Cambodian Book of the Dead

by Tom Vater

  “This is it. The Villa Ambassade.”

  Three girls ran along a narrow wooden pier. A speedboat was moored to the rickety structure and bounced gently up and down in the waves. Pete had climbed to the front of the boat and dropped the small anchor into the water. The boy that Maier had already seen in action in the Heart appeared behind the three girls.

  As he stood up, Maier could hardly believe his eyes. The girls were around twelve or thirteen and wore identical black pyjama suits, complimented by crude flip-flops cut from spent car tyres – the uniform of the Khmer Rouge. Their hair was cut short, they wore red krama around their necks and carried Kalashnikovs. What a show of force. Welcome to my genocide. Samnang stayed in the boat and Maier could feel that Pete had tensed up. But it was too late for second thoughts. They’d arrived at the place he’d wanted to visit all along. He ignored the pier and jumped into the shallow water. The Englishman followed and lit an Ara.

  The youngest and meanest girl got off the pier, stepped right to the water’s edge and pointed the gun at Pete’s chest.

  “No smoking,” she barked.

  There was no arguing with the weapon or the girl, but Pete wasn’t sure how to get rid of the cigarette. The girl looked like she would shoot him if he dropped it into the water.

  “That’s how you give up smoking,” he mumbled and gave his Ara to Samnang.

  “In a minute she’ll tell us that smoking is decadent.”

  Maier didn’t feel much like joking. He already had the feeling that he was a prisoner. He followed the boy to the villa. The girls marched slowly after them. Not a word of greeting.

  “Be really careful what you say here. Tep is very eccentric. Especially when he’s at home. Just keep focused on the business.”

  “Is he trying to bring back the Seventies? Does he have many of these killer girls?”

  “Many.”

  Maier shook his head.

  The Khmer Rouge had long stopped functioning as a guerrilla force. No one in Cambodia dressed and walked like these girls today. Once again, his thoughts drifted back to what he had seen through the hole in the floor of the casino.

  Their host was waiting for them on the wooden veranda of his villa. The veranda faced the jungle. The man obviously didn’t think much of sunsets. Today the old Khmer was in uniform. His short hair had been cropped shorter and stood in stubbles on his square head. Tep wore the uniform of a Khmer Rouge general.

  The old soldier nodded without a word and waved Maier to a rattan chair. He didn’t offer his hand. There were only two chairs on the veranda. The boy and the three girls in black lined up behind Tep. Pete had disappeared.

  A large tattered flag graced the wall of the bungalow. Maier was pretty sure that the three yellow Angkor towers set against the red background had once served as the colours of Democratic Kampuchea, the short-lived Cambodia of the Red Khmer.

  Kaley stepped out onto the veranda, with two glasses of wine balanced on a plastic tray. She too was dressed in black. She had put her hair up under a black Mao cap and didn’t know him. She handed him one of the glasses without a word. The flag and the outfits, all this iconography of failure, reminded Maier of skinhead gatherings in Germany, but these people looked more serious and spooky.

  Tep was watching him attentively. Maier watched back. He had the feeling that he wasn’t being appraised by the old man alone. You could easily get paranoid in the presence of Khmer Rouge, but he felt he was being observed by someone else. The door which led into the villa was covered by a curtain. Maier thought he could make out someone breathing behind the cloth. It wasn’t Pete, of that he was sure. No, this sounded like a much older man.

  Maier’s brain suddenly did somersaults. Perhaps Pol Pot, Brother Number One, was still alive. Perhaps he had not been poisoned by the Thais in 1998, but had retired to the idyll of Koh Tonsay. Crazy idea. Maier wasn’t that important.

  “Mr Maier, you are our guest for almost two weeks now and you not come to visit me in my home. And you meet everyone else in Kep. Maybe you like to find friend because you have no friend?”

  Maier cleared his throat. “I have been trying to understand the investment.”

  Tep smiled like a gentle, slightly senile pensioner.

  “And how is investment climate in Kep?”

  “It seems that all roads, and boats, lead to your doorstep.”

