Zero Hour in Phnom Pehn

by Christopher G. Moore

  A few minutes later he was inside Pratt’s room, where he saw the neatly piled file folders on the bed. On the pillow was Pratt’s tenor saxophone. The saxophone case lay open on the table. He never left Thailand without packing his sax and a copy of Shakespeare’s collected works. The book was on the table next to a photo of Pratt’s wife and kids. Room 405 had become with these few items his home away from home. Calvino closed the door and walked over to the balcony, opened the door and stuck his hand out in the rain. Pratt sat at the table, legs crossed, looking through a file. At a quick glance, Calvino spotted a photograph of a foreigner. Pratt followed his eye line.

  “Mike Hatch,” said Pratt.

  “Thanks for the word with Ravi Singh,” Calvino said, looking up from the photo. “You didn’t have to do that. But I figured you had it planned out. In the Thai way. You do me a favor with the local authorities and now I owe you. Since you put your face on the line for me, then I have to behave myself.”

  “Since when has my face ever changed what you do?”

  “Mostly true,” admitted Calvino.

  “I don’t see any conflict in both of us looking for Hatch. You want to give him some money. And I want to find out where he gets his money. And AK47s. You see things any differently?” asked Pratt, not looking up from his file.

  “I see it this way, Pratt. Guys like Hatch run close to the ground. They find cover so deep not even a cockroach could find their trail of crumbs,” said Calvino.

  “But you think you can find him alone?” asked Pratt. Inside his mind the colonel was asking himself another question—why does a farang take offense when an Asian says he can understand another Asian’s way of thinking better than a farang? And then take it for granted that a farang can understand another farang in a way that an Asian cannot comprehend? If he were a farang he could ask such a question but being Asian it was more natural to keep it unspoken.

  “I don’t know. But I’m going to try.”

  “You don’t care about a guy like Hatch,” said Pratt, closing his file, and turning around in his chair.

  “I didn’t say that I cared about him.”

  “Something’s eating at you, Vincent. You want to talk about it? Or do you want to play the stereotype Thai with me and say there is no problem?”

  The maddening thing about bi-cultural guys like Pratt was they knew how Thais and farangs both thought, and the games they played—if they could get away and not get caught—with each other’s values, customs, and myths.

  “Jai yen,” said Calvino. Have a cool heart. “If Detective Superintendent Ravi Singh and his UNTAC crew haven’t found Hatch, how am I gonna track him down in the mud and rain?”

  “Because you have a knack.”

  “What do you mean I have a knack?” asked Calvino. “Some guys always find a parking place, a seat on a train,

  the right shares to invest in. You’re not one of them. But you always seem to find who you’re looking for. It’s a kind of knack. You had it when I knew you in New York. You put your time in as a lawyer. But it was a dead end. You were born to be a private eye or a cop, a profession where finding people who don’t want to be found is a talent.”

  Calvino walked to the door and opened it.

  “Vincent,” Pratt called after him.

  He turned around. “Yeah?”

  “Watch out for yourself,” said Pratt.

  “In Phnom Penh we are both fish out of water. But I’m still a farang.”

  “Don’t drink the tap water. And, Vincent, before you go, there is a little something for you inside my briefcase.”

  Calvino looked around the room.

  “Over on the chair,” said Pratt, nodding to his left.

  Calvino opened the briefcase and saw his .38 Police Special and leather holster inside. He pulled the holster out, pulled out the .38 and checked the chamber—it was fully loaded. A note was attached from Ratana, which read: “You can get cold going naked in Phnom Penh, Ratana.” He had locked the gun in his drawer. Ms. Dugan had watched him; she was the perfect witness, his alibi. Ratana had found the chance to use her presence. She looked after Calvino well, treated him like he was someone in a federal witness protection program and she was responsible if anything happened to him. Ever since she finished her law degree at Ramkamhaeng University he had urged her to find a position as a lawyer. But she had refused to move over to a law firm. No one in her family could figure out why she would work for a farang private eye. Where was the status? What image was in that job? The answer to both questions was that there wasn’t any. Standing there with his .38 Police Special, he thanked all the gods that people put faith in for people like Ratana and Pratt. He folded the leather holster under his arm and there was an awkward moment of silence. They weren’t in Bangkok now. This was hostile turf with new rules of engagement. He almost changed his mind about dinner. But something held him back. Call it instinct. He smiled at Pratt. Inside this room at the Monorom Hotel in Phnom Penh, Pratt had admitted that Vincent Calvino had the knack.

