Hunters in the Dark

by Lawrence Osborne

  The driver had gotten lost and he circled back up to another boulevard—Monivong—and turned right into it until they came to Kampuchea Krom at a right angle to it. It had a somber, commercial feel. After the second junction, they came to the Paris. The hotel’s name was written over a curved entrance in English, Chinese and Khmer, and around its pale orange columns lounged a handful of cynical-looking drivers. There was a KTV with red Chinese lanterns across the street and a shop with a sign that read Sony, Make Believe.

  He had no bags, he was free and light as he came into the colorless and empty lobby with “international” clocks on the wall and the cool glance of two young receptionists.

  They barely looked up, in any case.

  The lobby had white leather sofas and a coppery bas-relief of Angkor Wat and a soft-drinks fridge with the word Vinamilk. Sashed boudoir curtains made it feel like something other than a hotel.

  “Passport,” one of them said impassively.

  And suddenly he remembered his passport. Which is to say that he no longer had it.

  “It’s at my other hotel,” he said quickly, not missing a beat.

  “What hotel?”

  “The Sakura. I can get it later.”

  The two Khmer girls looked at each other doubtfully.

  But it was a barang, a barang was not really a risk, and they didn’t really care either way. Cash is cash.

  One of them looked up at the clocks for some reason. The red letters below them spelled out the names of cities they would never see: Sydney, New York and of course Paris. The time in Paris would never be of any use to anyone staying at the Paris.

  “All right,” one of them said, “you can bring it later.”

  “I will, yes.”

  “But then you got to pay up front now.”

  “All right—two nights please.”

  It was thankfully cheap.

  “No bags?”

  “I’ll get them later.”

  He paid the cash and one of the girls took him up to the fifth floor. As they passed by the lift he saw the photocopies of passport pages of wanted criminals taped to the wall next to it. Heng, Sarquen, Cambodian: eyes like pumice. Men on the run like himself, their images of little interest to guests of the Paris who probably had enough secrets of their own. The girl glanced at him. Her attitude quickly relaxed even though the lift was broken. The futility of the building’s internal heat seemed to make her more amiable. It was the way here, the surface coolness quickly broke down.

  “Holiday?”

  “Business.”

  “Ah,” and her face fell a little.

  The Paris was a claustrophobic place, with half-lit corridors, a mama-san on every floor, and girls from the massage parlor sat around doing their day’s makeup and coiffure. They looked up for a moment as he passed and the brushes and eyeliners came to a moment’s standstill. So it was a single man’s place and they kept track of the resident denizens. The room itself was the usual cheap affair in the tropics but there was a working fridge and air-conditioning and a TV with a Japanese channel. The wooden ceiling was so polished that it looked like a floor. No gambling in the HOTEL room on the back of the door.

  The receptionist gave him the key and left him there. He locked the door behind him and went to the window and looked down into Kampuchea Krom. Tired and stoic trees withered up in the last hour of sun before the rain hit the city. The traffic went by in a curious silence. Behind a blue grille on a rooftop a woman sat combing out her wet hair. He sat on the bed in a state of vast emptiness and relief and took off the clothes that were not his and looked at the back of the collar and the inside of the linen trousers. Were they not Simon’s clothes, pretty obviously? They did not quite fit and Simon had been wearing the same kind of thing. The labels were of a tailor in Phnom Penh, a place called Vong. They were Simon’s clothes all right, they even smelled of a stranger. The gesture was strange and murky and he could not think it through even now. There was the money, and this was merely a better way of getting rid of him than killing him.

