Anarchy and Old Dogs

by Colin Cotterill

  “Didn’t he recall a customer who came in every fortnight with a letter to Vientiane?”

  “Siri, there wasn’t even a surname on it. It was a letter to a PO box. What could possibly jog his memory? I prodded him so hard he lost his temper with me and threatened to call the police.”

  “Huh, no danger there. But I’m glad you’ve built up a good relationship with the mail service.”

  “Siri, I—”

  Daeng interrupted them with two more bowls of noodles. The old warriors were as stuffed as steamed rice sausages but these dishes exuded a scent so erotic it would have seduced a palace eunuch. Daeng winked and they dipped their spoons into the broth. A whole new taste, a whole new love affair.

  After several minutes of blissful slurping, Siri managed a sentence. “Show me the envelope,” he said.

  Civilai handed over the letter and watched as his friend studied it.

  “I know. You’re going to dust it and fingerprint everyone in the province.”

  “No, genius. And don’t mock. I’m having a remarkably successful run with my Inspector Maigret franchise. What mon copain would do is narrow things down by trying to find out where one could obtain an envelope such as this.” He turned it over and noticed something for the first time. “Well now look at this, older brother.”

  “What?”

  “In the corner here. It looks like a little cross in pencil. Someone’s apparently tried to rub it out but they didn’t erase it completely. What do you suppose this means?”

  “In the West it’s the symbol for a kiss. I don’t suppose the Devil’s Vagina might have been secretly flirting with the dentist’s wife? An affair behind his back?”

  “Ménage à trois d’espionnage? More likely, the shop that sells them uses the cross when they’re counting them out, marking every ten or so. What do you think?”

  “I think you’re clutching at straws.”

  “But it isn’t impossible.”

  “It once rained tadpoles in Luang Prabang.”

  “All right. So that gives us one more lead to pursue. There can’t be that many places selling envelopes in Pakse. Then there’s the Devil’s Vagina himself.”

  “Or herself.”

  “Exactly. It is rather ambiguous. I think it’s worth asking around. See if the name elicits any reaction.”

  “Reaction other than taunts and ridicule?”

  “Your reticence suggests you’d prefer me to handle the vaginal probing.”

  “Not at all. I’ll have a stab at it. You can do the envelopes.”

  “We can get Daeng on to it, too.”

  “Siri, I don’t think …” But Siri had already called over his old comrade, leaving Civilai shaking his head and mouthing some unheard warning. Daeng sat with them, wiping her hands with a cloth.

  “You two aren’t leaving here until every last spoonful of that is inside you,” she said.

  “Fear not,” Siri told her. He took her hand. “We will have completely licked the pattern from the bowls by the time we exit. But, in the meantime, we have a little mystery we would like to get you involved in.”

  “Ooh, how exciting. I love a challenge.”

  “I know you do. My cousin and I are in search of a devil’s vagina.”

  Daeng roared with laughter. The late diners looked over at her and smiled.

  “Well, I’ve had some requests in my time,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “Most men your age are looking for something a bit softer, farm lasses straight off the bus, for example.”

  “I don’t think it’s an actual female organ,” Siri said. “More likely a person’s nickname or the name of a place. You ever heard of it?”

  She laughed again. It made her face glow like a teenager’s. “The name of a place? No. I’m sure I’d remember it if I’d met someone who was born in the Devil’s Vagina.” The thought set her off into another laughing fit and she dragged Siri and Civilai into it with her.

  “Don’t worry, boys,” she said when the mirth had subsided. “I’ll ask around.”

  Siri caught a worried glance from Civilai. He leaned closer to Daeng.

  “Just be careful who you ask,” he said.

  She didn’t need clarification. She seemed to read enough from his tone to realize she was getting into something sticky.

