The 37th mandala : a novel

by Laidlaw, Marc

  "Ah, that's better! What would you like to drink? Capuccino? Let me get you something. I had an excellent macchiato."

  Derek avoided sliding into the booth, as Etienne seemed to be urging him, and dropped into a chair beside the table. Nina came sauntering back, leaving the journalist staring in at them through the window with vague disappointment; she gestured him away, and he went. She sat down in the booth and smiled sharply at Derek.

  "I think Mr. Crowe would like just coffee, Etienne. Am I right?"

  Derek nodded, beginning to enjoy this. He lived for these battles, didn't he? He had never realized until lately just how much he enjoyed them: the sparring, the manipulation, the deceptions just beneath the surface. He almost broke out laughing, and Nina seemed to read his mood with uncanny accuracy, for she smirked and rolled her eyes as if to say Me too. They were all three sharing a nasty little secret.

  "You're all right with us, you know," she said. "I mean ... you're right to be protective, and it's good you keep the secrets ... but you're truly among your kind now. Do you understand?"

  "Oh, I understand," Derek said, and indulged himself in an open laugh.

  Etienne set a cup before him and slid into the booth beside Nina. They stared at him for a few moments, then glanced at each other.

  "Well," Etienne said, "where do we begin?"

  "How about this," Derek said. "You tell me how you got ahold of the manuscript."

  Now they really gaped at each other. He had been right all along! Someone at Veritas had slipped it to them, sold it probably; he would love to get names, but he doubted they would betray their source. Still, the confirmation of his suspicions was enough.

  "You are very well informed!" Etienne said. "I admit, I am impressed."

  "Amazing," Nina agreed.

  "But if you know so much, do you really need to be told that? Does our agent's name matter? He was dispensable; he did as we directed, and we had nothing further to do with him."

  "You paid him, I suppose."

  "Paid him?" Nina suppressed a gleeful laugh. "We cut him loose, that was his reward."

  Etienne was snorting with mirth. "Yes, completely loose. I don't think he got very far after that. Not so far from home."

  "That would have been a long walk, I think!" Nina said.

  Derek had to backpedal up a bit. They had lost him somewhere, or else he wasn't catching the full implications of what they were saying.

  "And the mines," Etienne said. "Do you realize how many millions of mines were sown in Kampuchea? How many years it would take to disarm them? Each one costs money, and Cambodia is a very, very poor country."

  "Wait a minute," Derek said. "Cambodia."

  "Of course, that's where the manuscript was kept. It was written in Tuol Sleng, and that's where it stayed."

  Tuol Sleng again? Derek thought. Now he was truly lost—and his fear once again running rampant. It wasn't just the possibility of blackmail that frightened him; the idea occurred to him that a larger danger was brewing, one that involved him and Huon and these two, and who knew who else besides?

  "We got a very good copy though. We found someone with legitimate access and borrowed him for a while."

  "You're going to have to do better than that," he said. "My lawyer is on the verge of sending you a cease-and-desist letter. It doesn't take long to get a temporary restraining order, you know. I could shut down your club before it opens."

  Etienne looked hurt. "Mr. Crowe, please ... what is the issue?"

  "The issue is your infringement of my property."

  "Oh, now that is novel," said Nina. "Infringement? What can you possibly mean?"

  "It's my obligation to defend the mandalas or lose my right to them."

  "Yes, defend them, by all means! We all are defenders, aren't we? But at the same time ... we want them to get around, now, don't we?" Etienne leaned close, his breath wretched from coffee, like a blast from a cat box. "You've seen our posters, our flyers?"

  "Your computer viruses, yes. But don't tell me you didn't pull them all, steal them from my book."

  "Oh, my," Nina said, sitting upright, quite serious and startled now. "Etienne, I think we have misjudged Mr. Crowe."

  Etienne looked naively surprised. "Yes, dear, I think so too." He lit a cigarette, offering the pack to Derek, who declined. "Mr. Crowe ... where did you get the designs?"

  Derek blinked, uncertain how to answer. "It—it's in my book," he said.

