A few moments later the longtail which had taken them over appeared, paddled in silence by the pilot who had been waiting by the closed-off bridge. The boat nosed up to the beach and Davuth stepped into it without a word. The boat rocked and he steadied himself; there was a stifling moment of awkwardness between them. The man was not afraid. He was merely unsure what to do.
By the same token he knew better than to ask any inconsequential questions and without explicit instruction he turned the vessel around and started up the motor. The sound shocked them both. Davuth took one last look back at the beach, where the clotted nets lay in wet piles on a mud as dark as cocoa. The Englishman had not followed him. They sped out onto the floodplain as the first drops of rain began to fall and the moon disappeared. He lay back in the boat with his hands behind his head and the spray washed over him. In a mere twenty-four hours, the long years of drudgery at his humble station had been left behind and he thought of his daughter asleep in her bed, unaware that he was at that very moment slaving on her behalf and safeguarding her future. She would discover it all later. Either way, it was fated and the fate that had chosen him had made no errors. He had done everything perfectly and the laws of the universe remained undisturbed and serene. At the quay of Takeo the lights were off and he took a roll of dollars and gave them to the pilot.
“If you talk to anyone, you’ll see me again. You don’t want to see me again.” He was sure that he had made his point because the man turned away and said nothing back.
Davuth then walked to the car still parked under the trees and drove through the deserted town. There were no karaokes here, no late-night bars, no nocturnal flimflam. The air was still. Just the needling, unrefreshing rain. It was as boring a town as a man could wish for. It would be fine in the early morning and never afterward.
Within minutes he was back on Route 2 and he was alone on the white-edged road with the gardens and orchards and paddies flowing by. He drove for two hours without thinking about anything. Finally he stopped in a lonely stretch and went into the fields to take a pee. He wanted to be back in the city before first light but he had a few hours to spare. As he stood there surrounded by the whispers of the crickets, however, he felt a strange desire to return to the island in the Mekong and take back everything he had done and said. It couldn’t be done, of course, but still he wanted to go back and make amends and let things take a different course. It was always the fields at this hour that took him back to the old days and the nights of executions which had gone virtually unrecorded. It was quite a thing to consider that he was the only man alive who remembered the last moments of many dozens of people. They lived within him still, he liked to think. But to whom had he ever made amends? To whom had he prayed for forgiveness? He had gotten away with it, and who was he to get away with it? Many of his comrades had also gotten away with it and when they were awake in their beds they reasoned to themselves that they had been young, far too young to be held responsible for anything. It was their extreme youth that explained their ecstatic sadism and skill at killing. It was a skill which only came from a knowing enjoyment, and therefore it was a youthful knowledge, a dementia of immaturity. But in the end he didn’t really believe it.
While he was there he went through their bags, finding nothing but clothes and toiletries and a hundred dollars in cash, and then he took the mobile phones and threw them into a canal running alongside one of the paddies.
He drove into Monivong and stopped at one of the late-night Viet places for some pho and nem. He was starving. At the family tables it was only young clubbers still high and wide-eyed. They gave him a curious jolt of energy. Restored in spirit, he drove back to Street 102 and parked the car a fair distance from Colonial Mansions, near the top of the alley by the boulevard. Then he walked calmly down to the property and passed unnoticed into the lobby, where everyone, as usual, was asleep at their post. He went up to his apartment, let himself in and turned on one light. His own orderliness reassured him and reminded him of a superiority which he had always known was his. An organized man, they used to call him.
He opened the safe and took out the bag with the banknotes and laid it on the bed with the passports and a few other things he had kept there. He was now ready to disappear forever from this oppressive residence. He assembled everything on the bed then turned off the light, closed the door quietly behind him and walked down to Robert’s apartment. It was now past three in the morning and the bureaucrats and corporate officers were asleep in their chilled rooms. He effortlessly opened the door and passed inside and then walked into the rear bedroom and turned on the light there. The curtains to the main room were already closed fast. He locked the door from the inside and then began his patient combing of the rooms, beginning with the safe, which he opened easily.
There was nothing inside. It was the first blow. He felt his face flushing with blood and fury, and he then ransacked the bedroom. He upended the bed, tore up pieces of carpet and emptied out all the cupboards. There was nothing even in the bathroom. The boy had taken everything with him and it now dawned on him—it had been inconceivable only a few hours before—that he had been telling the truth. The little bourgeois parasite had not been lying after all. It was a surprising thing. He gave up after half an hour and sat forlornly on the Englishman’s bed and let his hands dry slowly. It was now possible that it had all been for nothing. All he had was the money taken from the roadside in Battambang.
It was a fair sum but far short of the amount he had been hoping for. He had even hoped to be able to blackmail the Englishman, but he was sure now that it would yield nothing.
Well, he thought, it was worth the try. It’s always worth the try.
He cleaned up the unit and went back out into the corridor after locking the door behind him and keeping the key. There remained two hours of darkness and he considered simply walking out of the Mansions and driving home in defeat. He had, after all, lost nothing in the end, and for that matter he was still many hundreds of dollars in the black. Better to leave, then, and go back to his daughter. There would be more barangs floating in the river at a later time—they were inexhaustible bounty.
