I Shot the Buddha

by Colin Cotterill

  “Who is? It’s a once-in-two-thousand-years appointment. I imagine it’ll have to be a sort of gut reaction. You remember, little brother, that buzz we got standing beside Castro?”

  “That was a celebrity thing. Fan worship.”

  “Well, magnify that by a trillion. That’s how it’ll be. Were I to wear socks, if he turned out to be the next Buddha he would knock them off.”

  “Wait, two thousand years? Wouldn’t that make the previous Buddha a brontosaurus?”

  “Now, Siri. Let’s not get embroiled in the dubious myth of evolution. What’s relevant is that I’m getting a generous per diem and a chauffeur-driven vehicle. It’ll be like a second honeymoon, and I know for certain the villagers will go out of their way to entertain us. After all, if they want their boy to be recognized they damned well better butter me up.”

  •••

  The national police headquarters moved around a lot. It was currently housed beside the Ministry of Interior at Ban That Foun. The joke going around the city was that the place saved a lot of money on furniture because most of the detectives couldn’t find their own offices. Inspector Phosy sat at an old desk with its registration number stenciled on the front. The government discouraged attachments, so everything in his office had belonged to other people before the move. There was nothing new in the airy room, nothing without quirks. The metal cabinet screeched, the chairs wobbled and the desk lamps flickered like stage lightning. Even the framed pictures of the beloved leaders wore the ghosts of goatees and horns half-scrubbed from the glass.

  Until the ever-impending arrival of two new recruits, Phosy was the head and sum total of the Political Malfeasance Division, the department that specialized in crimes against, rather than by, government officials. When Siri arrived the policeman was two squares away from solving a Rubik’s cube, which, experts would tell you, was the furthest possible point from success.

  “If you’re busy I’ll call back later,” said the doctor from the open doorway.

  Phosy looked up. “Damn. How did you find me?”

  “Your hand-painted name plaque over the door. Very nice. You’ve all got them, I see.”

  “Even the secret police department,” said Phosy.

  “I went there first. There’s nobody there.”

  “Oh, they’re there all right. You just wouldn’t know where to look. Take a seat.”

  Siri chose a chair behind one of the empty desks. He looked out the window. The view was the non-rendered brickwork of the ministry building. A large lizard hung on the wall under the delusion she was camouflaged.

  “How’s Nurse Dtui?” Siri asked.

  “Her classes at the nursing college are getting her down.”

  “A remarkable woman performing unremarkable feats. The teaching of advanced anatomy to buffalo girls. It’s enough to drag anyone down.”

  Phosy poured him a cup of lukewarm tea from his thermos and delivered it to his visitor’s desk. It was a routine both had become accustomed to. The old fellow stopped there often in his desperate quest for something to do. But this day he surprised the policeman with his demand.

  “I have a case for you,” he said.

  “I’m not allowed to do requests,” said Phosy.

  “I know. This would be a sort of . . . hobby. Something to fill in the time before the next ministerial assassination attempt.”

  “That wouldn’t give us very long. What’s it about?” Phosy returned to his own desk and instinctively reached for a pad and pen.

  “You remember on Saturday I was telling you about our Thai forest monk?”

  “Noo?”

  “Yes. Well, he’s gone. Vanished into thin air.”

  “He’s a wandering monk. Isn’t he supposed to . . . wander?”

  “Yes, normally I’d agree with you, but Noo isn’t the type to just flee without telling anyone. And he’s left all of his stuff at the house, some personal things.”

  “He’s an illegal. Immigration might have nabbed him.”

  “I’ve considered that. But I don’t think so. You heard his note.”

  “Entrusted on a top secret mission?”

  “I think he’s got himself into trouble.”

  Phosy leaned back on two legs but the chair wasn’t into it. He dropped back to the floor.

  “Hmm. Did you work out the message?”

  “Mrs. Marcos is possibly the wife of the President of the Philippines. But as for her shoes . . . No idea. It’s not something you can just look up.”

  “When was the last time anyone saw the monk?” asked Phosy.

  “Saturday afternoon. That’s when he gave the note to one of the children from the house. He reportedly climbed on the house bicycle and headed east. Mrs. Fah’s kids waved him off.”

  “Was he robed?”

  “No. He always said that saffron was like day-neon. Not too many monks on the streets after noon. No, he was in his disguise. Hawaiian shirt, straw hat and shorts. According to the kids, he might have even penciled on some eyebrows.”

  “Some serious undercover work. Nobody else at the house has any idea where he might have gone?”

  “No. They said he’d been spending a fair bit of time with a young monk recently. Nobody knew him. He wasn’t introduced. He just arrived out of nowhere a week before.”

  “So, temple-related intrigue. Interesting.”

  “You’ll help?”

  “Yes, Siri. I don’t like the idea of good people vanishing without a trace in our city.”

  For once, Siri kept his mouth shut.

