AK opened the door just a crack and peeked through. The knock, the second in a span of ten minutes, had come at an inopportune time. The Stung Siem Reap Hotel manager stood in the dim light of the hall grinning at him, exposing some gold fillings. He was the same person who had offered at check-in to provide him with a woman for the evening if he so desired despite the note by the management on the closet door that prostitutes were not allowed in the rooms.
"Will you be needing a woman later on tonight?"
"A message for you. From Phnom Penh," the manager said. AK absently noted the manager's English was quite good.. He wondered where he had
"No, no thanks." AK opened the door wide enough to take the message, and then closed the door.
"Who was it?" Seraph asked.
"The manager. A fax from Phnom Penh."
"Important?"
"No. Just a note from Caron Stone agreeing to write a chapter on Human Rights in Cambodia for our final report on the Yale Genocide Project. And telling me what me what a shit I am."
Oh?" Seraph's curiosity was piqued: her innate jealousy aroused. "Who pray tell is Caron Stone?"
"Just an acquaintance. A colleague."
"Is she pretty? And why would she think you a 'shit,' as you so crudely put it." Were all Americans this uncouth, she wondered.
"Attractive you might say, in a ballsy sort of a way. Militant feminist," he added as an afterthought. He changed the subject. "But let's talk about you."
"I just came by to wish you a happy birthday. The others have gone off to do what ever it is one does in hotel rooms." She was still feeling the deep blush from the two bottles of the excellent Chardonnay they had shared at dinner. She felt a bit low and lonely. "You did announce at dinner it was your birthday."
"Forty-seventh, I'm afraid. I feel as old as some of those monuments we saw today."
"Well, Professor Art Kilmer, from now on I'll call you 'AK 47.' Seraph smiled. "As one ruin to another, may I inquire if you enjoyed your first day at Angkor Wat?" "Very much so. In fact, I think I'll call you 'My Apsaras." It was AK's turn to grin, his memory cataloguing the day's viewing of the sensuous sandstone carvings of the Angkor kings' nubile semi-mythological pleasures.
Their visit to Angkor Wat contained something of a risk. The vast temple complexes- -on some sixty square kilometers--were guarded by Cambodian government soldiers with AK 47 weapons against possible infiltration by Khmer Rouge forces. The Maoist communist guerrillas were still fighting a low-level insurgency in the mountainous northern provinces against the ruling coalition and sometimes against themselves. They often sandaled silently through the jungle into the temple complexes under the cover of darkness and laid down fresh land mines and booby traps as fast as the Mine Advisory Group workers could uncover the ones planted in the '70s and '80s. They also were known to kidnap and kill foreign tourists on occasion for the world-wide publicity it afforded their bloody cause. While AK had gingerly sneakered over the stone slabs of Ta Prohm, a bored soldier on guard in the fragments of a courtyard had offered him his weapon for a rare picture opportunity. Seraph had snapped a framed shot of a fit but somewhat gaunt individual who evoked in her a faded image of a fated expeditionary force soldier with a gun in his hand. Ta Prohm temple, left by French and Japanese conservationists to the jungle, gives tourists some idea of what Angkor was like when the city, abandoned in 1432, was rediscovered in the 1860s by French Naturalist Henri Mouhot.
It is a mysterious place with an eerie underworld ambiance. The dense canopy of leaves above shields an intense sun during the dry season, and allows a pale greenish light to filter down on the exposed serpent-like roots of the trees below and on the figures of heraldic lions, hooded nagas, and grotesque demons that guard temple entrances. The structure, built as a monastery in 1186 by King Jayavarman VII for his mother, was once populated by more than seventy thousand people, among them eighteen abbots, almost three thousand monks, and some six hundred dancers.
Seraph Templeton had knocked at AK's door for an after-dinner drink because her horoscope that day had informed her she would celebrate a birthday in the evening with someone she admired. She immediately slipped off her sandals out of habit and, refusing AK's offer of the single armchair in the tiny room, settled at the base of it, her long shapely legs tucked up beneath her on the wood floor. She wore a red silk blouse, deep V at the neck with a glimpse of heaving lace beneath, and a long khaki safari dress. Her teak-colored hair was still shower damp. AK mixed Seraph and himself gin and tonics from the mini-bar, rejected the idea of sitting on the edge of the turned down bed as being too suggestive, and settled into the armchair. He took a long sip of his drink. "Sorry, no ice," he said. Then, after an awkward pause."God, you'd never know we're in the waning days of a Maoist revolution," he reflected. "The revolution in the forest, the French like to call it. The communists, the Vietnamese are going to win in the end. I'm sure of it. Hun Sen and the lot. "The Cambodian government," he continued, "is a Trojan Horse with Khmer Rouge guerrillas inside, a sort of defacto defector force. Some two million lives and three billion dollars have gone down the drain in this ideological struggle. And for what?" "Hey, he added as an afterthought, did you know that Shawcross, the author of Sideshow, was the son of Lord Shawcross, the chief British prosecutor at Nuremberg?"
"No," Seraph replied, her eyes riveted on the chest hairs exposed at the top of AK's shirt.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure. The U.S. dropped more than 500,000 tons of bombs on the Khmer people. Carpet bombing they called it. Hell, this country is no bigger than the State of Missouri. Will Nixon and Kissinger be in the dock if ever there's a judgment day? I think not. Nor will Pol Pot. Nor likely Ieng Sery. The revolution here in Cambodia has been significantly different from that in Russia and China, which were the result of class struggles. There is no class struggle today in Cambodia because the ruling class was completely annihilated early on." "You don't think King Sihanouk is the equivalent of a Czar? But come on m'Bobby. Don't be so serious. Forget the revolution. What thank you of today?" Seraph smiled, turning her freckled Scots' face up into AK's. She was feeling a bit tipsy. "I told you. I was really impressed with Ta Prohm. It was a great idea, coming here. And I like your odd assortment of friends," his voice trailed off. "You know I'm going to make love to you, don't you, if you stay here like this," AK whispered into her ear. Seraph, finishing her gin and tonic, gently removed her earrings and laid her tousled head in AK's lap, her lips parted in anticipation of the kiss she was certain would come, had been certain for some time. Their lips locked in exploration, urgent prolonged tongue probing. Then, an awkward shuffle to the bed, frantic shedding of clothes along the way, groping for breasts and penis, erotic soft-finger massage, at last rapturized by hard swollen sultry penetration and three, almost Shakespearean, climaxes. Naked bodies entwined, writhing, they dampened the freshly hand-washed sheets, their sweat-glistened bodies teased by the warm air stirred from overhead by the slowly whirring ceiling fan. "Once more for King Sihanouk," AK had urged her jokingly, at the point of near exhaustion himself. He was vaguely aware that he had not used a condom: she of spreading the AIDS virus.
