Tom Knox - Bible of the Dead

‘I got hold of people in Phnom Penh! They confirmed it all… our presence in the Plain of Jars. We’re OK, Jake, we’re OK.’

It was true. The mood had altered. Significantly. It hadn’t entirely improved. But it had changed. Apparently some temporary satisfaction had been achieved. The thin officer sat back, and stared angrily but quietly through the grubby window. Chairs were set back. Hands were cursorily shaken.

The English-speaking officer escorted them from his office. As he did he told them they were free to go, but only free to leave the police station. He wanted them to remain within Ponsavanh itself, until his initial investigations were concluded.

At the door to the street the English-speaking policeman rewarded them with a terse and sinister grin. ‘So. I think your bus tour is over. This is a murder case. I believe you do well to remember this . Laos is not Cambodia. Sabaydee. ’

After six hours of questioning, they walked down the police station steps, into the dusty whirl of Ponsavanh.

Muddy pick up trucks were ferrying sandalled farm workers down the main street. Girls with inclined eyes, wearing brightly coloured jerkins adorned with silver coins on chains, were smiling at shops full of Chinese snacks and tiny bananas; ‘I need a coffee,’ said Jake, ‘Jesus Christ. How much do I need a coffee’.

Chemda nodded. ‘There is a cafe down here, in the market.’ They crossed the whirling main street; the shattered concrete of the roads and pavements led to a carless square – full of people. And tables. And chattering traders. And flies.

Many of the tables and counters were shaded from the sunshine by battered roofs of zinc; the tables were laid out with local food and game: dead wildcats, owls, strangled stoats, and small jungle dogs, their teeth wild and snarling even in death; there were bottles of yellow-and-black hornets pickled in vinegar, stinking riverfish on counters of blood-tinged ice, and piles of slaughtered field rats. Jake was used to the extraordinary fecundity and exoticism of Southeast Asian eating habits; he had never seen piles of rats before.

Chemda sat down at the rickety market cafe table, and glanced at Jake, as he gazed across the market aisle at the heaped-up piles of brown rats.

‘Field rats,’ she said. Her voice was thick with exhaustion. ‘They are famous here. I mean, as far as rats go, these are top notch. You can’t get a better rat in Laos.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Jake, smiling at her brave if tired attempt at humour. But the blood in the muzzles of the slaughtered rats reminded him of the blood on the floor, the blood of the dead Cambodian still in the tread of his boots. Ghastly.

‘What just happened? Did Tou really kill him? I don’t get it.’

She stared down at the grain of her elegantly narrow indigo jeans, now dusty and smudged. She shook her head, and hid her eyes with a poetic gesture, like the cultured shyness of an Angkor princess.

At last she dropped her hand, and spoke.

‘Can we sit in the sun?’

They shifted down the pewlike benches of the cafe into the light; the sun, Jake noticed, was actually strong, sharpened by upland cold – but strong. Healing. Warming. They both turned their tired faces to the heat and said nothing for a second, absorbing.

Then she said:

‘It can’t be Tou. It just can’t. He was, ah, part of the team.’

‘But he’s run away.’

Chemda shrugged. She had taken off her grey and tailored leather jacket, he noticed the slenderness of her topaz brown shoulders.

‘He’s scared. He is Hmong.’

‘OK…’

‘And he has contacts with other Hmong of course, which is why we employed him. The Hmong have been helping us. Because this is Hmong country: they know the Plain better than anyone. They farm the rice paddies, they slash and burn the forests. They also know which areas are, ah, too risky, too saturated with unexploded ordnance. Of course that is – that was – pretty important for our work.’

‘He rang you last night – trying to get through. But why…’ Jake was trying to puzzle it out. Something was jarring, incongruent. A shard of memory like a piece of grit in a shoe. Chemda interrupted his thoughts:

‘They really don’t want us here Jake. As I said. And a murder case gives them a great excuse to make things extremely uncomfortable. It took the UN ages to get permission for this investigation in the first place. Now they have the whip hand. You noticed they didn’t take our passports? It’s because they want us to quit, to go. To give up and fly home. That was his hint about Laos – you heard it? “ This is not Cambodia”. Ahh.’ Her sigh was brief. And unsentimental. And somehow undefeated.

Jake sat back. Their coffees had arrived, two chipped little cups of thick blackness, plus a tin of condensed sweetened milk already pierced and bubbling. Jake dribbled the viscous milk in his coffee; Chemda wanted hers black.

They drank, quietly.

A man across the market was holding a chunk of honeycomb. It looked like a thick slice of intensely rotted wood. The man was digging into each cell of the hive-slice with a finger, and retrieving a wriggling blob of whiteness. A larva. The man popped the white living larva in his mouth, munching and smiling, chasing it with slugs of Doctor Pepper from a can. Then he winkled out another, and ate it.

Something slotted in Jake’s mind. He looked at Chemda, and said:

‘You think they did it. Don’t you? The cops.’

Her eyes met his, halfway.

‘Yes.’ She frowned: ‘Because of the way he died.’

‘Why? It was a brutal death. But how does that prove it was the cops?’

‘You never read the stories, of what the Khmer Rouge did in Tuol Sleng?’

‘S21.’ He said. ‘The torture garden. Absolutely. I know the history. Horrific. But maybe I missed… some details.’

She gazed across the cafe seats. The market was closing up; dried rats lollipopped on wooden sticks were being piled in cardboard boxes. Then she spoke:

‘I have read two accounts of some experiments there. Accounts verified by the guy who ran the camp.’

‘Comrade Duch.’

‘Yes. Comrade Duch. Apparently, in Tuol Sleng they used to tie prisoners to iron beds, and they would attach pumps to them, and then drain every… drop of blood from their bodies. They wanted the blood for Khmer Rouge soldiers, but they turned it into, ah, a form of torture, a sadistic game.’

Jake was sweating, the sun was directly overhead, the hard plateau sun. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, as she elaborated.

‘They drained all the blood from these chained prisoners, just to see what would happen. Over many hours they took out all the blood until not a drop was left, the prisoners would writhe and gasp, someone described them as sounding like rasping crickets at the end, gasping, stridulating, croaking like insects as they died.’

Chemda looked briefly away, gazing at two barefoot boys sucking on the bloodstained ice from the fish counters; then she turned her dark serious eyes on him.

Jake spoke:

‘Grotesque. Truly grotesque. But why repeat that experiment on Samnang? ’

‘It’s a message . Someone is giving me, us, ah, a message. To scare us or warn us, or remind us of the horrors of Pol Pot. I don’t know. But Tou wouldn’t know any of this, and anyway if he wanted to kill Samnang he wouldn’t do it so bizarrely. But it surely cannot be coincidence: no one dies like that, as horribly as that, for no good reason. They are trying to scare me away. Ah. Because they know what I do – investigate the Khmer Rouge and their barbarities. They want me to give up. But I’m not giving up .’