'Bon soir? Monsieur? Bon soir?'
The sentries stood every hundred metres in ones or twos, holding their carbines in both hands. Their murmurs came to him like invitations, but Jerry was always careful and kept his hands wide of his pockets where they could watch them. Some, seeing the enormous sweating roundeye, laughed and waved him on. Others stopped him at pistol point and gazed up at him earnestly by the light of bicycle lamps while they asked him questions in order to practise their French. Some requested cigarettes, and these he gave. He tugged off his drenched jacket and ripped his shirt open to the waist, but still the air wouldn't cool, him and he wondered again whether he had a fever, and whether, like last night in Bangkok, he would wake up in his bedroom crouching in the darkness waiting to brain someone with a table lamp.
The moon appeared, lapped by the foam of the rainclouds. By its light his hotel resembled a locked fortress. He reached the garden wall and followed it leftward along the trees until it turned again. He threw his jacket over the wall and with difficulty climbed after it. He crossed the lawn to the steps, pushed open the door to the lobby and stepped back with a sick cry of disgust. The lobby was in pitch blackness except for a single moonbeam, which shone like a spotlight on to a huge luminous chrysalis spun around the naked brown larva of a human body.
'Vous desirez, monsieur?' a voice asked softly.
It was the night watchman in his hammock, asleep under a mosquito net.
The boy handed him a key and a note and silently accepted his tip. Jerry struck his lighter and read the note. 'Darling, I'm in room twenty-eight and lonely. Come and see me. L.'
What the hell? he thought: maybe it'll put the bits back together again. He climbed the stairs to the second floor, forgetting her terrible banality, thinking only of her long legs and her tilting rump as she negotiated the ruts along the river bank; her cornflower eyes and her regular all-American gravity as she lay in the leopard spot; thinking only of his own yearning for human touch. Who gives a damn about Keller? he thought. To hold someone is to exist. Perhaps she's frightened too. He knocked on the door, waited, gave it a shove.
'Lorraine? It's me. Westerby,'
Nothing happened. He lurched toward the bed, conscious of the absence of any female smell, even face powder or deodorant. On his way there he saw by the same moonlight the dreadfully familiar sight of blue jeans, heavy beanboots and a tattered Olivetti portable not unlike his own.
'Come one step nearer and it's statutory rape,' said Luke, uncorking the bottle on his bedside table.
Chapter 16 — Friends of Charlie Marshall
He crept out before light, having slept on Luke's floor. He took his typewriter and shoulder bag though he expected to use neither. He left a note for Keller asking him to wire Stubbs that he was following the siege story out to the provinces. His back ached from the floor and his head from the bottle.
Luke had come for the bang-bangs, he said: bureau was giving him a rest from Big Moo. Also Jake Chiu, his irate landlord, had finally thrown him out of his apartment.
'I'm destitute, Westerby!' he had cried, and began wailing round the room, 'destitute', till Jerry, to buy himself some sleep and stop the neighbours' banging, slipped his spare-key off its ring and flung it at him.
'Until I get back,' he warned. 'Then out. Understood?'
Jerry asked about the Frost thing. Luke had forgotten all about it and had to be reminded. Ah him, he said. Him. Yeah, well there were stories he'd been cheeky to the Triads and maybe in a hundred years they would all come true, but meanwhile who gave a damn?
But sleep hadn't come so easy, even then. They discussed today's arrangements. Luke had proposed to do whatever Jerry was doing. Dying alone was a bore, he had insisted. Better they got drunk and found some whores. Jerry had replied that Luke would have to wait a while before the two of them went into the sunset together, because he was going fishing for the day, and he was going alone.
'Fishing for what, for hell's sakes? If there's a story, share it. Who gave you Frost for free? Where can you go that is not more beautiful for Brother Lukie's presence?'
Pretty well anywhere, Jerry had said unkindly, and managed to leave without waking him.
He made first for the market and sipped a soupe chinoise, studying the stalls and shop fronts. He selected a young Indian who was offering nothing but plastic buckets, water bottles and brooms, yet looking very prosperous on the profits.
'What else do you sell, sport?'
'Sir, I sell all things to all gentlemen.'
They foxed around. No, said Jerry, it was nothing to smoke that he wanted, and nothing to swallow, nothing to sniff and nothing for the wrists either. And no, thank you, with all respect to the many beautiful sisters, cousins and young men of his circle, Jerry's other needs were also taken care of.
'Then, oh gladness, sir, you are a most happy man.'
'I was really looking for something for a friend,' said Jerry.
The Indian boy looked sharply up and down the street and he wasn't foxing any more.
'A friendly friend, sir?'
'Not very.'
They shared a cyclo. The Indian had an uncle who sold Buddhas in the silver market, and the uncle had a back room, with locks and bolts on the door. For thirty American dollars Jerry bought a neat brown Walther automatic with twenty rounds of ammunition. The Sarratt bearleaders, he reckoned as he climbed back into the cyclo, would have fallen into a deep swoon. First, for what they called improper dressing, a crime of crimes. Second because they preached the hardy nonsense that small guns gave more trouble than use. But they'd have had a bigger fit still if he'd carted his Hong Kong Webley through customs to Bangkok and thence to Phnom Penh, so in Jerry's view they could count themselves lucky, because he wasn't walking into this one naked whatever their doctrine of the week. At the airport there was no plane to Battambang, but there was never a plane to anywhere. There were the all-silver rice jets howling on and off the landing strip, and there were new revêtements being built after a fresh fall of rockets in the night. Jerry watched the earth arriving in lorryloads, and the coolies filling ammunition boxes frantically. In another life, he decided, I'll go into the sand business and flog it to besieged cities.
In the waiting room, Jerry found a group of stewardesses drinking coffee and laughing, and in his breezy way he joined them. A tall girl who spoke English made a doubtful face and disappeared with his passport and five dollars.
'C'est impossible,' they all assured him, while they waited for her. 'C'est tout occupé.'
The girl returned smiling. 'The pilot is very susceptible,' she said. 'If he don't like you, he don't take you. But I show him your photograph and he has agreed to surcharger. He is allowed to take only thirty-one personnes but he take you, he don't care, he do it for friendship if you give him one thousand five hundred riels.'
The plane was two-thirds empty, and the bullet holes in the wings wept dew like undressed wounds.
At that time, Battambang was the safest town left in Lon Nol's dwindling archipelago, and Phnom Penh's last farm. For an hour, they lumbered over supposedly Khmer Rouge-infested territory without a soul in sight. As they circled, someone shot lazily from the paddies and the pilot pulled a couple of token turns to avoid being hit, but Jerry was more concerned to mark the ground layout before they touched down: the parkbays; which runways were civil and which were military; the wired-off enclave which contained the freight huts. They landed in an air of pastoral affluence. Flowers grew round the gun emplacements, fat brown chickens scurried in the shell holes, water and electricity abounded, though a telegram to Phnom Penh already took a week.