by Agent Kasper
“I don’t want to die.”
“Then you won’t. Or maybe you will. Come on.”
“You’re nuts.”
“Shoot, son of a bitch!”
“Fuck you, Darrha.”
“Shoot! The boys are waiting, and—”
But Darrha can’t finish his sentence. Kasper’s fast with a pistol, even when he has to aim it at his own temple. He squeezes the trigger; the empty click strikes everyone dumb. But soon they’re all shouting again. Money changes hands. The majority of them have bet against Kasper, and now they want a chance to recoup their losses.
“It’s only fair,” says Darrha succinctly. He seizes the pistol and spins the cylinder again. Another go-round.
Darrha hands Kasper the gun.
There’s a mingled odor of sweat and alcohol, of animal temperatures approaching the boiling point.
To die in this place, the fucking armpit of the world, Kasper thinks. To die for a handful of desperados blitzed on drugs and alcohol, for a bunch of punks steeped in violence and formed by a subculture that gives human life no value. One bullet, six possibilities; one chance out of six that you’re fucked.
Darrha’s grinning like Charon. The ferryman on the last ferry.
Kasper thinks if he sticks that pistol in Darrha’s face, he’s got some probability of blowing him away. For a little more certainty, he’d like to have at least three live rounds in the gun. A crazy idea, sure, but one way or the other, he’s a dead man….
Darrha levels his AK-47. “Come on, Italian. Be brave.”
Kasper points the pistol at his temple. Click. An empty chamber, once again.
He flings the pistol at Darrha, who receives it in the chest. He laughs like the school bully who plays you a dirty trick and then yells in your face, “You fell for it! Couldn’t you tell it was all an act?”
And, in fact, Kasper thinks maybe it was just a prank. Maybe there never were any bullets in that revolver. Maybe it was all a show they put on to make him shit his pants.
So Kasper laughs too. And has another swig of this Mekhong Whiskey hooch, which it turns out is not all that bad. Darrha raises the pistol toward the ceiling and squeezes the trigger. Another empty click, and then a shot. Surprised silence reigns for a moment before they all go back to laughing, drinking, and settling their bets. Then, finally, they leave him and his prison, climb into their somber SUVs, and drive off into the night toward Phnom Penh.
They leave him with his jailers, the Cambodian family with guns, who return to their habitual silence.
The wife of the head of the family looks at him and says nothing. But she puts a hand on his shoulder, sighs, and at dinner serves him a double portion. Rice and dried fish. A lot of it, for a change.
6
Agent Kasper
Rome, in the neighborhood of the parliament building
May 2008
The senatore hands two one-euro coins to the street vendor who’s pestering him. He dodges the vendor’s proffered bouquet of roses and repeats, “No thanks.” Barbara says it too: “No thanks.” But the vendor insists she must take at least one rose, after which she and the senatore are free to continue on their way toward the Pantheon, amid the crowds that fill the streets around the parliament building on Friday afternoons.
“That guy took me for the standard-issue old gent with a young lover in tow,” the senatore chortles. “I should have bought you the whole bouquet.”
“Please, that’s enough,” she replies, and thrusts the rose into the first trash bin they come across.
Barbara hasn’t wasted any time since her meeting with the two women. That name—Manuela Sanchez—catapulted her fifteen years into the past, before the senatore was actively engaged in politics, back when he was simply a Roman lawyer with a thriving practice where Barbara took her first steps as a working attorney. It’s a name that warrants more than the standard infrequent e-mail or phone call.
They find an unoccupied café table on the edge of Piazza del Pantheon and sit down. For a few seconds they enjoy the spectacle offered by the piazza; then they check their respective cell phones, smile at a street photographer who wants to immortalize them, preferably in an embrace, and indicate the best way for him to get lost.
Then the senatore begins: “I haven’t heard from Manuela Sanchez in quite some time. I haven’t heard from her in years.”
“How do you figure that two apparently normal women would—”
“I figure it only one way: the guy who’s been kidnapped in Cambodia knows Manuela Sanchez. And pretty well, too.”
“Oh, I suppose it’s possible. If he’s really an ex-Carabiniere.”
“Indeed. For now, we’ll assume the two ladies gave you an accurate version of the events, even though I suspect they’ve left something out. This guy could be anybody. You have to try to find out more about him. It was surely his idea that they should contact Manuela. And he did it because he knows she knows me. Because through me, as a senator of the republic…”
“They need to get to the Italian government,” Barbara concludes. “To get to it fast and without making too much noise. Far away from the media.”
“Exactly,” the senatore agrees. “But Manuela would never expose herself personally. Especially not in a situation like this. Therefore she had them take the easiest route to yours truly: she sent them to you. And she got the desired result. I wouldn’t be surprised if she were watching us at this very moment from some corner of this piazza. You know her, she’s an exceptional woman….”
The senatore raises his glass of chardonnay as though for a toast. He murmurs some enologically appropriate comment and nods to himself. “Yes, I do believe I’ll go out for some sushi this evening. Care to join me?”
Barbara smiles at him from behind her empty glass. “I have a husband and two children waiting for me at home. Most of all, I’m facing a terrifying weekend at the seashore, and I’m going to have to work while I’m there. What shall I say to my two ladies?”
