The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot

by Colin Cotterill

  Siri and Beer were back in Thakhek by midafternoon. They banked the boat and went off in search of a woman by the name of An who had worked with the Japanese as a translator during the war. Every day, Beer surprised Siri with one more witness to the occupation. It appeared the Japanese had had an interpreter whose name was Miura. He was fluent in French. An, a Lao-Vietnamese, was also fluent in French and her own native languages. According to Beer, the Japanese were awful language learners. He cited the curse of not wanting to make mistakes. They were not prepared to go through that elementary stage of unavoidable stupidity that successful language learners endure. This, plus a belief that the rest of the world would soon be speaking Japanese, led to the remarkable statistic that 95 percent of dealings between the Japanese and the French passed through that narrow portal of Miura-san. To Siri that seemed like a relationship doomed from the outset. The Japanese officers coached in xenophobia from childhood would never really trust a Japanese who had been so enamored of the West as to learn its language and culture. They would view him as defective. But what concerned Siri more was why the Japanese did not utilize Toshi’s language skills. He had mastered Lao. He would have stood out in a Lao town as the only Japanese who could speak directly to the locals. Was he being circumspect and keeping his ability a secret? Perhaps he had seen how foreign language skills had turned the occupiers against Miura and he didn’t want to damage his friendships with his workmates.

  Siri had agreed to meet An in the area of scrubland at the foot of the hill to the east of the town. It was an unattractive spot but it was significant in that it was the site of the French colonial home that Major General Dorari used during the occupation. According to Beer, the major general had evicted the previous residents with threats, although Toshi hadn’t mentioned it in his diary. The house was also the one to which the Japanese officers had retired on the day of the surrender. As they had blown themselves up it was no surprise that there were no walls standing. In fact, there was nothing at all remaining of the original building. Nothing had grown on the lot since the explosion. Weeds had tried, and died. It was as if the earth there was starved of nutrients.

  Siri had asked to meet there on a hunch. Although he still didn’t really understand his relationship with the spirits, he’d been on whirlwind tours through the Otherworld. He’d spoken with the dead the way a drunk in a bar might strike up a conversation with another drunk. He’d done everything he could to hone his skills as a shaman but still he considered himself an amateur. And since his ornery spirit guide, Auntie Bpoo, had gone off-line, he was finding himself out of touch with all those gossips who could make sense of this mission. The site of a mass suicide seemed like a perfect spot to reconnect with the spirit world.

  He took a chance and removed the lucky talisman from around his neck and handed it to Beer. Its function was mainly to ward off snide attacks from the phibob, the malevolent spirits of the forest. But he didn’t know whether the charm might block out other channels. He needed to see if anything remained in the other dimension of the plot of land.

  Beer sat on a stump and watched as Siri walked across the barren earth and sat cross-legged at its center. The doctor scooped up dirt in both hands, closed his eyes, and started to hum the tune to “Parlez-Moi d’Amour,” which had been one of his favorites in Paris. There was no spiritual element to it. In fact he clearly had no idea what he was doing but evocation had never been his strongest hand. After a couple of minutes it was becoming embarrassing. He opened his eyes, but all he saw was Beer on a tree stump, now joined by an elderly woman. He stood, dropped the dirt, and brushed his hands together.

  And then he saw something else. It was a brief vision, electronic, as if his palms were electrodes and he was being charged somehow. Amid the buzz that shrouded him he saw creatures dancing, close, as if he were stuck in the middle of a popular discotheque dance floor. They were not human, but neither were they beasts. They were dressed in brilliant colors but their faces were white as chalk. They were drunk and raucous and clumsy but when they bumped into him he felt nothing. Within seconds it was all over.

  He was a little unsteady on his feet as he walked over to the couple watching him.

  “Did it work?” Beer asked.

  “Not sure,” said Siri, turning to the woman. “An?”

  She gave him an old-fashioned nop greeting and he returned it. He and she were of that same generation when it was still polite to offer a prayer to a new acquaintance. The years had not been kind to her face but she had a fine head of silver hair and her spine was straight.

  “Were you looking for spirits, Doctor?” she asked.

  “They’re like policemen,” he replied. “They’re never around when you need one. Were you in Thakhek when this place blew up?”

  “No, Doctor,” she said. “It was chaos here those last few weeks. All local communications had been cut. Nobody knew what was happening in Thakhek. Most of the Lao and Vietnamese fled. Of course the Japanese said nothing about their losses around the region, but we had the BBC from Thailand. We knew they were losing badly.”

  She poked a finger under her hairline and had a little scratch. Her hair slipped backward across her scalp and she righted it without embarrassment. Siri wondered why she would choose a silver wig rather than one of the coal-black beauties complete with plastic bougainvilleas on sale at the market.