  ******

  BY dinner time it had stopped raining. Calvino decided to go from the Monorom over to the Gecko Club—one of the instant expat shop-house restaurants that had opened to profit from the UNTAC and NGO personnel swarming over Phnom Penh searching for Western food. This was his first night in a strange city. He climbed into the back of a pedicab. On the ride to the Gecko, Calvino thought about a friend in Bangkok, Carlo Badoglio, an old Asia hand of thirty-odd years, who had been imprisoned by communists in Beijing in the 80s, had covered the wars in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam in the 60s and 70s. In Bangkok, Carlo had given him some names of people to look up in Phnom Penh. People who weren’t on Carlo’s shit list. He had lived long enough that his shit list kept increasing each year. So what he had to give Calvino by way of introduction didn’t amount to much. It was a start. Carlo’s Asian political coverage made him into a living legend throughout Europe.

  One of the names he gave Calvino was that of a photojournalist named Del Larson who had returned to Phnom Penh like a criminal to the scene of the crime. Carlo and Del had seen some heavy action in Cambodia during the early 70s. According to Carlo, during the shooting of The Killing Fields there were a couple of scenes which had been based on Larson’s experience in the French Embassy as the KR came through the gate and took over the compound. This was Del Larson’s claim to fame, and he had wanted his role to be immortalized. The producers thought a few minutes and cut out the scenes based on Del Larson’s life. He was edited out of the film. He was left on the cutting-room floor, swept into the garbage, thrown into the street. The way Del saw it, they had cut out his life and thrown it away as if it had no value.

  Carlo Badoglio said this was the complaint in life that kept Del Larson going. Some people were motivated by dreams, others by the injuries they had suffered. There was no question where Del Larson’s priorities had come down in the larger scheme of things. He said the producers were out to get him, to falsify history, to lie about what had happened in Cambodia. He wanted justice. He wanted revenge. He got neither. But Badoglio said there was some chance Del had information about the war weapons business. Or might know someone who did.

  “Just mention Carlo Badoglio. That’s all you have to say. We were just like that.” Carlo crossed his fingers and held them for Calvino to see.

  Calvino found him sitting outside the Gecko. He sat alone nursing a bottle of Tiger beer, peeling back the label with a dirty thumbnail. Del Larson had a face which could easily have passed for that of an Old Testament prophet, or it could have been Ernest Hemingway’s death mask strapped over someone else’s face. Del had one of those farang faces charcoal-broiled over the flames, fueled by years of failures, regrets, and passions. His was one of those lives where the soul had been scorched by an awful, wounding experience, like a bitter, prolonged, and hopeless Southeast Asia war; the large, puffy red eyes, full of hatred, suffering, and paranoia, looked up at Calvino. He would have been at home at the Lonesome Hawk in W
ashington Square, sitting at the bar with Patten and the other ex-army types.

  “Mind if I sit down?” asked Calvino.

  Del’s eyes registered disgust and aggression. But he didn’t reply to the question. He began rolling a large joint, spreading the marijuana across the cigarette paper with a thick, yellow-stained finger.

  “It’s not a free country,” he sneered, licking the paper and sealing the joint.

  “You found a country that is?” asked Calvino.

  “What do you want?” He lit the joint and sucked in, holding it for a few seconds, before the grayish smoke came out of his nose.

  “Carlo sends his regards.”

  “Carlo who?” he replied.

  He thought about Carlo crossing his fingers. “We were just like that,” Badoglio had said, with a big smile under his white moustache.

