Once I was in the museum, I slipped the tour guide a twenty-dollar bill and asked her to find Rim Nol for me.
While I waited I walked over to the Hari-Hara. A beautiful piece. And completely indistinguishable from the knockoff Nadia had in her possession. I’d need a magnifying glass and more time to make a real comparison, but I had to shake my head in amazement at the work of two great master artists: Taksin, a modern forger, and a craftsman whose name we didn’t know and the one who had created the museum piece a thousand years ago. Both were geniuses.
The tour guide came back and reported that Rim Nol had not reported to work that morning. “He’s out sick.”
My gut told me something was wrong. And it scared the hell out of me. I suddenly felt alone and vulnerable. And paranoid.
I left the building.
Getting sick when I was about to use him to expose a multimillion-dollar art fraud ring was too convenient. I felt sick myself. My stomach curled into a hard tight knot.
How bloody stupid of me to come here alone! Did I really think I could come back here and set the country on its head? A country with an unparalleled modern history of violence? Was I that naïve?
As I hurried out to the street from the museum to grab a taxi, a policeman suddenly appeared on each side of me.
“What do you want?” I asked.
Their response was in Cambodian, gibberish to me as they grabbed my arms and steered me to a car at the curb. They opened the rear door and pushed me inside.
Bullock was in the backseat.
“Please don’t scream or try to jump out and get run over by other cars.” He pulled a gun out of a side pocket just to show me he had it. “I shot a water buffalo once, you know.”
“That was very brave of you. I hear you pick on small children, too. Did you ever look in the mirror and wonder if the existence of a creature like you isn’t a good argument for the nonexistence of God?”
He twisted in the seat and jabbed his gun under my ear.
“Don’t confuse me with someone who you can bandy words with. I’d like to blow your fuckin’ stupid brains out—and I’ll do so as soon as I find out what you know.”
He was right—I had stupid brains and a stupid mouth to go with them. I’m lucky he didn’t permanently shut my mouth by shoving a gun in between my teeth and pulling the trigger. But that might still be in the cards.
The car took us to the back of Sinn’s shop near the Russian Market. Bullock hustled me inside the shop and into a dark room. A little light came from a crack in the wooden shutters.
He left the room, but I knew he would come back. He wanted answers from me. And then he’d kill me. Getting a preamble that I’d be murdered after I talked implied one thing—fessing up and dying would be less painful and more welcome than what he planned to do to me if I didn’t cooperate. He enjoyed inflicting pain, and would enjoy hearing me beg for him to stop. And I’d probably fill all his expectations as he applied pain.
I’m going to die.
The realization got me on my feet as I felt around in the dark for a weapon. I found nothing, but cut my finger on a piece of cracked glass on a display case. I used my shoe to knock off a bigger piece of glass, then wrapped my handkerchief around a wedge of glass with a sharp point. Not much of a weapon against a man with a gun, but it was all I had.
Hours later, Bullock came in with no gun in hand, but he was a man, bigger and stronger than me. He probably enjoyed thinking that he was giving me a sporting chance to fight back before he strangled me or whatever he had in mind.
He came close and I backed up. His thin purple lips spread in an ugly grin of power and contempt as he pulled a pair of pliers out of his pocket and slowly opened and closed them in front of my face.
“I have questions to ask you. Don’t give answers I don’t like.” He put his free hand on my breast and I jerked back, hitting the wall behind me—He snapped the pliers at eye level again. “You’d be surprised what these will pull off. Eyes, nose, teeth—”
“You sick bastard.”
My hand shot up and jammed the jagged glass into the flesh of his throat under his chin. He screamed and staggered back, blood spurting out and onto me from his jugular vein. I ran past him and through the door that led into the shop and out to the marketplace.
It was dark and a downpour had erupted. Most of the shops were closed and I didn’t dare run into an open one screaming that they call 911. I not only couldn’t speak the language, but the men who had helped kidnap me were policemen.
I hurried through the marketplace, buttoning my poncho and pulling the hood over my head, hoping the rain was washing away the blood.
My most pressing thought right now was getting to the airport and taking the next plane out of here, no matter where it went. But first I had to get to the hotel and check out so I could get my passport back from the front desk.
I grabbed a ride on a moto until I saw that the police had blocked the street. I quickly got off and went inside the first place available.
37
Half an hour later
A damaged person. That described me perfectly as I lay in a whorehouse with a naked masseuse hovering over me.
I hadn’t bothered reading the sign that offered “exotic massages.” And paid twice over for one.
In a strange city, a strange country, terrified of murderers and no where to turn … when the girl caressed my nipple, it got hard.
I was truly a damaged person.
She came down and kissed me on the lips, cupping her hand against my breast. I gently pushed her back and sat up.
“Sweetie, you’re a nice person, but it’s time for me to go.”
She stared at me with sad eyes.
Poor thing. She lived a cruel life, knowing nothing but poverty, misery, and abuse her entire young life. She was probably lucky to be even alive—in many poor Asian countries, girl babies were murdered at birth because they weren’t considered as valuable as males. When girls her age in the West were worrying about whether they’d get breast enhancements for high school graduation and what to wear for college, she had to worry about getting food and shelter.
