Lost Goddess : A Novel (9781101554340)

by Knox, Tom

  So Jake had stopped asking this question of most Cambodians after his first year in Phnom Penh: just looking around the city was information enough. There were hardly any old people. All the people who would have been old had been murdered.

  Whether that included Chemda’s wider family, he didn’t know. It seemed she wasn’t going to tell him. He certainly wasn’t going to ask. Not yet. He got the sense of something—something bad. But every Cambodian had something bad and tragic in the past, something best not discussed.

  The driver turned on the headlights: a small wild animal’s eyes reflected in the glare, then shot off the road. It was almost freezing now, a freezing twilight in the high hills. Jake buzzed the window shut to keep out the cold and the damp. Then he spoke:

  “This is it, isn’t it? The Plain of Jars.”

  They had topped out. The exhausted car rounded a final turn and stopped climbing—now they were very slightly descending onto a plateau. They had reached the plain, after sixteen grueling hours of solid, hard, bone-wrenching car travel.

  It was an unnerving landscape. The villages scattered across the moonlit plateau seemed to be bereft of electricity. That much was obvious from the lack of lights. But it also seemed that many of these wooden tribal hamlets lacked heat and running water, because people were bathing themselves in gutters, or from parish pumps. And the villagers had also lit countless small fires outside their wooden shacks, presumably for heat and cooking. Didn’t they even have chimneys?

  Whatever the answer, it made for a frightening vision: a medieval depiction of hell. The flat, darkling plateau was speckled with those thousands of tiny fires, flaring in the cold and mist. And everywhere, old women were crouched by the pumps, their ribbed and seminaked bodies garishly illuminated by the lurid scarlet flames.

  “Fifty kilometers,” said Chemda, “to Phonsavan. That’s where we are based.”

  As they neared the destination, Jake seized the moment; he needed more facts.

  “Who is pressuring the Cambodian government? To do this, to reckon with the past?”

  “The Cambodian people. The UN. Many Western governments.”

  “Not all Western governments?”

  “The Americans supported the Khmer Rouge in the late seventies, so they are more ambivalent.”

  “OK.”

  Her slight smile was pitying.

  “Yes, a fine irony. The Americans thought the Khmer Rouge could be a buttress against Vietnamese communism. But now many Americans, of course, do want the past to be examined, ah, especially the Khmer diaspora.”

  “People like you?”

  “People like me. Cambodians like me are coming back. And we want the truth.”

  The car slowed.

  Ahead of them, Jake could see real streetlights. It was a town. With shops, or at least garages open to the road: selling colorful packets of instant noodles, and mobile phone talk time, and lao-lao rice whiskey. Faces stared at Jake as they passed, faces blank yet inquiring, impassively curious, faintly Mongolian. Men wrapped in anoraks pointed and shook their heads; two of them scowled. There weren’t many Westerners up here on the chilly plain. This was not Vang Vieng, it was like another and very different world.

  They sped on into the gray-black countryside once more.

  “The Chinese are also involved in what happened here. During the KR regime.”

  Jake was glad to get to the center of the issue.

  “So what did happen here?”

  “We’re not entirely sure. But in 1976 Pol Pot gave an order. That’s the famous Khmer Rouge leader—”

  Jake bridled. “I have heard of Pol Pot, Chemda. He was a famous weather presenter, on morning TV?”

  For the first time since he had met her this morning, she laughed, sincerely; her serious face was transformed, delicate white teeth revealed, eyes wide and smiling.

  “OK. Sorry. OK. My professor at UCLA once said I was ‘a tad didactic.’ Am I being…” her brown eyes met his “… a tad didactic?”

  “Well. Yes. A bit.”

  A silence. The driver buzzed down a window and spat. The in rushing cold was piercing and stark. Jake shuddered, wishing he had brought a proper coat. All he had was a raincoat packed in his rucksack. No one had told him he would need to keep warm.

  Conversation might keep him warm.

  “So, Chemda.”

  She was staring at the darkness: the bombed and lethal plain. She turned.

