Dtui had just asked whether Santiago believed these two men actually had such powers when, from the corner of her eye, she noticed Siri’s hand reach for the amulet beneath his shirt as he stared back into the darkness. Santiago, however, was looking at the altar as he told her that he believed the markings she’d found on their mummy were known as “The Scratches,” the symbol identifying those who practiced the dark arts. Once he’d discovered their altar, he had confronted the two men in his office one day, forced them to take off their shirts, and had discovered their ritual scars. That was when he had—
“How many?” Siri asked. He’d removed his flashlight headband and was squinting back in the direction from which they’d walked.
Dtui didn’t even bother to translate the question. “Three on each side, Doc. Come on. Keep up. I’ve told …” She suddenly realized the question wasn’t directed to her. Siri wasn’t involved in their conversation at all. She shone her flashlight beam into the empty tunnel. The light seemed to snap Siri out of a trance.
“One of them is coming,” he said to Dtui.
“One of whom?”
“The spirits of the negritos.”
She was reluctant to translate this but she owed it to Santiago. The old doctor seemed to take the news even worse than she did. He backed up against the altar, his black-olive colored eyes flitting back and forth across the darkness.
“Should we do anything?” Dtui whispered.
“No,” Siri told her, still looking down the empty tunnel. “She says there’s nothing for us to worry about.”
Dtui didn’t want to know who “she” was. She took hold of Siri’s arm and held her breath. Behind her she could hear the Cuban muttering. She moved her head from side to side but her flashlight was useless. Only Siri could see the visitor.
He was naked and black as pitch. His face was a gathering of ill-matched features. He came loping urgently toward Siri and stood in front of him. Although Siri assumed this was the smaller of the two men, he still had to tilt his head upward to look into the man’s empty eyes. And there they stood, neither seeming to know what to do next. The black man became frustrated and grew angry. He seemed to look over Siri’s shoulder at Dtui with unconcealed fury. He raised his fist as if to strike her and bared his teeth.
“Dtui, step back. Stand next to Santiago,” Siri shouted.
She did as she was told even though she could see no spirits. Siri stood with his neck craned upward and his arms out to his sides. He clenched his fists and shuddered slightly. The shudder grew in intensity, became more like the vibration of a silent truck engine. Dtui and Santiago looked on with astonishment as Siri started to shake with such violence they knew some external force was exerting itself. Fearing for his safety, Dtui threw her arms around the doctor. All the strength she could muster didn’t stop his movement.
Then all at once, he went limp in her arms, and she lowered him to the ground. For several seconds there was no movement, no sound. Dtui put her hand in front of Siri’s mouth but felt no breath. Then, just as suddenly as he had collapsed, his eyes opened and he gave her a friendly smile.
“Nurse Dtui, you really will have to resist these urges to throw yourself at me.”
“I have a weakness for men who wobble,” she said. Santiago, pale as marble, came over to take a look at his old friend. He checked first Siri’s pulse, then his own. Siri looked as if he’d been in a fight. His face bore mysterious bruises that stood out against his drained white skin. Dtui looked into his pupils. As she held him, his strength gradually returned and, before her eyes, the bruises faded.
“Now that was an impressive recovery. I think you’ll live, Dr. Siri,” she said.
“Sorry about all that.”
“You saw something, didn’t you?”
“Yes, indeed I did.”
“What did it say?”
“Nothing.”
“But it did something to you.”
“Dtui, I may be wrong about this, but I do believe one of our Cuban friends just took up residence in me.”
That she didn’t translate.
There were three things Spiky Hair had forgotten to mention when he sent Mr. Geung off on a beeline for Vientiane. One was that the reason the road took such a mammoth detour was to avoid the Kuang Si foothills, some of which had a gradient too steep even for goats. No sooner had Geung huffed and puffed his way over one than another loomed ahead of him.
