Dr Siri Paiboun 06 (2009) - The Merry Misogynist

by Colin Cotterill

  She let out all the air she’d been holding back in one loud gasp. Her face turned the colour of an overripe chilli.

  “I kept my gift until I found somebody worthy to give it to. I need to know…” he continued.

  “Than, it’s all right,” she said, but she was far too stunned to look him in the eye. She spoke to the surface of the pond. “I understand, and I don’t think you’re rude or old-fashioned at all. You don’t need to be embarrassed. I think it’s lovely. I haven’t either…I mean, with a man…or anyone.”

  He liked the fact that she was tongue-tied, and he laughed with her. He reached for her hands. They were damp and trembling, most unpleasant. It was just as well he hadn’t touched her fingers earlier or he might not be here in this situation now. But it was too late to turn back.

  “Then I can’t think of any reason why I shouldn’t go to speak with your parents.”

  She pulled her hands away, not because she wanted to but because it was proper to do so. She stood and turned her back to him. Her hands went to her face.

  “It’s not that bad, is it?” he asked.

  She spoke through her finger mask. “No, it’s…I’m pleased.”

  Good, a woman of few words. Nothing worse than one who wouldn’t shut up – gushing, annoying. When at last she was able to pull herself together and turn back to him, he showed her the ring. It was a single gold band.

  “Where did you…?”

  “It was my mother’s,” he told her. “I always carry it with me in her memory. It’s an old tradition our family picked up from the French. I know I can’t give it to you till I talk with your father, but I was curious to see whether it fitted.” He took hold of her slimy hand again and slid the ring onto what in the West they called the engagement finger. It paused briefly at the joint then eased down towards the knuckle. He always got it right. He had a dozen rings of varying sizes in the truck and could judge with impressive accuracy which would fit. “I’m afraid it’s rather plain. It’s just a symbol of my sincerity. I promise I’ll do better with the wedding ring.”

  “Oh, no, Phan. It’s perfect.”

  “No, Wei. It’s you who’s perfect. Trust me.”

  They’d passed the midpoint of the week in Vientiane and there still was no new evidence in the strangled woman case. The ribbon that had been used was sold in two or three shops in the city but the shopkeepers couldn’t recall selling it to any suspicious characters. The pestle was made in Thailand and was expensive. Only one shop sold them, a store that specialized in exotic imported fare. The woman who owned the establishment hadn’t sold more than one to any of her customers. The strangler would have had to travel to Thailand to buy them there before travel restrictions had been imposed.

  Inspector Phosy’s meeting with the truck driver had proven fruitless. The man claimed that his sighting of the shrouded farmer and the invisible woman story were made up. Either that or he’d heard them from another driver. He couldn’t remember who because, assuming that really was how he’d come by the story, he must have been drunk at the time. Phosy had given the man his telephone number at police headquarters and told him that if the fuzziness ever cleared, Phosy would give him half a bottle of Thai rum in thanks.

  Later that same day, Phosy was bumped from the Luang Nam Tha flight in favour of some visiting VIPs from North Korea and several Party officials. He didn’t have any strings to pull higher than that. On Wednesday the flight didn’t take off as the visibility at their destination was poor due to crop burn offs. So it was Thursday, and he was killing time at the morgue before heading off to Wattay Airport for his third attempt. They were all in the cutting room – Siri, Dtui, and Mr Geung. Phosy was leaning against the freezer door.

  “B…be careful, Comrade Ph…Phosy,” Geung said. “You might f…f…freeze your eggs.” Geung laughed uproariously and the others chuckled along with him. The egg joke frenzy had gripped a Vientiane that was obviously in need of cheering up. When word got out that the prime minister himself had been in the limousine involved in the great scramble it had become something of a national campaign. Molutn singers, the common man’s humorists, had already performed several live versions of the saga. It had even found its way into Geung’s simple humour reservoir.

  “Steady, Geung.” Dtui smiled. “We don’t want little Malee hearing dirty jokes at her age.”

