“He’s not very bright.”
Daeng smiled and kissed his cheek. He was a little self-conscious in front of the headman and the Sangharaj.
“I love it when you’re jealous of other men,” said Daeng.
“I’m . . .”
“Could we perhaps get back to the subject?” said the Sangharaj. “We have an innocent man in prison awaiting a tainted trial. He now has the press and half the country against him. And with the sudden interest of the media, we have less time to collect evidence in his favor. My guess is that the real killer was the one to involve the press.”
“Someone in the village might have told the newspapers,” said Headman Tham.
“Why?” asked Daeng.
“Most of our income is from tourists,” he said. “Most of what we do is, you know, simple stuff. Guests don’t come with very serious problems, so we can’t charge too much. They buy souvenirs and take pictures and have a traditional Sawan lunch and some rice whisky and they’re gone. If Sawan got on the news we’d be set. We’d have a bit of a surge, like they say. We’re due for one.”
“But it’s not as simple as that, is it?” Siri shouted.
Tham looked at him and at the Sangharaj, and he smiled and shook his head. “No, Yeh Ming,” he said. “It’s not. It’s not that simple at all. We’ve got a balance there in the village. It’s all we can do to keep this or that pot from boiling over. We’ve all come there with our own demons. We’re none of us perfect.”
“What’s he talking about?” asked Daeng.
“They’re afraid,” said Siri. “They have to avoid all the serious stuff: the exorcisms, the spirit séances. They can’t control them anymore.”
“I haven’t put on my red hood for two years,” said Tham. “You know, Yeh Ming? I never know what I’m going to meet down there on the journey to the otherworld. Never know what I might accidently drag back with me. Or worse, never know whether they’ll get me before I can make it back. I’m scared of them. We all are.”
“Who?” asked the Sangharaj.
“The phibob,” said Tham. “We were all thrown out of our villages because of them. All found our way here to Sawan because of them. We knew we had phibob in us, but we didn’t really know what that meant. They’re all around us, waiting for us to let them out of the cage.”
“You do know that together you have the psychic power to discover exactly who it was that killed your people,” said Siri.
“We dare not,” said the headman.
“So you’re prepared to let Abbot Rayron be executed because you’re afraid of ghosts?” said Daeng.
Headman Tham looked at Siri pleadingly. “You know them, Yeh Ming,” he said. “You know what they can do.”
“Yes, I know them,” said Siri. “But I’ve beaten them before. I’m not afraid. Do you think your elders would stand together if I coordinated it all? Would they trust Yeh Ming not to let loose a plague of evil spirits?”
The headman gave it some thought. “If it was Yeh Ming,” he said, “I think I could convince them.”
Yuth dropped Daeng, Siri and the Sangharaj at the temple and Headman Tham went off into the village to win over a ragged band of scared elders. Siri had picked up a crate of beer in Nam Som: Singha. It was a third the price of the version on sale in Vientiane. He wished he had Civilai there beside him to chug the beer and formulate theories and solve mysteries. Because he had stupidly given himself a problem bigger than the afterlife. Siri, a veritable novice in the world of spirits, had promised a career shaman he could keep down a phibob rebellion. That he could stop them from dragging every man, woman and child in the village into the cauldron of insanity. Possess them to death. Yet he hadn’t the first idea how. Yeh Ming could tell him. Yeh Ming, the thousand-year-old immortal enemy of the phibob. He’d wrestled with them all his life and centuries into his afterlife. And he was there renting a small corner of Dr. Siri like some feeble retiree saying nothing at all.
Siri put the beer in its wooden crate into the carp pond. The water maintained a pleasant coolness during the day and chilled at night. He set out three triangular cushions on the slab of slate with a view of the sky and heaven and all that. The moon was pudgy but no longer full. Siri opened a beer with his teeth and took a long and blissful first draft. Ugly came to lie at his feet.
“Yeh Ming, mind if I join you?” said the Sangharaj.
Siri turned. “In a beer?” He smiled.
“In a meaningful dialogue.”
“Then you’re lucky you caught me before the sixth or seventh bottle.”
The monk sat on his allotted cushion. “You can feel it here, can’t you?” he said. “The tension.”
“Yes,” said Siri. “You?”
“Not of the dark spirits. But of the deceased. I just feel their presence. I imagine you see them. Does it become overwhelming?”
“Here or in Vientiane, no. They’re more like decorations. Like statues that breathe and shuffle around. They’re just souls waiting to move along. Nothing threatening. It was in Cambodia that I was overwhelmed. It was like a plague of desperate butterflies hitting your windshield. There was no time to be compassionate. You just turned on the wipers and drove through. I had no idea how to cope.”
“Hence the alcohol?”
“No. I drink so I’ll always have something to blame my stupidity on.”
The Sangharaj tried his best not to laugh but failed. “Where’s Madam Daeng this evening?” he asked.
“I imagine she saw us talking and went back to the room.”
“Why?”
“She knows we have things to discuss.”
“She’ll be thirsty.”
“She took a couple of bottles.”
The moon slipped out of its cloud and bathed their faces.
“What went wrong?” Siri asked.
“In Laos?”
