Julia smiled at herself.
Yes? Yes maybe. Perhaps she had it. The key. The code. The glimpse of a glorious solution.
She had it.
Refreshed, revived, and filled with excitement, she sat down at her laptop. And she worked, hard, putting these pieces together. The cave art. The trepanations. Guilt and conscience. The guiltless animality of the orangutan. The guiltless savagery of men reduced to animals in the back of a VW van.
Yes! The idea positively thrilled her. She was using the past. She was turning the past into something purposeful, something directed. She was also aware, somehow, that she was masking — denying and subverting — all the accumulated horrors, with thinking. But she didn’t care. Because she was getting ever closer to the truth.
It took her many hours; it took her several days. To break the monotony and refresh her mind, during these days, she took breaks to make phone calls on her cell phone, which miraculously worked; and to send e-mail from a small, dingy café that served Abkhazian tea with saucers of gooseberry jam.
Most of her calls were to Michigan, or to Alex, and full of lies. I’m fine, don’t worry about me. She knew they would only tell her to come home; of course there was no way she was going home, not when she was this close to the Truth.
Nearly all of her e-mails were to Marcel Barnier. He, apparently, was the link. The next link. He was maybe the only man who could tell her if she was actually correct.
He didn’t reply. Not once.
Julia wasn’t surprised. She sat and sipped her gooseberry-flavored tea, and she surmised that Barnier was avoiding the world. All these Western scientists and intellectuals, these Marxists who once visited Cambodia, must surely by now have realized what was happening to them: that they were all dying. Even the most isolated and friendless would have seen at least one or two news reports, especially of the spectacular later killings in France.
So if Julia wanted someone to confirm her theory, Marcel Barnier was the only one, because he was the only one left — yet he wasn’t replying. Perhaps, therefore, she should just go there? And see him? It had worked before. Yes, perhaps she would go there, when she had broken open the intellectual puzzle.
And on the third day she did it, she cracked it: she had her theory. Standing back from her laptop, which she was using in the hotel lobby, as the cleaners made their daily yet farcically halfhearted attempts to clean her room of forty years of Soviet grime, Julia almost gloated. It was just three pages of thoughts. But it was the truth. Or at least her version of the truth, a truth that had been entombed in the past for decades and, in some senses, centuries.
It was the Gospel of the Ice Age. It was the Spiritual Confession of Mankind, written on cave walls thirty thousand years ago.
Julia had, for the first time in her life, completed something: finished a journey, made that amazing discovery; she had restored an extraordinary thesis to the world. The fifteen-year-old girl still inside her, the girl who almost wept at the terrible Hands of Gargas, was exultant, and gloating, and almost happy, despite it all, because of it all. She smiled quietly to herself.
“Spasibo.” Julia accepted the bill from the lobby waiter for her canned, sweetened orange juice. Then she got up, walked across the tram-clanging boulevard to the Internet café, and booked the next flight from Adler to Moscow, and then from Moscow to Bangkok. She had just enough cash left in her savings for a few more flights and cheap hotels. She was going to use this money, the last penny if necessary, to see Barnier, whether he wanted to see her or not. This was her life, her moment. After this nothing seemed to matter; if she ran out of cash, who cared? Not her, not anymore.
A Valium let her sleep on the plane to Moscow, a Xanax let her sleep on the plane from Moscow to Bangkok. She needed energy for this confrontation: she was spiraling into the black hole of the truth, where destruction and oblivion lurked, where the killer herself might be headed — but the risk felt almost good, she was unmoored now, floating on the tidal bore, surfing her success to the mouth of the river. Gloriously free.
Maybe the gravity in all this was her own pride, dragging her to danger. But she was proud. As the Thai Airways plane landed at Bangkok she woke from a dream of herself receiving a prize for a great discovery. The man giving her the prize was her father. Then Rouvier. Then Alex. Her mother was apparently locked out of the Nordic hall. The walls of the hall were covered with paintings of huge cats.
“Sawadeekap! Thai Airways would like to thank you…”
She stirred herself: stashing her new clothes in the holdall, grabbing her laptop, filing out of the plane and exiting customs. The heat outside the airport was welcome, a wet cocoon of humidity. After the chilly, stale dankness of Sukhumi, this rich tropical Siamese closeness was better.
A cab? She got a taxi from Suvarnabhumi Airport, into the city.
Julia stared across the elevated highway at the myriad skyscrapers as they sped into town: Bangkok, it seemed, was another lusty and furious Asian megalopolis, with wild high-rises and huge elevated freeways and vast adverts for Japanese cars and English-language schools and South Korean TVs.
And Bangkok also had the answer to everything. Perhaps.
“You say Soi Sick?” The cabbie was talking. “Soi Sick, Sukhumvit? Near Sukhumvit?”
“Yes. I think so. Soi, er yes, Soi Six.”
She mumbled to a stop. What if the address on the card wasn’t correct?
She had no choice.
“Sorry, sorry, lady, I pay money.”
The cabdriver was handing over cash at a tollbooth, but when the gate opened they merely inched ahead: they’d hit the real urban traffic, the cholesterol of Asian prosperity. The cab stopped again and started again, slowed and stopped. The endless traffic massed, and moved, and slowed, like an organic process, peristalsis.
She gazed across the city. Again. Flashes of distant lightning zagged silently between the skyscrapers and the imperious Hitachi adverts: a storm over the Gulf of Thailand.
Then at last the traffic parted and the taxi swooped left and over a disused railway track, and now they were in the florid and gristly urbanity of central Bangkok, with the street-side kebab stalls, the upmarket European shops, the amputees lying outside British pubs, sushi bars, Bookazine outlets, French restaurants, and enormous marble megahotels squeezed between Bangladeshi tailors and Chinese jewelry shops.
“Soi Sick! No Soi Eight? You sure? Sure-sure?”
The cabdriver’s smiling Thai face was a wry question.
She repeated her answer: “Yes, Soi Six.”
The taxi swerved right, down Soi Nana, the commercial sex district. Middle-aged Western and Japanese men sat with unfeasibly teenage girls outside bars pounding the Rolling Stones and AC/ DC into the twilit street. Female flesh exhibited itself everywhere, languid, brown, sheened and exposed. Painted toenails. Vivid lipstick. Girls from Isaan ate fried cockroaches and fried beetles and sweetened coconut rice with chunks of fresh mango.
It was dark now, and the streets were bright. Julia saw Coyote Bars. Man4man Massage. Lolita Sauna. Bangcockney Pub.
Pachara Suites. Right in the middle of the red-light district.
“Here,” said Julia, the tension accelerating with her pulse. She alighted and tipped the taxi driver.
Pachara Suites was a gleaming, thirty-story condominium, with elegant slate fountains and a wall-eyed man begging outside using a Yum Yum noodle jar as a cup. The man’s blind eye looked like a mung bean.