Love Songs from a Shallow Grave dp-7

by Colin Cotterill

  "Good guess," he said. "But that was February. March was black and white. As you can imagine, we don't have too many covers in black and white in this modern age, but, by opening each book at its title page…"

  "It must have been a sight to see. I wish I'd been here." Siri shook his head in amazement as he looked around. It was true, the red book covers were inside the display cabinet like gallery exhibits. "Tell me, Comrade, do you have many returnees from the eastern bloc coming to use your service?"

  "Returnees are our burgeoning target market, Comrade. As the number of returnees swells, I imagine in ten years we'll have to move to larger premises."

  "But, right now?"

  "You have to understand," said the clerk, pointing a spindly ginseng finger at the doctor. "Not many of our brothers and sisters have returned to Laos this soon."

  "I do understand that. I'm just interested. How many returnees do you have subscribing to say…Russian journals?"

  The clerk reached below the counter for a ledger thick as a door step. He opened the cover and flipped two or three pages. He laboured over the list for longer than necessary.

  "Four," he said.

  "Hmm. Then I imagine the odds of two customers actually bumping into each other are quite remote."

  "Unless they're in the reading room at the same time."

  "You have a reading room?"

  "A small one. But I encourage customers to use it when they're here. I have tea in there. On occasions the odd sesame biscuit."

  "Could I see it?"

  "Certainly."

  The clerk walked around the counter on his long uncoordinated legs. Siri's chin came to his solar plexus. He led the doctor to a door at the rear of the store and opened it to reveal a small windowless room which could have been the parlour of an elderly royalist. Two comfortable sofas scattered liberally with unmatching cushions bordered a large teak coffee table with a cotton doily at its centre. Resting upon that was a basket of colourful but unconvincing plastic flowers. Around the walls were large tourist posters of Moscow, Berlin, Belgrade and Prague, a handwritten sign saying 'WELCOME TO OUR READING ROOM' in eight languages, and butterflies, a lot of three-dimensional butterflies cut out of coloured paper. To one side a taller table held a tin tray with upturned cups, a sugar dish in a moat of water to discourage ants, and a large pink flowery thermos.

  Ignoring the absence of natural light and the leaning towards kitsch it was a pleasant room. Some love had gone into it, some appreciation that customers might lack a convivial place to read in their crowded dormitories. And if two customers should be here at the same time with common experiences from Europe, otherwise incompatible people might become friends. And what better place for a killer to stalk his victims?

  "Comrade," Siri turned to the clerk who was standing uncomfortably close, "do the names Hatavan Rattanasamay, Khantaly Sisamouth, or Sunisa Simmarit mean anything to you?"

  Siri bunched his fists in hope as the man considered his question.

  "Yes," said the clerk.

  "Which one?"

  "All of them."?

  Madame Daeng's noodle shop was fast becoming the surrogate after-hours police briefing room. While he waited for the actual police officers to arrive, Civilai stood beneath the altar Daeng had lovingly built and decorated. It was a two-storey affair attached to the main pillar of the building. It was traditional to have a spirit house outside as a boarding inn for the displaced spirits of the land, but the authorities were being finicky about residents displaying their animism blatantly in public. So Daeng had flown in the face of tradition and brought them inside. She had even dared to house them under the same roof as the ancestral shrine.

  The ancestors lived upstairs in a thirty-centimetre-square box behind a barricade of Buddhas, incense sticks, wooden elephants, Chinese and Indian deities, a half bottle of red Fanta, and Sainte-Barbe, the patron saint of firemen whom Daeng had rescued from the bin of one of the French oppressors back in the fifties. Downstairs lived the rehoused phaphoom. These spirits of the earth were unashamed capitalists. Like the poor Lao who lusted after the consumer items they heard about on Thai radio, the phaphoom were far more cooperative when bribed. A free lodging wasn't always enough. Madame Daeng's spirit house was straight from the high society catalogues. Inside was all the doll's furniture she could cram into the space; a refrigerator, TV, bathtub, wardrobe, and shoe rack. Parked on a ledge in front were a toy school bus and a Mercedes Benz with diplomatic plates just in case they felt like an excursion.

