She tried again. And this time she would be more specific.
“What did he mean by Prunier’?”
“You can Google this yourself.”
“I did. And I found out. Prunier is a tiny village, twenty kilometers away. North Lozère.”
“Yes, I know.”
“So I went there, Annika. And there’s nothing there. I expected a collection of some sort. A small museum of archaeology, more skulls and skeletons, that kind of thing. But all I discovered was a boulangerie and a church. And some old lady who scowled at me. There is nothing in Prunier.”
Her Belgian friend smiled distantly.
“So you did not find. Do not worry. It probably will not help you anyway.”
Julia silenced her desire to swear, by drinking tea.
Annika added: “Consider it possible: some things are meant to be hidden.”
“And the relevance of that is?”
“The truth is hidden in the caves! But it has always been hidden there, hasn’t it? And we still do not know quite what it is.” The Flemish lady allowed herself another long, melancholic glance at a picture on the walclass="underline" at the beautiful twinned horses of Pech Merle, peculiar, elegant horses cantering away from each other since the Ice Age. “I always think, even today: why did they paint so many animals and so few humans? Isn’t that strange, mmn, Julia? And when they do paint humans, they are so sad or forlorn, no? The poor boys of Addaura, the terrible Hands of Gargas, the little stick man at Lascaux, with the slaughtered bison and his intestines, his chitterlings, like so many andouillettes, pouring out of the stomach! There is some more green tea.”
Julia flinched at the image: the spilled intestines of the wounded bison, at Lascaux, one of the more horrifying tableaux of Ice Age art. Troubling, like the Hands of Gargas. But why? What did any of this mean? The frustration was piercing, not least because Julia felt she deserved proper answers. After all, Annika had invited her over — after Julia had mentioned her find, the skulls, the argument. Yet now the older lady was being difficult, and shrugging, and mysterious, and stupidly European.
“Annika. I came over to talk. Can’t you just tell me? We’re friends. Why is Ghislaine being so obstructive? If you can’t tell me anything then I don’t—”
The telephone rang. Annika rose and crossed her little living room. Phone in hand, she stood under a wall poster of the Cougnac paintings. Julia tuned out from the overheard dialogue, not wishing to intrude. It looked like Annika was having a slightly painful conversation: whispering, white-faced, nodding tersely.
“Oui… oui… bien sûr. Merci.”
The receiver carefully replaced, the older woman came back to the coffee table, wrapping her cardigan even tighter — as if the wind were blowing down from the werewolf-haunted steppes of the Margeride and directly through the room. Picking up her cup, Annika drank some tea and cursed:
“Merde. The tea is cold.” Then she looked at Julia. “That was the police. Ghislaine has been murdered.”
8
Gaining. The police were gaining. “Faster,” said Chemda. Her hand gripped Jake’s momentarily, maybe unconsciously. “Faster. Quicker. Please.” Then she spoke in French, and then Khmer. Urging on the driver.
Jake doubted Yeng knew any of these languages. He spoke Hmong. But the meaning was plain.
Faster. Quicker. Please.
But no matter how fast they went, the noises behind them proved how swiftly they were losing. The roar of the big police Toyotas was drowning the growl of their own wheezing vehicle.
“Faster!” said Jake helplessly. He saw images of the blood-drained Cambodian man in his mind: did the cops really do that? Why not? Who else? Perhaps it was that thin, unsmiling Ponsavan officer. Jake could easily envisage him briskly slashing a neck, like severing the arteries of a suspended hog, watching the blood drain and belch. Nodding. Job done.
The jeep accelerated into a desperate turn.
They had no choice but to escape. Even if they surrendered to the Phonsavan police and Chemda used her grandfather’s leverage, again, to save them — and there was no guarantee that this technique would work a second time; indeed, Jake was sure it wouldn’t — that still meant surrendering Tou, who would certainly be beaten and imprisoned and convicted and possibly executed. And what would those clumsy and brutal police do to old man Yeng? The openly rebellious Hmong?
But their vehicle was old, asthmatic, and rusty; the police SUVs, however dirty, were fast and new.
Yeng spun the wheel, racing them along the soft earthen banks of rice paddies, ducking the car under the slapping branches of oak, bamboo, and glossy evergreens; the jeep slid and groaned in the mud, then sped on — grinding, desperate, and churning — but the cars were overtaking them. It was happening. They were being overtaken.
Jake swore; Tou shouted; Yeng accelerated. Jake thought of the thin police officer, his repressed anger and hatred: maybe he would happily hoist them by their ankles, open a throat—
An explosion blossomed in gold.
A huge and sudden explosion flayed the windshield with mud and water and leaves; the jeep toppled left and farther left, nearly flipping over; but then the driver-side tires found some purchase and surged forward and crashed back onto level ground, and somehow they sped onward.
Unharmed?
Smoke. There was smoke behind them. And wild flames of black and orange and billowing gray. Jake guessed at once: it must have been a bombie: an unexploded shell. The cars behind had surely hit some UXO. Jake stared, quite stunned, watching men falling out of one flaming vehicle, men on fire, screaming. Muffled screams.
Tou was whooping.
Jake gazed in horror.
“We have to stop.” He grasped Tou’s shoulder. “We must stop, they could be hurt—”
“No!” Tou said. “Crazy! They kill us. They kill Samnang, they kill you and Chemda, we go—”
Chemda looked Jake’s way. “We have to. He’s right—”
“But — but, Jesus—”
“No. No no no! We escape!” said Tou. “We escape now! See, they are stopping!”
It was true. All the police cars had been halted by the lead vehicle’s disaster. The cops were stuck in the smoke and the mud. They had all been saved by the American ordnance hiding under the softly petal-shedding magnolia trees.
“Escape. We escape.”
We escape.
Jake stared. Quite dumbed. Their old jeep rattled over the paddy-field bumps, screeching uphill and away. They were indeed going to escape — and maybe this was no accident, maybe this wasn’t just outrageous fortune. Jake had forgotten that Yeng knew what he was doing. Yeng knew the bush, the forest, the paddies. He was Striped Hmong. Hmong Bai. He knew all along where he was going, perhaps knew the route, and where to lead their pursuers: into the bombs.
Whatever the answer — luck or skill — the smoke and fire were a long way behind them now. The policemen, mobbing the wreck of their burned-out car, were visible but tiny. The jeep was already climbing into the mountains, quitting the Plain of Jars. And so their fate was boxed and mailed. They were on the run. If Jake really wanted adventure and danger and risk: this was it.
The plain stretched into the blueness of the distance as they ascended. The scenery was queerly serene, untroubled, as if this place had seen so much worse. And the serenity was paradoxically beautiful, too. Jake clutched his camera in his perspiring hands, and took a shot. The way the mosaic of rice paddies shone out so blue in the reflected sun: it was like the tessellated pieces of a stained-glass window.