I Shot the Buddha

by Colin Cotterill

  “But that’s not—” began Siri.

  “Quiet,” said Captain Gumron.

  Ugly began to kick up a fuss in front of the courtroom.

  “I take it that’s your dog outside?” said the judge. “I believe I saw you arrive together.”

  “I apologize,” said Siri. “He’s not that fond of police.”

  “Apology accepted and understood,” said the judge, still smiling. “Now if you’d perhaps allow me a few minutes to take back control of my court, I was planning to mention that there’s a month before that initial hearing in Udon. I’m sure if someone contributed a little brilliant detective work to the case before then and came up with a new suspect, we could also apologize to the abbot and pursue proceedings against a more likely murderer.”

  Interestingly, he looked not at the police captain during this speech, but at the abbot’s entourage, specifically Siri.

  “Your Honor,” said Abbot Rayron.

  It was the first time the monk had spoken, so everyone was surprised to hear his voice.

  “Yes?” said the judge.

  “I also apologize,” said the abbot.

  “For what?” asked the judge.

  “For forcing you to make such a difficult choice.”

  Everyone looked on in amazement. The abbot had apologized to the judge for the inconvenience he’d caused. Even the unflappable judge was stunned. He stared at the monk mystified for a few seconds before waving him away.

  Very few suspects sent to Udon had returned to tell the tale. The provincial justice department frowned upon paying for two-way tickets, so only non-returnable certainties made it to the central courthouse. Yet the judge had given them hope. A uniformed officer wai’d the abbot before handcuffing himself to him. He nodded when the lock was secure and led the monk outside. Siri and the team followed with their heads bowed. By the time they reached the door, the next case was already being heard. For once, Siri and Daeng could think of nothing to say. They followed the Sangharaj out through the double doors into the glare of a late afternoon filled with shouts.

  “How many have you killed, Abbot?”

  “Are there other bodies we don’t know about?”

  “Is this the temple’s way of clearing out the shamans?”

  The abbot, chained to his grinning guard, was surrounded by reporters. There were the whirrs of cameras and the orders to “Look this way, Abbot.”

  They pushed rudely against him. One prodded a cassette recorder into his face. He had no chance to respond between the questions. The police guard enjoyed the attention and had no intention of hurrying the abbot to the cell. It wasn’t until Siri, Daeng and Yuth, the headman’s son, forced their way into the crowd and hustled both abbot and guard out of the forecourt that the madness abated. Most of the reporters were local, but there were one or two from Bangkok.

  Someone had blabbed.

  10

  The Devil You Don’t Know

  Phosy had been sitting for an hour on an uncomfortable wooden bench one floor below his superior’s office. With every minute he waited, his overactive policeman’s instinct nipped at his nerves. He shuffled through the possible courses of action. Sergeant Sihot had said immediately after the ninja’s capture that they should rope and gag the guy and throw him in the Mekhong. Show the enemy what they were up against. Half the detectives at headquarters would, at the very least, have beaten a confession out of the man. There on the itchy seat in the cold light of day neither of those scenarios seemed so bad. Even when the cocky ninja had stared Phosy in the face and mocked him, the detective had kept his hands to himself.

  “You know it doesn’t matter, don’t you?” was what he’d said.

  “What doesn’t?” Phosy asked.

  “Whatever you do to me, whatever information you extract from me by, whatever means—it’s not going to make any difference.”

  “Beating you up would make a difference,” Phosy had said, although he wasn’t the type to hit a man in ropes.

  “Only to you, Cop. Not to your case.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Tomorrow I file criminal charges against you. Then we see who attempts to bail you out. Then we’ll know who your boss is at the armed forces ministry. And he’ll find out that the police force has come a long way since the old regime.”

  “You have no idea, do you?”

  “Tell me what I don’t have any idea about.”

  “No idea who we are,” said the man. “No idea how deep you are in something you should have kept out of. No idea how small and pathetic you are. How unimportant.”

  “Oh, kid,” said Phosy, “when will you learn? There’s no ‘we.’ You’re a hired thug and not a very good one at that. Even if you’re on a salary you’re still a hired ruffian. You just do what your boss tells you. People like you are never let into the inner circle. You’re a soldier ant, pal, and you just got squashed tonight.”

  “You should have let me kill her.”

  “What?”

  “A killing would have given you something to charge me with. But what have you got? Breaking and entering? A petty thief. They won’t even bother to charge me. I’ll be out of there before lunch. Really, Constable. You should have let me slice open that ugly fat bitch.”

  Phosy reached in his shoulder bag.

  “Bang,” said the ninja.

  But Phosy produced a Brownie Instamatic camera. The police department had three of them.

  “Souvenir?”

  “Kind of. I want to take a picture of you before you have your accident.”