Thoughts of not casting the first stone, knowing that but for the grace of God go any of us, and never complaining about having no shoes because there are people with no feet—homey little adages my mother was fond of saying anytime she saw me wasting something when I was a teenager—flew through my head as I dug in my wallet after I got dressed.
I calculated how much I’d need to get out of Dodge, including paying the madam, and gave the girl ten twenties. I gave her a quick hug.
She stared at me in complete puzzlement.
“Take care.”
I paused at the door. She had rolled up the bills and was inserting them into her vagina, no doubt to hide them from the bitch outside.
* * *
THE MADAM WAS standing at the end of the corridor as I stepped out of the room. Two policemen were talking with her.
She pointed at me.
They were the same ones who had grabbed me at the museum for Bullock.
38
The officers also didn’t speak English, but I didn’t need a Berlitz course in Cambodian to tell me I was in extreme danger. And helpless. They had guns and badges.
I was strangely calm as I sat in the backseat of a police car moving through heavy traffic. Maybe calm was the wrong word. More like dazed.
The rain had stopped. Oppressive heat sneaked back in.
The backseat smelled of piss and vomit, fermented by the hot-wet climate. Under ordinary circumstances, I’d be imaging all kinds of nasty critters crawling on me, but I was too numb to get excited about that, either.
I had tried to cleverly press the recall button on my cell phone to contact Detective Anthony almost the moment I was in the backseat, but an officer heard the telltale beep and took it from me.
Resting my head back on the seat, I closed my eyes and prayed. God help me! It’s not the first time I pra
yed when I had problems. I was one of those people who forgot about religion unless I was in dire need of divine intervention. I didn’t think I was a bad person. For sure, I had screwed up my life royally, but not by trying to hurt anyone. I only killed one person and he was a pervert who hurt children and animals. My only regret was that someone else hadn’t killed Bullock long before he laid hands on his first victim. I hoped he was reborn a worm in a boiling cesspool in hell.
The clouds thinned out. I squinted out the window and saw water. We were on a road that paralleled the river. Heading north, I thought, upriver, though with several rivers coming into the city I wasn’t sure what the waterway was called at this point. Chantrea and I had headed north out of the city for the Angkor trip, but this road didn’t look familiar.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked.
The cop in the front passenger seat turned and gave me a deadpan look but said nothing.
I tried the door handle and it moved loosely but didn’t open the door. “Take me to the American embassy.”
The passenger said something to the driver and I caught the word American. They laughed. He understood my request, all right.
Panic started mounting in me. Why weren’t they taking me to a police station? Were they taking me out to a deserted area to shoot me?
The police car turned off the paved road and went down a dirt track that brought us closer to the river. My imagination went wild and I saw myself being murdered, my body weighed down and dumped in the river.
The driver flashed his lights on and off three times and then flicked the high beam three times. A spotlight from a boat flashed back three times. I made out the boat in the car’s headlight. It was large and military-looking—a gunboat, the kind I’d seen on tropical rivers in movies. The boat dwarfed the small fisherman’s pier it was beside.
A small shack with an abandoned appearance was nearby. No lights showed from the open doorway and glassless window.
Through the window on the left side of the car I could see dim lights on the hillside that bordered the road. The terrain rose steeply from the road. What I assumed were houses or a single very large house was several hundred yards away. Too far away for me to shout to for help even if I wasn’t terrified that the cops would beat me to death with their clubs.
The police car pulled up next to the pier where two men waited. The men wore military field uniforms, the mottled camouflage pattern in greens and browns called battle dress. I didn’t see any military insignia on the uniforms or the boat; it was too dark to make out details. One thing I did notice—the soldiers or sailors, if they were in fact military, wore sloppy, ill-fitting uniforms. They didn’t have the sharp appearance of the soldiers I’d seen on the streets. One of them had a pistol in his waistband. I would have expected a military person to carry a pistol in a holster.
The gunboat had the same mottled color as the uniforms.
The two policemen got out of the car and left me sitting inside. The four men stood together, passed around cigarettes and a bottle, and talked, once in a while looking at me and laughing. Jesus. Why did I come back to this country? I should have stayed out and communicated my suspicions long distance.
Finally the officer who had been in the passenger seat opened my door.
“Get out.”
Perfect English. And I’d bet he knew much more.
One of the men in military dress propelled me toward the boat. Were they going to take me out onto the deep part of the river and dump me with weights?
“Let me go! I’ve called the American Embassy—”
He pulled a pistol from his waistband and shoved it in my face and said something in Cambodian. I didn’t need an interpreter. He led me down the short pier and to the side of the boat and indicated I was to climb up the ladder and onto the boat. Three men lined up on the boat stared down at me.
As I went up the ladder he grabbed my rear end with both hands and squeezed, setting off howls of laughter from all of them.
I lost it completely. I screamed and kicked him in the face with the heel of my shoe. He cursed as I scooted up the ladder and onto the boat.
