Bible of the Dead Read online

  One boy gazed Jake’s way, his mouth hanging wide open, goggling and laughing. The child’s mother came behind, pushing a long-handled wooden wheelbarrow.

  She also paused and stared at Jake; her expression was so shocked it was beyond alarm, it was pure incomprehension: like she was seeing an extraterrestrial.

  Tou laughed, unhappily.

  ‘They have never seen a white man before, ever. You are like a god. Or a demon.’

  A cloud of grey dust showed a vehicle approaching: coming the other way. It was an army vehicle. Troops in khaki were hanging on the back of the truck. The fear was congealing. No one spoke in the jeep. What troops were these? But the soldiers just gazed vacantly at them, half curious, half bored. Tired maybe. The apathetic gaze of conscripts across the world.

  Nothing further happened. The army truck disappeared. The trail ran its ragged way through the hills, sidling around mountains. Getting higher, giddily high. The first hints of mist and cloud appeared; bashful centaurs and unicorns of cloud that fled as they approached.

  It was darkening fast, it was nearly night. How long had they been driving? Chemda was half asleep, her head bobbing against the glass of the jeep window. Jake yearned to stop, to get out, to take a pee, to stop. But could they risk it? Maybe the police were just a few kilometres back. Maybe they were closing.

  But they had to stop – so they stopped. For a second. In the middle of the dark jungle. Now it was truly night: and it was cold up here, in the hills. Jake walked a few yards into the dank and clammy darkness of the chattering forest, full of night sounds. Frogs croaking. A concerto of insects. Nocturnal howlings in the distance. He thought of the wild cats and strange jungle dogs he’d seen in Ponsavanh market.

  He relieved himself. Trying not to make the mental association: all the blood, the blood in the muzzles of the dead jungle dogs, the blood on the floor of the hotel room: the man with a gaping throat, hung by his ankles to bleed out like a hoisted bush pig. Probably Samnang was killed by the police. But why? And why so cruelly? Was it really to frighten them? Surely murder and death was frightening enough.

  Jake shuddered. Sometimes, despite his convinced and angry atheism, he could sense death approaching, like a black god, a god he didn’t believe in who yet still hated him. I got your mother and your sister, now you.

  The moon was lonely overhead. Fireflies twinkled blue and green like shy and tiny ice-stars in the undergrowth.

  He walked back to the car and Chemda talked, nervously, as they drove on. She was talking of ancient history: speculating about the remains they had found in the jars. Jake marvelled that he had forgotten about them. In the midst of it all he had mislaid that image: the skulls kept in the jars. The sad old bones. Reproachful. You left us behind.

  No. He got a grip on himself.

  No.

  Chemda was talking about the prophecies of the ancient Khmer.

  ‘If the people in the jars, the people who made the jars, if they were Khmer . . . maybe they really were Black Khmer.’

  ‘And they are?’

  ‘The ancient Khmer: a cursed people. There are stories in the Khmer tradition of the earliest Khmers being a kind of terrible breed – no that’s the wrong word – of making a terrible mistake. Losing God. Losing faith. Becoming violent. What is the prophecy – Tou mentioned it.’

  The jeep’s headlights were struggling against the dark and the mist of the mountain forest. Chemda remembered the words:

  ‘A darkness will settle on the people of Cambodia. There will be houses but no people in them, roads but no travellers; the land will be ruled by barbarians with no religion; blood will run so deep as to touch the belly of the elephant. Only the deaf and the mute will survive.’

  Tou was silent, Yeng was silent. Jake nodded. He didn’t believe in prophecies, he didn’t believe in legends, he didn’t believe – he certainly didn’t believe in any kind of God, what kind of brutal God would allow all the terrors of the world? The Khmer Rouge? The death of children? His sister? But the skulls in the jar: they were certainly real; he had seen them, and the holes carved in their foreheads.

  Why?

  Chemda’s words echoed his thoughts.

  ‘It is highly suggestive. What happened on the Plain of Jars two thousand years ago? To the Black Khmer? Maybe they did something terrible – to their gods – to each other. That is the prophecy. That then is why they would be cursed. Ah. It could explain the legends.’

  ‘It’s like a kind of Noah legend, of a Flood. God wiping out the people as revenge.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Chemda. ‘And also no. And, ah, I still don’t know why this so upset Doctor Samnang.’

