The Edge Of Darkness

2. Maier

Maier, private detective, forty-five years old, 190 cm tall, perfectly trilingual, single, handlebar moustache, greying locks, currently cut almost short, leaned back in his economy seat, as much as he could, and smiled at the Thai stewardess who was coming his way. Maier had broad shoulders and green eyes and he looked a little lived in. Light boots, black cotton pants, a white shirt with too many pockets and one of those sleeveless vests with yet more pockets – he’d never quite managed to shake the fashion crimes of the war correspondent. At least he’d knocked the cigarettes on the head.

His father had turned up in Germany, from somewhere further east, sometime in the early Forties, despite the Nazis. He’d had green eyes and blond hair, and he’d been an attractive man, so attractive that the German girls, who had lost their husbands at the front, fell in love with him. Even in Hitler’s Germany, the Other seemed to have its attraction. At least as long as the Other called itself Maier and travelled with correct, possibly fake papers.

He had survived the war in the arms of young women and had fled to England in the closing months before returning to post-war Germany. In the mid-Fifties he had washed up on Ruth Maier’s doorstep in Leipzig, told her just that and hung around. But not for long. After eleven months, he’d disappeared and had never been heard of again.

Sometimes Maier asked himself how many siblings he might have. He wondered whether his father was still alive. And whether he might have worked for the Soviet secret service during the war? And whether he had worked for the Stasi later? Maier had never met his father. His love of women, his restlessness and his looks were the sole assets he had inherited from his old man. That’s what Ruth Maier had said.

His mother had been right of course. Maier didn’t enjoy staying put very much. After he’d finished his studies in Dresden, he had worked as an international correspondent in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. How he got the job without too much maneuvering, he never found out. Perhaps his father had had something to do with it.

When East Germany had begun to collapse, Maier had fled across Hungary to West Germany and had eventually ended up in Hamburg. After the Berlin Wall had fallen, Maier had expected to see life with different eyes. Finally, he’d be able to write what he wanted. He had been yearning for a new joy, an entirely new existence and he had almost found it. In the new Germany he had, after many years of working abroad, the right connections in the media and was soon hired by the news agency dpa.

Maier rarely woke up in his small, impersonal apartment in Altona. He was on the road for the most part, on assignment – German holidaymakers from Mallorca to Vegas, German investors in Shanghai, German footballers in Yaoundé. There was always something to report some place. And Maier didn’t feel at home anywhere. He’d fallen in love a few times, but somehow, he’d never hung around.

The power of money in the new Germany first disorientated him; later it became an irritation. He still felt as if he’d been catapulted from the fantastical dereliction of the old system into the depressing realities of the new one. Maier became ambivalent, despite the fact that, for the first time in his life, in the new Germany, he had the freedom to work. But life was too short to wash cars, watch TV or rent a video from the shop down the road. Maier chose the quickest, most radical way out of the German workaday life he could think of: he became a war correspondent.

After eight years down the front of the nasty little wars of the late twentieth century – from the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories to the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia and the high-altitude conflict in Nepal – he’d filed his last story four years earlier in Cambodia, had flown home and, after some soul-searching and a little retraining, had joined the renowned Hamburg detective agency Sundermann. Since then, Maier had been entrusted with cases all over Asia. He’d tracked down the killers of an Australian climber who’d apparently had a fatal accident in one of India’s most remote valleys; negotiated the release from Bang Kwang Prison, Thailand’s most notorious jail, of a man who’d fallen foul of the country’s draconian lèse-majesté law; and uncovered a pedophile ring amongst Singapore’s judiciary, though this most disturbing case had been stopped in its tracks by higher powers before the detective could wrap up his mission. He thought of himself as a fish, passing in silence through a big sea, catching prey here and there, occasionally unable to take a bite out of it for fear of being swallowed whole by more powerful predators. He didn’t miss the near-death adrenaline rush he had been addicted to in his last life.

And yet, Maier took his new job seriously. The years as a correspondent had left him with contacts in every major city in South and Southeast Asia. He always went down to the wire to get his case solved. His work as a crisis journalist had left him hardened, and determined as the hounds of hell. Maier could walk over corpses to get to the heart of a case. The truth, even if neither palatable nor publishable, was everything to him. Sundermann hadn’t been disappointed by his new detective.

When he was off work, Maier was a directionless romantic with desert sand in his shoes and a modicum of vanity in his eyes. That’s how he imagined his father had been.

“Vodka Orange, please.”

The stewardess’s hand touched his arm as she placed the plastic glass on the collapsible table in front of him. The slight, barely noticeable gesture made him smile.

