Cambodian Book of the Dead Read Online Free

and lived with, had wolfed down the organs in the belief that they were ingesting their enemies’ souls, as their victims had watched, holding their eviscerated stomachs, slowly bleeding to death. Just one of a myriad of reasons why the dead could never rest and the country was beset by ghosts and demons, some of them his very own.
    â€œDo you live in Phnom Penh, sir?” the young stewardess asked him, as she, with her best bit of barely trained elegance, which was breathtaking, placed a small carton, in which Maier could see an old-looking biscuit and an overripe banana, covered in cling film, next to his empty plastic glass.
    â€œNo, I am on holiday.”
    â€œAnother drink perhaps?”
    Maier hesitated for a second, and then opened his eyes wide enough to guess his thoughts.
    â€œVodka orange?”
    The stewardess’s gaze dropped to the floor of the aisle before she rushed off.
    A strange case. A case without a crime.
    The detective let the one and only conversation he’d had with his client run through his head once more.
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    â€œI want you to visit my son and find out what he is up to. You have to understand that Rolf is the black sheep of the Müller-Overbeck family,” she had said without greeting or introduction. Her voice had been dead flat.
    Mrs Müller-Overbeck, whose husband, a man who could trace his north-German ancestry back for several centuries and who had made his fortune with the first post-war coffee empire in the Bundesrepublik , had shot him a nervous, imperious glance. Ice cold and in her mid-sixties. Just like her gigantic villa in Blankenese, built by some Nazi before the war. With a haircut that could have dried out an igloo – silver, stiff and expensive – the woman had simply looked ridiculously affluent. What the rich thought of as low key. The skirt, fashionable and a touch too tight, and the blouse, uniquely ruffled, and finally the many thin gold bracelets dangling from her pale right wrist, almost loud like trophies, had not helped. Yet his client had not projected properly. There’d been something unscripted in her performance, which Maier had supposed to be the reason for his presence in the Müller-Overbeck universe. She’d been agitated. It was hard to be ice-cold and agitated at the same time. How did the Americans say? It was lonely at the top. Life was a lottery. Maier had instinctively understood that this woman’s expectations of service were in the rapacious to unreasonable bracket.
    â€œYou know the country?”
    â€œI am the expert for Asia at Sundermann’s. And I worked in Cambodia as a war correspondent for dpa.”
    Mrs Müller-Overbeck had winced. “There is war over there? Rolf is caught up in a war? I thought he ran some kind of business for tourists there?”
    â€œThe war finished in 1998. The country is currently being rebuilt.”
    Listening had not been one of the strengths of Hamburg’s coffee queen. Another reason for Maier to say as little as possible.
    â€œI do not understand why he wanted to go there. To a country at war. I can remember the post-war years in Germany all too well. I don’t understand why he would want to go and look at the suffering of others. But Rolf has always been difficult. An A in English and an F in Maths, everything had to be extreme… Of course the family is hoping that he will come back and take over the reins.”
    She hadn’t offered Maier a drink. Not even a promotional gift, a politically correct cup from Nicaragua perhaps. He pondered whether she ever drank coffee. She had seemed a woman who had never done anything that involved the acceleration of the inevitable ageing process.
    â€œYou will find him and watch him. I am paying your usual rate for two weeks. Then you will call me. And I will, on the basis of your meticulously detailed and inclusive report, which you will have sent me by email, prior to our call of course, decide