Zero Hour in Phnom Pehn

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Mike Hatch?” asked Calvino. No response. The driver blinked at him like someone hooked up to a life-support system.

  “Monorom Hotel,” said Calvino, the frustration building up until he could not stand going forward into nothingness for another minute. It was time to abort the search and try again in the morning. The Monorom was, after all, a landmark—the most famous hotel in Phnom Penh. Who in Cambodia had not heard of the Monorom? The answer was the driver of the Honda 50cc.

  “Manraw,” the driver said. “Monorom,” he repeated slowly.

  No sign of intelligent life registered on the face of the driver. It was like staring at a blank screen after the hard disk had crashed. The driver didn’t have a clue.

  How could any driver not know? The driver’s face betrayed no emotion. Calvino turned to Thu who had started to cry.

  He knew why Scott had leaned over the railing of the Lido, laughing at him. If it had been this easy to find Hatch, then Scott would have found him a week ago. Calvino had the arrogance of the new boy fresh in town. He had ignored the obvious warnings—no one pushes you into folly faster than you can push yourself when looking for someone in a foreign land and overlooking what everyone who lives there and has hit every sharp edge in the place already knows; then, as he saw the headlights coming from the opposite direction, it was so obvious that he kicked himself for not seeing it staring him in the face during the rain and gunfire. As the two lights came closer, Calvino heard a small voice shouting in his ear, “Set up, you’ve been set up and now you are going to die.” At a distance it looked like a car was heading straight for them.

  He pushed the girl off the bike and face first into the mud. He climbed on top of her as the first burst of automatic gunfire tore through the chest of the motorcycle driver. The two motorcycles overshot their position, and were turning around twenty meters past them as Calvino got his .38 Police Special unholstered and squeezed off two quick rounds. It was dark all around them. The driver of the motorcycle was dead a few feet away and the motorcycle was overturned, with the light in the mud. More gunfire screamed from the direction of the motorcycles, then stopped. He couldn’t see who was shooting at them. Whoever it was had slammed another clip into an automatic weapon and then the shooting started again. He guessed AK47s; half a dozen rounds had torn Calvino’s motorcycle driver in half. No matter what is on TV or in a movie, no one, meaning no one, armed with a .38 Police Special had enough firepower to stop someone armed with an M16 or AK47. His return fire had only succeeded in broadcasting his position. Another stupid mistake. He had made two mistakes in his first night in Phnom Penh. They would come in for the kill. That was how it was going to be, he thought. Shot dead in a muddy street in Phnom Penh. No sooner had he started to accept what was about to happen, than other shots echoed in the night. The location of the firing came from a 45-degree angle behind the attackers.

  A high-intensity spotlight illuminated the road. It was over as fast as it started. There was the sound of men running in the mud. Their dark forms darting in and out of the shadows of the spotlight. They knelt in the mud. Altogether three attackers were dead in the street. The silence was broken by the sound of walkie-talkie chatter. Pratt and Shaw knelt thirty meters away from the Land Cruiser. Shaw moved cautiously, pointing an M16 at the bodies in the street, kicking one over under the spotlight. They were dead but he was taking no chances. Pratt reached down and pulled Calvino out of the water. Mud covered his hair, face, and his clothes were slimy brown. He looked like a mud wrestler in between rounds and one who was down on the point count with the referees.

  “You know, Vincent, you should take better care of yourself.”

  Calvino bent down and picked up Thu. Her teeth chattered and she clasped onto Calvino with arms and legs as if afraid to let go.

  “She’s a friend,” said Calvino, carrying the girl toward the Land Cruiser. “Thu, this is Pratt. Thu’s Vietnamese. Her English comes and goes. I would like to think that we had a misunderstanding.”

  “Were you trying to get yourself killed?” asked Pratt. “Just a trial run.”

  “What you did was stupid, Vincent.”

  The girl had her head resting in the crook of his neck. She hadn’t said a word. Just stared at the bodies. She gave the impression that she was seeing something that she had tried to forget.

