by Nick Seeley
“Never touch the stuff.” He just sits there, looking at me like he knows better. “I’m a journalist,” I say, in Khmer. “If I take that, I won’t be one anymore.”
Phann doesn’t move. “You not journalist now,” he says, in English. “You detective. Need protection.”
“No thanks.”
Phann shrugs and puts the gun back in the car. “There’s nothing so important it’s worth dying for,” he says, just kind of conversationally. “I learned that a long time ago.”
“I learned the opposite.”
“May all the devas protect you from harm.”
* * *
Back in the room. Phann talked the hotel guys into not kicking me out, and they’ve reconstructed the bed while I was gone. I sit on it and smoke my way through the last of my gear. Look at the floor for a while, then change it up and look at the ceiling. The tiles make a nice pattern. The ones in the walls, too. Everything adds up.
About a thousand years ago, in another life, I had an uncle who tried to teach me chess. I could never get it. Trying to think five moves ahead—I lost and lost. Eventually I stopped playing. All I remember of the game is the feeling I have now: I’m in the dark and I can’t see what’s coming.
If I’m even halfway right about what Luke’s up to, sticking my nose in his business is going to be instantly fatal. Taking my suspicions to Kara could be just as bad. Time is running out before the Feds show up—and I’ve got no moves left to make. A pawn against an army.
That’s when I hear the click.
I roll off the bed, feeling in the dark for the metal poles that hold up the mosquito netting. Pull one out of its socket and grab the net in the other hand. The door bangs open and men rush in. I get the first one right in the eye with the end of the pole and toss the net in the face of the second, but there’s a third in the doorway with a gun pointed right at me, and I freeze.
A moment of relief as I realize there are no machetes.
The first guy grabs the pole out of my hands. The world goes red as he brings it down on the bridge of my nose. The room spins, hands grab me—
Then nothing, for a long while.
DIARY
August 1
I feel awake, for what must be the first time in days. I’m still a bit groggy, which I guess is from the medications. . . . I don’t know what all they’ve done to me. But it’s good to write again (in my right mind, that is, haha).
The hospital is some kind of colonial gothic—a big gloomy ward, divided by curtains on rails, which they mostly keep closed, but up above I can see the arches in the ceiling, and the edges of high fan lights. It’s all super clean and smells vaguely of bleach. The nurses have been in and out since I woke, asking me things in Cambodian that I can’t possibly understand, so I just do my best to smile. I’m not really sure that helps much. They wanted to give me a drip, and I could see from the bottle it was just saline, but I remembered my training: no needles. So I mimed drinking, and they brought me some kind of Tang-product. It’s amazing we have any astronauts left alive, if this is what we give them.
There was a doctor who came to see me sometime in the afternoon. He was absolutely tiny, in a perfect white coat and spectacles, and spoke a little English. He told me my leg had got infected. It must have been that cut, the one from the car on my first week. It never did heal, and I guess wading around in the swamps aggravated it. The doctor seemed very concerned.
“Bad cut,” he kept saying. “Why?”
I told him a dozen times that a car had hit me, but he just kept shaking his head, looking worried and vaguely accusatory. “Very bad,” he said. Gus called to shout at me, too. He said he had half a mind to send me home (which I managed not to laugh at) and if I wasn’t more careful, and this is a dangerous place, and etc. Apparently I gave him a scare. I think he was ready to drive all the way down to Sihanoukville just to yell at me in person, but I managed to convince him I was sorry, and would take better care of myself, and would have his story ready soon . . . eventually he seemed to calm down. Sok came by, and says that tomorrow we can finish the drive home—ideally without me having a seizure in the passenger seat this time.
And now I have a real story. I’ll tell Gus—in due time. Once I have all the pieces in place. Then I won’t be faking anymore.
