Hunters in the Dark

by Lawrence Osborne

  “Chicken Dijon!” he said mysteriously.

  The doctor chattered with his anecdotes of the Khmer Rouge years, during which time, as a very young doctor, he had been posted to a small town near the Thai border.

  “They asked us to do terrible things, Simon, but you would hardly believe me if I told you what they were. It was like life on a different planet.”

  “You’ve been to the genocide museums?” his wife asked.

  Robert shrugged, and he said that he hadn’t wanted to go since everyone else did.

  “But they’re our biggest tourist attractions,” Sophal said. “Don’t you find that cheerful and exotic?”

  “That’s why I didn’t go. It’s so tiresome, all that.”

  “I quite agree,” the doctor said. “It was all right for twenty years and then, suddenly, one gets tired of being an atrocity circus. You should go once, however. I am sure Sophal will take you if you want to.”

  “Daddy, that’s a terrible idea.”

  “You can discuss it between yourselves. Meanwhile, do you like our Chicken Dijon? Don’t look so surprised. It’s a dish I invented myself. It has a secret ingredient—entirely French, you see, but for a single component from the Cambodian forest.”

  “He’s always inventing dishes,” Mrs. Sar put in. “I can’t stop him. If it’s disgusting please don’t eat it. We have plenty of bread.”

  It was strange-tasting but Robert soldiered on, mumbling a few compliments to its inventor. Sophal, however, wanted to know about him. He had expected this all along and had prepared his speech carefully in advance. His invention now flowed thicker and faster than the one he had offered to Dr. Sar the previous day. He depicted his new imaginary parents, a disgruntled stockbroker father and a mother who wrote radio plays, giving them appearances that roughly matched the real ones but also giving them backgrounds that were vaguely upper-class. He borrowed traits from his real parents to keep it realistic and then went off into elaborate riffs which he knew were really inventions based on what he thought Simon’s parents were like. But how strange it was that he should even have a conception of what Simon’s parents were like. He described detestable garden parties and weekends in Istanbul and clubs in London that he had no idea about. He said that his father was a member of White’s, because he had read about White’s in a novel and it sounded appropriate. On it rolled, musical and rushed.

  “White’s?” the doctor exclaimed to his wife. “He says there’s a club called White’s.”

  “Is there a Black’s?” she asked innocently.

  Soon he realized that as he talked he was holding his knife in his right hand with a clenched fist. He quietly put it down and told a silly joke.

  “Your father,” Sophal said, “is he one of those typical English guys?”

  “He used to wear a bowler hat on the train, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I love that idea,” she laughed.

  “What school did you go to?” the doctor suddenly asked.

  Robert didn’t have to think, he simply plucked from memory the name of a random village in Sussex.

  “Chalvington,” he said. “It’s a small school—no one’s ever heard of it.”

  He had made the calculated risk that Sar would not look it up online later that night.

  “Did you board there?”

  “No, I lived at home. My mother said she’d never allow me to board.”

  Chalvington with Ripe—it was where Malcolm Lowry died of alcoholism.

  The doctor listened patiently and something told Robert that he didn’t believe it. He didn’t believe Robert, but he also didn’t care.

  When the chicken was finished they went back to the sofas and the maid brought the candles over. The doctor said that it was an unusually long power outage and that normally they only lasted two or three hours at most. Yet they did seem to be getting worse. It was the rain that triggered them. The city flooded easily and the generators went out. In his youth, however, they had gotten used to doing without electricity. He and his wife didn’t mind it, they liked the return of heat, starlight and nature. They secretly preferred it. One would have thought, however, that with the advances of technology and the huge increase in the country’s wealth—well, it was exasperating. He told Robert that he ran an exclusive private clinic for patients with psychological problems. Such problems were on the rise these days and doctors were at a loss to know why. The recent protests in the capital against Hun Sen had contributed, perhaps; dozens of people had been shot dead. There was a curious ripple effect from such things.

