Cambodian Book of the Dead

by Tom Vater

  But you had to take care in here. The squat Khmer bouncer who was in charge of bets at the pool table was not the only man who carried his gun more or less openly in his belt. Maier was keen to avoid trouble. After all, he’d only landed a few hours ago.

  “Shit, it is loud in here.”

  “You’re getting old,” Carissa laughed over her shoulder and passed him an ice cold can of Angkor Beer.

  Maier didn’t like beer. Nor did he like Ya-ba and disco music. Ya-ba meant mad medicine. Just the right kind of drug for Phnom Penh.

  “Holidays in Cambodia” by the Dead Kennedys blasted from the speakers. Maier could at least remember this one. Good sounds to kick back to and watch the dance on the volcano. And what a dance it was. Jello Biafra screamed “Pol Pot, Pol Pot, Pol Pot,” and the girls, who’d probably never heard of the man who’d killed their mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts, gobbled more pills as the sweat of three hundred drunks dripped from the ceiling onto the dance floor.

  By the pool table, a life-size sandstone bust of Jayavarman VII, the greatest of the ancient Angkor kings, stood, softly lit, in an alcove. The thousand year-old god-king sucked up the chaotic scene in the room with empty eyes. Maier sympathised. In the Heart, he felt as old as a Khmer god-king. An even older French man, his shirt open to his belt buckle, had climbed the bar with two girls and waved at the crowd, a bottle of red wine spilling from his right hand. The hair on his head and chest stood in all directions and he looked like an electrified dancing bear. Perhaps he’d once been a butcher or owned a tanning studio in the banlieu. And one day that had suddenly felt like no longer enough.

  Maier understood the man, though he had no desire to swap places. In the clouds of marihuana smoke behind the pool table, one of the young shredders began to open the trouser belt of a helpless, drunken and equally young tourist. Maier had just read in the Phnom Penh Post that the staff of the US Embassy were banned – by the US government – from entering the Heart. He had to laugh. Had this decision been made for security reasons or out of prudish concern for America’s brightest?

  “The English guy is already here, at a table behind the bar. And he’s with bad company.”

  “With some of these nouveau riche thugs?”

  Carissa leaned heavily into Maier and tried to make herself understood above the din of the music. “No, with real gangsters. People who don’t belong in here.”

  Maier shrugged and pulled a face. “So what are we waiting for? Introduce me.”

  “Hey, Pete.”

  “Wow, Carissa, babe, you look stunning, as always. May I introduce to you, gentlemen, Phnom Penh’s classiest import from New Zealand.”

  Maier immediately saw that all the chairs were occupied by problems. The skinny Brit with the bright red hair and the sunken cheeks, a tough little pirate, had jumped up and embraced Carissa. Maier guessed him in his mid-thirties. Perhaps he was from Essex or some shitty London suburb, where he had probably burnt all his bridges. The silver chain around his wrist was heavy enough to sink a water buffalo. He wore a Manchester United shirt, with the collar up, and moved in a cloud of cheapish deodorant. He counteracted this with a strong-smelling Ara, the cigarette of choice for taxi girls and motodops, stuck in his nicotine-stained fingers. Two full packs and three mobile phones lay on the table in front of him. So this was the business partner of Rolf Müller-Overbeck: the wide-boy from the mean streets of Britain. Not completely unlikeable, but definitely not trustworthy.

  The other two men at the table, both Khmer, were of a different ilk – one was young, the other old, though they came from the same dark place. They were smoking Marlboros and looked at Carissa as if she were a piece of meat. These days, Maier did not encounter men like these very often. There weren’t that many. Both of them had been defined and moulded by war. They were men who killed and thought nothing of it.

  Maier noticed that his presence had been registered. He could almost physically feel being observed and judged. Was he a potential danger or an opportunity to further their interests? What was the English guy doing with guys like this in a cosmopolitan filling station on a Saturday night?

