“Real slow, toss over the trousers first,” said Calvino.
The two men slowly handed over their uniforms. Bulgarian flags were sewn on the shoulders. He took the money out of the two wallets and threw it at the girls squatting in the corner. Then he backed out of the room with their trousers, shirts, underwear and shoes. He picked up their guns near the door and walked outside. He rattled the car keys in his hand as he jumped off the porch and into the driver’s seat of the Land Cruiser.
“Here’s some clothes,” he said to Scott, throwing him the uniforms.
“Bulgobatt streakers strike Phnom Penh. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened. If you are gonna rob anyone, the Bulgarians are a good choice. No one in Cambodia likes them. Now that would make an interesting AP story—how the Bulgobatts screwed while Cambodia was destroyed,” said Scott, checking the pockets.
“I gave their money to the women.”
“Bulgobatt streakers mugged by Italian-American Robin Hood. That’s an even better story.” Scott explained how the Bulgobatts had become the villains of the UNTAC forces. Their reputation for whoring, drinking, bribery, robbery, cheating, lying, and general wrongdoing may not have been entirely deserved but it was usually accepted. Everyone needed a scapegoat. A cut out. And the Bulgarians performed that duty for the resident journalists in Phnom Penh.
Calvino was no longer listening, he switched on the engine and pulled away from the brothel, tires spinning and spewing a shower of mud onto the front porch.
******
CALVINO drove the Land Cruiser into the grounds of the French hospital. He pulled up in front of the entrance and switched off the engine.
“Give me the keys,” said Scott. “I can find a buyer for this. Say we split the proceeds fifty-fifty. It’s just a matter of time before the Bulgobatts sell it on the black market.”
“It’s not for sale.”
He removed the keys and put them in his pocket.
“An honest car thief,” said Scott. “Not a trend likely to catch on in Phnom Penh.”
Thu was unconscious when Calvino lifted her out of the car and carried her inside the hospital. Scott tagged along, muttering about the ethics of stealing. One of the first doctors who came into the examination room, wearing latex gloves and a new pair of nylon stockings, had a familiar face. She was the receptionist at the hotel. Without a word she rolled back the towels from Thu’s wounds and traced the puncture marks with her finger. Another woman found a vein and slipped in a needle attached to an overhead drip.
“Mr. Calvino, Room 305,” said the doctor. “And one of your friends.” She wasn’t referring to Scott.
“Is she going to make it?” asked Calvino.
The smiling, round face gave away nothing. No emotional readout. Years of growing up under the guns of the Khmer Rouge had created a generation of such contentless smiles.
“She may lose her leg and her arm,” she finally said. “I think you better go back to your hotel. We will take good care of her. Goodbye, Mr. Calvino.”
He was on her turf. And he wasn’t a guest any longer. He leaned over Thu, brushed the hair away from her damp face.
“Take care of her.”
“Wait outside.”
“Do you know a Dr. Veronica? A French doctor?” The Khmer doctor tilted her head to the side. “You know Dr. Veronica?”
Suddenly his capital had increased. “She’s an old friend.”
“I tell her you are here.” Then she disappeared back into the surgery and left Calvino sitting in the corridor.
Scott had fled back to town, saying he had an appointment with an investor in his Vietnam project. It was a simple lie. But it didn’t matter, and Calvino was glad to be alone. Half an hour later, Dr. Veronica emerged from the operating room where they had taken Thu. She remembered him from the restaurant where she had sat at the next table with a Frenchman named Philippe. She looked different in the hospital. No low-cut evening dress. Instead she was dressed in a drab green top, loose pants, and her hair was covered. She offered him her hand. In the restaurant there had been an electrical connection—as if someone had fired a sexual flare-gun that burst over their heads. No sign of that connection was present as he stood opposite her. There was coldness in her manner, a professional detachment. They shook hands.
“Why don’t you come to my office?”
Calvino had started up the cross-table conversation. Now in the hospital corridor he was at a loss for words. She hadn’t given him much of a chance, turning and walking ahead, expecting him to follow. She was the kind of woman he suspected a lot of men had followed.
She opened the door to a room and turned on a light. It was a plain room with a desk stacked with files.
“Sit down, Mr. Calvino.”
She looked him up and down. And he was thinking that she must have been wondering what kind of man would have brought this girl into the hospital in this shape and stayed around to check out the results. She removed her cap and let her long dark hair fall back over her shoulders. She looked tired, and without the make-up and candlelight of the restaurant, she looked older; she had the kind of bone- weary look that turned thirty-five-year-olds into fifty-year-old women.
“Is she . . .”
“She’ll be alright.”
“I remember. Land mine victims are your specialty. Her leg?”
“We couldn’t save it. God knows we tried. We had to cut it here.” She made a slicing gesture below her own right knee, and then added with a shrug, “But she’ll live.”
“Christ. How?”
“She will think of something. The Vietnamese are very clever,” said the doctor. “Their life is very hard in Cambodia. But I suspect that you know that. The men who did this should be shot. But of course nothing will happen.”
