The Lost Goddess

31

“Boris vyı˘ ti!”

Yakulovich was stabbing at the orangutan with the cattle prod, poking like some effete and feeble swordsman. But the shocks were strong: Julia — in her desperation — could feel them herself, faintly conducted into her body through the writhing muscles of the ape, frazzles of pain and pungent fear. She struggled under the gross, surging weight, pushing at the leathery skin.

“Teper’, Boris v vashu kletku!”

The orangutan began to cringe and shirk the blows; another shock from the prod dislodged the ape completely and sent him loping into the cage, which Yakulovich shut, and locked, with fumbling hands.

For a moment Julia lay numbed and flat on the slimy concrete; but then she seized herself and sat up. She was bruised but unharmed, terrified but unviolated — the orangutan had got no further than her arms and thighs. But the ape had ravished her sense of herself: she could never forget this. The electric prickle of the cattle prod.

She stood. Swaying a little. But she stood. Brushing dirt from her long skirt and her top. Brushing and brushing. Yearning to shower. To wash the hot musky smell of the primate’s fur from herself — and from her clothes. No, she would burn the clothes. The way she burned her clothes after Sarnia.

The director was actually weeping as he gazed her way — weeping like a child, sobbing like a doll designed to cry.

“What can I say — I am so sorry, Miss Kerrigan.” His sense of disgrace was obvious, he even lost conrol of his previously immaculate English: “Miss, sorry, mne ochen’ zhal, etogo nikogda ne sluchalos ran’she! I sorry. Vy dolzhny byt gormonal’nye. Opyat’ ya proshu proshcheniya—”

“Whatever,” said Julia. “You stupid man. You…”

These curses dwindled to nothing. What was the point? Julia had seen and done enough. The orangutan was hunched at the far end of his cage, his long arms curved over his face. The eyes were big and sad and thoughtless.

She had to get out, now. Julia had everything she required from the Sukhumi Institute for Primate Pathology. All the information it could ever provide; maybe even some vital clues.

But now she urgently needed to bathe.

Walking to the gate, and then to the top of the hill, she scanned the bleak Sukhumi streets. She was searching for a hopeful sign between the drooping palm trees. Looking for something saying Hotel.

For once, she lucked out. Hotel Ritsa. Its light was flickering in the drizzle half a kilometer down the hill, beside the arthritic tramlines, toward the coast.

Julia ran down, dragging her reluctant bag, and checked straight in. The reception area was dusty and careworn. The elevator was probably dangerous. The sheets in the bedroom were nylon. The showerhead belched spurts of lukewarm water. It felt mildly paradisiacal.

She showered, long and hard, and then crept into bed, and drank her bottle of duty-free Georgian wine — using the bathroom toothbrush mug — and then she slept, in the nirvana of scratchy nylon, for many hours. And then she woke, and went down to a hotel breakfast of processed pink ham slices with pickled eggs.

When she came back to her room, she showered once more: one final cleansing. But this time, when she stepped onto the bathroom tiles, to dry her hair, she lingered at the mirror, and she gazed: appalled — and intrigued.

Her pale arms and thighs were liberally covered in bruises, purple handprints made by the orangutan. The bruises showed where the beast had grasped her, and groped her, fiercely clutching at her flesh. The bruises were dark and livid.

A tingle unsettled her as she stared at these contusions. The tingle of an idea. The fingers were all there: the fingers of the animal’s hands, guiltless, brutal, different, undaunted. Guiltless as the boys who attacked her in Sarnia.

Then she thought of the Hands of Gargas: their poignancy, their sense of remorse. Human hands, so very old. And full of a strange regret.

Julia smiled at herself.

Yes? Yes maybe. Perhaps she had it. The key. The code. The glimpse of a glorious solution.

She had it.

Refreshed, revived, and filled with excitement, she sat down at her laptop. And she worked, hard, putting these pieces together. The cave art. The trepanations. Guilt and conscience. The guiltless animality of the orangutan. The guiltless savagery of men reduced to animals in the back of a VW van.