  Jake turned from her and looked out of the viewless window. Out there it was cold and dark and chilling, like a sickening. The jungle was shivering. Feverish and clammy.

  Where were they going to sleep? Were they ever going to sleep? Devil black darkness had descended on them, broken by the feeble beams of the headlights. They were churning mud now, deep gloopy mud. The fireflies twinkled. Above them shone the moon, bemused, like a disembodied head, like the pale round face of a grieving mother in a black Islamic headscarf. The jungle yawned and sucked. The mud sucked them further in. Further and further. And at last Jake fell asleep.

  He dreamed of a man throwing a tennis ball. A tall dark man. A little girl picked it up. Her face was blemished with a vivid, portwine birthmark.

  He woke with a startled pain. Tou was shaking him roughly awake.

  How long had he been sparked out?

  It was dawn. They were on the lip of a canyon: a long mist-churned valley stretched ahead, and led down to a flat expanse, with a kind of airstrip and a dilapidation of buildings: low cabins, concrete and steel – but tumbledown and old. And there were ruined roads, strangled with weeds, or so it looked from this distance.

  Tou said:

  ‘The secret city.’

  So they’d reached the American airfield, the old American base hidden in the mountains. The Secret City of the Raven War, where the secret American bombers took off, to drop their secret golden bomblets on the people in the plain.

  He yawned, and felt a hit of nausea. Disorientation or altitude? He couldn’t tell. Rubbing the sleepy grit from his eyes, he got out of the car. Tou handed him a bottle of cold water.

  Jake drank, thirstily, lustily. They had escaped – for the moment – but what now. And where was Yeng? And Chemda?

  There. Down the road, in the clearing mist, between a clutch of Hmong dwellings, he could see Hmong men gathered: young men with guns and rifles and belts of ammo slung brigandishly over their backs. Hmong rebels. In the middle of them all was the slight, yet animated figure of Chemda, talking and gesturing.

  That girl. She had grit and steel and guts and backbone and Jake felt, again, the stirrings of moral admiration not unmixed with plain desire. She was tough. A tough determined Khmer princess. Five foot two of royal Khmer energy. Her ancestors, Jake suspected, would have been proud.

  Tou shook his head like something bad had happened.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Chemda ring her grandfather again. He say you go Luang. Then he save you.’ Tou pointed at the distant airfield. ‘The Stripe Hmong have plane, we can get you Luang, same same, no problem.’

  ‘OK, that’s good, isn’t it?’

  Tou shook his head.

  ‘Chemda nearly cry. She not cry, but nearly. Sad.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘People here know her face and they hear grandfather name. They tell her.’ Tou looked shyly at his own mudded broken trainers. Jake reminded himself to thank this boy, to thank this boy for saving their lives: but Tou was not for thanking, he was explaining everything: ‘Hmong lady she tell Chemda, she know her grandmother, royal Khmer lady, everyone know what happen to her. To grandmother. When the Khmer Rouge come to the Plain of Jars, in 19 . . . 19 . . .’

  ‘76.’

  ‘Yes. Then they do something to Chemda grandmother. They cut open her head. For
. . .’ Tou searched for the word. ‘For an experimen? Medical experimen. In her head. Cut her head open like she was a goat, in market.’

  Jake stared at Chemda down the road. What did it mean? Cutting open? Experiments?

  A parakeet flashed overhead, cinnabar and yellow, screeching in fear of some unseen pursuer.

  Chapter 9

  The plane was waiting for them, parked on the muddy airstrip. From two hundred metres away Jake could count the seats. Four. Just a little four seater: tiny and old and functional. Jake wondered precisely what function the plane had, normally: crop spraying? Drug dealing? Arms smuggling?

  He didn’t have time to ask. Already the propeller was turning. And the Hmong rebels escorting them to the tarmac wore extremely frayed and anxious smiles, keen to see them gone.

  Jake stared at Tou and Yeng, who were talking quietly. He felt a tingle of suspicion. Someone had betrayed them back at Ponsavanh: the police had known where to find them. Could it be that Yeng had betrayed them? Tipped off a policeman? Twenty dollars was a lottery win in Laos. Maybe they had bought his loyalty.