She was young, beautiful and, for a few bucks, she risked her life day in and day out. Cambodian Air Travel, the only airline that currently flew from Bangkok into Phnom Penh, ran overworked and ancient Russian propeller planes, dying air-wrecks long past retirement that barely managed to clear the Cardamom Mountains. The pilots were Russian, vets from Afghanistan, who’d once flown attack helicopters against armed resistance fighters. In Cambodia air space, the Russians’ worst enemy was alcohol. Planes that crashed over the remote and heavily mined forests of Cambodia were rarely found.

A cursory glance at his fellow passengers suggested that the almost forgotten kingdom he was heading for had changed since Maier’s last visit. Young, self-confident backpackers in search of post-war adventures, a French tour group in search of temples, and a few old men in search of women, or children, or anything else that would be available in hell for a few dollars, had replaced the soldiers, gangsters and correspondents who had dared to fly into Phnom Penh a few years earlier.

In those days, he’d travelled by helicopter into a darker place, where men had routinely barbecued the livers of their enemies on open fires, sitting on the edges of paddy fields in the shadows of solitary palm trees. They, men that Maier knew well, had travelled and lived with, had wolfed down the organs in the belief that they were ingesting their enemies’ souls, as their victims had watched, holding their eviscerated stomachs, slowly bleeding to death. Just one of many reasons why the dead could never rest and the country was beset by ghosts and demons, some of them his very own.

“Do you live in Phnom Penh, sir?” the young stewardess asked him, as she, placed a small carton, in which Maier could see an old-looking biscuit and an overripe banana, next to his empty plastic glass. She did this with her best bit of barely trained elegance, which was breathtaking.

“No, I am on holiday.”

“Another drink perhaps?”

Maier hesitated for a second, and then opened his eyes wide enough to let the girl look inside his inside.

“Vodka orange?”

The stewardess’s gaze dropped to the floor of the aisle before she rushed off.

Maier’s thoughts returned to the task at hand. A strange case. A case without a crime.

The detective let the one and only conversation he’d had with his client run though his head once more.

“I want you to visit my son and find out what he’s up to. You have to understand that Rolf is the black sheep of the Müller-Overbeck family,” the woman had said without greeting or introduction. Her voice had been dead flat.

Mrs. Müller-Overbeck, whose husband had made his fortune with the first post-war coffee empire in the Bundesrepublik, had shot him a nervous, imperious glance. Ice cold and in her mid-sixties. Just like her gigantic villa in Blankenese, built by some Nazi before the war. With a haircut that could have dried out an igloo, silver, stiff and expensive, the woman had simply looked ridiculously affluent. What the rich thought of as low key. The skirt, fashionable and a touch too tight, and the blouse, uniquely ruffled, and finally the many thin gold bracelets dangling from her pale wrists like trophies, hadn’t helped. But there’d been something unscripted in her performance, which Maier had supposed to be the reason for his presence in the Müller-Overbeck universe. She’d been agitated. It was hard to be ice-cold and agitated at the same time. How did the Americans say? It was lonely at the top. Life was a lottery. Maier had instinctively understood that this woman’s expectations of service were in the rapacious to unreasonable bracket.

“You know the country?”

“I am the expert for Asia at Sundermann’s. And I worked in Cambodia as a war correspondent for dpa.”

Mrs. Müller-Overbeck had winced, “There is war over there? Rolf is caught up in a war? I thought he ran some kind of business for tourists there?”

“The war finished in 1998. The country is currently being rebuilt.”

Listening hadn’t been one of the strengths of Hamburg’s coffee queen. Another reason for Maier to say as little as possible.

“I don’t understand why he wanted to go there. To a country at war. I can remember the post-war years in Germany all too well. I don’t understand why he’d want to go and look at the suffering of others. But Rolf has always been difficult. An A in English and an F in Maths, everything had to be extreme… Of course, the family is hoping that he’ll come back and take over the reins. He’s such a clever boy.”

She hadn’t offered Maier a drink. Not even a promotional gift, a politically correct cup from Nicaragua perhaps. He’d pondered whether she ever drank coffee. She’d seemed a woman who’d never done anything that involved any acceleration of the inevitable ageing process.

“You will find him and watch him. I am paying your usual rate for two weeks. Then you will call me. And I will, on the basis of your meticulously detailed and inclusive report, which you will have sent to me by email, prior to our call of course, decide whether you will be recalled to Germany or whether I will make further payments so that you may make additional enquiries.”

Mrs. Müller-Overbeck had smelled of money and avarice, but not of coffee. It looked as if Maier would become the babysitter to Hamburg’s rich heirs. There had been moments when he had wished the Wall back. In his thoughts, he’d cursed Sundermann, his boss.

“Mr. Maier, my expectations are very high and if I get the impression that you are unable or unwilling to fulfil them, then I will mention your agency to my friend, Dr. Roth, who sits on the city council.”

