by Sanchez, Bob
Sam offered a wide smile. Souvann looked up, but didn’t look glad to see him.
“Did your doctor allow you to go back to work so soon, Mister Tip?” Sam put down the milk and shook Souvann’s hand, which had the slippery feel of fish scales.
“My doctor won’t tend the fish while I heal.”
“Aren’t you going to tell me who shot you?”
“I don’t know who shot me.” Souvann looked at the fish; he had yet to look directly at Sam. Sam’s eyes drifted to a codfish, which returned a dead stare. “When I find out,” Souvann said, “I’ll deal with him myself.”
“What do you mean?” A .38-caliber pistol lay on the floor, partially hidden by the stool Souvann was sitting on, within easy reach of his good hand. It wasn’t the gun that had shot Viseth; that was a .22.
“I don’t trust the police,” Souvann said. “They’re no better than the criminals they’re supposed to protect us from. What are you doing in a job like that?”
Sam ignored the question. “We’ll do our best to protect you if you’ll let us. Do you know Bin Chea, the man who was killed a few days ago?”
“You’re standing there holding a gallon of milk and asking a lot of questions. Meanwhile, your family goes hungry, and I don’t get any work done.”
“Mister Tip, do you have a carry permit for that gun?”
Souvann shrugged with his good shoulder. “What do I need one for?”
“Massachusetts has a strict gun law. If you’re caught without a permit, you will spend a year in jail.”
“So you just caught me. I’m guilty of defending myself without permission. At least in jail I won’t see any Battboys.”
“Don’t count on that, Mister Tip. Meanwhile, I’m not going to arrest you. Give me the pistol, and I’ll return it when you get a permit. Come by the station in the morning. I’ll help you apply.”
Souvann turned over the weapon, grip first. “What do I owe you for not arresting me?”
“I want to know about Bin Chea. What do you know about the man?”
“I know a lot of people.”
“These people who attacked you might be the same people who attacked Bin Chea.”
“Then I forgive them.”
“Why are you angry with Chea?”
“I never said I knew him.”
“You don’t know him, but you’re glad he’s dead.”
“I never said--”
“You said more than you think. How do you know him?”
Souvann sighed. “We met at Site 2 in Thailand. He helped me start this business. I owe him three thousand dollars, and he’s been angry with me because I can’t repay him yet. My business is slow. If I paid him back right now, my daughter couldn’t go to school in the fall. As it is, I can’t afford health insurance for my family.”
“Did he ever threaten you?”
“No, never. He was always polite but insistent. Maybe he was my health insurance.”
“Why are you so angry at him?”
“Because in the last month, four of my tires have been slashed. Because I get calls in the middle of the night, one, two in the morning, and no one is there. Because I just had to replace my plate-glass window. And because I was robbed and shot. Those things never used to happen. And now I know what a shit he is. I’ve heard the stories people tell. They say that in Cambodia he was always polite to his victims before he bashed their skulls.”
Sam’s stomach tightened. “Do you have any reason to believe those rumors?”
“Everybody kept saying it. All those people can’t be wrong. To think that I trusted him.”
And now you think you don’t have to pay him back. “Did Chea know the person who attacked you?”
“There’s a chance. I heard Chea say the Battboys are scum. Follow a Battboy and you have to scrape your shoes, he said. But he didn’t say he would never let a Battboy follow him.”
“Does he have relatives in the city?”
“He has a son in his own house. In the second-floor apartment.”
Sam buried his surprise. The pieces were falling into place. “I met him. Who else lives in that apartment?”
“His wife, their son, and his mother-in-law.”
Nawath Lac and his wife had never said anything about losing Nawath’s father. How did she react? Shocked, but not grieved. They implied that he was only their landlord and not the head of the family. Had they held back? Was Chea alive, and had they known it when he spoke to them?
“When did you last speak with Chea?”
“The last time he asked for payment. About a week before I was robbed.”
Sam brought the pistol to the station. When he got home, Julie lay on the couch on her right side, her back to the door. The apartment smelled like roast chicken, which still sat on the kitchen table.
“You were gone for over an hour, Sam,” she said. “Trish had her supper and went to bed.”
“Can I get you something to eat?”
“Uh-uh. Not hungry.”
“Me either. Let’s just go to bed.”
She made a half-hearted effort to push him away, then yielded as he gently placed her arm around his shoulder. They walked together into the bedroom, and he eased her onto the bed.
“I can’t take this anymore, Sam.” Her voice sounded like sandpaper, and her eyes were red and moist. “When I married you, I never bargained for being your stand-in at a shooting gallery.”
Sam felt as though he’d been lashed in the face with the thorns from Julie’s roses. “I’m very sorry you were caught in the middle of this,” he said.
“Oh, it isn’t your fault. You know that. But I’ve always worried about you, and now I worry about our whole family.”
“Do you want me to quit the force?”
Her voice softened a notch, and her eyes glinted in the overhead light. “I know that’s not what you want--”
“I don’t have another job.”
“I make enough to pay the rent while you look. This isn’t the kind of life I want us to have.”
“You’re a teacher, and it’s what you like. I’m a detective, and it’s what I like.”
