Anarchy and Old Dogs

by Colin Cotterill

  “We? Civilai’s going with you?”

  “He insisted.”

  “Hell, Siri.”

  “What?”

  “He isn’t exactly low profile, is he? Do you think you can root around discreetly in the south with a politburo member at your side?”

  “Don’t panic. He’s going south to ‘convalesce after a minor operation.’ It’ll be very hush-hush. It’s just a coincidence we’ll be there at the same time.”

  “Who’s going to believe that?”

  “Phosy, he knows people down there. He can get us information I probably wouldn’t have access to. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “I should go with you anyway.”

  “No, son. You need to be here. If we can trace the letter, we’ll need someone here to follow up on it. I’ll phone and leave messages at my house as to my progress. You can pick them up there via Dtui. That will avoid the official government phone lines and the official govern ment phone tappers.”

  “What makes you think your phone isn’t bugged, too?”

  “I’m sure we can put together a little jiggery pokery of our own, a simple code that will baffle the Security Division. It can’t be that difficult. We aren’t beyond a little espionage of our own.”

  “Dr. Siri, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “As I believe I’ve told you before, I’ve never been sure of anything in my life. But it’s worth a try. It’s even a bit exciting, don’t you think?”

  The Night Bruce Lee Saved Laos

  As Siri had anticipated, the Soviet ambassador did indeed make the Yak 40 available for the trip south. It helped that a politburo member had also requested passage. Civilai was driven directly to the plane and made every effort to stagger bowlegged up the steps so anyone watching might sympathize. Hemorrhoids were no laughing matter.

  Despite the short notice for the flight, there were eight other passengers on board. Siri sat on a wooden bench nurturing his paranoia. He looked at the men opposite and tried to match their faces with an identikit for traitors he carried in his mind. He dismissed the four Russian education experts on their way to the teachers college. The two forestry officials had been too vocal as they sat behind Siri in the waiting room. They’d spouted precise figures to demonstrate how many millions of kip per day the government was losing as a result of the Thai logging embargo. The two army officers, however, sat composed and apart amid the spin-dryer vibrations of the old Soviet war craft.

  Just a coincidence? Siri wondered. They wore their uniforms proudly and sat erect, like men who had acquired their self-discipline in a place other than the jungles of Laos. He’d smiled at them when he’d first climbed on board and one of them had nodded back. The other, a thin man whose skin was stretched over his cheekbones like melted cheese, had looked away, pretending not to notice. In the din of the ancient Yak there was no conversation to be had, but Siri committed the stern sunburned face to memory. For the entire journey the soldier sat still, unconcerned by the discomfort of the seat, staring ahead at portholes too small to see through.

  Civilai, being an aristocrat of the politburo, was seated behind the bored Ukrainian pilots. Not first-class accommodation, except that it gave the VIP a marvelous view of the lightning that slivered and danced above the low clouds. It was like a grand plot of the weather, secretly stirring up its storms, bringing its witches’ brew of monsoons to the boil, holding back its life-giving rains till the last second. Civilai knew it would break someday soon. All this power would be unleashed, drenching the delicate earth below. His people, who for months had struggled to survive the drought, would find themselves struggling to survive the storms. Unfair really, but there was no more chance of stopping the weather than there was of … He shuddered as he considered the enormity of the task ahead of him.

  Pakse was a city without a center. It sat in the armpit between the Se Don and the Mekhong rivers, its suburbs only recently venturing across their banks. It wasn’t a place with a distinguished history. That mantle was held by Bassak, twenty-five miles downriver. That city, the old capital of Champasak, had been the seat of omnipotent and notorious regents: a place of legends. At one period in history it had been the heart of the southern kingdom, then one day it had ceased to beat, had lost the will to be great.

  Pakse, on the other hand, had always been a more logical base for trade because of the confluence of the rivers and its proximity to Thailand. The French had recognized this fact and made it their center of administration in the south. The only wonder was why it hadn’t become the capital sooner. Once deserted, Bassak fell to ruin. As any good historian knows, nostalgia is always a poor relative to commerce.