Yes! The idea positively thrilled her. She was using the past. She was turning the past into something purposeful, something directed. She was also aware, somehow, that she was masking — denying and subverting — all the accumulated horrors, with thinking. But she didn’t care. Because she was getting ever closer to the truth.

It took her many hours; it took her several days. To break the monotony and refresh her mind, during these days, she took breaks to make phone calls on her cell phone, which miraculously worked; and to send e-mail from a small, dingy café that served Abkhazian tea with saucers of gooseberry jam.

Most of her calls were to Michigan, or to Alex, and full of lies. I’m fine, don’t worry about me. She knew they would only tell her to come home; of course there was no way she was going home, not when she was this close to the Truth.

Nearly all of her e-mails were to Marcel Barnier. He, apparently, was the link. The next link. He was maybe the only man who could tell her if she was actually correct.

He didn’t reply. Not once.

Julia wasn’t surprised. She sat and sipped her gooseberry-flavored tea, and she surmised that Barnier was avoiding the world. All these Western scientists and intellectuals, these Marxists who once visited Cambodia, must surely by now have realized what was happening to them: that they were all dying. Even the most isolated and friendless would have seen at least one or two news reports, especially of the spectacular later killings in France.

So if Julia wanted someone to confirm her theory, Marcel Barnier was the only one, because he was the only one left — yet he wasn’t replying. Perhaps, therefore, she should just go there? And see him? It had worked before. Yes, perhaps she would go there, when she had broken open the intellectual puzzle.

And on the third day she did it, she cracked it: she had her theory. Standing back from her laptop, which she was using in the hotel lobby, as the cleaners made their daily yet farcically halfhearted attempts to clean her room of forty years of Soviet grime, Julia almost gloated. It was just three pages of thoughts. But it was the truth. Or at least her version of the truth, a truth that had been entombed in the past for decades and, in some senses, centuries.

It was the Gospel of the Ice Age. It was the Spiritual Confession of Mankind, written on cave walls thirty thousand years ago.

Julia had, for the first time in her life, completed something: finished a journey, made that amazing discovery; she had restored an extraordinary thesis to the world. The fifteen-year-old girl still inside her, the girl who almost wept at the terrible Hands of Gargas, was exultant, and gloating, and almost happy, despite it all, because of it all. She smiled quietly to herself.

“Spasibo.” Julia accepted the bill from the lobby waiter for her canned, sweetened orange juice. Then she got up, walked across the tram-clanging boulevard to the Internet café, and booked the next flight from Adler to Moscow, and then from Moscow to Bangkok. She had just enough cash left in her savings for a few more flights and cheap hotels. She was going to use this money, the last penny if necessary, to see Barnier, whether he wanted to see her or not. This was her life, her moment. After this nothing seemed to matter; if she ran out of cash, who cared? Not her, not anymore.

A Valium let her sleep on the plane to Moscow, a Xanax let her sleep on the plane from Moscow to Bangkok. She needed energy for this confrontation: she was spiraling into the black hole of the truth, where destruction and oblivion lurked, where the killer herself might be headed — but the risk felt almost good, she was unmoored now, floating on the tidal bore, surfing her success to the mouth of the river. Gloriously free.

Maybe the gravity in all this was her own pride, dragging her to danger. But she was proud. As the Thai Airways plane landed at Bangkok she woke from a dream of herself receiving a prize for a great discovery. The man giving her the prize was her father. Then Rouvier. Then Alex. Her mother was apparently locked out of the Nordic hall. The walls of the hall were covered with paintings of huge cats.

“Sawadeekap! Thai Airways would like to thank you…”

She stirred herself: stashing her new clothes in the holdall, grabbing her laptop, filing out of the plane and exiting customs. The heat outside the airport was welcome, a wet cocoon of humidity. After the chilly, stale dankness of Sukhumi, this rich tropical Siamese closeness was better.

A cab? She got a taxi from Suvarnabhumi Airport, into the city.

