I Shot the Buddha

by Colin Cotterill

  “No show. The elders put it down to their own superior mental power. You were right. You gave the villagers their confidence back. Mediums reunited with their spirit guides. The shamans reopened pathways to the otherworld. It was as if everyone suddenly believed again. You gave them faith. They’re back in control.” She took his hand. “Siri, you’re shaking.”

  “They’re not,” he said.

  “Not what?”

  “In control. They’re not in control. All it means is that the séance wasn’t important enough for the evil spirits to make an appearance. There’s something bigger afoot. Something vast.”

  “Siri, aren’t you being a little melodramatic?”

  He touched the talisman around his neck. It was as cold as Antarctica. “They’re not even interested in me tonight,” he said. “They’ve found someone else to haunt. Someone powerful. Someone without defenses. Who . . . ?”

  “You’re making me feel a bit uncomfortable.”

  “What would an evil spirit value?” Siri asked. “What would they envy?”

  “What?”

  “Purity, Daeng. They’d be all over purity like ants on a dying caterpillar. Him! I held his hand. I wasn’t being friendly to the patriarch, the phibob were using me to channel.”

  Daeng was already on her feet and fishing the repaired flashlight from her bag. Siri was at the entrance and moving fast. The Sangharaj’s quarters had no door. Siri froze in the doorway, and Daeng arrived in time to shine the lamp over his shoulder.

  “We’re too late,” said Siri.

  The pages from the Sangharaj’s canon were torn and scattered around the room. The monk possessed two robes. Both were folded neatly at the end of his sleeping mat. Wherever the monk had gone, either he was not dressed as a monk or he was not dressed at all.

  •••

  “He must be back by now. He’s a field surgeon with battlefront experience. We should find him.”

  “Dtui, we have qualified surgeons. They were all in the military.”

  “But I want him. I want Siri. He’ll know. He’ll know what to do.” She was irrational now, her voice loud and shrill. Her hands shaking.

  “We all know what to do,” said the hospital director. “But this isn’t just about skill. The blade went in through his stomach. We can’t just pull it out. We might cause more damage. We have to be careful, look at the x-rays, consider the options.”

  Dtui had worked at Mahosot Hospital for nine years both as a nurse and as a morgue assistant to Dr. Siri. She often heard the words “options,” “careful,” and “we know what to do.” All those options lacked equipment, cleanliness, experience and accountability. If you lost a patient it was an unfortunate but unavoidable statistic. She’d arrived at the conclusion that you stood a better chance of survival in the morgue than on the ward.

  The evening had begun in an innocent enough way. Dtui and Phosy had been walking along the riverside after her evening at the restaurant. He’d been discussing the connection with the presidential security division and the fact that someone at the armed forces ministry had leaked news of his visit with them. It didn’t matter who it was. He’d come to believe there was nowhere to go, that he might as well be investigating the whereabouts of the Lord Buddha. People were disappearing, and he didn’t want to be a part of such a system.

  They’d been discussing other lives in other places. They wondered what type of life Malee might have in a Thai refugee camp. How many years they’d have to save before they could afford to open a little cake shop in Milwaukee. Everyone needed cake to take their minds off their humdrum lives.

  And he’d walked toward them boldly, the ninja. In the shadows, the bruises around his eyes made it look as if he was wearing dark glasses. He smiled as if he knew something Phosy didn’t and held up his hands to show he wasn’t armed. Phosy stepped in front of Dtui. He had no weapon, but he’d have his wits about him in a street fight. He knew that the dynamics changed when forced to defend a loved one.

  “Well, look at that,” the man had said, “the fat girl and the bodyguard. Beautiful.”

  “You’ve got one chance to turn around and walk away,” said Phosy.

  “Or what?” said the man. “You’ll throw her at me?”

  Phosy wasn’t easily riled. He was an expert at taking in his surroundings and assessing his chances. Although the policeman couldn’t yet see it, he knew the man would have a blade at his belt. The moon was behind them, so the ninja wouldn’t be able to tell whether Phosy had anything in his hand. The man was approaching fast, which meant he’d be slightly off balance. All things being even Phosy would step forward, feint left and have the younger man in an armlock.

