“So, you’ve finally come back to us,” said Dtui.
Chief Inspector Phosy stood in the doorway of their room in the police dormitory wearing the same crumpled uniform he’d had on for four days. Malee was asleep in the cot, too exhausted from a day of unfettered imagination to welcome her father.
“Sorry,” said Phosy. “Things always seem to take twice as long as they need to.”
“Is it all over?”
“Finally.”
Phosy fell backward onto the bed. His wife was afraid he might fall asleep instantly so she threw herself on top of him. It was almost too much for the plywood base, which groaned and splintered beneath them.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Happy ending,” said Phosy. “Mimi’s on her way back to Vang Vieng on the bus with Sihot as a bodyguard.”
“I’ll miss her,” said Dtui. “Malee was very fond of her.”
“I won’t miss sleeping alone in my office,” said Phosy.
“Your idea,” said Dtui. “What did the judge say?”
“Death by owl was the official verdict. Or at least there was no evidence to prove otherwise. The original wife gets first grabs on the fortune but I get the feeling the minor wife won’t give up that easily. That should be nasty to watch. But it’s none of our business anymore.”
“What about Mimi’s dad?”
“Comrade Ouan? I suppose I shouldn’t really say.”
“Have you ever been beaten up by a girl?”
“You have to promise not to tell anyone.”
“Tell them what?”
“We, ehr . . . We decided not to press charges.”
She pushed him away.
“You can’t be serious,” she said. “The guy drugs three police officers and chains them up in a concrete room for two days and he’s going to get away with it?”
“We’ve put it down to tough Vang Vieng hospitality.”
“Phosy?”
“Look, Dtui, ours is a young administration still feeling its way. How would it look if three senior police officers allowed themselves to be overpowered and held hostage by one man? And I shouldn’t have even been there.”
Dtui smiled.
“Does this mean I’ll be getting my refrigerator now?”
“It’s not corruption. We’ll just call it . . . a tactical sidestep.”
“I’ll keep my mouth shut in return for a tactical microwave,” she said. “They’re all the rage now.”
“I’ve brought you something much better,” he said.
He was lying on his shoulder bag so he wrestled it out from underneath them.
“Close your eyes,” he said.
Dtui did as she was told.
“Now open them.”
She opened her eyes to see a plastic Ziploc sandwich bag between her husband’s thumb and index finger.
“What is that?” she said, trying to focus on the contents.
“Guess.”
“It surely . . . oh, it can’t be.”
“They were just about to set fire to the fellow,” said Phosy. “This is a valuable piece of forensic folklore. It will be invaluable in settling arguments long into the future.”
“And given that we don’t have a refrigerator, where do you propose we store ten centimeters of nasal hair?”
“I suppose if it keeps growing we could eventually stuff a cushion with it.”
“That’s disgusting,” she said, rolling onto her back. “You get more and more like Dr. Siri every day.”
“Which reminds me,” said Phosy, reaching once more into his bag. “This arrived today. Postman Ging special delivery. It cost me a pack of cigarettes.”
“It looks like a postcard,” said Dtui.
“It is. It’s from Daeng and Siri.”
“I haven’t seen one of those since the Americans left. Is there a picture?”
He flipped it over.
“Ooh, lovely,” said Dtui. “Since when did they have pyramids in Thakhek?”
“Probably not a lot of choice of postcards in Thakhek. It says, ‘Greetings from Egypt.’”
“It’s the thought that counts. What did they write?”
“‘Hello and thank you for the ride to Thakhek,’” Phosy read. “‘Not much going on. Quite restful. Wish you were here. Love, Siri and Daeng.’”
“That’s nice,” said Dtui. “They could use a bit of a rest.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Silence Is Golden
The villagers were crammed into the school building with an elderly Japanese soldier stationed at each point of the compass armed with some relic from the war. Each had a sword in a scabbard hanging from his belt. The scene was lit with candles and hurricane lamps. Yuki-san was sitting on the teacher’s desk, thumping his fist impatiently onto the wooden boards. He looked around at the old men he’d known as young warriors. They’d suffered as time passed, wasting their lives in the tropics, competing against diseases, malnutrition, wild animals, dysentery. They’d had houses and wives and had sired a battalion of ugly children, but it was not by choice. Every one of them had been waiting for this moment. There had been twelve of them to begin with, thirteen if you included Major Hiro. They were the regular core of the salvage team in Lang Son. They’d dived to retrieve the breeze blocks abandoned by the French gunners. They’d discovered all the other crates and cases. They’d called in a heavy winch to lift them out of the mud. It had taken six days to get it all out, twelve men laboring, the major in his usual trance, staring at clouds, muttering to himself.
But they were all there the day they pried open the two largest chests and saw the morning sunrise reflect off the gold. There wasn’t a single thought in any man’s head as to the glory of the empire or how many armored vehicles that much gold might buy. There was only greed in their hearts and a way out of the insane world they’d found themselves in. Captain Yuki it was who approached the major with his plan.