  Geung bent forward and touched Dtui’s enormous belly. “Sorry, Malee,” he said.

  “How much longer do you plan to keep the girl on ice?” asked Phosy, tapping on the freezer door.

  “Really, I don’t like to keep anyone in there for too long,” Siri confessed. “If we don’t find a family for her soon we’ll have to take her to the temple and give her an anonymous send-off. They don’t like that.”

  They all knew what he meant.

  “Anything on Crazy Rajid?” Phosy asked.

  “No sign of him,” said Siri. “It’s been two weeks already since anyone last saw him.”

  “Of course he might have just wandered off,” Phosy reminded them. “That’s what street people do. He could be anywhere.”

  “I don’t know.” Dtui shook her head. “He wandered pretty close to home as a rule. I mean to his dad’s home.”

  “Who’d have thought Crazy Rajid had a father?” said Phosy. “And could write. Wonders will never cease. Any luck with the second riddle?”

  “Not exactly,” said Siri. “I think the combination of its being written by a madman and translated from Hindi makes it doubly difficult.”

  “But he isn’t a madman, is he, Dr Siri?” Dtui asked. “I mean, he wasn’t born crazy. It was a trauma in his childhood that made him like this.”

  “You’re right,” Siri agreed. “And he may very well have a treatable condition for all we know. But we don’t have the expertise or the resources here to do anything for him. We can barely treat basic medical conditions.”

  Phosy took the note from Siri. “It’s obvious there’s a sane person in there somewhere or he wouldn’t be able to write things like this.” He unrolled the paper and read aloud,

  In the belly of the brainless one,

  Made in Thailand.

  Watched by four thousand eyes.

  “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it sane,” said Dtui.

  “It’s a riddle, Nurse,” Siri reminded her. “It’s supposed to be confusing.”

  “Then it succeeds,” she decided.

  “Made in Thailand. Made in Thailand.” Phosy seemed to hope that repeating it might make it clearer. “Should we be thinking dirty?”

  “I think Madame Daeng and I have been through all the dirty possibilities,” said Siri with a slight blush.

  “Is…is four thousand m…more than am…million?” Geung asked.

  “No, mate,” Dtui told him, “it’s not that many. But it’s a hell of a lot of eyes.”

  “We thought ‘brainless one’ might refer to the grand assembly building,” Siri confessed. “But we would never know which seat to look under.”

  “The national stadium?” Phosy offered.

  “Come off it.” Dtui laughed. “When was the last time they got more than fifty people watching anything there?”

  “True.”

  “Because if…if…if it’s a million…” Geung persisted.

  “It could be the spot where the Thai military intelligence put their telescope to watch what we’re doing over here,” Dtui suggested.

  “Not sure Crazy Rajid can swim that far,” Siri smiled.

  “…then th…there’s at least a m…million eyes at…at…at Wat Si Saket.”

  “Then there’s…What was that, Geung?” Dtui asked.

  “Wat Si Saket,” repeated Geung.

  “The little Buddhas.” Phosy nodded his head. “There are certainly a lot of them.”

  “It isn’t out of the question,” Dtui agreed.

  “But what’s the ‘made in Thailand’ connection?” Phosy asked.

  Siri clicked his fingers so lou
dly the others were afraid he’d broken a bone.

  “Of course,” he said and added another handprint to his forehead. “Shame on me. They taught us all this stuff at the temple in Savanaketh. Why is it I can remember verbatim French radio jingles for chocolate biscuits and not the history of my own country?”

  “Probably because – ” Dtui started.

  “It was a rhetorical question, Dtui.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Wat Si Saket,” Siri began, “is the oldest surviving temple in Vientiane, and that’s probably because, when the Thais flooded in to rape and sack and pillage in eighteen something or other, they didn’t want to destroy anything that reminded them of home. The temple was one of Prince Chao Anou’s creations. He was educated in Bangkok and was probably more Thai than Lao. The Thais set him up as a puppet king here, and he built old Si Saket in the Thai style. Made in Thailand. Voila.”