Julia stared across the elevated highway at the myriad skyscrapers as they sped into town: Bangkok, it seemed, was another lusty and furious Asian megalopolis, with wild high-rises and huge elevated freeways and vast adverts for Japanese cars and English-language schools and South Korean TVs.

And Bangkok also had the answer to everything. Perhaps.

“You say Soi Sick?” The cabbie was talking. “Soi Sick, Sukhumvit? Near Sukhumvit?”

“Yes. I think so. Soi, er yes, Soi Six.”

She mumbled to a stop. What if the address on the card wasn’t correct?

She had no choice.

“Sorry, sorry, lady, I pay money.”

The cabdriver was handing over cash at a tollbooth, but when the gate opened they merely inched ahead: they’d hit the real urban traffic, the cholesterol of Asian prosperity. The cab stopped again and started again, slowed and stopped. The endless traffic massed, and moved, and slowed, like an organic process, peristalsis.

She gazed across the city. Again. Flashes of distant lightning zagged silently between the skyscrapers and the imperious Hitachi adverts: a storm over the Gulf of Thailand.

Then at last the traffic parted and the taxi swooped left and over a disused railway track, and now they were in the florid and gristly urbanity of central Bangkok, with the street-side kebab stalls, the upmarket European shops, the amputees lying outside British pubs, sushi bars, Bookazine outlets, French restaurants, and enormous marble megahotels squeezed between Bangladeshi tailors and Chinese jewelry shops.

“Soi Sick! No Soi Eight? You sure? Sure-sure?”

The cabdriver’s smiling Thai face was a wry question.

She repeated her answer: “Yes, Soi Six.”

The taxi swerved right, down Soi Nana, the commercial sex district. Middle-aged Western and Japanese men sat with unfeasibly teenage girls outside bars pounding the Rolling Stones and AC/ DC into the twilit street. Female flesh exhibited itself everywhere, languid, brown, sheened and exposed. Painted toenails. Vivid lipstick. Girls from Isaan ate fried cockroaches and fried beetles and sweetened coconut rice with chunks of fresh mango.

It was dark now, and the streets were bright. Julia saw Coyote Bars. Man4man Massage. Lolita Sauna. Bangcockney Pub.

Pachara Suites. Right in the middle of the red-light district.

“Here,” said Julia, the tension accelerating with her pulse. She alighted and tipped the taxi driver.

Pachara Suites was a gleaming, thirty-story condominium, with elegant slate fountains and a wall-eyed man begging outside using a Yum Yum noodle jar as a cup. The man’s blind eye looked like a mung bean.

Julia found the glossy lobby deserted — she heard, too audibly, the squelching of her sneaker soles as she walked to the faraway elevator. Eighteen floors above, and down another long, bright, empty hallway, she located the door. She knocked.

Silence. An eyehole opened for a second, then occluded. Was someone behind the door? Checking her out? Or was this someone else? Was this the most absurd chase of a very wild goose?

Julia knocked again.

The eyehole shut. A latch was turned.

Finally the door opened, just an inch: the door was secured with three chains. An oldish, intelligent face peered out. Julia recognized an aged version of the young smile in the Phnom Penh photo.

It was Marcel Barnier.

His wild liverish eyes looked at Julia. He was holding a long knife in his hand. But as he absorbed what he was seeing, he seemed to relax. The faint trace of a pout glistened on his wet lips. A gourmet’s air kiss. Desirous.

“Fuck. Ah. You are Julia Kerrigan! The glamorous archaeologist? I Googled you. Saw your… photo. Yes. Yes, yes. I got your e-mails. Forgive me for not replying, but… Why the hell did the doorman let you through?”

“Uh.”

“Why? I told him not to. Was he not there?”

“No.”

“Fuck.” The face concealed behind the door swore twice, and sighed. “Fucking noodle head, Supashok. They shoulda kept the last doorman. Ai. Maybe he went for a pipi. OK…”

Dropping the knife on a table to his side, he unlatched one chain, then the second, then the third. He opened the door and gazed at her creased jeans and jet-lagged face.

“You understand that I am being very fucking careful. Come in.”

