Among strongmen I am strong…. I want to develop my country like other Southeast Asian strongmen did.
—HUN SEN: STRONGMAN OF CAMBODIA
Almost all the vehicles traveling Route 4 to Sihanoukville displayed bunches of bananas on their dashboards. At first I thought the fruit was the budget lunch in these parts, but I discovered the bananas weren’t for eating at the crest of Pich Nil Pass, in the Elephant Mountains, a hundred kilometers southwest of the capital. Below a shell-blasted bunker stood a bungalow-size temple surrounded by hundreds of gaily colored spirit houses, their little spires connected to the temple by a rope hung with bow-tied notes. My driver parked the car, took his bananas from the dash and handed me a couple, saying, “For Ya-mao.”
I pretty much pray to whatever god is in front of me and so I pro-nammed and studied the deity. Ya-mao’s effigy was made out of black stone, her lips were painted pink, she was wrapped in a gold silk robe and surrounded by a forest of phalluses. Not just hardwood erections carved with vaguely ridged glans, as you find in other Buddhist countries. On her right was a full-metal penis with big golden balls.
After leaving her some riels and the bananas, I got back in the car and read in my Sihanoukville Visitors Guide that Ya-mao was more than a fertility goddess: she seemed to be an ancient symbol of the Khmer worship of the strongman as God’s representative on earth. She had lived during the late Funan period, around the sixth century, and was married to a powerful king who ruled the south from Ream, a seaside village across a bay from present-day Sihanoukville. The king left her to go to war in Koh Kong and, unable to live without him, Ya-mao followed on a fishing boat and was drowned in a storm. She awoke in the next world still longing for her husband and appeared to him in spirit, tormented by her inability to consummate her desire. He was so touched by her devotion that he appointed her goddess of the south, empowered to give blessings to travelers who worshiped him by offering her symbols of his manly strength.
The Ya-mao myth blended two traditions: the Khmer custom of offering tribute to the strongman, and India’s ritual worship of the lingam—the phallic representation of the gods Vishnu and Shiva, the Hindu embodiment of the Strongman in His alternating roles as preserver and destroyer. Eventually, lingam worship spread across Cambodia, becoming incorporated into the Angkorian cult of the god king. Those who held the royal lingam collected the king’s due, melding obedience to authority with the mystical belief that the authority figure was God—the Infallible Phallus.*
All of this went a long way to explain My Lord Daddy Hun Sen’s oxy-moronic rhetoric on corruption. On the one hand, the prime minister flaunted his efforts to democratize the state and end payoffs. On the other, in his just-published biography, he openly bragged that he was “Cambodia’s strongman,” that he embodied the nation, and that he wasn’t required to “listen to anyone’s advice.” It certainly helped explain why in almost every town on Route 4 the most prominent building was not a Buddhist temple but the Cambodian People’s Party headquarters, which served both as the district house of the ruling party and the bank in which offerings were openly received, then transferred upward to the capital. In exchange for kickbacks, lawlessness could take place within the law, and district-level subordinates routinely marketed the country as a dumping ground for Asia’s most-wanted criminals and least-wanted substances.
I was about to see that not all of those substances were drugs.
Eight miles from Sihanoukville, just after the turnoff to fabled Ream, we passed an open field dappled with Brahman cattle grazing placidly among peasants using shovels and sticks to search for their next meal of beetles and lizards. Spoiling this pastoral vision, however, were scores of derelict shipping containers at the edge of the field. I touched my driver’s shoulder and told him to stop.
The field was the site of what environmentalists from the NGO Forum on Cambodia called “the worst act of toxic-waste dumping in recent times.” Almost exactly one year ago, on December 4, 1998, a ship called the Chang Sun had docked in Sihanoukville and unloaded 2,900 tons of what was listed in official documentation as “cement cakes.” The ship belonged to a Taiwanese manufacturer of polyvinyl chlorides, the Formosa Plastics Corporation. Within hours of the dumping, impoverished residents of the adjacent Bettrang Commune swarmed the site, thinking the cakey white substance was phosphate fertilizer. Farmers spread the powder on their crops and used the triple-lined bags to store rice or as bedsheets and window screens. Within a few days, over a third of the commune’s people began complaining of exhaustion, a perpetual feeling of being thirsty, and a paradoxical inability to urinate no matter how much water they drank. Half of the port workers who had handled the substance also fell ill. Then, on December 16, a young Sihanoukville port worker who had swept out the Chang Sun’s hold died in agony. Three days later, in Koki village, adjacent to the site, a 23-year-old man who had slept for several nights on plastic sheeting he’d scavenged from the dump site died under similar circumstances. Tests were run on samples taken from the acres of white cakes and they were found to contain “concentrations of mercury more than 20,000 times above safety limits as well as dangerous levels of dioxin and PCBs.”
