Anarchy and Old Dogs

by Colin Cotterill

“I showed you the envelope?”

  “It was on the table the first day you were here. I couldn’t help but notice one of the postmarks.”

  “What about it?”

  “It was old. They changed that puncher, or whatever it’s called, six or seven months ago. They use a round impression now, not a square one.”

  “Six months old? How can that be?” Siri wasn’t exactly sober now but he was focused.

  “That’s what I wondered. So I asked the old postmaster. He comes calling from time to time.”

  “I bet he does.”

  “He told me he’d seen that decommissioned postmark used before.”

  “Who by?”

  “People in the refugee camps across the border. They want to get in touch with friends and family over here. But they can’t just write letters with a Thai stamp and mail it. You know all the letters from outside the country go through the national directorate. It might take six months for a letter to reach its destination and by then it’s snipped to confetti and unreadable. So they have a service.”

  “What kind?”

  “They write their letters in the camps, buy actual Lao stamps there, and get them canceled with these unused Lao impressions to suggest they were posted in Pakse. They bring the letters to the border, smuggle them across, and put them on the buses to Vientiane. That’s the easy part. A few dollars to the driver to take on one more sack.”

  “Your postmaster seems to know a lot about all this.”

  “Perhaps that explains why he’s unemployed.”

  “Well, this is astounding.” Siri threw back his cocktail and poured two new ones. The final bottle was empty now. “This explains everything. The coup’s being plotted by the old Royalists in a camp on the Thai side, probably in Ubon. It’s the closest. They contact their agents around the country by letter. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s all funded with Thai and American money. You solved the puzzle. You’re incredible, Daeng.”

  He leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek and she pulled back. Even on the wrong side of sixty, etiquette is still etiquette. She stared at him with a disappointed look and started to hum the anthem of the Lao Issara.

  “So,” she said, at the end of the first verse. “Conspirators? There’s a coup planned? Feel like telling me about it?”

  At last, Siri dreamed that night. It wasn’t his usual vividly realistic production. Instead it was more pastel and slightly out of focus. But that might have been due to the fact that he was underwater. He was picking his way—on foot—along the bed of a fast-flowing river. He wondered why he was walking and assumed it had to be because he couldn’t swim. Even dreams had to be anchored in reality. He looked up and could see the harsh sun in a cloudless sky high above the surface of the water. On either side of him, two giant catfish floated patiently, like bodyguards.

  At one point, they were overtaken by a mermaid. She looked back and smiled at Siri, who was so occupied with admiring her magnificent globular breasts that he almost failed to notice the child riding on her back. The boy’s arms were hooked around her slender neck. It was Sing, healthy and alive and happy as a ten-year-old on a fairground ride. He and his mermaid raced ahead and merged into the murky water. Other mermaids overtook Siri, each with a person on her back, each speeding ahead into the gloomy distance while Siri plodded along with his corpulent guard of honor.

  When he awoke, the sheet beneath him was uncomfortably damp.

  The breakfast area in the Pakse Hotel was an excellent place to meet people and talk about the day’s plans. It wasn’t, however, somewhere you’d want to have breakfast. The coffee was road tar, the noodles were warm shoelaces, and the menu went rapidly downhill from there. Civilai sat with a cup of weak Chinese tea, tapping his fingers on the tabletop. He saw Siri descending the staircase like a man astounded by the invention of steps. Like Civilai, he was wearing dark glasses. The expression “the blind leading the blind” entered the politburo man’s mind. Siri headed unsteadily toward the front desk.

  “Over here, cousin,” Civilai shouted.

  Siri obviously hadn’t mastered his new eyeglasses because he engaged and temporarily waltzed with a concrete pillar before finding the table.

  “Are you joining me in incognito today?” Civilai asked.

  “It’s the daylight,” Siri said. “When I woke up I felt like I’d landed my spaceship on the surface of the sun. Couldn’t see a damned thing. It is particularly glary today, isn’t it?”

