by Peter May
David looked at him, clearly unhappy. ‘I suppose that’ll have to do.’
‘Aye, it will.’
David stepped out into the dark January night.
‘And stick to chasing ambulances in future, son. It’s a lot safer.’ The door slammed, closing off the light that had spilled out across the front lawn, leaving David frustrated and dissatisfied.
He walked up the path to where his car was parked under a street lamp, and cursed his own inadequacy. His initial confidence in his researches, his concern over the lack of contact with Lisa, had made him almost arrogant on the doorstep, until the unexpected force of Blair’s response had left him floundering like a novice poker player who shows his hand too early. The rest had been humiliating. Why, then, he wondered as he slipped behind the wheel, did his cocktail of emotions include a substantial quantity of relief?
He sat for a moment, toying idly with his key ring, not wanting to admit to himself what deep down he already knew. That somehow he had passed on the responsibility. If Lisa wanted to go running off to the other side of the world on a wild goose chase, then he could hardly be held to blame if she got herself into trouble. He’d put responsibility firmly back in the hands of the man responsible for her going off in the first place. There was nothing else he could do. He checked the time and realized he would be late for his shift.
From the darkness of his front room Blair watched David’s car drive away, then he drifted through again to the back of the house. Automatically, almost without thinking, he sank back in his armchair and relit his pipe. He pulled on it several times, letting smoke drift lazily from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth. For a long time he sat wrapped in a black cloak of winter depression. He felt the burden of guilt weigh heavily upon him. He should have tried to talk Elliot out of going in the first place. He should never have told Lisa where her father had gone.
Quite suddenly he laid down his pipe and rose to cross to his bureau and search among an untidy pile of paperwork for a number scribbled on an otherwise blank sheet of paper. He sat down, pulled on a pair of wire spectacles, and lifted the phone. The number took for ever to dial but rang only three times. A girl’s voice sounded in his ear, shrill and staccato.
‘Sam Blair,’ he said. ‘I’d like to speak to Tuk Than.’
He waited impatiently for half a minute before he heard Tuk’s oily voice on the other end of the line. ‘Mister Blair. Good to hear from you.’
‘Didn’t get you out of your bed, did I?’ Blair glanced at his watch. It would be nearly one a.m. in Bangkok.
‘No, no. I am in a business meeting.’
‘Strange hours you keep, Tuk.’
‘Was there something you wanted, Mister Blair?’ There was irritation in Tuk’s tone.
‘Just thought I’d check on that job we discussed a few weeks back.’
‘No problems. Your friend was very pleased with the merchandise.’
‘He got away alright, then?’
‘Oh, yes. Two weeks ago. No problem getting away. Problem getting back, I think.’
‘Yes, I think so, too. The news is not good.’
‘Not good.’ Tuk sighed audibly.
‘You haven’t heard anything, then?’
‘Nothing. And I’ll be honest with you, Mister Blair, I don’t expect to. You must excuse me now, I’m very busy.’
‘Sure.’ Blair was working hard at keeping his voice casual. ‘Just one other thing . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘You haven’t had any contact with his daughter?’
‘His daughter?’ Tuk sounded surprised.
‘Lisa. She was trying to reach him. I gave her your address.’
‘That was not very discreet, Mister Blair.’
‘Perhaps not. She hasn’t contacted you, then?’
‘No.’
Blair waited for something further, but nothing came. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘That’s fine. You’ll let me know if you hear anything? About my friend – or his daughter?’
‘Of course. Goodnight, Mister Blair.’ The line went dead.
Blair put down the receiver thoughtfully and took off his spectacles to rub his eyes. He shook his head. Tuk was lying. The tension in his voice had been unmistakable. All the usual ersatz bonhomie absent. He replaced his spectacles, opened a small drawer on the left of the bureau and lifted out a well-thumbed passport. He flipped it open and a younger version of himself stared back at him. He turned another page. Still valid for two more years. Another drawer yielded a London telephone directory and he made a call.
‘British Airways.’
