“Listen, John. Just had breakfast and overheard a couple of NGOs talking about a bombing last night. I thought you might have some information.”
“A couple of checkpoint shootings.”
“This was a grenade attack.”
Shaw laughed. “NGOs have been known to get things wrong.”
“Yeah, they get facts confused with rumors. Nobel Prize winners lumped with morons.”
“When you’ve been in Cambodia a bit longer you will hear all kinds of reports about attacks that never happened,” said Shaw. He paused.
“You want to take your reporter friend out to T-3 today?” he asked. “I can arrange it.”
“Tomorrow’s better.”
“I’ll collect you. You should see the killing fields. They have kept a field not far outside of town. It makes the point. Lots of sun-bleached skulls.”
Shaw wasn’t one to give up easily.
“Why don’t I get back to you?” As he put down the phone, he removed his .38 Police Special, checked the chamber, smiling as he remembered the condom Carole had placed over the barrel. He holstered the gun, wishing there was a life and place where no one ever used a gun except as bedroom foreplay. Cambodia was not that kind of place.
When Calvino walked into the hotel restaurant he found Scott sitting there, reading a two-day-old Bangkok newspaper. He sat down at the table.
“Who told you about the attack?” asked Calvino, pushing down the newspaper and revealing Scott’s face.
“One of Thu’s roommates. If that’s the right word. Whore mate. She came to your hotel first. The whore mate. That’s who I’m talking about. That whore is okay. It’s Thu who is fucked up. But the whore mate was here in the hotel. That was a problem. Unaccompanied whores aren’t let inside the door. She came around to my place where there are no rules. I came back with her but the receptionist said you had someone with you upstairs. We didn’t want to intrude. But I said, ‘Try and get him on the phone.’ It was engaged. I figured you didn’t want to be disturbed.”
The hint of frustration in Calvino’s voice earlier had made Scott smile. Scott was unaware that he had mistaken the nature of Calvino’s emotion, confusing frustration with despair and regret. Calvino blamed himself. He hadn’t wanted to be disturbed with Carole. He should have placed the receiver back on the cradle. But he hadn’t . . . the champagne, the pearls, the designer condoms, the feel of the skin of a white woman had all intervened, blurring the line between what he should do and what he ended up doing.
“She could be dead,” said Calvino.
“She might be. Who knows? But I thought we should go have a look. Just in case she’s alive,” said Scott.
“I always liked Thu. It would be a shame if she were dead.”
“Who did it?” asked Calvino.
Scott looked puzzled. Then he nodded.
“You mean who threw the grenade? Don’t know. I asked myself the same question. What I came up with is a little general. And I don’t mean Napoleon.”
“What are you saying?” asked Calvino.
A waiter arrived with a cup of coffee that he placed in front of Calvino. He took a long sip.
“You look like a pastrami sandwich that’s gone off,” said Scott.
“You should’ve come to my room last night.”
“The receptionist said you were occupied,” he said, clearing his throat and folding up the newspaper, smoothing out the wrinkles that Calvino’s fist had creased down the center.
“You never answered me. Who did it?”
Scott shrugged his shoulders. “Cambodians,” he said. He paused a moment, then, seeing that Calvino was about ready to come across the table at him, added, “The Cambodians like killing the Vietnamese. It’s a kind of national sport for them. Before the election all the politicians tried to outdo the others about who hated the Vietnamese the most. It’s normal. Everyone needs someone to hate. Hate is what keeps a people going. In this country, it means votes. And votes mean power. The Cambodians have tagged the Vietnamese. They are it. Thu got tagged. The UN calls it democracy. Everyone has an equal right to violent death.”
Calvino tried to shake off the numb feeling. The ache which comes with knowing he might have been able to do something to prevent it but hadn’t.
“Where is she?”
