The Deceivers Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  New York

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Phnom Penh

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Vietnam

  Chapter 45

  New York

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Life Imitating Fiction

  Teaser

  Prologue

  Forge Books by Harold Robbins

  Praise for Harold Robbins

  Copyright

  For Matt Cimber

  Acknowledgments

  Many people helped bring this book to fruition. They include: Jann Robbins, Hildegard Krische, Robert Gleason, Eric Raab, Melissa Frain, Elizabeth Winick, and Nancy Wiesenfeld.

  Harold Robbins

  left behind a rich heritage of novel ideas and works in progress when he passed away in 1997. Harold Robbins’ estate and his editor worked with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Harold Robbins’ ideas to create this novel, inspired by his storytelling brilliance, in a manner faithful to the Robbins style.

  A darkness will settle on the people of Cambodia. There will be houses, but no people in them, roads but no travelers; the land will be ruled by barbarians with no religion; blood will run so deep as to touch the belly of the elephant. Only the deaf and the mute will survive.

  —ANCIENT CAMBODIAN PROPHECY (Nic Dunlop, The Lost Executioner: A Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields)

  1

  Phnom Penh, Cambodia

  My name’s Madison Dupre, people call me Maddy, but Your name is Mud pounded in my head like a bad rap beat. I hadn’t heard the taunt since I was a little girl. It came back now as I sloshed in dirty water above my ankles down a dark street, worrying over the fact that I just killed someone.

  I was in a strange city, one that made the list of the world’s most dangerous places. No one would believe me if I told them I had only fought back. The thought of dealing with the police just added to my fears. In this small, poor country, police were not here to “protect and serve.” They had a gun in one hand and held the other out for a bribe. And I didn’t have the money to buy my way out of a murder charge.

  Hell of a day, Mud. You sure know how to have fun.

  If I was at home in New York sitting on a couch with a glass of Merlot, I would have had a lot of different emotions spiking through me like electric shocks. After all, I never killed anyone before. But cohesive thoughts about what I’d done didn’t gel. I just kept pushing them to the back of my mind. The man was a pig, for sure. Someone tough like Tony Soprano would have said he got what he deserved. But I’m not tough.

  Why me, Lord?

  Things went to hell at a place I never should have been, but desperation makes you do crazy things. We all have that panic button in us, a point where even the most timid of us will explode with fear and strike back.

  I was scared. And wet. Really scared, really wet. Rain didn’t drizzle and pour in Cambodia—it exploded from the sky. I was grateful that it washed the blood off my poncho and let me hide under it. Right now I needed that anonymity. For sure, I’d be spotted as a Westerner from the color of my skin, but Phnom Penh—pa-nom-pen is how I pronounced it—had a regular colony of free-living, free-loving, free-drugging young Westerners from places like Phoenix, Sydney, and London hanging about. When you leave your own country to live in a foreign one, they called you an “expat” for expatriate. Freewheeling Cambodia, where any kind of sex can be bought, called them “sexpats.”

  That’s what the bastard was who I killed, a sexpat who preyed on children.

  I’m a thirty-something businesswoman, an expert on antiquities from New York, in town on business. Dirty business, though not of my making. I’d been sent undercover to get information on criminals who looted antiquity sites even though I’m not a cop or even a detective—just an art expert who ended up in a city that was a pit stop before hell because I was too broke to turn down a dangerous job.

  It wasn’t long ago that I’d had it all—a high-paying job, a Manhattan penthouse with a closet full of Jimmy Choo shoes and Versace dresses, jewels from Harry Winston’s on Fifth Avenue. Then I’d lost it all. That’s why I was walking in the rain in pa-nom-pen with blood on my hands …

  They say you should never shop for food when you’re hungry because you’ll pick up things on impulse. The same thing could be said about taking a dangerous job when you were broke.

  I came to the Cambodian capital to resurrect my life, to get back to where I was before I fell from grace with the haughty world of priceless antiquities, to redeem my reputation—and bank account—with a feat that would stop antiquity looting from this small, poor third world country in the Far East.

  But all my good intentions won’t buy me out of a murder charge.

  My feet kept moving faster than my mind as I sloshed in the dirty water. When it rained like this, the gutters overflowed and brought garbage and other foul things onto the sidewalks. And there was plenty of stuff in the gutters to float out. It was a tough town, a dirty, sullied one, not user-friendly, with a history of violence few cities could equal.

  The most lasting impression of the city was illicit sex—it came in all varieties here, from two-dollar whores past their prime at twenty, to thirteen-year-olds who supplemented family income by spreading their legs for tourists who came halfway around the world to stick their cocks in places they’d do twenty-to-life for Stateside.