The city of Sihanoukville panicked in a way that hadn’t been seen since the Khmer Rouge evacuations in April 1975. Rumors swirled that Formosa Plastics had paid a multimillion-dollar bribe to government agents to facilitate the export of the ship’s contents to this site. One man was killed when residents stormed the headquarters of Kamsab, one of the government agencies they blamed for importing the waste. Four died in car accidents as people fought their way out of the city over packed roads—in their confusion, actually fleeing in the direction of the dump site. On December 23, cargo containers were brought in to ring the rubble and contain the drifting poisonous dust. The army was then called in and, dressed head to toe in white contamination suits and breathing masks, began shoveling the cakes into barrels. On March 30, 1999, the waste was shipped out of Cambodia and 4,000 tons of topsoil were removed from the site, which was then declared safe by Cambodia’s Department of Pollution Control at the Ministry of Environment. Cattle were set to grazing the reseeded wasteland and locals began digging for grubs. In the year since the dumping, 14 more commune residents—all healthy before the dumping—fell ill and died, and the grazing cows developed mysterious shiny bumps on their bodies.
Six months before I arrived, the government had tried to assuage local resentment by trying in absentia the Taiwanese officials behind the dumping, sentencing them to five years in prison if they should ever show up in Cambodia. No investigation of local officials was ever launched, and in covering the disaster, Phelim Kyne made the point that “the most poignant lessons of the Sihanoukville toxic dumping have been to underline the rot within the country.”
We came over a rise and headed steeply down towards Sihanoukville and its dockside parking lot of Maersk containers. My driver hauled up at a slough clogged with lily pads near a dilapidated train station at the corner of a street called My Lord Daddy Hun Sen Beach Drive, which led to the Koh Kong ferry dock. “Koh Kong?” he asked, but I told him to head on into town. I’d decided to spend the night in Sihanoukville. The port town had three big casinos and four discos where the 14K hung out in between their runs up the coast to Koh Kong.
Sihanoukville (or Kompong Som, as it is called by most Khmer) had never really been a stranger to dark deals in smoky places, having been in the thick of international intrigue ever since construction of the town began at the dissolution of French Indochina in 1954. Prior to that, Cambodia had exported its goods down the Mekong River, but the independence of Vietnam had cut Phnom Penh off from the sea. And so the French, trying to keep a foothold in their former colony, and the Americans, wanting to stay on Sihanouk’s good side in that era of guerrilla insurgencies, had formed a consortium to help the king develop his namesake city.
The port facilities were finished in 1960 and a 10-year building boom began, with luxury hotels sprouting on five beaches patronized by the jet-set families of the Cambodian elite, while the gravel streets of the town became peppered with the offices of shell companies secretly run by the KGB and the CIA. After the U.S. Air Force began bombing eastern Cambodia, the second phase of port construction was brought to a halt, and in 1975, the construction was reversed. The Khmer Rouge seized the Mayaguez, a U.S. container ship in port, and the U.S. Navy retaliated by bombing the Cambodian naval base at Ya-mao’s home village, Ream, plus Sihanoukville’s warehouses and train yard. Unwittingly, the U.S. Navy aided the Khmer Rouge’s de-industrialization plans. At the time, as in Phnom Penh, the Maoists were tearing things apart to help hustle in the golden agrarian age. Sihanoukville’s evacuated streets and deserted beaches were littered with the smashed refrigerators and televisions of the surf set.
Like the rest of Cambodia, the city stood as a ruin for the next 15 years, and only started peeping through the rubble towards the late ’80s, when the Vietnamese left. With the arrival of the U.N. in 1991 and the elections in 1993, it began to look as if Sihanoukville’s beaches might again serve as resort attractions; old hotels were restored and new ones built in the hopes the peninsula would evolve into a Cambodian version of Phuket. A year later, three tourists were kidnapped and murdered on Route 4 and development came to a halt. It started up again the following year, and stopped once more for a year after the ’97 coup. Then, a few months after Hun Sen consolidated his hold on power in the 1998 elections, casinos and disco nightclubs started to go up. At that point the go-ahead was given for the dumping of the toxic waste, and fear of death by mercury poisoning drove the town into another tourist depression. Not that the gangsters minded. That was when they began to thrive.
I’d been warned by Rainsy about asking pointed questions in Sihanoukville, but it was a bit of advice I forgot almost as soon as we entered Ekareach Street, the downtown’s pitted and potholed main drag. We got stuck behind a bullock cart that was trying to make a left and, while my driver was leaning on his horn, I noticed in the parking lot opposite us a dozen Cambodians arguing with a couple of Chinese guys in sharkskin business suits. The two Chinese stood above the crowd, under the gold marquee of the Long Beach Resort casino, and it almost looked as if they were dealing with some kind of union protest. I told my driver to turn in, but he sniffed trouble and stopped halfway up the incline to the lot. There wasn’t a single tourist in sight, and as I walked to the edge of the Cambodian crowd every eye turned on me. I offered my usual introduction, “Hi, I’m writing about travel in Cambodia,” then shook imaginary dice in a cupped hand, threw for a bet, and snapped my fingers. “Can I go in and play?” I asked.
The expressions of the Cambodians instantly changed from scowls to smiles—but the faces of the Chinese guys above them were immutably sour. “No open today,” said one sternly, looking me right in the eye. “No business for you,” said the other, pointing with his cigarette at my taxi.
The Cambodians seemed to recognize that I was a potential ally in whatever was going on, and one of them informed me, “Owner run away China yesterday!”
“No pay us!” said another. “Some men win here, say, ‘Now broke, casino no more!’”
“New owners,” said the first, pointing to the duo. “Say, ‘Go away.’ But open again tonight, tonight!! New workers, but no pay us!”
My mind wrapped itself around one thought. A casino will sometimes go broke in the face of a string of house losses, but usually not by chance. More often than not, organized crime figures holding a debt will engineer a takeover by seeding professional cheaters to break the bank. I looked back at my driver, who seemed the picture of misery parked in the lot. He turned the wheels on the Toyota, put the stick in reverse, and gave me the palm-down Asian-wave to join him.
I smiled at the no-nonsense Chinese men on the stairs. “Can I come back tonight when it’s open?”
Neither replied. One stepped down from the stairs, forcefully shoved his way through the crowd, and went over to my driver. He said something to him in Khmer, which sounded none too compromising, and my driver rolled the car backward onto the street, then threw it into first and started to roll east. His palm-waving was now almost frantic. When I got in I asked him what the fellows had said to him.
“He say not your business, take you away quick. No come back. Otherwise trouble.”
“You think they were Chinese mafia?”
He didn’t reply for a moment, then finally said: “You want know, somebody else tell you.”
I had intended to get a room in town, but now, thinking about pursuing this Long Beach thing, I reconsidered. Rainsy had described Sihanoukville as a tropical Marseilles where troublesome people disappeared as casually as boats over the horizon, so I decided I’d be safer staying at the most touristed beach—Ochheuteal, south of the city, and gave my driver the name of a hotel there. I’d forgotten Rainsy’s other cautionary words: that down here I would find myself either in the hot pan of Chinese mafia crime or in the slithering pit of criminal Caucasian sex.
We swung away from the center of town and around one of the most curious traffic circles I’d ever seen, offering a light touch to this creepy place. Atop a 10-foot brick base squatted a two-story-high lioness, while her three-story roaring mate, apparently prepatory to mating, stood beside her. They were both painted bright gold and faced the rising sun. Underneath the lion’s basketball-size testicles someone had placed a bunch of bananas.
We turned down Mithona Street, the beachside drive, passed a military-police base and pulled up at the hotel called the Crystal, a blue glass building that was undergoing expansion in anticipation of the tourist boom, although at high noon in this high season it looked like they still had a year or two to wait.
“I send girl your room?” the bellhop asked me at my door, on which was pasted a poster of a smiling condom walking into a room with a tart. Above it were written the English words: “No condom, no sex.”
