Located on the private beach, framed by calm unspoiled sea…. 418 kms. to Phnom Penh…. Meters to Thailand.
—KOH KONG INTERNATIONAL RESORT CLUB BROCHURE
Three and a half hours into my voyage to the mafia capital of Cambodia, sitting on the roof of the Sea Naga, I began to pick the brains of a flashy slots salesman with a four-inch pinkie nail. Twice a year Tha-nom and his two Bangkok partners donned their wraparound sunglasses and circled the Kingdom, hawking the latest slot machines in Poipet, Pailin, Sihanoukville, and Koh Kong—their last stop before heading home. We were just then closing on the jungly Koh Kong peninsula, but I didn’t see any instant city dominating the shore. “No here, no here,” Tha-nom said. He pointed to a spot on my French map and explained that all the development was on the other side of the green mountain, right on the border. With his nail he engraved an X at the southwest tip of the peninsula. West of the X a fast highway took off to Bangkok; east of the X was the mountain, a wide inlet of the Gulf of Siam, then a village called Krong Kaoh Kong, and then nothing but 200 kilometers of rolling rain forest until you hit Route 4 near Sihanoukville.
This, then, was the topographical gift to Pat Supapa that I’d heard about. Mr. Pat, the Thai-Cambodian “adviser” to Hun Sen, had been given the go-ahead on Koh Kong’s huge development just after the July 1997 coup. Since then, beyond the reach of Thai laws and under the protection of handpicked officials, Koh Kong International Resort Company Ltd. had developed a megamillion-dollar seaside gambling extravaganza, although gambling was just a part of Pat Supapa’s enterprises. In addition to the Bangkok Post’s allegations that Mr. Pat’s involvement in the drug trade had caused him to be “black-listed by Thai narcotics units,” he was a partner in 10 logging companies voraciously eating through the rain forest and in hundreds of shrimp farms that had destroyed the fish-spawning grounds along whole swaths of Cambodia’s mangrove coast.
Not that Tha-nom, the slots-seller, viewed Pat in these dark terms. Pointing to the ramshackle document checkpoint we were approaching, he said the gambling magnate had just donated millions of dollars to build a bridge across the inlet and then a road to Route 4. “Make ocean port, golf course, big park like Disney for Phnom Penh people come.” If there was a delay in getting started on the road, he said, it was because they’d only had one year of uninterrupted peace along the border. Tha-nom was referring, I assumed, to the final surrender of the Khmer Rouge last November, but I happened to know that right after peace was declared disgruntled troops from the Cambodian army itself had attacked Pat’s resort with rocket-propelled grenades and heavy-caliber machine guns. “The attack,” according to the Bangkok Post, had been “aimed at intimidating Pat Supapa,” who had brought in elite troops from Phnom Penh to guard his casino, instead of using “the local troops from Koh Kong, depriving them of protection fees.” (Mr. Pat had assured the Post that “the incident was a minor one and could be resolved quickly.”)
“Thanks God no more fighting-fighting,” Tha-nom smiled, standing up. “Very good you come now. Only nice people.”
“I’m actually visiting a friend of mine,” I smiled back. “His name is Mr. Chang. He’s a blackjack dealer. He probably knows you.”
Tha-nom pursed his lips, scratched his hairless chest beneath the numerous gold chains that adorned his sternum like a breastplate. “Mr. Chang,” he said ruminatively, examining his stiletto pinkie nail, then spoke something in curt Thai to his thuggish partners getting to their feet beside us. One, in a purple silk shirt, shrugged. The other shook his head at his chunky rings. “Sorry, no know you friend,” Tha-nom said, to my relief, since my blond babushka might have phoned ahead to tell Chang to expect me, and I was actually hoping I wouldn’t be able to find him.
At the same time I knew I would go on asking. I figured: someone like Chang gets dropped in your lap, he might tell you Steve’s alias.
We bumped the dock. Tha-nom and the other passengers—which included two Western backpackers and a couple dozen construction workers—jumped onto the pier with their bags. They presented their documents for examination, and then boarded a flotilla of perilously tippy outboard motorboats. As the Sea Naga backed away from the pier to take me across the inlet to Krong Kaoh Kong, I watched the outboards buzz north around a point towards a collection of shacks on the west side of the inlet. From there the passengers would hire motos or taxis to take them five kilometers over the hump to the Vegas in the jungle, or, if they were traveling on, to catch the express bus that departed every hour for Trat, Chanthaburi, and Bangkok.