  Maier was not sure how to address the man. Comrade didn’t seem a good choice. And he wasn’t going to call him General.

  “Yes, they do,” the general confirmed. “All roads lead to Tep. But you visit the very small one-way streets in Kep. I hear that you go to Bokor Casino to look.”

  The eyes of the old man did not go well with his friendly-grandpa style interrogation technique. They drilled right through Maier. He’d have to choose his next words very carefully. “True, I was in Bokor a few days ago. I only saw the casino from the outside. An amazing building.”

  Tep nodded.

  “It so run down. I will change it. Bokor is very special place in Cambodia. I will make resort there, maybe even golf course. What do you think, Mr Maier?”

  “I don’t understand why you are so keen on tourism, as well as the past?”

  Maier realised immediately that he’d made a mistake.

  “Which past, Mr Maier?”

  There was no turning back. Maier had pushed ahead too far and too quickly.

  “Your past, Tep. You are surrounded by children in black uniforms. That’s a tradition from a time when foreigners were not welcome here.”

  The Khmer laughed and shook his head.

  “You wrong, Mr Maier. Cambodia always welcome the foreigner, even in Angkor time. Only foreigner who want to make problem, who want to know our business, who maybe want to stop Cambodia become great country again, like Vietnamese, or American, we don’t like to see.”

  Maier didn’t say anything. He started wondering whether the three machine guns that were loosely pointing in his direction were slowly homing in. But he didn’t look directly at the girls. He had his hands full with Tep.

  “You see, Mr Maier, all foreigner who come to Kep and stay more than holiday, I meet. And you understand, in Cambodia today, the government very weak. So, in the province, the local man has to do the best to rebuild the country. We need to rebuild the country, Mr Maier. We have little money. America bomb everything and when we beat the foreign enemy, the Vietnamese, our real enemy, invade. Stay ten years, no problem. Big problem for Khmer. Vietnam make problem for Cambodia long time, take our land, destroy our country. We cannot do business with Vietnamese or American. So I ask, I meet clever man like you and I think, you work for this side or that side? Maybe you here to make problem for Cambodia, take our land or take our woman and child?”

  Maier shrugged and answered, “You know all about the activities of the barang in Kep and hence you should know that I am here to help Cambodia. Cambodia needs contact with the rest of the world. You cannot do it alone. The world is too small a place for that today.”

  The old Khmer suddenly leaned forward and grabbed for Maier’s right wrist.

  “The whole world want to help Cambodia. The UN, the CIA, the newspapers and many people think they can fuck the women and kidnap the children, put people in factories, where they make clothes for barang for a few riel. All this just to make economy in your country strong. And then you come and tell us we are murderers. Are you this people, Mr Maier?”

  Maier sat motionless and took his time to answer. Tep continued to hold on to his wrist. The breath of the old man was stale and used up.

  “I came to you tonight to discuss business. If you want to accuse me of other things, get your information right. A man with your connections should be able to find out whether I am just talking or whether I really have the money to buy a villa or two and restore them.”

  The general laughed sourly. “That right, Mr Maier. I am honest with you. I cannot find out why you come here. I spend my life in Kep. I come from Kampot Province,
where I grow up in a village. But I cannot decide if you want to make problem for my country and steal from Cambodian people, or if you are useful to rebuild Cambodia.”

  Tep rose and grabbed Maier’s left hand as well. The detective wondered whether he’d be asked to dance next.

  “Mr Maier, I tell you a story about Cambodian village. You know, local people in Cambodia are very superstitious. One day a group of monk come to my village. The monk is telling the villagers that they can kill all bad spirits in the village, if the villagers give them money and the animals. The villagers happy for help fighting many bad spirits, give the monk their animals and the money, and the monk leave the village. In the evening, a young boy is walking home from his rice field, when meet the group of monk. The monk drinking and eating. They kill all the animals already. They very drunk. The boy run home and tell his mother about the monk. The mother not believe her son and take him to the monk. The monk tell the mother, her son have the bad spirit inside and not his fault what he say. The monk tell the mother to leave the boy. They promising to help the boy. The mother agree and the monk take the boy and torture him for a week. After, the monk leave the boy almost dead near the village and disappear. Is the boy clever or stupid?”

  Maier was certain now that a third person was a silent participant in their conversation. In the silence between the general’s words, he felt a shadow leaning over him.

  “I am poor farmer son when French are here. My uncle die, building the road to Bokor. Like many other Cambodian, he die for the French. Later my brother work as guard in big villa. One day, the son of owner drive his car into a tree and tell his father my brother the driver. The father was friend of King Sihanouk. They arrest my brother and take him to the jail in Kampot. We never see him again. You see, no matter who rule Cambodia, the people without power never can do anything.”

  “Tep, we face the same situation in Germany. We have a lot in common. I grew up under a socialist government as well.”

  “You are from East Germany? Why you tell people in Kep you are from Hamburg?”

  The old Khmer knew too much. Maier felt dizzy again. No ordinary Khmer Rouge, general or not, would know where Hamburg was. He made a last effort to worm himself out of being a suspect, which meant convicted and executed.

  “I live in Hamburg. Until 1989, I worked in East Berlin, as well as in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania.”

  The Khmer loosened his iron grip somewhat.

  “Did you work for the Staatssicherheitsdienst? Do you know HVA?”

  Maier had not expected this question. The HVA, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, had been East Germany’s secret service, its CIA. Maier had bumped into its agents in Eastern Europe, had even tried to seduce one of them in Breslau once. He shook his head. He hardly felt the needle penetrate his skin. The old Khmer smiled. Maier began to sink.

  A voice, a German voice, ancient and thin, like cold clear soup, hissed behind him, “He never worked for the Stasi. A man like him would have been noticed in the Runde Ecke right away. But we can never be one hundred percent sure.”

  Tep let go of Maier’s hands. The detective tried to turn, but it was too late. He felt the thin white hand on his shoulder more than he saw it. For a few seconds, Kaley’s smile crossed his inner eye, then everything went dark.

  PART 2 - THE WHITE SPIDER

  THIRIT’S WISDOM

  You could rely on the Germans, even when it came to death.

  They’d phoned Dani Stricker immediately after Thirit, her turtle, had died. Dani wasn’t surprised. Her time in Germany was coming to an end. Without Harald, she felt more like a stranger every day, more than she’d felt for the past twenty years.

  She hurried through the rainy park to the Mannheim Botanical House.

  Harald had brought her here at the beginning. The heavy, humid air reminded Dani of the rainy season back home. She got homesick every time she entered the huge building, but she’d never told Harald. And they’d come back, as often as Harald had found the time, to admire the crocodiles in the entrance hall, and the Mongolian gerbils racing about in their enclosure, or they walked through the butterfly garden, before they drifted across to the reptiles who lived in several rows of glass tanks. Only the large turtles lived outside.

  Citizens could support one of these slow creatures and for her twentieth birthday, Harald had registered Dani as the godmother of Thirit, a tortoise from Southeast Asia.

  In the years that followed, Thirit had become the closest connection Dani had to home. Once she had mastered some German, she’d taken the tram to the park every month and had told Thirit about her childhood. Thirit had known all of Dani’s secrets, had listened to the young Cambodian woman for hours, as she had told her of her unfortunate sister Kaley. Thirit had had to listen to terrible stories, of murdered monks Dani had seen lying on the road in her village, of communes where people only worked and never ate, of friends’ parents who had been picked up for ‘training’ by Angkar one night and had never been seen again. Thirit had never commented or thrown in a critical remark. In Cambodia, a real friend never did that.

  The guard of the Botanical House, a young man in a muscle shirt, welcomed Dani. He was utterly taken by her, she noticed. Some western men were fascinated by Asian women and the park employee probably had no idea that she was ten years older than him. For a moment she felt something like longing, but the feeling was quickly swept away by thoughts of the coming weeks.

