Zero Hour in Phnom Pehn Page 8

  The interior of the Lido was vast. The room looked like it had been gutted, stripped clean of large, oily nineteenth- century machinery, chains, wires and electrical switches and then converted with some paint, tables and chairs, a bar counter and jukebox. There was a dance floor in the middle. To the right of the entrance was a long bar with stools, and on all three sides of the dance floor were tables occupied by working girls and clients. Dim lights and dark corners turned the figures seated at the tables into shadows. The Lido was like a back alley, a place one could slip in and out of without being noticed or stopped. There was no cross-table talk; the men kept to themselves, looking over the women. Privacy was an obvious attraction. For the girls. For the johns.

  Calvino sat at the bar and ordered another Tiger beer. After the beer arrived he counted about a hundred women. It was a rough count because there was a balcony overlooking the street and a load of women were outside, drinking and talking. Calvino sipped his beer and thought about how Lido was a familiar name that had been hung on a number of places. He remembered Lido Beach, Long Island, where the wise guys who worked on mob crews took their girlfriends on the weekend. The Lido Cinema in Bangkok, which someone burnt down. The Lido Guesthouse in Singapore. Another firetrap waiting to go up in flames. The Lido on the Champs Élysées in Paris had half-naked women dressed in four-foot-high feathered headdresses and knee-high silver boots. The kind of high-class French joint where Fat Stuart L’Blanc would have had dreams of scoring one of the girls. But he would have never gotten in the door. And now Calvino was inside the Lido Bar in Phnom Penh, where wise guys in uniform had a girlfriend for no more than twenty-four hours, and civilians like L’Blanc could also indulge their desires, recycling Vietnamese whores who had been with a uniform the night before.

  The action was happening next to him. Half a dozen blond- haired, blue-eyed men formed a semi-circle at the bar. They wore sidearms strapped to their hips. They started singing a German song, and clinking their beer bottles as they sang. Their green fatigues had small flag patches sewn on the left shoulder—a black, red and yellow striped flag. They were in their late twenties.

  “They are German doctors,” said someone who had moved in on Calvino’s right.

  “They are singing a German drinking song. They come here most nights, drinking, singing, and then leave together. Like a wolf pack on the hunt. But I have never seen them take the girls.”

  Calvino turned around on the stool.

  “John Shaw,” said the newcomer, introducing himself. “I’m from Ireland. Dublin, to be precise.”

  “Vincent Calvino. From Brooklyn. Residing in Bangkok, to be precise.”

  Shaw eased into the idea that this man was from Brooklyn, drinking his beer, watching the Germans, looking out at the dance floor. The music was courtesy of Madonna and a couple of young girls were moving seductively to the music. At the edge of darkness beyond the dance floor were a couple of crew-cut men at a table.

  “UNTAC Civ Pol can’t carry firearms. But in Cambodia the German doctors are armed. You might call that an irony. Cambodia is a place filled with irony. Irish irony blessed us with poets; Cambodian irony has cursed them with mass killers. Irony has an ambiguous, sometimes nasty, sometimes kind edge. It can go either way,” said Shaw.

  He was middle-aged, blue-eyed like the Germans, but he had the kind of eyes that tracked like a hunting dog; eyes that locked onto a detail, played with it, turned it over, didn’t let it go until he had no choice. He had no gut hanging over his belt, his dark hair was short, and the half-light showed high definition on his muscular forearm as he clutched the beer. Shaw looked like someone who kept in shape, lifted weights, and played on the police football team. NGOs had softer, anxious, frightened faces; they wore their soft bodies as badges of honor, showing that they belonged outside the field of personal danger, safe inside an office. And if they ran, it was from danger and not for exercise.

  “Are you a cop or a philosopher?” asked Calvino, knowing the answer before he put the question.

  “I’m a sergeant back home in Dublin. If you’re born in Dublin then you’re a philosopher from birth. A poet by simply walking the streets. What’s your profession is neither here nor there. My tour of duty ends in six weeks. Can’t say I’ll miss much about this place. The missus and kids, now that I’ll be glad to get home to see.”