“Sir,” he’d said. “We’ve done what we’ve been assigned to do. We’ve retrieved the breeze blocks and they’ve been reattached to the artillery. All the big guns are functional. Our operation under your leadership has once again been an unmitigated success. And, as you know, we were also able to salvage other objects that had been thrown into the river at an earlier time. Much of it was ruined and of no use to the military. But sir . . .”
“Yes, Captain?” said Hiro.
“You may recall that there were some items of great value raised from the river. There was gold, sir. And that gold has no claim of ownership against it. The French no doubt stole it originally and the Hor bandits before them. It is technically the spoils of war. Our beloved generals have taught us that victory deserves a reward. Recovering the breeze blocks has allowed us many great victories.”
“And what is your point, Captain?” asked Major Hiro.
“We—I mean, your unit—would be honored if we could use it for humanitarian purposes. We have seen great suffering in the region and, with your permission, sir, we would like to give a little back to the people here. We would like to share the great merit that has been bestowed on our empire by helping the poor and the sick.”
“That would be a very noble enterprise,” said Hiro, his eyes focused on two lizards playing chase across the wall.
“But Major, we would need to be patient. We need to be able to find a place to store the gold safely for a year or two to keep it out of the hands of opportunists and thieves.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” said the major. “I am Major Hiro Uenobu. I am the head of the salvage unit.”
“I know that, sir.”
“Then leave it up to me. Have the men reseal the crates and stencil the words Obsolete Breeze Blocks on both. I shall bury that gold in paperwork so deep you’ll need a diving bell to find it.”
“Are you sure you . . . ?”
“Do you doubt my filing ability, Captain?”
“No, sir. It’s just . . .”
“I know what I’m doing. Once the gold is safe, I shall share its location with you and the men. Give me thirty-six hours.”
But the major didn’t have thirty-six hours. He spent that day at his desk directing and redirecting the movement of containers. He stamped and signed each order. And that evening after sweeping his office and locking the door, he stripped butt naked and climbed an old observation turret. By the time they brought him down, his mind was scrambled. No matter how many documents they scoured, the men in his unit could find not a trace of the two crates. Captain Yuki and his men went to every known warehouse and storage depot. They broke open every box and case, but they could not find their gold. They visited the major every day trying to squeeze the location out of him, but by then he was already barking mad. Then, one day, he’d disappeared.
Captain Yuki took over Hiro’s position and rank and continued to search for both the gold and the man who had hidden it. They hired local guides to search for him, but they had no success. They kept an eye out for him, sure that he’d return to steal their gold, and one day he did just that. They didn’t see him come but one of their informants heard of a local headman who was attempting to sell a gold ingot. Yuki and his men went to the village and beat a confession out of him. His story was this: a Japanese major in uniform had arrived at the village by truck one night with an order written in Vietnamese for the headman to provide a dozen men to dive into the river and salvage some items there. The major didn’t speak at all. He took the village team to the river and pointed to the spot where he wanted them to dive. The gold was exactly where the salvage team had first discovered it in its original cases. Hiro had merely returned it to the river. The paperwork story had been merely a distraction.
The headman, like most locals in the region, was overawed by the might of the Japanese and he had no thought of taking the gold for himself. But the document had promised him one ingot in payment, for which he was most grateful. They helped the major load the gold into the truck and he went on his way with a friendly nod. The headman did have the foresight to jot down the number of the truck and he had kept the official order. Yuki noted that it was a very clever forgery, as were the travel papers deposited at every guard post between there and Thakhek. There they found the truck deserted on the bank of the Mekong River. This was another of Hiro’s ruses, as he had already offloaded the gold and had not used the Mekong as a transportation route. But Thakhek became the center of operations for Yuki and his gang in their search for the treasure that would have made them all very rich men. The war ended; the salvage unit deserted and relocated to rebel bases in the central region. They had no sympathy for the cause of the men and women fighting the French, but they needed to be close to the town where Hiro was last known to have been. They went their separate ways but kept in touch, always asking if anyone had run across a mute Japanese, always hoping that Hiro would come out of hiding and lead them to their rightful booty. They aged, got out of shape, and fought halfheartedly, but the scent of the gold never left their nostrils. Then, at last, a flash of light.
They got word from a contact in Thailand who told them about a doctor who had worked at the small hospital in Nakhon Phanom. It appeared that back in 1943 he had been contacted by a Japanese officer who did not speak. The soldier had cash—a lot of it—and a prescription written in Thai for vaccines to counter the childhood condition known as diphtheria. The doctor had told him that the medicine was hard to come by as it was still undergoing tests and very expensive. But the cost didn’t concern the Japanese. The doctor also told him that a qualified medical team would have to attend to the children and administer the vaccine. Again, the officer had no problem with that and even arranged transport across the river and to the site of the epidemic. The only insistence was that the Thai medical team would be blindfolded. Everyone on the team could feel that they were inside a water-filled tunnel for half of the journey. The doctor recognized the smell of bat excrement. One of them cheated and lifted the blindfold to see a beautiful quartz structure in a vast cave. Eventually they found themselves in a picturesque village in the mountains. They stayed there for two nights working with the surviving children.
