Cambodian Book of the Dead (21 page)

 

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

 

Maier woke in the morning, wheelchair-bound. He sat on a wide stone platform, just above the cliff from which the coastline was visible. He heard voices somewhere but he couldn't see anyone. He breathed in and out deeply. It seemed the best way to find out whether he was still hallucinating or whether he had returned to some reality. Shit, he'd been caught a second time.

The forest had crept across the stones for centuries and had spread so much that one had to step right up to the temple wall to get an idea of the building's dimensions.

Maier could move his arms and turned the wheelchair around. Lizards and squirrels chased along the hot stones and invisible birds sang from the trees. It didn't look like hell. But Maier had never been sure whether he'd recognise hell if he happened to end up in it. He remembered the old German's offer. How long had he been here? Suddenly, the mental floodgates broke, and a thousand questions rushed like an avalanche through Maier's head. What had happened? How much of what he took for reality was hallucination? He needed answers.

He remembered the girl who had given him the injection. Then it was all gone again and he sat in a wheelchair and admired the view and the jungle.

Maier heard voices behind him and turned his wheelchair once more.

“Ah, good morning, Maier.”

The White Spider spoke English today, out of respect for his companion – a tiny Japanese man who looked like a butterfly collector. The man was in his mid-fifties and wore a green saggy cotton hat, short khaki jeans and a shirt with a thousand pockets. He wore three cameras around his neck. Only the large net and the jar full of chloroform were missing.

A girl, dressed in black, followed the man, carrying a heavy camera tripod.

The Japanese nodded amiably at Maier.

“Are you also a guest of the Khmer Rouge? Everyone always says how unpredictable and dangerous these people are, but this is my second trip.”

Maier must have had questions written on his face, because the little man continued.

“I am here to stock up on my collection of objects from the Angkor period. And the White Spider is a reliable supplier.”

Maier wasn't surprised. He knew that smugglers, bandits and former Khmer Rouge soldiers had long sold the finest carvings and statues to private collectors from around the world. Just recently, Maier had heard of a catalogue of objects that still resided in temples. Collectors could place orders; the items were stolen, hauled across the porous Cambodian-Thai border and sold. Cambodia did not have the money or the political will to fight the thieves and vandals. For this reason, many smaller pieces had been taken to the national museum in Phnom Penh. What was left would disappear in the coming years. The Khmer Rouge had advanced from murderers to co-conspirators and suppliers to the bourgeoisie.

The Japanese man had lit a red Ara and theatrically blew smoke through his nostrils.

“We have a saying in Japan, ‘
Kiken nashi niha, yorokobi mo nai
'. It means as much as ‘Without danger, there is no happiness'.”

Maier was not sure whether he really agreed with anything the art collector said. The pleasure of being close to the White Spider was a dubious one and didn't stand in any kind of relation to the risk one took. But the Japanese hadn't understood that yet.

The White Spider smiled at Maier and said, “Your assignment starts today, Maier. My assistants will provide you with a laptop. You should start taking notes immediately. The quality of your documentation will dictate the quality of your life.”

The Japanese visitor had walked along the platform to the edge of the cliff and began to take pictures. Every so often he turned and snapped the small group around Maier.

“You see, Maier, in our business, discretion is everything. This man is not discreet. He is a good customer, but this time he has brought cash. And as you can see, he is clearly a security risk. What do you think, Maier?”

“Why don't you take his camera? You are the boss around here.”

“That's right,” the old German laughed and waved for the collector's assistant. The girl waited until the art collector looked at the world through his view finder, before she smashed the tripod into the back of his head. The Japanese man dropped to the ground like a sack of flour. Two more girls, dressed identically, emerged from the temple, took the man's cameras and threw them into the forest below. Then, all three dragged him away like roadkill. The collector could no longer move and cried softly.

“It is essential to kill with enthusiasm. I learned that in Croatia a long, long time ago. If you don't have enthusiasm for your line of work, then change job. Killing is not an occupation for dispassionate people.”