  He walked to Geung and planted a large kiss on his forehead. Geung wiped the kiss away violently but grinned with pleasure.

  “I don’t know why we just don’t hand all our mysteries directly to you, Geung,” Phosy said with very little sarcasm in his voice.

  “Any thoughts on the lady in the freezer, Inspector Geung?” Dtui asked.

  “Sh…she’s very pretty,” Geung decided.

  “So who’s the brainless one?” Phosy asked. He shouldered his bag for the trip to the airport.

  “It could refer to us,” Siri conceded. “But I think I shall take Madame Daeng for a cultural soiree at the temple this evening.”

  “Well, I’m husbandless tonight, so I’m coming too,” said Dtui.

  “I’m husbless t…too, so so am I,” said Geung.

  “That’s settled then.” Siri laughed. “It looks like Si Saket Temple will be doubling its annual quota of visitors in one evening.”

  Siri had been speaking only partly in jest. The residents of Vientiane had become very self-conscious about being seen in temples. People had begun to worship discreetly. Their faith had not been dented by the constant notices and the loudspeaker broadcasts decrying the curse of religion, but they found it prudent not to advertise their beliefs. The government interpreted the empty temple grounds as evidence that socialism was a more powerful dogma than Buddhism.

  This perhaps explains why, on that warm evening in March, the visitors arriving at Si Saket had to find the keeper of the keys in the nearby compound and convince him it was vitally important to the security of the nation that they gain access to the inner sanctum of the temple immediately. As there were no lights, they were forced to buy sanctified orange candles from the abbot and place them at intervals around the rectangular cloister. This created a splendid, albeit rather creepy, atmosphere. The walls on all four sides contained small alcoves from floor to beam, and each nook had its own Buddha image in bronze or silver or stone: three-dimensional dharmic wallpaper.

  “How many eyes would you say?” Siri asked Daeng.

  “At least four thousand. Do you suppose he counted them?”

  “Nothing about Rajid would surprise me. It does make me think we’re in the right place. All we need now is to decide which is the brainless one.”

  “We could ask them all twenty general-knowledge questions.”

  “By my calculations that would take longer than I have left on this earth,” he said. He smiled uneasily and Daeng glared at him. “What? Why are you giving me that look?”

  “Has something happened to you this week that I should know about?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean has the spectre of death landed in your morgue and handed you an invitation?”

  Daeng’s comment was intended as a joke but, like a hammer thrown from the far side of the room, it had somehow managed to hit the nail on the head. Siri felt a now familiar clenching at his heart. Every day the harbingers had visited him. Worms travelled the extremities of his desk, and the scent of damp earth filled his lungs. Saloop was everywhere – beside the road, beneath the table in the cutting room, outside the shop in the undergrowth opposite. Tonight, as they walked to the temple, the dog’s yellow eyes had glared from every alleyway and nook. Death was closing in on Dr Siri, but it was news he’d decided to keep to himself. There was no point in depressing anyone else.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he lied.

  “Oh, Siri, you’ve managed to swing every other conversation we’ve had this week around to death.”

  “I have not.”

  “You have. You’ve mentioned graves at least twenty times.”

  “Let me hear the tapes.”

  “Take my word for it.”

  “Daeng, I’m a coroner. It comes with the territory. If you wanted sweet talk you should have married someone at the boiled candy works. Death is my stock-in-trade.”

  “Then why do I get this niggling feeling it’s getting personal?”

  “Because you’re not as young as you used to be. Elderly people start to have delusions.”

  “Is that so?”

  She might have wrestled him to the ground at that point and twisted his arm behind his back had it not been for a shout from Dtui at the far end of the cloister.

  “Doc, Auntie Daeng, I think we’ve found brainless.”

