Zero Hour in Phnom Pehn

by Christopher G. Moore

  The Khmer doctor walked in a couple of moments later wearing her reception desk smile as if she had just pulled his key out of the pigeonhole and was about to wish him a good day. Thu was shaking so bad that her stump pounded against the floorboards like a dog’s tail in a thunderstorm.

  “We keep running into each other,” said Calvino to Dr. Veronica, who had knelt down over one of the bodies, her finger against the neck feeling for a pulse.

  She looked up at him. “These men would have killed you.”

  “That was the idea.”

  This didn’t satisfy her. Why didn’t Americans take such events more seriously? “I had better phone the police.”

  “Forget the police. Phone Shaw. We just finished picking up what was left of Mike Hatch.”

  “You mean he’s dead?”

  She rose from the floor and walked over to Calvino. She stood in front of him, a Colt .45 clenched in her right hand and looking as if she were about to cry. He put his arms around her, pushed back her hair and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Thanks for coming when you did,” he said.

  “I had no choice, did I?”

  “One always has a choice.”

  She embraced him for a moment, pulled back, composed herself. “Yes, your country is built on choice. This one is built on fear and blood. There is no choice.”

  “What if I wanted to choose you?” he asked.

  She smiled. “Did anyone ever tell you that your timing was bad?”

  He looked down at the bodies. The Khmer doctor helped Thu to the bed. She came over and took the Colt .45 from Dr. Veronica and put it under the mattress.

  “I had this feeling about you. I mean a feeling I don’t normally have about a woman,” said Calvino. But then he thought it might be better to keep his feeling to himself. The corridor was thick with nurses, official s, and doctors whom the good doctor told to keep out of the room for a minute. He went to the bed and helped Thu back into the wheelchair.

  “Where are you taking her?” she asked, walking around the bodies.

  “To my room at the Monorom,” said Calvino.

  “It may not be safe there,” Dr. Veronica said. “Then you tell me where in Phnom Penh is safe.”

  She didn’t answer and instead changed the subject. “You know these men?”

  Calvino looked down at the face of the dead man she had killed. He was a farang in civilian clothing. That meant nothing. He could have been a contract killer or UNTAC personnel doing some midday moonlighting. He might have been just about anyone but the answer was that he had never laid eyes on the man. He shook his head. Then he went over and took off the black stocking from the head of the man he had killed. He recognized the face instantly.

  “Philippe,” he said, looking up. “Your friend with the gold cigarette case.”

  “I tried to persuade him to return to Paris. But he wouldn’t listen. Now this.”

  “Who was he working for?” He tried not to let his anger, his disappointment show. He kept hearing Pratt saying to him that he had stayed in Phnom Penh because of her. And he had just finished all but saying that he loved her.

  “A man like Philippe never said who he worked for, only who worked for him.”

  “And a woman like you, can you say who you are working for? Or do we want to talk about the philosophy of theft and property ownership?”

  She slapped him hard enough to cut his lip and draw blood. Then she turned and walked through the crowd of attendants and out of the room.

  “Why these bad men want to kill Thu?” asked the Khmer doctor from the Monorom.

  “That’s a question I’d like an answer to myself. Maybe you want to ask Dr. Veronica if she has any theories,” said Calvino. Staring at the dead was no easy thing. A couple of minutes earlier they had a life to live. A moment later there was nothing but a body to bury. He wondered if they were the ones who had killed Patten and Hatch. If they were, then he was sad for one thing—that they had died so fast, they had gone out like a light without any idea what had hit them. There was no justice in that. They should have looked into the jaws of that snake. They should have had time to talk about Kim and crushed glass and a Harley sailing into a lake.

  Calvino shouldered his .38 and pushed the wheelchair toward the door. The bodies blocked the way. With the doctor’s help he dragged them to the side. By the time they were in the corridor half the hospital was outside.

  “A little accident,” said Calvino. “The good doctor is looking after everything.”

  He turned around and she smiled through a crack in the door. The practiced smile from the killing fields when Year Zero came and the only defense was to smile at those who had the guns.

  FOURTEEN

  THE WINDSOR FACTOR

  YELLOW ALTAR CANDLES flickered inside glass ashtrays. Candles illuminated about a half-dozen tables, the flames casting a penumbra of light in the near midday darkness of the Monorom Hotel restaurant. A citywide blackout had shut down the power in Phnom Penh. The Russian electrical generators were overloaded like work horses, stumbling daily before pitching headlong into a ditch. Calvino sat across the table from Pratt. The candle flame rose between them, turning their faces into shadows and dark eyebrows.

  “Thu is upstairs in my room,” said Calvino.

  “You’d think she would have been shaken up. But she wasn’t. She said it was just like Vietnam all over again. Nothing changed from one country to another. There is no bitterness or sadness in her. It’s just the way it is. She accepts that people want to kill her, have been trying to kill her since she was a child. She can’t imagine any other kind of life.”

  “She saw you kill two men at the French hospital . . .”

  “I killed only one. Philippe the Frenchman,” interrupted Calvino.

