Davuth sat facing the other way, toward Robert, and his thumb flicked the lighter on and off. When it was on, his face was lit from below, calm and smiling. He seemed to have been sitting like this for some time, waiting for the Englishman to show up. In his lap lay a regulation police pistol with the barrel against his knee but not pointing at anything. It looked like something carved from soapstone. Davuth left the lighter on now and then he invited Robert to sit down as well. The latter understood everything within a few seconds and his mind went wild with rage. He looked around for a heavy stone to use, to launch himself into an attack and smash the policeman’s head. But in that flicker of instant calculation he realized how lost the cause was. Even if he managed the move in a second he would be too late. He was snared, and Sophal had been snared already. They had walked into it blind. They had walked off a cliff and it was too late. The policeman, then, knew that Robert understood and he smiled peaceably. Let’s be reasonable, Davuth seemed to be saying, and after a few moments Robert did sit down and Davuth talked for a while.
“I know who you are,” Davuth began. “The easiest thing is you just give me your apartment key. I am going back to the city. By the time you get there yourselves I will be”—he made a strange gesture with his fingers, like falling snow—“long gone.”
It was said very gently. Nobody would come to any harm and since he, Davuth, had his passport it would be a foolish thing to pursue him or go on his own account to the police. Nobody would listen to him anyway.
“Also, what is the code to the safety box in your apartment?”
Robert gave it, and he handed over his phone at the same time.
“This is absurd,” he said, and took out the key and threw it over to Davuth. “You didn’t have to do all this just to get a key.”
“No, I thought it through very carefully. I want to be invisible—and you want to be invisible as well. This way you can carry on being invisible. I don’t care what you do. You are nothing to me.”
“There’s nothing in my room.”
“You’ve been throwing your money around. There’s enough to keep me happy.”
“There’s nothing there at all.”
“Well, I am not going to believe that now. You can say what you want. I know you went to the Diamond and won a lot of money.”
“All right, whatever you say.”
“You barangs. You think you can get away with it.”
Robert talked to Sophal but she said nothing back. Her shirt was ripped and her hair was tangled. There had been a struggle. The policeman offered him a cigarette and he declined. Davuth got up and dusted off his trousers and walked off nonchalantly until he was at the path and the forlorn couple were plunged in darkness. He felt it was appropriate to say a few more words but he could not think what they should be. People talked far too much anyway. He felt the key in his pocket and memorized the code and was happy that it had all gone so smoothly for him. He had enjoyed the girl as well, she had not put up much resistance in the end. Those types were always soft at their core. They had not had to struggle to survive. He looked down at them from the slight advantage of the path and he felt a twisting, momentary pity. But at least they were alive and, in his case, unharmed. They had gotten off lightly.
“You can get a boat at daybreak,” he said, in a more conciliatory tone. “There’ll be one at the beach.”
“There’s nothing in the room,” Robert called back mockingly.
“I’ll see about that. So long, bye-bye then.”
Robert stood as well, then sat down and put his arm around Sophal. There was no reason to delay this fortunate departure.
Davuth thought for a moment before striding away, and tossed the lighter in their direction as a small mercy. A few minutes later he was at the top of the hill in the menacing shadow of the prasat, where bats now wheeled in the humidity. The steps on the way down were covered with leaves and at the bottom the jungle seethed with fireflies. He composed himself, dried his forehead with his handkerchief and walked down to the shacks where a couple of kerosene lamps burned from the rafters. There was no one out and about, just the cows tethered to a few trees and their eyes shining at a measured distance. He stood at the edge of the water and raised his arm.
Hunters in the Dark
TWENTY-SIX
A few moments later the longtail which had taken them over appeared, paddled in silence by the pilot who had been waiting by the closed-off bridge. The boat nosed up to the beach and Davuth stepped into it without a word. The boat rocked and he steadied himself; there was a stifling moment of awkwardness between them. The man was not afraid. He was merely unsure what to do.
By the same token he knew better than to ask any inconsequential questions and without explicit instruction he turned the vessel around and started up the motor. The sound shocked them both. Davuth took one last look back at the beach, where the clotted nets lay in wet piles on a mud as dark as cocoa. The Englishman had not followed him. They sped out onto the floodplain as the first drops of rain began to fall and the moon disappeared. He lay back in the boat with his hands behind his head and the spray washed over him. In a mere twenty-four hours, the long years of drudgery at his humble station had been left behind and he thought of his daughter asleep in her bed, unaware that he was at that very moment slaving on her behalf and safeguarding her future. She would discover it all later. Either way, it was fated and the fate that had chosen him had made no errors. He had done everything perfectly and the laws of the universe remained undisturbed and serene. At the quay of Takeo the lights were off and he took a roll of dollars and gave them to the pilot.
“If you talk to anyone, you’ll see me again. You don’t want to see me again.” He was sure that he had made his point because the man turned away and said nothing back.
Davuth then walked to the car still parked under the trees and drove through the deserted town. There were no karaokes here, no late-night bars, no nocturnal flimflam. The air was still. Just the needling, unrefreshing rain. It was as boring a town as a man could wish for. It would be fine in the early morning and never afterward.