Another thing Spiky had omitted was what to do if the sky became overcast, as Geung was orienting himself by the sun on his bag strap. In the beginning, he just stopped, sat, and waited till the cloud passed. But as he climbed higher, the clouds became thicker and his guiding sun made fewer and fewer appearances. His waits became longer so that by 3:00 PM he’d stopped completely. It was a dilemma. He knew he had to keep moving but not in which direction. Every hill looked the same. Any one of them could have been the one he’d just crossed. There were no landmarks. Every tree looked the same.
And then there was the third thing. It was a whopper. Despite the efforts of hungry villagers and traffickers and traders in animal pelts or exotic organs, these hills still teemed with wild beasts. If they should ever have met, most of them would have been more afraid of Mr. Geung than he was of them. But a tigress that had been stalking him since he’d passed the waterfall wasn’t afraid at all. She had cubs to feed and she’d traveled far to find game. The human she was following was meaty enough, and he was heading almost directly toward her lair. It was as if she’d ordered room service and it was delivering itself.
The Million-Spider Elvis Suit
Siri returned to Guesthouse Number One. Santiago dropped him off and, as usual, said several things that Siri didn’t understand. Siri replied equally incomprehensibly, and they parted company with a friendly handshake and a lot of laughter.
While they were still with Dtui at Kilometer 8, Santiago had submitted the circumstantial evidence that had convinced him Isandro and Odon were dabbling in ugly magic. It was quite compelling. Two cases were particularly hard to explain away. The first was that of a Vietnamese woman who had come to Vieng Xai with the Vietnamese engineers. She cooked for them and did their laundry. As it turned out, she was an incurable racist. She believed that black-skinned people were barely a rung above the ape on the ladder of evolution and had no qualms about voicing her opinions. Whenever she saw the two Cubans around the hospital area, she would quite proudly call them monkeys. As she believed they lacked the intellect to speak her language, she even went to the trouble of miming her views for them.
She was an average-looking woman with an unpleasant personality, but lonely men in a foreign country tended to overlook such flaws. So it transpired that the woman fell pregnant. She claimed it was a miracle, a divine conception, and as none of the men stepped forward voluntarily to claim paternity, one by one, the local people started to believe her. They realized this would be the perfect opportunity for her to finger some randy soldier and blackmail him into marriage. Yet she swore to the last she was still a virgin.
Santiago had been away on the early morning she was carried into the hospital. It was her seventh month and something had gone horribly wrong. The young Lao surgeon on duty that night believed the only way to stop her hemorrhaging was to remove the fetus. It was his call and nobody later questioned his judgment. But the woman had died on the operating table. When Santiago returned, the Lao surgeon was inconsolable. He found the boy drunk at midmorning and ranting. Nothing the old doctor did could calm him. He knew this was far more than a doctor’s grief at losing a patient. There had to be something else. Santiago talked to the staff nurse. She told him the surgeon had ordered her out of the theatre before she could get a look at the fetus. He’d carried it himself up to the cave of the dead, where it was to be cremated the following night. Santiago, intrigued by the story, had gone up to the cave and there he found a burlap sack small enough to contain the Vietnamese woman’s baby. What he discovered inside was not human. In the sa
ck was the incomplete fetus of an ape.
Both Siri and Dtui felt they’d been spun a campfire horror yarn, but the teller was impressively calm and sincere. His second tale was no less peculiar. A Party cadre had come from Havana to make an official appraisal of how Cuban aid was being spent at one of the country’s few humanitarian projects overseas. He was due to stay for a week, check the books, and return. It was quite straightforward, but he was an observant man and not without some experience of Palo ways. Yet he was committed to the Cuban Communist Party and had no desire to complicate his life with magic. The Party had taught him that shamanism was one more opiate for a people who would be better off drunk on socialism.