  “Ravi Singh wouldn’t happen to be your boss?” asked Calvino.

  “Now how would you be knowing that?” asked Shaw, trying to look surprised but the big smile spoiled the effect.

  “Like you knew the Germans were medical corps.” Pratt and Ravi Singh had arranged for an Irish babysitter, he thought.

  “Can I buy you a beer?” asked Shaw.

  “Forget the Tiger. Try the VB. It’s a larger can for the same money.”

  The Germans had finished their drinking song. They faced each other and had that kind of look of men in a huddle between plays in a football game. Then gave a final shout in unison, clapped their hands, turned and marched out of the Lido without taking any notice of the women hovering at the door.

  “The Germans have always had discipline, will power,” said Calvino. “Qualities you want in a doctor or mechanic.”

  “I can’t really vouch for their discipline. But I know doctors shouldn’t be walking around with guns,” said Shaw.

  “In America guns have become a necessary dress accessory,” said Calvino. “Like jewelry.”

  “Seems like jewelry is on everyone’s mind,” said Shaw. The comment had almost drawn Shaw out but then he returned to his beer. Calvino saw him think this over and then back off. Shaw was one helluva cop, someone in control; he wouldn’t spring for something as obvious as this, and he smiled and raised his VB beer.

  “We’ve put the Lido off-limits for our boys,” explained Shaw.

  “We’ve got policemen from thirty-two countries on the UNTAC force. I have to be honest with you. Not all of our colleagues here have the same police training and experience. And when they come here, take out girls, put them in UNTAC vehicles, before you know it, what is a personal matter gets reported in the press. And that’s a bit of a problem. The missus in Dublin reads in the newspaper about how all the foreign cops in Phnom Penh are sleeping with Vietnamese prostitutes. She doesn’t much like that. Not that she’s got anything against the Vietnamese. She doesn’t, I must say, and I don’t much like what goes on here either. You should go around to the health clinic, and see all those lads standing in line with their dicks out, looking real sad. Tonight, I’m having a little look-in. Checking out who is being naughty and who’s being nice.”

  “We could stop bullshitting each other,” said Calvino. Shaw sighed. “Now why would I be . . .”

  Calvino cut him off. “It’s doesn’t matter why. I’m looking for someone. He is well connected . . .” He let it ride.

  “Connected to what, Mr. Calvino?”

  “That’s what I don’t know. But if I had to guess, I’d say it’s likely army and some other influential people on the inside track in Phnom Penh and Bangkok.”

  “You know how hard it is to send someone home from Cambodia?” asked Shaw, shifting gears as the music changed to heavy metal. “It’s all politics here. How can you run a police force when you can’t control your men? Run them out of the force if you have to? You know how much one-hundred-thirty a day is for some of these lads? One year in Cambodia is like working eighty years back where they come from. And don’t think they’re keeping the full amount. Most of it gets all divided up and passed down a line as long as this bar with hands out all along the way. Some end up living on four dollars a day. In their mind, they aren’t much better off than the Cambodians. Of course, the Cambodians are much worse off, but they don’t see it that way.”

  “The man I’m looking for had the right background to start up a sideline business,” said Calvino.

  “A lot of men have done that.”

  “This man had opportunity and access to several military produ
ct lines for which there is a world market. He was in business with a jeweler in Bangkok. The jeweler’s dead. He used to come here. Maybe you saw him. He was a fat French- Canadian.”

  “A lot of people come in and out of the Lido.”

  “You would have remembered Fat Stuart.”

  Shaw dropped one shoulder, leaned over the bar, the wheels spinning in his head as he raised the VB beer to his lips. “Some of our boys might bend the rules to their advantage if they had the chance. It’s cat and mouse. The Lido’s off-limits, but you saw the Land Cruisers parked outside. They know we can’t hardball them. Send them packing for whoring. They would just laugh in our face if we threatened them. But they also know that some activities can get them a one-way ticket out of here as fast as you can get a dose from a Lido girl.”

  “Drugs?” asked Calvino. “That would do it.”