“No thank you,” I said.
“You want boy?”
“No.”
“You want lady-boy?”
“No!”
He obviously thought I was just being shy.
“You ask me when you want, okay, okay,” he smiled. “Some girls no good you bring—make trouble.”
I gave him a dollar bill and asked if he could set me up this evening, not with a girl but with a moto driver who knew his way around the Chinese casinos and nightclubs. As expected, he had “a cousin” who would fit the bill exactly—a fellow named Am who would pick me up after dinner.
Prescribing myself a short dose of non-Triad-related tourism, I left the hotel for Ochheuteal Beach, supposedly the nicest in Sihanoukville, the one that was about to draw the hordes of tourists. To get to it you had to cross a trash-strewn field, then a plank bridge that spanned a smelly ditch where pigs and cows rummaged in the heaps of garbage the locals dumped there daily. Beyond that was a windbreak of straggly Australian pines—not a coconut palm in sight—and then the beach itself, just a narrow hard strand lapped by cloudy water that looked oily from the city’s effluent. Half a dozen tattered thatch umbrellas were planted in the sand at intervals, all taken by white-bellied, middle-aged men capitalizing on the sad menu my bellhop had offered me. Beyond them, the beach arced southeast a few miles to an inlet, across which you could see the naval base of Ream, which was just then adding a thick black cloud of smoke to the bluish haze. The land, the beach, the sea, the sky—everything seemed poisoned.
There were swarms of 13-year-old girls in loose smocks buzzing about the beach with thatch platters of pineapples on their heads. As soon as they saw me spreading out my towel, they converged. I’d only taken 1,000 riels with me—the pineapples, they shouted, were 1,500—and so I shooed them away with my briefcase. They persisted, of course, bargaining down. I finally gave one of the girls all the money I had and she drew an eight-inch knife and began expertly skinning and slicing. “Why you buy hers?” one of her companions complained, waving her own knife around. “Why you no buy mine?!”
I told her I had no more money, but that when I came back from the hotel later I would buy hers. “I go hotel with you,” she said, which caused her friends to giggle. “Okay, okay?” she asked, petting my neck.
“I go hotel with you! No, I go hotel with you!” her friends chanted.
It was hard to tell if these other kids really meant what they were saying, but I think the petulant one did. Her companion handed me my sliced pineapple on a stick and walked away with the others. The other girl remained. “Why you buy hers? Why you no buy mine?!” and burst into neurotic angry tears.
“Sohm toh—I have no more money with me,” I apologized, and turned around and began reading some material I’d been given by Sari Nissi, the Finnish head of Phnom Penh’s International Organization for Migration—the body that was investigating Cambodia’s Triad-run, burgeoning child sex trade. Suddenly I felt a stinging slap on my shoulder and turned to see the little girl running away up the beach. There were splashes of red all over my thighs and the sand. I looked at my shoulder and saw a two-inch gash where the girl had hit me with her razor-sharp knife blade. Rivulets of blood ran down over my ribs. “I’m stabbed!” I shouted, but I really wasn’t. Nevertheless, she could have put the knife in my back, or cut my throat. I ran back to the hotel, furious—not with the kid, but with these criminal johns. You go looking for a gangster and wind up cut by a sick child who’s suffered God knows what abuse at the hands, perhaps, of one of these gross white men under the umbrellas.
My disgust with johns increased with my Christmas Eve dinner at the neighboring Sea Dragon restaurant. There were only four diners in the open-air lounge, all white guys my age with teen consorts—one of the fellows with two kids either side of him. I recognized the men from the beach—they were probably staying in the Crystal, or else at the luxury Seaside next door. At the red oilclothed table closest to me a middle-aged pedophile cleaned his ear with a Q-Tip while his date looked at her purple-painted, stubby fingernails as if she were on the verge of suicide. He was a square dude in starched jean shorts, black sandals with white socks, a leather vest, obscene-looking tits and no chin. She wore a flower in her hair, a floral party smock, and those ridiculously stacked clogs then in fashion among Asian teens. Sihanoukville, as Sum Manit mentioned, was a port town, and of course, prostitution was to be expected—maybe there was a case for it being legal—but these guys were getting away with what to my mind was the next worst thing to murder.
