Fearless ; The Smoke Child

by Lee Stone

  ‘Has that happened before?’ Tyrone asked Frank.

  Frank shook his head, earnest and confused.

  ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Never.’

  Tyrone smiled and paid his tab in full.

  No question about it, he thought. Change is coming.

  20

  ‘How well do you know Cambodian history?’ the lawyer asked Charlie Lockhart as they moved into his office. He moved a pile of files that were stacked on top of a dusty chair and placed them on the floor.

  ‘I know a bit,’ Lockhart said.

  His gut told him to trust the lawyer, despite the bottles and the hangover and the overflowing ashtray. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, he reminded himself as he began to feel the magnetic pull of Kampot Jail again.

  ‘The symbol you saw was a flag,’ Fischer said, flicking to a page in the book and then pushing it across the desk so that Lockhart could see it. The flag was red and black, with a white cross in the middle. The cross was the same shape Lockhart had seen on the wall at The Happy; part crucifix and part swastika.

  ‘It’s a grim history,’ Fischer said. ‘Two million Cambodians were killed while that flag was flying.’

  ‘The Khmer Rouge?’

  Fischer nodded.

  ‘And here’s what you need to understand,’ he said. ‘The people who died under that flag died badly. I’ve seen my share of war, Mr. Lockhart. But even war has rules. This was different. They starved a million people to death in four years. The rest were tortured and killed. Buried alive in mass graves to save the regime’s bullets. Or bludgeoned with pickaxes. Children and babies were smashed against trees and thrown into the ground. Thousands of them.’

  Fischer took a breath. He rubbed a hand across his face and sighed.

  ‘Many Khmer Rouge agents survived. Today they’re hiding in plain sight. The Khmer Rouge leaders went into exile. The commanders fled to the jungle. But they’re still around, and they still scare people. A lot.’

  ‘So why scratch the symbol on the wall?’ Lockhart asked, looking up from the pictures of the killing fields. The soon to kill and the soon to die, lined up in black and white photographs next to yawning graves.

  ‘Because there are still sympathizers,’ Fischer told him. ‘People inside the police force who remain loyal to the cause. It’s a warning sign to them to leave the thing alone, you know?’

  The lawyer threw the book onto a pile behind him and stood up. He walked out from behind his desk and began flicking through the pile of manila folders he had moved to the floor so that Lockhart could sit. When he found what he was looking for, he returned to his seat and blew out with the early morning effort.

  ‘Do you need more coffee?’ Lockhart asked.

  The lawyer shook his head.

  ‘Let’s grab some lunch.’

  ‘Lunch can wait,’ Lockhart said. ‘I can’t eat while Kate is chained up in a cell. Can you get her out?’

  Fischer smiled.

  ‘We’re too far away from Phnom Penh for due process,’ he said. ‘The best way to get her out is to bribe the guards. And the best time to do it is tonight, when there are fewer of them around.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘At Kampot? After sundown when the prisoners are all locked safely away? Just a couple.’

  Lockhart liked those numbers.

  ‘But here’s your problem,’ the lawyer said.

  He slid the manila folder across the desk to Lockhart. The first page was a black-and-white picture of a young man wearing a black open-neck shirt and brandishing a pistol. His face was charismatic, enraged, yelling at someone who the photographer had not captured in the picture. He was handsome, but the camera had also captured his animal aggression; ugly and violent.

  ‘Who is he?’ Lockhart asked.

  ‘His name is Ta Penh,’ the lawyer said. ‘This was him marching on Phnom Penh, just before the purges began. He’d be a lot older now. He moved to Kep and became powerful until the regime fell. Then, he headed for the Cardamom mountains and stayed out of sight for almost a decade.’

  Lockhart flicked through the other pages in the folder. They were legal papers relating to cases that Fischer had brought to trial and lost.

  ‘What happened to him?’ Lockhart asked, without pulling his gaze from the files.

  ‘He started producing Sassafras oil.’

  Lockhart looked up.

  ‘He’s making Ecstasy?’

