Hunters in the Dark

by Lawrence Osborne

  “A friend recommended you to me,” Robert said, and he closed the door behind him.

  The old man was in a collarless Viet shirt with a tape measure draped around his neck. A bamboo cloche hat hung on the wall behind him and there were paper chits all over the counter, seemingly in disorder. Vong asked him who his friend was.

  “An American—I met him here.”

  “I have a lot of Americans I make shirts for.”

  “Well, I’d like a replica of this one—can you do it by tomorrow?”

  Vong touched his mouth with his thumb and there was a sly irony in the air.

  He said, “If you leave it here.”

  “Well, I can’t leave it here.”

  “All right, I will measure you up now.”

  “Can you make it from linen like this one?”

  “I got it.”

  “If you measure me up can you do it by tomorrow?”

  “I can do by three p.m.”

  “Make it twelve and I’ll give you two bucks extra.”

  “You’re in a hurry.”

  “Yeah, I’m in a hurry.”

  “What’s the hurry?”

  “What does it matter to you?”

  “A man in a hurry—”

  “I lost my other shirts,” Robert blurted out.

  “Lost them?”

  “Yeah, I lost them. A drinking party.”

  Vong laughed. “You jumped in the river?”

  “Yeah, I jumped in the river. Can you do it?”

  The tailor said he could and stepped out from behind the counter with the tape already extended.

  “All right, good,” Robert said, and he felt, suddenly, the sweat pouring down his face and into his neck.

  He held out his arms and Vong measured him.

  “You’re not NGO,” the affable Vong bantered. “NGO don’t jump in the river and lose their shirts.”

  “Sure they do.”

  “But you’re not NGO. I wonder who your friend was. I might remember him.”

  “His name was Simon. Tall and blond.”

  Vong continued measuring, a pin between his lips. When he removed it, he said, “Don’t remember that one.”

  “Never mind, I was just curious.”

  “I make a hundred shirts a week.”

  When the measurements were done they looked over the available linens. Robert picked out a pale green and a sand color. They came with mother-of-pearl buttons and trimmings. He went for soft collars and three buttons on the cuffs to make them look a little dressier.

  The tailor stepped back and looked at the shirt he was wearing.

  “One of mine,” he said immediately.

  “I didn’t say it was one of yours.”

  “I know my own shirts when I see them.”

  “It was a gift.”

  “From your friend?”

  Robert realized now that he had made a mistake.

  “Never mind. Shall I pay you up front?”

  “That’s the way usually.”

  Out came the thirty dollars.

  “Thank you,” Vong said. “What about trousers?”

  “I’m all right for trousers.”

  “Your trousers look a bit beaten in. But they’re mine too.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “They’re my trousers too. No way I wouldn’t recognize my own trousers.”

  Robert looked down helplessly at the trousers, which were indeed looking a bit beaten in.

  “Maybe they are,” he stammered.

  “Lose those too?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “You seem to like Mr. Vong’s clothes!”

  The tailor wasn’t really curious, he was more amused, and that kind of amusement could be brushed aside if Robert held his nerve and laughed along.

  “But I like them so much I decided to get some more.”

  “Good, good! So how about some trousers?”

  Blackmail, then, Robert thought.

  “All right, I’ll get one pair. Just like these.”

  Vong measured him again and they picked out the very same material.

  “They’ll look nice,” he said affably. “Twenty-five for you.”

  It was more than Robert had wanted to spend but he had to let it go. His irritation burst out, however.

  “Have those ready tomorrow as well. You may as well.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Vong rolled up his tape.

  Robert paid the extra twenty-five and Vong wrote him out a ticket for the three items.

  “You want to have many Vong clothes,” he said. “Don’t be one of those barangs who look like homeless people.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Everything will be ready tomorrow at noon. Is your friend Simon in town?”

  They were at the door now and Vong had opened it and his body had moved into a small bow.

  “I don’t know—why do you ask?”

  “So you can tell him to come by and get some more shirts, of course.”

  “I’ll tell him if I run into him.”

  And then Robert’s curiosity returned and he asked Vong once again if he remembered the tall, blond American’s face.

  “Not at all,” the tailor said. “But I might remember it by tomorrow. I might.”

  “I hope you do,” Robert said.

  His voice was dry and slightly hostile but he couldn’t help it. He felt victimized and he wanted to know where his predator was.

