Lawrence Osborne - Hunters in the Dark

“You can try it for a week and see if you like it,” the manager said gallantly.

“I don’t think I won’t like it.”

He went back out onto Street 102 and he saw at once glimmers of welding torches high up within the skeleton of the half-built skyscraper rising on the far side of the street. The Hangul characters burned into the plastic sheets that covered the building, undulating slightly as the elements tormented them. So they didn’t stop work even for a storm or a blackout. They found a way to keep slaving for their masters.

The same driver was waiting for Robert and the tuk-tuk wheeled around in the great scummy pool that still divided the hotel from the rest of the street. Seeing which, the staff had a low laugh as they lay on the hoods of the cars parked under the trees. It was not a difficult laugh to understand. There was a magisterial tolerance and indifference in it, as well as centuries of clandestine observation. As Robert clambered into the tuk-tuk, moreover, the driver turned with exactly the same laugh and said, with an iron evenness, “Boum boum, mistah?”

He arrived back there earlier than he had predicted and on that now dry street swarms of dragonflies played around the clumps of weeds and the still-damp datura. Like the day itself, the hotel seemed completely different. The ground-floor restaurant was serving its bistro lunch and the old pool was filled with paunchy white people who appeared to be on some kind of antagonistic holiday. His room was not yet ready and he sat by the pool windows and ordered a steak and fries with a glass of Coke and kept his shades on because he had slept badly and his eyes were fragile.

The men out in the pool all had shaved heads, the concentration camp look, with tattoos hard-edged on painfully white skin. The girls were immensely fat and arrogant and loud, and carrying much the same tattoos though on different parts of their bodies. They disported themselves through those blue waves like elephant seals, and the Asians coolly dressed at the restaurant in their pressed white shirts and cufflinks looked at them with a kind of despairing amazement and a quiet certainty that the economic decline of these beasts was somehow legible in the obscure codes of their tattoos and the weight of their belly fat. They were no longer the lean aggressors and masters of yesteryear. Robert felt the same way.

He ate his steak slowly then ordered a tarte tatin and a double espresso since he no longer had to worry about money, at least for a few days. The day manager then came to his table and said that his room was now ready, and left the key politely on the table. She asked him if he had any luggage and he shook his head and said something about having his things brought on from somewhere else. She nodded and wished him a pleasant stay, then turned as she was about to move off and asked him how long he was going to stay. He said he hadn’t decided but at least a week. Afterward he would see. It was all that needed to be said.

While he enjoyed his coffee, he called a few more of the numbers he had taken from the Language Tuition site and set up some more private lessons as best he could. There was a Khmer lawyer who offered him a few hours a week and a female musician who needed English to write songs. It didn’t seem that difficult to make a few bucks doing this sort of thing and he calculated that with five or six clients combined with the generous Dr. Sar he could do quite well for himself.

All it needed was time and patience and application. He already knew how to teach, it was second nature to him. It was a city where people didn’t ask many questions, certainly not as many as Dr. Sar had asked.

He would not need to repeat his performance of the previous evening. He could sense that it was like a giant wall of coral through which thousands of mutually ignorant fish swarmed night and day going about their secrets and evasions. There was no surveillance here, very little police presence and almost no puritanical curiosity or disapproval. The Khmers, thankfully, didn’t seem to be driven by a tormenting and malicious need to know everything about their curious visitors, the barangs whom they found faintly ridiculous but undeniably lucrative. The core Occidental principles of nosiness and constant outrage were not their thing. They simply went about their lives without mentally harassing everything and everyone around them. They lived in their coral and tormented each other in different ways, no doubt, but their history had at least taught them the terror of destroying privacy and individuality. With Westerners, it was going in exactly the opposite direction. In the body language of the human seals, with its lack of discretion and tact, you could see the retreat of privacy and the individual. It was curious.

He went up to his room unnoticed. On the landings he paused and glanced down the tiled corridors at the rows of doors and the garden tables on the balconies where the more discreet Chinese girls liked to sunbathe with their books. It was like a hotel where people spent their whole lives instead of a few days. The unit was right under the roof and there was a smell of disuse about it. He went in, turned on the AC and the single fan and waited for the two rooms to cool down. It was obvious no one had occupied it in weeks. Why then had he waited for it to be readied? While the place cooled he wandered up to the roof. There was a Jacuzzi there and a small ornamental garden. It looked over a good portion of the city, including the nearby fortified American embassy. The scraps of park burning in the afternoon heat with their piles of scattered refuse, the radio towers and the Hangul characters of the skyscraper where the welders were still hard at work. A single white girl lay on a sunbed under the little frangipanis, her face covered and oblivious to his presence. It was a genial hideout for him. He went back to his room, locked the door and unpacked a bag of groceries which he had bought earlier in the morning at the Sorya Mall.

Cartons of lychee juice, shampoo, soap, paper towels and both razors and a pair of scissors. He had also bought some cheap local hair dye in a dark blond color. He showered and then dried off and began to cut his hair carefully with the scissors. He cut his fringe straight and then shortened the hair around his ears. He mixed the two elements of the dye in the washbasin and applied the emulsion with a toothbrush to the top of his hair, making streaks which he toned down by rubbing them at once with a towel. He went back into the shower, washed off and waited for the hair to dry. It came out a dull blond-brown which was what he wanted. A gradual, barely noticeable change. Then he clipped his eyebrows.

He looked again at the label on the back of the shirt Simon had given him and he saw, as before, that it was a place called Vong with the street number. Street 200. It should be easy to find.

At five he left the Mansions and walked across Kossamak and the Freedom Park toward the street market at the far end. He walked in the direction of the river and then turned south onto the quay. He had decided to spend thirty dollars on two new shirts and when he was abreast of the hustle-bustle streets behind the river he turned into 130 and wandered aimlessly until he was on Street 19. Here he caught a motodop and told him to go to Street 200. It was a quiet street with little to recommend it. There was a row of cream-colored shophouses with metal grilles and above them balconies with plants. He quickly spotted the sign for Vong that he was looking for. It was next to another tailor called Beary. He had not stopped to think why he was going to the place where Simon had gone. It was more a dark curiosity than a rational move. He went in, and a Viet man of about seventy rose from a newspaper, a glass of tea and a pipe. There was, of course, no recognition in his eyes but neither was there any surprise. Robert simply said, “Are you Vong?” and the man said that he was. There were Vietnamese calendars all over the walls and a blood-red Buddha in the corner with electric candles. Bales of cloth stood in the shadows with colored pins stuck into them.