Hunters in the Dark

by Lawrence Osborne

  “That was very nice,” he said humbly.

  “You’re welcome. Do you have a phone number I can call you on?”

  “I got a new number yesterday.”

  When she had taken it down she kissed him on the cheek and told him to be careful in the flooded streets, making it clear that she wouldn’t come down to the pavement with him. Davuth stumbled into the rain and saw that the tuk-tuk had patiently waited for him, the driver huddled between the plastic flaps with a soaked newspaper. That night, he slept beautifully and his dreams were not even the usual nightmares—just the elegant forms of Viking longships and the mountains of stone and wild grass through which the cataracts of Scandinavia fall like those of Hawaii or Java.

  —

  The next day he took the unit at Colonial Mansions and passed the morning sitting at the balcony with his smokes. The unit was furnished and there was nothing to worry about. No one remembered him from his previous visit, not even the boy who had shown him around. People were so unobservant; they missed every passing clue. By midday the Englishman had not shown up and Davuth walked instead to Vong.

  The tailor was at his table and Davuth had no trouble being affable and quick-talking with him. He gave Vong a facile line about meeting a young Englishman in a bar who had recommended him.

  “I’m sure you remember him,” he joked. “Blond and rather good-looking. I’m sure he throws his money around a bit.”

  “It could be.”

  “He calls himself Beauchamp and gets his clothes made here.”

  “There’s one by that name who comes here. There are two of them, in fact.”

  “I know all about it. Two of them. Were you not a little curious?”

  “It’s none of my business, now that you mention it. Is it your business?”

  “It could be my business.”

  “Are you a detective?”

  “That I am. One of them has run away—”

  “With some money or some drugs?”

  Davuth laughed in his homely way.

  “I don’t know yet. Does our English friend have a lot of money to spend on clothes?”

  “Not that much.”

  “When was he last in?”

  “Last week.”

  “Colonial Mansions, isn’t it?”

  “You know already.”

  “But which unit?”

  “It’s 102. You could always ask them.”

  “That wouldn’t be very discreet.”

  Davuth asked him what Beauchamp had ordered.

  “Shirts, trousers. He wasn’t very particular.”

  “He’s a nice young man, isn’t he?”

  “As nice as they make them. The other one, though…”

  “Yes, he’s a different kettle of fish. Still, they all look the same, don’t they?”

  “They certainly do.”

  “I feel I should order a shirt—just to say thank you.”

  “Shall I measure you up?”

  “No time. Maybe next time.”

  Davuth looked quickly through the window into the street. His eyes shone a dark mahogany as the blue outer light hit then. The tailor felt that he had done something vile without realizing it, but it was too late. The detective was already on his way, cheerful and smooth. Vong watched him amble down the street without any pressing urgency. An odd bird, and a calculating look in his eye.

  —

  Davuth walked back to the Mansions and went up to the first floor. He walked down the line of doors until he was at 102. There he stopped for a moment, looked along the corridor and peered through the patterned lace curtains into a largely invisible room.

  Lingering only for a moment, he carried on down the corridor then climbed up to the floor above and circled round to the opposite side, from where he could look down at the same door. His own unit was on the floor above this, the third, and from his own balcony he had a fair view of 102. How easy it had been. He went up to that balcony then and sat there for an hour and saw no one come or leave. But patience was one of his hard-won virtues. He had honed it during years of sadism and war. In soft and comfortable times its power was magnified tenfold. He could sit there for days if he had to, or even weeks. He was crocodilian and he rarely felt tired or bored: those states had been made alien to him long ago. And so he waited for the light in 102 to come on or the door to open or a tall and slender blond to appear on the landing, wearing the clothes of Simon Beauchamp, who was now dead and turned to dust.

  TWENTY-ONE

  When he did so, Davuth was not at his balcony but downstairs in the lobby, where he sat at a table by himself with a glass of Sang Som. He had asked the receptionist to go into the closed café and get him some ice for his glass and he sat there with the glass, the ice, his own bottle of Sang Som and an ashtray, placid and watchful and totally sober. The rum burned his tongue and he enjoyed its ferocity, the way it seared the inner lining of his cheeks then gave up the ghost as it slithered down his throat. The cursed rain was back and the lights around the pool were going off one by one like a city closing down for the night. He always enjoyed those moments of closure and incoming darkness and it was usually when he took to the bottle in his cold and controlled way. He was raising his glass, in fact, when Robert and Sophal came through the glass doors and swept across the lobby arm in arm. He knew at once that it was the Englishman though he was surprised to see him with a very young and attractive Khmer girl. They always managed to snag one, didn’t they? He lowered his glass and smiled at them with his eyes and they could not fail to notice him. “Good evening,” he said in English and tipped his glass as if toasting them.

  “Good evening,” Robert called back and they paused for a moment before crashing through the doors into the pool area.

  “So that’s what you look like,” Davuth said to himself. The boy was not as shy or furtive as he had expected, not as weak. He had no experience with the English, only a few Americans and Germans and the odd Frenchman, and most of those he had met when they were already dead. In one sense, it was the ideal way to get to know them. The dead reveal everything about themselves without any artifice, or so it seemed to Davuth.

