Jake was only half-awake himself. His thoughts wandered. He daydreamed. The smell of the durians was like toilets at a hot summer festival when he was a teenager. Glastonbury. The pickup rattled through the gears. He thought of his sister running into the road as the car banged and juddered. Becky, Rebecca. Why was the guilt so persistent? None of it was his fault. His sister, his mother, and yet he felt guilt. It held him. Fuck the guilt.
Reaching down to his rucksack, he unzipped it and retrieved his wallet. Between two fingers he found the photo of Rebecca, lifted it and looked, close, in the gloom. Her undying smile, the guiltless, happy smile. Five years old, then snuffed out. The grief tugged at him like an undertow, like an immense tide he could not resist. Maybe he did not want to resist. Just let go. Just let it all go.
He buttoned the photo in his breast pocket. He wanted it close, close to him, he didn’t know why. Then he shut his eyes and tried to sleep, but he couldn’t; he drifted into turbulent semiconsciousness.
Voices outside came and went in a second as they slammed through hamlets and jungle, and slowed over rickety wooden bridges. Jake shifted and rubbed his eyes. It was dark in here, under the tarpaulin; just a flapping corner of light at the end of the pickup showed dust and road and paddy fields disappearing as they motored north.
He thought of his mother. Dying and smiling. How had she died? He didn’t want to think about it. He thought of the demon heads, the women in the frieze staring down at him as they hid at the dark center of Preah Kahn. He thought of Sonisoy, screaming. Everyone was dying now, it was day zero, year zero, they were clearing the city of his life; people were just falling in the gutter of Sisovath Boulevard. Soon they would blow up the bank.
A rattle turned his daydreams into lucidity. The tarpaulin was flung back. The driver was standing there.
“Anlong Veng.”
The driver motioned: climb out.
Tentatively, Jake rubbed his muscles as he walked away from the pickup. The sun was less hot now. They were in the main square of some tiny impoverished town where boys played volleyball in the middle of the dusty road.
Chemda was on maneuvers already: paying off the driver, and talking to another, younger man in a faded red Klang Beer T-shirt.
She turned and explained to Jake: “We can rest here.” She gestured down a shady lane that led to a kind of promontory. “This man is Rittisak, he will help us.”
“But—” Jake stared around. Some guys were drinking palm wine at a wooden shack a few meters away, looking curiously at the muddied Khmer princess and the scruffed up sweating white man. “Are we safe here?”
“We are safe here. This is Anlong Veng, the Thai border is on top of those hills there, the Dangrek Escarpment, Chong Sa crossing. This is the last place the Khmer Rouge ruled, until 1998.”
“OK.”
“The locals hated the Khmer Rouge so much they still hate everyone, the police, the customs — if we are outlaws that makes us their friends — we are safe here, well, for a few hours, but then”—she looked at Jake’s face—“then we move on. As you said. We have to get to Thailand.”
Their new friend, Rittisak, was beckoning, his hand turned down, flapping, requesting them to follow. The path led through a grove of shady trees, past a burned-out Soviet truck, to a large concrete house.
“In here,” said Chemda, following Rittisak through a door and up some steps.
The house was bizarre, empty and furnitureless and still hot from the day’s sun, and it was decorated with amateurish murals, of Angkor Wat in an idealized jungle setting; Disney-eyed deer were feeding at overly crystalline lakes, elephants bathed in the sapphire waters, watched by monkeys so cheerful they looked as though they were drugged.
But what made the house truly bizarre was the view. On three sides of the almost wall-less house stretched a plain of water shining red and yellow in the setting sun, with the faint spicy reek of decay breezing off the waters. Sticking out of the water, like burned arms and charred fingers, were thousands of dead tree stumps, sometimes entire dead trees, all black, stricken and ugly. The watery graveyard of trees extended many miles, sullen and tragic, to a sudden rise of hills beyond. It looked like a First World War battlefield, like the Somme or Ypres or Passchendaele — inexplicably flooded, and set beneath a decrepit tropical sun.
“What the fuck is that?”
Rittisak bade them sit down. They sat. Jake asked again: about the view, the peculiar lake.
Chemda explained, quietly, as the sun folded its cards behind the Dangrek Hills.
“This was Ta Mok’s house.”
“The Khmer Rouge leader?”
Chemda nodded, rubbing the mud from her hands on her skirt.
“Look at me. Filthy. Yes, Ta Mok, the Butcher — Pol Pot’s friend — the only man crueler than Pol Pot.”
“And that… fucking graveyard over there, the lake?”
“They call it the Butcher’s Lake. Because Ta Mok made it. In the last years of the Khmer Rouge, when they ruled this final corner of Cambodia, Ta Mok had the peasants dam a river and build this lake, an artificial lake, but it went wrong, it just killed the trees, killed everything.”
“Why?”
“They say he did it to bury all the corpses. Even to the very end, the Khmer Rouge were slaughtering people, they killed many thousands of peasants around here, and, ah, locals say that the remains are out there, concealed under the waters, poisoning the waters, forever.”
Chemda sat back. Her hands behind her, she was talking with Rittisak, and frowning. She explained: “Rittisak says that to get across the border we have to move tonight. In the dark.”
“Good idea.”
“But there’s only one route, only one way to avoid checkpoints.” She stared outward, at the watery desolation, and nodded. “Yes. We have to go that way. It’s the only way. It’s dangerous.”
“No.”
“Yes. We have to get across the lake.”
26
Quelques spéculations sur les origines de culpabilité et de conscience dans les grottes paléolithiques de France et d’Espagne.
Sitting in the darkened apartment, Julia thought, deeply. This was the title to Ghislaine’s essay, the essay that was sought by the killer.
“Some Speculations on the Origins of Guilt and Conscience in the Paleolithic Caves of France and Spain.”
What did it mean? What did it imply? What was he thinking?
The origins of guilt?
The others talked, quietly. She didn’t notice any of this. She didn’t notice Rouvier standing pensively at the window, she didn’t notice Alex murmur a question then disappear into the kitchen — because she was remembering the sensation she had felt by the stones, the Cham des Bondons.
Guilt. She had felt some kind of guilt. Mournful guilt. And now she had this clue; for all the horrors of her experience in the archives, she possessed a clue. Maybe there was a link between the skulls and the murders—and maybe the cave paintings, too? And if there was a link, it was something deep and serious, it had to be. She could sense the outlines of something, in a tactile way; she was like a blind person touching an abstract bronze sculpture. Art. Bones. Wounded skulls.
A part of her thrilled at her discovery, even as she shriveled at the memory of the killer. Plunging the knife at her eye.
Officer Rouvier was nodding again. Light, softly filtered by the half-closed blinds of the Carmichaels’ Marais apartment, was making subtle stripes across his kindly face. Like a man behind horizontal bars.