  The older man was in his mid-sixties. He had glued his short hair to his square, box-shaped head with gel. His neck was non-existent. He wore a black polo shirt and looked too casual in a grey pair of polyester slacks. Like a toad on a golf course. This man had worn a uniform for most of his life.

  The youngster next to him was his son, mid-twenties, wide hip-hop jeans, a Scorpions T-shirt, and a baseball cap, worn back to front on his equally square head, his thick, hairless arms defaced by backstreet tattoos. The boy had been born and had grown up during the civil war, a stark but no less assuring contrast to his formerly revolutionary father.

  Luckily, all the chairs were taken. It was better to stand, around people like this.

  Carissa exchanged kisses with Pete. “My old friend Maier is on the way to Kep, guys. He wants to poke around down there, see if there’s anything worth investing in.”

  Pete’s handshake was hard and dry. His dark eyes sparkled frivolously in his sunken face, which seemed deathly pale, despite a deep suntan. Pete looked like a guy who had nothing to lose and loved playing for huge stakes. Maier thought him largely pain-free.

  “Maier, mate. Come and visit. An old friend of Carissa’s is always welcome. And my partner is a Kraut too, just like you. At least you look like a Kraut.”

  Pete winked at him as if they were secret co-conspirators and whispered in a hoarse tone, “Kep was made for people like us. Nice beach town, built by the French, who are long gone, thank fuck. It’s a bit shambolic down there, but things are getting better. Haven’t you heard? Cambodia’s booming. Now’s a great time to get your investments in, mate.”

  The old man had got up. Pete threw him a few clunky chunks of Khmer. The son had also stood up, showing off the pistol in the belt of his low-slung ghetto pants. The older man bowed slightly.

  “My name is Tep. I am number one in Kep. My friends call me Tep.”

  Maier couldn’t imagine that this man had friends. The handshake was soft and moist, like creeping death. Did number one expect a round of laughs? Maier extrapolated a little – the man had Khmer Rouge and genocide written all over his face. The old comrades from the politburo, those who had survived the vagaries of history, had become investors. The price of peace.

  The younger man with the gun did not introduce himself, but that was OK.

  For a long moment, Tep smiled silently at Maier. The sonic sins of a Britney Spears song hung suspended between the two men, creating a strange, trivial backdrop to the encounter. What was a man like that doing in a place like this? Tep should have died in the jungle a long time ago.

  “I run a few businesses in Kep. I can help you if you need anything in Kep. Come to visit on my island. And bring your girlfriend.”

  The old man’s English was simple and barely understandable. Carissa pulled at Maier’s sleeve, as the detective tried to look as uninformed as possible.

  “Beer?”

  Pete had already ordered five cans of Angkor Beer and banged them on the table. Tep sat back down, a shadow of irritation shooting across his face, and turned to Carissa. The Antipodean journalist was waiting for him.

  “Aren’t you a former Khmer Rouge general? And aren’t you the guy who blew up the Hotel International in Sihanoukville? Perhaps you remember: a tourist from New Zealand died in that attack, General Tep?”

  For a split second, the old man’s eyes burst into flames. Pete laughed nervously, “Wow, Carissa, babe, Carissa, we aren’t here to reheat old rumours, are we? It’s great to see you, babe.”

  Pete, Maier decided, was capable of balancing a tray full of landmines, which was just as well in this place, at this moment.

  A young Khmer with a skinhead, dressed in an immaculate white silk suit, dead drunk and sporting a slight similarity to the bust of the god-king, had pulled his gun at the next table. A flat-footed tourist had just stepped on
his brand-new, imported Nikes. Enraged the young Khmer had spilt his beer onto a row of green pills he’d lined up on the table in front of him, which he now tried to rescue from the ash-sodden slop directly into his mouth. The hapless tourist had already disappeared into the throng.

  There’ll be trouble in a minute, was the only thing that came to Maier’s mind.

  The bald playboy swallowed his last pills and got up to scan the crowd for a likely scapegoat who was going to pay, one way or another, for someone else’s clumsiness. Someone would have to pay. With a theatrical gesture he whipped his gun from his belt and waved it around the room.

