The revelation was a physical sensation, a slap across the face. This guy was running a center that still did research into crossbreeding. Between men and animals. The editor of the magazine that published Ghislaine’s essay was still alive. Still out there. Still working. Still contactable. In Abkhazia, in the insurrectionist wilds on the periphery of the broken Soviet Union, by the Black Sea.
Julia’s troubled and excited mind flew across the world to this place. She tried to imagine it; she failed. She looked back at the screen. The website even gave an e-mail address for Sergei Yakulovich. In Abkhazia!
She knew she was going to contact him. As soon as possible. Because: Maybe he had a copy of the essay? Maybe he knew all the answers? And his career — human-primate hybridization — fitted the features of the puzzle too well. It had to be relevant.
But she also had to be clever. She couldn’t just e-mail and ask this Yakulovich guy straight out. Maybe if she did that, he would say nothing, pull down the shutters, thwart her one viable route through the maze. So maybe she could even go there. To Abkhazia. Why not? She just about had the money and she certainly had the time — and maybe she now had the ambition, even the confidence — after resisting the killer in the archives. And she had nothing else to do — the idea of now going home to London, retreating to teaching and winter and the quotidian pointlessness of her failing career, seemed ludicrous. Not after all this.
Alex wandered into the room. He was munching a croissant and carrying an unread copy of Le Monde.
“Morning, sweetheart?”
“Morning,” she said.
“Hey. Are you OK?”
She nodded. “Yes, sure, yes.”
As she watched him sit and not really read the paper, she knew her answer: she was probably going to do all this alone. She’d had enough of men patronizing her. Her father. Her boss in London. Even Alex was embarrassed by her wild ideas; even Rouvier was very charmingly unpersuaded. All the men in her life, from Dad to Ghislaine, they had scoffed, or condescended, or both — even when they meant well. Now she would show them all — and prove herself. Earn and demand their respect.
“Shall I make some more coffee?” Alex asked.
“Yep,” she said. “Coffee would be good.”
27
He didn’t dare look down. He didn’t want to look across, or behind him, or anywhere. He could feel the silt, or maybe something less acceptable, between his toes. A persistent cold breeze froze into him. Moonlight sheened the waveless water, silhouetting the black dead trees against the deadening silver.
The Butcher’s Lake. They were a third of the way across; already it was long past midnight.
“Here.”
He reached out a hand for Chemda. She had slipped in the rotting mud.
“Thanks.”
Jake hauled her up onto a kind of island, with its one requisite black spar of dead tree. A large white night bird, alarmed by their arrival, flapped away into the depths of sky, toward the silent tropical stars. The whiteness of the beating wings dwindled into dark.
Rittisak glanced back at his charges as they squatted on the mud bank, regaining some energy. His dark face was fathomless in the gloomy moonlight.
“It’s taken us two hours already,” Jake said to the Khmer, who shrugged. “How much longer?”
“No English, no English.”
Jake pointed to his wrist, where a watch might be if he hadn’t taken it off. “I said…”
But he said nothing: he gave up. He turned to Chemda to translate. She was barefoot and smeared with mud to the knee — but they were all barefoot and smeared with mud, indeed Jake was muddy to the shoulder. He had already slipped over once as they tried to ford the expanse of water, nearly collapsing into deeper grayness, splashing noisily, making the night birds clack and disperse in agitation, making Rittisak frown and whisper and put an urgent finger to his elegant Khmer lips: shhhhh!
At Jake’s request, Chemda translated. Rittisak answered. She translated again.
“Just another three hours, ah, more or less. He says the next bit is the worst… then it should get easier, shallower, I think.”
They rose and slid down the mud of the islet shore, and Jake girded himself for his near-submersion. The cold cringed into his ankles with a sensation of sickliness, like sudden gangrene. He wasn’t sure if he was imagining it, this definite feeling of viscosity to the water, this cold and unpalatable oiliness. Perhaps he was just spooked by those stories of bodies dumped here, drowned here, the Butcher’s thousands, cached underwater, like Ta Mok had been some kind of human crocodile, storing food.
The tiredness washed over him as they followed Rittisak’s delicate path, picking the shallowest route through the deceptive waters, the chilling wide swamps. He gazed, half-dreaming, at these strange black-and-white night birds, raptors, vulturesque, posed on so many trees. Did they feed off the corpses? Was that why they roosted here?
Chemda slipped again, and he reached out to steady her. He wondered if he loved her.
The trudge continued. It was a hypnotically repetitive process: wait for Rittisak to seek his path through the quagmire, then follow his footsteps exactly, then lean against a poisoned tree, then turn and make sure Chemda was OK.
Then repeat.
They were halfway across now. When he leaned against the next dead tree, Jake looked behind and squinted in the moon-tarnished darkness; he could see Ta Mok’s house, back there, on the dry ground. What must the Butcher have felt? Sitting there in his concrete villa with the stupid paintings, looking at this reservoir of death that he had decreed? Where the ospreys fed on the fish and the flesh, carrying the carrion of his victims to the distant kapoks on the Dangrek Escarpment? A sliver of wind goosefleshed the water around him. Another bird streaked the bleak whiteness of the moon, then disappeared.
It was three or four a. m. But was it really? How long to dawn? Was that the first skein of silvery blue on the far horizon? Maybe it was just some dismal Cambodian town staining the sky with its naked lights hung on stark concrete poles.
Rittisak was talking and pointing. Chemda came up close and held Jake’s muddy hand as she listened. She explained:
“Says it’s, ah, the last kilometer, we go that way, then we can climb the hills — some of this is deep — we need to be careful. But we are nearly there.”
Nearly there, they had nearly made it. Jake’s spirits surged with hope as they waded the greasy cold water. Soon they would be climbing up the hills, then they could rest in the dry, warm shelter of the forest, then it was an easy slip across the border, and then: safety! After all the terrors came Thailand. And trains and telephones and a talk with Tyrone. Jake yearned to be in Thailand, to be in a country that was not haunted by two million ghosts, a country that wasn’t one giant neak ta, one giant spirit house, with more specters than citizens.
The waters oiled between his legs, making a silver-and-rainbow coil in the moonshine. Jake stared down, absorbed.
A face was staring up at him.
He lurched, swayed. And reached out a hand for a branch of black wood.
“Are you OK?”
“I’m fine.”
He lied. He was sure he’d seen a face, a kind of face, a skull, a skull with flesh on it, bobbing momentarily. Or had he? Jake had no time to sort the nightmares from reality. It was all a nightmare. Now he could hear a fat sudden noise behind him. A splashing angry noise, coming close. The trees were denser here, the moon was partly clouded, the light was so poor: Was it someone pursuing them, or some animal?