by Andy Maslen
Gabriel raised the cold glass to his lips and inhaled through his nose before taking a sip. Aromas of flint and peach. The wine was good, chilled perfectly. He took a decent mouthful and rolled it round his mouth before swallowing. The olives were salty and stuffed with garlic. He crunched one after another until they were gone.
Time to see who’s here, Wolfe.
32
Magician's Rabbit
THE only Cambodians in the bar were staff. The clientele were drawn from all over the world. Gabriel heard a Babel of languages spoken at the different tables. Mandarin here, Spanish there, Russian in the corner, French by the tall windows overlooking the garden. Gabriel was looking for one group in particular. Not by name, or even composition. He was looking for that loose accumulation of people who gather in hotel bars to drink, smoke, if they’re permitted, gossip with each other, and complain about the weather. Expats. British expats to be specific. He cast his eyes around the different groups sitting at low tables and knocking back large whiskies, gin and tonics or beers.
There they are, he thought. Lounging around three tables that had clearly been pushed together from other parts of the bar were a dozen or so men and women, all speaking English. Some were tanned almost to the same colour as the Cambodian waitresses. Others wore the boiled-lobster look of the recently arrived, too desperate for sun to heed the warnings about burning posted in every hotel and pool. Still others were as pale as if they had just emerged from the escalators at Oxford Circus underground station. The laughter was loud, and only grew louder if one of the participants happened to catch a disapproving glance from a Finn, a Japanese or a German. Talk of rugby matches, “Johnno should have nailed that kick,” and British politics, “I tell you, he’s worse than useless, bloody automaton,” floated across the room like cigarette smoke. Gabriel picked up his glass and strolled through the bar towards them.
He arrived at the shoulder of a dark-haired woman in a white shirt and jeans who was waving her cut-glass tumbler around as she concluded a filthy joke involving horses and debutantes.
“Look out, Judith,” one of the men called out over the raucous laughter, “don’t spill your Grouse over our guest.”
She turned round, smiling. A tanned, round-cheeked face with large hazel eyes fanned with white creases at the corners. Gabriel smiled and spoke.
“I’m sorry to intrude, but I heard your voices. I’m new in town. Name’s Gabriel. Wolfe.”
She stood immediately and stuck out her hand. She wore silver rings on every finger. He saw a skull, a hibiscus flower, a large, round, blue stone. They shook hands.
“Judith Perry. Pull up a chair.”
With the seating reorganised amid much laughter and chair-scraping, Gabriel found himself ensconced in the midst of a typical expat gathering. All happily drunk to varying degrees and more than willing to welcome a stranger on the basis of a shared passport and very little else.
“So Gabriel, what brings you to Cambodia? Not on one of those bloody awful yoga retreats, are you? Can’t bear all those tossers wandering around in baggy trousers chanting om all the bloody time.”
The speaker was a forty-ish man with a florid complexion, blond hair swept back from a high forehead and pale-grey eyes that weren’t completely focused on Gabriel as he spoke.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Rich, shut up about the fucking yoga bunnies. Just because you can only touch your toes with a golf club,” another man said, prodding the man’s belly with a finger.
“No,” Gabriel said. “No yoga.”
“What then?” the man called Rich continued. “You don’t look like a backpacker—”
“Thank Christ!” someone shouted.
“—so it’s business?”
“Sort of. I’m looking for someone.”
“You’re not a cop, are you?” Judith asked, laying a hand on Gabriel’s left thigh. “Out here to arrest those bloody men. I hope you are.”
This remark drew a chorus of approving murmurs from the other drinkers. Gabriel noticed one man watching his reaction closely. About his own age, maybe a little younger. Tall, athletic build, short hair. Scar bisecting his right eyebrow.
“No, not a cop. What bloody men?”
“Oh, come on, don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. Paedophiles, darling. They’re everywhere. Germans, mostly, but Russians, too, Scandinavians, Dutch, and of course our own dear countrymen.”
