by Peter Jaggs
Presently Chavy, the younger of the two girls, ran off into the yard and came back with half a dozen tiny coloured shells which she dropped into the fish tank. The Professor was instantly furious.
“No! No! No!” He yelled angrily at the surprised girl. “You will dirty the water!” He wagged a big finger at her admonishingly. “Leave it alone!” he instructed her sternly. “It is my aquarium, and it is not a toy!”
The two young girls looked at each other. They never said a word, but after twenty-five years in Asia it was obvious to me they had formed a silent pact. I shuddered to myself. Trouble was on the way. The sisters got up from where they were kneeling and silently slid out of the side door together. The Professor pulled up a chair, the National Geographic channel forgotten for once, and he stared into his aquarium with rapt concentration.
The next morning I was woken at an untimely hour by The Professor clattering about outside as he prepared his nets and buckets. It was barely light and Stumpy the lizard had risen early and appeared from his hiding place. He was happily sunning himself in the warm spot on the wall where the early morning rays slipped their first fingers of light in through the small window. Stumpy was apparently a morning person but I’m not and I groaned. No doubt encouraged by his success, my ardent zoologist of a neighbour had decided to rise at this inhuman hour and attempt to repeat the sensation of the previous day. I was still hungover from the previous nights revelry and I turned over and swore when I heard his beloved bike clattering away from the Crazy Monkey sounding like an antique printing press. I pulled the bedsheet over my head and tried to ignore the beer-induced throbbing in my skull in an attempt to get back to the land of nod.
Just as I was about to drift off again, I heard low voices and giggling in the television room outside. It was Chantavy and Chavy—and they were obviously up to no good. I climbed out of bed very quietly and opened the door a fraction and peered out of the crack. The two young sisters were in the process of putting something into The Professor’s aquarium and they were laughing together as they did so.
The two lovely Cambodian girls looked a picture as they stood over the tank with their heads very close together. Their satiny hair hung around their smiling faces and shone in the early morning sunlight that filtered in through the window. Two tight kramas were stretched enticingly over a quadruplet of firm buttocks as they bent to their task. The girls only stayed half a minute, then they scampered out of the side door in a fit of giggles. I was still half asleep and thought nothing more about it and returned back to bed, intending to catch another couple of hours sleep.
In fact, I didn’t wake up again until the sound of loud male shouting woke me up around noon.
“Look what your daughters have done!” The Professor was yelling at Srey-Leak, with a dangerous note of hysteria in his voice. “It’s murder that’s what it is—a bloody murder!”
It sounded like the poor guy was almost in tears and I hastily pulled a towel around my waist and went out into the television room to see if I could help. The Professor was wobbling his head and waving his arms around agitatedly and kept poking his finger at his aquarium. Srey-Leak was standing demurely in front of him, allowing him to let off what was definitely a very full head of steam.
“They were previously unrecorded specimens!” The Professor was wailing. “I will never find anything like them again!”
The poor bloke was actually crying now.
I looked into the aquarium to see what all the fuss was about. The Professor’s pretty little fish were both gone and in their place were two six inch Snakehead Fish—a predatory species I had often caught on lures and livebaits that the Thai people call ‘The Freshwater Shark.’ It appeared the two teenaged girls had had taken the rapacious little carnivores from one of the big earthenware pots in the yard where their father kept a variety of fish and released them into the Professor’s aquarium, where they had eaten his previously unrecorded specimens.
Srey-Leak smiled at The Professor kindly and spoke to him in a calming voice, feigning an ignorance I did not believe she possesed.
“The girls were only trying to help,” she said soothingly, patting him kindly on the shoulder. “They know how much you like fish—and you never seem to catch very many.”
With that, the owner of the Crazy Monkey guesthouse walked serenely out of the side door in order to see to a party of biking, hiking, rucksack toting backpackers who had just arrived in town. As she walked away, The Professor stood there fuming apoplectically and opening and closing his mouth in exactly the same manner his previously unrecorded specimens had done before their demise. I retreated back into my room hastily.
The Professor really was dreadfully upset and later that day he was even talking about leaving the Crazy Monkey and finding a new place to stay. To cheer him up, I asked him to come and have a couple of beers with me that evening on The Hill, but he was still under the impression that the area was unsafe and populated by ‘cut-throat rascals,’ as he put it, and he declined my offer. Maybe it was just as well he had. When I made my way up to the dusty crossroads, just as I was about to turn into the bar-strip, I gave Narith and his motodop cronies—who were gathered there as usual—a cheery wave.
Narith’s’ bike was up on its stand and he was reclining backwards on the seat and using the handlebars as a pillow. When he saw me coming up the track he leapt off his machine and strode towards me, his face twisted with rage.
“Why you speak bad to me last night?!” Narith shouted at me angrily, and he stopped a yard in front of where I stood. The furious motodop driver took up an aggressive stance in the middle of the road, his muscular legs spread wide and his hands on his slim hips. He looked at me hard.
