Anarchy and Old Dogs

by Colin Cotterill

  “All right, what?”

  “Doctor?”

  “Very good. Shall we go?”

  Once the roles were established, Officer Tao became a very jolly little man. He chatted amiably on their journey across town and made it clear to Siri that if there was anything he needed while he was in town, Tao was his man. It took only ten minutes to get to the deputy governor’s house behind the sports stadium. A Land Rover was parked in front, and a large man in a safari suit was sitting cross-legged on the porch.

  “You’re honored,” Tao said. “The governor’s here to meet you himself.”

  They pulled up beside a lemon ghost tree and Tao removed his hat respectfully. “Governor Comrade Katay, this is Dr. Siri from the Justice Department.”

  If he hadn’t been told this was the governor, Siri would have mistaken the nervous-looking character for a janitor. When he stood, it was as if his suit were filled with crumpled newspaper rather than a body. He held out his hand to Siri, who shook it and smiled. There was no power in the governor’s handshake and no confidence in his voice.

  “It is you,” the governor said. “I thought it might be. You don’t remember me, do you?”

  Siri stared at the large man, trying to place him. If they’d met, it must have been long ago and … Then it came to him.

  “The school at Tum Piu,” Siri said. “You taught—what was it?—Lao language?”

  Yes, Siri remembered him, a nervous, paranoid teacher, suspecting this student or that of having rightist sympathies. He’d been fed well since those days but the tic below his eye had followed him from the northeast. Siri had been the resident surgeon in the Piu cave hospital, a place now renowned for a Nomad Fighter rocket attack that had cremated all the staff and patients. The school further down the valley had housed the children of the hospital staff and the surrounding villagers. Overnight it became an orphanage. In one of the many quirks of fate that had saved Siri’s life over the years, on the day of the attack he’d been called to Xam Neua to tend to the president.

  By all accounts, Katay had been a competent teacher and a dedicated Party man, but Siri was shocked to find him here as governor. Of course, there had been numerous positions to fill around the country when the Pathet Lao took over and a limited number of trustworthy cadres to fill them. But he was hardly governor material.

  “Lao language and ideology,” he said proudly as if that was the pinnacle of his career and things had gone downhill since. “Now look at me.”

  “You’ve come a long way, Comrade.”

  Katay laughed with embarrassment and lowered his voice. “No doubt they’ll replace me soon enough. There are plenty of young chaps being trained in the Eastern Bloc.”

  “Meanwhile … ?”

  “Meanwhile I’m running a renegade province and I have a limited number of workers under me whom I can trust. There are spies everywhere here, Siri, and assassins. That’s why I was so glad when I saw your name on the telegram. I enjoyed our political debates at Tum Piu so much. I know you’re a man after my own heart.”

  Siri vaguely recalled that their “debates” had been mostly him listening and Katay spouting a stream of conspiracy theories.

  “So, what do we have here?” Siri asked.

  Katay looked sideways at Tao, who was standing by the Land Rover talking to the governor’s driver. He put his arm around Siri’s shoulder and led him onto the front porch. There Siri detected a familiar odor. Katay’s voice was almost a whisper now and he was leaning close into the doctor’s face.

  “I’ve had a suspicion for a long time,” he whispered, “that the Soviets are trying to undermine the Vietnamese influence in Laos. I believe their ultimate objective is to overthrow our government and take over the country.”

  Siri was afraid to ask why the hell they would want to. So he kept quiet and nodded.

  Katay continued. “Of course, they have to be discreet. Eliminate our key personnel one at a time. I was curious as to how they might go about it and then it happened—bam! My deputy, assassinated in his own bath.”

  “You’re positive it was an assassination and not, say, an accident?”

  “Look at the facts, Siri. The facts. His first night back from Vientiane after meeting with the Russians. His first bath using that fiendish Soviet water heater. It had to be rigged to kill him. That’s why I needed you here.”

  “Actually, I’m more of a doctor than an electrician. You might need to bring some technical person in to prove something like that, comrade.”

