The Woman Who Wouldn't Die

by Colin Cotterill

  When Daeng and her team had first approached the URC and suggested a journey upstream, she’d expected to haggle a price. But the crew was so pumped with adrenalin from the races, it was up for anything. They’d booted out half a dozen rowers who seemed not to care in the least and made space for the guests. Against the current they barely caused a breeze but Ugly’s tongue unfurled above the cool water as he scanned the bank ahead for hostiles. Daeng leaned back against Siri’s chest. Mr Geung rehearsed the words he’d use to placate his fiancée. The crew was passing around several plastic bottles from which they swigged with great enthusiasm.

  ‘I could use some of that,’ shouted Civilai.

  A housewife handed him one of the containers and winked. He took a swig and spat it out. Coconut water.

  ‘This is all you’re drinking?’ he said with amazement.

  ‘Of course,’ said the old village headman.

  ‘But you all seem so … stoned. How can that be?’

  ‘We work hard,’ said the old man. ‘We don’t have a lot of chance to play, but when it comes, we play hard too. We don’t need stimulants.’

  ‘Remarkable,’ said Civilai.

  ‘Adrenalin,’ said Siri. ‘If only you could mix it with soda and ice.’ He watched the elderly lady in front of him who paddled with gusto even though her oar was too short to reach the water.

  ‘Has anyone considered what we might do when we get there?’ Civilai asked.

  ‘We might ask someone whether back in 1978 they remember seeing a naval vessel full of engineers,’ said Siri, prompting laughter from his shipmates.

  ‘Then perhaps there’ll be enough time for someone to explain why the elephant thing was so relevant,’ said Daeng.

  ‘The elephant,’ Civilai began. ‘A noble creature used for hundreds of years as a pack animal. Its courtship has been compared by many to the politburo. Much show and trumpeting but you don’t see any results for two years. Moody beasts whose strength is all in the neck with a surprisingly weak back. They were gradually replaced by asses and ponies and trucks. During the war – hard times – some were eaten. Nutritious but a bit like chewing on one’s favourite shoe. The population dwindled but you’ll find more here in Sanyaburi than any other province. That is largely because it’s one of only two border provinces you don’t have to swim to from Thailand. A lot of our most profitable smuggling of goods takes place right here and much of the jungle is only accessible by elephant. Lesser pack animals are easily spooked and unwilling to cut new swathes through dense undergrowth.

  ‘Once the Thailand trade was squeezed out by the Party and diverted to the Vietnamese border, business over on the west flank changed direction. Export switched to import. Black market goods flooded in across this porous border with the tacit knowledge of the local administrators. The things we lacked – which are many – they had. But it’s very much a one way trade. Empty elephants to Thailand. Full elephants to Laos. So, the question is, why have fifteen elephants been showering and frolicking at the riverside for three days when there’s smuggling to be done? It can only be because they’ve been booked. They’re waiting for a delivery. Something to take to Thailand.’

  ‘It could be something completely unrelated,’ said Daeng. ‘The sleazy governor might be exporting something.’

  ‘Very true, Madame Daeng,’ Civilai agreed. ‘But the governor has to maintain his position. Has to show his loyalty to the Party. He’s not going to blatantly load up fifteen elephants in the middle of the boat races with all us outsiders around. No, I’d say this is a private booking and I bet you it has something to do with your witch. For some reason, she’s prepared to risk everyone seeing and I bet it’s because she has a very narrow aperture of opportunity. This has to be done now. There’s something they want to ship to Thailand in a hurry.’

  ‘What?’ asked Daeng.

  ‘I think that’s a question we might get answers for if ever we catch up with the cruiser,’ said Siri. ‘And, brother …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You did so well with the elephant question, here’s your bonus history question for two hundred points.’

  ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘What of significance happened in this country in 1910?’

  ‘1910? Let me see, France and Siam were busy slicing us up and winning parts of us like poker chips. Sanyaburi found itself back in French hands.’

  ‘I wonder if that’s got anything to do with it?’ said Siri.

  ‘The resident general experimented with making the whole country a free trade area. No notable battles, births or deaths as far as I know.’