  Fischer’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘You know about the oil, huh?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve written about it,’ Lockhart said. ‘So I know how it works. I know about the deforestation. And I know that a barrel of Sassafras oil makes a hell of a lot of pills, and a hell of a lot of money for whoever distilled it.’

  ‘You’re a reporter?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  Fischer pulled for a moment at his beard before saying: ‘Well, you’ve got the basics right. Ta Penh got rich real quick. He clawed his way up the supply chain until he was running the whole thing, right the way to the streets.’

  ‘Which streets?’ Lockhart asked, closing the manila file. ‘Where?’

  ‘Probably a long way from Cambodia. Europe. America maybe. I don’t know. Ta Penh’s a genuine Howard Hughes. Nobody ever sees him, but he’s still connected. He’s still feared. And now with the money from the oil he’s producing, he’s bought himself friends exactly where he needs them.’

  ‘So the mark on the wall, the Khmer flag, you’re saying they’re a warning from him?’

  Fischer nodded.

  ‘His gang, anyway. Every case in that folder you’re holding had a similar mark on the scene. And every one of them collapsed in court.’

  ‘So maybe Kate’s sister got caught up with them?’ Lockhart thought out loud. ‘Matilda’s traveling through Asia for a few months. Maybe she meets one of Ta Penh’s dealers along the way and agrees to do a little distribution work while she’s traveling… but then what if the deal went sour and she ends up strangled at The Happy?’

  Fischer stood up and walked towards the window. He squinted as he surveyed the view. Lockhart figured he’d reached the point in the morning when he could finally cope with daylight.

  ‘It’s possible,’ he said eventually. ‘And then her sister gets caught in the crossfire and slung into prison as a witch.’

  Then Lockhart went quiet.

  ‘There is another problem,’ he said eventually. ‘What if Ta Penh has heard about the girl coming back from the dead? We will not be the only people trying to get into Kampot Jail, will we?’

  21

  There was time to kill before nightfall, and the changing of the Kampot guard, so Lockhart convinced Fischer to take him to the village market, mostly to keep him away from the drink. They ate in the square, frying meat on a small clay oven as locals wandered past their table.

  ‘Nobody sees you,’ the lawyer observed. ‘How is that?’

  Lockhart looked up from the clay pot.

  ‘Nobody sees you either,’ he said. ‘People are busy.’

  Fischer shook his head.

  ‘I’ve been here thirty years,’ he said. ‘You just got off the plane a week ago. This isn’t Phnom Penh, you know. People here are not so used to Westerners. People here stare at tourists. So why aren’t they staring at you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lockhart said. ‘I guess I’m not doing anything worth staring at. I’m just eating lunch.’

  He added another strip of beef to the garlic coated clay. The lawyer looked at him more carefully. He was right: he wasn’t doing anything unusual. Nothing that drew attention. He took in his surroundings, but he did it slowly, in his own time. He seemed interested by the cuisine, but he wasn’t exuberant about it. A reporter, the lawyer remembered. Well, he knew how to blend in. No question about that.

  ‘How long are you here for?’ Fischer asked. ‘How long will you stay?’

  Lockhart shrugged as he chewed.

  ‘We’ll get the first plane out tom
orrow,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t make sense to stick around.’

  The lawyer nodded, his matted dreadlocks rubbing across his shoulders.

  ‘Where will you stay tonight?’

  Lockhart put his fork down and stared at Fischer.

  ‘I was hoping you’d in throw bed-and-breakfast with your fee,’ he said.

  Fischer agreed.

  ‘I just hope Ta Penh stays away,’ he said. ‘He’s a thorough man.’

  He pushed a casework file across the table to Lockhart.

  ‘He doesn’t give people the benefit of the doubt,’ he said, as Lockhart flicked through the yellowing hand-typed pages. ‘People who cross him disappear. And they don’t come back. I guess once you’ve cleared an entire city of human life, you become pretty cavalier.’

  The files told stories of men suspected of stealing from Ta Penh. All of them had died slowly and painfully, usually by drowning in suspicious circumstances. All of them had ligature marks on their skin. Sometimes, their families had been killed too. But in every case there was missing evidence. Or a procedural mistake. Or a disappeared witness. Always the cases collapsed.