  “How about selling AK47s?”

  “They would be history.”

  “You have your suspicions?” asked Calvino.

  “Those I have, my friend,” replied the Irishman, setting down his beer.

  “But nothing you can prove?”

  “If I had proof, then I wouldn’t be sitting at the bar talking with you. Now would I?”

  Calvino broke out in a big smile. Shaw had a certain quality. Call it sincerity or honesty. He had a little of the Irish storyteller in him as well. Someone who had been on the force long enough to know that it often made no difference what the truth was; like love and hatred, the truth was unstable, shifting. Calvino remembered what Pratt had told him about police work. You studied close-up people straddling the thin line, some working both sides against the middle. Sooner or later someone always fell off. Patience was waiting for that moment, not forcing it and being ready to catch those unlucky enough to fall. But, as in most parts of the world, in Phnom Penh it was easier to define the line than to find who was sitting in the shadows, talking to the whores.

  “I’m looking for a Vietnamese girl,” said Calvino.

  “You came to the right place. Not that many Khmers working at Lido. That gives you a wide choice,” replied Shaw.

  Shaw was right. The Lido girls were overwhelmingly Vietnamese hookers—faces painted, in cheap dresses, they sat at tables, hovered around the bar, spilled onto the dance floor, friends dancing in groups, looking over the men standing with beer on the edges. Not long after the German doctors left, a couple of foreigners—Africans not much smaller than Fat Stuart and decked out in their traditional dress—were dancing with teenaged prostitutes, their huge bellies pumping up and down. The African peacekeepers towered above the girls who giggled and pointed at the bouncing stomachs. Calvino tried to imagine what was going on inside their heads as they danced.

  Calvino eased off the stool.

  “I’m going to have a look around,” he said. Shaw shrugged. “By all means, help yourself.”

  He walked along the edge of the dance floor, and then slipped out the back and onto the balcony, which overlooked the street and main entrance below. He stood at the railing, looking down. The rain pelted the canopy above the balcony.

  From behind him came a familiar English voice. “The trick is to stay away from the gaping holes in the canopy.”

  Calvino looked up and saw the hole and stepped to one side.

  “The whores can spot a newcomer,” said the Englishman. “They always stand under a hole, and the rain falls on their head. It makes the whores laugh. They think a man who doesn’t know enough to keep his head dry probably doesn’t know the cost of screwing either. It’d be difficult to know

  if this is actually true. But the whores believe it’s true. And that’s really all that matters.”

  “Scott, what are you doing in Phnom Penh?” asked Calvino.

  “Keeping myself dry.”

  Richard Scott smiled, tilted back in his chair, touching the wall, his feet pressed against the floor, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer straight from the can. His gray eyes and short-cropped gray hair gave him a boyish look for someone pushing fifty. He had on his jogging outfit—Nike shorts, Reebok tennis shoes, and a faded white singlet with a Singha Beer ad on the front. Scott was in perpetual training, working out with weights but mostly long-distance running. He entered iron-man contests for men over forty-five years old and sometimes finished in the top ten. Not bad considering a lot of guys in that age bracket didn’t whore or drink, and had been in professional sports. In Bangkok, he had tried his hand at running a couple of bars, thinking he would have his private stable of girls. Only it didn’t turn out that way. Toward the end, Scott had once said that the age of bargirls had to be calculated like dog years. Each six months working in a bar equaled five years in a normal woman’s life. By the time a girl had worked five years in a Bangkok bar she was twenty-four going on fifty-four. Scott had been drunk when he said this made all the women far too old for him once he realized their true age. Calvino thought he would have said the same thing stone cold sober.

  His was an old story repeated a hundred if not a thousand times over—he drank too much and didn’t have enough cash flow to pay both the landlord and the police. Calvino hadn’t seen Richard Scott for nearly a year. Once or twice they had run into each other at the forty-baht lunch at the Lonesome Hawk Bar in Washington Square. Then Scott disappeared from the Bangkok scene. One rumor had Scott double-crossing an influential person who had him killed; his body tied down with iron and cement and dumped in the Chao Phraya River. Another rumor had Scott going back to London, and working for a house removal company. That rumor had few believers; Richard Scott never liked heavy lifting unless it was in either a weight room or a bedroom.

