A Nail Through the Heart pr-1

by Timothy Hallinan

  "Can't."

  "It's not here," Chouk says, his voice urgent for the first time. "It's in my room. The thing that explains Madame Wing."

  "Sorry. You're here for the duration."

  "What would I escape to? I can't use my good hand anymore. I couldn't finish even if I were free."

  "You'll heal."

  "It'll be too late by then. It had to be done by day after tomorrow."

  "Why the day after tomorrow?"

  "Later," he says. "After you see."

  "Just out of curiosity, what were you going to do with the deed to her house?"

  Chouk's smile is broad and sudden. "I was going to make it out to Vinai Pimsopat and send it to him. Anonymously, from a grateful constituent."

  Rafferty laughs. Pimsopat is a notoriously venal politician, even by Southeast Asian standards, a short, fat, black hole into which enormous quantities of government funds disappear. His nickname in the press is "The Scoop."

  "She'd have had a hard time getting it back."

  "It would have cost her another ten or twenty million baht. Most of all, it would have frightened her."

  Rafferty says, "Where's your room?"

  "Not far. We can get there in twenty minutes."

  "Not you. You're not supposed to move around yet."

  "And you're probably not going to wander off and leave me here, so who can go?"

  Rafferty gets up and goes to the door and pulls it open. "We'll send Superman," he says. "After all, he's faster than a speeding bullet."

  "On April seventeenth, 1975, the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh," Chouk is saying. His voice is weak but steady. "We all stood in the streets and cheered. Cambodia was going to belong to Cambodians again. Our country had been sold out from under us. Lon Nol didn't care about the people; all he wanted to do was milk the Americans for more money. The Americans had decided that the central Vietcong headquarters were in Cambodia, even though there weren't any central Vietcong headquarters. So America sent the bombers." His ruined hand describes an arc until the handcuff stops it and then lands next to a plate containing half a sandwich. Rafferty had fed it to him until he shook his head. "A lot of Cambodian people died. Men, women, old people, children. The Americans were killing us every day of the week, dropping fire out of the sky on nuns and babies, and the government just sat there with its hand out saying 'No problem, send money.'"

  "While people died."

  "The Americans gave the Khmer Rouge the only thing they'd been missing: an enemy everyone could hate. The Khmer Rouge moved in, and Lon Nol ran like a rabbit." He takes a shaky breath. "What I remember most clearly is how young they were. The soldiers. They looked like children. Some of them actually were children, of course, and we'd learn more about that later. The way the Khmer Rouge used children, I mean." He squeezes his eyes closed and shifts his weight, easing the strain on the bandaged arm.

  "Do you want to rest?"

  A tightening of the mouth, a dry swallow. "I want to talk."

  "Your call."

  "Phnom Penh was a beautiful city, with broad boulevards and graceful buildings and trees everywhere. It had shade, the river, the flat plain, with its one hill and the temple on top of it." He is looking at the opposite wall, and his eyes and voice are soft. "I loved the city then. I played violin in the symphony orchestra. I taught music. I had-" He stops and swallows. "A wife. Sophea. Two children. Two girls. Eleven and thirteen."

  A tear slides down his cheek, but he seems not to notice. He doesn't even blink his eyes against the moisture. "So they came. We cheered for them. We invited them into our homes and fed them. We had victory parties. Two days later they began to empty the city.

  "They said everyone was going to work the soil." Chouk is speaking so softly Rafferty has to lean forward to hear. Superman has been gone more than an hour. It is getting dark in the room. "It took them three days to drive everyone out, even the sick people in the hospitals. Six hundred thousand people in three days. We were each allowed to carry as much of our lives as we could squeeze into one bag."

  He puts his head back as far as he can, stretching the long muscles in his neck. "The bag was a trap. On the way out of the city, the soldiers stopped and searched everyone. Anybody who had packed a book was killed. Anybody with soft hands-'office hands'-was killed. Anybody who wore spectacles was shot or beaten to death." He closes his eyes and rolls his head slowly from side to side. "My family stood in line with soldiers on either side, holding one another's hands, with our bags packed full of books, some of them in English. I had my violin. We were waiting to die." He is breathing rapidly and shallowly, as though he were once again lined up, waiting for his bullet.

