The Deceivers (33 page)

“Where are you taking me?” I asked.

The cop in the front passenger seat turned and gave me a deadpan look but said nothing.

I tried the door handle and it moved loosely but didn't open the door. “Take me to the American embassy.”

The passenger said something to the driver and I caught the word American. They laughed. He understood my request, all right.

Panic started mounting in me. Why weren't they taking me to a police station? Were they taking me out to a deserted area to shoot me?

The police car turned off the paved road and went down a dirt track that brought us closer to the river. My imagination went wild and I saw myself being murdered, my body weighed down and dumped in the river.

The driver flashed his lights on and off three times and then flicked the high beam three times. A spotlight from a boat flashed back three times. I made out the boat in the car's headlight. It was large and military-looking—a
gunboat
, the kind I'd seen on tropical rivers in movies. The boat dwarfed the small fisherman's pier it was beside.

A small shack with an abandoned appearance was nearby. No lights showed from the open doorway and glassless window.

Through the window on the left side of the car I could see dim lights on the hillside that bordered the road. The terrain rose steeply from the road. What I assumed were houses or a single very large house was several hundred yards away. Too far away for me to shout to for help even if I wasn't terrified that the cops would beat me to death with their clubs.

The police car pulled up next to the pier where two men waited. The men wore military field uniforms, the mottled camouflage pattern in greens and browns called battle dress. I didn't see any military insignia on the uniforms or the boat; it was too dark to make out details. One thing I did notice—the soldiers or sailors, if they were in fact military, wore sloppy, ill-fitting uniforms. They didn't have the sharp appearance of the soldiers I'd seen on the streets. One of them had a pistol in his waistband. I would have expected a military person to carry a pistol in a holster.

The gunboat had the same mottled color as the uniforms.

The two policemen got out of the car and left me sitting inside. The four men stood together, passed around cigarettes and a bottle, and talked, once in a while looking at me and laughing. Jesus. Why did I come back to this country? I should have stayed out and communicated my suspicions long distance.

Finally the officer who had been in the passenger seat opened my door.

“Get out.”

Perfect English. And I'd bet he knew much more.

One of the men in military dress propelled me toward the boat. Were they going to take me out onto the deep part of the river and dump me with weights?

“Let me go! I've called the American Embassy—”

He pulled a pistol from his waistband and shoved it in my face and said something in Cambodian. I didn't need an interpreter. He led me down the short pier and to the side of the boat and indicated I was to climb up the ladder and onto the boat. Three men lined up on the boat stared down at me.

As I went up the ladder he grabbed my rear end with both hands and squeezed, setting off howls of laughter from all of them.

I lost it completely. I screamed and kicked him in the face with the heel of my shoe. He cursed as I scooted up the ladder and onto the boat.

A crewman grabbed my arm and led me to a companionway leading down inside the boat while another man went ahead of me. As I came down, he grabbed my body and ran his hands over my breasts. I hit him as hard as I could with my fist but he pulled me in close and started lifting up my dress.

The second man came down and pulled him away from me, an argument quickly ensuing. The masher, who had a big grin with a wide gap of missing teeth, found it all very funny. He was drunk and stunk of alcohol and nastier things.

I was pushed through an open hatch and into a small cabin. The watertight bulkhead door was shut behind me, leaving me in the dark. I felt the wall next to the door with my fingers and turned on a light switch. The light barely took the edge off the darkness, but it was enough for me to see that I'd been put into a small cabin that was being used as a storeroom.

Wood crates with writing in a foreign language that looked like Russian were stacked inside. The stamped-on picture of a weapon, the type they call AK47s, was on the crates. I lifted the lid of a crate. It was filled with canned food, not rifles.

A small, one-person built-in bunk with a soiled blanket and no mattress occupied almost half of the tiny cabin's space. With crates stacked up against the other wall, I barely had room to stand.

The walls of the cabin were metal but thin enough for me to hear laughing and shouting. I turned the handle to the door slowly and opened it an inch. The group of men were gathered around a table playing cards and drinking and howling with laughter.

My fear level soared when it occurred to me that they were probably wagering to see who was going to rape me first. Rape and then murder me. I wondered if these men had AIDS. I read it was common in third world countries where store-bought sex was readily available. But what did it matter if they were going to kill me anyway?

There was no way out of the room. The porthole was too small to even put my head through. It was open and let in a tiny bit of night air, but not enough to cool down the oven of a cabin.

The door had to be pushed open into the room for anyone to enter. I needed to jam the handle and block the door. The crates of cans could block the door if they were in line one after the other rather than piled on top of each other.

I tried to lift the top crate but it was too heavy. I frantically unloaded the crate and set it empty against the door and refilled it. I unloaded half of the next one and slid it off the top and onto the floor, against the first one. By the time I got the third one in place the laughter outside had become a howl.

I emptied the final crate and wedged it up under the door handle. I had just gotten it into place when someone pounded on the door and yelled. It sounded like Toothless to me, no doubt announcing he had come to claim his prize.

The door handle jiggled and someone banged against it. It held.

The laughter stopped and the pounding and cursing became violent. Toothless wasn't too happy about not being able to get in. Soon I had the impression that more than one person was putting their weight against the door.

After more pounding and kicking and grumbling, the men appeared to get tired of their game because the noise stopped.

I didn't know how good Russian rifles were, but for sure, the heavy wood crates were built like Sherman tanks. Filled with canned foods, the door was not going to budge. The only way the men were going to get in was to blow the door down. Or shoot off the hinges?

I was pretty sure that whoever had arranged for my kidnapping was planning to have me murdered. It looked like the preliminaries were going to be pretty brutal, too.

