The scrawl was so shaky, it took Jake a few seconds to decipher the words. At last he made sense of the spidery writing.
I cant help it. Make me animal.
“What does that mean? Ponlok? What does—”
Too late, Jake realized the danger. Ponlok was already on Chemda, and moving fast. The janitor grabbed her bare legs. She screamed. But the old man had pushed her over, and down, and shoved his hand inside her skirt. Drooling on her neck.
Instantly, Jake grabbed the Khmer man by the arms, pulling him off, tearing at his dirty collar, pulling out fistfuls of hair; but then Jake felt a wild flash of metal across his forehead.
A knife. Ponlok had produced a huge knife from somewhere, he’d swiveled and slashed, slicing Jake hard across the face. The quivering cur of a man was transformed into something powerful.
The pain was momentarily blinding. Jake staggered and gasped. The blood was gushing from his forehead; frantic and angry, he wiped it away, and stared through the crimson pain.
Ponlok was on top of Chemda. Her panties were torn and they were dangling from an ankle. The janitor was unzipping himself, but the other hand was tightly holding the knife, pressing it hard against Chemda’s throat, so hard it was whitening the dark skin of her neck. Chemda’s eyes blazed in terror, staring at Jake.
Help me.
Jake stood, frozen with exquisite indecision. One slash of that brutal knife could kill Chemda.
But the Khmer man was going to rape her. In front of him. On the grimy concrete floor of S-37.
20
Alex Carmichael rolled off Julia, flopped back, and lit a cigarette.
“That was nice,” he said.
She slapped him.
“Nice? You just had sex with me. You aren’t allowed to use the word nice for at least fifteen minutes.”
He laughed, puffed twice on the cigarette, then extinguished it in a used wineglass from last night.
“Coffee, babe?”
“Please.”
She watched him swing his arms into a dressing gown and disappear toward the kitchen. What did she feel? She felt more than “nice.” Perhaps she was falling for him, properly. So far their relationship had been sexual but recreational, an agreement, friends-with-benefits, one of those things that happens in the intimacy and intensity of an archaeological dig, like actors and actresses on location.
Usually these flings flamed out, quite peaceably, when the season was over. But Alex was turning out to be more than expected: the sex was good, he was properly masculine, clever, unruly, and frivolously cynical in a way that made her laugh when she really needed to laugh; he was forty-two, English, and married, though he was apparently getting divorced. Maybe she could finally accede and relax into love?
Julia sat up. This was cowardly, and it was absurd: this was the wrong time to be thinking about relationships, in the middle of all this.
She hastened into the bathroom, turned the steel dials, and showered — but the self-criticism came quickly now, rinsing her, scalding her, like the water gushing from the showerhead. Was she a coward?
Almost everything about her life had been too safe. She had let herself settle into a safe job at a mediocre university in London. Home was an average apartment in a quintessentially boring suburb. She led a risk-free life as a permanent singleton, and always made sure the men she dated were unsuitable for real and possibly painful commitment. Like Alex.
Julia stepped from the shower and quickly toweled and assessed herself in the mirror.
Her own nudity often perplexed her. The sense of her own sexuality. Her breasts, her skin, her blond hair. She knew on a theoretical basis that men found her attractive. Sometimes. But she wasn’t always sure why, perhaps she didn’t want to know why. Did this all come from Sarnia, from what had happened there? — the rejection of her own attractiveness, in case it happened again. Yet with Alex she had found an easiness; and with some other men, too. But they were always men who could be lost, excused, or argued away. Men who wouldn’t hurt her too much, if they suddenly turned on her. She was intrinsically timid in her choices. Wasn’t she?
She paused. The mirror steamed. She wiped it with a corner of the towel and looked at her damp blond hair, her own bare face. Devoid of makeup.
How much of her timidity, her lack of true confidence and self-worth, tied in with her faltering career? Too much, maybe. And yet now — now things were different. She had, for the first time, discovered something. The skulls. Prunières. And she had shown tenacity — hadn’t she? — in pursuing this. Refusing to be frightened by Ghislaine on the Cham. Refusing to just hide, to go back to London. Coming to Paris to solve the puzzle.
And she still cherished that insight she had, about the skulls and the stones. Guilt. That was her insight. Hers. So maybe she wasn’t so timid. Maybe she had surprised and revived the steeliness in herself. Maybe she remained the girl who packed her bags and went to Montreal, despite her pleading parents; still the talented eighteen-year-old who got into McGill, the girl enraptured by the cave art.
She toweled away the last dampness. Vigorously. She wasn’t going to let go, not now. Moreover, she was involved with these murders, the chain of mysterious events, whether she liked it or not. And she knew the two evolutions in her life converged: the skulls and the murders, there was a link. But what? Even if she was resolved, the complexities were intense.
Dressed and ready, she stepped eagerly into the kitchen. Alex was there, doing his laid-back thing. Consuming his coffee and croissants, reading Le Monde very slowly, trying to improve his French and failing.
They had done this many mornings through the summer. The ritual was sometimes comforting; right now, for Julia, it was frustratingly sluggish, a wholly unnecessary delay.
“Please, come on, Alex, this is unbearable, all this waiting, let’s go.”
He put down the newspaper.
“Right now?”
“Right now.”
An hour later they were in a taxi heading north for St. Denis, a rougher part of Paris, not the Paris of Haussmann and the boulevards, this was the Paris of les banlieus—literally, the “places of banishment”—the Paris of Algerian and Moroccan kids with no jobs, the Paris of couscous and Muslim rappers and nervy policemen in riot gear standing by vans just down the road from teeming mosques.
It was dull and cold and drizzly: late November. Their destination was the subsidiary archives of the Musée de l’Homme: the most far-flung outpost of the empire of Parisian ethnology.
Alex spoke: “You know I met him. Just a couple of times.”
“Who?”
“Hector Trewin.” The taxi had stopped at a junction. Alex gazed out at some Arab kids in Inter Milan shirts, doing nothing.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, it’s true. Sort of. I mean, we weren’t best mates. But I went to a few of his lectures at Balliol, the Ashmolean, when I was a student. And we chatted. He was very, very slightly famous.”
“And?”
Alex shrugged a laconic shrug. Julia insisted, she wanted to talk.
“Go on, tell me! Trewin, what was he like?”
“A lot of the students revered him, this great Marxist intellectual. But he creeped me out. Everything was theoretical. The world was theoretical. Breakfast was bloody theoretical. He simply wouldn’t acknowledge that there was a practical problem with communism; as far as he was concerned, Marxist theory was fine so it should work, and one day it would. We just had to keep trying. I asked him about Stalin and Mao and he actually said, ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’”