I rolled the Mine Action van between two hangars facing away from the apron and pulled up and switched off and watched the outside mirrors, waiting for the final scrap of information that would soon become available: would Colonel Choen be flying south-east towards the capital or west towards the main guerrilla base across the mountains?
He was out of the staff car now, standing with his escort and waiting for the chopper to land, dust and heat waves blowing across the apron in the draught from the rotors, a foam cup bowling along the ground as the undercarriage took the shock and the pilot cut the engine and Choen went on standing there, not going towards the chopper even when the door swung open.
A man showed there, looking around him for a moment and then dropping to the apron, seeing Colonel Choen and going across to him in a crouching walk through the draught from the rotors, smoothing his hair back and hitching his briefcase higher under his arm, fairly tall, a light grey European suit with an inch of white cuff showing and a pocket handkerchief displayed, a pair of handsome tan-coloured brogues — and now a smile for Choen as the colonel came forward to meet him, both men giving a perfunctory bow as they shook hands, the pilot coming across to the staff car with a suitcase, presumably the visitor's.
Flying, then, neither south-east to the capital nor west to the guerrilla camp across the mountains, no information on that. Information, instead, on this.
I waited until the staff car was through the gates to the perimeter track before I started up, the chopping of the Kamov's rotors echoing from the hangars as it took off again and I moved the van to within a hundred yards of the target vehicle on the curving track and then dropped back to keep station.
The town was dead now as we drove through it; the heat at this hour filled the streets. Bicycles leaned at doorways; a dog sprawled asleep in a patch of damp earth below a water pump; the remains of a chicken coloured the ground, its blood marking the track of the wheel that had crushed it.
They were both sitting in the back of the staff car, Choen and his visitor: I could see their heads through the rear window, leaning together in conversation until they reached the Hotel du Lac, where the car pulled in.
I was in the lobby by the time the colonel's escort was bringing in the visitor's baggage. There was good cover here: the balustrade of the staircase, three potted palms and a fluted column, and I was within earshot of the two men as they took the stairs to the next floor, the visitor with the briefcase still under his arm and Choen carrying a worn leather attache case. Both were talking in French, the colonel haltingly, the visitor more easily but with a Russian accent, so that I knew that in waiting out the hot, jading and seemingly unprofitable hours of this day we had arrived at a breakthrough.
15: FOOTSTEPS
It was just after six in the evening when the Russian came down the stairs and looked around him and walked across the lobby to the bar.
I got up from the table in the corner and went over to him.
'Boris Slavsky!' I said. He turned to look at me. I was holding my drink, to let him know he wasn't expected to shake hands. 'Voss,' I told him, 'Andrei Voss.' In Russian I said, 'You don't know me, but I've heard of you, of course.' He watched me with great attention, a touch of suspicion in his pale clear eyes, which didn't surprise me. He wasn't a man who liked to be heard of by strangers. He smelled strongly of a mediocre cologne; I'd caught it when he and Colonel Choen had gone up the staircase earlier in the day, and that was why I hadn't come here alone this evening.
'Would you care to join us?' I half turned to look across the room. 'We're at the table in the corner.'
Slavsky looked in that direction, then back at me, a token smile touching his mouth. 'Why not?'
'You want to order your drink here, or at the table?'
'I'm in no hurry.'
I led him across the room. 'Gabrielle, this is Boris Slavsky, from Moscow.' He looked down at her, the smile more relaxed. 'Gabrielle Bouchard,' I told him, 'from Paris.'
She held out a hand and he leaned over and kissed it; he was a big man, would be broad-shouldered even without the padding in the flashy tropical suit, made, I would think, in the Czech Republic. Forty, forty-five, starting to brush his hair carefully across the scalp, his face also broad, Slav, the cheekbones prominent, the mouth full, predatory in Gabrielle's presence, but would become hard if he were challenged, would sneer, watching the death of an opponent. I didn't know Boris Slavsky but I knew his type, had worked with people like this, had worked sometimes as one of them. I knew his name because it had been in the hotel register when I'd booked a room here just after he had gone upstairs with Colonel Choen.
'Is she for rent?' he asked me as he sat down. He was still looking attentively at Gabrielle.
'I don't know,' I told him, 'I only met her this morning. But I doubt it — she works for a top French magazine.' He hadn't noticed her camera, slung from the back of her chair, but in any case he didn't really think she was a prostitute: she didn't look like one, and this wasn't the kind of hotel where they would sit with their clients. He just wanted to know if she understood Russian, had been watching her eyes for any reaction to his question, had been prepared, even, to get his face slapped. 'Boris says he's delighted to meet you,' I told Gabrielle in French, and she smiled nicely to him.
Having seen this man's flashy suit when he'd come out of the helicopter, and having smelled his eau de Red Square in the hotel lobby, I thought of visiting Gabrielle at the Catholic Mission, partly to know how she was and partly to tell her about the Russian visitor to Pouthisat. I told her I needed to meet him, and she agreed to help.
'I was afraid you might see it,' I said, 'as being asked to use yourself as bait.'
'How do you see it, then?'
'As using yourself as a weapon against Pol Pot.'
'Exactly. That's why I'll do it.'
So when Boris Slavsky had looked across the room at the table in the corner he'd seen Gabrielle sitting there in a raw silk sarong, one slender arm across the back of her chair, her head tilted as she watched him with her deep aquamarine eyes.
'What'll you drink?' I asked Slavsky now.
'Smirnov.,
'How?'
'Straight up.'
Gabrielle's Pernod was low in the glass so I ordered another one and two vodkas. 'Boris has just arrived,' I told her in French with a Russian accent, from Phnom Penh.' I glanced at Slavsky. 'How was the flight from Moscow?' I'd said that in French too, and he was looking blank, so I switched to Russian again. 'I'm sorry, I just thought we might talk in French as a courtesy to Gabrielle. I was asking how your flight was from Moscow.'