by Tom Vater
“Old story from old Cambodia. Do you believe in ghosts, Maier?”
Maier hesitated to answer. In this country one lost touch with reality even quicker than one’s life. “Since I lay on that bunk in the temple, I believe in anything. Perhaps the horrors of the past left something here in Cambodia. So many unimaginable crimes have been committed in this country. It’s hard to see how things could be as they were before. Some of the horror sticks.”
“I never see ghost, Maier. But the Khmer, they live with ghost every day. But my brother and this lady not kill by ghost.”
“No.”
Maier read the article once more.
“I will go and visit the man who is in jail in Kampot. The man accused of Dani Stricker’s murder.”
“Maier, the Cambodian government say you missing. Everybody looking for you. Tep know many police. He not stop until he find you, dead or alive.”
“And you too.”
“Yes, me too. You want to know why I save you? Alone I can do nothing. I save you because I think you crazy to come to Cambodia to solve crime. Maybe you so crazy you help me. I want to know what happen with my brother and what happen in the temple with the young girls.”
Raksmei sat down on the cool tiled floor and appeared to be ordering her thoughts.
“I run orphanage in Kampot. A few month ago, my brother find out that some of the girl we report missing are on Bokor mountain. He go up there one time, but he not tell me what he see. Tep want to find the money to buy casino and make all new. I think this connected to Kangaok Meas Project.”
“Could I make an international phone call?”
“Good to hear from you, Maier,” Sundermann said. “We were getting a bit worried. Two days ago, Frau Müller-Overbeck paid us a visit. She was very upset when she told us that her son had disappeared. I don’t want any details now, but I assume you are on his trail.”
“Her son is in Phnom Penh. He is trying to sell his business. That’s all I can say right now.”
“She will pay a fat bonus if you bring him back to Hamburg.”
“Dead or alive?”
“It’s that serious, Maier?”
“The people who are close to this young man are dying like flies. He is deeply involved in a crooked real estate deal with occult overtones.”
“That sounds like Cambodia, Maier.”
“And the police are looking for me at this point. No one knows why I am here, though, or who I really am, so there’s no need to worry. I need another week to solve the case and get the young man out of here.”
“Don’t become a fly, Maier. You’re one of the best. If it gets too hairy, then slink across the border into Thailand and we will send Altwasser as a replacement. I will pass your news on to Frau Müller-Overbeck. Don’t bother with the report. It’s all under control this end.”
“It is already very hairy. I will be in touch.”
“Alive, please, Maier. If he dies, there will be a lot of trouble and no bonus.”
Sundermann wasn’t a bad boss. Maier had all the freedom he wanted to do his research. He was expected to work independently and discreetly. And he was expected to produce results.
“I have one week left, then I need to take the young man back to Germany,” Maier said.
“You go to Phnom Penh and find this man.”
“He refuses to leave Cambodia without his girl.”
“Girl?”
“Kaley, the girl in the story of the Kangaok Meas.”
Raksmei slowly shook her head.
“Not possible. I think she belong to General Tep. No one can help. My NGO cannot help. She too old.”
Kaley’s desperate request to find her sister had sounded genuine. But Maier was beginning to think that the mysterious beauty was either mad or did indeed work for the general.
“Somehow Kaley is at the centre of all this though. I saw her in the temple.”
Raksmei shook her head.
“Not possible, Maier. Kaley is in Kep.”
“She sat next to me on my bunk and asked me where her sister was.”
“I think you dream, Maier.”
“And the White Spider? The old German?”
Raksmei took her time to answer.
“A barang who speak Khmer and Vietnamese. Speak very well. A friend of General Tep. He here long time. He live and speak like Asian man. No like Khmer Rouge man. But maybe he here in Khmer Rouge time. I don’t know.”
“Are you scared of this man?”
“I don’t know. He always friendly to me. But everyone scare the White Spider. Everyone shaking when he come into the room. He not like people speak bad with him, disagree with him. He never shout. Always speak very quiet.”
“Do you think Tep is scared of the man?”
Raksmei shook her head.
“Tep is old friend. They like brother and brother. I never see Khmer and barang good friend like this. But all the girl in the temple very fear from him.”
“How many girls live in the temple? Do you know?”
“Maybe twenty. They come and go in big black car. They all look and talk same same.”
Raksmei stared into empty space, lost in thought.
‘Did the Khmer Rouge not manipulate children to get them to brand their own parents as traitors or anti-communists?”
“I know, Maier. They do that before, long time before. Young Khmer people like me not know much about Khmer Rouge time. My friend in Kampot, they don’t know who is Pol Pot. We not want to remember and the parents not want to talk about these times. But I know, the soldiers who come to Phnom Penh in 1975, many of the children, young boys and girls.”
“Do you know who your parents are?”
Again Raksmei took her time to answer.
“No. Somebody tell me my father is barang. My brother, he say same. Papa is barang. But maybe mama is barang. I don’t know. I think I am born in 1980.”
“At that time, there were not many barang in Cambodia?”
Raksmei nodded.
“No barang. The Khmer Rouge throw out all the foreigner or kill them. But maybe there is some exception.”