  He lay back on the stiff bed and smiled at the thought of Simon and his slender girl trying to kill him. Obviously this was better. And they would not have had the nerve to kill him. No normal person ever had the nerve. And yet it was also possible that Simon had given him a backhanded gift in the light of their conversation the previous night. He had read Robert quite cannily, and he had surely sensed that the Englishman would not protest too much. He would not come back looking for his things, not even for his passport. It was an incredible game, sending him off naked into the world like that, but he had intuited that Robert would survive and make the best of it. People lost their passports all the time, it was never the end of the world. He would not, Simon had guessed, even go to the British embassy in a hurry and make a declaration, and if he did they would just give him a new one. It was difficult to see what difference it would make. But alternatively, he could go find himself a false one. They were easy to procure from the city’s army of forgers. And in fact he was thinking about it already. He was thinking how he would step, lightly, into someone else’s life.

  But what life had Simon led here? Exhausted, he lay naked on the bed and turned on the TV set and watched a program about outer space that was all in Khmer. He could tell that it was about some tiny distant blue planet which had just been discovered a few months earlier, a place where it rained shards of glass all day long and where the nights lasted barely thirty minutes. He dozed. The sounds of the hotel drifted down into his consciousness. The girls shuffling in nighties and hot pants from floor to floor, the Khmer pop music, the men coughing on their way out and flinging the spit in the back of their throats. The daily thunder rolled in with a generous laziness and the trees shimmered with lightning, spreading a subtle panic through the street below. He was easily refreshed. When he was up, he felt confident again and he shaved with the hotel’s plastic razor and put his expensive clothes back on after a cold shower. The air-conditioner barely kept the grit-filled heat at bay but he no longer felt hot. He thought he would go out and find an Internet café and maybe something to eat as well. It was going to rain then, but rain never hurt a man.

  He went down by the stairs, landing by landing. In the street the rain came down in terrible sheets, the drivers outside cowering at the edge of the lobby. There was a soft surprise in their faces.

  He found a motodop and told the driver to take him to an Internet café. They set off through the downpour and he let go of any remaining apprehension about staying dry. They drove down Kampuchea Krom until they crossed Monivong, and then they had reached a street called Pasteur, passing clubs with names like Shanghai and Flamingoes and bars stirring into nocturnal life with a laziness that gave them a natural and inevitable force.

  In the thunderous rain the neon had a frosted, childish quality. They passed the Sorya Mall, a ground-floor open space filled with bars and sofas, and at the end there was Street 136 and the Internet café where the driver let him off. He dashed inside, soaked through, and sat at a terminal by the window for half a dollar.

  He had wanted to just check his e-mails but now he was not sure if he should. To open his account would perhaps expose his whereabouts to someone who might be looking for it. He didn’t know who would be looking for it as yet, but eventually—surely—his on-off girlfriend, Yula, would be anxious and maybe his parents as well. Incredibly, he hadn’t thought of them. It might be a decisive thing, to use his Gmail password now. Decisive, that is, down the line. He therefore hesitated before signing in.

  His hand hovered over the keyboard and gradually it relaxed and retreated. It had to be thought over, and now he was not sure that he wanted to go back to anything. He only worried about his mother, even though there were other things to worry about, a thousand loose ends left in a chaos of abandoned responsibility.

  He often thought, in this respect, how un-English he really was, because breaking away from home was not proving to be as difficult as he might have once an
ticipated. On the contrary. It was proving easy and harmless, at least to himself. Because his own motive was becoming clearer to him, he assumed that it would become clearer to everyone in his life as well. It was not the case, and he realized that. But he hoped it would be soon. If he could walk out of the door and not come back, others would eventually understand why. There was no point, then, explaining himself to a chorus of puzzled resentment. If they couldn’t understand, nothing could make them understand. Most people appreciated where they were born and grew up. They grumbled, but they liked it, could not live without it. He was not like that, he now understood. There was nothing about his birthplace or his life there that he enjoyed or would defend to the death. There was nothing he enjoyed in that way of life. It was claustrophobic and petty, and the police watched everything you did and thought. It was a way of life that justified itself as being the pinnacle of freedom, but it had not come up with an alternative reason for existing once the freedom had been sucked out of it. There wasn’t even sex or sun. There was health care, so that although life was expensive at least death was free. A society premised on free death.