  Civilai chuckled to himself. Daeng was married to a man who lived amongst spirits. Surely, with such personal contact, she could dispense with all this mumbo jumbo. Why would a woman so worldly, so astute, put so much effort into superstition? He was reaching for the patron saint of French firemen when Madame Daeng came down the stairs.

  "Don't you dare," she called.

  "I was just — "

  "Then don't. A woman's spirit house is her soul. Leave it alone."

  "You're an enigma, Madame Daeng."

  "And plan to stay that way."

  A lilac Vespa stopped directly beneath the shop awning and a rain-sodden Phosy climbed from its seat.

  "Will it ever stop raining?" he asked nobody in particular He kicked off his sandals and shook himself like a dog before entering. He carried a wad of papers wrapped in several plastic bags. They were obviously more important than himself in shorts and a T-shirt. At the sound of the bike, Siri had shelved his book and come downstairs.

  "No Sihot?" he asked.

  "Family crisis," Phosy told him. "Seems the more relatives you have to live with the more crises you have to endure."

  "And where's Dtui?" Daeng asked.

  Phosy hesitated.

  "She's not here? I came straight from the ministry," he said. "Haven't had a chance to go home."

  "You were at the ministry dressed like that?" she asked.

  "Er, no. I have…I have spare clothes at the office."

  On their way to the meeting table, Siri and Daeng exchanged one of their now customary glances. Once they were seated, Civilai, oblivious to any domestic drama, opened the proceedings. Siri noticed that his friend was wearing the same clothes he'd worn the last time they'd seen him.

  "As instructed," Civilai began, "I performed my underhand duties at K6. Being a resident there and having no known police background, I was able to do my spying with relative ease. As you know, in my dotage I have become something of an Adonis in the kitchen. So, on Thursday I took a tray of sweet, freshly baked macaroons to the old stable building which the Vietnamese use as their centre of operations. As I am a frail and harmless pensioner, but fluent in Vietnamese, the guards quickly opened up to me and started to share secrets. My macaroons have that effect on people. The soldiers made no secret of the fact that they dislike their commander, Major Dung. They don't like his womanising ways or his personality, but they all agreed he is a man with many skills. Most pertinent of these is that the major is an expert in amongst other things, a Vietnamese martial art called quoc ngu. It is, basically, the use of a double-edged sword. And he brought at least one with him."

  "I knew it," Siri said.

  "One of the men had seen him practising with-it in the clearing behind the stables," Civilai added.

  "What about fencing swords?" Phosy asked.

  "Nobody I spoke to there knew what fencing was so I can't answer that. The macaroons ran out before I could get any more information about Dung. But, as an aside, I enquired about the project being undertaken by Electricite du Lao. It appears that both the auditorium and the houses around the garden sauna are included in the rewiring schedule. Your Comrade Chanti would surely have been at both locations, at least during the planning stage."

  "Sihot went to talk to him today," Phosy told them. "We'll see what he had to say for himself tomorrow."

  Civilai accepted a glass of rum and soda from Madame Daeng with an overly polite nod. No Thai hooch this but genuine Bacardi he'd brought along hi
mself, courtesy of the president. He sipped at his drink, smacked his lips and said, "Which brings me finally to the groundsman, Miht. I'd seen him around often but never had cause to talk to him. He turned out to be a very knowledgeable fellow. But he couldn't come up with a memory of a Lao?Vietnamese couple with a daughter who trained with the American doctors. He was, without a shadow of a doubt, lying to me."

  "What makes you think that?" Phosy asked.

  "Well, he isn't the only survivor from the old to the new regime. There are two or three more who stayed on to ring in the new. One of them is called Comrade Tip, the washing lady. She maintains the small laundry at K6. My wife used to take our bedding there because our line isn't strong enough to hold up all those wet sheets and covers. Comrade Tip knew exactly who I was talking about. She couldn't remember the mother's name but the father was a cook?handyman called Rote. Their daughter was a precocious girl called Jim. She'd done really well in school, charmed the Americans, and ended up in a mission hospital in Nam Tha."

