Lawrence Osborne - Hunters in the Dark

It was not as perfunctory as she had been expecting, and she didn’t care either way. She wanted to know something about him that could not be obtained in any other way. It had not been that long since she was running alone through the sugarcane and when she had run about half a mile she had stopped and crouched and waited until the unknown figure appeared at the trench where Simon lay and calmly smoked a cigarette. Even from such a distance his face was unforgettable and when she saw it again she felt a nauseating surprise but no real astonishment.

He paid and took his shower and came back to the bed.

She said, “Where are you staying?”

He told her and even gave her his apartment number. The implication was that she could come and visit him any time she liked.

“Maybe I’ll come by then,” she said.

“It’s better than me coming here. I don’t like these places.” The slight disdain in his voice enraged her.

He rose and got dressed and she did the same. She had what she wanted, but she was not sure why she wanted it. She didn’t know yet how she was going to use it.

Fifty dollars was left on the bed.

Picking the money up, she escorted him to the stairs, where the rain was now pouring in uncontrollable torrents.

“That was very nice,” he said humbly.

“You’re welcome. Do you have a phone number I can call you on?”

“I got a new number yesterday.”

When she had taken it down she kissed him on the cheek and told him to be careful in the flooded streets, making it clear that she wouldn’t come down to the pavement with him. Davuth stumbled into the rain and saw that the tuk-tuk had patiently waited for him, the driver huddled between the plastic flaps with a soaked newspaper. That night, he slept beautifully and his dreams were not even the usual nightmares — just the elegant forms of Viking longships and the mountains of stone and wild grass through which the cataracts of Scandinavia fall like those of Hawaii or Java.

—

The next day he took the unit at Colonial Mansions and passed the morning sitting at the balcony with his smokes. The unit was furnished and there was nothing to worry about. No one remembered him from his previous visit, not even the boy who had shown him around. People were so unobservant; they missed every passing clue. By midday the Englishman had not shown up and Davuth walked instead to Vong.

The tailor was at his table and Davuth had no trouble being affable and quick-talking with him. He gave Vong a facile line about meeting a young Englishman in a bar who had recommended him.

“I’m sure you remember him,” he joked. “Blond and rather good-looking. I’m sure he throws his money around a bit.”

“It could be.”

“He calls himself Beauchamp and gets his clothes made here.”

“There’s one by that name who comes here. There are two of them, in fact.”

“I know all about it. Two of them. Were you not a little curious?”

“It’s none of my business, now that you mention it. Is it your business?”

“It could be my business.”

“Are you a detective?”

“That I am. One of them has run away—”

“With some money or some drugs?”

Davuth laughed in his homely way.

“I don’t know yet. Does our English friend have a lot of money to spend on clothes?”

“Not that much.”

“When was he last in?”

“Last week.”

“Colonial Mansions, isn’t it?”

“You know already.”

“But which unit?”

“It’s 102. You could always ask them.”

“That wouldn’t be very discreet.”

Davuth asked him what Beauchamp had ordered.

“Shirts, trousers. He wasn’t very particular.”

“He’s a nice young man, isn’t he?”

“As nice as they make them. The other one, though…”

“Yes, he’s a different kettle of fish. Still, they all look the same, don’t they?”

“They certainly do.”

“I feel I should order a shirt — just to say thank you.”

“Shall I measure you up?”

“No time. Maybe next time.”

Davuth looked quickly through the window into the street. His eyes shone a dark mahogany as the blue outer light hit then. The tailor felt that he had done something vile without realizing it, but it was too late. The detective was already on his way, cheerful and smooth. Vong watched him amble down the street without any pressing urgency. An odd bird, and a calculating look in his eye.

—

Davuth walked back to the Mansions and went up to the first floor. He walked down the line of doors until he was at 102. There he stopped for a moment, looked along the corridor and peered through the patterned lace curtains into a largely invisible room.

Lingering only for a moment, he carried on down the corridor then climbed up to the floor above and circled round to the opposite side, from where he could look down at the same door. His own unit was on the floor above this, the third, and from his own balcony he had a fair view of 102. How easy it had been. He went up to that balcony then and sat there for an hour and saw no one come or leave. But patience was one of his hard-won virtues. He had honed it during years of sadism and war. In soft and comfortable times its power was magnified tenfold. He could sit there for days if he had to, or even weeks. He was crocodilian and he rarely felt tired or bored: those states had been made alien to him long ago. And so he waited for the light in 102 to come on or the door to open or a tall and slender blond to appear on the landing, wearing the clothes of Simon Beauchamp, who was now dead and turned to dust.

When he did so, Davuth was not at his balcony but downstairs in the lobby, where he sat at a table by himself with a glass of Sang Som. He had asked the receptionist to go into the closed café and get him some ice for his glass and he sat there with the glass, the ice, his own bottle of Sang Som and an ashtray, placid and watchful and totally sober. The rum burned his tongue and he enjoyed its ferocity, the way it seared the inner lining of his cheeks then gave up the ghost as it slithered down his throat. The cursed rain was back and the lights around the pool were going off one by one like a city closing down for the night. He always enjoyed those moments of closure and incoming darkness and it was usually when he took to the bottle in his cold and controlled way. He was raising his glass, in fact, when Robert and Sophal came through the glass doors and swept across the lobby arm in arm. He knew at once that it was the Englishman though he was surprised to see him with a very young and attractive Khmer girl. They always managed to snag one, didn’t they? He lowered his glass and smiled at them with his eyes and they could not fail to notice him. “Good evening,” he said in English and tipped his glass as if toasting them.

“Good evening,” Robert called back and they paused for a moment before crashing through the doors into the pool area.

“So that’s what you look like,” Davuth said to himself. The boy was not as shy or furtive as he had expected, not as weak. He had no experience with the English, only a few Americans and Germans and the odd Frenchman, and most of those he had met when they were already dead. In one sense, it was the ideal way to get to know them. The dead reveal everything about themselves without any artifice, or so it seemed to Davuth.

Half an hour later they came down in their swimsuits and jumped into the uninviting water and swam to the far end, where Davuth saw they had positioned a bottle of wine. There they bobbed about drinking and laughing and caressing each other, the young in love with being young. He watched them with a detached fascination that — for a while — had nothing to do with his intentions. But, in any case, when he considered his intentions he found that he didn’t have any. He was making it up from day to day, adapting to what happened or didn’t happen, as the case might be. He could tell from their cursory glances at him (which felt distinctly downward ) that he had registered in their eyes as little more than the usual country bumpkin. It enraged him for a moment but then he settled back and admitted that in a sense they had a point and there was nothing he could do about it. That’s what he was and he minded it much less than someone else might. The Revolution, at least, had taught him not to be ashamed of his origins and he kept that feeling alive day by day, decade after decade, secretly and malignantly. The girl especially had looked at him with a sudden contempt, as if he didn’t even have the right to speak up as they walked across the lobby. “Who is he?” she would have been thinking as they climbed up to 102. That bumpkin who so insolently wished them a good evening in an English he obviously didn’t speak, alone with his cheap and tawdry Sang Som, the drink of truck drivers and policemen. That little snob had not even concealed her surprise and resentment. She didn’t even know who she was really with, in all likelihood.