Phnom Penh Express (25 page)

The strategy worked, she recounts. The Lebanese recognised the potential value of this young woman. Like religious converts, people who rediscover their lost faith are prone to radicalisation because of their zeal to prove their newfound belief. Farina was also less likely to attract police scrutiny because of her Cambodian background — after all, she was just a girl from a Buddhist country. They fell for it.

Then something happened that propelled her into the heart of the organisation. She was already participating in operations for her new masters when the Lebanese discovered that the Australians had identified her as belonging to one of Hezbollah’s extremist factions. Her file had been relayed to intelligence watch-lists around the world. To Farina, this only served to reinforce her credibility with Hezbollah, but the Lebanese recognised the danger it posed.

“I was sent straight to the group’s most influential leaders in Lebanon. And with that move, I infiltrated Hezbollah’s highest ranks,” Farina recounts with a certain pride in her voice.

But she was also on her own there. For her own safety, nobody, apart from her bosses in Israel, knew her real identity. The intelligence community was monitoring her alter ego. For them, Farina, alias Merrilee, was a wanted Hezbollah activist. And to Mossad she was now one of their principal assets; she, a 26-year-old orphan.

It was during that period that she gained insight into Hezbollah’s financial structure, how and where they sourced resources to expand their business of destruction and death. It was then that she first heard mention of Cambodia. Like careful business people, Hezbollah spread their risks and diversified their income, but dealing in blood diamonds stood out. One of Hezbollah’s middlemen was a South African who found buyers for the group’s ever-growing stream of illicit precious stones. However, what was more important, logistically and also as a matter of honour, was to identify his Israeli buyer.

“Yes, that’s right,” Farina declares, “Hezbollah’s main buyer was one of our own, who had sold Israel out. So I was determined to get him.”

Farina pauses again, reflecting her own words.

“I never managed to find out the identity of the Israeli buyer... until last week. It’s even possible that nobody in Hezbollah knew either, but I am still not sure — they usually like to acquaint themselves with the people they deal with. Anyway... my bosses had to make a decision. Go after the South African in the hope that he would lead us to the Israeli buyer. In which case I would have to pull out, as I’d become a prime suspect to Hezbollah. Or else patiently maintain the status quo.”

Once more, silence fills the hospital room. Only the fan continues its monotonous creaking. Farina shrugs and carries on talking.

“Before Mossad could make a decision, I was selected for one of Hezbollah’s biggest suicide missions in years. I had no choice. It was an extreme honour to be martyred and showing the slightest reluctance would have cost me my head there and then. So the same day I fled across the border to Israel with the help of the Israeli air force, after slitting the throat of Hezbollah’s third-in-command. Before I even set foot on Israeli soil, our operatives had already secured Dieter Driekamp inside a Tel Aviv hotel.”

Farina looks at Phirun. His face shows fatigue but is otherwise void of expression.

She continues about Driekamp’s interrogation, her presence there, his subsequent assassination and how the trail led to The House in Cambodia.

“And on to you.”

Farina’s story is nearing its end. Shortly after the Driekamp operation, she was sent to Phnom Penh to identify and destroy the network’s Cambodian arm. Mossad reasoned that destroying Hezbollah’s buyer would cut off one of the terrorists’ most important revenue streams.

By then Farina’s value to Mossad had shrunk dramatically, since appearing on Hezbollah’s ‘Most Wanted’ list, so they could afford to take a risk with her, she explains. After Lebanon, she was decorated with a special Award of Honour for her services, the youngest agent to ever receive it. In the back of her mind, however, she knew that she had become expendable.

But she played along with the game. She kept on convincing herself that she owed it to them. That they were her only family. She had no relatives that she knew of — and no friends, only enemies. There was nowhere else to go, no dreams to pursue. She remained determined to complete her mission at all costs.

Farina quietens, seemingly lost in thought. Only after a long silence did she speak again.

“Who could have foreseen that freak coincidence — that shipping clerk’s error? The moment you started distributing those parcels, you became a prominent name on my hit list.”

She sounds resigned.

“I guess you can fill in the rest of the story yourself...”

