their mouths. Can we? Now one is in hospital, and there is one left. Doctor Samnang. Not happy. Sometimes I wonder . . .’ She sighed. ‘I wonder if I am doing the right thing, in forcing these old men to rake over the past. But, it is my job.’ The steeliness had returned to her soft Khmer vowels; her English was only slightly accented. She turned to face him, square on: and she stared him out.
‘And then. There is a personal angle.’
‘OK.’
‘My grandmother died here.’
Jake said nothing. Chemda’s face was ghosting in the twilight.
‘I think she died up here in the Plain of Jars. She was one of the academics the Khmer Rouge brought with them.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘I have a Khmer friend in Los Angeles. Her father was also sent here. And he claims he saw my grandmother, in the Plain, that she was one of the team. My grandmother was quite well known: my family is quite well known. So, my grandmother was an anthropologist, ah, we know she disappeared around that time, and we know there were rumours she came here. No one will tell me the truth because maybe no one knows the truth.’
Chemda’s words were like a litany, softly and reverently repetitive, a whispered prayer in the gloaming of a church.
‘That is one of the reasons I am doing this, Jake. By uncovering the truth about my family I can uncover the truth about Cambodia. It doesn’t make me popular, many people want to forget. But I don’t care.’
They drove in silence for fifteen minutes. The cabin was cold. Then Chemda’s cellphone chirruped, an incongruously jaunty song. Cantopop. She picked up the call, but the signal was bad.
‘Tou? Tou? Can you hear me?’ Rattling the phone, she cursed the reception, and explained. ‘Our guide, Tou. Trying to reach me. Cellphones are almost useless up here. Outside the towns.’
Jake was not surprised. A place without electricity was hardly likely to be superbly linked with telecommunications. Nonetheless the thought added to the growing sense of isolation.
An hour passed in even more subdued silence. And then:
‘Ponsavanh!’
The driver had spoken for the first time since the morning. They were entering, what was, for Laos, a largeish city. Straggling and busy and concrete, it was an ugly place, especially in the harsh glare of rudimentary streetlights. Jake saw an internet cafe, people in scarves locked on bright screens in a dingy room; a few closed tourist shops had Plain des Jarres scrawled in crude paint on their windows.
The pick-up swerved a sudden right, onto a very rough and rubbled track.
‘Here we go. The only hotel in the area. Home.’ Chemda smiled, with a hint of sarcasm. ‘My guide Tou is here. And the historian. The one who can, ah, still walk . . . It is good we are arriving at night; this is less conspicuous. The Pathet Lao do not want us here. Of course. They want us gone.’
‘You are intruders. Raking up the past.’
‘Yes. And also . . . there is tension. The Hmong.’
‘The hill tribesmen?’
‘They live in the uplands right across Southeast Asia, but here is the real Hmong heartland. And the jungles and mountains south of here. There are still Hmong rebels down there. Some say. Still fighting the Vietnam war.’
‘I heard a few stories.’
Now Jake could see lights of a distant building. Chemda continued:
‘The Hmong helped the Americans in the Vietnam war, when Laos was a secret battlezone. The North Vietnamese were using Laos as, ah, a route, to ferry arms to South Vietnam.’
‘The Ho Chi Minh trail.’
‘Yes! You know your history.’ Her eyes brightened, momentarily. ‘Yes. It came right through here, the Plain of Jars. So the Americans secretly infiltrated Laos, and secretly bombed the trail, and they recruited Hmong to help them, in the air war, because the Hmong hated the communists, the Pathet Lao, the people still in power now. The Lao regime.’ Her voice softened to a wondering tone. ‘The Americans actually had a whole secret city in the hills south of here, with airstrips, warehouses, barracks. And maverick pilots, specialist bombers, fighting a completely clandestine war. The Hmong helped, some actually became fliers . . . So there is still a lot of, ah, very bad feeling, and the Lao don’t want outsiders here, stirring things up.’
The car jerked to a stop outside a blank concrete building. The car park was almost empty: just a couple of dirty white minivans. Chemda got out and Jake joined her, yawning and stretching; the cold upland air was refreshing now, he inhaled deeply the sweet night scent of pollution and burning hardwood.
‘Come and meet the team. What’s left of it.’
The walk took a minute, along a walkway, to a door, where she knocked. Silence replied. She knocked again, there was no reply; Jake leaned against the door jamb, impatient with weariness. As he did he realized he was standing in something sticky.
The revelation was a slap of horror.
‘Jesus, Chemda, I think that’s blood!’
Chemda flinched and gazed down; then she stepped smartly aside, so the dim light of the walkway bulb could shine on the pooling fluid.
It was vivid and it was scarlet.
Immediately Jake pushed with a shoulder; the door wasn’t locked, but it was heavy: something was inside, blocking the way. He pushed again, and once more; Chemda assisted, resting a hand on a doorpanel. The door shunted open and they stepped into the bleak, harshly lit hotel room.
It was empty.
Where was the blood coming from? Jake followed the trail: the thickening flood of redness emanated from behind the door; the heavy door he had just swung open. Jake pulled the door, so they could see behind.
Chemda gasped.
Hanging from the back of the door, by ropes attached to a hook, was a dead man. A small, old Cambodian man, in cotton trousers, bare-chested. But he was hanging upside down, his ankles were roped to the hook, his body was dangling and inverted; his hands trailed on the ground and his head bobbed inches from the blood-smeared concrete floor.
The man’s throat had been cut: slashed violently open. Blood had obviously poured from his jugular onto the floor: as with the bleeding of halal butchery, he had been hung upside down so the blood would drain out. A smeared knife lay discarded nearby.
The old man’s hanging hair was just touching the blood. Like the tips of elegant painting brushes, dipped, quite delicately, in a puddle of crimson oil.
Chapter 4
The smell of decay was obscure but pungent. This was new. Maybe that rat had died down here, somewhere, in the night. Julia looked around at the shadows, eating into deeper blackness.
She was crouching in the furthest reach of the Cave of the Swelling with Ghislaine Quoinelles, her team leader. Ghislaine was the sixty-something leader