  “Should I ask why you’re here?” asked Scott. “Part of a larger American conspiracy to give the Cambodians back to the KR? After all, it was your country that financed them. Armed them. And said to them, ‘Look at all those fields, why not do some killing? You might be good at that.’ But you probably don’t want to talk about who is financing you in Phnom Penh. Did I say that? I take it back. It’s raining and it’s never a good time to talk about politics when you’re trying to stay dry.”

  Calvino started to remember why he hadn’t missed Scott. Richard had a religious faith in working out, staying fit, and in his belief that the ills of the world lay at the feet of the American Government. Every American was an agent, someone sent with specific instructions either to convert or, failing conversion, to subvert and overthrow other governments so they would have a market to sell weapons. There was no such thing as a private eye or private agent; he had Calvino pegged as a secret agent. A kind of at-large Third Secretary who talked shop with people like Alice Dugan.

  “I heard you were in England,” said Calvino.

  “For a couple of months. It was pretty grim. No work. And one day I packed it in. Since I’d had enough of Bangkok I thought why not try Cambodia and Vietnam.”

  “Did you see Fat Stuart about a month ago?” asked Calvino.

  Richard Scott dropped the front legs of the wooden chair forward and made a grab for one of the girls, pulling her onto his lap.

  “He’s a bit difficult not to see.”

  “He’s dead,” said Calvino.

  “Someone once said if Fat Stuart died at the rate of one pound a year, he might live to be a thousand.”

  “He died all at once,” said Calvino.

  “The first time he came to the Lido, the girls freaked out. Almost all the whores are from Saigon. You’ve heard about the boat people. This little one on my lap is one of the bus people.” He gave her a kiss on the cheek, and she curled up, playing with his chest hair, twisting and braiding it with her fingers.

  “Think how bad it’s gotta be for these girls in Saigon for them to get on a leaky old boat or a broken-down bus. For a few bucks they are riding with chickens and pigs for hours. They’ve heard that Phnom Penh is lousy with rich farangs who will fuck them for money. Some of them end up at the Lido. Their worst nightmare must have come true when Fat Stuart cam
e through the door. He has dimples on his knees larger than their face. He spoke a strange kind of French. That’s the hellish thing about poverty for a woman. Either you starve or you accept money from a thousand-pound jellyfish-like creature to climb on top of you. Evolution is a strange business.”

  “Fat Stuart was four-hundred something,” said Calvino. “Tell that to a girl who weighs ninety pounds.”

  As Calvino stood back from the rail, automatic gunfire erupted from about fifty meters up the road. AK47 fire in two three-round bursts. This was followed by a moment of silence and return fire came back from the opposite end of the street, making the Lido near the dead center of the crossfire. The motorcycle taxi drivers on the street below had dived under their bikes for shelter.

  The Vietnamese girls fled from the hand railing and stood erect, their backs touching the far wall, clutching their hand- bags against their chests. One was crying. Most were shaking, eyes closed, lips quivering with fear. They looked like the condemned at the wrong side of a firing squad. Being caught in crossfire on the balcony of the Lido was not what they had in mind as a good evening of fun. They didn’t talk, joke or look at each other. Scott finished his beer and told the girl on his lap to go and fetch him another one. But she was too afraid to leave his lap, and she tightened her arms wrapped around his neck each time he tried to pry her loose.

  “They freak out every time there’s a little gunfire. It’s nothing really. Most of the time the Khmers are shooting at the clouds.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard, they think it makes the rain go away.” Scott nodded. “Maybe it does. Who knows? Has anyone ever studied the problem of rain clouds and bullets? Maybe the CIA.” Additional gun bursts knocked out some windows in the building across the street.

  “They seem to have a hard time hitting the sky,” said Calvino, his hand instinctively reaching in for his own gun. He crouched down near the balcony and looked down the street.