I was the only passenger left on the Sea Naga as it tacked slowly through the busy cross-inlet traffic towards the iron warehouses and rusted roofs of Krong Kaoh Kong. Shacks on stilts lined the shore to the right, with the town’s dirt streets and wooden houses visible through a line of seaside palms. It was a primitive place, looking every bit the haven for pirates working the Gulf of Siam and smugglers ferrying goods across the river—the main occupations of the village, according to my travel books. Given the uncertainty of this Chang business, however, I had decided to base myself here. I preferred to sleep among the town’s smugglers and pirates rather than the casino’s Triads.
As we came up alongside the dock, a kid in the waiting crowd of krama-covered peasants called out to me, “You need moto, mister?” He was no more than 18, and slick as a Tijuana tout—with hair greased straight back from his forehead, wearing a button-down pink dress shirt, shiny black trousers, and patent-leather shoes. He said his name was Sam and offered to be my tour guide.
He saw me looking around for other moto options, so he tried to reassure me. “I work for German man, own tourist company,” he said. “Otto Weyer, at restaurant in town.” He reached into his shirt pocket and with the pinched tips of his fingers delicately withdrew a tattered flyer. “Otto’s Restaurant, Koh Kong: Food & Drinks Nice Athmosphere [sic], Now Open,” said the flyer. It featured a computer-generated cartoon of a Beat Generation couple sitting at a checkered table over caffe lattes and reading the papers. Beside it was a photo of a tropical beach at sunset, and beside that was an art nouveau cartoon of piano keys cornily juxtaposed against a sax player and a champagne bottle filling a glass. Sam followed this flyer up with a hand-cut card for Otto’s Restaurant.
“Does Otto really think he’ll get Westerners here?” I asked.
“Just start now, because much here for tourist. Visit islands, go diving, go hiking. Very good for look at forest and birds.”
All in all, the kid was probably authentic, I thought, and plunked my bag on his gas tank, got on behind, and told him to take me to the cheapest clean hotel he knew. We took off down a road alongside the inlet that ran away from town, passing a number of stone archways on the right, each guarded by soldiers holding automatic rifles. For all its reputation as an end-of-the-world sanctuary for smugglers of goods, drugs, and humans, Krong Kaoh Kong’s outskirts were dominated by sprawling government bases—army, police, customs, immigration, and the Cambodian People’s Party—which raised the inevitable question: how was all the illegal activity taking place under the noses of all these enforcers of the law? Even with his broken English, Sam had a sophisticated answer. “Cambodia law say ‘No can do it.’ But you need pay permission first, then you can do it.”
We continued along the fenced perimeter of a National Police base until I saw a whitewashed two-story building in the middle of a parade ground, with the words “Koh Pich Hotel” written in gold along its eave. From the inside it appeared to be an old government building, perhaps once a French military barracks or colonial office. The walls had hardwood wainscoting, there was an old-style hardwood bench at the door with slats and curving arms, and the divide at the front desk was hardwood as well. The fellow behind the desk took down my passport number and asked if I wanted a girl. Before I could refuse, Sam interrupted to tell me he had to run, he’d be back at eight. “Tonight I can invite you to very important party with my friends. Militaire. Customs. I have friends because they are useful, for advantage.”
Well, the kid’s more up front than most, I thought.
Sam showed up an hour late, dressed in a white shirt and white slacks. By then I’d had a dinner at the hotel’s restaurant, patronized by a crowd of shady-looking, late-middle-age Thai-Chinese, each with a teen Khmer girl at his side. “You like here so far?” he asked. “Very beautiful sunset. Much to do for tourists.”
“Far as I can see the main thing for tourists here is prostitution,” I said.
“Oh ‘specially in red light—Walker Street!” he replied, probably thinking I was impressed with the opportunities. “You want ’nother girl there before we go to party?”
“No,” I said. “But I’d like to have a talk with one.”
We headed back up the main road, turned down a muddy block past the ferry pier, then swung into what Sam had called Walker Street. “It not so easy for lady get job here. So many young lady, they work for this. You see what you like, I wait.”
