by Lee Stone
Was it possible that Ta Penh, the grizzled old Khmer Rouge commander still held some sway here, just like he did in Kep? Would someone be watching out for Kate as she tried to pass customs? And what about his own demons? They might be lurking too. Dangerous men of power and influence still followed behind, reaching out for him. Still waiting to settle their score.
Lockhart’s nerves had been pinched since Kep. Kate was worse. She was pale and jumpy, unsure which way to look. Fischer had dropped them in a backstreet near to The Happy and had promised to make the arrangements to cremate Matilda’s body once the authorities released it.
‘There’s nothing you can do for her now,’ he’d told Kate as they walked away from the lawyer’s SUV. ‘We have to think about the living, not the dead.’
It was a harsh truth, but it was not the moment for sugar coating the pill. Time was against them, and Kep had suddenly felt like a town full of spies, with its bent cops and secret Khmer Rouge signs. Lockhart had ducked into a Money Exchange near to the market to withdraw Fischer’s fee. Then they had headed for The Happy, nervy and alert as they moved along the shaded side of the street. When they reached the bar, Lockhart ghosted in the same way he had escaped on the night of Matilda’s murder. He found police tape still covering the room where he had tried in vain to resuscitate her. He remembered the killer, and the ponytail swishing behind him as he brushed past on his way out. Lockhart remembered hunting for him through town, and the struggle in the alleyway, and Chhan, the guy with the missing eye. He shuddered, and brought his mind back to the moment, searching through the drawers for Kate’s passport. He didn’t stay a minute longer than necessary, throwing everything into Kate’s suitcase and tucking her passport into his back pocket. Then he had slipped back out of the Happy and into the street, just as he had on the night of Matilda’s murder.
They arrived at customs twenty minutes before boarding. When they reached the front of the cue, a bored woman waved a hand and called Lockhart forward to her booth. He slid his passport under the glass and waited for her to process it. He rolled his shoulders and forced himself to relax. Watched her fingers flick back and forth through the pages of his passport until eventually she looked up from the paperwork, her face stern and her eyes hooded in a frown.
‘What was the purpose of your visit?’
It was the same drill as always. Same efficient scrutiny. Except that it wasn’t. It was different. It was different because the woman behind the glass wasn’t staring at him. Instead, her eyes flicked over his shoulder and fixed on the queue behind him.
‘Just a holiday,’ Lockhart said, resisting the urge to turn and follow her gaze. ‘I’ve been on the beach in Kep.’
The woman’s eyes came back to him.
‘From Germany?’
Lockhart shrugged.
‘Sure. I flew in from Frankfurt.’
Her eyes flicked up from the pages, but instead of focusing on him, her gaze went back to the front of the queue behind him. To Kate Braganza. As he watched, Lockhart was sure he saw a spark of recognition in her eyes before she brought them back to him and nodded curtly. As he watched, the woman’s hand moved beneath her desk, feeling for a call button.
‘You flew in six days ago?’
‘Uh-huh.’
She cleared her throat.
‘Long journey for six days, no?’
This was not an unusual question for Lockhart. Moving on quickly had become a force of habit.
‘I might come back,’ he said. ‘I liked it.’
She ignored him and went back to flicking through the pages of his passport.
‘Many stamps,’ she said.
Lockhart smiled.
‘I’m a travel writer,’ he said. ‘Best job in the world.’
‘Are you travelling alone?’
‘Yes, I am,’ Lockhart said.
He had booked the tickets separately, seating Kate and himself in different rows so as not to alert suspicion. In the corner of his eye, Lockhart saw movement. A uniformed guard had moved out from one of the other counters and was slowly edging towards him. From a brief glance, Lockhart guessed he was in his early fifties. Old enough to have lived through Year Zero and picked a side. Old enough to have forged allegiances and loyalties that stretched long beyond the Khmer Rouge’s years in power.