So he went back up to his room, locked the door and took a shower. The night was cool, he left the windows open. The water cold and reviving, the moths becalmed on the bathroom walls.
He had been a bit of a fool, and he didn’t relish the failure.
When he came out into the bedroom he felt tired and yet restless. His anger had risen and would not subside. He lay on the bed in his towel and thought and thought until his mind had exhausted itself and finally come to a standstill. He opened the bag and counted out the money and looked over the passports and resolved to throw them out on his way home. Two invisible men who didn’t matter to the world. Two crooks who didn’t even know they were crooks.
He dressed and combed his hair in the mirror. As he was patting the last jet-black strands there was a knock on his door. Carelessly, he had left the main room’s light on. Perhaps it was reception nagging him about his tab. But at four in the morning?
Going to the door he waited for a moment then sensed that the person on the other side of it had not gone away. He opened it then and saw Sothea standing by the rail of the corridor. She reclined casually against the rail and her eyes were cool and unhurried. Surprised, he opened the door wider and asked her bluntly what she was doing there. But then he reconsidered. Why not?
She came in.
“It’s a bit late,” he said, closing the door behind her.
“It’s never too late for this.”
“True.”
He calculated the time. What difference did thirty minutes make?
“I wasn’t expecting this,” he said all the same.
“All the better.”
She walked into the bedroom and sat on the bed. By now she knew the room quite well and she spotted at once the small signs of his imminent departure. His affairs were all packed, it would seem.
“You’re going away?”
“Yes, back to my job. I shouldn’t have stayed away so long as it is.”
“I see. In the middle of the night?”
“Why not in the middle of the night?”
“No reason. Still…”
“Still what?”
He came and sat next to her and his breath was cold and scented with a touch of whisky.
“The roads are empty.” He smiled. “I’ll need to leave within an hour.”
“Then there’s no point talking.”
There’s rarely any point talking anyway, he thought.
She took off her shirt and shoes and went into the bathroom. The mirror was misted and the tiled floor damp. She was wearing jeans and in her front pocket was a small screwdriver. She gripped it for a moment as she inspected her mouth in the mirror, then she washed her hands and let the hot water run a while. She was composing herself. Then she turned and went back into the room where the policeman was already naked and lying on the bed. How quickly he always dressed and undressed. There was an uncanny efficiency about him, even when it concerned nothing more consequential than his animal needs.
Sothea turned off the main light and they lay together for a while, saying nothing, until he said, “Why are your jeans still on?”
“I was just thinking.”
“Don’t.”
“All right, I’ll take them off.”
She put them on the floor beside the bed but kept the screwdriver in her hand. He had turned over on his front as if waiting for a back massage and his head was laid on his arm, his eyes closed. In reality, he was suddenly exhausted after the long drive. The futility of the whole thing had been sinking in moment by moment. He was disgusted and discouraged. The moths fluttered around the main room and he heard them knocking softly against the plastic shutters and the walls. Slowly, he fell into a semi-doze. It was an unexpected gift to her. It was now, indeed, that she wanted most to talk to him. She wanted, in the first place, to tell him everything she had seen and everything she had lost because of him and the filthy driver he was in cahoots with. But there was no time for that. She thought of Simon lying by the side of a sugarcane field on a nameless road. Was that really necessary? A policeman was supposed to report such things and then investigate them. It was only amazing that he had failed to recognize her after they had met that day on the way up to the Scot’s sinister hotel. He had desired her then—for a moment—and he desired her now. But he had failed to connect the two moments in time. Did he think she was two different women? It was a blind spot that was all the more surprising in a man like Davuth. She would make him pay for that oversight. She and Simon could have had a decent enough life together; it was one version of the future she had never given up on. It had been taken away from her by a disaster not of her own making.
She raised herself up and realized that now he was asleep and noticed nothing. She whipped the screwdriver up high and then plunged it straight down into the back of his neck. She put so much force into the blow that there was no struggle. He gasped and stirred and before he could wake she had struck a second time and with even greater ferocity. His blood rushed up out of the two wounds and she straddled him and raised the screwdriver once more. This time with both hands, driving it into his neck as far as she could. His whole body shook like a pig impaled.
The moths in the next room still beat against the shutters. When she was exhausted in her own right she rolled off the squalid body and sank onto the floor for a while. She had already decided that it was all the result of Simon’s karma and of her own, and it was all foreordained. Against the unleashed consequences of karma one had no defense. The circle of samsara was mostly fixed; there was no liberation. Events piled up against each other like logs being thrown onto a pile. She would meet Davuth in a future life and with luck he would be a fly and she would be a gecko chasing him down and eating him. If, that is, she was lucky. She might not be lucky. The seeds laid by any given karma were not entirely known, the outcomes could not be foretold with any accuracy and it was likely, in any event, that one would remain floating and turning within the circle of eternal suffering.