Zero Hour in Phnom Pehn

by Christopher G. Moore

  It was more complicated than law and order, Shaw explained, as they watched the shooting and drinking ahead of them. Like Ireland, to understand Cambodia was to understand its history. Cambodia harbored a secret, which it yielded up to those who searched the night for common criminals, thugs, gunrunners, and whores. Cambodia was a society where the continuity had been destroyed, broken, where something basic in the human spirit had gone missing in action. It was a country without records in government offices. The filing cabinets were empty. The drunks at the checkpoint, firing wildly at a pick-up, this was not an isolated incident of the night. Underneath the surface the population, twisted and disjointed, had ruptured the continuity between past and present. That essential link in time that every people defines for itself through a collective history, customs, law, and society. Pol Pot had physically destroyed enough people to rip open and bleed dry the linear progression of their society; he had been in the grand tradition of the Khmer despots who had broken their continuity with what they were and had been. Once that break occurred there was no longer a base line for judging good and evil; there was no fixed line between fiction and reality, crime and legality, wrong and right. All the lines had blurred. Why would anyone in such a society want to accumulate records of criminals?

  “The soldiers are no more than children. See that one over there? He’s fourteen, fifteen,” said Shaw. “Forty-three percent of the population is under fifteen years old. And sixty-three percent of the adults are women. Cambodia is like a child care center where the kids carry automatic weapons.”

  The illegal checkpoint—another name for a roadblock thrown up by criminals in uniform—was located near the intersection where the CPP, the Cambodia People’s Party, had their headquarters office and the old cinema—which had been closed down. There were sixteen legal mobile checkpoints put up in Phnom Penh every night. UNTAC Civ Pol had stopped counting the number of illegal checkpoints. Shaw radioed in to the Phnom Penh police headquarters to confirm the checkpoint was illegal.

  “Ready?” asked Shaw, turning on the engine.

  Pratt nodded. Calvino stared straight ahead, his jaw fixed, his .38 Police Service revolver on his lap. Shaw turned on the headlights, put the Land Cruiser into gear, and headed directly at the checkpoint. Within seconds four armed soldiers stood in the path, AK47s ready to fire. When they spotted the UNTAC Land Cruiser, they lowered their weapons and smiles appeared on their faces.

  “Put your gun on the floor,” said Shaw.

  Calvino squeezed the metal, then dropped his hand and let the .38 slide onto the floor board.

  A Khmer army officer in a rain slicker walked over to the driver’s side, rapped his knuckles on the window. Shaw rolled it down. The officer, rainwater running off his nose, stuck his head inside, his eyes wide open, and the veins in his neck sticking out like blue rope, looking at Pratt and Calvino.

  “What are you boys up to?” asked Shaw.

  “Check car,” said the officer. He pushed the hood of the slicker back. The rain had been beating against his hair and face, and dripped from his chin. He didn’t look like he was in a good mood.

  “Shoot at car, too.”

  The officer pulled his head back a couple of inches, but keeping inside the cab of the Land Cruiser. He grinned and nodded. The smell of cheap whiskey filled the vehicle.

  “The police don’t like you boys putting up checkpoints. You know that, don’t you? Besides you get all wet on a night like tonight.”

  The officer shrugged as if to say, “Who gives a shit what the Phnom Penh police like or don’t like? This is a wide-open city. First come, first served.”

  John Shaw slowly reached into his shirt pocket and produced a pack of cigarettes and three one-dollar bills—which worked out to a buck for each man on the roadblock. That was the going rate. Pay more and you were a fool. Try and pay less and you were dead. He handed the money and cigarettes to the officer. “We want to buy AKs. Can you help us?”

  The army officer had opened the pack of cigarettes, cupped his hands against the rain and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. He leaned forward as Shaw lit it for him. His eyes half closed as he inhaled.

  “AKs,” said Shaw, like a schoolmaster. “Can. One-fifty each.”

  “Fifty each,” said Shaw.

  The officer looked at him hard, smoke curling out of his nose.

  “Ninety. Good price.”