“At La Paillote last night you gave the appearance that anything was possible.”
“I was intrigued by you and your Thai friend.” “Phnom Penh is a place for intrigue . . .”
“You must excuse me but my English is not very good,” she said.
“She’s not going to die, is she?” Dr. Veronica shrugged.
“You can never tell. But I think not.” “She was helping me find someone.”
“Is that your job? Finding people in Phnom Penh?”
Calvino leaned forward over her desk. “It’s keeping people alive. A little like your job. Only I’m finding I’m not so good at it in Phnom Penh. Two other girls were killed in the attack at the lake. I saw the bodies.”
Death was trivialized by such exchanges, he thought. The information didn’t make much of an immediate impression on Dr. Veronica. No more than cutting off Thu’s leg had or the thought of the life lying ahead of Thu without a leg and a useless arm. It made him angry with himself. He caught himself from showing that anger, and turned away from the doctor.
“We’re all trying to heal something. But the wound never seems to close. Ever since the first time I met you I had this feeling you had invested a lot in the healing business. Then I thought this is a woman who has some larger mission. And I started to wonder if you thought that I could be of some use to whatever you are trying to do. That’s why you asked me to the hospital. Only you didn’t expect this. That I’d show up with a girl with a shattered leg and arm.”
Dr. Veronica had the look of an NGO who had been in the field too long; someone who had been raised in Paris, and volunteered to work on the staff of a hospital in Southeast Asia because she thought she might accomplish some good. Only to find out that good and right were concepts that required considerable adjustment to the reality of what happened in the field.
“Do you have any idea what these people have been through?” she asked.
“Probably not,” he said.
“That may be the first honest answer I’ve heard all day,” she said. “So I’m going to fill in a gap in your knowledge. We French have been here since the last century. We imported the Vietnamese to run the civil administration of the colony.”
“Some gaps in your knowledge have already been filled since I talked with you at the restaurant. Yes, we made mistakes. Many stupid things were done and not done. So you try the best you can to live with the history others in your country have passed down to you. Americans must understand that a little. Yes?”
“We understand,” said Calvino.
Coffee arrived as she began her story.
Six months earlier, Dr. Veronica had been sent by helicopter to Battambang when the Khmer Rouge shelled the village. There was a medical emergency with UNTAC staff and she said that she would go. She spent the night. While she was sleeping the rockets started. A housemaid came running into her room with a flashlight. She saw the maid’s face as she said, “Pol Pot, he come back.” The look of death lit her face in the dim light. It was painful to witness such a mask of terror under the flashlight. She saw in the old woman’s eyes the fear of someone who had seen, felt, and understood death.
The two words had so much power to strike fear—Pol Pot. The maid had survived death when that name had been in the air before. Not once, like dodging a bullet, but for months and years on end, when the bullets never stopped coming. It shaped her mind, and formed the substance of her dreams. What she had witnessed during Pol Pot’s days was so overwhelmingly cruel that she knew it had not—could not—ever disappear from Cambodia. It was out there, waiting, stalking like a wild, hungry animal that tracks you for food. No matter where you go, where you hide, how many fires you light to keep it away, it comes back for you. Now that animal was pounding the village with shells. It had come back for her; it remembered her, and she remembered an animal that had taken so many villagers before. Her face, at that precise moment, was the face of death—it wasn’t on a dead person, but stuck on someone who was alive. That was what had startled Veronica—that the living also wear the masks of the dead.
After she stopped talking there was a slightly embarrassed, annoyed expression on her face.
“You think maybe I personalize the suffering too much, yes?”
“What else can you do with suffering?” She relaxed and sipped her coffee.
“We French are partly responsible for the suffering of the Cambodian people.”
He could see that this was more than a political statement but something she felt deeply.
“Coming here as a doctor is . . .”
“My way of atonement,” she said quickly. “More than a gesture is needed. Something must be done on a large scale. And that takes money. A great deal of money. And in the world where capitalism demands selfishness, how does one raise such money?” She asked this in a determined fashion, as someone who had thought out the angles and difficulties and had made a commitment.
“You’re saying the ends justify the means?” asked Calvino. “If your ends are justice, of course you must do everything that is possible to serve those ends.”
“Steal?”
“What is theft? Some objects have been stolen so many times who can say who is the rightful owner? The original thief? Or the crook who last stole it?”
“What about murder?”
“Yes, what about it?”
“Do your ends justify that, too?”
“How many Vietnamese did your government murder in Vietnam?”
“That was a war.”
“And this is not?”
A nurse came in and whispered something to the doctor. Dr. Veronica looked up and nodded.
“You can see Ms. Thu now, if you wish.”
“I’d like to continue this conversation.”
“As you like.”
“If theft and murder are justifiable, then what about lying?”
“To serve a larger truth, of course, yes,” she said.
“Did you ever know a French-Canadian named Stuart L’Blanc? A jeweler who lived in Bangkok.”
A smile slowly crossed her face.
