The eyes of the cadaver were closed as I reached the coffin, scooping some water for its upturned hand and thinking for a moment of the life I'd taken away in exchange for the life I'd saved, a deal is a deal, shuffling past the shrine behind the two women as the abbot intoned his prayers and the flamelight flickered along the walls and across the faces of the gilded figurines, a deal is a deal, my friend, in the land of dog eat dog, so rest in peace if the Lord Buddha thinks you've earned any, because you weren't the driver that night, you were the one with the gun.
There was a moment, as I reached the north wall and turned and began making my way to the back of the temple again, when I was closer to the dead man's family than I'd been before. I was looking straight ahead but at the edge of my vision field I thought that one of them, perhaps the brother, turned for a moment to watch me as I passed — I couldn't be sure. But he'd been too busy that night with the Zhiguli going wild all over him to have got a look at me, and I'd seen no one else there who could have borne witness.
One of the women in the group was weeping, the mother I suppose, the agony of her grief making a soft high whimpering against the incantations of the abbot. Weep, then, good mother, for your dear departed son, but weep also for the widows and the orphans and the cripples hereabouts, for he touched their lives too, and less kindly.
'They'd be so much better off with Christ,' one of the Caucasian women whispered as we reached the back of the temple. 'All this chanting and everything.'
'Each to his own,' the other woman said, 'and I wouldn't have missed the experience.'
A monk began beating a gong behind the shrine, and when some of the mourners rose from their knees I got up too and turned and moved through an archway into the burnished copper morning outside.
It wasn't yet nine, but the temperature would already be in the eighties, with the humidity the same on the hygrometer; the sun was a shimmering disc above the pagodas and temples and pock-marked concrete buildings to the east. The city had sounds of life, with the streets filled with the ringing of cyclo bells and the shouting of merchants, but in a couple of hours the sun would be nearly overhead and we'd be in the nineties and the siesta would begin.
I could feel the heat radiating from the row of parked cars and jeeps In the temple grounds, and barbs of dazzling light bounced of their metalwork and windows as I moved past them into the shade of a rubber tree where I'd left the steel-grey Mazda.
I got into it and sat behind the wheel, and the sweat sprang onto my skin at once, the thing was like an oven, sat there while they came slowly out of the temple, some of them walking down the path under the sugar-palm trees, the others trudging in their sandals to the row of vehicles, standing there talking for a while and then getting in, slamming the doors. Then the family came out, talking with the abbot for a minute and then moving across to the ivory-white Honda that was standing under one of the trees.
He didn't look around him, the brother, which I thought was cocky. I'd been prepared for him to check the environment, and that was why I was sitting low on the seat of the Mazda with the sun visor down; but he was simply helping the women into the car and getting behind the wheel. I thought it was cocky of him because he knew it hadn't been an accident that night, that someone had seen his brother bring the gun into the aim and had gone for the Zhiguli. He should have realized that for someone to do that, they would have had to be tailing both cars, his and the minister's. In other words the hit had been blown, and it had cost him his brother's life, and that should tell him there was someone operating in Phnom Penh against the Khmer Rouge, a lone-wolf agent who might well show up at the funeral with a bullet for him.
He'd know the hit hadn't been blown by a government bodyguard: a bodyguard would have had his vehicle close to the minister's outside the Royal Palace Hotel, and the hit team would have done one of two things: they would have called the whole thing off or they would have opened fire on both cars the instant the minister climbed into the Chevrolet, going for a hit-and-run operation with a good chance of getting clear.
But perhaps he wasn't cocky, the brother; perhaps he was just untrained, an efficient guerrilla, say, but not an espion.
He'd started the car but wasn't moving off yet, and while I waited I thought of Salamander, thought of the debriefing signal I might be able to send some time today, some time tonight, so that they could pick up their bit of chalk in the signal room and scratch it across the board: Executive has gained access to the Khmer Rouge base in Phnom Penh.
Because that was my immediate objective: they'd gone underground in the capital, Gabrielle had told me, and no one knew where they were.
But if the day went well and I got access to their base and signalled Pringle and told him, it wouldn't go onto the board in London because there wasn't a board for this one, for Salamander. No one in the whole of the Bureau except Flockhart knew I was out here in the field; no one even knew there was a field; no one was in the least bit interested in Phnom Penh or Cambodia; no one could care less. No one.
And for an instant I knew I'd brushed close to the truth of what was really happening in the scene behind the scenes, where Flockhart was pulling the strings.
Then it was gone, and all I was left with was the knowledge that at this moment I had as much substance for the Bureau as a phantom. So how had that bastard done this to me? But we know, don't we… his tone had been so silky when he'd said over the telephone, Wouldn't it be frustrating for you to come all the way home and have me prove to you that you'd missed the chance of a lifetime?
The Honda was moving off and I let it get as far as the road past the temple gardens before I started the engine and got into gear and took up the tail.
'You want girl?'
'No,' I said.
'Want boy'?'
'No.'
My sister pretty. Look.'
He pushed a creased sepia photograph through the window of the Mazda, the picture of a child-woman with frightened eyes and tiny breasts that would never get any bigger before she died one of the dozen deaths her gods in their bounty had to offer her, starvation, abuse, privation, AIDS, she could take her choice but must hurry, she was already twelve years old.
'No,' I told him and hit his hand away, harder than I'd meant but without regret.
09:43.
No one had come out of the building over there for the past fifteen minutes. I was using the clock on the dashboard instead of my watch because it allowed me to flick my eyes down and up again without losing time. The sign on the wall of the building said KAMPUCHEA IMPORT-EXPORT, and there was a bleached and tattered flag hanging limp from one of the windows. The man who interested me had taken the women home and then turned north and west onto what had once been called USSR Boulevard, the route to Pochentong Airport. He'd parked his Honda at the side of the building, and I could see it in the gap between two of the market stalls, the one selling mangoes, bananas and pineapples and the one next to it, where dried fish was hanging from poles. They and the people milling around them made adequate cover: I was hiding in plain sight.
The sun was higher now by two or three diameters, and its brassy heat pressed down through the haze, shimmering on hard surfaces and spreading mirages across the airport road.
Within the next hour six men went into the Import-Export building and four came out again. None of the four was my target.