Dr Siri Paiboun 06 (2009) - The Merry Misogynist

by Colin Cotterill

  “In Luang Nam Tha?”

  “Yes, which attaches a grain of truth to the rumour.”

  “You have the sister’s name?”

  “And address. Am I not the complete detective?”

  “You’re Inspector Migraine incarnate.”

  “It’s Maigret, Phosy. But thank you. Should I leave that avenue of investigation to you?”

  “Of course. Siri, I can’t believe this animal has committed the same atrocity more than once.”

  “Fortunately we live in a place where things like this are so scandalous people continue to talk about them.”

  It was the first chance to meet and speak in relative privacy. Phan had done his duty the previous evening. He’d charmed the immediate and extended family. The grandmother, eleven sheets to the wind, had declared him ‘a very jolly boy who would be a great asset to the family’. The father had translated proudly for Phan. The others had shushed her and told her there was no such plan in the works but Phan knew they were all thinking the same thing. His foot was in the door. His was a skill many men yearned to possess and he had it in droves. He was now ready for the prelude to the kill.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

  Phan had driven the truck up a particularly troublesome hill to arrive at Wei’s school from the far side. The track from the village was too narrow to navigate so a huge detour had been necessary to arrive there in the vehicle. But the old Chinese truck was a vital player in this drama. Phan arrived just as the bell sounded for the end of the day’s lessons. The children gathered around the truck like ants on a wounded caterpillar. He did tricks for them: produced boiled sweets from their ears, made gooseberries vanish. He was the Messiah. Wei had walked out to meet him.

  “I know. I apologize,” he said. “I finished work early. I didn’t have anything to do. I remembered your mother saying you’d hurt your toe. She said it was painful for you to walk.”

  “It’s only half a kilometre along the track.”

  “Even so, I thought you might like a ride.”

  The other teacher had come out to watch the show with a big smile on her face.

  “It…it isn’t appropriate,” she said. Wei’s cheeks were as stained as rose apples.

  “I mean you and the children, of course.”

  “By road, you have to go all the way around the mountain.”

  “I have to anyway. Look…” He leaned closer so the children couldn’t hear. She smelled grease on him and some kind of disinfectant soap. “I didn’t want to embarrass you, really. I just…I just thought I could help. If you prefer, I’ll leave you to walk.”

  She looked at the children gathered expectantly around the truck, then back at him. So tall, so polite…so interesting.

  “All right, for the children’s sake,” she said at last. “They don’t get many opportunities to ride in a truck. It will be nice for them.”

  They screamed all the way back to the village. Wei sat in the passenger seat with a smile on her face that wouldn’t go away. Their countryside, the scenery she knew too well, was suddenly unrecognizable. From the window of his truck it had become…magical. A feeling had come over her she couldn’t understand. Part of it was physical, as if she needed to wee but knew she wouldn’t be able to. Her insides danced. It was all part of the spell. She had suddenly been whisked up in a hurricane that blew through her world.

  The children from outside the village were dropped off individually at their huts. They strode proudly from the truck as if a private limousine had delivered them. Phan saluted like a chauffeur when they thanked him. They would remember the experience for years. He dropped the children who lived in the village at the hand-pump diesel stand in the dead centre of town. The provincial roadway that passed through the village was barely two dirt lanes wide. Buses and military vehicles carried their own spare petrol so the diesel stand was largely for decoration. When Phan had filled up there twice he doubled the owner’s monthly revenue.

  Wei was about to follow the children but Phan touched her arm. “Wei, could I talk to you?”

  “It isn’t – ”

  “Appropriate, I know.” He smiled. “We’re in the middle of town. There are eyes everywhere. We have a hundred chaperones. How dangerous can it be?”

  “I didn’t say…” She was tongue-tied. She spoke all day for a living but here she was…couldn’t put a sentence together.

