“American embassy?” the general said. He gave Ranar a questioning look.
I didn’t know how much English the general understood, but like most educated Cambodians he had probably picked up some out of necessity.
Ranar rattled off something in Cambodian but the general still didn’t look happy. I heard him say “American embassy” again. No doubt whatever truce the general had with the government didn’t include him offending any foreign governments that were a prime source of economic and military aid to the country.
“The American embassy is going to have you arrested,” I said.
“You’re a liar. You’ve called no one,” Ranar answered.
True, but the general again ragged on Ranar. The prince was patently uncomfortable with whatever questions were being thrown at him. Some sort of accord seemed to have been reached between the two of them because Ranar directed his attention back to me.
“You should have gone back to New York. You were warned not to come back here, but you had to put your nose into our affairs.”
“I was invited here. Remember? Your poor country was being robbed of its national treasures.”
“You have gotten yourself involved in matters that don’t concern you. Now you will have to pay the penalty.”
“So will you. Has he told you that his plans for the revolution aren’t much of a secret?” I directed the comment to General Chep but I might as well have slapped him on the face. His hand went to his holstered pistol.
I froze—expecting to be murdered.
I knew immediately I had gone too far and had dug a hole for myself, but I had to give them a reason to keep me alive.
Ranar came off the porch and faced me.
“Tell me what you know—what you think you know.”
“I know about the Russian and the oil deal. Oil for guns.” I was deliberately vague, just throwing out rumor and innuendo in the hopes something stuck. Something did.
“Who else knows this?”
“No one … not in person, at least. I sent an e-mail to a friend in New York with an attachment. I told him not to open the attachment unless something happened to me.”
The lie rolled off my tongue smoothly, but I wasn’t sure if Ranar believed me. Regardless of what he thought, the general must have picked up on what I said because the words “e-mail” and “attachment” got tossed between them. And I heard the name of my hotel spoken.
“We shall check out your story here and in New York,” Ranar said.
“I didn’t send it from my hotel,” I said.
“Where did you send it from?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“I don’t think you sent an e-mail. Once we verify that, I will deal with you.”
“In other words, you’re going to murder me at your first opportunity. You are really a despicable traitor—”
His right hand came up and caught me on the side of the face, sending me sprawling as I hit the ground. He didn’t stop there. He kicked me in the thigh and I cried out in pain, “You’re a filthy pig.”
“You’re being held for smuggling cultural treasures. I’m shocked that you betrayed my trust and have engaged in criminal activities, but considering your past history, I erred in trusting you.”
Ranar stared down at me, calm, sounding as though he had just paid me a compliment about how well I had taken his beating. He turned to the general. I didn’t understand the words, but I could tell he was addressing the warlord with his diplomatic self.
More jabbering spewed from the general’s mouth, but something Ranar said seemed to satisfy him. I heard again the words American embassy, New York, and the name of my hotel.
A smile appeared on the general’s face. Ranar probably told him I’d be shot after they checked my story about calling the American embassy. From the looks of the general, I was sure he’d rather roast my feet over a hot fire. Maybe I was wrong about his concern over the embassy—out in a jungle, he probably could care less about a foreign embassy.
Ranar, on the other hand, with links to the U.N. and residences in New York, Paris, and London, had much more to lose.
The general cracked orders to the officer in Cambodian and the man grabbed my arm and jerked me to my feet. Holding me by the arm, he steered me up the stairs and down the porch at a fast pace. I was barely able to keep my feet under me as he hurried me along. My head was spinning and the side of my face hurt worse than my leg.
He took me around back and off the porch to a hut that had shuttered windows and a door held closed by an steel bar set between large metal supports. He took off the bar, opened the door, and gave me a push through the doorway and slammed the door behind me.
Most of the room was dark, but there was light from a lamp on a table on the other side of the room.
A man seated at the table stared at me, his mouth open in surprise, his eyes wide. He had been working a piece of sandstone with chisel and hammer in hand. He was Thai or certainly Southeast Asian, slender, about thirty.
I stood for a moment, looking at the man and getting used to the light, when I heard the sound of the steel bar being reinserted.
My sudden appearance in the room and the door being barred again signaling that I was obviously a fellow prisoner had left him wide-eyed and speechless.
I had looked for this man in Bangkok and was sure he had been taken to Cambodia.
“Mr. Taksin, I presume.”
41
Taksin got up, excitedly jabbering in what I supposed was Thai. I didn’t know if he thought I had been sent in to question him … or pleasure him.
I held up my hand to stop. “Do you know any English?” Like any good American, I assumed everyone else in the world spoke some English if for no other reason than they heard it so often from movies, television, and songs.
He stopped his outburst and stared at me. Finally he sat back down and gave me a good once-over.
I repeated my question.
“English? Little bit.”
“We can go slow.”
He stood up as I came to the table.
“You are Taksin?”
He nodded.
“My name is Madison Dupre. I’m an American art investigator. Like you, I’m a prisoner.”