  ‘Boring. That’s all?’ said Daeng.

  ‘It’s quite a significant amount,’ Civilai pointed out. ‘And I’ve given you more than you’d learn at a Convenient History 101 course you might study at Dong Dok College. The world began in 1975 as far as they’re concerned. What did you want exactly?’

  ‘I was hoping for a key,’ said Siri. ‘1910 was the clue.’

  ‘I still think it’s a phone number,’ said Daeng. ‘1910.’

  ‘Not an active one,’ Civilai told her. ‘Numbers 1000 to 2000 were decommissioned after the takeover. That was the French network.’

  ‘There it is,’ said Siri. ‘The French connection again.’

  ‘So we’d not be able to discover which department or household used that number before it was decommissioned?’ asked Daeng.

  ‘Not on a leaky boat in the middle of the Mekhong,’ said Civilai. ‘When we get back to Vientiane we can go through the files at the central post office.’

  ‘No. It’s a date,’ said Siri. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  The rowers at the front of the boat were yelling excitedly. They’d seen something in the water. Some tried to stand to see over the heads in front but the movement unsettled the fine balance.

  ‘What is it?’ Civilai asked.

  ‘No idea,’ said Siri.

  The URC boat was steered without a rudder through some group osmosis which explained why it spent so much time zagging. But somehow it found its way to the left bank and defied the current that was so eager to send it home. Ugly barked. Everyone stared to the right. Nobody spoke. There was no breeze, no cloud, seemingly no weather at all.

  ‘My heavens,’ said Siri.

  ‘It … it’s waving,’ said Mr Geung.

  Despite the fact that nobody was rowing, the boat held its place in the river and angled towards the open water where a hand protruded, its fingers splayed. It seemed to be telling them to stop.

  A cacophony of sound drummed through Siri’s head: screams and gunshots and loud Chinese music. He pressed his palms against his ears, closed his eyes, and straight away he knew whose hand this was.

  ‘Grab it,’ he shouted.

  They all looked at him as if he were mad. Nobody in their right mind would invite the Siren of the water to drag them down into the depths. Nobody would take hold of that dead hand and allow the evil spirits to escape into a live body. Reluctantly they rowed towards the hand. Siri dared touch it. He reached over the side of the longboat, lunged but missed. But Daeng behind him was more successful. She caught hold of the wrist with two hands. To everyone’s shock the hand arrested the flow of the heavy teak vessel like an anchor. The longboat wheeled around and Siri scurried back to help his wife. He took hold of the slender hand.

  ‘Row to the bank,’ he cried.

  And row they did, as hard as they were able. But the hand in the river was stronger. Siri and Daeng held on with all their might but the boat was going nowhere.

  ‘Put your backs into it,’ Civilai shouted.

  Every man, woman, amputee and child leaned into their oars if only to get away from that horrifying hand. After several minutes, the rowers were panting but the hand held firm.

  ‘It … it must be a very heavy hand,’ said Mr Geung.

  ‘Again,’ Civilai shouted.

  The oars dug in with unprecedented coordination. The boat lunged. The hand conceded. It took som
e ten minutes to reach the bank. If the team had put this much effort into the races they would certainly have fared better. At the bank, the water they bailed out of the craft was half sweat.

  Siri and Daeng were out of the boat and up to their waists in the river. Still they held the delicate hand between them.

  ‘This is who I think it is, isn’t it?’ said Daeng.

  ‘Yes,’ Siri replied.

  Two of the few crew members under fifty jumped from the boat and, careful not to touch the body, they ducked below the surface. When they re-emerged, one of them said, ‘It’s no wonder we had trouble. She’s roped to some bloody great hunk of machinery.’

  The two men dragged it to the bank and Siri and Daeng found Madame Peung’s body much easier to slide up on to the grass. Her ankle was tied by a short rope to an air compressor. Daeng told them she’d seen it the night before, stowed to the stern of the frigate. Siri could see no wounds. There were no bloodstains on her clothes. If her raised arm was a conscious effort, he had to assume she’d died from drowning. Yet in most cases, the victim’s face would be contorted in agony. Madame Peung seemed almost to be smiling. Even in death she was beautiful.

