The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot

by Colin Cotterill

  Standing on the uneven pavement was a scrawny man dressed as a farmer but wearing a splendid post office helmet from the old regime. He never entered the restaurant unless invited by Siri himself.

  “Comrade Ging,” said Siri. “I’ve told you, you really don’t have to get permission to go inside.”

  “Oh, I’m not here for food,” said Ging as always. “Just doing my duty delivering mail. Officials of the Lao Postal Service do not request or expect remuneration for doing something of which we are proud.”

  There was no mail delivery service in Laos. Letters were either sent to post office boxes or to a large poste restante sack, much of the contents of which would never be claimed. There were as many postal workers slitting open and censoring mail as there were selling stamps, and customers could never be sure of what subversive material their mail contained. Comrade Ging sold stamps. But on his breaks and after work he would don his helmet, wrap a homemade post office armband around his boney bicep, and deliver unopened mail to residents he knew would show their gratitude. Madam Daeng’s noodle shop was one such place.

  “Do you have something for us?” Siri asked.

  “I do.” Ging smiled, reached into his back sack, and pulled out a parcel the size and shape of an Omo washing powder packet. He nodded and handed it to Siri. “And with that, I’ll be on my way.”

  Siri was tempted to let him go but he knew his wife would berate him for doing so. And it was nice to have mail delivered.

  “Perhaps you’d be kind enough to join us for a meal,” said Siri.

  “I . . . I don’t think I’ll have time.”

  “Madam Daeng would be pleased if you could spare a few minutes.”

  “Well, I . . . All right, then. To keep Madam Daeng happy,” said the man, walking triumphantly into the restaurant. He removed his helmet and found an empty stool. Mr. Geung welcomed him by name and Geung’s wife, Tukta, served him without asking what he wanted. In fact, after forty years in the postal service, all he really wanted was respect.

  “What’s that?” Daeng asked her husband. She was bent over the noodle trough. The steam wafted around her like a dream sequence but she never seemed to work up a sweat.

  “Parcel,” said Siri, heading for the stairs.

  Daeng could have repeated her question but a simple eyebrow raise stopped him in his tracks.

  “Feels like a book,” said Siri. “Heavy. Ging just dropped it off.”

  “That’s very nice for you,” said Daeng, ladling out four bowls with the deftness of a conjurer. “But don’t you think our customers could use a bit of maître-d’ing?”

  “Darling, your noodles sell themselves. They don’t need promoting.”

  “After a day of dealing with bureaucracy our customers appreciate a little sympathy and a few laughs. We aren’t just a noodle shop. We’re a wellness agency and you are the doctor of compassion.”

  “But I . . .”

  “The book can wait.”

  The book waited until 8 p.m., when the customers had all returned to their overcrowded homes, the tables were cleared and clean, and Mr. Geung and Tukta were back in their room talking to the baby that wouldn’t be born for another six months. Everyone was aware that the odds were stacked against a woman with Down syndrome producing a healthy child. And when the father also had Down syndrome those odds tumbled into infinity. But, like Dr. Siri, Geung had friends in other dimensions and he’d been shown their daughter in a dream. Geung said she looked a little like Sarinthip Siriwan. Siri pointed out that it would be a most difficult birth considering the size of the Thai actress. The couple laughed at that for a week.

  “So, are you going to open it?” Daeng asked.

  “I was wondering what the chances are that it’s a bomb,” said Siri.

  They were sitting on the riverbank sipping their after-noodle rice whisky cocktails. The lights of Sri Chiang Mai on the Thai side were all out; probably another power cut. The Thais were renowned for creative wiring. So, with the moon yet to make an appearance, the darkness was thick: like staring out over a landscape of tar. Daeng got to her feet.

  “Where are you going?” Siri asked.

  “You don’t expect me to sit beside you if it’s a bomb, do you?”

  “I don’t know. It could be romantic, splattered across the Mekong together, our parts floating side by side to Cambodia.”

