by Knox, Tom
It seemed the pieces of the puzzle were scattered, but they were somewhere here, or hereabouts.
“Mr. Yakulovich, why did Barnier want to talk with you?”
“He wanted to know how far our work had proceeded by the 1970s. We discussed what the Chinese wanted from us, and so forth.”
“How far had it gone, your work?”
Yakulovich hesitated, visibly, and the quietness was prolonged. Julia could hear the monkeys, clacking their teeth in their cages outside. The old man glanced at the darkening window and back at his guest. His mouth was shut and his lips were thin. His wisps of remaining gray hair hung lankly to the side, uncombed. But then he shrugged, in a beyond-caring manner.
“Journalists always like to ask about this. Usually I never reply, ever, it is so very controversial. But you are a scientist, a fellow scientist, Julia Kerrigan, I can trust you. You have made the effort of visiting us. I can be much more open, as we are on the same team! Nyet? The same side, yes?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“And we are also alone now! The laboratory has closed for the day. So let us be frank and open and transparent, as scientist to scientist!” He sipped his tea and grinned. “This is how science proceeds, is it not? The scientific method, the open exchange of data. And I am proud of what we achieved here.”
Julia was desperate for him to get on with it. She wanted the truth, she could feel the truth near at hand yet obscured, like a shadow passing behind baffled glass.
Picking up and toying with his teaspoon, he continued.
“We had a little more luck with impregnating human females. Eventually.”
“Luck?”
“At first there was no success at all, with the artificial insemination of primate sperm into humans. We faced complete failure. So we asked ourselves: Why the failures? We decided that artificial insemination itself was part of the problem, that we needed actual coitus to produce viable embryos.”
Julia ignored the revulsion inside her; she smiled falsely and asked: “Coitus, you mean actual … sex?”
“Yes! Intercourse! It is well known that artificial insemination between humans has less chance of producing viable offspring than actual intercourse. We do not know the precise reasons for this, but intercourse acts as an ovarian stimulant, vaginal peristalsis is greater, all sorts of complex chemical and anatomical processes take place in sexual congress that surely aid the successful fertilization of eggs and the creation of viable embryos, so it was speculated that we should try coitus across the primate-human barrier.”
She asked, as dryly as possible: “How?”
He set the teaspoon down.
“The idea that we enslaved women from Guinea or some other old French colony is absurd. No. We had volunteers.”
“Women volunteered for this?”
“Why not?” Sergei laughed a high, wheezing, old man’s laugh. “The women were not expecting to … bring up their half-breed babies, just go to full term, parturition. I have letters here in my desk”—he slapped the wood—“from women happily and bravely offering themselves. They were good young Communists in the good old days. They were happy to lend their wombs to Stalin. Or Khrushchev. Or even Brezhnev.”
“What happened?”
“We realized it was a question of accustoming the primate rather than the human. The woman can, of course, rationalize her situation, and lubrication can be artificial, but the primate has to be aroused. We experimented on denying apes sexual outlet; that is to say, denying them mating or masturbation, then giving them olfactory stimulation with human pheromones, then allowing them to copulate with a fitting receptacle, a human-female-shaped doll. This was promising. So then we moved on to primate-human couplings, to coition with the live subjects, the human volunteers.” He smiled wistfully in the semidarkness. “We also learned from the Romans. Yes, it is true! They used to have a spectacle at their great circuses where they would herd virgin Christian girls, girls condemned to die, into the Colosseum. The girls’ genitals were drenched with the urine of chimps and mandrills, then the Romans would unleash a troop of sex-starved apes into the arena, and the beasts would rape the girls to death. Of course, the depravity is distasteful. But also very useful! Why should we not learn from this?”
His face was pale with sincerity. “So we realized we could maybe drench the vagina of a female human volunteer with some chimp or orangutan urine and that could work. And we came close, we were coming close, we achieved fertilizations, which were swiftly followed by abortions. Who knows what we might have achieved if we had been given just a few more years.” He sighed. “But there it is. We ran out of money and time, after that came Gorbachev and the war, and here we are, helpless, feeble, impoverished. No one wants our science. That is why it is good to meet you. A real scientist with proper perspective, not this modern, sentimental hysteria.”