  But all things were not even. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of the other man approaching Dtui from behind. Phosy dropped and kicked his wife’s feet from under her. She landed with a thud on the packed earth of the street, but it made her a harder target. The second man stopped and looked on in surprise, but when Phosy looked back the ninja was already on him.

  “Nobody hits me and gets away with it,” he said.

  They were interrupted by shouts from along the riverbank, shadows running toward them. But by then the blade was already in Phosy’s gut. The assassin’s work was done. When Geung, Tukta and Crazy Rajhid arrived, the inspector was on his side on the ground in a pool of blood.

  Now Phosy lay on a gurney in an open-air corridor at Mahosot waiting for an x-ray, waiting for the arrival of a surgeon, waiting for death to take him somewhere more organized. Dtui continued to press the bunched-up sheet against his stomach to stem the blood. She’d disinfected the wound as best she could, but her dilemma was the blade. Was the director right? Would its removal cause more damage? She didn’t know. But it was as if Mr. Geung read her mind.

  “Better chance in the m-m-morgue,” he said.

  •••

  Civilai took some time to open his puffy bruised eyes wide enough to see where he was. He felt like he’d been hit by a buffalo. The pain punched at him from the inside. He couldn’t lift his left arm. It was obvious they’d continued to beat him even after he was unconscious. There were voices.

  “Wait,” said one. “He’s alive.”

  “Don’t talk shit,” said another. “He’s got no pulse.”

  “Then come here and tell me his eyes aren’t moving,” said the first.

  Three figures in black cloaks without hoods gathered around him. Civilai clenched his fist but had no strength to throw a punch.

  “Shit, he is,” said the second man.

  They ran out of view then returned a few seconds later wearing their hoods. If his face hadn’t hurt so much Civilai would have laughed at that. He had no doubt at all he’d been dead for a few seconds, but there had been no distant light, no limbo, no out-of-body experiences. It had been a good atheist’s death. He didn’t know why his body had rebooted. He wasn’t in the best of shape to take advantage of his second chance, but he was aware he had one last shot.

  One of the hooded men grabbed him by the foot and dragged him across the floor. It gave the old politburo man a chance to look around. He was back in the house, the large room. It was nighttime, and the place was gloomy, lit only by thick black wax candles. There was an altar, the type you’d expect to find at the front of a church with a white lace tablecloth. It held expensive-looking silver items: decanters, snuff boxes, a candelabra. But on an upper tier were three Buddha images like the one he’d seen in the mechanic’s yard but much larger. They too had experienced lobotomies and were standing on their heads. The meaning was clear. In his research, Civilai had been reminded that, in the Catholic version of the black mass, the crucifix was inverted to indicate the absence of respect. This was a cult conceived by a perverted Frenchman forty years earlier to test the bonds of Buddhism. There were sweet joss sticks burning on either side. From their scent, Civilai suspected
they’d been fashioned from marijuana. The altar candles were phallic. To one side there was an opulent throne.

  He lay there in the center of the room for some time before the performers arrived. He and Siri had seen Boris Karloff in The Black Cat, so he knew what to expect: satanic cult, scary leader, horrible death. But it was one thing to watch it on film and something else entirely to be in the middle of it. The black-hooded actors formed a circle around him. In all he counted eighteen. His sight was returning. His arm throbbed.

  One of the hooded eighteen spoke. “Brothers of the Sacrilegious Order of the Almighty and Most Powerful Mara,” he said.

  Civilai recognized the voice.

  “We are gathered here this night to purge Nirxana of one of its most odious enemies. We call on the spirit of Marche to guide our hands today and to give our great leader Mara the wisdom of the ancestors to make a judgment.”

