Private Demons Read online

  He had been sixteen when, in the customary rite of passage for many Cambodian men, he had left his mother’s home in Phnom Penh to spend a year living as a Buddhist monk. In the city, he had enjoyed a somewhat privileged life; his mother—Samchit—was a prima ballerina in the Royal Cambodian Ballet; his father, of whom he had only the vaguest recollections, was a French diplomat, attached to the local embassy . . . a French diplomat who was already married and whose aristocratic family hailed from the region around the port of Calais. It was because Lucien, and his twin sister Lisette, could not be formally recognized with his name that their mother had simply bestowed upon them the name of that famous harbor town. In light of his later career, Lucien often thought it had been strangely prescient of her.

  Cambodian society was a remarkably tolerant one; the country having been overrun, infiltrated, and colonized many times since the reign of the mighty Khmer kings, the people took a long, and generally unprejudiced, view of things. And the prevailing strain of the Buddhist faith, Therevada, offered them an easy, accepting, even fatalistic, philosophy to live by. If a man could not abide by all five precepts of the Wheel of Righteousness, he could pick out one or two—such as never to steal, or to deceive—and adhere to those as best he could. Technically, it wasn’t proper, but Cambodians preferred being at peace, with themselves and others, to passing judgment or practicing dogma.

  Still, daily life had been permeated by a sense of the world’s duality, of the struggle for supremacy between Good and Evil. What was implicit in much of Buddhism was made explicit in the Hindu beliefs which had drifted over from India and also taken a strong hold on the Cambodian psyche. There were wars being waged between the elements of the Godhead—Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, Shiva the Destroyer—and powerful demons such as Ravanna, or the serpent god Kaliya. A man, to be wisely prepared in life, should be turned inward, at a formative time in his life, so that the war for his own spirit might be won by the forces of Good and assure him of transcendence, in one way or another.

  For the young Lucien, the monastery was also a means of getting him out of trouble.

  In Phnom Penh, a bustling and cosmopolitan city, he had run with a fast and, by Cambodian standards, wild crowd. He and his friends, from the Lycée Franҫais, had zipped around town on motorbikes, drunk lots of Coca-Cola at street-corner cafes, and chased girls through the spacious and elaborately landscaped city parks. Their study time had been devoted less to French and algebra than to the thousand variations on the traditional martial arts of karate, akido, and jiu-jitsu. Lucien, gifted with his mother’s agility and his father’s frame—taller and more angular than that of his Cambodian friends-proved a natural, and highly skilled, fighter. It was that, among other traits, his mother hoped to temper with a year of contemplation.

  He could still remember the fight he’d put up on the morning of his departure.

  “A monk will be here at midday to escort you to the monastery,” his mother had announced.

  “He can come if he wants,” countered Lucien, “but I won’t be here.” He made for the door.

  “If you think you are going to get on your motorbike and drive away, you’re wrong,” his mother said. “I’ve given the bike away.”

  Lucien stopped, dumbfounded. Even his sister, as distressed as she was at the news of his departure, was speechless; the loss of his motorbike made their mother’s plan suddenly appear irrevocable, and already underway. Lisette began to cry, then ran out onto the porch, where he could hear her sobbing uncontrollably.

  His mother—as regal and beautiful as she had ever looked—remained on the love seat their absent father had recently sent them from France. Her eyes, as dark and almond-shaped as Lucien’s, shifted toward the porch. “She’ll get over it.”

  “Never,” Lucien swore. “And neither will I. Lisette and I are the same body, the same blood, and we must not, ever, be separated. How can you not know that? How can you do this to us? Haven’t we suffered enough already?”

  At this, his mother looked genuinely hurt. Her brow furrowed, and her shoulders, which were always held back, visibly sagged. She started to answer, then stopped, and lowered her eyes to the intricate embroidery of the love seat. With her long, narrow fingers, which she used so artfully in the Cambodian ballet, she absently brushed the pale blue and gold fabric, and it was then, as he stood defiantly before her, that Lucien saw the tears well up in her eyes and roll, one by one, down her cheeks. She made no sound.