Within minutes he was back on Route 2 and he was alone on the white-edged road with the gardens and orchards and paddies flowing by. He drove for two hours without thinking about anything. Finally he stopped in a lonely stretch and went into the fields to take a pee. He wanted to be back in the city before first light but he had a few hours to spare. As he stood there surrounded by the whispers of the crickets, however, he felt a strange desire to return to the island in the Mekong and take back everything he had done and said. It couldn’t be done, of course, but still he wanted to go back and make amends and let things take a different course. It was always the fields at this hour that took him back to the old days and the nights of executions which had gone virtually unrecorded. It was quite a thing to consider that he was the only man alive who remembered the last moments of many dozens of people. They lived within him still, he liked to think. But to whom had he ever made amends? To whom had he prayed for forgiveness? He had gotten away with it, and who was he to get away with it? Many of his comrades had also gotten away with it and when they were awake in their beds they reasoned to themselves that they had been young, far too young to be held responsible for anything. It was their extreme youth that explained their ecstatic sadism and skill at killing. It was a skill which only came from a knowing enjoyment, and therefore it was a youthful knowledge, a dementia of immaturity. But in the end he didn’t really believe it.
While he was there he went through their bags, finding nothing but clothes and toiletries and a hundred dollars in cash, and then he took the mobile phones and threw them into a canal running alongside one of the paddies.
He drove into Monivong and stopped at one of the late-night Viet places for some pho and nem. He was starving. At the family tables it was only young clubbers still high and wide-eyed. They gave him a curious jolt of energy. Restored in spirit, he drove back to Street 102 and parked the ca
r a fair distance from Colonial Mansions, near the top of the alley by the boulevard. Then he walked calmly down to the property and passed unnoticed into the lobby, where everyone, as usual, was asleep at their post. He went up to his apartment, let himself in and turned on one light. His own orderliness reassured him and reminded him of a superiority which he had always known was his. An organized man, they used to call him.
He opened the safe and took out the bag with the banknotes and laid it on the bed with the passports and a few other things he had kept there. He was now ready to disappear forever from this oppressive residence. He assembled everything on the bed then turned off the light, closed the door quietly behind him and walked down to Robert’s apartment. It was now past three in the morning and the bureaucrats and corporate officers were asleep in their chilled rooms. He effortlessly opened the door and passed inside and then walked into the rear bedroom and turned on the light there. The curtains to the main room were already closed fast. He locked the door from the inside and then began his patient combing of the rooms, beginning with the safe, which he opened easily.
There was nothing inside. It was the first blow. He felt his face flushing with blood and fury, and he then ransacked the bedroom. He upended the bed, tore up pieces of carpet and emptied out all the cupboards. There was nothing even in the bathroom. The boy had taken everything with him and it now dawned on him—it had been inconceivable only a few hours before—that he had been telling the truth. The little bourgeois parasite had not been lying after all. It was a surprising thing. He gave up after half an hour and sat forlornly on the Englishman’s bed and let his hands dry slowly. It was now possible that it had all been for nothing. All he had was the money taken from the roadside in Battambang.
It was a fair sum but far short of the amount he had been hoping for. He had even hoped to be able to blackmail the Englishman, but he was sure now that it would yield nothing.
Well, he thought, it was worth the try. It’s always worth the try.
He cleaned up the unit and went back out into the corridor after locking the door behind him and keeping the key. There remained two hours of darkness and he considered simply walking out of the Mansions and driving home in defeat. He had, after all, lost nothing in the end, and for that matter he was still many hundreds of dollars in the black. Better to leave, then, and go back to his daughter. There would be more barangs floating in the river at a later time—they were inexhaustible bounty.
So he went back up to his room, locked the door and took a shower. The night was cool, he left the windows open. The water cold and reviving, the moths becalmed on the bathroom walls.
He had been a bit of a fool, and he didn’t relish the failure.
When he came out into the bedroom he felt tired and yet restless. His anger had risen and would not subside. He lay on the bed in his towel and thought and thought until his mind had exhausted itself and finally come to a standstill. He opened the bag and counted out the money and looked over the passports and resolved to throw them out on his way home. Two invisible men who didn’t matter to the world. Two crooks who didn’t even know they were crooks.
He dressed and combed his hair in the mirror. As he was patting the last jet-black strands there was a knock on his door. Carelessly, he had left the main room’s light on. Perhaps it was reception nagging him about his tab. But at four in the morning?
Going to the door he waited for a moment then sensed that the person on the other side of it had not gone away. He opened it then and saw Sothea standing by the rail of the corridor. She reclined casually against the rail and her eyes were cool and unhurried. Surprised, he opened the door wider and asked her bluntly what she was doing there. But then he reconsidered. Why not?
She came in.
“It’s a bit late,” he said, closing the door behind her.
“It’s never too late for this.”
“True.”
He calculated the time. What difference did thirty minutes make?
“I wasn’t expecting this,” he said all the same.
“All the better.”
