Disco for the Departed

by Colin Cotterill

  “So what should I do now?” Lit asked.

  “Oh, I think the doctor will be quite cooperative. He may even confess to a thing or two. You should offer him temporary accommodation in your security complex for the night, perhaps have a little chat with him tomorrow together with the Cuban delegation. I think they’ll be surprised to hear what he has to say. I imagine they’ll want to contact the families of Isandro and Odon and see what they want done with the bodies. I’m sure our politburo would gladly ship them home.”

  “Shouldn’t Hong Lan be buried with them?” Dtui asked.

  “Oh, I don’t see why,” Siri replied. “They’re just bodies. Their souls are already together.”

  The Plimsoll Pirouettes

  The concert was scheduled to begin at six thirty. It was almost eight and Dr. Siri still sat beside an empty chair fifty yards from an empty stage. The first twenty-six rows had just started to fill, giving him a view of the backs of famous Lao heads and heads that were probably famous in other communist countries. The politburo members were there with their wives, including Civilai and his companion, the lovely Mrs. Nong. There was a cordon of uniformed troops seated between the VIPs and the common people in the rear where Siri sat near the back, saving a place for Dtui.

  People were shown to their places by ushers who had once been senior military officers under the Royalist regime. They had undergone almost two years of reeducation and were considered to be trustees. They wore borrowed shirts and ties and expressions of defeat. Today’s assignment was barely a humiliation compared to some of their experiences out in the jungle. Many of them didn’t know that their king and queen had joined them in their exile, and most could not have cared less.

  Fashionably late, the president and prime minister and the heads of the Vietnamese delegation arrived to thunderous applause from the audience. They turned and returned the applause before sinking into the sofas and armchairs that formed the front row. As was the case at any event, large or small, in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, proceedings couldn’t begin without an insufferably long speech mentioning everybody involved in the revolution and their grandfathers. Dtui turned up toward the end of it.

  “I thought you weren’t coming,” Siri said, not bothering to keep his voice down. Most people in the commoners’ section were chatting and having a good time. Socialist microphones had an extra notch to cope with Lao audiences.

  “I was busy having two traumatic events,” she told him.

  “You saw Lit?”

  “That was the first. It wasn’t exactly like breaking his heart. More like disturbing his life schedule. You know what I mean. Actually, I had the feeling our little show this morning might have already put a few doubts in the comrade’s mind about my suitability as a mate.”

  “He knows you weren’t involved in any of the shenanigans.”

  “Yes, but he must have noticed I wasn’t particularly surprised either. I didn’t scream or fall about in panic. Perhaps that’s what he expects from a woman. He still seemed a little shell-shocked by the whole affair. He didn’t beg me to reconsider.”

  “Just as well. You’d already made your decision.”

  “Yeah. But it would have been nice to have had a suitor for a couple of months. I might have taken him to a dance or two and shown him off to the girls. I could have introduced him to Ma.”

  A blade of accidental static from the microphone cut through the audience. The people hushed guiltily.

  “And you spoke to your mother?” Siri whispered.

  “Yeah. That was the second trauma.”

  “Goodness me. Why?”

  “She read me a letter.”

  “Bad news?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “But it traumatized you?”

  “It shocked me out of my bloomers.”

  “Are you going to tell me what it said?”

  A procession of pink-and-yellow-clad musicians filed down into the orchestra pit with their instruments. It seemed a terrible shame that such pretty costumes should vanish from sight so soon. The sound of music rose from the pit almost immediately, and the elaborate speaker system sent it rolling around the dome of the roof. The chamber vibrated. Natural acoustics, without electronic supplementation, would have filled the cave with a much friendlier sound. Siri felt Dtui’s warm breath as she shouted into his ear.

  “It was from the examination board.”

  “What did they say?”

  “I have to be ready to leave for the USSR in December.”

  “You passed?” The overture came to a sudden halt just as Siri whooped with joy into the silence. Some of the senior cadres looked over their shoulders but the commoners laughed as they put their hands together for the unseen musicians. Siri felt no embarrassment whatsoever. He was so delighted he would happily have run up onto the stage to make the announcement public. He kissed Dtui on the cheek and then held on to her hand throughout the concert smiling the whole time.

