Phnom Penh Express (3 page)

The trouble didn’t stop there. The very same day, another dutiful public servant, this time hailing from the Ministry of Labour, had contacted her to “discuss your staff’s work permits”.

“What’s wrong with them?” Nina had asked.

“Oh, don’t worry, we’ll find something,” had been the bureaucrat’s answer to an unnecessary question. She was to present herself, with the cash, at his office the following morning at 10:30
AM
.

Then, as if by black magic, the construction company’s manager informed her matter-of-factly that the cost of building materials had increased, and that the price estimate for the final part of the job would have to shift upwards accordingly.

“What? Again?” had been her naive reaction. “Why?”

The construction boss had feigned surprise.

“Because of the war in Iran, of course,” he’d said — and didn’t she know that the price of fuel had gone up too?

“Iraq.”

“Pardon?”

“Iraq. Not Iran. There’s no war in Iran. Not yet.”

“Yeah, whatever. Fuel’s still gone up.”

Nina sips her coffee and looks at Phirun, desperation etched across her face.

“If things go on like this, I’ll be finished before I’ve even started.”

“Maybe those bureaucrats don’t take you seriously because you’re a
barang
,” he replies thoughtfully, using the Khmer word for foreigner. “Shall I go talk to them?”

Phirun isn’t particularly keen to deal with any bureaucratic types, but after the happy chocolate incident he feels he owes Nina a favour.

“Be my guest, Rambo, but I refuse to pay bribes. They can have some of the luxury chocolate gift boxes as a deal sweetener, but no money. Once you start paying out, there’s no end. Cambodia has to grow up.”

“Bribery happens in every country,” Phirun protests quietly.

“Not to this extent. It will kill my business.”

“Have those gift boxes arrived yet?” Phirun changes the subject, aware that bribery is a touchy subject for Nina. He never quite understood why
barangs
have such a problem with a bit of under-the-table bargaining, as long as it’s reasonable. In Belgium, his adoptive country of the past eighteen years, the dodgy deals were far less overt but not necessarily less common. Certainly not among the higher-ranking authorities. But even among ordinary families, tax evasion had become a national sport to the extent that honestly declaring your income is almost regarded as unpatriotic — it’s upsetting to regular Belgians.

“Oh, Jesus! Speaking of those boxes...” Nina suddenly remembers, “the supplier in Antwerp even messed those up, too. They’ve not only sent me the wrong design but they’ve actually filled them with their own chocolates. They can’t even get a simple order right. I ask for packaging, they send me their stock of Mother’s Day presents!”

“You’re kidding! Did they think we can’t make our own?”

Nina shrugs. She’s by now so tired she can hardly bring herself to care any more.

“But we can still use them, right?” Phirun asks. “I mean, do they look expensive?”

“They’re okay... for our purposes, anyway. I guess we can use them. It won’t make much difference,” she answers, defeated.

“Perhaps if we replace them with some happy chocolates?” he winks.

“Phirun, that’s not funny.”

“Sorry, sorry. Anyway, let me give it a try. How many of them did we receive?”

“Not sure,” Nina sighs, disheartened. “Thirty or forty I believe.”

“Then I’ll take some of them home now and tomorrow morning I’ll give each of those officials a fancy looking gift box, you know, the Asian way. It will make them feel sophisticated and exclusive — let them gain face with their colleagues, their wives, mistresses, whoever.”

But deep down Phirun knows that chocolates unaccompanied by money will never turn a corrupt bureaucrat into a shining beacon of responsible governance. He might as well try to teach a dead squid to whistle through its nose.

THE WOMAN TALKING into the cellphone is not pleased.

“I am not pleased.”

“Of course not, I know, but what can I say?”

She talks slow and clear.

“You could tell me something about Dieter Driekamp. That’s your job, to find things out.”

Despite her self-control, her voice is laced with deadly menace. This does not escape the man’s attention at the other end of the line. It’s beginning to make him nervous.

“He’s disappeared, Miss Tzahala. It’s as if he vanished from the earth. My contacts at customs were very sure: he didn’t leave the country; he must still be here in Israel. Somewhere...”