  Phan leaned against his door, as far from her as he could be. He clutched the wheel like a shield and stared at the road ahead. “I had…I had no idea, no plan,” he began. “I came only to work. I’ve been to a hundred, two hundred towns like this. I’ve done my surveys, made my calculations, and left. I’ve enjoyed meeting the people, sharing jokes and experiences. But I’ve never…”

  Wei was looking out of her own window so he couldn’t see the crimson her face had become. “I don’t think you should say any more.” She pushed open her door a centimetre or two.

  “No, I have to say this or I would never forgive myself. I have never felt this way before. I have to leave soon and we will probably never see each other again. And, if we don’t, I want to leave you with this…this overwhelming emotion I’ve had since I first saw you by the pond. It’s not…I wish I were more…wish I were better with words. Because when I saw you something flooded into me and I don’t know how to describe what it was. You’ve changed me.”

  Never, never had she heard such words. In all her seventeen years she’d never heard a man truly express himself. This was Laos. Men held in their feelings. You could be around them all their lives and not know they had one emotion between them. So this was overwhelming. It was as if his large hand had reached inside her rib cage and squeezed her heart. She couldn’t breathe. She threw open the door of the truck and walked unsteadily away.

  Phan watched her go, reached across, and closed her door. The woman who pumped the diesel was leaning on the counter in the tiny bamboo service hut. She smiled. He smiled back and shrugged. She held up her thumb.

  This was too, too easy.

  It was only four thirty of the same, incredibly long, Monday. Siri was sitting on a wooden bench at the new Ministry of Justice. He’d heard of their dilemma. Prior to the ministerization, Judge Haeng had been an appropriate department head in the eyes of the administration. He was a judge, albeit a fast-track, Soviet-trained judge, and he was from a wealthy family. So, as a department head, he fitted the bill. But as a minister, even though it was fundamentally the same job, he was found lacking. Being a minister had certain inherent expectations. How, for example, could anybody barely turned forty be a minister? A minister had to look experienced, with the lines of wisdom etched onto his countenance. Haeng had acne. What diplomat would want to shake hands with a spotty minister?

  So a room on the top floor of the Ministry of Justice was being refurbished for the arrival of the new minister. Siri watched agile old men climbing the bamboo scaffold like spiders on a web. They chipped away the clay hornets’ nests and replaced broken louvres. Nobody yet knew who the new minister would be, so, temporarily, Judge Haeng remained in charge. It had been a very painful slap in the face for him and his mood reflected it. This was certainly a bad time to be asking him for favours.

  “He’ll see you now, Doctor,” said Manivone. She was the receptionist, the head of the typing pool, and the real brains behind the Ministry of Justice. Siri was sure that without her, Judge Haeng would be driving a motorcycle taxi.

  “What hat should I wear?” Siri asked.

  “My first choice would be something hard and shock proof,” she said, walking beside him along the open-air corridor. “But as it’s almost going-home time, I’d go with cap in hand. The Vietnamese adviser’s in there so the judge has to keep hold of his temper and act humble. If you come across as pathetic he might take pity on you.”

  “I don’t do pathetic very well.”

  “I know. But don’t rile him. You know what he’s like when you rile him. Play it by ear.” Siri kno
cked and turned the doorknob, “…or earlobe,” she added and laughed behind her hand.

  Siri was smiling when he entered the room. Haeng continued to do whatever it was he was doing at his desk and ignored the intrusion. Comrade Phat, a Vietnamese with few teeth but no shortage of charisma, looked up from his corner table and greeted Siri in Vietnamese. Siri replied in kind and Phat laughed. This was probably a bad start if Siri wanted to win over the judge. Judge Haeng’s Vietnamese wasn’t good enough to catch the joke. He would naturally assume the worst.

  Siri sat on the rickety chair in front of Haeng’s desk and awaited his audience. The judge seemed to be composing a memorandum. He wrote like a child with his tongue poking slightly through his lips. Siri had always seen him as a boy although Haeng was clearly middle-aged. He didn’t have any respect for the young fellow.

