A Deadly Cambodian Crime Spree

by Shamini Flint

  Yes, it was almost exactly thirty years since he had left Cambodia to visit an ailing mother in a comfortable Paris suburb. He had plucked up the nerve, it had taken weeks, and told his parents that he had a Cambodian wife and two young children. He had been afraid, rightly so as it turned out, that his foreign bride would be too much for their conservative middle-class prejudices. There had been tears and recrimination, shock at the double life he had been living for the last three years.

  At last he had found the guts to put his foot down. They would gain a daughter and two beautiful grandchildren or lose a son. It was their choice. His parents had succumbed to the pressure and promised reluctantly to welcome his new family. He agreed to bring them back to France after his tenure teaching at the French lycee was over or if the situation in Phnom Penh – torn between the communists, Sihanouk and the American puppet government – became too dangerous. His heart overflowing with joy, he booked his flight home – he called it home – distant Cambodia, a country which he had learnt to love in parallel to his wife. The date stamped on his return ticket was April 17th, 1975 and he waited anxiously, excitedly, happily for the day to arrive. That day, the Khmer Rouge overran Phnom Penh and all international flights into the city were cancelled. He had not seen his wife and children since.

  ♦

  Chhean glanced at her watch. She still had a couple of hours before she had to hurry to her next assignment, and as always she planned to use it sitting in on Samrin’s trial. The Cambodian woman wrinkled her small nose in disgust. She’d really drawn the short straw this time. When she had signed up to be a court liaison at the war crimes trial, excited at the chance to use her language skills, she had envisaged an important role explaining the function of the tribunal to senior diplomats and academics. Instead, she’d been instructed to babysit some lowly policeman from Singapore who was attending the trial on behalf of ASEAN.

  Chhean stood in line outside the court room, her tapping foot the only overt sign of her impatience, waiting to be ushered in by the various functionaries. The tribunal guards were dressed in light-blue shirts and heavy gold braid. She supposed this fondness for colourful costumes was a subconscious effort to forget the days when authority had worn black collarless pyjamas and red chequered kramas. If only it were so easy to dress up or disguise the past.

  A sudden awareness grew that she was being watched and she turned around. A small-sized man in baggy well-pressed trousers was beckoning to her. He was a clerk at the documentation centre for the tribunal, usually buried under a mountain of paperwork. Chhean had asked for his help, and now he beckoned her over with five-fingered urgency. Was it possible that he had found something?

  She hurried towards him, fine hair blown away from her face by the stiff breeze, short legs pumping energetically. As she reached him, he said in an undertone, “New documents have been found, buried in the ministry archives.”

  Chhean’s face brightened.

  “I have no time to go over them,” he explained apologetically.

  Chhean was not surprised. Her friend was stretched for time dealing with the enormous amount of paper that the trial of Samrin had generated.

  “Would you like to look at them yourself?” He explained quickly that he could arrange for her to have access to them, provide her with the necessary credentials.

  Chhean, who had been about to suggest the same thing, smiled at him broadly and was rewarded by the sight of her friend blushing bright red. It was mean of her to exploit the crush this man had on her – God knows what he saw in her, a short, stocky and determined woman – but she needed as much information as possible.

  Chhean knew the clerk thought she was on a wild goose chase but she didn’t mind. She had been doing this for so many years now, looking for traces of her family history in yellowing documents that hinted at secrets within. So far she had not found anything – not a single thing – but every time a fresh cache came to light, she would trawl through the sepia photos and mildewed paper looking for a hint of the past, her past. So now, she accepted the clerk’s offer gleefully. She would continue the hunt for her parents, her family and her identity in this new treasure trove of possibilities, her only clue the photo in her pocket. She took it out now and glanced at it although every detail of the image was burned into her memory. It was her talisman, her link to a world beyond the harsh reality of the refugee orphanage on the Thai border where she had grown up. Chhean’s face lit up as she imagined the day when she would finally find the people in the photograph, her family.

  Her friend, worried by her sudden radiance, raised a finger warningly. “Remember, you might not like what you find. Sometimes, it is better to let the past keep its secrets.”

  Two

  François Gaudin reached into his wallet and took out a single snapshot, a black and white picture fading to grey of a young woman, her face turned away slightly as she looked down at the laughing child clutching her skirt, a baby enfolded in her arms. He felt the wetness of tears on his eyelashes and blinked them away. He needed to be in control of his emotions.

  Back in Cambodia for the first time in so many long years, he had been unnerved by the grim concrete layer of modern development and the innumerable brothels. The only thing unchanged was the grinding poverty on the faces of the people. He hadn’t known where to begin in his search for answers. François already knew that none of them, his wife or children, had returned to the family home: his mother-in-law had written and told him that. Neither was there a trace of them in the village from which the family had originally fled. It was as if they had been swallowed up by the earth. Later, when the truth of the Khmer Rouge era was revealed, François realised that that was probably what had happened. The polished ivory-coloured bones of victims of the killing fields were still dug up each planting season. He had assumed that this was what had happened to his family, had a nervous breakdown and been dissuaded by his parents from making the trip back. After all, what was the point? If they were alive, they would have contacted him. His in-laws had already searched long and hard. In the end, he had fallen in with his parents’ wishes. His wife and children, missing, presumed dead. A statistic to add to the other statistics.