  “There’s nothing romantic about dismemberment, Siri. I’m off to the ladies’ room. You can open it while I’m gone. I’ll listen for the bang.”

  Guided by the single lamp in the shop behind her, she scampered up the bank. Not bad for a seventy-year-old. Siri took his penlight out of his top pocket and held it between his teeth—teeth that he could still proudly call his own, all thirty-three of them. From the same pocket he removed a Soviet army knife and flicked open a blade. He sliced through layers of thick masking tape and removed an inner skin of brown paper. Inside that was a plastic bag followed by several layers of Thai newspaper and another plastic bag, all taped securely.

  When Daeng returned, Siri was sitting in a pile of assorted wrappings, holding a somewhat smaller parcel in his hands.

  “We used to play that when we were children,” she said.

  “Play what?”

  “You give someone a gift and by the time they’ve unwrapped it there’s nothing inside.”

  “How cruel you were,” said Siri. “No, I feel I’m almost down to the meat. Just one more layer of tissue paper and . . . there.”

  At last he found what was most certainly a book of some kind. The cover was made of a sort of skin; leather perhaps. It was dotted with a dark mold and smelled rancid. He opened it carefully but all he found were blank pages.

  “Hmm,” he said. “That’s odd.”

  He turned the book to what should have been the back and there on the rear cover were two small Chinese-looking initials branded onto the skin. He opened it to the back pages, where he was met by line after line of neat handwritten text.

  “Chinese?” said Daeng.

  “Japanese.”

  “Can you read it?”

  “I’m afraid not. I picked up the numbers when we were in the underground and the Japanese were threatening to invade. Thought it might be useful for recognizing times and dates in captured documents. But I didn’t get around to the letters. They don’t use the same date system as us. It starts with the reign of the current emperor and that began in . . . 1926. So the number here is probably Showa Eleven. I’m assuming this is a diary and it starts in 1937.”

  “And there I was thinking I only married you for your body.”

  “It’s a two-for-the-price-of-one package, Daeng. No extra cost for the genius.”

  “So, 1937? Japan’s at war with China,” said Daeng.

  “This starts July seventh.”

  “Stop showing off.”

  Siri flipped through the pages, right to left.

  “It’s beautifully penned,” he said. “Someone’s obviously put their heart into it. Every page neat and precise. Not a crossing-out or a smudge; not so much as a wine stain. There’s a week or two between each entry. And it looks like the writing gets more confident. Much stronger. It’s as if the writer’s gouging the ink into the paper. And I . . .”

  “What?”

  “Daeng. Look at this.”

  She leaned over the page.

  “Well, I’ll be,” she said.

  The Japanese text ended halfway down the page and was replaced with the date 12/30/1940, in Western numerals, and the Lao sentence My name is Kangen Toshimado (咸元利圓). The Lao lettering was childish but it was legible, and to Siri’s eyes, it seemed to introduce a sudden burst of fun: a hibiscus sprouting suddenly in a cabbage patch.

  “Our Comrade Toshimado’s learning Lao,” said Daeng.

  Siri turned the page and there was Toshi
mado agreeing with her.

  I am studying Lao, he wrote.

  A week or two had passed in diary time but he’d obviously been practicing his lettering. Daeng turned the page and read the entry for 1/6/1941.

  I am Japanese. I am a major in the Imperial Army of Japan. I am thirty-four years old. My friends call me Toshi.

  With every page they turned, the Lao language seemed to spread like a virus over the paper. On 1/24/1941 he attempted his first full page. There were mistakes here and there but they all suggested that Toshi was enjoying his journey through this new language. He wrote about traveling across the Lao countryside with his friend and eating and drinking local delicacies. He threw it all down on the page, hang the consequences. Suddenly, after three years of beautiful but disciplined Japanese text, his words had flamboyance.