“Why don’t you just give her the money without torturing her for the night?” I asked the guy beside me.
“Are you French?”
“What do you want?”
“Back in France you’d get five years in jail for this shit.”
He called something angrily in Khmer to the kitchen, where the guy who ran the place was cooking. Alerted by the fuss, the other gents turned my way.
A ponytailed fellow in a bathing suit and a muscle shirt called over, “What’s your problem, mate?” Definitely Australian. So was his bald buddy, who pushed his plate away and said, “Do you want a problem?”
Here it goes, I thought. The French guy I could handle; not two Aussies. Motivated as I am sometimes when I see something I don’t like, I’m not an effective barroom brawler. One time in college, on Saint Patrick’s Day, I squared off against anti-Semitic frat jerks and wound up in the hospital. I didn’t want to wind up in Sihanoukville’s hospital. On the other hand, why should these guys be able to have their way with impunity? They were both cigarette smokers, and I’m pretty fast, so I chose the next best form of aggression. Boot and scoot.
“I’m a journalist covering the child sex trade in Cambodia,” I said, standing up and moving off the hardwood floor to the sand parking lot, as if in disgust, not flight. “I’ve seen what it does and you guys are doing it.”
In a second I was safely out of sight in the dark, probably spared a run by their fear of exposure. Which made me think: Next time I blow through a scene like this I’m gonna talk the assholes up, get their names and pictures, and deliver the goods to their embassies. So watch out, diablos, because I travel a lot.
Two hours later Am and I stepped past a lineup of two dozen taxi girls and entered the NASA Nightclub, just off the Golden Lion Traffic Circle. Save for the mirrored beams and disco ball it was a bare, square barn, black lit so the white tablecloths and plastic chairs glowed radioactively purple, as did the dance band’s white elf hats as they sang Khmer Christmas pop—“Silent Night” with a deafening electronic reverb.
The floor was crowded with older Khmer men dancing with taxi girls, girls dancing with girls, and men dancing with men, which had no homosexual connotation in Cambodia. In this puritanical society, most women did not date. Since men never took their wives to clubs, and single men didn’t go to clubs to meet marriageable women, dance halls like the NASA were strictly hooker strolls. Problem was, some men who attended couldn’t afford a woman. So the guys who drew the short straws in life danced with other guys in similar circumstances.
While we watched the strange show on the dance floor, I speculated to Am that the Long Beach owner had probably fled because the Chinese mafia had run him out. Am laughed and replied that he didn’t know a thing about the Chinese mafia, he was just a moto driver. He also seemed shocked when I told him Sam Rainsy alleged that Sihanoukville was a hotbed of passports for sale. “No, no, Mr. Terry—illegal, il-legal!” he said, seductively enough to let me know he knew about both topics. His shyness, I assumed, was due to the fact that I hadn’t done anything to make him trust me—like ask him for drugs or pick a girl from the lineup outside the door, which was no doubt highly unusual and suspicious.
He was charging me five dollars for the night, only a little above average for a town tour, so I said, “Am, why don’t I pay you now, in case I forget later.”
“What you want, okay,” he shrugged.
“Is fifteen enough?”
He took the money and recognized it for what it was. “You make story about bad things here, Mr. Terry?” he asked.
“Yeah. Bad things. You won’t have to worry for yourself. Okay?”
He leaned forward and patted my shoulder—the wounded one, which hurt like hell and opened the cut. He left the table and was gone for 10 minutes, somewhere over by the coat check. Then he came back.
“I think maybe nobody here now know what you say,” he shouted over the shrieking female lead’s rendition of “Jingle-Bell Rock.”
“Where then?” I asked.
“I take you by port—high, high, high. Peak Casino. Very expensive. Beautiful view.”
The evening was comparatively cold all across Southeast Asia. The Bangkok Post the next day showed Japanese tourists in Chiang Mai wearing balaclavas on a subfreezing morning. In Sihanoukville the temperature never got below 65 but, with me in just shorts and a thin dress shirt, the wind climbing up to the Peak Casino made it feel a little like winter. “I think maybe you look for Bela-Russie girl,” Am said, rubbing his hands in the parking lot that overlooked the glittering port. “Work gambling. Upstairs. High, high.” He flipped his hand to the top floor of the floodlit Mandarin-roofed palace. “Name Lar-i-sa. She know what you ask.”