“American? Prisoner?” He looked past me to the barred door and then back at me, raising his eyebrows.
American and being held prisoner didn’t connect in his world vision, I guess.
“Yes, I’m a prisoner, too. I came to Cambodia to investigate the Siva. You know what I’m talking about? A Siva was sold in New York for a great deal of money. The Siva you made.”
He shook his head and rattled off something in Thai.
I got the idea. His English only stretched to things he wanted to talk about.
I touched the side of my face. I was already swelling. I didn’t need a mirror to know my face was red. “You see this? It’s only the beginning. They are going to kill me. They are going to kill you.” I let that sink in. I knew he understood. “You comprehend kill, murder, don’t you? They murdered your friend back in Bangkok. They murdered him when they kidnapped you and brought you here.” I nodded down at the sandstone he was working. “They haven’t killed you yet because they still need you. But when you are through giving them what they want, you know what they are going to do, don’t you?”
He stared down at the table.
He understood.
“Taksin … listen to me. They want something from you. I guess that piece you’re working on. Once you’re through with that, they plan to kill you because you could testify against them.”
As I talked, I looked closer at the piece he was working on. There were actually two pieces on the table—he was making a copy of a yaksha, an ill-tempered demigod. The original sat next to his copy. I had seen the original at the National Museum.
I had been right when I told Rim Nol that the forger had to see and handle the actual museum piece. Here it was happening in the flesh. The real artifact
had been removed from the museum and brought to a warlord’s encampment to be duplicated.
Staring at the artifact and the fake, I had an epiphany. What a dummy I had been! I thought I was the world’s greatest art expert and all along I had been fooled by sleight of hand.
My leg hurt and my head felt like someone had used it as a punching bag. A chair was against the wall. I sat down on it.
“I’ve been wrong all along,” I told Taksin. “The art fraud scheme isn’t about duplicating museum pieces and passing them off as originals.”
He said nothing. His features molded into that deadpan expression that people in the Far East seem able to accomplish. I knew I was hitting a cord. He retreated into our language differences when he didn’t want to share information.
“The scheme is infinitely more clever than simple forgery, isn’t it? The idea isn’t to produce a forgery and sell it, is it?”
Taksin’s face told me he was pondering an answer, but before he expressed himself we heard the steel bar being removed. The door flew open and guards shoved an almost naked man into the room. The man took only a step before collapsing on the floor.
I recognized him.
42
I knelt beside Rim Nol. “My God. Who did this to you?” I realized it was a stupid question after I said it.
Dressed only in his underwear, he was bruised and bleeding in a dozen places.
“Khmer Rouge,” he said. “They like to torture before they kill. They want me to tell them who else knows what they are up to.”
“The Khmer Rouge did this to you?”
He nodded his head as he tried to get up. Taksin helped me get him into a sitting position against a wall.
“Not old reds,” he said, “but they’re the same. They want to take over the country and kill anyone who doesn’t think like they do.”
Taksin had a bottle of water on his table. I got it and brought it back to Nol. He held up his hands but couldn’t take the bottle—his nails had been ripped off and his fingers were bloody, black, and swollen.
Trying to control my own shaking hands, I held the bottle to let him drink. He took a sip and choked, water and blood coming out of his mouth, down his chin, and onto his chest. He had massive bleeding bruises on his chest and abdomen. I wondered if his internal organs were damaged. The animals who did this to him had tortured him all over. And I knew why they threw him in with us—to scare me. It wasn’t necessary, I was already sick from fright. And barely able to keep from breaking down as I stared at poor Nol.
I wanted to comfort and hold him, but I would only hurt him more if I did. I wondered if I was the cause of all this. I tried to hold back my tears but couldn’t. “I did this to you! I’m so sorry.”
Nol’s breathing was labored. He shook his head. “No, no, not you. You don’t understand. I knew the museum was being looted.” He coughed and it broke into a choke and more blood spilled from his mouth. It took him a moment to recover enough to continue.
“Pieces like the Siva were being taken from the museum by Ranar’s command. They would be gone for weeks at a time. I went to the Minister of Culture and told him my suspicions. He instructed me to keep my eyes open and report back to him on everything Ranar did.”
I tried to give him water but he choked again. He didn’t have to say any more about what happened at the museum. However it happened, Ranar found out Nol was spying. And now the poor man was paying a terrible price for protecting his country’s treasures.
Taksin looked at me and shook his head, indicating that Nol would not make it. I didn’t know whether Buddhist monks were like Christian religious cadre in terms of caring for the sick and dying, but I suppose he saw death in Nol’s injuries. As a Westerner from a rich country, I saw injuries that a triage team at an ER could fix.
Nol got control of himself. “But it has been a mystery to me.”
“What’s been a mystery?”
“Why,” he choked, “steal a museum piece when selling it would expose it as stolen?”
“Oil for guns,” I said. “A Russian billionaire was financing a revolution for Ranar. He put up the money for Ranar’s revolt in return for getting the concession on oil discoveries that have been made in the Cambodian part of the Gulf of Thailand. But the Russian wasn’t certain Ranar’s revolt would be successful so he demanded security for his advances.”
