Quiller Salamander

by Adam Hall

  People were still coming into the temple, all of them Asian except for a couple of women in sunglasses and headscarves, tourists, I would have said, or Foreign Aid Service workers, here for the local colour.

  I was kneeling below the rough stone wall at the back, in a shadow created by two of the oil-burning lamps below the east oriels. Most of the light in here came from the rows of candles brought into the temple by the mourners, who had placed them below the gilded Buddhas along the wall.

  The pallbearers lowered the coffin onto the silk-covered trestle in front of the principal shrine, and the mourners began forming a line behind the three women and two men who were standing nearest the coffin. I put them down as the mother, wife - or sister - and daughter of the deceased, and his father and brother.

  It was the brother who interested me.

  I'd come here straight from the house in Kralahom Kong, a narrow street leading to the jetties on the Tonle Sap, not far along from where, last night, we'd watched the ferry in trouble out there on the water, Gabrielle and I. Before I'd left Pringle yesterday afternoon at the airport I'd told him to use a local sleeper agent to keep up the daily payments on the Peugeot so that the clerks at the General Directorate of Tourism wouldn't report it as missing. I'd picked up a Mazda 626 LX from one of the black market dealers for twice the normal rate.

  The house in Kralahom Kong wasn't strictly a hotel - there was no name or sign outside - but it had rooms for rent behind its scarred walls and its peeling shutters hanging at an angle above the street. It was the third place like this I'd checked out, and I chose it because there was a picture of King Sihanouk over the rickety little desk and because the proprietor was one of the hundreds of cripples in the town. A cripple with Sihanouk's picture in his house would kill Pol Pot if he ever got the chance, With his bare hands, and slowly, if he could be sure it wouldn't land him in one of the Khmer Rouge torture cells before they finished him off.

  The abbot was intoning the prayer for the dead, but I understood only a word here and there - Buddha, heaven, departed, words like that, and only then because they were repeated so often and I was able to work out the context.

  The incense lay heavy on the stifling air, filling the lungs with perfume.

  The line of mourners began moving now, filing past the catafalque, many of them in robes, all of them scooping holy water from the stone basin to trickle into the upturned hand of the deceased. When his family began moving slowly towards the east wall of the temple on their way back to their places, I joined the two Caucasian women in the line of mourners, the only cover there was available. I couldn't have stayed where I was, against the wall; everyone had come in here to pay their respects to the dead, and a round-eyed observer would have stood out a mile.

  The eyes of the cadaver were closed as I reached the coffin, scooping some water for its upturned hand and thinking for a moment of the life I'd taken away in exchange for the life I'd saved, a deal is a deal, shuffling past the shrine behind the two women as the abbot intoned his prayers and the flamelight flickered along the walls and across the faces of the gilded figurines, a deal is a deal, my friend, in the land of dog eat dog, so rest in peace if the Lord Buddha thinks you've earned any, because you weren't the driver that night, you were the one with the gun.

  There was a moment, as I reached the north wall and turned and began making my way to the back of the temple again, when I was closer to the dead man's family than I'd been before. I was looking straight ahead but at the edge of my vision field I thought that one of them, perhaps the brother, turned for a moment to watch me as I passed - I couldn't be sure. But he'd been too busy that night with the Zhiguli going wild all over him to have got a look at me, and I'd seen no one else there who could have borne witness.

  One of the women in the group was weeping, the mother I suppose, the agony of her grief making a soft high whimpering against the incantations of the abbot. Weep, then, good mother, for your dear departed son, but weep also for the widows and the orphans and the cripples hereabouts, for he touched their lives too, and less kindly.

  'They'd be so much better off with Christ,' one of the Caucasian women whispered as we reached the back of the temple. 'All this chanting and everything.'

  'Each to his own,' the other woman said, 'and I wouldn't have missed the experience.'

  A monk began beating a gong behind the shrine, and when some of the mourners rose from their knees I got up too and turned and moved through an archway into the burnished copper morning outside.

  It wasn't yet nine, but the temperature would already be in the eighties, with the humidity the same on the hygrometer; the sun was a shimmering disc above the pagodas and temples and pock-marked concrete buildings to the east. The city had sounds of life, with the streets filled with the ringing of cyclo bells and the shouting of merchants, but in a couple of hours the sun would be nearly overhead and we'd be in the nineties and the siesta would begin.

  I could feel the heat radiating from the row of parked cars and jeeps In the temple grounds, and barbs of dazzling light bounced of their metalwork and windows as I moved past them into the shade of a rubber tree where I'd left the steel-grey Mazda.

  I got into it and sat behind the wheel, and the sweat sprang onto my skin at once, the thing was like an oven, sat there while they came slowly out of the temple, some of them walking down the path under the sugar-palm trees, the others trudging in their sandals to the row of vehicles, standing there talking for a while and then getting in, slamming the doors. Then the family came out, talking with the abbot for a minute and then moving across to the ivory-white Honda that was standing under one of the trees.