Funny, though . . . I was so messed up, with working and not sleeping and being sick—well, I don’t even remember a lot of it. But one thing I do remember was this feeling of being watched. It started in Sihanoukville, I think, with the insomnia—I would doze and then wake up, sure someone else had just been in the room with me: hearing the rustle of curtains, the sound of the door closing. The sense of another body, somewhere, nearby. Once or twice, I could swear I smelled perfume in the air. In Koh Kong, it was worse. I thought—well, I can’t even tell you what I thought.
I feel mostly fine now, sitting up in bed eating hospital food with a liberal mixture of crow. But the funny thing . . . that feeling of being watched has never really gone away. . . .
WILL
OCTOBER 14–15
I’m coughing, shaking icy water from my eyes. Shivers run through me like electric shocks and I try to curl up, but I can’t: pain in my wrists where they pull against—what? Tape, maybe? Ankles strapped to the legs of a hard chair.
Naked, wet, freezing.
My face burns. Nose blocked, trying to breathe, to brace myself: if I’m alive, it’s because they want something from me. I know what comes next and my mind is screaming, just one more beer, one more screw, one more fix, one more cigarette—they have to give me that at least, a last smoke—
Beneath that, silence.
I have to piss, so I do. One less thing they can use against me.
“Jesus Christ, you grow up in a barn?”
Pain runs through my face—
—please god no no no just give me a cigarette i’ll tell you anything—
—I’m guessing rubber hose. Sparks, rainbows of blue and pink and yellow, resolving into a single, bright light.
“You piss when we tell you. Do that again and we’ll cut it off.”
It’s Luke. He sounds less cheery now. I can’t see him past the light. Shut my eyes.
I can hear other people in the room, moving. Muffled footsteps, no echoes: a shack or a shed?
More pain.
—godgodmakeitstoppleaseanything—
I’ve come off the junk three times. I can do pain.
“Eyes open. You rest when we tell you. We can cut your eyelids off, too, y’know.” I let my head loll and do as told. Dirt floor. Faintly, the sound of frogs—still in the woods, then. I look back into the light before they figure out what I’m doing.
“Answer my questions, tell the truth, and you’ll get out of here just fine.” That’s a lie. He says it like he’s asking me to fasten my seat belt in the event of a water landing. And I still love him for it, mind screaming, yes, please, anything—“Lie, or stall me, and we’ll start cutting.” That’s the truth.
“Okay.” It comes out like slush, but I guess he knows what I mean.
“What’s your name?”
“Will. Keller.” Pain again. “Can . . . check, been here . . . years.” He hits me three more times. Pain like liquid, filling me up from the face down until I’m a bottle of fire and god, jesus, just make it fucking stop—
“Don’t answer any question not asked of you.”
I wait.
“Who sent you looking for us?”
“I wasn’t looking for you.” The hose in the face again.
—pleasepleaseanything—
“I’m telling you what you want to know,” I shout.
They hit me some more. My face burns and burns and I feel the pain spread through my body, like it’s burning away the cold. Things come into focus: I guess that’s adrenaline.
—stoppleasejuststop—
It isn’t going to stop.
“Hit me again and you won’t get any answers,” I mutter. Another blow, n
ow across the thighs. “You might as well start cutting.”
“Really?” I feel a hand grab my balls.
“Fuck yourself.” The hand squeezes and twists. I go ahead and scream.
Everything red—
Black.
Some while later, when I’m able to think again, I notice I’ve vomited on myself. The seat feels wet underneath me. I’m sobbing. This is worse than cold turkey—worse than anything.
“Who sent you?”
I’m desperate, trying to think of an answer that will satisfy them—but there’s nothing. Game over. These aren’t subtle guys: this isn’t going to last much longer. I breathe into a pain that’s tearing through every nerve—turn my head and spit on the floor.
Best I could do.
Something cold grabs my cock, and I look down. Having trouble seeing—a pair of bolt cutters.
“Cutting off your cock is worse than cutting off your balls, you know. Thing about cutting someone’s balls off is, they don’t mind so much, after. The urges are gone, y’know? But cut off a guy’s cock? He spends the rest of his life thinking about what he’s missing. Now, who sent you?”