A few of the others nodded, including the man with the scar.
“I had noticed. But as I said, I’m not police. Just trying to trace someone who knew a friend of mine.”
“Knew?” Judith said. “A dead friend?”
Behind the flirty body language and the large tumbler of whisky she managed to project an aura of boozy vagueness, but he sensed now something behind the show. An astuteness he’d sometimes seen in military police officers, detectives and the better type of military commander.
“Sadly, yes. He was an American.” Gabriel noticed that the hubbub of the group’s several overlapping conversations had subsided. All eyes were on him.
The watchful young man with the scar spoke.
“You a soldier?”
Gabriel shook his head.
“But you were, right?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Maybe not to these drunken layabouts with their soft hands, but I can tell. Davey Flynn. Eight years Royal Marine Commandos. He stuck out his hand and Gabriel felt the strength in the man’s grip.
“Paras.” No need to mention The Regiment, he thought. Maybe in a one-to-one conversation he’d open up a bit more, but there was no need in a group of strangers.
“Nice,” was all Davey said in return.
“Was your friend in the Army, too, Gabriel?” Judith asked, turning in her chair to face him directly.
“He was. US Marines.”
Gabriel sketched in a few details. Just enough to explain his presence in Phnom Penh.
“And you’re looking for someone he was working with in PP?” she asked.
“A charity director. A man called Visna Chey. I tried looking him up on the web, but there’s nothing.”
The mention of Chey’s name drew nothing but puzzled looks from the expats. Gabriel realised he’d been hoping that one would immediately dig out a phone and produce Chey’s contact details like a magician’s rabbit.
Judith’s mouth turned down for a moment, and her brow furrowed. Then her expression changed again. She smiled widely, revealing large, horsey teeth and called across the heads of a neighbouring table.
“Lina! Over here, darling!”
She waved a ringed hand for good measure, then turned to Gabriel.
“Make some space. I think we’ve just solved your problem.”
Gabriel shuffled his chair to the side, then stood to fetch another.
On his return, he found himself face-to-face with a Cambodian woman. The only Cambodian in the bar not wearing the hotel’s sea-green, grey and white uniform.
“Chanlina Ly, Gabriel Wolfe,” Judith said, standing between them as if she were the hostess at an embassy cocktail party. “Chanlina’s a journalist. Gabriel’s a—” She paused. “Actually, what are you, Gabriel? I don’t think you said.”
Gabriel smiled as he shook the woman’s hand, marvelling at how such a slender person could exert such a powerful grip. Yes. Good question. What am I? Really? A government assassin? A playboy of independent means? An avenging angel? A righter of wrongs? A death sentence for people who get too close? “I’m between jobs at the moment. A consultant. How do you do?” he said, falling back on the simple behavioural protocols drilled into him by his diplomat father over years of endless receptions in Hong Kong.
“How do you do?” she repeated, using the formal code he’d thought had all but disappeared. Nowadays when you asked someone how they were it opened a floodgate of detailed information about health, state of mind and, distressingly often, diet and lifestyle choices. “Please, call me Lina. You’re English?”
>
“Living in Hong Kong at the moment, but yes.”
“Well, now that you two have been formally introduced, what are you drinking, Lina?” Judith asked, her manner half-hostess, half head girl.
“What is that in your glass, Gabriel?” Lina asked.
“Sancerre. It’s very good.”
“Then that’s what I’ll have.”
Judith signalled a waitress.
The conversation around them had fractured again. Rugby, politics, what to do about sex tourists: the topics were engaging enough for the other members of the group to lose interest in Gabriel, at least for now.
“Gabriel’s here looking for someone, Lina,” Judith said, placing her hand back on Gabriel’s thigh and patting it as if it were a dog. “A charity director. Does the name Visna Chey ring any bells? He’s not on the web”
Gabriel watched as Lina took a sip of the wine. She had eyes of a golden honey colour, set in a broad-cheeked face. Her skin was smooth, and estimating her age was a matter of guesswork. Pushed, Gabriel would have said thirty, though he knew it could just as easily have been forty. Her dark hair was long, but tied back with a leather thong. White Levi’s shirt tucked into jeans. Then she smiled broadly.