Shit. I thought things had been going too well. This was much more like the Cambodia I had imagined in my nightmares back in Pattaya. I cast my mind back to the previous evening. Admittedly, I had been slightly the worse for wear, but I couldn’t believe I had been either drunk or daft enough to upset the toughest motodop driver on The Hill. Narith growled at me like an angry dog and took another step towards me. I debated kicking him in the balls and doing a runner, but with all his henchmen at hand, I knew I wasn’t going to get very far. And anyway, where exactly was I going to run to? With the town consisting of three dirt roads and the hill up to the beach, there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
The adrenalin kicked in and I prepared for the worst. I can honestly say I wasn’t scared—I was merely terrified. I knew I was no match for the fierce young motodop driver and I wondered if I might at least manage to get one good whack in before he battered me into the dirt road. I stared back into his blazing eyes, trying hard not to show I was almost about to shit my pants.
Narith moved in for the kill and I tensed.
Then suddenly, the motodop driver’s face broke into a huge, good-natured grin and he began laughing in delight. All his pals at the crossroads joined in and I looked at them in amazement, thoroughly confused. Narith threw his arms around me and gave me an amicable hug which almost cracked several ribs, then stepped back and shook my hand vigorously.
“I sorry! I sorry!” he apologised, gasping for breath in his merriment. “I only joking with you! You my friend!”
Feeling slightly sick, I attempted a weak grin and Narith gave me a matey clap on the back as I walked by, trying very hard to control my shaking legs.
The motodop boys were all still laughing like a pack of hyenas as I walked past them into the bar-strip.
“Velly funny joke! Velly funny joke!” Narith yelled after me in delight, as I made my way towards a much needed drink. Jesus! I thought, mightily relieved that I hadn’t gone with plan one and the boot in the bollocks. If this is the Cambodian sense of humour Chantavy and Chavy are going to be washing a great deal of boxer shorts on this visa run. Despite the motodop drivers’ hilarity, I wasn’t sure the joke was velly funny, at all.
I doubt that Louis, the tough French owner of the bar that had become my local would
have even batted an eyelid if Narith had played the same trick on him. He was one of the most villainous looking characters I have ever seen. Both his muscles and craggy face could have been carved from granite. His arms were criss-crossed with thin, white scars from previous knife fights, and his wrists were as thick as my forearms. He was obviously not a man you would want to cross and when I first arrived on The Hill I took one look at him and thought “I’ll give that bar a miss”. However, by the end of my stay in Sihanoukville I had realised despite his fearsome reputation and the fact that he looked like a character out of ‘Papillon,’ Louis was one of the good guys and only switched on the darker side of his character if someone made a problem in his bar. Normally, the Frenchman was polite and friendly to all his customers and the ‘Shark Bar’ was one of the most popular places on The Hill. I knew the brawny gangster couldn’t be all bad, because all his girls seemed to love him, as did his many friends. One night Louis was in a particularly amicable mood and in a husky voice heavy with an accent from the darker streets of Paris he told me how he had come to be a bar owner in this back of beyond place.
“My name is Louis, but in the underworld of Paris I have always been known as ‘Le Requin’ which means ‘The Shark’. I have been in Cambodia for eight years now. It was tough in the beginning, because I missed the bright lights and action of Paris and it was so very quiet in this country I felt I had been buried alive. Now the tourists have begun to arrive in more numbers and since I moved from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville and became a bar-owner, life has been more interesting.
Yes, I am a French gangster and I am proud of it. My father was a well-known safe-cracker. He was a great friend of Jaques Mesrine, who used to bounce me on his knee and show me fighting moves when I was a young boy whenever he came to our house to talk over jobs with my Papa. I cannot remember my grandfather, but I know he ran women in Montmarte so I guess I am carrying on the family tradition. Papa told me grandfather killed a fellow over a girl way back in the thirties and died in French Guiana—that’s Devil’s Island to you—where he spent fifteen years with men such as Belbenoit, La Grange and Milani. So you see, I have a good pedigree, my friend, and it was inevitable I should follow in their footsteps. It is in our blood to find our way around society.
Because of my background, life in Paris was very good to me. I was offered all the big jobs going and I could take my pick from a string of beautiful women. I was brought up on nightlife, and I always had a taste for the best restaurants and the finest wines. Even when I was a very small kid I used to run messages and errands for the big boys.
One night, not so very long ago, a damn fool of a drunkard who had ripped me off over some jewelry he fenced for me insulted me in a restaurant in front of all my friends and he fell onto my knife. It seemed that the silly bastard who killed himself was—although a petty crook—the husband of a woman whose father was a ‘flic’ and she put pressure on her Papa to bring me to justice. Even if I had known the mug’s father-in-law was a cop I would have still killed him anyway because the honour of both myself and my family were at stake. After the cops fished him out of the river Seine they started looking for me in earnest. They didn’t much seem to like the fact that I had taken his hands from him before he had died as a warning to anyone else who thought they might like to wet their beak at my expense. It wasn’t long before the net began to close and I barely had time to pick up a pay-off from a big job I had pulled with some friends before leaving France for Cambodia.
I arrived in Phnom Penh and I hated it. When I walked the streets in Paris I was known, feared and respected. On the streets of Cambodia I could have been just another ten-dollar-a-day backpacker. I found the city cramped, dirty and tedious. I took to drinking more and more to alleviate the boredom and I began to lose my sharpness and physique.