  The maid then brought in coffee and some rice-ball desserts not unlike the Thai boua loy Robert had eaten in Bangkok. Sophal was next to him on the sofa with her legs crossed and their arms rubbed against each other as they used their spoons. It felt like centuries since he had felt anyone close to him. He could smell the rose talc under her T-shirt now turning faintly sour with the heat. Her father suggested they set up a time for an inaugural lesson and she said, “Well, I can come to Colonial Mansions the day after tomorrow if you like.”

  “How about it?” the doctor said.

  “If you like,” Robert replied, but now he had to think fast. “On the other hand,” he suggested, “we could just meet in town. You can take me somewhere.”

  “All right,” she said slowly. “I can take you somewhere.”

  The doctor and his wife exchanged a clearly delighted look.

  “You two will figure it out,” Dr. Sar said with finality. “What about a Vietnamese lunch?”

  “I’ll come and pick you up at the Mansions,” Sophal decided. “We can just stay in the lobby there if it’s convenient.”

  “I’m not sure what I’m going to teach you,” Robert said. “Your English seems perfect as it is.”

  “I need to practice—don’t we all?”

  “If you say so.”

  “She gets her future tenses mixed up,” the wife said. “And her past tenses too.”

  Robert put down his dish, looked at his watch and said, “Maybe I’d better be going. That driver has been waiting outside for two hours.”

  “So he has,” the doctor said, and put his dish down as well. “Sophal, give Simon your phone number and you two are all set.”

  The girl, in fact, walked him down to the outer gate in the rain. She seemed nonchalant about the lessons and said that all she wanted was some fun conversation, which her family was prepared to pay for. She saw no reason to pass it up.

  “By the way,” she said, “my father said to give you this. He didn’t want to give it to you himself. He’s quite shy about things like this.”

  It was an envelope, and it obviously contained money in cash, and she pushed it gently into his hand and shook her head as if to say, “Don’t worry about it, it’s normal—he likes you.”

  He took it and there was no awkwardness at all.

  “He needn’t have,” he muttered and quietly gauged the amount inside.

  “Tomorrow I can’t,” she said as the gate came open, and they saw the driver sprawled inside his tuk-tuk, his bare feet balanced on the metal rail. “The day after, Colonial Mansions. About two is OK, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, that’s fine with me.”

  “Goodbye then, Mr. Beauchamp. I forgot to tell you what a weird name that is—but I’ve heard it before somewhere. I can’t remember where.”

  “It’s not a common name.”

  “Is it an American name too?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it is.”

  She shook his hand, and there was a subtle mockery in her look.

  He said, “Bonne nuit,” and went down to the tuk-tuk, whose driver had stirred. She waited by the gate and the driver peered out and then looked up at the rain. He saw that the electricity had not come back on.

  “It’s going to be a dark night,” Sophal called down to him. “I’d go straight home if I were you, Mr. Beauchamp.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Bonne nuit yourself.”
>
  And as the tuk-tuk pulled away she smiled and the gate closed and the driver shot him a knowing look. Robert asked him to drive to Street 102 and he slumped into the backseat and held the rails tight. The evening had been a success, but he couldn’t really say why that success had happened.

  —

  They went down Norodom again and the lights came back on. He opened the envelope and looked inside, feeling slightly guilty that he had taken the unexpected gift without more of a protest. It was five hundred dollars which he had done nothing to earn and which the doctor had given him as an encouragement. Or else as some obscure gesture which could not be reciprocated. Five hundred. It was the windfall that changed the situation. It made no sense at all but, as he now thought, the lucky have great timing and he knew that he wouldn’t think about it again.

  He pocketed the bills and threw away the envelope. At Colonial Mansions, which was his destination, he found the boys scooping up the water that now formed a moat around the buildings and the night manager standing in a black suit with an opened umbrella. Robert jumped over the moat and went into the ice-cold lobby, where the air-conditioning seemed to have been on the whole time. The manager came to the reception desk with him and Robert asked him if he had any units he could rent him starting from the following day.

  It took a while to find a smaller unit on the first floor that Robert could rent by the day or by the week, as he pleased. It was furnished and it was discounted because it had an obscured view and little natural light.

  “All right,” Robert said, and laid down a hundred to hold it. “I’ll take it from tomorrow afternoon. Does it have a table?”

  “A table, four chairs and a sofa. And a king-size bed.”

  “Kitchen stuff?”

  “All equipped. It’s a one-bed apartment.”

  It was perfect.

  Robert thought for a moment about whether he should see it first but then he let it go: if it was unacceptable he didn’t much care.

  The manager gave him a receipt then took him around the ground floor to show him the facilities. There were two wings to the property, one with the handsome old pool and one with a sleek new pool. Both were lit from below and the rain puckered their surfaces.

  “Most of our guests are long-term residents,” the manager said. “They work at the embassy next door or with the Korean construction company up on the boulevard. It’s very quiet.”

  “I was looking for a quiet place. I’m having good luck today.”

  “We are getting more Chinese now.” The manager lowered his voice. “They like to swim late at night.”

  At the center of the old pool was a woman’s head patiently making its way along its length, beaten by the rain but calm-looking, the hair trussed up above it. A strangely nightmarish sight, with the goggles and the rhythmically gasping mouth.

  Robert stood just out of range of the rain dripping from the eaves and looked up at the balconies stacked on top of each other with their foliage and waxy flowers. The French windows darkened and yet open here and there, the resumed glare of the city glowing against low-hanging clouds. Every step of the way things had been laid out for him, from the very moment he stepped across the border. It was neither good luck nor bad, just luck in itself. Phnom Penh was a city that encouraged such things. He could see the tight discretion which had come over the manager’s inscrutable face as they turned and walked back into the lobby, upon whose walls old photographs of colonial Indochina made an unnecessary case for a difficult romanticism. Robert told him that he would be around after lunch the following day.

  “You can try it for a week and see if you like it,” the manager said gallantly.

  “I don’t think I won’t like it.”

  He went back out onto Street 102 and he saw at once glimmers of welding torches high up within the skeleton of the half-built skyscraper rising on the far side of the street. The Hangul characters burned into the plastic sheets that covered the building, undulating slightly as the elements tormented them. So they didn’t stop work even for a storm or a blackout. They found a way to keep slaving for their masters.

  The same driver was waiting for Robert and the tuk-tuk wheeled around in the great scummy pool that still divided the hotel from the rest of the street. Seeing which, the staff had a low laugh as they lay on the hoods of the cars parked under the trees. It was not a difficult laugh to understand. There was a magisterial tolerance and indifference in it, as well as centuries of clandestine observation. As Robert clambered into the tuk-tuk, moreover, the driver turned with exactly the same laugh and said, with an iron evenness, “Boum boum, mistah?”

  TEN

  He arrived back there earlier than he had predicted and on that now dry street swarms of dragonflies played around the clumps of weeds and the still-damp datura. Like the day itself, the hotel seemed completely different. The ground-floor restaurant was serving its bistro lunch and the old pool was filled with paunchy white people who appeared to be on some kind of antagonistic holiday. His room was not yet ready and he sat by the pool windows and ordered a steak and fries with a glass of Coke and kept his shades on because he had slept badly and his eyes were fragile.

  The men out in the pool all had shaved heads, the concentration camp look, with tattoos hard-edged on painfully white skin. The girls were immensely fat and arrogant and loud, and carrying much the same tattoos though on different parts of their bodies. They disported themselves through those blue waves like elephant seals, and the Asians coolly dressed at the restaurant in their pressed white shirts and cufflinks looked at them with a kind of despairing amazement and a quiet certainty that the economic decline of these beasts was somehow legible in the obscure codes of their tattoos and the weight of their belly fat. They were no longer the lean aggressors and masters of yesteryear. Robert felt the same way.

  He ate his steak slowly then ordered a tarte tatin and a double espresso since he no longer had to worry about money, at least for a few days. The day manager then came to his table and said that his room was now ready, and left the key politely on the table. She asked him if he had any luggage and he shook his head and said something about having his things brought on from somewhere else. She nodded and wished him a pleasant stay, then turned as she was about to move off and asked him how long he was going to stay. He said he hadn’t decided but at least a week. Afterward he would see. It was all that needed to be said.

