dollars and said, “Kharb jai.” Then he motioned with his free hand at the green mountains all around them, and he did a machine-gun action with two fingers pointing and shooting. “Pathet Lao! Bang bang!”

The phrase didn’t require interpretation. Jake raced the final ten yards to the plane. Chemda was already inside the minuscule cabin. The “pilot” was another skinny, grinning Hmong lad, barely eighteen, in ripped jeans stained with motor oil; he smelled faintly of last night’s lao-lao whiskey. Jake reached for the ladder, but now he realized Tou was also dawdling. Backing away.

“Tou? You’re not coming either?”

“I stay here for… Luang no good. Police. My Hmong friend are here. Better for you go Luang.”

Reflexively, Jake once again reached into his pocket for cash. Tou frowned at the idea and the gesture. No! He didn’t want anything. Instead he stepped back and did a mock salute and he laughed.

“Number one plane! Royal Hmong Air Force.”

Jake laughed, very anxiously — and said goodbye, trying to repress the fear that this was all a setup. Tou and Yeng weren’t coming because they knew that the plane was going to crash? No, that was ridiculous. The pilot didn’t look like a potential suicide. But the mystery was so mazelike he felt trapped by his ignorance.

“Quick please!”

He climbed the ladder.

There were no seat belts in the tiny plane. There were barely any seats. The carpet of the cabin had worn away so much that the steel of the chassis was visible: bare rivets and bolts.

A rusty door slid shut and the pilot clicked a switch and slammed a pedal; the old wheels rumbled down the cracking concrete, and Jake wondered if this plane had enough life to reach the end of the runway, let alone the royal capital of Laos, and then they were up and away and banking left and up and up and… just about over the crest of the surrounding hills.

The lushly forested peaks were lavishly mustached with white mist: the plane banked left and ascended again, and the green and rugged summits of the cordillera stretched beneath to a hazy horizon of more hills and blueness.

“Fuck,” said Jake, resting his head against the tiny perspex window behind him. Chemda’s worried and weary smile was about ten inches away. The plane was that small. It was just the two of them, sitting opposite each other, and a hungover pilot, in a plane the size of a dinghy.

“Hmong Air Force One?” said Chemda. And then she suddenly laughed. And Jake laughed too, because he needed to relieve the tension, and because he just liked her laughter: there was something lyrically and infectiously sarcastic in it, pretty yet grounded — and clever. Aware of the absurdity of everything.

“What a night.” Jake shook his head, the laughter dying on his lips. “What a fucking horrible couple of days.”

“Samnang.” She sighed, and swallowed away some emotion. “I still can’t work it out. Aiii. Khoeng koch…”

She was speaking in Khmer; it was incomprehensible.

But Jake did comprehend. He felt like he had, this instant, flown through the clouds to the dazzling blue of the truth.

“Suicide!”

“What?”

“Samnang wasn’t killed. It was suicide.”

She gazed at him, perplexed.

“Explain?”

“It must be suicide. No? Otherwise, it’s too much coincidence. Think about it. Your other guy just runs into a minefield, knowing the danger? Do you believe that is likely? Why would he do that? Now this other guy dies — slashes himself, hangs himself—”

“But why, why kill himself?”

The plane banked. Jake raced on: “Maybe someone is, or was, intimidating these men, telling them not to help you — putting on intense pressure, maybe getting to their families?” Jake was speculating, wildly, unscientifically. But he was sure he was right. “And that’s why he killed himself, that way. There is a message in the killing, Chemda! He did it to himself, like a suicide note no one could erase or steal, knowing someone would see the terrible parallel.”

Chemda frowned. Jake continued: “Think about it. Tou comes to him and says, ‘We’ve found the jars, rediscovered the jars,’ and then — you see?”

“OK….” Chemda nodded. “And then, ah, Samnang realizes something terrible is about to be revealed — something he was involved in, all those years ago. He sees no way out. But he wants to leave a note, that no one can erase—” She hesitated, pensively, then said: “But still, suicide. How can we be sure?”

“The knife,” said Jake, almost triumphant. “The knife was just lying on the floor. Would a cold-blooded killer do that? Leave the weapon lying by the body? We know Tou didn’t do it. He has absolutely no motive. If it was the cops, they would have taken the knife and used it to frame Tou—”

A brief silence between them ensued, while the pilot talked quietly and cheerily in Lao via the cockpit radio. Jake stiffened with renewed tension; he might have solved the puzzle of Samnang’s death, but their situation remained precarious. Exceptionally precarious. Who was the pilot speaking with? And what was he saying? Jake realized he hasn’t asked a question of Chemda, a question that had been ripening in his thoughts for a while.