“Thank you.”

Nervous, hopeful, quite terrified, she stepped inside.

The apartment was in chaos. Cardboard boxes sat on the floor, full of books and paintings. Furniture was partly dismantled and stacked against the wall. Half-empty bottles of Johnnie Walker and completely empty bottles of Jacobs Creek Grenache Shiraz stood on tables and in corners next to copiously overfilled ashtrays.

“I am moving. Yes. And yes, I am an alcoholic. For reasons I am sure you understand. To escape, to save my life. I used to escape through fucking liquor, now I have to escape for real.”

He looked in Julia’s eyes.

She nodded and said, “I think I know why.”

“That’s good. That’s good-good. Save a lot of horseshit talking.”

His French accent had been entirely erased and replaced by a kind of coarse, slangy, slightly bizarre Anglo-American-Oriental English; his breath smelled of whiskey and cigarettes and garlic. Presumably, decades of living out here, speaking the only Western language anyone understood, English, had beaten the Frenchness out of him.

“You look stressed. Very charming, but stressed. Ah ah. We can have a fucking drink, no? The fridge will be the last thing I empty.” He laughed, angrily. “But so what — I like a drink, it keeps me cheerful. What is it they say about the French, a Frenchman is an Italian in a bad mood? Hah. Ein bier, meine freunde? I will have wine!”

Julia said yes. Barnier laughed again and slipped into his kitchen and returned with a beer and a glass. He looked at her inquisitively as she sipped the Tiger beer.

“You want to know everything I know. Yeah?”

“Well. As I also said, um, I have some ideas of my own. I wanted to see if I was…” The beer was refreshingly cold. She drank. “See if I was right.”

“The great mystery? Maybe we can inform each other, ma bichette. Trouble is, I do not know everything. You may know more than me.” Wariness and mischief and anxiety mixed in his gaze. “But maybe not. Maybe I know quite enough already. And someone ought to hear my story, before I escape.” He gestured at the boxes. He took a glass of red wine from somewhere and swallowed a huge gulp. He lit a cigarette and said, “So, ask me your questions.”

“But. It needs time. And you seem, sorry, I mean — you must be very on edge. When are you going to go?”

Barnier paused, and exhaled smoke, before he answered. He slurped once more at the wine and ogled Julia’s blond hair. His own hair was thin and brownish gray; his clothes were relaxed and youthful, though not in the embarrassing way of Ghislaine: just jeans and a gray T-shirt, stained with drops of red wine. Loafers. No socks. A suntan. A man keeping himself reasonably in shape apart from the alcohol. But the face was frightened and the lips were stained red with tannin.

Then he said: “I’m going. Somewhere, very soon, where that witch of a killer, that krasue, won’t find me. I have read all the newspaper reports. I have read the shitty police e-mails, but not replied. I do not trust anyone. Fuck. ’Course I am on edge. She’s coming for me — here.”

Julia said, “Do you know who she is? The killer?”

“No. Not exactly.”

“Do you know why she is killing all these people?”

“Revenge!” Barnier tapped ash, and stared at her with a sudden expression of deep and existential fear. He was scared. He was really and visibly scared. But then the bravado returned. “Yes, it is revenge — it is surely revenge — for the poor Khmer millions we helped to destroy. And I cannot blame them, you know? That is the poignancy. I cannot blame them. The fucking things we did, the Marxists, us, me, Danny the Red and the rest of us, all the reds now in socialist governments across Europe, we gave the Khmer Rouge succor, we told the world their lies, we were their useful idiots, maybe we fucking deserve to die. But if I am gonna die then I am gonna die happy. Do not go gentle into that good night, but rage, rage, and order some hookers and blow.” His eyes flicked around the room. “Come. You are right. If we want to talk, let us do it in a good place, somewhere safe, somewhere there are pretty girls. More pretty girls. And these are naked. We can have lady drink short time. You know you are not the first person to come and see me today. I am suddenly an attraction, a destination, a tourist honeypot.”

“How?”