  4

  At the Whim of a Dead Transvestite

  Of course throughout history husbands had been known to disappear, some permanently. But this vanishing trick invariably involved a suitcase and a vehicle. Dr. Siri’s dematerializations were sudden and dramatic and most certainly of psychic origins. For the record it would help to note that the doctor hosted the spirit of a thousand-year-old Hmong shaman named Yeh Ming. The old ghost had lain dormant for most of the doctor’s life, but over the past five years there had been stirrings. Siri hadn’t known his parents, so the reason for this possession remained a mystery. Yet every person with true psychic abilities could sense the presence of the old Hmong. And every passing spirit latched on to the doctor like sticky weed. Although Siri had yet to learn how to communicate directly with them, he now had a collection of dissatisfied spirits loitering in his subconscious. The most annoying of these was certainly Auntie Bpoo, the transvestite fortune-teller. Even when still alive, the seer had haunted Siri with her eerily accurate predictions. Although she claimed to be a lucky amateur, it was clear she could see beyond this dimension. She knew that Siri had been cursed from birth to carry the spirit of the shaman. She knew that he had yet to master the skills necessary to communicate with the spirit world. And, when she had died, she opted to join the frustrated spirits that possessed the old coroner. She had become the shop steward for his disgruntled inhabitants. She was the medium with the most potential to guide Siri. She better than anyone else could have taught him to engage in meaningful dialogue with the other side. But Auntie Bpoo proved to be an awful roommate. She was ornery and sarcastic and uncooperative. Their communication was one-sided and at the whim of the dead transvestite. This was particularly frustrating given that while working as a coroner Siri had been closely aligned to and fascinated by the spirit world and he would have sold his ragged old soul for a sit-down chat with the departed. Instead he was a voyeur, watching the dead perform in his dreams or hearing them as background rhubarb at inopportune moments.

  That was the reason he had accepted the potion from the medium in Luang Namtha on his previous trip. She’d promised him it would help him travel to the other side to spend time with the specters and the phi. In a two-for-one deal he’d accepted a second potion to treat Madam Daeng’s arthritis. The medium had warned th
at there were likely to be side effects in both cases. Madam Daeng had gladly accepted hers: a tail in return for blissful pain-free days tangoing to and fro between the tables of her restaurant. But Siri had not been so lucky. His disappearances left him wedged in some dark space like a man caught between the doors of adjoining hotel rooms. There was no handle on either and barely enough room to turn around. He’d tried chanting and feeling for secret latches and using terms from literature such as “Open sesame!” all to no avail. He felt certain the other side was just beyond that second door but had no idea how to travel there. Auntie Bpoo had been right. Siri was a most pitiful shaman. But that Auntie Bpoo, she was something else.

  “Good morning, darling.”

  Siri opened his eyes to find Auntie Bpoo lying beside him on a luxurious Western bed with pink sheets and soft, frilly pillows. It was a girly bed, most certainly Bpoo’s taste. She was wearing what they used to call a baby-doll nightie that contrasted drastically with her rugby forward’s build and military haircut. Thick makeup coagulated around the bristles on her chin.

  “No, don’t try to speak, darling,” said Bpoo.

  Siri couldn’t. He was gagged and tied to the bedstead with black nylon stockings. To his relief, he was fully dressed. The room was bright. Sunlight was streaming in through the French windows. A blue and red lizard rode blissfully on the slow-moving overhead fan.

  “You know you only make a fool of yourself when you try to speak,” said Bpoo. “And anyway. I have a poem for you. I know how you adore my poems.”

  Siri yanked at the nylon tethers, but he had no choice but to listen.

  Information, she began

  The InvasionOf your privacium

  You’ll never see ’em

  They hearand watch ya

  Each breath

  To the death

  Then they’ve gotcha.

  Whatever

  Never trust the ghosts.

  They have no scruples.

  “I hope you can remember it,” she said, “because I get the feeling it will be very useful for you sometime in the future or in the past. Whichever comes first. You do know you’ll be out of the country, don’t you? No, of course you don’t. You know so little for such a learned man. Now, my miniscule one, the door’s over there. Be on your way.”

  Siri looked toward the door then back to the transvestite. But she was gone, as were the bindings. He was alone on the bed. He tested his voice, which seemed to work perfectly.

  “See? I can speak,” he said, but of course there was nobody to hear.

  He stood and walked to the door and stepped through it without thinking. When he realized what he’d done it was too late. One door slammed behind him, and he was stuck again in that no-doorknob space between dimensions. He knew when Madam Daeng turned to cuddle him in their actual bed he wouldn’t be there. She’d assume he was in the bathroom rather than in the limbo between doors. But this time he had a voice.

  “Is there anybody there?” he shouted, and knocked on the second door. His voice echoed clearly in the space but the knock made no sound. He listened. There were mutterings coming from the other side. Domestic. A radio playing. Children laughing. Some kind of machine. Perhaps a vacuum cleaner. Then an eerie silence. Then a deathly scream.

  Siri waited but there were no more sounds. He was afraid the connection had been lost.

  “Hello,” he shouted again. “Can you hear me?”

  Then came a man’s voice. Not Lao. Thai.

  “Who’s in there?”

  “It’s me,” shouted the doctor. “Can you hear me?”

  The door before him began to open slightly. Light poured in through the crack and dazzled him. A hand dropped onto his shoulder.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if they could hear you in Australia,” said Madam Daeng.