As in Phnom Penh’s north end, the prostitution district here consisted of consecutive blocks of shacks lit by neon black light, with waving, beckoning Vietnamese and Khmer girls in front of them. It was the lowest rung on the prostitution ladder, the purple light within each shack showing a sagging flophouse mattress on bamboo posts that stood on a bare dirt floor. Dozens of prostitutes lined the three blocks, clustering in groups of threes and fours around the shack entrances, dressed in cheap miniskirts, flounced childish blouses, and plastic sandals, with quite a few barefoot and almost all merely in their teens—if that.
“Who’s their boss?” I asked Sam, figuring some local government satrap had to be giving the okay to run this strip.
“Maybe many mamasans” he said, skirting the question. “Very cheap for you. You want I stop?” he asked.
“Pull up anywhere.”
I’m sure he didn’t believe I just wanted to talk, but you’d have to be a very sick man indeed to want anything else from these kids. The just-released report of Sari Nissi’s International Organization for Migration, Paths of Exploitation, featured a profile of the children, who were almost all from rural villages. “Some of the women were kidnapped and forced to work as prostitutes, some were tricked by false promises, some had agreed to be sold [by their parents], and some had come on their own initiative to look for work in the brothel.” However they wound up in these huts, they were, as Larissa had told me, slaves now, at the disposal of the brothel 24 hours a day, seven days a week, except when menstruating. They received 1 to 6 percent of the money they generated, with the rest going to pay off the investment of the extortionate mamasan who controlled them. They had unprotected sex with anywhere from 4 to 15 clients a day and almost all of the kids had multiple STDs, including HIV, syphilis, and gonorrhea. While the brothels in the village were once freelance affairs, Sari Nissi had informed me that the girls were now being bought and trafficked by organized crime groups that transported them across the border to higher-paying locales along Route 3—particularly the Thai resort town of Klong Yai, a few miles north of the Koh Kong casino. IOM had found that “the brothels in Klong Yai are either controlled by Thai police officers or directly owned by relatives of police officers.” Despite being underage, the Khmer sex workers of Klong Yai had all been supplied with work permits. Unlike Thailand, in Cambodia all prostitution was illegal, but the law against it was almost never enforced and to date nobody had been convicted of pimping kids.
I sat down at an entrance to a tent and, via Sam, talked with a couple of the children in exchange for a five-dollar bill. Their daily dose of clients ran the gamut of the town’s male inhabitants—from senior officials to fishermen. One of them said that on a couple of occasions the mamasan had rented her to men who stayed at the Koh Kong Resort hotel, and she found that very exciting. Both of the girls said their ambition was to move to Klong Yai where they could work out of hotels permanently. Eventually, ultimately, they wanted to return to their villages, marry, and raise families. One of the girls giggled and said she was waiting.
She explained the situation to Sam, who laughed and said: “Wait for her first period so she get days off.”
Sam pulled his Honda into a hotel parking lot that was crowded with dozens of other motos. Squealing Asian rock music sung in high-wire English poured through a blue archway that framed a wide atrium filled with young Khmer teens. They were bouncing to the music around a table piled high with gift boxes and a Christmas tree. Some wore conical party hats, others Santa hats, and there was a friendly intermingling of boys and girls off the dance floor. I was taken aback: these were the first bourgeois-looking and-acting kids I’d seen in Cambodia. They were dressed in neat school clothes that would not have been out of place in North America, and they were all smiling—but not neurotically. It reminded me of a Catholic high school party. I said that to Sam.
“Yes—it is our school party. We all go to English Language School.”
“There’s an English language school in town?”
“Yes.” He pointed to a table of five male adults. “Our teachers.”
The men were in their late 30s and 40s. They sat in dress shirts drinking beer from mugs, which a couple of fellows raised to me in greeting. Sam introduced me all around and I quickly learned that, indeed, three of the five had law enforcement jobs, and, aside from Sam, the students were the children of CPP men who worked the border. The teacher who spoke English most fluently was a captain of the immigration police named Khim Keo, and the strangest thing about him was that he openly admitted he was moonlighting as a teacher because he was both unwilling and unable to attain a position that would earn him any bribes.