Three years later I met Jean, an old aquaintance from Paris, who was in a similar situation to myself. He was a fraudster who had been playing his games for a good long time, but was now under investigation. Like myself, he needed to flee France before he lost his freedom. Jean told me he had opened a couple of bars and restaurants in Sihanoukville, which although very quiet, was a much more pleasant location than Phnom Penh. Jean is a very smart guy but has always used brains rather than brawn and a bunch of ex-foreign legion boys turned up and started showing a little too much interest in his business. He asked me if I would like to become his partner. He knew with me looking over his shoulder the soldier boys would soon forget any ideas they had been cooking up.
A year ago Jean found out through a bent cop that the ‘flics’ had shelved his case due to the death of their main witness and it was safe for him to return home. I bought him out, so here I am. The sole owner of three bars and a restaurant we built up together, which makes me a pretty big man in Victory Hill. Back in Paris, my old friends call me ‘The King of the Dirt Roads,’ but to my surprise I find am happy here now. Cambodia has every chance of becoming a major tourist destination in the future and I want a slice of the action.
A while ago I took a trip across the border and visited a friend who has a bar in Pattaya. In the future I will use the same system as he does—bar fines and girls—because Pattaya is where most of our customers are going to come from. I plan to give them a home from home and I believe this will make me a rich man one day. Jean was sure that if all goes well in a decade or so Victory Hill will boast a nightlife to rival that of Thailand’s premier beach resort. Eventually, we hope Sihanoukville will provide an alternative to the pollution and overcrowding that will eventually drive many holidaymakers and residents away from a city which is growing far too quickly. If I can keep the control I have now this could make me a very important guy one day. There is a community of us here now as well as a few legionaires who are on the fringes, but my backround, reputation and contacts put me at the top of the pile.
There is no way the cops are going to come looking for me here. My grapevine alerts me to any possible trouble and The Hill is way too small for anyone to hide around corners. Killers in Cambodia are a dollar a dozen and the body of a nosy character could be lost in the sea without trace very quickly and easily.
You people from Pattaya are the type of tourists we want here and in the past few years you are beginning to arrive. Backpackers are often too frugal to spend a buck or two on a drink or a girl and we don’t want perverts who come here to fuck children for a couple of dollars. I believe my bars are the way forward. It is quite possible that one day the Chicken Farms will be forced to close and that is going to give me a hell of a lot of femmes to choose from. I never employ underage girls in my bars although with my contacts it would be possible for me to do so. It is simply my belief. Guys who fuck children get their balls cut off in my world and just because I have been forced to change countries doesn’t mean I have changed my principles. All my girls are over seventeen and most of them work to make money for their families.
So, my friend, go back to Pattaya and next time bring your buddies. Tell them we try to keep The Hill clean and safe and that the paedophile reputation is slowly dying. Invite them to come and have a night and maybe a girl in the Shark Bar, where there is a Frenchman known as La Requin who will be pleased to have a drink with them. True, I am a fort-a-bras and a gangster, but your pleasure is my business. Be sure that if you come to enjoy yourself and put some money in my till, I will shake your hand and welcome you to my new world.”
What a night! As well as witnessing the brutal, piscatorial murder of The Professor’s two previously unrecorded specimens and being scared shitless by Narith’s bizarre idea of a joke, I had found the conversation and insights into the life of the fearsome Frenchman fascinating. I had expected Louis to be rough and ignorant, but after our tete-a-tete I realised there was much more to Le Requin than a pair of iron fists. I found myself wondering why such an intelligent and principled man had deemed it necessary to live his life on the wrong side of the law. The man had such charisma and energy he would probably have made a succ
ess of any legal form of business or employment he turned his hand to.
My musings kept me awake and I had difficulty sleeping, even after my usual quota of a dozen draft beers and a couple of funny smokes had been partaken of. This insomnia was partly caused by my reflections on the life of the French gangster and partly due to Srey-Leak’s daughters. Chantavy and Chavy had not yet got over their cruel vengeance on The Professor, and the giggles and laughter from the room next-door continued unabated for hours, until they finally faded away in the early hours of the morning.
Like Le Requin, the beautiful moon girl and the little angel had taken their revenge.
CHAPTER TEN
After I had been on Victory Hill a week, I was seriously beginning to doubt my chances of finding Psorng-Preng at all. I really had done my best. I had shown Ron’s photograph around all the bars on The Hill and downtown and to anyone else I happened to bump into who I thought might know her, and now the number of places on the list Ron had given me back in Pattaya was becoming smaller and smaller.
When I first arrived in town I thought the prospect of my success was pretty good. The Hill was so small I guessed surely somebody must know of Psorng-Preng, but although nearly everyone I showed the picture to remembered Ron, so far the face of his girl had produced only vacant looks and head-shaking. I wasn’t sure if—similar to the Thai people—the residents of Sihanoukville were reluctant to divulge the whereabouts of a fellow Cambodian and were deliberately feigning ignorance, or if they had really hadn’t seen her. Either way, up until now my best efforts had drawn a complete blank.