  “Sorry. I was thinking. But let me finish the story. We know that in ’76 the Khmer Rouge, and the Pathet Lao, and the Maoist Chinese, they all sent a team here, to the, ah, Plain of Jars. A team of historians, academics, experts who knew something about the remains, the Neolithic ruins. Then they made people search the whole area, despite all the lethal UXO.”

  “Unexploded ordnance.”

  “Yes. Hundreds died. The KR didn’t give a damn … nor the Chinese. They were looking for something. We don’t know exactly what. In the scale of things”—her eyes sought Jake’s and found them—“in the scale of things it is a pretty minor atrocity. Just a few hundred killed, a thousand injured. What’s that compared with two million dead?” She shook her head. “But it’s a puzzle, and it was cold-blooded murder. And Pol Pot and Ieng Sary and Ta Mok the butcher, all the Khmer Rouge leadership, they were, ah, obsessed with this project, likewise the Chinese. They had no money but they spent lots on this, in the summer of ’76. Searching the plain. Searching for what?”

  “And these historians?”

  “Most of the academics were later purged by Pol Pot. Murdered at Cheung Ek. The killing fields, of course. But two survived. I tracked them down. We asked them to come with us, to show us where they searched. All this is part of the UN’s work … to, ah, dig up the truth. But these guys—they were very unwilling.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “They were ordered to help us, by the Cambodian government. They had no choice. But they don’t have to say anything, we can’t force the truth from their mouths. Can we? Now one is in the hospital, and there is one left. Doctor Samnang. Not happy. Sometimes I wonder…” She sighed. “I wonder if I am doing the right thing, in forcing these old men to rake over the past. But it is my job.” The steeliness had returned to her soft Khmer vowels; her English was only slightly accented. She turned to face him, square on, and she stared him out.

  “And then. There is a personal angle.”

  “OK.”

  “My grandmother died here.”

  Jake said nothing. Chemda’s face was ghosting in the twilight.

  “I think she died up here. In the Plain of Jars. She was one of the academics the Khmer Rouge brought with them.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I have a Khmer friend in Los Angeles. Her father was also sent here. And he claims he saw my grandmother, on the plain, that she was one of the team. My grandmother was quite well known; my family is quite well known. So, my grandmother was an anthropologist and, ah, we know she disappeared around that time, and we know there were rumors she came here. No one will tell me the truth because maybe no one knows the truth.”

  Chemda’s words were like a litany, softly and reverently repetitive, a whispered prayer in the gloaming of a church.

  “That is one of the reasons I am doing this, Jake. By uncovering the truth about my family I can uncover the truth about Cambodia. It doesn’t make me popular—many people want to forget. But I don’t care.”

  They drove in silence for fifteen minutes. The cabin was cold. Then Chemda’s cell phone chirruped, an incongruously jaunty song. Cantopop. She picked up the call, but the signal was bad.

  “Tou? Tou? Can you hear me?” Rattling the phone, she cursed the reception, and explained. “Our guide, Tou. Trying to reach me. Cell phones are almost useless up here. Outside the towns.”

  Jake was not surprised. A place without electricity was hardly likely to be superbly linked with telecommunications. Nonetheless the thought added to the growing sense of isolat
ion.

  An hour passed in even more subdued silence. And then:

  “Phonsavan!”

  The driver had spoken for the first time since the morning. They were entering what was, for Laos, a largish city. Straggling and busy and concrete, it was an ugly place, especially in the harsh glare of rudimentary streetlights. Jake saw an Internet café, people in scarves locked on bright screens in a dingy room; a few closed tourist shops had Plain des Jarres scrawled in crude paint on their windows.

  The pickup swerved a sudden right, onto a very rough and rubbled track.

  “Here we go. The only hotel in the area. Home.” Chemda smiled, with a hint of sarcasm. “My guide, Tou, is here. And the historian. The one who can, ah, still walk…. It is good we are arriving at night; this is less conspicuous. The Pathet Lao do not want us here. Of course. They want us gone.”

  “You are intruders. Raking up the past.”

  “Yes. And also … there is tension. The Hmong.”

  “The hill tribesmen?”

