The Woman Who Wouldn't Die

by Colin Cotterill

The sun was setting behind the buildings when the rubber dinghy floated into Pak Lai. With the Uphill Rowing Club continuing its journey to Luang Prabang transporting the Buddha images, Siri and his team had inflated the dinghy and made good time downriver. The current had apparently noticed its mistake and was flowing fast towards the south. They’d collected the body of Madame Peung and the two boatmen had taken over the rowing. Near the town, they’d passed the elephants heading upriver for their rendezvous with Tang and told the mahout he was out of luck. There would be no delivery to Thailand. Pak Lai was rocking with the euphoria of finals day. Music came from every direction and villagers were slowly stirring the air in front of them with fanned fingers as they danced in time to the beat from the invisible instruments. When the dinghy docked opposite the Lao navy cruiser, Governor Siri, drunk as a lord, was on the wonky jetty.

  ‘Have a nice day out, did you, Comrade Coroner?’ he slurred.

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ said Dr Siri, grabbing the governor’s arm to help himself out of the boat.

  The governor yanked his elbow away indignantly.

  ‘You do realize there’s a unit of soldiers here waiting for your professional self to identify a body.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They can leave. It’s not the man we were looking for.’

  He helped Daeng and Geung out of the unstable craft leaving Civilai to sort it out for himself. The governor didn’t like being dismissed.

  ‘How can you be so sure? You haven’t even looked at the bodies.’

  Siri walked away. Daeng was on the river bank picking out a large stone that seemed to have taken her fancy. She turned back and smiled at the governor.

  ‘It’s nothing you need to concern yourself with,’ she said. ‘You’re just the governor. But here’s a coup for you. Down there in the dinghy is the body of the woman, Madame Peung, who was invited here by the minister. About ten kilometres upstream is the air compressor she was tied to before she was thrown into the river. She was killed by somebody on that boat. So you have a murder inquiry to conduct. Good luck.’

  ‘I … I …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We don’t have any police stationed here.’

  ‘Well, you’re going to have to find some,’ said Civilai, clambering out of the boat. ‘The minister’s going to want answers.’

  ‘It’s the last night of the races,’ said Governor Siri.

  ‘Then you’d better get some coffee inside you and get cracking.’

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ said Daeng. ‘The doctor and I will be changing our room. The one we’re in is crowded and smells of beer. We’ll take the room Madame Peung was in. She won’t be using it.’

  ‘What about the brother?’ asked the governor.

  ‘Oh, right. Forgot to tell you …’

  With the rooms sorted out, the corpse billeted, and the Vietnamese engineers under a sort of open-air house arrest until someone could formally investigate the death of Madame Peung, Civilai and Mr Geung took a stroll to the temple which was the centre of the evening’s activities. The old politburo man still couldn’t quite get it. People were dancing and singing and joking without even the vaguest hint of alcohol. It didn’t seem natural. The crew on the boat had glowed with that same generic joy. The buzz of being together with friends. Freedom from an endless war. Freedom to work the land and earn enough to feed the family and put a little aside for these three days off a year when their village could drag its boat to the river, laugh, capsize, collide, win a prize for the slowest time or the fattest rower, throw the winners into the water, launch all the boats to pay homage to a great serpent. That’s what they were on: the euphoria of simplicity.

  ‘Geung,’ Civilai asked, ‘when do you suppose I first entered that state that convinced me I had to be drunk before I could enjoy life?’

  ‘You’re an ad … dict,’ said Geung.

  ‘Yes, indeed. Should I give it up, do you think?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You were supposed to say “yes”.’

  ‘It’s too late. The drunk Comrade Civ … Civilai is the real Comrade Civilai now.’

  Geung saw a dart stall with bright balloons on a board. He was a hot shot with a dart so he abandoned Civilai and jogged over to it. The old man, his mouth open just a fraction, watched him go. He wanted to defend himself somehow but had no idea how to do so. He wondered exactly when it was that the drunk Civilai had taken the alpha role in his personality. It was troubling. He decided he could really use a drink.

