by Nick Seeley
She’s staying at Le Royal, the most expensive hotel in town—the gangsters like it because it’s got good security and private entrances. A couple guys there owe me favors from the Vy days, and I’ve thought up a dozen ways to catch Kara off guard, get myself some advantage from the location—
The memory of the quay stops me. Kara’s running this show: the most dangerous thing I can do is try to take away her control. Tricks and pretenses won’t help.
The only way to come at her is straight on.
* * *
The bar in Le Royal is a sun-lit alcove filled with tasteful rattan furniture, high colonial ceilings, and wide, arched windows that open onto a garden patio. The waiter gives a deep bow when I arrive and silently sweeps me into a chair. If my appearance troubles him, he doesn’t let it show. Nhem, the bartender, hovers in the background. When I come in, he busies himself chopping limes, careful not to look my way. Kara’s not here yet, so I order a bourbon—then change my mind and go for some expensive Scotch with a lot of syllables in the name.
Who knows, could be my last drink.
I finish it in three long swallows; order another.
Fine: my second-to-last drink.
Not a huge crowd at half past eleven. A pair of fiftyish white guys are chatting over peanuts. They’re dressed in the same ready-for-the-jungle casual: rumpled safari shirts, blue jeans, tastefully chosen indigenous jewelry handmade by the tribes of wherever. They look like UN, or government—the kind who used to be aid workers and never quite got over it. In the far corner, a heavyset, nervous-looking businessman eats a late breakfast, making increasingly urgent-sounding calls on his cell phone in Chinese. By the door, a slender, gray-haired woman in a pristine white walking outfit and expensive sandals has stationed herself with her cappuccino and Lonely Planet, a huge white sun hat tossed across the table.
No reason to think Kara is here alone: any of these people could be working with her. I watch them sideways, keeping my eyes on the brochure I’ve picked up about Angkor tourism.
She’s ten minutes late coming down. Here in the hotel, she’s ditched her street clothes for a thigh-length yellow sundress and fashion-forward flats. I’m struck by how young she looks: with her legs bare and hair scattered, she could pass for a schoolgirl on holiday, except for the exhaustion hanging around her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she says, out of breath. “I’ve been on the ph— my God, your face! Are you okay?”
Feel myself flush as I fumble for an answer. “Art critic. I’ll be all right.”
She sits, and her brow furrows as a thought hits her. “Was that from . . . ?” Was that from looking for June?
“No.” I try to be reassuring. “Nothing to do with your sister. Just a rough day at the office.”
“Oh.” She lets out a sigh of relief—then stares at her fingers. “I’ve been so worried.” How did I think this girl was a threat?
From across the room: a sudden, sharp bang.
That’s what saves me.
Everyone jumps—Kara practically falls out of her chair. We all turn to look for the source of the noise. All but one: for a tiny moment, the woman in white is looking the wrong way. She’s watching Kara. Her hand has slipped underneath her sun hat.
Behind the bar, an embarrassed Nhem is saying sorry, holding up the wooden cutting board he just carelessly dropped into a steel sink. Not a gunshot, but it was loud. The aid cowboys actually clap.
But I’m awake again.
Kara’s face had gone pale; now her cheeks are starting to flush with embarrassment. “Wow. High-strung, I suppose!” Self-deprecating laugh, then her eyes grow tired again. “You can imagine what this has been like.”
Fucking hell, she’s good. That breathless entrance, the schoolgirl look: making herself vulnerable. Without a word, she’s been begging me to protect her, cutting off my questions before I even ask them—and I’ve been falling for it. Three sentences in, I’d already half convinced myself the quay was just the speed talking. Another five minutes, I’d have told her anything she wanted.
I’d even forgotten about asking Nhem to make something go bang. At least my surprise was genuine. He played it well—make a mental note to get something nice for his wife.
“So,” Kara says, “what did you want to talk to me about?”
“I’m sorry.” I shake my head as if I’ve lost my train of thought. Tack left: try to recapture the breathless idiocy of my first reaction to her. “Sorry, it’s been a long week. You said you were on the phone?”
“God, all morning. Our parents are going completely insane. They keep threatening to come out here, and I’m trying to tell them to wait. Our dad has been sick, and I don’t want to put him through the stress—”
Most liars are lousy at it, cruising by on bluster and people’s desire to believe. The woman across from me is something else: an artist, spinning fantasies so real they show in her hair and her complexion and the curl of her toes. Even now, when I know she’s toying with me—because she wasn’t fooled for a second by my trick with the cutting board—there is nothing in her face or voice or posture except Kara Saito, worried big sister. Every second, I have to fight the part of my mind that says I’ve somehow made a mistake.
“I can’t imagine what you must be going through,” I say.
The waiter slides over to our table, hovering. Kara orders her tea without looking at him, her eyes still fixed on me.
“Beam, no ice,” I say.
I am miles from good enough to play with her. I’m pretty sure I can’t even stall her, she’ll smell me lying a mile off. That leaves one option.
“What was June to you, really?”
“What do you mean?” No bogus shock, just confusion. “Okay, fifteen years, we’re pretty far apart, I don’t know. . . . Are you asking if we were best friends and whispered secrets to each other in our beds after dark? No, of course not. But she’s still my sister.”