  Half an hour later they came down in their swimsuits and jumped into the uninviting water and swam to the far end, where Davuth saw they had positioned a bottle of wine. There they bobbed about drinking and laughing and caressing each other, the young in love with being young. He watched them with a detached fascination that—for a while—had nothing to do with his intentions. But, in any case, when he considered his intentions he found that he didn’t have any. He was making it up from day to day, adapting to what happened or didn’t happen, as the case might be. He could tell from their cursory glances at him (which felt distinctly downward) that he had registered in their eyes as little more than the usual country bumpkin. It enraged him for a moment but then he settled back and admitted that in a sense they had a point and there was nothing he could do about it. That’s what he was and he minded it much less than someone else might. The Revolution, at least, had taught him not to be ashamed of his origins and he kept that feeling alive day by day, decade after decade, secretly and malignantly. The girl especially had looked at him with a sudden contempt, as if he didn’t even have the right to speak up as they walked across the lobby. “Who is he?” she would have been thinking as they climbed up to 102. That bumpkin who so insolently wished them a good evening in an English he obviously didn’t speak, alone with his cheap and tawdry Sang Som, the drink of truck drivers and policemen. That little snob had not even concealed her surprise and resentment. She didn’t even know who she was really with, in all likelihood.

  He left them there and went up to his apartment and later, still curious, he stepped out to the balcony and looked at the two heads in the pool. He had formed the unconscious idea that the Englishman had money locked up in his unit, money that was in some way connected to the dead American, and he was certain that he could be blackmailed or intimidated to surrender it to him with
out too much fuss. But all was uncertain and vague. He didn’t know either way; it was a shrewd and logical guess relative to the circumstances. He obviously had enough money for clothes at Vong and an apartment at Colonial Mansions and he had no passport. There had to be reasons for these things.

  —

  He made up his mind to get to know them, but in a very casual and unobtrusive way. The next day he watched them go out together and he again sat in the lobby with his bottle of Sang Som and waited for the boy to come back to the Mansions. He did so after lunch. Once again, Davuth raised his glass and because it was the second time the boy stopped and came over with a lopsided smile and cocked his head and said, “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

  “No, sir,” Davuth said in his gimcrack English. “But I saw you last night with lovely lady friend.”

  “You did, yes. But do we know you?”

  “Me? I think not.”

  “I just wondered—”

  “Have a drink. I am all alone in this Mansions and always drink alone in this lobby. I have my own bottle, as you can see.”

  “I don’t know,” Robert said.

  “Sit and have a drink. Why not?”

  There was a playful finality to those last two words and so Robert gave in, slightly curious anyway. His instinct told him that the offer was best not avoided or refused rudely. The man had level, steely eyes that gave off an indistinct heat.

  “All right,” he said, “I will.”

  “Please,” Davuth shouted across the room in Khmer, “one more glass for my friend.”

  It was brought.

  Davuth poured, and then used the tongs in the ice bucket sitting on the table next to him.

  “I like mine icy cold—and you?”

  “I like it cold too.”

  “My name Davuth. And you?”

  “Simon.”

  “It’s nice American name.”

  “English.”

  “You holiday or business?”

  “Holiday,” Robert said. Then, “Well, business too. I am thinking of living here.”

  “Very nice and welcome. Well, chin.”

  “Chin-chin.”

  They tapped glasses and sipped.

  “You look like a bright young fella,” Davuth said.

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “You found nice Khmer girl all right.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  Davuth gave him his brightest smile.

  “You are young, handsome. They will love it.”

  “Are you staying here?” Robert asked, to change the subject.

  “I am tour guide. I have a deal to stay here.”

  “A tour guide?”

  “I know everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “If you want Angkor Wat, I can take you. Vietnam, I can take you.”

  “That must be good business.”

  “Yes, sir. I can take them to every place and translate for them. This is why I wait here in the lobby.”

  “I see.”

  Robert accepted a second shot almost at once.

  Davuth said, “I wait here and they come and find me! The Americans are the best. They pay upfront—unlike the Chinese who pay downback. It’s my joke. They pay after and never happy. What about you?”

  “I don’t really take tours. I’m sorry.”

  “But you will change your mind one day.”

  “I will?”

  “You will. You will take a tour somewhere with Davuth. It’s the best one you can have. And it’s romantic for your girlfriend.”

  “She probably wouldn’t find it romantic.”

  “Oh, we’ll talk. I have a lot of options. Good price for you. Very romantic.”

