It crossed his mind that some sort of blackmail might be shaping up here. He could shut off the Club Mandala lunatics, but he sensed he could not ignore this man. Not until he’d heard his demands, at any rate.
“Where—where are you?” he said after a moment’s pause.
“I am very close,” said the man. “Can I please buy you a coffee? If we could only meet for several minutes, it would be very important.”
“Where?”
“I could not help but notice, there is a Cambodian restaurant across the street from you. We could meet there….”
“How soon?”
“As soon as is convenient.”
“Now,” Derek said. “Let’s get this over with. How will I know you?”
“Oh, don’t worry. I know you from your books.” He laughed, a deep rattle. “Bye-bye.”
Derek put down the phone. He had not yet even taken off his coat. The mandalas were taking over his life, he realized, making it practically unlivable. But maybe all this would lead to some kind of publicity. Maybe he should devote himself to getting the most out of this book, and stop worrying about the next. See where that took him. A foiled blackmail attempt—and surely the Mooney connection was too tenuous ever to be exposed—could be played up in a big way. He would have to figure the man’s angle, that was all. He was sure of his own immunity; for all practical purposes, he was innocent of anything.
He switched on the answering machine to let it finish its message and noted down the number of the Club Mandala owner on a Post-it, which he shoved in his pocket. He’d call them, all right. He was just getting warmed up.
Outside, he crossed the street one step ahead of traffic, arriving at the door of the Prey Svay Cafe just as a man standing there opened the door to him. He stopped and stared at the man, half a head shorter than he, wiry and very dark, with thinning gray hair but otherwise clean-shaven; exuding strength and confidence, but all of it hard won. The skin of his face was so scarred that it looked like pockmarks; the hand holding the door was also covered with knobbly scar tissue. Derek bowed slightly, as if that were the custom in all of Asia, then felt like an idiot when the man put out his free hand and shook.
“I am Huon.”
“All right.”
Derek entered ahead of him. It was a small restaurant with a counter running down the middle, where several isolated patrons sat sipping soup and watching the kitchen or reading newspapers; the opposite wall was lined with booths. Derek slid into the far corner of the last booth. Huon stood for a moment removing a gray plastic raincoat, revealing a neat tweed jacket, a striped oxfordcloth shirt with several pens in the pocket, black tie knotted in a double Windsor. He folded his coat carefully and laid it on the bench cushion. As he sat beside it, Derek saw that the man’s left ear was missing. A gnarled clump of scar tissue was all that remained of it; that and a livid scar like a fresh bruise.
Huon caught him staring and touched the spot with a scarred finger. Derek made a point of not looking away; he would not be squeamish with a man who, after all, had come to stare at him.
“Many suffered,” he said, “under the Khmer Rouge. Physical anguish was often the least of it. I assume you know something of Cambodia? Democratic Kampuchea? The Pol Pot, Ieng Sary regime?”
“I didn’t come here for a history lesson.”
“Oh, but this is not history—it is more like current events. The Khmer Rouge are a power in Cambodia today.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
Huon sighed and tilted his head to one side, folding his hands. The waiter appeared at the end of the table. “That is what I would like to know,” he said. “Coffee only?” Derek nodded. Huon ordered for the two of them, speaking what Derek supposed was Khmer. The plump little waiter nodded, his eyes lingering on Huon at least as openly as Derek’s had, then he moved away slowly, glancing back at them twice in the time it took him to reach the kitchen. He continued to look over occasionally from beyond the counter. When he returned he carried two water glasses with a half inch of condensed milk at the bottom of each and steel coffee filters perched on their rims, draining into the milk. Derek found such stuff undrinkable, cloying and bitter at the same time; he hated the taste of the canned milk. He pushed the glass away from him. “Just bring me a cup of black coffee,” he said. “You can take this away.”
“I’m sorry,” Huon said. “I thought you might be more of a connoisseur.”
“I can’t imagine why.”
“Mr. Crowe…” Huon blinked several times, as if finding the right place in a teleprompted script.
“Mr. Huon…”
“No, that is my first name. I prefer not to give you my last, just now. I am a city councilman in Southern California, and I wish to keep all this very quiet, in order to protect my people—Cambodian refugees, I mean—from more harm.”
“What can I possibly do to harm your voters?”
“You have already done a great deal, I’m afraid, merely by printing your book.”
“I don’t follow you at all.”
“I think you must.” Huon’s voice, warm and conciliatory, suddenly opened to expose a reach of colder, deeper levels—those depths in which he had weathered privation and suffering yet found the strength to survive. Nothing in his outward appearance had changed, but suddenly Derek realized that the man was graver than he had suspected. He felt another twinge of fear. Did this really have to do with Elias after all?
“I think you must, because you have the mandalas. You have them exactly. And there is only one place you could have had them from.”
Derek’s coffee arrived. He gulped it hastily, burning several layers of tissue inside his mouth but hardly feeling it as he tried to anticipate Huon’s next words and plan his response. He must get Huon off his track somehow, if what he feared was coming… .
“What does the name Tuol Sleng mean to you?” Huon said.
Derek relaxed, because the name meant nothing to him. He shrugged, pleased to be able to appear wholly innocent now.
“Another Cambodian restaurant?” he asked.
He was glad to see Huon look disappointed. “Tuol Sleng,” he repeated. “The name means, in Khmer, the Hill of the Poison Tree. It is a district in Phnom Penh, but more importantly, it was an interrogation center in that spot, established by the Khmer Rouge during their control of Cambodia, between about 1975 and 1979. Where were you during those years, Mr. Crowe, if I may ask?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but I was in college and then working in an ad agency. I certainly wasn’t gallivanting about Southeast Asia like one of those hippy mystics you must have mistaken me for.”
“No one went ‘gallivanting’ in Cambodia during those years. Do you know where I was, Mr. Crowe?”
“If I could hazard a guess, I suppose I’d say you were in Tuol Sleng.”
“Very good! But only at the very end of the regime. No one lasted very long there. Only a few survived its collapse. I escaped, yes—first Tuol Sleng and then the Vietnamese invaders. I fled to Thailand, collecting some of these scars on the way to the border.” He raised his scragged hand. “We were not supposed to leave the path, you see; it was mined all around. But whenever shells went off around us, someone always panicked and jumped for cover. In this case it was several children I was looking after. Orphans. I chased after, trying to stop them, but too late. Their bodies shielded me from worse damage. They all died. These lumps—” He touched some of the grainy scars on the back of his hand—“These are shards of their bone, along with shrapnel, buried in my flesh. All that remains of those children.”