  “Fifty’s a better price. How many you want to sell?”

  The army officer held up nine fingers, or it may have been ten because the third finger on the left hand was missing. Shaw clarified the situation by holding up all ten of his fingers, and the army officer nodded.

  “Eighty,” said the officer. “Fifty-five. Last price.”

  The officer thought for a few seconds before he turned, barked some orders and two soldiers ran over carrying five AK47s each, which they loaded into the back of the Land Cruiser. Shaw peeled five hundreds and one fifty off a roll and passed the cash through the window to the officer. He counted the money three times before stepping aside. During the entire transaction, Pratt and Calvino had been innocent bystanders. They had said nothing and watched the deal unfold as if Shaw were conducting a street-level lesson. If that was his intention, then he succeeded.

  As they drove away with the AK47s rattling in the back, the distant sound of gunfire echoed once again through the dreary night. It wasn’t coming from the checkpoint where they had scored the weapons but from some rainswept street a couple of blocks away. That was doing business at a mobile night market in Phnom Penh. A driver paid tribute, bought merchandise or died in the rain.

  “How many checkpoints are selling AK47s?” asked Pratt, obviously shaken by the encounter. Closing the deal with trigger-happy drunks had all the makings of a confrontation.

  “Three, four? No one really knows,” replied Shaw.

  “What you’re saying is no one has a handle on who is involved or how many people are playing this game,” said Calvino.

  “That pretty well sums it up, Mr. Calvino,” said Shaw.

  “The gun business has been the first industry fully privatized in Cambodia. We simply don’t know how many self-employed merchants are working the streets and markets, or who their buyers are. That’s the hell of it. Any other country in the world, you can figure these things out. You put men out in the street, you pay informants. You finally get to the bottom of it. In Cambodia the bottom is a void. You can never touch bottom with all the King’s men and all the King’s horses.”

  Shaw patrolled the streets of Phnom Penh for another two hours before his shift ended. He had the location of the legal checkpoints for that night. They bought a dozen more AK47s, M16s, and a rocket launcher, which was probably disabled. He had made his point to the Thai officer and the civilian from Bangkok. The first makeshift, mobile checkpoint with the drunken soldiers armed with AK47s was not unique. Illegal checkpoints had sprouted up throughout the city and the men collected from anyone passing. The toll was fixed in cigarettes and cash. They were in competition with the sixteen legitimate mobile checkpoints monitored by UNTAC Civ Pol.

  Phnom Penh at night was a nightmare of rivalry between factions—federals, locals, political parties, and military; all playing cop on the beat, all wanting a pay day, none getting money from the government, all helping themselves. These were the forces of repression set loose on the city. In the eyes of the army officer at the checkpoint, they had seen the stare of someone who looted bodies, sold weapons, and drank in the rain and mud, waiting out the pain . . . because the pain no longer mattered. In the storm raging in the soul all energy was concentrated on surviving until tomorrow.

  ******

  RICHARD Scott, dressed in a faded Saigon 333 Export Beer singlet and black jogging pants, sat back in a wooden chair on the balcony of the Lido drinking a Tiger beer. When Calvino came out empty-handed, he glanced down at the street, pretending not to notice Scott.

  “Not drinking?”

  He pulled a small bottle
of Mekhong out of his suit jacket pocket and took a long sip. Scott grinned from ear to ear.

  “That’s more like it. I can’t stand these bastards who don’t drink. Food gives me a hangover. Beer is nature’s true food. On our Highway One Marathon we plan to find a beer company to sponsor us. I think it’s a good idea. What do you think, Vinee?”

  “I can see you’re in training.”

  “Who me? Train? We can’t all be All-American professional football players, can we?”

  A Vietnamese whore in a short blue dress and gold earrings circled like a cat before she sat on Scott’s lap. He bounced her up and down on his knee, and she giggled, covering her mouth with one hand. One of her black high heels fell off, and she laughed even more, the way a child laughs out of pure joy.