  The proceedings went on into the night. Beautiful Vietnamese ballerinas in army uniforms pirouetted in plimsolls. Acrobats did unthinkable things with chairs. A girl balanced upside down on a donkey, which ran in circles on the stage and pissed on the electric wiring, which smoked briefly. A small choir of angels in red scarves and berets sang Party songs, the ballerinas returned for a rousing dance with rifles, and a North Vietnamese pop star sang a romantic ballad that brought tears to the old men’s eyes.

  The final performance of the night was a Lao ramwong dance that snaked down from the stage and collected members of the audience. Civilai was one of the first out of his seat. He waved when he caught sight of Siri, who hoped his friend had left his feathers in Vientiane. Those behind the army cordon were not allowed to join the main snake so they stood where they were and danced in place. Dtui and Siri faced one another, bobbed to the music, and gestured like mismatched reflections in a mirror.

  Behind her head, in the shadows of the side caves, in the nooks and crevices, Siri could see the departed assembling. They waited patiently for their turn. Once the old men had gone back to their houses, there was to be an official shindig for the young and the young at heart. As a special dispensation, the young Lao would be able to dance till the early hours. Although the partygoers would suspect nothing, Siri knew the spirits wouldn’t want to miss anything as fantastic as a chance to strut their stuff with the living.

  Civilai had no place in his heart for modern music, so he’d flown back to Vientiane directly after the show with the other party poopers. There was room on the helicopter, so he wangled spots for Siri and Dtui. The journey was made all the more pleasant for Civilai by having Siri yelling the events of the previous ten days in his ear above the chop of the rotors. His own life had become so predictable and pointless, it was a tonic to hear Siri’s marvelous tale.

  “How come the Vietnamese didn’t find Isandro when they discovered the body of the girl?” Civilai asked; he never let Siri get away with any gaps in his reasoning.

  “I have to assume Odon buried his friend first and disguised the grave so it wouldn’t be discovered before the process was complete. He was just about to do the same to Hong Lan when he was disturbed by the arrival of the soldiers.”

  “You don’t want to make this a police matter? You have enough evidence against the Vietnamese militia and the guide for murdering Odon?”

  “I get the feeling the army will take care of this in its own way.”

  “As they seem to take care of everything else.” Civilai almost had all the facts straight in his mind. Only one question remained and he knew the reply would be conjectural. “Any idea how the couple died?”

  “The bodies were too far gone to tell. The girl may have died from her disease. If she was still alive, I imagine the lovers drank some poison together once they got to the cave. It was a love pact, after all.”

  “And do you honestly believe the hocus-pocus worked and the lovers’ souls were reunited in the afterlife?”

 
Siri thought again of the locked cupboard and the unseen creature that had escaped from it. “I can’t be sure. But I’d like to think so.”

  “After all these years, you’re still a romantic.”

  “When you get to our age, older brother, you start to wish you’d devoted more time to romance when you still had the chance.”

  “You’re right.” Civilai leaned across to Mrs. Nong and whispered something in his wife’s ear. Whatever it was, it caused her eyebrows to rise and a blush to suffuse her cheeks. She looked out of the far window and smiled uncontrollably.

  “I hope you didn’t just make a promise an old fellow like you won’t be able to keep,” Siri said.

  Dtui and the doctor had arrived in their crowded suburban shelter for the homeless at 3:00 AM. The mongrel bitch was still asleep on her nest and a company of geckos were gathered around the porch lamp like three-dimensional wallpaper. The human guests were sleeping, too. Siri did a quick head count and found he’d inherited one new house-mate since they’d been away. Apart from Monoluk, Dtui’s mother, there had been Mr. Inthanet from Luang Prabang; Mrs. Fah, whose husband had passed away; and her two children. And now there was a monk, of all things, asleep on Siri’s hammock in the back yard. None of these people stirred.