Khim was Vietnamese, 43 years old, and he’d come to Cambodia as a soldier with the conquering Vietnamese army in 1981, then stayed on in Phnom Penh after his regiment left, getting a job in 1991 as an interpreter for UNTAC. He backed Prince Ranariddh in the 1993 election and then joined the Cambodian National Police, which, it will be remembered, had two competing factions within its ranks for four years. Since the north was Funcinpec territory, Khim was stationed in Siem Reap with other backers of Ranariddh. When Ranariddh was overthrown in the ’97 coup, however, Khim’s political affiliation turned into a liability. He was exiled to Koh Kong—a posting with a lot of potential except for the fact that he was barred from the lucrative customs branch and assigned a desk job in the town’s immigration building. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t put the arm on people for bribes at the border.
“You know, I work hard, and I have more capability than the other people,” he complained. “But I have no money. I have no sponsor, I have no supporters, no one of the high forces, therefore I am kept down. I can say I am an important officer, but it’s no power, I have no power. The other policemen have smaller rank than me but they make more money than me. It’s not only me. Everybody in Cambodia not in CPP cannot make money.”
“How much money do they pay you?” I asked.
“They pay me almost a thousand baht, is equivalent to twenty dollars a month. How can I survive on that? I have my wife and I have my children. The other policemen, they want to get the houses and the high jobs. With their high jobs, they can make corruption. They don’t care about how much they have to pay for the senior job.”
“So they buy the job?”
“Yes, they want to get the higher job, they have to pay the money. After they get the job and the houses then they turn to corruption.”
He had an older brother in Victoria, B.C., he said, who’d escaped Vietnam as a boat person in the late ’70s. His name was Nguyen Chuong and he owned a landscape business. Six years ago Nguyen had sent Khim a thousand dollars, but that was the last he’d ever heard from him. He wrote his brother’s name on my pad and asked if I could look him up when I got back to Canada.
“One thing I hear a lot about is trouble at the gambling casino,” I said, figuring that, in Sam’s words, if I was of advantage and use to Khim, he might tell me something about the murders. After all, he commanded the CPP men who worked right there at the border, which was actually the property line to the casino. “Chinese Triad gangsters go to the casinos in Koh Kong,” I said. “Weren’t there two murders there last month?”
“Sorry,” he laughed. “I have never been there, I know nothing about it.”
“Well, in Phnom Penh everybody talks,” I said. “I was just wondering whether you knew if it was all just gossip.”
“Sorry, I know nothing,” he smiled.
I decided on a less dangerous question—about the trade in Cambodian passports. His response was that Sam Rainsy was making too much political hay out of criminals needing to buy fake passports in Sihanoukville. It was actually far more straightforward in Koh Kong. “Here, when want to pass the border of Cambodia, they have only to pay for the immigration. To take money from people that go through the border is no problem. That kind of corruption is not a problem for Cambodia. The problem is selling drugs, smuggling drugs, smuggling children—very, very bad. But taking money from people that cross the border, that is the price of the world, that is the way of Cambodia.”
I asked him if he thought “the way of Cambodia” might have been different if Ranariddh had prevailed. He seemed to doubt it. He still supported Funcinpec, he said, but was deeply disappointed with the prince’s rapprochement with Hun Sen. “They fighting one day and then they are good friends tomorrow. Now they make a deal. Ranariddh wait to be king. You see, Hun Sen, he has a very cunning way. He is a man with a lot of tricks.”
“Oh, I’d agree with that,” I said.
“But that’s not my problem. I stay away now. Let them do what they want—I just stay away from them. The police, too. The policemen in the CPP, they can break the law, and they can break the law by themselves. It is very tough for me to work near that. So I try never think about what they do. I just pay attention to my teaching the children. Teaching is much purer. Teaching is hopeful.”
At that, Sam pulled me into the middle of the dance floor to teach the students Christmas carols. My class of eager charges thought I was just being shy when I tried to explain I only knew one—“Jingle Bells.” It was far too complicated to explain that I was a Brooklyn Jew who’d never sung a Christmas carol, so, in addition to “Jingle Bells,” I taught them the first lines to “Frosty the Snowman” and “White Christmas” and led them in humming the rest.