  So, as a city built on greed, Pakse was never likely to be a place one would visit just for enjoyment. There was nothing grand or spectacular to put on a postcard and impress people at home. Not even the ugly unfinished palace of the exiled regent warranted a photograph. The government buildings were practical and basic; the houses had been constructed for seeing out of. Even the temples were pale recent copies of their sisters in the north. The roads were yellow clay and what few plants had survived the development were camouflaged in its grime. If the northern capital of Luang Prabang was a jewel in the Indochinese crown, Pakse was the seat of the royal underpants.

  Siri and Civilai obviously weren’t occupying adjoining rooms on the second floor of the Pakse Hotel to partake in the joys of city sightseeing. Civilai had turned up there without his trademark glasses and wearing a monk’s tight woolen beanie. He’d checked in under the name of Sawan and was certain the night clerk had no idea who he was. Nobody knew or cared who Siri was, so he checked in under his own name. The two counterrevolutionaries sat on the edge of Civilai’s bed staring at the amazing cross-stitch depiction of stags in a Nordic stream that had been framed and hung on the wall. A ceiling fan rocked perilously above their heads.

  “Makes you want to go to Scandinavia, doesn’t it?” Siri said.

  “What time is it?”

  “Eight.”

  They’d left Wattay Airport early and made good time. There would be no knowledge gained with regard to their quest until daylight.

  “Want to do something?”

  They arrived at the little Pakse Cinema ten minutes after the film had started. It was a delight to be there. The Odeon, the only picture house in Vientiane, had been commandeered as a political lecture hall. The day that happened, Civilai and Siri’s hearts had been deprived of oxygen. They’d been starved of one more breath of culture. The old boys were movie aficionados: addicts, some might say. Their habit had been nurtured in the smoky cinemas of Paris. In Hanoi, and in the caves of Huaphan, they’d attended every film projection, no matter how desperately awful the movie on offer promised to be. They were perhaps the only two in the audience to derive pleasure from such blockbusters as Rural Sanitation in Southern Yunan and The Benefits of Oiling Your Weapon. They’d left the cinema cave in tears after a showing of The Public Humiliation of an Illiterate Goat Herder. The films didn’t matter. It was the atmosphere they loved, that truly social feeling of strangers sharing emotions, laughing together, being thoroughly depressed together, being moved as one, like passengers on a funfair ride. They missed it: that instant communism.

  As they paid their hundred kip they heard gales of laughter emanating from inside the picture house. The cashier told them they should go through the heavy black doors and wait until their eyes were accustomed to the darkness. Then they could sit wherever they liked. The house wasn’t full. Not too many people could afford a night out at the cinema these days. A hundred kip was almost forty cents, and money like that could be better spent.

  They did as they were told, stood inside the thick curtain door and waited until their eyes could tell the difference between empty seats and laps. They settled into two seats close to the exit and stared wide eyed at the screen. It was a marvelous sight. A bare-chested Chinese—Bruce Lee, according to the poster—was standing bravely at the center
of a circle of evil-looking hoodlums. There was no sound-track. At the front of the cinema, silhouetted against the bottom of the screen, sat three artistes. One was a man surrounded by a collection of musical instruments. He was well illuminated by a spotlight that cast a halo onto the film. The other two were actors. One male, one female, judging from their outlines. They had only small electric bulbs in front of them, illuminating their scripts. These were the interpreters of the film.

  Bruce looked to one side and stared directly at the ringleader of the gangsters.

  “You seem to underestimate the Lao Democratic Republic,” he said in a high-pitched voice. The mouth movement was far more economical than the words he spoke. The audience chuckled. Siri grabbed his friend’s arm.

  “Ha,” said the villain in a deep manly voice. “We represent the oppressive West. You know we shall always be victorious over small fry such as you and the community farmers of which you are one.”

