Cambodian Book of the Dead by Tom Vater Page A

dislocated its jaw. The water filled with blood.
    Rolf pulled him up then, his computer had indicated a safe ascent. The reef sharks were back and fought over the legs of the man.
    Maier had never climbed into a boat as fast. Samnang pulled him out of the water. The young tattooed tourist from Frankfurt asked, “So, are we going in now, or what?”

 
    ONE HOT, ONE COLD
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    â€œYou still want to invest here, Maier?”
    Rolf Müller-Overbeck leaned drunkenly into the bar of the Last Filling Station. His long hair dripped with sweat. The young German’s question did not sound sarcastic. Maier was counting his dollar bills for the next round of drinks. There had been many rounds already.
    The Last Filling Stationwas packed. Even Les “Snakearm” Leroux served beer tonight. It looked like the entire foreign community was present. Maier looked around – a pretty strange life you led here, isolated from the locals; but, he knew, that was the norm all over Asia. Unbridgeable culture gaps and huge income disparity precluded integration. The Khmer sat on the floors of their huts and drank illegal rice wine that had been distilled in the jungle. The foreigners sat on plastic chairs and drank beer. To make things worse, Kep’s resident expatriates sat in segregated clusters, divided by nationalities, at several metal tables.
    Still, the entire room had murder on its mind. Murder talk in at least four languages. And with every translation, the details became increasingly sketchy, the truth more flexible, the shark ever larger.
    The French, including M and Mme Maupai, sat in the centre of the action. A second table was occupied by a noisy group of Scandinavian tourists. They had heard about the killing from the German kids and kept away from the local barang . As if murder was contagious. Perhaps it was in Cambodia.
    â€œWhat kind of shark was it?” was Maier’s first contribution in a while, a change in subject without changing the subject.
    He’d decided by now that he would have to keep his true intentions in Kep secret. He had a feeling the murder in the Gulf was in some way connected to his new young friend, the coffee heir from Hamburg. Luckily, nothing brought men closer together than the shared survival of dangerous adventure. Hanging out with the man he was hired to shadow now came natural.
    â€œIt was a tiger shark. I’ve done more than four hundred dives off the coast of Kep, but I’ve never seen a monster like that. Tigers don’t usually show up in such shallow water, but perhaps El Niño has something to do with it.” Rolf swallowed hard. “A friend told me that he saw a big shark off the west coast of Thailand a few months ago, while snorkelling! I didn’t believe it then. Maier, we were fucking lucky. A tiger shark! Luckily, I didn’t see how it finally mauled Sambat, poor bastard. But I’m still in shock.”
    â€œThe fact that such a big fish came into shallow water must have had something to do with the victim and all that blood. Sharks can smell blood for miles. Who was the victim?”
    â€œGuy called Sambat. Worked with his sister for an NGO in Kampot, a few miles down the coast. The NGO looks after orphans. The two of them were orphans themselves – and one of their parents was a barang . They were born shortly after the Vietnamese invasion in ’79. It’s a kind of miracle they survived at all. I didn’t know Sambat well, but he was a nice guy.”
    â€œA great guy,” Les added.
    â€œHe often came on his half-dead Yamaha from Kampot for a beer. He was really a serious man, reflective and pragmatic, really amazing for his age. Just like his twin sister. In fact, he dropped in yesterday and talked about abductions of children to Bokor.”
    â€œBokor?”
    â€œThe old French hill station, stuck up on a plateau in the Elephant Mountains, buddy. Maier, if there’s a building in this world