  He didn't look around him, the brother, which I thought was cocky. I'd been prepared for him to check the environment, and that was why I was sitting low on the seat of the Mazda with the sun visor down; but he was simply helping the women into the car and getting behind the wheel. I thought it was cocky of him because he knew it hadn't been an accident that night, that someone had seen his brother bring the gun into the aim and had gone for the Zhiguli. He should have realized that for someone to do that, they would have had to be tailing both cars, his and the minister's. In other words the hit had been blown, and it had cost him his brother's life, and that should tell him there was someone operating in Phnom Penh against the Khmer Rouge, a lone-wolf agent who might well show up at the funeral with a bullet for him.

  He'd know the hit hadn't been blown by a government bodyguard: a bodyguard would have had his vehicle close to the minister's outside the Royal Palace Hotel, and the hit team would have done one of two things: they would have called the whole thing off or they would have opened fire on both cars the instant the minister climbed into the Chevrolet, going for a hit-and-run operation with a good chance of getting clear.

  But perhaps he wasn't cocky, the brother; perhaps he was just untrained, an efficient guerrilla, say, but not an espion.

  He'd started the car but wasn't moving off yet, and while I waited I thought of Salamander, thought of the debriefing signal I might be able to send some time today, some time tonight, so that they could pick up their bit of chalk in the signal room and scratch it across the board: Executive has gained access to the Khmer Rouge base in Phnom Penh.

  Because that was my immediate objective: they'd gone underground in the capital, Gabrielle had told me, and no one knew where they were.

  But if the day went well and I got access to their base and signalled Pringle and told him, it wouldn't go onto the board in London because there wasn't a board for this one, for Salamander. No one in the whole of the Bureau except Flockhart knew I was out here in the field; no one even knew there was a field; no one was in the least bit interested in Phnom Penh or Cambodia; no one could care less. No one.

  And for an instant I knew I'd brushed close to the truth of what was really happening in the scene behind the scenes, where Flockhart was pulling the strings.

  Then it was gone, and all I was left with was the knowledge t
hat at this moment I had as much substance for the Bureau as a phantom. So how had that bastard done this to me? But we know, don't we ... his tone had been so silky when he'd said over the telephone, Wouldn't it be frustrating for you to come all the way home and have me prove to you that you'd missed the chance of a lifetime?

  The Honda was moving off and I let it get as far as the road past the temple gardens before I started the engine and got into gear and took up the tail.

  'You want girl?'

  'No,' I said.

  'Want boy'?'

  'No.'

  My sister pretty. Look.'

  He pushed a creased sepia photograph through the window of the Mazda, the picture of a child-woman with frightened eyes and tiny breasts that would never get any bigger before she died one of the dozen deaths her gods in their bounty had to offer her, starvation, abuse, privation, AIDS, she could take her choice but must hurry, she was already twelve years old.

  'No,' I told him and hit his hand away, harder than I'd meant but without regret.

  09:43.

  No one had come out of the building over there for the past fifteen minutes. I was using the clock on the dashboard instead of my watch because it allowed me to flick my eyes down and up again without losing time. The sign on the wall of the building said KAMPUCHEA IMPORT-EXPORT, and there was a bleached and tattered flag hanging limp from one of the windows. The man who interested me had taken the women home and then turned north and west onto what had once been called USSR Boulevard, the route to Pochentong Airport. He'd parked his Honda at the side of the building, and I could see it in the gap between two of the market stalls, the one selling mangoes, bananas and pineapples and the one next to it, where dried fish was hanging from poles. They and the people milling around them made adequate cover: I was hiding in plain sight.

  The sun was higher now by two or three diameters, and its brassy heat pressed down through the haze, shimmering on hard surfaces and spreading mirages across the airport road.

  Within the next hour six men went into the Import-Export building and four came out again. None of the four was my target.

  10:53,.

  'Move car.'

  He looked down at me, his uniform ragged and sweat-soaked, his rifle slung from the shoulder, his eyes in the shadow of his peaked cap.

  'What?'

  'Move car now.'

  He was blocking my view a little and I shifted on the seat to keep the main entrance of the building in sight. The target had gone in there and would presumably come out at the same place. I could watch his car instead, until he went over to it, but I wanted to take a look at everyone else who went through those doors and came out again. At this stage I needed to watch faces and commit them to memory, because this operation could last for hours, even for days, and some of the people I was watching now could become surveillance targets too. The dead man's brother wouldn't be the only Khmer Rouge agent in that building; it could even be their base.

  'Papers.'

  I reached for my wallet without taking my eyes off the building. I had the sun visor down but the glare from the white concrete was becoming a problem, flooding the retinae and causing loss of precise definition, making their faces look much the same, the faces of the men going in and out of the building. Sweat trickled on me; the oven I was sitting in was set higher than a hundred degrees for a slow roast.

  'British?' the policeman asked. Sweat dripped from his chin onto the papers. I didn't say anything; two men were coming out of the building, and I couldn't remember seeing them go in. 'British?' the policeman asked again.

  'What? Yes.'

  He gave my papers back. 'Foreigners move car. Not place here for car.'

  I put the papers into my wallet and got out a 1,000-riel note and gave it to him and he went away. The two men were getting into a Toyota and I lost interest. Only one man would come through those doors and get into the ivory-white Honda and he was my target.

