Hunters in the Dark by Lawrence Osborne

went to the window and looked down into Kampuchea Krom. Tired and stoic trees withered up in the last hour of sun before the rain hit the city. The traffic went by in a curious silence. Behind a blue grille on a rooftop a woman sat combing out her wet hair. He sat on the bed in a state of vast emptiness and relief and took off the clothes that were not his and looked at the back of the collar and the inside of the linen trousers. Were they not Simon’s clothes, pretty obviously? They did not quite fit and Simon had been wearing the same kind of thing. The labels were of a tailor in Phnom Penh, a place called Vong. They were Simon’s clothes all right, they even smelled of a stranger. The gesture was strange and murky and he could not think it through even now. There was the money, and this was merely a better way of getting rid of him than killing him.
    He lay back on the stiff bed and smiled at the thought of Simon and his slender girl trying to kill him. Obviously this was better. And they would not have had the nerve to kill him. No normal person ever had the nerve. And yet it was also possible that Simon had given him a backhanded gift in the light of their conversation the previous night. He had read Robert quite cannily, and he had surely sensed that the Englishman would not protest too much. He would not come back looking for his things, not even for his passport. It was an incredible game, sending him off naked into the world like that, but he had intuited that Robert would survive and make the best of it. People lost their passports all the time, it was never the end of the world. He would not, Simon had guessed, even go to the British embassy in a hurry and make a declaration, and if he did they would just give him a new one. It was difficult to see what difference it would make. But alternatively, he could go find himself a false one. They were easy to procure from the city’s army of forgers. And in fact he was thinking about it already. He was thinking how he would step, lightly, into someone else’s life.
    But what life had Simon led here? Exhausted, he lay naked on the bed and turned on the TV set and watched a program about outer space that was all in Khmer. He could tell that it was about some tiny distant blue planet which had just been discovered a few months earlier, a place where it rained shards of glass all day long and where the nights lasted barely thirty minutes. He dozed. The sounds of the hotel drifted down into his consciousness. The girls shuffling in nighties and hot pants from floor to floor, the Khmer pop music, the men coughing on their way out and flinging the spit in the back of their throats. The daily thunder rolled in with a generous laziness and the trees shimmered with lightning, spreading a subtle panic through the street below. He was easily refreshed. When he was up, he felt confident again and he shaved with the hotel’s plastic razor and put his expensive clothes back on after a cold shower. The air-conditioner barely kept the grit-filled heat at bay but he no longer felt hot. He thought he would go out and find an Internet café and maybe something to eat as well. It was going to rain then, but rain never hurt a man.
    He went down by the stairs, landing by landing. In the street the rain came down in terrible sheets, the drivers outside cowering at the edge of the lobby. There was a soft surprise in their faces.
    He found a motodop and told the driver to take him to an Internet café. They set off through the downpour and he let go of any remaining apprehension about staying dry. They drove down Kampuchea Krom until they crossed Monivong, and then they had reached a street called Pasteur, passing clubs with names like Shanghai and Flamingoes and bars stirring into nocturnal life with a laziness that gave them a natural and inevitable force.
    In the thunderous rain the neon had a frosted, childish quality. They passed the Sorya Mall, a ground-floor open space filled with bars