‘And end up in squalid little klong houses, working sleazy bars up dark alleys when they are no longer young enough or attractive enough for your customers.’
Grace smiled and turned to Slattery. ‘Are there any of my girls who catch your eye, Mr Slattery?’
‘Two of ’em, actually, ma’am.’
She called over the girl who had shown them in. ‘See to it that Mr Slattery has everything he wants, with my compliments.’
The girl bowed and Slattery grinned. ‘See you back at the hotel, then, chief.’
In the car Grace said to Elliot, ‘I thought we would never get rid of him.’
Her room was on the first floor of her rambling mansion house, known throughout Bangkok as Chez La Mère Grace. ‘It was what they called my house in Phnom Penh,’ she said. ‘The house there was my mother’s really, and I took on the name when she died and left me the business. She called herself Grace. She wanted an English name. She thought it very chic.’
‘She was a Cambodian, your mother?’
‘Oh, yes. Her real name was Lim Any. I was the result of a liaison with a high-ranking French diplomat. But they never married.’ She finished pouring their drinks at a glass cabinet, kicked off her shoes, and padded across the thick-piled carpet to kneel opposite him on one of the huge soft cushions scattered around a foot-high circular table. The room was sumptuous. Velvet drapes, antique cabinets, exotic trunks with gold clasps. There were mirrors everywhere you looked, even on the ceiling above an enormous circular bed spread with red silk sheets and white cushions. Two or three discreetly placed lamps cast light on key areas, and left others in pools of mysterious darkness.
‘You would have loved Cambodia,’ she said. ‘The Cambodia I knew.’
‘Tell me about it.’ He settled back with his drink.
Her smile seemed distant as she drifted back to a world gone for ever, a world she had loved like life itself, and for which there could never be a satisfactory replacement. ‘Were you ever in Phnom Penh?’ He shook his head. ‘It was a beautiful city, Mr Elliot. It had all the grace and style of the French, the brashness of the Chinese, and yet at its heart was still very Cambodian, full of history. You have seen photographs of Angkor Wat?’
‘Sure.’
‘Then perhaps you will understand a little of Cambodia. But you must see it to feel it. The temples symbolize everything that was great about a race that once ruled the whole of Indochina. Then, lost for hundreds of years, they were rediscovered in the last century by a French explorer, a mirror on a long-forgotten past.’
‘I think we could skip the history lesson,’ Elliot said.
She smiled with something like condescension. ‘Perhaps you have to be Cambodian to understand.’ She sipped her drink thoughtfully. ‘The Fifties and Sixties were a golden era in our more recent history, under the rule of that fat little man, Prince Sihanouk.’
‘I heard he was a bit of an eccentric.’
‘Oh, yes, he was eccentric, Mr Elliot. But you mustn’t mistake eccentricity for stupidity. The Prince was successful in keeping Cambodia out of the war in Vietnam for nearly twenty years before the Americans bombed our country in 1970. Oh, some people thought him mad. He had a penchant for making his own movies, in which he nearly always starred himself as some awful gangster. Of course, I was invited to the palace on the banks of the Mekong many times with my mother. I saw several of his films. They were truly dreadful. He played the saxophone, too. Not badly. And wrote music for performances by the Royal Dancers. He preserved many of the traditions of Cambodia. The people turned out in their thousands every year for the Fêtes des Eaux, a sort of Oxford and Cambridge boat race on the Mekong, held during the rainy season when the waters of the river and the Tonle Sap reverse their currents and flow back on themselves. It is one of the wonders of the world.’
Elliot yawned and she chided him with mock severity. ‘I don’t think you are taking me very seriously, Mr Elliot.’
‘Tell me about Chez La Mère Grace.’
Her smile was resigned. ‘At Chez La Mère Grace,’ she said, ‘time was unimportant. There were no clocks, as you will see there are none here. Sex cannot be measured by the minute or the hour, or even by the day. Nor is it something to be done in the dark, furtive and secret.’ She paused. ‘Another drink?’
‘Sure.’
She rose and crossed to the cabinet to refill their glasses. ‘Of course, not everyone came to Chez La Mère Grace for sexual gratification. A night out in Phnom Penh was not complete without a visit to my house for a few pipes of opium. I had one of the best boy pipes’ — she pronounced it peeps — ‘in the city. A couple would dine at a club along the river then come to the Rue Ohier, in the fashionable centre of Phnom Penh, to smoke in one of my upstairs rooms.’ She came back with their drinks and curled up on a cushion, revealing the curve of one of her legs all the way up to the top of her thigh, brown and smooth and tempting. ‘A good boy pipe is a very rare commodity. He must be able to cook the opium over the flame of a candle so that it does not burn but remains soft and malleable in order that the pipe may be primed to perfection. Only one or two pulls at each pipe are necessary to achieve that pitch of exquis-ite harmony and peace that the smoker seeks.’
Elliot took a pull at his second drink. ‘How did the war affect you?’
‘At first not at all. We were all very sad when the Prince was driven into exile after Lon Nol’s coup. The General was little more than an American puppet, and that gave the Khmer Rouge a popular support which they had never previously enjoyed. If it had not been for the interference of the Americans, the Khmer Rouge could never have taken power. They would have remained a small, ineffectual group of guerrillas buried away somewhere in the jungle.
‘We sometimes heard the sound of distant guns from the swimming pool where we would spend our afternoons in the sun, cooling ourselves in the water and sipping chilled Chablis. I could never understand why the Cambodian people felt it necessary to fight, to make war.’
‘Understanding is seldom found in swimming pools and glasses of chilled wine.’
The contempt in his voice stung her to reply. ‘Nor is it to be found in England or America, where you know nothing of Cambodia or its people. Cambodians are a lazy, happy people, Mr Elliot. They live in a rich, fertile and beautiful land. They have never had reason to do other than smile and give thanks to Buddha.’
Elliot remembered the face of the refugee at Mak Moun. He had had no reason to do either.
‘In the last months it became clear that the Khmer Rouge were going to win,’ she said. ‘Lon Nol’s army was corrupt, had no will to fight. The officers sold the food for the troops, the money for the war effort lined their pockets. Dollars for Cambodia. When the Khmer Rouge were only a few kilometres from the city they would still prefer to spend their nights drinking or smoking opium or buying favours from my girls. Eventually I barred army officers from my house. And a few weeks later I was forced to close up, take what I could, and flee the country. I would certainly have been killed had I stayed.’ She got up and moved to a trunk by the bed. ‘All I have left now of Cambodia are my memories and my jewellery.’
With a small key hanging on a fine gold chain round her neck, she unlocked the trunk and threw back the lid. She lifted out tray after tray of necklaces and earrings and gold and silver bracelets, rings and brooches. ‘These’ — she held out a necklace and bracelet set of hand-engraved silver — ‘were my mother’s. Made for her by the Prince’s own silversmith, Minh Mol. There are others, too. Earrings, cufflinks, brooches, crafted by men now dead whose skills have been lost for ever. Only in Cambodia could you find such men.’