***

After another long pause, Farina turns to Phirun who’s still neatly tucked under the white sheets. His face is turned towards Farina but his eyes are shut. It seems he’s asleep.

Then Phirun quietly speaks, keeping his eyes closed.

“Nina told me you were ‘gone’. Dead, I thought. Another scheme of yours?”

Farina averts her eyes.

“She thought that it would be better for you to assume that was the case.”

The silence accentuates the drone of traffic outside.

“I was going back to Israel anyway. We weren’t going to see each other again. I wasn’t going to contact you.”

Another pause.

“Nina was right, in a way. I had gone. I flew to Israel yesterday. The moment I passed through customs, I went straight to the ticket counter and put myself on the first flight back. Now I’m here.”

“Why?” Phirun asks, cynicism underlining his words. “Did you forget to finish part of your job?”

“The moment you were shot, I finished Tzahala. Half a second later, the American, Billy, had me in his sights. His hands were trembling. The Colonel and the Israeli were dead. I could have easily taken him out, but in a flash... The image of you throwing yourself in front of me was lodged in my brain. It changed something, and I couldn’t kill him... I simply couldn’t. No more killing...”

Farina takes a deep breath.

“No more killing,” she repeats, “no more...”

“What happened then?”

“Instead of taking out the American, I looked aside, to where you were lying — bleeding, but alive. I crawled over and started tying a shirt around your wound. The American let me, then he put his gun down and started helping me. He called his embassy and some people arrived in no time. You were driven off in a grey Lexus without number plates. Then the American and I returned to the business at hand.”

She had told him everything, things he had no right to know. It took Billy two hours and numerous calls to the U.S. who in turn, Farina suspects, contacted Mossad and confronted them with some hard facts. At some point, presumably after getting confirmation of some sorts, the American had relaxed.

Then when she and Billy discovered they had been chasing the same people, they made a deal to cover for each other. Officially, the Colonel and Tzahala killed one another. Billy did not want his superiors to learn of his unauthorised activities. As for Farina’s bosses, and especially the Israeli government, it would be extremely embarrassing politically if the outside world knew an Israeli national had been financing Hezbollah.

So the only people inside the chocolate shop that evening were Phirun, Tzahala and the Colonel. The Colonel and Tzahala killed each other because of some business dispute. The neighbours’ murders were, rightly, linked to them, and the investigating police fed the whole story, supported by the usual financial incentives. As long as no Cambodians are involved, they don’t really care if a couple of
barang
criminals do each other in.

In the end, everybody was happy. The only outsider that Farina and Billy had to convince was Nina, because she would soon hear Phirun’s account.

“Eventually she agreed, for the sake of her business, I suppose.”

“Bravo, nice story. And now I’m supposed to take pity on you, to be thankful for not having murdered me, and to keep my mouth shut or else? Tell me, would non-cooperation land me on your hit list again?”

Farina turns her tired face without offering an answer. After a while it’s Phirun who talks again.

“I’m sorry...,” he says, quietly. Then adds, “You haven’t told me yet why you came back from Israel.”

“No, don’t be sorry... you have all the reasons in the world to think of me as... I have no right...”

“My question, Merrilee.”

“It’s Farina,” she manages to flash a smile but it disappears quickly.

“I’m not sure why I came back. Perhaps for several reasons; I don’t know. Maybe because I didn’t want to return to my life in Israel. I’m twenty-eight and am not even sure how many people I have killed. And in the end, it doesn’t make any difference. Everybody is replaceable. It’s just a matter of time before someone else, someone even worse, fills in. We may have won this small battle in Cambodia but not until we rethink some of our own convictions and conquer the minds of those we fight will the war be won. By either side.”

She pauses again to think, then continues.

“I thought that people prepared to sacrifice their lives for someone else only existed in the movies. Or were suicide bombers who give their lives in order to take many with them. But you... you were neither of those. You were real.”

“I was stoned out of my mind! I had no idea what I was doing; it was a lucky accident!”

Farina speaks just two words.

“Your poem.”

“What about it?”