  “But you’re the coroner now. You can tell whether he was murdered. Right?”

  “Not always. But let’s see. Where’s the body?”

  “Inside.”

  “In his house? Still?”

  “Right. I had them lock the place as soon as I heard. His wife phoned me when it happened and described the scene to me. I told her to leave and touch nothing. She brought me the key and went to stay with her mother.”

  “So, the body is … ?”

  “Still in the bath, I presume.”

  “What? After two days? My God. I hope she removed the plug. We’ll have beef stock in there if she didn’t.”

  “I told her to pull the circuit breaker.”

  “Thank goodness for small mercies. You have the key?” Katay held it up. Siri called to Tao and asked him if he’d like to join them.

  “Not really,” Tao shouted back.

  “Officer!”

  “Coming, Comrade.”

  The three men recoiled when the door shutters were pulled back and the stench of death hurried to escape. Siri felt no spiritual presence. No hovering grievances looking for revenge. They walked through to the back kitchen where Deputy Governor Say lay naked in a zinc bath. Only his head remained above the surface of the now tepid water and it carried a peculiar frozen smile like that on the face of a ventriloquist’s dummy. His body was pink and hairless.

  “All right. I’ve seen it,” said Officer Tao. “Think I should be heading back to—”

  “Tao, it’s your crime scene,” Siri reminded him. “Take some notes.”

  “Notes? Right.” Tao looked around for a pen and paper in the cluttered kitchen. Siri approached the bath and knelt beside it. The brand-new Russian water heater was hooked onto the side of the bath and its element hung below the surface of the water. The lead of the heater looped down to join an extension cord that snaked across the floor to another extension. This was a junction to which a dozen other cords were connected, an octopus of accidents waiting to happen. The skin of the corpse was unmarked.

  Siri called to the governor, who remained in the kitchen doorway. He put a handkerchief over his nose and walked forward.

  “Yes, Doctor?”

  “I presume your deputy was a reasonably intelligent man.”

  “Why, yes. He was an old student of mine. Quite brilliant. I recommended him for the position.”

  “So we’d have to assume he wasn’t the type of man who’d climb into a tin bath full of water in which dangled a live electrical element.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “… him for the position,” came a voice from behind them. Siri turned to see Tao attempting to write down the governor’s words.

  “Officer Tao,” Siri said. “This isn’t an article for the Pasason Lao news. I think it would be sufficient for you just to summarize the things that I say.”

  “Very well, Doctor.”

  “We’ll have to assume then,” Siri continued, “that once Comrade Say’s big toe touched the surface of the water, he would have received a jolt powerful enough to send him flying across the room.”

  “I would imagine that’s true,” the governor agreed.

  “Why then is he sitting submerged in the bath?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I would have to guess it’s because the water heater was placed in the bath after he sat in it.”

  “But that would be …”

  “If Say wasn’t of an unsound mind and dun
ked a live element in his own bath, we’d have to say premeditated murder, Comrade Governor.”

  “That’s outrageous. Are you getting all this down, Tao?”

  “Almost, Governor.”

  “As the police officer handling this case, what would your next step be?” Siri asked Tao.

  “Next step? Er … interrogation, sir.”

  “Of whom?”

  “Everyone. Anyone who had a grudge against the deceased and all his house staff, friends, and relatives.”

  “Good,” Siri interjected. “But that’s likely to be a lot of work.”

  “It’s worth it,” said Katay. “This was the deputy governor of Champasak.”

  “I’m not suggesting there shouldn’t be an inquiry,” said Siri. “But perhaps I could suggest a method of eliminating the suspects.”

  “I’d be grateful for any help,” Tao said.

  “Then do you think we could fingerprint the handle of this heater to see who the last person to touch it was? That would certainly have to be the person who put the heater into the water.”

  “Excellent idea,” said Tao. “How exactly would we go about that?”

  “How? Surely they taught you fingerprinting at the police school?”

  Tao snorted a laugh through his nostrils. “Dr. Siri. I’m just a soldier in a new uniform. Soldiering and policing are interchangeable as far as my bosses are concerned. All the real policemen—I mean the trained ones—either hopped it across the border or they’re up with your friends attending seminars. We’re hard-pressed just to keep the peace. We’re a few years away from doing any actual investigating. Sorry, Governor, but it’s the truth.”

  Katay shook his head. “Don’t apologize, Tao. These are desperate times.” He squeezed Siri’s arm. “Doctor, can you do anything?”

  Siri’s emotions were mixed. He bemoaned the lack of expertise in his country and wondered how long it would take to educate its youth to become proficient in even the most fundamental skills. But, on the other hand, where else would a seventy-three-year-old amateur get a chance to play detective as he often did? He had a Maigret mystery right there up his sleeve. The intrepid French detective on holiday in a remote town. A break-in at a small art gallery. No crime laboratory around, so in order to check for fingerprints on a discarded frame, Inspector Maigret turns to basic chemicals: a simple gray powder of magnesium and chalk.

  This was how Siri would have gone about proving the identity of Deputy Say’s assassin. While the governor’s driver was out hunting for magnesium, Siri and a reluctant Officer Tao removed Say’s body from the bath and took an impression of the right index finger using a square of carbon paper. All they needed then was to compare it to that on the handle of the heater to determine whether Say had committed suicide and, if not, to start the murder inquiry. Then would begin the arduous business of fingerprinting anyone who had access to the deputy’s house on the night in question. But the god of unnecessary paperwork intervened. Even before they had the powder, the crime solved itself.

  Officer Tao had gone to the home of the mother of the deputy governor’s wife in order to obtain the addresses of her staff and close friends. She was an uncomplicated woman. Like many of the nouveau powerful in Laos, Say had gone into the villages and found himself a pretty but uneducated wife to complement his new lifestyle. Tao told her of the magic of fingerprinting and how they would be able to determine the identity of the murderer even without torturing the suspects. To his amazement, the woman burst into tears right in front of him and dropped to her knees.

  “It was me. It was me,” she sobbed. “I didn’t realize. ‘Bring me some more hot water,’ he shouted. And there he was, all round and ruddy from all them Soviet pleasures: the vodka and the food and the big-boned women I wouldn’t wonder. ‘Bring me some more hot water.’ What on earth did he want a hot bath for? It’s humid enough to bathe standing up with all your clothes on this time of year. He was just showing off that he’d been given a water heater. That was all. So, I thought, what’s the point of having it if you still have to lug heavy pails back and forth across the kitchen? I took the heater out of the bucket, hooked it on the side of the bathtub, and dropped it into the water.”

  She sobbed then for a full minute, unable to speak. Tao stood over her with a rather embarrassed look on his face.

  “I didn’t know it’d kill him,” she went on. “Just thought it might singe him a little bit and teach him a lesson. But he sort of sizzled and shook and this big grin spread over his face like he was enjoying it. I didn’t know what to do. I jumped back and watched him fry. Next thing I knew he was dead.”

  It was 11:45 a.m. when Tao related the story to Siri and the governor. Say’s wife was locked up in the Pakse police station and the case was solved. The Soviet Union was exonerated, the governor placated, and the widow allowed to purge her demons of guilt all with fifteen minutes to spare before lunch. It was Siri’s fastest ever conclusion of a case but he was still a little upset that he hadn’t been given the opportunity to eliminate the suspects one by one through the magic of dactyloscopy.

  Free Lao

  Siri told all this to Civilai under the tarpaulin of a rather special noodle stall overlooking the Mekhong ferry ramp. The lady owner, Daeng, began her day at four in the morning just to have everything perfect by lunchtime. But apart from being a noodle perfectionist she had many other arrows in her quiver.

