He looked around to give the abbot time to rethink his answer. They were sitting cross-legged in the prayer hall. The Buddha image looked down on them, jolly in its new coat of yellow paint. The wall murals depicted scenes of what Civilai called the Indian music hall version of Buddha’s life: flying through the air and bursting into flames, taking on Angulimāla, the killer of thousands, walking through mountains.
“Then, no,” said the abbot at last.
“Well, somebody’s trying really hard to make us believe you did,” said Siri. “So if you can think of anyone who might want you put away for life, now’s the time to remember.”
The long gaps between question and answer were vexing. Siri drummed his fingers on his knees.
“I’m a Buddhist monk in an animist village,” said the abbot. “I have a big fine palace to live in because the Buddhist Council has a budget for buildings and ornaments. It’s possible the spirit worshippers in the village resent this opulence because in their eyes I’m just another shaman. Brother Ya mixes potions that make a man irresistible to women. Sister Song selects a spot to dig a well. Abbot Rayron performs at funerals. I could branch out. There are monks who bless airplanes and provide lottery numbers and tell fortunes. But I do not. I don’t step on anyone’s toes. I adhere to my scriptures. I teach. I lead by example. I try to steer the villagers in the direction of better decisions on health and personal relationships and management of resources. But I don’t preach. It’s not our way. I tell stories. I hope to inspire. But I’ve never had a heated debate on the benefits of my religion. If you ask me if I’m respected here, I’d say I hope so. If I’m liked? I hope so. If I’ve angered a man enough to wish me dead? That, I hope not.”
Siri shifted his numb buttocks and stretched his spine. One gentle crack echoed through the hall. He stared at the abbot. He was what Madam Daeng referred to as “eventually handsome”: a face you don’t immediately consider to be good-looking but which grows on you. He was about forty with a body that left no evidence of the sugars and alcohol and starches and fats and tobacco the twentieth century inflicted upon the weak.
“Then what about your personal life?” Siri asked.
“I’m a monk. I don’t have a personal life.”
“But you did. Before the monkhood.”
“Oh, such a distant life. How is that likely to help us, Doctor?”
“In your defense? Probably not at all. But in understanding you there’s gold to be panned in a man’s origins.”
“Then I think your pan might be empty. I was abandoned at the temple when I was eight.”
“Really?” said Siri. “Me too. See? Our first scoop, and we come up with empathy. Eight must have been the fashionable age to dump young boys.”
“But you broke away, Doctor. I remained with the Buddha because he was the only father I knew. I’d been raised by a woman I loved and who apparently loved me. And then suddenly she wasn’t in my life. People I didn’t know took over her duties. Then one day a man came to the house. He looked Chinese, but he spoke Thai. He was well dressed. He put me in the backseat of his car. There was a small paper bag beside me that contained my clothes. I’d never been in a car. It was like flying in a magic device. And he dropped me at the temple, told me to be good for my mother’s sake, mussed my hair and flew off. Thanks to the mode of my arrival I was instantly popular with the novices.”
“Do you know where the temple was?”
“Of course. It was my home as a child. Wat Po in Udon Thani.”
“And did you ever return there later in life to ask about the man with the car?”
The abbot contemplated his fists for a long time. “Not until it was too late. The monks I served as a novice were all dead, and there was no record of deliveries. Today people drop off dogs at the temples when they can no longer cope with them or are too poor to feed them. Back then the same applied to male children. I was an unwanted stray, but I found acceptance and peace.”
“Until now.”
“This is my destiny.”
“Oh, don’t give me that karma rot.”
But this was to be the night when destiny demonstrated her power. It was beneath the light of a single moon that three unrelated women lost their lives: one on the outskirts of Vientiane, one in Pak Xan and one in a village of sleeping shamans. It was midnight and Madam Daeng was woken by the word “merde” repeated several times. She opened her eyes to see her husband hurriedly putting on his trousers by the light of the full moon. As she was not unused to emergencies in their relationship, she immediately stood and began to throw on her clothes as well.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To the village,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
“My brain. I can’t believe how stupid I am.”
“Anytime you need reminding, feel free to ask.”
They were already on their way out of the door with their bags over their shoulders.
“Five years, Daeng,” he said. “Five years I was at that temple. They told us those damned stories over and over again until they were big chunks of unwanted gunk lodged in our memories. The Buddha stories. The son of a king decides to renounce his wealth and head off into the world leaving footprints and body parts from Nepal to China.”
Daeng’s flashlight worked that night although the full moon was bright enough to see the eyelashes on a mosquito. They were out of the temple compound gate and on the haunted path. Again, Ugly balked at the start of the track. The couple ran at a sort of geriatric road-walk pace ignoring the howls and groans coming from the jungle on either side. Siri’s lungs weren’t what they used to be, and Daeng had only recently reclaimed her leg muscles.
“I wish I’d brought the Triumph,” he said.
“And what was it the Buddha did that was so important we need to risk heart attacks?” wheezed Daeng.
“The four . . . things.”
“What four things?”
