Black Heart, page 33
Yet even the death of Murano was pushed to the background by the advent of the cadre's newest assignment. The Chinese were developing an enormously complex pipeline to funnel heroin to the American soldiers in an effort to undermine their war effort.
Angka Leu, it appeared, was in full agreement with this philosophy for Sok's cadre had been chosen to be one link in this pipeline. And two weeks before, the sacks of the drug began trickling into the encampment to be buried until the next link could be contacted. It had been Sam, on one of his trips out of the encampment, who had brought them the news of this very important assignment. A definitive link with the Chinese was important since it brought with it increased military aid to further Angka's cause.
Thus it came as a total shock when one evening, in those few dusky moments before true darkness descended upon the jungle, Sam was remanded into the custody of the higher council.
Immediately this happened, Sok was herded out from the cadre, divested of his sidearm and put into a tent alone. There was a guard at the doorway.
The night passed with interminable slowness until at last a figure filled the opening. Sok moved towards it, saw that it was Ros.
'Mit Cheng is on trial,' he said without preamble. 'It has been discovered that he has been secretly working against Angka.'
'My friend!' Sok exclaimed incredulously. 'But that's impossible! He is absolutely loyal to the cause. I'd stake my life on it. There must be some mistake.'
'He is on trial now,' Ros said, ignoring Sok's words. 'You will be informed of the revolutionary court's decision.'
'I don't understand any of this. I -' Ros began to turn away.
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'Mt't Ros!' The man turned back. 'I would like to see him.' But Ros had already turned away.
Sok's mind was whirling. What had happened? He concluded that he must be dreaming. But he knew that he was not; the pain he felt inside himself was very real. The flickering torchlight was real. The smells of the jungle were real.
The evening meal came and went. No one brought him food. No one talked to him. From time to time he could see the men walking in small groups of two or three across the compound. Often they glanced off to where the tribunal had gathered to hear the damning evidence.
At length he heard the commotion then and rushed to the opening, trying to draw it aside so that he could see what was happening. The guard barred his way but he could see the tribunal had broken up.
Outside, at the centre of the encampment, a circle was forming, the same kind of circle the men made when a monkey or a wild pig was captured. Only there was no animal this time.
There was Sam.
Sok considered killing the guard then. But what could he expect to achieve? He would be shot before he advanced another ten metres. What else was there to do? Think! he berated himself. You've got to save Sam.
Now he could glimpse the top of his brother's head as he was led into the circle. It was going to happen without delay. Oh, Sam! Sam! The judgement had been rendered; the court had found Sam guilty and, as Ros had said, Sok would be informed. The circle of soldiers was his messenger.
If only there was a way to save Sam's life. But he knew that there was nothing he could do. Angka had spoken and its voice was law in the jungle. Should he attempt to interfere, he would be summarily executed. What purpose would that serve except that he would not have to endure witnessing his brother's death.
Then he remembered Murano; he remembered his training. The essence of kokoro was nonprecipitous action. Reactive aggression. It was a discipline only for the patient.
If he could accept what was about to happen, he could turn his thoughts to the aftermath. He knew the men responsible -
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those who comprised the tribunal. One by one kokoro would take them from this life, hurl them downward to a land filled with serpents. This Sok vowed even as he heard the first blow struck.
The sound of the cudgel was a distinctive one. Some time before they had replaced the rifle butts which Angka had decreed were too valuable to trust to crush human bone without sustaining damage.
It was a wet ungodly sound with no analogue in nature: the thwap of bloody flesh peeling and splitting, the crunch of bone fracturing. It seemed to go on for a very long time and even though Sok had made up his mind, he put his fists to his ears in a vain attempt to block out the sounds. He bit his lower lip so hard he drew blood, its taste hot and salty, coppery in his mouth.
He thought of the damage he would do to them, one by one, afterwards but with each arrhythmic sound his body jerked as if seized by convulsions and his mind snapped back to the present. Into this nightmare.
At last the sounds slowed, then ceased altogether. Sok let out a long sigh. It was over. The agony that had racked him began to fade. The muscles of his body commenced to tremble in brief rippling clusters.
'Mil Sok.'
He turned to confront Ros who stood now in the opening. His face was shadowed, his black uniform stained and struck with blood and gore.
'You are summoned by Angka,' Ros said without definable emotion. His dark-flecked cudgel was held at his side. 'You will come outside now.'
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*
For Macomber the return to China was as difficult as plunging his fist into a sheet of flame. He had not expected it to be so bad but the memory of his first and only love burned like a living jewel in his heart, the heat rising, the nearer he came.
