Black heart, p.5
Black Heart, page 5
'Yes. I know that,' Sokha said excitedly. 'And Preah MohiWellas l do that Pa« of Vietnam is really Kampuchea. So you Panditto is my guide. You should've seen it, Sam! The powerSee' " s an historical fact that you cannot trust the Vietnamese, he has! He reached out to me. And when he touched me I fell U burns me UP lnside when l see that Vietnamese family
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living near to us in Chamcar Mon. What right have they to be there? It is Sihanouk's doing, I tell you. He lives in Chamcar Mon four days a week with Monique and her clique of followers. Why else would they be there?'
'I don't see anything wrong with them,' Sokha said with a child's simple logic. 'They've never hurt us; they've never been mean to me or you or any of us.'
Samnang looked at his brother's troubled face and felt inside himself the white hot spark of rage. He struggled to smile, to quell the fire inside him; he had just come from seeing Rene. Always Rene lit that fire within him with his words.
Smiling still, he put his arms around his brother's shoulders, squeezed him in an embrace. The love between them was very strong. 'There is no one else to talk to,' he said softly, 'so sometimes I talk to you. You're all I have; the only one who understands.'
'I understand, Bawng,' Khieu Sokha said, wanting desperately to be of help to his brother. It filled him with happiness that they should be here together talking. 'You know I do.'
'Yes,' Khieu Samnang said, closing his eyes. 'Now forget what I've said. It's nothing.' But soon, he thought. Soon it will be something.
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Kim was down in the Library, taking notes on the 'Ragman' file when the summons from the Director came. The librarian relayed the message that he was wanted upstairs.
Kim nodded, looked once more at his notes to make certain he was at last on the right track. Then he closed the file, got up from the leather and wood chair, took his notes to the shredder, fed them in. Nothing written was allowed out of the Library without a double signing.
He returned the file to the Librarian, logging in the time and scribbling his signature just below it. He nodded again to the nondescript man and went out along the narrow corridor.
Everywhere there were deep pile carpets. It was very quiet in here on all levels; one of the Director's prerequisites. Even on the first two floors of the building housing the Dieter Ives Music Foundation and Library, open to the public, setting perhaps two dozen grants per year to young American composers - the fafade behind which the real foundation did its work - the use of earphones when playing back musical selections was mandatory. Only on alternating Sundays, when recitals were held in the auditorium in the back of the building, was there any sound at all above a soft murmur.
For Kim this studied silence nurtured the memories of his long-dead family that were all that kept him alive now. These vivid memories had allowed him to be patient; time had a different meaning for him than it did for most people.
Ascending in the elevator, he thought of what his patience had brought him. Now was the time, he told himself, to set it all in motion. He had the last piece of the puzzle at last, felt the elemental urge of the hawk as its powerful wings flutter just before it takes to the air after spotting its prey. It had taken him a long time to run down this one. Many lifetimes, it seemed. Emerging onto the top floor, he looked out the fortress-
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shaped window onto K Street, watching the pedestrian flow. To the east was Farragut Square and the YWCA, near enough to the White House to get more than tourists walking by.
Kim turned from the window without a backward glance. He went through the two doors, the first opening towards him, the second, opening away from him.
He stood on Astroturf but there was no impulse to smile. The Director engendered no such levity. He was a bear of a man, impressive even to Kim, who had been trained to ignore physiognomy. The Director had a prognathous jaw dominating everything but his hard glittery eyes. Kim did not like the Director's eyes; they reminded him too much of Tracy Richter's.
'Have a good time in Florida?' the Director said like thunder.
'Florida's intolerable in the summer,' Kim came into the room.
The Director came out from behind his battleship of a desk, folded his arms across his massive chest. He was as close as a mere human being could get to looking like one of the heads on Mt Rushmore.
'Kim,' he said, 'you and I go back a long way. I hired you against the recommendations of a number of people for whom I normally have a great deal of respect.'
The Director pushed off from the desk like a cruiser heading for deep water. 'Now I trust I don't have to reiterate what a unique position you hold in the foundation. In some ways you have more freedom than I do. So much so that if the President ever got wind of it, he'd have my nuts in a sling.'
'We both know why you allow it.'
'Hell, yes, don't we though.' The Director allowed a smile to break through the ice. 'Jesus, you do one helluva job for us where we need it the most.' His arms broke apart like roiling thunderheads. 'While all those other bastards're chasing their tails in Southeast Asia, we have you building up files thicker than my wrist on all the most militant Communist leaders.' He brought up one hand, cocked it like a pistol. 'And then one by one' he closed one eye, aiming 'bourn, bourn, bourn, they disappear into the night like red flowers.'
He pushed his shirtsleeves up as if the most difficult work were yet ahead of him. 'But then again that's not all of it.'
Kim knew now what the Director was leading to but he would be goddamned if he'd give him any help. He stayed
silent.
'Kim,' the Director said, in his most serious voice, 'you spend your life terminating people. You do it better than almost anyone else alive today. Fine. That's what you're paid to do.' The Director squinted and the sun went out. 'I think it's reasonable to assume that when you're back home on vacation you could think of something else to do.'