“A girl from Cambodia. Chemda Tek. And her boyfriend, Jake… Jake something. A photographer. A Brit.” He belched smoke. Profanely. “They found me this morning. They, too, are frightened. They are also pursuing these mysteries. I told them to go away for a while ’cause I must pack, and I told ’em I would meet them in a bar this evening, a nice busy bar with lots of witnesses. It’s at Soi Cowboy.” He dropped his cigarette butt in his glass of wine. The cigarette whispered and died. “I have a feeling no woman would ever just walk into this bar alone, so we should be safe. C’mon, ’s go. Because staying here feels like sitting, waiting to die, a target.”

“Who are they? These people, what do they want?”

“I am not totally fucking sure. I was drunk when they told me. Hey, it was eleven a. m. Let them explain, non? Come, if we are to talk we might as well all do it together. Somewhere safe. This way, moumoune.”

They took the long elevator ride to the ground floor, then a short walk around the corner, then ten minutes down thrumming Sukhumvit Boulevard, with Barnier gazing down each junction as if he expected to be run over — or attacked — at every junction; and then they crossed the Asok walkways, whereupon they were immersed in another sex-district strip of the most garish neon, with go go bars and massage parlors and love hotels and small baby elephants carrying drunken Western boys on a stag weekend who threw hopeful leers at the harlots enticing them into Sheba’s and Suzie Wong.

The bar they apparently wanted was called Baccara. It was luridly advertised in scarlet light, and inside it was dark and noisy and big and full of Japanese men staring at a central stage where maybe thirty or forty nubile girls were dancing in gauzy bras and equally transparent miniskirts.

But then Julia realized the Japanese men in their sofas and armchairs were not staring at these girls but staring up. She followed the communal gaze. Above them was a glass ceiling, and on top of it about twenty more young girls danced languidly to Chinese pop music, naked apart from tartan schoolgirl skirts, wearing no underclothes at all.

“Biggest no panty bar in the world!” Barnier’s laughter was like a vulgar heckle. “The Japs love it here, and the girls love them back. You know why? You wanna know what the girls call Japanese men? Mr. Four. They call Jap johns Mr. Four—”

“I’m sorry—”

“’Cause they pay four thousand baht for a fuck, they last just four minutes, and they are four centimeters long! Hah. Look, there’s our good friends. Let’s get some Tanquerays and tonic and talk. Corner left, nine o’clock.”

Julia followed Barnier’s gesture and noticed a particular female figure sitting discreetly in the darkest corner, with her back to them. Her body language was stiff and uncomfortable; she seemed Asian, judging by the petiteness, the dark bare arms, dark long hair. Julia empathized with any discomfort the woman might be feeling: they were virtually the only two women in the bar who weren’t half-naked, or dancing, or serving drinks.

The woman’s companion was a young white guy, tall, presumably Jake. Julia glanced back at the woman. Her profile, seen obliquely, was familiar in other ways.

The shock of recognition was liquefying. This was no ordinary Asian woman. This was no coincidence.

Julia swayed as the cliff edge of fear dropped around her.

Barnier was gesturing to a smiling bar girl.

“Nong? Hello? Sawadee? We go talk-talk with friend over there? Gin tonic. Bring three. Kapkap.” He pointed at the table, then turned to Julia. “Let’s go over.”

“No. Stop.”

Barnier didn’t hear her. Julia whispered again, urgently: “Stop!”

She reached out a hand and pulled at the Frenchman. He was bemused.

“Eh? What is it?”

A pause. Julia hesitated. Maybe she was wrong? She wasn’t wrong. That long dark hair, the curve of the back, the profile.

She was right. As she stood, immobile and silent with shock, Barnier shoved on and walked to the table and said, “Chemda, Jake! Look! I have brought yet another exciting new friend. I am such a fucking wanted man.”

Jake rose and offered a hand and said hello to Julia. But Julia’s focus was still fixed on the face of the woman: Chemda Tek.

Then Chemda Tek spoke.

“Hello?”

This was it. The final proof.

She even had an American accent.

Chemda Tek was the killer.