  Until now. He was old and close to death and so he had decided to return. After days of wandering the streets, a ghostly figure lost in the shadows of the throbbing dusty reality of twenty-first century Phnom Penh, he had finally remembered that many Khmer women with French husbands had sought shelter at the French embassy during the fall of Phnom Penh. It was one of the few places that his wife’s family might not have investigated. And so he had made his way slowly, on foot, along the long walls on Preah Monivong Boulevard. Perhaps Kiri had sought refuge for herself and the children. It would, after all, have been the sensible thing to do. And he knew that his wife had a streak of common sense as wide as the Mekong.

  He was ushered through the grounds of the embassy by a young Frenchman. The modern building with its flat roof and white façade bore no resemblance to the place he used to come to renew his passport and notify the consulate of his whereabouts. But he had not seen the embassy in the days after the fall of Phnom Penh, with the gates barricaded shut, Khmer Rouge soldiers camped opposite and terrified individuals within. A picture formed in his mind of people clumped together on a lawn. He’d seen it in a newspaper after the fall of Phnom Penh, the negatives for the photo smuggled out of the country by one of the last foreign journalists to leave Cambodia. The men and women were Khmer refugees. Their meagre possessions, salvaged from their homes before the arrival of the first Khmer Rouge soldiers, were piled up beside them in little heaps, small monuments to hope. Perhaps his wife and children had been amongst them.

  After much consultation between bureaucrats while François sat patiently in a chair against the wall, he was shown in to see an elderly attache who wore an expression that combined sympathy and irritation.

  “You have left it a long time to trace your family.”

  “I knew if they had
escaped, survived, they would have contacted me.”

  The attache shrugged, a purely Gallic gesture that could have been acceptance, disgust or an acknowledgement of his explanation.

  “I was afraid to know the truth. I didn’t want to know what they had suffered.” François was garrulous in response to the man’s quizzical expression, seeing judgment, fearing judgment, where perhaps there was only curiosity.

  “And now?”

  “And now…I am old. I wish,” he paused – seeking the right words, “I wish to have some rest.”

  François didn’t need to say more. He could see the understanding in the pale blue eyes deep set in a wrinkled brown face. This was a career diplomat who had spent most of his time within hailing distance of the equator. François took a small folded piece of paper torn out of a notebook and slipped it across the table. The names of his wife and children were written on it with a tentative hand.

  “Did they have French passports?”

  François shook his head.

  “Any proof of marriage?”

  “No, we were married in a Cambodian ceremony. I hadn’t registered the marriage with the embassy when Phnom Penh fell.”

  “It happens,” said the attache. “We cannot predict the future. You shouldn’t blame yourself.”

  The Frenchman buried his face in his hands. “I was afraid that word would get back to my parents if I informed the embassy…that’s why I didn’t register the marriage.”

  “Ah…I see.” Unable to absolve François of blame in the light of this new information, the attache busied himself with checking the names against a central database.

  He shook his head with genuine regret. “We have no records of them, I’m afraid.”

  “Does that mean they didn’t come here?”

  “We didn’t take down the names of all the Khmer – not once it became apparent that the communists would insist they leave the grounds to join the forced evacuation of the city.” There was a lop-sided smile on his face as he added, “The Khmer Rouge didn’t have much time for niceties like the sovereignty of embassy grounds.”

  François nodded his understanding.

  “I was here,” the other man said unexpectedly.

  A spider web of lines formed across François Gaudin’s thin face. “What do you mean?”

  “Those last days…I was a junior official at the embassy. The day we ordered the refugees to leave was probably the worst of my life. The Khmer Rouge liaison said they had to be turned out – or they would invade the compound. We had so many embassy staff, French nationals, foreigners – Russians, Vietnamese – we had a responsibility to them. In the end, we agreed.”

  “My God…” whispered François.

  “God?” remarked the attache. “God was not in Cambodia that day – or for the next four years.” He continued, “We turned the Cambodians out. They didn’t make a fuss or beg to stay. We must have sent so many of them straight to their deaths.”

  François took the photograph out of his breast pocket, the one of his wife and two children, and held it out reluctantly to the other man. He had turned to gaze out of the window, his vision blurred with tears, so he did not see the other man grow pale beneath his tan.

  ♦

  The Mercedes-Benz pulled up by the gates of the National Museum. Despite the poverty in Cambodia, there were pockets of wealth, the government and business elite, who travelled in style behind darkly-tinted glass in bloated limousines. None of the passers-by spared the vehicle a second glance. Mostly they were not interested but there was an element of fear as well in the averted eyes. The privileged classes protected their privacy and wealth with a certain disdain for the rights of others.

  The rear window wound down slowly and a balding, middle-aged man peered out. His attention was on the small coterie of men selling postcards and books to foreign tourists by the museum entrance. Two of them were in wheelchairs and one leaned on a single crutch: the one he wanted – Cheah Huon. He’d been given a cursory description but there could be no mistake. The amputated leg was not sufficient to identify the man – in Cambodia such injuries were common – but the scar tissue on the man’s face and neck were horrific even by the standards of the country.