  ‘Awfully bad luck,’ said Civilai, who leaned from the longboat. ‘Fancy her getting her foot tangled up in the rope just as the compressor was about to fall overboard.’

  ‘You’d think she’d have seen it coming,’ said Daeng, and winced at her own insensitivity.

  Siri felt a good deal sorrier for the death of Madame Peung than he had been for the loss of his books. She’d been kind to him. He liked her. But, quite clearly, the villains had no further use for her. If the water at that spot had been just twenty centimetres deeper, they’d have passed her by. But had she made some supernatural afterlife effort to raise her arm? To be seen? To have her body put down with respect so her spirit might move on? He wouldn’t have put it past her.

  With the compressor as their reward – thirty kilograms of scrap metal – the two men agreed to sit with the corpse until the longboat passed on the return journey. They kept their distance from her. Siri had considered it disrespectful to go into battle with a body on board. Daeng and Geung took the two empty paddle spots and joined the uncoordinated splash upriver. Siri had several excuses for not picking up an oar, not least of these his injuries sustained in a run-in with the Khmer Rouge. Any other man would have enjoyed the three months of bed rest the doctors had recommended. Siri had been repainting the bathroom Wattay blue after only a week. A bathroom that was now in ruins. A good enough reason not to waste time painting bathrooms. Civilai cited the loss of his right earlobe as the reason why he didn’t rush for the vacant paddles.

  The conversation amongst the rowers had taken a more serious tone. The discovery of the body had shifted them into a superstitious frame of mind. There was speculation that the great naga had taken another soul because the race organizers had banned the final party. This was where everyone took to the river in anything that could float to thank the great serpent for not flooding them the previous year. There would always be a lot of drinking and at least one near-fatality.

  ‘Civilai?’ said Siri.

  ‘Yes, brother?’

  ‘We’re heading after a boat with a machine gun attached to it and ten armed soldiers on board.’

  ‘It won’t come to that, Siri.’

  ‘If we happen to round a bend and there they are, they might come at us.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I think we should at least explain to our shipmates what we’re doing here.’

  ‘They didn’t ask when we set off.’

  ‘They hadn’t seen a dead body tied to an air compressor when we set off. We might need their help.’

  And so, with the oars raised and their chests heaving, the crew listened to Civilai’s abridged version of why they were pursuing a Lao naval vessel.

  ‘Where would they be heading?’ asked one shirtless fat man with stomachs piled on his lap like hillside paddy fields.

  ‘It’s a point exactly twenty-two kilometres upriver,’ said Siri.

  This was followed by a mass exchange of nods and a soundtrack of ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Sharp bend in the river? Rock cliff?’ asked the fat man.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Siri.

  Smiles. Chuckles. Knowing looks.

  ‘Frenchy’s Elbow. Might as well just leave your Vietnamese to it,’ said the old lady with the short oar. ‘They’ll be taken care of, all right.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Daeng.

  ‘It’s started,’ said the headman. ‘One body already and they haven’t even arrived there.’

  ‘Is there something at this place?’ Siri asked, although he knew there was.

  ‘Not something you could poke in the eye with a stick,’ said one woman. ‘But something just the same.’

  ‘Are there bodies there?’ Siri asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the headman. ‘Plenty. But your minister won’t be finding his brother at Frenchy’s Elbow.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because the boat at the bottom of the river there went down about the same time your minister was born.’

  A shudder ran up Siri’s neck. Nobody was rowing. The river was running fast from the floods in China. Yet they were floating at some speed … against the current.

  ‘Frenchmen?’ Siri asked.

  ‘Ah, there’s one with the gift,’ said the old lady.

  ‘Well, here’s one without,’ said Civilai. ‘What are we talking about here?’

  ‘Everyone in these parts knows the story,’ said the fat man. ‘It was the year of our Lord Buddha 2543 …’

  ‘Of course, it would be,’ said Civilai. ‘Better known as 1910.’

  ‘You can’t get reliable intelligence these days,’ said Siri.