I moved the dirty blanket off the bunk and sat down. The walls were wet from the humidity. The room smelled … not from human stink, but river smells baked by the tropical sun into the boat's metal-like paint—river water polluted for an eon by rotting vegetation, dead and live fish, and the excretions of man and beast, come together to suffocate me in the oven-hot cabin.

Sweat rolled off me. The country was so hot and wet, I had to wonder if wood even rusted.

The boat rocked and knocked and scraped against the pier. The motion of the boat and the stale, stinking air got me queasy.

I heard a noise on the outside of the boat and a body came into view and then a leering face at my porthole. Toothless had been lowered down to porthole level. He shoved a leather sack through the porthole. The sack fell to the floor.

Something in the sack wiggled as I stared down at it. A green head came out, followed by a long, slithering body.
Snake!

I screamed and grabbed the empty crate blocking the door handle and threw it open side down over the snake. I jumped on the crate and came face-to-face with the toothless seaman who howled with laughter as he was pulled back up.

Squatting on the crate, my heart jackhammering, my breath barely coming, I had to think about what to do, but my thinking wasn't coming out straight.

It was a joke, I told myself, they were just laughing and having fun. Cruel fun. If they had wanted to kill me, they could have done it right away. Unless they had put me in the room to take turns—

I had to stop it. If I gave in to panic and fear, I was doomed. I stood up on the crate and took in gulps of air through the porthole.
It's okay
, I told myself.
I can handle it
. Whatever happens, I can handle it. They're just drunk and playing grab-ass with a helpless woman.

I knew they were not the ones who had ordered me to be kidnapped. That had to be Ranar. That only made sense. He had the power.

I leaned back, trying to get my heart and breathing under control. For now I was safe from the snake.

Snug as a bug in a rug
, my mother would say as she tucked me into bed when I was little.

“Snug as a bug in a rug,” I whispered.

But what would happen when they made me open the door? It was inevitable that at some point I would have to open the door. If Toothless was lowered back down to my porthole with a gun in hand, I'd have no choice.

At the moment though, I was more concerned about the snake under the crate.

39

Kirk was at the Foreign Correspondents' Club exchanging war stories about the Cambodian jungle with a
National Geographic
photographer when he received a message from Bullock to come to Sinn's store near the Russian Market. The message had nothing more than the numbers 911 and a scrawled letter B.

That meant Bullock and trouble. They used 911 as a code whenever there was trouble. Trouble in their business usually meant that an honest police official had seized one of their “exports” or, much more likely, a dishonest one was demanding much more money than he was worth.

There was another possibility and it disturbed him. The FCC bartender had told him that when he was coming onto his shift earlier he had seen Maddy on the street.

Maddy was supposed to be gone, back to New York, anywhere but Cambodia where she had stirred up trouble for herself. He hoped Bullock's message didn't concern her.

Kirk finished his drink, trying to wash down the bad taste in his mouth with the alcohol. He hated dealing with Bullock. Not because they were coconspirators in a smuggling ring—Kirk was a realist not to judge himself any less culpable than other crooks—but because Bullock was a slime.

Foreigners hung around Cambodia for different reasons—most to make money, legal or illegally, a few humanitarian types to help the poor and sick. But Bullock hadn't come just to make a dishonest buck; he took advantage of the loose enforcement of sex laws. Even at that, if the creep had stuck to adults, Kirk would have found him more amusing than repulsive.

He left the bar and boarded a moto for the trip to the market.

Even though Kirk was Swedish, he was born in Dutch Amsterdam where his mother had been a prostitute. He wasn't sure if the Swede listed on his birth certificate was actually his father. Kirk tried to find the man once, but discovered he had a criminal record and had dropped out of sight years earlier.

Amsterdam wasn't a town filled with Dutch people wearing funny hats and wood shoes. It was an international city, vibrating with people from the former far-flung Dutch colonial empire; a sex and drug capital of Europe, its citizens were both morally conservative but socially liberal and worked hard to regulate both industries. It was a place where growing up on the streets gave him an education about people, places, sin, and survival.

When Kirk was nineteen, he moved to Sweden and joined the Swedish army to escape a problem he got himself into in Amsterdam. He had stabbed a drug dealer who was beating up a woman. The woman was a druggie, but since his own mother had spent much of her life abused by men, Kirk instinctively rose to the defense of women.

Punching the thief who grabbed Maddy's purse had not been planned—he acted as he always did with women. People who got to know him—and very few did—quickly understood that he had an old fashioned, chivalrous attitude toward women. And he never paid for sex.

*   *   *

KIRK FOUND BULLOCK
lying on his back. He stood by the cot and stared down at the antiques dealer. The man's face was wet from sweat and pasty white, his breathing shallow. Bullock's neck was heavily bandaged.

“You look like death warmed over.”

Bullock's eyes fluttered open. “The fuckin' cunt. She tried to kill me.”

“Where's Maddy?”

“Ranar's got her. General Chep's camp. Ranar will dispose of her after he checks out a couple things.”

“Checks out what?”

“She told the cops who picked her up that she'd called the American embassy. Ranar doesn't buy it, but he needs to wait to see if the embassy asks about her.” He touched the bandage around his neck. “Fucking bitch. If I had the strength I'd get my pliers red hot and pinch off every fucking piece of flesh on her body. I'd—”

Kirk cut him off. “What else does Ranar want from her?”

“She's been talking to that curator, Rim. Ranar doesn't trust him. Thinks he snoops around too much. He wants to know what the two of them know. And who they've talked to.”

“What'd you do to her?”

“Nothing, I was just getting started when the bitch cut my throat with a piece of glass. We caught her at the museum trying to contact Rim.”

“Where's Rim?”

“Crocodile meat by now, probably.”

“You killed him?”

“Ranar's got him.”

“Why the 911 message?”

Bullock tried to get up, but fell back down with a cry of pain.