  “He was a gangster with a very impressive record of crime in Paris. A very bad man, Vincent. Still, explaining that he was killed by an American in a French hospital is . . .”

  “Awkward?” “Precisely.”

  “Officially how did he die?” asked Calvino.

  “Trying to defend you and the girl. A stranger broke into the hospital room. A hired killer. There was a shoot-out. Both men died.”

  “You made him a hero?”

  “False heroes like false prophets have always outnumbered the genuine ones,” said Pratt.

  “Who was the other hitman?”

  “A Russian freelance gun for hire. Ex-KGB agent.”

  “You think Dr. Veronica knew about the hit?” asked Calvino.

  “She says she didn’t.” “You believe her?” “Do you, Vincent?”

  “I don’t know anything anymore. Not about this case, not about women, not about life.”

  Pratt looked tired in the candlelight. He knew Calvino wanted to resolve this one question over any other but he had nothing substantial to suggest she was part of some larger plot. Calvino had invested something in this woman and his face showed the signs of a small defeat.

  “You did good,” said Pratt. “Staying alive is doing good.”

  “You should have told me where you were going,” said Pratt, a note of regret in his voice. The candle flickered from a draft. The curvature of light made the corner of Pratt’s lips look downturned.

  Calvino knew at the time that taking off suddenly was not the right thing to do. Sometimes the right thing is not what should be done. So he had left without saying a word to anyone. He didn’t want to admit it was because he wasn’t sure any longer who he trusted. Shaw and the UNTAC body snatchers had watched him climb onto the motorcycle. He wasn’t certain where their true loyalties ran. Even Pratt hadn’t told him the full truth and this made him edgy. They had never lied to each other all the years they had known each other. Then he told himself that Pratt hadn’t really lied, he had done the Thai trick of not revealing the whole truth. This was hardly a Thai invention. Calvino justified his action—pulling Pratt off to the side for a heart-to-heart discussion would have been the same as taking out a full-pag
e color advertisement.

  “You’re right,” said Calvino. “I should have said something. But in the five minutes I would have used to try and explain a feeling that made no real sense, the Russian and Philippe would have killed Thu. As it is, I’m lucky not to have been whacked.”

  “Don’t stop worrying. There are likely more where those came from,” said Pratt.

  “You track down the stocking over Philippe’s head?” Pratt had been waiting for that question.

  “It belonged to our friend at reception.” “I thought it might,” said Calvino.

  “It looks like he had something going with her.”

  “Which shows that Dr. Veronica was not involved. Otherwise why would he get involved with a Khmer doctor?”

  “Maybe he had bad farang morals.”

  “Asian morals, farang morals. I never could figure out what that meant.”

  “He used one of her black stockings.” “Which she received as a bribe.”

  “From a Western journalist who wanted sex with you,” said Pratt.

  “It’s unlikely we’ll ever know what she wanted from him,” said Calvino.

  “Out of Cambodia. That was the point she stressed.” Calvino’s law—On a micro level there was a point to everything; but on a macro level everything was pointless.

  “She told you that?”

  “And that things were complicated. She was talking about some of the personal relationships of the hospital staff.”

  Pratt had said this with resignation. The casualness with which he accepted horror was one of his strong points. Destiny wasn’t to be struggled against; it contained the obvious truth, its shape, movement, and meaning.

  “I thought we were going to talk about diamonds and ruby stones,” said Calvino. “And how Mike Hatch got a big piece of red glass stuck in the hole which once held his eye.”

  Pratt, the candlelight flickering on his face, smiled, one of those smiles that has nothing to do with happiness or pleasure; a smile which says, yeah, nothing is gonna change the fact that we are at the end of a chain of events that still hasn’t ended and if we’re not careful might plow straight through us. He had carefully gone over in his mind what he was going to tell Calvino. His commander was of the opinion that foreigners come and go. They were in Thailand but they remained outside the sphere of influence. Some had a reputation. But none had any lasting importance. The pride in being Thai was the pride of being free and independent. As long as the foreigners were isolated from power, Thais could remain proud. The commander himself was a proud man. He said that the foreigners were not a force that mattered because to matter required power. A Thai had to be responsible for solving the jewelry case. Allowing a foreigner the credit would be a great loss of face.

  Westerners were to be treated as water poured over your hands. Water is useful. We must use water. But it is the hand which makes itself clean; and is soon dried, doing the work of the country, protecting its honor. Pratt believed there was some lesson to be learned from his commander and disbelieved this particular line at the same time. In his mind this was no contradiction. It just was. Calvino was his friend who was also a foreigner. He was also a member of his family. How can a member of the family be a foreigner? Of course he couldn’t. But he was. Unless he brought Calvino inside the case, his friend would be at grave risk. The other foreigners were dead. They were of no account. But Calvino counted.

  “You’re not going to like what I’m going to tell you.”

  “I already know that,” said Calvino.

  “There are things which I should have told you before.”

  “I already figured that much out. But it doesn’t matter about before.”

  “No hard feelings?” asked Pratt, eyes dancing in the candle-light.

  “Feelings never get hard or soft. Just hot or cool,” said Calvino.