  Dr Siri had supervised the overnight stowage of Madame Peung. Tobacco leaves were the wrapping of choice for a dead body but Pak Lai had none. Instead she was laid in a half section of concrete piping and garnished with hay and marijuana. After dinner, with Daeng’s blessing, he had returned to check on the body. He was a little disappointed to find her lying there still. He wondered whether reincarnation was a buy-one-get-one-free deal, that we were all allowed one return. He pulled over a ten-litre paint tin and sat beside the woman who twice used to be.

  ‘How is everything?’ he asked.

  The gentle smile was still on her lips as if she were keeping a secret. There had been no contact at all since her death. Siri had been hoping she would come to him somehow – offer herself up as his spirit mentor. He needed her to continue the tutorials that had brought him to the edge of two-way communication. He’d been the thickness of a TV screen away from a conversation with a dead king. And now she was gone. Her eyes were closed but all the while he pictured the Wolf Man scene when everyone knew Lon Chaney was dead but his eyes had sprung open and given Siri a near-bowel-evacuation in the front row of the picture house.

  He edged his paint tin a little closer.

  ‘So, you have nothing to say to me?’ said Siri.

  He waited for an answer. Looked around for subliminal messages. Closed his eyes in search of a vision. The chickens clucked in the next room. He wondered if that were a sign. He clucked back. He waited. No. They were just chickens. He was alone again. His two guides were lost, Auntie Bpoo, the cantankerous transvestite fortune-teller, to her going away party in a week, and Madame Peung, silent as the grave. Why was this all so difficult? He just wanted to talk to ghosts. That was all.

  *

  Inspector Phosy had little use for a clock. He worked until the work was done or until he fell face down on to his desk from fatigue. As his office was only twenty minutes on foot from the police dormitory, he used the walk to clear his head of all the legal clutter. Apart from the passing curfew patrols there was nobody on the street after ten. He could admire the stars and take lungfuls of air that weren’t seasoned with smog or smoke. He could filter out the news he would not tell his wife, like a description of the crushed face of the Lane Xang Hotel gardener they’d pulled from the pool. He could organize the unavoidable, like his imminent dispatch to Vieng Xai to train another batch of reluctant soldiers in the art of policing.

  The voice came from a bank of hedges he’d just passed.

  ‘I have a gun pointed at the back of your head,’ it said. ‘I never miss. Don’t turn around.’

  The accent was Vietnamese. Phosy stopped and held up his palms in front of him. He was unarmed.

  ‘Good boy,’ said the voice.

  ‘What do you want?’ Phosy asked.

  ‘Facts.’

  ‘The Ministry of Information has a whole department full.’

  ‘Don’t get cute, cop. The last patrol passed three minutes ago. It’ll be an hour before the next one finds your body. Nobody around to hear the shot. Keep that in mind next time you get the urge for stand-up comedy.’

  ‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s better,’ said the voice.

  Phosy had a suspicion the man was speaking from the back of his throat to sound more threatening. The gunman stepped out of the vegetation and came up close behind Phosy. So close that the policeman felt the mouth of the gun in the small of his back. It was a stupid move. Amateuri
sh. It told Phosy three things: exactly where the weapon was, exactly where his adversary was, and the fact that the fellow didn’t have a lot of experience in this hoodlum game.

  Phosy spun to one side, swept the gun away with his right hand and thumped his left fist into the side of the gunman’s face. He was out of practice but he still heard the satisfying click of a cheekbone fracturing. The rest of the punches had probably been unnecessary but Inspector Phosy was very touchy about having guns pointed at him.

  Madame Daeng had headed away from the riverbank foolishness and the noise of revellers and found that old wooden swing in the garden of the administrator’s office. She lowered herself slowly on to the seat and listened to the cries of the cicadas. She admired the panorama of stars, the trails of lightning bugs joining the celestial dots. She considered her good fortune and sighed with every memory that came to her. To have succeeded and survived. To have known great people. To have been reunited with the love of her life. And what a good life it had been.

  *

  I was pregnant when I met him. A Frenchman’s child, I told him. A general. It was more than enough to keep a junior officer at arm’s length. But still I smiled at him and he came to the noodle shop for his lunch. I was in my early forties by then but I was blessed with good skin and a youthful face. I often claimed to be in my late twenties. The French had no idea how old we were. We were a different species.