  "And did she recall where this couple worked?" Siri asked.

  "As clear as day." Civilai smiled and sipped his drink. "At the Jansen house. The house with the sauna."

  This revelation led to a frenzy of questions and qualifications and hypotheses. But mainly it caused a single headache that throbbed in the temples of everyone present. What did it mean? The parents of victim number three, Jim, had worked at the house where victim number one was killed. Siri tipped onto the back legs of his chair and let the spirit beam arrest his fall. He'd imagined the case in more simple terms; the victims met a bad man who had clearance at K6 and he killed them. Now it seemed the crime had a history. It was like planning a red theme and having delivery after delivery of drastically yellow books.

  "Damn," he said. "Phosy, are your findings going to make this any more complicated?"

  The inspector hadn't accepted a drink. Recently he'd become Phosy the temperate. Siri wondered how he would ever elicit secrets from a sober man.

  "I looked down the list of bookshop patrons you gave me," Phosy said. "All three victims had subscribed to receive journals in their respective fields, paid for by the embassies that sponsored them. I showed the clerk Polaroids of the victims and he was certain he'd seen all three utilising the reading room. He said that Saturday afternoon was the most popular as Saturday was a half-day for most workers. There might be seven or eight customers in there at a time. People even sitting on cushions on the ground. I doubt they were all engrossed in the malt yield of the Ukraine. It was a sort of informal reading club. Of course, there's no guarantee our killer put his name down to subscribe to anything, but we're working our way down the list. It's the best lead so far."

  After the meeting, Siri wasn't of a mood to sit and drink with Civilai. He had a room full of books and a limited number of years to get through them. But Civilai had insisted in that belligerent way of men who are starting to lean too heavily on the bottle. He seemed more out of control than usual. He didn't even know he was putting on old clothes to go visiting. Only a man living by himself would be allowed to make such a mistake.

  "Where's Mrs Nong?" Siri asked.

  "Surely you mean, how's Mrs Nong?" Civilai said. They were sitting at the gingham Formica tabletop. Madame Daeng had gone upstairs. Phosy had left, presumably to pursue his nefarious late-night habits. A large purple gecko hung boldly from the far wall like an ornament. It had interrupted the conversation several times with its rude burps.

  "No, I mean 'where'," Siri confirmed. "She wouldn't have let you out in this state."

  Civilai laughed.

  "Am I in a state, Siri?"

  The doctor remained silent and stared at his friend. Even the gecko held its breath.

  "She's visiting her sister," Civilai said at last.

  "Her sister lives in Khouvieng," Siri reminded him. "That's a twenty-minute trip from your house."

  "I mean she's staying there for a few days. She's not well. The sister. The sister's not well."

  Siri continued to stare. Rain dripped and splashed from the rear window shutter.

  "She likes to stay there sometimes," Civilai added.

  Stare.

  "Quite a lot of times lately, in fact. She's been gone a couple of weeks now. I'm starting to wonder, you know, wonder if she's planning to come back at all."

  He delivered it like a joke but neither of them laughed.

  Stare.

  "I do wonder, since that little bit of political hoo-hah we went through last year, I mean, since the…since my retirement, I do wonder whether I've been even more difficult to live with than usual. All this baking. Goodness, she's barely been able to get into her own kitchen. I'd snap at her if she tried. She probably goes to her sister's just for the opportunity to cook something. I wonder if I've been awful about a lot of things."

  Stare.

  "I'm planning to get my act together. And you don't have to tell me this stuff doesn't help." He symbolically pushed the glass away. "Alcohol is an ally to the contented but a foe to those with heavy hearts. Not sure who said that. I probably made it up myself. Damned good, I think. I still have flashes of the old genius every now and then. Moments of lucid thought. Increasingly cantankerous though. I imagine she'd say that."

  He ran his finger across the cool plastic table top tracing the squares.

  "I'm going to see her, of course."

  The gecko clicked like a clock.

  "Tomorrow seems as good a day as any. Don't you think?"

  Stare.

