by Tom Knox
‘The Cambodian people. The UN. Many western governments.’
‘Not all western governments?’
‘The Americans supported the Khmer Rouge in the late 70s, 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 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 garish packets of instant noodles, and mobile phone talktime, and lao-lao rice whisky. 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 darkening countryside once more.
‘The Chinese are also involved in what happened here. During the KR regime.’
Jake was glad to get to the centre of the issue.
‘So what did happen here?’
‘We’re not entirely sure. But in 1976 Pol Pot made 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 inrushing 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 to 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 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, in 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, ah, we know she disappeared around that time, and we know there were rumours 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 cellphone 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. Cellphones 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 isolation.
An hour passed in even more subdued silence. And then:
‘Ponsavanh!’
The driver had spoken for the first time since the morning. They were entering, what was, for Laos, a largeish city. Straggling and busy and concrete, it was an ugly place, especially in the harsh glare of rudimentary streetlights. Jake saw an internet cafe, 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 pick-up 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 battlezone. 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 bo
mbers, 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 car park 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, he inhaled deeply the sweet night scent of pollution and burning hardwood.
‘Come and meet the team. What’s left of it.’
The walk took a minute, along a walkway, to a door, where she knocked. Silence replied. She knocked again, there was no reply; Jake leaned against the door jamb, impatient with weariness. As he did he realized he was standing in something sticky.
The revelation was a slap of horror.
‘Jesus, Chemda, I think that’s 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 doorpanel. 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 the door, 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 was dangling and inverted; 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 blood. Like the tips of elegant painting brushes, dipped, quite delicately, in a puddle of crimson oil.
Chapter 4
The smell of decay was obscure but pungent. This was new. Maybe that rat had died down here, somewhere, in the night. Julia looked around at the shadows, eating into deeper blackness.
She was crouching in the furthest reach of the Cave of the Swelling with Ghislaine Quoinelles, her team leader. Ghislaine was the sixty-something leader of the archaeology department of northern Languedoc – just one remote branch of the labyrinthine French bureaucracy for archaeology. He was, for this season, her boss.
‘Oui oui. Hmm. C’est un peu petite . . .’
Still no decision. Julia tutted, inwardly: reining in her impatience.
But it was difficult; because Julia had never really liked Ghislaine. He was a helplessly off-putting guy, supercilious to his inferiors yet obsequious to his superiors. And he drooled. He was drooling now as he crouched on the cave floor and examined the skull, his lower lip was pouting, kissing the air, like a salivating gourmand contemplating a broiled ortolan. Was he intending to eat the skull?
She had to wait for his verdict. He was the boss. And she needed his approval 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.
And she could so easily have not had the chance! The only reason she was here was an offhand remark by a friend, in her department in London, who had mentioned a dig in the south of France. Not far from the great caves. There was room for an archaeologist from England. For a season. The offer had immediately gripped Julia with that old and giddy excitement. Proper archaeology. Dirt archaeology.
And so Julia had scraped together her savings and begged a sabbatical from her slightly sneering boss and she had left for France with high hopes and she had spent a summer digging in France – the birthplace of human Art! 30,000 years ago! – and at first she had found nothing, because there was nothing to find any more; and right up until yesterday it had seemed her sabbatical was going to dwindle away into disappointment, like everything else, like her career, like too many relationships.
But now she had found The Skulls.
She had achieved something. Hadn’t she?
‘What do you think, Ghislaine?’
‘Wait. Please. Enough. La patience est amere, mais son fruit est doux . . .’
Julia obeyed. Bridling, she obeyed.
Ghislaine was a smart man. He was also a gifted linguist: able to slip between English and French – and German and Chinese – with ease. Julia was thankful for this as she was embarrassed by her possibly hick, certainly poor, Quebecoisinflected French: she and Ghislaine could speak English together.
She waited, stifling her anxiety and excitement, as Ghislaine poked at the dust. His trousers creaked as he did this.
His trousers often creaked, because they were often leather.
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 ludicrous pompadour, obviously dyed.
Crossing her arms against the cold, Julia wondered if she was being hard on Ghislaine: 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 virile 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 ageing professor in a remote part of France doing a rather obscure job: and perhaps the absurdly young clothes were Ghislaine’s way of holding on to the better part of his life, when he had been halo’d by momentary fame, when his hair wasn’t stupid.
A hint of pity for Ghislaine stung at Julia. She wanted not to dislike him. She didn’t like disliking people. Such a waste of time. And someone must have loved him, once.
Still, the leather was ludicrous.
‘The skull it is obviously male. Yes yes. But the skeletons . . .’ Ghislaine hesitated, and took out his eyeglass to scrutinize the vertebrae. Then he turned:
‘I am finished, Miss Kerrigan.’
At these words Julia’s hopes ascended – and subsided almost immediately afterwards.
Something was wrong. Maybe.
Despite the initial expression of intrigue, and even delight, Ghislaine now seemed less than impressed. With a beckoning signal, he backed away, into the higher, wider part of the cave.
‘Yes,’ Ghislaine muttered, ‘quite an interesting discovery, but not so unusual.’
With his expensive German pen, he pointed down and along, at the wholly disinterred skull. ‘These trephinations are moderately common in this region, and this era, the Gorge of the Tarn, and the grottes in the Causse Mejean, they have yielded similar fruit. We see this quite a lot.’
‘But the wounded children, the flints? Surely?’
‘Non. They are typique.’
‘Typical? Typical?? I’ve never seen anything like this and –’
Ghislaine frowned – but said nothing; he turned and walked towards the ladder. She watched his leather trousers as he ascended the steel rungs, to the winds and skies of the plateau. Supplicant and pleading, she followed. What exactly was Ghislaine saying? Was she going to get
the chance to exploit her find?
The fresh air was cold and dank, almost colder than the cave. Julia gazed about. The forests of the Cevennes stretched away beneath them, rolling down to the sunlit coast. Down there in Cannes and Nice and Collioure it was still summer, yet up here on the massif it was autumn. A crackle of lightning flashed away to the east; black luftwaffes of clouds were rolling in.
Ghislaine was on his mobile, chattering away in quick, posh, impenetrably Parisian French. Julia walked a few yards away, tuning out. Waiting nervously for the final verdict. What was wrong? Surely this find was important? Maybe he just needed to be persuaded?
The professor had finished his phone call. And now, without a word he started marching to his car, parked on the road by an abandoned farmhouse, a kilometre along the cattle path.
The rain was falling now. Julia pursued her boss. She had to know. Her heartbeat matched her excitement. She stammered:
‘Ghislaine, sir, I mean – Monsieur, sir, Monsieur Quoinelles I need to know. Can I do the next season? I can can’t I? The bones, I am sure there is something here. That is OK isn’t it? I have ideas. I know you think this is typical but really really I do have an idea and –’
He swivelled. There was a look on his face she had never seen before. Contempt. Not the laughable pomposity or the risible vanity of before. Contempt. He snapped:
‘The crania will be taken tomorrow, and the skeletons. There are museums which can accommodate them, perfectly. They will find their home in Prunier, naturally.’
‘But –’
‘You have heard of Prunier? Ah no. Of course not.’ Another contemptuous snort. ‘Miss Kerrigan, I will not need you next season. Your job here is complete.’
This was stunning. This was a stunning disappointment.
‘What?’
‘You are relieved, is that how you phrase it? Retired. Finished. I need you no longer.’
‘But, Ghislaine, please, this is the best find I have ever made, I know I make mistakes and –’
‘Ca suffit!’ He pouted, angrily. ‘Go home, go home now. Go to Canada. They have history there, do they not? Some of your post offices are thirty years old.’