  "This can wait," Rafferty says.

  "When it came to be my family's turn, an officer stepped forward and stopped the soldiers from opening our bags. We were led to one side and told to wait. I later found out he'd been a subscriber to the symphony. He'd seen me play the Beethoven Concerto in D. He'd enjoyed it. The soldiers took us back to the city, back to our own house. They put guards all around us, as though we had anywhere to run when the whole country was being turned into a prison.

  "So we were still in Phnom Penh when the bombing started. They blew up the banks, the libraries, the churches, the hospitals, anything with ties to the West. There were going to be no foreign influences in the Year Zero. That's what they called it, the Year Zero, the glorious new beginning." He stops and opens his eyes. "Could I have some water?"

  Rafferty raises the bottle to Chouk's lips. One swallow, two, and then Chouk lifts his chin: enough. "Glory," he says. "It was about glory. We-Cambodia, I mean-were going to return to our days of glory, the days of Angkor, when Khmer kings ruled most of Southeast Asia." The sound he makes might be a laugh, or just something caught in his throat. "Of course, the days of Angkor were a thousand years ago. That was Pol Pot's great leap forward-ten centuries into the past."

  "I wasn't aware there were a lot of violinists at Angkor."

  Chouk's grin is quick and white, with no more humor in it than the laugh had. "They were such hypocrites. The fat boys-Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, all of them-had been rich kids. They went to school in Paris. The people, the ordinary people, were sealed off from the West-from books and ideas and even medicine. But the fat boys liked music."

  "And that saved you."

  "In a manner of speaking, I suppose it did." He starts suddenly and looks around the room at the darkness, as though he is just noticing the passage of time. "Where's the boy?"

  "Probably stuck in traffic. It's rush hour."

  "It shouldn't be taking him this long."

  "He'll be here." Rafferty prompts the man back to his story. "You met Madame Wing in an interrogation center."

  "'Met' is an interesting choice of words. You could say I walked into her, in the sense that people sometimes walk into an airplane propeller. You could say I was thrown into her, like a tree into a chipper. 'Met' is a little on the soft side. But I don't want to talk about her yet. We'll talk about her when the boy gets here."

  "I want a beer," Rafferty says. In fact, he needs to escape the room: the thick, dark atmosphere and the darkness of Chouk's past. They combine to exert a pressure that makes him feel like he's been buried alive. "I'd offer you one, but it'd probably knock you out."

  "I don't drink."

  "Hang on." He goes out into the equally dark living room, snapping on lights as he goes. The illumination does nothing to lift his mood. A detour takes him to Miaow's room, where she is bent over a schoolbook, copying something down. The tip of her tongue is pasted to her upper lip.

  "Hello, Miaow."

  "Hello, Poke." She does not look up from her work. "Where's Boo?"

  The old name seems appropriate for the first time. "On an errand."

  "Who are you talking to?"

  "Someone who doesn't feel well. I'll tell you about it later."

  She squints down at the book. "What does 'spontaneous' mean?"

  He hates this
kind of question. "Um…sort of unplanned. You know, if you were a witch and you decided all of a sudden to turn me into a toadstool, that would be a spontaneous decision."

  "You're too nice to be a toadstool," she says without looking up.

  "Thank you, Miaow."

  "I'd turn you into a mushroom."

  "Great," Rafferty says. "I could be your pet mushroom. You could buy me a little hat."

  "Mushrooms already have caps," Miaow says, dismissing him.

  One-upped by an eight-year-old. There is something sane and warm in being one-upped by an eight-year-old. In the kitchen he pops a beer, draws a deep breath for strength, and goes back into the bedroom. On the threshold he hesitates and then decides against turning on the lights. Chouk rolls toward him, his face thrown into relief by the light coming through the door until Rafferty pulls it closed behind him.

