The Lost Goddess

5

The Lao policemen had guns in shoulder holsters. The smell of male sweat in the hot and stuffy room was distinct and intense. The questioning became more aggressive.

Why were Jake and Chemda here? Who was the dead man? Why had Tou disappeared? Why had Tou telephoned them last night? Why would anyone kill a harmless old historian? Why were they looking at the Plain of Jars? Who had given permission? What did they expect to find? What could be interesting about a bunch of old jars? What? When? Where? How? Why were they here?

Chemda stared at the ground, saying nothing, saying as little as possible. Jake did the same. But the thinnest cop, with the sweatiest shirt, seemed enraged by their muteness. He glared and he shouted. His face was so thin, everything about him was thin, the nylon of his clothes, the plastic of his shoes, the vowels in his curses. He was thin and angry and fifty and sweating hatred for everything Jake represented: money, the West, youth, privilege, the English language — all the Western kids puking on the steps of the temples of Vang Vieng, all the Westerners polluting beautiful ancient Laos.

Jake almost wanted to say sorry.

He said, “Sorry?”

The man shook his head angrily and spat out a question; but he spoke barely any English. He stood and he shouted at Jake, incomprehensibly. What was he shouting? It was all said in Lao. Jake tried not to cower in his chair. He got the sense this particular policeman was a millimeter away from whipping out his gun and slapping it across Jake’s face, breaking his nose like balsa, squirting blood onto the desk. Was that already a bloodstain? On the wall?

Jake stayed mute. Staring ahead. Meek and polite — and mute as possible. That’s what Chemda had advised. Say nothing. But this was nasty. Jake had heard vague stories of Western journalists being seriously abused in Laos, for going where they were not wanted: journalists flung in jail, and tortured, by a prickly Communist regime, a cornered country, now surrounded by capitalists. He’d seen men on the terrace of the FCC in Phnom Penh with limps and bruises and ragged, disbelieving expressions: I just got back from Luang, where the beer is good and the girls are cute, but man, oh man.…

The cops turned for a moment. And walked away.

Chemda whispered: “Remember what I said at the hotel.”

He couldn’t forget. The hours since the discovery of the corpse were now a stark and unforgettable tableau, luridly lit in his mind.

When they had discovered the body, Chemda had stifled her immediate shock and suppressed any hint of tears, and with extraordinary calmness she had turned to Jake and intoned, “The police will use this against us, try and get rid of us, or worse. When they interview us — say nothing.” Then she’d gone straight to the hotel manager, leaving Jake with the corpse, swinging gently as the door creaked on its hinges.

Soon after, Chemda had returned with the manager, a fat man with red eyes who gaped at the body in horror, and who tiptoed past the blood like a bizarrely corpulent ballet dancer.

The rest was a series of grisly procedures. The ambulance. The sirens. Lights in the parking lot. Dirty white police cars behind. Frantic phone calls and texts. Tou had been searched for — and not found. Eventually Jake had collapsed onto a bed in a spare room for a few meager minutes of sleep.

And then the police had come back, just after dawn, to snatch Chemda and Jake and take them to the station — for the interrogation, maybe more. And so they were brought here, to the Ponsavan police station, an anonymous yet menacing concrete block in this anonymous yet menacing concrete city, a building adorned with three Communist flags hanging limply in the dawn light over the concrete porch.

The young Lao officer who had first collected them was polite enough. Just enough. He spoke some English. He’d led them through corridors of dusty policework to this stuffy room, where his desk loomed large, and handcuffs and batons hung from a hook. Jake had wondered what tools they had in the basement. And then, at last, the questioning had begun: long and incessant, remorseless. Hours of grinding questions. Repeated relentlessly, like the cops expected them to suddenly change their answers if they asked the same question for the tenth time.

Hours later, they were still here. Was this ever going to end?

