by Peter May
‘Shhhh!’ He put a finger to his lips and signalled for her to follow. She slipped quickly down the steps behind him, and in the shadow of the hut they embraced. She held him tightly, never wanting to let go, emotion choking her. How often she had known the heat of his body when he had slipped into her bed on cold nights and snuggled up to her for warmth. But how was it possible? She held him at arm’s length to look at him and brush the hair from his eyes.
‘Hau, what are you doing here?’
He still had the face of a boy, but his eyes were much, much older and he spoke quickly and with quiet authority. ‘Ny, they are sending me away.’
‘Away? Away where?’
‘To Phnom Penh. They say the Vietnamese might attack, and they want more soldiers to defend the city in case of invasion.’
Ny was stunned. It was the first she had heard of it. A Vietnamese invasion! Perhaps, then, there was still hope. For surely the Khmer Rouge could not withstand the might of the Vietnamese army. But her heart froze with the same thought. They were sending her brother to fight. And the fanatics of the Khmer Rouge would urge their troops to fight to the last, and shoot those who refused. ‘Oh, Hau,’ she whispered. ‘You must not go.’
‘I have no choice,’ he said. ‘But I will not fight. I will run away.’
‘They will kill you.’
‘I will take the chance,’ he said simply.
‘I will get Mother.’ She turned towards the steps, but he stopped her.
‘No. I cannot face my mother.’ And there was a look of shame in his eyes. ‘I have done things,’ he said. ‘They made me do things . . .’ And he could not even face his sister.
Ny took him again in her arms. ‘Oh, Hau.’ When she looked once more into his face she saw that he was crying. He brushed away the tears, ashamed of them too.
‘Tell her,’ he said, ‘that I will go and hide at our house in the city. If our country is freed then she must look for me there.’
Ny looked at him with pain in her heart. She knew it was impossible. They heard footsteps and drew back further into the shadows. Ny saw the young cadre approach the hut and climb the steps. ‘You must go,’ she whispered urgently to Hau. She kissed him. ‘We will look for you.’ And she hurried out to the foot of the steps as the cadre climbed back down. He looked at her suspiciously.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I was waiting for you.’
He seemed surprised, then smiled. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘I have not much time tonight.’ And he led her quickly away through the stilts. She glanced back and saw the shadow of Hau darting away between the huts, and she wondered if she would ever see her brother again.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A crystal chandelier hung overhead, tinkling gently in the breeze of the air conditioning. The air was cool rising from the cold marble floor. Elliot and Slattery stood uncomfortably in the opulence of their surroundings. A beautiful Thai girl in a long pink silk skirt and white blouse had let them in, asking them to wait. She had then tiptoed away into the depths of the house. Somewhere, they had heard a bell ring twice, followed by a deep silence. Slattery scuffed his heels impatiently, hard leather on marble echoing around this grand entrance hall. Erotic Greek statues stood on plinths, a chaise longue against one wall beneath a painting of a Renaissance nude, white and plump with blue-veined breasts. Velvet curtains were drawn on tall windows.
‘I thought you might like to see some of my acquisitions before we go back to the house.’ La Mère Grace’s voice echoed off marble. They looked up to see her descending the broad staircase, elegant and beautiful, bearing herself with a poise that comes only with age. Her white dress buttoned up to a high collar at the neck, and clung to her contours in an elegant sweep to her ankles. It was split up one side, almost to the top of her thigh, allowing her to move freely and reveal glimpses of a long, shapely leg with each step. Her black hair was piled high to show off her fine-boned features and small, perfect ears. Her smile was radiant, betraying a hint of ironic amusement. ‘My car is waiting,’ she said.
The car was large, black and American, with smoked windows. It was driven by a girl in a chauffeur’s uniform and peaked cap who drove them smoothly, and with assurance, through the night traffic of Bangkok to a nightclub for members only. A small waiter in a perfectly fitting dinner suit bowed, led them to a reserved table and brought them drinks. The hostesses – they were not bar girls here – were discreet and extremely beautiful, all in white like their mentor, but without her poise. A band played soft seductive American jazz, and, through an archway, wealthy men dined with elegant women. Subdued lighting was concealed above red velvet drapes and the drinks, served from a long polished mahogany bar, were expensive. But they paid for nothing.