  Our head of clandestine operations had pointed him out to me. The Frenchman was tall, good looking. But, more importantly, he was a courier. He had his pouch with him all the time and, in the daytime, an armed aide. We spoke, me with my poor French. My bashfulness. I knew how to flirt by then. Knew what effect I had on a man. And then, one day just before he left for Saigon, I took his hand and put it on my belly.

  ‘What the …?’ he said.

  ‘It’s a pillow,’ I told him. ‘I’m sorry I lied to you. I wear it to keep away the soldiers. A terrible thing happened to me once. So this is what I do to stay safe. Nobody else knows. Only you. I really want you to know. I hope you don’t mind.’

  It always worked. It was a big ego boost to the men who had little success with women. And I could tell he was new at this romance game. In no time at all we were together. Of a night, my round pregnancy pillow sat comically on the chair beside the bed. We laughed about the fact that I’d been pregnant to that scoundrel of a general for three years without a break. He thought it was a lovely story. That I was lovely. He was wild for me. I told him that he was the first man I had volunteered myself to. Such a confession tends to make a man stupid and careless.

  He’d returned from Paris that particularly important night. He came straight to my room. He was still in uniform. He was carrying a briefcase. I’d been through his pouches before but I had the feeling this was something much more important. I produced a bottle of champagne and told him a West African member of the French legion had given it to me one day as he was about to board the ferry. I thought he must have stolen it so I didn’t feel guilty to have brought it home. I’d saved it for a special day. I honestly believed this was it. We drank. The excitement of the day. The heat. The exhaustion of love. He fell asleep. I knew it was a sleep deeper than any he’d ever known.

  By the time he woke, the briefcase was locked and the papers seemingly untouched, and I was still naked beside him. But he was late. An Aéronavale was waiting to take him to Vietnam. Everything rested on the contents of that briefcase. Everything.

  ‘Mademoiselle. Mademoiselle.’

  Daeng was stirred from her reverie. A dark shape loomed in front of her, a silhouette against the lights at the riverside and a rising moon.

  ‘Mon capitaine,’ she replied.

  ‘One of thousands, I don’t doubt,’ he said.

  ‘I’m impressed that you found me,’ said Daeng.

  ‘When the wolf scents blood …’

  ‘I’m not bleeding, monsieur.’

  ‘Oh, yes you are. You may not admit it. Not yet. But you have been bleeding for many decades. You are still bleeding for all my brothers you led to their deaths.’

  ‘And who’s bleeding for all my brothers and sisters?’ she asked.

  The Frenchman took two paces towards her. She could make out the outline of a stick or a bar in his hand. He lifted it and rested it on his shoulder. It seemed heavy. Iron, perhaps. Madame Daeng had no doubt whatsoever what he intended to do with it.

  ‘Two hundred of your kind are not worth one Frenchman,’ he said.

  Daeng laughed.

  ‘That’s the attitude that made you so popular in the colonies, my captain. The attitude that lost you Dien Bien Phu. Or is that a touchy subject?’

  ‘We did not lose that battle.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The history books would have it otherwise.’

  ‘It was the Americans and the British who lost it.’

  ‘No it wasn’t. It was arrogance. You assumed you’d have air support from the Allies so your generals dug in to a non-defendable position. They knew for sure their old friends would get them out of yet another mess.’

  ‘I’m not here to have this conversation with you.’

  ‘Yes you are. This is one of those “get it all out in the open” murders my husband hates so much. If you’d wanted me dead without any exchanges you’d have crept up behind me and cracked my skull in two. You have things to say. Perhaps you want to hear my confession before you dispatch me. You want to justify my death with some sort of righteousness. Well, you’re in the wrong place.’

  He took another pace forward. He had it in mind to strike her. She distracted him.

  ‘How many others know?’ she asked.

  He stopped.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘That it was you who lost them the battle.’

  ‘I … what are you talking about?’