'Do you know -'
'Yes,' the Director interrupted, 'I know who Lon Nam was.'
'He was a slaughterer of babies!' Kim cried. 'A butcher in the forests of Cambodia. He deserved less than the execution I gave him.'
'What he deserved or did not deserve,' the Director said evenly, 'is not at issue. It was a sanctionless execution and that I will not tolerate. Even from you. Your value to me only goes so far. Just be damned glad you're not in the CIA. Timpson would take you down so hard you'd be crawling for the next six weeks.'
'You shouldn't've found out,' Kim said. 'There was no way
'But I did find out, didn't I?' The Director smiled without warmth. 'Don't let your position here inflate your ego, Kim, or one day you'll be looking into the sun with blind eyes.'
He turned away abruptly, a sign that the interview was at an end. 'That's your lesson for today.'
Three days a week Khieu worked for Pan Pacifica, a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing Americans and Asians closer together through cultural and artistic understanding.
Pan Pacifica occupied three floors of a modern office building on Madison Avenue in the mid-sixties. It thrived through corporate and individual sponsorships, in no small part due to the recent prodigious growth in trade with the Japanese, Chinese and Thais.
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But much of the work it provided was less immediately visible to the public. That included succour and refuge, resettlement and reeducation for the stream of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees coming into the country. Already it had, in great part, been responsible for setting up the first few Cambodian Buddhist temples in the United States: in Washington, DC, Los Angeles and, most recently, in New York City.
It was in this less public area that Khieu worked. He spent much of those three days a week confronting a seemingly endless parade of Cambodians with blasted, frightened eyes. The awful mirror their faces presented him was, he felt, a fitting reminder of all he had left behind; all his father had saved him from. And each evening when he left the office he felt an overwhelming gratitude for the safety he had been abruptly and sometimes he felt miraculously - provided.
Khieu's exotic good looks were a source of comment at Pan Pacifica as it was everywhere he went. A large percentage of the organization's personnel was Caucasian and female. The executive director tended towards the younger applicants in her hiring principally because she felt they were more idealistic and more enthusiastic.
For his part Khieu took the inevitable brushes with flirtation with a mixture of cool grace and curiosity; he wondered what it was the women saw in him. This reaction only succeeded in fuelling the flames.
There came a time when a great deal more than flirtation was delivered to him. At about the same time Kim and the Director were deep in conversation almost three hundred miles away, Khieu looked up from his desk to see Diane Samson standing over him.
She was young and, being in the publicity department, quite beautiful. That was an attribute the executive director insisted on. The public face of Pan Pacifica was of paramount importance to her.
'Yes?' he said. He did not put down the pen he had been using to draw up plans for a second New York Cambodian enclave in Brooklyn.
'I'd like to talk to you about the refugee problem,' Diane said
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Behind the large-lensed glasses, her blue eyes shone. 'I think it's time we did some print promotion of that side of us. The New Yorker, Business Week and Forbes seem the most logical places to start but I need to talk to you about copy.' She leaned towards him, Put her knuckles on the edge of his desk and said very directly, 'Can you give me some time?'
Khieu nodded. 'All right.'
'Let's see. You won't be here tomorrow.' She cocked her head. 'Could we do it now, d'you think?'
Khieu rarely made lunch plans; there was always too much work and he was conscious of the fact that he did not spend five days a week here. He had not finished the enclave proposal but, all things considered, he thought it could wait. He stood up from behind his desk, stretched. 'Any place special in mind?' He watched her eyes straying to the play of his taut muscles beneath his shirt.
'How about my place?' Diane whispered, leaning in.
She was not kidding. She lived less than five blocks away on East Seventieth Street, in a small but well-kept brownstone. From the bedroom you could look out at the leafy backyard filled with an old lightbarked American elm.
He allowed her to lead him through the apartment to the bedroom, then stood looking at the sunlight dappling the ground below through the multitudes of boughs while she slowly unknotted his tie, unbuttoned his shirt.
He felt its brief tickle as it slid down his bare arms, turned his head to watch her as her coral lips opened and her tiny tongue came snaking out to surround his nipple.
It erected under her tender ministrations and she moaned, running her fingertips lightly over the muscles of his arms, shoulders and chest. But he felt nothing.
He felt nothing, too, when she slid his pants down, gasping at his hard length. He stepped out of the puddle of his trousers and picked her effortlessly up in his arms, carrying her to the bed.
He removed her blouse and was astonished to feel the force of her emotions when he bent his head towards her, sucked a nipple into his mouth as she had done for him. Obviously,
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she felt something; some powerful pull he was as yet unaware of.
He scooped her breasts together, licked up and down the cleavage until her restless body told him to return to her nipples She moaned when he took them inside his mouth one by one, babying them.
'I feel it,' she whispered. 'I feel it all the way down to my thighs.' Her eyelids were fluttering.
Khieu wondered what it was she was feeling and put her fingertips up against his own nipples so that he might feel it himself. She played with them, twirling them and rubbing them but still he felt nothing.
Yet I am hard, he told himself, staring for a moment down at his rampant penis; I am always hard in these encounters. Yet what do I really feel?