  —

  That night he went to Street 136 and ate on the outdoor terrace of a place called Okuncha. Salmon tartare salad and a cold Angkor. Sitting there he looked up at the first-floor balcony of the Candy Bar opposite, and the girls under the propeller fans looked down at him and smiled and cocked their heads like spaniels. What an easy life it was. Just moments randomly pieced together. Then he walked over to the Sorya and played pool by himself among the open-air bars. The rain swept in at about nine. For a long time he sat brooding close to the street and the puddles and the drunks with umbrellas and the white college boys dumbfounded by the easy sex and the way the middle-aged men didn’t move on their perches for hours. The bars were playing Psy that night and girls danced around the tables with quiet, spinning motions that were footsure and elegant and distant. He thought about Vong. It had clearly been a mistake to get involved with him and he cursed himself for his stupidity. Tailors are always shrewd. They are observers of men. Robert had bought some postcards in the supermarket and now he wrote one to his parents and one to Yula. He wrote that he was having a good time and that nothing was out of the ordinary. The phrases were trite and typical of the things he wrote home. It might be the last thing he wrote to them in a long time, and he wondered if he could rise above the clichés he had scribbled. But the less dramatic he was, the less they would feel suspicious or become alarmed. His parents would shrug and criticize his irresponsibility, but Yula was the tricky one. She would pore over every word for hidden meanings. She was already suspicious, he could sense it even from a distance of five thousand miles. They had no commitment to each other now, but she would be hurt by his silence.

  He wondered if he should send either postcard after all. He finished them anyway, then put them in his pocket and thought it over. Perhaps not, then. Disappearance ought to be an event that is thought through carefully. One ought to take it seriously. It couldn’t be undone flippantly, and in any case he didn’t want to undo it. Surely she had known how miserable he had been when she knew him. It wasn’t her fault, but then it wasn’t his either, and in his mind it was only a temporary situation. He might be gone for a year, or two, or three, and then he would see.

  He lit a bitter Alain Delon and got a one-dollar rum and Coke. Things disappeared in any case for different reasons. One day, not long ago, he had given to his class of thirteen-year-olds a copy of the famous daguerreotype of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris taken in the year 1839. He asked them to write an essay on the theme “Why is the street in this photograph empty?�
� It was the kind of thing they relished. But none of them got the right answer. The street was not empty because in those days there were very few vehicles and very few people and very few pigeons. Paris in 1839 was not empty. One could clearly see the awnings of busy shops and cafés. It was just that the exposure time had been about ten minutes, and thus nothing moving within that window of time had left a trace for the ages. There was just the ghostly silhouette of an unknown man having his boots polished by another man, at the corner of the cobbled Boulevard du Temple. It took more than ten minutes to shine a pair of boots in those days and he told them that he often wondered who that man was—the Frenchman with the thin, manly leg raised upon a shoe polisher’s stool.

  ELEVEN

  Sophal arrived early for her lesson, while Robert was still at Vong collecting his clothes. She went into the busy lunchtime restaurant and sat at a table and ordered a coffee and then asked the boys to go up and alert Mr. Beauchamp. “He’s out,” they said at once, and she nodded quietly and resigned herself to a salad. She was early, it was true, but it was still a little odd. She looked out at the brilliant pool and the dark-skinned boys with nets skimming its surface. Her mind soon emptied and grew out of its irritation. She had spent the morning being interviewed at a clinic and she felt she had done well, but in the end it was of no interest. There was a futility about trying for such things. In the back of her mind she had a growing sense that her efforts were going to yield nothing down the line. Even in the last few weeks the future—the feeling of the future—had become foreshortened. It had narrowed and dimmed, just a little but enough to make her anxious. A suffocation had come upon her. What if she had no future at all?

  She had been in Paris for a year and now Phnom Penh felt alien and small. Just as once there had seemed no way out if it, now there seemed no way into it. Even her command of Khmer had weakened a little—it was strange how that happened, as if the brain could handle two languages at a time, but never three. All her friends had what they called “language partners,” those fairly well-to-do foreigners who liked to spend a few hours a week with a pretty girl pretending to hone their English skills. It was usually their fathers who went out and found them—it was more seemly that way. She thought of herself as too old for these kinds of childish games, but sometimes there was nothing for it, one had to play by the local rules. Why care too much?

  She impaled the cherry tomatoes lazily on her fork and wondered about Simon Beauchamp. He was good-looking all right. Young and nicely aloof and undesperate. He had been quite a surprise when he appeared the other night since, she idly supposed, she had been expecting a goofy desperado in shorts and flip-flops. When he walked in in his nice linens and his clean-shaven cheeks she had been pleasantly surprised. So what was he doing in Phnom Penh? she had wondered even as she was turning away from the piano and getting a good look at him. He was not an English teacher, for one thing. Nor was his name Simon: she felt it in her bones.

  His eyes were spacious and pretty and you could open their doors and enter on light feet. A man of wide-open portals, but what was he expecting? A man didn’t float around a foreign city for no reason whatsoever, not at the age of twenty-eight. A Khmer boy would never do that unless he was working at a large company in Germany or the United States. Yet there was no aura of leisure about Mr. Beauchamp. He was far from being a pathless wanderer. He bustled and bristled and his eyes were quiet and malicious.

  He was a bit Heathcliff, wasn’t he?

  She smiled and wondered if she should have a drink. Her hands were itching to do it, to rise and click the fingers and say “Drink!”

