by Knox, Tom
“Typical? Typical?? I’ve never seen anything like this and—”
“Please. Calm down. We can talk on the Cham. The cave is … unpleasant.”
His reply was polite, yet somehow sharp. Ghislaine turned and walked toward the ladder. She watched his bulk as he ascended the steel rungs, to the winds and skies of the plateau. Supplicant and pleading, she followed. What exactly was Ghislaine doing? What was he saying? Was she going to get the chance to exploit her find? As they reached the surface, Ghislaine put a hand in his leather pocket. For his cell phone.
The twilight air was cold and dank, almost colder than the cave. Julia gazed about. The dark forests of the Cévennes stretched away beneath them, rolling down to the very distant coast. A crackle of lightning flashed in the east; black Luftwaffes of clouds were rolling in, scudding over the gravely sober stones of the Cham des Bondons.
Ghislaine was on his phone, chattering away in quick, cultivated, impenetrably Parisian French. Julia walked a few yards away, tuning out. Waiting nervously for the final verdict. What was happening? Ghislaine must see the relevance, the importance, of her discovery. For all his superciliousness, his oleaginous bullying, he was a smart man, he spoke so many languages; he spoke very good English—which Julia appreciated, as she was embarrassed by her own poor, probably Québécois-inflected French.
Tense, she waited, as patiently as she could, as Ghislaine strode this way and that in the drizzle.
The professor had finished his phone call. She waited for him to speak: to pronounce. To turn and smile his sickly smile, and say Bien sur. You are right, this is the most interesting find of the season.
But instead, he shrugged, and tutted, and turned—and started marching straight to his car, parked on the road by an abandoned farmhouse. Just visible in the gloom.
The rain was falling harder, persistent and annoying. Half frantic, Julia pursued her boss. She had to know. Her heartbeat matched her excitement. She stammered:
“Ghislaine, sir, I mean, Professor—please. I need to know. Can I do the next season? Can I? Please? I am sure there is something here. The bones, the skulls. That is OK, isn’t it? I have ideas. I know you think this is typical but really, really I do have an idea and—”
He swiveled. There was a look on his face she had never seen before. Contempt. Not the laughable pomposity or the risible vanity of before. Contempt. He snapped.
“The crania will be taken tomorrow, and the skeletons. There are museums that can accommodate them, perfectly. They will find their home in Prunier, of course.”
“But—”
“You have heard of Prunier? Ah, no. Obviously not.” Another contemptuous snort. “Miss Kerrigan, I will not need you anymore, not next season. Not ever. Your job is complete.”
This was stunning. This was a stunning disappointment.
“What?”
“You are relieved, is that how you phrase it? Retired. Finished. I need you no longer.”
“But, Ghislaine, please, this is the best find I have ever made, I know I make mistakes and—”
“Ça suffit!” He pouted, angrily. “Go home, go home now. Back to the States. They have history there, do they not? Some of your post offices are thirty years old.”
The rain was heavy, the thunder rumbling. Julia felt the blackness closing in on all her dreams. Her wild dreams of this afternoon. The Find of the Season. The Justification for Everything.
“But this was my find! This is unfair! Ghislaine, you know it is unfair.”
“Pfft. Your discovery is mediocre, and indeed it is shit.” Ghislaine’s black hair was damped by the rain, his leather trousers were smeared with mud; he made an absurd yet slightly menacing figure.
And now Julia found herself backing away. She was alone here, in the emptiness, not a farmer for miles, all the villages abandoned: alone with Quoinelles. And she had the horrible sense of physical threat. His angry finger was jabbing the air.
“What do you know? You learn in your American colleges and yet you have not heard of these things? You know nothing. The skulls and skeletons are just typical. Typical shit. Shit. Just shit. I expect you to return your carte d’identité tomorrow.”
His aggression was palpable, yet also strange. She got the queer impression he was threatening her for some kind of nihilistic fun, for his own bleak amusement. Trying to frighten her, trying to make her flee the scene first.