  The city sported old-fashioned whorehouses, go-go bars with pole dancers, “date” bars with lap dancers, blow job bars with knee dancing, and a city dump where the scavenger families were so poor, a certain type of man could buy a child to do things considered unimaginable by sane people.

  Like I said, Phnom Penh wasn’t a nice place.

  The whole region was also a mass of startling conflicts: Indochina—countries like Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam—had some of the world’s most conservative social c
ustoms. It included a tradition that women wear conventional clothing, appear modest and demure, with a taboo on showing romantic affection between the sexes in public.

  But those old-fashioned traditions were combined with some of the most beautiful women on the planet being available for hire for almost any imaginable sex act, involving any bodily orifice, usually for an amount of money most Americans called chump change and Cambodians called salvation.

  While America had abandoned cowboys for astronauts as heroes after Star Wars, the Old West was hot stuff here where go-go bars often had names like Dodge City and Roundup Club, and featured thong-wearing pole dancers with cowboy boots who were able to shoot Ping-Pong balls out of their vaginas.

  Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path to enlightenment—right views, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right-mindedness, and right contemplation—was practiced Cambodian style side by side with banditry, lawlessness, civil war, and endless varieties of illicit sex, some of which involved young girls who should have been in classrooms rather than back rooms.

  With the endless varieties of sex available, household pets probably even got into the act.

  Violence and political turbulence were also not strangers to the city. It wasn’t uncommon to see men in battle dress, packing AK47s, swagger out of two-dollar whorehouses as serene Buddhist monks carrying begging bowls flowed by in their red- and saffron-colored robes.

  * * *

  AHEAD, TWO CITY policemen huddled under a portico as they smoked and jabbered with prostitutes. I tried not to look away, but kept my chin up and eyes straight ahead. The thought of being locked up in a Cambodian jail terrified me. If the city was a pit stop before hell, a prison here must be frightening enough to raise the hair on my soul. I began trembling despite the warmth of the monsoon rain.

  A moto driver rolled by me with a passenger. Motos were a modern version of a rickshaw—they looked like a wheelchair being pushed by a small motorcycle. He stopped in front of a hostess bar and let off his passenger.

  As I approached, the driver asked me, “Cowboy, you want girl for boom-boom?”

  I pulled back the poncho hood enough so he could see I was a woman. “No boom-boom. I need a ride.” I climbed into the passenger chair.

  “Where you go?” he asked.

  “Take me to the quay.”

  The river quay was a five-minute ride halfway to my hotel. It would give me a chance to think. I needed a plane ticket out of this nightmare, but I couldn’t get on a plane without a passport and it was back at my hotel.

  I didn’t feel safe going directly back to the hotel because it was the first place the police would go if they were looking for me. The quay was the restaurant and tourist nightlife area of the city. I could slip into a restroom there and clean up any blood left on me. Then drive by the hotel in a regular taxi and see if a police car was outside. If it was clear, I could dash in and get my passport from the front desk and make a run for the airport. I wouldn’t even go to my room to pack. Just leave it.

  Jesus. My mind wasn’t geared up to deal with this. It all sounded so complicated. And scary. What would I do if the police were already at my hotel? I had no place to go, nowhere to hide.

  One foot in front of the other. That was how I took tough times; I just kept moving forward, putting one foot in front of the other, not looking back for fear the hounds of hell were yapping at my heels. My biggest regret whenever I felt miserable was not being rich—the rich weren’t any happier than the rest of us, but at least they could afford to choose their miseries. Or buy their way out of them.

  Police cars ahead had parked sideways in the street, creating a roadblock. All traffic was being stopped.

  They found the body?

  “Pull over, I’m getting off.” I had to tell the driver twice before he understood.

  He started yapping about the fare. I pulled dollar bills out of my pocket and gave them to him and hurried away. American dollars were more welcome than Cambodian currency.

  Another police car came down the street behind me.

  I was in front of a boom-boom joint with large plate-glass windows that showcased provocatively dressed women and girls lounging on couches. A pulsating lipstick red sign flashed “La Petite Khmer.” Khmer was the ancient name of the Cambodian people.

  I took a deep breath and stepped into the whorehouse.

  2

  I was immediately assaulted by the warm scent of sweet tropical fruit—apparently the perfume of choice.

  Brightly lit, the room had flashy neon signs of palm trees, coconuts, and posters of hula girls on the walls. How the Hawaiian posters made it from Honolulu to the wall of a whorehouse in Phnom Penh surely was a tale to be told.