  “Calvino’s my name. I’m a friend of Carlo. The foreign correspondent based in Bangkok. You were at the French Embassy together in ’75,” he continued, sitting down. He waved over a waitress and ordered two Tiger beers. When they came he motioned for the waitress to give the Moses look-alike one of the beers.

  “Are you part of some world-wide Italian conspiracy?”

  “This one’s for Del?” asked the waitress, who was a young

  Australian blond.

  “Yeah, it’s for Del,” said Calvino. He waited until the waitress left.

  “Stupid cunt,” said Del. “Giving my name out like that.”

  “Carlo already told me your name. He said you might be able to help me with some information.” “Why would he say that?”

  “Because you two go back. Share some history.”

  “Fuck history.”

  “I’m looking for someone named Mike Hatch. He’s an American who’s been living in Phnom Penh the last few months, doing business here.”

  “What do you want him for?” asked the man, in an American accent.

  “I have some money to give him.”

  Del relit his joint, sucked in long, and then blew up—spewing spit and smoke from his mouth. “Fucking, holy, bullshit. You expect me to believe you’re in Phnom Penh to give some asshole money and you want me to tell you where he is? What fucking planet are you from?”

  “Brooklyn,” said Calvino. “It does an orbit around Manhattan.”

  Calvino tried to guess Del’s age—it was somewhere around fifty but if someone had told him that Del was thirty or seventy years old he wouldn’t have argued with him. The accent was East coast working-class. The bitterness from New York. The wardrobe your basic homeless fashion statement.

  “It’s the suit, isn’t it?” asked Calvino after a long silence. He had hit the button. “I hate fucking suits. The suits started the war and then couldn’t stomach what they started. They couldn’t stomach what some of us reported. Then they fucked off, said it was someone else’s fucking mess. American suits always fuck off when there’s heat in the kitchen.” He blew a lungfull of smoke across the table at Calvino.

  Carlo had said Del was someone who had spent too many tours of duty on the trail, someone who had never returned from combat. Del was reliving the past, lost deep in that past, somewhere in a jungle, whispering the same paranoia over and over again. The burnt-out cases had that look in their eye . . . “Charlie’s coming. I can hear him coming. Man, he’s gonna be here any fucking minute. He’s gonna shoot us, man. He’s gonna use his knife and cut out our guts.”

  “Forget about Hatch. Where can I buy a gun?” Calvino asked, as the waitress brought him pasta and French bread.

  “Stop any motorcycle asshole and ask him.”

  The pasta had just the right amount of garlic and the French bread was fresh. Calvino swallowed some of the beer. “But I’m asking you, Del. A guy like you knows where things are. I figure you go way back. Before the KR emptied the city.”

  “Before Year Zero,” said Del. The pot had relaxed him but he was still feeling paranoid. As Calvino had turned around in his chair, he had seen the outline of the sidearm concealed under the jacket.

  “AK47s, M16s, that sort of weapon is what I have in mind,” said Calvino.

  “You’re a fucking DEA cop!” The allegation sounded half- way between a declaration and a question.

  “You looking to take me out? They have been trying for years to take me out. To make me shut up. You gonna do that job for them?”

  “I’m staying in Room 305 at the Monorom. You wanna float any ideas about the weapon business, give me a call.” Calvino slid two twenty-dollar bills across the table.

  “No information comes without a price tag, Del. And I am not a cop. I am not running guns. Let’s say, I am interested in capitalism and marketplaces. And a certain capitalist client of mine has some money for Mike Hatch.”

  Del looked at the money. He was itching to pick it up, look it over, and see if it were fake or real money. Forty bucks in Phnom Penh bought a five-year supply of grade-A quality marijuana.

  “You in the war?” asked Del, touching an edge of one of the notes.

  “My first impression of Phnom Penh is it hasn’t ended.”

  “It never ended,” said Del. “That much you got right.”

  Del Larson pulled out another piece of rolling paper, shuddered as he distributed a hefty pinch of marijuana along it. An insane look of horror filled his face as he gazed up at Calvino. “It’s fucked. It’s totally fucked up. You’ll see.”