“Then find him,” she suddenly bursts, yelling. “His test shipment never arrived!”

Around the same time that Phirun and Nina are having their conversation in The House, less than a mile away the woman on the phone frantically paces her large, air-conditioned Phnom Penh villa. It’s mostly hidden behind a large wall spiked with barbed wire, tucked away in the residential Boeung Keng Kang quarter.

“I’ve put all my men on it, Miss Tzahala, but Driekamp must have gone underground. Not a trace. He didn’t check out of the hotel, his stuff is still in there, even his passport. It’s almost as if he wants to make a point.”

The man hesitates.

“I promise you: we do all that we can. We have to keep looking.”

“Harah!”
the woman curses in Hebrew. She’s on the verge of losing control. The mutual silence on the line weighs heavy; the man doesn’t dare utter a word. Finally, she speaks.

“Could it have been his supplier?”

“Most unlikely. Why would they screw their own agent? That would go against their long-term interests. No, I only see one explanation —”

But the woman cuts him off.

“I’m supposed to meet our new partners tomorrow here in Phnom Penh,
with
the shipment,” she says. “I’ll have to be very creative as to why we have failed to deliver the diamonds — you realise that?”

“Yes.”

Her voice hardens.

“I want to be one hundred per cent certain that Driekamp has vanished with the shipment, if that’s what you are saying. Because if we screw up again, our Cambodian friends won’t stay friendly much longer. I’ll be finished and — let’s be clear — I won’t go down alone. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

While she’s talking she stares at a dead lizard squashed between the door and its frame. Its shrivelled little body sticks to the inside of the door.

“Yes I understand,” the man answers quickly.

“I thought so,” she snaps. “Find him!”

Tzahala presses so hard on the disconnect button she almost breaks her ultrathin mobile. Frustrated, she throws it onto the bed and picks up a packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes, left over from her last trip to Tel Aviv. Sunk deep in thought, she shakes one out of the pack and lights it.

What the hell happened? Driekamp wouldn’t be so stupid to set us up with only one test-shipment of diamonds, she thinks. That just wouldn’t make any sense. If he wanted to screw us, he’d have done it properly, not with just the one shipment.

Angrily, Tzahala stubs out her unfinished cigarette and pours herself a whisky. Tiredness is suddenly overwhelming her. She switches on the TV and stretches herself out on the bed. She skips quickly past numerous Khmer karaoke channels until she arrives at CNN. A U.S. military commander is explaining how a troop reduction right now would send the wrong message to the insurgents.

“Same shit, different day,” she mumbles distractedly.

The commander continues rambling about how U.S. military ground intelligence has uncovered at least one extremist cell with links to a social services organisation in Iran that is suspected of financing Hezbollah. This new intelligence added more weight to earlier accusations of direct Iranian involvement in the insurgency.

The commander drones on but something he just said has grabbed Tzahala’s attention. One word: Hezbollah. It has triggered something in her brain. And the longer she thinks, the clearer things become. It’s true it wouldn’t make sense for Driekamp to run off with one shipment but he wouldn’t hesitate trading diamonds with Hezbollah, Tzahala realises. He’s a bold South African; he’d deal with the devil itself. And she has never asked questions about his suppliers — not doing so had been something of a silent agreement between them.

“
Zoobi!
” she curses again in her native Hebrew.

If her theory is true, she thinks, it means that she’s been indirectly financing Israel’s archenemy number one. Driekamp’s sense of irony is impressive. Not that she’s got a problem with the idea — she doesn’t give a damn who she deals with. If she wants to continue with leading Israel’s fastest growing criminal empire, she can’t be choosy. She’s more concerned about the implications. In the best-case scenario, Driekamp had already been done in by Hezbollah — those boys are easily upset. But usually for a valid reason and Driekamp’s no fool. Besides, the likelihood that he never left Israel reduces the possibility of the Hezbollah scenario. Which leads to another line of thought: the worst-case scenario.

She stands up and begins prowling the room, clutching her whisky glass. If Driekamp has been dealing with Hezbollah, she continues reasoning, then Mossad might have gotten onto his tail. And it wouldn’t take them too long to make the connection with her.

She stops pacing and stands still. Sweat droplets have begun to break out on her forehead.