Jake stared, now, at the hammer-and-sickle flags hung around the room, as the thin cop questioned Chemda. So many flags? They implied a very defensive insecurity. This was a nervous place. The flags said: We are Communists, definitely. Ignore the rampant capitalism everywhere. Look instead at all the flags. Jake wondered again how many people were taken to the basement. Such a big concrete building would definitely have a large and chilly basement.

The questioning of Chemda continued. Jake reached into his pocket and took out his light meter. It was the only bit of gear he had. All his cameras were back at the hotel: he felt like a soldier forcibly deprived of his rifle. He fiddled, uselessly, with the meter.

And now the cop came back to Jake with his questions, interpreted by the English-speaking policeman. They were the same questions, all over again.

Why were Jake and Chemda here? Who was the dead man? Why had Tou disappeared? Why had Tou telephoned them last night? Why would anyone kill a harmless old historian?

Jake replied quietly, and meekly, and honestly. And repetitiously. For another hour.

At some unspoken signal, they were both asked to stand, and separate. The authorities were dividing them. They were apparently going to be questioned individually. Chemda gave Jake a long glance as she was led away, then she reached and subtly grasped Jake’s hand. The touch was like a mild electric shock. Then she let go.

Jake stared at her. She was turning now and regarding the smiling, faux-polite, English-speaking cop: her regal Khmer expression was proud, uptilted, daring the police to do their worst. There was a shamelessness to her loveliness in that tiny moment. A kind of unabashed and aristocratic pride. Imperious and defiant.

He admired her stance, her confidence. And yet he worried for her. He wondered what the Communist cops would do to this beautiful and well-born girl who openly defied them.

The door closed; he was alone with the thin cop. All the other policemen had gone, along with Chemda.

The assault came at once. Like the anorexic cop had been just waiting for his moment, when he was at last unobserved, he leaped from his chair, grabbed Jake by the hair, and yanked his head back, painfully, pulling at the roots. Now he spoke over Jake’s face. Spoke down. Salivating. Angry. Hoarse. Speaking Lao.

There was something foul in the cop’s breath, some overripe Asian food, a pungent meat, or last night’s Chinese liquor; Jake blocked out the man’s spittled words. He closed his eyes and said nothing, letting the policeman rage and snarl. How else should he respond? What else could he do? He counted the seconds as the cop slapped his face. Once, then again, then a third time. Hard.

Jake kept his eyes shut. He heard the cop say a name. He opened his eyes. The cop gestured angrily, and then eagerly stepped to his desk, like a boxer going to his corner, impatient for the next round. A drawer was flung open. The cop was rifling, briskly searching. Looking for what? A knife? A scalpel? The fear tingled in Jake’s fingers.

The door swung open. Chemda stepped through, followed by the policeman who spoke English. She lifted her cell phone and explained: “I did it — I got hold of people in Phnom Penh! They confirmed it all… our presence in the Plain of Jars. We’re OK, Jake, we’re OK.”

It was true. The mood had altered. Somehow. She had done it: she had saved them. She had saved Jake from a real beating. The English-speaking policeman nodded at the room, nodded at everyone, as if he were saying This is over, for now.

Jake stood and said nothing about what had happened. The thin cop was staring furiously, but quietly, through the grubby window.

Doors were opened. Hands were very cursorily shaken. The English-speaking officer escorted them from his office. As they walked, he told them they were free to go, but only free to leave the police station. He wanted them to remain within Ponsavan city, until his initial investigations were concluded.

When they reached the street, the English-speaking policeman rewarded them with another unreadable grin. “So. I think your bus tour is over. This is a murder case. I believe you do well to remember this. Laos is not Cambodia. Sabaydee.”

After six hours of questioning, they walked down the police station steps into the dusty whirl of Ponsavan.

Muddy pickup trucks were ferrying sandaled farmworkers down the main street. Girls with inclined eyes, wearing brightly colored jerkins adorned with silver coins on chains, were smiling at shops full of Chinese snacks and tiny bananas. “I need coffee,” said Jake. “Jesus Christ. How much do I need coffee.”