“Of course I meet many people. I cannot remember them all.”
“He weighed four hundred pounds.”
“That’s quite unhealthy.”
“He’s dead now.”
“You see, I was right.”
When he went into Thu’s room, she was still unconscious. He stood beside her bed, thinking about how people atoned for their own sins and the sins of others. It was a full-time job, cleaning up the mistakes and misadventures of the past; it was a job that never could be finished. At La Paillote, he remembered that Pratt had said almost nothing about the French doctor. It was curious why he had been so uncurious about her. It was as if she were invisible in the world, walking as a shadow over mud roads. He sat beside Thu’s bed and watched her breathing. Her face was turned to the side on the pillow and there were tubes in her arms. If pain had a map then it was printed on that sleeping face. There was something in her face that reminded him of a Bangkok bargirl. The girl had a boy fathered by a farang. The girl’s father had chosen and registered the name of the baby. He came home with the official certificate. The baby’s name was Bandit. He had been born into a tribe of women who had been outlawed by the circumstances of their birth. Mothers giving birth to children called Bandit. Mothers hundreds of years old. He brushed the hair from Thu’s face. He wished he possessed the power to change what was unchangeable—to shift Thu’s fate, Bandit’s fate, and that of others just like them. The twisting of the screw, which anchored them to misery and suffering, never came loose. Knowing that misery was bottomless was to understand that hatred and cruelty were the children of misery. Like Bandit was the child of a whore.
Dr. Veronica watched silently from the door.
She wondered what kind of man sat at the bedside. His face twisted with emotion as if he had suffered a defeat. She left without saying what was on her mind. That she was not disappointed that he had come to the hospital, and that she hoped he would return.
TEN
PAYING THE PRICE
THE TWO BULGARIAN UNTAC non-commissioned officers whom Calvino had left naked in the whorehouse danced in a high-step rage. Nothing was better than revenge when the emotions were still boiling with anger and hatred. The two men, sweat dripping off their faces, had drawn blood as they circled Calvino’s chair. But their blood lust had been satisfied. A third man, an officer, calmly smoked a cigarette and watched his men as if this was a training exercise and he was grading them on their performance. One of the men from the brothel poked Calvino’s chest with a wooden nightstick, the leather strap wrapped around his wrist.
They held Calvino in a small upstairs room. The windows were painted black and a solitary, dusty 60-watt naked light bulb hung down like a glass noose above his head. Four or five kilos of dirty pots were stacked in one corner on a straw mat. Beer bottles were scattered across the width of the room. The stained wallpaper had curled into long yellowish tongues licking at the stale air like the hologram of some dead creature murdered in another dimension. The smell of pot clung in the air but it was mixed with some vile stench he couldn’t recognize. Calvino looked around. Wherever they had taken him it wasn’t a five-star hotel; it bore the same aesthetic taste as the whorehouses out by the lake. He finally spotted the source of the rotting smell. It came from a coffee-colored stained tampon someone had slapped like a contaminated waffle against the far wall; it looked like the UNTAC boys used the room for screwing. Scott had said the Bulgobatts had a reputation for evil. Most of the time what Scott said had a grain of truth hidden in it. This time Scott had hit the mother lode of truth for a few bad men who happened to be Bulgarians.
The three men had dragged him blindfolded out of an UNTAC vehicle, through a door, up two flights of stairs, and into the room. One of them ripped off the blindfold and slammed him hard in the face.
“Don’t tell me, you’re not ordering out for lunch,” said Calvino, shaking off the sharp pain.
“We fuck you up,” said one of the men.
“You think we okay? You
get away with that shit?” said another, waving Calvino’s .38 Police Special in his face.
“Don’t tell me. At school you majored in torture and minored in Dracula English.”
Then he tipped his head to the side, feeling his face swelling, and spit blood on the floor. More blood was running freely from his nose. The sight of all that blood and his agony made them laugh.
“Who said you could spit on our floor?” asked one of the men.
“He don’t respect us. He don’t spit on his own floor.”
“Maybe we make him lick it up.”
“You guys are good peacekeepers,” said Calvino. “Probably Greenpeace members. Health food freaks. All around good citizens. But you should know something.”
“Yeah,” said the officer, who had stepped forward. “You hit me one more time and . . .”
“You’ll kill us, right?” Calvino shook his head.
“Wrong. You guys have watched too much prime-time TV in Bulgaria.” Calvino grinned and tried not to black out. He was on that edge where the pain cuts out the consciousness. He’d been there before. It was a kind of platform, he got into a train made of pure light and suddenly he was in motion going fast, feeling nothing, thinking nothing, moving on a razor track which skirted memory and thought.
The three men hovered over him.
“What you do, American boy? Tell us. We want to know.” A drill hole of fear shot through the needle eye of that curiosity.
Calvino liked that; that fear gave him an edge to hold onto.
“Black magic,” he said. “Boys like you from Vampire country should understand black magic. Witchcraft. Evil spells.”
Zero Hour in Phnom Pehn Page 18