  “They like a ride, now and again, Vinee,” he said, drinking from his bottle of beer. “I talked with Ms. Thu earlier. You know that you made her quite depressed last night. She says you wouldn’t allow her to make you happy. That is a significant offense for a Lido hooker. You know how easily these girls lose face. If you don’t fuck them, they take it as a rejection. It’s a very personal insult not to fuck them. Not like the maggots which, if you fuck or don’t fuck, they find a way to make it into an insult. As if you have pissed on their womanhood.”

  Scott had gone to the end of the hardcore line when the conversation involved any reference to a white woman. He had gone the full emotional circuit from first names, to mem farang, then briefly to the ‘round eye’ stage, and crashed against the final hardcore wall—white women were maggots.

  “I was looking for her. Have you seen her around tonight?” asked Calvino.

  “She’s gone.”

  “Where?”

  He smirked and kissed his Vietnamese whore on the neck.

  “She said something about men shooting at her last night. But these whores sometimes hear gunfire in their dreams. I’m not saying she lied. She probably was confused by the sound of your snoring,” said Scott.

  “If you know where she is, I’d like to know,” said Calvino, pressing the issue harder than he intended.

  The results were predictable.

  “I’m hardly her booking agent,” said Scott, finishing his beer. He was taking the high ground.

  “She went with a client. He was an Eastern European of some sort. One of those Dracula states where horses pull carts on dirt roads, the women are fat and ugly at twenty-five, and the army has state of the art military hardware on soft loans from the Americans. Or he might have been Canadian. It was probably short-time. I’m certain if you wait long enough she’ll be back.”

  “You didn’t happen to run into Mike Hatch since last night?” asked Calvino.

  “Not that I remember,” said Scott.

  Calvino reached into his wallet and peeled off a hundred- dollar bill. “Does that help your memory?”

  He had Scott’s full attention. The Vietnamese whore stilled herself on Scott’s lap, staring at the bill in Calvino’s hand like a praying mantis that had spotted an ant on a tree leaf.

  “I only want to talk to him, Richard,” said Calvino, seeing that Scott was weakening under the pressure of his lap mate.

  He reached out and took the note. “Is tomorrow soon enough?”

  “I can wait,” said Calvino.

  “Say five o’clock. There’s a shophouse where we go for a drink. You know the roundabout at Independence Monument?”

  Calvino said that he knew the place. It was a famous Phnom Penh landmark. One of those ironic landmarks, which translated into English words like independence or democracy. Big Brother slogans used by the Brother Number Ones of the world.

  “Take the street going toward the river,” continued Scott. “Fifty meters into the road you’ll see the shophouse. There are tables outside. It’s run by a Chinese guy with a Thai wife.”

  “Near the police station?” asked Calvino. “Yeah,” said Scott.

  Calvino knew the police station all right. He had been inside it. Ravi Singh and Shaw worked out of this station. He had made an appointment to meet Mike Hatch within two hundred meters from where Shaw would be drinking coffee, and Ravi Singh would be commanding UNTAC Civ Pol for all of Phnom Penh. Calvino liked this small irony. In time he would like even more telling Shaw where he found Mike Hatch.

  ******

  THERE was no one at the front desk of the Monorom Hotel when Calvino came back alone after one in the morning. His key wasn’t in the box where it should have been. Calvino pushed open the door behind where the receptionist should have been sitting, and found a Khmer woman seated on an office chair, her dress hiked up to her waist. She was reaching down and had the second of a pair of black stockings rolled just above her ankle. They locked eyes, and the receptionist quickly lowered her dress and smiled. He had got a glimpse of the brand name on the package on the floor. From the writing on the package, it was clear the nylons were manufactured in Thailand. The price sticker was in Thai baht as well. In Cambodia, imported stockings were a luxury item for a hotel receptionist. He took his time looking at how good the smooth black looked against her legs and he couldn’t help wondering if she had ever worn a pair before that night.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” said Calvino.

  “What can I do for you?” She smoothed her dress down to her knees, and turned around on the swivel chair.

  Before he had disturbed her, the job had been less than half finished; the nylon on her left leg ran to her thigh, but on the right leg her calf and ankle were bone white like one of those ads for suntan lotion.