“You have good voice,” Khim Keo flattered me when I sat down. “You should be professional performer.”
The next morning, before I went over to Koh Kong, Sam took me to meet his other useful friend, Otto Weyer, the only resident white guy between Trat and Sihanoukville. Otto was a middle-aged expat from Hamburg who in 1998 had invested in renovating a restaurant on a quiet, palm-lined street a block from the ferry. He was now building a five-bungalow guest house, banking on his bet that, with an end to the civil wars, adventure tourists would start to show up—either stopping off while using this route to Thailand, or headed for the (as yet) unspoiled tropical island of Kaoh Kong to the south.
Smugglers were not an issue for Otto; they imbued the place with a certain forbidden allure that he felt might ultimately attract bargain hunters, a point I actually agreed with, being in the market for a backup mini-recorder at the moment. “This whole town is a smuggler’s cove—it’s been this way for hundreds of years,” he said. “It’s a way of life—of course it is—the same as Koh Kut and Koh Chang Islands in this part of Thailand. This is the living they are making here. I mean what else they do? There is nothing here—there is no agriculture, no factories, there is nothing you have to live, except maybe fishing, and then there is nothing else.”
“So they have boats and they use them.”
“They have boats,” he shrugged. “They smuggle things in and they smuggle things out. Everyone knows, everyone does it, nobody cares.” His only problem in this romantically perfect location was the tacky publicity being generated by the casino monstrosity across the inlet and over the hill. Triad rub-outs and pitched battles between competing armies were not the kind of “wild-life” that ecotourists were interested in observing.
I truly felt for Otto. He was a gentle bohemian in a turtleneck living in a beautiful little cove, listening to Miles Davis on his CD player, inhabiting a post-and-beam house with a thatch roof, smoking a little grass that was all but legal here, and hoping to make a modest living off adventurous schoolteachers with binoculars. Except the gangsters were ruining the neighborhood.
“This mafia casino change everything,” he sighed wearily. “There’s tremendous money in this casino, so they kill each other. Two mafia guys just got shot—the manager and his assistant.”
I told him I’d heard it was the 14K from Macau trying to break the bank and take back control of the tables from the 4 Kings, that the fellows who got shot were possibly 14K plants.
“Who knows these things?!” he said, echoing Larissa. “All I know is the owners are something very big. The ones who fight them must be very big. And one mafia did something, some kind of business with the other. They kill them when they steal—maybe that was it. Ultimately I believe it was Thai mafia hit men hired to come over the border and do this. It wasn’t from here. Honestly. It’s all Thai mafia, this whole business is mafia, it’s not from here.”
I tried to reassure him that “here” was still pristine, and that I was sure things would work out for him. Then I told him I was headed “there” today. I asked if he knew a fellow named Chang who worked the blackjack table.
“Are you kidding?! I know nobody there! I don’t want to know anybody there. I never go there, and my advice to you—”
“Don’t go there.”
“That for sure. Let Sam show you Wat Toult’nian on hill here. Otherwise I hear next week you are caught in a fishing net.”
The ride across the choppy inlet would have caused a North American customs agent to burst into laughter and tears. Stacked to the gunwales with boxes that had Thai and English script all over them, an echelon of three blue-bottomed motorboats were making the crossing from west to east, threading around the one I was in. After a smuggler got his goods this far he loaded them on the ferry to Sihanoukville and was home free.
Of course, if anyone was making a fortune it wasn’t the motorboat drivers, at least judging from the dock they used. Hay Lat, as the landing on the other side was called, was a collection of corrugated-roofed huts with verandas held up by skinny crooked poles. The boats were chained three deep to a boom, so that I had to teeter-totter across each deck, then step up to the rotting wooden pier, where I was mobbed by drivers wanting to sell me a ride to the border. Otto had told me to take a car, since the motos were too dangerous on the back track, and after haggling a bit for a 50-baht fare I got in a Toyota with no windshield and whose back seat had been removed. “Drive slow,” I told the driver. “I’m not in a rush.”
“Slow, yes,” he replied. “Very slow. No want hurt.”
