Phnom Penh Express

by Johan Smits

  To his shame, Phirun notices the girl has given up on animating action man. He clenches his teeth — if only his splitting headache would disappear.

  “Are you always this quiet, or what?” she asks, playfully pinching one of his nipples. “Yesterday you weren’t so quiet, were you?”

  “Well, yeah... listen, er...”

  “Merrilee.”

  “Right. Merrilee. I’m sorry, I...”

  “What for?”

  “Well, er..., I don’t exactly recall in detail what happened yesterday. Maybe too much to drink...”

  “You don’t remember the foursome we did yesterday?”

  “The four... What?”

  “Yeah, those two other guys, you and me.”

  “What?”

  “Just kidding.”

  Phirun has never ended up in bed with such a gorgeous looking girl. But now that the long awaited miracle finally happens, he can’t remember anything of it. What an idiot he is, he thinks, he could kill himself for it.

  “I’m really sorry. This normally never happens to me, it’s...”

  “Spare your breath, mate,” she interrupts. “I had a fab time yesterday — you too, you will be pleased to hear, in case you don’t remember — but there’s nothing more to it. You were very sweet and it was all good fun last night.”

  She pauses for a second, then adds:

  “And I still have a couple of hours to spare for breakfast if you fancy one, but then I’ll have to go — no hard feelings, yah?”

  “Okay,” Phirun replies, “so you’re not upset or anything?” he asks, trying to hide his disappointment.

  “Of course not,” she laughs at him. She kisses him quickly on his mouth and throws the sheets aside, exposing the rest of her perfectly curved, naked body. Then she energetically jumps out of bed.

  “C’mon, time for breakie, I’m starving!”

  ***

  Two Paracetamols, one long breakfast and three hours later, Phirun is standing in Street 240 in front of Nina’s bakery and café. He’s still thinking of Merrilee — what a stunning, divine creature she is. God does exist, it’s official.

  After breakfast in The House he asked her if he could get her telephone number.

  “What for?” she said.

  “To call you,” he replied, simple logic being one of his few remaining reflexes.

  She took his hand, smiled and gently but clearly explained that she wasn’t interested in pursuing a relationship.

  “Me neither,” Phirun lied, “but just, you know, I’d like to invite you to, er... the opening party of a chocolate shop soon. That’s where I’m working, making chocolates.”

  It was the best excuse he could come up with, and it had worked, strangely enough. Although she had quite reluctantly passed him her number and made him promise her free chocolates at the launch party.

  While he tries to kickstart his old motorcycle, Phirun tries to replay last night’s events. He still can’t remember much. What a shame, he thinks, considering how attractive Merrilee is. Why had she agreed to come home with a drunk, average guy like him? She must have been drunk, too, after all, she’s Australian. Luckily, she hadn’t taken any offence to him not remembering. He wonders if that is a good or a bad sign. Good, maybe, in the sense that she’s easygoing and cool and not like those girls who make scenes because you leave the toilet seat up (although Phirun always closes it). Bad, perhaps, in the sense that she doesn’t really appear to care about the episode or seem especially interested in him.

  The second possibility puts him in a foul mood and he resolves to find out for himself whether it’s true or not. And even if it’s true, even if she isn’t much into him, then why shouldn’t he at least try to win her over?

  Phirun accepts that he might be overreacting, for he doesn’t really know the girl. She might be a terrible character. But then, the couple of hours that they had spent together over breakfast had been wonderful. He had learnt that she is twenty-eight, a year his junior. He’s tired of all those immature girls that swarm about Phnom Penh’s nightlife. Merrilee sounded mature, intelligent, witty and charming. And she looks like a direct descendent of one of those stone-carved celestial dancers adorning Angkor Wat. Just the memory of her naked body makes his knees buckle. Phirun realises that he might be in love.

  He steers his motorcycle out of Street 240 onto Norodom Boulevard, past the Independence Monument, narrowly missing a hand-pushed mobile stall selling fried chicken feet, and continues until he stops in front of the traffic lights at the intersection with Mao Tse Tung Boulevard. Just before him, three guys on a rusty Daelim motorcycle are transporting a king-sized bed. The driver’s body is shoved up so tight that he’s almost glued to the handlebars while the second person is pressed against his back with the huge bed upright behind him. On the other side of the upright bed is a third guy, standing on what is left of the motorcycle’s seat, trying to prevent the bed from falling by bear-hugging it with his arms spread wide, reminiscent of the Christ’s crucifixion. The circus is out again, Phirun thinks, observing the mid-traffic acrobatics.

  Merrilee had done most of the talking, explaining that she was born in an Australian refugee detention centre, where her then pregnant mother had been incarcerated upon arrival. She said that she had never known her father, who had stayed behind to look after his parents in Cambodia because they were too old to board the boat. They had never heard from him or his parents again and naturally assumed that they had died at the hands of Pol Pot and his cronies. Or perhaps even the Vietnamese forces, they weren’t sure.

  Life as a single mother and refugee in a country of which she didn’t speak the language had been particularly harsh for Merrilee’s mother. But somehow she had managed to send her only daughter to university, determined to give her the education of which she had been deprived. It had been her mother’s hope that if Merrilee could be educated in Australian schools, she would not have to face the humiliation and discrimination that she had endured in later life.

  The lights turn to green and Phirun drives his motorcycle onto the wide boulevard, carefully avoiding the clowns with the king-sized bed. He zigzags between the herds of motodops coming from every possible direction, all bestowed with licences to crash. He makes his way with difficulty through an intersection where a lone policeman is causing widespread confusion with his failing attempts to regulate traffic and soon he’s pulled up again by a red light. He looks to his left and makes eye contact with one of two bored-looking cows. They are harnessed in front of a wooden cart loaded with earthenware from Kampong Cham province in the east of Cambodia. Phirun looks ahead and waits for the lights.

  Her mother had been wrong, Merrilee told him. At school, she still had to deal with discrimination and stupidity. But instead of being intimidated, it had toughened her and strengthened her resolve to succeed. She felt she owed it to her mother, who had done everything within her power to offer her daughter a fair chance in life. Her mother, Merrilee confided, had once told her that Merrilee had inherited her father’s stubbornness and intelligence, and she was very proud of that.

  Well before the lights turn green, the unorganised army of countless motorcycles, bicycles, tuk tuks, cyclos, cars, pickup trucks, SUVs and the two cart-pulling cows, push into motion for an early invasion of the irresistibly beckoning intersection ahead. Phirun joins the traffic avalanche and continues his journey. He’s looking forward to a cold shower and a half-hour nap. After two near-collisions, he passes the white perimeter wall of the Chinese embassy and is again halted by traffic lights. There used to be hardly any traffic lights in Phnom Penh, Phirun realises, and now there are suddenly too many. Not that it really matters, as he seems to be one of few drivers naive enough to acknowledge them at all, during the fifty per cent time window when they are not deactivated by power cuts. His eccentric habit of stopping for red lights must have been acquired in Belgium, and now, for the sake of his own safety, he’ll have to try and get rid of it.

  Merrilee was n
ow about to graduate as a lawyer, she said, specialising in human rights. She’s visiting Cambodia to research a paper she’s writing for her university thesis back home. She plans to stay for only three months, four at the most, she told him. Then she suddenly changed subject.

  Phirun finally stops in front of a simple house in a backstreet behind the Chinese embassy. He looks up at the metal gate decorated with barbed wire that serves as the front door of the building in which he rents his little apartment. At knee level, a little custom-made hole is cut out in order to be able to unlock the heavy padlock on the other side of the gate. After all these months, Phirun still hasn’t got the knack of opening it without dropping his keys. As he can’t directly see the gate’s bolt on the other side, he wriggles his hand through the small opening and blindly tries to insert his key in the padlock. Just after he manages to find it — it took him two long minutes — the neighbour’s poodle starts barking viciously as if that’s its only purpose in life. Phirun drops his keys with a fright, cursing the dog.

  “Goddamn, Chucky,” he shouts at the poodle, “shut your evil trap!”

  He lowers himself onto his knees and gropes with his hand along the floor at the other side of the gate while wishing burglary hadn’t been invented here yet. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a normal house where you can just put your key into the front door, open it and enter? he thinks.

  Phirun finally manages to unbolt the gate and to the soundtrack of Chucky’s incessant barking, he pushes his weathered motorcycle inside. He pauses to look at the noisy hound. Phirun’s stare makes the diminutive beast go completely berserk. With spiteful pleasure, he places himself just a few inches away from the little monster on the other side of the iron fence that separates animal from human. Chucky is now beside itself with blind rage.

  “One day I’ll turn you over to the Vietnamese,” Phirun says in a low voice and calmly walks away from the raging poodle.

  ***

  A short while later Phirun steps out of the shower, a towel wrapped around his waist, and over to his unmade bed. It hasn’t changed since he left it that morning, and he wonders if Merrilee’s scent is still lingering between the sheets. He sniffs the fabric, then the pillow hopefully, even while pondering what exactly has made him into a dog or a pervert. To his disgust, the only thing he can smell is his neighbour’s wife’s omnipresent fermented fish. He throws himself onto the bed, ready for his long awaited nap.

  The wet towel around his waist chafes so he unwraps it and lets it slide aside. Phirun’s own nakedness awakens vivid memories of Merrilee’s. “Way too late, you traitor!” he shouts at his erect member. She must be used to having loads of men eating out of her hand, he thinks, and wonders if he’s been nothing more than a drunken one-night-stand to her.

  He hadn’t told Merrilee much about his own life. He only explained that, just like her, he had been a war refugee. But, unlike her, he was born here and could speak Khmer reasonably well. He told her how both of his parents are alive and being cared for by his younger sister, who lives in Antwerp. Phirun had returned to Cambodia nearly six months ago, the second time since his parents had fled the war with their children. Merrilee expressed surprise at the passion with which he spoke of Cambodia.

  “Until now, I’ve been mostly disappointed,” she told him, but Phirun on the other hand is intrigued by what he now considers to be home.

  “Hey, if you could hear my parents describe their Cambodia, their culture, the music they and their friends partied to — I had to experience it for myself,” he told her. “And I’m sure there’s some of that past spirit left, enough to kickstart a new future.”

  But Merrilee wasn’t convinced. “There’s not much spirit to be found these days,” she objected, “only the spirit of money and greed.”

  “But who did our people acquire that taste for money from?” Phirun countered. He was not disagreeing with her but he’s convinced that this is a passing, admittedly ugly phase his country must wrestle itself through.

  It was a long breakfast and Phirun could not avoid the impression that, behind the sceptical look in her beautiful brown eyes, there was something else too, just a glimpse of it, once or twice. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but there was a certain interest there. It was enough to keep his hope alive. His hope that maybe some day, Merrilee and him would be having another one of those long breakfasts.

  Chapter ELEVEN

  “FINALLY!” TZAHALA EXCLAIMS when her phone rings. She glances at her watch — 6:30 AM. Tel Aviv again, she reckons, and quickly walks into her living room to answer it. But she’s wrong, it’s a local Phnom Penh call.

  “Miss Tzahala?”

  Tzahala curses inwardly.

  “Don’t mention my name on the phone,” she yells.

  “Right, sorry,” a man answers in a non-committal tone. “I have just received news. Very interesting.” The voice speaks in a thick Cambodian accent.

  “It better be,” Tzahala answers.

  “We have managed to locate three of our boxes. Four days ago they were presented as gifts to officials — I mean here, in Phnom Penh — who, it seems, are very impressed. Impressed by not only the chocolates’ secret contents, but more so by the generosity of the donor. We’re still trying to track the other boxes, but we’ll find them soon enough, word is spreading.”

  Silence on the other end of the line.

  “Miss Tza...”

  “Who’s the donor?” the woman interrupts sharply.

  “A Belgian-Khmer man called Phirun.”

  “What? Who? Whoever the hell he is, he’s as good as dead!”

  “He made the delivery personally, with compliments from The House.”

  “What house?”

  “Yes, The House.”

  “I said, what house?”

  “Baat!” the man confirms in Khmer, “The House.”

  “For shit’s sake, what house are you talking about?”

  “The House! That’s the name of it. It’s on Street 240, not far from King’s Palace.”

  “I know 240. You say their house is called The House?”

  “Baat, baat.”

  “Confusing. No wonder they’re into money laundering,” Tzahala murmurs, irritated. “And what the hell are they doing inside this house, apart from handling chocolate laced diamonds?”

  “It’s a Belgian bakery and café. I heard they also plan to open a chocolate shop.”

  “Are you sure it’s Belgian-owned?” she asks, surprised now.

  “One hundred per cent.”

  Tzahala pauses. She’s impressed by the irony and arrogance of her competitor. But then, Colonel Peeters has never been a shy man, she thinks.

  “Good work. Call me back when you find out more.”

  “Baat Miss Tz...”

  Beeeeep.

  ***

  Half an hour, one cold shower and two coffees later, Tzahala is wide awake and fully functioning. Her brain is processing the events of the past few days. She has no doubt that the Belgian Colonel is behind all this. Of course he was! Why hadn’t she considered him earlier?

  Christ, she thinks, the way he snuffed out Driekamp, before they had properly gotten going, means he’s much more powerful than she’d thought. She knew he was the king bee in Antwerp, but never imagined that his influence could reach Tel Aviv. But how the hell did he find out about her network in the first place? At least she now knows who she’s up against.

  “Harah!” Tzahala curses out loud.

  But she’s not the kind of woman to panic easily. She’d be in the wrong line of business if that were the case. And the business she’s in happens to be one she’s extremely good at.

  Okay, let’s recap, she thinks, pouring herself another coffee. Driekamp is, or was, the one and only connection to her. That had been a condition they had quickly agreed on. She and Driekamp had never actually met in person and he had never seen her face. He didn’t even know her real name.

  “So, dear Colonel, I know who you are — b
ut you don’t know me,” she mumbles.

  At least she’s got that advantage over him. She has to try and keep it that way, and makes a mental note to warn her local boys to be extra careful when making enquiries. But the question of how the Colonel could have detected her newborn network perturbs her. Tzahala can think of only one explanation. Driekamp must have independently found out about the Colonel’s existing operation that Tzahala is trying to duplicate. He must have approached the Colonel and offered his diamond buying services to him too, hoping to supply both rival networks and double his business overnight.

  Tzahala mulls this over and nods — not an implausible theory. Given the Colonel’s reputation of being a careful man, he must have checked out Driekamp’s background and somehow found out about the Cambodian shipment of operation ‘Phnom Penh Express’, thereby discovering the South African’s deception. That would have been exceptionally difficult, though, she admits. Unless the suspicious Colonel had ordered Driekamp’s every move monitored for the last few days of his life, and thus learnt about the test shipment to Cambodia. It would have been easy enough to send a few goons over to Driekamp to beat the information out of him. Good thing that Driekamp didn’t know her identity. But what else could he have revealed? The shipment’s destination, which is the contact at the courier company’s local office here. But Driekamp never knew where the shipment would go to from there. And did Driekamp know the local contact at customs? She didn’t think so. No, he didn’t.

  Tzahala jots some notes on a little writing pad, listing her ideas in the hope that it will lend clarity to her thinking.

  What would the Colonel have done after uncovering her operation? Identify and then take out the contact at the courier company? Or bribe him into sending the parcel to his own men here, rather than to my contact? It wouldn’t be impossible for him to do that, given that he’s already established a presence here.