He added, with an almost cheeky gleam in his pale eyes, “Neither is living.”

The girl who had given Maier the last injection put a laptop computer onto his lap and pushed his wheelchair after the White Spider.

“I am Raksmei, Maier. You can't remember me, but you will. I have given you drugs. I will help you,” she whispered behind him. Maier did not react. But he was sure that this girl was the sister of Sambat, the boy who'd been executed in Kep. When had he last seen her? How had she managed to get inside?

A second girl helped lift Maier over the threshold of the temple.

The Japanese lay on a rusty hospital stretcher in an almost dark, damp hall. A few candles, stuck to the base of a pillar on which a statue of Buddha or Ganesh might have once stood, threw an eerie, unpredictable light into the room. Maier could smell blood and garbage.

“We prepare our girls for all eventualities. Everyone has to be ready for combat at any time. Ready without hesitation, without thinking, without having to look into the eyes of their commander, without sentimentality, they will be able to successfully go through with the job at hand, so to speak. The readiness to overcome incredible odds and challenges is an old Khmer Rouge tradition, especially when it comes to health care. And our art collector will make the perfect cadaver to bring our students closer to surgery.”

The White Spider snapped his fingers and the girls tied the Japanese to the stretcher. Raksmei had a syringe ready, but the old man shook his head.

“Unfortunately we cannot afford to waste medication indiscriminately. We have to do without during training.”

The old German nodded to the youngest girl, who rolled a small steel table to the stretcher. The Japanese had woken up and, with a confused expression, looked around the dark hall. When the girl approached him, he screamed so loud that Maier thought his head might burst. Without hesitation, the girl grabbed a bone saw off the steel table and began to amputate the art collector's right leg. Screaming still, the Japanese shat himself and passed out. Urine and blood mixed below the stretcher.

In an instant Maier understood where he was, what he was and what would be expected of him.

“Yes, Maier, everything is becoming clear now. Now you are ready to accompany me on my last journey. Now you are my biographer.”

 

THE BIOGRAPHER

 

Maier was empty and tired. The continuous hallucinations had worn him down. The murder he'd witnessed had numbed him. He had written the first entry in his biography.

 

The White Spider oversees two girls attempting to amputate a man's leg in a temple hall near Bokor Palace. There are no qualified medical personnel present. In order to simulate war-like conditions, no medication is administered to the patient during the operation. The patient, a Japanese national, dies during the procedure, presumably from shock.
 

 

It was hard to write more than a few lines about the butchering in the temple hall. It was hard to write anything.

Now he sat, still in a wheelchair, in the shadow of the old casino and watched twenty girls, still in their teens, as they were being drilled in close combat by Tep and his son.

It was agreeably cool on the plateau and the pale morning sun barely managed to pierce the clouds of fog which hung between the crumbling buildings of the French hill station. The training was as brutal as the operation had been on the previous day, and Maier was sure that some of the girls would not survive their apprenticeship. Again and again, Tep, dressed in a tracksuit like a football coach, made the girls attack each other with bamboo sticks, while his son pulled one or another girl out of the mêlée and let her smoke
Ya-ba
on the casino steps. The cheap amphetamine had its desired effect. After three or four pills, the girls were so highly motivated that they picked up a machete without hesitation.

Inspector Viengsra sat on the balustrade surrounding the property. He smoked one Ara after another and watched the drama. The policeman had long passed the point of being able to participate in physical training.

The White Spider appeared next to Maier and looked down at him, smiling broadly. The old German wore a freshly-pressed, spotless white shirt, and a large black floppy hat, under which his pale blue eyes roamed like fog lights.

“I see you are taking notes. That's great. Everything should be noted, even our mistakes. No one is perfect.”
Maier was not sure whether the old man referred to the death of the Japanese man or the training of the girls. If he continued writing for his captor he would be as guilty of the crimes he documented as the actual killers. Every sentence he put to paper was part report, part confession. That of the White Spider, as well as his own. The moment had come to make a fundamental decision. As if the White Spider had read Maier's thoughts, the old man turned and snapped his fingers.

