“Oh, fuck,” was the sum of what came out of Scott’s mouth.
No one else had a great deal to add to Scott’s assessment of the scene inside the room.
Calvino walked over to the body, which no longer looked like that of a human being. What was left of Hatch appeared more like a wild animal which had been professionally slaughtered, gutted, and hung in a cold storage locker. The body was naked except for a pair of black leather boots.
Hatch’s killers, like Patten’s, hadn’t left a pretty picture for the next of kin of the deceased, but rather a message of terror intended for any other people involved in business with them. Calvino walked closer, a handkerchief held over his nose, and examined Hatch’s face; it was swollen from repeated beatings, had a dislocated jaw, a missing ear, and the lower lip missing, showing teeth and old dental work. That was bad enough but the real piece of work was one eye socket—a black void like an empty light socket in an abandoned shed. Hatch’s arms and legs were a latticework of cuts at two-inch intervals. It was like someone had taken a ruler and measured them off one at a time. There must have been fifty, seventy cuts on each arm and leg.
He had died slowly with his killers inflicting a great deal of pain. Between the eyes was a single bullet hole. It was a small-bore entry wound. But the shooter had carefully chosen the right round to cause a large exit wound. Hatch’s brains had been blown out and along with skull fragments were splattered against the wall. He had been hoisted off the floor. He hung from a couple of large metal rings suspended by chains from the ceiling. His body had been rigged up with leg irons and handcuffs, and left spread-eagled as if it had been field cleaned by poachers.
“Not even in Northern Ireland do you see this kind of butchery,” said Shaw.
“Why would anyone do this? For guns? For smuggling a few fucking AK47s?” Scott’s voice trailed off from where he leaned for support against the wall.
“Someone wanted something . . . something he wouldn’t give,” said Calvino. He looked around the room. An unmade bed, stereo and speakers on the floor, clothes scattered around. Hatch’s wallet was on the nightstand. The money inside was untouched.
“Or couldn’t,” said Shaw, pulling out his walkie-talkie and calling in his report.
“‘If I were covetous, ambitious, or perverse, as he will have me, how am I so poor?’” said Pratt, quoting Shakespeare’s Henry VI.
“Meaning?” asked Shaw, looking up from the walkie-talkie.
“The rich pretending to be poor might be killed like this. But the poor man could never save himself from such an end if his captors believed him to be lying.”
As Calvino stepped around the far side of the bed, he stopped and leaned down on one knee and touched broken pieces of glass on the floor. The floor below the body was ringed with several dozen mounds of shattered glass.
“Pratt, look at this.” Calvino held up some of the fragments for Pratt to inspect.
“Mr. Scott appears to be right. More than smuggled war weapons appear to be involved in these murders,” said Shaw, kneeling beside another small circle of shattered glass.
“But why go through a ritual killing?” asked Calvino.
“What kind of people do this kind of thing?” He sighed. On the evening news people at a murder scene were always saying this same thing. No one ever seemed to have a new observation on the human condition that led to murder or on the moral and mental state of people who committed murder. It was simply beyond the imagination of people that other people had a capacity to release evil they failed to admit was in themselves as well.
Looking at the body it was obvious to all of them that Hatch had been slowly and deliberately tortured and that no man who had information could have withheld it under the pain his killers had inflicted. Before they killed him, they must have understood as well that Hatch really didn’t have the information. But why these pieces of shattered glass on the floor? It didn’t make sense. One or more of them had used one of Hatch’s dumbbells to grind beads of glass into dusty little piles.
Shaw pulled a sheet off the bed and was about to loop it over Hatch’s body when the light caught the dead man’s face from Calvino’s angle kneeling on the floor.
“Wait, John,” said Calvino. The others looked up.
“Wait for what?” asked Scott.
“There’s something in his eye socket,” said Calvino.
Pratt pulled a chair over and climbed on it. He had a small penlight, which he pointed into the socket where the blood had dried and the flesh had curled back. Then he saw it.
“Some glass object,” said Pratt.