  “Have a few drinks last night, did we?”

  “Older brother, you know me, just a small aperitif before dinner.”

  “Really? Then why did you wake up so late?”

  “I’m a slow sleeper.”

  “Come on. What time did you get in?”

  “I had to wake up the watchman to open the door. I almost came directly to your room.”

  “I’m a married man.”

  “You’ll see me in a completely different light when I tell you what I found out.”

  “I doubt that, but I’m desperate enough to believe anything. Tell!”

  Before Siri could begin, the cook came over and asked if they were ready for breakfast. To Civilai’s disappointment, Siri ordered them fried eggs, bread, and coffee.

  “We’re going to need something solid inside us today,” Siri told him.

  “Well, we’re in the wrong place for that. How did your visit to the fishing village turn out?”

  “Oh, heck. How could I have forgotten that? It was amazing. The whole community was mourning for the boy. I’ve never seen anything like it: marvelous spirit, lovely people. Poor as river mud yet devoted to each other. Remember the way country life used to be? No, perhaps you don’t. Of course, I’d arrived there thinking the mother was overreacting. A drowned child is a drowned child. But once I saw the body I knew she was right. Something very abnormal had happened to that boy.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, first, yes, he had indications of a drowning: some froth in the bronchi, water in the lungs. Nothing conclusive really, as he’d been in the water for so long. It was the other inconsistencies that made it so odd. I don’t really know how to describe it. It was as if there were two parts to him. As if the maceration of the bottom half of his body had happened faster than that of the top half.”

  “That doesn’t sound very logical, Siri.”

  “I know. I immediately understood why the river people were unhinged by the sight. His arms and face were covered in mosquito bites but there were none on his legs. Then there were the splinters.”

  “Wood splinters?”

  “Yes. There were these enormous splinters, about ten of them, in his back and the backs of his legs. I can’t imagine how they got there.”

  The cook appeared and plonked down two plates and a basket of gray bread in front of the guests. The eggs seemed to float like flat tropical fish in pools of grease.

  “Coffee’s coming,” the cook said. To Civilai’s ears, it sounded like a threat. He pushed his plate away and turned to Siri.

  “Tell me, didn’t this boy wash up in Muang Khong or somewhere?”

  “Sri Pun Don.”

  “All right. So what? A hundred miles from his home after I don’t know how many hours of being thrashed about by the river. Surely he would have brushed against submerged logs, tree trunks?”

  “I thought of that,” said Siri, spooning the egg goop into his mouth as if it were food. “So had the family. But think about it. The flow of the Mekhong hasn’t yet built up any pace. Logs that have been submerged for months, years? They’re soft wood already. You need dry timber to get splinters. And if the damage was caused by the river, surely the splinters would be all over, not just on his back.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know. Obviously, our priority here is the fact that our country may soon be plunged into anarchy. Nonetheless, I’ve promised the mother I’ll do a little rooting around. The community gave me half a dozen mud carp for my tro
ubles.”

  “I love mud carp.”

  “Me, too. That’s why Daeng and I ate them all last night, sorry. As I say, we have bigger fish to fry, and, to that end, we’ve made a breakthrough.”

  Civilai had managed to spear his fried egg with his fork and was holding it above the plate, watching the grease drip. “We have?”

  Siri told him everything: the Devil’s Vagina tree, the refugee camp connection, the mail service. Yet even as he was telling it, he realized the story lacked the same certainty it had held the previous night. Civilai echoed his thoughts.

  “Your friend Daeng did a good job. But don’t you think you might be a little too desperate to make a link between all these spare parts? Myths and legends and postal networks don’t necessarily spell out a camp-based insurgency, Siri.”

  “I know, but we’ve been here almost a week. Do we have anything better? Has all your clandestine networking actually turned anything else up? Be honest now. I’ve seen how frustrated you’re getting. You haven’t achieved much, have you?”

  “Not a lot.”

  “Then this is better than nothing. What do we have to lose?”