  "You were in Phnom Penh," Rafferty says, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  "Not for long. A few weeks. Then we were sent to the countryside. We grew rice. We dug ditches. We dug graves." He pauses and swallows. "A great many graves. The killing never stopped. And the interrogations went on day and night.

  "There were already interrogation centers all over the country, for those who didn't plant rice fast enough, or grumbled about being worked sixteen hours a day, or starved with insufficient enthusiasm. Or people they should have killed the first time around but missed. People like me."

  "How did they find out who you were?"

  "Somebody talked." He takes a breath and holds it, then releases it. "Somebody always talked." He turns to Rafferty, and his eyes glint in the darkness. "It might have been one of my daughters. They indoctrinated the children twenty-four hours a day."

  Rafferty says the only kind thing he can think of. "But you don't know that."

  "And I don't want to know. I think it would kill me."

  "So you were betrayed. What happened?"

  "I was special, because I'd had some status before the revolution, so they sent me to Tuol Sleng. In the middle of Phnom Penh, they took over a high school and turned it into something new: an interrogation and murder facility for Khmer Rouge who had betrayed the revolution. Of course, nobody had betrayed the revolution. It was just craziness, paranoia. They used Tuol Sleng to torture confessions from people Pol Pot was afraid of, or just tired of. The basic idea was simple. Bring people in, torture them until they signed a confession, and kill them. Seventeen thousand people went in. Seven came out."

  The room is almost completely dark. The sound of traffic from the street is like an anchor to the life of Bangkok, going on all around them. "What were they supposed to confess to?"

  "Anything. Collaborating with the CIA. Sympathizing with Vietnam. Listening to Thai pop music. Eating weeds in the forest. One person confessed to not watering his houseplants. Whatever it was, people were tormented until they said what they were told to say, and then they were taken to the killing field at Cheung Ek in trucks and put to death. Beaten with hoes, usually, or chopped with machetes, because the revolution was short of bullets."

  "Did they do that to your hand?"

  "This?" Chouk looks at Rafferty as though he hasn't been listening. He lifts the hand as far as the chain will allow. "This was just a way of saying hello. It's trivial. They wouldn't even have bothered with it if they hadn't known I was a violinist. They did it to hurt me inside and also, I think, because they just hated beauty. Beauty frightened them. They beheaded every Buddha at Angkor. This hand could finger the melodies of Beethoven and Bach, so they destroyed it."

  He gazes at the ruined hand regretfully but remotely, the way someone might look at a house that burned down years ago. "They did it with a hammer and pliers in one of the interrogation rooms. Classrooms, they had been, with blackboards and windows so the children could see the sky while they learned. They put an iron bed frame in each room and wired it to a hand-cranked generator. In one corner they put the knives and the bolt cutters and the pruning shears and the whips made out of heavy copper electrical wire, and the iron rods they used to break the long bones. They placed these things in the corner opposite the door so they were the first thing the subject saw when he came into the room. To the left of the door was a little table with a chair in front of it for the interrogator to use. The table and the chair were so neat, so clean. In some ways they were the worst things in the room. We were chained to the bed frame, filthy and stinking with our own piss and shit, and the table and chair were so clean. The interrogator sat there and made notes while his assistants did their work. They worked around the clock sometimes, in shifts. You could hear screaming all day and all night. For some reason it was worst at night."

  The door to the bedroom opens, and Superman comes in, framed in light, holding a file folder. His eyes are enormous, stunned, like someone who has just survived a disastrous accident and doesn't know why. He moves quickly to Rafferty and thrusts the folder at him as though it were an animal that bites. Then he turns to the bed and spits on Chouk.

  "No," Rafferty says, rising to take the boy by the shoulder. "He didn't do anything."

  "You haven't looked," the boy says. "Kill him."

  Rafferty is still standing. "You've got it wrong. Now beat it. Go sit with Miaow. And don't talk about this. I'll explain it after dinner." He takes a napkin from the sandwich plate and wipes the spittle from Chouk's face.