  But that didn’t make sense at all. Why go through all the pain of the last twenty-four hours, rescuing Tou and Chemda and Jake from the police, if Yeng’s immediate or even ultimate intention was to turn them over? So, no, it wasn’t Yeng.

  They were approaching the airfield proper, passing a barricade of rusted, empty, Budweiser beer kegs. Jake marvelled at all the emptiness. What had once been the busiest airport in Indochina was now a museum of tropical weeds and concrete decay, surrounded by shacks adorned with ancient Coke signs rusted into a purple-red: vintage and resonant.

  The whole place vibrated with memories, with jungly and luxuriant nostalgia: the air was moist with ghosts of young American pilots and dead Hmong heroes, and the whiff of marijuana and china white heroin, and big slangy guys in jeeps and talk of Charlie and LZs and Willy Peter – and cartridge players blasting the Doors –

  He glanced back at Chemda. Her brown eyes were full of gratitude and weariness. Not the alertness she had shown, staring in the jars at Jar Site 9.

  Jar. Site. Nine. This partial answer to the puzzle slid into place in Jake’s mind, with a satisfying exactitude. Jar Site 9! The Laos government knew perfectly well what had been discovered in Jar Site 9. And they were still protecting it. A communist government protecting what fellow communists had discovered in the 1970s. A final site that had been kept untouched, maybe for this American. Fishhook.

  This made perfect sense. Jake and Chemda had already been conspicuous on the streets of Ponsavanh – he was virtually the only white guy in the city. Tourists were meagre. Then someone – it could have been anyone – had spotted them heading south, towards the Jars. This person told the police. Paranoid and dangerous, the thin and smiling Ponsavanh cops did their job: protecting Jar Site 9. They came after them.

  But why did it mean so much to the authorities, and to Samnang, then and now? A bunch of old skulls and burned ribs in a jar?

  Jake scanned the horizon – as if the answer would be hanging from the mango trees. There was no answer. Just a monkey hooting in the jungle; vaguely human, yet distinctly inhuman. A macaque? A gibbon? A langur? The jungle thronged with life. And there were Laotian soldiers in there, too, chasing down the last Hmong rebels. Not conscripts: real soldiers. Trained soldiers. Killers. Aiming their guns thisaway.

  Now.

  ‘OK OK,’ Tou said, turning and calling to Jake. ‘Hurry. Please?’

  They paced quickly across the concrete. Jake’s anxieties were winding ever tighter. They needed to be gone. But who had organized this? How were they going to repay the Hmong?

  ‘Chemda,’ he said, eyeing the plane. ‘How do we sort this out? I only have about a hundred bucks –’

  ‘My grandfather,’ she answered. She lifted her phone. ‘I have talked with him. Grandfather Sen is helping us . . . He has persuaded the Hmong –’

  ‘Come,’ Tou interrupted. ‘Come quick please quick.’

  As they ran the last yards Jake remembered. And turned. ‘Yeng?’

  The old man had halted. He shook his head. He was standing on the broken asphalt: he was not going to accompany them to the plane; instead he grasped Jake’s hand, and then Chemda’s, and then he cracked a weary smile and said Sabaydee.

  His conscience tolling, Jake grabbed a fistful of dollars, virtually all of the dollars he had on him, and thrust them into Yeng’s hand. Yeng refused. Jake tried again.

  Yeng accepted just ten dollars and said:

  ‘Kharb jai.’ Then he motioned with his free hand at the green mountains all around them, and he did a machine-gun action with two fingers pointing and shooting. ‘Pathet Lao! Bang bang!’

  The phrase didn’t require interpretation. Jake raced the final ten yards to the plane. Chemda was already inside the minuscule cabin. The ‘pilot’ was another skinny grinning Hmong lad, barely eighteen, in ripped jeans stained with motor oil; he smelt faintly of last night’s lao-lao whisky. Jake reached for the ladder, but now he realized Tou was also dawdling. Backing away.

  ‘Tou? You’re not coming either?’

  ‘I stay here for . . . Luang no good. Police. My Hmong friend are here. Better for you go Luang.’

  Reflexively, Jake once again reached in his pocket for cash. Tou frowned at the idea and the gesture. No! He didn’t want anything. Instead he stepped back and did a mock salute and he laughed:

  ‘Number one plane! Royal Hmong air force.’

