Zero Hour in Phnom Pehn

by Christopher G. Moore

  She didn’t say anything as she looked at the photograph. “He was a very bad man,” she said, handing the photograph back.

  “At least you’re a good judge of character,” said Calvino.

  “And his friend. Mike Hatch. Do you remember his friend?”

  “He a bad man, too,” said Thu. “Why you ask me about these bad men?”

  “Why are they bad?” asked Calvino.

  This made her laugh. “They help Khmer Rouge. Give them money.”

  “Money for what, Thu?” he asked, pulling her down on the bed. He sat cross-legged beside her.

  “For AKs,” she said. “How do you know?”

  She blinked, crooked her head to the side.

  “You want to make me happy?” he asked quickly. She nodded.

  “Then tell me how you know about the guns.”

  “Can I stay with you tonight? I too scared to go home.” For a second her eyes flashed with a deep fear. She looked toward the window.

  “Of course you can stay.”

  Upstairs there was the languid, smooth sound of Pratt’s tenor sax. He listened to the music. Thu had her head against his shoulder, her ankles hooked over the edge of the bed. There was comfort in the sax. Jazz had been invented by the walking wounded and excluded in America, black men trying to express the sound of tears. It was like being inside a rain cloud, listening to Pratt play, or inside a slaughterhouse at prayer time, thought Calvino. Pratt hadn’t been able to sleep. He had picked up the sax and did what he always liked to do in the middle of an inky night streaked with rain and doubt.

  “You can tell me about the AKs?” he asked her.

  She smiled, relaxed a little and lifted her head away from Calvino long enough to light a cigarette. The flame of the lighter lingered for a second too long, dancing a ballet to the jazz in her brown eyes. Then the flame was gone and she inhaled on the cigarette. Taking away the cigarette, she brought her face close to his and shuddered. They touched foreheads.

  “Your friend, Richard, he tell me. True? I dunno. Maybe he joke me,” she said, her face coming back to eye-level with his.

  “You know where I can find Mike Hatch, Thu?”

  She bunched her hands into fists, the muscles rippling with definition along her bare forearms. She was a strong girl, someone who had known physical labor.

  “In hell,” she said. “He’s dead?”

  “His kind no die easy.”

  “How many times you go with Mike?”

  She held up two fingers, then three, four and finally all five digits revealed the answer. “Where did he take you?”

  “Hotel.”

  “His apartment?”

  “No. He no like. Maybe he afraid I know where he live.” There was a truth, a Calvino’s law—If you’re running guns in Phnom Penh never give your address to a prostitute.

  “On the motorcycle tonight, what did you tell the driver?” She laughed. “I not tell him anything. I can’t speak Khmer. He just go and go. He hear AKs near the Lido so he go away fast. He not know where to go. He scared.”

  The last time Calvino had seen the driver, his legs were tangled in the muddy wreckage of the Honda motorcycle, and his face bobbed half-submerged in the floodwater. The AK47 had chewed him up. His arms floated in the water, and a large air bubble had arisen inside his shirt, giving him a hunchback. The driver had been dead a few minutes and already his body had gone bloated, twisted in the wreckage.

  “The driver didn’t know where he was going?” asked Calvino.

  She shrugged her bare shoulders as if to say, “Who in the hell knows where they are going after midnight in Phnom Penh?” What she actually said was quite different.

  “My friend, Saigon girl like me, she knows Mike’s place,” she volunteered. “She cut his hair. She go to his house and boom, boom Mike after she cut his hair.”

  “No bullshit, Thu?”

  “You save my life. So I tell you this.” Her tone was measured, and she thoughtfully knocked an inch of gray ash off her cigarette into an ashtray.

  “Tomorrow you take me to your friend?” he asked.

  She inhaled from her cigarette, held the smoke in her lungs, and thought about this request. Wheels turning. There was a risk, always a risk in doing a favor, exposing a friend to a stranger. A stranger looking for a gunrunner. A stranger who had saved her life.

  “Okay, I ask her. If she say no problem, you see her.”

  She lay back on the pillow, smoking. Pratt’s tenor sax going mellow and soft as a candle flame throwing soft shadows on the wall of the soul. Within a couple of minutes she was fast asleep. Calvino took the cigarette from between her fingers and put it out in the ashtray. He turned out the light.

