Julia didn’t care about anything anymore. The killer wouldn’t have helped Julia if she meant Julia harm. Julia wanted to talk to this strange, silent young woman. This brutal murderer.
“Who are you?”
A soft breeze rippled the silken thangkas.
“Soriya.” The killer spoke, and walked closer. Her accent was quite clearly American. “You know you had a miscarriage? It’s not life-threatening, the pregnancy was not advanced.”
“Why did you help me? You tried to kill me before.”
“I know pain. I understand pain.”
Piercing curiosity filled Julia’s thoughts. Maybe the killer — Soriya — would explain. And Julia yearned for an explanation, for the truth, for something to fill the emptiness that now grew inside her, the horrible void; the tears came rising to the surface, but she fought them.
“OK.” Julia sat farther along the bench. Inviting this woman — this woman? — Soriya to sit beside her.
Soriya sat down. She was svelte. Young, athletic, wiry. She had Chemda’s beauty — but differently. Dark, angry eyes.
The sun was slipping behind the sawtoothed horizon. A cold Siberian wind was coming down from the Snow Mountains, reminding the black-necked cranes of the winter they had escaped.
Gazing directly at Julia, the Khmer woman took off her wig of long dark hair.
Underneath she was completely bald. She had a very faint scar on her forehead.
Julia gasped. “They cut you.”
“Yes.” Soriya paused, and continued: “Or so I have now calculated. Finally. Someone abandoned me. Chemda’s mother, Madame Tek. Chemda’s mother is my mother—”
“You are her sister.”
“Almost…. Almost.”
The Khmer woman’s smile was shaded with an intensity of pain.
“Growing up in America as a child, I was wild, unhappy, suicidal. I was moved from foster home to foster home. Unwanted. Because I was disturbed, and violent. Not comfortable in my skin. I tried to find out who my real parents were, but the records had been destroyed. I was just another orphan from Cambodia, another product of the chaos, after the Khmer Rouge fell. But my sense of dislocation was worse than that. And why was I scarred? What was wrong with my mind?”
“How…?”
“I am Chemda’s twin sister. And yet I am not. I cannot explain now. I don’t want to. I was strong, and clever and athletic. I was recruited. Special forces. Then I left the army. But I still wanted to kill. I couldn’t control myself. Barely, I controlled myself.”
The light in the house was fading fast. Soriya’s speech was dark and unhurried and compelling, and Julia forgot about her miscarriage as she listened to Soriya.
“I went to Cambodia. Researching my past. Desperate. I found a guy named Ponlok. Begging, near Tuol Sleng.”
“Ponlok. I have heard of him—”
“I saw the scar on his head. We shared the very same scar. He told me what he knew, that he had heard a rumor. That the Khmer Rouge tried the surgical experiments on babies, on one baby in particular. He told me I looked like Chemda Tek. He told me it happened in Anlong Veng. I went to Anlong Veng. I found the doctor who did the trick. Madame Tek had twins. The doctors did a switch on the mother, told her the second girl was stillborn, a miscarriage. I was whisked away.” Soriya’s eyes softened, for a second, in the twilight. “I am sorry for what happened to you today.”
Julia did not know what to say. She struggled toward a reply.
“It does not compare to… what happened to you.”
Soriya shrugged.
“No. It does not. The doctor told me, in Anlong Veng, that I was carried off. Like a prize. The prize was me. They took me away and tried the experiment on me, they wanted to see how I would fare compared with my twin. She was the control. It was science. But it went wrong. I was a disturbed baby, feral, epileptic. A failure. They gave me away. Someone adopted me from America. That’s how I ended up there, age two, just thrown away like a spoiled chicken steak. In America I got worse. The fighting. Disturbances. Fits and seizures.” Soriya paused. “When the doctor in Anlong Veng told me all of this I was… even angrier. I threatened him. I was brutal. He told me that one man could explain more, about the experiments, the theory that had mutilated me. Hector Trewin. So I went to England and I tortured some of the truth out of him. And he gave me the list of names and told me about the Western mission. The Marxists. He didn’t tell me why they did what they did, but he told me that they helped, helped the Communists do their experiments. And so I resolved to kill everyone. If I had to kill, I was going to kill all the people that did this to me.” She gestured at the scar on her head. “They made me this way. So I have been slowly killing them. One by one. I have many passports. One of them says Chemda Tek.”
“You travel as Chemda?”
“It is easy. When I am dressed like her I am identical — unless you look very close.”
Julia could see this was true. Only close up, sitting two feet away, could she properly see a difference in Soriya’s face. A faint haze of facial hair, maybe. A stronger jaw, perhaps. The mind affecting the brain? But how?
And yet the face was beautiful, just like Chemda’s. Beautiful and dark, and murderous, and scarred.
“What about… what happened in Paris?”
“I do not like killing anyone I do not have to kill. The archivist, at the museum? That was wrong. I am ashamed of that. And I am sorry for what I did. To you, too. My temper still surges, I still have… many cognitive problems. Violent urges. I can’t help it. But I am sorry I had to do that, and sorry I frightened you. I have been shadowing you and the English guy, for a while. And Chemda. Of course. Following you. Watching you. I followed Barnier to his apartment block.”
A puzzle presented itself to Julia. She ignored the pain in her belly and asked: “How did you find me here? Why did you find me here?”
“Two Westerners in Zhongdian? Not hard. A few days ago I tracked down a young Tibetan. Tashi. Rumors said he had taken two gwailos, two white people, to Balagezong. Neither came back. He told me Jake was taken by men in the mountains. He said you were here in this house. He was very, very frightened. I decided to come and find you.”
“Why?”
An evening breeze kicked at Soriya’s fake black hair.
“I know who you are. An archaeologist. You have the truth.”
“What?”
“All along, all through this, I have been trying to find out why they did this to me — what was the point in cutting me open. Trewin refused to say, even at the expense of his life. No one would tell me. I tried to find out more. At the museum, in Paris, I was desperate. That’s why I went back into the museum, after I did it. After I killed the guy at the door. I wanted that box. Prunières de Marvejols. But you must have moved it. So I was still seeking the truth. And Barnier, when it happened, he tried to bargain for his life, and he told me you and he had worked it all out. But the doorman disturbed me. I had to act quickly. I killed him. Had to. But that meant he couldn’t explain. That leaves you. Only you can tell me what happened. Tell me, please. Why did they do this to me?”
Julia hesitated for a long time. Then she explained. Softly, firmly, lucidly, she elaborated the theory. Outside in the cold evening air the yaks walked along the valley in quiet processional.
At the conclusion, Soriya nodded.
And then she said nothing, gazing out at the brooding turquoise sky. Julia broke the silence: