LITMIR.BIZ

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nothing in Prunier.’

      Her Belgian friend smiled, distantly.

      ‘So you did not find. Do not worry. It probably will not help you anyway.’

      Julia sighed and sipped Chinese tea; Annika added:

      ‘Consider it possible: some things are meant to be hidden.’

      ‘What the hell does that mean?’

      ‘The truth is hidden in the caves? But it has always been hidden there hasn’t it? And we still do not know quite what it is.’ The Flemish lady allowed herself another long, melancholy glance at a picture on the wall: at the beautiful twinned horses of Pech Merle, peculiar elegant horses cantering away from each other since the Ice Age. ‘I always think, even today: why did they paint so many animals and so few humans? Isn’t that strange, mmn, Julia? And when they do paint humans, they are so sad or forlorn, no? The poor boys of Addaura, the terrible hands of Gargas, the little stick man at Lascaux, with the slaughtered bison and his intestines, his chitterling, like so many andouillettes, pouring out of the stomach! There is some more green tea.’

      Julia flinched at the image: the spilled intestines of the wounded bison, at Lascaux, one of the more horrifying tableaux of Ice Age art. Troubling, like the hands of Gargas. Why was Annika talking this way? This was ambiguity upon ambiguity. Adding irritation to frustration.

      What should she do? Julia had more questions. And she felt she deserved straight answers. After all, Annika had invited her over, after Julia had mentioned her find, the skulls, the argument. So Julia had driven over through the autumn wind and cold, and now the older lady was being difficult and shrugging and mysterious and Gallic, even though she was Flemish Belgian.

      ‘Annika. You asked me over. Can’t you tell me? We’re friends. Tell me what is all this about? Why is Ghislaine so obstructive? If you can’t tell me anything then I don’t see what –’

      The telephone rang. Annika rose and crossed her little living room. Phone in hand, she stood under a wallposter of the Cougnac paintings. Julia tuned out from the overheard dialogue, not wishing to intrude. It looked like Annika was having a slightly painful conversation: whispering, white faced, nodding tersely.

      ‘Oui . . . oui . . . bien sur. Merci.’

      The phone receiver carefully replaced, the older woman came back to the coffee table, wrapping her cardigan even tighter – as if the wind was blowing down from the werewolf-haunted steppes of the Margeride and directly through the room. Picking up her cup Annika drank some tea and cursed:

      ‘Merde. The tea is cold.’ Then she looked at Julia. ‘That was the police. Ghislaine has been murdered.’

      Chapter 8

      Gaining. The police were gaining.

      ‘Faster,’ said Chemda. Her hand gripped Jake’s momentarily, unconsciously maybe. ‘Faster. Quicker. Please.’ Then she spoke in French, and then Khmer. Urging on the driver.

      Jake doubted Yeng knew any of these languages. He spoke Hmong. But the meaning was plain.

      Faster. Quicker. Please.

      But no matter how fast they went, the noises behind them proved how swiftly they were losing. The roar of the big police Toyotas was drowning the growl of their own wheezing vehicle.

      ‘Faster!’ said Jake, helplessly. He saw images of the blood-drained Cambodian man in his mind: did the cops really do that? Why not? Who else? Perhaps it was that thin unsmiling Ponsavanh officer. Jake could easily envisage him: briskly slashing a neck, like severing the arteries of a suspended hog, watching the blood drain and belch. Nodding. Job done.

      The jeep accelerated into a desperate turn.

      They had no choice but to escape. Even if they surrendered to the Ponsavanh police and Chemda used her grandfather’s high profile, again, to save them – and there was no guarantee that this technique would work a second time, indeed Jake was sure it wouldn’t – that still meant surrendering Tou, who would certainly be beaten and imprisoned and convicted and possibly executed. And what would those clumsy and brutal police do to old man Yeng? The openly rebellious Hmong?

      But their vehicle was old, asthmatic and rusty; the police SUVs, however dirty, were fast and new.

      Yeng spun the wheel, racing them along the soft earthen banks of rice paddies, ducking the car under the slapping branches of oak, bamboo and glossy evergreens; the jeep slid and groaned in the mud – then sped on, grinding, desperate, and churning – but the cars were overtaking them. It was happening. They were being overtaken.

      Jake swore; Tou shouted; Yeng accelerated. Jake thought of the thin police officer, his repressed anger and hatred, maybe he would happily hoist them by their ankles, cut a throat –

      An explosion blossomed in gold.

      A huge and sudden explosion flayed the windscreen with mud and water and leaves; the jeep toppled left and further left, nearly flipping over; but then the driverside tyres found some purchase and surged forward and they crashed back onto level ground, and somehow they sped onwards.

      Unharmed?

      Smoke. There was smoke behind them. And wild flames of black and orange and billowing grey. Jake guessed at once: it must have been a bombie: an unexploded shell. The cars behind had surely hit some UXO. Jake stared, quite stunned, watching men falling out of one flaming vehicle, men on fire, screams. Muffled screams.

      Tou was whooping.

      Jake gazed in horror.

      ‘We have to stop.’ He grasped Tou’s shoulder. ‘We must stop, they could be hurt –’

      ‘No!’ Tou said. ‘Crazy! They kill us. They kill Samnang they kill you and Chemda we go –’

      Chemda looked Jake’s way:

      ‘We have to. He’s right –’

      ‘But – But Jesus –’

      ‘No. No no no! We escape!’ said Tou. ‘We escape now! See they are stopping!’

      It was true. All the police cars had been halted by the lead vehicle’s disaster. The cops were stuck in the smoke and the mud. They had all been saved by the American ordnance hiding under the softly unpetalling magnolia trees.

      ‘Escape. We escape.’

      We escape.

      Jake stared. Quite dumbed. Their old jeep rattled over the paddyfield bumps, screeching uphill and away. They were indeed going to escape – and maybe this was no accident, maybe this wasn’t just outrageous fortune. Jake had forgotten that Yeng the Driver knew what he was doing. Yeng knew the bush, the forest, the paddies. He was striped Hmong. Hmong Bai. Perhaps he knew all along where he was going, and where to lead their pursuers: into the bombs.

      Whatever the answer – luck or skill – the smoke and fire were a long way behind them now. The policemen, mobbing the wreck of their burned-out car, were visible but tiny. The jeep was already climbing into the mountains, quitting the Plain of Jars. And so their fate was boxed and mailed. They were really on the run. If Jake really wanted adventure and danger and risk: this was it.

      The Plain stretched into the blueness of the distance, as they ascended. The scenery was queerly serene, untroubled, as if this place had seen so much worse. And the serenity was paradoxically beautiful, too. Jake clutched his camera in his perspiring hands, and took a shot. The way the mosaic of rice paddies shone out so blue in the reflected sun: it was like the tesselated pieces of a stained glass window.

      Where had that image come from? His childhood. The stained glass window, the blue robes of the Virgin. It was a visual echo of himself, as a little boy, with his mother in a Catholic church: holding her hand, staring up: there’s Saint Veronica, Jacob, and there’s Saint Francis, and that’s the blue of Saint Lucy, Saint Lucy blue.

      Jake took another photo, to mediate

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