  Jake laughed, very anxiously – and said goodbye, trying to repress the fear that this was all a set-up. Tou and Yeng weren’t coming because they knew that the plane was going to crash? No, that was ridiculous. The pilot didn’t look like a potential suicide. But the mystery was so maze-like he felt trapped by his ignorance.

  ‘Quick please!’

  He climbed the ladder.

  There were no seat belts in the tiny plane. There were barely any seats. The carpet of the cabin had worn away so much the steel of the chassis was visible: bare rivets and bolts.

  A rusty door slid shut and the pilot clicked a switch and slammed a pedal; the old wheels rumbled down the cracking concrete and Jake wondered if this plane had enough life to reach the end of the runway, let alone the royal capital of Laos, and then they were up and away and banking left and up and up and . . . just about over the crest of the surrounding hills.

  The lushly forested peaks were lavishly moustached with white mist: the plane banked left and ascended again and the green and rugged summits of the Cordillera stretched beneath, to a hazy horizon of more hills and blueness.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Jake, resting his head against the tiny perspex window behind. Chemda’s worried and weary smile was about ten inches away. The plane was that small. It was just the two of them, sitting opposite each other, and a hungover pilot, in a plane the size of a dinghy.

  ‘Hmong airforce one?’ said Chemda. And then she suddenly laughed. And Jake laughed too, because he needed to relieve the tension; and because he just liked her laughter: there was something lyrically and infectiously sarcastic in it, pretty yet grounded – and clever. Aware of the absurdity of everything.

  ‘What a night.’ Jake shook his head, the laughter dying on his lips. ‘What a fucking horrible couple of days.’

  ‘Samnang.’ She sighed, and swallowed away some emotion. ‘I still can’t work it out? Aiii. Khoeng koch . . .’

  She was speaking in Khmer, it was incomprehensible.

  But Jake was comprehending. He felt like he had, this instant, flown through the clouds to the dazzling blue of the truth.

  ‘Suicide!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Samnang wasn’t killed. It was suicide.’

  She gazed at him, perplexed.

  ‘Explain?’

  ‘It must be suicide. No? Otherwise it’s too much coincidence. Think about it. Your other guy just runs into a minefield, knowing the danger? Do you believe that is likely? Why would he do that. Now this other gu
y dies – slashes himself, hangs himself –’

  ‘But why, why kill himself?’

  The plane banked. Jake raced on:

  ‘Maybe someone is, or was, threatening these men, telling them not to help you – putting on intense pressure, maybe getting to their families?’ Jake was speculating, wildly, un scientifically. But he was sure he was right. ‘And that’s why he killed himself, that way. There is a message in the killing. He did it to himself, like a suicide note no one could erase or steal, knowing someone would see the terrible echo.’

  Chemda frowned. Jake continued:

  ‘Think about it. Tou comes to him, and says, We’ve found the jars, rediscovered the jars – and then – you see??’

  ‘OK . . .’ Chemda nodded. ‘And then, ah, Samnang realizes something terrible is about to be revealed – something he was involved in, all those years ago. He sees no way out. But he wants to leave a note, that no one can erase –’ She hesitated, pensively, then said: ‘But still, suicide. How can we be sure?’

  ‘The knife,’ said Jake, almost triumphant. ‘The knife was just lying on the floor. Would a cold blooded killer do that? Leave the weapon lying by the body? We know Tou didn’t do it. He has absolutely no motive. If it was the cops, they would have taken the knife and used it, to frame Tou –’

  A brief silence ensued, the pilot was talking quietly and cheerily in Lao, via the cockpit radio. Jake stiffened with renewed tension; he may have solved the puzzle of Samnang’s death, but their situation remained precarious. Exceptionally precarious. Who was the pilot talking to? And what was he saying? Jake realized he hasn’t asked a question, of Chemda, a question that had been ripening in his thoughts for a while.

  ‘Why aren’t we flying straight to Phnom Penh? It’s just an hour or two.’

  Chemda’s oval face was smudged with dirt and tiredness.

  ‘They will know if we try and fly straight across the frontier. International air traffic control. That could cause very big problems. But if we go to Luang there are other ways out of the country . . . Much more discreet exits. Roads, ah, through the jungle.’