  “Huon,” he called and then again, louder.

  One of the wheelchair-bound men said something and gesticulated in his direction. He couldn’t make out what had been said but the amputee turned to stare and the man in the car beckoned him over. Huon leaned his crutch against a wall and snapped on an artificial limb. He hobbled over to the car, his expression a combination of curiosity and wariness.

  “You are Cheah Huon?” asked Judge Sopheap.

  The man nodded, the scars on his neck bunching and stretching like a collection of centipedes.

  “I hear you sell books.”

  There was a quick affirmative nod from Huon. “And postcards,” he added.

  “Bring them over – I’d like to have a look.”

  Huon did not question or hesitate – one didn’t when instructed to do something by a social superior in Cambodia. He loped off in an ungainly fashion and returned with the cardboard box of books.

  “You want me to show you some titles?”

  The judge shook his head. “I’ll take them all. Pass them over.”

  Huon’s expression was puzzled but he obediently pushed the box through the car window.

  Sopheap reached inside the inner pocket of his jacket, extricated a thick envelope and handed it to Huon. “This should cover the price.”

  Huon’s eyes lit up as he felt the thickness of the envelope. “Thank you,” he whispered.

  “Now, remember.” Sopheap’s voice had grown cold. “I have met your demands. My client expects you to keep your mouth shut. Do you understand?”

  There was no hesitation on the part of the amputee. “Yes, sir. I understand. Please tell your client that his secret is safe with me.”

  ♦

  Singh awoke suddenly and clutched the seat rests like a lifeline. As the aircraft banked, he stole a glance out of the window. The city of Phnom Penh was spread out and low-rise, in contrast to the skyscrapers that clamoured for attention on the approach to Singapore’s Changi. Here, muddy brown rivers snaked together like overfed pythons to meet at the city centre. He guessed that two of them were the Mekong and the Tonle Sap; he had no idea what the third river was called. He had read about the Tonle Sap and was fascinated by the idea that it flowed from the highlands to the sea for part of the year – and then reversed its flow for the rest of the time. Sungei Kallang, the longest river in Singapore, all ten kilometres of it, did not indulge in such erratic behaviour.

  In a few short minutes, the plane came in to land at Pochentong Airport, now renamed the Phnom Penh International Airport. It had recently been refurbished and modernised by the looks of things. It even had an aero-bridge. There was no need to clamber down steep steps onto grey tarmac. It was still a distant cry from the imposing cathedrals built for the worship of incoming tourists in other Asian cities like Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Phnom Penh airport was a yellow building built in practical rectangles. The locals just didn’t have the tourist dollars to indulge in architectural extremism. Alternatively, surmised Singh, this might be his introduction to communist architecture.

  He wandered through immigration, denied hotly that he needed a visa – it was probably an attempt to extort a few dollars – collected his bag from one of only two carousels and walked out to the waiting area. Here he changed some money to rieh and noticed that each note was decorated with a picture of Angkor Wat.

  As he lumbered out of arrivals, blinking against the bright light, Singh was immediately bombarded with offers of rides that seemed to range from taxis and tuk tuks to ‘motos’, whatever those might be. He ignored the enthusiastic solicitation, relieved that he didn’t have to try and choose a reliable driver from amongst the hordes. He had been informed that, as befitted the ASEAN observer to the war crimes tribunal, he would be met at the
airport – but he had no idea by whom. He squinted at the various young men carrying pieces of cardboard with names scrawled on them in marker pens. He spotted a placard written in a neat hand and held aloft by a stocky woman whose expression was in marked contrast to the beaming faces around her. He grinned, baring his brown-stained smoker’s teeth. The sign read, ‘Inspector Sing’. He wondered whether to interpret this as an instruction. That would certainly attract the attention of the dour creature waiting for him. He walked over, panting slightly in the heat, which, although not as intense as Singapore, was still in marked contrast to the air-conditioned building from which he had just emerged. He felt sticky damp patches form under his armpits.

  “I’m Inspector Singh,” he said.

  She looked at him and her thick straight eyebrows arched. He wondered what she had been expecting – not a short, fat, turbaned Sikh apparently. Mind you, relative to her height, he was a giant of a man. Despite her diminutive stature she grabbed his bag with a determined grip, waving away his protests with the other hand.

  She said in English, “My name is Chhean. You come with me this way please. We go to the car now. Then to hotel in Phnom Penh.” There was very little in the way of pauses between sentences and a strong accent to boot. Singh wondered whether this staccato tone was going to characterise their whole relationship. He would need to work hard to participate in any conversation with this woman. He chortled inwardly – not that different from his communications with Mrs Singh then.

  Singh followed obediently in her wake as she marched towards a waiting taxi. He noted that she was as broad-hipped as she was broad-shouldered and walked with short but quick steps. Unlike many of the airport greeters, Chhean was not dressed in native Cambodian dress but instead wore a pair of black trousers and an oversized blue shirt that reached to mid-thigh and covered her posterior. Her trousers were too long and she trod regularly on the hem.