  “Fat Stuart’s girl. Can you believe that?”

  “Between Fat Stuart and you, she’s going to get the right impression of farangs,” said Pratt.

  They sloughed through the unpaved road where mud was mid-calf high. When they reached the Land Cruiser, Thu was weeping. The shock had worn off and the exhaustion, hatred and fear all hit her at one time. Then she lost consciousness. Calvino grabbed her as she fell. The water was deep enough that a man who sank to the bottom disappeared from street level. This was the worst part of flooding—when the waters receded, what was left on the ground included all kinds of debris—discarded plastic bottles, cans, newspapers, bits of wood and bodies, bloated and stiff.

  “Perhaps I forgot to mention in the Lido—Phnom Penh isn’t all that friendly a place after dark. It’s not like Dublin, you know. You have to be careful. In fact, it’s better not to be out unless there’s an emergency.”

  Shaw had just killed three men, their bodies submerged in the floodwater, and he was talking with the compassion of a priest as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  “Emergencies find Vincent,” said Pratt.

  Calvino looked at the two men and down at the girl.

  “I’d like to say it could have been worse. But I’m not certain that is true,” said Calvino.

  “It could have been a lot worse, lad. You could be dead along with the girl,” said Shaw.

  “Then we would have had to answer some extremely awkward questions. Such as why Pratt’s close friend was killed on our watch.” He swung open the door of the Land Cruiser.

  “There was gunfire near the Lido,” said Calvino. He carefully lifted Thu inside.

  Pratt checked her eyes with a flashlight. “She’ll be okay,” said Pratt.

  They drove off slowly. Calvino sat in the back cradling Thu. Pratt sat in the front. Shaw broke the silence.

  “Six months ago when some poor bloke ran a checkpoint, the Cambodian police opened fire and blew him away,” said Shaw.

  “It was a mess. I had to explain that just because someone doesn’t stop at a checkpoint, you don’t kill them. It’s a difficult thing to teach in Phnom Penh. We’ve trained them to shoot in the air when someone doesn’t stop. Now they shoot a couple of rounds in the air, and then kill the driver and passengers. This is called progress,” said Shaw.

  “Vincent, you missed a splendid dinner tonight,” said Pratt.“I told Ravi Singh that you weren’t feeling well. I am pleased that you did not make me into a liar.”

  Shaw glanced at Calvino in his rear-view mirror. Calvino saw the look in Shaw’s eyes: questioning, a little angry, and suspicious. He was looking at a man who should have been dead.

  “I had better radio in a report,” said Shaw, pulling out the radio. “Criminal elements have been reported shot two kilometers east of the Central Market. Please notify the local police. And ask if they might pick up whatever bodies are in the street before dawn. You know how the Khmers hate finding bodies on the street in the morning.”

  The radio crackled with an acknowledgement and Shaw put the radio receiver back on the cradle. They drove for a while, with the sound of the windscreen wipers breaking the silence. Calvino’s nose leaked gunge. He looked over at Thu who was awake and coughing, her head bent forward. Nothing about his plans to do his job in Phnom Penh had turned out right. He sat helplessly in the back of the Land Cruiser wishing he had never taken Patten’s case. It had seemed so easy in Bangkok. Find Mike Hatch, wrap up the assignment, and head back to Bangkok. Twenty-four hours of work for five grand. But a lot of things in life were not like they were supposed to be. Life wasn’t a movie set where everyone knew the script in
advance. And no one paid five grand for something that anyone could do and had no risk. Most of the time life limped along, missing a step, then stumbling and pitching forward into the mud; life stopped and what was left got buried along the road. He thought about the dead men they had left behind. A couple of hours earlier they had drunk, laughed, talked about tomorrow. Only there wasn’t going to be any tomorrow. They were gone, history. And, like most history in Cambodia, forgotten by the time they had died in the mud.

  A few minutes later Shaw pulled the Land Cruiser onto the sidewalk in front of the Monorom Hotel. Thu was holding onto Calvino’s arm with a deathlike grip.