“You know that’s not what I mean. She’s not who she says she is.”
“I . . . I don’t understand. Is this some kind of ‘Does anybody really know anyone’ thing?” She gets suddenly worried. “Was June in some kind of trouble? Did she do something wrong?”
Still not a crack: she’s going to play her bluff to the end, make me show my whole hand before she gives it up. So I do. Lay it all out: the dummy e-mail, the fake passport, the phone calls back to Northwestern to make sure it wasn’t a crazy coincidence. “The girl you say is your sister is not Jun Saito. So you can’t be Kara Saito. So, again: who are you, really?”
She looks down, deflated. Then up, hopeful:
“Do you need more money?” She’s reaching for her handbag. No sudden moves—but if I let her pay me off, I’m pretty sure I won’t leave this hotel alive.
“No,” I snap. “I know you think I’m dumb, but I’m not dumb enough to shake you down.” Take a breath, sell this hard. It’s the truth, and I need her to believe it. “Whoever you two are, whatever you’re involved in, I don’t care. I guess you can tell that just by looking at me. You offered me a lot of money if I found June alive, I’m trying to earn it. But whatever she was really up to, that’s the thing most likely to get her missing. You want her found? There’s stuff I gotta know. Maybe you don’t: maybe you just want it to look like you’re looking. If that’s the play, I’ll go along: poke around, be just discreet enough to be noticed, and never bother you again. I just don’t wanna be looking over my shoulder.”
She lowers her head into her hands, sighing deeply—like listening to me has exhausted her all over again. Then her fingers start to run through her hair: they move fast, expertly smoothing and straightening and twisting the unruly strands into a tight, shining knot behind her head. She stretches, and I can hear the joints in her neck pop; claws flex and retract. When she looks back at me, she’s a different person, with a face carved from bone and eyes that slice like scalpels.
“It was a cheap pretense,” she says, in a voice that’s brand-new. “June was a
lways careless about details.” Her eyes flash. “We really did call her June, she got lucky with that girl in Paris. She is my sister; I do want her found. And you are definitely better off not knowing our real names. But I understand you might want more information. Who knows, you might even be able to use it. So, fine”—she leans in and smiles, wide and white and sharp: a tiger smile, her tongue playing gently across the back of her teeth—“let’s play twenty questions.”
I give up on the idea of getting a grip on myself. Drain my glass, gesture for another.
“You shouldn’t drink so much.” She’s still smiling.
“You shouldn’t lie so much.” Lean in, before I lose what’s left of my nerve: “Was June involved in something criminal?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does she have a record?”
“Not under her real name. I couldn’t say about the aliases.”
“Was she into drugs?”
“I assume you mean ‘consumption of.’ I never saw it, and I’d say it was unlikely.”
“What about ‘trafficking of’?”
“I don’t know. I would be very surprised.”
Something’s coming clear; I change tack. “Did June really miss her flight home?”
“No.”
“I’d say she wasn’t coming home at all. And hadn’t in a long time.”
“You might be right.”
“How long? Months?” There’s at least a year in the journals.
“Almost five years.”
“How old is she?”
“She was twenty-three this summer.” Kara watches me do the math. “Yes: eighteen and out. She went to college—a good one. She was young for her grade. Did most of a year, then vanished.”
“Why?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Why didn’t you find her?”
“She’s good.”
“You’re better.” Our faces are getting closer as we bat this back and forth, and now I feel, more than see, something flicker across Kara’s mind: something dark and worried.
“We weren’t trying that hard. I knew she could take care of herself, and I thought it would be better if she came back on her own terms.”
“She had money?”
“Plenty. She specialized in hiding it.”
“You said we a minute ago.”
“Me and Father.”
“What’s he do?”
“He makes sushi.”
“An artist with a knife, then.”
She just grins. I think again about the cutting board: Kara never even glanced at her bodyguard. She looks after herself. I wonder where she’d hide a gun in that outfit—or if she’s a knife girl, too.
“Get your mind out of my skirt,” she says. “That’s not where I keep my weapons.”
“June’s mother left when she was eight?”
“Six.” Dangerous eyes: the tiger knows a trap, wonders how I know. Be more careful.
“Why?”
“Her mother was a pill-popping refugee from the Valley of the Dolls who spent her life on a desperate quest to get more of things she already had too much of. Father caught on, finally, and firewalled her. So she bailed.” The bitterness is the first emotion to pierce the veil she’s worn our whole game.
“Sounds like you didn’t care for that branch of the family.”
“I could never hurt my sister.” There’s something off in how she says that, but I don’t have time to think.
“How much did June know about the sushi business?”
“I couldn’t tell you. June was sheltered. Doted on. She was supposed to have a different life, but clearly she knew more than we thought.”
“Maybe that’s why she left.”
A pause. Lies and truth both come easy, but now Kara is actually thinking about what to say. “June loved Father when she was young. She would follow him everywhere. After her mother ran off, they were closer than ever. But then . . . I don’t know. June never found her place. In school, she excelled when she felt like it, but often enough she didn’t. She’d go from one clique to another, every week she was someone new: no one got close to her. Student groups, environment groups, political groups: she joined everything, stayed with nothing. The only thing she was never willing to try was family.”