Armed with this information, Yuki gathered his troops, consulted his maps, and deduced that Major Hiro had gone to ground in the cave network leading to the village of Sawan at the end of a tunnel called Thum Huk. The war with America was coming to an end. The Viet Minh had a number of captured helicopters at their disposal. The mechanic responsible for maintaining them was another Japanese deserter who had befriended the salvagers. He knew of three mercenary pilots who didn’t ask questions. He suggested that nobody would miss three old helicopters for a few hours. They flew across the border, did one low pass over the village so everyone would identify the invaders, and landed in the central square certain there would be no retaliation. They searched every building and the lower caves. There wasn’t much of value, so they didn’t waste their time pilfering. They all knew what they were looking for and the quickest way to find it was to burn down the entire village and sweep the land around it with metal detectors. Yuki-san spent longer in the headman’s house looking for evidence of contact between the village and Hiro. He emptied all the documents from the single metal file cabinet and trashed the place. His last gesture was to rip the mattress with his knife. And there, beneath it, was a small trapdoor leading down to two layers of bamboo flooring. And tucked between them was a box containing US dollars, some personal documents, and Hiro’s diary. Yuki-san opened it at the last page and his heart raced. He was certain the diary would give up the location of Hiro’s gold. Even after they’d burned down every house, scoured every meter of ground, and had found nothing, Yuki’s heart still beat wildly. They returned to the helicopters and flew back across the mountains and Yuki began his frustrating journey through the pages of the diary.
And now he sat on the schoolteacher’s desk, banging it with his fist until his knuckles bled. Arriving at this stage had been masterful on his part. By staying in the jungles for all this time he had alienated himself from his homeland, dishonored his family name. He could never return to Japan. He had no contacts and no resources. But he needed an academic to read the Lao section of the diary. It was good fortune that he’d heard of the crime-fighting doctor in Vientiane from a Vietnamese neighbor who’d spent time in Laos. Yuki had released information shred by shred to keep the doctor enthralled and he’d waited for him to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. Yuki-san had heard of the yokai when he was a child but he never would have made the connection through Hiro’s stories. For that he had to thank the clever Lao—before killing him. The Japanese knew that Dr. Siri was the type who would never rest until he caught up with Yuki and his men. That’s why he had to die. That’s why they all had to die. A neat, clean end to the story; gory but necessary. The way the Imperial Army had rampaged through China, clinical, heartless, merciless. No witnesses. No guilt. Nobody would suspect a band of Japanese of such a massacre. It had to be insurgents. There would be clues left strategically around the village pointing to royalists in the Thai camps. With everyone gone they would cut the gold into lumps, load it onto the foldable boat, and head for the life they deserved. There was just one small matter to take care of, but the Japanese leader was getting impatient.
“We’ll give him five more minutes,” said Yuki-san. “If they’re not here then we’ll assume they aren’t coming. We can head back along the river and take care of the doctor and his wife and the idiot Vietnamese back in the town. Not as neat as I’d planned but we can take our time now. We’ll do away with this menagerie first.”
It was what Teacher Satsai had anticipated. He had enough Japanese to understand what their fate would be. So in a gentle whisper he had spread the word that upon his shout of “Go” everyone was to make a run
for it, head in whatever direction they could as fast as they could. Many would be mowed down by the machine guns but at least some would get away. Satsai himself was crouched near the leader. He’d go for Yuki-san and subdue him the best he could.
But the plan was put on hold as Beer marched the old Lao couple into the school yard with his gun trained on their backs.
“What kept you?” shouted Yuki-san, jumping down from the desk.
“Sorry,” said Beer.
Yuki unholstered his pistol. Siri was certain he was about to shoot the three of them in the head right there and then. There would be no discussion. Three executions: bang, bang, bang, then a signal for the massacre.
But instead there was an explosion. It was followed by another, and another. Yuki turned in time to see the third blast light up the night sky.
“What . . . ?” he said.
“That would be Chief Inspector Phosy and a few dozen armed police officers,” said Siri. “I’m sure they’ve already overpowered your pudgy Japanese forward guard and secured the tunnel entrance. I’m afraid that cuts off your orderly escape route. You really should have come in helicopters again.”
“Your only option now is to use us as hostages and talk your way out of here,” said Daeng.
There was another explosion. Yuki-san stood with his gun at Siri’s head.
“Getting closer,” said Siri.
“You could panic and get your unit of geriatrics to kill all these nice people, but you’ve made the classical mass-shooting mistake of placing your old boys in positions where they couldn’t shoot the hostages without shooting each other,” said Daeng.
Another explosion.
“Plus there’s the suicide bomber element,” said Siri.
“What are you talking about?” said Yuki.
Siri opened his shirt to reveal a nest of explosives with the letters TNT written on them strapped to his chest. A wire snaked through his sleeve down to his hand in which he held a device that looked a lot like a detonator. He rotated to give everyone a good look. There was a gasp from the captives.
The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot Page 20