  Sometimes things happened quickly. The skinhead climbed onto his chair and began to scream hysterically. Tep nodded to his son and turned to Maier, “Don’t make any problems in Kep. Investors are welcome, snoops and stupid people are not. You see.”

  The first shot, the one to drive up the courage, went straight into the ceiling. The Heart stopped in its tracks. The DJ cut the music. The house-lights flashed on, illuminating a few hundred twisted, strung-out faces in mid-flight. Carissa grabbed for Maier’s shoulder and pulled him to the sticky ground. Pete had already vanished. Punters rushed for the exit. The old general made no effort to move. His son had got up and walked a few feet away from the table, behind the fashionable rebel who stood on his chair, turning round and around, levelling his gun more and more towards the surrounding tables. From the floor, Maier had a perfect view of the young man’s next moves.

  Pop, pop, pop.

  The tourists screamed in panic. The playboy skinhead was dead by the time he hit the table in front of Maier, which collapsed in a hail of bottles, cans and cigarette butts.

  Tep’s son had shot him in the back.

  Blood, beer, pills and broken glass spread across the tiled floor. The dark red was striking on the immaculate white silk. That’s how easy it was to die in Cambodia.

  The boy helped his father get up and made a path for the old man to get behind the bar.

  “Follow them.” Maier grabbed Carissa. “There must be another exit.”

  The muggy night air felt good after the two beers he shouldn’t have drunk and a murder he hadn’t wanted to witness. But outside there was only Cambodia. Shots rang down the street. Car windows were smashed. A small gang of motodops raced down Rue Pasteur, into the darkness. Girls screamed. Saturday night in Phnom Penh.

  “So this is the most popular nightclub in the country,” he said, more to himself than anyone around him.

  The windows of the police station that stood, hidden behind a high wall, directly opposite the Heart, remained dark, despite the gunfire. No policeman who earned twenty dollars a month would get involved in this weekend orgy of adolescent violence unless there was money to be made. The situation would eventually bleed itself to death.

  The general pulled his polo shirt straight and stared down the road, an expression of faint amusement on his flat features. The old man did not seem overly concerned about his son’s state of mind, after the youngster had just killed a man in cold blood in front of several hundred witnesses.

  “Thanks, Mr Tep, your son saved our lives.”

  The general looked at Maier for a moment, his eyes fixed and devoid of message.

  “Kep is a quiet town. You can relax. Come and visit on my island. Ask local fishermen how to get to my villa on Koh Tonsay. Germans always welcome. And forget what happen here tonight.”

  His car pulled up.

  Carissa had freed her 250 from the chaos of parked bikes in front of the Heart and Maier lost no time jumping on the back. A few seconds later, they crossed Norodom Boulevard.

  “Fucking hell, Maier, as soon as you turn up, the bullets start flying. The article I’m going to write about this tomorrow will be sensational. Son of former KR general shoots son of oil executive in Cambodia’s most cosmo nightclub. That’ll make waves. You’ll have to drink beer without me tomorrow.”

  “I don’t like beer.”

  CHRISTMAS BAUBLES

  Carissa’s heavy breasts floated above Maier’s equally heavy head, as seductive as the baubles that his mother had fastened to the Christmas tree forty years ago. In his drunken state this absurd association made passing sense, a few heartbeats before sunrise. Gram Parson’s “Hickory Wind” was playing on Carissa’s laptop. The song, which she’d always liked, took Maier back to his early assignments in Cambodia. Another job, another life. Dangerous thoughts percolated in his mind.

  “The nights were never long enough with you.”

  “What nights, Carissa? Mostly we did it on the roof of your villa in the mornings, because we were working at night or because we were too wasted.”

  “Nothing much’s changed with ten years having passed then.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Then I still turn you on?”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Everything’s alright then.”

  Carissa rolled out from under the mosquito net and stretched in front of the open window of her apartment.