“About five clicks from the hotel. That’s out by the lake.” All the while he had been inside Carole Summerhill-Jones talking the big lesson of life he had learned from Thu, using her to make love with Carole Summerhill-Jones, Scott had been trying to get through to him. He felt a wave of guilt wash over him. He had learned nothing. As if all those years in Asia had counted for zero. All the time he had been talking, talking, playing gender politics as if any of that mattered; and Thu’s friend was downstairs with no imported nylons to bribe her way into his room. She had been trying to get through the talk for help. And where was he when the call for help came? Wrapping his fingers around a strand of expensive pearls. He walked out of the hotel with Scott, feeling that he had to do something to atone for last night; he had to put it right with Thu.
******
THE lake was called Boeng Kak and for more than five kilometers along the north end of the lake were a string of wooden single-story brothels—which cost about as much as Carole Summerhill-Jones’s pearl necklace—occupied by legions of Vietnamese whores who had bussed in from Saigon. Scott, who sat between the driver and Calvino on the back of a 50cc Honda, explained that UNTAC soldiers supported the prostitution industry at Boeng Kak.
“The bus people,” said Scott. “Not to be confused with their sisters the boat people who made it to America and Australia. If they weren’t slaughtered by pirates along the way.”
A light rain slanted against their faces. The motorcycle driver, whose head never rotated one degree, wore one of those cheap plastic hooded raincoats. He was like a robot on automatic control. The weight of the two farangs on the back of the Honda had nearly flattened the tires. Slowly the motorbike made its way along Blvd Achar Mean, passing the French hospital. The sign on the front had the misspelled word ‘hoptial.’ The driver took the first turning at the roundabout. Not long thereafter the motorcycle turned onto a road that was all mud and potholes. The rain was coming down hard as they entered the vast lakeside complex of whorehouses. Young girls in pink and yellow pajamas came running through the rain as the motorcycle stopped, one grabbing hold of Calvino’s waist and not letting go.
“Chuck, chuck, chuck, four dollars.” They sounded like baby cheerleaders trying out a new cheer for Homecoming. This was less a cheer than an advertisement. Four bucks was the going rate. Soldiers came out to the lake looking for a cheap screw.
Calvino shook his head, trying to hold her away but that wasn’t sufficient to stop her. She held tight, locked her arms and legs around his leg and as he walked he carried her through the mud.
Scott batted one of the girls away as if she were an annoying insect that had landed on his arm.
“I once asked why they didn’t wear black pajamas. And you know what one of the little whores said? She was about fifteen. She said, ‘Mother wear black. I wear pink. Much better color,’ she said. ‘Black the color of death.’ I kinda liked that. Of course it is a lie. White is the color of death among the Chinese. Could it be that the Vietnamese sense of color and death have been Americanized?”
Calvino followed him onto the wooden porch of a brothel. The door was opened and inside were several girls, pale, and wild-haired, eyes filled with fear, curled together on bamboo mats. Scott spoke enough Vietnamese to convince the girls that he hadn’t come to kill them. Besides, as he pointed out, he didn’t look even vaguely Cambodian. An old woman with yellow eyes and a long butcher’s knife listened to him. She lowered the knife and led the way. They quickly followed her through a series of small rooms, through a beaded bamboo curtain that took them to the back, where they walked along a narrow wooden walkway. Behind the house was the lake. It was the color of battery acid; close to the s
hore the water became a reedy marsh littered with discarded plastic bottles and floating garbage. There was a strong tang of raw sewage that made the eyes water. At the end of the walkway were several smaller buildings. The smell of decay was in the air and not even the rain could drive it back into the polluted lake.
The old woman pushed back a sheet over the entrance to one of the rooms. They went inside and found Thu in a room smaller than a prison cell. She was on a bed and her right leg and arm were wrapped in blood-soaked rags. Another girl squatted on the floor, swatting flies and listening to rock’ n’ roll on a radio.
Calvino bent low and, kneeling down, he looked at her closed eyes. Her face was smudged with dirt. Her hair smelled damp from sweat. Her skin felt cold. She was still in a state of shock. He carefully peeled back the soiled dressings. The flesh had been torn in several places. Entry wounds the size of his thumb and he could feel the jagged metal from the grenade. The old woman offered him the knife, thinking that he was a doctor who had come to treat the girl. That had been the story Scott had told her. Calvino looked at the knife, then at the old woman and shook his head. Slowly, under his touch, Thu’s eyes opened a tiny slit.