  He lay in bed thinking that this was the beginning. His first night in Phnom Penh. Less than twenty-four hours into Cambodia and he had this lonesome feeling crawling over him. A feeling born from an instinct that he had landed in a place where comfort and compassion were like lost tribes. It was the feeling of pain. The kind of pain that Mekong was invented to cure for a night. It was very late and the last ember from Thu’s cigarette died in the ashtray. Pratt’s sax had stopped as he finally drifted off and he found himself at the racetrack, watching Saddam’s jockey standing in the saddle and jerking back on the reins until blood poured from the mouth of the horse. Blood covered the dirt track and all the people in the stands were on their feet. Then a scream echoed off the concrete terrace steps. A woman’s frantic scream of terror. Only it wasn’t in his dream. He was awake in his hotel room in Phnom Penh and the Vietnamese woman sat up in the bed screaming in a language that he didn’t understand. He put his arms around her and pulled her closer. He didn’t know the Vietnamese word for nightmare; but somehow it didn’t matter. Her screaming stopped as he held her close and stroked her hair. She was afraid to close her eyes after that. The night held images waiting backstage for the mind to click off. Images of men with guns. Images of fire from the sky. Images of bodies in the mud. He told her that it was okay and she wanted to believe him. But she had stopped believing anyone a long time ago.

  SIX

  UNTAC HEADQUARTERS

  CALVINO LEARNED OVER the hotel balcony and watched people on the street. By morning the flood waters had receded, leaving a trail of debris the color of dog shit gone bone-dry from the tropical sun. The Phnom Penh streets had the look and smell of a drained bathtub shared by a shift of coal miners. Side streets were mud tracks with potholes as deep as in any dirt-poor upcountry village, smelling of sewage. Thu had quickly dressed and as he turned she had quietly placed herself behind him. She anxiously clutched her bag, and moved from foot to foot—she was ready to leave. And she was waiting for his permission.

  He took her down to the lobby and waited until she walked out the door and into the street, wondering if he would ever see her again. She hadn’t said goodbye. Mornings brought on a strong urge to flee as the girl and customer looked one another over in harsh sunlight. Without the shadows and alcohol the connection of the night before was broken. It was as if the ambush and death had happened to someone else or in another lifetime. He stood at the lobby door until she disappeared out of sight and then made his way into the hotel restaurant. Shaw was at a table reading a Bangkok newspaper. Shaw was all smiles, dressed in blue shorts, tennis shoes and a light blue shirt with a dark blue epaulet on each shoulder. His walkie-talkie lay on the table. He had watched Calvino escort the girl to the door, sipped his coffee and savored how they had lingered for a second, touching fingers, saying nothing, then returned to his newspaper as Calvino turned and entered the restaurant. Shaw raised an eyebrow and a waiter hurried to the table with another cup of steaming coffee. Calvino pulled up the chair and yawned.

  “I hope the second half of your evening was more pleasant than the first half,” said Shaw.

  Calvino sipped the coffee and made a face. He scooped in a spoon of Coffee Mate and stirred slowly. Then he looked up at Shaw.

  “Thanks for last night. I shou
ld be dead . . .” he said.

  “I did nothing. Two Khmers had a shoot-out over a motor- cycle. You know how often that happens here? Often. I have already filed the report. The basic facts. Three Khmer men were killed. Weapons and motorbikes were recovered by UNTAC Civ Pol. An UNTAC press spokesman said, ‘Increased lawlessness is likely as UNTAC forces withdraw from Cambodia.’ ”

  Shaw broke off a piece of French bread.

  “That’s how the official report reads,” he continued, chewing on the bread. “You weren’t there. I came upon the scene to investigate. End of matter. You should try the bread. It’s the one good thing the French brought to Cambodia. Bread.”

  “Have you seen Pratt this morning?” asked Calvino.

  “He’s meeting with Mr. Singh at UNTAC Headquarters. After you finish with your coffee, why don’t we join him? Unless you have another appointment.” The last sentence was said without irony. Shaw was the rare cop—open, honest, decent, and a crack shot.

  “I didn’t get much out of the girl, if that’s what you want to know,” said Calvino, trying his coffee again.

  “I would have been surprised if you did,” said Shaw. Calvino pushed the coffee away.