Raksmei pushed a second wheelchair next to Maier.

“Oh, no.”

 

Carissa sat next to him and smiled unhappily. Her face was as white as her hair. In the pale morning light she looked so very beautiful and broken. He looked at her in silence.

“You were right, Maier, I should not have followed you. You don't bring any luck to girls. But it's good to see you.”

“I'm not exactly having the time of my life either. For now, think yourself lucky you've still got legs. I told you this was one investigation you should have left your fingers off.”

The White Spider stepped between the two.

“In order to motivate you properly, I have invited your girlfriend to join us for a while. Unfortunately, Ms Stevenson seems to have similar problems with her legs as you did and cannot walk at present. Whether we will operate on the lady in the next few days depends on your literary abilities. You understand me, Maier?”
Maier nodded numbly and began to write.

 

Extreme hand-to-hand combat. The apprentices are fighting with sticks and machetes in front of the Bokor casino. Amphetamines are used deliberately and excessively to motivate the fighters. The results are remarkable. At least one of the girl fighters is unable to continue and tries to cut her throat with her own knife.
 

 

A girl had brought a chair and the old German sat down next to Maier.

“What is your name?”

The White Spider did not answer for some time. Finally he cleared his throat and looked at the detective with something akin to fatherly pride.

“I keep forgetting that you are my biographer. Your detective career is over. I have to get used to that. Keep writing, keep writing.”

Maier managed to smile at the man with forced benevolence.

“My name is Lorenz, Hilmar Lorenz. I was probably born in Düsseldorf in 1925. I grew up in an orphanage. From there I joined the
Hitlerjugend
and then the SS.”

“In 1943, I worked in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. That's where I found my calling. I worked as a point man between the SS and the Ustashe. I worked in the camps. Tens of thousands, Maier, tens of thousands of people marched past me to their deaths. I was part of a gigantic machine. When we began to take heavy casualties on the Eastern front, I knew that Hitler and the German dream had failed. A year later, in September 1944, Tito urged some Croatian and Bosnian troops to change sides and join the Partisans. I still remember that morning clearly. I acted immediately. Out of necessity and conviction, I might add. I like being on the winning side. As I had a lot of intelligence information, the Partisans did not kill me. In order to prove my worthiness, I was ordered to lead the communists, disguised in Ustashe uniforms, into my own Ustashe camp. I became a Trojan Horse. The Partisans and I killed everyone. We killed my friends and colleagues, fellow fighters, even the prisoners. Everyone. That's what saved me. I was accepted, I was on Tito's side. I performed an ideological U-turn and realised that ideology is secondary. It's not about the ‘why', it's all about the ‘how'.”

Maier took notes and tried to remember what he could of southern Europe during World War II. The Ustashe had been the most feared fascist militia in the Balkans and had been every bit as brutal as the Khmer Rouge. Lorenz was not too far off the mark – it hardly mattered whether totalitarian systems were left- or right-wing. The Germans and Dachau, the Khmer Rouge and the Killing Fields, the Americans and Vietnam. Death knew no ideology. One could become a war criminal in any culture.

Maier continued to write.

 

Lorenz proved to be flexible, ruthless and cunning enough to integrate himself into the communist power clique. In 1945, Hilmar Lorenz, under the assumed name of Yvan Nazor, organised a series of massacres along the Austria-Slovenian border. Thousands of Ustashe units as well as countless Wehrmacht soldiers perished in these efforts. Following the foundation of Yugoslavia, he became a member of the internal security services.
 