“You westerners and the web. You know, there are other ways to find things out.”
“I hope you can enlighten me,” Gabriel said.
She took another sip of the Sancerre.
“That is really very good. I normally drink beer – Angkor – but maybe I will switch from now on. So, yes, you are in luck. I know Visna. Well, I know of him. Do you have a card?”
Gabriel fished a business card from his wallet and handed it over in exchange for the one Lina was holding out to him.
She held it up and read aloud.
“Gabriel Wolfe. Security Consultant. Wolfe & Cunningham.” Her expression clouded over.
“What’s the matter?” Gabriel asked.
“In my country, the word security carries many meanings, not all of them pleasant. Are you advising our government?”
“No! Absolutely not. Look,” he said, glancing around at Judith and the others who had drifted away into their own conversations again. “Could we talk somewhere else? Somewhere quieter? I can explain.”
33
An Education
AFTER thanking Judith and the others for their hospitality and promising to return the following evening, Gabriel followed Lina out of the hotel.
“Are you hungry?” she asked him.
“Actually, yes. I am. Starving, in fact.”
“Have you tried Cambodian food yet?”
“No, but I’d love to. Where do they serve the best?”
She grinned.
“I’ll take you to my favourite restaurant.”
Lina’s favourite restaurant was a few blocks away, and they walked through the dusk, dodging through the swarms of Honda 50s that buzzed everywhere like beetles, overloaded with huge baskets of plastic tubs, auto parts, planks of wood or just entire families, six or seven to a moped, smiling children and chubby babies held on their mother’s or older siblings’ laps. The brownish dust Gabriel had noticed earlier still coloured the air, which was laden with the fetid smell of dung, not all of it animal. To protect themselves against breathing it in, most people wore black bandannas over their faces. The sign above the door was in Khmer and English, in overlapping scripts of red and green neon.
រះបរមរាជវាំង/The Royal Palace
Gabriel stood to one side at the door, which was screened with fine gold chains, and let Lina precede him into the restaurant’s air-conditioned interior. At once, an older man, in his seventies perhaps, and dressed immaculately in a black silk suit cut in the western style, bustled over to Lina. He offered her a sampeah, placing his hands together just under his chin as if in prayer. Then he bent at the waist, drew her hand into his own and kissed the back before releasing it.
He glanced at Gabriel and spoke, in English.
“Chanlina Ly, welcome. So happy to see you again. And you have brought a friend.”
“Mister Vhet, this is Gabriel Wolfe. He said he wanted to eat the best Cambodian food in the city. Where else could I bring him?”
Beaming under the flattery, Mister Vhet ushered Gabriel and Lina to a corner table and settled crisp white linen napkins on their laps.
“Would you like drinks, please?” he asked.
Gabriel looked at Lina.
“More white wine suit you?” he asked.
She nodded.
“A bottle of house white, please.”
“You need menus?”
She shook her head, smiling again.
“You choose for us.”
Clearly this was a game the two enjoyed. Mister Vhet beamed widely before disappearing and issuing a short series of instructions to a cook in whites and traditional toque through a hatch at the rear of the room.
A waitress, resplendent in cerise blouse and long yellow skirt threaded with gold arrived with an opened bottle of wine, two glasses and a small white dish of grilled prawns with green onion. She poured them both a generous helping of the wine.
“Enjoy!” she said, then slipped away to fetch another table their bill.
They clinked glasses.
The wine was cold, and beneath the chill Gabriel could taste a floral sweetness.
“Lychee?” he asked.
Lina nodded.
“Cambodia took the French winemaking traditions and adopted them. Then we adapted them. You like it?”
He grinned.
