The Rat Catchers' Olympics

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The Rat Catchers' Olympics Page 8

by Colin Cotterill


  “Why are you having coffee?” said Siri.

  “While you’re hiding in a tree watching an assassin I shall be entertaining your wife.”

  “You cad.”

  “We can’t leave her alone on her first night at the village. I shall take our two attractive administrators for dinner.”

  “You may have to wait a while for Daeng. She’s having a facial.”

  “A what?”

  “I know. I think my wife’s been replaced by an alien. Turbans and fashionable clothes and makeup. If I were a psychologist I’d suggest she’s crying out for help and I’d know what to do about it.”

  “Are you neglecting her—you know—in the nest?”

  “Certainly not . . . and it’s no business of yours what goes on in my nest.”

  The topic was curtailed with perfect timing by the arrival of a pageboy in a pale blue uniform. He jogged up to Sergei and handed him an envelope. The bar man brought it to Civilai.

  “To Comrade Seeweela,” he said.

  “That’s almost me,” said Civilai and signed for the delivery. From the envelope he removed a very long telex message and started reading.

  “I thought the point of a telex was its brevity,” said Siri.

  “Shh,” said Civilai.

  “Ah, there’s a job for you at the mausoleum.”

  “Shit,” said Civilai once he’d reached the end of the message. He told Siri about Phosy’s meeting with the old man and the subsequent murder. The inspector was following up on the identity of the dead man. He also mentioned the suggestion that the intended victim might be a Lao or Vietnamese resident in Moscow. This was a scenario they hadn’t considered.

  “This isn’t the most cosmopolitan city in the world,” said Civilai. “I can’t imagine there’s a Vietnamese or Lao community here.”

  “And it’s the last place on the planet the royalists would have fled to,” said Siri. “But I suppose it’s worth following up on.”

  “We need Roger,” said Civilai and gestured for Sergei to bring the phone. “I have to go to the communications center and answer this telex,” said Civilai, dialing the pager number he had for their guide. “I’ll meet Roger there and see what he can do to find us a list of foreigners in Moscow. Dtui will call here just before six to tell you where she is so you can start your surveillance. If you’re lucky our assassin will be attending the big pre-opening ceremony bash in the garden tonight like the rest of us.”

  Roger was still pumped up from the magic that had enlivened a language he’d studied alone in a tape laboratory. He was full of the stories he’d learned from his new Lao brothers and sisters that day. But Civilai had no time for stories.

  “Roger,” he said.

  “Yes, uncle.”

  “How difficult would it be to get the names and nationalities of all the foreign residents in Moscow?”

  “Not difficult at all,” said Roger.

  “Really? I thought Moscow was all about secrets and paranoia.”

  “Perhaps it was in the fifties and sixties,” said Roger, “but it’s not like that anymore. They dragged all the spies out from under the beds. In fact it’s quite boring here. That’s why the Games are so important. It gives us something fun to do. And this is the age of openness and honesty. There’s a lot we can share.”

  “Really? Then why did you send all your students to distant provinces during the Games?”

  “There are plenty of students at the village or volunteering around the venues,” said Roger.

  “Hand-picked to be sure they won’t be expressing any anti-Soviet sentiments,” said Civilai.

  “There are no anti-Soviet sentiments,” said Roger indignantly. “We’ve come to expect your generation to continue seeing a lot of half-empty cups, uncle. We don’t blame you. You grew up in paranoid times.”

  “So if you asked for those names you wouldn’t get into any trouble?”

  Roger laughed. “There’s an information booth downstairs, uncle. Their only purpose in life is to tell the athletes anything they want.”

  Chapter Nine

  Great Kelly

  The pre-opening ceremony party was more splendid than anything the Lao had ever experienced. There was a concert by a singer whose name was far too long to remember followed by live chamber music in the open air. There was unlimited finger food and, of course, drinks. There were fireworks and jugglers and tables with artisans showing traditional crafts. The athletes and officials from each country were dressed in their national costumes and languages became irrelevant. It was all about sparkle. So many flashbulbs popped it was like the opening night of a Hollywood movie.