  “You are a usurper of agronomic labor,” said Bruce. “I shall teach you a lesson.” To the accompaniment of cymbals and something like a kazoo, he proceeded to beat the stuffing out of the attackers, no doubt appreciative of the fact that they approached him one by one rather than en masse.

  Soon only Bruce and the evil Asian lapdog of colonial oppression remained standing. The latter’s eyebrows suggested he felt helpless without his gang of handpicked henchmen, just as the Royalist regime would have felt without its American lackeys to hide behind. Bruce, the Lao Democratic Republic incarnate, flexed his bloodied biceps in the direction of his oppressor foe.

  “So, it’s just you and me,” Bruce said. “Me, the representative of the honest people of the land. You, a capitalist who would gladly sell the soil beneath our feet to the foreign devils.”

  The lips of the protagonist and antagonist had not actually moved during this altercation. Siri and Civilai were rocking in their seats with laughter, their cheeks wet with tears. They thought it couldn’t get any better, but it did. To the gasps of the audience, the capitalist who would sell the soil from beneath their feet somersaulted backward onto a roof, saying, “We slaves of the Western money culture will always prevail, you common coolie.” And then vanished.

  Bruce was devastated that the lower classes had once again become the victims of the idle rich, but a woman’s voice from offscreen shouted, “The Republic of Laos loves you, Somchit, for protecting us from foreign aggression. Our day will come.”

  The audience cheered, and Siri and Civilai slapped their palms together, breathless with laughter.

  “Now this,” Siri wheezed at last, “is entertainment.”

  Ten rows behind them sat the only man in the audience who wasn’t enjoying the show. His military uniform now replaced by slacks and a short-sleeved sports shirt, the tight-cheeked passenger from the Yak flight kept his eyes firmly focused on the backs of his targets. A Type 77 Chinese pistol jutted uncomfortably into his belt.

  The 220-Volt Bathtub

  After a disappointing breakfast of Vietnamese lentil soup and stale baguettes, Siri and Civilai walked from the Pakse Hotel into another overcast, steamy morning. The same type of stodgy cloud they’d left behind in Vientiane was hanging over them like soft bread. The whole country had become a sandwich. The town’s reluctance to turn itself into a real city that welcomed visitors was evident in its lack of footpaths and its abundance of deep holes. The only buildings that didn’t look like they might blow down in a strong gale were government departments housed in Franco-Chinese blocks with thick walls and gaping windows that threw forth their wooden shutters like bat wings. Nothing was really white—not the whitewash on the temple walls or the street signs, or the eyes or teeth of the dowdy people they passed. Bullock carts and small pony traps overtook them in the street, and both the drivers and the beasts they drove glanced back discreetly at the two old men. Civilai in a peaked cap and dark glasses looked like the undernourished older relative of a Cuban revolutionary. Siri bounded along beside him.

  The Pakse Bureau de Poste was housed in a small concrete building covered in flaking gray paint. What had apparently once been a neat, well-cared-for garden hugging the wooden fence had grown wild and unlovable. Thorny sprigs reached out for the old men from between the palings. It was here Siri and Civilai parted company, Siri to fulfill his obligation to the Justice Department, Civilai to see whether the post office could shed any light on the origin of the dentist’s letter. They agreed to meet for lunch at the ferry crossing, where they would pass on the morning’s results.

  When Siri arrived at the police station, he failed to disturb the duty officer from the delicate task of removing chin hairs with a pair of tweezers. The officer didn’t even look up from the little round hand mirror he held in front of his face.

  Siri said, “Excuse me” and waited for a “Yes, sir. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  It didn’t come.

  “Well,” Siri said, “either you have a hearing problem or I became invisible overnight. Which is it?”

  The officer nipped and plucked once more before lowering the glass and glaring over it at the intruder.

  “And who do you think you are?” he asked. His voice rasped like a man who’d consumed too much spirit the night before.