  He knelt down before her, took her hands between his own. And for the first time in his life, he understood the pain, and the shame, that his mother endured over their abandonment. The two of them had stayed that way for however long—a few seconds, a few minutes—and at the end, without another word being spoken, Lucien had gone out onto the porch to console his sister, and patiently await the arrival of the monk . . . .

  “We’re approaching the spot where the Garuda was last heard from,” Wilkerson announced. They were now several miles out to sea.

  Lucien looked down at the choppy white water so far below. There was nothing to indicate a ship of any sort had even so much as passed there.

  But had his mother, he wondered, ever forgiven him? That was something he could never know for sure.

  “There’s nothing left at the actual site, of course,” Wilkerson added, his voice over the headphones filled with static. “The water here is over two hundred fathoms deep, and the current’s carried all the debris to the south. But I thought you’d want to see where it happened.”

  “Thank you,” Lucien replied into the hand-held microphone, “I do.”

  Wilkerson brought the helicopter down a couple of hundred feet, and said, “Best we can make out, this is the spot.”

  The water, its surface stretching away forever, unperturbed, betrayed nothing of the disaster.

  Wilkerson headed the chopper in a southwesterly direction, and a few minutes later they did begin to see some signs of the explosion. At first it was just a sort of stain on the water, which Lucien mistook for a shadow. The water showed a smudge of darker gray.

  “That’s some of the LNG down there . . . tends to pool together,” Wilkerson said. “Luckily.”

  The next patch was a quarter mile or so further on.

  “Amazing thing is,” Wilkerson observed, “there isn’t more of the stuff. The ship wasn’t leaking—it just must have gone up in a fireball and taken the fuel with it.”

  There were the first signs of debris now, floating on the water; Lucien saw what looked like shredded plastic and canvas tarps, and whitewashed planks from what might have been a lifeboat. There would have been no time to launch it.

  “You have had no sign of survivors?” Lucien asked, though he knew what the answer would be.

  Wilkerson shook his head. “No way anybody could have survived what happened to the Garuda . . . no way anybody would have wanted to.” He glanced over at Calais. “Not the way you’d have come out of that inferno.”

  Below, Lucien saw a red junk, riding low in the water. Several men, stripped to the waist, were hauling in a net. It occurred to him that it was strange they should be fishing in this polluted stretch of water . . . and then it occurred to him they weren’t fishermen at all. Wilkerson must have read his mind.

  “Thai pirates,” he said, “doing a little scavenging on their day off.”

  Hun, silent until now, said, “Wish we had bomb.”

  They were low enough that Lucien could see one of the men shield his eyes with his hand and look up at the helicopter. Then, apparently unconcerned, he went back to helping the others with the net.

  “Where are our people?” Lucien asked.

  “Up ahead,” Wilkerson said. “We have only limited options out here on the open water. We deployed most of our resources closer to the coastline, where the LNG could have an impact.”

  Wilkerson was right; he seemed to have everything under control. Still, it was hard for Lucien to continue on, leaving the Thai pirates, unm
olested, to go about their business.

  Closer to the shore, Lucien saw several motorized craft arrayed in a sort of loose, open triangle; the water between them was bounded by containment booms, which looked from the air like long, black snakes, bobbing lazily on the waves.

  “We’re pretty much trapping it as it comes in,” Wilkerson explained, “then skimming it off.”

  “How much can you get?”

  Wilkerson wagged his head from side to side. “Hard to say exactly. Maybe seventy, eighty percent of what we trap. Some of it we already treated, farther out, with chemical dispersants, but I don’t think it accomplished much.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sea was too calm. You need the wave action to stir it up good, and we had a spell of unusually calm weather.”

  Lucien was reminded of the terrible squall he had encountered on the flight over. But here, apparently, it had remained calm. The boats below them, white with blue and yellow trim, might almost have been pleasure craft on an innocent outing, were it not for the booms, and the cumbersome vacuum equipment floating beside them on bright orange pontoon platforms. No more than a half mile southeast, Lucien could see the ramshackle piers and beachfront shacks of another small fishing village.