  The penlight was made in China so neither of them was surprised when the feeble beam gave up the ghost. It was a sign of the times. Soviet donations were ugly and almost indestructible. Chinese donations looked like the originals but didn’t work, yet the donors still believed the third world should be grateful.

  “Let’s go inside and read some more,” said Daeng.

  “A riddle first,” said Siri. “Why do you think someone would send me the diary of a Japanese soldier?”

  “Because they knew you were desperate for reading material?”

  “I admit it will be fun to read but they’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get this to me in one piece. My guess is that there has to be a point.”

  “You sure there isn’t a letter in there?”

  “I didn’t look.”

  He held up the diary by the spine and, recklessly, fanned through the pages. At first nothing happened. Then a single page came loose. It was caught briefly in the lamplight from the shop as it surfed a breeze. It was almost impossible to follow its course but it was clear to both of them that it was headed in the direction of the river. Before it could hit the water it was out of sight.

  Dr. Siri and Mr. Geung arrived at the morgue just before the sun rose. They’d both held on to their keys for old times’ sake. The place didn’t get a great deal of use. It wasn’t that people were no longer dying, rather that decisions were made at higher levels as to whether anyone really needed to know how or why. As in all good socialist states, the mechanism of secrecy was the most oiled. Mr. Geung pulled out the sliding tray and was delighted to see that Comrade Thinh’s nose mustache had grown a good two centimeters since his last visit. But, to their unrelenting surprise, the hair on Thinh’s head was also considerably longer and the finger- and toenails had begun to curl into claws. It defied all logic but this was a mystery that would have to wait. Their purpose for visiting the morgue was to find answers to more earthly questions. They lifted the body onto the cutting table and removed the sheet. It served no purpose other than modesty and Comrade Thinh really had nothing to be modest about.

  “You see, boy,” said Siri. “If you have enough money, women can forgive the smallest of transgressions.”

  Geung snorted.

  “Perhaps it w-w-was too cold in the freezer,” he said.

  “A chicken doesn’t become a sparrow after a night in the icebox,” said Siri.

  “You’re speaking ill of-of the dead.”

  “I know. And I’m sure he’ll make me regret it when he gets to the otherworld. But first, to work. What do you see here?”

  “Broken bones,” said Geung.

  “Many?”

  “Left arm three places, shhhhoulder, both legs, ankles, ribs, and probably more.”

  “Good. All consistent with falling onto rocks from a cliff. See anything inconsistent?”

  Geung looked at the doctor querulously.

  “I . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I have D-d-down syndrome.”

  “So?” said Siri. “That doesn’t make you an idiot.”

  “I don’t have . . . I-I-I’m not qualified.”

  “Nonsense. How many times have you sat in on our autopsies?”

  “Forty-seven.”

  “Right. And there I was thinking it was a rhetorical question. Just take a look at our friend here and tell me what your gut says.”

  “It says ‘Grrrr’ sometimes.”

  Geung laughed. Siri slapped his friend’s forehead playfully.

  “Hilarious,” said Siri. “Sadly, we don’t have time for comedy. The security people will be here soon to throw us out. Tell me what you see.”

  Mr. Geung ran his eyes over the body like a scanner passing over a document. He flipped over the corpse and scanned what Nurse Dtui referred to as the B side. He looked up at Siri and shook his head. Siri gestured for him to continue. Geung lifted the arm. It folded in places arms had no right to fold. He took hold of the hand, turned down the palm, and looked surprised. He went to the other side of the table and checked the back of the left hand.

  “You see it?” said Siri.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Scratches. On the backs of the hands.”

  “But not the palms,” said Siri. “But if you’re repelling an attack or falling, it’s instinctive to hold out your palms in front of you. It doesn’t do any damned good from two hundred meters, but we aren’t really programmed from birth to fall from a cliff. And, even if you land on bushes, you’re probably dead already and you don’t have any more chance to bleed. These scratches are caked in congealed blood. My guess is they occurred before the fall.”

