Colin Cotterill - Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

"Camus," said Daeng, her voice crumbling like river salt.

"That's right. It was gone. Plus a notebook he kept. I don't know whether he'd taken his travel documents to the embassy with him but they weren't there either. I was lost.

At first I felt outrage. How dare they do this to us? I decided that anger might be the key. Beasts respond to violence. I went down to reception. I made a lot of noise. Kicked over a pot or two. Insisted on talking to a senior official. Insisted on a translator. But, of course, nobody could understand me. When I tried to leave the hotel, the guards grabbed me roughly and spat some insults at me. I looked into their eyes, Daeng, and I saw my death. And I saw the death of others. I saw it so clearly it was as if I had already been killed. I went back to my own room and wedged a chair against the door knob. I was afraid. My legs were shaking. I was afraid for Siri but I was afraid for myself, too. I thought they'd be coming for me. If Siri was up to something they were sure to think I was involved. I didn't grab a gun and hold it to the head of one of my captors…"

Civilai's eyes had become as grey and damp as the evening clouds above them.

"That's what heroes do," he went on. "But I crept to my bed with the light blazing and I lay there all night wide awake. I lay there quivering like a coward. I considered all the things they might do to me. I'd seen the look of fear in Ambassador Kavinh's eyes. I had no weapon, only one last resort. They said they had no use for money but I didn't believe them. And I had dollars. At least I thought I did. I hadn't checked my secret stash. I took the bag into the bathroom and locked the door. I sat on the tile floor and couldn't stop my hands from shaking. It was half an hour before I was calm enough to peel through the layers of cloth in the strap of my satchel. And that's when I found the letter. It consisted of three single sheets. They had been folded and refolded into a three-centimetre square and wedged into a little plastic coin bag. Somebody had put it into my secret dollar compartment but they hadn't touched the money."

"Siri," said Mrs Nong.

"He's the only one it could have been," Civilai agreed. "The only one who knew. I thought about the footprints and the picked lock and I imagined he'd found his way back into the hotel somehow and come to leave me the note. That's what I wanted to believe. But the sheets were written in Khmer. The handwriting appeared to be from three or four different sources with signatures at the end of each segment. The last side comprised of musical notes on uneven, handwritten bars. What looked like lyrics were written below. It all meant nothing to me. I wanted to scream my frustration."

"Calm down, brother," said Madame Daeng. Mrs Nong had hold of her husband's hand. It trembled as he recalled that awful night. "There really was nothing you could have done."

"There was so much I didn't understand," Civilai went on. "If he'd found his way back to the hotel, why didn't he come down to the reception? Surely with so many people around he would have been safer than wandering alone through Phnom Penh. I had far too much time to think. I refused to go on their ridiculous irrigation tour the next morning. I told the guide I'd been asked to pay my respects to the Chinese ambassador. Of course it was out of the question. So I stayed in my room until it was time to board the flight to Peking. Even before we took off I was hustling the Chinese on board. I found one woman, one of the official journalists. She spoke Vietnamese poorly. During the flight I did my best to convey to her everything I knew and everything I didn't. She passed my story on to the Chinese delegation. Once we landed, at last I was able to agitate. I still carried a little clout in China from my politburo days. Some people remembered me. The Lao ambassador to Peking came to see me and together we went to the central committee where I repeated my story in the presence of an official Lao-Chinese interpreter. The committee members seemed, not upset exactly, more…frustrated. Like the parents of a naughty child."

"Would the Khmer listen to the Chinese anyway?" Daeng asked. Her voice was calm but not even her tightly clasped hands could disguise the shaking.

"They're the only people they would listen to. All their funding, all their weapons, all their credibility…it all comes from China. Their influence is enormous there."

"So enormous they could bring the dead back to life?" Daeng asked.

"Now, stop that," said Mrs Nong. "They aren't going to harm a delegate from an allied country. The worst that can happen is they arrest Siri for stepping out of bounds and put him in prison. They want to be seen to be strong. With Chinese intervention they'd have him out in no time. Right, Civilai?"

Her husband's face didn't convey the confidence she'd hoped for.

"What of the note?" Daeng asked. "The Khmer letter."

"We found a translator," he told her. "There's no shortage of Khmer royalists holed up in Peking. The Chinese like to hold on to different factions from this or that country and offer them immunity. They collect them like elaborate chess pieces in case they might come back into play somewhere along the line. They've got old Sihanouk sitting — "

"Civilai!" said Nong.

"Yes, right. Right. The translation. I'm not sure, as it stands, if it could be called evidence and I don't get the feeling the Chinese were particularly surprised by its content. But it made a lasting impression on the ambassador and myself. It was written by officials at the old royalist Ministry of Communication. They wrote of atrocities they'd witnessed and their treatment at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. I suppose it can be best summed up by the words of one young man, the one who wrote the song. He said his name was Bo something-or-other. His note was dated April the twenty-first, 1975. He was a musician and a junior official at the ministry. He said that he and many of his colleagues were patriots and that they remained at their posts even after the invasion in the hope that they could offer their expertise to the liberation forces. At first, the revolutionaries were kind to them and welcomed them into the new brotherhood. Bo and his fellows explained their work and taught the newcomers the skills they needed to operate equipment.

"On the second day of occupation the troops took the managers for what they called reorientation. They told the juniors it was necessary to teach them the ways of the new regime. Bo said he heard gunshots every day and night, not from a battle but from what sounded like firing squads or single shots. The young soldiers wouldn't let them leave the ministry building to go home to their families. Bo said that the Khmer Rouge were not like them. They were country people who had never seen cars. Never had electricity. It was as if they saw Bo and his kind as the enemy and Bo began to realise his life would be a short one. That was when he began to collect the testimonies and signatures.

"On the third day he watched them shoot his office mate in the forehead for no apparent reason. The guards left the corpse sitting there at his desk as a 'reminder'. Bo's final words were that he loved his country and he believed that this was a temporary madness, but he felt sure he would never see his fiancee again. She lived in Battambang and he prayed that the insanity hadn't yet spread that far. He wrote that his only regret was that he would never be able to watch the expression on her face as he sang her the song he had written for their wedding. "It's a poor substitute," he wrote, "but I have written the tune and the melody on the rear of this note. If somebody finds this letter, I would like her to hear it. I would like her to know how much I love her. And I would like the world to know what craziness has descended on our beautiful city. These people are not Cambodian."