  “Very sorry, Frau Stricker, but Thirit died last night. These animals have a life expectancy of ten to fifteen years. Yours was almost twenty years old.”

  Dani was not sure how she was to react. The Germans expressed their commiserations like other people, but surely no one expected tears for a turtle.

  Dani did not have any.

  “Can I see Thirit one more time?”

  The young man shrugged his shoulders in embarrassment and looked at the floor.

  “Unfortunately one of my colleagues already disposed of the animal. We had hoped that you might want to sponsor another turtle…”

  Dani shook her head sadly.

  “I am leaving Mannheim in a few days. Thanks for informing me.”

  She left the man standing there, admiring her, and walked through the doors of the Botanical House.

  Her life in Mannheim was over.

  But where next?

  Her phone rang. She ran to a nearby closed café and stood under the awnings.

  “You asked me to call once more. I have found your sister. And the man you are looking for. Everything is going as planned. Do you have any further instructions?”

  Dani’s heart beat all the way into her skull.

  “My sister is alive? You have no doubt?”

  “Absolutely sure. There is no doubt. She lives in Kep, on the coast.”

  Desperate thoughts raced through her mind. She had sworn not to return to her country. She had tried to become a German for twenty years. But it only took a few seconds to change her mind.

  “I am coming to Cambodia.”

  For several seconds, there was no answer.

  Finally the man answered calmly, “Don’t come here. The situation is complicated and dangerous.”

  “I want my sister. Where is she?”

  “Perhaps you should wait a week or two. But I would really advise you not come.”

  Dani resented the man’s advice. She had to see her sister.

  “I am Khmer. I know my country is dangerous. You work for me and I will come to pick up my sister.”

  The man chuckled, “OK, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Send me your flight details by SMS to this number. Be patient. You hired me to get rid of the man. Has that changed?”

  “No.”

  Dani shook the ice-cold rain from her hair. The man had hung up.

  SHADOW PLAY

  Maier lay on a bunk covered with a straw mat. He couldn’t move anything but his eyes. It was almost dark. The room in which he lay smelled of old stone, of moss, o
f wild animals. A suite in a luxury hotel it wasn’t.

  Outside, from somewhere unimaginably far away, he could hear birdsong, perhaps a few insects. No people, no engine noises. Maier felt incredible and assumed his mental well-being to be the result of the drug they had given him. Or perhaps his euphoria had something to do with the fact that he was still alive. Wherever he was now, his life couldn’t be worth much to anyone but himself.

  Shadows moved around him. He tried to turn his head – to no avail. He was paralysed.

  “You see, Maier, it’s my mission to find out who you are. I will not let you go. You can no longer walk anyway. The general told me that you might want to invest in us, but I am convinced it is too late for that. Things have gone too far. Our relationship is not transparent and unnecessarily complicated. For this reason, I will take you back to 1976, metaphorically speaking, and I will interrogate you before you are disposed of. I am sure you understand. Tried and trusted methods.”

  Maier could almost see the man, not directly see him, but feel his presence. He spoke German.

  Maier was not scared. It was too late for that. It was probably too late for Müller-Overbeck and Kaley as well.

  He was alone again. Shadows brushed through space for long seconds. Time had slithered into a black hole. The back of Maier’s head hoped that they had given him Flunitrazepam, Ruppies, R2s, Ropys, Flunies or something similar. He couldn’t remember a thing, but his head was clear.

  Had he been permanently damaged? He wasn’t worth much if he remained paralysed. He tried to laugh. After a while, the mosquitoes attacked. Maier groaned; he was the perfect meal.

  Children’s voices. Serious children’s voices. No laughing. Light. Shadow. Orders. Maier managed to turn his head. His eyes were swollen, but he could see that he lay under an old mosquito net. Caught in the net of a huge spider. The room in which he lay was bathed in soft late afternoon sunlight, which flooded through an open, stone-framed window, like the blood of a freshly slaughtered buffalo. The walls were constructed from huge carved blocks of stone. He’d been taken to an old temple ruin of the Angkor Empire.