The Woman Who Wouldn't Die

by Colin Cotterill

  In Lao, she said, ‘Who are you looking for?’

  She tried the same question in Russian but the look on his face suggested they were to be marooned on their separate islands in a vast linguistic sea.

  But then, in English, he said, ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance you speak English?’

  Dtui’s English came from a dictionary and several textbooks. She had few chances to use it. The phonetic alphabet had taught her how the words were supposed to sound but few speakers of English consulted the phonetic alphabet. Consequently she had a problem with accents. It took her some time to digest the Westerner’s words. He was reaching for something in his satchel.

  ‘I speak a little,’ she said, relieved to have removed the cork that held in her English.

  ‘Then you must be Vietnamese,’ said the man.

  ‘Vietnam? No. I am Lao.’

  ‘Well, wonders will never cease.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I …’

  ‘Never mind.’ Again the smile. ‘I was hoping to find my good friend, Dr Siri,’ he said.

  ‘You know Dr Siri?’

  ‘We were best friends, before. In France.’

  ‘Really?’

  Malee had continued her gentle wail. It was unusual for her not to fall back into the depths of sleep. Dtui was concerned as a mother but failed to recognize the animal instinct with which a baby is born but sheds over time. The awareness of danger.

  ‘Is he here?’ the man asked, looking around the room.

  ‘No. He is in Pak Lai.’

  ‘Is that far?’

  ‘Is it …? No. On the Mekhong about seven hours.’

  ‘Oh, too bad. Then perhaps I can talk to his wife?’

  ‘Madame Daeng, also …’

  ‘In Pak Lai?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then that’s all I need you for.’ The smile was gone. ‘Far too easy,’ he said, and walked to the table where Comrade Koomki lay in charred lumps.

  ‘I …’ Dtui had started to pick up the anxiety in her daughter’s tears.

  ‘You are a doctor?’ he asked.

  ‘Nurse.’

  She took a step backwards to the dolly where her instruments were laid out.

  ‘A nurse?’ he repeated. ‘And such a pretty nurse.’

  Dtui had a scalpel in her hand behind her back. She tried to make the three steps to Malee’s hammock look natural but her bladder suddenly ached and her legs began to wobble. Acting natural could only be acting at this point. The foreigner picked up a short length of bone with his left hand and again reached into his satchel with his right. To Dtui’s disgust, the man put the bone between his teeth and began to chew.

  ‘No better combination,’ he said. ‘Calcium and charcoal. The arsonist’s snack of choice. But, of course, as a nurse you know this already.’

  His right hand emerged from the satchel holding a metal bar. He looked at Malee suddenly silent in her hammock. Dtui stepped between her and the man and held the scalpel in front of her. Barnard laughed.

  ‘Ooh! Such a small knife compared to my big iron,’ he said. ‘Nurse of the morgue. Nurse who deals with the dead. Do you know what cancer is, my pretty nurse? Certainly you do. Cancer is a contract that states categorically how long you have remaining to complete all of your business. It allows you a small portal of time to avenge all the wrongs you have suffered. To find peace from the demons that live beneath your skin.’

  He took a step towards Dtui. She held her ground and brandished her scalpel. He seemed not to care. He had a lot to say. Dr Siri had often told her that it’s only in the movies that crazed killers explain everything before that final blow. That actual killers just got it over with and fled. She had no idea what the Frenchman was saying but she was certain he had murder in mind.

  ‘And when you realize your future is measurable in hours rather than dreams,’ he continued. ‘That is when you seek out the moment in time when everything changed. When everything became shit. You go back to that moment and do what you can to delete it so you can sleep through those infinite hours of death without nightmares.’

  With no warning, he smashed the tyre iron on to the aluminium dolly, sending the bones flying across the room. Those that were left he crushed with three manic blows. Dtui swept her daughter into her arms and stepped back to the wall. She knew the tiny blade would offer no defence at all against this maniac with his metal bar. Her only hope was to attack. Thus far, the man’s face had shown no emotion, no anger, no excitement. His was a temperate, dull expression like the mask of the dead.

