Zero Hour in Phnom Pehn Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  ZERO HOUR IN PHNOM PENH

  “The story is fast-paced and entertaining. Even outside of his Bangkok comfort zone, Moore shows he is one of the best chroniclers of the expat diaspora.”

  —The Daily Yomiuri

  “Zero Hour in Phnom Penh is political, courageous and perhaps [Moore’s] most important work. Moore is a brilliant storyteller and a masterful character inventor.”

  —CrimiCouch.de

  “Zero Hour in Phnom Penh is a brilliant detective story that portrays—with no illusion—Cambodia’s adventurous transition from genocide and civil war to a free-market economy and democratic normality. Zero Hour in Phnom Penh is a rare stroke of luck and a work of art, from which one can always draw more stories and levels of meaning. . . . an all too human, timeless, historical and philosophical novel.”

  —Deutsche Well Buchtipp (Bonn)

  “A thriller in which the importance of the single crime shrinks visibly at the sight of mass murder and grand corruption.”

  —Stuttgarter Zeitung

  “It was ten years ago in Cambodia, but this great novel sits well after Kandahar, Luanda, Kabul, Baghdad and other places where the brutality of war destroys the souls of humanity.”

  —KulturNews (Hamburg)

  “In [Zero Hour in Phnom Penh] one experiences an impressive novel and discovers lives in a country—keyword ‘Pol Pot—that has a long history of genocide behind it. A novel of sad intelligence and intelligent sadness.”

  —Facts Zürich

  “Moore is an accurate storyteller and a sensitive observer. He bares the colonial attitude of the foreigners and soberly describes the survival strategies of the young women—imparting a great amount of information and a valuable insight.”

  —P.S. Magazine (Zürich)

  “The novel is more than a crime fiction. It is a believable attempt to describe a society at the crossroad. Moore’s portrayal of the omnipresent prostitution in Cambodia goes under the skin. Nothing is glossed over.”

  —Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten

  “Zero Hour in Phnom Penh is a bursting, high adventure . . . extremely gripping . . . a morality portrait with no illusion.”

  —Westdeutscher Rundfunk

  “A well written, exciting, but not simplistic thriller. The description of Cambodia at the end of the Pol Pot terror regime (approximately 1993) is convincing. High tension amidst violent backdrop. Recommended. ”

  —EKZ Buchbesprechungen Reutlingen

  “Moore’s crime fiction is a multi-layered and disillusioning picture of the Cambodian society and the UNTAC soldiers: the reality behind the headlines.”

  —General-Anzeiger (Bonn)

  “Like other Calvino novels, Zero Hour in Phnom Penh captures the tropical sultriness that often sucks away the breaths of West Germans in Southeast Asia. Heat, noise and stench almost emanate from the book.. Moore heats up the climate even further with his portrayals of raw power, cheap sex, wretchedness from drugs and human contempt. It can be stomach-turning for the delicate of the hearts.”

  —Badische Neueste Nachrichten Karlsruhe

  “Moore writes to entertain, and that he does.”

  —Bangkok Post

  ZERO HOUR IN PHNOM PEHN

  A NOVEL

  BY

  CHRISTOPHER G. MOORE

  Published by

  Heaven Lake Press at Smashwords

  Copyright 2010 Christopher G. Moore

  Discover other titles by Christopher G. Moore at Smashwords.com:

  A Killing Smile

  A Bewitching Smile

  A Haunting Smile

  Chairs

  Publisher’s note

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  For M.C. Chatrichalerm Yukol, teacher and friend

  Special thanks to: Norman Smith for his insights and for sharing with me his remarkable knowledge about Southeast Asia; and to UNTAC Civ Pol officers who took me under their wing and guided me into places I would not otherwise have seen.

  “It’s not a matter of reason or justice. We all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we cannot get out.”

  Graham Greene

  The Quiet American

  GENOCIDE TO LATTE

  Author’s Introduction

  Digesting mass murder has no clear time frame. In the case of Cambodia, between April 1975 until August 1979 when the Vietnamese arrived, the Khmer Rouge managed to kill about one-third of the population. A bullet, a shovel or hoe were killing tools. Starvation and disease added significantly to the piles of bodies accumulated during Khmer Rouge rule. By any standards, there had been a lot of murder. Tensions between those who supported the Khmer Rouge and those at the receiving end of their wrath were still strongly felt when UNTAC forces were sent to Cambodia with the mission to bring democracy, free elections, and a fresh start where both sides could reconcile themselves with the past and each other. In March 1993 I was in Phnom Penh as a journalist covering the UN venture into Cambodia. Drawing upon this experience, I wrote Zero Hour in Phnom Penh—the only novel that has emerged from this period.