  One of the few benefits of being a policeman in the People’s Democratic Republic was that nobody cared about brutality in police custody. So that morning he’d merely had to tell the desk sergeant his prisoner got those two black eyes by dancing with a tall Ukrainian woman with a reinforced brassier. The sergeant almost fell off his chair laughing. But now on that hard wooden bench with his instincts twitching, Phosy was starting to believe he should have fed his ninja to the giant catfish.

  Most of the government buildings had open-air corridors, so Phosy heard the voice from the floor above clearly enough.

  “Phosy? You down there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come up.”

  It was the Lao version of the intercom.

  The supervisor was leaning against the wall in front of his office smoking a Marlboro.

  “Smoke?” he said.

  “No, thanks,” said Phosy when he arrived. “You have something to tell me?”

  The supervisor puffed on his cigarette. Four years on and they were still finding stashes of them. It was as if the royalists had planted them before they fled the city to wipe out the enemy one lung at a time.

  “Bo dai,” said the supervisor.

  “Bo dai, what?” as if he didn’t know.

  “You have to drop your investigation.”

  “I thought it was our investigation.”

  “It’s not going anywhere. It’s time to stop.”

  “We have a military hit man downstairs and seven witnesses prepared to state—”

  “He’s out,” said the supervisor.

  Phosy accepted one of the cigarettes. He didn’t smoke, but he wanted to crush something in his fist.

  “Had visitors, did you?” he asked.

  “Phosy, don’t—”

  “You know we could save a lot of money on rent by moving into the armed forces ministry. They even have a lady who delivers tea and biscuits right to your office.”

  “Phosy!”

  “Of course we’d be answerable to the general, but that’s not much different than . . .”

  “Phosy. It’s not them.”

  “Not who?”

  “The army didn’t do it.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “It’s true. They weren
’t responsible for the kidnapping. You were wrong.”

  •••

  From the roof of his guesthouse Civilai could see Thailand. The Thais had long-distance telephones and faxes and even courier services where you’d give a man a letter and he’d speed off on his motorcycle and hand it over in person. So close—just across the river—but so far. In Pak Xan, the public phone at the post office wasn’t active. A line was down somewhere. The postal worker even had the nerve to say, “But we do have a fax machine.”

  Two buses passed through town every day on their way to Vientiane. Civilai had entrusted notes to the drivers of both and handed over generous tips for the trouble of delivering the messages to the ministry. The odds of that working were as narrow as Laos winning a medal in the next Olympics. Like so many times before, he was being held prisoner by his country’s non-communication system.

  He went to the council office to see whether they’d had any luck with their own phone. But the greasy clerk was nowhere to be found, the director was off “in the field,” and the telephone had a padlock that prevented unauthorized users from dialing. The second-in-command assured Civilai they’d bring him a message whenever they had a response from Vientiane. The only response Civilai wanted was a pickup truck with half a dozen embassy officials on board. The director had taken the Renault, so the assistant suggested in a most condescending fashion that the old man take advantage of this quiet period and relax. If he was lonely the man said he knew of a pretty young lady who was a most competent masseuse. This suggestion was punctuated with a wink.

  Civilai had reluctantly agreed to stop at the police station to pay a courtesy call on the rude flip-flopped police officer. He was eating sweet suet balls at his desk and didn’t offer one to his visitor.

  “How did you know the dead woman?” he asked, dribbling sauce down his chin.

  “I assume you have a remarkable memory,” said Civilai, helping himself to a seat.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re beginning an interview without a pad or a pen. Unless you’re planning to bite my replies into your suet balls in Morse code I’m assuming you’ll be memorizing everything,” said Civilai.

  That entire speech was apparently meaningless to the policeman. “I asked you a question,” he said.

  Civilai sighed. “My wife and I encountered her on Sunday evening for the first time,” he said. “We’d never seen her before.”

  “But she knew you,” said the policeman.

  “Knew of us, more like. She knew we’d been to Ban Toop.”

  At this point, one of the five framed black-and-white photos of senior Party members that lined the wall behind him came unscrewed. To prevent warping, very common of wooden frames in the tropics, a second screw anchored the frame at the bottom. This screw held, so the president now hung upside down and out of alignment. To his credit, the policeman barely reacted to this decoration malfunction and continued his interview. Civilai, on the other hand, found the sight of this upside-down ex-royal, now with a single eyebrow above his nose, rather hilarious. His replies to the policeman’s questions were seasoned liberally with giggles. This riled the policeman, who took it as a personal insult. From that moment on any pretense at détente was canceled.

  But all at once the dangling photograph took on entirely different characteristics in Civilai’s mind. The fall from alignment was symbolic rather than accidental. And as he went through the motion of replying to the policeman’s questions he rummaged through the clutter of his memory in search of a story. Scary tales around a campfire as a teenager. Gossip and rumors that had become folklore. He searched desperately for a connection.

  “Are you listening to me?” said the policeman.

  “No, not really,” said Civilai. “Look, I need a library.”

  “You what? Do you want me to arrest you?”

  “Do you want me to take your job from you?”

