“Haunting you? Probably. We’ll know for sure if we can’t bring this little fellow back from the edge.”
“Little girl,” said Geung.
“I imagine if you killed his cat Comrade Koomki would dedicate the rest of his afterlife to making you miserable.”
Geung put the cat on the table and tried again with drips of coconut water. Judge Haeng stood over her like a grieving parent.
“Will she . . . ?” asked the judge.
“She can’t find her swallowing instinct,” said Dtui. “Let’s give her a hose job.”
Dtui bit a corner off the plastic bag and squirted the juice into the cat’s mouth through the hole. Most of it ended up on the table but some found its way down the throat and made her cough.
“I reckon that got through, don’t you?” said Dtui.
A little tongue appeared between the cat’s lips and licked at her wet whiskers.
“There you go,” said Geung.
He left the cat with Dtui and went to take a look in the wardrobe.
“In-in-instant noodle packets,” he said thumbing through the contents of the shelves, “leather boots chewed down to-to-to the soles. Shreds of p-p-paper.”
He knelt down to look on the bottom of the cupboard and let out a victorious cheer.
“Here we, here we are,” he said.
He pulled out a twenty-five liter water bottle that lay on its side. It was made of heavy duty plastic. The top was screwed on tightly and still had the water distributor’s tape stretched over it.
“It must have been a frustrating obstacle for a cat dying of thirst,” said Dtui. “But it’s not full, so she got in there somehow. See anything, pal?”
“Here on the side,” said Mr. Geung. “She scratched her w-w-w-way in.”
“And wore her claws down to the stubs,” said Dtui holding up one front paw.
The cat was lapping weakly at the puddle of coconut water in Dtui’s palm, still with no strength to stand. Her eyes were closed, and her body shuddered from time to time.
“Lucky she wasn’t a dog,” said Dtui. “Cats originated in warmer climates. They don’t drink as much as dogs. Just as well. It isn’t exactly flowing out of the bottle, is it?”
“Only one drip so far,” said Geung.
“Right,” said Dtui. “One drip every ten minutes. She’d have to be one patient cat.”
“She’s a survi-vi-vivor,” said Geung.
“She sure is,” said Dtui. “I think we should take her home and fatten her up.”
“No,” said the judge.
“No, what?” said Dtui, about to get on her high horse.
“I mean, I’ll take her.”
“That’s all right,” said Dtui. “It’ll be a burden for you. We can—”
“Seriously,” said Haeng. “Give her to me. I’m responsible for what’s happened to her.”
“If you insist. But there are any of a hundred reasons why she might not make it through the night.”
“I know.”
And so, Dtui handed over the cat to a person she’d never imagined to have any compassion for man or beast.
•••
Civilai found himself at the wheel of a Renault that could easily have been the one he first drove back in 1921. Admittedly, some parts were held together with tape, but she was much tougher than she looked. She bounced along over rocks and ruts as if she were designed for such a terrain. There wasn’t much to see on the forty-minute journey. The rice farmers had deserted the fields sooner than join cooperatives, so the paddies sat crusty and dry in the midday sun. In the far distance a storm was gathering as if Mother Nature had made a mistake with the sky design and tried to scribble it out. The only other vehicle he saw was a homemade tractor powered by a two-stroke diesel engine carrying twenty or so workers in straw hats. Civilai waved and smiled, but they all looked at him sourly.
Nor were there smiles upon his return to Ban Toop. He cruised slowly down the dusty main street with an elbow on the window ledge. He called out “Hey, you” to one child he saw there, but the boy looked away, pretending not to have heard. Despite the car’s lack of speed, a suicidal chicken threw itself under the front wheel of the Renault. There was an almighty scream before the bird expired. In a normal world this would have resulted in the chicken’s owner rushing from her house to claim compensation for the dead bird. But in Ban Toop, nobody reacted. Not a face peeked from a doorway.