“Sangharajs don’t run away unless there’s no hope. When did it go belly up?”
The old monk shook his head and rearranged his robes as if he were about to deliver a sermon.
“Where does anything go wrong?” he said. “On paper everything seems logical and sensible and right. But you put it in the hands of the illogical and nonsensical and wrong people, and its flaws are revealed.”
“Are you talking about socialism?” Siri asked.
“I’m talking about any delicate flower you leave in the hands of a gorilla. We were worried at first when we heard the Communists were getting support from Vietnam and China. We were the opium of the people in their eyes. They killed and incarcerated thousands of monks in the Soviet Union. We were expecting a purge.
“Then these Pathet Lao cadres arrived in our villages, and they told us how, in their view, Buddhism wasn’t so far from socialism. The Lord Buddha worked with and for the people. They had us believe he was the original Marxist. And we respected them. They weren’t the plump government officials who stopped by once in a while to tell us there was no funding available for temples. The same corrupt beasts who were pigging their way through five hundred million dollars of US funding a year.
“Those young socialist people lived frugally like us. They were country boys and girls. They knew how the population had suffered from the years of civil war. They knew that villages paid tax to the government but saw nothing in return. We were undergoing the indignities the Lord Buddha had challenged two thousand years earlier. We admired the young soldiers who traveled by night and sat in the temples with our novices and patiently explained with charts and statistics how Laos had more than enough natural resources for every man, woman and child to live comfortably. And they recruited us. Our young monks would travel from temple to temple giving the same optimistic talks. And our new best friends the Pathet Lao assured us that as soon as they assumed power they would take up the Buddhist portfolio and improve the lot of the Sangha.
“And briefly, thanks to some diplomatic jiggery pokery in Europe, a coalition government was set up there that included the Pathet Lao. And true to their word, they took up religious affairs that nobody else wanted. Immediately, they issued orders that the temples were to multiply their efforts to spread the word of Communism in the countryside. It was perfect, you see? In a country with no modern communications system, they had a long-established network at their disposal. In more developed countries an invading force might take over the radio stations. In Laos they had us, and now they weren’t passing on directions as our friends. They were dictating as our superiors.”
Siri went down to the pond for two fresh beers. The monk’s monologue had rendered Ugly comatose. Siri opened one of the beers with his teeth and handed it to his wife, who had arrived silently and was sitting away from the men on a raft of sweet-smelling grass. He winked at her and returned to the monk.
“The coalition soon broke down,” said the old man, “and the Pathet Lao lost its seats, but the bush temple network was at full strength. Just as kings and warlords throughout history pumped vast wealth into the temples to unite and pacify the peasants, so the PL was using us to do exactly the same thing but without the vast wealth. In 1975, with not a little help from Hanoi, the Pathet Lao took over the country. The Chinese and Soviets were over the moon. The Americans had failed to prop up that most important Indochinese domino. And just as the Americans in defeat had abandoned their Hmong allies, so the Pathet Lao in victory forgot its pledges to us. They were reminded by their socialist relatives overseas that religion was ‘the sigh of the oppressed people.’
“I suppose they could have destroyed our temples as the Siamese and the Ho bandits had done. They could have lined up the monks and beheaded us as the Khmer Rouge was so fond of doing. But I suppose some Laoness still had a pulse in them, and they merely let us starve. Neglect can be a far more effective form of abuse.”
“So why did you wait this long?” Siri asked.
“Patience, friend Siri, is a very Buddhist trait. It sometimes stretches over centuries as we wait for our enemy to be reborn a quail. I hoped things would improve.”
“But . . . ?”
“But then in January this year the new Ministry of Tourism announced that Buddhism would be their focus for 1980. The temples would be the bait to attract tourist dollars. They said they were disappointed at how little the monkhood was doing to help promote our wonderful country. We received a memo telling us to stop being lazy and clean up our act. Last straw. Here I am.”
“And how was our friend Noo recruited to aid in your escape?”
“He had a Thai identity card and contacts on this side. He knew what we were going through. We respected him for the articles he wrote.”
“Articles?”
“Oh, yes. He produced a large body of work describing our abuse. His pieces were published in a number of international journals and magazines. He didn’t tell you?”
“He didn’t tell us a lot,” said Daeng, who had been quiet for long enough.
“That’s why I was surprised to find Dr. Siri, deep in his cups, as Noo’s replacement,” said the monk. “Do we know what happened to him?”
“I have a policeman friend who’s looking into his disappearance,” said Siri. “He still doesn’t know that you were Noo’s top-secret assignment. I think it would really help if he had that knowledge.”
“I’ll get on to it in the morning,” said the Sangharaj.
And that was the end of seriousness for the evening but not the end of mystery. Siri was never at his most comfortable sleeping in temples. He was always conscious of his own atheism and suspected the walls and ceilings resented the disbeliever. So he woke often. It was during one of these sleepless moments that he witnessed something odd from his window. He saw the Sangharaj on his hands and knees digging in the garden by moonlight. He dug a hole as deep as his arm’s length and put something into it. He hurriedly filled the hole with earth and left. Siri shook his head and smiled to himself.
•••
“If it wasn’t the military, who the hell could it be?” asked Nurse Dtui.