  ‘And they’ve never found him?’ Lockhart asked.

  ‘Nobody has seen him for two decades,’ Fischer said. ‘Nobody is certain that he still exists. But someone is still hiding out in the jungle and pulling strings. And my money says it’s Ta Penh.’

  After lunch the storm clouds gathered in again, and at the first signs of darkening skies they set out for Kampot Jail in Fischer’s Toyota which still smelled of new leather and wood.

  ‘Just goes to show you never meet a poor lawyer,’ Lockhart said. ‘Not even out here.’

  Fischer laughed.

  ‘I wasn’t always a lawyer,’ he said. ‘You want to know the truth? I was a soldier, back in the day.’

  Lockhart watched Fischer at the wheel. It wasn’t the first time people had opened up to him while they were driving.

  ‘Uncle Sam dropped me out of a Huey in Da Lat, North East of Saigon, right at the start of Sixty-Eight.’

  The sky above the road to Kampot blackened, and the first plump raindrops hit the Land Cruiser’s windscreen.

  ‘Vietnam, right?’ Fischer said, turning to Lockhart. ‘The war you Brits stayed away from. Best decision you ever made, you ask me.’

  Fischer smiled under his thick beard and turned back to the waterlogged dirt strip.

  ‘I hit the ground mid January,’ he said. ‘The Viet Cong had me in a bamboo cage by the end of the month.’

  The heavens opened, and Lockhart watched the screen blur as water hit it like it had been thrown from a bucket.

  ‘How long were you there?’

  ‘Long enough for them to break me,’ Fischer said. ‘No shame in that. I was young and green, and I didn’t have much to tell them. They tortured me anyway, just to make sure. Eventually I picked up a fever, and I pretty much forgot who I was. I didn’t know it but the US Army had already scratched my name into a memorial back home. Missing in action. The Viet Cong moved on a year later, and the villagers let me go.’

  ‘But you didn’t go home?’

  Fischer looked across at Lockhart for a moment before returning his eyes to the red dirt road.

  ‘Home to what?’ he asked. ‘The army had me down as dead. Truth is, I never got on much with my folks. That was half the reason I came out here. I didn’t have a girl back home. So no, I stayed. I’d picked up the language while I was locked in the cage. When they freed me, I worked in the fields. By the time the war ended, I spoke like a local and I had one hell of a tan. Before I was drafted I had enrolled for law school, and so I took a university place at Saigon, which had become Ho Chi Minh City by then. I crossed the border in Seventy-Nine. By then, Pol Pot had killed almost a quarter of everyone here. Cambodia needed rebuilding. It was a land of opportunity, and I’ve been here taking my chances ever since.’

  By the time they reached the Kampot the storm had stopped, and the streets were steaming. Fischer parked the land cruiser a little way from the main prison gate. The boy was there, poking his tarpaulin roof with a broom handle so that the water ran off onto the ground. Jorani the dog was padding through the puddles, and the pot was warming again on the stove. The boy greeted Fischer like an old friend, and the lawyer spoke to him as an equal which Lockhart thought was a good measure of the man.

  ‘I owe you a commission for my new client,’ he said, pointing at Lockhart. He rolled out a few notes, which looked like they’d seen better days. He folded them and handed them to the boy. The boy took Fischer on trust and tucked them into his back pocket without counting.

  ‘You want a beer?’ he asked.

  ‘There is nothing in this world I’d like more,’ the veteran said, and he rolled off another note. ‘One for my friend, too.’

  The boy pulled a couple of bottles from a rusting fridge. There was no power to it and the beer was warm. The boy popped the caps off and opened a coke for himself.

  ‘Samnang hasn’t got a taste for beer yet,’ the lawyer said.

  ‘That’s probably no bad thing,’ Lockhart said, remembering the state Fischer had been in when he’d arrived at his house. ‘Have you seen anything interesting, kid?’

  Samnang hadn’t, so they sat and drank in the damp air under the cover of the thin tarpaulin, until dusk began to settle. Jorani padded back under the cover and closer to the stove. Lockhart watched the prison gate and thought about Kate, locked up behind it. Was she waiting for him? Or had she lost hope like Fischer had done, inside his bamboo cage?