  This made Pratt smile, this time with some pleasure. “Have you ever heard of the Windsor Factor?”

  “It sounds like it could be the name of a Bangkok condo.” “Not really. It’s a piece of jargon that came out of Sotheby’s some years ago.”

  “Sotheby’s like the auction house?”

  Pratt nodded. “After the Duchess of Windsor died her estate sent her jewels off to Sotheby’s for auction. The experts published a list giving the estimated price for each item. Set them out in the auction catalogue. These prices were a sort of guide as to the range of value. Then the auction came. And one thing happened which no one had expected. A wild card or subjective factor. At the auction the prices kept going up and up. No one seemed to notice what the value was supposed to be. The Windsor jewels brought in five times the expected price. Why? A lot has been written on that question. Some say people were willing to pay a large premium for owning a piece of history. Or the glamor of being associated with the Duchess of Windsor. Those who bought were buying more than a stone and metal. Like an Elvis guitar. Or a Monroe cocktail dress. In this world value has to do with all kinds of strange, irrational feelings.”

  “The Duchess of Windsor was reincarnated as a Patpong bargirl. Number 19 in an upstairs bar. That would be karmic justice.”

  “In a way her spirit is in Phnom Penh,” said Pratt. “Stop being so Thai and level with me.”

  “You will of course remember the problem we Thais have had with the Saudis over some jewels?” asked Pratt. He had broken the seal on the promise with his commanding officer with that one question.

  Remember, thought Calvino. The question had to be the understatement of the 1990s for anyone who lived in Thailand. The loss of the jewels had caused enough embarrassment to shame a fox caught with a mouthful of feathers inside a chicken house.

  “The Saudi jewels?” asked Calvino. There wasn’t a cocktail party in Bangkok at which the jewels had been left out of the conversation. The basic facts, as Calvino knew them, were that in the original heist, a Thai domestic servant walked out of a palace with a half-billion baht worth of jewels. The servant had worked for a prince in Saudi and had literally stolen the crown jewels. The servant escaped to Thailand with bags of the jewels—some said cardboard boxes of jewels—which weighed about as much as he did. No one ever figured out how he did it. Get all those jewels out of Saudi and into Thailand.

  Later, upcountry, the thief surrendered to the police and handed over the stolen loot. The Saudis were happy; the Thais were happy. The Saudis awarded medals to the Thai police. But this happiness was a state, which existed until the truth was revealed. And that brief period of happiness abruptly ended when the Saudi prince discovered that what had been returned by the Thai official s did not correspond—as a lawyer would say—in kind or quality to the jewels stolen by his Thai servant. This realization marked the beginning of a long, bitter, and angry disillusionment on both sides, trading insults and threats. There was enough face on both sides for no one to back down. The Saudis pulled their ambassador out of Bangkok. The wagons were drawn in a circle as soon as it became an issue of national pride being at stake. The theft spawned a rumor industry. From the sidelines, Calvino had thought it was like a marriage that had gone sour a couple of weeks after the honeymoon. The Saudis insisted that what the Thai authorities had returned didn’t correspond to what had been stolen by the servant. Stolen jewels had gone missing in Thailand. But what’s a couple of bags of jewelry among friends? In this case, it was a lot. There was no shortage of rumors on who had helped themselves to the jewels. Fingers were pointed at several high-ranking police officers and politicians—and their wives. But there was no hard evidence—meaning it would never be settled on the basis of legal evidence. With important, influential people, there was never enough evidence. What general ever voluntarily returned plunder? History offered few examples of such conduct. Once a general gives the plunder to his wife, then to take it off his wife’s throat and return it to strangers? Only a strange kind of Western logic could ever conceive of that possibility.

  Some unconfirmed press accounts claimed that some of the wives had appeared at
exclusive high society events decked out in stolen jewels looking like the cat with a fat mouse between its teeth. Years of grinding, non-productive investigations had not turned up any concrete answers. Committees had looked into the matter. Video cassettes containing evidence gathered dust or disappeared. Still nothing tangible was ever found to link anyone to the jewels; it was as if they had vanished. Some said they had vanished through the hands of some top brass—but no one ever said who these people were—at least as far as Calvino knew.

  “We’ve recovered all of the jewels except . . .” he paused.

  “One special piece. A necklace. The owner, a Saudi prince, wants that necklace back. He doesn’t want money compensation. Or another necklace, which matches the original. He will accept only the original. Until then Thailand’s relations with Saudi remain . . .”

  “Cool,” said Calvino.

  “Frozen,” said Pratt.

  One piece of jewelry was determining the relations of countries. Figure it, thought Calvino. What was worn around a woman’s neck had become a kind of diplomatic noose. Missing Saudi jewels had been boilerplate headlines for a couple of years in Bangkok. The odds makers had given better odds for finding a live version of Big Foot drinking Singha beer in a Patpong bar.

  Those two words—Saudi jewels—carried all the information that Calvino needed to rethink the meaning behind the ground glass on the floor of Hatch’s room, the way he had been butchered, and the red stone eye.

  “Applying the Windsor Factor, what kinda money are we talking about, Pratt?”

  “Fifty million US dollars.”