Five bone-jarring klicks on, we crested a hill and I beheld another world. Laid out against the glittering ocean below was a glaring white gambling town that made Pat Supapa seem Cambodia’s equivalent of Stanley Ho. The palm-lined main street and emerald lawns stretched for a mile to the border, with hotels and hotels-in-progress the whole length. Backhoes and Caterpillars were digging into the hillsides and excavating the flats, sending up red and white clouds of dust to the tops of the aluminum streetlights. At the end of it all was the border-hugging flagship of the development, the five-star Grand Hotel and Koh Kong International Casino, a postmodern Xanadu that looked partly like a Chinese city hall and partly like a Fort Lauderdale condo, with a six-story pediment and a nine-story blue glass middle tower crowned by a Mandarin copper cupola. Beside its sweeping porte cochere stood a glass and concrete clock tower with a radio antenna and rooster on its fastigated top, circled by spot beams. I had to reflect that a few miles over my shoulder 90 percent of the homes were lit at night only by candles.
I got out of the Toyota and gave my driver a 10-baht tip. “Have you ever been inside the casino?”
“Me—no. Cambodia people no allow in. But much fun for tourist—if no lose everything, ha ha ha!”
The designers of the Koh Kong International Casino must have been well aware of the theory my father had held on gambling addicts: he said gamblers played not to win, or even to lose, but in order to cultivate a heroic sense of themselves. At the marble entrance to the casino, just beyond where you checked your guns and directly in front of the plush stairs to the high-stakes rooms, was a floodlit display case filled with hard evidence of the dire peril gamblers faced every time they crossed this threshold. Atop the case was a big sign that said, in Chinese, Thai, and English, “PAWN”—the embodiment of gambler risk. A smiling man in a crimson uniform and white gloves beckoned me to pause and review the contents. Looking in the case, my eyes were dazzled by coruscating gold, sparkling diamonds, and silvery pearls. Each piece of jewelry, hocked by some bottomed-out roller, had a price tag in Thai and U.S. currency. A Rolex was $9,000, a ring $18,000, a necklace $30,000. There was a woman’s diamond tiara, with a price tag of $80,000. I looked up. A six-foot mirror behind the fellow gave me a gold-hued view of myself bent over the challenge, Chinese characters signifying “Good Fortune” over my scalp. To a compulsive player, this was the ultimate, inebriating dare, an announcement of the hazard that the brave faced squarely, and cowards ran from. No better than any hotshot gambling on a long shot, I turned and headed up to where the murders had taken place, not far from where Chang probably dealt.
At the top of the first landing was a mural of a Greek statue demurely posed by a fountain in a forest clearing, a cool image to comfort the sweaty sportsman before he rounded the landing to behold a six-foot statue of fiery Kwan Kung, the largest I’d ever seen indoors, roped off by a red velvet cord. At his feet were offerings of fruit and, of all things, an extra-large pizza. I stopped and pronammed, smelled the garlic and hot sauce, prayed for good fortune, and set down a 1,000-riel note in his dish. Me being white, my obeisance caught the attention of the floor manager at the pillar beside KK; I smiled at him and saw his glance go over my shoulder to a mountainous plainclothes guard. I put the wrestler and the overseer behind me, entered the low-ceilinged, smoky card room, done up in polished ochre wood. To my right was the refreshment bar—coffee, tea, drinks. Straight ahead were the card tables: poker, baccarat, and blackjack.
There was a young guy with thick spectacles dealing the blackjack table, not looking exactly like the archetype of an Inside Charlie. But of course you could never tell. I went over to the cage for 2,500 baht in chips and sat down between a middle-aged Thai woman at home base and a squinting overweight Chinese at first. I was figuring that if Larissa had phoned Chang, and this fellow were Chang, the info would be so fresh in his mind that there’d be some glow in his eyes as his gaze met the one belonging to the Jew from Little Odessa—showing up exactly on schedule. But his glance moved over mine, staying empty, on auto, on the job.
I was trying to decide when to make my move, but I was up $200 so suddenly that, spellbound and basking in the back pats of my neighbors, I became distracted from my mission, and didn’t return to it until I crested and was on my way down. “Chang,” I said, touching a 10,000-baht chip, ready to tell him I wanted change. But the dealer didn’t give me that reactive glance we dogs and humans offer when we hear our name. He did look over, but not until he saw my proffered hand.
“You’re Chang?” I asked, smiling.