“What if I strip off and do a jig on the roof?” Civilai shouted. “Would that get your attention?”
He continued to drive at the pace of a government committee meeting. He passed the old colonial building and once again noted its abnormal state of conservation. He parked in front of the headman’s house. From recent experience he wasn’t expecting the man to be home, and he wasn’t disappointed. Even the wife was absent. But there was suddenly a flurry of activity. He went to the side of the house in time to see a lanky youth run out the back door and across the field. It was the fastest he’d seen anyone move in the village. Then, as he was walking back to the car he caught sight of a pedestrian. A crooked old lady with a gnarly staff was edging her way along the far side of the road. He calculated she’d reach the other end of the street sometime in the next millennium, which made her something of a captive audience.
“Any idea where the headman is?” he shouted.
She ignored him. Goodness knows how Civilai loved to be ignored. He decided there and then that he’d wrestle her to the ground sooner than have her take no notice. But all it took was for him to cross the road and stand in front of her.
“Get out of my way, baldy,” she said.
“Oh, good,” said Civilai. “You can see me.”
“’Course I can. I’m not blind.”
“Deaf, perhaps?”
“What?”
“I asked you if you knew where the headman was.”
She was in a quandary. She wanted to keep going but her way was blocked, and it would take several minutes to go around the annoying man.
“Move!” she said.
“Not until you tell me where the headman is,” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Her face was parched and grooved like a terraced rice field left fallow for a hundred years. Little beads peered out from between the furrows.
“Let us be,” she said. “We’ve found some kind of peace at last. Don’t stir it all up again.”
She shuffled a foot forward, and Civilai stepped out of her way. He didn’t know what she meant, but he felt an overwhelming despair in her. He didn’t want to add to her suffering, whatever it was.
He drove to the only other place he knew in Ban Toop, but the Tasitu mechanic’s yard was also deserted. The scattered debris looked even more ancient. There was no jolly topless mechanic running out to meet the Renault. Civilai parked and walked to the brick building and called out.
“Maitreya, are you there?”
There was no answer, so Civilai walked in to the workshop. It smelled of old grease and flat petrol. Even the smells were odd in this odd village. In a working mechanic’s shop the scents were fresh: oil bled from an engine, grease newly slapped on axles. But this shop had only lingering ghosts of the work once done there. Civilai doubted Maitreya had worked on a car engine since the turnover. So how did he make a living? How did anyone here make a living? Before he left Vientiane he’d checked the roster and found Ban Toop had rejected an offer to join a cooperative, citing a lack of able-bodied workers. That usually meant the rice farmers were doing very nicely, had access to the black market and would make a lot more money by going it alone. But in this area the fields were deserted and unloved.
Civilai walked to an alcove behind a cloth curtain in the back of the workshop. The space was barely broad enough for a workbench
with a vice and an acetylene tank with a blowtorch. And on the bench was the oddest thing he’d seen in a very long—
“This how you do it in Vientiane?” came a booming voice from directly behind him.
Civilai’s old heart missed a short run of beats. He looked over his shoulder to see Maitreya with a large rusting wrench in his hand. The old man gathered himself.
“Do what, young fellow?” he asked.
“Walk into people’s places without an invite.”
“It’s just a workshop,” said Civilai. “In fact I was hoping you might have a toilet back here.”
The mechanic frowned. “Plenty of trees and bushes outside,” he said.
“Ah, young Maitreya,” said Civilai pushing past the younger man and back into the garage where there was space to avoid a swinging wrench, “my crouching tiger days are over. If I can’t find a French toilette with a comfortable seat I’d sooner let it back up for a week. That’s what I fear will be the death of me.”
“You thought you’d find a French toilet in a workshop?”
“Why not? Judging from that fine old French villa back in the village, you had foreign influence here in Ban Toop. And the froggies always put in the bathroom before the walls and roof. It’s a known fact.”