 

“I only got to meet Tito after the war ended. I was not the only
SS-Standardjunker
who made a career in a communist country. In Vietnam, scores of my old SS colleagues fought for the communists against the French. That didn't surprise me. I was a child of totalitarianism and hence I was sent to Cambodia as a Yugoslavian diplomat in 1973. Tito knew that he had the right man in the right place. For me it was like a third spring.”

The girls had completed their training for the day, and Tep, followed by his son, approached Maier. The general looked at Maier as if he were inspecting a flat tyre on his SUV and grinned, “Not long now, Maier.”

 

When the Khmer Rouge marched victoriously into Phnom Penh on April 17th 1975 and took power, Hilmar Lorenz was Yugoslavia's diplomatic representative to Cambodia. In the following months, Lorenz took part in a number of secret meetings of the Cambodian communist party's central committee. Often, he was the only European present. In 1976, Yugoslavia donated nine million dollars towards rebuilding the shattered nation. Lorenz stayed in Cambodia until 1979, aside from a few short trips to Belgrade, and would only be recalled after the Vietnamese invasion.
 

 

“I don't understand what you are doing here today. Surely there are other, more vicious regimes about, which would go to great lengths to utilise your services and expertise?”

The White Spider appeared to play through all possible answers to Maier's question. Finally, he bent forward and began to admonish his prisoner.

“Please do try and keep the irony from the voice of the biographer. Otherwise I will have it removed with a knife. A man like you would not be able to survive such a loss. It's very simple, Maier. I have grown old. My experience and services were very much in demand in 1975. I was probably as old then as you are now. In the new Cambodia, I am not needed, officially. But I came back for nostalgic reasons and the country can use any kind of help with its reconstruction. I am a consultant. I think that's the going term nowadays.”

 

Following the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Lorenz visited the German embassy in Belgrade. With the help of partly forged documents, he managed to prove that he had a right to German citizenship. Neither his past in the Waffen-SS, nor his work as a Yugoslav intelligence agent was uncovered during the application process, and since 1991, Lorenz has been a German citizen again.
 

 

“I was a pensioner, a damn pensioner, like millions of others. Germany has grown old and careful. But I was in no mood to die in a small apartment in Darmstadt. I returned to Cambodia with UNTAC, just like you, though not as a detective, but as an investor. I used the money I got from the sale of my apartment and bought land in Phnom Penh. And one day, during a visit to Kep, I bumped into Tep, my old friend Tep, with whom I had crisscrossed his country thirty years before to take stock of the revolution. He was almost destitute and I bought him a piece of land on the coast. A thanks and a token of remembrance, for the good times. We both made a fortune when land prices shot into the sky a few years later. Enough money to get mad ideas.”

The old German's mobile phone rang. He said nothing on answering the call. After a while he slowly got up and walked towards the black SUV that stood waiting next to the casino. Raksmei, the young woman whom Maier had thought to be European, the little sister with the needles, helped the White Spider to his vehicle.

Before the German got into the car, he called for Viengsra, the policeman who'd fallen asleep next to his dog. Lorenz shook his head in resignation, carefully climbed onto the backseat, closed the door and lowered the window. He grinned at Maier, as if he'd just had a brilliant idea, and shouted, “When tourists come to visit the casino, we retreat to the pagoda. We have had some problems with a Russian who lives up here. But you are welcome to stay. Your legs should almost be usable again. Tep's son will keep you company and will assist you in getting rid of this useless policeman. I am relying on you, Maier.”

The moment had come as quickly as Maier had expected. While he didn't like the policeman, he had no desire to kill him. This was the final journey Lorenz had mentioned. A journey into the human off-side. Maier did not want to follow the old German.

“And don't wait too long. A man awake and in fear of his life is more dangerous than a man who is sleeping. Until tomorrow.”

The White Spider retreated into the darkness of the car and the dark window slid up silently. As the SUV pulled off, the window lowered once more.

“That was just a joke, Maier. We still need the policeman. I wish you an enjoyable evening. Keep writing. I want a story, not a notebook. Write with style and flair if you want to save your girlfriend's legs.”