  ‘Oh, do stop it. Surely you aren’t still denying it after all these years? Do you want me to remind you? You’d attended the meeting in London. Winston Churchill had categorically refused to give your troops any aerial support in Vietnam. You were the harbinger of that bad news. You carried the documents. You were flown directly to Bangkok and from there the shuttle to Pakse. You should have taken a night flight to Saigon but you refused. You said it was too dangerous to fly at night relying on instruments. You said your cargo was too valuable to lose. But all that was a lie. Your real reason was that you wanted to come to me. To spend the night with your little native girl.’

  ‘I never did such a thing.’

  He shifted uneasily. It was the first indication that he wasn’t completely in control of his emotions.

  ‘You were head over heels in love with me,’ she said. ‘You told me so many times. You—’

  ‘Silence!’

  ‘You’d arranged travel documents. You’d bought me a little cottage in Provence.’

  ‘You …’

  He was one metre from her, the bar raised. He was close enough for her to see the blood vessels in his eyes, to hear the rasp of his breath. But she leaned back on the swing, her feet firmly on the ground and she smiled. And whether it was the memory of that smile or merely a desire to prolong this execution – dreamed of for a lifetime – he hesitated.

  ‘When did you realize it was me?’ she asked, her voice still calm, her smile still held out in front of her like a shield.

  Tears appeared in the old man’s eyes. He lowered the metal bar.

  ‘I fought it,’ he said. ‘I considered every other possibility. There were others at that meeting in London. There could have been a spy. It wasn’t necessarily me. It wasn’t necessarily you. And so, with this colossal doubt inside me, I set out to find who else could have leaked the information. Nobody suspected me. My name never came up in the endless debates. I was trusted. I was even promoted after it all. I was given more and more responsibility. But still I doubted myself. And, one by one, I eliminated every other possibility until there was only you.’
/>   ‘You poor man.’

  ‘The weight of the secret became a tumour and it is ready to kill me. That’s why I’m here. You are the reason I had a miserable life. You are the reason I shall die without a family. But all I ask in return for this wretchedness is that you answer one question.’

  ‘And I know what that is.’

  ‘Are you so clever? What is the question, my little whore?’

  She pushed back with her feet a little more and leaned forward.

  ‘What it all basically comes down to,’ she said. ‘What every major decision, every career move, every stupid mistake made since the beginning of time comes down to. L’amour. You need to know whether it was real. Whether your role in the destruction of your national pride had an acceptable foundation. Was it really love we had?’

  Neither spoke. Daeng looked up at the old man and wondered whether the last words she spoke on this earth would be true or false. She didn’t really know. Could she have loved him despite their polarity? Could she have followed him to France and entertained him at weekends in their love cottage? Would her life have been happier? She stared up at him.

  ‘Look at you,’ she said. ‘You are a hateful person. And, you’re mad. You have to admit that. Do you think I wouldn’t have recognized these faults back then? You fell so easily in love with me because nobody else had made the effort to love you before. My amour was the best, perhaps the only, love you’d ever had and you so desperately wanted it to be real that you closed your eyes to the illogic of it all. A daughter of the oppressed kneeling before the oppressor. Every minute spent with you was a minute in hell. I detested you and your kind. No, my captain. I never—’

  The metal bar rose and fell in a split second. It came crashing down with a sickening crack. Blood gushed from the wound. It was a marvellous moment. Barnard smiled, gave a deep sigh that gurgled in his throat, dropped the metal bar and headed towards the jungle. It was all over.

  Siri returned to their room in the administrator’s building only to find his wife missing. He washed his hands in the attached bathroom and wondered what had become of the small mirror above the sink. He returned to the guest room. In Daeng’s place on the bed was a notebook. He sat and turned up the bedside oil lamp. He flipped to the last page of writing and there in large print were the words THE END. He smiled. Madame Daeng, once given a challenge, was not one to back down. She had set about documenting her life with relish. She had included chapters that would most certainly never clear the censors at the Ministry of Information, but would take Hollywood by storm. She’d asked him from time to time whether this or that passage was appropriate. He’d told her that suitability was irrelevant. This was a life and a life was not to be reworked. In many ways, the book that he held in his hands was worth every bit as much as his lost library because this one had a pulse. It had been marvellous to read the wisdom of the philosophers but what purpose did they have with no warm body to apply their theories to? This book was Daeng. He knew he would read it time and time again with as much joy as he had derived from Sartre and Camus.