The mechanic smiled and dropped the wrench onto the dirty floor, which surprised Civilai.
“You should be careful,” said Maitreya. “I come back to find a strange car in the yard and someone nosing through my things. A man might act rashly, if you know what I mean. One of the boys just told me there was a stranger rooting around.”
“I didn’t hear you come back,” said Civilai.
“Bicycle. Great weapon of war. The Japs used them a lot against the British. Whole units sneaking up on a garrison without a sound. Slit their throats before they knew what had hit ’em.”
“I’ve never heard that.”
The two stared at each other for a while.
“Tea?” said the mechanic.
“Thank you.”
They sat on old Shell oil drums drinking their tea under a lush American iron filings tree. The fig tree beside it hadn’t faired so well. Someone had used it as a notice board. There were hundreds of nails hammered into the trunk. It stood leafless and riddled with disease, its only fruit a truck tire hanging from a rope. The tree’s demise probably paralleled that of the mechanic’s business.
“I thought I made it clear I wasn’t interested in any of this Buddha nonsense,” said Maitreya.
“You did,” said Civilai.
“Then why didn’t you go back with your wife?”
Civilai smiled. “Well, you’re right,” he said, “you’re not the next Buddha. I have no doubt about that. But I have a report to write, and just as we were about to leave something peculiar happened. I’m the type who can’t sleep when there’s a mystery left unsolved.”
“I hope I can help,” said Maitreya.
“An old woman came to see us at the guesthouse. She claimed to be your mother.”
Maitreya laughed. “Spindly? Hair like an old carpet? Shaking hands?”
“That’s her.”
The mechanic took an unnecessarily slow draft of tea. “Wan’s her name,” he said. “They call her the fruit bat. She should have been locked up a long time ago.”
“She’s not your mother?”
“She’s nobody’s mother. Mad woman. Did she pull the virgin birth routine on you?”
“She had a note from the hospital.”
“And did you notice there wasn’t a name on the note? Every time there’s a stranger in town she comes up with the same story claiming to have given birth to whoever it is the visitors have come to see. I don’t know who wrote the note for her. I know for a fact she can’t read or write. She just memorized the words. It’s sad, Uncle, but it’s hardly a mystery. But if you’re into unanswered questions I imagine you’re wondering why the village is empty.”
“That had crossed my mind.”
“Simple. We’re preparing for our village festival. Everyone’s off in the hills gathering wood and hunting for meat. It’s a big deal for us. It was very bad luck that your visit coincided with it. The headman would have liked to meet you.”
Maitreya tuned the Renault before he’d let Civilai leave. It was strange that a car mechanic wouldn’t recognize the only car within fifty kilometers of the village. But as Civilai drove back to Pak Xan, he put together a long list of bizarre points. Strange it was that the village would be celebrating a festival that wasn’t on any calendars. Strange that the town’s only guesthouse should claim they’d never seen the fruit-bat woman before. Where else would she stalk strangers? Strange that a villager would call a government official “uncle” rather than “comrade.” Strange that a man in an isolated village should know Madam Nong had already left. Strange that a poor village would reject the opportunity to join a rice cooperative. Strange that a mechanic would show such little respect for his tools.
But, as he drove back into a shocking pink sunset, Civilai couldn’t make head or tail of the strangest thing of all. On the bench in the alcove behind the workshop was a Buddha image some sixty centimeters tall. But the top of its head was flat. For some reason, somebody had sliced off part of its skull and placed it on the bench beside the Buddha like half an unexploded bomb.
•••
Inspector Phosy had made an appointment by telephone, a rare occurrence in the People’s Democratic Republic. It was often simpler to turn up at the place, ask whether the person you wish to see is there, announce your arrival and wait. But there was something ceremonial about a meeting at the Armed Forces Ministry. The telephone operator at police headquarters called the telephone operator at the ministry to make an appointment. Twenty minutes later, the telephone operator at the ministry called back and said the appointment was as soon as the inspector could get there.