  “I think I’m Dr. Siri Paiboun from the Justice Department, but I confess I haven’t checked my identification papers for a few days.”

  There were places where a mention of the Justice Department would snap a government official into a respectful state of mind. Pakse was certainly not one of those places. The officer fished around under his desk for a wastebasket and swept his pluckings into it with the side of his hand. Having done so, he yelled at the top of his voice, “Hey, Tao!”

  A middle-aged man in police trousers and an off-white undershirt poked his head out of an office three doors down. He was about Siri’s height but three times his girth. His short gray hair had receded to a point beyond the crown of his head, leaving behind one small circular atoll of bristle at the front.

  “What?” he said, apparently suffering from the same throat affliction as his colleague.

  “Your Vientiane guy’s here.”

  “Good.”

  There was no hello. Tao ducked back into the room and left Siri hanging there like crematorium smoke. They’d warned him in Vientiane that in Pakse he might not find the same poor standard of public officialdom that he’d become accustomed to in the capital. They’d told him he should lower his standards even further.

  For any northern cadre, a posting to the deep south was the Lao equivalent of a Russian’s banishment to Siberia. The south was still a hotbed of anticommunist feeling. After dark, the authorities could only guarantee security as far as the outer city limits. Beyond that, Royalist insurgents operated with impunity in the villages, spreading dissent and recruiting new troops for the guerrilla war against the socialists. It was an exact reversal of the situation six years earlier when the CIA and Royalists had barricaded themselves inside Pakse, and the Pathet Lao and Vietminh had ruled the roost in the countryside. Pakse always proved to be a burning pot handle for any faction that tried to hold on to it. So police officers transferred from the north had invariably offended somebody in authority or had shown themselves to be unfit for employment anywhere else.

  Tao emerged from his office wearing a police hat that was too small for his head and a leather jacket twice his size. He obviously hadn’t noticed how hot and clammy the day was.

  He strode past Siri and slapped him on the back.

  “Come on, old fellow,” he said. “Where’s your car?”

  “What car?”

  Tao stopped and turned back with an angry look on his face. “They didn’t arrange your transport? I thought you were government.”

  “I just work for them, like you.”

  “All right. We can go on my bike but you’ll have to pay for the petrol.”

  He marched through the large open frontage of the building and out to the dust bowl in front. He�
��d reached his motorcycle before he realized the Vientiane guy wasn’t following. Siri, smiling, was leaning on the counter.

  The pudgy policeman called out, “Oy. Come on. They’re waiting for us. What are you, crippled or something?”

  Siri took a small plastic jar of aniseed balls from his top pocket and slowly unscrewed the cap. Tao marched back inside already glossy with sweat. “What are you playing at?”

  “Your name’s Tao, right?” Siri said, offering him a handful of aniseed, which was rejected.

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, Tao. You’re probably the type of man who believes he’s been sent to work in the worst place on the planet. Am I right?”

  “I’ve got no time for this. What’s your point?”

  “My point is, this is far from the worst place on the planet. There are much worse places than this. Even in Laos there are worse hellholes. There are postings so horrible, Pakse would seem like the Tiger Balm Pleasure Gardens by comparison. And not only do I know where those postings are, I can arrange for people to be sent there.”

  “I don’t—”

  “So here’s the deal, Officer Tao. I’m going to be here for a few days. While I’m in town, you’re going to call me ‘doctor’ or ‘comrade’ or even ‘sir,’ if you like. Because even though I don’t wear a uniform, I outrank you about twentyfold. When there is a need, you will ferry me around on your decrepit motorcycle without any extortion attempts. It is your duty and you receive a budget to do so. By showing me respect, you’ll see that I can be a very useful contact for you, Officer Tao. Do we understand each other yet?”

  Tao looked over Siri’s shoulder to see whether the duty officer had been a witness to his dressing-down, but they were alone at the front desk. He seemed to weigh the offer in his mind, but it really wasn’t that difficult a decision to make.

  “All right.”