I shrug.
When I was maybe fifteen, sixteen, my buddies and I would drive out at night to what was probably once a wheat field, though by our time it was just a couple acres of flat, dusty earth, sprinkled with dandelions and switchgrass and rape. We’d chalk a line down the middle, and two guys would pull their cars up on opposite ends and drive at each other. No strategy. No planning. The first one to swerve lost.
I was very, very good at that game.
Mutilation is a cheap threat to a dead man, and as I sit there, silent, Luke finally realizes it. He holds the bolt cutters to my cock as long as he can, making these menacing grunting noises. But it’s over: he wants what I know more than I want anything from him.
The only thing I’ll bargain for is a fucking cigarette.
And like that, it really is over. The door opens. A new voice: American, smooth. This guy did go to Yale.
“All right, amateur hour is over. Clean him up, give him something to eat—we got any candy? Give him some sugar. And get some lights in here, for God’s sake. Not much of a criminal mastermind if you trip in the dark and break your damn neck.” He’s still muttering as he goes out.
Not over: now it’s actually started.
* * *
The first thing I see is Phann. He’s taped to another chair a few feet away, shirt off, covered in cigarette burns. His face is purple, neck black and bloody, clearly dead. My chest starts heaving.
Not again.
He was okay. He should have got out. I should have—
Another bucket of water hits me in the face. Focus on the cold as it sluices away blood and urine and vomit. Then someone is drying me off with a wadded-up shirt. I try not to look up.
These guys really are amateurs: if they’d kept Phann alive, they could have used him to get me to talk. Guess I don’t look like the type.
Luke has left, but the others are still there. Two are Cambodians, dressed in nondescript garment-factory seconds. The third is bigger and has the same thug look about him as Luke—guessing he’s another American. They cut the tape on my arms and legs, and let me get dressed, my whole body screaming as I try to move. I can’t see out of my left eye.
We’re in a small shack, some kind of waypoint. A few crates in a corner, empty; some folding chairs, a camp stove, and a couple fishing boxes full of supplies: cereal, candy bars, Nescafé, water bottles. The American tapes my hands again, but in front of me this time. One of the Khmers hands me a Snickers and I tear into it, too hungry to care that it’s probably my last meal. They start boiling water.
Now a fourth guy comes in, I guess the one who stopped the interrogation before. Mid-fifties, Han Chinese features, but everything in his bearing says American. In a tan summer suit, he looks ready for martinis on the Vineyard. He makes two coffees; hands me one. “I apologize for my associates. They see all this stuff about Guantánamo on TV, and they think that’s how it’s supposed to be done. That’s why we’re going to lose the war on terror . . . just like we lost the war on drugs.” New England accent—not Boston, could really be a Yale man. There’s a trace of hesitation there: not another accent, just the space where one was erased.
He pulls out some expensive European cigarettes; offers the pack. I take two.
“Why don’t you tell me a story?”
I don’t see anything to lose by the truth. “Name’s William Keller. I’m a photographer, I’ve been here for nine years. Before that, a selection of other shitholes. I have no interest in you people or what you’re doing, I’m down here looking for a missing girl. She used to be an intern at my newspaper. Name’s June Saito. Twenty-three years old, skinny, blond, half-Asian. You’d know her if you saw her.”
He hears the question in my words and smiles. “If you think you’d like to run this, I can always get Luke back in here. You were doing very well with him.”
“No thanks.” I manage a crooked smile, too, but I know he sees through it, to the terror freezing my spine at the mention of Luke. He knows I’ll say anything just to keep him in the room. “June went up to Angkor—or that’s what she told us—and never came back. I figured she ran off with a boy and it would be an easy buck, but I was wrong. I found out she’d been down here—got a bug up her ass about that break-in at Luke’s office. I thought maybe she’d come down again without telling anyone, to try to get a scoop, so I followed. That’s when things got hairy. As soon as I saw your boy, I knew something was going on and it was out of my pay grade. I was gonna get out of town, but as I was headed back, I stopped in the mangroves. A spot I recognized from a photo June had taken. I thought I’d look around, and I found a body.”
