Lawrence Osborne - Hunters in the Dark

As his father’s catamaran sailed quietly down to the open sea, he used to feel a kind of death wish, the urge to keep sailing across the Channel toward Dieppe and another life as a crook. It was as if when you didn’t know what to do with your life, a river could save you by making you purely unconscious. Even the way his father taught him nautical knots seemed to be a silent preparation for something furtive in the future, and his father was aware of it. When they were alone out at sea riding waves, his father asked him about his school and his friends, and everything that Robert said in reply to these questions merely served to illustrate how hopelessly alone and isolated he was. Nor did it seem that anything could be done about it. He was a lonely kid and his teachers often remarked upon the fact. He sometimes missed school altogether and went walking through the woods until it grew dark and he had to make his way home. He always lied about the reason for his lateness. “You’re a funny little bugger,” his father would say, and his bafflement was tenderly neutral. Looking back on it now, it seemed to Robert that everything had been a sign pointing to a future liberation far from his own home — because already then, all those years ago, he had been in the peculiar situation of not loving that home but of feeling that it didn’t suit him at all and never would. And so it had turned out.

Robert and Sophal parted ways by the Psar Rus and he headed back down to the river in a quiet mood, eventually turning along 106 and walking up in the drizzle alongside the lawned gardens. To the right, by shambolic tin walls and shaggy trees, the girls stood at the corners waiting for people like him and men slept inside waiting tuk-tuks as if the night was already over. Higher up the street turned to rubble and grit and litter and the dogs stood there watching him, assessing his strengths and weaknesses. An alley swung to the right toward 102 and as he passed into it he saw a young woman ahead of him picking her way gingerly through the long oblong puddles and scattered refuse from the day market. Thrown together inside the claustrophobic alley they walked a few yards apart until she turned left at the large trees and into the pool-like darkness around them and up toward the golden lights of the Mansions. He hung back a little to let her ascend the steps and then followed her into the lobby, where she didn’t stop at the reception desk, breezing past into the corridor that led to the stairwell.

He went the opposite way, up to his apartment, but on the first floor he stopped midway and waited for her to reappear on the floors above him. Something about her was unusual. Not the shiny black dress or the heels, nor the tight white summer blouse and the careful pinning of the hair. It was that something about her was not unfamiliar.

When she did appear it was on the third floor. Her hand was on the rail and then she stopped as well, halfway down the landing, and she saw him standing below her, looking up. When their eyes met he recognized her and she him and she flinched and stepped back from the rail, but not entirely out of view. Sothea, for her part, was astonished more than anything else and she didn’t know what to do but go forward until she was at Davuth’s door. Robert turned toward his own door, unlocked it and hung back, wanting to change his mind and go up and speak to her.

He couldn’t think of any conceivable reason that she had appeared out of nowhere in his own building. He glanced back up at the third floor but she had slipped from view.

Feeling rash, he decided to go up and find her. Once on the third floor, however, he found himself in an empty corridor with no Sothea. He walked down it slowly and peered through the windows of each unit and as he did so he felt a sickening giddiness and inertia. Here was a person who could expose him easily, but whom he could expose as well. And if Sothea was there, wasn’t Simon likely to be there, too? Perhaps even in one of these units on the third floor!

There was only a faint echo of old Chinese music coming from one of these units and he went down to the ground floor and out into the street to wait for her. He went across the street and sat on the bags of cement that were stacked outside the Korean construction site and waited for some time until it was late enough for the motodop drivers to sullenly drive off empty-handed. The long wait began and as one o’clock came he heard, as if hours in advance of themselves, cocks crow in the gloom behind the embassy. The silent lightning kept him company, but even so Sothea did not reemerge until well after three. She was obviously still shaken and nervous because as she stood at the top of the steps she looked up and down Street 102 and when she saw that it was empty she started off down the same alley through which she had come a few hours earlier.

He followed her, almost in disbelief, and they walked briskly onto the long, humid lawn bristling with crickets. She slipped into this darkness so effectively that he could barely see her until they came out on the far side. There was a bar there with a few drunken old Frenchmen sitting outside on cane chairs with their women and Sothea darted to a corner just behind the market, not looking behind but seeming to know that all was not well. He caught up to her as they turned into the smaller street and when he was a few feet away she turned and saw him and her eyes went wide with horror and she began to run. He called out, “No, wait!” and ran after her and to his surprise she relented almost at once because she couldn’t run in her heels.

She slowed and then stopped and turned a second time, and this time she was composed and cold and ready to hit back.

“It’s all right,” he said, and held up his hands, and she saw that he was not nearly as angry as she had expected.

They took each other in for a while and then she sat down on the curb and he sat down as well and he felt the sweat massing on the palms of his hands. He had prepared nothing to say and now that he had to say something he couldn’t find any words at all. It was pointless demanding explanations, they both knew what had happened. Moreover, he knew that Simon had done all the planning and the execution. She had had nothing to do with it. Finally he said, “So where is Simon?” and left it at that.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“I know he’s at Colonial Mansions — I followed you from there.”

“He’s not there.”

“I think he is. I need to know which apartment he’s in.”

“No, it’s someone else. Simon and me broke up.”

“Then where did he go?”

She shook her head and there was something final about it that was very real.

“So you really don’t know?” he said.

“Maybe he’s dead.”

“What about my money? What about my passport?”

“I dun know about that.”

“You must have been with him when he spent the money.”

“He spent some…We spent some — I am sorry.”

He suddenly flew into a small repressed rage.

“You two — you really fucked me over.”

“Yes. It was bad thing.”

“So now you say it was a bad thing.”

It wasn’t even really my money, he thought.

“I think you better make merit,” he said, half joking.

“Yes, you right. It was bad thing.”

“It was bad thing and now we’re here in the same city.”

“Yes, it crazy.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“I said it crazy.”

“You think it’s just crazy and that’s that?”

“Yes, it crazy.”

“Then it’s OK, it’s just crazy and not, you know, evil or malicious or anything really bad?”

She shrugged and looked down at her feet and soon he calmed down and it was he who felt sorry for being a bully. He ought to have known — it was a small country, you ran into people again quite quickly, and Phnom Penh was small as well, for all its secrets.