  “Let’s go find Pratt,” he said.

  Shaw pulled out a plastic badge with a stickpin on the back. It was an official UNTAC press card with Calvino’s photograph laminated on the front. He pushed the pink card across the table to Calvino who looked at the press card and his photograph. In the space after the words ‘representative of’ was typed—New York Free Press.

  “There isn’t any such newspaper in New York,” said Calvino.

  “No? I wouldn’t worry. It’s a detail. It’s a left-wing under- ground newspaper in case anyone should ask. The name New York Free Press somehow seems to fit your personality,” said Shaw, pushing the local newspaper across the table. Calvino read the headline—“Cambodian officials deny charge of human rights abuse in Phnom Penh Prison.”

  “One day I’m going to find a way to get a reporter inside T-3 Prison. Perhaps you might volunteer for the job. Abuse doesn’t cover the misery of what hellish torture goes on in there.”

  “You sound like a priest,” said Calvino.

  “There’s a little bit of priest in every Irishman. And enough of the devil to know we can’t always win by following the rules.”

  Shaw paid the bill and stood up from the table. He saw Calvino glancing at the Bangkok newspaper. Page one had another story about how Saudi Arabian official s had publicly criticized the Thai police for their investigation into the theft of jewelry a couple of years earlier. It was an old story; but every few months it would flare up as another unresolved case with everyone running for cover, claiming lack of knowledge; official denials were made at the hint of a cover-up and the Saudi official s demanded satisfaction. Pratt was part of the faction trying to recover the stolen jewelry; other influential people were doing all they could to prevent that from ever happening. He wondered if Pratt had seen the papers. Calvino moved away from the table, wondering why Shaw wanted him to go inside T-3 and why he had circled the news story about the two-year-old jewelry theft in Saudi.

  ******

  UNTAC Headquarters was situated opposite Wat Phnom. The wat was built on a large hill that gently tapered down into a green field. The stupa rose to the sky and was the center point of a massive roundabout. Calvino saw several monks climbing the stone stairs cut into the hillside. The wat looked down on UNTAC Headquarters, or UNTAC Headquarters looked up to the wat—depending on your point of view, Shaw said. The guard post at the HQ entrance was heavily sandbagged. A couple of soldiers were behind the bags, sticking close by the machine gun. They didn’t appear all that tense but they had the hard look of being on the job, keeping an eye on the street, looking over those approaching the entrance. Directly in the field of fire dozens of motorcycle taxi drivers waited for UNTAC workers to emerge.

  Shaw told him about how, the week before, a Cambodian cop had given chase to a motorcycle thief. The thief drove straight toward the entrance. By the time the machine-gunner reacted, he thought the Cambodian cop who was pointing his gun and about to shoot was launching a surprise attack. The machine gun opened fire and cut the Cambodian cop in two. The incident hadn’t done all that much for Cambodian police morale or the apprehension of motorcycle robbers.

  “I can’t blame the Khmers for not bothering with the theft problem,” said Shaw. “The poor blighters aren’t even getting their nine dollars a month pay. They say the hell with it. Who can say they are wrong? It’s dangerous with most of the crooks carrying automatic weapons. Then to have UNTAC cut one of their own in half, it doesn’t look good.”

  When the Land Cruiser reached the checkpoint, the soldier on guard duty stepped in front and held up his hand. He immediately recognized Shaw behind the wheel and gave Calvino a long, hard once-over.

  “He’s press,” said Shaw.

  Calvino handed the soldier the pink plastic press card. The soldier handed the card back to Calvino, saluted Shaw, and waved them inside the compound.

  “After our meeting you might want to check out the news conference at noon. Now that you’re a reporter, showing your face at a news briefing is a good idea,” said Shaw.

  The Land Cruiser passed a series of white pre-fabricated one-story buildings and Shaw pulled into a parking space across from the canteen. UNTAC soldiers sat at tables eating pancakes and bacon and eggs, and drinking coffee. Shaw locked up the Land Cruiser and led the way to the office of the Chief of Operations for UNTAC Civil Police. Calvino found Pratt and Detective Superintendent Ravi Singh and another uniformed officer sitting inside. Calvino was introduced around the room and then sat down beside Pratt. No one said anything for a few seconds. Pratt waited as they looked over Calvino before he decided to break the silence.