“Do you know the difference, though? Do you? The difference is that my teaching didn’t get your ass nearly shot off.” She covered her face with her hands.
Sam’s fingertips glided across her hands and paused at the pair of rings she wore, the engagement ring with a small diamond, and the gold wedding band that had been his mother’s.
“Do you really like your work?” she finally asked.
“I don’t have to like it, I just have to do it. Dealing with Wilkins is a problem for me. Callahan says that Wilkins wants me to fail.”
“Is he right?”
“Cal says a lot of things that don’t make sense, but this does. And I’m afraid I’m taking this case personally.”
Julie looked at him with a curious expression.
“I finally saw Bin Chea’s picture, and I recognized him from Cambodia.”
“He was an old acquaintance?”
“Some people said he was a teacher before the war. Mathematics or something. Exactly the type Pol Pot tried to eliminate. Whatever he had been, he managed to hide his past and join the communists. When I knew him, he ran the camp where I worked. My sister was already dead; my mother had just disappeared. And my father--”
Sam took a deep breath, and Julie gripped his hands. How was life ever possible without her?
He lay next to her warmth, his mind drifting like skeleton-ribbed clouds across his past. The boat floats idly on Tonle Sap, and his uncle pushes a pole into the shallow water. The skinny legs of a twelve-year-old splash alongside the raft and disturb the mirrored surface that reflects the herons overhead. Thunder comes out of the cloudless sky from miles to the east, and white streaks mark the paths of airplanes, the sun glinting off their bodies.
Please forgive your father’s harsh words, Uncle says. Your father feels a great deal of pressure, trouble he cannot talk about. Samb
ath wonders if it has anything to do with the bombs that pound the other side of the Mekong River.
“I never told you how he died,” Sam said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was 1978.
Little Mountain was a wart on the face of the landscape, a bump on the road to hell. Comrade Bin stood in the ashes on the summit, a snake still sizzling in the embers underneath his boot. It had all been very efficient: the worker who poured the gasoline lay in the smoky blackness next to a charred can.
He was one less person eating the camp’s precious food.
However, the comrade who had thrown the torch was the luckiest boy alive. Comrade Sambath escaped with no more than singed hair, wet trousers, and a scarred soul. That was good; Sambath was a steady worker who never stumbled or fell ill.
With the trees scorched from the hilltop, Comrade Bin finally had a clear view for at least five kilometers in every direction. No one could surprise him now.
On the west side of Little Mountain lay the camp: a stucco headquarters building, a lake, a soccer field, a mango orchard. On the east and south sides lay forest where workers could find firewood, or if they strayed too far, land mines.
On the north side lay the highway that stretched eastward into the heart of Cambodia. A single truck sputtered toward the camp, trailing a cloud of red dust. Comrade Bin walked back to the camp to meet the truck.
The soldiers swarmed like ants around the truck and pulled the criminals to the ground. A hundred teenage boys swept the courtyard, gathered mangoes from the grove on the far side of the pond, dug the pits, carted away the bodies, and filled the pits. But they could not carry away the stench of death from the fouled lake.
Sambath had been sweeping the courtyard when the truck pulled in. The gray plume of smoke had disappeared, but the smell drifted toward the courtyard as though pulled along by Comrade Bin. Bin had disappeared briefly into the cover of trees halfway down the hill.
Shame corroded Sambath’s spirit like battery acid. “Go ahead and throw it,” Comrade Bin had called from the bottom of the hill. “No one else is up there anymore.” So that morning Sambath had thrown the torch, and the hilltop had gone up in flames with a whump and a scream.
As prisoners tumbled off the truck, Sambath scanned every bruised face, the way he had done with every fresh supply of victims for months. With luck, he would never see his father here at Little Mountain. With luck, Father had slipped into the forest and headed for Thailand on the western border.
With luck, Sambath’s eyes deceived him now.
The prisoner straightened his bearing, ready to accept his fate with dignity. He looked toward Sambath; their gazes locked for a moment, absorbed in their fears for each other. What could they make of their mutual discovery in the moments before the prisoner’s execution?
And what had caught the attention of Comrade Bin’s best worker? Sambath never stopped working without a compelling reason. Here perhaps was a diversion to lift Comrade Bin from his boredom.
“I see you have picked someone out of the crowd.” Comrade Bin spoke barely above a whisper, but every muscle tensed in Sambath’s body. Bin crooked a finger at the prisoner, who approached slowly. A round-faced soldier followed with his AK-47 unslung.
“Ah, I see,” said Bin. “He has your walk. And look, Comrade. He has the same mouth, the same coffee-brown eyes. He’s a solid-looking man, just like you.”
Sambath gulped. “He would be an excellent worker.”
“I will decide that. Is he your father?”
“He’s not my son,” the prisoner said.
“No, he was my neighbor,” Sambath said.
Comrade Bin looked at the prisoner’s features carefully, then turned to Sambath. “A neighbor who slept with your mother, perhaps. Where did you grow up?”
Sambath hesitated; the prisoner mouthed the word “Poipet.”
“I grew up in Poipet,” Sambath said.
“That’s where the prisoner claims he’s from,” the soldier said. “But he’s a police chief from Battambang.”