‘I’d like to reserve a seat on the first available flight to Bangkok.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Grace sat on the edge of a hard leather chair, gazing bleakly around Tuk’s spartan study. There was no warmth in the room, even in the light of the reading lamp on the desk. She was tired, her eyes gritty. It was almost forty hours since she had last slept. The desire to lie on, pressed close to Lisa’s warm young body, had been almost irresistible. But she had forced herself to leave the temptation of the girl’s room, knowing that she had to act fast if she was to save Lisa’s life.
She had heard Tuk speaking on the telephone in the hall, but it was several minutes since he had hung up and still he had not reappeared. The call had come at an infuriatingly inopportune moment. When she arrived, Tuk had been mellow and relaxed, and she guessed that he had been smoking – there had been that glaze about his eyes. He had listened to her, sipping an iced whisky, gazing off into the distance, his mind on other things. The fate of Elliot’s daughter seemed unimportant. His interest lay elsewhere.
The girl was unaware, Grace told him, that the General had bought her virginity. She thought she had been raped. She had no idea of Grace’s role, or Tuk’s, so she posed no threat to either of them. What harm would it do if they let her go, gave her back her passport and put her on a plane? She was only a child, after all.
And then the call had come, and Tuk’s indifference had shifted at the mention of the caller’s name. It had meant nothing to Grace. Sam Blair. English – or American perhaps.
She looked up as Tuk re-entered the room. His face was creased by a deep frown, his eyes black and thoughtful. Grace grew more tense. It did not augur well. He wandered to his desk without glancing in her direction and lifted his drink. For a long time he stood just holding it, staring into its amber depths, frozen in thoughtful contemplation. Then he turned a speculative gaze in her direction.
‘What I don’t understand, Grace,’ he said, ‘is your motivation. What is this girl to you?’
Grace gave a tiny shrug. ‘An innocent,’ she said.
Tuk showed his teeth in a nasty grin. ‘Have you slept with her?’ Grace made no reply. ‘A week ago you saw only money to be made.’
‘The General paid well.’
‘As will many others.’ Tuk emptied his glass and crossed the room, still holding it. He smiled down at her and reached out with his other hand to hold her jaw, gently squeezing her cheeks between his thumb and forefinger. Grace resisted the temptation to recoil from his clammy touch. ‘You are a very beautiful women, Grace.’ He shook his head. ‘You like girls, don’t you?’
‘Not exclusively.’ Grace’s voice was steady. ‘Unlike you and your boys.’
His pincer grip tightened at once and his smile curled into a sneer. ‘You know what I think?’
‘No, Than. What do you think?’
‘I think you’ve gone soft in your old age, Grace. I think you’ve fallen for that girl.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Than!’
He snapped her head back in a sudden, vicious movement and leaned to push his face very close to hers. She made no attempt to struggle, but held herself rigid and still. ‘Don’t ever call me that!’ She smelled the whisky and opium on his breath. ‘You didn�
�t think I was ridiculous when I set you up here in Bangkok! When all you had was a reputation and a few thousand baht! I made you, I can break you.’ And he smashed the top of his glass on the arm of her chair and thrust the jagged edge at her face. He felt her trembling in his grip and was pleased by her fear. ‘And I could mark that pretty face of yours so that no man’ – he chuckled – ‘or woman, would ever want to look at you again.’ The light in his eyes reflected the exultation in his power.
‘I’m sorry, Than. I didn’t mean any disrespect.’ She heard the shake in her own voice.
He jerked her head free and stepped back. ‘Good,’ he said.
She raised a hand to her cheek and felt blood oozing from the wound where the glass had pierced her skin. He strode back to his desk and banged down the remains of his glass.
‘Anyway, I have no choice now. I must dispose of her.’
Grace felt sick. ‘Why?’
‘That call.’ He gestured towards the hall. ‘It was from an associate of Elliot’s. He was the one who gave the wretched girl my address. I told him I hadn’t seen her.’ He shrugged and held out his hands. ‘So there you have it. If I let her go he’ll know I lied. I can’t take that risk.’ He seemed annoyed that the decision should be forced upon him.
