The Reckoning

18.

At the crack of the bullet, as if the skin of the place had been punctured, the mist drew off in a sudden rush. It didn’t burn away; the sun could not penetrate the triple canopy. It simply lifted and was gone.

They were surrounded—dwarfed—by those god heads and demon faces and the dreams of architects raised in stone and by this complicated forest. The canopy stretched overhead like an umbrella with veins. Molly felt made up, as if the giant stone heads among the trees were dreaming them all into existence.

She had forgotten about the others. Hours had passed. She could not read the green twilight. It seemed lighter without the mist, and yet dark for her sense of the time. Could it be late afternoon so soon?

Suddenly she was starving.

They followed the echo of the gunshot out of the canyon. It took some searching to locate the head of the stairs. Molly could barely distinguish between one building and another. She was in sensory overload, drained from too little sleep and too much emotion, way too much. She hadn’t experienced so many raw feelings in years, all packed into the space of a single day. The city was like a fuse. One sensation seemed to trigger another in a chain reaction of old fears and repressed memories and anger and wild hope.

Luckily, Duncan had an instinct for the ruins. After a few false turns, he brought them to the rim with its pink sandstone nagas and the staircase. With the mist cleared, the terminus sprawled beneath them, a grand cul-de-sac in a bowl of steeply terraced walls. Trees and vines clung to the most precipitous walls.

From this height, the white Land Cruiser looked as delicate as an eggshell. The big Mercedes truck could have been a toy. The rest of them were down there, and when Kleat saw her and Duncan, he gave a big wave with his gun hand, which only made him look more miniature. The expedition suddenly seemed fragile and overreaching. Their discovery was vastly bigger than they were.

As they descended the stairs, Molly saw that Samnang had not been idle during their absence. A bright green rectangle of a hut made of leaves and poles now occupied the lowest terrace, with one side open to his little spark of a fire. The fire gave her a clue to the time. It glittered too brightly for day. Night was nearing.

They reached the ground. As she wove through the trees, Molly kept an eye out for the names of women carved in the bark, but the light had changed or she was among the wrong trees. She couldn’t find the marks.

Even before entering the camp area, she saw Kleat grinning, and his reason for it. He was wearing a GI helmet with most of the canvas eaten away. Closer still, she could see fading tally marks along one side where a soldier had been counting down his days.

The brothers were in high spirits, too. A row of green bronze and jade vessels and geometrically painted jars stood along one ledge. She expected Duncan to start in about the plundering, but he only sighed.

“We’re on their trail now,” Kleat said. He opened his hand carefully, as if it might hold precious jewels, and three empty brass cartridges lay on his palm.

“You found those in the city?” asked Duncan.

“No, right here in the clearing. Sam found them lying over there.” He knocked on the helmet. “We almost drove over it last night.”

“That’s all you have?”

“It’s a start. Now we know where to look. Down here. Forget the city.”

Molly glanced around at the forest enclosing them. You couldn’t see the reservoirs from here, or their tire marks in the leaves. When it came time to leave, they would have to search just to find their way back to the causeway.

“What are those?” she asked, pointing at saplings bent into O shapes. They appeared at various distances among the trees, like animal snares.

“That’s Sam’s work. Landmarks. I sent him to look for the ACAVs. They have to be around here somewhere.”

“Was that your gunshot?”

“No sense wasting time up there. They probably never went up into the ruins.”

Molly resented that. She and Duncan had been crossing the city’s threshold, drifting among its stories. And Kleat had summoned them.

“Well, they did, for your information,” she blurted out.

Duncan grimaced. She bit her lip. How could she have known that was their secret?

“They were up there?” Kleat said.

It was too late to take back her words. “We found barbed wire in the gate at the back.”

“You found wire?” Kleat said. “And you didn’t call for me? That was the deal. I told you—”

Molly darted a glance at Duncan. It was true, they had abandoned the evidence in order to go exploring in the city. “We called for you,” she lied. “We waited. You didn’t hear us.”

“What gate?” His eyes fell on her camera. “Show me.”

She turned on the camera and showed him her pictures of the tunnel. The camera was quirking out again. The flash glare had blanched white the interior of the tunnel. The vines and roots and coiled wire were thin dark arabesques, but also there were shapes inside, trapped shapes if you wanted to embellish the image. With some imagination, one could almost make out arms and legs.

“What are those things?” Kleat said.

“Ricochet. The flash bouncing off the mist. Maybe I’m wrong about the wire. It looks like vines.” Or tendons.

But his curiosity was piqued. “And what about these?” he pounced, as she scrolled through the terra-cotta warrior series. This was what Duncan had been hoping to hide.

“Statues.” She shrugged. The stone eyes stared out from the display.

“There must be fifty of them.”

“I didn’t count.”

“Where is this gate?”

“There’s no way to describe it,” Duncan said. “You saw what a jumble it is.”

“Then you can lead me there tomorrow,” Kleat said. “But first thing, we’re going to do a line sweep of the area down here. Those ACAVs are somewhere.”

She started to object to his diktat. But Duncan was quicker. “Good,” he agreed. “There’s nothing left of today. It’s getting dark. We need rest and food. We’ll start fresh in the morning.” Not a word more about the city, as if Kleat really might forget it.

The two men went to the hut. Before it got dark, Molly walked to the truck to grab a flashlight and another camera battery from her mule bag. Picture possibilities swarmed through her mind. There had to be a temple or a tree from which to shoot that giant reclining Buddha in its entirety, and she wanted to line up three particular spires so they took the eye to a vanishing point. And there were those sweethearts’ names in the forest, so tender, so terribly mortal, the letters deformed by the years.

She was zipping shut the mule bag when Samnang returned through the dusk. He went straight to the ledge with the looted ceramics and bronze and jade bowls, and obviously this was the first he’d seen them. He approached the brothers, crouching by the fire. From the truck, she could hear him chastising them. One of the brothers rose and shouted back, shaking his rifle. Another flicked a burning twig at him. Bad luck children, she thought.

She joined Kleat and Duncan in the hut.

“A regular civil war out there,” Kleat said. The Khmers’ arguing seemed to please him. At last Samnang disengaged and hobbled off into the forest again.

Someone had put a box of MREs inside for them. Molly sorted through the packets, calling out the names of meals. She made her own selection and slit the thick plastic with her Swiss Army knife. People complained about the meals, but she’d developed a taste for them while covering a crew of hotshots one fiery season in the San Juan range.

While her chow mein heated in the bag, she gazed out at the darkening trees, unwinding for the first time in a month. After the muggy central lowlands, the forest felt cool and restoring. Even so, sweat beaded her forehead. She wiped at it.