  Almost ten years later, I returned to Cambodia to explore the changes that had intervened in a half a generation. “Time walks fast,” said the young Khmer woman DJ with a breezy California accent. She might have been in a shopping center in Los Angeles. But she had never been outside of Cambodia. And she was young, broadcasting in English to the generation of Cambodians born after the Khmer Rouge had been defeated. “Time walks fast,” she said again. “It seems like Monday but already it is Thursday. I like the fastness. But I don’t want to grow old. Do you want to grow old? Of course you don’t. Like me, you want to stay young forever. And I have been thinking about how much I like Santana. He wrote a song called Black Magic Woman. I wish I knew his nationality. I mean, he’s not America and he’s not black or Asian. I don’t know where he’s from. But I really think he’s cool.”

  On the 7-dollar ride from the airport, the driver had tuned to an English language station in Phnom Penh. He understood English. The whole country was studying the English language. The bookshops stocked Madonna, An Intimate Biography and John Grisham’s Summons. How to do tapes for Chinese, French, and Japanese were displayed on the shelf. A little more than a generation earlier the Khmer Rouge had been killing anyone who spoke a foreign language or read foreign books. Now the streets were filled with students in their white shirts and black trousers carrying books and dreaming of riches.

  The Monorom Hotel had been famous in 1993. Journalists on fat expense accounts stayed there, as they had done since the 1970s, preferably in one of the balcony rooms. It had been renamed the Holiday Villa, and had the look of an aging hooker with too much makeup. The old Royale had buckets in the main lobby catching water from the ceiling in 1993. The room could be had for $18 and the swimming pool was packed with weeds and mud. The Singaporeans had transformed the hotel into a world-class five-star Raffles hotel with $300 rooms and offered a Champagne dinner for New Years at $70 per head.

  At the old Russian market, in 1993 Khmer soldie
rs with amputated limbs hobbled after UNTAC soldiers who roamed the market where AK47s were sold for $75 and marijuana cigarettes in packs of 40 could be bought for $2. A decade later, the UNTAC soldiers had been replaced with tourists in their twenties looking through pirated DVD titles as Die Another Day, 8 Mile, and Spiderman. The AK47s and marijuana had vanished. The instruments of war and the drugs to fight pain and terror had given way to the new age of consumption. The images were not of the recent past but of the cartoon worlds churned out by moguls of Hollywood who couldn’t find Cambodia on a map.

  On the night of the full moon, the reflection shone over the Toulesap as I walked along the quay. I had witnessed a part of a procession in which between one and two million Khmers had participated. On the forty-five kilometer journey, Khmers lined the street. In spots they were stood ten deep. They had come out wearing their finest clothes. As I stood by the quay, a military vehicle with red light flashing and siren blaring slowly led a procession of a half-dozen floats. Monks sat in rows on several of the floats. On one float was a large glass case and inside were Buddha relics—hair, teeth and bone—and the procession was taking the relics to a new stupa built in the old capital of Odong. The new temple had been built on a mountain in Ponhea Leu district in Kandal Province. The King and Prime Minister and princes and official s were at Odong, waiting. What we witnessed had historic meaning. It had been over three decades since the relics had been moved. Thirty years was a lifetime in Cambodia.

  Later in my room, I watched the procession on TV. The truck with the cameraman outside of Phnom Penh captured people stepping forward, handing lotus flowers, incense sticks and Cambodian flags to the monks. Some of the trucks overflowed with such offerings. Looking at the vastness of the crowd—one to two million—one couldn’t help think they nearly equaled the victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide. All people and all factions had, however, come together in a bond of faith and belief. Had they put their differences aside for this procession or was this evidence of healing taking place?

  That same Thursday evening a one-star general killed a nineteen-year-old who had allegedly beaten up his son. The new threat to the social order were the children of the ruling class who had formed gangs and roamed Phnom Penh, claiming turf, fighting each other, and other wise raising hell as untouchables. In this case, the general had been arrested. A day later another general, an aging former Khmer Rouge commander, was sentenced in a Phnom Penh court to life imprisonment for ordering the murder of three young tourists in 1994. The Australian, British, and French Embassies applauded the sentence. Like the movement of the relics, a general’s arrest for murder and another general carted off to prison on a murder conviction appeared as once in a life time incidents. The local papers covered the UN Secretary-General’s call for the trial of Khmer Rouge leaders in accordance with internationally recognized standards of justice. It was one thing to imprison one general who ordered the murder of foreign tourists, but what about his accountability for and participation in genocide, Cambodian killing Cambodian? No one raised the issue. There was only silence. Will true justice ever be brought to Cambodia? Will those responsible for the genocide be brought before such a tribunal? Or is it still the reality, that justice and truth are too threatening and divisive? A decade after UNTAC pulled out of Cambodia, no one can answer these questions.

  The Foreign Correspondents’ Club had just opened in the spring of 1993. As a journalist covering events on the ground, I found it a place to meet colleagues. A decade later, if there were any foreign correspondents in Phnom Penh, they had found a new watering hole. The FCC was overrun with tourists and NGOs with their toddlers and teenagers running around with the arrogance of a Khmer general’s son, racing among the tables with their pool cues and eating hamburgers. The FCC as a day-care-center, a tourist trap, a place to write postcards showed the distance between the days when UNTAC land cruisers roamed the streets, and the threat of war remained real, the possibility of genuine elections uncertain.