  He turned to her as if suddenly remembering she was in the room.

  Dtui lunged with the knife.

  He held up his left hand like a policeman stopping traffic.

  She lunged again and the blade cut a ribbon of red across his palm.

  He looked disappointed. His hand gushed blood but he seemed not to care.

  Dtui felt this was all without hope. He was a living cadaver and there was nothing she could do to frighten him. Still he talked.

  ‘It is a shame,’ he said, his bloody dripping hand still held aloft. ‘Two generations of lotus eaters gone in one small massacre. It will never make the newspapers in Europe.’

  He took that decisive step forward just as the louvres above Dtui’s head shattered, sending a hailstorm of glass across the room. The Frenchman showed no defensive instincts. It was as if he were staring into snow. Glass pierced the skin of his face as he looked up towards the source of this interruption.

  ‘You’re surrounded,’ came a deep male voice speaking English from beyond the window.

  This was followed by the sound of a gunshot.

  ‘We know you’re in there. Come out with your hands in the air.’

  Barnard sighed. He looked at the mother and daughter as if contemplating whether he might have time to beat them to death. He twirled the metal bar around like a conductor exercising his baton and he pouted. Then, he turned and walked calmly to the door with his weapon held above his head.

  Dtui’s knees buckled and she slid down the wall to the concrete floor. Malee, who had held back her tears this whole time, suddenly released a flood. Dtui willed her own breath to return. Her heart to beat. The ink blots to clear from before her eyes. She waited for the sounds of yells and gunshots from outside. Of a chase. Of a killing. But there was nothing. In fact there were no sounds beyond the cries of her daughter. She calmed the girl with a lullaby and, some five minutes later, eased herself back to her feet. She placed Malee in her hammock and walked on unsure legs to the exit. She peeked nervously around the door frame. There was nothing untoward. Mahosot was its normal sleepy self. There was no sign of the crazed Frenchman.

  A nurse emerged from the midday shadows of the canteen, her crisp white uniform reflecting the sun like a solar panel.

  ‘How are you, Dtui?’ she called, calmly, as if the world had not, five minutes earlier, been about to end.

  ‘Did you see a … a farang, just now?’ Dtui asked.

  ‘The Soviet doctor was just …’ the nurse began.

  ‘No. A tall, old man. Blue shirt. Carrying a leather satchel.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Anything unusual? Police? People running?’

  ‘Dtui, are you all right?’ asked the nurse.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Dtui confessed.

  Something had happened that she couldn’t explain. A broken window. A voice she’d never heard before. A gunshot. Two lives saved. A miracle.

  At first it might have seemed odd that a landlocked country should have a navy. It was something like tropical Singapore listing a snow plough amongst its official vehicles – which it did. But when one considered the fact that Laos had a five-thousand kilometre border to police, a thousand of which was river, it began to make more sense. The Lao People’s Navy comprised twenty US-made river patrol boats, sixteen amphibious landing craft and two fairly large cruisers that couldn’t be used in the dry season.

  When one of the cruisers arr
ived in Pak Lai mid-Monday afternoon, the crowd cheered, believing it was part of the celebrations. The vessel ignored the current race and ploughed between the two longboats, causing both to capsize in its wake. The crowd went wild with enthusiasm. They seemed to cheer every damned thing. There wasn’t a bottle to be seen anywhere but those Sanyaburans were most certainly on something.

  The cruiser reached the wooden dock and, unlike the ferry, did not berth politely. It seemed to use the flimsy structure as a brake to arrest its charge upriver. The pier creaked and leaned at a precarious forty-five degree angle but did not give up its moorings. Sailors fore and aft tied off on the wooden posts. Ten unenthusiastic army engineers in a mismatch of uniforms ambled across the deck and strolled along the jetty. The boat was piled high with heavy equipment, even a bulldozer rocked precariously at the stern. The engineers had arrived.