All the dusty layers of images began to rise like spectral skeletons and it was as if no time had passed since he had last been to this vast Asian shore. Particularly, he felt with the acuteness of pain the enigma of her disappearance. He thought he had successfully laid that to rest but he saw now that he had only been fooling himself. Was she alive or dead? He stared out the train window as it rumbled and rattled up the southeast coast of the mainland on its way to Canton. The Hong Kong New Territories were already far behind to the southwest, their carefully terraced paddies of brilliant emerald, the acres of fish farms a sharp contrast with the newly constructed high-rises in the burgeoning, teeming new suburbs just outside Hong Kong near Sha Tin. The government was doing its best to induce citizens to relocate from fiercely overcrowded Hong Kong to the rapidly expanding suburbs. Macomber had to laugh. The New Territories were on a ninety-nine-year lease from the People's Republic. That lease which the communist Chinese did not acknowledge in any case expired in 1997. What would happen then to the New Territories? No one knew but the British government, at least, was banking on the fact the cornmunist Chinese made too much money from Hong Kong ever to overrun it. Besides, what would they do with the eleven-anda-half million Chinese citizens there who had been brought up in relative freedom?
Macomber would have preferred to fly into Canton but the Chinese government had been insistent. They wanted the cornmission to see for itself the prosperity of the new China and thus
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the train ride had been arranged. At least they would fly from Canton to Shanghai.
They had debarked at Lowu, a small village on the northern border of the New Territories. The tracks stretched straight on through a covered bridge spanning the Shum Chun River that only freight trains passed through unhindered.
Up ahead he had seen the concrete and stucco guard posts and outbuildings flying the red flag of Communist China. The delegation was met by a group of Chinese in olive drab uniforms, red stars embroidered on their caps, bands of the same colour on their uniform collars. Guns were much in evidence, 'to discourage any form of incident', they were told through an interpreter. Macomber needed no such interpretation, quite naturally, but he thought it prudent not to mention his facility with the language to anyone present.
The members of the commission were walked across the covered bridge where they boarded another train for the remainder of their journey into Canton. They were all in one car filled with plush seats obviously built for just such an occasion for surely the normal tourist inside the mainland would not receive such red carpet treatment.
A slim young Chinese woman was appointed their guide and she kept up a running commentary, pointing out the pertinent sights the government wished to display. But her expertise was curiously specific. If questions were asked by various members of the committee concerning sights observed about which she had not spoken, she merely went on with the prescribed programme.
Macomber turned her sing-song drone off almost as soon as she had begun; she would, he knew, say nothing he could use. The itinerary of the Trilateral Commission contained ninetyfive per cent dross and five per cent real business. In any case, Macomber had other business to attend to; his real reason for accepting a post on the commission. It would take him into China on a perfectly legitimate purpose.
As he stared out the window now at the flowing green and blue of the mainland, he wondered for perhaps the thousandth time what it was that made life so different here. He had the kind
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of analytical mind that sought logical answers even in the realm of the mystical because the nature of life, as he saw it, was sorting out all the pieces of an incredibly complex jigsaw puzzle. To do it right, he felt, one needed only logic to filter through the facts, assemble them in correct categories, give them specific priorities and then act on the resulting information.
And, in truth, if anything angered him, it was Khieu's misunderstanding of that logic. He possessed a faith in mysticism that was anathema to Macomber. That was one of the reasons Macomber had sent him off to college in Paris. Sound thinking, economic as well as philosophical, he felt, would cause Khieu to realign his thinking. And it had, to a large extent. But Macomber had not counted on the fact that his Cambodian son had no sense of history. Well, how could he? The history, such as it was, of the Khmer lay in the mist-shrouded buildings and temples of Angkor Wat, built by the Khmer king, Suryavarman II from 1130 to 1150 AD.
But the knowledge the ancient Khmer had used to construct these awesome edifices remained a mystery. Macomber counted himself fortunate indeed to have walked through the ruins of that forgotten city before the Khmer Rouge allowed the jungle to creep back, slowly re-engulfing the city.
But what could Khieu or any Khmer for that matter know of Wat? It was as much an enigma to him as it was to Macomber. The Khmer had no heritage, no history and therefore no sense of themselves in the timeline of the world.
What could you do with such people but turn them to your own will? After all, the French had managed to swing the entire country around but so unsuccessfully that the Khmer had begun to turn against one another. But such were the battles of the radical philosophers, too cerebral and too chaste to bring their own fingers to bear on the triggers. They were far too busy calling the foot soldiers to arms to fight for them.
Macomber hated and admired those French radicals all in the same breath. He could not help thinking of them as cowards but the other side of the coin revealed them to be master manipulators. From the moment the first of the Khmer intellectual elite emigrated into their circle, they had politicized the Cambodians
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to their own polarized point of view. The Khmer were hooked and in Khieu Samphan, the Khmer Rouge at last had found their self-sought saviour. His now famous paper, 'Cambodia's Economy and Industrial Development', became the rebels' bible with which they pointed out the only way for the New Kampuchea to survive: to destroy everything and everybody associated with the old, corrupt regime. But by extension the destruction went on and on until the new and 'enlightened' regime became the thought police for the entire country.
That Macomber had taken Khieu out of such an environment had saved the boy's sanity. Cambodia might be his birthplace but the world was his home now. His mind and body had be-m turned to other, more profitable pursuits by the educating process Macomber had devised for him. The end result was that Khieu was comfortable enough to function in any country.