“It’s not Sancerre, but it’s good.” He took a swig then placed his glass beside his plate. “You mentioned security as if it were a dirty word. I work – have worked – for the British government. But never in Cambodia. Not even when I was in uniform. I’m here strictly on personal business.”
Lina looked at him steadily for a few seconds, pursing her lips. She appeared to be making a decision of some kind. Then her face relaxed. Gabriel imagined she’d reached a conclusion. Her words surprised him.
“You know about the Cambodian genocide?”
“Not really. I’ve heard of it, of course. It was 1975, wasn’t it? I was born five years later.”
“It was my misfortune to have been born five years earlier. My father was a journalist and my mother was a doctor. They had three other children. Two girls, one boy. The youngest, Hol, was six months old; the oldest, Tan, was thirteen. Until the Khmer Rouge arrived in Phnom Penh, my life was perfect. We children went to school, played, scampered after each other in the streets like strays, a whole neighbourhood of children to play with. Then one day, everything changed. April 17, 1975. The Khmer Rouge soldiers arrived and told us all to leave the city. Everyone. Families, old people, babies, the infirm and disabled. They said it would be just for a few days, as a precaution. Then the detentions began. Then the killings.
“My family was rounded up and marched towards a death camp in the country. We were fifteen, in all, counting my grandparents, auntie, uncle and cousins. They marched us at gunpoint through villages. If anyone stumbled they beat them with their rifle butts. In the last village before the camp, my mother told me she had treated the headman’s daughter a few years before. In Cambodian culture that placed a debt on him. He came out of his big house, and when the Khmer Rouge were round the corner, he took my hand and led me away, back into his house. He could not risk taking any more of my brothers and sisters. They smeared me with mud and messed up my hair, took off my city clothes and dressed me in cut-down adult clothes. ‘Now you are a peasant,’ he said. ‘We will keep you safe. You do not talk; your voice is too educated.’ And so that is how I was saved. I found out afterwards that the Khmer Rouge killed everyone in my family. They kept very detailed records. Like the Nazis, you know?”
Gabriel nodded, wondering as he listened to this story of almost unimaginable horror, how Lina had remained dry-eyed throughout.
“What happened to you?” he asked.
�
�In the end, the Vietnamese came and kicked the KR out of Phnom Penh. They defeated them in the war that followed. I was eight by then. I lived with the headman. When I was eighteen, I went back to Phnom Penh and completed my education. The UN were there by then, and many international charities. I could read and write English a little, thanks to my parents. I went to the UK for three years. I studied journalism at the London College of Printing. Then I returned. Now I write for the Cambodian-language papers and the English ones too, Cambodia Daily and the Phnom Penh Post. Everything is tightly monitored by the government. Many ex-KR officers managed to hide and then worm their way back into positions of power. So I also blog under an alias, PhnomPenny. That’s where I can post the articles my editors are too scared to run.”
As she finished speaking, a waitress arrived with a tray covered in small, lidded dishes. She arranged them so that they covered the table top, smiled and departed.
“Take some rice, then pick and choose,” Lina said. “It’s all delicious.”
Gabriel helped himself to rice and a spoonful of stir-fried pork and vegetables, fragrant with lemongrass and coriander.
“Mmm,” he mumbled through a mouthful. “Lovely.”
The spicing was piquant rather than fierce, and reminded Gabriel of the Chinese food the cook had prepared at the embassy where he’d spent his early years. They ate steadily for a while and Gabriel explained what he’d learned so far about Vinnie’s work, both in Cambodia and for Orton Biotech.
Lina took a sip of the white wine, which the waitress had placed inside a terracotta cooler that sweated beads of condensation on its lower half.
“You understand now why your card, the word security, made me stop?” she asked.
“It ought to mean safety. But I’ve met plenty of people who use it to mean something different. Especially if they call themselves internal security. The Balkans, some African countries, Latin America. They can be torturers, killers, the worst. Maybe they started out thinking they were doing good, but too many of them forget their humanity.”