  The speaker was Comrade Luangrat, the director of the regional council office, which went a long way in explaining why Civilai had received no backup from the ministry. The speech Luangrat gave was grammatically incorrect, as if it had been written by a non-native speaker. It had probably been passed down from the pen of Marche himself. Civilai tuned out and thought back to those early days. An educated but flawed man with a hatred of organized religion had established a dark cult amid ignorant country people. Of course they had been too afraid of the great white master to argue with him. A secret organization with magic imported from the great capitals of Europe. A charismatic but feared anti-Buddha. A society that still embraced animist beliefs. And that cult held on through the wars and the peace and the takeover in a village that lived apart from the rest of the country—from the rest of humanity. Funded perhaps by cultists in the West. New leaders had emerged, and generation after generation had prolonged the dread. The membership and influence spread its tendrils through the province. A belief system based on something quite absurd had taken over to control the lives of citizens desperate for something to depend upon.

  The councilman was still spouting, but now the circle of idiots had begun to chant in the background. It made no more sense than anything else in that place because the chant had been memorized backward. Civilai was about to conclude that Boris Karloff had done it all so much better when a door opened on the far side and two naked girls appeared. One of them was the teenager who had threatened Civilai that afternoon. They plodded across the room with no elegance or élan to the closed double doors. They stood one at each handle and pulled the doors open.

  The circle chanters dropped to their knees and performed a reverse nop where the backs of the hands were together. It looked uncomfortable. And, to the accompaniment of an unseen gong, Mara, the devil incarnate, entered the room. He looked serene, even in his dark glasses and his pool-table-green monk robes. The two naked girls fell in behind him and followed him to the throne. But even that small performance lacked class. Before taking his seat, the devil motorcycle mechanic looked up to the nine-tiered umbrellas suspended from a hook on the ceiling and clenched his fists and intoned some quiet words in their direction. When he finally sat, the two naked girls knelt on either side of him.

  Civilai sighed. Satanism, animism, the world’s religions, they only worked if you were afraid of them. And if you weren’t in awe you’d see through it all. He recalled the story of the Mexican child who ate the taco with the Virgin Mary’s face on it—a taco that attracted hundreds of devotees—because he was hungry. Civilai was not afraid of the power, just of the fools who wielded it. But hopeless as it seemed, he had one gambit. The only way to pull it off however was to overcome his own sarcastic nature. This, possibly his final performance, called for the surrender of his ego. He had to prostrate himself before a mechanic and resist the temptation to make smartarse comments. The odds were against him.

  The chanting stopped. Those in the circle changed to a sitting position with their feet pointing directly toward Mara. One of the naked girls handed him a cheap palm leaf temple fan. He produced a Zippo lighter from somewhere deep in his robes and set light to it. It burned rapidly and flew off as ash. Civilai wasn’t overwhelmed by all the symbolism. He could feel the big scene coming. Mara stepped down from his throne and paced around the circle. With the sunglasses on it must have been difficult not to step on a disciple. Each hooded man nodded respectfully as he passed behind. When Mara stepped inside the circle, he was directly in front of Civilai. The old man cringed as if the power emanating from the part-time Satan was too much to bear. Mara looked at him but addressed the circle.

  “He dared to come here,” he said, “this lover of the Buddha . . .”

  The audience hissed.

  “. . . to question our faith,” he continued. “He accused us of being a descendant of his God.”

  Hiss.

  “He said the senate of morons in Bangkok had sent him. But that was a lie. He is a spy.”

  Groan. Hiss.

  “He investigated our heritage. He cast aspersions on our great founder, Marche, the first and most great Mara.”

  “Mara the first. Mara the first,” they chanted.

  “He called for his gang of Satan haters to come here to destroy us. But we thwarted his attack.”

  A cheer from the circle.

  “But his arrogance knows no bounds. He dared to come to us alone. To challenge us. A decrepit old man with no control over his bladder.”

  Gales of laughter from the hooded men.

  Civilai looked up. “How could you know that?” he asked.

  “You were searched, you idiot,” said Mara. “Do you know how insulting it is to be invaded by an opponent whose only weapon is a colostomy bag?”