“I kept on rereading it, over and over again, on the plane back to Israel. I was shocked when I realised how well it described my current life.”

“My poem? But you tore it into pieces; you mocked it to hell...”

“No, that’s not the one I’m talking about. I’m talking about your other poem,
Inside the Tree,”
she explains, and confesses how she’d broken into his flat.

“I don’t know why I took it. I couldn’t resist. But it wasn’t until later, on the plane, that the full extent of what was written hit me. And it chilled me to the bone. It was eerie in its description of how I was feeling, so precisely. Of how my
life
was.”

“It wasn’t written with that purpose. I was not writing about you, I was writing about myself.”

“Yes, I recognised that. And that recognition, of shared feelings, made me... I felt connected to you. Intensely. There were many emotions, but most of all I felt like a complete idiot. The very person who, only days before, I was planning to murder, was the person who saved my life. The person by whose poem I felt understood. That’s how screwed up my life had become. And reading those lines again on that plane... They made me cry... I think maybe that’s the reason I came back.”

They are both silent. Somewhere a dog is barking into the evening.

After a while, Phirun turns his head and rests it on the pillow, looking directly at Farina. His expression is still blank.

“I’ll go now,” Farina says softly, rising from her chair.

“No, stay.”

Phnom Penh, August 2018

HE’D BETTER HURRY up or he’ll be late for the seminar, Phirun thinks and speeds up his car. The moment he negotiates the corner onto Norodom Boulevard, he’s stopped by the police.

“Oh, man, not now...”

He lowers his window. A young officer in a starched new uniform addresses him.

“Road tax?”

Phirun points to this year’s tax sticker, clearly visible in the correct place on his front window. The officer nods.

“Driving licence.”

Phirun hands it over and while the officer examines the plastic card, Phirun rummages through his pockets for dollars.

“Okay.”

“Excuse me?”

“Okay, go,” the officer gestures impatiently and looks away.

Phirun shakes his head. Phnom Penh has definitely changed, he thinks. He stops for the red traffic lights, just like the other drivers. Yes, it has changed. Just to his side is a sizable vacant plot of land where two years ago, a sky-high building had besmirched the urban landscape. The new government had ordered it demolished. A survey had revealed that the concrete used in its construction was of substandard quality; nowhere near even the level required by minimum safety standards. As a recent government decree now forbids new high-rise buildings on Norodom Boulevard — an attempt to restore some of its past character — nobody is sure what will eventually be built on the open site. Maybe nothing, Phirun thinks, remembering the new mayor’s vow to promote green spaces.

A few minutes later he turns into Street 240 and drives past the house where the chocolate shop was once located. He wonders how Nina is doing in Amsterdam. Since the opening of the chocolate shop six years ago, everything has been a bit of a rollercoaster for her. Phirun was still in the hospital in Bangkok at the time of the official opening party, but it had been a wild success. Three times as many people than were invited turned up; the entire stretch of Street 240 was closed off, because of the dozens of parked hummers clogging the road. Anticipating more chocolate-covered diamonds, all of the officials had turned up, too early, like flies attracted to dung.

Phirun laughs out loud. It seemed that the last happy chocolates somehow ended up among the free handouts — which resulted in an unusually uplifted mood. Everybody was high, yet nobody really knew why. A couple of Canadian tourists paid $500 to a
tuktuk
driver, requesting he circle the Independence Monument for two hours — they were so transfixed by the incandescent water fountains surrounding the monument.

Nina had been scared that she’d have to close down or even be prosecuted, but quite to the contrary, the effect of the happy chocolates neutralised the officials’ initial disappointment. Instead, after stuffing themselves with the sweet treats, their newfound elation resulted in some unusual scenes. In one, five wives of highly placed officials vied for the amorous attention of a young bodyguard and ended up dancing naked on the roof of a hummer in traditional Khmer
Apsara
style, encouraged by their cheering husbands. Since the local press was covering the event, the embarrassing moment threatened to prematurely end their potentially lucrative careers. Instead, the media were promptly ordered to destroy all evidence of the debauchery, and the entire incident was swept under the carpet, including the controversial ingredients of Nina’s chocolates.