The joint was bronze-banistered and lushly carpeted, mobbed with Chinese on every level, with magnificent picture-window views all around. The only white person in there was a pretty, pertly lipsticked blond lady in her 30s dealing baccarat on the third floor. I bought $50 worth of chips and sat down at Larissa’s table. She did a double take at my pale face, then focused her almond eyes on my shoulder. I wasn’t wearing a T-shirt and had bled right through, staining my shirt halfway down to the pocket. That in itself would not have been completely unusual—wounds being part and parcel of hanging around Sihanoukville on a holiday eve—but I think what struck Larissa as even more strange about me was that I fumbled stupidly when the bet was on me. People had wagered up into the hundreds while I sat there looking at my chips like a nearsighted grandmother trying to distinguish between two coins at the grocer’s—sending the whole table into exasperated Cantonese mutterings.
As in the Philippines six years ago, in two hands I completely lost my stake. When you lose you learn to lose, but it’s a bit of wisdom I’ve never absorbed, so I just sat there taking up space without going to the cage for more. “You from Eastern Europe?” I asked. “You have the accent.”
“Minsk,” she said, sliding face cards from the shoe to everyone but me. “And you?”
“Vancouver, Canada, by way of New York. Actually, I spent years in Little Odessa—Brighton Beach.”
“Is suppose to be interesting place. I like visit New York after here.”
“How long you been here?”
“Ha! Too long—year and a half—Poipet, Pailin—all over.”
Hmm, I thought. What’s a good-looking Belarus gal doing buzzing around Cambodia for a year and a half? Right time frame, anyway, I calculated, getting my mind back to Steve.
The floorman showed up at my side, flashing Larissa an angry look. “Please,” he said to me. “You must play you want sit here.”
“I can stand,” I said, slipping off the stool.
The floorman’s eyes rested on my colorful shoulder, then darted to a goon in the corner. He held up a warning finger to Larissa, turned back to me with a smile. “She no allow socialize with customers,” he said, his smile instantly disappearing as he looked back at Larissa, who shook her long bleached hair off her shoulders in a leonine show of independence. The floorman wore a nameplate saying Marco, just right for a Vegas casino, but awfully strange for a Cambodian one. “Look, Marco, it’s not like I’m not playing the house. My name’s Bud Abbot and my girlfriend Lou Costello is just downstairs playing a fortune.” I winked at Larissa, but I don’t think she’d seen many reruns of ’50s television in Minsk. I shook Marco’s hand. “I’ll have a drink downstairs and maybe she can join us there when she’s off, okay? I’m asking permission.”
“I am done at one,” she told Marco, petulantly, then looked back at me and smiled, as if to spite him.
I went down to the parking lot and told Am I was fixed up, I’d find my way home all right. He smiled lasciviously and I shoved his arm. “You think because I write bad things I do bad things? I told you I was married.”
“I no say that, Mr. Terry. I only tell you, friend to friend, she married too, dealer man, work another casino.”
“Well why didn’t you bring me to see him then?”
“Not know where find him now. He work Long Beach, ha ha ha!”
An hour later Larissa came up to me at the bar. “Where is Lou?” she asked.
“That was just a joke. Abbot and Costello—they’re an American comedy team. I was humiliating Marco for you, Larissa.”
“He is a rodent. Is new here, from Macau.”
“That’s where he got his name from!” I exclaimed, not bothering to conceal my excitement.
“And my name? How did you know?” She said this looking up coyly, over a cigarette she was lighting. She lounged back in her stool, crossed her legs, put one arm on the rest, the other back over her chair—wide-open body language which I appreciated less for the sexual opportunity than the ambience. The Asian casino, the Steve-pursuit, the Natasha-informant. She was still wearing her red dealer’s jacket, her bosom pulling at the buttons of her white blouse and revealing black bra. Her tapered blue slacks ended above strap heels showing painted toes and a naked instep. You really couldn’t beat it.
“You know my moto driver,” I said. “Or he knows you. Am.”
“I think my husband know him,” she said.
“Yeah, he mentioned you were married to a guy worked at the Long Beach. What went on there anyway? I came into town, there was trouble out front.”