  “What?”

  “Take a look at me. Don’t you know who I am?”

  Nobody outside Vientiane and very few in it took any notice of who was on what board or which committee. Just a lot of old fogies in jackets and ties.

  “I . . .”

  “You’d better remember because in an hour my team will be here from Vientiane and right now, your position is hanging by a thread. Write down the name Civilai Songsawat, Lao Politburo. Oh, wait. You don’t have a pen, do you? Then memorize it. And when you’ve done that and you’ve considered how much trouble you’re in you can tell me where I can find some books in this town.”

  Of course there was no library. Even the national bibliothèque on Sethathirat looked more like a poorly stocked bookshop. The country had few tomes in its own language beyond the palm leaf manuscripts lying unread in the temples. But, like Siri, Civilai had hope that not all the French or English books had been destroyed. That besides Siri’s ill-fated goldmine of classic French literature there might be other caches of gems hidden away until a day when the country regained its common sense. Naturally, the policeman knew of none. Nobody would confess to owning contraband literature. But there was one likely source.

  Civilai was back in Teacher Grit’s classroom. The children were huddled around mathematical puzzles and barely noticed the stranger’s arrival.

  “Ah, brother,” said Grit, shaking Civilai’s hand warmly. “How was your visit to the temple?”

  “Frustrating,” said Civilai. “Your local rats enjoy a good French report.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Grit, “but you haven’t given up?”

  “I need an encyclopedia.”

  “And a submarine and a Rembrandt?”

  “Is it that difficult? The lady football referee said you were the fountain of all knowledge.”

  “I disappoint often.”

  “Come on. You were angry about the cadres burning books here. Somebody like you would have found a way to hide a small stash. I’m not going to report you. I just want to look something up.”

  The old teacher puffed up his cheeks. “English or Thai?” he asked.

  “No French?”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m not sure the Thais will have what I want, and my English is pretty horrible.”

  “Give me twenty minutes till the break, and I’ll help.”

  The eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published in 1911, and it looked its age. Whilst its spies waged war against the Communists, American educators and volunteers stocked its school libraries in Laos mainly with secondhand books. A lot of the material was overt propaganda: abridged readers on great Americans and the like. Many of the schools destroyed their stock in ’75, not knowing how the Pathet Lao would react if they found them. Others, like Teacher Grit, hid them and returned them to the school when the coast was clear.

  “Bit dusty,” said Grit, “but all here, thirty-five volumes. We boarded off the alcove during the early paranoid years but as you can see there’s a little flap that worked its way loose and this paraffin lamp always seems to be alight during school hours. It’s a sort of secret cave. The children love it. So, brother, what are we looking up?”

  “Missa Niger,” said Civilai, “although I doubt you’ll find that. These are just words I vaguely remember from my youth. Perhaps you could try, La Messe Noire. The black . . .”

  “Black mass,” said Grit, in English. He was already thumbing through the battered B volume. He didn’t seem at all fazed by the choice of topic. Civilai assumed he couldn’t have known what it meant. He wasn’t that sure himself. It was just an expression that had returned to him from stories he’d heard as a boy. From a picture he’d once seen in a book in his high school library of cloaked figures and a crucifix hanging upside down on the wall. He’d been thinking about the Buddha images in the mechanic’s yard. Their defilement had been deliberately sacrilegious.

  Grit found the entry, moved the lam
p closer so he could make out the small lettering and translated as he read.

  Black Mass: a blasphemous and obscene burlesque of the traditional Latin Mass performed by satanic cults. It is a ritual characterized by the inversion of the true Mass as celebrated by the Roman Catholic Church. Charges of satanism and celebration of the blasphemous black mass have been made against persons accused of heresy and witchcraft since early Christian times. It is invariably linked to a belief in a pagan deity.

  The rite commonly incorporates other elements of satanic magic such as philters or abortifacients. (These last two Grit was unable to translate.) The naked back of a woman often serves as an altar and a consecrated but defiled host such as altar bread is generally used to intensify the mockery. Allegations have been made that the mass extended to perverse sexual rituals, and the sacrifice of children. The mass may include inverting, spitting and stepping on the cross, stabbing the host and other obscenities.

  Once he’d finished, Teacher Grit looked up at Civilai, whose face was etched with questions.

  “Helpful?” he asked.

  •••

  “But to whose advantage would it be to get the press involved?” asked Daeng.

  She was shouting above the growl of the Toyota engine. Headman Tham’s son, Yuth, drove the village truck, but everyone had chosen to sit in the back to vent their frustrations.

  “The policeman,” shouted Siri.

  “Now, how did I know you were going to pick him?” said Daeng.

  “He gave it away,” said Siri. “All his talk about the influence of the media on a case. He’s exactly the type who’d want to get his face in the newspapers to advance his career. He’d be the local cop who caught the shaman village serial killer.”

  “Then why announce to us what effect alerting the press would have?”