  Siri and Dtui ate and slept a little, but by six they were both as wide awake as the early-rising cockerels on the roof. Then they had to face an inquisition from their house-mates. “Who died? How? Who did it?”

  Apparently, dull radio dramas weren’t stimulating enough for them. The doctor did as good a job as he could of summarizing their adventures in the northeast, but was glad when the time came for them to leave for work. Halfway into the city, he realized he’d forgotten to ask about the monk, or perhaps he hadn’t been ready to get the reply “What monk?”

  He and Nurse Dtui arrived at the hospital at their usual time. It was Monday morning and their stay in the northeast already felt like a different time in an entirely different country. Siri parked his motorcycle in his regular spot and Dtui unlocked the morgue doors. There was a stale smell inside rather than the familiar stench of bleach and disinfectant. They assumed this was the smell of a morgue unused for ten days. At least it was clean and everything was in its place, just as they’d left it.

  They opened the windows to allow the hot air inside to change places with the hotter air outside. They sat at their respective desks, ready to collate their fragmented recollections of the Huaphan case. It was likely to take them the better part of a day to put it into a form that even Judge Haeng would be able to make head or tail of.

  At twenty minutes after eight o’clock Mr. Geung staggered through the doorway like a drunkard. He hadn’t even stopped to take off his boots. Siri and Dtui looked up to see him silhouetted there, swaying. The only thing keeping him up appeared to be the uneven smile on his face.

  “Hello, Geung honey,” Dtui said. “What in blazes has happened to you?” She stood and began to walk toward him.

  Before sinking to his knees and crashing onto the concrete floor, Geung heard the doctor’s voice. It was such a wonderful sound—a sound he’d been afraid he’d never hear again. He’d imagined this meeting as he staggered painfully through the outer suburbs and across the city, as he fell into and out of trances beside the busy streets. He’d dreamed of seeing the faces of his workmates, and here he was—the morgue and his promise intact. He couldn’t have been happier. This, too, was his destiny.

  “Mr. Geung,” the doctor had said, looking at his watch. “You’re late.”

  Beware the Snowy-Haired Avenger

  As head of the National Department of Justice, Judge Haeng could, technically, have found a lot of things to keep him busy every day of the week. Yet, by hanging on to senior staff who knew the workings of the department far better than he, and by not initiating any new projects, he managed to arrange many large gaps in his daily schedule. These he filled with visits to his family fish farm, afternoon trysts with colorful nightclub singers, and, his particular favorite, just kicking off his shoes and taking nice long naps. If napping had been an event at the Asian Games, Haeng would certainly have been the Lao national champion. He had everything under control and was proving to everybody that he could capably fill the shoes of those corrupt Royalist rogues he’d condemned so often at village seminars.

  He became particularly upset, therefore, whenever the politburo gave him tasks that took away his three-hour lunches and “just-say-I’m-in-court” afternoons. The signing of the Vietnamese treaty had turned his life into a hellish succession of meetings and formal dinners and interminable speeches, many his own. The Hanoi judicial delegation had been particularly irksome. They’d insisted upon seeing the inner workings of the Lao legal system. Not only was that mechanism lacking oil, it was also missing a number of irreplaceable spare parts. But he could hardly confess this. So Judge Haeng had set about orchestrating an elaborate deception.

  He moved men from outlying police posts to fluff up the two stations visited by the Vietnamese and stage-managed a fake trial at the central courthouse. He shifted four brand-new microfiche viewers from the old USAID compound and set them up at the criminal records department. As none of the Lao records were on fiche, and nobody knew how to operate the equipment anyway, on the day of the delegation’s visit there was a sudden and mysterious power outage, which meant the visitors had to leave without seeing the system in action. The judge was exhausted and thanked the heavens that the Vietnamese only had one more half day before he would be rid of them.