“The things the Buddha saw that made him realize the world wasn’t all frangipani leis and champagne cocktails. He climbed over the palace wall and went into town to see what his parents had been shielding him from. And that’s when he saw them.”
“What? Who?”
“An ascetic, a corpse, an old man . . .”
They were too late for the sick woman. She’d been given some sort of fast-acting poison. When they arrived at her hut, her lips and the inside of her nose had already turned greyish white, and there was some bubbling around her mouth. Siri had seen her earlier in the day when he’d offered to take a look at the village sick. He’d found the elderly folk to be in remarkably good shape. The old woman was the only serious case that the herbs of young brother Ya had been unable to help, and Siri had treated her for hepatitis. The Buddha had seen a sick man on his fact-finding mission, but as there were none available, in this case, a sick woman would have to suffice.
Following Siri’s alert, the villagers headed off with their weapons to find the murderer. Some voiced their opinions that they’d find the culprit back at the temple where he’d come from. An old witch suffering from insomnia had been rocking on a chair on her porch when the monk walked past in the direction of the dead woman’s house. She had no doubt whatsoever in her mind that the monk was Abbot Rayron.
•••
Humnoy, the man who currently ran the Lao national police force, was neither a policeman nor a military man. Nor was he an academic versed in the laws of the country because they were yet to be written. Nor was he a bookkeeper of any standing. His qualifications for the role could be summed up in the phrase, “He’s a good Party member and the brother-in-law of somebody important.”
The lack of abilities in no way prevented him from doing his job. The buck had to stop somewhere, and he was the perfect man to stop it. He made endless arbitrary decisions based, apparently, upon how to upset the fewest of his su
periors. His favorite words were bo dai, which naturally meant “no.”
“Bo dai,” he said having listened intently to the inspector’s request. It was no less than Phosy expected. But Phosy was no two-left-footer when it came to circle-dancing with administrators.
“Yes, that was my first reaction too,” he said. “Why rile the military? Who really cares that their soldiers kidnapped an innocent civilian on the street in front of witnesses? He probably deserved it. Why, the two young soldiers are probably downstairs right now putting in an official complaint about whatever it was he’d done. Because we all know this is not a country run by a military junta, but a democratic republic with a fully functioning police force charged with the responsibility of keeping the peace.”
“I’m not—”
“In fact that’s what I reminded Corporal Suwit on Friday.”
“Who?”
“Corporal Suwit at the Armed Forces Ministry. Oh, sorry. I assumed you two were acquainted. He knows everything there is to know about you down to your shoe size.”
“What in blazes does this Suwit have to do with me?”
“He’s the head of the military—national police liaison department. You do know that exists, right?”
“There is no such thing.”
Phosy had gambled on his boss having no more knowledge of the department than Phosy himself before he stumbled across it.
“With all due respect, sir, I was sitting in that office just a few days ago. Suwit seemed to have a lot of information about me and my cases. He had a file on my department as thick as a temple lintel.”
“But that’s . . . that’s atrocious.”
“Couldn’t agree more, sir. Especially given some of his comments about . . . No, doesn’t matter.”
“Phosy!”
“No, really. I shouldn’t say.”
“I order you to tell me.”
“There was nothing direct. Just comments about . . . about your suitability for this position. What they called ‘a poor track record.’”
“Bastards.”
“I know, sir. I told him I didn’t want to hear any more.”
“How dare the army keep files on us?”
“How dare they, indeed?”
The director was a broad man, brawny, easily angered. His cheeks reddened to signal he’d passed his limit, but commendably he didn’t raise his voice. He placed his big hands flat on the desk and practiced his breathing. Phosy sat patiently. Finally, the director nodded.
“These witnesses,” he said.
“Yes, sir?”
“Would they be prepared to give evidence?”
“I believe so.”
“All right. Bring ’em in.”
“Are you sure it’s—?”
“Just do it.”
Phosy stopped outside the director’s door. He should have been sitting in that chair. He’d fought and spied bravely for the Pathet Lao during the resistance years. He’d agreed to join the police to convert men of war into peacekeepers. He’d been integral in the writing of most of the temporary regulations they were using as their flimsy legal base. But it seemed that for every competent man or woman there was an incompetent man above. It was the law of trickle-up irresponsibility. And the competent man and woman spent so much time manipulating the incompetent men they had neither the time nor the motivation to do their jobs properly.
Phosy took a police jeep out to the kiosk of the cordial seller. He had a young sergeant by his side. He’d omitted to mention that the innocent civilian was not Lao. And there was, of course, just the one eyewitness, and she had no idea who the kidnappers were. All she had was an instinct, and that wouldn’t carry any weight in the court of law—if in fact they had such things. But Phosy had people who owed him favors. He was certain one or two of them could be diverted retrospectively to the scene of the crime. And with backup, who knew what the cordial seller might recall?
She wasn’t sitting behind the bottles when they arrived. He drove off the road and down the track that led to her bamboo hut. The pile of empties still dominated the yard. The hut wasn’t a complicated structure: A single room on stilts with barely enough space for a pig below. A ladder up to an unfenced balcony.