  But she waited. There might be someone there she knew, but there wasn’t. She continued thinking about Simon. She was a little tired of men, in reality, because one could only go through the process a given number of times and suddenly one came to the realization that the repetitions were not only dull but toxic. And her parents were so desperate for her to get married and worse. She was almost twenty-six and, to their eyes, the danger zone was approaching.

  For her part, she felt no such thing. All she felt was fatalistic curiosity and a desire to return to the outside world. Maybe even London, given how affluent his family seemed to be. It was a sin to think like that—and stupid, too—but it crossed her mind anyway as she finished her salad and ordered a gin and tonic out of boredom. It came with a sprig of mint and a pile of ice.

  Her father would be shocked but she drank them quite a lot these days. They went down well in the hour before lunch, the black hour before consciousness arose. She had given up rising early like her parents. Now, with nothing to do but study and wait, she could get up when she wanted and go to bed when she wanted. It was contemptible but she wasn’t yet twenty-six and she had her excuses. Everyone knew the future would be different.

  —

  Meanwhile, as she was sipping her freezing gin and tonic, Robert was watching Vong folding his clothes and looking at the clock on the wall. He would be back just in time.

  “Now that I think about it,” the tailor was saying with his back turned to him, “I remember your friend Mr. Simon. He came in six months ago to get some shirts. My assistant said he was the most dashing man in Phnom Penh. I don’t know why I forgot him. He is an antiques dealer, isn’t he?”

  “I never ask him about his work,” Robert said.

  “I think he said he was an antiques dealer. I might have his card somewhere. These ones will fit you better than the ones you are wearing. It’s always a problem wearing another man’s clothes.”

  “It certainly is. Did Mr. Simon say where he was living these days?”

  “Not a word. You’d know that better than me. I just remember his shoes—he was wearing a remarkable pair of shoes.”

  “Oh?”

  “I thought he must be a man of taste.”

  Vong turned with the package neatly tied up and handed it to him. There was nothing more to say between them and Robert let the awkward conversation die where it was. He went out hurriedly and rode back to Colonial Mansions on a motodop.

  When he came through the lobby he immediately saw Sophal sitting alone by the window and it was too late to go up and change into his new clothes. It was too bad but he had to make the best of it. He came up to her table and she was sucking on a straw inserted into a gigantic gin and tonic and her eyes had gone askew. But he was not late at all. He apologized anyway and held up the tailor’s bag and sat down opposite her and asked her if that was indeed a gin and tonic.

  “It’s the real thing,” she said.

  “Then I’ll have one too.”

  When it came he touched her glass with his and they agreed that their English lesson had gotten off to a flying start, by Buddha.

  “I don’t expect you to give me an English lesson,” she said. “I’ve been speaking it since I was five. I thought—I thought I’d show you around the city a bit since my father is paying you anyway. So who cares. He’s not going to know.”

  “You know, I used to be a teacher,” Robert said slowly. “It wouldn’t be any sweat for me. I know how to do it.”

  “Yes, but it’s a bore anyway. I just thought—I don’t know, I thought you might be interesting. In some way.”

  “Interesting?”

  “A foreigner is always interesting. Even if he isn’t.”

  “But I’m not interesting.”

  “It’s not for you to say though. Were you really a teacher?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t seem like a teacher.”

  She ate the mint sprig and looked at him calmly.

  He said, “It’s not the first time someone has said that. I think I have teacher written all over me.”

  “No, you don’t. You look like something else. I don’t know what. A cattle rustler.”

  “Oh?” He laughed, but she didn’t.

  “Something like that,” she said. “Something slippery.”

  “I’m no
t slippery,” he snorted. “I wish I were.”

  “You’re slippery enough. My father doesn’t think so though.”

  “Your father is a good judge of character.”

  “He’s anything but that. But I look out for him. Shall we go for lunch somewhere else? I have a feeling someone I know is going to walk in and I don’t want them to.”

  “You said you’d show me around.”

  “Let’s go to Street 136 and eat some pho. Then I’ll take you somewhere else.”

  “Let’s.”

  “It’ll be stinking hot.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  —

  Robert was pleased to be out of Colonial Mansions. He made to pay for her salad and drink but she had already settled up. He left his bag at the reception and they went out into the cloying heat and took one of the tuk-tuks that were always loitering along 102. They sat side by side and rattled without words into the maze of streets which shone in a dour, metallic sunlight. Sophal now assumed a cool, tensile posture, as if she were in public and this required a different composure. She looked straight ahead with her neck poised and upright and her eyes did not stray to either side. High above the city, however, the familiar atomic cloud that seemed to appear there every day was moving with its silent fatalism toward the sky’s apex, where the sun monopolized all the light. Its edges were frilled like the coat of some unimaginable sea creature. There the mass of cloud turned suddenly brilliant and hysterical. It’s moving, he thought idly, watching from under the tuk-tuk’s shade, moving like a predator toward our light.