  The walls were stark white and so were the couches—when the sun was up, you’d need sunglasses to navigate the room. I’m sure no one thought about the fact that white was the color of purity.

  Petite young women wearing bright pastel shorts and tops glittering with red sequin trim lounged on the snow white couches and looked like Christmas ornaments from an “Adults Only” store.

  My movie perception of what a house of prostitution should look like included crystal chandeliers, round red velvet couches, and erotic women in elegant evening dresses. This place was a faked orgasm—stark commercialism under racks of white lights that exposed its dark heart, cheap sex, and not a few roaches.

  The “girls”—a generic word for prostitutes of any age—were all chips off the same block. None looked over thirty to me and most appeared to be in their late teens to early twenties. Some wore short-shorts with bras and spiked heels; others, cowboy boots and light cotton skirts that barely covered their crotch area.

  I instantly felt sorry for them. When I saw people who were downtrodden for reasons out of their control, a phrase my mother often used would come to me: But for the Grace of God go any of us.

  A matron with a big cheesy smile as sincere as a time-share salesman welcomed me.

  “Come, come, come, everyone welcome. Have beautiful partner for you.”

  She made a grand, sweeping hand gesture at the roomful of young women who stared at me with limp eyes and professional smiles.

  “Boom-boom for short time, boom-boom for long time, very good boom-boom—”

  “No boom-boom.” I nodded at a sign that advertised massages. “A massage, I want a massage.”

  “Good massage.” She gestured at a girl dressed in bra and shorts with lacy frill and black patent spike heels. “Boom-boom for short—”

  “A massage. I’m in a hurry.”

  What I wanted was out of the bright room with its large windows facing the street and into a back room where I could hide.

  The matron waved us toward a door down the hallway. “Good massage. Boom-boom, too.”

  Her English was obviously limited to what was necessary for the business at hand.

  I followed the girl down a hallway and into a room that was low budget basic: a double bed, a Chinese screen with a towel tossed over it, a small wood basin with a pitcher of water beside it. Too bare and plain even for a Motel 6.

  A curtained window faced the street. I pushed the drape apart just enough to get a look outside. Two police officers on foot, maybe the ones I’d seen earlier, stood by a police car stopped in the middle of the street and were talking to the driver.

  I hoped I wasn’t the subject of their conversation.

  I turned around and found the girl had removed her bra to expose small, erect mounds of breasts.

  She couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen. No doubt a “mature woman” in her occupation considering that the country was notorious for having prostitutes in their early teens.

  She stared at me, uneasy, her features passive, but her eyes wondering. I wasn’t acting like a typical customer. Besides men, straight and lesbian women also came to Phnom Penh looking for action, paying for sex when they failed to hook up with other tourists who were birds of a feat
her, but their body language didn’t have the hunted animal look that I had.

  “Boom-boom” with a woman may have just been another paying customer in a day’s work for this girl.

  “Boom-boom?” the girl asked.

  I shook my head and made like I was rubbing myself. “Massage.”

  The girl pointed at the white towel draped over a Chinese screen. I needed to get the massage or the girl would get suspicious. I stepped behind the screen and disrobed and wrapped the towel around me. The towel was thin but looked reasonably clean.

  Knowing I needed to keep the girl on my side since I was acting strange, I took a twenty-dollar bill out of my handbag and gave it to her.

  “Good massage,” I said.

  She nodded at a sign on the wall and rattled off something in Cambodian. It had the word “massage” in big letters and words in smaller print underneath. I gave it a quick glance but my first concern was the sheet on the bed. It looked reasonably clean, no stains that hinted at recent activity. I still didn’t like the idea of lying on it but it was better than going back outside.

  Lying facedown, I left the towel draped over my bottom half and kept my handbag beside me.

  I twisted to tell her to go ahead and found she’d taken off her shoes and was slipping out of her shorts, leaving only a thin thong that barely covered her pubic area.

  “We have a communications problem,” I said.

  She gave me another puzzled look.

  I rubbed my side. “Just massage. No boom-boom.”

  She nodded but I had no idea if she understood. I wondered if she knew how to give a therapeutic massage … or only the kind that men got off on.

  I raised up enough to pantomime again, rubbing myself. “You understand, massage.”

  The girl nodded vigorously and said something again that I didn’t understand. She gestured at the sign on the wall again.

  “Yes, good massage,” I said.

  I forced myself to lie still, resisting the urge to run to the window and peek out or stick my head out the door to see if the police were coming down the hallway. As her hands touched my skin, my tense muscles contracted with spasms.