  “If you don’t like it, just tell me,” said Daeng.

  “Of course I like it,” said Siri for the umpteenth time.

  They were walking arm in arm along the broad concrete pathway in the grounds of the village. They were smiling at strangers, humming along to the music they had no cultural allegiance to and remaining no more than twenty meters behind Sompoo the shooter, who strolled with his teammates.

  “I mean, I can change it,” said Daeng.

  “No, really. It’s grand,” said Siri.

  Madam Daeng had returned from the beauty salon that evening . . . a redhead. Perhaps “Fanta Orangehead” might describe the color better. Her hair, not yet long enough to cover her neck, had been teased into a hundred small springs that made her head look like a piano stool that had split open. She wore a mauve polyester trouser suit and heels that put her several centimeters above her husband. But, worst of all, she was hiding behind somebody else’s face.

  “There are women here with engineering degrees who specialize in cosmetics,” she said. “Two of them work on your face at the same time. It’s incredible that both halves look the same at the end of it.”

  “That’s wonderful,” said Siri. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer me to take the late surveillance? I haven’t really been overworked here.”

  “No,” she said. “Why? I requested the late shift.”

  What he wanted to say was that he doubted she’d be able to blend into the surroundings given how colorful she’d become. But he decided to keep that to himself until he could determine what particular help she was crying out for.

  By midnight few of the athletes had retired. They knew they’d be unable to sleep with all the excitement they’d felt on the first day at the village. The shooters were seated at picnic tables drinking. Sompoo was still with them. The military had put a ban on spirits but didn’t consider lager to be alcohol. Only Sompoo drank lemonade.

  At 6 a.m. Siri awoke with a scream having dreamed an African witchdoctor was leaning over him with a knife. He’d left the light on when he went to bed and it was actually Daeng whose nose was close to his.

  “Nightmare?” she asked.

  “Not exactly,” said Siri.

  “I handed over to Civilai,” she said. “But the boys are all in their rooms sound asleep.

  “Daeng?”

  “Yes, love?”

  “I miss you.”

  “I missed you too.”

  “No, Daeng,” he said, propping himself up on the pillow. He’d decided during his spell of surveillance that honesty trumped diplomacy. “I mean I miss you.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “All this. The clothes, the shoes, the hair, the face mask. None of this is you.”

  “Oh, Siri. You don’t want to be promenading around Moscow with a frumpy old lady in a pha sin skirt.”

  Siri took her hand. “Actually I do,” he said. “I love my frumpy old lady in or out of her pha sin skirt. She’s my beauty. Where did she go?”

  He’d seen her cry twice in their time together and on one of those occasions she had a bullet in her. But
a tear broke free of its waxy mascara blockade and rolled down her cheek. It drew an almost perfect vertical black line before disappearing under her chin. That, for Madam Daeng, was hysteria.

  “Oh, Siri,” she said. “I just want to make myself attractive for you.”

  “Then don’t do all this,” he said, wiping away the mascara line with his thumb. “Attractive for me is the puffy eyes I see when you wake up in the morning. It’s the panic when I walk into the bathroom without knocking and you try to cover yourself with a face flannel. It’s the smile you share with me when you see a baby, the menace in your glare before you attack someone, the feel of your hand on my chest when you’re checking that I’m still alive. Nobody does that like you.”

  “But you fantasize about other women.”

  “I do not.”

  “Then what about Great?” she said. “Great, what?”

  “Your darling, Great Kelly.”

  At last it clicked.

  “Daeng, surely you haven’t been doing all this because you were jealous of a Hollywood movie star?”

