Jake shook his head. “No.”
“Then I don’t… understand. An identical killer? Maybe they are cousins… or what?”
“Who cares. Let me through.”
He shoved between Barnier and Julia, pushing himself into the sordid bustle of Soi Cowboy.
The street life of Soi Cowboy was blithely ignorant of the turmoil in Baccara. Freelance whores were eating sausages on sticks outside Rawhide, fake monks were begging sorrowfully at the corner by the Dollhouse.
Where was Chemda?
Jake tried the phone three times. Nothing. Voice mail. He went back, walking up to the doorman of Baccara.
“Did you see a girl? A Khmer girl, running out of here?”
“Nnn?”
“A dark girl? Please, which way did she go?”
The doorman grunted, and shrugged — and pointed at another bar.
Jake demanded: “Lucky Star? She went in there?”
A shrug — then another curt but directed nod.
“Girl.”
Pushing urgently through the Cowboy crowds, Jake entered the indicated bar.
Lucky Star. It was dark. He squinted, saw two naked girls on a stage, one wearing a pelvic harness and a strap on dildo, penetrating the other, time and again. The girls writhed and moaned, robotically. The music was Debussy: “Claire de Lune.” Men in the shadows were silently throwing fifty-baht notes onto the stage.
Jake ran right out. Despairing, depressed, desperate. Evidently the doorman had thought Jake had just wanted girls. Girls on girls.
It was all disgusting. Soi Cowboy disgusted him. Meeting here had been some kind of joke by Barnier, a repulsive joke by a sick and frightened man.
He was never going to find her. Maybe they would kill her. Whoever they were. His anxiety surged. Raged. A monster from the swamp. At the corner of Soi Cowboy by the Dutch pub, he anxiously phoned his hotel on the off chance, as a last chance — but the receptionist had not seen her either, and that was that.
His hopes had gone.
Jake looked up and down the glittering lights of Asoke Boulevard in terminal dismay. A bleeping from his phone; a text message.
Kdnapd. Car. Plz help. Dont know where. lease help Jake help.
33
Twenty-four hours later and Jake still hadn’t heard anything. Her phone was, of course, switched off. He’d waited for hours in the hotel just hoping, but it was hopeless.
In desperation, feeling his sense of himself begin to dissolve, he had even tried calling Chemda’s mother and grandfather, risking everything — but all he got was the Sovirom maids, who answered his questions with impenetrable Khmer. He was lost; he was unmanned and enfeebled; he understood no one; and now he was sitting in a street-side bar in central Bangkok with Julia and Barnier.
Marcel Barnier’s breath smelled of whiskey. He always smelled of whiskey. He had apparently been drinking on the sois of Sukhumvit, nonstop, since the incident in Baccara, as he was too damn “motherfucking scared” to go home to the flat in case “the witch” came to kill him.
It was accepted by all that the witch, the killer, was not Chemda. Julia had been tearful and profound enough in her apologies on that score. But that didn’t answer any of the other questions. The questions that burned through Jake. Where was Chemda? Who’d taken her? The Laotians? Her family? The Khmer Rouge loyalists? Would they come for Jake? And if they did find Jake, would they bother with a kidnapping? Maybe they would just kill him, as they had so nearly done in Anlong Veng.
He remembered the smells and the senses of that moment: involuntarily praying in the dust by Pol Pot’s grave; staring at the incense sticks planted in the old noodle jar; smelling the rotting trash. Waiting to die, like a tethered goat. He knew that could happen again at any moment — but he couldn’t flee for his life.
Because of Chemda. He couldn’t leave Chemda to her fate. Not now, not ever. He had lost two women in his life. This third he would find again. He had to, or his life was smoke and ashes.
Jake turned and looked at his drinking companions. Julia — miserable and guilt-ridden and earnest. And Barnier, drunk and frightened and smirking. But at least they seemed relatively calm. Jake was far from calm. He was nervy. Jumpy. Twitching. He wanted to do something. Anything.
“Tell us? Why have you asked us here, Marcel?”
The Frenchman languorously swallowed another shot of Mekong whiskey.
“I want to know what you have discovered, I want to compare notes. Apparently Julia has a theory.”
“A theory?”
“What happened in Cambodia thirty years ago. Julia says she has worked out why. The theoretical basis.”
Jake switched his anxious gaze to the pale American woman.
“Yes,” she said, very quietly, as if speaking to herself. “Well… I believe I might have pieced together the intellectual idea that underpinned what happened in Cambodia in 1976.”
“So! Now is the time to tell!” Barnier grinned, quite vulgarly, maybe a little desperately. “Ideas, theories, discoveries, whatever. Confess! It might help us, and it might even help Chemda. No? Allez, les braves!”
Barnier lit a cigarette and inhaled the smoke through his nose. Jake stared, in nervous depression, at the ecstatic neon glow of the nearest sushi bar, and then he shrugged at his own bleakness. He looked at his cell phone. Nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing piled on nothing.
They had nothing better to do, nothing else they could do. Why not discuss, why not do this?
He motioned at Julia.
“Go on?”
In five very dense minutes, she outlined her theory: but she did it in precise and deeply confusing scientific language. The words were long and slippery; Jake found them hard to follow. His thoughts persistently drifted to Chemda. Barnier had no such problems, he kept saying, “Yes, yes,” grinning self-consciously and exhaling cigarette smoke in clouds of triumphant approbation, like he was winning a game of poker. By bluffing.
“It’s a stunning thesis,” said Barnier when Julia had concluded. “It is surely right! This is surely what Ghislaine’s essay must also have affirmed. C’est magnifique! You are a true scientist, and a sleuth!”
Julia looked half anguished, half pleased. Jake was entirely confused.
“Can you guys explain it a bit slower, in more simple terms. Remember, I’m just a bloody photographer. A snapper.”
Julia offered a sympathetic smile. “Of course. Sorry. First you have to know a little bit about the evolution of the human mind.”
“OK.”
Patiently, and more slowly, she explained behavioral modernity: the accepted idea that men and women made a Great Leap Forward in their cognition and cultural development around forty thousand years ago. Jake nodded.
“So, cave art, music, religion and stuff, proper burials, and tool making, they all… this is the first time we see them?”
“Correct,” said Barnier. “Abstract mentation! Teamwork in hunting. Even humor is born. We see many, many signs that the human mind, the human spirit, quite suddenly changed during the Ice Ages.”
“Why did it change?”
Barnier puffed smoke at a passing tuk-tuk and answered: “Genetic mutation. Or change in the neural structures. Or both! No one is sure.”
“So… In which case. Go over it again? The entire thesis?”
Julia nodded, shyly, and answered: “It’s actually quite simple but, like I say, very relevant. In essence I believe that the birth of the art evidenced in the cave paintings shows the birth of guilt, and this guilt is the key to the modern human condition.”