  Civilai gave up on his egg and let it splash back onto the dish.

  “Nothing at all. Let’s go with it. I’ll get in touch with my contacts in Vientiane and see what they can dig up. I imagine we have people placed in all the camps keeping an eye on things.”

  “Spies, you mean?”

  “Observers. They’d know if there was a major plot being arranged. Lots of gossip in the camps. Don’t forget we have to be careful who we share this with. I think your friend Daeng should be the end of the grapevine.”

  “Well …”

  “What?”

  “Daeng and Phosy.”

  “How on earth could you get word to Phosy between last night and now? You’ve only just crawled out of bed for heaven’s sake.”

  “I was excited. I wrote him a note. Daeng said she could have it on the 6 a.m. bus to Vientiane. She knows the conductor. She was going to get him to drop it off at the morgue when he arrived.”

  “The morgue? So Dtui’s in the loop as well.”

  “Come on, old brother, if we can’t trust them, who can we trust? They’ve been involved in this from the beginning.”

  “It’s not their reliability I’m concerned about. It’s their safety. This is a nasty situation, and they have a not-unwarranted reputation for acting recklessly. Let’s just hope they don’t do anything silly.”

  Something Silly

  The refugee couple waited until dark before attempting to cross the ink black Mekhong to Thailand. The ever-present cloud had obscured the moon, so only one or two pricks of light from far downriver gave them any sense of space or distance. Without them the couple would have been suffocated by the darkness.

  The journey from Vientiane on the dusty, potholed road had left them bruised and parched and particularly grumpy. Of course, Phosy had been in a mood long before the couple had climbed onto the bus in the capital. He’d already been fuming while he waited for the fake laissez-passers at temporary police headquarters. He was a man used to getting his own way and somehow he’d let himself get talked out of his own harebrained scheme and into someone else’s. He knew it was madness. He was sure to lose his job. But then again, if they failed in this mission, there might not be a job to lose. There might not be a life to ruin.

  As far as that went, Dtui had been right. And, yes, she’d been right, too, about the fact that a couple would draw less suspicion on the Thai side than a single man. Refugees escaped in family groups or in large numbers. A man on his own might be a spy, a communist infiltrator. Alone, he was far more likely to be shot by the Thai border patrol. In fact, Dtui had been right about everything, which was the main reason he was sulking. She’d acted so smug as she ticked off all the logical reasons she should go with him to Ubon, and he couldn’t argue against one of them. All she’d left him with was the perennial policeman’s fallback: “Because I say so.”

  She’d laughed at him then, laughed in his face, made him feel as small as the roaches that scurried around their feet in the cutting room. She’d shown him the letter again: scrawled writing, almost incomprehensible to anyone who hadn’t spent a year deciphering her boss’s notes. It was garbled, as if he was on medication, but there was no doubt to whom he had written:

  “Dear Dtui,” it said and “Please pass this message on to Phosy.” Siri and Civilai obviously saw her as the senior contact. Wasn’t that humiliating as well? He really had no choice. The letter hadn’t exactly told them they should go to the camp; in fact, it told them not to do anything until they received further instructions. But just how long were they expected to sit around waiting?

  So here they were, dressed in their simplest clothes with no possessions other than a small pack containing hurriedly collected paperwork. The house documents and wedding certificate had belonged to Phosy and his wife. Phosy had been an agent of the Pathet Lao long before the communists moved into Vientiane. With the takeover complete, he’d been sent to the northeast for specialist training and to reassure his employers that the soft life in the Royalist capital hadn’t distorted his ideals. He’d maintained his cover identity in Vientiane and pretended he was being sent for reeducation. When he returned to his home six months later, his wife and children were gone. She’d taken them across the river with no word of apology. He’d heard nothing from her since. After eighteen months of hoping she might come back or get in touch, he filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion.