  “Siri?” said Haeng, as if he’d just noticed him. “What is it?”

  Obviously the judge was in a bad mood; Siri was in need of a clever tactic or two to win him over. He tried the most obvious first.

  “I just came by because I was astounded when I heard. After all you’ve done for the Justice Department, your impeccable record. How could you have been passed over?”

  Siri had lied to Manivone. Pathetic wasn’t at all beyond him. But Daeng was right. The only way to get Housing off his back was to have Haeng on his side. Few men would have seen Siri’s blatant pandering as anything other than what it was. But Haeng obviously wanted to hear it.

  “Why, thank you, Siri,” he said. “It’s always heartening to hear a hurrah from the soldiers in the ranks.”

  “And you are an inspiration to the men, Judge.” Siri was temporarily interrupted by the clearing of a Vietnamese throat. “I often find myself repeating your Party mottoes.” He didn’t bother to add, “At drinking sessions for a good laugh.”

  “Well, I’m touched, Doctor.”

  “Oh, yes. And one of my favourites, and I hope I’ve got this right, goes, “If a mother cries in Pakse we feel sorrow in Xam Neua. If a daughter is born in Bokeo, we burp her in Khamuan. It is the duty of a good socialist to consider every Lao a member of his family.” That still brings a tear to my eye, that one.”

  “I think you have the essence of it, Siri. Well done.”

  “That motto changed my philosophy, Judge.”

  “It did?”

  “After you uttered those words I went out and invited my new family into my home: the poor, the blind, the previously immoral, the widowed, and the dishonest.”

  “Siri, you aren’t referring to your present house, are you?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “I’ve been there, remember?”

  “Wasn’t it marvellous to see your dream turn into reality? I tell everybody, even the Department of Housing, that my living arrangements were inspired by Judge Haeng.”

  “You do?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Well, I suggest you un-tell them.”

  “What?”

  “You are a senior Party member and the national coroner. You have to command respect. Yet your house is a zoo, Siri. I thought your marriage might settle you down, force you to kick that band of scavengers out onto the street and make you live like a respectable senior citizen. It’s a government residence, not a guesthouse.”

  “Oh, I get it. A Party motto is perfectly sound advice until it’s put into practice. Say it after me by all means, but don’t actually do it. We don’t really want everyone in Khamuan wiping the snotty little Bokeo tyke’s arse.”

  “Siri, you always resort to vulgarity when you lose an argument.”

  “How would you know? You’re never around when I lose an argument.”

  Judge Haeng stood and shuffled papers on his desk. He was in a black huff.

  “Dr Siri, these are working hours. I have neither the time nor the inclination to discuss your personal life. If you have technical or medical information for me I am happy to listen. Otherwise, please don’t disturb me. And now I have a meeting.”

  Siri was fuming inside, which caused the smile on his face to pucker his cheeks.

  “Oh, I completely forgot,” he said calmly. “I do have some medical and scientific information to pass on to you.”

  “Well, let’s have it. I’m in a hurry.”

  Siri coughed and recited, “A fart is fifty-nine per cent nitrogen, twenty-one per cent hydrogen…”

  Haeng pushed back his chair, grabbed his papers, and strode to the door.

  “…and nineteen per cent carbon…”

  The door slammed.

  “…dioxide.”

  Siri pursed his lips and stared at the brown marks on the backs of his hands. He fancied he saw familiar country outlines from the atlas there.

  “What’s the other one per cent?” asked Phat.

  “Depends what you had for dinner,” Siri told him.

  There was a beat before both men burst into laughter.

  “Dr Siri,” said Phat, drying his eyes on a torn-off rectangle of tissue paper. “How have you survived in the system this long?”

  “Actually, Comrade, they did away with me several years back. I’ve returned to haunt them.”

  “So it would seem, Siri. So it would seem. Trouble with Housing?”

  “They aren’t happy with the class of people I have living with me.”