In Vieng Xai, the bookkeeper saw something that concerned him, and he decided to discuss it with Santiago. They had an appointment to meet one evening at eight, but an hour before that time, Isandro came to Santiago’s office to tell him the accountant had been struck down by some affliction and was clutching his throat, unable to speak. The director went to the man’s bedside and could see he was in agony. They rushed him immediately to the theatre, where Santiago performed an emergency tracheotomy. There was no evidence of disease or trauma to the respiratory tract, so the surgeon concluded the man’s labored breathing resulted from intense pain. After several more exploratory incisions, Santiago found the cause of his problem. The accountant’s epiglottis had turned to wood— more accurately, to a hard substance like the pit of a small peach. The surgeon had no choice but to remove it. They sent the bookkeeper home in a deep coma. When they were putting together his belongings to ship back to Havana, they found a slip of paper in his bag. On it were the names of the two interns, and beside them the man had doodled various Endoke symbols.
Although the monkey fetus story had been secondhand and, to some extent, conjecture, the doctor had seen this bizarre manifestation for himself. Soon after, Santiago discovered the altar, confronted Isandro and Odon, and insisted they return to Cuba.
Siri had asked why, if the two men were so powerful, Santiago hadn’t been afraid of retribution. The Cuban had smiled broadly and had slowly begun to unbutton his shirt. Siri and Dtui were astounded by what they saw. A necklace of talismans hung like a mayoral chain of office against his undershirt. This esteemed man of science was adorned with a lei of talismans, dried flowers, nuggets of metal, miscellaneous teeth, and carefully placed knots. It was a wonder he could stand upright under its weight. Siri’s single white amulet paled by comparison. Santiago admitted openly his fear of the two Endoke priests Siri felt oddly comforted that he wasn’t the only man of learning forced to use magic to stay alive.
In his room, Siri began to undress before heading down to the shower. Since his experience at the altar he had felt peculiar. Strange desires were welling up in him. Normally, he spent as little time out of his clothes as he could, but today he felt an odd hankering to look at himself in the closet mirror. This was something he’d avoided doing for a number of years. He was no oil painting. They wouldn’t ever cast a statue of him. But for some reason he felt a surge of pride as he looked at his solid frame. If he dyed his hair he could pass for, what—sixty? Fifty-five? He was strong, virile even. Today, for some reason, he believed he could break rocks with his bare fists, rip the husks off coconuts with his fingers.
He let his gray PL-issue undershorts drop to the floor, and he strode up and down the room, straight backed and buck naked. He let his penis swing from side to side, flexed his biceps, bared his teeth at …
“Can I get you some more tea?” The kitchen lady was standing in the doorway. He hadn’t heard the door open. In her hand she held a fresh thermos. She looked at him sadly as if he were a dementia victim who had lost track of his trousers. “Are you all right, uncle?”
Siri grabbed the quilt from the spare bed and wrapped it around himself. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
An hour later, respectably dressed now but no less embarrassed, he was back at the president’s house. Once more he was standing over the dissected mummy. He’d never revisited a body so many times, but this particular victim kept changing personality the more Siri learned about him. Two things still worried Siri. If the two Cubans had been sent home, what had Odon been doing back at the president’s cave a month later? And if he was being violently beaten and held under cement, what possessed him to hang on to a key? Surely he would have wished to use both hands to defend himself.
Siri fished the key from his pocket and went out onto the balcony of the new house. First he enjoyed the splendid view across the valley. Then he went to the back of the building and strained his neck to look at the very top of the karst cliff. It was from there the boulder had fallen that had led to the discovery of the body. Odd that it should land exactly where it did ten days before the concert. He went to the start of the pathway that led up to the old cave. The broken sections and the boulder were halfway between the house and the cave entrance. What were you doing there, señor? he wondered.
Once the former cave dwellers’ houses had been completed and all their documents and personal belongings moved into them, there had been no reason, none at all, for the senior cadres to go back into the caves. Such a visit would have been no more likely that the Count of Monte Cristo popping back to the Chateau d’If to reminisce over the happy times he’d spent there. So the caves were locked to keep out animals and preserve what someday might become historic sites for tourists. What better place? Siri realized. What more unlikely hideout could there be than the vacated caves of the president himself?
