Lawrence Osborne - Hunters in the Dark

“You might get hit by a pot of paint.”

Sar was now carefully measuring the English boy. His tone, the way he paced his sentences. He was not as obvious as he had at first appeared. There were thin, layered depths to him. There was something about him that was affected and forced. His accounts of himself were not quite true. But they were not sufficiently false for the doctor to dismiss him out of hand. He was playing a role, but Sar felt tolerant toward those who played a role. He had had to play many roles himself during the terrible years. It was survival, and the roles a man assumed in order to survive did not seem to him a capital offense. Robert (or Simon to him) had level and transparent eyes that gave the lie to some of the less trustworthy things coming out of his mouth. Should one trust the eyes then? His father had always told him that the eyes never lie.

He disguised his thoughts, however.

“Now let’s drink to making Sophal speak perfect English in a matter of weeks.”

“Maybe she should meet me first,” Robert said.

“She’ll like you well enough. I do.”

It was a promising start, and when they went out into the now-thunderous afternoon the doctor called a tuk-tuk for him, paid the driver upfront and said that they would expect him the following evening at eight.

“Don’t bring anything, Simon. Just yourself.”

“I will and I won’t.”

“The girls will be thrilled to meet you.”

Maybe they would be. The doctor had his own car and Robert rode in the tuk-tuk as far as the Paris then went up to his room and slept for an hour. The city was now sweltering and sunless but his mood was up. He had a good feeling about his prospects, which only a few hours ago had seemed as dark and uncertain as could be. His luck had turned. Luck always turned. He slept as if drunk. Thunder in the afternoon. Rain swept in while he was unconscious, beating down the dust and the people slipping under the trees. At six in the evening the electricity went off in all the streets around Kampuchea Krom and the roads overflowed with caramel water. He opened his eyes and felt happy. A drifter always knows when he has drifted far enough from the system to feel the thrill of surviving against the odds. The flood when it came would see him float like one of those little paper boats that even children know how to make.

The deluge lasted all night and through the following day. It was hardly worth getting up and he spent most of the day in bed reading the Herald Tribune and drinking from a bottle of Royal Stag which he had bought on the street for a few dollars. He lay there naked with his clothes hung on wires to keep them clean and uncreased. The city, meanwhile, sank into a premodern gloom hour by hour, fragile and beautiful as it seemed to diminish into a lacework of newly created canals. When he went down to the lobby to buy some fried rice at the restaurant he saw the girls sitting glumly on the stairs with their iPhones, texting and chatting with nothing to do. The rooms were stifling. Yet the street was fresh with a menacing wind. The tuk-tuks still raced along them like boats, spewing dirty water on either side and the drivers laughing it off.

He took one, eventually. Robert leaned over and handed the driver Dr. Sar’s business card with the address printed on it, a numbered street off Norodom Boulevard, and the driver handed it back to him with a nod. Water roared against their doors as they set off in entirely the wrong direction, eventually coming to the Wat Phnom, which was marooned in a virtual lake. The American embassy was high and dry to one side and at the unsubmerged street corners people stood in plastic capes stoically waiting for Noah’s flood to recede. They went past the generator lights of the Sunway Hotel and then crossed the little bridge by Street 106. Here by long park lawns and trees the sudden darkness was even stranger. On the bridge a few people also stood under beaten-down umbrellas paralyzed by the sudden disappearance of light and the pools emerging within the lawns behind the Phsa Reatrey market. The power had still not come back on by the time they reached Norodom.

The usual illumination of that immense French street had been knocked out and the crowds had scattered with the downpour. They went down what was now a half-empty boulevard plunged in gloom, with restored villas and ruins alike behind high walls and sugar palms. The gardens were suddenly more magnificent than the houses they served. They splashed through the corners where the traffic hesitated in the dark and careered to miss collisions. The people standing there had taken off their shoes and carried them in one hand. It was as if they didn’t know what to do now with a lightless night. Tramp through it and hope for fun, soldier on and pray that nothing went wrong before first light? What did one do here when the lights went off and the streets became like this — hushed and ancient and the trees suddenly remarkable?

They crossed the traffic circle around the monument. On its far side, Norodom continued. The streets became quieter, perceptibly more refined. At the corner of Street 334 they turned but only for a moment: the house occupied the entire corner. Behind cypresses and palms a dark yellow European house rose up with trims of white stucco. There was an ironwork gate with an electric bell, but none of the lights were on and it was hard to see anything clearly. The potential absurdity of the situation was suddenly obvious to Robert. It was possible that they had not been able to call him. He got out nevertheless and paid the driver and the man simply parked the tuk-tuk there on 334 and said he would wait for him. It was a narrow street darkened by spreading trees. Outside the villas of the affluent stood sentry boxes with all-night guards. The wall of the adjoining property was a dark and somehow menacing red.

“There’s no need to wait,” Robert said.

“No, I wait.”

“I don’t want you to wait.”

“But I will wait. I wait here.” What will you do if I do not wait ? his face said.

It was true.

Robert turned, walked up to the gate on Norodom and rang the bell, the cascade of water slithering down his back. He could see a loggia of some kind with potted palms, a lone chain lamp suspended above it. The garden hissed with cicadas. To his surprise the door opened and a maid stood there holding a candle in a glass cage in one hand. She was old but subtly elegant in that small circle of light and behind her he could see the shadowed, unlit house with candles flickering inside it.

“The power is off,” she said sweetly, “but the doctor and his family are waiting for you inside. It’s going to be a candlelit dinner.”

She led him up a brick path under takien trees and the closer they got to the house the brighter the candlelit windows seemed. As the door opened he heard music, a piano being played quite well, and the doctor’s quick, rippling, girlish laughter. The Sars were sitting in their front room, among their Khmer antiques. At the far end of the room the piano was being played by their daughter. Kinderszenen, he was sure.

He tensed and then resolved to be suave and calm. To be Simon, in effect. The room was lit with dozens of tea-light candles and there was a table set for four with painted terracotta dishes and a decanter of red wine that looked as if it had stewed badly in the oppressive heat. The windows were open in the hope of catching wet breezes, but the air inside the room had come to a numbing standstill and he felt his hands burst with perspiration. The doctor got up and a tall, thin woman next to him did the same and as they rose together the alarming difference in height between them made itself known.

—