Dead and Gone

“Perfect. Thanks.”

“Sure. Tell you what—drive me out to where I’ve got the limo stashed. I’ll take it back to Seattle; you keep the hot rod until I get back. The suite’s covered, no worries there.”

“You want me to meet you at the airport Sunday?”

“No need. There’s always plenty of cabs around at PDX. And that way, there won’t be any phone calls.”

“Speaking of …”

“How many you want?”

I spent the next couple of days prowling Portland. Knowing I didn’t have enough time to really learn the streets, but wanting to get a sense of the terrain. I’d checked the plaza where we’d set the meet—it was only a few blocks from the hotel—and I knew it couldn’t be boxed without a damn regiment standing by. The hotel was my trump—a place to duck into where I could just disappear.

Anyone interested might check the lobby, but no way the hotel was going to stand for a room-to-room unless it was the police asking. Whoever they might be considering for backup, I was sure the Russians weren’t bringing the law.

Gem always passed on coming along with me. Said she had some things to do. Sometimes she was there when I got back, sometimes she wasn’t. She must have found a greengrocer nearby—the living room smelled like a fruit stand from all the produce she had stacked in various spots. Refrigeration wasn’t a problem; Gem ate everything she scored the same day she brought it back. She asked me once if I wanted some pomegranates. I played along and told her no thanks. She ate them all, neatly and completely.

My first day of prowling turned up a bakery a few blocks away. A good one, from the smells. Picked out a half- dozen pastries. Plump ones, oozing with custard and cream. Gem gave me a sly smile and a wink, as if I’d just bribed her. And a tiny trace of a wiggle as she pranced over to the desk to arrange the pastries in a neat, precise row.

She washed them all down with hits from a huge bottle of water, talking between bites.

“You are in danger?” she asked.

“Yeah. I just don’t know from who.”

“But the people I am to meet—they will know?”

“They’ll know something. Maybe the solution to the puzzle, maybe just another piece of it.”

“If there was no danger to you, you would not be seeking them?”

“No.”

She regarded me soberly, despite a mouth surrounded by powdered sugar. I felt like I was cocaine on her scale: telling her I weighed a kilo while her readout said two pounds.

“It cannot be as you say. Not only as you say.”

“Why?”

“You are in a rage. A cold, black rage. When we talked … before … you told me you understood the fear. I believe that is true. But you are being hunted, yes? You were almost killed, and by people you do not know. Where is your fear now, Mr. Burke?”

“It’s there, I promise you.”

“Is it? Whoever your enemies are, you could hide from them. But what you want is their blood.”

“Why would you say—?”

“Revenge is only for small things,” she said, her voice a thin strand of white-hot wire. “For my country, for my people, there can be no revenge.”

“So you forgive the Khmer Rouge?”

“So you mock me? What do you know of our … suffering?” she said, something deeper than anger in her tone. I figured she never finished the first time she talked about it, so I just shut up and listened. “What revenge could you imagine for such a scale of evil?” she went on. “Could there be revenge for what Hitler did to the Jews? Or Stalin to his people? For Idi Amin? In Cambodia, it was not one tribe against another. It was not Rwanda. Or Bosnia. Or Northern Ireland. It was not even the ‘class struggle’ so beloved of Marxists, although Pol Pot claimed to be one. What happened was that the monster was set free. The monster in men that kills, and tortures, and rapes for … for the pure evil joy of it. Revenge? For true revenge, we would have to kill the Devil.”

“There is no Devil. There is no ‘evil’ that gets loose. It’s all inside humans. Some humans. And it’s those humans who have to pay.”

“Which humans? The ten-year-old boy who bashed in babies’ skulls with a shovel because his leaders told him the babies were the seeds of the privileged class? The people who made moral decisions not to kill died for their choice. Would you cleanse all Cambodia to be certain none of the guilty escaped?”

“No. But they can be found if only—”

“Found? Perhaps. Some of them. Some few of them. But even South Africa has a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They are trying to heal their country, not exterminate all those who committed atrocities. Rwanda is going to have trials. They will take decades, and only a handful of people will be punished. Only zealots want revenge. Most people, what they want is food. They want safety. And they want a future. Revenge will provide none of that.”

“That’s their choice.”

“But not yours.”

“Not mine.”