  One member of the group was a doctor—a coroner, of all things—who had convinced his compatriots that a review of the justice system could not be complete without a visit to the morgue. Judge Haeng had argued against this with all his might—the smell, the sight of blood, the heat—but they all seemed to be in agreement with the annoying little Vietnamese doctor. It occurred to Haeng that perhaps every country had the thorn of a difficult national coroner in its side. But he had no choice. On the evening of the last day of the visit, following a farewell banquet at the old presidential palace, Haeng had his driver take him out to Dr. Siri’s house, deep in the new suburbs behind the That Luang shrine. It would be his first visit to the place. It would also be the first time he’d seen Siri since his trip to the northeast, and since the removal of his moronic henchman from the morgue.

  On the car journey there he took a number of deep breaths and prepared retorts for the complaints sure to come his way. Siri was insolent but occasionally competent. The old man had done a reasonable job in Xam Neua. Haeng would begin by telling him so, get him in a good mood, inform him of how satisfied the Party was with his work. He would not allow the doctor to bully him about the missing moron. He was, after all, the head of the Justice Department and Siri was just a worker. But still he felt his hands tremble as he walked through the tall front gate and into a well-tended yard. The front door of the house was wide open, and he could see Siri in the back kitchen. Haeng clenched his fists and called Siri’s name, but was totally unprepared for what happened next. Siri raised his arm in greeting, smiled, and trotted out to welcome him. He was so polite, so friendly, that Haeng wondered whether Siri had confused him with someone else. But taking the judge’s arm, Siri led him inside.

  It was an awful place, a menagerie: old people, invalids, brats running amok. Siri had turned perfectly good government housing into a slum. There would be a report made to the housing division about this, no question, but there was a more pressing issue. He hurriedly acknowledged the introductions and immediately dismissed the names of Siri’s gang from his mind. As soon as he could, he herded Siri and Dtui onto the front step. He asked for assurance that they would be neatly turned out for tomorrow’s visit, white coat for the doctor, crisp white uniform for the nurse. It was also vital that there be no—what he referred to as “patients.” Siri asked whether he meant dead bodies, and Haeng acknowledged that was his meaning. If there were any bodies in the freezer, Siri would have to get there
early and clear them out.

  Siri had been so bold as to ask where they should dump a body, were it to arrive before the delegation turned up, but Haeng didn’t give a hoot what they did with it as long as the morgue was spotlessly clean and presentable. Siri and Dtui assured him there would be nothing dead to spoil the reputation of the national mortuary. They assured him it would be a day like no other. Haeng drove home that night with a lighter heart. The only possible flaw that might spoil an otherwise exemplary picture of Justice Department efficiency had been removed. And, miracle of miracles, there had been no mention of that matter. This Siri character was proving to be trainable after all. Haeng lay back in his seat and smiled for the first time all day.

  The entourage of shiny black Zil limousines pulled up in front of the morgue at nine fifteen the following morning. The hospital director was there to meet the delegates. He had a speech written and planned to give each of them a wrist garland of orchids. But it was a stinking hot day, and the cars had kicked up a mist of dust. The Vietnamese wanted nothing to do with the director’s foolishness. They wanted merely to get the final pointless visit over with and head off to the airport. They’d all been in Laos far too long already. They pushed past the director and a chorus of applauding nurses, and headed for the shade of the morgue entrance. The director recognized at least two senior Party members, a judge, and two police generals as they shoved him out of the way. But his camera still hung by his side, and he had no photographic evidence that his hospital had been so honored.

  The delegates were met in the vestibule by Dr. Siri in a spotless white lab coat and, of all things, a shirt and tie. A gleaming stethoscope hung around his neck. He stood beside a beaming Judge Haeng and welcomed the Vietnamese in their own language. He had no need of an interpreter although this left Haeng at a slight disadvantage. Despite completing much of his undergraduate education in Hanoi, Haeng’s Vietnamese was infected with a horrible Lao accent, and his comprehension was lacking. The doctor said he regretted there were no bodies to show the guests but he invited everyone into the autopsy room regardless. The throng shuffled forward to find Dtui standing in front of the large freezer door. She was immaculately groomed and dressed in her whitest uniform. She’d even gone so far as to stick a bright pink champa flower above her ear. She smiled sweetly and pulled open the freezer door like the hostess on a Thai television game show.