Pi-Da shakes his head violently as if to break free. When he turns to us, his flesh is gray and he seems exhausted. “I can’t do more than that-her energy is too crude and too powerful. She’ll kill me if I let her take over. You have no idea what you’ve got involved with. This is Khmer sorcery, not a party game.” Without another word he leaves us to go back to the bar. Lek is staring at me with huge eyes.
“Yes,” I say, “it’s true. I had an affair with her.” I cannot face Lek any longer. I leave him to rush down the stairs two at a time into the anonymity of the busy Bangkok night.
26
There are lots of bankrupt states and plenty of kleptocracies; there are a few failed states; and there is Cambodia. After the Nixon holocaust: Pol Pot, generously supported by the CIA. Almost two million die in a civil war, except it’s not like other civil wars. Everyone here remembers the knock on the door in the middle of the night and relatives taken away in an oxcart, usually by a teen with a machine gun, never to be seen again except as corpses, often mutilated. Then there is Tuol Sleng, where the torturing took place, and the skull mountains in Choeung Ek. Among the Cambodians themselves, a universal numbness hides psychic scars that go to the marrow. Many appear to be sleepwalking, random thuggery is an everyday hazard, “girls, guns, gambling, and ganja” are the economy, corruption is the work ethic, child abuse a national sport. You can use the local currency if you’re feeling quaint, but everyone prefers American dollars. Naturally the capital, Phnom Penh, attracts NGOs like flies; pale pampered European faces look out from the tinted windows of four-by-fours. A lot of the city is crumbling. At the police station Kimberley flashes her credentials. Neither of us has any investigative rights here, but then nobody here obeys the rules. It’s not difficult to get them to cooperate for a hundred dollars.
The apartment where Stanislaus Kowlovski died is on a side street about two hundred yards from the Mekong. We duck out of a blinding sun, following a cop whose uniform may be the only legal thing he owns. A short, stooping brown guy with some fingers missing from both hands, he believes we’ll be excited by the blood and goo on the wall. He is. The stains are buried under a swarm of flies, though. He sniggers, “Big American, what a body, dead now. Crazy. What kind of pain could he possibly have, a white man? All over the country there are people who can hardly walk for the anguish they feel; others cannot walk because their legs were blown away by land mines. This guy had everything. With a body like that he could have had any woman he wanted, even farang women. Crazy.”
They showed us the gun at the police station, a Chinese-made Kalashnikov. You can buy them almost anywhere here: if they charge more than two hundred dollars, they’re ripping you off. When the cops took the gun, though, they left the cord he used to pull the trigger, via a pinion he had fixed in the stock, which he must have held between his feet. A bloody way to go -it took out the whole of his lower intestine and snapped his spine-but it did the trick. The FBI and I pay no attention to anything except the cord. You have to believe Kowlovski was making a statement here, perhaps a confession: it is bright orange, about a centimeter thick, just like the rope he used to kill Damrong.
“You okay?” the FBI says. Sure.
“What are you thinking?”
“Get him to show us the belongings.”
He takes his orders from her rather than me, obviously, and shows us out of the living room (linoleum, one dirty sofa, a TV) to the bedroom, where a suitcase is lying on the bed. Naturally anything valuable he might have owned will not be found. We rummage around a collection of clothes all designed to showcase his outstanding physique and way too big for any Cambodian cop, then find his money belt buried at the bottom. There’s no money in it, of course, but there are a few spent airline tickets and something else. The FBI looks at it quizzically and hands it to me. It is a varnished elephant-hair bracelet. I tell her about the one Tom Smith was wearing, last time I saw him, and that Baker also had one. “Smith said an eccentric monk gave it to him at a Sky-train station.”
Kimberley shakes her head and looks at me for guidance. “I thought your monk friend was in Bangkok?”
“Only an hour away. Monks are allowed to fly, just like us.”
“Don’t they take a vow of poverty? They’re not supposed to have cash?”
I nod and repeat, “Not supposed to have cash.” She jerks her chin at me, but I don’t want to say more. The implications are, after all, somewhat radical.
“Why Cambodia?” she asks.
“Yeah, why Cambodia?”
“You said he ordained here?”
I nod.
Kimberley shrugs and picks up a pair of shorts to shake them upside down. A second elephant-hair bracelet falls out. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
“It’s like he’s making a point, this monk,” the FBI says.
“Right.”
“But who to, if not you?”
We get thorough in our search after that, but find nothing else of interest. At the morgue we’re able to identify Kowlovski from pix that Kimberley brought. The body collapsed in two when they picked it up, and the two pieces are laid in the drawer with a gap between them.
“In this country it’s a miracle they managed to get the head at the top and the feet at the bottom,” Kimberley growls.
The FBI needs a beer, and so do I. The best place I know is the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, which is right on the Mekong (old colonial building, fans and high ceilings, well renovated, brilliant snapshots of war on the walls). From the balcony I’m watching a boy wheel a crude barrow near the river, looking for tourists. The twisted human form strapped to the board, which is bolted to two bicycle wheels, must be a brother or other close relation, because the boy and the quadriplegic appear very close when they are not panhandling. He kisses the distorted human form with the extra-large head repeatedly, coddles him, and presents him to a middle-aged Western couple, perhaps Americans, dressed in smart casuals, as they stroll past. He and the cripple are very polite, to judge by the smiles and pleading eyes and tragic frown on the quadriplegic’s big twisted face, but the message is clear, calculated, and direct: How much is it worth to make this universal icon of guilt disappear? A few dollars, as far as I can see. After an embarrassed glance, the couple resume their walk by the Seine while the kid wheels his brother back toward the Mekong. What else could we have done? the couple seem to ask each other; decent people cannot stand very much reality.
“About this monk, Damrong’s brother,” Kimberley says, sipping her draught lager, leaving a white mustache around her mouth which she wipes with a sleeve.
As it happens, I’m not thinking about the monk-I’m thinking about Kimberley. I know she’s never been to Cambodia before, but I think something in her culture makes the detritus familiar; she’s more relaxed, more sure of herself, than in my more demanding country. She is also wearing military-style pants and a light khaki vest with a hundred pockets. “Anything could happen here,” she says with relish. “Are you sure he’s for real?”
“As sure as I can be. He’s definitely a mediator familiar with vipas-sana. There’s no other way to get that weird.” I tell her about Phra Titanaka’s personality changes.
“Bipolar,” she diagnoses. “A true psycho could never be that organized or that coherent. Maybe he forgets to take his lithium from time to time. You think he got to Kowlovski?”
“Looks like it, doesn’t it? One elephant-hair bracelet might have been a coincidence, but two – ”
“Is downright provocative. Somehow he found out who the masked man was before we did? But I thought you said he never saw the video.”