  "Very good. And it doesn't suggest to you that the mandalas might speak to more than just your Ms. A?"

  "I suppose ... in theory." And this was just what he had told Huon the night before. But he hadn't believed it himself; nor did he now.

  "My dear, perhaps we should show Mr. Crowe the manuscript."

  A conspiratorial look.

  "He is one of us, whether he knows it or not. I suppose he ought to see."

  Etienne opened a small leather valise that lay on the seat beside him and took out a velobound folder with black vinyl covers. It looked like a business report, some shareholder's document, until he riffled the pages and Derek saw they were photocopies of lined notebook paper, covered with handwriting and diagrams. The script was in characters unfamiliar to him, but it came as no surprise to see mandalas scattered throughout. His mandalas.

  "I assume you recognize these," said Etienne.

  "What does this prove, except that you copied them?"

  "Look at the dates," Nina said, pointing to the bottom of one page, where Derek saw a thumbprint and small notations in Arabic: 15-10-78. Which, since there was no fifteenth month, must have indicated October 15, 1978.

  "We can authenticate them, if you persist in doubting," said Nina. "But why should you?"

  Derek sagged, caught off guard once more. How far could he reasonably pursue his threats of a lawsuit? What would his own story sound like in court? Who would appear the greater idiot before a jury? Assuming they could prove their claims that these mandalas had been drawn a dozen years before he'd even seen Elias Mooney's collection, what did that tell him, except that the skin and the notebooks and these pages all shared a common origin? He had given enough lip service to reality; he might as well bow to it. Here was the real author of the mandalas.

  "The writing is my father's," said Etienne. "I assume you do not read Khmer?"

  "No," Derek growled.

  "He was not Cambodian, but he was a fluent student of the culture. Many young Cambodian intellectuals and activists came to Paris for an education and ended up studying communism. My father was an anthropologist, but more, he was a Cambodian junkie; he emulated, I think, everything about his exotic friends—even embraced the Communist revolution in Cambodia, which had nothing to do with him. When I was very young, he moved there altogether, leaving me with my mother in Paris; there was no place for a child in what he was doing."

  "Poor boy," Nina said, patting Etienne's forearm. "Abandoned at a tender age."

  "Well, he was right. I have no longing for the guerrilla life."

  "Guerrilla?" Derek asked.

  "Yes, he lived in the jungles with the Communist Party of Kampuchea—the Khmer Rouge. They were on the run, you know, till they took Phnom Penh in 1975. But it must not have been long before he lost his illusions about politics and returned to his true passion—anthropology. He vanished into a remote plateau, cutting himself off even from the Red Khmer, and lost himself among the phnong, the hill tribes. The older cultures interested him more than politics. He lived with one semi-nomadic group for many years, a tribe that called itself the people of the mandala." Etienne grinned and nodded when he saw Derek's eyes. "Oh, yes. That is not the Khmer word, but it will do. It is a good word for our purposes."

  Nina smiled. "It evokes such beautiful feelings," she said. "Among your readers, for instance."

  "Oh, yes, Mr. Crowe. I love what you have done with them! They will reach a much wider audience the way you've painted them—a wide and unsuspecting audience. And the emotions released when their
true nature is understood ... the mandalas will feast on that!"

  "Go on," Derek said in irritation. "Your father lived with this tribe for how long?"

  "Well, I think he would be there still if his old friends the Khmer Rouge hadn't tracked him down and hauled him back to Phnom Penh. They called him a traitor to the party. They accused him of training the tribes for a counterrevolutionary offensive, working for Vietnam or the KGB or the CIA. He expected to be forced to confess his part in a conspiracy to overthrow Democratic Kampuchea, but instead he found himself an object of other attention. His body, you see, was covered with sak. These are magic tattoos he had received among the phnong."

  Derek grew rigid, not out of fear that his own secret was about to be revealed but because at last he had a glimpse of the skin's original owner—and of its origins. This was a story that not even Elias Mooney had seen, with all his talk of astral investigation. He must be triply careful himself to reveal nothing.