  “You saved my life,” she whispered.

  “I thought you didn’t speak English,” he whispered back. “Only a little bit,” she said, as he lifted her and carried her into the lobby. English was like consciousness; it was something that came and went, like a dream, like a nightmare.

  A woman was sitting behind the reception desk. She looked at Calvino dripping mud and carrying a Vietnamese prostitute across the floor. Shaw with his blue UN beret and Lt.Col. Pratt in civilian clothes followed discreetly, talking, as if Calvino and the girl were nothing out of the ordinary. Calvino stopped at the desk.

  “Room 305,” he said. “Mr. Calvino?”

  “I fell off a Honda,” he said.

  She stared at him and then gave Thu, her hair tangled and wet, the once-over. Her expression never changed; never revealed what she was thinking. Thu hugged close to Calvino, looking down at the floor. She wasn’t saying anything.

  “We both fell off,” he continued, following the receptionist’s eye line.

  He had fallen down into the muck and he had been riding a Honda, but that didn’t half explain the full story. The receptionist held out the key to Calvino’s room, being extra careful not to touch his hand with her own. There was something about the way she started to pull back that made him think she had changed her mind and wasn’t going to give him the key. But before she had time to say anything Pratt stepped in beside Calvino, holding out his hand.

  “I’ll take that,” he said, taking the key to Calvino’s room. “And if you would give me the key for Room 405 as well.”

  “See you tomorrow,” said Calvino. He started toward the elevator.

  Shaw moved forward, blocking his path.

  “No offense,” said Shaw. “But you’ve had a swim in a pool which breeds some very strange life forms. I’ve seen them under the microscope. A real good wash down should put that right. Tomorrow I’ll come around and collect you. Say, eight a.m., if that suits you?”

  Suddenly the Irish cop was in his face with plans for the morning. Calvino stared at him for a couple of seconds. The man had saved his life.

  “If eight a.m. were a suit, it would never fit. Try nine,” said Calvino, dripping as he and Thu stepped from the lobby into the elevator. As the doors closed, he saw a crooked smile on Shaw’s face and saw Pratt come up and stand next to Shaw. They looked like they had some other matters to discuss.

  *****

  CALVINO stood under the shower, the nozzle pointed at his face. The jets of water pulsated like waves against a shore. His eyes closed. He opened them as Thu slipped into the shower. She wrapped her arms around his waist, and brushed her face against his chest. He tried to step back but she held on tightly. Her eyes were wide open, looking up at him, the water beating against her long black hair, turning it into a thick black pelt. This was the second time she had showered. She had been alone in the shower for fifteen minutes before Calvino knocked on the door. She’d come out, and then Calvino had gone inside. Now she was back, wet again, looking up at Calvino. He couldn’t tell if she were crying or laughing. Her face was wet and her lips spread back, showing her teeth. She had been a stranger and with a stranger the emotional images that played over the face had no previous context. Having been nearly killed together had taken the place of the usual small talk between tricks preceding the sexual encounter. It created something closer to a shared feeling that goes with a relationship. There was nothing like the sudden terror of death to strip away the sense of strangeness; but in this case there was no text to read. Not in her face or her body. Calvino felt her shudder against his body. He hovered at that edge where you gave in to the emotion or you pulled back. He decided, in the end, that it was time to get down to business.

  “You ever take a shower with Fat Stuart? A big French guy from Canada?” he asked, watching the water pouring down her face. She looked blankly at him—the same blank look she had on the back of the motorcycle.

  “Huge here.” He made a motion showing an enormous, round belly but she didn’t respond. It didn’t matter. Because Calvino told himself that he knew the answer without any confirmation from Thu; there wasn’t enough room in the shower in Room 305 of the Monorom Hotel for anyone but Fat Stuart, and he wasn’t sure all of Fat Stuart could take a shower together at the same time.

  “I’m an early morning kind of guy,” he whispered, turning off the water.