  “Siri, my love, you’ll never change, will you? Always the dashing hero off on some quest to save mankind. But you’d better put some of that hero time aside for me while you’re here. We’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

  Further up beyond the ferry ramp, a man stood in the doorway of a soon-to-be-demolished French villa. His eyes were trained on the two old men sitting at the noodle stall. He didn’t need to use his binoculars because his eyesight was keen. His military training had given him the expertise and the patience to fulfill his mission. There was no hurry.

  “How’s she feeling?” Civilai asked. He was in a wicker chair by the window of his room. Siri had stopped off at the long-distance phone booth at the Bureau de Poste on his way back. He sat on the bed and sighed.

  “I don’t know. She has a knack of always sounding cheerful, even when the weight of the world is on her shoulders.”

  “Do you suppose she’s angry that we weren’t there for it?”

  “No. The one thing you can be sure of with Dtui is that she doesn’t hold a grudge. She knows why we’re here. If it weren’t for the cremation she’d probably have jumped on a bus and joined us already.”

  “How did it go?”

  “All right, she said. Nice ceremony. The monks got sloshed afterward. She wonders whether they aren’t just Royalists hiding out in saffron till the heat’s off. But they knew the chants so nobody complained. A lot of her ma’s friends were there, hospital people. Phosy was with her.”

  “Any news from him?”

  “Nothing about the dentist’s wife. A dead end, he says. He managed to get the blood sample to someone at the Swedish forestry project. They promised to take it down to Bangkok next trip and get it looked at. Otherwise Dtui and Phosy are just sitting around, waiting for orders from us. Dtui did say Judge Haeng was asking why I was still in Pakse.”

  “Why? Well, it’s obvious. Complications with the case.”

  “That’s what I told her to say. The possibility of other homicides by domestic appliance. I hinted at an assassination attempt with a vacuum cleaner. I might have to conjure up something more credible if we stay here much longer.”

  “We’ve barely started.”

  “Done nothing at all, as far as I can see.”

  Their time in Pakse had yielded nothing. The envelope search took longer than Siri had expected. He soon learned that all the shops in Pakse sold pretty much the same things, contraband from either Thailand or Vietnam. There were few stores that didn’t sell envelopes. But none of the owners recognized the brand or style. The only thing he learned from his search was that the sender probably hadn’t bought his envelopes in Pakse. It was frustrating. It always seemed much more straightforward in detective novels.

  Civilai’s pursuit of the Devil’s Vagina had apparently gone no better. As it turned out, his initial fear of being recognized had been grossly overestimated. Without his large black-framed glasses there was little to connect him with the grinning statesman in the grainy photographs in Pasason Lao. In fact, it was soon apparent that people in the south didn’t read. He didn’t once see a coffee-shop patron poring over the week’s news or a young office girl hurrying to finish a romance novel on her lunch break. To Pakse, Civilai was just a peculiar old man dressed like a farmer on holiday.

  Like most outsiders, he was not to be trusted. He asked Siri one evening, “If anyone knew, do you think they’d tell a stranger in the street?”

  No, they both knew it was a waste of time. Civilai busied himself with setting up his network of trustees. He was spending more time by himself. The dentist lead was getting fainter by the day but Civilai seemed to be more occupied. Siri would come back from a day of fr
uitless detecting to find him surrounded with handwritten notes. He’d always say, “We might be getting somewhere,” without giving away many details, and for a while, Siri believed there might be hope of an organized resistance. But one day he returned to find his friend particularly flustered and frustrated. The question Civilai asked was confirmation to Siri that they were lost.

  “What about your—you know—other friends?”

  Civilai had thus far avoided asking the “s” question. The fact that he was pursuing it now suggested to Siri that earthly channels had failed. His confidence crumbled like river salt.

  “I seem to have become spiritually impotent,” Siri confessed.

  “Oh, I say.”

  “I know. I feel like a sinking ship, being deserted. I haven’t had any contact with the supernatural for over a week. I’ve even stopped dreaming.”

  “Damn! Isn’t it always the way? When you really need a ghost there’s never one around.”

