Quiller Salamander

'No drugs,' I said. 'Just a dressing, if you think it needs one.'

'Hey, mister, the patients don't call the shots around here, they just get the shots' — a big grin, pleased she'd thought of it — 'but maybe we can make a deal. Wanna visit with your girlfriend while you're here?'

I looked along the ward. 'Where is she?'

'Back there in Outpatients. Don't worry, she's fine, I just have to change her dressings. You go an' show her your trophy of the chase and I'll be right there, honey — and congratulations, any reasonable man would've been good an' dead by now.'

Gabrielle was photographing a child in rags, blood on her face, three years old, four, the flash freezing her for print, her eyes wide, accepting of whatever next would happen to her.

'How did you know I was here?' Gabrielle asked me.

'I just came in for a dressing.'

She looked at my hand, wanted to know how it had happened; I just said I'd been careless, trekking in the jungle. She looked thinner, I thought, even after such a short time, and there were shadows under her eyes.

'You're working too hard,' I said.

She cupped the child's head against her thigh as she looked at me. 'I have to catch up. I should have started sooner.'

'You're losing sleep,' I told her. And when she slept, her dreams would be full of the killing.

'I catch a few hours during the day.' We were both studying each other as if it had been a long time, or as if we weren't going to see each other again. 'Has Leonora looked at you yet?'

'Just for a minute.'

'What does she say?'

'I had some fever, that's all.'

Then the nurse came in and picked up the child. 'Where are the parents?'

'I don't know,' Gabrielle said. 'I found her wandering in the street, but I don't understand Vietnamese.'

'I'm going to give her to the night nurse to look after, then I'll be back real soon.'

When Leonora had gone I asked Gabrielle, 'Are you working tonight again?'

'Of course. Every night.'

'Can I go with you?'

'Why?'

'I need some information.'

Crickets were strident in the silence as we sat in the jeep, waiting. The full moon hung above the frieze of palms along the southern horizon; the air clung to the face like a web, humid after the rain; shadows were long.

We had been moving through the town for three hours, ever since midnight, stopping and starting and waiting and drawing blank, and now Gabrielle pulled the map out of the glove compartment of the jeep again and opened it, switching on the overhead lamp.

'We could try the new school just south of here, on the road out of the town, and then perhaps the temple on the road east to Krakor. I am not going to sleep until we find one.' She switched the lamp off and put the map away. 'Sometimes it is like this, and one must be patient. But it's very late now — would you like me to drop you off at your — wherever you're staying?'

I said no. When I told Flockhart about General Kheng tomorrow he'd want to know where he was: it could be crucial.

Gabrielle drove the jeep three or four blocks, passing the hotel where Slavsky was staying and turning south, rolling to a halt in the cover of a barn and cutting the engine. I could sense the tension rising in her again as she took her short-barrelled Remington from the rear seat and checked it. Whether or not I got the information I wanted, she would make the kilclass="underline" that had been agreed on.

'We'll give it an hour,' she said softly. 'Yes?'

'Whatever you decide.'

She'd told me how she operated, and what she'd learned. 'They always arrive in some sort of vehicle, and switch off their lights when they near the area they've chosen, slowing down. That's why they like moonlit nights, unless there are street lamps not far away.'

I remembered what she'd also said, earlier, about her childhood: I knew I'd never want to do anything else but paint flowers, all my life long.

'Sometimes there are two of them, but they usually work alone, perhaps to conserve manpower and place more mines. It only takes one man, after all. He is always armed, of course, and takes care not to be seen or heard: there are police patrols, and sometimes military as well if a curfew is ordered. But that applies more to Phnom Penh.'

We left the jeep, walking together as far as the narrow street; then the waiting began, in the cover of bamboo, and I heard rats among the fallen leaves, disturbed by our arrival. Water was running somewhere, a cistern overflowing after the rain; its sound brought the illusion of peace to the night.

'It won't always be like this,' Gabrielle said softly. 'There won't always be killing.'

'No. Everything will change.' And come full circle, as it always did; the trick was to be somewhere else when it happened. 'You should go to Paris,' I said.

'When?'

'Tomorrow. Paris or anywhere. Get out of here.'

'You still think something will happen on the nineteenth?'

'I think it's very likely.'

Unless there was an air strike. That would be the last chance.

'I have to stay,' Gabrielle said.

'And take photographs?'

'Of course. It's my job, and whatever happens will have to be recorded. But it's more than that.'

I didn't answer, didn't want to think about it. If there were to be another million dead in the Killing Fields she would be one of them this time.

The rats rustled in the leaves of the bamboo.

'Will you be here,' Gabrielle asked, 'for a while?'

'In Cambodia?'

'Yes.'

'I work under instruction. I don't know where I'll be at any given time.'

There was some kind of vehicle on the move in the distance, beyond the airfield. We stood listening to it.

I was working under instruction, yes, but if I was ordered out of Cambodia before the nineteenth the reason would have to be fully urgent: I'd want to stay on to help Gabrielle, keep her from getting caught if the Khmer Rouge launched the second holocaust.

'It's going farther away,' she said. The vehicle.

'Yes.'

But the next one, minutes later, sounded less distant, and we stood listening again.

The moon was below the tops of the sugar palms now, throwing them into stark relief against a skein of cloud nearer the horizon. There was no other sound louder than the droning of the vehicle, still distant but nearing by degrees.

'Perhaps this one,' Gabrielle said quietly. I thought it might simply be a police patrol or a merchant bringing in goods for the market, but in a moment she hitched the Remington higher and said, 'Yes. This one.' By now she was experienced in this kind of work, would have acquired specific instincts.

Light flowed suddenly across the wall of a building as the vehicle turned in the distance, its sound loudening; then within seconds the light went out and the engine note decreased.

We had rehearsed things already, but for the sake of security Gabrielle said again, 'If there are two of them I will shoot one immediately and go for a kill. The second one I will drop without killing if I can, before he returns my fire. If I succeed, he's yours. Don't leave cover until you're sure there's only one of them still alive, because I might have to fire twice. If only one man gets out of the vehicle, he's yours until you signal me.'

'Understood.'

I left her and moved along the street, keeping to the cover of a dry-stone wall until I reached the school. There was an arched gateway and I went through into the playground, dropping out of sight from the road.

I could now identify the vehicle by its sound: I'd heard these things before. It was a Chinese-built jeep, bouncing over the potholes on stiff springs, the slack timing-chain sending out a distinctive clatter from the engine. It was still running blacked-out, and the only light in the street was from the moon.