‘Here we cater for Bangkok’s elite,’ Grace said. ‘Government ministers, high-ranking civil servants and army generals, the captains of Thai industry. The Prime Minister himself dines here on occasion. But it is, I think, not quite your style. As I told you, we cater for all tastes.’ She pushed her glass languidly away. ‘Drink up, gentlemen, and we shall take a little trip downmarket.’
Downmarket, it transpired, was one of the better massage parlours on Patpong Road. A girl rose from a desk, pressed her palms together, and bowed as Grace led them in. ‘Madame,’ she said deferentially.
‘These gentlemen would like to see the facilities we offer here,’ Grace said.
‘Of course.’ The girl led them through to a red-carpeted lounge dotted with deep, soft sofas and armchairs. A crimson flock wallpaper covered three walls and the ceiling. The fourth wall was a large window looking on to a chamber where something like a hundred girls sat in tiers, chatting idly. Each had a number pinned to her dress. Some were plain, some pretty, others indifferent. Most looked bored, and all were very young. None, Elliot thought, over twenty.
‘Here, discretion is assured,’ Grace said. ‘Our customers need not feel embarrassed, for the girls cannot see them.’ She ran a cool hand lightly across the glass. ‘A two-way mirror. All they can see is a reflection of themselves.’ But Elliot noticed that none of the girls looked in their direction. Perhaps they were ashamed of their own reflections. ‘A man may choose a girl by her number, and he will be taken to a small room where the girl of his choice will shower him and then give him a body massage. Soap or oil is applied for maximum lubrication. Any further activity is a matter for private negotiation between the girl and the customer. Naturally we take ninety per cent. And, of course, our girls are very clean. They are checked regularly by our doctor.’
‘I’ve heard,’ Elliot said, ‘that many of these girls are sold to establishments like this by their families. Peasant girls straight from the paddies. Bought and sold like slaves.’
Grace looked at him with feigned surprise. ‘Do I detect a hint of disapproval, Mr Elliot?’ She shook her head. ‘Do you really think they would be better off in the paddies, working from dawn till dusk, thigh-deep in water, legs scarred by leeches, skin burned by the sun? Such women are old by the time they are thirty, dead by fifty – if they are lucky. Here they make more money than they could ever have dreamed, are well fed, receive the best medical care.’
‘And end up in squalid little klong houses, working sleazy bars up dark alleys when they are no longer young enough or attractive enough for your customers.’
Grace smiled and turned to Slattery. ‘Are there any of my girls who catch your eye, Mr Slattery?’
‘Two of ’em, actually, ma’am.’
She called over the girl who had shown them in. ‘See to it that Mr Slattery has everything he wants, with my compliments.’
The girl bowed and Slattery grinned. ‘See you back at the hotel, then, chief.’
In the car Grace said to Elliot, ‘I thought we would never get rid of him.’
*
Her room was on the first floor of her rambling mansion house, known th
roughout Bangkok as Chez La Mère Grace. ‘It was what they called my house in Phnom Penh,’ she said. ‘The house there was my mother’s really, and I took on the name when she died and left me the business. She called herself Grace. She wanted an English name. She thought it very chic.’
‘She was a Cambodian, your mother?’
‘Oh, yes. Her real name was Lim Any. I was the result of a liaison with a high-ranking French diplomat. But they never married.’ She finished pouring their drinks at a glass cabinet, kicked off her shoes, and padded across the thick-piled carpet to kneel opposite him on one of the huge soft cushions scattered around a foot-high circular table. The room was sumptuous. Velvet drapes, antique cabinets, exotic trunks with gold clasps. There were mirrors everywhere you looked, even on the ceiling above an enormous circular bed spread with red silk sheets and white cushions. Two or three discreetly placed lamps cast light on key areas, and left others in pools of mysterious darkness.
‘You would have loved Cambodia,’ she said. ‘The Cambodia I knew.’