Did Yale’s eyebrows rise, just the tiniest bit?
“I had a friend come down, we checked it out on the sly. Wasn’t June. I didn’t know what else I could do, I was set to go back to Phnom Penh. That’s when you fellas grabbed me.”
He keeps looking at me. I give him a second. This is the tough part. “So Peng didn’t send you?”
“General Peng? He’s the guy you’re trying to put out of a job?”
“Clever.”
“I saw him once. Your buddies were stuffing him in a police van.”
He nods. “So. Just another white man in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“It happens to us a lot.”
“The thing you don’t understand is that everywhere outside your hotel room is the wrong place. You should have gone home.”
I don’t rise to that. He’s starting to stand, though, so it’s now or never. “I guess you know I’m telling the truth, and now you’re going to kill me and dump me in the swamp. But that’s not your best play.”
Yale raises his eyebrows. “Why not?”
“For a start, killing Americans causes problems. People notice.”
Yale just smiles down at me. “Not you, Mr. Keller. I checked on you. All those years out here, running away from whatever it was that made your home unbearable. A bad marriage. A nasty uncle who fiddled with you. Something you did that you just can’t live with.”
“What are you, my analyst?”
His voice is melting sugar. “I’ve seen plenty like you. You grow up in America and it hurts you, it hurts you so much. So you come out here, into the real world.” Suddenly, he’s hard, harder than Luke could ever be. “In the real world, you’re not special. You have a drug problem. Who knows what kind of trouble you might get yourself in, looking for a fix? So you’ll be found somewhere with a gun in your jeans and a needle in your arm.” He shrugs. “Even your friends, if you have any left, will hear what happened and nod their heads sadly. ‘It’s too bad,’ they’ll say. ‘But we saw it coming.’ You’ll be a cautionary tale they trot out at parties: ‘I knew a guy who died in Cambodia. Addict. So sad.’ ”
“That doesn’t solve your problem.” He looks at me, curious now. “I’m not
the only one. You’ve also got an American girl who’s gone missing, probably dead. That may not be your doing—I’m coming to think it’s not—but it’s connected to you by circumstance. If I can find that connection, others will, too. First the paper, then the girl’s family. They’ve got money; they’ll keep looking. Especially if I disappear. You’ll get one nose after another poking into your business down here, and I don’t think you can kill ’em all.
“But if I go back and spin a tale about how I think June went up to Siem Reap, met a boy, and left the country, you’re in the clear. I get to stay alive. I get paid by my client and get out of here. Like I said, I don’t care what you do. You already know I can keep my mouth shut.”
He’s weighing this, not bothering to hide the fact. Or he’s toying with me. An idea begins to dawn: it’s a hell of a gamble. Then I see Yale’s hand move absently across his pocket, fingers brushing whatever he’s got in there, and I know I’ve only got seconds.
“You might still decide it’s easier to kill me and worry about the rest later. But I have something I think you want. Something I came across looking for the girl.”
Now his eyes get narrow. “And what might that be?”
“Photographs. Not here, they’re with a friend in Phnom Penh. She’ll trade you the card for me.”
“Photographs of what?”
Deep breath. “A few days ago, two Cambodian guys took out a kid named Van Chennarith. Broke into his hotel room and took him apart with machetes.”
Van’s name turns on the electricity. They’re all looking at me now. The two Khmers, who had been sitting scratching their arms, are practically vibrating. Yale is staring at me intensely, suspiciously: Have I blown it?
Straight down the line. “I’ve got photos of the whole thing. Blood, faces, and all. I gave them to a friend, as insurance. Now I’m guessing you’re still working with Van’s dad, but maybe not—maybe you ordered the hit yourselves. I don’t care. Either way, I figure maybe you want those pictures.”