Brigits_Flame April Entry 04 - Reap
The Night Market in Siem Reap is wreathed with snakes in jars. They seem to wriggle as Wally runs past the stalls. The vendors call out, but he scarcely hears them.
“Hey-mister-hey-mister, get your cobra wine! Get your cobra wine and please your lady tonight!”
“Fresh caw, mister! Fall-apart pork! Creamy egg! Luscious broth! The finest in Angkor!”
Wallace Sternberg’s stomach churns with anxiety and two shots of snake liquor. Cambodia at night is a sticky heat, and the short jacket he has worn to disguise his shoulder holster now seems a sweatily poor idea. Why would you send a white guy from St. Paul to Cambodia anyway? He is undoubtedly the worst spy in the hemisphere, he decides. His superiors must want him dead.
A shot rings out by his head and shatters a jar of cobra wine. Someone wants him dead. Time to pick up the speed, Wally. He leans into his run and begins to sprint, zig-zagging between vendors. Someone crashes into the requisite fruit cart. “Watch where you’re going!”
But Wally was watching where he was headed - very carefully, in fact. The pot-shots grow more and more frequent as he reaches nearer and nearer to his mark: Ouch Channary, the Moon-Faced Pain-Maiden, the Khmer Khmeanie, the Knasty Knitter, the greatest heroin lord in the Golden Triangle. They call her the Poisoned Spider, too, for she is always embroidering, knitting, and crocheting, with needles and hooked dipped in powerful sedatives, to forever be protected while appearing innocent. Her sewer lair lay just ahead, behind either the stand that sold the soup called kurytheav and the curried fish called amok trey. Wally decides to run amok.
There were snipers on the rooftops, but, Wally reasons, they couldn’t shoot at you if you were underground. So he unholsters his weapon, gives a terrifying Minnesota yowl, and hurls himself onto a thatched mat that acted as a manhole cover. He falls right through, and lands, arms outstretched, on a human form. A living human form. Ouch Channary, in fact.
“Um,” he says. “Hi.”
But she does not answer, for Wally has fallen on such her in such a way that she has pricked herself with her embroidery needle. She stares at him, bugs out her eyes, gurgles, and falls over, unconscious.
Wally radios for back-up and for a helicopter extraction. Later, in the looming dawn, with a high-profile capture and a cup of warm rice wine behind him, the thought occurs to him, and it shortly makes its way back to Langley:
You Siem Reap what you sew.
Augh.