Phnom Penh Express

by Johan Smits

  One of the three men standing around him takes the headphones off Dieter’s head, but the screeching noise continues unabated inside his mind. The doctor injects more fluid into Dieter’s arm, and several seconds later the pain in his muscles subsides enough to prevent him from passing out. The moment the rubber ball is pulled out of his mouth, his fast, heavy breathing fills the room. The doctor watches intently, calmly smoking one of Dieter’s Lucky Strikes. The same man who pulled the headphones off his head now bends forward and puts his mouth next to Dieter’s ear, almost touching it. This man is in his late twenties at most, but clearly the one in charge. He speaks softly, almost whispers, like a loving parent saying goodnight to his child.

  “We can do this all over again. Take all night, maybe two. We’re paid by the hour.”

  Dieter produces a pathetic, unintelligible sound and stares wide-eyed at the ceiling. His brain is frantically trying to process the onslaught of information mixed with surging emotions and the threat of more pain to come. For the moment, he’s mostly focused on the pain aspect. The young man still has his mouth pressed to Dieter’s ear. He speaks in a monotone voice, quite used to if not a little bored by the macabre spectacle.

  “You will tell us everything about Cambodia. If any of the details don’t add up, you will leave this world in a way you’d never imagined possible.”

  The man pauses and gently strokes Dieter’s face. He wants to ensure his victim clearly understands.

  He continues.

  “This was just a little sample.” For an instant a brief smile flickers on the man’s face, then quickly fades.

  “In return for your kind cooperation we will assist you out of your miserable existence quickly and more humanely — the choice is yours.”

  Dieter is breathing fast, like a rabbit in its death throes. Once the word ‘Mossad’ pops into his brain. But he quickly stops trying to think, he just wants this to be over. He has never experienced such agony and is surprised his body has been able to take it so far. He’s definitely too young to die, but right now he’d give just about anything to not have to go through that hell again — including his life.

  The man is now standing upright. He looks relaxed, hands casually tucked inside his pockets as he smiles down at his handcuffed victim. It’s the ominous smile of a sadist. Dieter stares back with big, quivering eyes and moves his head. It’s more of a jerky spasm than the intended nod.

  “Congratulations, my South African friend,” says the man quietly. “Wise choice... I guess,” he adds with a hint of disappointment in his voice. He turns his head and looks at the doctor.

  “Inject the pain killer.”

  The man glances over his shoulder at a young, oriental woman lingering at the far end of the room from where she has been quietly observing Dieter’s ordeal. At her nod, the three men leave, closing the door behind them. The young woman walks over to Dieter and positions herself in front of him.

  When his tear-blurred vision finally manages to focus properly on the woman, Dieter’s face flashes with surprise and then anger. Black Lotus! Her iconic nickname races through his conscious while the young woman remains emotionless. The distinctive birthmark on her right cheek is shaped like the petals of a lotus flower. It grants her the illusion of innocence while her brown, Asian eyes belie her icy gaze. She starts talking to Dieter in a businesslike fashion.

  “It’s all over for you now. You know the deal. You talk, I listen.”

  It doesn’t take him long to contemplate his options. He hasn’t got any. Once again, Dieter moves his head.

  Several hours later, in the darkness of the late evening, his body would wash ashore on one of Tel Aviv’s beaches.

  Chapter THREE

  LIKE MANY OF the other establishments that line Phnom Penh’s Street 240, a Belgian bakery and café, The House, is busy. Its tables are swollen with people casually chatting while they eat. Young Cambodian staff run around clearing tables and taking orders.

  Two doors down is another elegant French colonial building. It’s an offshoot of the bakery’s business and will soon become Cambodia’s first chocolate factory. Belgian owner Nina has already named this new extension to her business ‘The Chocolate House’. It made perfect sense to her — how could it be anything else?

  She loves the new building that she recently acquired and renovated. None of the original floor tiles are missing and with their subtle colour scheme they form one of the most intricate mosaic patterns she’s ever seen. But it’s not only the undoubted aesthetic quality that makes her so fond of this place. It’s mostly because this is where all her chocolate is being produced.

  Her family has been in the bakery business for five generations, and Nina knows her chocolate. She also knows that Phirun, her new chocolatier, has started creating his own strain of pralines and truffles, to hand out at the opening. Each time she enters the place, she is welcomed by a divine aroma. Nina sometimes daydreams that she’s walking inside a giant brownie. She can’t get enough of this place or its smell.

  Standing in front of a wooden double door she rummages through her pockets for the key. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, her salivary glands are already anticipating a delectable nibble on one of Phirun’s latest creations. Nina realises how lucky she is to have found him — he’s got an unnatural talent. When she opens the door she hears the electric whirring of the two chocolate-melting machines pumping their waterfall of liquid cacao into the stainless steel bowls. Bowls of heaven, Nina calls them. She enters, closing the door behind her.

  Strange, she thinks. The windows’ shutters are closed — she thought that Phirun was going to be busy producing today. Indeed, the machines are running, although the interior darkness hints at something amiss. Where are the light switches again?

  Nina takes a few steps and startles at the crunch of broken glass beneath her feet. She eventually finds the light switch, flicks it on and looks around. Nothing unusual — until she spots Phirun’s body slumped motionless on the floor.

  “Phirun,” she gasps, “are you all right?” She hurries over to him and kneels.

  “Oh...” is the only response she gets.

  Looking more closely, she notices how his face and hair are coated with an uneven mix of white flour and dark chocolate. Then she notices the broken Calvados bottle. Is he drunk?

  “Phirun, are you okay?” she tries again.

  “We are all chocolate,” he manages this time, gazing blankly at some dried-up chocolate stuck to his finger.

  “What?”

  She helps her young master chef to his feet. Apart from his dazed look he seems okay. Then suddenly he giggles.

  “Phirun, are you drunk?”

  Another giggle.

  “You’re drunk, aren’t you?”

  More giggling.

  She leads him to a chair then scans around the room, seeking some clue as to what’s been going on. She opens one of the big fridges. It’s packed with plastic tubs of various chocolate products. Nothing unusual. She closes the fridge when the waft of a vaguely familiar aroma catches her nose.

  What is it? she thinks. She knows that smell. It’s what often emanates from her husband’s study when he’s claiming he’s got extra work to do. The moment she realises what it is, her eyes fall upon the culprit: a little plastic baggie of a greenish substance.

  Of course! Why didn’t she think of it sooner? Phirun must have been ‘experimenting’ by bunging dope into the chocolate mix. He’s stoned out of his mind.

  Although she allows herself a brief smirk, Nina can’t help feeling concerned that her newborn venture might be mutating into the kind of wacked-out student farce that ought to be set in Amsterdam.

  Adopting a sharper tone, she addresses her chef.

  “Phirun!”

  But the chocolate wizard is now wobbling in his chair, his arms spread skywards. The happy part has definitely kicked in, Nina thinks.

  “So we’re all laughs now?”

  “We’re all one!” Phirun shouts
in reply, kicking his legs out.

  “Where have you stashed these happy chocolates?”

  The giggling man lowers his arms and looks groggily at his employer.

  “I like you,” he decides.

  “Thank you Phirun, I like you too, but where are they?”

  All she gets in response is nervous laughter.

  ***

  The House is quiet when Phirun enters — the café is about to close. Two staff sweep and mop the floor and a couple of regulars loiter at a table in the corner, delaying going home. A jazzy tune plays softly in the background. Phirun walks straight up to his boss who’s sitting at the back drinking this evening’s last cup of coffee.

  “Nina, I’m sorry...” he starts but is helpless to hide the grin spreading irresistibly across his chop. The happy chocolate effect is evidently one that lingers.

  Before Phirun gets the chance to dig his hole even further, Nina interjects, gesturing for him to sit down.

  “Let’s not make a big issue out of this,” she begins. “I just want you to understand something clearly. You can do whatever you like at home, but at the chocolate shop you make chocolates, nothing more.”

  “That’s what I was doing,” he tries to joke but stops when he notices Nina’s dark mood.

  “You look worried, boss,” he half teases. “What’s up?”

  “I usually hate listening to people complain,” she sighs, “but since you asked. Quick coffee?”

  Nina starts to explain her mounting pile of problems. It all started with the locals who live in the ‘little village’ behind her new building. The ‘little village’ is actually a large backyard cramped with small wooden houses that are, in turn, cramped with large families. The people living there almost started a small revolution over Nina’s new air conditioning system. The industrial unit had been attached to a wall inside the alleyway leading to their backyard. It would have to be removed, they had decided. And removed within twenty-four hours or the chocolate shop might be tested for its fire safety credentials, was their neighbourly missive. Arson has always been a powerful argument for Nina, who quickly obliged.

  Then an entrepreneurial servant from the Ministry of Commerce had contacted Nina to let her know that, in retrospect, the cost of her business licence had mysteriously risen three hundred per cent, and she was kindly requested to settle her bill as soon as it was convenient. It would pain his heart to see her shop’s licence revoked, he assured her.

  The trouble didn’t stop there. The very same day, another dutiful public servant, this time hailing from the Ministry of Labour, had contacted her to “discuss your staff’s work permits”.

  “What’s wrong with them?” Nina had asked.

  “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll find something,” had been the bureaucrat’s answer to an unnecessary question. She was to present herself, with the cash, at his office the following morning at 10:30 AM.

  Then, as if by black magic, the construction company’s manager informed her matter-of-factly that the cost of building materials had increased, and that the price estimate for the final part of the job would have to shift upwards accordingly.

  “What? Again?” had been her naive reaction. “Why?”

  The construction boss had feigned surprise.

  “Because of the war in Iran, of course,” he’d said — and didn’t she know that the price of fuel had gone up too?

  “Iraq.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Iraq. Not Iran. There’s no war in Iran. Not yet.”

  “Yeah, whatever. Fuel’s still gone up.”

  Nina sips her coffee and looks at Phirun, desperation etched across her face.

  “If things go on like this, I’ll be finished before I’ve even started.”

  “Maybe those bureaucrats don’t take you seriously because you’re a barang,” he replies thoughtfully, using the Khmer word for foreigner. “Shall I go talk to them?”

  Phirun isn’t particularly keen to deal with any bureaucratic types, but after the happy chocolate incident he feels he owes Nina a favour.

  “Be my guest, Rambo, but I refuse to pay bribes. They can have some of the luxury chocolate gift boxes as a deal sweetener, but no money. Once you start paying out, there’s no end. Cambodia has to grow up.”

  “Bribery happens in every country,” Phirun protests quietly.

  “Not to this extent. It will kill my business.”

  “Have those gift boxes arrived yet?” Phirun changes the subject, aware that bribery is a touchy subject for Nina. He never quite understood why barangs have such a problem with a bit of under-the-table bargaining, as long as it’s reasonable. In Belgium, his adoptive country of the past eighteen years, the dodgy deals were far less overt but not necessarily less common. Certainly not among the higher-ranking authorities. But even among ordinary families, tax evasion had become a national sport to the extent that honestly declaring your income is almost regarded as unpatriotic — it’s upsetting to regular Belgians.

  “Oh, Jesus! Speaking of those boxes...” Nina suddenly remembers, “the supplier in Antwerp even messed those up, too. They’ve not only sent me the wrong design but they’ve actually filled them with their own chocolates. They can’t even get a simple order right. I ask for packaging, they send me their stock of Mother’s Day presents!”

  “You’re kidding! Did they think we can’t make our own?”

  Nina shrugs. She’s by now so tired she can hardly bring herself to care any more.

  “But we can still use them, right?” Phirun asks. “I mean, do they look expensive?”

  “They’re okay... for our purposes, anyway. I guess we can use them. It won’t make much difference,” she answers, defeated.

  “Perhaps if we replace them with some happy chocolates?” he winks.

  “Phirun, that’s not funny.”

  “Sorry, sorry. Anyway, let me give it a try. How many of them did we receive?”

  “Not sure,” Nina sighs, disheartened. “Thirty or forty I believe.”

  “Then I’ll take some of them home now and tomorrow morning I’ll give each of those officials a fancy looking gift box, you know, the Asian way. It will make them feel sophisticated and exclusive — let them gain face with their colleagues, their wives, mistresses, whoever.”

  But deep down Phirun knows that chocolates unaccompanied by money will never turn a corrupt bureaucrat into a shining beacon of responsible governance. He might as well try to teach a dead squid to whistle through its nose.

  Chapter FOUR

  THE WOMAN TALKING into the cellphone is not pleased.

  “I am not pleased.”

  “Of course not, I know, but what can I say?”

  She talks slow and clear.

  “You could tell me something about Dieter Driekamp. That’s your job, to find things out.”

  Despite her self-control, her voice is laced with deadly menace. This does not escape the man’s attention at the other end of the line. It’s beginning to make him nervous.

  “He’s disappeared, Miss Tzahala. It’s as if he vanished from the earth. My contacts at customs were very sure: he didn’t leave the country; he must still be here in Israel. Somewhere...”

  “Then find him,” she suddenly bursts, yelling. “His test shipment never arrived!”

  Around the same time that Phirun and Nina are having their conversation in The House, less than a mile away the woman on the phone frantically paces her large, air-conditioned Phnom Penh villa. It’s mostly hidden behind a large wall spiked with barbed wire, tucked away in the residential Boeung Keng Kang quarter.

  “I’ve put all my men on it, Miss Tzahala, but Driekamp must have gone underground. Not a trace. He didn’t check out of the hotel, his stuff is still in there, even his passport. It’s almost as if he wants to make a point.”

  The man hesitates.

  “I promise you: we do all that we can. We have to keep looking.”

  “Harah!” the woman curses in Hebrew. She’s on the verge of l
osing control. The mutual silence on the line weighs heavy; the man doesn’t dare utter a word. Finally, she speaks.

  “Could it have been his supplier?”

  “Most unlikely. Why would they screw their own agent? That would go against their long-term interests. No, I only see one explanation —”

  But the woman cuts him off.

  “I’m supposed to meet our new partners tomorrow here in Phnom Penh, with the shipment,” she says. “I’ll have to be very creative as to why we have failed to deliver the diamonds — you realise that?”

  “Yes.”

  Her voice hardens.

  “I want to be one hundred per cent certain that Driekamp has vanished with the shipment, if that’s what you are saying. Because if we screw up again, our Cambodian friends won’t stay friendly much longer. I’ll be finished and — let’s be clear — I won’t go down alone. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  While she’s talking she stares at a dead lizard squashed between the door and its frame. Its shrivelled little body sticks to the inside of the door.

  “Yes I understand,” the man answers quickly.

  “I thought so,” she snaps. “Find him!”

  Tzahala presses so hard on the disconnect button she almost breaks her ultrathin mobile. Frustrated, she throws it onto the bed and picks up a packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes, left over from her last trip to Tel Aviv. Sunk deep in thought, she shakes one out of the pack and lights it.

  What the hell happened? Driekamp wouldn’t be so stupid to set us up with only one test-shipment of diamonds, she thinks. That just wouldn’t make any sense. If he wanted to screw us, he’d have done it properly, not with just the one shipment.

  Angrily, Tzahala stubs out her unfinished cigarette and pours herself a whisky. Tiredness is suddenly overwhelming her. She switches on the TV and stretches herself out on the bed. She skips quickly past numerous Khmer karaoke channels until she arrives at CNN. A U.S. military commander is explaining how a troop reduction right now would send the wrong message to the insurgents.