“That you have an appointment with a government official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
“All right, that should calm them down for a while. But in the meantime…”
“In the meantime, keep the appointment. Monday morning, nine-thirty, at the ministry.” He smiles and hands her a card with a telephone number written on it. “The official will be expecting you. That’s his cell phone number. Call him if you get lost.”
Barbara takes the card and slips it into her wallet. Next to the other one, the one with the number to call for Manuela Sanchez.
—
The sea off Circeo is heart-stopping.
The playful voices that come up from the shore, torture.
It’s a Saturday in May with the smell of high summer, and she must stay here, shut up inside four walls, while her husband, their two sons, their friends, and a few thousand other Romans live it up on the beach, practically under her nose.
Barbara tries to go online but can’t connect. Again. The DSL’s acting up. She rises from her chair and declares she’s had enough. Her work won’t suffer if she spends a few hours in the sun.
She’ll do it. The moment has come for her to change into some beachwear.
She undresses and examines herself in the bedroom mirror. All of herself. She can officially conclude that her sacrifices were not in vain. The results aren’t all she could wish, but they’ll do. What a shitty winter she’d had without wine, without cheese, with very little bread and hardly any pasta. Lots of salads. An infinity of salads.
She goes for the two-piece. It’s May, the spring sun is marvelous, it demands thorough exposure. But when she returns to the living room and glances at the computer screen, the DSL is working again.
Barbara sits back down in front of the keyboard, opens the browser, and resumes her search. She types in the name of the “prisoner” and adds some possible keywords. She looks for the newspaper articles she’d linked to earlier. About ten articles in all, taken from the major Ital
ian newspapers, except for one from the Phnom Penh Post. She jumps from one article to another, from one name to another. There’s one that recurs several times in the body of the last article: Kasper.
Agent Kasper.
Something tells her she won’t make any appearance at all on the beach today.
7
The Hospital of Horrors
Preah Monivong Hospital, Prison Ward, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
July 2008
“Everything all right.”
The physician stands up, puts his dirty stethoscope into an even dirtier canvas bag, and tosses it into its case. “You are well,” he repeats in his scratchy English.
Kasper looks at him through half-closed eyelids. Fuck you, he thinks. If I’m so well, why do I feel so awful? Why can’t I get back on my feet? But don’t breathe a word of that to this so-called doctor with the parchment face. Kasper watches him blathering in Khmer with an officer of the guards. He sees him nod: he’s well, he’s well.
Four months.
That’s how much time has passed since his capture.
Since then he’s lost about twenty pounds, he suffers from dysentery and extremely high fevers, and he lives in a state of permanent exhaustion. When he’s weaker than usual, he can barely drag his feet. His eyes are lost in the void. He’s like a zombie. One of the many zombies shut up in this hospital.
The smell of “lunch” heralds the arrival of the guard who distributes food. A privilege reserved for few. If you want to eat decently, you must pay your guards, and to pay your guards you must have money. Those who have none survive on the watery swill provided by the hospital: vegetable scraps and substances it’s useless to scrutinize, swimming in some thin liquid.
It’s always better than when meat’s on the menu.
Kasper has stopped wondering what strange kind of animal goes into the stew they serve him every so often. Some say it’s dog, some say rat. Whatever it is, it makes him puke.
Before arriving here—Preah Monivong Hospital in Phnom Penh—he’s been a roving prisoner. Months in the worst hovels in Cambodia. Or in the Phnom Penh barracks of his CID tormentors. Never in an official prison. Because when you go to jail you get registered, because a Westerner would be conspicuous, because the prison grapevine could reach the wrong ears. No, it’s better to avoid official places of detention.
He’s a ghost prisoner.
From the moment he was taken, it’s been a steady descent into hell. His malarial fever comes on in violent waves; in its worst moments, it gives him hallucinations. Weeks, months of physical and psychological torture have done him in.
They wake him up in the middle of the night to move him to another jail. He’s thrown into rural cells in remote villages surrounded by rice paddies and swamps that extend as far as the eye can see. His minders are dull-eyed men and women who watch him without understanding what they’re seeing. They plainly feel neither interest nor pity. They’re specters. Anonymous extras in a world devastated by unremitting violence. Its ferocity has something pathological about it, and it unites everyone, victims and executioners, transforming them into bombs ready to explode over a trifle.
A third of Cambodia’s population disappeared at the hands of the Khmer Rouge; between 1975 and 1979, in less than four years’ time, whole generations were wiped out. The genocide and the infinite cruelty of those years subsequently played a large role in shaping the culture and attitudes of the population. Hun Sen, prime minister since 1993 and dictator since 1998, is a former Khmer Rouge with total control over his country.
More than thirty years have passed since 1975, but very little has changed. Death can come for revenge, for repression, for political expediency. That’s the particular kind of justice that the regime considers appropriate. And often, indispensable.
The land mines in Cambodia’s rural and mountainous regions have never been cleared. Every day people with shattered faces and mangled limbs are transported to Preah Monivong. Perhaps their lives will be saved. Others less fortunate don’t even make the trip to the hospital. Their fragments are collected and put in a bag, and the bag winds up in a pit. Or gets burned.