  “They live in the uplands right across Southeast Asia, but here is the real Hmong heartland. And the jungles and mountains south of here. There are still Hmong rebels down there. Some say. Still fighting the Vietnam War.”

  “I heard a few stories.”

  Now Jake could see lights of a distant building. Chemda continued:

  “The Hmong helped the Americans in the Vietnam War, when Laos was a secret battle zone. The North Vietnamese were using Laos as, ah, a route, to ferry arms to South Vietnam.”

  “The Ho Chi Minh Trail.”

  “Yes! You know your history.” Her eyes brightened, momentarily. “Yes. It came right through here, the Plain of Jars. So the Americans secretly infiltrated Laos, and secretly bombed the trail, and they recruited Hmong to help them, in the air war, because the Hmong hated the Communists, the Pathet Lao, the people still in power now. The Lao regime.” Her voice softened to a wondering tone. “The Americans actually had a whole secret city in the hills south of here, with airstrips, warehouses, barracks. And maverick pilots, specialist bombers, fighting a completely clandestine war. The Hmong helped, some actually became fliers…. So there is still a lot of, ah, very bad feeling, and the Lao don’t want outsiders here, stirring things up.”

  The car jerked to a stop outside a blank concrete building. The parking lot was almost empty: just a couple of dirty white minivans. Chemda got out and Jake joined her, yawning and stretching; the cold upland air was refreshing now, and he inhaled deeply the sweet night scent of pollution and burning hardwood.

  “Let’s unload. Then you can meet the team. What’s left of it.”

  Their baggage was meager. It took a few seconds to shift the rucksacks and luggage from the pickup to the parking lot and into the echoing and utilitarian lobby.

  No one was around. Three clocks, on the wall above the reception, gave the time for Paris, Vientiane, and New York. They were all stopped.

  “This way.”

  The walk to the room took a minute, along a wood-railed path to a door, where Chemda knocked. Silence replied. She knocked again; there was no reply; Jake leaned against the doorjamb, impatient with weariness. As he did he realized he was standing in something sticky.

  The revelation was a slap of horror.

  “Jesus, Chemda, is that blood?”

  Chemda flinched and gazed down; then she stepped smartly aside, so the dim light of the walkway bulb could shine on the pooling fluid.

  It was vivid and it was scarlet.

  Immediately Jake pushed with a shoulder; the door wasn’t locked, but it was heavy: something was inside, blocking the way. He pushed again, and once more; Chemda assisted, resting a hand on a door panel. The door shunted open and they stepped into the bleak, harshly lit hotel room.

  It was empty.

  Where was the blood coming from? Jake followed the trail: the thickening flood of redness emanated from behind the door, the heavy door he had just swung open. Jake pulled on it, so they could see behind.

  Chemda gasped.

  Hanging from the back of the door, by ropes attached to a hook, was a dead man. A small, old Cambodian man, in cotton trousers, bare-chested. But he was hanging upside down, his ankles were roped to the hook, his body dangling; his hands trailed on the ground and his head bobbed inches from the blood-smeared concrete floor.

  The man’s throat had been cut, slashed violently open. Blood had obviously poured from his jugular onto the floor: as with the bleeding of halal butchery, he had been hung upside down so the blood would drain out. A smeared knife lay discarded nearby.

  The old man’s hanging hair was just touching the pool of blood beneath: with a delicate, even tender finesse. The blood glistened.

  4

  “Jesus, Ghislaine?”

  The large dark shadow was illuminated: she could see Ghislaine’s white face. He had flicked on his flashlight when he heard her scream.

  “Ghislaine!” Her heart was still thumping, protesting. “What the fuck are you doing, creeping around down here in the dark?”

  He came closer. His dark leather clothes squeaked, slightly, in the moist air of the cavern.

  “Miss Kerrigan, calm down. There was no light, I was concerned: I thought Annika was working down here. With you.” His face was gray, and indistinct behind his torch. “Where is Annika?”

  Julia felt her trembling subside—very slowly. It was just Ghislaine. Just Ghislaine Quoinelles, just her boss. Yet her terror had been very real: the dark shape, looming down the cave passage, so big. Like an animal. Maybe she had spent too long reading the local legends, the werewolf on the Margeride, la Bête de Gévaudan. The beasts and the skulls and the overwhelming darkness.