Shaw handed him a pair of plastic gloves and Pratt put them on before putting his thumb and forefinger into the empty eyehole. Carefully he pulled the object out and stepped down from the chair. No one said anything as they stared at what lay on the palm of Pratt’s gloved hand. The burnt-out eye socket had been the nesting place for a red piece of glass the size of a robin’s egg—a robin’s egg fat enough to kill the robin which tried to lay it. This big, round object had been cut into the shape of a fine piece of jewelry. It was a strange calling card to leave inside the open wound of a dead man. A red-eyed stone. Strange to everyone but Pratt who knew that Kim had left a calling card for him to find. The question was how to read that card. Kim might have been crude, slicing up Hatch because he hadn’t revealed the whereabouts of the jewelry. Or he had found the jewels and had killed Hatch for all the trouble he had caused and as a warning for Pratt to ease off his investigation. The question was—how clever was Kim? How dangerous was no longer in issue. Neither Stuart L’Blanc nor Patten had been smart enough to avoid the cemetery. Now Hatch. All three had died for a prince’s treasure. Had Kim found what he was looking for or had he walked away from the last killing empty-handed?
******
NOTHING about the case was falling into place, thought Calvino. But a place for things to fall into was evolving in Calvino’s mind. He had a strange feeling about the way Pratt had reacted when he had removed the red glass object—Pratt hadn’t had the kind of reaction he had expected. No, he didn’t expect a tidal wave of surprise or shock to pass over Pratt’s face, it never did and probably never would; but the subtle flicker of excitement at such a discovery—that was missing, as if Pratt knew all along what he was looking at and what it meant. Friends who share a couple of decades, as Pratt and Calvino did, learn little things about each other, small details which are the heart and soul of friendship. They weren’t the kind of things a stranger could pick out. Pratt saw in Calvino’s face a mirror of his friend’s recognition that Pratt knew exactly what the glass egg message was intended to convey. He tried to make up for his lack of reaction by giving a little shiver, but it was too obvious, planned, and most of all too late for it to be passed off as a natural reaction.
An instinct told Calvino that Pratt had finally come close to finding what he had been looking for in Phnom Penh. It always had been something besides the smuggled guns from day one. Maybe Pratt was sent to Cambodia to do whatever was necessary to stop the flow of guns to terrorists in the South but along the way another mission got tacked on, something more important than the gun-smuggling. That was the Thai way, to layer one face behind another, fitting motives and missions like masks; taking them off was like trying to get to the bottom of Russian dolls—they all looked the same only they got smaller and smaller until they were about the size of the glass stone taken out of Hatch’s eye socket.
Every farang who had been directly connected with the Thai gunrunning operation was dead: Fat Stuart, Patten, and Hatch. A hat trick of violent, ugly deaths. The only persons still alive who knew those three dead men were Nuth, a low-level customs official and Scott. From the terror in Scott’s face he didn’t look like he would have given very good odds on his own life. There was one other person. Someone code-named Kim who had high-level police department connections and was the mastermind behind the missing Saudi jewels. There were so many gangsters from Thailand and Hong Kong ope
rating illegal businesses in Cambodia they could have qualified for a group rate on flights to Phnom Penh. Somewhere hiding in that group of economic vultures was Kim.
The path leading to Kim was through Nuth. Maybe, thought Calvino. Scott had lied about where Hatch had lived and about his knowledge of Hatch’s activities. He could have lied about his relationship with Kim. He had after all gone to the airport to collect the Harley and had done something a farang without powerful friends never succeeded in doing—he got an expensive piece of merchandise out of the hands of a customs official who had demanded a pay-off. You had to live in Asia a long time to realize how difficult that was to achieve. Whatever nerve Scott had in reserve was pretty well drained away inside Hatch’s room. He had gone away totally shaken by the vision of Hatch’s slaughtered body hanging from the ceiling of his room. Scott said that he didn’t want to go back to his shophouse and followed Shaw around saying how much he liked the Irish and how they were like the Welsh, always kicked around by the goddamn English.
“I think we should have a talk,” said Pratt once they were alone in the street. UNTAC Civ Pol Land Cruisers were parked around the entrance to Hatch’s building.
Calvino liked that Pratt brought it up without waiting to be asked. “Coffee shop of the Monorom,” he said.