  “What’s that place called?”

  “Koy,” Wilkerson replied. “They’re probably the hardest hit by this. What gets by us winds up on their stretch of coastline. And the LNG screwed up some of their favorite shrimping territory.”

  “We’ll make restitution,” Lucien said. “I’ll go there myself if I have to, just to tell them that.”

  They were now even closer to the village. Lucien could make out several people clambering over the frame of a new hut, laying down a cover of broad brown leaves to make the roof.

  Wilkerson took the helicopter in a high, slow circle over the town. He glanced at Lucien out of the corner of his eye, and with one hand rubbed his chin, as if debating whether or not to speak. “I don’t know how I oughta put this, “ he finally said, “but I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  “Wouldn’t do what?”

  “Go to that village.”

  Lucien could understand why; they must hate him for spoiling their waters. But he would make plain it had been an accident, and an accident that would never happen again. “It’s good of you to warn me, but I’m not afraid to go.”

  “Hell,” said Wilkerson, shaking his head, “I know that. It’s not that you’re afraid of them. It’s that they’re afraid of you."

  Lucien paused. “Because of the Garuda?"

  “Because they’ve got some crazy notions about you in this part of the world,” Wilkerson said. “I can’t be the first one to tell you that.”

  “No . . . you’re not.”

  Wilkerson turned the chopper back toward Pattaya. “The fact that it was a ship called Garuda just adds fuel to the fire . . . so to speak. If a ship with a holy name blows up, they figure it’s a message.” The sun filled the cockpit with a blazing white light. “They don’t even like to sail, let alone fish, anywhere near where the Garuda went down.” Quickly, the helicopter picked up speed and altitude. They flew in silence for several minutes, while Lucien stared, without seeing, at the lychee orchards and rice paddies flashing by below. Hun, stewing in back, finally spoke.

  “People stupid,” he said, angrily. “People not know anything. People talk, and not know anything.”

  Wilkerson shrugged and said, “Listen, I’m with you. If I didn’t think we were doing some good here, I’d have been long gone. Besides,” he added, turning to face Lucien with a broad smile, “times may be hard, but they’re not so hard I’ve got to work for the Devil himself.”

  Lucien did not return the smile.

  Wilkerson, aware that he might have overstepped himself, turned back to the controls; over the radio, he alerted Pattaya that they were coming in.

  Once an insignificant trading port, Pattaya had gradually metamorphosed over the years into a popular beach resort; along the oceanfront, there were several luxurious new hotels, and the usual complement of gift shops, nightclubs, and outdoor cafes. But the stretch of waterfront where Lucien was heading was relatively unchanged; here, commercial vessels from many ports of call docked at long, sometimes crumbling, piers and disgorged their cargoes into huge canvas nets that dipped down into their holds empty and came up again loaded with crates of oyster paste or dried prunes, black kegs of tar or wooden hampers filled with ginger root. There was also a thriving trade in more “advanced” products, such as Sony Walkmans and Panasonic TVs, though the provenance of these items was not always as clear. It was up to the Customs Office, headed by Sri Halim, to establish the legitimacy of these goods, and why they were passing through such a backwater port as Pattaya. He had become rich over the years making just such judgments.

  The chopper put down on the far end of an unused loading dock, its whirring rotors picking up the stray leaves and old newspapers and whisking them into the water. Lucien stepped out first, the wind from the blades ruffling his hair and making his white shirt snap and ripple around his body. Hun followed him, stopping for a second to lean against the helicopter and limber up his bad leg after the flight. Together, they made their way down the long pier, the wet concrete crunching under their shoes, and up the steps to the Customs Office. A compact blue station wagon, with a government sticker on the windshield, was parked outside.

  Inside, they were greeted with a blast of chilled air and a burst of static from a radio console. Sri Halim was seated, his legs spread wide to allow his potbelly full play, in a sagging rattan chair. A Thai, in a government-issue khaki uniform, was seated across from him.