Standing her ground, with a tilt of her chin—thinking fuck you, if you’re going to sack me, fuck you—Julia stared straight back.
The silent hiss of the rain surrounded them.
With a weary shrug of repugnance, he turned and walked to the car once again. She watched as he disappeared along the path; he didn’t seem at all absurd anymore.
And now?
Her own car was the other way. She had to trudge through the drizzle, carrying the weight of her disappointment, her crushing letdown. She wouldn’t be able to call her father, or her mother, and vindicate her decision to go to Europe; she wouldn’t be able to tell her friends, her colleagues, the world about her discovery. She felt like a teenager spurned in love; she felt like an idiot.
She had been dumped.
Julia walked. Her bleak route took her past a steel cowshed, a run of barbed wire, and the very loneliest of the moonlit megaliths. And there, despite the pelting wet, she paused and looked around, feeling her anger and anxiety evolve, very slightly: as she surveyed the stones of the Lozère, the Cham des Bondons.
Truly, she still loved this locale—for all its saturnine moods. It was somehow bewitching. This ruined landscape, of legends and megaliths. This place where the werewolves of the Margeride met the elegiac Cham des Bondons.
The rain fell, and still she lingered. Remembering what had brought her here.
The only reason she was in Lozère at all was an offhand remark by a friend, in her college department in London, a year ago, who had mentioned a dig in the south of France. Not far from the great Ice Age caves! And there was room for an archaeologist from England! For a season! The offer had immediately gripped Julia with that old and giddy excitement. Proper archaeology. Dirt archaeology.
Enthused and animated, Julia had scraped together her savings and begged for a sabbatical from her mildly sneering London boss, and then she had left for the Continent with high hopes and had spent a summer digging in France—in France—and yet she had found nothing, because there was nothing to find anymore. Nothing. And right up until today it had seemed her sabbatical was going to dwindle away into disappointment, like everything else, like her career, like too many relationships.
Until today. The skulls. Her Find.
Julia gazed at the standing stones.
The megalithic complex of the Cham des Bondons was one of the biggest in Europe—only Carnac was bigger, only Stonehenge and Callanish were more imposing—yet it was virtually unknown.
Why was that? She could think of one obvious answer: the remoteness was crucial. The departement of Lozère had been depopulating for centuries. The highest limestone steppe of all, the Causse Méjean, just west of the Cham, was said to be the single most deserted part of France: a great plateau of rock with just a few shepherds remaining. Everyone else had gone. Everything else had gone.
It was, therefore, no wonder almost no one knew about the cold and windy Cham des Bondons: there was no one here to see the stones, and no easy way to pierce the guarding wilderness.
And yet maybe there was some other explanation, too—maybe the atmosphere of the Chem des Bondons had something to do with the stones’ lack of fame. The dark, mournful, off-putting ambience. They were like sad soldiers standing around the grave of a beloved king. Like the moai, the great and tragic monoliths of Easter Island, erected by a dying and maybe violent society.
A flash of insight illumined her thoughts.
Could it be?
Fat raindrops were falling, yet Julia did not feel the cold. This sudden idea was much too intriguing: it was a long shot, fantastical
even, yet sometimes in archaeology you had to make the intuitive connection, the leap of faith, to arrive at the new paradigm.
Walking briskly to her car, she fumbled for her keys even as she fumbled for the truth. The dating of the Cham des Bondons was late Neolithic. The dating of the skeletons was Neolithic. They came from the same long era of human history. Could there be some link between the Bondons and the strangeness of those bones?
Yes. No. Why not? Who could say?
Hell with Ghislaine. This was her Find. It was her puzzle to solve: and now she had an intuitive lead. There must be a link between the stones and the bones. And the link was that echoing sense, that chime of insight. The fact that she got from the skeletons underneath her feet, down there in the cave, the very same emotional sense she derived from the stones:
Guilt.
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 st
epped 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.