Lockhart wondered again about what had happened after he and Kate fled the cages in the heart of Kampot Prison. If Ta Penh had survived, would his malignant influence stretch out from the Cardamom Mountains as far as the immigration controls? And if he had survived, would he be looking for revenge? Hell, yes. And if anyone at the airport was working for Ta Penh, the guard was a prime candidate. His uniform was cheap navy polyester, with a too-thin black tie and a scratchy looking white shirt. It wasn’t a uniform that smelled of authority or pride, and yet he was, at that moment, sharp and alert. Something was happening in his world that was important to him. Exciting, even. Lockhart could sense it in the way he shaped up as he approached.
There was an uncomfortable silence as the woman behind the glass slowly scrolled her finger down the passenger manifest, cross-checking Lockhart’s details. With each second she delayed, the guard came closer. Lockhart turned casually so he could get a better look at him. But the guard was looking elsewhere. Just like the woman behind the glass, he seemed more interested in Kate, waiting at the front of the queue behind Lockhart. The woman looked up to speak just as the guard arrived at her booth. He leaned forward until his mouth was inches from her ear and said something to her in Khmer. She nodded and then looked up, and both of them glanced at Kate at the same time. Then she slipped Lockhart’s documents back under the screen and waited for him to head through the partition doors and into the departures lounge beyond. For a second he stayed rooted to the spot, not wanting to draw attention to himself, but not wanting to leave Kate either. And then he moved. Because he had no choice. This was the problem with airports.
The barrier between Cambodia and freedom was a partition stud wall and a series of domestic wooden doors. Each was weighted, so that when Lockhart walked through, it closed behind him. There was no handle on the reverse side. No way back. No way to influence what was happening to Kate. The departure lounge was sparse, with a polished floor and white walls. A bank of plastic chairs faced a glass wall that looked out onto the apron. He took a seat against one wall and surveyed the scene, watching the doors and clinging on to the hope that Kate would be smart enough to argue her way through. The room was filling up, with passengers milling around, stretching their legs for one last time before the flight.
Lockhart let the noise wash over him, his attention focused on the doors at the far end of the room. A steady stream of passengers emerged; mostly Americans and Europeans, making their way home. None of them was Kate. Lockhart forced himself to look away. To look casual. It didn’t come easily. Then something changed in the room. People around him started shuffling forward, like the whole place was a bathtub and someone had removed the plug from the far end of the room. The gate was opening. Lockhart stayed where he was, staring at the one-way doors that led back to passport control, willing them to open and Kate to emerge.
But she didn’t. Suddenly the crowd was disappearing through the departure gate like the last sands of time falling through an hourglass. Suddenly he felt vulnerable and exposed, like a rock revealed by the retreating tide. If he was going to do anything at all, Lockhart knew the moment had arrived. He stood up and headed away from the departure gate and back towards the doors that led to the passport control. He had no idea what he would do when he reached them. He hoped that necessity would pull a plan from his brain as he moved. In the end, it didn’t matter, because the door opened when he was only halfway there. Kate Braganza walked through, as if she hadn’t a care in the world.
‘What happened?’ Lockhart asked he turned, and they walked briskly towards the departure gate.
‘I don’t know,’ Kate said. ‘The woman behind the glass asked me to wait.’<
br />
‘And?’
‘And nothing,’ Kate said. ‘She just told me to wait, so I waited.’
They reached the boarding desk.
‘Waited for what?’ Lockhart asked as he handed over his ticket for inspection.
‘I don’t know. She didn’t ask me questions. Just made me wait as the others went through. Then the guy who was watching you came back, gave her a nod, and she let me through.’
Lockhart let the information percolate as they took back their tickets. He didn’t understand it. And he didn’t like it. They headed off, and Kate Braganza looked at him sideways as their footsteps echoed along the tin can jetty that led out the plane.
‘You going to walk me all the way home, Charlie?’ she asked.
Despite it all, Lockhart smiled.
‘Walk you home?’