  They drank on, and Robert began to like him. He was unlike any Khmer he had met so far, rough, fast-talking, manly in his way. He seemed quite ancient although not yet out of his fifties. The eyes and their crow’s-feet had gone ancient and shriveled and yet they were also intensely alive and witty and through them Robert felt himself mocked, but gaily and without deep judgment or animosity. Davuth, he felt, was much deeper than himself because he had lived a much more dangerous life. The gift of a dangerous life: swiftness of thought, a fine capacity for hatred. You didn’t meet that type in developed areas anymore. In rural southern Italy you might, wandering the roads. You might in Serbia or the darker French towns, where strange military types still surface for a moment, veterans of wars they won’t admit to. You might come across one in the poorer islands in Greece, mending nets. But Davuth, although Robert didn’t know it, came from a recent war and it was a native one. He had come through it and he had learned how human beings worked on the inside. He looked right through Robert and into empty space and appeared unsurprised at how transparent an educated man can be, how docile and primitive and ignorant. There was no respect in his attitude at all. Davuth, for his part, had seen educated people begging for their lives from armed illiterate children by burning roadsides and he had not forgotten the looks on their faces, the way they had tried to explain why their palms had no blisters. It was one of those pathetic things you never forget. The children would listen, uncomprehending, then shoot them in the head with Kalashnikovs and laugh as the bodies went into convulsions. All that education and restraint for nothing. A demented child can blow all that classical music and Marx and mathematics out of you in a split second, just because he feels like watching your convulsions. Look to your own salvation, the Buddha said. He wouldn’t look out for yours, there was just yourself and your inner compass and the ability to plan ahead.

  “All the same,” he said, “I can fix thing for you around town if you tell me what you need. I’m a fixer as well as a tour guide. Everyone here needs a fixer—I mean every barang like yourself.”

  “You can give me your card if you like.”

  “They’re up in my room. But I can give you my number.”

  Robert hesitated for a moment but took it down anyway. There was no harm in it and one did need a fixer. It would be doing a hard-up local a favor if he could ever afford to do it. What would it cost, anyway? Fifty dollars? He could do that at some point. He even asked Davuth point-blank now what a trip down to the Mekong near the Viet border would be and the guide poured him another drink and just said that he could give him sixty for the day and his meals and all would be fine with him. It wasn’t much, he added, to take the girl on a romantic trip and there was a temple down there that no one knew about, the temple of Phnom Bayong, near the village of Kirivong. They could hike there for hours and look down on the Mekong and feel like they had come somewhere different.

  Robert began to agree with him, though outwardly refusing.

  “I’ll run it by the girl,” he said.

  “I think that girl—that girl will say yes.”

  The Englishman thanked him for the drinks—it was far too much—and said he might see him later.

  “You might see me later,” Davuth said. “In fact, I’m sure of it.”

  “Then I will.”

  Robert went up to his room, drew the curtains and lay on the bed in a slight stupor. He hadn’t realized that Sang Som was so strong even with ice. Despite the AC he felt hot and damp and something in the chance encounter had rattled him. The fingers, perhaps, fat and powerful and elegantly assured. The eyes full of humor and doubt. An hour later, he went to meet a Vietnamese businessman he was giving lessons to and didn’t return to Colonial Mansions until nightfall. This time it was Sophal who was waiting for him in the lobby and he told her about the tour guide he had met there a few hours earlier.

  “It was the same guy from last night.”

  She frowned and there was a sudden anxiety in her voice.

  “Him?”

  “Looked a bit rough to you?”

  “He looked like a con man. I wouldn’t talk to him, no.”

  “Not at all,” Robert protested. “He’s a riot. You should meet him.”

  “I don’t want to meet him.”


  “I’m sure he wants to meet you. He suggested taking us on a tour.”

  “You said no, I hope?”

  “Of course I said no. But he’s sort of funny. I quite like him.”

  “Don’t even think about it!”

  They went up to the room and made love. The heat of the day seeped through the flimsy curtains and made them feel washed out and spectral, but the thread of the conversation begun lightheartedly in the lobby was not broken and sure enough it resumed eventually.

  “I said no to the tour, as I said. But all the same—”

  She said, “What is he doing hanging out in the lobby like that? It doesn’t feel right.”

  “He says he’s fishing for clients.”

  She snorted. “That’s one thing to dislike.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Remember, you’re not local. You don’t pick up on these things.”

  “What things?”

  “The vibe. He looked at me—”

  “He’s just a horny old man. I’m sure they all look at you like that. We can’t hold that against him, can we?”

  “You think I want to be holed up in a car with that for hours on end?”

  “I suppose not,” he admitted reluctantly.

  Moreover, he was not sure why he wanted to go on that tour now. It just seemed like a fairly good idea for a romantic weekend, but more than that it was an added layer to his disguise, a distraction from the question which he now imagined was turning inside Sophal’s mind about his identity. The more normal things they did together, the less she might brood about Robert and his loose ends. This was how he was thinking, in any case, though it was more a blind probing than a train of thought. He thought it would be clever to kick up a little dust and commotion because of late he had begun to feel a quiet suspicion in her. It was her instinct cutting in and the only way to foil instinct is to spoil, entertain and divert. She lay now against his chest with her hand resting on the area of the heart and he could feel her aroused attentiveness and wariness. He was correct. Sophal had bristled at the mention of a tour in the east with a man like that and she began to wonder at once why he had suggested it. His breath still smelled of that cheap rum and it was obvious who he had been drinking with. Why, though, would a man like Simon sit down and drink rum with a man like the tour guide? What would they have to talk about?