The violence is palpable, breathable. You can see it in people’s gestures and in their eyes. Poverty, desperation, horror. And the loss of all hope. That’s the Cambodian blend.
Preah Monivong Hospital’s prison ward is a big room with metal cots for beds. Many prisoners, especially the “politicals,” are chained to their cots. The common toilet area, on the left side of the room, contains a large earthenware jar with water the prisoners can use to perform their “ablutions.” As to the rest, there’s a latrine and no provision whatsoever for privacy. Waste is channeled into a fetid collector in the middle of the floor, where a hole swallows everything. Suffocating heat and decomposing organic matter provide the ideal habitat for gigantic cockroaches and for huge rats straight out of horror films. At night, these enormous rodents scurry across the floor and feed on whatever they find. To avoid being bitten on the legs, you have to barricade your cot and lie there hoping no rat will be bold enough to mount your barricade.
Meanwhile, barely a hundred meters away, city life goes on as usual. A door, a little yard with a two-meter gate, and a former garden now used as a dump separate the hospital’s prison ward from the center of the capital. The chaos of Boulevard Pasteur is around the corner, not far from the main market. In Preah Monivong, people die from torture or privation in the middle of the city, where others are living and rushing about and shopping.
Kasper knows that right now death is close, only an instant away. Maybe it would be a liberation. Even that thought has crossed his mind in certain moments. Then he regretted it: no self-pity, no sniveling. He mustn’t give in. He doesn’t want to die.
Kasper wanted to be hospitalized. He tried as hard as he could to get in. It’s possible to escape from hospitals. Or at least you can try. It’s surely easier than breaking out of regular prisons.
And so he has a project.
He receives his daily food ration, which the guard procures from somewhere outside the room. Kasper tries to eat. “Chicken” and stewed vegetables. He closes his eyes and brings some food to his mouth. Maybe his response is just psychological, but today the food seems worse than usual. He gulps down the first mouthful, then the second. He finishes in two minutes and then forces himself not to think about it.
What day is today?
He lost track some time ago.
It’s July 2008, more or less, perhaps the nineteenth. His fiftieth birthday. Turning fifty in the Hospital of Horrors.
He blows out a little imaginary candle.
Happy birthday, old boy.
—
The last time he was in touch with his family, Patty and his mother told him the foreign minister would be taking an interest in his case. Attorney Barbara Belli was working to bring about a government initiative.
An initiative.
People in the Farnesina Palace, the seat of the foreign ministry, say they’ll do it. They’ve been saying so for weeks. He’s skeptical. He knows how those things work. Too much time has passed by now.
He’s about to stretch out on his cot again when he becomes aware of a presence very close to him.
The man has the moustache and beard of a lone yachtsman. His blue shirt accents his pale blue eyes. He’s tall and burly, maybe seventy years old. Another Westerner in the hospital ward for Cambodian prisoners. It could be he belongs to a humanitarian organization. Maybe he’s a doctor. Or something like that.
“I know you,” the old man says, without coming too near. “Damn, I’m sure I’ve met you before. I even think I know where. We had some drinks together one evening. My name’s Jan. Jan van Veen.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“Yes, of course,” he says with a smile. “But in economic science.”
Kasper takes a closer look at him. Dutch, judging by his name and his English. No, he’s not familiar. “Well, Doctor van Veen,” Kasper say
s, “I’m—”
“Sharky’s!” van Veen exclaims. “Aren’t you the Italian who owns Sharky’s, here in Phnom Penh? We had drinks together. A year ago, maybe a bit less. I was at dinner with two friends, two Englishwomen, and you sent us a bottle of champagne. You were really great to do that. We’ve often talked about you, the girls and I. You don’t remember….Your partner was there too, the American with the white beard….Everybody calls him…Wait…”
“Clancy.”
“The very same! A great character, that American. Look, I must thank you again. It was Veuve Clicquot, if I remember correctly. My favorite.”
Mine too, Kasper feels like saying. But instead he simply asks, “So what the devil are you doing here, Jan van Veen?”
“I came here to see a guy who used to work for me. He got in trouble with the law, and then he got sick. I came to see how he is.”
“And how is he?”
“Worse off than you. He can’t last long.” The Dutchman lowers his voice. “What happened to you? How did you wind up in this place?”
It’s a long story, Kasper would like to warn him. I was ambushed, he thinks. Betrayed. But he decides to say something that seems easier. And more accurate. “By being an asshole,” he replies. “They grabbed us both, Clancy and me. They separated us. I have no idea what happened to him.”
“Are you injured?”
“I’ve got dengue fever and various infections.”
A male nurse approaches and attaches a drip to Kasper’s arm. He gives the Western intruder a filthy look and goes away. The clear liquid descends, drop by drop, into Kasper’s veins. He gets one bottle of the stuff per day, but instead of perking up, afterward he feels wearier than before.
“What are they giving you?”
“Vitamins. According to them.”
“But nobody’s doing anything for you in Italy? Politically, I mean. Your government, the Vatican, the Red Cross, somebody…”