‘Tell me about it.’ He settled back with his drink.
Her smile seemed distant as she drifted back to a world gone for ever, a world she had loved like life itself, and for which there could never be a satisfactory replacement. ‘Were you ever in Phnom Penh?’ He shook his head. ‘It was a beautiful city, Mr Elliot. It had all the grace and style of the French, the brashness of the Chinese, and yet at its heart was still very Cambodian, full of history. You have seen photographs of Angkor Wat?’
‘Sure.’
‘Then perhaps you will understand a little of Cambodia. But you must see it to feel it. The temples symbolize everything that was great about a race that once ruled the whole of Indochina. Then, lost for hundreds of years, they were rediscovered in the last century by a French explorer, a mirror on a long-forgotten past.’
‘I think we could skip the history lesson,’ Elliot said.
She smiled with something like condescension. ‘Perhaps you have to be Cambodian to understand.’ She sipped her drink thoughtfully. ‘The Fifties and Sixties were a golden era in our more recent history, under the rule of that fat little man, Prince Sihanouk.’
‘I heard he was a bit of an eccentric.’
‘Oh, yes, he was eccentric, Mr Elliot. But you mustn’t mistake eccentricity for stupidity. The Prince was successful in keeping Cambodia out of the war in Vietnam for nearly twenty years before the Americans bombed our country in 1970. Oh, some people thought him mad. He had a penchant for making his own movies, in which he nearly always starred himself as some awful gangster. Of course, I was invited to the palace on the banks of the Mekong many times with my mother. I saw several of his films. They were truly dreadful. He played the saxophone, too. Not badly. And wrote music for performances by the Royal Dancers. He preserved many of the traditions of Cambodia. The people turned out in their thousands every year for the Fêtes des Eaux, a sort of Oxford and Cambridge boat race on the Mekong, held during the rainy season when the waters of the river and the Tonle Sap reverse their currents and flow back on themselves. It is one of the wonders of the world.’
Elliot yawned and she chided him with mock severity. ‘I don’t think you are taking me very seriously, Mr Elliot.’
‘Tell me about Chez La Mère Grace.’
Her smile was resigned. ‘At Chez La Mère Grace,’ she said, ‘time was unimportant. There were no clocks, as you will see there are none here. Sex cannot be measured by the minute or the hour, or even by the day. Nor is it something to be done in the dark, furtive and secret.’ She paused. ‘Another drink?’
‘Sure.’
She rose and crossed to the cabinet to refill their glasses. ‘Of course, not everyone came to Chez La Mère Grace for sexual gratification. A night out in Phnom Penh was not complete without a visit to my house for a few pipes of opium. I had one of the best boy pipes’ – she pronounced it peeps – ‘in the city. A couple would dine at a club along the river then come to the Rue Ohier, in the fashionable centre of Phnom Penh, to smoke in one of my upstairs rooms.’ She came back with their drinks and curled up on a cushion, revealing the curve of one of her legs all the way up to the top of her thigh, brown and smooth and tempting. ‘A good boy pipe is a very rare commodity. He must be able to cook the opium over the flame of a candle so that it does not burn but remains soft and malleable in order that the pipe may be primed to perfection. Only one or two pulls at each pipe are necessary to achieve that pitch of exquis-ite harmony and peace that the smoker seeks.’
Elliot took a pull at his second drink. ‘How did the war affect you?’
‘At first not at all. We were all very sad when the Prince was driven into exile after Lon Nol’s coup. The General was little more than an American puppet, and that gave the Khmer Rouge a popular support which they had never previously enjoyed. If it had not been for the interference of the Americans, the Khmer Rouge could never have taken power. They would have remained a small, ineffectual group of guerrillas buried away somewhere in the jungle.
‘We sometimes heard the sound of distant guns from the swimming pool where we would spend our afternoons in the sun, cooling ourselves in the water and sipping chilled Chablis. I could never understand why the Cambodian people felt it necessary to fight, to make war.’
‘Understanding is seldom found in swimming pools and glasses of chilled wine.’