  An continued unabated. “You could feel it, too, in the behavior of the Japanese troops,” she said. “There were deserters. There was unheard-of insubordination amongst the lower ranks. There were uniformed soldiers committing crimes. Miura protected me from drunks on a number of occasions. So we locals headed for the hills. We’d already been approached by the Free Lao insurgents. They had bases. They were recruiting. The jungle towards the Vietnamese border was so dense the Japanese army had never been able to root out rebels.”

  “Did you leave, too?” Siri asked Beer.

  “You bet your life,” said Beer.

  “So neither of you witnessed the mass suicide,” said Siri.

  “No,” said Beer.

  “Then how can you be sure it happened?”

  Beer looked at An.

  “Miura and I had become close,” she said. “Before the Chinese arrived he came to stay with me in the caves.”

  “He deserted?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But he’d never been really accepted by his countrymen. And, by then, there were already a number of Japanese deserters who had sided with what became known as the Viet Minh. Miura told us all about that last day in Thakhek as he had heard it from the superiors who came into town to investigate the incident.”

  “How do you suppose they’d go about something like that?” Siri asked.

  “About what?” asked Beer.

  “Blowing themselves up as a group effort. I mean, they wouldn’t have planned it. They only heard the broadcast in the morning. You don’t have a stash of dynamite in the living room just in case you feel like a dramatic end.”

  “Probably hand grenades,” said Beer. “Something like that.”

  “I don’t see hand grenades completely destroying a two-story building,” said Siri.

  “Well, Doctor, it wasn’t completely destroyed,” said An. “Not by the explosion. The roof and one wall to the living room were gone. And all the wood in the place was burned in the ensuing fire and there were scraps of metal lying around. But then villagers helped themselves to the bricks and the floor tiles and the surviving roofing. They even took the concrete piles. By the time they’d finished there was nothing left.”

  “What about the bodies?” Siri asked.

  “There were none,” said Beer. “The explosion didn’t leave a trace of them.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Dear Comrade Pilot

  Chief Inspector Phosy held on to a facial expression full of confidence for as long as was humanly possible. Not one wrinkle o
f doubt was visible. But, unseen by his colleagues, his intestines had unraveled. What had he done? There were the three of them, still in the concrete factory, still chained, still hungry. And they’d said goodbye and thank you to their kidnapper and he’d left. He’d promised he’d get the key. He said he understood what Phosy had said about the evidence exonerating his daughter and believed him. But he’d been gone for six hours and a lot of thought can go into six hours.

  “Do you think . . . ?” said Jiep.

  “Shut up,” said Phosy.

  “I just . . .” said Jiep.

  “Shut up,” said Sihot.

  Comrade Ouan had kindly put a new wick in the lamp before he left. To keep his mind off their predicament, Phosy was watching a spider construct a huge web on the wall above them. This seemed a ridiculous waste of time considering they were in a concrete room that wasn’t on the flight path of any winged insects. He wondered how many more hours he’d have to study that web. He thought about Malee and whether she’d grow up to be a surgeon or just a regular doctor. He thought about Dtui and wondered whether he’d have married her if she wasn’t as large as she was. Probably not. He liked big women. And he thought about whether he’d live on in history as the chief inspector who was found mummified with two good men some hundred years in the future.

  He turned his head from the web to see a girl of around eight with a baby of about three months in a sling on her back.

  “Are you the policemen?” asked the girl.

  “We are,” said Sihot.

  “I’m to tell you my dad has to go away for a while,” she said. “Sorry he was slow. He had to pack.”

  “I hope he’s going somewhere nice,” said Sihot.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She looked confused. He’d disturbed her train of thought.

  “What else did he tell you, love?” asked Phosy.

  The baby started to cry. The three men in the room were of a mind to join it.

  “I’m to tell you that Mimi is back home now and she’ll be looking after us all. We don’t have a mother.”

  “Mimi’s your older sister?” said Phosy.

  “Yes.”

  “And your dad’s name is Ouan.”

  “I know.”

  Phosy’s intestines returned to their rightful place.

  “And did he give you something for us?” he asked.

  “Only this,” she said, holding up a bunch of keys. “But you have to promise.”

  “Promise what, love?”

  “Promise that you won’t keep Mimi in Vientiane for a long time. She has to look after everyone. We need her here.”

  “Oh, I promise,” said Phosy.

  “Me too,” said Sihot.

  “And me,” said Jiep, crossing his heart and hoping not to die.

  “Did you really need to break the gun barrel over his head?” Roper asked.

  “I’m sorry,” said Daeng. “I get jumpy when someone points a musket at me. Those things are notoriously sensitive. They go off at a sneeze.”

  Daeng, Roper, and the pilot were sitting on a bench in the central pavilion. They now had three gun barrels pointed at them, and these were very serious AK-47s. No danger of them going off at a sneeze. The male villagers, comfortably back in their more natural state, sat around the hut chewing and spitting and picking their noses like the thugs they probably were.

  “This is the point where you tell me I don’t understand ethnic culture,” said Daeng.

  “You’ve placed us in a very difficult situation,” said Roper.