  And, at exactly that second, like a convenient stage direction in a bad play, there came a loud knock at the door that made the two old fellows jump out of their skins. Civilai scrambled around for his dark glasses, and Siri, laughing, went to the door. The knocking became more intense.

  “You’ll give yourself splinters,” he called. “I’m coming.”

  With Civilai adequately disguised, Siri opened the door to find a small bony woman of around thirty standing in the doorway. She had on a well-worn green blouse and an oft-scrubbed green phasin skirt. Her head was bowed to hide her face, which left him with a view of thinning hair and a broad, uneven part. Her weather-beaten hands clasped a cloth bag in front of her.

  “Are you the doctor from Vientiane?” she asked, without looking up.

  “Yes. Can I help?”

  “The fat policeman said I should come. He said you knew stuff about dead bodies.”

  Siri stepped out to join her in the hallway and pulled the door to. Still she didn’t look up.

  “Well, it was very nice of Officer Tao to recommend my services,” he said. “But actually I’m in the south on official business. I’m not sure I can …”

  She looked up into his face. Her eyes were bloodshot and swollen and tight with grief.

  “It’s just … my son.”

  “What about him?”

  “They pulled him out of the Mekhong down at Sri Pun Don last night. He was in his school shirt with the badge. I sewed his name on it.” She paused to catch her breath. “That’s how they found me and let me know. I’d been looking for him for a week. It’s just me since his dad ran off but all the neighbors was looking. We went down to get the body. Brought it back today. We all know something’s not right.”

  “In what way?”

  “Our place is on the river, Doctor. We’re fishing folk.

  Sing, that’s my boy, Sing could swim before he could walk. There wasn’t no way he could of drowned.”

  “Accidents happen, Comrade. Even to experienced swimmers.”

  “That’s what the police said. That’s why they refused to do anything about it. But things ain’t right, Doctor. I could take it, perhaps, if I thought he just drowned. I could live with it. But I know something else happened to him.”

  “You think he was interfered with?”

  “No, sir, not like that. We’re all river people. We’ve all seen drowned bodies before, plenty of them. But my Sing … just doesn’t look right. There’s something odd about the way he come out of the water.”

  “And you want me to have a look.”

  “We … we can’t pay you much.”

  “Couple of fresh fish, perhaps?”

  She smiled, tight-lipped. “That would be no problem at all, sir.”

  The Devil’s Vagina

  Siri sloshed barefoot through the muddy streets, his old leather sandals in his hands. Twice he’d skidded and landed on his backside, laughing like a fool. The rain fell in a mist so fine and warm it was like walking into a long sneeze. It wasn’t a tropical storm by any stretch of the imagination and it wouldn’t help the farmers to any great extent, but it certainly felt good to be rained on again. Everything seemed to be going splendidly.

  The misty downpour had begun as he sat drinking Lao cocktails (half rice whisky and the other half rice whisky) with Daeng at her humble wooden lean-to. They saw the rain as an omen, a sign that things were going to get better for their country. They’d sat on the front porch that night and talked about the missing years when Siri had fled to Vietnam with Boua. The last time he and Daeng had seen each other was in the sports stadium in Savanaketh on October 12, 1945. It was a date that neither of them was likely to forget, probably the happiest day the Lao had ever known.

  The Japanese occupation forces had demonstrated that an Asian nation could match the once invincible West. This created a belief in the Lao that they could and should be running their own affairs. The French oppressor, preoccupied with events in Europe, had let its control of the colonies slip, and on that day in Savanaketh stadium, the governor had stood on the halfway line in the center of the football field and shouted into a wobbly microphone. On that day, Laos had been proclaimed an independent nation with its own national assembly. The cheers could be heard in Paris. There was an impromptu parade and an orchestra of khen pipes, gongs, and drums. Householders put up decorations and waved the new Lao flag. The celebrations went on far into the following day.