She looked me straight in both eyes. “What are you doing here?” She leaned forward. “Are you a drugs agent?”
Cardsharp that she was, she had a highly developed personal lie detector behind her pupils. I knew if I shifted mine, I’d lose any chance of getting information out of her. I had no choice but to be up front—so unusual for me that I was afraid she’d mistake my effort at honesty for dissemblance. “Larissa, I’m not a cop. I’m a writer on a story about a gang guy who might have been here. I’m just curious what went on there yesterday. It could be the same gang he’s in.”
This information constricted her from neck to midriff. She took her arm off the chair and turned back to the bar. Then she looked sideways at my epaulet stain. “What happened that you are bleeding?”
I told her about the little girl on Ochheuteal Beach, how I hated what my white kind were doing to their brown children. “They are all like that here,” she said. “Not all—the backpackers—they fuck each other. But the government ones who come to help, the United Nations, the businessmen—they fuck the kids. It is a sick joke. You should write about that.”
“I intend to. I heard it’s worse in Koh Kong. That’s where I’m headed next.”
“Koh Kong you will see it is slavery. They go from here to there. Then—no one knows where they end up.”
That brought me around the corner to asking why she’d been hanging around the snake pits of Cambodia for a year and a half. She asked if I’d ever been to Belarus. I said no, but my grandparents had come from the Ukraine. “The same. They left. Everyone wants leave from there, except the oligarchs.” She’d been a math teacher in Minsk, earning less than a Cambodian moto driver; her husband had made some money “at something,” and they’d taken off across Siberia, then down through China and Laos to here, where, because they both had good heads for numbers, they’d become prized itinerants at the three casinos, plus the floating Naga Casino in Phnom Penh and the ghoulish dens of Poipet and Pailin. “Me more than Vlad,” she said. “I am very popular with Chinese gamblers. They give me crazy tips. You wouldn’t believe if I told you. Before they play. For luck. When I dye my hair, they give me double. Gold is good luck for them. Red too—so I dye my nails.” She held up her crimson-lacquered nails and sighed. “For white women, Chinese men are very easy to manipulate. Is not just me. Ukraine girl at Holiday Palace casino, is just new, but she know already.”
“I knew a Chinese Triad member I was able to manipulate,” I said. “I destroyed his career.”
“Why didn’t he kill you?”
“He died first.”
Her beer arrived and we clinked glasses. She asked if I had written anything that had been published in Eastern Europe. I told her about the swinger book, that there were now clubs in Minsk, Moscow, and Kiev, so a Russian translation was a possibility for the future. I asked what the Slavic slang word for swinger was. The thinnest of smiles stretched her red lips. “We say just swingers. There is not enough time to have our own word for it.”
“You’ve heard of them then.”
“Of course.”
Of course.
“So what went on over at the Long Beach? I’m thinking gangster business.”
“They are all over. Everything here is gangsters, as you say. Same as East Europe. Maybe is worse there. For the girls anyway.”
“I’m thinking they broke the place with cheaters,” I said, steering back to the Long Beach, “then closed on a deal, sent the owner running.”
She looked behind her.
“They try in Koh Kong, too,” she said quietly, reinforcing some prior knowledge I had on the subject.
“You mean with the manager and his assistant? The ones who were murdered?”
“It is not something to talk about here. Do you need a lift to town?”
Larissa had a putt-putt Vespa parked in the lot. She took out a pair of clogs from the hatch and replaced them with her heels and two bottles of beer I’d bought at the bar. “Where’s Vladimir tonight?” I asked, getting on behind her.
“He is home.”
We coasted down to the port, then up Ekareach and past the lions. “They are the biggest balls in the world, no?” she asked into the wind.
“I’ve seen bigger in swing clubs,” I said. “Big fat guys—halfway to their knees.”
“You must have good time research for that, ha ha ha! What do you do? Walk with a pad? Like a doctor? One fuck, two fucks?”
“Not quite, but something like that. I take notes after. You guys ever been to a swing party?”
“Why would I tell you? For your next book?”
Walking along the beach by the Crystal I pressed her on the Koh Kong thing again—the manager and his assistant.
“I think perhaps this mafia should be a part of it—if there is cheating to get the ownership. So maybe they cheating for the one which want to get it. Or else for themselves. Is confusing. I just hear. BJ dealer at casino name Chang maybe tell you what you want.”