Sergei Yakulovich paused. Like a man semiproud of something very secret. Dying to tell, yet still wary.
“Would you like to see the last of the donors, the ape who came closest? Then we can conclude our discussion of Ghislaine Quoinelles. Poor Ghislaine.”
Julia said, “Why not?” Even as the puzzle dragged her further in, her mind yearned to escape. This ghastly place. She wanted to burn it down.
The director pushed back his chair and led them through the offices. He stopped at a cupboard, opened a door. It contained guns, or maybe stun guns, and cattle prods, and rope, and neck irons. Yakulovich selected an electric prod.
“Don’t worry, we won’t need it, he is too old, but we have rules on safety.”
It was dark outside, but harsh lights illuminated the laboratory compound. Yakulovich was bumbling along in his brown suit, humming a tune. He paused at the cage of the sobbing orangutan.
“Boris!” he crooned through the cage bars. “Boris! Boris u nas posetitelyei!”
The old man found a key in his pocket and opened the cage door.
“You don’t have to do this,” said Julia.
“No, no, it is no problem. I want to show you that we are still treating our primates well, they are not unhappy, they are friendly. And the friendliness is key, they need to be accustomed to humans, to like us, and trust us—the reason we managed to mate Boris with human females is that he trusts humans: from birth he was trained to like us, therefore the coitus could take place.” Sergei found a mandarin in his pocket and waved the fruit at the squatting creature. “Boris, moi drug, ya prinesti plody!”
The ancient orangutan unhunched the long arms from his hairy face. His streaked eyes gazed from the dark depths of his prison. Then the ape shambled with painful slowness across the cage to the open door, into the brightness of the compound lights. Its eyes expressed a sadness deeper than anything Julia had witnessed. A black, black sadness, unfathomable, like coal mines of sadness. Sergei Yakulovich was stroking the ape’s forehead.
“See, perfectly tame. Of course, very old now. No longer interested in the girls!” The director laughed. “But before, when he was subadult, he was our most promising ape. He fertilized three human wombs. We came closest with him. But that was before everything was shut down. Such a tragedy.”
The orangutan looked at Yakulovich. He was sniffing. The ape was sniffing the air. It turned its wide sad face and sniffed at Julia. Sniffing in the direction of her face, her stomach. She inched away.
The ape inched forward.
“Do not worry,” said Yakulovich, brightly. “Boris is not a threat.”
Julia was gazing in disgust at the ape’s groin. A small erection was visible.
The director gazed quizzically at Julia.
“Miss Kerrigan, you have strong pheromones? Perhaps you are premenstrual? This is an unusual reaction. He is reacting to you.”
She shook her head.
“Please. This is disgusting.”
He bridled. “But why? What is so disgusting?” His expression was an uncomprehending sneer. “This is just science!” He seemed affronted. “If you are offend
ed by this then you should talk to the Chinese!”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Yakulovich shrugged. “Exactly what I say? The Soviet Union sold all its data to the Chinese in the 1980s, when we were too poor to defend ourselves. Indeed, I asked Barnier what had happened to our research, how it had progressed in the East. He could not be explicit, he refused. But this is what Barnier told me.” The director sighed, expressively. “Barnier said simply this: ‘The Chinese took it much further.’ Who knows what they did, Miss Kerrigan, who knows? The Chinese! They are entirely without scruple, they are the new Roman Empire, who will govern us all!”
Sergei Yakulovich turned back to his favorite prisoner and stroked the orangutan’s forehead. Crooning in mumbled Russian. Julia stared at the bleakness. The drizzle was falling again, the stench of shit was pervasive, the orangutan was stroking his scarlet penis, and the little rhesus monkey was still shrieking, running to one side of the cage, and screaming, and running to the other side, and screaming. Julia gazed at the sad eyes of the orangutan. Sad and crying, yet guiltless. There was no conscience there: just suffering.
Suffering. And libido. And rage.