His eyes tuned to truthful and trustworthy, Maier had nodded in agreement, and had let Mrs. Müller-Overbeck work on him, her scrawny, pale and lonely hands fragile as thin glass, held together by gold, coming up and down in front of him to emphasise the message.

“If my son is involved in any illegal or dangerous business over there, then please have his business uncovered in such a way that he is immediately deported back to Germany.”

“Mrs. Müller-Overbeck, that kind of action can be very dangerous in Cambodia.”

The coffee queen had reacted with irritation. “That’s why I am not sending a relative. That’s why you are going. I expect results, solutions, not doubts. I want to see my son where he belongs.”

“I can’t force your son to come back home.”

“Tell him he is disinherited if he won’t budge. No, do not tell him anything. Just report to me. And please be discreet. Rolf is my only son. You never know, in these countries, so far away…”

Maier had only then realised that Mrs. Müller-Overbeck was crying. The tears would surely turn to ice in seconds. She’d patted her sunken cheeks with a silk handkerchief.

“Preliminary investigations have told us that your son is a business partner in a small dive shop in a beach resort. He appears to be reasonably successful at what he is doing.”

Mrs. Müller-Overbeck had abandoned all efforts to save her face and blurted in despair and with considerable impatience, “I could have told you that myself. I want to know with what kind of people he is doing business, whether he has a woman, what kind of friends he has. I want to know everything about his life over there. I want to know why he is there and not here. And then I want him back.”

“You don’t need a private detective to find that out. Why don’t you just fly over there and visit him?”

“Don’t be impertinent. You are being well paid, so ask your questions in Asia, not here. Goodbye, Maier. Please remember every now and then that your agency’s licenses are granted by the city of Hamburg. And I am a significant part of our great city. That will keep you up to speed.”

“This is co-pilot Andropov speaking. Please return your seats to upright position. We’re about to land at Phnom Penh International Airport. The temperature in Phnom Penh is thirty-three degrees, local time is 6.30. We hope you enjoyed flying Cambodian Air Travel. Look forward to welcoming you on our flights again soon. On behalf of captain and the crew, have a pleasant stay in Cambodia. Hope to see you ’gain soon.”

The stewardess passed Maier’s seat, wearing her most professional smile. There was no way to get through now. Maier sighed inwardly and turned to the window.

Cambodia was down there, a small, insignificant country, in which the history of the twentieth century had played out as if trapped in the laboratory of a demented professor.

French colony, independence in 1953, a few years of happily corrupt growth and peace under King Sihanouk, followed by five years of war with CIA coups, Kissinger realpolitik, US bombs, a few hundred thousand dead and millions of refugees – the most intense bombing campaign in the history of modern warfare was the opening act for the communist revolution of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, who killed a quarter of the country’s population in less than four short years. The g******e was choked off by the Vietnamese, unwelcome liberators, and almost two decades of civil war followed. Finally, UNTAC, the United Nations Transitional Authority of Cambodia, had shown up, organised elections of sorts and had then fled the burnt out, tired country as quickly as possible. The last Khmer Rouge fighters had thrown in their blood-soaked towels in 1997 and joined the county’s government troops. Maier had stood right next to them. It had been a painful process.

Since then, Cambodia had known peace – of sorts.

The women were beautiful. It had always been like that, if you were to believe the silent stone reliefs of countless apsaras, the heavenly dancers of the Angkor Empire that graced thousand-year-old temple walls in the west of the country. The highly paid UN soldiers had noticed the sensuousness of the women too and had promptly introduced HIV, which now provided the only international headlines of this otherwise forgotten Buddhist kingdom – a kingdom that had ruled over much of Southeast Asia eight hundred years ago. Past, present and future, it was all the same, every child in Cambodia knew that. Maier was looking forward to it. All of it.

The plane made a wide curve and barely straightened for its landing approach, descending with the coordination of a happy drunk towards the runway. The sky was g*n-metal grey. Dark, heavy clouds hung low to the east of the city over the Tonlé Sap Lake. The country below looked dusty and abandoned. Here and there Maier spotted a swamp in this semi-arid desert, a rubbish-filled fish pond or a clogged-up irrigation canal. Dots of sick colour spilled on a blank, diseased landscape.

The aircraft abruptly lost altitude. Glittering temple roofs amidst the grey metal sheds of the poor that spread like tumors around the airport, shot past. Beyond the partially collapsed perimeter fence, children dressed in rags raced across unpaved roads or dug their way through gigantic piles of refuse. The Wild East.

The Cambodian Air Travel flight began to shake like a dying bird and Maier couldn’t help but overhear one of the passengers in the seats behind him, a dour but voluptuous Austrian woman.

“Gerhard, are we crashing? Will we die, Gerhard?”

Maier spotted a few skinny cows grazing peacefully on the edge of the runway. Then they were down.

Welcome to Cambodia.