Grace sought desperately for some kind of reprieve. ‘But surely, she’s still worth preserving as insurance – against Elliot’s return?’
‘Elliot’s dead,’ he snapped. ‘We both know that.’ Then he relaxed again into his habitual humourless smile. She could not raise her eyes to meet his. He watched with satisfaction as tears fell in dark splashes on the white cotton of her dress.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The embers of the fire glowed faintly in the dark, gathered in the small ring of stones McCue had arranged in the centre of the floor to form a makeshift hearth. He squatted cross-legged in front of it, working his needle by the dying light, a crude pattern cut out of canvas with his hunting knife. A pair of shorts for the boy who lay sleeping curled up with his mother and sister.
Elliot glanced at the sleeping bodies of mother and children lying as one, arms and legs entwined. Their first physical contact in nearly five years. Hau’s face was buried in his mother’s withered breast, McCue’s sweat-stained T-shirt drowning his nakedness. Tears had dried, bellies were full. They were at peace, even if only for a few hours. Serey seemed to have drawn strength from the tearful frailty of her son, a rediscovered sense of purpose. Just as Elliot had lost his. She had taken charge of boiling the rice in a pot she had salvaged from the wreckage of her kitchen. She was a mother again, all her maternal instincts driving her to feed and protect her family.
Throughout the day they had heard the distant sound of sporadic gunfire, as Vo Nguyen Giap’s Vietnamese army secured the city. Closer, they had heard the rumble of trucks carrying troops toward the city centre, the roar of tanks moving into strategic positions. It was not a time to be on the streets, and they had stayed hidden and secure in the wreckage of the Angs’ once elegant villa. Elliot knew, however, it would not be long before the people from the countryside, freed from the Khmer Rouge yoke, would start drifting into the city in search of food, families, friends. The situation would be confused, the Vietnamese as yet without controls, or any kind of temporary administration. The fighting would continue in the north. If there was to be any escape it would have to be soon, while the country was still in a state of chaos.
Escape, Elliot reflected, was all that was left. An admission of failure. He wondered what there was to escape to. The life he had known? Hadn’t the acceptance of this job been an escape in itself – from a life that was going nowhere, a past that had effectively destroyed the future? Escape had become a way of life, a mechanical act, accompanied always by the one person he liked least in the world – himself. And always, as a snowball gathers snow, the burden of his past had grown with the years; a burden that was becoming intolerable.
He shifted his focus back to McCue’s needle as it worked dexterously back and forth through the tough canvas. There was something incongruous in his gentle domesticity. ‘You’re full of surprises, Billy.’
‘Like life,’ McCue said without raising his eyes from the needle. ‘Like finding the kid. Like you killing Mikey in cold blood.’ He raised his eyes slowly to meet Elliot’s. ‘Like any of us still being alive.’
Elliot nodded toward the canvas that was beginning to take shape as a pair of shorts. ‘Where d’you learn to do that?’
‘You learn to do a lot of things when there ain’t no one else to do them.’ He turned back to his needle, the taut muscles of his bare chest reflecting the last glow of the fire. ‘What’s your plan?’
‘We’ll head east tomorrow night. As soon as it gets dark.’
‘We?’
Elliot shrugged. ‘Do what you like.’
‘And them?’ McCue flicked his head towards the two women and the boy sleeping against the wall.
‘We are no longer your concern.’ Serey’s voice, soft in the darkness, startled them. ‘Our lives are in no real danger here. And we are together again. If Yuon wants us he can come and get us himself.’ The acrid wood smoke and the darkness obscured her face from them. ‘You have brought my family together. It is you who are in most danger now. If you can escape with your lives then you must try.’
McCue looked at Elliot. ‘So we’re just going to leave them to the tender mercies of the Vietnamese?’
‘Whatever the Vietnamese might be,’ Serey said, ‘they cannot be worse than the Khmer Rouge. If they can rid my country of such an evil then I welcome them with all my heart.’