The contempt in his voice stung her to reply. ‘Nor is it to be found in England or America, where you know nothing of Cambodia or its people. Cambodians are a lazy, happy people, Mr Elliot. They live in a rich, fertile and beautiful land. They have never had reason to do other than smile and give thanks to Buddha.’
Elliot remembered the face of the refugee at Mak Moun. He had had no reason to do either.
‘In the last months it became clear that the Khmer Rouge were going to win,’ she said. ‘Lon Nol’s army was corrupt, had no will to fight. The officers sold the food for the troops, the money for the war effort lined their pockets. Dollars for Cambodia. When the Khmer Rouge were only a few kilometres from the city they would still prefer to spend their nights drinking or smoking opium or buying favours from my girls. Eventually I barred army officers from my house. And a few weeks later I was forced to close up, take what I could, and flee the country. I would certainly have been killed had I stayed.’ She got up and moved to a trunk by the bed. ‘All I have left now of Cambodia are my memories and my jewellery.’
With a small key hanging on a fine gold chain round her neck, she unlocked the trunk and threw back the lid. She lifted out tray after tray of necklaces and earrings and gold and silver bracelets, rings and brooches. ‘These’ – she held out a necklace and bracelet set of hand-engraved silver – ‘were my mother’s. Made for her by the Prince’s own silversmith, Minh Mol. There are others, too. Earrings, cufflinks, brooches, crafted by men now dead whose skills have been lost for ever. Only in Cambodia could you find such men.’
Elliot examined the fine detail of the engraving. Miniatures of many of the scenes hewn out of the stone of the temples of Angkor Wat. ‘And this’ – Grace passed him a small, round, pink tin box, scraped and dented – ‘is my most prized possession. Given me by one of my regular customers.’ Painted in faded gold on the lid of the box was the name of the shop where it had been bought: BIJOUTERIE HUE-THANH, 121 RUE OHIER, PHNOM PENH. ‘It is such an unprepossessing little box,’ she said, ‘I could not imagine what manner of cheap jewellery it might contain.’
Elliot lifted the lid to reveal a gold bracelet on a bed of tissue. It was a good inch wide, comprising thousands of tiny links, each hand-crafted in the form of a miniature star. He lifted it carefully out. It was heavy, flexible, every link moving freely. He turned it over and marvelled at the way a human hand had ever been able to work such tiny pieces of metal with such fine precision. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘I took it to a jeweller in Pari
s one time, and he could not believe it had been made by hand. He said there was not a jeweller in France who could make such a thing.’
Elliot put it back in the box. ‘Did you go to Paris often?’
‘I was educated there, and in my teens was trained as a ballet dancer. I still do the exercises to keep me supple and fit. The body is like a musical instrument, Mr Elliot. It requires care and fine tuning for it to perform at its best.’ She ran her hands down over her breasts and the flatness of her stomach as if to illustrate her point. ‘I am very proud of my body. I am forty-five years old, but I have the body of a woman half that age. And I have the benefit of age and experience to make me a better lover than any twenty-year-old.’
She took the pink tin box and shut it away in the trunk with the rest of her jewellery. ‘I cannot keep calling you Mr Elliot. You have a name, I suppose?’
‘Jack.’
‘Ah, Jacques. It was the name of my mother’s lover. My father.’ She pulled a bell cord by the bed. And almost immediately the double doors of the room were opened by the girl who had admitted them earlier. She bowed and Grace spoke to her briskly in Thai. Then she turned to Elliot. ‘If you will follow my girl she will take you to your room.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Do not worry, Jacques. This is not goodbye. Only au revoir.’
Elliot followed the girl down a long hallway, through an arch, and she opened the door to a large bedroom all in white – white carpet, white walls, white furniture, white silk sheets on the bed. Another door led off to a shower room. She left him, and he wandered around the room touching things, wondering about Grace. This was not what he had expected. He turned as the door to the bedroom opened. Two young women in long white robes padded in. One was slightly taller than the other, with long dark hair. The smaller girl had her hair cut short. They were both pretty. They bowed, and the shorter one giggled. ‘We undress you,’ she said. Elliot shrugged. He wasn’t about to protest.