Chemda nodded. “There is a café down here, in the market.” They crossed the whirling main street; the shattered concrete of the roads and pavements led to a carless square full of people. And tables. And chattering traders. And flies.

Many of the tables and counters were shaded from the sunshine by battered roofs of zinc. The tables were laid out with local food and game: dead wildcats, owls, strangled stoats, and small jungle dogs, their teeth wild and snarling even in death; there were bottles of yellow-and-black hornets pickled in vinegar, stinking river fish on counters of blood-tinged ice, and piles of slaughtered field rats. Jake was used to the extraordinary fecundity and exoticism of Southeast Asian eating habits, but he had never seen piles of rats before.

Chemda sat down at the rickety market café table and glanced at Jake as he gazed across the market aisle at the heaped up piles of brown rats.

“Field rats,” she said. Her voice was thick with exhaustion. “They are famous here. I mean, as far as rats go, these are top-notch. You can’t get a better rat in Laos.”

“I’m sure,” said Jake, smiling at her brave if tired attempt at humor. But the blood in the muzzles of the slaughtered rats reminded him of the blood on the floor, the blood of the dead Cambodian still in the tread of his boots. Ghastly. How close had he been to a real beating?

“What just happened, Chemda? Did Tou kill him? I don’t get it.”

She stared down at the grain of her elegantly narrow indigo jeans, now dusty and smudged. She shook her head and hid her eyes with a poetic gesture, like the cultured shyness of an Angkor princess.

At last she dropped her hand and spoke.

“Can we sit in the sun?”

They shifted down the pewlike benches of the café into the light; the sun, Jake noticed, was actually strong, sharpened by upland cold — but strong. Healing. Warming. They both turned their tired faces to the heat and said nothing for a second, absorbing.

Then she said, “It can’t be Tou. It just can’t. He was, ah, part of the team.”

“But he’s run away.”

Chemda shrugged. She had taken off her gray and tailored leather jacket, and he noticed the slenderness of her topaz-brown shoulders.

“He’s scared. He is Hmong.”

“OK…”

“And he has contacts with other Hmong, of course, which is why we employed him. The Hmong have been helping us. Because this is Hmong country: they know the plain better than anyone. They farm the rice paddies, they slash and burn the forests. They also know which areas are, ah, too risky, too saturated with unexploded ordnance. Of course that is — that was — pretty important for our work.”

“He rang you last night — trying to get through. But why…” Jake was trying to puzzle it out. Something was incongruent. A shard of memory like a piece of grit in a shoe.

Chemda interrupted his thoughts: “They really don’t want us here, Jake. As I said. And a murder case gives them a great excuse to make things extremely uncomfortable. It took the UN ages to get permission for this investigation in the first place. Now they have the whip hand. You noticed they didn’t take our passports? It’s because they want us to quit, to go. To give up and fly home. That was his hint about Laos — you heard it? ‘This is not Cambodia.’ Ahh.” Her sigh was brief. And unsentimental. And somehow undefeated.

Jake sat back. Their coffee had arrived, two chipped little cups of thick blackness, plus a tin of condensed sweetened milk already pierced and bubbling. Jake dribbled the viscous milk into his coffee; Chemda wanted hers black.

They drank quietly.

A man across the market was holding a chunk of honeycomb. It looked like a thick slice of intensely rotted wood. The man was digging into each cell of the hive slice with a finger, and retrieving a wriggling blob of whiteness. A larva. The man popped the white living larva into his mouth, munching and smiling, chasing it with slugs of Dr Pepper from a can. Then he winkled out another and ate it.

Something slotted into Jake’s mind. He looked at Chemda and said, “You think they did it. Don’t you? The cops.”

Her eyes met his halfway.

“Yes.” She frowned. “I do. Because of the way he died.”

“Why? It was a brutal death. But how does that prove it was the cops?”

“You never read the stories of what the Khmer Rouge did in Tuol Sleng?”

“The torture garden, S-21,” he said. “Yes, I know the history of Tuol Sleng: horrific. But maybe I missed… some details?”