  Still, he had to say something: "Tattoos?"

  "In Cambodia they were very common, especially among soldiers and the tribal people. The sak are like amulets—most often Buddhist symbols of power and protection. The soldiers of Lon Nol, who held Phnom Penh until Pol Pot seized it, had little training or weapons. They relied on talismans. Many were covered head to toe with sak. This didn't keep the city from falling, of course. My father's sak were different. They were unique to his tribe—I mean the phnong who took him. And there was one interrogator in Tuol Sleng who took a particular interest in them.

  "Chhith was his name. He treated my father very well at first; the interrogations began to resemble anthropological discussions. Chhith asked my father to write down everything he had learned from the phnong, and in return he became his protector in Tuol Sleng. Of course, Chhith's motives were not what you would call pure. The mandalas spoke to him, through my father, and he believed he could somehow control and use them for his own ends. The three of us understand that the mandalas wish to be spread—but Chhith worked to keep them to himself. A very selfish man, and doomed because of that. He misunderstood them completely; he wished to take their domain for his own.

  "After my father's death, there were a series of murders in Phnom Penh, which was already a skeleton city, a fraction of its original populace working for the Khmer Rouge under rigid strictures, while the rest were out dying in the countryside. At each of the murder sites, one of the mandalas appeared crudely painted in the victim's blood. Chhith was sacrificing to them, you see? As if they needed his help in that respect! The killing fields were feeding them plenty. And they must have been fat already after the war in Vietnam, the carpet bombing of Cambodia, the Maoist revolution, the Korean war ... well, we could go back and back. The twentieth century has been a time of unparalleled feasting, has it not?"

  But Derek was thinking of Huon's story, his concern for his constituents—among them, no doubt, many refugees from the Phnom Penh of those days. "So there are other Cambodians who know about the mandalas? Others who would recognize them in my book or the posters for your club?"

  Etienne looked puzzled. "Very few, perhaps. I do not think many. The people in Phnom Penh were kept like prisoners; they wouldn't have come in contact with Chhith or his sacrifices. And the people of the mandala, the tribe that had kept their secrets for ages, they were wiped out by the same Khmer Rouge who captured my father. It was that act, in fact, which truly set them free."

  "How do you mean?"

  Etienne looked down at the notebook he held. "It is hard to be sure exactly—what I have here are fragments of the whole confession. We wanted to be sure of getting the images, that was the main thing. I've pieced together the story from the writing that surrounds my father's drawings—these pieces here and here. I believe he was initiated into the mysteries of the mandalas gradually, over the years he dwelt with the phnong. Now in the tribe were thirty-seven initiates, each devoted to one particular mandala; when one initiate died, a new one must take his place. My father was honored to receive one initiation, and with it one sak—the mark of his own guardian mandala. It was not created with needles and pigments, like other tattoos; it appeared spontaneously at the climax of the ceremony, along with a rush of clairvoyant visions. I suppose you must have had a taste of those yourself, eh?"

  Derek chewed the inside of his cheek, still determined to give away nothing until he knew exactly where he stood. He pointed at Nina's mandala tattoo. "I suppose that was spontaneous too."

  She looked crestfallen, shaking her head. "This is only mimicry, I'm afraid. I have not yet felt their touch, like Etienne."

  "You?"

  Etienne grinned slowly and pulled down the collar of his black T-shirt. In the center of his nearly hairless chest, small and sharp as an engraving, was one of the intricate mandala patterns, a sun disk of radiating lines tipped in barbed hooks.

  "Were you drunk when you got that?" Derek asked, figuring that his best bet now was to break the mood of rampant occult insanity.

  "Drunk? No. A more lasting and enlightening intoxication nourishes me," Etienne said. "You must have your own sak, Mr. Crowe."

  "I'm not about to bare my ass in public."

  The couple laughed. At least they had a sense of humor.