Phosy stood on the middle step and banged on the banana-leaf door. There was no answer. The balcony was caked in dust from the road, but out of courtesy he kicked off his sandals and climbed up.
“Anybody there?” he called.
No answer. Even before he pushed the flimsy door a familiar smell hit him. He knew what to expect. The room was buzzing with flies. They seemed to congregate mostly around the far side of the room where a window shape was cut out of the panel. There was a dark, dry puddle. There had been a lot of blood, although much of it would have seeped down through the gaps in the bamboo flooring. He sighed and looked through the window. The scenery was beautiful: white terns on the backs of buffalo, lush green paddies, and verdant trees that looked like they could defy the advance of development forever. The only nature that ever disappointed him was of the human variety.
•••
It was an odd breakfast. Captain Gumron had been dragged out of his bed at two to investigate yet another murder at Sawan Village. As there was no phone line to Nam Som, Yuth, the headman’s slow-witted son, had taken the village motorcycle to alert the police. The captain, having talked to some peculiar Lao coroner and his wife—both apparently in the country illegally—had interviewed the eyewitness to the crime. She was riddled with cataracts in both eyes, but he really had no choice but to re-arrest Abbot Rayron. The sun was up, and he and his constable were tired and in need of a feed. As the alms at Sawan village were legendary, they decided to accept the offer of breakfast before dragging the suspect off to jail. The only other good news was that this was court day. They would have had to come anyway to cart the monk off to hear the judge’s decision on the previous month’s hearings. So, in a way, they were killing two birds with one stone.
As Abbot Rayron was accused of multiple homicides, the Sangharaj had graciously agreed to take on the abbot’s alms that morning. He returned with a feast worthy of a five-star hotel. Abbot Rayron sat a few meters behind the Supreme Patriarch, eating meagerly.
“Well, if you didn’t do it, brother,” said Captain Gumron, slurping up spoonfuls of delicious rice porridge, “you must have really pissed somebody off. Because it means there’s a character out there pretending to be you killing folk and defiling corpses. Anybody hate you that much?”
“Not to my knowledge,” said the abbot.
“It might not be personal,” said Siri.
The captain had long since tired of the old Lao man’s theories. He was on the verge of making this a double arrest.
“What do you mean, Siri?” asked the Sangharaj.
“Well, think about it,” said Siri. “An anonymous monk committing crimes that mirror the revelations of the Buddha. This isn’t a murderer who hates Abbot Rayron. It’s a murderer who hates the religion.”
“I’d like to remind you all this is an ongoing investigation,” said the captain. “And I am not at liberty to discuss theories or wild accusations.”
“Then don’t say anything,” said Madam Daeng. “Just listen.”
The captain laughed. “One more comment like that, young lady, and I’ll have you in handcuffs,” said the captain.
Siri’s haunches rose. The policeman was clearly flirting with his wife. The Thais had no scruples. The doctor had no choice but to lock horns with this rival.
“Whilst doing my rounds of the elderly and infirm of the village,” he said, “I noticed how few villagers had hair above their collars. I think it’s something the Thai police should have taken into consideration.”
“What?” said the captain. “Hair fashion? Isn’t that more the role of your morals police up in Laos? Length of hair. Length
of hem. We’ve got better things to do.”
“I’m talking, of course, about beginning the search for the man who’s impersonating Abbot Rayron. Something you should have been doing months ago.”
He stared at the Thai policeman, who was stuffing his face with food meant for the monks. He was in his fifties, and, despite the restrictive qualities of the Thai police uniform, he had a considerable paunch. He walked as if he expected a wild boar to run between his legs. He wasn’t at all Madam Daeng’s type, yet she fluttered her eyelids every time he looked her way.
“In fact,” Siri continued, “if I were a Thai policeman I’d be looking at the elders of the village. One or two of them are losing their hair. I’d be focusing on men over forty.”
“Mr. Coroner,” said Gumron, using the derogatory term, “ghost doctor,” suggesting Siri’s role was more a vocation than a profession, “from getting out of bed this morning to my arrival here took thirty minutes. Anyone with a motorcycle or car can come here. Why would I concentrate my efforts on the village when anyone from the town could have done it?”
Siri smiled. “Because,” he said, “this is a crime of hate. You have so many more splendid temples around Nam Som with many more monks to abuse. Much more explosive points to be made. But he chooses a small temple in the jungle. No. Whatever inspired these murders has its roots here.”
“Of course,” said the captain. “A man of science. You’d be delighted if the murderer was a shaman or an exorcist or any one of the weird characters who practice pagan rituals here. You’re prejudiced.”
Daeng wiped a tissue over her lips, smiled and left the men to their duel. Siri would have loved to race after her, lift her tail and shout, “Is this prejudice?”
He would gladly have disappeared right then and reappeared five minutes later to see the look of amazement on the man’s face. But there was something about the captain. His ease around the villagers. His willingness to come to Sawan alone when other townies dared not unless they were in a tour group. Siri understood.
“You’re from here,” he said.
“What?”
I Shot the Buddha Page 11