Julia swallowed a surge of true and wild anxiety. She felt like she were about to throw up. The link was proved. They hadn’t just got “lucky” with the box. Their find was no coincidence. Someone had been in to use this box just a day before them. But it wasn’t some friend or colleague of Ghislaine’s.
It was the murderer.
Her fearful thoughts were once more interrupted. The official had slid back the window once more: he was pointing through the glass of the main door.
Look! The same woman is coming again, you can ask her yourself.
Iced along her spine by the terror, Julia turned, and squinted, and saw.
Approaching the building was a strange, menacing figure, a short, lithe young woman, with the palest face, and long dark hair. The face was somehow odd, inexpressive; yet the eyes were demonic. Slanted and brightly dark, and luxuriously intense.
Julia shrank back in reflex. The murderer would reach the door and discover Julia in a few moments. Three seconds. Two. One.
21
Ponlok pressed the knife cruelly to Chemda’s pulsing neck. She was screaming and writhing, but if she writhed any harder she would slash her own throat. The blood would geyser. Her legs were being slowly forced open.
Jake had a fraction of a second to decide.
He stepped back as if turning away, then swiveled in an instant and ran two steps and flashed out a boot, as hard as he could manage. At school he’d learned to do the drop kick fast, very fast, invisibly fast. Before he got crushed in the rugby maul.
It worked. A sickeningly direct hit. The thudding sound of his steel-capped boot hitting Ponlok’s head was queasy and cracking; but his kick did the task. The janitor went sprawling into the grit of the rancid laboratory. The knife spun silver in the sunlight, twirling into shadows.
Ponlok gave a low and ugly moan. The Khmer man was prone, bleeding, half conscious. Jake grabbed Chemda’s hands and helped her to her feet and she said:
“Aw kohn, quick!”
He didn’t need thank-yous; he understood quick; hand in hand they skeltered down the alley, down the next alley, up the fire escape past the jackfruit trees and into the apartment. Two minutes. Chemda bandaged his head with some torn up cotton T-shirt; he wiped himself down in the bathroom, then stuffed his few items into a bag. Chemda was in the living room, calling someone on a phone, rattling questions in Khmer. Then she looked Jake’s way. “Now!” As one, they sprinted down the steps to the yard and then the boulevard; they were two pitiable fugitives with a couple of bags standing alongside the national drag race of Highway 6—where anyone and everyone could drive by and see them — but then a black-and-white old Citroën taxi squealed to the curb and the driver grinned his six teeth.
Chemda jumped in and said, “Siem Reap.”
The man lifted a hand as if to say whoah — Siem Reap?
Jake knew this was a long way — two hundred kilometers north, into the jungle, close to Angkor. A day’s drive. Yet the taxi driver’s skeptical eyes narrowed into shrewd acceptance when he saw Chemda flourish a clutch of dollars from her bag: tens, twenties, hundreds.
“Siem Reap, baat!”
The taxi dodged through the traffic, which was thinning anyway as they swiftly exited the brash periphery of the city.
Sweating and trembling, Jake checked behind them. Nothing. Nothing but traffic. They passed Caltex stations, Happy Cellphone shops, grungy garages, then more Caltex stations, more Happy Cellphone outlets, more tire shops; it was like the backdrop to a cheap cartoon repeating itself. Then they passed an old French shop with dépôt de pharmacie on the side, then a Sukisoup outlet, a patch of wasteland, and the skeletal bamboo scaffolding of a half-finished apartment block — and then, at last, the water buffalo and the paddies and the sugar palms inclining their heads, like chancellors bowing to a despotic lord.
The royal sun.
They had made it out of the city. They were in rural Cambodia, the land of two seasons and two harvests and two million dead, the land of the killing fields.
“The money is my mom’s,” said Chemda. “I just took it.”
Jake shrugged and didn’t reply. He wasn’t even sure if he cared, or if he was meant to reply. If he answered her, that meant a dialogue, and a dialogue meant conversation, and a conversation meant they might have to talk about what had just happened: Chemda had nearly been raped by an old man. An old man who had been, what, altered? An old man who had endured the same terrors as Chemda’s grandmother, and who else?
It was too much. The grief in Chemda’s life was mounting like the pyramids of bashed in skulls at Cheung Ek. And this was just Chemda’s family. There were a million more Khmer families in Cambodia, out there, each one with their little pyramid of skulls. No wonder there were so many neak ta: so many cages for the unquiet dead.
“Remember what Ponlok said? I was wondering… if anyone else was experimented on. So many of my cousins did not survive.”
Her eyes were staring ahead, lustrous, in profile. They were roaring through a little village, where women loosely turbaned by the elegant Khmer scarves — the striped or chequerboard cotton krama, used as slings or turbans or baby carriers or lunch packs or ponchos — looked up at the car. The women frowned under their kramas. Children played in the dust, quite naked.
They were going too fast. Jake didn’t care, he wanted to go fast. Faster than the police. Faster than light. Faster than life. He was hot and dehydrated. Again. And he couldn’t keep saying nothing.
“Look at it this way. Do you remember anyone in your family being aggressive? Demented? Like the janitor?”
“Why?”
“Because, Chemda—” he hesitated, and his gaze failed to meet hers “—because I reckon I have an idea why Ponlok did what he did. ’Cause he wrote those notes. Just before he attacked you.”
“What?”
“He said, ‘They make me like this.’ He was trying to warn us before he did it.”
“How long before?”
“Moments. Just seconds.”
“So he knew what he was going to do? Attack me?” She exhaled. “And he tried to warn you and yet—” Her face whitened with understanding. “He is aware of the problem but he just couldn’t help himself. An uncontrollable urge.”
“Yes, exactly.”
Her demeanor was strained, like she was forcing herself to use a matter of fact voice, even though her lips were trembling. “But how could this brain surgery they did, or whatever it was, how could that have such an effect?”
“Well. I think I have an idea, maybe. Just maybe.”
“OK.”
“What I mean is — I did a bit of research on primitive surgery when we got back from Chiang Rai. I read about holes in the head, like the trepanations we saw in—”
“Trepanations?”
“It means holes drilled in the skull.”
“OK. Hnh. And?”
Jake stared through the grimy cab window. The forests out there were thicker now. Mahogany, rosewood, sugar palm. The banyan of the Buddha. They were driving deep into the soul of the country: Siem Reap, Angkor Wat, the emotional heartland of the Khmer.
He gave his answer.
“I’m obviously not any kind of expert, but it seems, maybe, the frontal lobes of the brain are associated with self-control, commanding the baser emotions; so maybe if you cut out some of the frontal cortex, you excise the most evolved part of the brain. Therefore, just possibly, it could make you amoral and criminal. Cruel. Predatory. Violent.”