  “But how?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that, Geung. Here’s our experienced hiker. He’s been to the cliffs many times before. A happy man. He takes a pretty girl to a scenic spot. They drink some wine. No stress. Next thing you know he’s free-falling to the rocks below. I have just one explanation.”

  Siri stood at the head of the table and ran his fingers through the victim’s thickening hair.

  “I thought so,” he said. “Geung, come and feel this.”

  Geung hurried over to complete his test. He, too, ran his fingers across the scalp. At first he didn’t feel anything, but then . . .

  “Yes,” he said.

  And when Geung extracted his fingers he looked at his own hand and shared a Eureka moment with the doctor. His expression went from monochrome to full-screen Technicolor. Under the nail of his index finger was a tiny piece of evidence that explained the whole damned thing.

  10/2/1943

  Hello my love. How are you? I miss you and the children. I have grown a small beard since you last saw me, and I look like a goat. But do not expect milk from me. I am back at the Chinese border in Lang Son on a mission. I have confirmed that our treasure is safe. I am not surprised they didn’t discover it. It was officially buried under a mountain of documents. I have found a way to transport it to you through the tunnel of love. Do not be surprised when you see it. I shall be home soon. Do not worry about me.

  “How did you rescue it from the river?” Phosy asked.

  “It didn’t make it that far,” said Daeng. “We have a guardian angel, don’t forget.”

  “Crazy Rajhid?” said Dtui.

  Daeng smiled. Rajhid, the occasionally mad Indian, lived on the riverbank, where he climbed trees, impersonated frogs, and swam naked, mostly at night.

  “We can’t get any privacy,” said Siri. “Madam Daeng and I go down to the riverbank often . . .”

  “To catch clams,” said Daeng, smiling.

  “But we can never be sure of any personal moments because he’s always there,” said Siri. “Or at least the threat of him being there is always hanging over us.”

  “He has saved our lives on more than one occasion,” Daeng reminded him.

  “Which is the only reason I don’t shoot him,” said Siri.

  “And he did rescue your loose diary page,” said Dtui. “Wha
t do you make of it?”

  Nurse Dtui was walking around the restaurant with her little daughter, Malee. The tables were skyscrapers and the aisles were streets. In this game, Malee was blind for some reason and her mother was a guide dog. Dtui was certain her daughter would be a novelist when she grew up.

  “We haven’t read the whole thing yet,” said Daeng.

  “And half of it’s in Japanese,” said Siri. “But we’re plodding through the Lao. Cross-referencing events in the diary with events during the Japanese occupation.”

  “The page you just read was obviously cut from the diary with a sharp blade,” said Daeng. “We assume it was important for some reason. There was a short message stapled to it. It said, ‘Dr. Siri, we need your help urgently.’ Grammatically correct but untidy, probably not written by a native Lao.”

  “What are you planning to do?” asked Phosy.

  “Nothing until I’ve read the whole diary,” said Siri.

  “And he’s painfully slow,” said Daeng.

  “One sips at a fine wine, my dear,” said Siri.

  “And in the meantime, we won’t know who sent us the diary, who needs help, or what help he or she needs,” said Daeng.

  “If it’s from Toshi himself, he’d be about your age now, Siri,” said Phosy. “He might be one of those fanatical Japanese soldiers that hang out in the jungle for thirty years after the war ends, refusing to surrender. When’s the last date in the diary?”

  “August fourteenth, 1945,” said Daeng. “It was the day before the Japanese Emperor’s notice of surrender was broadcast.”

  “And what did he write on that day?” Dtui asked, a little dizzy from her guide-dogging laps.

  “Dtui, I’m disappointed in you, really,” said Siri. “I only folded over the corner to see the date. Do I look like the type of person who would skip to the last page of a story?”

  “Well, yes, you look like exactly that type, especially if it solves the mystery of why he’s writing to you.”