by Tom Vater
“You want me to take you to a good hotel? I can find a very cheap room for you.”
Dani, tired, shook her head.
“I have a reservation at Hotel Renakse. Please take me there. You know, the hotel in front of the Royal Palace.”
The driver gazed at her in the rearview mirror with empty eyes. She had not forgotten her mother tongue, but the man could tell that she did not belong here.
Dani’s mobile phone rang and she dug it out of her handbag.
“Rent a car, a four-wheel drive if possible, and come up to Siem Reap. Take a room and wait for my call. My last call.”
“Your last call?”
“Yes, in a few days it will all be done. When you have found your sister, leave the country immediately. No one will follow you beyond Cambodia’s borders.”
“So far you haven’t done anything for the money I paid you.”
The man laughed drily and said in English, “That’s how it is in this business. The clients want unmentionable things done and at the same time they demand information.”
He hung up. Dani Stricker wound down the window, leaned back and stared into the traffic, lost in her thoughts.
THE NEEDLE
He still lay on the bunk when he woke the next morning. The hallucinations of the previous day had receded. He could hear birdsong in the jungle. Maier still existed. He lay in a thousand-year-old temple in the dark heart of Cambodia, alive and mentally intact. But he was no longer in the mood for it. Today would be his last day. A knife, a bullet, an injection, he didn’t care which. It just had to be quick.
“Do we know each other?”
The White Spider. Maier recognised the man immediately, despite the fact that he had never seen him before.
Today he was wearing his human shape. The man was at least seventy, as tall as Maier, but twenty kilos or so lighter. He wore khaki jeans, a thin white cotton shirt and a tie. He stood, slightly bent, over the detective. The Omega on his wrist was probably accurate, to the second. He probably had leather wings under his shirt. His face hung back in the shadows, Maier could not make him out clearly.
“Who am I?”
“I have never seen you before. And now that I have seen you, I never want to see you again.”
The White Spider smiled thinly. He combed through his thin silver hair. His hands were huge, his fingers long and thin like hairless bones.
He stared down at his prisoner with narrow blue eyes that sparkled in a thin face. He looked like someone who enjoyed a good bottle of wine, who read the right books and who never sat in the sun. Culture had never saved anyone from themselves.
“I can have you killed straight away, without further discussion. Would you not like to cling to the hope that you can talk yourself out of this for a little while longer? Don’t you have a will to live, Maier? Are you even a real German?”
His voice was as thin as the fingers on his pale hand. A voice that came to Maier from far away. A voice that knew no resistance and no doubt.
“Why were you sent to Cambodia?”
Maier looked past the man now into the clear sky, towards freedom. Then he pulled back into the cell. Where he belonged. Outside, everything would be different.
The world he had left no longer existed. In his absence, everything had continued turning, without his input, his hopes and his fears. He embraced the darkness now. Here he would make his deal with the devil that stood in front of him now.
“I can see neither life nor hope in your eyes. I don’t really know why I am here. I don’t know what it is to be German. You are German. Me too. Still, someone should dig a ditch in a rice field and throw you in it, along with your friends. That’s where you belong. I belong to the world. Not just Germany, but the world.”
The man was silent.
“I assume my kidnapping and imprisonment is down to the paranoia of a few crazy holdovers of long-gone wars. You must think I have stumbled upon some dark secret from your past.”
Maier gasped for air. A voice in his head was trying to make him panic and chanted “Shitty cards, shitty cards” over and over.
Maier lay, the man stood. He seemed to contemplate something. Maier tried to relax. Just a little. He could not ask this man to continue torturing him. His capacity to absorb pain was exhausted. Freedom or death made preferable alternatives. Sometimes, the same was different, but mostly, it was just the same. Maier had thought to the end. Losing was better than hesitating.
The White Spider turned towards the window. For him too, there was no way out. The deal was on the table. Perpetrator and victim had united into an organism called brute. The interrogation had ended. All that was left was the clean-up.
Raksmei had appeared next to the White Spider. Maier had the feeling he’d met the girl somewhere before. But her eyes were the same as on the previous day. Pale blue and far away. A Khmer with blue eyes?
He couldn’t reach her. She held a syringe in her right hand.
“Tell me why you are here and I may let you live.”
Maier could detect a faint expression of hope in the old man’s face.
“You know why I am here. You have always known.”
He was alone with Raksmei. He could not move. The sun fell through the window the same way it had done the previous day.
A day without Maier.
It had all gone so quickly, this life.
The young woman knelt next to him, tied him off, found a vein and stuck the needle into his arm. Maier smiled and opened his eyes wide enough to let her look inside.
The world was full of shit and gasoline, baby.
HOMECOMING
Dani Stricker had tears in her eyes. She couldn’t help it after sitting in a crab shack in Kep all afternoon. She had discarded her assassin’s advice. Siem Reap could wait. Once, a long time ago, in another life, she had come here, with her sister. They had run away from the paddy fields for a day to see the ocean. Their parents had never allowed them to go so far from the village. Dani’s sister had been very young then, before the Khmer Rouge had changed their lives forever. With the few riel Dani had taken from the family purse, she had bought steamed crab for her sister.