  Now Dtui was to take the woman’s name and become the wife of a temple craftsman, a carver of teak door reliefs. It would provide them with the perfect cover: a career frowned upon by the agnostic socialist authorities. He was an ideal candidate to seek refugee status in Thailand, and Dtui had all the makings of a typical wife.

  “You’re going to have to get over this, you know?” Dtui said, her feet dangling in the refreshing river water. “We have to get into our roles soon.”

  “Don’t tell me how to do my job,” he said, ripping the bark off an innocent sapling.

  “You’re in a mood.”

  “So what? We’re a married couple, aren’t we? This is what marriage is like.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Now what?”

  “If your marriage was like this … Well, it’s a shame, that’s all.”

  He clammed up again.

  They were at a spot forty miles downriver from what used to be the ferry crossing between Savanaketh and Mukdaharn. It had closed when the Thais blockaded Laos to prevent socialism from seeping into their country. But eight hundred miles of Mekhong River served as a border between the two, and short of filling it with oil and setting light to it, the Thais knew they could never really police the banks of the river. Phosy and Dtui sat in a spot that was nowhere in particular on the Lao side, directly opposite nowhere in particular in Thailand. It was ideal for discreet crossings. Local entrepreneurs had set up a lucrative business to take advantage of the already disadvantaged. For an extortionate fee they’d row refugees across to where a truck would pick them up and drive them to a main road. Then they were on their own.

  Had Phosy been by himself, he would have swum across and saved the money. Dtui was a nonswimmer. On the bus ride he’d suggested someone her shape should be able to float across. He’d immediately regretted saying it but wasn’t about to apologize. Dtui, for her part, had ignored him and pretended to sleep most of the way south.

  They both looked up when they heard the splashing of oars. It was so dark they didn’t spot the skinny craft until it had almost passed them. The oarsman couldn’t see them at all.

  “Anyone there?” he called.

  “Over here,” Phosy said. The pilot steered the long boat toward the bank and crashed against the rocks. It was all he could do not to overbalance into the water. His thick, greasy spectacles slipped down his nose.

  “Are you sure you’ll be able to find Thail
and, brother?” Phosy asked.

  The oarsman laughed. “No problem. I just row toward the smell of money. I know I’ll hit it eventually.”

  Getting Dtui into the craft wasn’t an easy matter. She refused to let the men touch her. It wasn’t until they were both standing in the water, holding onto the gunwales to stop the boat from rocking, that she managed to lower herself onto the narrow wooden seat. There she sat, holding her breath and looking directly ahead. The men climbed in and they headed off. It was no more than a three-minute boat ride, and like all good businessmen, the oarsman waited until they were midstream and completely at his mercy before revising the fare.

  “This is where you pay,” he said. “Thirty thousand kip.”

  Phosy laughed. “Don’t give me that,” he said. “I could buy the state ferry for that.”

  “That’s the price, brother. Take it or leave it. It includes the truck pickup on the other side. If you don’t pay up, we turn back.”

  “We don’t have that much with us,” Dtui told him.

  “Yeah, they all say that.”

  “Is that so?” Phosy asked. He edged closer to the man. Dtui felt the boat rock perilously for a second or two, then heard Phosy’s voice as a menacing whisper floating on the water.

  “I’m sure you can feel what’s pressed up against your neck,” he said. “Either you take us across for the fee we agreed on in Savanaketh, or I slit your gullet from ear to ear. Do they all say this as well?”

  “Yeah,” said the oarsman. “Some of ’em say that.”

  “And?”

  “And I tell ’em it’s twenty thousand.”

  “Good.”

  The oarsman’s cousin looked undernourished and smelled of fish. He had a beaten-up pickup truck that crunched and putted its way from the river along a dirt track. He drove with the headlights off, somehow negotiating the narrow trail by the illumination provided by the dim cab light above his head. He tried to impose a petroleum surcharge but he didn’t put a great deal of effort into it and wasn’t too disappointed when Phosy told him to take a hike.

  “Some of the rich ones just hand it over without a fuss,” he said. “You can’t blame me for asking.”