Julia found the glossy lobby deserted — she heard, too audibly, the squelching of her sneaker soles as she walked to the faraway elevator. Eighteen floors above, and down another long, bright, empty hallway, she located the door. She knocked.
Silence. An eyehole opened for a second, then occluded. Was someone behind the door? Checking her out? Or was this someone else? Was this the most absurd chase of a very wild goose?
Julia knocked again.
The eyehole shut. A latch was turned.
Finally the door opened, just an inch: the door was secured with three chains. An oldish, intelligent face peered out. Julia recognized an aged version of the young smile in the Phnom Penh photo.
It was Marcel Barnier.
His wild liverish eyes looked at Julia. He was holding a long knife in his hand. But as he absorbed what he was seeing, he seemed to relax. The faint trace of a pout glistened on his wet lips. A gourmet’s air kiss. Desirous.
“Fuck. Ah. You are Julia Kerrigan! The glamorous archaeologist? I Googled you. Saw your… photo. Yes. Yes, yes. I got your e-mails. Forgive me for not replying, but… Why the hell did the doorman let you through?”
“Uh.”
“Why? I told him not to. Was he not there?”
“No.”
“Fuck.” The face concealed behind the door swore twice, and sighed. “Fucking noodle head, Supashok. They shoulda kept the last doorman. Ai. Maybe he went for a pipi. OK…”
Dropping the knife on a table to his side, he unlatched one chain, then the second, then the third. He opened the door and gazed at her creased jeans and jet-lagged face.
“You understand that I am being very fucking careful. Come in.”
“Thank you.”
Nervous, hopeful, quite terrified, she stepped inside.
The apartment was in chaos. Cardboard boxes sat on the floor, full of books and paintings. Furniture was partly dismantled and stacked against the wall. Half-empty bottles of Johnnie Walker and completely empty bottles of Jacobs Creek Grenache Shiraz stood on tables and in corners next to copiously overfilled ashtrays.
“I am moving. Yes. And yes, I am an alcoholic. For reasons I am sure you understand. To escape, to save my life. I used to escape through fucking liquor, now I have to escape for real.”
He looked in Julia’s eyes.
She nodded and said, “I think I know why.”
“That’s good. That’s good-good. Save a lot of horseshit talking.”
His French accent had been entirely erased and replaced by a kind of coarse, slangy, slightly bizarre Anglo-American-Oriental English; his breath smelled of whiskey and cigarettes and garlic. Presumably, decades of living out here, speaking the only Western language anyone understood, English, had beaten the Frenchness out of him.
“You look stressed. Very charming, but stressed. Ah ah. We can have a fucking drink, no? The fridge will be the last thing I empty.” He laughed, angrily. “But so what — I like a drink, it keeps me cheerful. What is it they say about the French, a Frenchman is an Italian in a bad mood? Hah. Ein bier, meine freunde? I will have wine!”
Julia said yes. Barnier laughed again and slipped into his kitchen and returned with a beer and a glass. He looked at her inquisitively as she sipped the Tiger beer.
“You want to know everything I know. Yeah?”
“Well. As I also said, um, I have some ideas of my own. I wanted to see if I was…” The beer was refreshingly cold. She drank. “See if I was right.”
“The great mystery? Maybe we can inform each other, ma bichette. Trouble is, I do not know everything. You may know more than me.” Wariness and mischief and anxiety mixed in his gaze. “But maybe not. Maybe I know quite enough already. And someone ought to hear my story, before I escape.” He gestured at the boxes. He took a glass of red wine from somewhere and swallowed a huge gulp. He lit a cigarette and said, “So, ask me your questions.”
“But. It needs time. And you seem, sorry, I mean — you must be very on edge. When are you going to go?”
Barnier paused, and exhaled smoke, before he answered. He slurped once more at the wine and ogled Julia’s blond hair. His own hair was thin and brownish gray; his clothes were relaxed and youthful, though not in the embarrassing way of Ghislaine: just jeans and a gray T-shirt, stained with drops of red wine. Loafers. No socks. A suntan. A man keeping himself reasonably in shape apart from the alcohol. But the face was frightened and the lips were stained red with tannin.
Then he said: “I’m going. Somewhere, very soon, where that witch of a killer, that krasue, won’t find me. I have read all the newspaper reports. I have read the shitty police e-mails, but not replied. I do not trust anyone. Fuck. ’Course I am on edge. She’s coming for me — here.”
Julia said, “Do you know who she is? The killer?”
“No. Not exactly.”
“Do you know why she is killing all these people?”
“Revenge!” Barnier tapped ash, and stared at her with a sudden expression of deep and existential fear. He was scared. He was really and visibly scared. But then the bravado returned. “Yes, it is revenge — it is surely revenge — for the poor Khmer millions we helped to destroy. And I cannot blame them, you know? That is the poignancy. I cannot blame them. The fucking things we did, the Marxists, us, me, Danny the Red and the rest of us, all the reds now in socialist governments across Europe, we gave the Khmer Rouge succor, we told the world their lies, we were their useful idiots, maybe we fucking deserve to die. But if I am gonna die then I am gonna die happy. Do not go gentle into that good night, but rage, rage, and order some hookers and blow.” His eyes flicked around the room. “Come. You are right. If we want to talk, let us do it in a good place, somewhere safe, somewhere there are pretty girls. More pretty girls. And these are naked. We can have lady drink short time. You know you are not the first person to come and see me today. I am suddenly an attraction, a destination, a tourist honeypot.”
“How?”
“A girl from Cambodia. Chemda Tek. And her boyfriend, Jake… Jake something. A photographer. A Brit.” He belched smoke. Profanely. “They found me this morning. They, too, are frightened. They are also pursuing these mysteries. I told them to go away for a while ’cause I must pack, and I told ’em I would meet them in a bar this evening, a nice busy bar with lots of witnesses. It’s at Soi Cowboy.” He dropped his cigarette butt in his glass of wine. The cigarette whispered and died. “I have a feeling no woman would ever just walk into this bar alone, so we should be safe. C’mon, ’s go. Because staying here feels like sitting, waiting to die, a target.”
“Who are they? These people, what do they want?”
“I am not totally fucking sure. I was drunk when they told me. Hey, it was eleven a. m. Let them explain, non? Come, if we are to talk we might as well all do it together. Somewhere safe. This way, moumoune.”
They took the long elevator ride to the ground floor, then a short walk around the corner, then ten minutes down thrumming Sukhumvit Boulevard, with Barnier gazing down each junction as if he expected to be run over — or attacked — at every junction; and then they crossed the Asok walkways, whereupon they were immersed in another sex-district strip of the most garish neon, with go go bars and massage parlors and love hotels and small baby elephants carrying drunken Western boys on a stag weekend who threw hopeful leers at the harlots enticing them into Sheba’s and Suzie Wong.
The bar they apparently wanted was called Baccara. It was luridly advertised in scarlet light, and inside it was dark and noisy and big and full of Japanese men staring at a central stage where maybe thirty or forty nubile girls were dancing in gauzy bras and equally transparent miniskirts.