  At almost the same time, met with the same frenzied cheers, the ferry appeared upstream. It had left Luang Prabang with Comrade Civilai as its only passenger but was now full to the brim. At every turn in the river, every small village, it had taken on revellers intent on enjoying the Pak Lai boat races. None of them had laissez-passers but who was checking? At heart, the Lao were party animals and the zoo had been quiet of late.

  The ferry leaned against the dock from the north side, setting it upright. The passengers were off the boat in seconds and mingling with the huge crowd. Civilai, who was absolutely, most certainly, and definitely on something, staggered to the wrong side of the ferry and was about to step into the Mekhong. The pilot rescued him in time and deposited the old politburo man and his travel bag on the shifting jetty. Siri was there to meet him.

  ‘Have a rough cruise did you, skipper?’ Siri smiled.

  Civilai’s eyes were no longer coordinated. The cord seemed to have snapped. One was overseeing the river while the other honed in on Siri.

  ‘Those … these Sayabung people,’ he slurred, ‘are all nuts. You wouldn’t believe how … how … who much a person could smoke, and snort and ingest in a four horse period. Or, hours, of course – even.’

  ‘Oh, I believe it, old brother,’ said Siri. ‘In fact your eyes have no pupils.’

  Civilai began to scan the jetty beneath his feet and check his pockets.

  ‘I had them,’ he said. ‘I know I left Lang Praboon with them. And did I say … passionate?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Sangbarani women.’

  ‘Say no more, old man. I know your wife.’

  ‘I need …’

  ‘Some sleep.’

  ‘How …?’

  ‘I’m psychic.’

  ‘You’re not. You’re a—’

  ‘I know. Let’s go.’

  Siri propped up his friend as they walked the short walk to the guest house.

  ‘Who are you taking me, you villain?’ Civilai asked.

  ‘To my bed.’

  ‘Good. Will Mademoiselle Daeng be joining us?’

  ‘I doubt it. She’s not talking to me.’

  ‘At last a natural marriage. All this lalalala love at your age. Totalement obscene. Did you take on a concubine, you old snakehead? That’s the test.’

  Civilai had apparently lost the use of his legs as Siri was now dragging him along the gravel path. Despite his large stomach he weighed surprisingly little.

  ‘What would I do with a concubine at my age?’ Siri asked.

  ‘Nothing. That’s the point. You just dress her up sexy and walk her around around town and everyone thinks you’re Valentino. At your dis … discreet love nest you sit and play backgammonon and on and you eat scones.’

  They were passing the engineers. Young men. Undisciplined. Rude.

  ‘Looks like the old queens are going to get lucky this afternoon,’ shouted one of them to a parry of laughter.

  Siri stopped and Civilai almost slipped through his grasp. It wasn’t the comment that caused Siri to pause – although he would normally take a few moments to make mincemeat of the young soldier – it was the language he’d spoken. Siri looked around at the boys in the unit. Sharp, angular cheekbones. Chinese eyes. The engineers were all Vietnamese.

  To come across a unit of Vietnamese soldiers at that time would not have been unexpected. There were an estimated forty thousand of them on Lao soil ‘easing the transition’. When still active and able to stand, Civilai had once stood up in front of the committee and suggested that the Vietnamese invasion of Laos had already happened but nobody was prepared to admit it, particularly the numerous party members of mixed, Vietnamese-Lao ethnicity. The Vietnamese labour force dragged in by the French oppressors had been encouraged to spread its seed, one might say, at the grass roots level. There were currently ‘advisors’ in each of the ministries and the recent memorandum of understanding had given Vietnam a licence to trade and pillage.

  But Sanyaburi was a province as far from the Vietnamese border as it was possible to get. There were no security issues that might trouble Hanoi. The Vietnamese military experts had supposedly been training Lao troops for ten years. Lao engineers were every bit as competent as their trainers. Why would a Lao minister order in a Vietnamese unit in what was basically a personal matter?

  Siri walked on, dragging Civilai as he went.

  ‘Aren’t you going to smaggle his face into a billion billion little pieces?’ Civilai slurred.

  ‘No, brother. I have to think this out.’