  While he enjoyed his coffee, he called a few more of the numbers he had taken from the Language Tuition site and set up some more private lessons as best he could. There was a Khmer lawyer who offered him a few hours a week and a female musician who needed English to write songs. It didn’t seem that difficult to make a few bucks doing this sort of thing and he calculated that with five or six clients combined with the generous Dr. Sar he could do quite well for himself.

  All it needed was time and patience and application. He already knew how to teach, it was second nature to him. It was a city where people didn’t ask many questions, certainly not as many as Dr. Sar had asked.

  He would not need to repeat his performance of the previous evening. He could sense that it was like a giant wall of coral through which thousands of mutually ignorant fish swarmed night and day going about their secrets and evasions. There was no surveillance here, very little police presence and almost no puritanical curiosity or disapproval. The Khmers, thankfully, didn’t seem to be driven by a tormenting and malicious need to know everything about their curious visitors, the barangs whom they found faintly ridiculous but undeniably lucrative. The core Occidental principles of nosiness and constant outrage were not their thing. They simply went about their lives without mentally harassing everything and everyone around them. They lived in their coral and tormented each other in different ways, no doubt, but their history had at least taught them the terror of destroying privacy and individuality. With Westerners, it was going in exactly the opposite direction. In the body language of the human seals, with its lack of discretion an
d tact, you could see the retreat of privacy and the individual. It was curious.

  He went up to his room unnoticed. On the landings he paused and glanced down the tiled corridors at the rows of doors and the garden tables on the balconies where the more discreet Chinese girls liked to sunbathe with their books. It was like a hotel where people spent their whole lives instead of a few days. The unit was right under the roof and there was a smell of disuse about it. He went in, turned on the AC and the single fan and waited for the two rooms to cool down. It was obvious no one had occupied it in weeks. Why then had he waited for it to be readied? While the place cooled he wandered up to the roof. There was a Jacuzzi there and a small ornamental garden. It looked over a good portion of the city, including the nearby fortified American embassy. The scraps of park burning in the afternoon heat with their piles of scattered refuse, the radio towers and the Hangul characters of the skyscraper where the welders were still hard at work. A single white girl lay on a sunbed under the little frangipanis, her face covered and oblivious to his presence. It was a genial hideout for him. He went back to his room, locked the door and unpacked a bag of groceries which he had bought earlier in the morning at the Sorya Mall.

  Cartons of lychee juice, shampoo, soap, paper towels and both razors and a pair of scissors. He had also bought some cheap local hair dye in a dark blond color. He showered and then dried off and began to cut his hair carefully with the scissors. He cut his fringe straight and then shortened the hair around his ears. He mixed the two elements of the dye in the washbasin and applied the emulsion with a toothbrush to the top of his hair, making streaks which he toned down by rubbing them at once with a towel. He went back into the shower, washed off and waited for the hair to dry. It came out a dull blond-brown which was what he wanted. A gradual, barely noticeable change. Then he clipped his eyebrows.

  He looked again at the label on the back of the shirt Simon had given him and he saw, as before, that it was a place called Vong with the street number. Street 200. It should be easy to find.

  At five he left the Mansions and walked across Kossamak and the Freedom Park toward the street market at the far end. He walked in the direction of the river and then turned south onto the quay. He had decided to spend thirty dollars on two new shirts and when he was abreast of the hustle-bustle streets behind the river he turned into 130 and wandered aimlessly until he was on Street 19. Here he caught a motodop and told him to go to Street 200. It was a quiet street with little to recommend it. There was a row of cream-colored shophouses with metal grilles and above them balconies with plants. He quickly spotted the sign for Vong that he was looking for. It was next to another tailor called Beary. He had not stopped to think why he was going to the place where Simon had gone. It was more a dark curiosity than a rational move. He went in, and a Viet man of about seventy rose from a newspaper, a glass of tea and a pipe. There was, of course, no recognition in his eyes but neither was there any surprise. Robert simply said, “Are you Vong?” and the man said that he was. There were Vietnamese calendars all over the walls and a blood-red Buddha in the corner with electric candles. Bales of cloth stood in the shadows with colored pins stuck into them.