In a single second Julia was unsure what she saw. Yakulovich sailing backward; the great long arm of the orangutan extending past him; and suddenly a dark and heavy flash as the ape leaped toward her. Julia seemed to pivot away, on instinct, and run. But the ape had her, it grabbed at her neck and pulled her brutally to the floor. She tried to struggle free, writhing on the damp ground, skidding her heels against the rain and urine and concrete, but the animal was enormous: huge and pungent.
Now she could feel the large, inhuman hands between her legs. Ripping her panties away. Julia gasped.
And the little monkey was still screaming, running across the cage, and screaming.
30
The blow didn’t come. He waited. Still nothing. Khmer voices rose to a clamor, more voices: many voices, shouts even. Jake opened his eyes, looked left: beside him the soldier was still wielding the rusty iron bar, ready to execute him and Rittisak. But the iron bludgeon was hanging, unused, and the soldier himself was gazing offstage, with a distinctly nervous expression.
Why?
Villagers, at least a hundred of them, coming down the path from the main road, shouting and yelling and clutching ugly long knives and hatchets and machetes and old Russian rifles. Even pitchforks.
He glanced Chemda’s way, the tiny fledgling of hope in his heart. Chemda had shrugged off the uncertain grasp of her captors, and she was marching to greet the mob. Despite her ragged flip-flops and her muddy skirt and her dirty hair, she still looked like a Khmer princess, bold, proud, self-possessed: she was talking with the villagers, they were smiling at her, waving their fists in triumph and anger, gesturing furiously at the soldiers: the captors.
They were being rescued. The would be executioner dropped his cudgel to the ground and backed away. Raucous shouts apparently demanded that Jake and Rittisak be unhandcuffed.
The youngest soldier nodded, and humbly shuffled up, and turned a key behind Jake’s back.
He was uncuffed. Rubbing his raw wrists, he stood in the hot sun and stared at Chemda. The incense from the offerings to Pol Pot perfumed the smiles they exchanged, frightened smiles. Rittisak was also released. Jake crossed to Chemda’s side, walking around the low grave.
“Why…” He was almost muted by the reversal.
Chemda told him, “Your friend. He did this.”
“Tyrone?”
“Yes. Ah. So they say, these people. He has contacts here and he called them last night and asked them to help us, to watch out for us, and he said they should help us because of what I do.” She gestured at the triumphant crowd of Khmer peasants in their vests and kramas and dirty sandals.
“They know I am trying to get the Khmer Rouge imprisoned, and they want me to go on with my work. They want me to bring the tyrants to justice.” Her dark eyes looked up at his. A shine in the dark tropical depths of her eyes told of her emotion. “I thought they were going to kill you. Jake, I thought they were going to kill you.”
“Trust me,” said Jake, “so did I.”
So he had Tyrone to thank for his life. Of all people: laconic, selfish, hard-assed Tyrone McKenna. Jake felt a surge of love for his cynical friend, and he smiled at his own sentimentality.
But he was also swallowing the vinegary aftertaste of his intense fear. He breathed deep and long. His leg muscles were still weakened from the terror, and he felt like he might just crumple to his knees, right here and now, by Pol Pot’s graveside. He had been oddly calm, the moment that Death had approached, Death the dull functionary, Death who casually took his sister and his mother, Death the offhand commander of the killing fields.
But now he had survived, Jake was suffering the emotional aftershocks. Palpitations. The sweats. He tried to assert control over his own reflexes. Breathing deep.
A few meters away, the Khmer villagers were yelling at the soldiers, who were now silent and cowed. One of the locals walked up to the apparent leader of the squad and simply took the submachine gun from the soldier’s weakening hands.
The large eyes of the young Khmer soldier blinked rapidly, in anger or terror, or cowardly relief. But he did not move. He was rigid. Jake realized the soldiers were now, probably, in fear for their lives: outnumbered a hundred to one, caught by an entire village in the act of brutal, Khmer Rouge– style execution, in a region riven with loathing for the Khmer Rouge. The troopers knew they could die, any minute.
“We mustn’t let them kill them,” said Jake to Chemda. “The locals, they can’t kill the soldiers.”
Her face was contorted with disgust, but she nodded. “You’re right. Ah. They don’t deserve to live, but you are absolutely right. We need to be … inconspicuous.”
“And we’re still stuck, Chem. There’s no way we can just sneak down the ravine, not now, there are other policemen around—”
She shrugged impatiently. “So we’ll have to cross the border, at the official frontier.”
“No way. Come on. They’ll stop us and send us to Phnom Penh.”
Her frown was fierce. Jake gazed around at their rescuers. A possibility evolved in his mind.
“I have an idea. We could ask these people … to help? To come with us? With all of them we have a chance.”
Chemda didn’t even reply: she turned and she talked with the villagers. The villagers nodded and yelled, urgent and keen. And Chemda was smiling a half smile.
“They’re going to help.”
The crowd moved as one. Jake realized it was working. They were being escorted to the frontier. The soldiers were left behind, guarded and disarmed. The huge crowd of locals was now walking boldly up the burning sunlit road to the frontier, just a few hundred meters away.
As the mob approached the border, Jake saw the look of astonished alarm on the faces of the Khmer customs officers in their little glass kiosk. The officers had obviously been briefed to watch for escapees matching Chemda’s and Jake’s description; they had surely been told to stop them and arrest them at once, to prevent their crossing. But they obviously hadn’t expected Jake and Chemda to be accompanied by half of Anlong Veng.
What could five border policemen do against maybe a hundred angry people with knives, guns, and rusty machetes?
The crowd fell into an oddly solicitous silence as it met the white wooden boom that marked the Cambodian frontier. Jake saw the blue-and-red stripes of the Thai flag fluttering languidly from a flagpole, a hundred meters farther on; he saw Thai faces leaning to the window in the glass-and-steel office, observing the strange scene unfolding on the Khmer side of the border. Behind the Thai officers, he could just make out the kindly portrait of a bespectacled King Bumibhol of Siam, hanging on the wall.
Jake wiped the sweat from his eyes and assessed the situation. He knew they would have little trouble getting into Thailand. Their passports were in order: British and American citizens c
ould enter Thailand freely and get a visa anytime.
But Jake and Chemda still had to cross the Khmer border first. Would his plan work?
The Cambodian officers inside their kiosk were making frantic phone calls. Two of the officers had guns drawn—the revolvers were laid significantly and blatantly on the counter before them. But the crowd, still ominously silent, moved closer, gathering around the kiosk. The sheer weight of numbers threatened to topple the little building; the sad little office, with its sad men inside, rattled and vibrated.
Victory came quick. The guards surrendered: behind their grimy panes of glass they did deep submissive bows, with their praying hands high above their heads: they were doing the high wai, the deep inferior samphae of total submission.
The fattest Cambodian border guard urgently beckoned Chemda and Jake to his little hatch, past the white barrier. His hands were shaking and sweat was dripping in long rivulets down his chubby, frightened face.
Wordless, he took their passports. He glanced at the crowd behind the barrier.
He stamped Chemda’s passport, he stamped Jake’s passport. With the same weak, unspeaking demeanor he waved them on. His face said, Just go, please. Go. Now.
But Jake lingered for a second, savoring the moment, this tiny refreshing moment of his victory, in all the recent tragedy of flight and defeat; Chemda walked over to Rittisak, who was smiling, at the front of the crowd. She hugged him.
Then she ran back and took Jake’s hand, and they walked the hundred meters of no man’s tarmac, to the bigger, glassier office on the Thai frontier.
“Sawadee kap!” said the Thai border guard. He glanced down at their passports. His smile was brief, but subtly meaningful. “Thirty-day visas?”
“Yes,” said Jake, “thirty-day visas.” He clutched Chemda’s hand. “Kappunkap.”
Jake found them a cab to Surin, a badly abused Toyota Corolla with a fat Isaan driver and maybe thirteen monastic amulets hanging from the rearview mirror. He gazed ahead of them as they motored past the cane fields, and so did Chemda. Their mutual good mood, their sense of wide-eyed astonishment, at their own gruesomely belated good fortune, had already dwindled; it was entirely gone by the time they reached the train station, whence they had decided to catch the night train to Bangkok. To Bangkok and Marcel Barnier.