  He lay beside her in their bed.

  “Oh, no,” said Siri.

  “Not pleased to see me?” she asked.

  “No . . . I mean, yes, of course.” He sat up and looked at the milky moon through the window. “It’s just that I was close. I almost crossed over. I’m sure of it. I heard a voice.”

  Most wives would be woken by their husbands in the middle of the night to hear complaints about belly gas or weak bladders. Madam Daeng was not most wives and she understood perfectly. Her husband had vanished and taken one giant leap for humankind and she was proud of him. Theirs was a relationship made, if not in heaven, then at least some other unearthly place.

  •••

  Government workers in Vientiane were earning some seven dollars a month, so everyone took a second job. This created a sort of zombie population: sleepless people shuffling around with little time for their loved ones or gossip or political issues. If you were lucky enough to have two jobs you did both of them to half of your ability so as not to burn out. Expecting a smile from a public official, therefore, was like asking a cooperative farmer to give up a pig. Yet there was something about Madam Daeng’s noodle shop that made everyone forget how depressed they were. For lunch and dinner the place was packed with people going to and from their workplaces. Mr. Geung’s funny lines and Daeng’s smiles and gourmet noodles at rock-bottom prices put the workers’ minds in a happy place. They sat beside strangers but in the twenty minutes between putting in an order to the sound of Chinese spoons scraping bowls, they gave up their life stories and learned half a dozen secrets. It was noisy there, as a good restaurant should be. In Paris, Siri had always been bemused by the lowering of volume as the menu prices increased. He’d never been to a Michelin-rated restaurant but he imagined large rooms as silent as libraries where orders were taken in mime and soup-slurpers were thrown out unceremoniously on their derrieres.

  It was so noisy in the noodle shop that Siri had to invite Judge Haeng upstairs so they could hear each other. Siri’s illicit library of French classics had been consumed by the fire, so no rooms were out of bounds. The judge did take time to peruse the Thai Mekhong Whisky bikini calendar at the top of the stairs.

  “It’s Daeng’s,” said Siri.

  He noticed that the judge had applied foundation to hide the dark bags under his eyes. His voice slurred from lack of sleep.

  “This is everything,” said Haeng, laying a pile of files on the coffee table as he sat on the wooden sofa. “And I’ve been through it a hundred times. The man lived alone. He had no lover, no friends and no social life as far as I can make out. He lived for his job. He was a star at Housing. He hounded out illegal squatters and had a hundred-percent conviction rate against residents making illegal alterations to their properties. From that you can deduce he was a pedant. A little creep, Siri.”

  Siri sat on the floor opposite the judge. “What in these files did you handle personally?” he asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I mean, I imagine you meted out most of the documentation to your underlings and just signed.”

  “Well, I . . .”

  “Was there anything that you handled yourself? Something that might cause Comrade Koomki to single you out for attention?”

  “No, Siri. The minister signed the document that posthumously cut him dishonorably from the list of public servants. Everything else was just general paperwork, except for the home visit.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  The judge rolled his eyes. It was a most annoying habit. “Following the police investigation,” he said, “an officer of the public prosecution department visits the home of the accused to assess what property needs to be destroyed or redistributed for the good of the republic.”

  “Isn’t that rather a menial task for the head of department?”

  “Most of our officials were off with the flu. But I was curious anyway to see if there was anything to connect him to insurgents. The destruction of property is a favorite practice of cross-border terrorist
s. A good public prosecutor leaves no—”

  “Tell me about his place.”

  “Nothing to tell, really. Basic. Smelled of rats. An old colonial shared house. Three families and seven single officials. Communal bathroom down the hall. Koomki lived in one room that had a tiny scullery at the back with an ancient refrigerator and a single-burner gas range.”

  “And you didn’t take or damage anything?”

  “What do you take me for, Siri?”

  Siri had an answer for that but he kept it to himself. “So tell me what you did there,” he said.

  “Is this really necessary?”

  “Do you eventually want to get some sleep?”

  The judge sighed and wiped a hand over his face. “I walked around,” he said. “I had to be certain the police hadn’t damaged anything. It’s all government housing, you see. I had to sign off on the property checklist. I put the few items that could be considered valuable in the wardrobe and locked it.”

  “What items?”

  “An alarm clock, a transistor radio, a small brass Buddha image . . . It’s all here in the invoice. It’s policy to prevent robbery as best we can. There are those who prey on the dead, you know?”

  “I know. Then what did you do?”

  “I completed my list, turned off the light, walked into the hallway and locked the door. I put the two keys in a manila envelope and returned them to my office. Siri, this is not—”

  “Describe the room to me.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “Please.”

  “All right. It was spartan. Bedroll against one wall, a little ripped. A towel open flat on the floor beside it. A shelf made out of river driftwood and bricks. About ten books.”

  “What language?”

  “Thai. Mostly building regulations. Some comic books.”

  “Topic?”

  “Childish things. Cartoon animals, little girls’ adventures.”

  “What else?”

  “Table. One chair. A box of clothes. That’s pretty much all.”