Lawrence Osborne: Hunters in the Dark

Davuth sat facing the other way, toward Robert, and his thumb flicked the lighter on and off. When it was on, his face was lit from below, calm and smiling. He seemed to have been sitting like this for some time, waiting for the Englishman to show up. In his lap lay a regulation police pistol with the barrel against his knee but not pointing at anything. It looked like something carved from soapstone. Davuth left the lighter on now and then he invited Robert to sit down as well. The latter understood everything within a few seconds and his mind went wild with rage. He looked around for a heavy stone to use, to launch himself into an attack and smash the policeman’s head. But in that flicker of instant calculation he realized how lost the cause was. Even if he managed the move in a second he would be too late. He was snared, and Sophal had been snared already. They had walked into it blind. They had walked off a cliff and it was too late. The policeman, then, knew that Robert understood and he smiled peaceably. Let’s be reasonable, Davuth seemed to be saying, and after a few moments Robert did sit down and Davuth talked for a while.

“I know who you are,” Davuth began. “The easiest thing is you just give me your apartment key. I am going back to the city. By the time you get there yourselves I will be”—he made a strange gesture with his fingers, like falling snow—“long gone.”

It was said very gently. Nobody would come to any harm and since he, Davuth, had his passport it would be a foolish thing to pursue him or go on his own account to the police. Nobody would listen to him anyway.

“Also, what is the code to the safety box in your apartment?”

Robert gave it, and he handed over his phone at the same time.

“This is absurd,” he said, and took out the key and threw it over to Davuth. “You didn’t have to do all this just to get a key.”

“No, I thought it through very carefully. I want to be invisible — and you want to be invisible as well. This way you can carry on being invisible. I don’t care what you do. You are nothing to me.”

“There’s nothing in my room.”

“You’ve been throwing your money around. There’s enough to keep me happy.”

“There’s nothing there at all.”

“Well, I am not going to believe that now. You can say what you want. I know you went to the Diamond and won a lot of money.”

“All right, whatever you say.”

“You barangs. You think you can get away with it.”

Robert talked to Sophal but she said nothing back. Her shirt was ripped and her hair was tangled. There had been a struggle. The policeman offered him a cigarette and he declined. Davuth got up and dusted off his trousers and walked off nonchalantly until he was at the path and the forlorn couple were plunged in darkness. He felt it was appropriate to say a few more words but he could not think what they should be. People talked far too much anyway. He felt the key in his pocket and memorized the code and was happy that it had all gone so smoothly for him. He had enjoyed the girl as well, she had not put up much resistance in the end. Those types were always soft at their core. They had not had to struggle to survive. He looked down at them from the slight advantage of the path and he felt a twisting, momentary pity. But at least they were alive and, in his case, unharmed. They had gotten off lightly.

“You can get a boat at daybreak,” he said, in a more conciliatory tone. “There’ll be one at the beach.”

“There’s nothing in the room,” Robert called back mockingly.

“I’ll see about that. So long, bye-bye then.”

Robert stood as well, then sat down and put his arm around Sophal. There was no reason to delay this fortunate departure.

Davuth thought for a moment before striding away, and tossed the lighter in their direction as a small mercy. A few minutes later he was at the top of the hill in the menacing shadow of the prasat, where bats now wheeled in the humidity. The steps on the way down were covered with leaves and at the bottom the jungle seethed with fireflies. He composed himself, dried his forehead with his handkerchief and walked down to the shacks where a couple of kerosene lamps burned from the rafters. There was no one out and about, just the cows tethered to a few trees and their eyes shining at a measured distance. He stood at the edge of the water and raised his arm.

A few moments later the longtail which had taken them over appeared, paddled in silence by the pilot who had been waiting by the closed-off bridge. The boat nosed up to the beach and Davuth stepped into it without a word. The boat rocked and he steadied himself; there was a stifling moment of awkwardness between them. The man was not afraid. He was merely unsure what to do.

By the same token he knew better than to ask any inconsequential questions and without explicit instruction he turned the vessel around and started up the motor. The sound shocked them both. Davuth took one last look back at the beach, where the clotted nets lay in wet piles on a mud as dark as cocoa. The Englishman had not followed him. They sped out onto the floodplain as the first drops of rain began to fall and the moon disappeared. He lay back in the boat with his hands behind his head and the spray washed over him. In a mere twenty-four hours, the long years of drudgery at his humble station had been left behind and he thought of his daughter asleep in her bed, unaware that he was at that very moment slaving on her behalf and safeguarding her future. She would discover it all later. Either way, it was fated and the fate that had chosen him had made no errors. He had done everything perfectly and the laws of the universe remained undisturbed and serene. At the quay of Takeo the lights were off and he took a roll of dollars and gave them to the pilot.

“If you talk to anyone, you’ll see me again. You don’t want to see me again.” He was sure that he had made his point because the man turned away and said nothing back.

Davuth then walked to the car still parked under the trees and drove through the deserted town. There were no karaokes here, no late-night bars, no nocturnal flimflam. The air was still. Just the needling, unrefreshing rain. It was as boring a town as a man could wish for. It would be fine in the early morning and never afterward.

Within minutes he was back on Route 2 and he was alone on the white-edged road with the gardens and orchards and paddies flowing by. He drove for two hours without thinking about anything. Finally he stopped in a lonely stretch and went into the fields to take a pee. He wanted to be back in the city before first light but he had a few hours to spare. As he stood there surrounded by the whispers of the crickets, however, he felt a strange desire to return to the island in the Mekong and take back everything he had done and said. It couldn’t be done, of course, but still he wanted to go back and make amends and let things take a different course. It was always the fields at this hour that took him back to the old days and the nights of executions which had gone virtually unrecorded. It was quite a thing to consider that he was the only man alive who remembered the last moments of many dozens of people. They lived within him still, he liked to think. But to whom had he ever made amends? To whom had he prayed for forgiveness? He had gotten away with it, and who was he to get away with it? Many of his comrades had also gotten away with it and when they were awake in their beds they reasoned to themselves that they had been young, far too young to be held responsible for anything. It was their extreme youth that explained their ecstatic sadism and skill at killing. It was a skill which only came from a knowing enjoyment, and therefore it was a youthful knowledge, a dementia of immaturity. But in the end he didn’t really believe it.