  Civilai slept like a man full of conflicting stimulants, oblivious to the fact that his bedroom was crowded with party-goers. Not even hearing the cheers from the river below. Siri dumped him on the penthouse suite bed and went off in search of his bride. He found her on a swinging wooden seat in the garden behind the governor’s house. She didn’t seem to be enjoying her beer. Her husband was five metres from her when he dropped to the ground and walked up to her on his knees. Ugly, the dog, followed the cue and dragged his bottom across the short grass one metre behind. When Siri was close enough he gave Daeng a nop fit for a queen.

  ‘My love,’ he said, his head bowed in shame. ‘You were right.’

  She laughed.

  ‘You were right too,’ she said.

  ‘I was?’

  ‘I was. I am … jealous,’ she told him.

  ‘You are?’

  ‘It’s irrational and unwarranted and a product of my own imagination, and I should be old enough to know better. But … yes. I hated seeing you with that beautiful woman. I wanted to drown her in the river.’

  ‘Then … why didn’t you?’ he smiled.

  ‘She weighs more than I can comfortably drag. I’m not as young as I was. And … perhaps that’s my problem. Perhaps it isn’t her who is the used-to-be woman, but me. Because of this annoying biography you’ve had me put together, I’ve been remembering me. I mean, what I consider to be the real me. Doing a lot of probing into my soul. Asking, was that me or is this me? Was I immoral? Did I actually achieve anything? What have I become as a result of it all? And there she is, this successful businesswoman who has conquered the material world, and now is in control of the afterlife … and you. What was I compared to that?’

  This time, Daeng’s hand was more than pleased to be in his.

  ‘The answer isn’t nearly as complicated as the question,’ Siri told her. ‘You were great. You always have been great. And you always will be great. There is no woman who can compare to you because you are unique. And that makes me great too because I ended up with you.’

  He watched the tears race one another down her face. He rarely saw her cry. He never cried himself so he put the dampness on his cheeks down to an early dew.

  ‘And what am I right about?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When you grovelled over to me a few minutes ago you said I was right.’

  ‘Ah, yes. There’s something going on.’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘I never doubted you. Did you witness the arrival of the engineers just now?’

  ‘No.’


  ‘They’re Vietnamese.’

  ‘No? All of them?’

  ‘I swear.’

  ‘What the hell are they doing here?’

  ‘It might have been the minister’s doing. Trying to keep this secret, so he brings in foreigners. Word’s less likely to get around.’

  ‘That’s a lot of trouble to go to just to keep a secret, Siri. What if there’s a completely different motive? Something totally unrelated to the brother and the sunken boat.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps it’s the only way they could get Vietnamese troops into Sanyaburi.’

  ‘There’s hardly enough of them for an invasion.’

  ‘But if they’re engineers they might be here to do some surveying? A bit of spying on the Thai border?’

  ‘Then that would mean the whole performance with Madame Peung was just to win the minister over and get him to make the call to bring in soldiers.’

  ‘Siri, how certain are you that she’s legitimate?’

  Siri got off his knees and sat on the swing beside his wife. He looked off towards the river, mentally thumbing through his conversations with the witch.

  ‘She talks about things as if … as if she’s seen what I’ve seen. She’s shown me how she makes contact, or rather how she opens herself to be contacted. She’s been teaching me how to relax and accept whatever comes my way. There’s just so much evidence. All that display in the governor’s meeting room on Saturday. It was too natural. Too spontaneous. I mean, how could she know all those things? She hadn’t been told who would be there in the room.’

  ‘All right. So she’s really a medium. Then we’d have to assume someone harnessed her skills to meet outside objectives. Blackmail? Threats?’

  ‘The brother. What if he’s not her brother? What if he’s a minder? By her side all the time to make her say what someone wants her to say.’

  ‘All right. We might be getting somewhere.’

  ‘And we might be going there for no reason.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just that this could all be exactly what it seems. The Vietnamese unit was the only one available. We’ll all go and dig up the boat and we’ll find the remains of the minister’s brother. No mystery at all.’