  "Not hungry." Superman has not taken his eyes off Chouk. He purses his lips, and Rafferty thinks he will spit again, but instead he stalks from the room, slamming the door behind him.

  "A warrior," Chouk says. "Is he yours?"

  "Apparently." Rafferty turns on the bedside light, squinting against the glare, and begins to open the folder.

  "Wait," Chouk says. "Before you look at it, let me tell you what it is."

  He shifts a little in the bed. "Just in case anyone still doubted that Pol Pot was insane, he declared war on Vietnam. This was the country that had just defeated America. They were better armed than the Russians. The war lasted two weeks, and then the Vietnamese came."

  "And bless them for it."

  "We were already in Tuol Sleng by then. When a subject was sent to Tuol Sleng, his family went with him. So my wife and children were there, too." He stops, and his eyes go to the folder. "My wife and children," he repeats.

  "Tuol Sleng was a summer camp for monsters, but they were precise monsters. The precision took the form of exhaustive files on every prisoner who entered the prison: the charges against them, the forms of torture used during the interrogation, the confession, and the date of death. We were all going to die, of course. It was like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland: sentence first, verdict afterward. Every prisoner was photographed, sometimes just before they were killed. The highest-ranking prisoners were photographed dead, as proof for Pol Pot and the other fat boys. There were thousands of photographs."

  "I've seen some of them."

  "A man named Duch headed up the operation, but the interrogators did most of the work. The head female interrogator was called Keck."

  The two men look at each other, and Rafferty says, "Madame Wing."

  "We had been there a week when she killed my wife and daughters. She killed my oldest daughter first, in front of my wife. She was trying to make my wife say I was a CIA agent. Tiara was a beautiful girl, so she began by cutting off her nose. She did it with a razor, and she made my wife sharpen the razor. She told my wife, 'The sharper it is, the less it will hurt.'"

  He is looking at the blanket now, and tears are falling from his downturned face. "She murdered them all. She saved my wife for last and killed her with me in the room. She made it go on for two days. I was shackled hand and foot while she worked. There was nothing personal in it as far as Keck was concerned. It was what she did, eight hours a day. She took pleasure from it, but it wasn't personal. They could have been anyone, as long as they had nerves and tears and blood and bone. I could have been anyone, as long as I loved them, as long as it hurt me
to watch. It wasn't enough to maim us, to kill us. First they had to drive a nail through our hearts."

  Rafferty draws a couple of deep breaths. "Why are you alive?"

  "Pol Pot's war against Vietnam. The Vietnamese invaded Phnom Penh, and the guards and interrogators ran. They had just started on me. I guess you could say I was lucky. After my first session, they returned me to the group cells. As soon as the Vietnamese entered Phnom Penh, the interrogators killed everyone in the interrogation rooms, and then they went to get the files. When the Vietnamese arrived, they found bodies everywhere and seven of us alive. In one room there were two filing cabinets full of photos. One drawer was empty. It had held pictures of the interrogators at work. Keck emptied it. I saw her leave with it." He glances down at the folder in Rafferty's lap. "With that."

  "This is hardly a drawer's worth."

  "I don't know what happened to the rest. She may have thrown them away. She may have sold them, one at a time, to the people who were in them. Those are the pictures of her. You can look at them now."

  The folder opens too easily for what it contains.

  The first thing he sees is Keck's eyes. They look out of a gaunt younger woman's face. The flesh beneath the skin has been burned away by the rage that animates the face. The eyes could be looking at a barren landscape, a blasted tree, the face of the moon. They have no time for anything living.

  The other pictures are unendurable. Flesh tears, bones snap. Keck's long fingers slice and probe. The luminous eyes look down as from a great altitude, as though the living beings she is driving mad with pain are as distant as ships slipping below the horizon.

  Rafferty looks at the top sheet and closes his eyes. While they are still closed, he shuts the folder. When he opens his eyes, Chouk is studying him to assess his reaction. "Why would she keep these?"

  "The same reason people keep photos from their school days, or of their families. It was the best time in her life. She was happy."

  "How did you find her?"