The rain hit the roof, splashing around the gap in the tiles Why didn't someone put a new one in? Was it because you couldn't expect to live, as a Cambodian, for more than thirty-six years even without a shot fired, as Gabrielle had told me? Or was it because the photographs of your mother and two sisters on the wall of your tumble-down little room were simply the photographs of some people who were there in the Killing Fields, raped and then clubbed to death because of the shortage of ammunition? Perhaps, yes, it was because of things like that. With a broken life, how would you find the interest in mending a broken tile?
They crowded past the doorway — merchants, women with infants in their arms, soldiers not six weeks out of school, a little girl trailing a worn stuffed tiger. They would have photographs, those people. They would have photographs too.
'In London,' I heard Pringle saying, 'you told Mr Flockhart that you accepted the mission. He was a little put out when you changed your mind, but felt that after I'd given you a preliminary briefing in the field you might reconsider.'
Two schoolmasters or government clerks, proud of the status their glasses gave them as intellectuals, the glasses that would mark them for death if Pol Pot took over the country again and began his political cleansing.
A gaggle of young girls, twittering like birds, gaudy paper flowers in their hair.
'I need,' Pringle said, 'to signal Mr Flockhart tonight with your decision.'
'Do you,' I said.
Two more merchants, their canvas bags clinking with tin Buddhas and cheap brass pagodas, then two cripples helping each other along with only one crutch between them, two of those who got away with it the last time but wouldn't have a hope of running fast enough the next.
A pale unkempt woman walking alone, a red plastic comb in her hair and her eyes permanently frightened, going home to look again at her photographs.
Then I saw the doll.
It was life-size, its pale porcelain face perfect and unmarked, and it was being carried by a half-starved middle-aged woman who seemed hardly to have the strength. The doll was in a worn rattan basket that concealed its legs, and as I watched, the woman made to hitch the thing higher, but her companion — younger and stronger, perhaps her daughter — took it from her, lifting it out of the basket and holding it tight against her, and I saw that in fact it had no legs — they'd been broken, I suppose, and taken off. The older woman walked beside her, stroking the hair of the doll. Both were smiling, as if they were sharing joy in having this toy to carry around with them, and then I saw the toy smile too, suddenly and sweetly. It wasn't a doll after all, with that perfect porcelain face, but a child, a little girl with a blanket wound around her hips and nothing below, no legs.
And watch out for trip mines, the man in the Trans-Kampuchean office had told me, the Khmer Rouge are still blowing up whoever they can find — military, civilians, women and children, you name it, they'll kill it.
I watched the two women, their backs to me now as they neared the exit doors, the small bobbing head of the child lost from sight; but I could still see — went on seeing, would always see, forever — that sweet sudden smile.
'Yes,' I told Pringle.
'I'm Sorry?'
'Yes,' I said again. He gave it a moment, absorbing the unexpected.
'You agree to go ahead?'
'I said yes, for Christ's sake, didn't I?'
In the corner of the cafe the mah-jong pieces clicked like broken bones.
Pringle sat back from the table. 'Very well. I'm glad I was able to brief you so successfully. We — '
'It's nothing to do with your bloody briefing.'
He tilted his head and brought it down an inch, raised it again in a gesture of concession. 'Whatever your reasons, I'll be delighted to signal Control tonight with your decision. And as your director in the field, is it too soon to ask if you've any idea how you'll start Salamander running?'
'You speak French?'
'Yes.'
I pushed the grey, cheaply-printed newspaper across the table for him so that he could read the lower headline; it was the paper I'd seen and bought on my way in here through the hall, La Vie Cambodge.
'Apparently I killed a man last night,' I said, 'so I'm going to start things running at his funeral.'
5: SALAMANDER
There'd been a moon tonight, a thin curved blade of light cutting through the haze across the city. The rain had stopped in the late afternoon, giving way to a stifling moist heat as twilight came.
'Are they in trouble?' I asked Gabrielle. One of the ferries on the Tonle Sap was drifting in midstream, butted and nudged by two or three smaller boats.
'They're always in trouble.' She uncorked the bottle of red wine she'd brought with the other things in the brown paper bags — a tin of smoked salmon and some escargots, a hunk of Brie and a loaf of pain de seigle. I'd asked her how she'd managed to find stuff like that in a place like this, and she'd just smiled and said she had French blood.
I'd phoned her room from the lobby of the Royal Palace Hotel an hour ago to ask if she could join me for dinner somewhere, so that I could return her hospitality.
'Tonight?' She'd sounded cautious.
'If the spirit moves you.'
'Well yes, I–I'd like that. But you don't mean here at the hotel?'
I thought that was interesting. There were good reasons why I didn't mean here at the hotel, but she wasn't expected to know them.
'Somewhere more private,' I said.
The caution was still in her voice but she said in a moment, 'The most private place I know is a pension along the river, in Hassakan Street. I'll bring something for us to eat. Will you give me a little time?'
We'd met here ten minutes ago, and she'd said a few words in Khmer to a shy little woman with only a few teeth but a heartbreaking smile, and we'd climbed the half-lit stairs to this small room at the top of the house with its window looking east across the river.
Pouring the wine Gabrielle said, 'I didn't expect to see you again so soon.'
'I haven't the patience to wait long for my pleasures.'
She didn't smile, gave me a studied look in the light of the cheap brass lamp. 'I think you have. You are a very disciplined man.' The note of caution I'd caught over the phone at the hotel hadn't quite left her voice, or it had changed to a hint of reserve. She was different from last night in the restaurant, less open.
She sliced the bread with a plastic knife she'd brought and offered me butter, using a give-away tin-opener on the smoked salmon before I could help, arranging everything with the formality the French practise even at a picnic.
'Did you get any pictures today?' I asked her.
Her dark blue eyes clouded. 'Fifty or sixty. I take fifty or sixty every day, and put them on the first plane the next morning. Cripples, weeping widows, fatherless children playing at soldiers in the ruins. I think in English you call it "sob stuff". I call it getting the message across. Or at least trying.'
I cut some more bread. 'It used to be the pen that was mightier than the sword. Today it's the camera.'
We both looked across at the window as a splash sounded from the river. In the glow of light from the city we could see a man overboard from the terry. Shouting broke out us others leaned over the rail to help him back.
'He should be careful,' Gabrielle said. 'There are snakes in the river. They swim across at night — the light attracts them, and the rats.' She drank some wine, still watching the scene out there. 'Especially the hanuman — do you know it?'