She walked into the bedroom and sat on the bed. By now she knew the room quite well and she spotted at once the small signs of his imminent departure. His affairs were all packed, it would seem.
“You’re going away?”
“Yes, back to my job. I shouldn’t have stayed away so long as it is.”
“I see. In the middle of the night?”
“Why not in the middle of the night?”
“No reason. Still…”
“Still what?”
He came and sat next to her and his breath was cold and scented with a touch of whisky.
“The roads are empty.” He smiled. “I’ll need to leave within an hour.”
“Then there’s no point talking.”
There’s rarely any point talking anyway, he thought.
She took off her shirt and shoes and went into the bathroom. The mirror was misted and the tiled floor damp. She was wearing jeans and in her front pocket was a small screwdriver. She gripped it for a moment as she inspected her mouth in the mirror, then she washed her hands and let the hot water run a while. She was composing herself. Then she turned and went back into the room where the policeman was already naked and lying on the bed. How quickly he always dressed and undressed. There was an uncanny efficiency about him, even when it concerned nothing more consequential than his animal needs.
Sothea turned off the main light and they lay together for a while, saying nothing, until he said, “Why are your jeans still on?”
“I was just thinking.”
“Don’t.”
“All right, I’ll take them off.”
She put them on the floor beside the bed but kept the screwdriver in her hand. He had turned over on his front as if waiting for a back massage and his head was laid on his arm, his eyes closed. In reality, he was suddenly exhausted after the long drive. The futility of the whole thing had been sinking in moment by moment. He was disgusted and discouraged. The moths fluttered around the main room and he heard them knocking softly against the plastic shutters and the walls. Slowly, he fell into a semi-doze. It was an unexpected gift to her. It was now, indeed, that she wanted most to talk to him. She wanted, in the first place, to tell him everything she had seen and everything she had lost because of him and the filthy driver he was in cahoots with. But there was no time for that. She thought of Simon lying by the side of a sugarcane field on a nameless road. Was that really necessary? A policeman was supposed to report such things and then investigate them. It was only amazing that he had failed to recognize her after they had met that day on the way up to the Scot’s sinister hotel. He had desired her then—for a moment—and he desired her now. But he had failed to connect the two moments in time. Did he think she was two different women? It was a blind spot that was all the more surprising in a man like Davuth. She would make him pay for that oversight. She and Simon could have had a decent enough life together; it was one version of the future she had never given up on. It had been taken away from her by a disaster not of her own making.
She raised herself up and realized that now he was asleep and noticed nothing. She whipped the screwdriver up high and then plunged it straight down into the back of his neck. She put so much force into the blow that there was no struggle. He gasped and stirred and before he could wake she had struck a second time and with even greater ferocity. His blood rushed up out of the two wounds and she straddled him and raised the screwdriver once more. This time with both hands, driving it into his neck as far as she could. His whole body shook like a pig impaled.
The moths in the next room still beat against the shutters. When she was exhausted in her own right she rolled off the squalid body and sank onto the floor for a while. She had already decided that it was all the result of Simon’s karma and of her own, and it was all foreordained. Against the unleashed consequences of karma one had no defense. The circle of samsara was mostly fixed; there was no
liberation. Events piled up against each other like logs being thrown onto a pile. She would meet Davuth in a future life and with luck he would be a fly and she would be a gecko chasing him down and eating him. If, that is, she was lucky. She might not be lucky. The seeds laid by any given karma were not entirely known, the outcomes could not be foretold with any accuracy and it was likely, in any event, that one would remain floating and turning within the circle of eternal suffering.
TWENTY-SEVEN
She left the screwdriver on the bed after wiping down the handle and took—with a slow deliberateness—a cold shower to wash herself down. She felt nothing at all. She washed her hair and her fingernails scrupulously. She felt she was honoring her dead lover.
In the main room she got dressed without getting a spot of blood on her. Now the moths had stilled and there was a taste of dawn in the air. The Mansions were about to stir with weary life. She saw at once the bag that he had packed, stowed next to the bed. Inside it was her and Simon’s money, and the two passports. For a moment she was blindly elated and triumphant, and spotted too the amulet which Davuth always wore to protect himself and which, crucially, he had neglected to wear as he went to bed for his pleasures. It was the one thing she would leave untouched and it was surely fate that had made him forget it. If he had been wearing it the screwdriver would never have pierced, he would have sensed her intentions. The thought made her shudder finally. He had hunted her, and them, and now she had hunted him. Yet neither had really been hunting the other. There was another key on the table in the main room, with an apartment number tag attached, and she took it.
When she was finished she took hold of the bag, went over the room again carefully and then slipped out into the corridor, locking the door with the push button in the handle. The cleaners were scraping the surface of the pool below with nets. They did not look up. She went down to the apartment number on the key and opened the door and went in. This unit was plunged in darkness and she had to reluctantly turn on one of the lights. The place had obviously been ransacked, the floors strewn with damaged toiletries, and the violence of the pillage appalled her. She began to understand how the English boy had been wronged. First by them and then by Davuth. And who, in the end, had he harmed to deserve such a thing?
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