In many ways, this process had been far more enjoyable for Macomber than siring his own son. He had done his best with Eliott, consulting the best paediatricians, child specialists, teachers, educators. He had steeped himself in their theories, applying the synthesis to his rearing of his son. He was at a loss to understand what had gone wrong. That he loved Eliott made his disappointment that much more difficult to bear.
This incident with the Christian bitch had seemed like the last straw - initially - and Macomber had decided to punish Eliott immediately. Then Khieu had brought him the entire transcript of Eliott's dialogue with the woman and, within that exchange, Macomber had at last begun to sense a way in, a handle, a kind of unconscious power he could wield over his son as he did with everyone else.
How many times had the Christian woman called him a man? A real man. And how Eliott had responded to that. Macomber had immediately understood the intelligence of the woman, knew she was far better off dead. She had found his soft spot and had plunged into it without hesitation. He resolved to take up where she had left off on his return.
Then he turned his thoughts elsewhere, his disquiet returning. It was China: filled with intangibles, abrupt surprises, puzzling multiples. For him there was always a disturbing sense of alien
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flux occurring just outside his field of vision. He felt he could never rest here but must be continually on the move in order to stay one step ahead of whatever it was he felt dogged his footsteps in the Far East.
Macomber closed his eyes, willing himself to listen to the high-pitched voice of their guide. Soon its insistent buzz had lulled him into sleep.
Outwardly, at least, Shanghai was a city that looked as it always had, dominated by the enormous sweep of the business district along the wide Bund at harbour's edge.
However, that was as far as it went. Once the outlaw capital of the world, where any illegal substance or service could be had at a price, Shanghai was now the trading centre for Communist China. It was less of a tourist attraction to the relatively newly opened mainland than Beijing and some of the more industrial cities to the north.
For one thing Shanghai had always been a foreigner's city, clinging to the mainland as Kowloon did now. Refugees from World War II streamed into the city from Eastern Europe, settling there, hiding within its cosmopolitan clutter.
All that was gone now. But, more than that, the burgeoning variagation that had made such an impression on the teenaged Macomber, had been beaten into the earth. Communism could not tolerate such unchecked individualism.
Now there was one standard, one mode of dress, one way of doing business, one way of obeying the law as well as one standardizing mode of speech. But, as he was about to find out, more than one way of life.
Perhaps because it has always had a history of being China's most open city, the Communist regime understood that there was only so much terraforming that it could do here. Or perhaps it was merely that they were not as omniscient as the mythos they had created made them out to be. Besides, as 'sidestreet news', the unofficial but highly accurate grapevine of the country, said, the government was in desperate need of money to continue the financing of its gargantuan modernization programme. In Shanghai, so it was said, local entrepreneurs were being encouraged to devise their own ways of raising dollars.
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At least that was what the Monk told Macomber.
Macomber met the Monk, as prearranged at the Jin Jiang Club. The building, a large, rambling structure with Romanesque overtones, had been the site of the Colonial French Club of Shanghai before the invasion of 1949.
It had been opened in January of 1980 as a kind of playland for foreign businessmen and officials of the government with enough clout to trade in on favours. It housed an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a pin ball room, bowling alley, a smoke-filled billiards room, even a place to play mah-jongg, a game the government, at least, frowned upon as being immoral, coming as it did from 'China's decadent feudal' past.
Macomber, in black tie, met the Monk at the French restaurant housed within the many-roomed building. He had been greeted at the door by a tall slim Chinese in a dark Western business suit who bowed as soon as Macomber had handed him the card of invitation.
Soft light of saffron, emerald, sapphire and ruby from Art Deco lamps of coloured glass, illuminated the entranceway, sending gleaming streaks like trembling lacquered nails across a wall composed of imitation Persian mosaic, all deep purpleblue and peacock green.
Macomber was taken past the green-carpeted card room where six Chinese citizens were hunched over their clacking tiles, sweating liquor, creating their own peculiar dialect different even from the off-centre Shanghai variation.
The Monk was sitting at a table for two covered with spotless white linen, gleaming cutlery, sparkling crystal. Behind him, windows overlooked a lush garden in the centre of which were spotlit a pair of green clay tennis courts.
The Monk it was not his name, of course, but it was the only designation by which Macomber knew him - was a heavyset man somewhere between fifty and seventy it was impossible to make a more accurate assessment. He was lithe on his feet and quick to smile. His utterly black eyes were bright and beady. His hair was still black but a natural tonsure had appeared over time at the very top of his skull, thus presenting him with his nom deguerre. He was a businessman with no affiliation.
He looked up as Macomber arrived, showing tiny yellow
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teeth like ivory antiques, and gestured for the other to sit down. He said nothing, continued to draw blue smoke from a thin, vilely smelling cigarette. A narrow tin with a Victorian design imprinted on it lay open beside his right elbow, displaying perhaps a score more of these instruments of torture.
'Your trip, I trust, was a pleasant one.' The Monk did not look at Macomber when he said it but rather above and a little to the left of him. He wore a wide-lapelled suit that had gone out of style in the 1970*5.
'Pleasant but far too long.'