“No, not Chang,” he said, taking the chip and shoving me 10 from his rack. “Kai.”
“Oh, hi Kai. Is Chang dealing today?”
“No.”
“Because he was dealing the last time I was here. You look a little like him.”
This aroused an askance look, and I cursed myself for not finding out from Larissa whether Chang was 20-something, like this guy, or an older gent. I’d automatically assumed that, because he was a big-mouth, Chang would be young. Being the only Americano this place had likely seen for months, I was already suspect. Now I was probably being assessed as a threat—Vegas bad guy, DEA, Interpol, or, most threatening of all to a casino covering up two murders, the press.
I had to stick it out, however—a forced gamble that bought me nothing but another 50-buck loss. At which point I got up and wandered into the roulette room. At the entrance, just this side, was an ornate lacquer wheel, a grand old antique with a gorgeous hardwood bowl, a four-foot lacquered black mast, ivory slots, and what looked like real diamonds set in the canoe eyes. To the left of the entrance the air-conditioning system throbbed like a Morlock engine, spoiling the effect of the museum piece. I was actually jotting those words, “Morlock engine,” when the plus-size security guard—not a bad candidate for the part of a Morlock—came up behind me and asked if he could be of assistance.
“Do you know how old that wheel is?” I asked.
“Yes old,” he said. “Come from United Stay, I think. Where do you come from?”
“Near there,” I replied vaguely, “I’m traveling.”
“You write travels?” he pointed to my pad, smiling.
“Yeah, this is for my diary. The minister of tourism in Phnom Penh told me Chang would show me around, explain the expansion.”
“Chang?” he asked.
“He deals blackjack.”
He thought on that for a moment. “No Chang. Kai. Have no Chang work here.”
“I guess I got the wrong information. Oh well—where’s the restaurant?”
Friendly as a doorman, he told me to go downstairs, make a left at the pawnshop and go straight. “It by pool. You see. Nice for you. See ocean.” I walked straight out of the casino, waved goodbye to the floor manager, and descended the stairs. At the landing I looked back up and saw the manager on his cell phone.
From that moment on I was kept track of by a relay of employees on cell phones: check-in desk, where I inquired about a room; pool, where I sat and drew a map of the place; and restaurant, where I ordered a soup lunch of tum yum goong, and asked a truly innocuous-looking young waiter if he knew a fellow named Chang who dealt cards upstairs.
“Deal cards upstair?” he repeated.
“That’s right.”
“He no here today. Think go home Bangkok.”
“Oh shoot,” I said. “You know when he’ll be back?”
“Think Tu-day. Off Sunday Monday.”
Well, there it was. I had to get back to Phnom Penh to catch the boat up the Tonle Sap to Siem Reap on Tuesday. It had been a bitch getting tickets on that ferry, and if I missed it I’d never make the millennial celebrations. Might as well put down my last hundred baht and see if I could lose it all. “Here’s my cell phone number. When Chang comes back on Monday, give it to him and tell him to call me collect.”
Slightly nonplussed, the fellow took the note and service fee and pocketed both. I glanced over my shoulder, away from the sea and towards the stairs. “Those guys that were killed—”
But that ended the conversation. “Sorry, sorry,” he smiled, holding his hand up and backing away.
I was back outside on the pool patio, chatting up the bar waitress about all the hubbub in the casino after the killings, when here came the wrestler, this time not smiling. He sent the waitress running, then asked straight out: “What you want here?”
I told him, “Writing a travel article”—all squealy innocence.
“Never mind, never mind,” he said. “You check bag? I need to see!” He put his hand on the strap and tugged.
“No, you never mind,” I came right back at him. “Here.” I fished in my case that was now stretched between us and gave him Ambassador Norm Mailhot’s card, Sum Manit’s card, Sam Rainsy’s card. He looked at them confusedly, like a bull going cross-eyed at a blur of sword points, then let the case go. I took the cards back. “I was told I would get a friendly reception here, so I could write that tourists should come here. I’m sorry, but I’m disappointed.” I turned, feeling awfully naked at my back, and headed straight for the entrance, where the floor manager was waiting to see me out. As I huffed past I said snootily: “I’m gonna let the prime minister know about this when I see him in Siem Reap.”
I just about did, too.