“You know what Angka thinks of liars, Comrade Sambath. If you admit the truth, I will let your father join your work group.” Comrade Bin smiled, his eyes glinting with compassion, honesty, and understanding.
His tongue darted like a snake’s.
What could Sambath do? Deny Father’s identity and condemn him to certain death? Or admit it and possibly condemn them both?
“He--he is my father. He would be an excellent--”
“You are not my son,” the prisoner said. “You are not my son.”
“You have nothing to fear from honesty,” Comrade Bin said. “But I’m surprised that you can’t agree on this. I think I know how to find out the truth.”
That evening, the work camp settled into shadows beneath treetops that glowed like golden embers from the sun’s dying flame. Father hung on a pipe cross made of plumbing ripped from the stucco building. Beneath his feet, the kindling waited for a spark. For a moment, the two were alone.
“Father,” Sambath pleaded. “The others are dead. Admit who you are. Maybe Comrade Bin will keep his word.”
“He already knows who I am,” Father said. “He wants to know about you. Here they come.”
“Yes, here we come.” Comrade Bin held up a sheaf of dry grass while a nameless aide toyed with a cigarette lighter. “Comrade Sambath, you turned that boy to charcoal on the hill this morning. This will be nothing different: take a life and save your own.”
“No! He’s my father!”
“He is a criminal. If you are his son, then you are a criminal too.”
The aide flicked the lighter; the end of the straw burst into yellow flame. Comrade Bin extended the torch to Sambath.
“No!”
“No is a dangerous word, Comrade.”
Father spoke softly. “I wish to make a confession.”
Comrade Bin stepped closer, the light flickering across his face. He loved to hear confessions.
“You don’t have the courage to light it yourself,” Father said, and he spit in Comrade Bin’s eye.
Bin stood still for a moment, then thrust the torch into the kindling. He wiped the spittle from his face and stared at the flames, willing them to grow. Tongues from hell licked at the soles of Father’s feet, and he sucked in a deep breath.
Sambath choked back a scream.
Red and yellow light flickered across Comrade Bin’s face. “You will stay here and watch Comrade Father die,” he told Sambath, “however long it takes.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“I buried him, Julie.” Sam’s voice caught briefly. “I buried my father. When I came to America, I tried to shut the past out completely. I had never expected justice for his death, but it made me sick having to look for Bin Chea’s killer.
“Meanwhile, the whole case file has disappeared. Wilkins said the FBI identified the prints on the shooting victim as Bin Chea’s. When I saw Chea’s picture, I was only too anxious for him to burn in hell.”
“We need a few days’ vacation, Sam. You have two weeks coming. Let’s go up to Sunapee.”
“Your father wouldn’t let me near his cottage.”
“I’ll just smile sweetly. He won’t say no to his little princess.” She batted her eyes and winced, as though she’d hurt herself blinking.
They hadn’t gone to New Hampshire since he’d received his patrolman’s badge. Her folks’ cottage on Lake Sunapee would be a good place to decompress. Teach Trish to swim. Hold Julie’s hand while they stood ankle-deep in the water and watched Trish try to cup minnows in her hands.
“I’ll take you and Trish up there, then go back to work. You both need to get away from here, and I’ll come up when I can.”
Julie made the arrangements with her mother, then lay down next to Sam and fell asleep. His mind began to drift, and Sarapon’s voice echoed in his mind:
You are my only love,
And I will wait for you.
And then he fell aslee
p.
The ring on the phone was too damn loud. How long had it been ringing? He fumbled for the receiver, and it slipped out of his hands and onto the floor. Too sleepy. Who the hell--? It seemed that the telephone screamed when it fell. Sam picked it up.
“Yes?”
The voice spoke in Khmer, indistinct, distant, frantic. “Oh, no. D-Don’t. P-Please don’t. I didn’t--” The voice screamed again like the ghosts in Sam’s nightmares, and then the words dissolved into a babble, a gurgle, and a click.
Sam heard a dial tone, and the soft breath of Julie’s sleep. It was three-thirty. He was wide awake.
Sam called work at 6:55.
Wilkins was adamant. “I want you in here at seven sharp. No excuses, no bullshit.”
“This is urgent, Lieutenant.”
“What’s the problem?”
“I need to move Julie and Trish. They’re not safe in this apartment.”
“Sending them back to her parents?”
“No, I’ll feel better if they’re out of town. Her folks have a place up on Lake Sunapee.”
“You’re more or less worried for nothing. I told you we’re wrapping this up. You’ll be getting another assignment.”
“I’ll be back before noon. I’ll make up the time.”
The trip to Lake Sunapee took two hours, mostly on smooth, well-paved highways. No one spoke more than a few words during the whole trip.
The cabin stood surrounded by pine trees at the water’s edge. Julie’s father had built it when she was born. Every spring, he refreshed one side of the cabin with white paint and black trim. For two springs in a row, he had turned down Sam’s offer to help with the painting.
Beach chairs. Toes in the water. Sailboats in dazzling red and yellow, their sails teased by the languid air. Sam could take it. But today he left these pleasures to Julie and Trish. He drove east to the interstate and headed south.