  "Hmm, well, you've certainly put a damper on this party, Dr Siri Paiboun." He lifted his wrist to look at a watch he'd forgotten to put on. "And just look at the time. I have shirts to wash." He scraped back his chair, abandoned his drink, blew his young brother a kiss and meandered unsteadily between the tables to the open shutters.

  "Don't forget to put your lights on," Siri shouted as his friend slipped behind a curtain of rain. He sighed. Was it the weather? Did the constant grey turn everything negative? Why was everybody having so much trouble getting along? Half the world not finding love at all, the other half not knowing how to hold on to it. Or had it always been like this?

  "Things have to be sorted out before it's too late," he told the gecko.?

  Siri read until one a.m. The second Soviet strip light, newly installed in the second-floor library, had illuminated his book with such enthusiasm that he could see the flecks of wood fibre in the paper. His mind could have stayed up all night but his body craved sleep. He apologised to Monsieur Sartre and went to bed. For once, Madame Daeng didn't stir when he joined her and, as soon as the ghost of his missing left earlobe hit the pillow, he was thrown into that nightmare. The same boy, wearing Siri's talisman around his neck. The same moment of indecision. Would he laugh and walk away or would he pull the trigger? The moment dragged through time, allowing the panic to take hold. Will he blow off the doctor's head tonight, or not? The finger twitches, then relaxes. The boy smiles and walks on. A sigh. Head on night. And in the distance he hears the voice. The melodic voice of love and promise. A sound so enchanting Siri is drawn to it like a night moth to the bright fire trail of a jet engine. No good can come of it. He reaches into his own dream and grabs for his stupid music-following self. "Don't do it," he calls, and he finds himself just in time and throws his arms around himself and drags himself out of his nightmare.

  And his pillow was wet with sweat because he knew that if he were to ever find the singer, all hope for mankind would be lost.

  "Bad dream again?" Daeng asked.

  "Something bad is going to happen," he told her.

  She brushed back his hair and said, "It's only a dream."

  But it wasn't.

  12

  FOUR MONKS AT A FUNERAL

  Sometimes, torture can be just the threat of torture, the promise of misery. The imagination can scroll through a menu of horrors more awful than anything a half-witted interrogator might come up with. There are those so petrified by what their own
minds have envisaged that they're shouting their confessions even before the torturer comes for them. It's only just occurred to me what a weapon my own mind can be against me. My own gun pointed at my own temple. I am light-headed and weak already, certainly not thinking clearly. I can see, but cannot feel the bruises nor taste the blood but I know my right wrist is broken.

  They took me to a room and removed my blindfold. The smiley man and the heavy monk were there. There was a pervading stench of bitter blood and disinfectant. They chained me to an armchair without a cushion, sat me on the bare springs that cut into the backs of my thighs. It's comical to think about it but those damned springs could nip like angry crabs. The torturers ignored me. They left me sitting and went about their business. Their business was a young girl, no older than fifteen. What kind of subversive could she have been? When they'd finished with her she was as good as dead. I had my eyes closed for the whole ordeal but my ears told me everything.

  Then it was quiet and the heavy monk pulled up a school seat and sat on it. He looked ridiculous, like an elephant in a baby's chair. He was wearing black pyjamas that fitted him now. The charade was over. He flipped down the wooden writing arm that rested on his fat thigh.

  "This," he said, "is your life. After you hear, you will indicate that you understand what it say and you will sign. You will sign today, or you will sign after the bones in your foot are broke one after one. Or you will sign the next day after we take out your eye. But some time you will sign. Better for us all to sign now."

  My only thought then was that if this man were truly to put on saffron robes, they would sizzle against his skin and catch fire. I grew up with monks. I know there's more to being a monk than cutting off your hair and eyebrows. There's deportment, manners, and a way of speaking that come from truly understanding the dharma. They're not learned but acquired and the heavy monk had none of these traits. But I'd tested him anyway, just to be certain. I told him a story about the seven monks who chanted in front of my mother's funeral pyre. He saw nothing wrong with the tale even though I pushed him on it. Any true monk would know that four monks have to chant in front of the pyre..I hadn't bothered with any other tests.