But what about the missing shipment? she wonders. When Driekamp had called her in the evening, it was afternoon in Tel Aviv, and the shipment had already left that morning. That’s what he had said, anyway. Could Mossad have intercepted it? That’d be unlikely, in the given timeframe... And Driekamp had sounded his usual self, too. He certainly didn’t sound like he was talking with a gun pressed to his head. Moreover, if Mossad were on her tail it wouldn’t make sense for them to intercept the shipment; on the contrary, they’d follow it.

This last thought calms her down. In one swift movement, she empties her glass and walks out of the bedroom, through the large living room and into the kitchen. It’s her favourite space to think. It’s quiet, light and airy, and the only place where she feels there’s a bit of soul in the house. When she started renting the villa six months ago, she had not chosen it for its charm and character. She needed a residence in a secure area where she could go about her business with discretion but also receive people in a certain style. Since most of her business dealings are with affluent Cambodian and Thai officials, the house had to radiate a certain kind of wealth — the one they can identity best with: the quick and easy kind. All the heavy furniture in her giant living room is in expensive, polished wood and two walls are decorated with gaudy Angkor Wat paintings favoured by the wealthy Khmers. An enormous TV screen dominates another wall while two crystal chandeliers hover over the room like ominous birds of prey. Outside on the driveway, a large black Hummer is parked but she never uses it, except for official visits. It’s too large and slow for Phnom Penh traffic. She prefers the low profile
motodops
, the local motorcycle taxis.

Tzahala sits at the kitchen table and lights another cigarette. The nervous drumming of her fingers on the table’s surface is the only sound that fills the room but she doesn’t hear it, again lost in thought. Could one of her network here in Cambodia have set her up? Her drumming suddenly stops, but after contemplating it further she dismisses the idea. It’s a small, select team who know how ruthless she can be. They wouldn’t dare. And so far, her most trusted aid is the only other person who knows where the diamonds are hidden. Moreover, when she had started preparing the launch of her new network, she made sure to build in enough internal control mechanisms to avoid being screwed by her own people.

One moment Tzahala’s mind wanders back to Mossad only to realise, again, that the theory doesn’t make sense. Despite her frustration with the enigma of Driekamp’s disappearance, it fills her with relief — Mossad’s involvement would be bad news. She lets out a big sigh. Back to square one... She finishes her cigarette and prepares for bed.

IT’S ANOTHER TYPICAL morning in Phirun’s small flat. He wakes up to the penetrating stench of
prahok
, Cambodian fermented fish paste, that his landlord’s wife compulsively concocts in the flat downstairs. At the same time, the relentless tone-deaf wailing of the karaoke addict upstairs is slowly but surely pushing him towards the brink of insanity.

He looks at the time — 6:45
AM
. Grunting with effort, he stands up and finds refuge in the bathroom where the noise becomes slightly more bearable after he shuts the door and lets the shower run at full capacity. The cold water marshals him from the land of sleep to the land of waking; not always an easy journey for him.

I could use a happy chocolate right now, he thinks, and tries to remember where he put the Paracetamol. Yesterday’s experiment has left him with a headache the size of a football pitch and his neighbour’s caterwauling is only adding to the pain. While most native countrymen would naturally start longing for fried fish while cheerfully humming along with the neighbour, Phirun’s foreign upbringing has rendered him indifferent to these two pillars of his birth country — smelly food and awful music. It makes him doubt he will ever become a proper Khmer.

While the cold water gushes over him, Phirun lets his thoughts wander back over his past. His parents had been quite well off before the Khmer Rouge seized power over Cambodia in the mid-seventies. The family fortune had been lost during the war, but at least most of his kin had survived the murderous regime. The majority of them had fled in time, in contrast to countless other unlucky families. He wonders if that’s partly why he’s often treated like a
barang
in his own country, rather than a true Khmer. Or, rather, like an
anikachun
, a not very flattering term for a person with no fixed abode — a gypsy, a wandering refugee. Were some Khmer Rouge survivors envious to a certain degree? Did they resent the fact that Phirun had avoided the suffering unimaginable to those who hadn’t lived through the nightmare?