  They stood in the shower for a minute longer holding each other, dripping and thinking what a miracle it was to be alive. It shouldn’t have happened this way—that they would be standing naked together, clean and secure, the guns of the street several floors below. No amount of sex or drugs ever allowed anyone to reach that kind of high.

  In the bedroom Calvino sat on the edge of the bed, the hotel towel wrapped around his waist. His shoulder holster and .38 Police Special hung over the bed stand.

  She poured herself a drink from the bottle of Mekong and then walked over to the bed and stood before him, wrapped in a towel. The whore’s mask of make-up had been washed off in the shower. Calvino saw that she was serious.

  “You save my life tonight,” she said.

  “No, my friends saved your life. I almost got you killed,” he said. Giving and receiving credit was where things always became messy, he thought. She wanted to believe something and the question was whether it mattered what she believed.

  She shook her head. She swallowed some of the Mekong and shivered.

  “Before they come. You save me. Khmer Rouge hates us. They kill many Vietnamese.”

  From across the room with her long wet black hair swept back from her skull, she had looked no more than early twen- ties. Now, as she stood close at the edge of light cast from the lamp, she let the towel slip down to her waist, then below her waist but she kept her legs covered. In the shower he had not got a good look at her. Now he saw the body beneath the towel and wanted to weep. There were too many scars for a woman in her twenties. But in bargirl years she was as old as the Ancient Mariner. Counting the scars was like counting rings in a tree trunk; Thu’s body showed what the face did not—a woman in her thirties who had known her share of front-line living in war zones. Her belly was a twisted grid of superhighway scars like those from childbirth—like flesh-colored corduroy stitched over her stomach. He pulled the towel away from her legs. On one side were red welt-like scars around one ankle. On the opposite leg the skin looked as if it had blistered, then bubbled, boiled like rain in hell against her flesh, and after her skin cooled, the new texture formed a landscape of webs and moon craters dotted with ravines and mounts.

  “Napalm,” she said. “I burn in ’68. Then I’m six. Now a long time ago. But I’m alive. You think I’m ugly?”

  Calvino looked away.

  “No you’re not ugly.” He meant it. Turning away had nothing to do with the look of her body but what he was feeling inside. Sometimes a woman got to a man. Not in any way they ever thought; but they could find a pathway and go straight to the heart. Thu had done that.

  He might not have been able to read her face, but her body was an open book filled with suffering and misery written in many chapters from her feet to her belly. Misery was a relative concept. At some point misery passed a threshold and entered the territory of survival. It was the difference between being unhappy and staying alive. Thu was someone who knew this difference, thought Calv
ino. She had spent some hard prison time along the way. She had spent some of her childhood seeing the firebombs raining from the sky. She had managed to survive. That night she had survived one more time, and like survivors everywhere, she saw Calvino as not just a customer but also someone who bore witness to her near death and who had pulled her back from the edge. Thu reached out her hand toward Calvino’s face, bringing it around.

  “You cry for Thu?” she asked him, looking in disbelief at the tears on her hand. “No one ever cry for Thu,” she said, without despair or self-pity; it was simply a matter of fact.

  “Yeah, I cry for this,” he said, touching the napalm scars. “And this,” brushing his fingers over her stomach.

  “Don’t cry here,” she said, patting her stomach. “From my baby. I am not sad about here. I only sad if you think Thu an ugly girl.”

  She ran her hand across his cheek. There was a softness, tenderness in her gesture; not a sexual touch, but the touch of a survivor who had known hatred and violence. They had come after her in Vietnam; they had followed her to Cambodia. He clasped her hand in his, reached down, picked up her towel and wrapped it around her shoulders. There were other scars; ones buried inside her which no flesh exposed, but which screamed through her dreams at night. Most of the Vietnamese girls working at the Lido were older—they had shed one life for another.

  “I make you happy,” she said. “You want to make me happy?” She nodded.

  “You remember this room?”

  She looked around, some wrinkles appearing on her forehead as she tried to think what Calvino thought was so special about this room.

  “You remember him?” asked Calvino, showing her the photograph of Fat Stuart.