He walked up the concrete path, around the removed section, then onto the path again, which brought him to the front door. There was an actual door in a rectangular frame set back from the rock face. Siri had a delightful sense of the absurd, so he visualized ringing a bell, peeking through a mail slot, and wiping his feet on a donkey-hair doormat. But the door was barred and locked, and it would have taken a small brigade of very persistent firemen to break through it. He walked around the rocks to the right of the door heading upward but quickly came to a dead end. He passed the door again heading south, rounded a small outcrop, and came to what must have been a back door.
At first glance, this, too, seemed locked and barred. The cursory inspection of a night watchman would have ascertained as much. But Siri stepped up to the door and looked at the wooden planks that were nailed across it. A thick metal chain with a padlock was wound around two links connecting the door to the frame. It looked impenetrable. He stood back and stared at it like a puzzle.Once he’d taken in the whole scene, he smiled. Before him, he knew, was an optical illusion. He took hold of the handle and tugged at it. The door, complete with its nailed planks and its frame and its metal chain, swung open on oiled hinges.
Before going inside, Siri reached into his cloth bag for his flashlight. He paused briefly to admire the brilliance of the faux-locked door, then let it shut silently behind him. PL caves were part natural, part sculpted. Where alcoves didn’t exist, rooms were constructed of plywood to give the feeling of a rather claustrophobic motel. Each cave had an airtight room with a pump and fallout-shelter doors in case of chemical weapon attacks. For some reason, perhaps because the Americans really didn’t know they were there, the Pathet Lao in their Vieng Xai caves had escaped such vulgar onslaughts.
He followed his flashlight beam through the Stone Age apartment. He’d only visited it once before when one of the president’s sons had been ill. It had been more homey then. There had been pictures and carpets and ornaments. With the generator lights and a good imagination you could have been in a bungalow on the Black Sea. Now, it was just a cave. Siri opened the last door off the old meeting room, expecting to find it just as empty as all the others, but the door nudged something. He shone his light inside and took a look. It was crammed with all kinds of ill-matching objects like a jackdaw’s cache.
Somehow he knew. This was where Odon had stayed after his return from Hanoi. Siri imagined him holed up here under the noses of the LPLA. The stone grate in
the corner, directly under the air vent, still had a sooty black pot standing on it. The long straw nest must have been his bed. A green plastic pail with a broken handle still contained drinking water, and, standing against the wall, was the only piece of furniture in the entire place: a tall wooden wardrobe. Even before he approached it and tried the door, he knew it would be locked and that the key in his hand would open it. Even so, he tugged at the handle first and thought he heard a sound from inside. The key turned easily in the lock and he pulled open the door. Although it appeared empty at first glance, something fled past his ear from out of the darkness. He was too slow to catch it in the beam of his light but he sensed rather than heard the soft flapping of wings. He assumed it was a bat but it was already out of the room. He looked into the closet again—a simple rectangle with a shelf at the top and a rail for hangers. That was it— no clothes, nothing. There wasn’t even a mirror on the inside of the door. He wondered why a man would lock an empty cupboard and hang on to the key even when he was under attack. Even when he knew his life was about to end.
Siri ran his hand around the back edges and corners inside the old wardrobe to find the hole or gap through which the bat had entered. Failing, he started again, more carefully this time, pushing at the wood to find a spot that might give way. He tapped the solid teak of the sturdy old structure and stood back, scratching his head. There was nothing. There was no possible way for the bat to have entered that closet. None at all. Of course, that made no sense. The key was in the hand of a man who’d been buried in cement five months ago. For the bat to have survived for that length of time, there would have to have been large amounts of food in there with it. Even if it had managed to eat all that food, it would have done an awful lot of shitting in five months. There was no sign, visual or olfactory, of that. Siri was flummoxed.
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