  It was then that he opened the Gmail account and quickly went through his messages. Surprisingly, almost no one apart from his parents had sent him anything. It was as he had suspected. He felt a bitter contempt for himself for even hoping that it might have been otherwise. The two messages from his parents, moreover, were simple enough.

  Bobby, we know you are on the road and it’s awfully hard to send message sometimes, but still we are here, you know, not six feet under. You might pop us a message once in a while just to let us know that you aren’t either!

  The second seemed a little more anxious.

  Bobby, are you all right? We don’t know how we feel about you being in the land of Pol Pot. I mean, really. Awful things happen there, we’ve heard. We hope you are being careful at least. Send word, all right?

  And impulsively he did.

  Everything OK. Don’t worry. Having a marvelous time in the land of Pol Pot. Would I be a monster if I decided to stay here a year and not come back to that awful job? Would you be furious if I did that? I met a girl. You know the story. But everything’s dandy! It couldn’t be better.

  Bobby

  It was fake, but it was not entirely so. The gist was true.

  He imagined his father turning to his mother with a sly wink.

  “So, he’s got a girl out there. I told you so.”

  It was then that he decided to “go invisible.” He felt that he could cut off contact with them for a while without arousing their fears. How long that would turn out to be he couldn’t imagine. It might be weeks, or even months. He knew how they thought—once they had received word from him that he was thriving in foreign parts they would tend to let it go for a while. He would send them a curt word later on, when he knew what he was going to do. He didn’t know himself at that moment, and so there was little point trying to explain it to them.

  Out in the rain there was a street almost in rubble. Wide, sultry, open to vice. Short-term hotels with little white neon signs were still open and freelance girls trawled the flooded pavements in pressed white shirts and black hair combs. He went onto some sites where people posted services ads and personals and looked through the Language Tuition section.

  It was free to register and put up an ad, but in the Language Tuition Sought section there were quite a few people asking for English lessons at about ten dollars an hour. He scribbled down the phone numbers of six or seven and went out into the rain again and walked down 63 for a while until he came to a shop selling cheap phones and SIM cards. He got a ten-dollar one and a one-dollar SIM and fixed his new number up inside the shop so that it worked before he made his way out.

  He didn’t want to waste any money now so he made his way back to the Paris—he was wet anyway and the humidity would never let him dry out—and on the way a Viet girl followed him slowly on a kind of damaged Vespa and called out “Why not, why not?” until giving up and turning away. On Kampuchea Krom the pavements had emptied, the trees poured with warm water. When he arrived back at the lobby a man asleep at the reception desk raised his head and looked up with an aimless eye at the barang. Two girls ahead of him on the stairs turned and asked him what room he was staying in. They smelled like Ivory soap and turmeric. He said he only spoke Romanian. Then, when he was back on his granite bed, he remembered that he had meant to eat and had forgotten. He lay down and felt slightly feverish and decided to leave the curtains open because the lightning flickering through the window would, against its usual proclivity, help him sleep and forget everything. And so it did.

  EIGHT

  The following day he got up early and went down to the restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel. Its doors were opened to the street and the sticky tables attracted flies. He ate some dried sand gobi in soya bean sauce and some kai lan in oyster sauce and after them some weak tea. The day had risen in a new spirit, with a low, aggressive sun and a dry, acid dust that came onto the tongue and the eyelashes. It was strange how at this time of year the city did not remain either wet or dry for long. The men there ate while silently reading newspapers with tin pots of Vietnamese coffee, the glasses beneath the metal filters lightened with condensed milk, and when he had tired of the tea he got the same coffee for himself and counted everything out carefully dollar-wise. He would have to survive on very little until he got a pupil or two. He sugar-loaded the coffee, which had a nutty, almost chocolate taste, and drank it down as slowly as he could. Soon the discomfort of the night and the bad sleep were dispelled and he came back to life and set to work calling the numbers which he had culled from the Language Tuition section.