Maier realised he was hurting the girl with his questions and changed the subject.
“How did you get into the temple?”
“I know General Tep long time, since I am little girl. He help me and my brother. We grow up with old lady in Kampot. I call her aunty, but she not aunty. She die eight years before. After that I live with my brother in her old house. Tep, he give money and food. I remember him long time.”
“I had not imagined Tep to be a generous man.”
Raksmei laughed, but Maier could sense that the girl was angry.
“One time he try to chat me up. When I start Hope-Child he give some money. After my brother gone, I give up NGO and offer to Tep I can work for him. He accept.”
“And why does he tell you about his dark secrets?”
“In Cambodia, people like this, man like this. They not think that a woman they know long time can make problem for them.”
Maier laughed drily.
“That’s not a Cambodia phenomenon. It’s like that everywhere.”
But Maier still had doubts. A large piece of the puzzle was still missing.
“I have to go to Kampot.”
Raksmei brushed her short hair across her forehead and smiled. She pulled a small wad of dollar bills and his passport from her pocket.
“I find in your room in the temple. Tonight I take you to Phnom Penh. From there you go alone.”
After she’d left, Maier opened the bottle of whiskey.
FREEZER
Maier pressed ten dollars into the hand of the man on duty. The lucky recipient pulled a stretcher from the ice box and disappeared. The mortuary in Calmette, Phnom Penh’s barely functioning government hospital, was silent, dirty and cold. The hospital was a place to die in. A last way-station. The doctors bargained hard for every dollar. The medical equipment, such as it was, did not work and cockroaches ru
led the grey building with impunity, day and night. During the UNTAC days, the hospital had gained the moniker “Calamity”. Patients and their families lay on mats in the corridors. In the yard, the sick slept under mosquito nets on the bare ground. Nurses demanded hard cash for every shot of morphine. No one who was admitted was expected to recover, but Calmette was the best hospital in the country. The place where they stored foreign corpses. Maier hesitated for a second before he pulled the cloth back.
The journey from Battambang to the capital had been wonderful. He travelled through Raksmei’s country, a country whose stories he had absorbed for many years, and had written about in his articles. He felt very much alive. Raksmei had warned him that the roads and trains between Battambang and Phnom Penh would be watched. Maier preferred to remain dead for now. This had called for a journey on the Funny Train.
The French had brought the railroads to Cambodia, but since the end of the war, only one train a day commuted between the capital and Battambang and, after decades of neglect, the tracks were in pitiful condition. The three-hundred-kilometre journey took around twenty hours. Usually the train was so packed that every available bit of roof space of the gutted and rusty carriages was occupied.
Maier had suffered through the trip in the Nineties, during the UNTAC presence in Cambodia. In those days, the journey had been free for passengers prepared to ride in the first two carriages. This hadn’t been a charitable gesture by the railway authorities. The front of the train had been regularly blown up by landmines that Khmer Rouge units had dropped onto the tracks during the night.
As the roads around Battambang were unnavigable during the rainy season and virtually useless the rest of the year, local people constructed their own trains – from old tractor axles, water pumps and a home-made wooden platform – the Funny Trains.
These unlikely and unsafe vehicles transported up to ten passengers at a time and moved down the tracks significantly faster than the regular train. When two Funny Trains met, one could be quickly dismantled, deposited next to the rails, until the tracks were free once more.
The young man who operated the unusual vehicle didn’t say a word, which was fine with Maier. The detective spent the day in silence, a water bottle in his hand, dressed in a torn shirt and the pants of a Cambodian farmer, a krama around his head. He tried to process the events of the previous days. He didn’t do too well. His thoughts turned back to his mission again and again. He knew Kaley’s sister had been killed, but he had no idea why. This German Khmer had not seen her sister for years, decades even. He had to see for himself. He thought of Hort. Right now, the necessity of knowing felt like a yoke around his neck.
Village children ran along with them, waving and screaming at the top of their lungs, then Maier was left to his thoughts again. The driver stopped in Pursat and bought a bag of fried frogs. All that was left of the French-era train station was a single wall, against which the male passengers of passing trains urinated. Just like Battambang.
Maier ate nothing.
The Funny Train reached Phnom Penh Airport after dark. Maier jumped off, paid the driver and took a taxi into town. Every bone in his body seemed to have moved during the bumpy ride. He rented a cheap room in a guest house at Boeung Kok where he’d left money and a couple of phones. Then he waited for dawn.
Maier had seen, photographed and examined many corpses. Death made the human body unfamiliar. Whatever had made the person who’d left the body behind was no longer there.
There’s wasn’t much left of her head. Whoever had swung the golf club had wanted not just to kill. Daniela Stricker’s face was totally disfigured. The lower jaw was missing. The back of her skull had also been bashed in. As if the murderer had wanted to obscure the identity of his victim.
After a while, he forced himself to search her torn clothes.
Her hands and arms were punctured by small round holes, which had become infected. She had been tortured, most likely by the three little girls. He turned the woman around. He could see livor mortis on her hip and along her back. The discolouring of her skin suggested she’d been moved a few hours after her death. He took another close look at her head. No doubt about it, Ms Stricker had been tortured, shot, moved from the scene of the crime, and then been beaten with a golf club. The police had covered up the true murder.