  “My key isn’t behind the desk. I thought you might have it,” he said, his back toward her.

  “Your friend come and ask for the key,” she said, quickly putting on the other stocking.

  “Pratt?”

  “No, a lady friend.”

  “Did she leave a name?”

  The receptionist sighed as she finished pulling up the stocking.

  “She said you know her.”

  “And you just handed over my key?”

  “Why not? The bellboy said that last night you have a girl. Why not another one tonight? All men are alike in Cambodia.”

  “Nice stockings.”

  “Your friend gave them to me,” she said.

  He looked at the receptionist, wondering why her English was so good. She wasn’t the peasant type and didn’t look Chinese. He guessed her age as somewhere in the mid-thirties, her hair was haphazardly tied back on her head, and she was round-faced, with the kind of confident, in-control eyes that could track a tank fifty meters away without her smile ever fading.

  “Nice gift,” he said.

  “It’s been a long time since I had a pair,” she replied. “You weren’t here last night.”

  She nodded. “I work at the hospital.”

  “Why is a nurse working in a hotel?”

  Her smile widened as if saving the best for last. The kind of smile which said, “So you’ve figured it all out without figuring anything right.”

  “I am a doctor,” she said. “Twice a week I stay at the hospital for a twenty-hour shift. Most of the week it’s seven to six, then I come to the hotel and work.”

  “A doctor?”

  “Why not?” Her eyes full of fire.

  She had the right question. So far he had come up with all the wrong answers. Calvino smiled, thinking that he liked how this woman handled herself. She had the way of someone who had grown up where controlling the situation and handling the person made the difference between staying alive and being dead.

  “Are you from Phnom Penh?”

  “I was born here. My father was a professor. He was killed by Pol Pot. We lost fifteen members in our family. They died in the country. No food, no medicine. They lost weight. There was nothing to eat. Muscle disappeared. It was very hard to see people die that way. Now I think only of my family—my mother, brothers, and sisters. We go on. What else can we do?”

  “Leave Cambodia,” suggested Calvino.r />
  She smiled at him and said, “That is my dream.”

  “Then go.”

  “You give me a ticket?” Her smile becoming firmer.

  “What about your husband?” He knew this was a feeble response. Put the responsibility on the husband arguments were usually made by fools, comics, or sadists. Calvino regretted his choice of words.

  “Never mind him. You give me a ticket. My husband can find another wife. I think no problem. Finding a ticket out of Phnom Penh, that is a problem.”

  “Sounds like a happy marriage,” he said.

  “In Cambodia to be alive is to be happy,” she said.

  He had come for his key and found a doctor who had survived the killing fields and had the simplest of all dreams—a better life in another place as far as possible from the place where Brother Number One and his little brother helpers had slaughtered her family. And all her attention was now devoted to a pair of black stockings.

  Life went on. There was pleasure in covering her legs in nylons. There was pleasure in the dream of a new life. One was immediate and real; the other an illusion, chasing a shadow that she could never catch. But why not try, now and again, to ask for a one-way ticket out? Miracles sometimes happened. Only it wasn’t going to be that night or with him.

  She tossed Calvino a spare key to his room. The bribe of the pair of nylons ensured she would never tell him who was waiting for him upstairs in his room. Or the person’s motive. It didn’t matter. Anyone seeking real harm wouldn’t have advertised their presence. They would have broken into his room. He ran through the mental odds of Ms. Thu, having finished her short-time, returning to the Lido, finding out from Scott that he had been around asking for her, and arriving at a hotel which had a policy prohibiting guests from taking whores to their rooms. Maybe she had used a pair of nylons to talk her way into his room.

  He watched the doctor go back to the reception area and take her place behind the reception desk of the Monorom Hotel in her new nylons. Calvino followed her into the reception area. She immediately ignored him and started watching the TV in the lobby. He had ceased to exist. She had been operating on soldiers ten hours earlier. She had lost interest in that as well. Now she was glued to the TV.