  On the way out of the Gecko Club, Calvino thought about Carlo Badoglio. He had intelligent eyes, which had looked sad as Calvino was about to leave his house. Carlo wrapped an arm around his shoulder and walked him to the front gate of the compound.

  “Vincent, the problem is we live too long. Last century a man like me would have died at thirty-five of some tropical disease. Journalist dies in Asia, the copy would have read. They would have run my picture. A youngish-looking man in his prime. Ah, now that would have been the romantic way to end it all. Now we have this shit. Every asshole lives too long. We have too much medicine. We live too long after we’ve done all we can ever do. When you see Del Larson you will understand what I mean. He missed his time to die and now he’s pissed off at the world for keeping him alive. He wants to die but doesn’t know how. Who am I to talk? Of course, I’ve lived too long. My last book sold twenty thousand copies in Europe. That makes me just another old asshole who missed his chance to die young.”

  FOUR

  THE LIDO BAR

  MUD-SPLATTERED MOTORCYCLES and UNTAC Land Cruisers lined both sides of the road in front of the Lido Bar. Calvino studied the action curbside for a few minutes. The girls and non-UN personnel came and went on the motorcycles for hire—all the drivers had second-hand 50cc Hondas imported by the container load from Japan. The UNTAC Civ Pol on their hundred-thirty a day paycheck operated in a different world, coming and going like Third World warlords in high-class Japanese motoring style. Calvino worked his way down a row of motorcycle taxis, showing Fat Stuart’s picture to the drivers. They smoked cheap cigarettes and huddled under the balcony of the Lido, keeping out of the rain.

  It was the kind of crowd that had looked at photos of dead people before. In fact, looking at photos of the dead seemed normal in a country which had preserved more pictures of the dead than the living. The first driver stared blankly at the photograph of Fat Stuart, turned it around upside down, passed it down the line to the next driver; each one in turn had a vacant, the lights are on but no one is at home, look. The last motorcycle driver smiled and demanded money. Calvino handed him a soiled five-hundred-dong note—which worked out to be less than one cent. The driver’s smile fled the scene as he handed Calvino the photo, and pocketed the money. “He look like you,” said the driver, laughing. Calvino thought about this. He had been insulted before but this guy was in a league of his own.

  He shrugged and turned away from the motorcycle drivers. Showing them the photograph was a long shot—but sometimes guys working the street had a good memory for anyone out of the ordina
ry. And there was no question a Khmer weighing in at one hundred twenty pounds wouldn’t easily forget a man the size of Fat Stuart. This was the kind of weight range which could buckle the frame of a 50cc motorcycle, blow out the tires and bend the wheels, putting its owner out of the transportation business. His four hundred thirty pounds required specialized transportation. Calvino glanced at the four or five UNTAC Land Cruisers. He wondered if Fat Stuart had had a friend or two on the UNTAC police force. So far he had more questions than answers.

  He walked through the entrance. The Lido Bar was on the second floor of an old, squat building. The red stair carpet was frayed at the edges, stained, faded, spotted with cigarette butt burns like the hide of a torture victim. It was around eleven as Calvino climbed the flight of stairs and walked into the bar. It was dark inside. Like the Thermae Bar in Bangkok, the Lido catered for men who wanted a hassle-free meeting place which had wall-to-wall women for hire. Young girls, or older ones who kept to the shadows so their excess mileage couldn’t immediately be spotted in the half-light.

  Calvino had drunk in bars like this one. It was a place that made you want to drink. No one could stay sober and sane in a place like the Lido. This bar wasn’t the last stop on the road for women who had worked in a bar or massage parlor. It was the end of the road. There was nothing waiting on the other side but the grave. The end-of-the-road women had a certain look of sadness laced with excitement. It was like a drug, pulling them back, making them lazy for normal work. And there were the semi-pros—the girls with day jobs who needed some quick cash for a birthday present or the rent. Looking around the bar, it was not difficult to spot the sharks among the newcomers, the runaways and castaways, and the drug addicts. Calvino threw back another drink. One of the women eyed him, he looked away and she walked on, looking for money for a fix, to feed her baby and pay the rent. Who knew? Who cared?