Maier would have to travel to Kampot to talk to the man in jail there. He heard voices approaching the door of the mortuary. The detective pushed the dead woman back into her cooling slot.
The employee burst in and gesticulated wildly. Maier didn’t lose a second, pressed another twenty dollars in the man’s hand and followed him through the only door, up a set of stairs and into a small office. Seconds later he saw the boy, Tep’s son, his baseball cap turned backwards as usual, pass the door, followed by three young girls. The girls wore jeans and T-shirts today. They wore their hair short and their expressions left no doubt that they’d come from the temple Maier had been held at. The boy carried a revolver.
The hospital employee behind Maier shook like a leaf and started mumbling to himself. The small room they were in had one window. Maier told the man to close the window behind him, and escaped into the bright morning sun.
Who had known that he’d be at Calmette Hospital today? Was the appearance of the boy and his three angels a coincidence or had he been betrayed?
The detective tied his krama around his head and marched, his head bowed, through the entrance gate of the hospital and disappeared in the crowds on Monivong Boulevard.
ROLF
The German’s handsome looks had all but faded. Maier almost didn’t recognise the young coffee heir, who lay sprawled in an armchair in the back of Restaurant Edelweiß. Rolf Müller-Overbeck didn’t react as Maier threw himself onto a sofa opposite and pulled off his krama.
“Hello, Rolf.”
“Hello, Maier. Thought you’d been fed to the fish in front of Koh Tonsay by now. Almost feel like I’m meeting an old friend, after not seeing him for many years. Time flies.”
The young German dropped the filter of a burnt-out cigarette into an overflowing ashtray and stared blankly at Maier. His clothes were dirty. His shirt was ripped across his right shoulder. He looked almost as desperate as the legless beggars who moved up and down Sisowath Quay.
“You don’t seem to be particularly happy about my survival.”
Rolf shrugged.
“It’s all over, Maier. My business has been stolen and my woman has disappeared, probably kidnapped, probably not to be saved. Your appearance doesn’t make much difference in the larger scheme of things.”
“Perhaps I can help you.”
The younger man laughed bitterly. “Help me? Everybody wants to help me. Help me to buy land, help me to start a business, an honest business, help to cheat the locals, to pull them across the table and to rape them. I don’t know why you turned up in Kep, but since you did, things have been going downhill. And now you want to help me?”
“What happened?”
Rolf pulled another cigarette from his crumpled shirt and began fiddling with a cheap plastic lighter.
“Why should I tell you anything? You make it all worse.”
“After what you have just told me, it cannot get much worse. I can assure you that I have nothing to do with the problems in Kep.”
Maier knew that he didn’t sound very convincing. Rolf said nothing.
A smiling waitress arrived with two cans of beer.
“Vodka orange,” Maier ordered and handed one of the cans back to the young woman.
“Last week we found out that the land documents most of the barang in Kep hold are fakes. Tep cheated us and then offered generously to transfer our investments to the casino. Otherwise it would all be gone and we could leave Kep. And if that was not acceptable, the general’s little killer girls would chase us away. As expected, my partner Pete signed the new contract with Tep. Without asking me.”
“And where is Kaley?”
“Disa
ppeared. Inspector Viengsra came and took her. After I refused to invest in the casino, I received a letter. I found it under my door at the dive shop office.”
The younger German pulled a piece of paper from his breast pocket.
Maier scanned the page, which had been torn from a child’s exercise book. If Rolf wanted to see Kaley again, it read in broken English, he’d have to pay fifty thousand US dollars. The deadline for the drop had already passed.
“I don’t have fifty thousand US dollars. Anyway, this doesn't mean anything. Who knows what would have happened if I’d paid.”
Maier looked into Rolf’s eyes. The coffee heir was all the way down. The moment had come to push forward, directly into his heart.
“What happened to Kaley’s daughter?”
Rolf brushed the long hair from his gaunt face and looked at Maier with a hostile expression.
“You’re telling me that you have nothing to do with what’s going on in Kep and you ask me so personal a question?”
“Why is the question personal?”
“Because I killed Poch, Kaley’s daughter.”
Maier went for a mild smile. He knew he’d driven Rolf into a corner, exactly where he wanted him. The pressure to confess, to communicate, to share his suffering had to be overwhelming.
“You don’t look like someone who kills small children. What happened?”
“Yes, I’m a child killer and everyone in Kep knew that and knows that and they keep their mouths shut because Tep makes them. I am the child killer of Kep. That’s the secret of our little community.”
Maier said nothing. He was waiting for more.
“I was driving our jeep between Kampot and Kep. Pete sat next to me. Suddenly, a black shadow ran across the road and it went bang.”
The young German finished his beer and waved the can in the direction of the waitress.
“We stopped. A small girl was lying in front of the car in the middle of the road. She was alive for a few more minutes, but she didn’t say anything. Just this little bundle of suffering and death. Her name was Poch. She was Kaley’s daughter.”