She and Phosy sat with Mr. Geung and Tukta at the end of the evening shift.
“Of course it’s the military,” said Phosy. “Of course the commissioner’s going to say it isn’t. They would have come and made threats and put pressure on him. What else could he say?”
“But the nin-ninja said we got it wrong, too,” said Geung.
Tukta nodded. She rarely spoke in public, but Geung led everyone to believe he couldn’t shut her up when they were alone. He said that some of his most insightful observations had originated from her.
“He wanted to put me off the trail,” said Phosy.
“You said he was a-a-a thug,” said Geung.
“He’s right,” said Dtui. “A thug isn’t going to start thinking about providing misinformation. He’d gloat over the fact you got it wrong.”
“Which brings me back to the same question,” said Phosy. “Who else could it be? I know it’s not the police, and we’ve counted out immigration. That only leaves us with the girl scouts.”
Both Geung and Tukta thought that was hilarious.
“Didn’t your boss give you any clues?” asked Dtui.
“Nothing,” said Phosy. “In fact he’s closed the case. I don’t have any resources to follow up. He told me to back off. I don’t have any allies.”
“You have them,” said Tukta.
They all stared at her in surprise.
“Who?” said Daeng.
“The army,” said Tukta.
•••
Civilai’s last stop on his fact-finding mission was back at the temple. He’d studied Buddhism the way a naughty schoolboy might study physics and chemistry, picking up the basics without knowing how the elements joined together to make an atomic bomb. He’d forgotten most of it. What he needed was a primer, but the only monk he knew in Pak Xan was of limited capacity. Still, it was worth a try.
He found the monk sweeping leaves from the prayer hall with a long straw broom. The monk laughed when he saw Civilai approach and sit on the top step in the shade of the overhanging roof.
“All alone?” said Civilai.
“I have the nagas and the garuda and the bees,” said the monk. He was a soft fifty with leaky eyes and asymmetrical bald patches in his short hair.
“Not much of a conversation to be had there,” said Civilai.
“Better than some people,” said the monk, “and good enough for me.”
“Then, would you be kind enough to postpone your conversation with the bees and answer an old man one or two questions?”
The monk laughed. “I don’t know much,” he said.
“But you know about the Buddha?”
“Oh, yes. That I do know.”
“Much?”
“Everything.”
It was quite a boast, so Civilai put him to the test. He patted the step beside him, and the monk came to join him. He still held on to his broom.
“They tried to raise me a Catholic,” said Civilai.
“That’s a nice religion,” said the monk. “Lots of singing.”
“It has its good points. But very clearly it has a devil. You know what a devil is?”
“Of course,” said the monk.
“Now when they taught me Buddhism nobody mentioned a devil,” said Civilai. “There were hells, lots of them, but none of them had a scary old creature with horns. So am I right in saying there is no devil in Buddhism?”
“No.”
“No there isn’t?”
“No, you’re not right,” said the monk. “There’s a devil.”
“Can you tell me about him?”
“Yes.”
Civilai waited. The monk didn’t speak until Civilai coughed.
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br /> “Now?” said the monk.
“Yes, please.”
“Mara,” said the monk. “It was Mara who tempted the Lord by offering his three daughters. It is Mara who interrupts our meditation and puts temptation into our minds.”
“He sounds more naughty than evil,” said Civilai.
“Oh, he is evil, Uncle. It was Mara who caused a shower of rocks to smite the Lord. He holds the wheel of life in his hands. The word Mara means ‘death.’”
“I see,” said Civilai. “And are you afraid of Mara?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have a loaded .32 ACP automatic under my bedroll.”
The two men laughed. Civilai patted his friend on the back, walked down the steps and crossed the dirt yard. He stopped and looked up at the lush, flowering fig tree that stood guard at the temple entrance. All of the ridiculous parts had come together to make a ridiculous whole in his mind.
Civilai returned to the steps and said to the monk, “There’s one favor I’d like to ask.”
11
Dr. Siri’s First Official Public Disappearance
Phosy picked out his name from the guard’s list of welcome guests, marched across the parade ground and entered the Ministry of the Armed Forces. Corporal Suwit sat at his desk staring at the door as if he’d been expecting someone to enter. But there was surprise in his voice.
“Inspector Phosy?”
Phosy had spent much of his time in this office bluffing and, yes, lying blatantly. So he saw no point in changing a winning formula.
“Your man paid us a visit last night,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You may recall that I provided you and your colonel friends with some information—false, as it turns out—that the witness to the kidnapping of the Thai citizen was alive and staying at a noodle shop on Fa Ngum.”
Phosy again ignored the guest chair and sat on the sofa. Corporal Suwit seemed to be looking around his office for some assistance.
“That information was erroneous for a number of reasons, in particular that the witness had indeed been killed already. But the interesting thing is that you and your two superiors were the only people I passed on the location to. And who should turn up there but a soldier, highly trained in the arts of suburban subterfuge. He found his way into the building through a rear window and attempted to kill my wife with a twenty-centimeter blade. The latter, I’m sure you know, is standard military issue for discreet missions.”
I Shot the Buddha Page 17