But McCue shook his head. ‘We came here to get them out, Elliot. We can’t just leave them. A couple of kids and an old woman.’
Serey’s shrill voice silenced him. ‘Mistah McCue, do you know what age I am?’
McCue sighed. ‘No, lady, I don’t know what age you are.’
‘I am thirty-eight.’ She said it proudly.
And Elliot realized, with a shock, that she was two years younger than himself.
‘I may look old to you. Withered, perhaps. But I still have a mind, and a free spirit. I am not stupid. Which is why I am still alive.’ They heard her shift in the dark, but gently so as not to disturb her children. ‘I survived the slaughter of the educated and intelligent by virtue of my education and intelligence. You cannot for one minute imagine what life was like under the Khmer Rouge. To remain silent when all around you saw only senseless destruction. And yet only in silence was there safety.’
Elliot was surprised by her sudden and unexpected clarity of mind. She had barely spoken in the days since the raid on the commune, except to pursue her dogged insistence that she would not leave Cambodia without her son. There was something compelling in her voice now, a power and intelligence that Elliot had never suspected.
‘In the first year after the Khmer Rouge victory, we were moved around from village to village. We were the new people, those from the cities, regarded with suspicion and often disliked by the ancients, the peasants in whose name the revolution had been made.’ She paused to brush stray wisps of grey hair from her face. ‘After several weeks building small-scale irrigation ditches in the paddies, we were assigned to build a larger canal to bring water from a nearby lake.’ Her remembered frustration was audible in a deep sigh. ‘They made us sleep in the open on mats, without tents, close to the site. We were forced to huddle round fires at night to stay warm and keep away the mosquitoes. Every hour of the day was spent digging. Thousands of us digging – a canal that ran uphill.’
The sarcasm in her tone was acid.
‘The site had not been surveyed, there were no plans, no records. The Khmer Rouge appeared to believe that revolutionary fervour could defeat the laws of physics.’
McCue had ceased sewing, his needle held suspended.
Serey’s voice continued to rise and fall
in an oddly monotonous cadence, the hint of an American accent in her nasal tone. ‘The banks of the canal were constructed from loosely piled earth. In the unlikely event that water would someday defy gravity and actually run through it, the banks would simply be washed away. If men and women and children had not been dying all around us from exhaustion and hunger, it would have been laughable.’
They heard her breathing in short, sharp gasps in the dark.
‘One poor brave fool who had, until then, concealed his identity as an engineer tried to tell the Khmer Rouge idiots how it should be done. They paraded him before us at a merit festival. He knew nothing about the revolution, they said, and yet he was trying to tell them what to do. He was the living proof of imperialist arrogance. No doubt he died to prove their point. We never saw him again.’ She paused again, her voice trembling now, choked with emotion.
‘Qualifications, they told us, were saignabat – the invisible signal. All that mattered was physical work, saignakhoeunh – the visible signal. That was tangible. Therein lay honour.’ Elliot realized now it was anger he heard in the scratch of her voice, years of pent-up fury. ‘One listens, one obeys, one says nothing. It takes intelligence to create such evil, stupidity to enforce it. You cannot reason with stupidity.’
Elliot glanced at McCue, who appeared not to be listening. He was staring vacantly into the fading light of the fire.
‘In nineteenth-century Cambodian history there was a sage called Puth,’ Serey went on. ‘Puth prophesied that his country would suffer a dreadful upheaval, that traditional values would be turned on their head, houses and streets would be emptied, the illiterate would condemn the educated. Thmils – infidels – would take absolute power and persecute the priests.’ A tiny shower of sparks burst from the embers of the fire and caught her face briefly in its light, eyes glazed now, lost in painful memory.
‘As an educated woman I might once have poured scorn on such prophecies. But Puth also predicted that the people would be saved if they planted the kapok tree. In Cambodian the word for this tree is kor, which also means “mute”. It was said that only the deaf-mutes would survive this period of chaos. Say nothing, hear nothing, understand nothing.