  In fact, the celebrations had lasted almost as long as the independence. Following their rout by the Japanese, the French troops had regrouped, were rearmed by the Americans, and set about reclaiming their colony. The Free Lao movement, the Lao Issara, had suffered horrific reprisals for its audacity. There were massacres and witch hunts and Siri and Boua became fugitives. They escaped from Champasak and fought with a number of scattered Free Lao resistance groups before finding their way to Vietnam and a completely different type of insurgency.

  Daeng had stayed in the south of Laos, and continued to sell her noodles by day. At night she coordinated covert Lao Issara operations to disrupt the French occupation. She was the agent they code-named Fleur-de-Lis, and, to the day the invaders scurried back to France with their tails between their legs, her identity had never been discovered. Siri considered her more of a national hero than a lot of the speech givers and hand shakers in Vientiane, and he told her so.

  How drunk they became, these two old revolutionaries talking about their victories and defeats, recalling the names of their old allies. And, at the point when they could barely feel their faces, just as Siri was about to begin the long stagger back to his hotel, Daeng had surprised him once more with her resourcefulness.

  “Oh, by the way,” she said. Siri had climbed to his feet using the front beam of the porch. Daeng had used Siri to pull herself up. She liked the way rice whisky dealt with arthritis. “I forgot the most important thing.”

  “What could be more important than reviving the Free Lao?” Siri asked.

  “I think I might have found your vagina.”

  They were both at a giggly stage and it took a while for them to calm their respective convulsions.

  “Of course, if you aren’t going to take it seriously …”

  “No,” he slurred. “I’m all right. Tell me.”

  “Well, I’d doubted it could be the name of a person or a place so I went for some natural phenomenon. I thought perhaps it was some rock formation or a gully. You know what these country folk are like. The people I asked were wise elders, sons and daughters of the land. They knew all the local myths and legends. And, to my amazement, one old fellow knew right off what I was talking about. Your Devil’s Vagina isn’t a rock formation at all. It’s a tree.”

  Siri sat down again, felling Daeng at the same time.

  “You don’t say.”

  “Well, yes I do,” she said. As they were back on the straw matting and the bottles were still there, she filled his glass for the umpteenth time and told him the legend.

  “It’s all about
a Khmer princess. It seems she’d been promised to a king who was a drinking buddy of her daddy’s while she was still in the womb. I’m sure worse deals have been made in bars but I can’t think of any right off. The girl grew up to be a real looker and the date of her betrothal arrived. Naturally, as you can testify, the ravages of many years of drinking had left her fiancé saggy and bewrinkled, not to mention extremely old, and the princess was beside herself with grief.”

  “There were two of her?”

  “What? Look, pay attention or I won’t tell you the punch line. There was just the one princess, and the night before the wedding she climbed out a palace window and ran off to the jungle. She knew there was only one way to protect her maidenhead, so deep in the forest she ripped off her—”

  “Oh, don’t!”

  “Yes, and threw it high into a nearby tree. In this way she was able to return to the palace asexual and totally unmarriageable. As if things weren’t bad enough, she was banished from the kingdom and forced to fend for herself. Being vaginaless—and thus no longer possessing the soul of a woman—she soon became a devil, and died of old age in a hostel for homeless devils. Actually, I just made that last part up, but good story, eh?”

  Siri was blearily silent for a few moments. Finally, he looked up and said, “Women’s souls are in their vaginas?”

  “Siri, it doesn’t matter where we keep our souls. The point is—are you going to remember all this tomorrow?” He nodded solemnly. “The point is, the Devil’s Vagina is the name of a tree, a real tree.”

  “Where does it grow?”

  “Mostly around Burirum near the Khmer border.”

  “That’s Thailand.”

  “A plus for geography. But the old fellow said it grows here and there all the way up to the Lao border. He said he’s never actually seen one in Laos.”

  “No doubt the Department of Culture burned them all down for having a rude name, corrupting our youth. Why on earth would these conspirators sign their letters with the name of a Thai tree?”

  “No idea. But there’s more.”

  “Thank heaven.”

  “The envelope.”