Bible of the Dead by Tom Knox Read Free Book Online

and smudged. She shook her head, and hid her eyes with a poetic gesture, like the cultured shyness of an Angkor princess.
    At last she dropped her hand, and spoke.
    ‘Can we sit in the sun?’
    They shifted down the pewlike benches of the cafe into the light; the sun, Jake noticed, was actually strong, sharpened by upland cold – but strong. Healing. Warming. They both turned their tired faces to the heat and said nothing for a second, absorbing.
    Then she said:
    ‘It can’t be Tou. It just can’t. He was, ah, part of the team.’
    ‘But he’s run away.’
    Chemda shrugged. She had taken off her grey and tailored leather jacket, he noticed the slenderness of her topaz brown shoulders.
    ‘He’s scared. He is Hmong.’
    ‘OK . . .’
    ‘And he has contacts with other Hmong of course, which is why we employed him. The Hmong have been helping us. Because this is Hmong country: they know the Plain better than anyone. They farm the rice paddies, they slash and burn the forests. They also know which areas are, ah, too risky, too saturated with unexploded ordnance. Of course that is – that was – pretty important for our work.’
    ‘He rang you last night – trying to get through. But why . . .’ Jake was trying to puzzle it out. Something was jarring, incongruent. A shard of memory like a piece of grit in a shoe. Chemda interrupted his thoughts:
    ‘They really don’t want us here Jake. As I said. And a murder case gives them a great excuse to make things extremely uncomfortable. It took the UN ages to get permission for this investigation in the first place. Now they have the whip hand. You noticed they didn’t take our passports? It’s because they want us to quit, to go. To give up and fly home. That was his hint about Laos – you heard it? “ This is not Cambodia”. Ahh.’ Her sigh was brief. And unsentimental. And somehow undefeated.
    Jake sat back. Their coffees had arrived, two chipped little cups of thick blackness, plus a tin of condensed sweetened milk already pierced and bubbling. Jake dribbled the viscous milk in his coffee; Chemda wanted hers black.
    They drank, quietly.
    A man across the market was holding a chunk of honeycomb. It looked like a thick slice of intensely rotted wood. The man was digging into each cell of the hive-slice with a finger, and retrieving a wriggling blob of whiteness. A larva. The man popped the white living larva in his mouth, munching and smiling, chasing it with slugs of Doctor Pepper from a can. Then he winkled out another, and ate it.
    Something slotted in Jake’s mind. He looked at Chemda, and said:
    ‘You think they did it. Don’t you? The cops.’
    Her eyes met his, halfway.
    ‘Yes.’ She frowned: ‘Because of the way he died.’
    ‘Why? It was a brutal death. But how does that prove it was the cops?’
    ‘You never read the stories, of what the Khmer Rouge did in Tuol Sleng?’
    ‘S21.’ He said. ‘The torture garden. Absolutely. I know the history. Horrific. But maybe I missed . . . some details.’
    She gazed across the cafe seats. The market was closing up; dried rats lollipopped on wooden sticks were being piled in cardboard boxes. Then she spoke:
    ‘I have read two accounts of some experiments there. Accounts verified by the guy who ran the camp.’
    ‘Comrade Duch.’
    ‘Yes. Comrade Duch. Apparently, in Tuol Sleng they used to tie prisoners to iron beds, and they would attach pumps to them, and then drain every . . . drop of blood from their bodies. They wanted the blood for Khmer Rouge soldiers, but they turned it into, ah, a form of torture, a sadistic game.’
    Jake was sweating, the sun was directly overhead, the hard plateau sun. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, as she elaborated.
    ‘They drained all the blood from these chained prisoners, just to see what would happen. Over many hours they took out all the blood until not a drop was left, the prisoners would writhe and gasp, someone described them as sounding like rasping