18 Salamander by Quiller Salamander (epub)

Author:Quiller Salamander (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

13 : DEBRIEFING

‘And your wife?’ I asked the man with no teeth.

He looked down. ‘She dead,’ he said in halting French.

So I didn’t ask directly about his sons, his other daughters.

‘I’m sorry. There’s just you and Cham?’ It was short for Chamnan.

I had followed her home through the streets this morning, walking slowly. She was perhaps fifteen, though she looked more, hunger and shock and grief having wasted her small sharp-boned face. She was watching me now from the cramped little kitchen, her crutch leaning against the wall. By her eyes I saw she wasn’t sure she wanted to share her home with a round-eye and his odd manners. I’d followed her because I needed a safe-house, and if she had a father or a mother they wouldn’t favour the Khmer Rouge, wouldn’t be informers. We’d had to pause several times, Cham and I, on our way here, because this one had gone off not long ago, maybe near her school, and she was still trying to get used to the crutch - it was rubbing under her arm, and the rag she was using to cushion it kept shifting.

‘Yes,’ her father said - there was just himself and Cham here in the house. It was on stilts and made of mud and bamboo, and he’d told me there were two rooms to spare and I could take either one. His sons, I supposed, or his two other daughters wouldn’t be needing them any more.

‘I don’t want,’ I told him, ‘to be talked about. Do you understand that?’

He looked surprised. All the round-eyes he’d seen hadn’t minded in the least being talked about; they’d come into his country with their good new clothes and stout boots and loud voices and treated him and his neighbours rather like children. I thought I’d better spell it out for him.

‘I don’t want anyone in the Khmer Rouge to know where I am.’

He frowned, then nodded quickly, looking across at Chain and saying something in Khmer, his tone emphatic. ‘She understands?’ I asked him.

‘Yes. We not talk about you. She can keep secrets. All my people know how to keep secrets.’

‘Of course.’ I offered him 2,000 riel per day for my board, and he was pleased, glancing quickly around the room as if he’d never realized its value.

I slept through the heat of the day on the bamboo bed in the room I’d chosen; there was no other furniture in it except for a chest of drawers made from packing cases still with their Oxfam labels on them. This had been another daughter’s room; there were long black hairs still caught in the split ends of the bamboo behind the straw-filled pillow, and even though I’d been awake all night, sleep didn’t come easily, or soon. In none of the missions I’d so far worked had I felt anything in particular about the opposition: they had simply represented the target, the objective. The Khmer Rouge was different, and when the first wave of sleep came over me it was borne on a dark, tugging undertow of rage.

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