LITMIR.BIZ

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Jake definitely envied Tyrone. The red haired, hardbitten, sardonic, forty-five year old Chicagoan didn’t have his job threatened by a billion people with cameraphones. Ty was a proper journalist; a correspondent, and no one had perfected software that could write a decent foreign news report. Yet.

      ‘Alright Jake?’ Ty smiled. ‘Got all your shots?’

      ‘Got them. Startling new visual angle on Vang Vieng.’

      ‘Let me guess,’ said Ty. ‘Sunset over the karst?’

      Jake admitted the cliché. Ty grinned, and laughed, and lifted his glass of good Lao beer. Jake quickly drank his own beer, and felt the tingle of pleasurable relaxation. The beer here was good. That was one of the surprising things about Laos: Jake had heard back at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh that Laos was primitive and poor even compared to Cambodia, and indeed it was, but it was also effortlessly beautiful, and the beer was good.

      Tyrone was leaning forward.

      ‘Tell ya something, I have got a scintilla of gossip.’

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘Chemda is here.’

      A bar boy came over. Tyrone turned, and breezily ordered some more Lao beers – tucking a few dollars into the kid’s hand as he did. The kid bobbed, and tried to say thankyou for his lavish tip, and blushed, and then smiled.

      The English photographer assessed the Laotian waiter. Probably three years ago this waiter had been a barefoot tribal lad, not even able to speak Lao. Living in a hut in the hills. Now he was serving beer to laconic American journalists and dreadlocked French girls and beery London gap year boys with Girls Are Gay written in lipstick on their sunburned backs, and the boy was earning more money in a week than his father earned in a year even as his culture was destroyed.

      It was sad. And maybe Jake was making it worse, taking photos that would only attract more people to spoil what was previously unspoiled. And maybe, he thought, he should stop punishing himself for the way the universe worked.

      His mind clicked back into gear, he recognized the name. Chemda. Chemda Tek. A beautiful Cambodian girl from Phnom Penh. She spoke English. American educated. A lawyer or something with an NGO. Maybe the UN? The tribunals by the airport in Phnom Penh. He’d met her at the Foreign Correspondents Club.

      ‘Chemda Tek. What’s she doing here?’

      ‘Well it’s Tek Chemda technically. Khmers reverse their names like the Chinese. Surname first, pretty name second. But she’s Americanized so yep, Chemda Tek.’

      Jake said nothing; Ty said:

      ‘So you remember her. Cute, right?’

      Jake shrugged.

      ‘Well, I hadn’t noticed.’

      ‘Yeah . . . rrrright.’

      ‘No. Really. The fact she looks like one of the dancing apsaras of Angkor Thom, had completely escaped me. Mate.’

      They chinked glasses and chuckled. Tyrone said:

      ‘She’s at the hospital.’

      The single word hospital unsettled Jake, somewhere deep. He moved the conversation forward.

      ‘She’s OK?’

      ‘Yeah yeah, she’s fine. But it’s an odd situation.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘She’s with some Cambodian professors.’

      ‘Here in Laos?’ Jake was mystified. ‘I thought she was working on the Khmer Rouge stuff. Reconciliation. In PP.’

      ‘She was, sure.’ Tyrone repressed a burp with a drunken hand, and gazed out at the street. A hammer and sickle flag hung limply from a concrete lamppost in the gloom: in the jungly darkness the communist red looked darkest grey.

      Jake pressed the point: he wanted to know more. Tyrone explained. He’d met Chemda on the street near the hospital. She was in Laos to visit the Plain of Jars with a pair of old Cambodian professors, themselves victims of, or associated with, the Khmer Rouge, the one-time and long-hated genocidal Maoist government of Cambodia.

      ‘Why the Plain of Jars?’ asked Jake.

      Tyrone finished his beer and explained.

      ‘Apparently during the Khmer Rouge era, these historians were made to go there – seems the communists made them go to the Plain of Jars to look at something.’

      ‘Sorry?’

      ‘You know what the Plain of Jars is right?’

      Jake faltered a reply:

      ‘Big . . . old . . . stone . . . jars. Sitting in . . .’ He paused. ‘A plain?’

      They laughed. Tyrone continued:

      ‘Plain of Jars: two-thousand-year-old jars. Big fuckers. Near Ponsavanh. Saw them years back. Boring but curious. No one knows who built them or why.’

      ‘But what’ve they got to do with . . .’

      ‘The Khmer Rouge? The KR?’ Ty smiled affably. ‘Ain’t got a clue. But the Rouge and the Pathet Lao were obsessed with the Jars, it seems, and they researched them in the 70s, coercing these historians maybe – and Chemda is trying to find out why –’

      ‘And?’

      ‘The whole thing back in the 70s obviously freaked out the professors. Something happened there, or they found something there.’

      ‘But why the hospital? Why’s she here?’

      A tuk-tuk clattered past, two stroke engine coughing fumes into the soft tropical night. Barefoot German girls were laughing in the back as they counted out wads of kip. ‘Kharb jai, dankeschon, kharb jai.’ Tyrone smiled at Jake:

      ‘The prof, it seems, stepped on a bombie. One of those little butter-yellow cluster bastards. You know that whole area is mined and lethal – all that fine American ordnance –’

      ‘That bit I know. You guys did a proper job on Laos.’

      Tyrone nodded; Jake persisted:

      ‘Didn’t the Yanks drop more bombs on Laos, in the Vietnam war, than on the whole of Germany – in the entire Second World War?’

      ‘Hey. Please. We dropped more bombs here than on Germany and Japan combined.’ Ty sighed, personably. ‘Anyhow, where was I. Yeah. This crazy professor took a wrong turning and got half his fucking leg blown off. And Chemda had to bring him to the nearest hospital, which given what a crappy little squatter of a country Laos is, was all the way here to Vang. A long day’s drive with this poor bastard bleeding out in the back of the pick-up –’

      ‘And now?’

      ‘She’s heading back. Finish the job, get the answer. She’s a determined girl, that one. Like her dynasty.’ Tyrone turned and motioned to the bar boy. ‘Sabaydee. Two lao beers? Kharb jai.’

      ‘Heading back to the Plain of Jars?’

      ‘Tomorrow, yeah. S’what she told me. She heard on the vine we had finished our assignment, so she wondered if I’d like to cover the story. For the Phnom Penh Post, New York Times, ya know. I told her I didn’t care how intriguing it all is, I’m doing this coffee table gig for fun, I need a break from the wartime stuff – and anyhow I’d rather have drunken sex with a senior Ayatollah than spend four days on Laotian roads, going to see a bunch of enormous stone cookie jars.’

      Tyrone paused, and gazed at Jake’s pensive expression. He groaned.

      ‘Oh god. Colour me fucking stupid. You wanna do it, don’t you? You want the story. You want to cover it. Make a name for yourself at last!’

      Chapter 3

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