  ‘The French bastards convinced the King of Luang Prabang that he should lend them his crown jewels for some world fair over in Europe somewhere,’ said the fat man. ‘In fact it seems pretty damned obvious that they were stealing them. But, what can you do when you’ve got a dozen muskets pointed at your head? They loaded it on a French gunboat called La Grandière, guarded by six French soldiers, and they set off downriver to Vientiane. But that treasure was cursed. They say a whirlpool surged up out of that deep water and swallowed the boat down in a spot they now call Frenchy’s Elbow. Drowned, all of ’em. In the early days you could see the hull from the bank. Locals passing it on the river would swing by to take a look. They might dive down to see if there was anything to salvage. But every one of them that tried suffered personal or family ills straight after. Deaths or sickness or crop failure. They say one boy got all the way down there into the cabin. It was dark and he was feeling around and his hand fell on the face of a man. He fought the urge to flee and took the man’s hand. He helped himself to a ring. Perhaps that was what triggered the curse. ’Cause when he first dived down there he was just a lad, but when he surfaced with the ring in his hand, he was a grey-haired old man. That was the last time anyone went down there.’

  ‘And he had a unicorn horn sticking out of his back,’ whispered Daeng to her husband. She too had noticed their upriver floatation.

  ‘You not buying any of this?’ Siri asked her.

  ‘The Curse of Frenchy’s Elbow? Come on, Siri. Everyone living near water goes nutty eventually. Loch Ness monsters and Sirens and Great Nagas. It’s a symptom of water vapour inhalation.’

  Civilai crawled back to join them.

  ‘Have you noticed we’re floating against the current?’ he said.

  Siri ignored him.

  ‘What about my dreams?’ said Siri. ‘The naked Frenchmen. You don’t think there could be a boat laden with the crown jewels of Laos down there?’

  ‘Whether there is or there isn’t,’ said Daeng, ‘some silly curse isn’t going to stop that unit of engineers from digging it out. But I’ll tell you one thing. If there is treasure down there it all makes a lot more sense than a search for a minister�
��s dead brother. A lot of effort has gone into organizing this and we can’t leave it up to your spirit friends to stop them shipping our treasure off to Thailand.’

  ‘Irrespective of the fact our old kings pilfered it from some other old kings in the first place?’ said Civilai.

  ‘It belongs – through the statute of limitations on the possession of regal booty – to Laos,’ she told him.

  ‘You just made that up,’ said Civilai. ‘It’s extortion paid by vassal states to a tyrant. At the worst they’re stolen goods.’

  ‘And they’re our stolen goods and I’m not handing them over to the Vietnamese without a fight. Siri?’

  ‘Yes, my love?’

  ‘What are you grinning about?’

  ‘It’s not a grin. It’s a smile of admiration. There’s nothing “used to be” about you. The fire never burned out. You’re as much in love with Laos as you were back then.’

  ‘And you, old man?’ she said. ‘Are you tired of fighting for this nation of lotus eaters?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Then let’s not invest all our faith in this stupid curse. Let’s put together a plan B.’

  ‘I think a plan B might involve a lot of sleeping under trees,’ said Civilai. ‘Digging a boat out of sixty-eight years of silt is no easy matter.’

  Like the north-easterly monsoons and feather-duster salesmen, Inspector Phosy was relentless. If something was blocking his path he would chip a way into it until a breakthrough could be made. There were two large rocks currently sitting in front of him and he hadn’t made much of an impression on either of them. The Housing Department had confirmed that Comrade Koomki was missing. The inspector had collected a good deal of evidence that Dr Siri was a mortal enemy of the Housing Allocations head but nothing at all to tie the deceased to the Frenchman. One more setback was that Sergeant Sihot was stuck in a clinic in Xanakham with chronic diarrhoea. He didn’t make it to Pak Lai.

  Phosy had also heard back from Vietnam. The reply came via their Intelligence Unit. They had a sprawling complex behind their embassy but seemed to operate independently. Nobody knew what intelligence was being gathered there or why they’d been allowed to set it up in the first place. Phosy recalled that Civilai had lobbied without success to have it shut down.