  At the hotel, when they’d returned from the cinema the previous night, Siri had casually mentioned Madame Daeng, the cook to the night clerk. Siri held out little hope that his old friend would still be there after all these years. That’s why he’d been so surprised by the reaction. The clerk had laughed and told him more people in Pakse knew the name Madame Daeng, the cook than they did President Soupanouvong. He’d told Siri where she could be found and, sure enough, here she was.

  She still had the keen, all-seeing eyes and the fine delicate features that had fascinated so many young men back when. The look of shock on her face could have drained the river for ten miles in each direction. She’d tossed the noodle sieve into the boiling water, hobbled over to her famous doctor on legs stiff with rheumatism, and thrown her arms around him. Ignoring the stares of the mystified diners, Siri and Daeng could feel the strong beating of each other’s hearts as they stood locked together like hands clasped in prayer. From his stool beside the noodle cart, Civilai had timed the embrace at a minute, but for the old comrades it was an exchange of missed decades, of battles and loves and losses, of friends departed and disasters shared.

  Siri had first met Daeng thirty-seven years earlier at the southern youth camp where he and his wife, Boua, were serving with the Free Lao movement. Daeng had been their cook. At first that was all the remarkable young woman had done, but she soon demonstrated skills and determination far beyond the wok. In 1940, the French had urged the Lao to set up the youth movement in answer to Thailand’s posturing about shifting its eastern border into Lao territory. It was intended as a mechanism to engender nationalistic feeling against the Thais. When Siri and Boua returned from their studies in France at the end of ’39, the camp in Champasak had been their first posting. They’d spent two years training young medical interns, teaching French, and molding young minds. What the French didn’t realize was that the youth camps they were sponsoring around the country had a well-hidden and brilliantly conceived agenda. In them the foundations were being laid for ousting the French oppressors. It was from the youth initiative that the Lao Issara—the Free Lao movement—was born, and Siri and Boua had been instrumental in its creation in the south.

  When the youth camps were finally closed down by the French for becoming too radical, the Free Lao began its subversive acts of rebellion. Madame Daeng, then a miss, had tagged along with the rebels, cooking, tossing the odd grenade, joining in the campfire plots. She was an inspiration to the young Lao who had grown strong from her noodles, and she was a valuable ally to Siri and Boua. But in the confusion that accompanies a gu
errilla war, they’d lost touch. Siri and Boua had gone to Vietnam and Daeng remained in the south. And now, on Siri’s first day back in Champasak, they had been reunited.

  Siri introduced her to his cousin, “Pop,” and she looked at Siri with a wry smile on her sun-rusted face. She’d always been able to tell when he was lying. She greeted the “cousin” and told Siri their reunion proper could wait. For the time being, she promised them the best lunch they’d ever tasted in their lives and went to fish the sunken sieve from its tank. Siri knew from experience that this wasn’t an idle promise. When the huge bowls arrived in front of them, the aroma was poetry enough to make them lose the threads of their morning adventures. The piquant spices caressed their palates and reminded them how many years it had been since they’d really tasted food. Even Siri in his nullified state could pick out every herb, root, and legume. He forgot Civilai, just as Civilai had no further interest in him, until the last spoonfuls of broth had made the trip north.

  It was Civilai who spoke first. “That … that was …”

  “I know.”

  “Let’s take her back to Vientiane,” Civilai said, only partly in jest. “She could have a real restaurant there, not sweat out her days for ferry passengers under a grimy tarpaulin for fifty kip a plate. She should be rolling in money.”

  “Believe me, brother,” Siri said, “Madame Daeng is the type of woman who could roll in whatever she pleases. If this is what she’s chosen it’s because it makes her happy.”

  “Even so …”

  “All right. You’ve heard enough of men in baths and silly wives. It’s your turn. Tell me about the post office.”

  “I wish I had a long funny story with a happy ending.”

  “No luck?”

  “The fellow there looked at the envelope and the postmark and told me, quite logically, that it could have been brought in by anyone. Some two hundred people a day come in with letters. They pay their money, get their stamps, he cancels them, and throws the letters into a big sack. The sorter goes through them, puts them in smaller sacks, and puts them on the bus.”