  Darkness fell, and they watched the guard in his hut, sitting beside a desk lamp that attracted mosquitos like a magnet.

  ‘How long until the night shift?’ Lockhart asked the boy when he couldn’t stand waiting anymore. ‘What time do they change?’

  Samnang smiled.

  ‘Around now,’ he said. Lockhart watched as six guards walked out from the entrance of the prison and congregated around the front gate. As if on cue, three others walked around the outer perimeter in a huddle. They all met at the guard hut. One of them swapped places with the guard on the gate, and the other two shared stories for a moment before heading inside the jail. Slowly, the seven men who had finished their day’s work melted away into the night.

  ‘They never come back?’ Lockhart asked.

  The boy shook his head. The Lockhart and Fischer waited under the tarpaulin until the air was still and there was nobody else in the street. The skies had cleared after the afternoon downpour, and moonlight was casting a glow across the scene. Lockhart and the lawyer stayed back in the shadows and the new guard in the hut.

  ‘How much should we offer him?’ Lockhart whispered to the lawyer.

  ‘We’ll send Samnang to negotiate,’ Fischer said. ‘We’ll let the guard name his price.’

  Lockhart looked at the boy who nodded his ascent.

  ‘No way,’ Lockhart said. ‘This is my problem, kid. Not yours.’

  Suddenly the dark street was bathed in light and the roar of an engine filled the night air. A car pulled up right outside the guard hut. The engine cut out. Fischer made a long breath.

  ‘I don’t like the look of this.’

  The front doors opened and two men got out.

  ‘Me neither,’ Lockhart said, turning to Samnang. ‘Have you seen them before?’

  The boy shook his head and slipped a finger inside Jorani’s collar.

  The guard stood up and took hold of his rifle. He didn’t look like he’d been expecting company. The driver reached into his pocket slowly and pulled something into the light. It was cash, and he started pulling notes from a roll; counting them off just as Fischer had done for the boy. The guard waved the money away, and they argued. The two men began to get agitated with the belligerent guard, their voices rising in the night air. The passenger who was the taller of the two, leaned into the guard hut and jabbed his finger into the guard’s chest, but the guard stood his ground.

  Fischer and Loc
khart exchanged glances. Not such an easy bribe after all, Lockhart thought.

  There was a click, and all three men fell silent. The back door of the car opened, and a man stepped out into the shadows. He was stooped and walked slowly towards the guard hut. The men who had been in the front of the car turned and watched him approach, waiting to follow his lead. The guard watched him too. When he reached them, the stooped man stopped and looked up at the guard. For a moment, the guard said nothing, until an understanding, and a great fear, passed across his face in the lamplight. Then he held his hand up towards the old man, as if to check that he wasn’t an apparition. He shook his head in disbelief, and took a step backwards, topping against his chair and losing his balance. He opened his mouth, but no words came. After a moment his legs gave way, and he sank to his knees.

  ‘Ta...’ he said eventually. ‘Ta… Penh…’

  The man raised his hand from the shadows, and gunfire cracked twice in the night air. The guard slumped sideways and out of view.

  ‘Bhat,’ he said, stepping over the guard’s body and into the courtyard beyond.

  22

  The monsoon clouds had begun to creep across the sky above Kampot jail, extinguishing the stars one by one.

  ‘Ta Penh,’ the young boy whispered horror coating the two rasping syllables as they watched the three men disappearing across the courtyard behind the iron gate. Lockhart stepped out from underneath the tarpaulin shelter. The lawyer put a hand on his arm.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Let’s wait and see how this thing plays out.’

  Lockhart pulled his arm free.

  ‘You know how this will play out,’ he said. ‘The same way it always plays out with this guy. Kate Braganza will become another page in your unsolved file. Unless I do something right now.’

  Fischer stood up slowly and stepped into the road.

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  Lockhart shook his head.

  ‘It’s a long time since you were a soldier,’ he said.

  The lawyer looked down at his hands. They were shaking. They’d been shaking for as long as he could remember. He put it down to the drink, but he was an old man. An old man whose adventures were mostly behind him.