  “We were just going over what we know about Mike Hatch,” explained Pratt. “That he grew up in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. Hatch was a street punk with earrings and a ponytail. Here’s a more recent photograph from Interpol. Take a look. And I was explaining that you had been investigating Hatch in Bangkok and might have some information.”

  Calvino smiled, looking down at Hatch. He was staring straight into the camera with a ‘fuck you’ look. A long, narrow-jawed face, junkie eyes, a nose that looked like it had been broken a couple of times, and Mick Jagger lips. His dirty blond hair looked like it hadn’t been washed for weeks. He wore a Harley T-shirt, and had a cigarette behind his right ear; on one earlobe were three small diamond earrings. Calvino wondered if they might have been a gift from Fat Stuart. Mike Hatch came across as a bad imitation of a rock star. The others in the room watched him study the photograph and then put it back on the Chief of Operation’s desk. But the large-framed, distinguished-looking man leaning forward from behind the desk pushed it back.

  “Keep it, Mr. Calvino,” he said. “You never know when it might come in handy.”

  So that had been their game, he thought. Pratt had smoothed things with UNTAC Civ Pol by telling them that Calvino would know how someone like Hatch thought; that Calvino and Hatch came from the same city, and that if anyone could get inside this guy’s head, it was Vincent Calvino. He knew Pratt well enough to know how he would have pitched his role and connection. Besides, Calvino had a reputation for tracking down people who didn’t want to be found. So far he hadn’t come up with any hot, inside information about Mike Hatch, the guy they were looking for. But then he had just arrived in Phnom Penh, too. What Calvino read from the Interpol report on Mike Hatch was the ordinary career path for your average farang grifter who made a living by running the usual street cons and back-alley deals in Bangkok.

  The Chief of Operations, who had been introduced as Robert Burke, was in his early fifties, had lean, bony arms, white hair, large cheek bones, and a face set off with the kind of pale blue eyes you almost never see outside of the movie screen. He was the second Irish cop assigned to the illegal transportation of weapons case—an exp
ression Calvino noticed had been used in a report on top of Burke’s desk. Along with Shaw, Burke’s presence gave the distinct impression that the Irish cops were heading the mission to find Hatch and bust the gunrunning operation. Out of an UNTAC Civ Pol force of 3,600 cops only forty were Irish. What were the odds of so many Irish being bunched together in one case, he thought. But he let his questions ride as there would be plenty time later.

  “Mike Hatch is your usual low-level, streetwise scam artist,” said Calvino. “Fake passports, stolen credit cards and travelers checks. A year ago he was fencing stolen TVs, VCRs, fax machines, about anything electronic, to expats on Sukhumvit Road. Some of the stuff came from the port of Klong Toey, other stuff was being ripped off at Don Muang Airport. Hatch is the kinda guy who has never done anything in life but steal. I grew up with guys like him. Stealing is in their blood. Or their mother’s milk. They were always broke. That goes with the territory. But the way I figure it, finally things got too hot for Hatch—he was behind in his rent.”

  He had their attention. He picked up the Interpol report and looked through it. Sloppy, he thought. These guys had part of the story; but the part they had left out was like seeing Hamlet with the last two acts cut. Calvino played with them a little. He had been delivered up to perform. Why not make them come right out and ask him?

  “And that’s all you know about Hatch before he left Bangkok?” asked Robert Burke.

  Calvino glanced over at Pratt, who knew full well what he was doing.

  “I heard a few things.”

  “Such as?” asked Robert Burke.

  “Let’s say that maybe his Chinese landlord used a spare key to go into Hatch’s room and found a dozen microwaves, a crate of Sony Walkmans, some passports—American, Canadian, Japanese, and a stack of blank airline tickets. And the landlord does what you would expect him to do. He doesn’t phone the cops but shakes Hatch down himself. The Chinese landlord decided he was going to be Hatch’s partner and take ninety percent of the action would be my guess. So Hatch had a fire sale—cleared out as much as he could in forty-eight hours, then used a fake passport, filled out one of the blank airline tickets, and flew to Phnom Penh. He’s been out of circulation in Bangkok for four, five months. Long enough to cut Bangkok’s crime rate in about half.”