  Raucous laughter. Some rude comments.

  Civilai reached for his bag. Technically it was a urostomy bag, but he wouldn’t haggle.

  “Don’t worry, Great-grandfather,” said Mara. “It’s still there. We didn’t want you to have an accident on our nice clean floor. We pride ourselves on our hygiene. It’s full, by the way.”

  The men in the circle had never heard anything so hilarious.

  “Please have mercy,” said Civilai. “I’m just a weak old man following orders from Vientiane. I didn’t realize what harm I was causing here. I can see it now. I admire what you’ve achieved so much. I have no resp—”

  Mara kicked him in the side of the head.

  “Shut up, old Father Time,” he said. “How stupid do you think I am? A man will say anything at his execution.”

  “Exec . . . ?”

  “Oh, dear. We didn’t tell you? Our sacrifices are usually a lot fresher, but there will be some value in your death. The letting of your blood should appease some of the lesser devils in heaven. In fact they were disappointed when we thought you were already dead.”

  The circle had started a wordless, monotone dirge. Mara snapped his fingers, and one of the naked girls, shivering either from the cold or the embarrassment, walked to the edge of the circle with a long flat box in her hands. It was beautifully embossed. She held it out for Mara, but her eyes were on Civilai. He wondered if she was thinking about his words from that evening or if all personal opinions had been deleted from her head.

  Mara opened the box and took out a ceremonial dagger that glinted in the candlelight. He held it with great reverence in his palms and walked slowly counterclockwise around the circle. The dirge increased in volume and intensity until the room had filled with an audible menace. Civilai had to admit the situation was getting rather disturbing, eerie, even. Every head followed the dagger, the instrument of generations of misguided executioners. Nutcases who had been brainwashed into believing that violence was the route to heaven. Mara offered up the dagger to the three lobotomized Buddhas.

  “Oh, great Marche,” he shouted, his weak voice barely audible above the chanting. “We offer you this unbeliever, this naysayer. And with his blood may you feast this n
ight and—”

  The shot was so loud the men in the circle covered their ears before dropping to the ground. Most were disoriented, but there must have been one or two who saw what happened. Some witnessed it in reverse.

  One man in the circle had clearly been shot because he shouted, “I’ve been shot,” and clutched his chest.

  The bullet that hit him had passed through the shin of the all-powerful Mara and shattered it. And at the source of the shot sat Civilai in a pool of cold orange juice. The gun in his hand shook a little. When the blast faded from their eardrums all anyone could hear was the whimpering of a wounded motorcycle mechanic and the unenthusiastic screams of the naked girls. Mara managed to say, “Get him,” before the sight of his own blood caused him to faint. The men in the circle reacted slowly. One, to Civilai’s right, got into a crouch, but Civilai didn’t train his weapon on the would-be attacker. It remained aimed solidly at Mara’s head.

  “If anyone comes near me I’ll shoot him again,” he said.

  There followed a particularly subdued pandemonium caused in part by the lack of peripheral vision through the eyeholes.

  “What’s happening?” someone asked.

  “He shot the grand priest,” said someone else.

  “Who did?”

  One man directly behind Civilai ripped off his mask and made a play for the sacrificial politburo man. The gun fired again, this time passing through Mara’s foot and finishing off the poor fellow who’d caught the first ricochet.

  “He’s killed Mon,” someone shouted.

  The naked girls’ screams had become more like the bleating of hungry goats.

  “This is what’s known as a standoff,” said Civilai. “My guess is that one more bullet will see off your high priest. As things stand, no matter how fast we drive it’s still touch and go whether we can get him to a hospital before he bleeds to death. So you, Comrade Luangrat of the council office, I want you to bring your car right up to the front gate. Two of your accomplices will then carry your unconscious leader and put him on the backseat. This group will be followed by me with my four remaining bullets propped up on either side by our young lady friends there. One false move and this particular incarnation of the devil will be terminated. I’m a very good shot.”