Upon his arrival Phosy felt a little like royalty. He was met at the gate by a high ranking official and escorted to the police liaison office. The official knocked, opened the door and left. There were three men in the room. Corporal Suwit sat at his desk and two more officers sat on the plastic couch. They were wearing green uniforms that fit, another rare occurrence in Laos.
Phosy toured the room shaking hands, first with the two officers he didn’t know. They stood (reluctantly, to Phosy’s mind) to return the handshake.
“These are Colonels Viboun and Vinai,” said Suwit. “I’ve asked them to join us because we’re all concerned about this misunderstanding. The officers are keen to clear it up as soon as possible.”
“Well, a big ‘yes’ to that,” said the policeman. He sat not on the lone wooden chair in the middle of the room but at the end of the couch. Its two occupants had to shuffle along to give him room.
“I can’t tell you how many nightmares this case has given me,” said Phosy.
“We hope you’ve made some progress,” said the man directly beside him. He spoke without turning his head in the inspector’s direction.
“Oh, comrade,” said Phosy, “you wouldn’t believe how many wrong turns we’ve made and how much bad luck we’re having.”
He thought somebody might ask a question, but nobody did.
“Look, I know this will probably turn out to be totally unrelated to you fellows, but I’d really appreciate it if you’d allow me to just get it all off my chest.”
“Feel free,” said the farthest colonel.
“Well, first,” said Phosy, “we discovered that the cyclist who was kidnapped isn’t even a Lao citizen. He’s Thai.”
“How did you learn that?” asked Suwit.
“We found his ID at the guesthouse he’d been staying at,” said Phosy. “So naturally, we had to contact the Thais and they insisted on sending some of their people to assist with the inquiry. We told them we’re perfectly capable of f
inding him ourselves. They said there’d be an international incident if we didn’t, so we assumed he was connected . . . if you know what I mean. They wouldn’t kick up such a dust storm if he was just a tourist. So that raised the profile of the investigation, and, I tell you, that’s all I needed because I’m dealing with some nervous witnesses already.”
“Witnesses?” said the nearest colonel.
“Right,” said Phosy. “Our main witness, the one who saw the actual abduction directly in front of her, she got cold feet because her sister was killed by—we suspect—a jealous boyfriend and she—the witness, that is—she came home to find blood everywhere and her sister buried under a pile of empty bottles. It took us an age to calm the witness down. Am I going too fast for you? No? Good.”
He took the opportunity to help himself to one of the unchilled soft drinks on the coffee table in front of him. The couch soldiers were being oddly quiet.
“I hope you found somewhere secure to house the witnesses,” said Suwit.
“Not sure I’d call it safe,” said Phosy. “And I’m trusting you boys to keep this to yourselves, but we’ve got the main witness above a friend’s noodle shop on Fa Ngum. We doubt the death of her sister is connected to this case but you can never be too sure. Am I right? Of course I am. But if the boyfriend does turn up we’ll know he did it because we have his fingerprints from the crime scene.”
“His fingerprints?” said the nearest colonel.
“One or two sets still unidentified,” said Phosy.
The other colonel laughed. “This isn’t some American thriller,” said the farthest colonel. “Are you sure you aren’t overestimating the capabilities of your department?”
“I know what you mean,” said Phosy. “A few months ago I was just as skeptical as you. But this—I don’t know what to call him—this forensic-evidence genius shows up, trained overseas, and suddenly we’re not only keeping up with our neighboring countries, we’re leaping ahead of them. Things we wouldn’t have noticed before, like the motorcycle tracks.”
“What about them?” asked Suwit.
“We’ve made a plaster cast of the tracks of the motorcycle that the kidnappers were riding. And now we’ve got the tire tracks of the man who killed our witness’s sister. Of course, they aren’t connected, but if they were we’d know it soon enough.”
I Shot the Buddha Page 13