  None of them answered. Perhaps it was too early in the morning. He paid and strode out into the sunshine and walked slowly down Monivong until he reached the Victory Monument. The sky had lost all its monsoon darkness and he looked forward to a dry and bright spell. It seemed like a city of twenty-year-olds in which only the old possessed the shabbiness he had expected, as if they had emerged suddenly from a distant age of terror. He went ambling down Neak Banh Teuk Park toward the Samdech Chuon Nath statue, an old man with large ears seated cross-legged surrounded by nagas and lions. Robert paid it no attention. He pressed on along Hun Sen Park and past the massive Nagaworld casino and a fairground on the left called Dream Land, the Ferris wheel temporarily stilled, waiting for night, but the street vendors already there with their barrows of tiny steamed snails topped with artful crests of red chilies. He went inside Nagaworld for a few minutes to cool off and sat inside a kind of Chinese pavilion with plastic willows and painted blue-sky ceiling and stone waterfalls. He came out dried of sweat and circled around past the Landmark Hotel until he came alongside the Himawara Hotel, where the gold leaf of the palace was suddenly visible and the saline river could be felt in the nose.

  There was a restaurant next to it, with tables set out above the river, empty at that hour. He sat there and ordered an omelette with cucumbers and pork and a fermented fish called tray prama. He made his calls again as he was drinking the next round of Chinese tea and this time a woman picked up. She was Khmer and spoke little English.

  She said, “Dr. Sar coming back at eleven.”

  He said it was for the English lessons.

  “He will call you back, Mr….”

  A name, he didn’t have a name yet. He had not even been asked to give one at the hotel, or maybe he had signed his usual signature, he couldn’t remember.

  “Mr. Beauchamp,” he said quickly.

  He pronounced the p.

  She repeated it and he said “Yes.”

  “Mr. Beauchamp, Dr. Sar will call you before lunch.”

  So he was a doctor.

  “All right, I’ll wait for his call.”

  “Aw khun!”

  He thought of continuing with the calls but his superstitious side was strong and he thought he might jinx this one and he didn’t want to jinx a doctor. A doct
or might pay well enough, and he loathed the thought that he might have to break silence and call his parents for money. That was unthinkable. He went back out into the street and walked down alongside the river until he was by the Cambodiana Hotel and then the wide, milky water itself with the construction cranes shining on the far side as if sprinkled with silver dust.

  Although the day was typical of those that follow a night of rain—the earth patted down and compact, the insects somehow uninterested in humans—the sky showed the first anxieties of the struggles that would return by nightfall. In the center of the blue void a great atomic cloud had formed, blindingly bright at the edges, and as it evolved upward it grew darker and yet more brilliant at the edges.

  The tension in the air did not at first seem related to it, but soon one began to know better. In the street the long puddles brightened for a moment then grew dim, and the electricity which rippled through the air drew the eye upward to the slow-motion mushroom cloud and its impending crisis, which would not arrive for hours, maybe not even till the next day. Along the Tongle Sap the frangipanis and star trees were held in a total stillness, like things carved out of wax, and under them old ladies performed their t’ai chi to music boxes. The beauty of automata, the beauty of wax and stillness and sky-tensions. For the first time in twelve hours his clothes began to dry and become crisp again and the sun burned into his shoulder blades. He crossed the road and went into one of the spread-out café terraces with cane chairs that line the tourist stretch of Sisowath Quay. It was La Croisette. As he settled into one of the cane chairs the phone rang and a male voice said his new name with a gravelly amusement, as if he had heard it before but as if it didn’t matter. The doctor introduced himself in a slightly struggling but distinctly American-inflected English.

  —

  “I was glad to get your call, Mr. Beauchamp,” the doctor said. “My wife and I have been looking for an English tutor. Could we maybe meet up for lunch in an hour? Where are you?”