  Life wasn’t easy in the tropics, but a sunrise that you could never witness in Europe was about to point its first light fingers across the horizon, and get caught up in a decadent play of glittering sparks on the golden roof of a neighbouring temple before beginning to dance around Carissa’s neck and shoulders. Maier groaned.

  “Why didn’t you stay?”

  “For the same reason I will go to Kep alone.”

  Carissa turned towards Maier in the faint light. Now she looked like the Hindu goddess Kali, irresistible and merciless.

  “Why?”

  “Because I do not like to watch my best friends die. And this country finishes off even the best. Especially the best.”

  “So you expect problems on the coast?”

  “I do not expect anything. I don’t even really know why I am here yet. But I am sure that the son of my client is up to his neck in shit.”

  “I survived quite well without you for the past ten years, Maier. You’re just commitment-shy.”

  “That I am. But that has nothing to do with me going to Kep alone.”

  “Then you love me a little bit and want to save me from the evil in this world?”

  Maier sensed the sarcasm in her voice and replied as calmly as he could. “That I do and that is what I want to do.”

  “All men are the fucking same,” she hissed, lifted the net and fell towards him.

  Maier was alone in his dream, crossing the country on foot. Everything was on fire. The air was filled with the stench of burned flesh. The smell was so bad that he seemed to be permanently retching. The corpses of lynched monks, policemen who had been skinned alive; dismembered teachers; postal workers, rotten and hollowed out by maggots; of engineers who’d been half eaten by stray dogs; artists who’d been shot; judges who’d been beaten to death and decapitated students whose heads grinned from thousands of poles that had been rammed into the rice fields, piled up by the roadside and slowly slid into shallow graves that they themselves had dug earlier. Except for a few farmers with closed faces, virtually all the adults had been killed. General Tep and his horde of undernourished, angry humans, clad in black pyjamas and armed with blood-soaked machetes and sticks, marched with torches across the dying land and burnt one village after another to the ground.

  Maier reached one of the villages, a typically dysfunctional cooperative on the verge of starvation, destined to fail, because no one had any tools and all the tool makers had been killed.

  Tep had caught a woman who’d been grilling a field rat over a smouldering, badly smelling fire. Angkar, the mysterious and powerful organisation that fronted and obscured the communist party of Cambodia, had forbidden the private preparation and consumption of food. What Angkar said was law. And all those who opposed the laws or broke them, were taken away for re-education or training and were never seen again. Angkar could not be opposed.

  There was good reason for this. Those who ate more than others were hardly exemplary communi
sts and were not completely dedicated to help Kampuchea rise from the ashes of its conflicts. Those who ate in secret had other things to hide. With traitors in its midst, Kampuchea had no chance to fight the imperialist dogs. The enemy was without as well as within. And the CIA was everywhere.

  Tep had no choice. He beat the woman to death with a club, split her head right open. As the woman’s skull cracked, a small noise escaped, “Pfft,” and the world lay in pieces.

  The woman had two daughters. The girl in the rice field had watched her mother’s murder and was running towards her father who was working under a hot sun with his second, younger daughter.

  Tep, soaked in blood, the liver of the woman in his fist, followed the girl. He listened as the father shouted to his daughters to flee. When he finally reached the man, he tried to kill him with a hammer, the last hammer in the village. Tep hit the man in the face, again and again, but he would not die. Tep began to sweat. Maier stood next to Tep. He was sweating as much. He was witness. He couldn’t stop a thing. The younger daughter stood a little to the side. She wore her hair short and like the rest of her insignificant family, wore black pyjamas. She was a product of Angkar and had grown up in a children’s commune. She hardly knew her father. She was a child of Angkar.

  “What is your name?” Tep smiled gently at the girl.

  “My name is Kaley.”

  “Your father is an enemy of Angkar, Kaley. He works for the CIA.”

  The girl smiled and looked down at the broken man, who lay beside her, breathing in hard spasms. Tep handed the hammer to the girl. She might have been twelve years old. After she’d done as ordered, he shouted for his men to cut the man open and devour his liver.