Pratt looked at his watch. “Thirty minutes.”
Calvino nodded and stood back as two men wearing blue berets, their faces grim and pale, carried a stretcher past with Hatch’s body cocooned inside a body bag. This wasn’t the kind of peacekeeping duty they had signed on for, thought Calvino. He walked off into the street, hands in his pockets, stopping at the spot in the road where he had been ambushed what seemed like a lifetime ago. He was looking for some context for the murders. Every society, time, and place had brackets for the violent deaths which occurred. Hatch and Patten had been killed in Cambodia. Two deaths. What did that amount to, he wondered. The Khmer Rouge had killed what? Some said a million people, but no one really knew the number. They had efficiently killed off all the judges, lawyers, prosecutors, and burnt all the law books. The Khmer Rouge by the very act of establishing Brother Number One’s Year Zero had systematically destroyed the very fabric of law and left victims orphaned from the civilization dating before Year Zero.
Any idea, law, rule, or concept before Year Zero and anyone who had been connected with them was the enemy. He had once been a lawyer. People hated lawyers. It was fashionable to hate them and their role in the system. But in Year Zero they were purged and slung in shallow graves. Then the massacres slammed into the country like the monsoon rains and rather than shooting at the clouds, the Khmer Rouge guns cleaned away people like sweeping away debris from a garden. Nothing and no one was left to stop the guns from firing into crowds again. It was in this void that Hatch and Patten had done business. Into which UNTAC had sent its troops. Outside of Phnom Penh government official s had piled mountains of bones left behind by Pol Pot’s regime; bones had littered a field as far as the horizon, serving as a reminder of the price paid to reach Year Zero.
Calvino watched Scott pacing beside a Land Cruiser like a caged animal. He had nowhere to run. He was scared, arms folded together as if he were feeling a cold winter wind. This wasn’t Thailand or even Vietnam. Anything could happen and no one could do a goddamn thing to rescue him. What was running through his mind was how someone had Hatch strung up like dead game. Tortured him with Year Zero efficiency. Hatch’s death gripped Scott with a horror and dread more powerful and immediate than mass executions committed by the Khmer Rouge.
As Calvino stared at the window to Hatch’s room, he felt the same chill of fear he had experienced his first night in Phnom Penh. From that window Hatch could have witnessed the botched ambush. He might have stood watching as the gunmen on the other motorcycle opened fire on Thu and him, killing their driver. Someone else might have been with him watching, too. People he never told Scott about. People who had whacked Patten. The same people who had thrown a grenade into the shack out at the lake, killing several people. Had the grenade been for Thu?
Watching Hatch’s body put in the back of a white UNTAC van, Calvino had a personal vision of Thu in her hospital bed and the men who had killed Hatch and Patten in the corridor. She was their next target. And he thought of Dr. Veronica, who would be foolish enough to try and stop the attack, just as she had come to his own rescue only to be shoved to the ground. Scott was out of reach for the moment. They would go after Thu next. Why hadn’t he thought about it before? She was the last link—the last cut out—and with her dead no one was left alive who could threaten their operation. Except the Khmer custom official Nuth and Scott. It was a short list that no one wanted to be on.
Pratt looked up from his conversation with Shaw as Calvino waved down a motorcycle and got on the back. All he could think was whether he would arrive at the hospital too late and Thu would be dead.
“Where is Calvino going?” asked Shaw. It was too late to ask him.
“Back to the hotel,” said Pratt. It was a safe answer. But from the look on Calvino’s face, Pratt had a pretty good idea that Calvino had figured something out and was in one of those farang states of accelerated hurry.