  "Well," Etienne said, "my father did have them on his ass. And everywhere else. The night the phnong were massacred, while he lay in captivity, the thirty-seven came to him—through him. He had visions then—visions such as we can never conceive. Imagine your own experience, multiplied by thirty-seven. All of them coming through you, into you, at once. It must have been magnificent! He was the last initiate. He had to become their vehicle, their vessel. They did not perhaps trust him to keep his sanity for long, and so they made sure to impress themselves on my father in a way that was ... indelible. What a sight he must have been!"

  "You never saw him yourself?" Derek asked cautiously.

  "I was only a boy, and in France at the time. It was not until later that I tried to trace him. I was denied access to the records of Tuol Sleng, since he was considered an active member of the Khmer Rouge, not one of its innocent victims. Then one day a man found me, a Khmer himself; he told me some of my father's story, though not all, and questioned me closely. He was looking for my father's skin, and thought it might have come to me after the fall of the Phnom Penh."

  Derek strove to sound shocked and surprised. "His ... skin?"

  "Yes. You see, in the end, Chhith had my father flayed. It was the only way to be sure of preserving the mandalas intact, I suppose. Then when the Vietnamese took Phnom Penh, Chhith escaped but lost the skin. This man said he had been imprisoned beside my father in Tuol Sleng and had befriended him there."

  Etienne began to chuckle, looking over at Nina, who was laughing too. But Derek did not consider at first why they were laughing so hard. He was thinking: My God! It must be Huon!

  "Excuse me, but that was the final irony," Etienne said. "This man who said he was a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, himself a victim of torture, I felt very bad for him. I thought he must have suffered as my father suffered. And I still thank him, you know, for setting me on the path that led me to the mandalas. He showed me a few of the designs—I first had them through him. It is all very funny, really."

  "I don't follow you."

  Etienne put his thumb down on a line of Khmer script. "Here, my father is writing directly to Chhith, thanking him for his interest and protection, sympathizing with his own losses in the service of the Khmer Rouge, ingratiating himself. It is my father's brief and touching homage to the man who was about to murder and skin him. But when I finally read this passage, I recognized him."

  "Recognized who?"

  "My father's so-called friend, the one who sought me out. He was terribly scarred, you see, and missing one ear."

  Yes, Huon!

  "And here," Etienne said, emphasizing lines that Derek could not read, "my father calls Chhith, fondly, 'my one-eared fellow sufferer.' "

  Etienne and Nina convul
sed into laughter again. It did not sound ironic in the least—it was good-natured, almost whimsical. But Derek could take no part in it. He felt as if the room were sliding away from him; as if some livid wheel were even now appearing in the center of his chest, flooding him with awful insight. Huon was Chhith, the concentration camp interrogator, the torturer and sacrificial murderer. He was still on the trail of the mandala skin, and it had brought him to Derek. He had narrowly deflected the monster ... but for how long?

  "You do not look amused, Mr. Crowe," said Etienne.

  "I—I know this man," Derek blurted, because now there could be no joking, nor could he keep this a secret. He must warn them. He swallowed nervously, as if ashamed before Etienne's look of astonishment, and went on. "He came to me the other night. I think now he was looking for your father's skin. He thought I had it, but I didn't know what he was talking about. I pointed him in your direction. I even gave him your number."

  "No!" The couple looked at each other again, and Derek expected horror and dismay; but instead the news sent them once again into hysterics, whooping with laughter.

  "Chhith is here!" Etienne cried in jubilation.

  "He called himself Huon," Derek said.

  "Yes, Huon! The name he used when he said he was my father's friend."

  Nina said, "I told you! I've been getting strange calls, someone hanging up when I answer. He must be waiting to hear your voice."

  "I don't believe it! Well, it is all coming together." Etienne looked almost smug. He sat back in the booth, arms crossed, beaming.

  "You're not... nervous?" Derek asked.

  "Goodness, no."

  "I mean, if this is the man you think ... he tortured and murdered your father, and how many others besides?"

  Etienne made a dismissive gesture. "I am ready for him this time. He doesn't know what we know about him. And he still persists, apparently, in wanting the mandalas to himself. He is pathetic, really."