“Why aren’t we flying straight to Phnom Penh? It’s just an hour or two.”

Chemda’s oval face was smudged with dirt and tiredness.

“They will know if we try to fly straight across the frontier. International air traffic control. That could cause very big problems. But if we go to Luang, there are other ways out of the country…. Much more discreet exits. Roads, ah, through the jungle.”

“And there are lots of tourists in Luang.”

“Yes,” she said. “It will be safer for you there. You won’t be quite so visible.” She twisted in the painfully small cabin, looking down at the ruched green pelt of the countryside: the forests already were thinning, the hills mellowing and softening.

“That is the Mekong. We are nearly there.”

“Where shall we stay? I know some hotels.”

She shook her head. “My family has very good friends in Luang. A French couple. A little hotel by the river, hidden away. Good place to hide for one night…. Sleep, we need to sleep. No? Then we work out a way to get out of Laos.”

Already they were descending. Jake saw roads and a truck, the metal roofs of rice barns and farmhouses, sugarcane fields. Moments later they bumped to a halt on a brown dirt airstrip. It was another random airport in the bush, even more ramshackle than the Secret City. Just a hut at the side of a broad boulevard of mud and a man in the hut who nodded, knowingly, at the pilot, when they walked from the plane to the perimeter gate.

“Luang Prabang,” said the pilot, pointing beyond the wall at a sunlit road. “Sabaydee.” The pilot slapped Jake on the back, and then did an elegant wai — the hands-pressed-together, all-purpose, praying-and-bowing gesture of Indochina — to Chemda. She did the same in return.

The pilot, Jake noted, still smelled of lao-lao whiskey. Maybe he had been drinking on the plane. But they had made it. Jake and Chemda grabbed their bags, their pathetic remnants of luggage, and walked out onto the road. The traffic was light, bordering on nonexistent: a few farm trucks, then nothing, then a Honda motorcycle carrying an entire family — father, mother, two infant children, piglet. Then nothing. But a few minutes later a yellow metal tuk-tuk coughed into view, rounding the lush bamboo stands, decorated with stencils of Australian and British flags.

They hailed the tuk-tuk and climbed aboard. They were heading into Luang. Jake felt his spirits rise and his nerves subside for a moment as the warm air breezed his face. He had loved Luang Prabang when he had first seen it, just a week ago — though it felt like a year. Luang Prabang: the ancient capital of the kingdom. Half French colonial resort, half glittering Buddhist citadel, royal and sacred Louangphrabang.

And here he was again, where smiling girls bicycled quietly by the boulangerie; where old Laotian men played petanque by the water tamarinds; where the orange-robed monks walked from temple to temple every morning past a hundred Buddhist shrines, teakwood bars, and rambling Chinese shops.

Street vendors were hawking pyramids of tangerines arrayed on wicker baskets. Barefoot men slept on rushes in the shade of papaya trees. The mighty Mekong River slid past unnoticed, like a great and famous actor, forgotten in his dotage.

“Here,” said Chemda.

The hotel was indeed discreet, beyond the royal palace and the tall scruffy stupa: so discreet the road gave up before it reached the building.

They climbed out of the tuk-tuk and paced the last hundred meters of dirt. The hotel door was closed. Le Gauguin, said a sign. Chemda pushed open a large door and they slipped into the coolness of a wooden lobby scented with teak and cedar and incense — expensive, private, tranquil. Jake yearned immediately for a shower. Sleep. Then escape.

“Chemda! Chérie! Bonjour!”

A late-middle-aged French woman strode into Reception. She was introduced: Madame Agnès Marconnet. She hugged Chemda and smiled warily at Jake. The two women spoke quickly in French, too fast for Jake to begin to understand; before he could say please or merci they were escorted by a girl in a silk cheongsam to two guest rooms, and Jake struggled through a couple of merci beaucoups and kharb jais and Chemda said she would see him later, and then he fell straight into his bed without even showering and slept immediately, hungrily, like a starveling famished of sleep for a century. He slept so hard he didn’t dream, at first, but then something in the darkness of his subconscious disturbed him and he woke with a vague but ungraspable sense of panic.

For a few moments he lay there, perplexed, collating his wits. He didn’t know what time it was. Dawn, maybe. The thin filter of blue light, through the slats of the shutters, pierced the darkness of the room.

Then he stared. Hard.

Something was hanging from the door. Three meters away.

He wished he were dreaming, but he was awake. Wide awake.

This was something truly and purely terrible, something beyond hellish.

Jake’s mind swarmed with the horror.

Please. No.