******
ABOUT the worst mistake anyone ever made in Asia was to glamorize a whore or excuse her choice of occupation as some kind of hard decision forced on her by poverty and not one she has any personal responsibility for. That was bullshit. There were plenty of girls born dirt poor who lived and died dirt poor without ever turning a trick to pick a few dollars out of a stranger’s wallet. The chance of ever finding that peasant girl who would die rather than sell herself was unrealistic, a sentimental pipe-dream, but it was the slender hope that kept a lot of men going from one day to the next. Still, when it came down to Thu, Calvino wasn’t going to fall into the trap of thinking she was any different than any other woman who made the same choice she had because he knew she wasn’t. She fell in bed for money, that was one thing; but she had the bad karma to fall in with a crowd of so-called businessmen like Hatch, Patten and Scott. She was too poor to understand that the money wasn’t worth it. But in Cambodia money was everything. No risk was large enough to turn away from a sure pay day. She had already lost one leg and was standing to lose her life. He told himself as the motorcycle pulled into the courtyard of the hospital that if she were dead then he would pay to have her buried. But he wasn’t going to cry for her. She was milk that got spilled a long time ago.
He paid the driver and walked straight through the door, not bothering to stop at the reception desk. He had to make a judgment at that moment. One he would have to live with. It was either go to Dr. Veronica’s office and hope she was there, or to go straight to Thu’s room. He had no doubt the killers would go straight for Thu. It wasn’t necessary to ask her room number because he had been to her room before.
“Has anyone else asked for Miss Thu?” The Khmer nurse giggled.
“If anyone does ask, tell them room 9.” Thu was in room 7. She looked at him blankly as if trying to figure out what he had said. Her face was one large question mark, which he didn’t have time to set right.
Halfway along the corridor he lifted his .38 from his shoulder holster and dropped his hand down to his side and kept on walking like he was carrying a bag of eggs. He slowed his pace, listening for voices. A nurse passed. Then another one and he smiled, trying to distract attention from the fact he was walking down a hospital corridor with a loaded gun in his hand. When he got to the door, he swallowed hard, then, gun held straight out in front, walked in. Thu was in the bed and there was a nurse giving her some medication. The nurse dropped the needle and covered her mouth.
“It’s okay,” he said, lowering the gun.
“No kill me,” said the nurse.
“Sweetheart, I’m not going to kill you. But I am gonna ask you to leave. I want you to tell Dr. Veronica that Mr. Calvino is here and she is to leave the hospital immediately.”
“I don’t see h
er today.”
“Look for her, damn it,” he said. He tried to calm down, holding his gun low. “The other doctor, the one who moonlights at the Monorom, find her and tell her that Mr. Calvino’s here. There might be some trouble. But I hope that’s not the case.”
She had turned, screamed, and run out of the room and Calvino shut the door behind her. He wasn’t certain if the nurse had understood a single word he had spoken. But it didn’t matter, she was gone and Thu was in her bed where she should have been. She raised her head and was looking at Calvino, wondering what in the hell he was doing coming into her room like that and nearly causing the nurse a heart attack.
“You have any visitors today?” She shook her head.
“No one ever come. But you.”
“That’s good.” He pulled back the sheet on her bed. The stump had been freshly wrapped and the bandages looked clean. He pulled a wheelchair out from the corner.
“Where we go?”
“Out of here.”
“Why we go now?”
“Because . . . some bad people might be coming here. And they won’t be bringing flowers or diamonds.”
He had barely finished this little speech when someone knocked on the door. One thought raced through his mind—that was a funny thing to do, knock on a hospital door. Nurses, orderlies, and doctors just walked in any time, day or night, and did what they wanted. That’s what made hospital like prisons and sick people like convicts. He rolled Thu out of the bed, cupping his hand over her mouth to stop her from shouting out. He lifted her onto the floor, dragging her to the far corner near the window. She was terrified but he didn’t have any time for explanations or gentle treatment. He knelt down, pointing his .38 Police Service revolver.
The first man through the door carried an AK47 and fired point-blank at the bed. Calvino’s two shots caught him at ear level. He wore a black stocking over his face and he went down hard with a thud. The bullets from Calvino’s .38 had killed him before he hit the floor. The second man ran. He wasn’t shooting. His AK47 jumped out of his hands and flew across the room. He staggered a few steps, then stumbled, clutching his back. Dr. Veronica had fired four shots and each had struck their target in a tie pattern in the center of the man’s back, knocking out his heart and lungs, killing him quickly. He collapsed, leaking a river of blood.
Zero Hour in Phnom Pehn Page 24
