'Nearly two years, off and on.'
She couldn't have sent anything sensational to Paris in the last two years: just pictures of crippled children, the elections, the UN pulling out, Sihanouk's coronation.
'And how long will you stay here?'
'Until Paris recalls me.'
The blaze was getting out of control over there and the river was running red. A fire truck had reached the scene and was sending out a jet, backed up to the quayside and sucking water from the Tonle Sap. Whenever she saw a fire, this woman beside me, she was watching her home burning down again, her homeland, Cambodia.
I took the Sony from her and stowed it in the glove compartment and started the engine. 'Where did you leave your car?'
'I walked. It's safer.'
'I'll drop you off at the hotel.'
'All right,' she said.
I stopped the Mercedes in the narrow street that ran behind the Royal Palace, and left the engine running. The decision had come up for me on our way here, and I looked at Gabrielle. 'In case anything happens in Pouthisat that you might want to photograph, you may decide to fly there tomorrow. If so, where would I contact you, if I needed to?'
She watched me steadily, her eyes dark. 'I don't know. I've never leftthe capital, except to take a break.'
'How soon could you find out, assuming you'd be interested?'
'You don't have to do this for me.'
'I know.'
Two beats, and she said, 'I would stay at the French Catholic mission. There'll be one there.'
I got out of the car and stood with her for a moment while she touched her mouth on mine and turned away and went through the gate to the hotel gardens, camera slung from her shoulder, not looking back.
9: SPOOK
'How soon can you get me to Pouthisat?' I asked Pringle.
There was a brief silence. It had taken four rings before he'd picked up the phone but it didn't worry me: it was long gone midnight and the mission wasn't in a hot phase and he needed his sleep: later there might not be too much available.
'There's no night flying,' he said.
'In the morning, then.'
'I'll need a little time.'
I looked at the clock in the lobby. I'd given Gabrielle five minutes before I'd come into the hotel by the main entrance. 'I'll call you again in half an hour,' I told Pringle, 'that okay?'
'It depends on how soon I can wake anyone useful. Why Pouthisat?'
'I could have a lead.'
Tobacco smoke hung on the air, drifting from the bar. There was another brief silence on the line. 'Indeed. Do you need to debrief?'
'Yes.' I hadn't got any real information for him, but if that date — the nineteenth — was important, then yes, I should debrief on the principle that if the executive is in a hostile field he should send in whatever information he's got and as soon as he's got it, in case he gets killed or cut off. 'We'll need a rendezvous.'
The Vietnamese girl by the big gilded doors took another step, another step back, glanced across me, leaned on the wall again, closing her eyes and letting her red lips part a little.
'Do I bring London in?' Pringle asked me. He meant should he signal Flockhart.
'No. All I've got is access, of a sort.'
Colonel Choen.
'Indeed.'
I started feeling impatient. Pringle was blowing this whole thing up into a big deal. Access of a sort didn't warrant signals to Control, for God's sake.
'Look,' I said, 'nothing's carved in stone. But I need to get to Pouthisat. I'll call you back in thirty minutes.'
The Vietnamese girl took another step, drifted near me and laced the air with frangipani as I went out through the main entrance, my head turned away from the bar.
The moon was higher in the south by now, its crescent perched with a touch of artistry on the silhouetted minaret of a temple near the river. Smoke still rose from the fire on the far side, and the sound of sirens moaned through the streets in a chorus of echoes.
I waited in the Mercedes, watching the windows of the hotel, not knowing which was hers, Gabrielle's, and not knowing, with the warmth of her mouth on mine lingering in the memory, whether I should have told her I was going to Pouthisat, where it would be even more dangerous for her to know me, contact me. Her credentials were impeccable — she'd been screened, in effect, by Flockhart himself, my control for the mission — and she had her camera, a means of freezing images in the instant, of recording reality unimpaired by the eye's reliance on the brain's interpretation, which could sometimes show the bias of its own judgement. A camera could be useful, even invaluable, at some stage of the game, and if going to Pouthisat could give Gabrielle the chance of a major scoop for Paris I wanted her to have it. Not for the credit, but for Cambodia, the country she loved, was weeping for.
But I was aware, as I waited in the car and watched the lights in the windows over there, that Gabrielle Bouchard had already stirred an undercurrent in the stillness of my psyche that had nothing to do with reasons. And that gave me no excuse for exposing her to danger.
Scruple, thy sting is sharper than the serpent's tooth, therefore shall I pluck thee from my bosom, otherwise I'll never get any bloody sleep.
Pringle picked up on the first ring this time.
'Tomorrow at 0700 hours,' he said, 'there'll be a dark green Renault van waiting on the perimeter road to the south of the airport, opposite the Trans-Kampuchean maintenance hangar. It will have Mine Action Unit No. 6 on the side. The driver's name is Tucker. He'll be your pilot.'
'Code intro?'
'There isn't one. You've been presented simply as an «observer». Choose your own name, and whatever you want to observe.'
And keep the David Jones cover intact. I liked his thinking. I would have played it that way in any case, but the fact that he'd already got it worked out for me was reassuring; he was beginning to sound more like a pro.
'I get into the back of the van?' I asked him.
'Yes. Tucker will then drive you through the freight-area gates past the guard and take you onto the plane.'
An elderly Chinese in a dark silk suit and brilliant shoes came out of the bar and slowed, seeing the girl and then nodding, going out with her through the tall gilded doors, shooting his cuffs and trotting jauntily by her side.
'This is a routine flight?' I asked Pringle.
'No, it's been chartered, through discreet approaches to Mine Action Committee Headquarters.' That wasn't bad either, gone midnight and with only thirty minutes to work with.
'Will you be moving?' I asked him.
'Oh yes. You can telephone me at noon at the Hotel Lafayette. Then we'll meet and chat.' Make a rendezvous and debrief.
'Will do.'
'Any questions?'
'No.'
We shut down the signal.
It was a Siai-Marchetti SM 1019A built for battlefield surveillance, turbo prop, observer's door, with a stack of mine detectors rattling aft of the seats as we lifted into the huge red orb of the rising sun and turned to the north-west.
'The Killing Fields,' Tucker called out, pointing downwards as we cleared the airport, and I had a frisson because he sounded like a tour guide and those fields down there weren't a historic monument yet: the whole thing could happen again.
We levelled out at 6,000 feet and the mine detectors stopped rattling.
'Been here before?' Tucker asked me. He was stocky, bare-armed, handled the controls in his sleep.
'Yes.'
'Been some changes, right?' We were flying over rice paddies now, tobacco crops, savanna grass. 'Gonna be some more.' He turned his head to look at me, correction, look me over, his eyes intent. 'Who are you with? Or is that — '
'I'm just observing. What's the medical situation now?'
'Situation? It's a bloody tragedy. There's one doctor for twenty or thirty thousand people in this country, so most of the health care's done by volunteer services. Call it health care, but a lot of it's a matter of sterilizing the stumps before gangrene can set in. My sister's in the Red Cross out here, Christ knows how she does it, she had a kid in yesterday, fell right across a mine, and my sister — her name's Mary — she just started work trying to stop the blood flow while the doctor was throwing up — the doctor.' His eyes were hot now, simmering. 'You know what I'd do if I ever came across Pol Pot? I'd hang him by the testicles from a sugar palm and watch the crows come in.'