He felt the momentary warmth at the moment of his penetration. He felt how moist she was. But he also saw in her eyes how much she wanted his penis and he did not understand that passion.
He charged into her and, knowing where it felt best fot women, rose high inside her.
She groaned and clutched him, her legs coming up around him, her heels at the small of his back pushing and relaxing, pushing and relaxing.
Khieu felt her muscles tensing, bunching up and beginning to tremble. Then he backed off and she cried out for him tc continue. Her hips pushed up against him until her damp buttocks were off the bed, clenched hard but he used his superior strength to keep himself from hiking her. He rubbed the tip ol himself inside her while his head swooped down and he licked her breasts again.
'Oh, I can't ..." Her voice was aqueous with desire. She strained upward again. 'I can't ..." Eyes squeezed shut, arms drawn taut across the rippling muscles of his back. 'Stand it!'
And with a great effort, she levered herself all the way up rubbing her pelvis hard against him.
Then Khieu pushed her flat down against the mattress
moving very fast, high up within her to give her the maximum sensation.
He heard her gasp in his ear, gurgle like a small child who has difficulty swallowing. Her inner muscles clamped themselves around his penis as he slid back and forth inside her.
Abruptly, he was cast down into viscous shadow; his hand pained him in quick, bright bursts like the hideous blossoms of mortar fire. Firestorms of images coming and he fought them back.
She was gasping like an engine out of control and once he was certain she called out his name. Her rigidity fixed him, her enormous tension transfering itself to him at the last moment.
He knew that moment, understood it as the time when his penis would spurt its semen. He did, in retrospect, feel some -pleasure then. A tiny ball of intense heat in the spot covered by his pubic hair. He expelled an indrawn breath at its reflexive force while Diane sobbed into his sweat-soaked chest.
But there was nothing else to it. He wondered again as he walked slowly back to the office just what strange emotion had suffused Diane Samson, overpowering her with its force. At the very end when he had released himself into her, he had felt just a breath of it like a heated desert wind that hinted of the furnace of its origin but did no more.
And that was the most curious part; the part most mysterious to him. He did not often choose to think about that dark area. It reminded him too much of vague unnamed feelings he would arise with some mornings. They seemed to come most often the day after he had his nightmares which continued to possess him every ten or eleven days like clockwork.
He would always awake from those in the dead of night, sweatdrenched, breathing as if he had just run twenty miles over hard terrain, his mind filled with the heat of the falling napalm like a strap across his back, the stench of cindered human flesh clogging his nostrils.
Then he would cross to the ancient wooden statue of the Amida Buddha in his room, light a prayer candle and sink down onto his knees, in front of the enlightened face. He would pray
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diligently and long, as he had been taught by Preah Moha Panditto. And at length his mind would be clear again.
And invariably the next night he would sleep all the way through only to awaken in the pale light of dawn with the disquiet he somehow associated with his lovemaking suffusing him, bringing a sharp constriction to his groin.
His right hand would ache and he'd look around wildly, feeling the heated breath of that unknown furnace closing on him, brushing past him just a heartbeat away.
On Madison and Fiftieth, a black man with hair like greased snakes danced on the spot to Rastafarian Judge Dread. Earphoned into his Sony Walkman tapeplayer, he offered leaflets for a massage parlour around the corner, to every male who came his way.
But just a block away, the polished limos were lining up like a black caravan from the East, about to unload in front of St Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth.
The recently sandblasted face rose upward majestically, its twin spires seeming pale and remote in the brilliant late morning light. A pride of policemen had sent the sidewalk vendors and the shining-faced Three Card Monte practitioners scurrying for more felicitous precincts.
Tracy, standing on the steps of St Patrick's, saw the limo he had sent to pick up Mary Holmgren slide to a halt and went down to get her.
She was a thin woman with chestnut hair, a hard chin and pale nononsense eyes. She was dressed in black, more formally than anyone else, with a small hat and attaching veil.
'Hello, Mary,' he said softly. 'How are you?'
Mary Holmgren stood up, faced him. She was complete!) oblivious to the ranks of reporters, television and still camera* emplanted outside a roped-off barrier. Her face looked fresh and healthy.
She eyed him, put her black-gloved hands on the shoulder of the teenage girl who emerged behind her. 'You know mi daughter, Anne.'
'Of course.'
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'Margaret,' Mary Holmgren said in a voice like granite, 'please take Anne inside. I shall join you momentarily.' A tall, white-fleshed creature nodded her small head, took Anne's head, leading her up the steps as cameras ground away for history and flashbulbs exploded like miniature suns.
'She'll emerge the heroine from all this,' Mary Holmgren said, watching the straight line of her daughter's back.
'Is there anything I can do, Mary?'
Mary Holmgren linked her arm through his. She accepted the con-dolences of the city's comptroller and borough president, nodded at a representative she knew only slightly. She pulled on Tracy's arm.
'Is she here?'
Tracy knew instantly that she meant Moira. 'No, she isn't.'
She patted the back of his hand. 'Good. I could always count on you to do the right thing, Tracy.'