  “Calais!” Halim called out, without even attempting to rise. “Bienvenue! It is much too long since I see you. Welcome.” He smiled at Hun too, and with one broad hand gestured at a couple of chairs, in no better shape than his own, arranged on either side of a mini-refrigerator. “Please,” he said, nodding at the fridge, “take what you like. Please.” He himself had a can of Budweiser.

  Lucien and Hun helped themselves to cold drinks, and were then introduced to Mr. Yang, the government inspector from the Ministry of Marine Affairs. Yang was skinny, with stooped shoulders, and a black mustache that had never really grown in properly. He studied Lucien and Hun with a serious, but sidelong, glance.

  “So,” Halim began, “you have seen it.”

  Lucien nodded.

  “Then you know, is nothing there to see.” Halim smiled again, revealing teeth stained red from years of chewing betel nut.

  “In English then?” Yang said. He swiveled in his chair, which sounded as if it might collapse at any moment. “The ship is gone, yes. The cargo is not.” He had an envelope on his lap, sealed with string, that he handed to Calais. “That is our preliminary report,” he said. “In Thai and in English.”

  Lucien thanked him, and took the envelope.

  “The numbers,” Yang said, “are the same in both languages.”

  “I understand.”

  Yang paused, as if made unsure by Calais’s seeming docility. “The costs to the tourist and fishing industries of Thailand are great. The government of Thailand cannot pay the costs of cleaning a private accident. That is not the responsibility of the government of Thailand.”

  Lucien nodded again, in agreement.

  Yang stopped to sip from the can of 7-Up he held in his hand. Brushing the moisture away from his sparse mustache, he went on, in a slightly less bellicose tone. “There is also another question.”

  Lucien knew, from dealing with such functionaries all over the globe, that there always was.

  “The ships of L.C. Carriers receive harbor and import privileges at three of our ports. Now that this accident has happened, the government of Thailand will be forced to review those privileges.”

  Lucien still said nothing. Sri Halim sipped loudly from his beer can.

  “You understand this?” Yang asked, sounding somewhat frustrated. “These privileges a
re worth a lot of money.”

  “Yes,” Lucien replied, in a neutral voice, “and I pay a lot for them.”

  “But still, the government of Thailand will be forced to review them,” Yang persisted. And then, coming to the point Lucien had long foreseen, he added, “I will be the head person of that review.”

  The radio crackled with another report from offshore; the air conditioner continued its chilling drone.

  Halim sipped from his can again, then threw in, as if for no particular reason, “Yang—you never told me. Do you wish to go with me to the boxing match? I have to know; others will want to go if you don’t.”

  Yang, looking unhappy at the distraction, said, “Yes. I told you I wanted that ticket.”

  “It’s a big match,” Halim said, by way of explanation to Lucien and Hun. “Somsook, the Tiger of Raiburi, is fighting Deang, of Bangkok. Very big match.” He crunched the empty beer can in his hand. “Very big bets.”

  Lucien knew the purpose of Halim’s intrusion; it was to let Yang know that he, Halim, could serve as the conduit of the bribe Yang was demanding. Either Yang was being obtuse and not catching on, or he wanted to do business directly with Calais himself and cut out the middleman. To be so bold, Calais figured, he must be very sure of his connections further up.

  “I’m sure that we can come to terms,” Lucien said, “for the renewal of the harbor rights . . . and for your help here today.”

  Yang looked as if he could hardly keep from setting the price now . . . but even he exhibited some restraint in the presence of two witnesses.

  “When I have read the report,” Lucien said, “I will know better the appropriate sums. You will be in your office at the ministry tomorrow?”

  “I can be.”

  This was not a man worried about his job security.

  “Good. A representative will meet with you there.”

  “What time?” Yang asked, eagerly.

  “Noon.”

  Yang sat back, with an expression that mixed both satisfaction and uncertainty. He had gotten what he wanted, but it had been too easy.