  The new generation of tourists sat in Internet cafes intermingled with restaurants; they had a communication connection with the outside world that we never dreamt of in 1993. While they were more connected in one way, in another they were more isolated, in their small booths, never giving themselves a chance to find that being cut off, being isolated, brings advantages and insights into the location and into oneself. Being connected gives a sense of certainty and safety. The tourists had never left home, family, friends, or colleagues. Physically they were in Phnom Penh but inside their minds they had gone nowhere. It is unlikely they would have heard of the Briton, Australian and Frenchman—all in their twenties—who in 1994 had been dragged off an upcountry train, held for two months, then killed.

  In 1993, when Calvino arrived in Phnom Penh, he explored the back streets, he sought out the places where there might be a story—or a body. Sipping a latte at the Pink Elephant Restaurant with a half-dozen fellow travelers was not his way of understanding Cambodia. The old Lido was a place where the UNTAC soldiers rolled up in their white land cruisers, and with their $168 daily allowance, were a welcome sight to the mainly Vietnamese hookers who waived from the balcony. The Lido is no more. Recently, the government cracked down on prostitution in Phnom Penh in advance of hosting several regional conferences. But have the working girls disappeared from the scene or have they only faded away, waiting until the guests leave? Only time will tell. Meanwhile, in Phnom Penh women in green frocks work under a hot mid-day sun sweeping the main streets. The vast complex of slums in the heart of town has been knocked down and replaced with a sprawling shopping center and office complex. Next door to this complex is a park named after the Prime Minister Hun Sen.

  At the end of the day, Zero Hour in Phnom Penh is a unique crime novel as the private eye Vincent Calvino finds himself seeking to solve a private crime in the midst of a society that has suffered the trauma of mass murder. He comes to realize that any individual crime pales when compared to what happened to more than one million people at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. If Calvino were to return to Phnom Penh today, he would find many things unchanged—such as the fear of using justice and truth to resolve the past—and many things on the surface had changed—Internet cafes, hordes of tourists, five-star hotels, and a new airport where the menu includes melted tuna au gratin, cheese cake, and latte. In Cambodia, the human condition continues to stretch the void—from the horror of genocide to the vulgar ostentatious travelers who have, in their own way, sought to have their cake and eat it, creating the illusions that they have never really left home.

  ONE

  RACE DAY

  PATTEN WAS LEARNING hard on his crutch as he walked through the door of the Lonesome Hawk Bar. The rainy season had kicked up his bum hip and leg—metal fragments left from a SAM missile launched over Laos made the joints sensitive to the change in weather. Shafts of pain shot down old established nerve pathways. Patten hated the rain, he resisted the pain but finally did what he was forced to do every rainy season: he watched a room full of strangers clocking him as he came into the bar, his underarm sweating through his shirt, making that peg-legged noise as he pushed down with his crutch.

  “So I’m using a crutch, what’s it to you?” asked Patten in the face of a low-life squinting over a bottle of Singha Gold.

  “Didn’t mean nothing.”

  “Fucking hell you didn’t,” said Patten.

  “No, I was just thinking it must be hard in this rain. Walking on a crutch.”

  “In the rain, in the sun, under moonlight. When is it ever easy on a crutch? Is that what you’re saying?”

  The Lonesome Hawk Bar was a meeting place for ex-pilots like Patten, old soldiers, CIA types, and other members of the mobile ex-Cold War fighting and intelligence machine which had been left stranded in Bangkok with no further operational orders and no enemies left to kill. They showed up to eat a big lunch for one and a half dollars—salad, soup, and always meat with greens and potatoes. The black cook, whom everyone called B
lack Hank, was medium built, had hard eyes, wore an Oakland Raiders cap, and took real pride in his kitchen work. He was talking to Calvino at the bar when Patten came in. Patten spotted Calvino straight away at the bar. A whore was serving him a drink and smiling all friendly like she found Calvino to be someone special.

  “You know the real truth about these girls, Calvino?” asked Patten.

  Calvino turned around and looked at him. “What’s the truth, Patten?” Thinking to himself that if the real truth ever connected with Patten it would be a freak accident like his connection with the SAM.

  “On the macro level their lives are a real tragedy. But on a micro level they are a lot of fun,” he said. “You can quote me on that.”

  Calvino hadn’t planned to quote Patten on anything. But before Calvino could reply someone in the bar had started up about a dead guy named Jerry.

  A farang named Jerry Gill had a one-time appointment with the oven that afternoon. But no one from the Lonesome Hawk was going to his cremation, and Gill didn’t know anyone who didn’t go to the bar. So it was gonna be just Jerry, some monks and the oven at the wat. Jerry had eaten his fair share of the forty-baht lunches over a couple of years before he had suddenly died. The fact he was dead everyone admitted. Black Hank had guys signing a card. Calvino had signed his name. There were a couple of dozen names scribbled at odd angles on the card.