She looked ahead, a Mona Lisa smile playing across her lips.
‘Well, you seem to be going my way…’
Lockhart nodded. Through the jetty’s portholes, he could see the Ethiad Boeing triple seven, ready to skip them half way across the world to safety. And yet it didn’t feel like a clean break. Lockhart, who had become expert at moving on, felt the loose ends of everything that had happened tangling around his ankles. It unnerved him that Kate had been singled out at the control desk. And it unnerved him that once they had found her, they had let her leave.
They boarded the aircraft as separate passengers and settled into their seats; Kate in the central block, Lockhart a few rows behind in a window seat. He watched her profile, newly confident amidst the familiar babble of Western voices. The long flight home would give her ample time to process what had happened over the past few days, and for the reality of Matilda’s death to take hold. The violent loss of not only a sister, but a twin, would hit her hard at some point.
Lockhart never tired of the thrill of take-off, and as the Rolls-Royce engines roared and the aircraft picked up speed, he felt the gloom lift like he was shedding his skin. The triple seven shook as it climbed, and outside his window the confetti of tin roofs at the end of the runway were already far below them. The climb continued relentlessly, the aircraft bearing ever upwards to the thin air until Cambodia was far behind them. Eventually they broke through the gray monsoon clouds and emerged into the sunlight as if waking from a terrible dream.
28
From where it was planted on the West Side of Midtown Manhattan, The New York Times Building climbed some fifty-two stories upwards towards the Gods. It was as tall as the Chrysler Center - which had grown out of the East Side mud some seventy-seven years earlier - and only three buildings in New York City were taller. It was wrapped in a metal grill designed by Renzo Piano to help protect it from the sun. Today, the grill clung against the wind. Emblazoned across the steel structure, stretching an entire block, the newspaper’s masthead claimed the building for its own. The same masthead had been stamped at the top of every copy of the New York Times since September 1851. These days, it was embedded into every online article and smartphone app as well.
It struck Marie Saunders as she queued for her morning latte at the Moroccan Coffeehouse on the opposite side of Eighth Avenue that Masthead was an appropriate word. She had a fondness for etymology and knew that masthead was one of the many nautical terms that had clambered their way up onto dry land over history. Hauling over the coals, swinging a cat, and making waves had done exactly the same. Mastheads derived from the small wooden boards that all ship owners used to nail to the top of their vessel’s main sail spar. So when her bosses had taken ownership of the building on Eighth Avenue by emblazoning their logo over the face of it, Marie Sanders had been all in favor.
The relocation had proven to be controversial. An ancient block had been swept away to make room for the new building, and with it had gone a vibrant community and culture. Rubin’s fabric shop, frequented by Broadway dressers, had been forced to sell up; Cohen’s hat store, which had been doing a roaring trade from the same spot for forty years, went the same way. The sex shops, prostitutes and drug dealers were all bulldozed off the block.
Most of those who were forced to move made a point of not moving too far. The Moroccan Coffeehouse was a prime example, having originally served the bohemian crowd of hatters and dressers and pimps and girls. Many of the old crowd still frequented the place, which was the main reason Marie drank there. She used The Moroccan as a secret barometer of the mood of New Yorkers before she headed into the unreality of the busy newsroom where priorities and morality were necessarily different to anywhere else in the City.
‘Hey, Kenza,’ Marie said as she reached the front of the queue. ‘Hell of a morning, isn’t it?’
The barista smiled without turning to the window. She scribbled Marie’s order onto the side of a take-out cup without asking what she wanted. Her eyes twinkled, and if Marie’s heart had been made of stone, she would not have been able to resist smiling back.
‘A morning is whatever you make it,’ Kenza said. There was a spark of natural intelligence in her dark brown eyes, like she always knew a little more than she let on. ‘Talking of which, your mornings seem to be getting a little easier now, no?’
Kenza prided herself on knowing her customers and their preferences, and she had Marie all worked out. She had gone through three long weeks barely able to hold her coffee down, a phase that thankfully seemed to be passing. Now, she was spending more time in front of the mirror, infatuated by the changes in her own body, wondering how obvious her secret was becoming.
‘Do you know, Kenza,’ Marie said, ‘sometimes I wonder if you’re a mind reader.’
An enigmatic smile crossed the barista’s lips.
‘Maybe I am,’ she purred. ‘Take the weight off. I’ll bring it over.’
‘Kenza,’ Marie began. ‘I’m not…’
‘I know exactly what you are,’ she smiled, the twinkle returning to her eyes. ‘Go grab a seat. There’s a storm coming, apparently. They’re saying the swell could swallow us up.’
And there it was. The story of the day. It was Marie’s job to select the stories that would boost the number of readers and viewers and downloaders. If she could do that with Pulitzer journalism, so much the better. But ultimately, Pulitzers didn’t keep the wheels oiled. Ultimately, it all came down to the numbers. The number of sales. The number of clicks on sidebars and banners, the amount of traffic delivered and the measurable return on advertisers’ investments. All of that added up to whether or not the New York Times could keep its eighteen thousand energy-efficient light bulbs on. And that was what Marie Sanders would be judged on, in the end.
Picking the right story on the right day keeps a newspaper alive. And nobody could tell what content would hit a home run better that the readers themselves. What would take Marie a whole morning to learn from focus groups analysis, she could pick up in twenty minutes sitting in the window of the Kenza’s café. Kenza served coffee to all walks of life and listening to their babble was usually enough to convince Marie which way the public mood was headed on any given day.
Kenza arrived with her coffee.
‘Skinny latte,’ she said.
‘Thanks, Kenza.’
Marie watched the traffic slowing in the morning crawl. The Atlantic winds were picking up and the driving rain was almost horizontal. A couple of raindrops raced each other down the outside of the glass. In her mind, she bet on one of them. Her raindrop lost, but she smiled, feeling for a moment like a kid again. She imagined what it would feel like to be a mom. It wouldn’t be long now. She smiled into her cup for a minute, lost in the future.
The ticker on the TV screen behind her reflected in the glass. It was slugging the weather Frankenstorm, which made her smile. It was too early to run with that kind of headline in any meaningful way; she knew. But there was something in the air. Maybe it was a communal sixth sense; everyone was feeling the pressure and moisture in the air and waiting for the inevitable. Polite society is, after all, only a few short generations b
eyond its hunter-gatherer ancestry, which roamed the wilds and watched the skies for millennia. Maybe people are not so disconnected from nature as they like to think. Maybe people just know. Anticipation. What was it Mickey Mouse used to say? It’s Wednesday. It’s Anything Could Happen Day. Well, maybe anything would.
By the time she arrived across the road, the newsroom was humming. Reporters were already plotting their schedules. They were jacking up calls, working their angles, and squeezing their contacts. Soon they would pour from the building, deploying to the places where news actually happened. Sure, the tickers across the top of every glossy flat screen on every desk drip-fed the latest lines from around the world; stories from the Associated Press, AFP, the American Press Agency, the Press Association, Reuters, and the biggest broadcast news channels. Cub reporters watched them scroll, waiting for the next world-changing event to flash, the same way gamblers watch slot machines, hoping for the jackpot to drop into the pay line. In truth though, most stories - and all scoops - came either from personal contacts or from sheer blind luck. The biggest headlines were usually carved out by a reporter with little more than a notepad, a killer question, and the balls to ask it.
From the mezzanine on the fourth floor, the newsroom looked like a Wall Street bear pit. It extended out eastwards at the base of Times tower and was topped by a huge glass roof that spilled daylight over the drama below. A blood red staircase descended from the mezzanine into the heart of the melee. Interns had been known to cling, white knuckled, to the steel balustrade when they first descended, afraid to let go and submit themselves to the broil.