  “You talked about her for a week, Siri. Great this. Great that. How elegant she was. How she’d married a prince. How she turned heads everywhere she went. Dtui showed me a picture of her. How could an old Lao girl compete with that? You said she was your perfect woman.”

  Siri took her in his arms and held her more tightly than ever before.

  “Daeng, you are adorable,” he said. “Thank you very much for trying to make an old man happy. But this isn’t the way. Grace Kelly came up in conversation because Civilai and I were putting together a cast for the movie we’ll never make. It was a flight of fancy. I didn’t say she was my perfect woman. I said she was my perfect leading lady. You walked in at the wrong moment. I wouldn’t begin to know what to do with her if she turned up on our doorstep. You are far more attractive than she will ever be because she is fantasy and you, Daeng, are natural.”

  “Really?

  “Usually. So I want you to go to the bathroom, shampoo those rosy piglets out of your hair, wash off the war paint, take off those noisy clothes and come back to bed au naturel. Then I’ll show you what type of woman a man wants in his life.”

  They were awoken an hour later by a loud knocking at the door. Siri stayed in bed because he’d just performed the septuagenarian equivalent of an Olympic marathon so Daeng went to the door. She found Civilai standing in the hallway.

  “I think I’ve made a mistake,” he said.

  The three sat at their en-suite kitchenette table with cups of tea and Civilai told them what had happened.

  “When Daeng phoned me to take over her shift I closed my eyes briefly,” he said. “When I opened them again half an hour had passed. I had no choice but to go and check that the shooters, in particular, our Comrade Sompoo, were still in their rooms. It was getting on for 7 a.m. and I thought they’d be having breakfast but I forgot they’d had a late night. When I got to the third floor the door to their apartment was ajar. It appeared they hadn’t yet grasped the concept of security. I have a map of the athletes’ sleeping arrangements so I knew that Sompoo shared a room with the youngest shooter, Boom. Their room was off to one side and Boom was there but Sompoo’s bed was empty. There was nobody in the bathroom. I went to the balconies on either end of the corridor but he wasn’t there having an early morning smoke. All I can think is that he was coming down in the elevator when I was going up. What should we do?”

  Siri shrugged.

  “Sit back and wait for news of an assassination,” he said.

  •••

  From the dead soldier’s ID card Phosy had learned that the old man’s name was Pinit Saopeng and that he had spent most of his later military career as an undercover officer on secret missions originally with a clandestine guerrilla movement famously known as Group 959. Like Phosy, he had worked on covert operations during the French and American occupations and there wasn’t exactly a library section the policeman could go to find information on such things. Even the Defense Ministry archives were classified. Phosy had requested any files that had been cleared by the security division but he knew he had little hope of putting all the pieces of Pinit’s life together. He did, however, have an address.

  The old man had described his home as a dog kennel but even dogs had views. The Party had shown its gratitude to Pinit by giving him a concrete box to see out his grey days. It was like a cell in a block of cells and the wall of the adjoining block was six centimeters from its louver window. There wasn’t even enough of a gap for a breeze to negotiate its way in. He had a straw sleeping mat, an old Soviet fan, a transistor radio and a basic table and chair. The only thing out of place was a stack of books and magazines against the far wall. In 1980 Laos there was not a great deal of reading going on.

  Beside the bed was Pinit’s collection of Pasason Lao newspapers. Phosy knew there’d be nothing learned there. The magazines were all Thai, mostly political and anti-communist. They were banned on the Lao side and not easy to come by. Phosy wondered whether Pinit had them merely as reading material to stimulate his old mind or if the old man had sympathies toward Thailand.

  The books were more eclectic. There were a number of languages, none of which Phosy could understand. He spoke Lao and some Vietnamese and several hill tribe dialects but had no European language skills. He did recognize enough to know that some of the books were in English, Thai, German and Russian. And it was the Russian connection that interested him most. The day before, when Pinit had made the connection between the photo in the newspaper and the suspected assassin in Moscow, the old man had seemed . . . what was it? . . . relieved in some way. Perhaps he was glad that Phosy had been able to put a name to the rogue soldier. Did Pinit know a hit was planned over there? Was Phosy reading too much into his own instinct or did the old soldier know who the target was? Was that the reason he was silenced?