“You come for Thu. Save Thu again. Yes?”
“She seems to remember you,” said Scott. One of the girls ran up and gave Scott a can of Tiger beer.
“Shut up, Richard.”
“She’s lost a lot of blood,” said Scott, leaning against the wall and pulling the tab off the beer. He took a long drink. He watched Calvino kneeling down at the foot of the bed where Thu lay, wondering how he could do it without a drink.
“We have to get her to a hospital,” said Calvino as much to himself as to Scott. “She stays here, she will die for sure.”
“On a motorcycle?” asked Scott. The problem in Phnom Penh was the lack of local transportation. They would never get someone to come out to the lake. A motorcycle appeared to be the only solution.
Calvino wrapped towels around her shattered leg and arm.
“Who did this, Thu?”
Her head rolled to the side and tears spilled out of her eyes. It was horrible enough to see the pain, but the tears rolling down onto the dirty bedding and the rock ’n’ roll music blaring on the radio held by the girl nearby brought home the awful realization of how the world keeps going, going, and never caring for a moment, for a second. Calvino gently lifted her in his arms, turned and pushed through the sheet on the doorway.
“Hey, where are you going?” asked Scott. “To the hospital.”
“Good idea,” said Scott. He finished the beer and threw the can in the lake on the way out.
The old woman clutching the knife ran ahead to another room. She stopped and pushed back a bath towel over the doorway. She motioned for Calvino to look inside.
“She thinks you’re a doctor,” said Scott. “And she wants you to see this.”
Calvino looked inside and wished that he hadn’t. Holding Thu in his arms he stood in the doorway. The old woman had started to wail and brush tears away from her eyes.
Two dead girls, mouths open, flies on their faces, touched at the cheek as they lay side by side on the floor. Part of one girl’s face had been blown off, leaving the eye socket a black hole, an empty, violent wound. She looked about sixteen and wore white pajamas. Thu started weeping in Calvino’s arms, and he turned away, pushing out of the room and back onto the walkway.
“They did a reasonable job of it,” said Scott. “Cambodians hate these girls. It makes no sense. But what in the world does?”
That had been the first honest question Calvino could ever remember Scott asking. “Let’s go,” said Calvino.
“They want to kill me,” said Thu.
“But they kill my friend.”
“Why?” asked Calvino, half-running down the walkway. “Because of bad man.”
“You know these men who hurt you?”
But she had passed out, her eyes had rolled back into her head by the time they reached the main room. Rain was pouring down. He had found Thu just as Scott had described Ms. Thu, as he had said, was pretty badly wounded and fighting for her life in a shithole beside a lake that was choked with pieces of floating garbage and smelled like a backed-up sewer. She was dying near a polluted swamp. He had to get her out of there. Putting her on the back of a motorcycle was out of the question. Leaving her in the brothel was out of the question.
In the main room he put her down on a bamboo mat. He had to think. One of the Vietnamese girls brought Scott another Tiger beer. Scott sat on a chair and drank. Calvino walked back through the slum corridors and outside to the road. Vietnamese girls dressed in their pajamas scattered from his path, as if they instinctively smelled something worse than the lake—the sour stench of death resting in his arms. Scott came out behind him and looked up and down the road. Nothing was moving.
“We could have a long wait,” said Scott.
The thought of a long delay in getting Thu to the hospital was numbing. Calvino stood in the middle of the muddy road. He ignored the rain. Scott lit a cigarette and spit into a puddle. A teenager from Brooklyn would have had the solution twice as fast, he thought.
“Ever steal a car?”
The question caught Scott by surprise, he smiled, and finished his beer, crumpling up the can before throwing it in the street.
“There are no cars out here.” He sucked on his cigarette.
“But otherwise, it is a brilliant idea. Any others? Maybe a helicopter?”