  “Me? I’m the only one who understands what’s happening here.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “This is not a poor village,” she said. “They have a Cummins generator that could only have been delivered here by helicopter. They have brand-new AK-47s. They’ve changed out of their flip-flops and are running around in Adidas sports shoes. In front of the huts I saw working boots but there are no farm implements to be seen. What do they do to sustain themselves? I think you know the answer to that. The girls we brought here don’t speak because they don’t have a common language. They’ve been bought or kidnapped from remote villages. Are you keeping up with me?”

  She was expecting an argument but Roper shook his head and looked down at his leather loafers.

  “The refugee camp security division suspected such a thing might happen again,” he said.

  “Again?” said Daeng.

  “Couriers bringing in children they claim to be their own,” said Roper. “They register as a family to get priority for resettlement overseas. The camp communities are usually very aware of what’s going on around them. A camp is essentially a large village where families mix and children play together. There were two occasions when residents reported suspected couriers, one of which turned out to be a correct call. The courier was sent home. The camp organized a program of awareness-raising, encouraging people to report suspicious behavior. I honestly believed the practice had been curtailed.”

  “You knew all this but you didn’t see anything suspicious about these girls?”

  “I’m not a child psychologist. I don’t know how children are likely to respond to the death of their mother.”

  “Who probably wasn’t their mother.”

  Roper’s face was lined with embarrassment. “I didn’t know that. I thought seeing their father would help. I assumed it was some sort of trauma.”

  “It is, Roper,” Daeng shouted. “And you’re causing it.”

  The guards raised their weapons. She lowered her head and her voice.

  “I’m guessing this gang here specializes in kidnapping kids from different minorities. Laos has a couple hundred ethnic groups speaking eighty-five languages.”

  “Eighty-six,” said Roper.

  “Don’t make me hit you.”

  “Sorry.”

  “They take kids who can’t tell anyone what’s happened to them because nobody understands. Our girls here can’t even speak to each other. It’s possible the courier could communicate with one or both of them but in situations like this the kids would be threatened. I’ve seen it before. They’re told there are assassins in the camp listening for this or that language; killers who hate people from that community. The kids are told that speaking just one sentence in their own language will be their last. Of course, they’re petrified. Mr. Roper, you’ve just brought two lambs back to the slaughterhouse.”

  Roper shook his head. “We . . . we should do something,” he said.

  “Good plan, Mr. Roper.”

  “I could talk to the headman. Reason with him.”

  “We should have brought the old dog some marrow bone,” said Daeng. “No, there’s no reasoning here. I’ll give you an insight into our future. I’ll play the part of the village headman. The script goes like this. ‘I was expecting the UNHCR team to come and bring back our darling children but the helicopter didn’t arrive. It probably crashed somewhere in the jungle. So we’re mourning not only our children, but also the brave UN people who tried to bring them home.’”

  “You think they’ll kill us?” Roper asked.

  “I’m certain that’s the plan now that everything’s gone wrong.”

  “Oh, my word.”

  “I think the only reason they haven’t killed us already is because they’re waiting for the girls’ fake father to return from his hunt. And I think I know what he’s been hunting. It wouldn’t surprise me if he turned up here with a helicopter of his own. That landing pad’s seen a lot of traffic. The village screwed up. All they had to do was welcome us, play the adoring but simple natives, give us a glass of sugar juice, and wave us off. He’d return to two girls, barely used, ready for recycling. I think Big Daddy will be pissed when he sees how badly they’ve handled everything.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  �
�It’s a small village.”

  “So?”

  “So we take the village before Big Daddy gets home.”

  Siri picked up the coffee cup and could still feel the buzz in his fingers. He sat alone with An in a corner of the restaurant. Beer had gone hunting for another cast member from the occupation, a mechanic who’d worked on Japanese planes.

  “Let’s start at the other end,” said Siri.

  “You mean when the Japanese arrived?” said An.

  “Yes.”

  “It was nutty. You always imagine an occupation to be dramatic. But these seven or eight soldiers and their officer arrive on a long boat from Thailand. What I’ll never forget is that they were all standing to attention. The boat caught the occasional wake from a bigger boat or slowed down suddenly, but those Japs stayed on their feet. It was impressive. I was on the dock with the French administrator. Mr. LeHavre himself was still acting like the French were just hosting a picnic for some transient troublemakers. He wasn’t about to give them an official welcome. His driver was waiting to take their leader to headquarters. We hadn’t been able to find anyone who spoke Japanese. We had a French teacher who could speak English quite well. We thought if the Japs didn’t have a French speaker, at the very least they’d have someone who could speak English. But we were wrong. They spoke exclusively in Japanese until Miura-san arrived. Not so much as a ‘bonjour.’”

  “How did you communicate?”

  “We didn’t. They climbed up the riverbank, marched into town, and stood at attention beside the old fountain. Their leader, who I later learned was a major general, unrolled a parchment, held it up in front of him, and read from it. Orated is probably a better word for it. He had a powerful voice.”

  “But it was all in Japanese,” said Siri.