  “Are they paying rent?”

  “Not a brass kip.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you.”

  The door opened. Judge Haeng returned to his desk with a pronounced limp, and collected his forgotten walking stick. He ignored the two disrespectful old men and shuffled out. The laughter resumed.

  The morgue seemed to have frozen in time since Siri had left on his mission to the Ministry of Justice. Nothing had moved, not even Geung, who still stood with a toilet plunger hoisted above his head trying to coax a ceiling lizard to drop into it.

  “Are you training it?” Siri asked.

  “I…I want to take it ou…outside. It shits on th…the…the gurney. I don’t want to kill it. It’s Buddha’s crea…creature.”

  “Keep your voice down, Geung. The Ministry of Not Mentioning Religion might hear you.” Geung was bemused. “Look, I’ll give you a little hint. Spray it with water. I don’t know how I know, but when you do that they can’t hold on for some reason. Try it. But when you get it outside give it a stern talking-to so it doesn’t come running back in. All right?”

  Geung’s laugh clanged around the room. “Ha, who…who’s mad enough to talk to a…a lizard?”

  Siri laughed and patted his friend on the back. “Sorry, my little comrade. Sometimes I forget who it is I’m addressing.”

  “Oh…oh!” Geung hopped on one leg. “I remember.”

  “What?”

  “The last message. Teacher Ou…Teacher Ou…Oum.”

  “Wants me to get in touch?”

  “Something…drug.”

  “All right. Thank you. Good job. If I’m not back by six, you can lock up.”

  Geung saluted and turned again to the job at hand.

  “It’s definitely Meprobamate,” said Oum, her voice sounding like ice rattling in an empty glass over the telephone line. “It reacted with furfural.”

  “I thought it might be something like that,” Siri replied. “How heavy was the dose?”

  “The reaction was really strong. I’d say it was quite concentrated.”

  “Enough to cause loss of consciousness?”

  “Not impossible.”

  “Let’s hope so. I’d hate for her to have been aware of what was going on. In a way I’m glad it was Meprobamate. The symptoms of an overdose are more like a coma – drowsiness, loss of muscle control, unresponsiveness.There are other drugs that paralyze the nervous system. You can see what’s going on but can’t lift a finger to stop it. I’d prefer that she was unconscious or at least numb.”

  “Oh, and the contents of the stomach,” Oum remembered. “Did you go th
rough them before you brought them over here?”

  “I did take a look. Didn’t recognize anything.”

  “The little green fellows?”

  “Berries of some kind? Seeds?”

  “I wouldn’t bet my life on it, but they looked a lot like capers to me.”

  “And they are?”

  “They’re used for seasoning. I had them once or twice in Australia. You get them in Italian food. Not the kind of thing you can find locally.”

  “So they would be imported and expensive.”

  “If I’m right.”

  “Not the type of thing a farm girl would include in her diet.”

  “Not at all.”

  “I’ll pass that little clue on to Phosy. Any luck with the ultraviolet light?”

  “I just got back from the gym. It isn’t the type of place I hang out normally, but I did your test. I don’t think we should read too much into this. The machine only has two settings, and neither might be the right one to reveal phosphates, but nothing made an appearance on the sample you gave me.”

  “So either the perpetrator didn’t ejaculate…”

  “Or the school has a crap piece of black light equipment. Can you come over and pick up all your evidence? My fridge is full.”

  Siri did as he was told. On his way back along That Luang Road with both his shoulder bag and his mind full he switched off the engine, cruised, and contemplated on the long downward incline. If the lycee legend was true, if there really had been a similar murder, then how could they be sure there weren’t others? This wasn’t Europe. There was no network to cross-reference commonalities between crimes. In Laos, local police forces described their cases in two ledgers and when these were full, one would be placed on the shelf in the police station, and eventually the other would be sent to Vientiane and filed at police headquarters under the province from which it had come. If two similar crimes occurred in two different provinces, there would be no way of telling.