Calvino went back into the house and looked at Thu’s face. She was trying to smile and that attempt to comfort him made things much worse. He covered her head with a clean towel one of the girls had managed to find. He lifted her off the bamboo mat and carried her out to the porch and into the rain. It was morning and the brothels and road were empty of customers. Almost empty, he thought, spotting a parked UNTAC Land Cruiser thirty meters away. Scott smiled, and for the first time there was some kind of warmth in that smile. Or it may have been the effect of the Tiger beer.
“I have just found us transportation,” said Calvino, looking back at Scott on the porch.
“Maybe you are okay,” said Scott, flicking his cigarette into a puddle of rainwater.
“Let’s go,” said Calvino.
The white UNTAC Land Cruiser, splattered with mud, was half-ass parked, the back end sticking into the road, in front of a one-story wooden shack. They walked in the rain, then Scott ran ahead, pushed back the beaded curtain over the front door and had emerged from the brothel by the time Calvino and Thu had reached the Land Cruiser.
“Who does it belong to?” asked Calvino, leaning against the vehicle to support Thu’s weight and his own.
“Two hairy white legs sticking out of a back room.” “You tell them we had an emergency?”
Scott nodded. “They said fuck off.”
“You told them we had a girl with serious injuries?” “Calvino, they don’t give a flying fuck.”
Calvino looked at the front entrance. Scott was likely right. “Are they armed?”
Scott shrugged. “They’re not allowed to carry weapons. But they had guns. Asia is full of contradictions.”
Calvino tried the door to the Land Cruiser and it opened. He carefully loaded Thu onto the back seat.
“Get in and stay with her,” he said to Scott. “Where are you going?” asked Scott. Calvino removed his .38 Police Special.
“To get the keys.”
“I thought you were going to hotwire it,” said Scott.
“You need a degree in engineering or a career as a life-long hijacker. Or a gun.”
“I don’t think they are going to like this very much.”
“It doesn’t really matter what you think, Richard.”
Scott swiftly swung open the door on the passenger’s side, climbed in, shutting the door hard. They looked at each other for a moment. He watched Calvino disappear into the squalid whorehouse, his gun held low at his side. The mamasan, who was about four foot two i
n brown slippers, saw his gun and flashed him a smile filled with black teeth. She simply pivoted to one side and pointed with a bony finger at a makeshift room in the back. Calvino put a finger to his lips, and then put that finger to the old woman’s lips, her eyes never leaving the gun at his side. On a table near the window were empty beer bottles and a red scarf. He grabbed the scarf and tied it around his face, then walked toward the sound of groaning and panting in the back. He found two naked UNTAC police officers on bamboo mats with teenaged Vietnamese girls. He pushed back the beaded curtain, and pointed the .38 Police Special at them. The one with blond hair and lantern jaw was flexing his chest muscles looking like he might try to go for Calvino’s gun. Scott was right. They were armed. He spotted the 9mm pistols in leather holsters just inside the door. He kicked the guns behind him. Calvino pointed the gun at the blond’s forehead and pulled back the hammer until it locked. It was a sound that got their attention.
“You come off the floor, muscle man, and I’ll blow your fucking brains out. Back. Move back, now. I want your uniforms. Throw them out. Do it now, asshole,” he demanded. The adrenalin surge hit him hard as he moved away from the door.
“You can’t rob us,” said one of the officers in heavily accented English.
“You’re going to tell me it’s against the law. Like the unauthorized carrying of handguns. The way I look at it, I can do whatever I want to do. Just like you two. Now move.”
The other with black hair balled up his fists. It was more of an act for his partner than any real threat; you could look into a man’s face and see a lot of bluff when it came to rushing straight into the barrel of a gun. That only happened in the movies.
Their erections had already gone south. Three Vietnamese girls shivered in the corner, their thin, brown legs pulled up to their chins. They sat with arms clasped around their knees, hyperventilating. They must have figured this was another Khmer Rouge attack, with some crazy KR who had the features of a farang. Calvino stepped forward and kicked the officer who had made the fists in the stomach. He crumpled up, his eyes rolling into his head.
Zero Hour in Phnom Pehn Page 17