She gazed across the café seats. The market was closing up; dried rats lollipopped on wooden sticks were being piled in cardboard boxes. Then she spoke:

“I have read two accounts of some experiments there. Accounts verified by the guy who ran the camp.”

“Comrade Duch.”

“Yes. Comrade Duch. Apparently, in Tuol Sleng they used to tie prisoners to iron beds, and they would attach pumps to them, and then drain every… drop of blood from their bodies. They wanted the blood for Khmer Rouge soldiers, but they turned it into, ah, a form of torture, a sadistic game.”

Jake was sweating; the sun was now directly overhead, the hard plateau sun. A sadistic game? He thought of the cop searching in the drawer as Chemda elaborated.

“They drained all the blood from these chained prisoners just to see what would happen. Over many hours they took out all the blood until not a drop was left; the prisoners would writhe and gasp, someone described them as sounding like rasping crickets at the end, gasping, stridulating, croaking like insects as they died.”

Chemda looked briefly away, gazing at two barefoot boys sucking on the bloodstained ice from the fish counters; then she turned her dark, serious eyes on him.

Jake spoke: “Grotesque. Truly grotesque. But why repeat that experiment on Samnang?”

“It’s a message. Someone is giving me — us — ah, a message. To scare us or warn us, or remind us of the horrors of Pol Pot. I don’t know. But Tou wouldn’t know any of this, and anyway, if he wanted to kill Samnang he wouldn’t do it so bizarrely. But it surely cannot be coincidence: no one dies like that, as horribly as that, for no good reason. They are trying to scare me away. Ah. Because they know what I do — investigate the Khmer Rouge and their barbarities. They want me to give up. But I’m not giving up.”

Her expression was dark.

Jake felt a need to move. “OK. Let’s go for a walk, Chemda. Somewhere with fewer rats.”

They stood and stepped from the market, paced through a busy side road into the main street. It was more crowded and hectic than ever. And it was obviously full of Hmong people now: many of the women were dressed in the most splendid finery.

For several moments Jake and Chemda observed, together and silent and alone. They stared at the passing people: the cavalcade of girls, twirling delicate silken umbrellas, escorted by proud young men in ill-fitting suits. She answered his question before he asked it.

“No, they don’t always dress like this. It’s the Hmong New Year. The most important three days, when people meet their future husbands.”

“So…”

“They are fiercely traditional. Animist… but wait — is that — over there?”

She was pointing, and trying not to point. Jake scanned the scene: the parasols and the pickups, the Chinese noodle trucks and the silver jangling coins on summery dresses.

A small figure was discreetly waving at them, down the road, half hidden between two large jeeps.

“It’s Tou,” she whispered.

Jake marveled. This was Tou? He was barely more than a boy. And this was the crucial figure? Their all-important guide? This was the chief suspect in the homicide of Samnang? It was indeed a ludicrous concept: this boy looked more street urchin than murdering villain.

Tou’s smile was broken; his shirt was grubby and worn; his face was young and brave and eager and frightened.

Glancing both ways, Tou slipped into the shadows, then seconds later he reappeared, directly behind them, speaking quick, anxious, and fairly articulate English.

“Come, please, quick, Chemda — come!!”

His nervous glance flickered over Jake.

“It’s OK,” said Chemda. “It’s OK. He’s a friend, he’s with me. What is it? Are you all right? I know the police are—”

“Chemda, I have seen what they look for.”

“What?”

Tou gave his anxious reply. “The Stripe Hmong! One of them come to me yesterday, old Hmong man. And he tell me — he tell me stories of the Khmer Rouge come here, in the seventies. And others. That’s what I tell Doctor Samnang last night. That’s what I try tell you on the phone. Then Samnang he get sad, crying, and I run away—”

“What? What stories?”

“Chemda. I show you. We must to be quick, but…” He lifted a finger, invoking their silence, and their discretion. “I show you.”

“What do you mean? Show me what?”

“I show you what the Khmer Rouge find. Many, many years ago. On the Plain of Jars.”