A crewman grabbed my arm and led me to a companionway leading down inside the boat while another man went ahead of me. As I came down, he grabbed my body and ran his hands over my breasts. I hit him as hard as I could with my fist but he pulled me in close and started lifting up my dress.
The second man came down and pulled him away from me, an argument quickly ensuing. The masher, who had a big grin with a wide gap of missing teeth, found it all very funny. He was drunk and stunk of alcohol and nastier things.
I was pushed through an open hatch and into a small cabin. The watertight bulkhead door was shut behind me, leaving me in the dark. I felt the wall next to the door with my fingers and turned on a light switch. The light barely took the edge off the darkness, but it was enough for me to see that I’d been put into a small cabin that was being used as a storeroom.
Wood crates with writing in a foreign language that looked like Russian were stacked inside. The stamped-on picture of a weapon, the type they call AK47s, was on the crates. I lifted the lid of a crate. It was filled with canned food, not rifles.
A small, one-person built-in bunk with a soiled blanket and no mattress occupied almost half of the tiny cabin’s space. With crates stacked up against the other wall, I barely had room to stand.
The walls of the cabin were metal but thin enough for me to hear laughing and shouting. I turned the handle to the door slowly and opened it an inch. The group of men were gathered around a table playing cards and drinking and howling with laughter.
My fear level soared when it occurred to me that they were probably wagering to see who was going to rape me first. Rape and then murder me. I wondered if these men had AIDS. I read it was common in third world countries where store-bought sex was readily available. But what did it matter if they were going to kill me anyway?
There was no way out of the room. The porthole was too small to even put my head through. It was open and let in a tiny bit of night air, but not enough to cool down the oven of a cabin.
The door had to be pushed open into the room for anyone to enter. I needed to jam the handle and block the door. The crates of cans could block the door if they were in line one after the other rather than piled on top of each other.
I tried to lift the top crate but it was too heavy. I frantically unloaded the crate and set it empty against the door and refilled it. I unloaded half of the next one and slid it off the top and onto the floor, against the first one. By the time I got the third one in place the laughter outside had become a howl.
I emptied the final crate and wedged it up under the door handle. I had just gotten it into place when someone pounded on the door and yelled. It sounded like Toothless to me, no doubt announcing he had come to claim his prize.
The door handle jiggled and someone banged against it. It held.
The laughter stopped and the pounding and cursing became violent. Toothless wasn’t too happy about not being able to get in. Soon I had the impression that more than one person was putting their weight against the door.
After more pounding and kicking and grumbling, the men appeared to get tired of their game because the noise stopped.
I didn’t know how good Russian rifles were, but for sure, the heavy wood crates were built like Sherman tanks. Filled with canned foods, the door was not going to budge. The only way the men were going to get in was to blow the door down. Or shoot off the hinges?
I was pretty sure that whoever had arranged for my kidnapping was planning to have me murdered. It looked like the preliminaries were going to be pretty brutal, too.
I moved the dirty blanket off the bunk and sat down. The walls were wet from the humidity. The room smelled … not from human stink, but river smells baked by the tropical sun into the boat’s metal-like paint—river water polluted for an eon by rotting vegetation, dead and live fish, and the excretions of man and beas
t, come together to suffocate me in the oven-hot cabin.
Sweat rolled off me. The country was so hot and wet, I had to wonder if wood even rusted.
The boat rocked and knocked and scraped against the pier. The motion of the boat and the stale, stinking air got me queasy.
I heard a noise on the outside of the boat and a body came into view and then a leering face at my porthole. Toothless had been lowered down to porthole level. He shoved a leather sack through the porthole. The sack fell to the floor.
Something in the sack wiggled as I stared down at it. A green head came out, followed by a long, slithering body. Snake!
I screamed and grabbed the empty crate blocking the door handle and threw it open side down over the snake. I jumped on the crate and came face-to-face with the toothless seaman who howled with laughter as he was pulled back up.
Squatting on the crate, my heart jackhammering, my breath barely coming, I had to think about what to do, but my thinking wasn’t coming out straight.
It was a joke, I told myself, they were just laughing and having fun. Cruel fun. If they had wanted to kill me, they could have done it right away. Unless they had put me in the room to take turns—
I had to stop it. If I gave in to panic and fear, I was doomed. I stood up on the crate and took in gulps of air through the porthole. It’s okay, I told myself. I can handle it. Whatever happens, I can handle it. They’re just drunk and playing grab-ass with a helpless woman.
I knew they were not the ones who had ordered me to be kidnapped. That had to be Ranar. That only made sense. He had the power.
I leaned back, trying to get my heart and breathing under control. For now I was safe from the snake.
Snug as a bug in a rug, my mother would say as she tucked me into bed when I was little.
“Snug as a bug in a rug,” I whispered.
But what would happen when they made me open the door? It was inevitable that at some point I would have to open the door. If Toothless was lowered back down to my porthole with a gun in hand, I’d have no choice.
The Deceivers Page 25