  Phosy put the Russian books to one side. He’d have someone go through them later and write a synopsis for him. Thai and Lao were close enough that he could tell the Thai books were all fiction. A literate Lao had nowhere to go for reading pleasure in a bookless country. But the ministry bloodhounds would still have branded Pinit a subversive if they’d ever raided his room. At the bottom of the stack were four children’s books in Russian. They were dated in the early 1940s, which suggested they meant something to the old soldier. One of them had a handwritten message inside the front cover. That too Phosy would have somebody translate.

  The inspector looked inside the wonky wooden closet. From the rail hung one black civilian suit, one long-sleeved white shirt, one pair of camouflaged trousers and a light, waterproof jacket. Beneath these were socks and underwear and a pair of gloves. One pair of military boots stood to attention inside the door of the room. Nothing was new. Not a great reward for a lifetime’s dedicated to the revolution.

  As an investigator of many years’ experience, Phosy had learned to look in all the places a man with something to hide might stash his secrets. There were no floorboards or ceiling panels, no desks with false bottoms. He went to the communal bathroom along the hall, looked in the cistern and the water tank and felt for loose tiles. They were all loose but hid nothing. Back in the room he walked one final circuit before collecting his books. He looked again at the view from the window. All he could see was non-rendered brickwork. He removed the louvers from the window frame one by one to get a better look at the wall. With no sun to bleach it, the grouting around the bricks was still grey all but for one area. Its frame was a lighter shade to all the others. He ran his finger along the edge of the bricks and sniffed at his finger.

  Toothpaste.

  “He might have gone for a jog,” said Dtui.

  “Or a walk on the roof,” said Daeng. “Insomnia.”

  “Or he might have been out casing the scene of the shooting,” said Siri.

  “Or actually committing the
crime,” said Civilai, still feeling guilty for his failure.

  The four were seated in the B block cafeteria with stodgy Soviet breakfasts in front of them. Two tables away sat the shooting team with Sompoo in the middle telling jokes.

  “This really is a fine time for an assassination, you have to admit,” said Siri. “The local TV stations have nothing but Olympic news and smiling citizen interviews. I can’t even imagine a murder report finding its way into the newspapers for the next three weeks.”

  “We should still get Roger to check the papers just in case,” said Daeng.

  “Why are you so sure he’s done something wrong?” said Dtui.

  “And when did you join the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ camp?” Civilai asked.

  “You know, I watched him for six hours at the shooting range yesterday,” said Dtui. “He was friendly and relaxed. He was polite and dedicated. I didn’t spot any homicidal tendencies.”

  “That’s exactly why hired assassins are so successful,” said Civilai. “They merge. They’re the type about whom you say, ‘I can’t believe he was a killer.’ They’re calculated and calm under pressure. They don’t wear T-shirts with their occupation printed on them.”

  “I doubt he’ll do anything silly today,” said Daeng. “The eyes of the world will be on us here. There’ll be more security people on the streets than the country’s ever seen before. It’s a big day.”

  A big day it certainly was. After breakfast, everyone would be ferried to the central Lenin Stadium to prepare for the opening ceremony. They’d be participating in the greatest show on earth. The predictions were that it would be live on television in one and a half billion homes around the world and even the boycotting nations would see the highlights. America’s NBC had paid eighty-seven million dollars for the coverage rights but North America would view no more than five minutes of Olympic news a day.

  The Lao administrators were already in a froth, but the arrival of Roger cranked up the excitement tenfold. He was jumpier than a flea in a dandruff drift. He shook hands with everyone twice, pulled a spare chair from the next table and sat astride it with his elbows on the chair back.

 

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