I resist the urge to lean back, to cross my arms or push my chair away: anything to put some space between me and the quiet rage in Kara’s voice.
“So if she didn’t miss her flight home, and you hadn’t seen her in years, how did you find her?”
“Carelessness. Nostalgia. I’m not sure.”
Don’t respond, just look. Kara continues:
“She put Kara Saito down as her emergency contact. The phone number was mine. Maybe she’d been doing it for years, but this time she ended up in the hospital, and I got a call saying June Saito had an accident in Cambodia, but she’d be fine.”
I can just see it. This woman gets a call from someone she’s never heard of, halfway around the world, saying that someone else she’s never heard of is in the hospital. She doesn’t say “Wrong number” and hang up. She plays along. Finds out who she’s supposed to be and inserts herself into the story.
“Did you talk to June?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“I waited. Your boss told me when she was supposed to leave, and I came to try and convince her to come home—but she was already gone.”
“You said before you weren’t looking for her. Why now?”
“Father’s dying. It’s time. She should come home.”
I play a hunch. “He doesn’t know, does he? ‘Father.’ He thinks you’re in Saint-Tropez, doing whatever a girl like you does. But you’re out here.”
She smirks. “Tempe, depressingly enough. I’m in Tempe, meeting vendors about quality assurance.”
I don’t want to know what this woman’s idea of quality assurance is. “Just one more thing. Why me?”
“Why not?”
“ ’Cause it stinks. Whoever you are, you’ve got money. But you show up here without a cop or a lawyer in tow and hire a washed-up photographer to play Sherlock while your sister is missing? You should have the army out.”
She laughs, and I’d swear it’s real this time, because it makes the hair on my arms stand up.
“Mr. Keller, I think you underestimate yourself. You have been far more difficult to play than most people, which, I have to say, has turned out to be a relief. And I don’t think you realize how limited my options are. The police don’t love me—sushi is a bit rarefied for their tastes. The embassy is entirely populated by the kind of boys I went to college with. Private detectives in LA are usually scam artists, and inevitably lowlifes—I have nothing against lowlifes, but these all sideline for the tabloids. I could use my own staff, but the good ones, like Miss Eyre”—Kara makes no gesture to the woman by the door; she knows I know—“well, my sister would recognize them in a heartbeat, and she would move on. And anyway, this country is . . . different. I wanted someone who knew the territory. For better or for worse, you’re my man.”
I almost believe it. It’s close to the truth, close enough she means it. But it’s not everything. Thinking fast: I don’t know what to believe out of what I’ve just heard, but I believe Kara really doesn’t know what happened to June. And that means she doesn’t know how close it gets to her, or “Father,” if he exists, or whatever business they’re in.
She wants the digging done by someone disposable.
And now, just watching me, she knows I know. “So, Mr. Keller,” she says, still with that playful edge in her voice, but I can feel the steel underneath, “what do you think happened to my sister?”
DIARY
July 14
Gus said yes!!
It wasn’t even all that hard, it’s just not like in the movies. You have to figure out the rules: An editor is like a banker, he won’t give you a story unless you already have one. (All right: I got some help from the boys at t
he paper! Barry was particularly good for the outlining. I didn’t tell him why I wanted it, of course. . . . ) In the end, all I had to do was figure out why Luke and Wendy’s NGO was already a story.
They work in this beautiful area out west, Koh Kong. Apparently it has amazing coastline, acres of mangrove marsh, it could totally be a paradise . . . but it’s just a bunch of dirt-poor villages full of people who are slowly tearing it all down just to stay alive. A couple years back, the government built a huge bridge connecting it to Thailand across the gulf. Some Thai mogul put a casino right next to it, everyone expected the money to start rolling in, and soon enough Koh Kong would be Monte Carlo. But nothing happened . . . those pesky trickle-down economics just didn’t trickle.
Maybe it was poor planning: Koh Kong just didn’t have the infrastructure to support big resorts or hotels: the electricity is sporadic, there’s no proper port, the roads there are a shambles and there’s no direct route to Phnom Penh, you have to go south almost to Sihanoukville. Gamblers would come over the bridge for the day, then go home, and no one benefited but the casino owners. Maybe there was a bit of corruption thrown in as well. And bad luck: relations with Thailand haven’t exactly been swimming along. So the people stay hungry, and keep over-exploiting the environment, which only makes life harder in the long run. . . .
That’s the story: the years of money and effort that have gone into trying to develop this place, and the reasons they’ve all failed. Paradise lost. Throw in a few paragraphs about a plucky little group of photogenic Americans who are trying to break the cycle of poverty, and you have exactly the kind of story an editor will go for.
That’s how I sold it to Gus, anyway, and after about fifteen minutes of maybes and eye rolling, he agreed. Of course I have to wait until after the elections—that’s going to take up the whole week. But he’ll let me go down with the boy and help him do the election stuff in Sihanoukville, and then I can go up to Koh Kong afterward.