Nol and Taksin both stared at me. I don’t think “security” to them translated as collateral for a loan.
“The Russian gave Ranar money for guns, probably for this General Chep’s army.”
“Chep was a young Khmer Rouge officer back in the seventies,” Nol said.
I had guessed that. I’d been told the Khmer Rouge was still powerful in rural areas. “But the Russian wanted a guarantee that he would get his money back if he didn’t get the oil concessions. He asked for the most valuable thing Ranar could get his hands on—Khmer antiquities. It had to be only the finest ones because tens of millions of dollars was being advanced. And that meant high-end museum pieces.”
I wasn’t sure they were following my story, but I went on because I was laying it out for myself.
“To get them out of the museum, Ranar had to have them duplicated. That’s where Taksin came in.” I nodded at the former monk. “Ranar had him make duplicates that were good enough to take the place of the originals at the museum. Then Ranar gave the originals to the Russian billionaire, along with some of Taksin’s fakes, obviously represented as real artifacts. But they weren’t given to the Russian to sell. They were just collateral, to hold in case the revolt didn’t work.
“But the Russian was killed and his girlfriend got the museum pieces. She probably knew little about the deal since she had no interest in revolutions and oil. She wanted money and selling the pieces was her way to get it.”
I stopped and stared at them. “We have to get out of here or we’ll all be murdered.”
Taksin shook his head. “Jungle. Snakes. Swamps. No way out. We try, they kill us.”
“They’re going to kill us anyway!”
Nol met my eye and I realized how stupid my statement must have sounded to him. He was already dead and he knew it—he wouldn’t be able to run even if we got out of the room.
I realized how Ranar would do it. Rim Nol would be his fall guy. Ranar would “discover” the crimes at the museum and put the blame on the curator, who would be conveniently dead or, more likely, simply missing.
I leaned back against the wall. It was hopeless. We were prisoners of a warlord with an entire army. The thought exhausted me. All three of us were about to die.
Taksin met my eyes and nodded, sweat dripping off his chin. “Fucked,” he said.
I almost laughed. “Exactly the way I feel.”
It began to rain again, Cambodian style … a torrent as if an ocean in the sky just opened up.
The downpour hit the roof and found many holes. I was under one of them. I didn’t move. I stayed next to Nol as he shut his eyes and put back his head.
I shut my own eyes and tried to focus on listening to the falling rain.
* * *
I WOKE UP and saw Taksin kneeling beside Nol, giving him something.
“What’s going on?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.
The sound of the door being unbarred cut off a response. I froze in sudden terror. Were they coming for me?
Two guards came in shouting. I couldn’t understand what they said but they went for Nol, not me.
My good sense snapped and I got to my feet and pushed at them, screaming, “Leave him alone. Leave him alone.”
They grabbed me, each by one arm, and flung me back, slamming me against the wall. The air burst from my lungs and I stood stock-still, stunned.
Nol rolled over from his sitting position against the wall onto his chest. As he did he gave out a cry. His whole body trembled, his legs shaking violently, pounding the floor. He suddenly gave a great sigh, then his body went limp.
A guard grabbed him and
rolled him over.
The wood handle of a steel chisel protruded from his chest.
43
The guards didn’t bother washing the blood off the floor after they took away Nol’s body.
I sat on the floor and stared at it until Taksin came over and helped me to my feet. He led me across the room to a mattress on the floor and told me to lay down.
“He asked you for the chisel,” I said.
Taksin nodded. “So much pain. He sought peace.”
I laid down and closed my eyes again. The rains came back, this time with wind that lashed the deluge against the hut. I stared up at the dark ceiling and listened to the rain and the gentle tapping of Taksin’s hammer on a chisel as he worked a piece of sandstone.
I hoped that Nol did find peace and would be reunited with his family.
I thought again about what a strange world it was. Most of us were caring and humane people, but there were always two-legged beasts living among us that were sick and cruel.
I was still on the mattress, dozing off and on, when I heard the explosions and jerked awake. Taksin had fallen asleep with his head down and his arms folded on the table. He propped his head up and looked at me.
We just stared at each other. Nothing we could do. We couldn’t see out or get out. Rain was still coming down.
“Sounded like it came from the camp area where the soldiers are,” I said.
The bar rattled again and both Taksin and I stood up as the door swung open. A woman wearing a dark raincoat came in.
“Hurry.”
“Chantrea! What—what’s going on?” I stammered.
“I’m getting you out of here. Come on.”
Another explosion sounded.
“That’s Kirk setting off explosions to divert Chep’s men. Come on, both of you, before we’re spotted.”
I hustled Taksin out with me. For a moment I thought of grabbing the museum piece on the table but left it behind, deciding I should keep both hands free.
Chantrea’s station wagon was outside, lights off, its motor running. I got in the passenger side and Taksin slipped into the backseat.
The Deceivers Page 27