Her cell phone rang.
“Where are you?” the feminine voice with the strong barang accent enquired without a word of greeting.
“At home. I have come home. I am in Kep.”
She hoped that she didn’t sound tearful. She could still taste the lemon sauce which came with the crab on her lips. The man said nothing for a moment.
“You are an idiot,” he said finally, “I told you not to come back to Cambodia. I told you I had found your sister. Now you are in Kep and in danger and so is she. The man you want dead is not dead yet.”
She didn’t like the tone of the man’s voice. She was paying him well. Before she could protest, he carried on, “If you have transport, leave immediately. Go back to Phnom Penh and wait for me to get in touch. And I mean immediately. I will call you back when it is safe for you to have a beach holiday. You are jeopardising your sister’s life.”
The line went dead. Dani was furious. Who did he think he was? Cambodia was her country. No one could be of any danger to her here. No one was even likely to recognise her. She ordered a pot of green tea. She could still return to the capital tomorrow. The man was clearly paranoid. She so missed her sister.
Dani watched the mellow surf lapping against the rocks below the shack. She heard steps approaching beside her and looked up expecting the waitress and her tea. A girl with short hair, dressed in black pyjamas approached quickly and grabbed her roughly by the hair. She jerked back in surprise, but it was too late. The girl plunged a needle into Dani Stricker’s throat and pushed the plunger.
BILGE WATER AND MEKONG WHISKEY
The water slapped against the side of the wooden boat. The smell of rotten fish was overwhelming. Had Maier had more room to manoeuvre, he would have stuffed bits of cloth or pieces of wood into his nostrils, but he lay less than twenty centime
tres below the boat’s deck in bilge water. He was trapped.
He’d managed to vomit twice without suffocating or being discovered. Did he want to be discovered?
He could see across the lake through a small hole in the side of the boat. Phnom Krom, the mountain at the western end of the Tonlé Sap, bopped up and down a few kilometres away. Grasses and drifting plastic rubbish floated close by.
The boat was being loaded. Heavy boxes packed with fish crashed onto the deck, which pressed down onto Maier. The wooden boards above his head were bending closer and closer. He wanted to scream, but most of all, he wanted to know more.
Why was he still alive? Had the young woman helped him escape? What was he doing under the deck of a fishing boat? How long had he been unconscious?
A loud, authoritarian voice barked an order. The men who were loading the boat stopped in their toil.
Maier could detect uniforms in the shallow water outside, moving towards the boat. Now he saw one of the men who’d been loading the fish, a typical Khmer fisherman, skinny and brawny, his back, bent from years of hard labour, burnt almost black by the sun. A policeman grabbed the man by the throat and screamed at him. Everywhere Maier could see now, uniforms were closing in. If Cambodian policemen stalked around in dirty water, up to their hips in the sauce, holding their Kalashnikovs above their heads, their uniforms muddy, they had to be under great pressure to produce results. Or they’d been promised a fat reward. They were looking for him.
But who knew that he lay under the planks of a boat on the Tonlé Sap? He barely knew himself. Someone had taken him from the temple to the lake shore and loaded him onto the boat. As much as he tried to stretch, he could not see or hear the young woman who had executed him with her syringe.
The commanding officer now stood directly in front of Maier’s spy-hole and scratched his balls. Two of the officer’s minions crashed about above Maier and began to bang on the wooden deck. Through the narrow gaps between the planks he could see that the men were trying to figure out how solid the deck was. Sweat and frustration dripped down on him.
A few minutes later they gave up and began to wade towards the next boat. The policeman in front of Maier growled, spat into the dirty water and disappeared.
The boat’s engine coughed into life. The screw hit the water and the vessel began to move. Maier could see Cambodia pass through the tiny hole by the side of his head. Unnoticed, he slid through the floating village of Chong Neas, beneath Phnom Krom. An hour later, the boat passed the flooded forests of Kompong Phluk, whose fishermen lived in huts constructed on high poles, which reached far out into the water. But the boat didn’t stop. Maier could hear the sound of a transistor radio from afar, a girl singing a mournful tune across the water, before sinking back into the rhythm of the engine and the rush of the water.
In the afternoon, the mosquitoes devoured Maier. He let himself go. What else could he do? He was sure the men on the boat did not know of their stowaway. He was a ghost and he tried to live the moment. After the days in the temple cell, he felt slightly euphoric, despite the insects, the vomit, the water, and his present imprisonment.
As evening came, they reached the mouth of the Stung Sangkar River. Every now and then he saw faint lights on the shore, lined by poor fishing communities. Then the night swallowed the land and only the gurgling water reminded Maier that he was still alive.
He woke up with a start. He was cold. The boat had stopped at a pier, probably in the early hours of the morning. A few weak bulbs flickered above an embankment. He could hear drunken voices.
The boat must have reached Battambang, the largest town on the Stung Sangkar. He began to shake. The sun would soon be up. Battambang had hotels and telephones. He would ring Carissa. His lover was the only person he could trust. But first he had to get out of his water taxi.