  I'd brought nothing for an overnight stop from the house in Kralahom Kong: I might have to abandon the Mazda at some stage of the operation and wanted to travel light. But I had enough coins for a phone call, my only connection to my director in the field. I'd told Pringle at the airport that I'd found my own base, but hadn't told him where, and he'd been expectedly stuffy.

  'I'd prefer,' he'd said, 'that you use the safe-house we've set up for you in Keochea Street.'

  'Is it Bureau?'

  Without looking down: 'Actually, no. But the man who owns it has a deep hatred of Pol Pot and is in our debt.'

  'I'll think about it,' I told him. 'Deep hatreds can flare up at the wrong time, and I don't want any excitement.'

  In the end Pringle had said he'd be reluctant in the extreme to report to Mr. Flockhart that I refused to use their safe-house and I'd said that was tough shit and when I left the airport I made sure he wasn't in my mirror.

  12:31.

  Another man came out of the building but he didn't go anywhere near the white Honda. The long siesta had begun, and at any moment my target should be leaving his office, to drive home and be with his grieving family again. But nothing was certain, except that the sun had reached its zenith and the streets were shimmering.

  A sheet of pale green paper came eddying through the open window of the Mazda and my reaction was slow because of the heat and it worried me: it could have been something else, a hand with a knife in it, or a gun. A Caucasian woman in a white T-shirt and slacks was moving away behind the car.

  The heading on the pamphlet read:

  EURASIAN ACTION COMMITTEE, CHURCH OF CHRIST

  In this report we shall address a tragic situation in Bangkok, Thailand, that has been given a token reference in the general media but nothing more. Thai and other travel agents working with the airlines are boosting the tourist tradein that country by offering package tours for men only at the equivalent of 4,000 US dollars, with a promise of - and we quote - 'Four days and nights of exotic entertainment that is guaranteed to satisfy any man's wildest dreams.'

  Three Asians moved beyond the top edge of the pamphlet and went into the building; they were wearing camouflage outfits and combat boots; I couldn't see any weapons. Conceivably they were out of the jungle, guerrillas from the Khmer Rouge forces.

  It is known throughout Asia that at least half of the male and female prostitutes reserved for European and American tourists are below the age of fifteen, and at least half of them are carrying the HIV virus, while many are passing into the first stages of AIDS, despite spurious 'medical certificates' to the contrary. This was not mentioned at the recent conference in Amsterdam on the rapidly-spreading global AIDS epidemic. The Geneva-based Association Francois-Xavier Bagnoud, which runs a shelter for child prostitutes in Thailand, has also reported that according to the testimony of a girl rescued from a brothel and questioned, she was constantly beaten and underfed, and that girls were taken away and shot by their pimps when they fell sick or were of no further use. We urge you to do whatever is in your power to make it widely known, beginning with your family, your friends, and your representatives, that unless the most strenuous diplomatic pressure is brought to bear on the Thai government to cease trading in tragedy, the present efforts of the Church of Christ to succour the suffering must prove of little avail. We want to see the world that God created made fit for His people to live in. Is that too much to ask? But we ask more - we ask for your help, for without it we can do so little, and with it we can do so much.

  I folded the sheet of cheap, badly-printed paper and put it away.

  At 1:13 the young Kampuchean running the fruit stall dragged a roll of canvas down across the front and put the cash box into his patched shoulder-bag and got onto his bicycle and wobbled away, the back of his sweat-stained T-shirt proclaiming him to be a supporter of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  And then the rain came, driving across from the coast and blotting out the dark burnished gold of the temple domes and quenching the sun, bringing a false twilight into the streets.
r />   In the middle of the afternoon the white Honda was still standing over there beside the building, half-lost to sight in the rain, and I realized that the agent must have been driven away by one of the men who had gone inside, and that his car could still be there at midnight, or in the morning. But that was an assumption, and I didn't act on it. I had no other lead: the block of apartments where he'd dropped off the women was in the centre of the city, a difficult surveillance target; it could also be that he didn't live there himself, might not go there to comfort his family before tomorrow, if then. .

  At six in the evening, when the only moving shapes were the trucks ploughing through the downpour along the airport road, I opened the door of the car and emptied the Coke bottle and filled it and emptied it again, for this relief much thanks, but it didn't help the overall situation, which was that I'd been sitting here on the bloody peep for most of the day and could be here for most of the night.

  The smell of frying was coming from somewhere, seeping through the vents of the car, and I realized I hadn't eaten since early this morning, would need to take in some protein as soon as I could, but this wasn't the right time because a man was coming out of the Import-Export building now, huddled against the rain as he jogged across to the Honda and got in.

  This was at 6:14 and I noted it simply because it might be a habit of his to leave there at this time of the day. It wouldn't be dark for another hour but the sky was still heavy and the headlights of the Honda came on and I waited until it had splashed through the mud beside the building and turned south before I started up and took a left and two rights and another left as fast as I could and got him in my sights again at a distance of fifty yards, closing the gap a little but leaving my lights off, keeping track of him through the rain with the wipers moaning across and across the windscreen as we kept on going south until we reached Pokambor Boulevard and turned south-east towards the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek.