Hunters in the Dark

by Lawrence Osborne

  The best would be to dispose of it in a grave but he didn’t have a shovel. He turned and walked to the Saber and took the keys and toyed with the idea of taking it instead of his own car, but the stupidity of that move dawned on him and he put the keys back. He returned to his own car and the urge to just drive off took hold. There was no trace of him at the scene, nothing connecting him. Sometimes it was better to leave things as simple as possible, and he knew too that the girl had not even seen his face. He was about to take off, but as he opened the car door a pair of lights came into view on the road and he was caught in a moment of doubt.

  It was a car moving quite quickly up the road toward him and there was not time to do anything but get into his taxi and try to get away before it caught up with him. He turned the key, the engine started, but it was already too late. The other car, a black SUV of some kind, had already drawn level and then swerved brusquely into the verge and interposed itself between the taxi and the Saber.

  Ouksa backed his car into the road but a man had already descended from the SUV and was walking around the front of his vehicle and into the road ahead of him, his hand extended. He could sense from this authoritative gesture alone that it was a policeman and the life went rushing out of him. Everything in him went slack and despondent and he let go of the wheel and slammed on the brakes and wild thoughts moved through him. A few miles away, his crippled wife woke up suddenly and opened her eyes and for a moment she had a premonition of disaster, a certainty that things would turn out badly for both of them.

  FOURTEEN

  Davuth had held up his hand and the frightened driver he could see behind the wheel had instinctively obeyed the silent command and stopped the car he was reversing. Davuth went up to him and showed him his badge and asked him what he was doing. It was in a cool, disdainful voice, the voice that stopped all comers, and there was no need to ramp up the pitch. He knew already that the driver had no ready explanation and he knew already what had happened because all the signs were there and logic dictated that Ouksa had done what he had done. He told him to park the car and come over with him to the Saber and he told him to do it slowly. Ouksa did as he was told and they walked together across the muddy open ground to the edge of the cane field. Davuth asked him his name, and all the rest.

  “It’s a barang, isn’t it?” he said to him as they came to the ditch.

  The policeman had a strong flashlight and shone it down as far as the white shirt and the paralyzed blue eyes. For Ouksa everything looked at once very different. The frogs sang right across the vast fields of cane and there was a gentleness in the rain.

  “I didn’t know him,” he said quietly.

  “You followed him here from Moonrise. I know all about him.”

  “He threatened me—we pulled over.”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. Shall we go have a look at what’s in your car?”

  “You don’t believe me,” Ouksa said.

  “There’s nothing to believe.”

  Ouksa could do nothing but go with Davuth back to the car and show him everything that was under the seat. The policeman took the passports and the money and simply walked to his car and threw them in the back. He was feeling rather pleased with himself. It had been, after all, an extremely easy trap to load and spring and he had done no work but wait and observe. The driver was a simpleton. He told Ouksa to shut up and stay by the Saber and he went through the car himself until he found the clothes and heroin equipment and the dope itself. It was to the driver’s credit that he had left it behind. He took that as well and threw it into his own car and then returned to the shivering and terrified youth.

  “Where are you from?”

  Ouksa spilled everything about himself.

  Davuth said, “You’re probably wondering what I’m going to do.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m not going to do anything. I’m going to give you a shovel and you’re going to take all their belongings and your bat into the sugarcane and bury them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then you’re going to go home to your wife and shut up about everything you’ve done. It’s not difficult to understand, is it?”

  Ouksa shook his head, and his misery was tinged with relief. Davuth could sense his insolence and his fear jostling in the atmosphere between them. It was a small struggle and he had to impose himself more fully.

  He said, “If you ever say anything I’ll come down there and shoot you myself. I’ll blow your head off like a chicken. I’ll come and shoot you in the head and say you were a suspect in a murder and that’s all, you’ll be forgotten.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’re clear then.”

  Davuth relaxed. The worm was a worm now, but he was not yet properly crushed.

  What about the barang?

  “Where did the barang get all this money?”

  Ouksa said he had no idea.

  “No idea? You’re a liar, you—”

  Davuth stepped up to him and took him by the throat. He had been a policeman all his life, since he was thirteen or fourteen. He knew how to make fear abundant. He knew how to shake them up and make them think of the afterlife in a mass grave.

  “Where did he get it?”

  Faltering, Ouksa said, “He stole it.”

  “He stole it? Who was he? Who was that rich fuck?”

  “He was a drug dealer, sir.”

  “From where?”

  “American.”

  “American—”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And he stole it from who?”

  Now Ouksa found a petty courage.

  “I don’t know. From a barang.”

  “You don’t know? Then how do you know he stole it?”

  “I heard from the boatman.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “No, it’s true. They said—”

  “What did they say?”

  “—he took it from a barang.”

  “Where is that other barang?”

  “He left.”

  “Who was that boatman, brother?”

  “His name is Thy.”

  To Davuth it seemed probable enough. He relaxed his grip and the tension ebbed. His point had been made and the driver had been shaken down.

  “I’ll give you a hundred,” he said. “For digging that hole and burying their belongings. It’s fair.”

  “It’s not much of a deal,” Ouksa dared answer.

  “You little worm. You’re the one who did it. You deserve nothing. I could shoot you now—nothing would be said.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Shut up and get digging.”

  Davuth went to his car and took out a shovel and threw it at him. He turned on the Saber’s headlights and sat on the bonnet and lit a cigarette. In response, Ouksa looked up at the sky: three hours of dark remaining, maybe two or less. He didn’t know what time it was. He went to the barang’s car and took out all the stuff that was in it and rolled it into the suitcase and dragged it out. It was a task intended to humiliate him and he knew it. Before the belongings were disposed of, however, Davuth sifted through them one last time. There were two shirts and he turned the collars and saw that they were from a tailor in Phnom Penh called Vong.

  “Dig the hole properly,” Davuth said, “and don’t be lazy. Dig it a good way in and make it deep.”

  —

  The rain had now lessened but the ground was soft and sticky. Ouksa went into the cane a fair way and threw down the shovel, then went back to the ditch and began to drag the suitcase over to the same spot. It was an infuriating struggle. His feet slipped in the mud and he was not strong enough to drag it effectively. He couldn’t understand why it was so heavy. It took him the better part of ten minutes to pull the thing out of view of the road and close enough to the shovel. He cursed the policeman and his devious and well-timed arrival and picked up the shovel and began to drive it into the sod between the thick sugarcane stalks. It was a bestial task even if th
e rain had ceased. When the hole was finished he was exhausted and wiped his face and stood still with his ears alert. Far out in the sugarcane he could hear a distant, tiny sobbing. It was almost like the wail of a small animal, but it was certainly human. The girl, lost and bewildered and alone out there in the sea of cane. He wondered if Davuth heard it too. It was only now, surprisingly, that he thought of the Ap and a cold fear gripped him and he rolled the suitcase into its grave with a furious urgency. He filled it in with the same earth, smacked it down with the back of the shovel and dragged himself to the verge as the light was beginning to change. The policeman was still sitting coolly on the hood as if lost in thought and around him lay a circle of cigarette butts. His cowboy boots had been polished and they had not lost their luster. Ouksa went up to the SUV and laid the shovel against its side and said that it was done.

  “Did you pat it down?”

  “It looks like nothing’s there.”

  Davuth threw the cigarette he was smoking to the ground and then said, “Pick up all the butts and put them in your car. Burn your shoes when you get home. I’m going to say I found a car by the roadside.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ouksa crawled about picking up the butts. Like a dog, the policeman thought. Like a vulture.

  Davuth said, “Did you hear something out there?”

  “I heard an animal—an animal was crying.”

  “There it is again.”

  The policeman slid off the hood and walked up to the cane. The sobbing, again. But now so far off they could hardly hear it.

  “There was someone else,” he said sharply.

  He went back to Ouksa, who had stood up, and slapped him hard in the face.

  “There was someone else here.”

  “Yes, a girl,” the driver stammered.

  “She ran off?”

  The driver nodded.

  “That’s not very good news.”

  “She didn’t see my face.”

  “How the fuck do you know what she saw?”

  Davuth remembered. The cute Khmer girl who was under twenty-five. Did it matter that she had seen Ouksa’s wretched face?

  He pulled out his pistol and walked yet again to the cane and thought about going in and finishing it. But it would be impossible to find her. It was going to have to be the way it was and by and large it would work well enough. It might be more practicable to dispose of Ouksa. He considered it. But no. It would only complicate things further. He reholstered the gun and strolled back to the SUV and smiled at the muddied youth and told him to just drive away and pretend that nothing had happened. He wasn’t very smart, he said to him, but it was better than being the American. He should thank Buddha for being alive and with all his limbs.

  “And a hundred dollars better off.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It could have been you,” Davuth said, looking down at the ground to make sure that Ouksa had picked up all the butts. “You’d be reincarnated as a cockroach.”

  “I understand,” Ouksa said and bowed his head.

  “Now help me carry the American into my car.”

  —

  They struggled down into the ditch. With difficulty they dragged the body back to the SUV and rolled it into the back. It had a leaden sadness, a pointlessness. Davuth covered it with a towel and then he walked Ouksa over to his car and shone the torch into his face. He saw how colorless and soulless it had become, how his fear had grown and was now uncontrollable. It was gentleness that would seal the affair now. He turned off the beam and sighed and gave Ouksa a cigarette.

  He said, “That was a stupid thing you did. Now you’ll have to live with it. Go to the temple and ask forgiveness. Pray and make merit.”

  “I will, sir.”

  Ouksa was now sobbing, his whole frame shaking.

  “I didn’t do it for me—” he began.

  “It doesn’t matter who you did it for. You have to make merit.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Make merit and think about your sin.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It’s pathetic, Davuth thought, and walked back to his car. Pathetic and necessary.

  He took out the passports and looked them over. He had expected one to be the girl’s, but it was not. An Englishman. He turned to Ouksa.

  “Who is this?”

  “Don’t know, sir.”

  “Robert. You know this one?”

  Ouksa shook his head.

  “Why was his passport under your seat?”

  “I found them together in the barang’s car. I don’t know—”

  The face was open. It was childish and blond, with wide-open slightly crazy eyes, those of a man who did not believe what had just happened to him. Was he alive or dead?

  “Why did he…?”

  Davuth stared out at the sugarcane as if the answer might be there.

  One can feel a human heart from a great distance; the hunter feels his prey even in a great darkness.

  “They must be friends,” he murmured. “In any case—you don’t know.”

  “No, sir.”

  “It doesn’t make sense. But you can go. I’m getting sick of looking at your miserable face. Wash your damn hands when you get home. Don’t talk to your wife. Don’t talk to your children. I’ll know if you do.”

  —

  Davuth waited for Ouksa to drive away before walking thoughtfully around the scene. Tire marks and footprints, yes, but that day’s rain would wash them away quickly. There was just the Saber. It was best left where it was, untampered and abandoned. It was a rusting hulk anyway, it would be scavenged by midday. He walked down to the cane again and listened for the sound he had heard earlier.

  The stalks, defying him, waved back and forth in the breeze and disclosed nothing. The horizon was lit. Everything had returned to normal. He thought it all through as slowly as he could and soon he realized that the less he did the better. There was no one above him in the police hierarchy at that local level who might look over his shoulder or ask him an inconvenient question. He was magnificently alone.

  He drove down to the river amid the cock crows and went to a sand spit he knew and dragged the body down there and let it go gently into the water and waited until the current shifted it and bore it out into deeper water where it could move. He felt a quiet satisfaction doing it. He was familiar with death, there was nothing magical or awesome about it. It appeared and it disappeared and in that respect it was very much like life.

  FIFTEEN

  Davuth’s station lay seven miles downriver from that place. It was an old French schoolhouse with perforated cement windows in some rooms and a dusty yard shaded by dying trees. There were two cars and a motorbike and a servant cleaned the rooms and made the two men meals when his other officer was there. There was a desolation about the road the station stood on. A few women had food stalls there during the day and by the gates there was always a tray of split chicken pieces and fish roasting slowly in the sun. The pale blue sign with the words Police Station in English and Khmer was slowly rusting at the edges and beginning to look unimposing. He sat alone for many hours in his office with the blinds down smoking bad cigars and reading horoscopes in the local papers.

  When the Internet was up he played online poker and lost small amounts week by week, but indifferently and with a kind of method, and when it was down he played patience with himself and talked on the phone with the business owners he shook down now and then. He called his daughter at her school and told her to be home on time and thought for five minutes every day of his dead wife and then rode around the area in the SUV looking for what he called “signs.” His days were usually empty and serene. On most of them, he went to the river and sat there quietly with a packed lunch and waited for the bodies of barangs to show up. It was quite a rare occurrence but there was one every month and then he would be busy.

  They were mostly young, early middle age. Europeans, Australians, a few Americans and Canadians, people drifting ea
stward, doping up in Laos and Luang Prabang and coming down in the dry season to the places in the kingdom where they could winter for a few dollars and party among themselves. They picked up Khmer girls and Yaa Baa and Burmese heroin and went their merry way en route to enlightenment. The curious thing was that he had seen more of them in these last years.

  They were middle-class and unemployed, or so it seemed, their education now of little value, and they seemed to be able to scrounge enough money to take leave of their senses for months on end. Once upon a time, the Khmers had been in awe of them. But now their dirtiness and scruffiness and unruliness had dimmed their image at the very moment that the Chinese and the Thais had come into considerable amounts of money. The barangs no longer seemed as formidable as their grandparents, even if their grandparents had been hippies in the sixties. At least the hippies back then had class—though the sixties were an age that seemed prehistoric from the perspective of a Khmer of fifty-four, precisely because he remembered its peaceful wonders. Back then the kingdom had been a paradise on earth. The king upon his throne, the guerrillas far away in their jungles, the war in Vietnam not yet close and callous in the day-to-day. The streets were filled with girls in miniskirts. But he, to tell the truth, had mightily enjoyed the Revolution.

  The barang grandchildren of that age now wandered the East with no prospects and they dropped like drunken flies into his river, forcing him to scoop them out. Naturally he knew all about the American (though he had pretended otherwise to the gullible Ouksa), but even the American could not pay for all the cremations. He, Davuth, did his best. He went through the possessions that were left behind—usually little more than a few rags and useless books but with a family heirloom ring here and there—and then went through all the desultory procedures. The call to the relevant embassy, the filling-out of the report forms, the inventories and then, lastly, the sad and lonely cremation at the wat with only himself present.