The detective lifted his bite-covered arms and pushed hard against the wooden planks above him. The wood bent a little, but there was no moving it. They had laid him below deck and then nailed everything shut. He would freeze to death before sunrise. He had not drunk or eaten anything for at least sixteen hours.
Suddenly he heard steps on the pier above him.
“Maier?”
A woman’s voice, quiet and self confident. Khmer.
Maier groaned, “Yes?”
“I will get you out, but it will take some time. I don’t want to make a noise. Everybody think you dead.”
“I do too,” he answered weakly.
BATTAMBANG
After a couple of days, Maier began to walk. But he couldn’t run from himself. He slept under a net in a neat, small room located in an unremarkable family home on the edge of town, a bottle of water under his arm.
Every few hours, he woke, bathed in sweat, listening to the panic recede, and cursed the world. He hadn’t seen Raksmei since his rescue. Twice a day, the family with whom he stayed invited him to eat. Rice and prahok. Maier did not eat much. The boys who lived in the house tried to animate him to play football, but he wouldn’t leave the safety of the net.
A few days later, she suddenly stood in his room, a pile of newspapers under her arm. Jeans, white cotton shirt, leather sandals. She had parted the short hair with a garish plastic hair clip. He noticed small golden rings in her ears. She hadn’t worn those in the temple.
“I have only bad news for you, Maier.”
Maier looked at her silently.
Raksmei appeared to be two people at the same time, changing and shifting from one moment to another. The blue eyes were confusing. There couldn’t be many children her age who were half-Khmer and half-barang. To Maier, Raksmei seemed to be both self-confident European woman and traditional Cambodian girl from the countryside. The impression was disorientating. Carissa had been right, the girl was special. She reminded Maier of someone. He hoped that his brain was only temporarily muddled by the drugs they had given him. The drugs she had given him.
“Maybe you read article in Phnom Penh Post first.”
She left a phone and a bottle of Mekong Whiskey and disappeared. Maier didn’t feel like bad news.
CAMBODIAN WITH GERMAN PASSPORT KILLED IN KAMPOT
Daniela Stricker, a Cambodian carrying a German passport, was found dead in her hotel room in Kampot. A 42-year old Canadian was arrested near the Green Apsara Guest House while trying to flee on a motorcycle and has made a full confession. The murder weapon, a golf club, was found at the crime scene.
The police in Kampot are looking for a 45-year-old German real estate speculator. Police investigations suggest the man left Kampot a day before the crime took place. It is not clear whether the man is a suspect. A week ago, Sambat Chuon, an employee of Hope-Child, a Kampot based NGO, was registered as missing. The local police dismissed any possibility that the disappearance and the murder of the German national could be connected. According to a German Embassy spokesman speaking on condition of anonymity, Mrs Stricker was from the town of Mannheim and had been recently widowed. Suicide has been ruled out.
A passport photo accompanied the brief article. The woman’s face was familiar. After staring at the image for a while, he knew. This had to be Kaley’s sister. Shit. And the German speculator? Maier didn’t have to speculate all that much – he was being set up. He still held the paper in his hand when the young woman returned two hours later.
“Do you see my brother die?”
“No.”
“But you are diving near where my brother die, right?”
“Your brother was sunk with stones around his feet. When my dive partner and I reached him, he was already dead and there was nothing we could do for him. The water was full of sharks. I am sorry.”
“I sure it all the same story.”
Maier swallowed, “Me too.”
“You are journalist?”
“No.”
She had saved his life. He had to tell her the truth. There was no one else in Cambodia who’d listen to him.
“I am a private detective. I am he
re to look out for a young German man in Kep. I was hired by his mother. It’s Rolf, the owner of Reef Pirate Divers.”
Raksmei watched him for a while.
“He disappear. I hear he have problem with partner and go to Phnom Penh to sell business.”
She hesitated for a moment.
“You not here to find out what happen in Kep and Bokor and why somebody kill my brother and this lady?”
“No, I did not come for this reason. But we both think all this is connected and I am sure my client is up to his neck in trouble.”
Raksmei nodded sadly.
“Raksmei, why did you save my life? And what were you doing in that temple with those people?”
“I look for murder of my brother. I want to know what happen to all the children who disappear from Kampot in last two years.”
“And?”
“The people who stay in old Khmer temple near Siem Reap, they trade with property on the coast. From Koh Kong to Sihanoukville and to Kep. But I think this is front for something different. Do you know Kangaok Meas Project?”
“The old man in the temple asked me the same question. A woman in Kep told me a story about Kangaok Meas, an old Cambodian story.”
“The story of golden peacock and Kaley?”
“Yes.”
“Kaley is Khmer Rouge. She with Tep, old Khmer Rouge General, who use her to get barang business partner. Maybe she mad. I not know her much.”
“She asked me to find her sister. I think the German woman killed is her sister. I am pretty sure.”
Raksmei looked at Maier doubtfully.
“I think Tep kill her family long time ago. He call her Kaley. She Tep slave, I think.”
“That is possible, but it is too simple, Raksmei. All the men who slept with her in Kep allegedly fall under a curse. They say if it rains after a man has spent a night with Kaley, he will die a violent, agonising death. All the locals and westerners in Kep believe this.”