“Chang? What’s his last name?”
“I don’t know, I don’t want to know. Just he come here when it happen. He know all this gangster business. My opinion? They can’t succeed break Koh Kong. Too big. Long Beach is small. One night they can break it.”
“Did you ever hear the name of the gang 14K mentioned?”
“Of course. They are the ones around here. From Macau. Marco, I don’t know if he is one. But to work, everyone knows someone.”
“Do you want to come upstairs?” I asked. “I want to show you something.”
In my room I took from my suitcase a copy of The Lifestyle, signed it and gave it to her as a present. “There’s no sex in it, per se. It’s mostly about the behavior.”
“Reubens,” she said, smiling at the cover, a detail of lightly clothed dancing figures from The Worship of Venus. She was the first person I’d ever met who’d identified the artist. “It is a good choice. Are you the one who choose it?”
“Actually, my wife did,” I said, digging down into my suitcase. “She’s an artist.”
This didn’t seem to make any impression on her. She flipped the pages as I came out with a folder. “‘The Inside Story,’” she said, reading the title of Chapter Seven. She slipped off her dealer’s jacket and leaned sideways onto the bed on one elbow. “Who is Jodie?”
“A woman who showed us around the club. That chapter’s about what goes on in their bodies when they’re swinging.”
She looked up and laughed, pulled her hair from her face. “Is it different than normal?”
“Very much different.” I sat down beside her. The light from the bed lamp shadowed her high cheekbones. She really was a beautiful woman. “A man ejaculates three times as many sperm cells after he’s seen his wife doing it with another guy,” I said. “It’s the way his body tries to deal with the competition inside her uterine track.”
“My God, did you count?”
“Someone else did.” I opened the folder. “Larissa, have you ever seen this guy?”
I placed Steve’s puss on the pillow and she glanced casually sideways. She crinkled her forehead. “Is he the one you are looking for?”
“Yeah—the dead one. He’s not dead, though.”
“Thick glasses.”
“Right. Very short, tubby. Maybe about a year ago or more.”
“Aren’t you afraid if I know him I will get rich to let him know you are looking?”
“I’m taking that chance.”
She sat up and placed the photo in her lap, studied it seriously. Then she shrugged, quite girlishly, and leaned against me. “No, I have never seen him. I would tell you.” She turned her head and brushed my ear, put her hand against my chest. “What’s this?”
I didn’t reply. What could I say?
She reached into my breast pocket and pulled out my tape recorder. “It is not on?” She held it to the light, saw the spindle turning, turned back at me with her mouth open. I took the Realistic from her. “Larissa—”
“What have you done—mentally rape me?!”
“If you knew him, I needed proof. Your name would never be used.”
She jumped up, grabbed the recorder, clocked me sideways across the head with it—a metal roundhouse that sent me to the mattress, almost out cold. She threw the recorder on the linoleum and stomped it to pieces. By the time I could see straight she was out the door. Am I in trouble? I wondered, following her with my hand at my head. The desk boy hardly looked up as I staggered through the lobby in chase. He’d probably seen bodies on this tile floor, no comfort to my fear of the revenge she might beg from Vlad, Marco, or Chang. I caught up to her as she was kicking the Vespa to life.
“Larissa, I’m working with the police on this,” I said. “There’s a DEA cop in the next room to me. Don’t try anything.”
She spat a Slavic curse at me, from the bottom of the Pripet Marsh, I’m sure, then puttered off, up Mithona and around the corner, leaning into the turn. I turned around, checking for witnesses. There was a band of fluorescence glowing over Ream. Above the goddess’s home the smoke was still rising. “Protect me, Ya-mao,” I prayed.
She did. Five hours later I was safely on an express boat to Koh Kong—wondering if the next person I should see on Steve was the mysterious know-it-all Chang.
*Lest this practice be written off as purely an Asian superstition, it should be pointed out that cerebral Canada has its own form of lingam worship. The symbol of the British Crown in Parliament is the Mace, a long silver shaft topped by a royal bulb. Without the Mace, proceedings cannot be opened, and under its power all taxes are collected—some of which taxes, as is often revealed, go into the pockets of those who derive their power from the Canuck lingam.