  The mutilated skulls.

  She spoke, urgently: “Annika is at home. She’s got a cold. She’s fine.”

  “But the light? What happened to your light?”

  Julia knelt and picked up her helmet—which she had dropped in her panic. “I guess I just forgot—and the battery ran dead. See?” She tapped the headlamp glass. “The battery’s flat. Totally dead. But, Professor. I had a reason to be distracted.”

  “Yes?”

  “I believe I have found something. At last.”

  A glint of sly brightness lurked in his expression, like an old philanderer gazing at another ingenue actress.

  “Show me.”

  They crouched together, down and along the stone corridor. Julia held the torch aloft as Ghislaine moved closer still and leaned to scrutinize her discoveries. He lifted the skull with his large white hands.

  “Oui, oui. I see. Yesss…. Yes, I see. Of course….”

  Ghislaine was kneeling so close to her, she could sense his body heat in the chilliness. The smell of his leather clothes was distinct, and pungent. What was it with the leather clothes? Ghislaine Quoinelles dressed thirty or maybe forty years too young. Today’s leather jacket and leather jeans combination was especially risible. His haircut was the normal drugstore-black pompadour. Ridiculous.

  Hunching herself against the cold as they knelt in the dirt of the dimly lit cavern, Julia wondered if she was being hard on Ghislaine, letting her anger at his foolishly creepy approach infect her thoughts. But why had he been creeping around like that? Maybe he was just looking out for her? He was a pretty strange man.

  She knew a little of his background. She knew that Ghislaine had been something important a long time ago, a student revolutionary, a soixante-huitard: an upper-class leader of the leftish student rebels in the socially turbulent Paris of 1968. Indeed, she’d been shown black-and-white pictures of him—shown them by Annika—grainy shots of a handsome Ghislaine in Paris leading the kids, photos of him in sit-ins, interviews with him in Le Monde, profiles of him alongside Danny the Red and other famous young radicals.

  So he had once been a tall and cerebral young Communist—in a country that worshipped daring and sexy intellectuals. Once he had been in possession of an exquisite future. Now he was, somewhat mysteriously, an agi
ng professor in a remote part of the country doing an obscure job on the periphery of French archaeology: and perhaps the absurdly young clothes were Ghislaine’s way of holding on to the better part of his life, when he had been haloed by fame, when his hair wasn’t stupid.

  A hint of pity for Ghislaine stung at Julia, in the cold of the cave. She wanted not to dislike him. She didn’t like disliking people. Such a waste of time. And someone must have loved him, once.

  Besides, she needed his approval of her find. That’s how it worked in France: she needed his say so to make this her project, to secure her rights to her own discovery, to quarantine the cave until she could return next season and investigate further; then she could write a paper and make her name. Or at least, begin to make her name. And this was maybe her best chance. Ever.

  “What do you think, Ghislaine?”

  “Wait. Please. La patience est amère, mais son fruit est doux.”

  Another agonizing pause. He was scrutinizing one of the wounded neck bones, and the arrow flint cruelly embedded between the vertebrae. At last he turned. The thick hair was very black on his large, white, gesturing hands.

  “The skull, it is obviously male. Yes, yes. But the skeletons…” Ghislaine hesitated, and took out his eyeglass to once more scrutinize the neck bone. Then he stood. Abruptly.

  “I am finished, Miss Kerrigan.” With a beckoning signal, he retreated into the higher, wider part of the cave. “Yes, it is quite an interesting discovery. Quite interesting, but…”

  “But what?” Julia quelled her rising sense of panic. Surely Ghislaine could see the extraordinariness of her find?

  With his expensive German pen, he pointed down and along, at the wholly disinterred skull. “You see? These trephinations are moderately common in this region, and this era. The Gorge of the Tarn, and the grottos in the Causse Méjean, they have yielded similar fruit. We see this quite a lot.”

  “But the wounded children, the flints? Professor?”

  “Eh. They are typique.”