  They joined Dtui and Geung in front of a small gallery of much larger Buddhas, some up to one metre tall. They stood or sat as if in a line-up of suspects: similar but different. And the fellow who stood out from the crowd had a head that ended above the ears. He was made of hollow cast iron and had obviously experienced a traumatic event that had removed the top of his head and half his back. His vintage and historical significance allowed him a place in otherwise complete company.

  “Looks like a candidate,” said Daeng. “Anyone feel like sticking their hand in there?”

  Geung raised his arm.

  “Yes, Mr Geung?”

  “I will.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Geung put his hands together and muttered a quick prayer of apology before very excitedly reaching down into the bowels of the Buddha. He rummaged around for a few seconds before re-emerging with a small roll of paper. He handed it to Siri, who unrolled it to reveal a page of unfathomable Hindi letters.

  “Mr Tickoo,” Siri shouted, “Bhiku.”

  “Wake up, Mr Tickoo!” Daeng yelled even louder, her voice echoing around the silent neighbourhood. They stood in front of the shutters of the Happy Dine Indian restaurant, looking up at the gaping open window on the second floor. Geung’s dormitory at Mahosot and Dtui’s police hostel room weren’t far from the temple, so they’d agreed to walk each other home, leaving Siri and Daeng to pursue what was hopefully the last instalment of the riddle. They all hoped this final clue would lead them to Prince Crazy Rajid’s palace. Mr Tickoo’s face arrived at the window with a smile that lit up the sidewalk around them.

  “It is even more fiendish,” said Rajid’s father. Mr Tickoo was sitting inside the restaurant with Siri and Daeng. The fluorescent tube above them was buzzing and cutting out every now and then like at an amateur discotheque. It was annoying but the note kept them spellbound. They watched the Indian consider and contemplate and finally compose. They sipped their tea impatiently, waiting for the last word of the last line. When it arrived and Bhiku looked up with a satisfied smile, they pirouetted the notepad around to see its Lao translation.

  One million pachyderms

  And one spirited bear

  Look sadly at the all-night sun.

  Siri looked up from the paper as if he’d won the national lottery.

  “Why so smug?” Daeng asked.

  “I’ve got it,” he replied.

  “Already?”

  “More by luck than intelligence, my love.”

  “Well, that’s no fun at all. Don’t tell me the answer. Let me get it for myself. Pachyderms…the old word for…”

  “Elephants,” Siri put in.

  “I said don’t tell me. I knew that. So obviously a million old elephants eq
uals Ian Xang. Name of the ancient kingdom of Laos.”

  “And?”

  “Several businesses.”

  “The largest being?”

  “The Ian Xang Hotel?”

  “Spot on.”

  Mr Tickoo clapped his hands. “My word,” he said. “It’s like watching the gods laying out their plan for the universe. Such brilliance.”

  Daeng and Siri looked at each other.

  “Don’t let yourself be diverted by conceit,” Siri said.

  Daeng continued, “I know I’m close here. A bear. The logo on a bottle or a can? No? A bearskin rug? A certain configuration of stars? Spirit…a drunken bear? A dead bear? A dead bear at the Ian Xang Hotel…the empty cages.”

  “You are remarkable.” Siri smiled and squeezed her hand. The riddle had only been simple for him because it paralleled a case he’d handled the previous year. The Ian Xang Hotel had previously imprisoned live animals for the edification of the general public. One black bear had been the star attraction until it was freed. Siri could imagine Rajid wandering into the Ian Xang grounds and watching the poor old girl behind her bars. Somewhere there lay the secret to the location of Rajid’s palace.

  “What time is it?” Siri asked.

  “Who cares?” answered Daeng.

  The grounds of the Ian Xang were spacious for a Lao hotel. There was some thick tropical vegetation, native flowers that had been dug up and replanted in unnatural rows, and a swimming pool that was starting to look more like a lotus pond. It had so many leaves floating on it a skinny teenager could have walked across its surface without getting wet.

  Siri and Daeng had strolled through reception arm in arm as if they owned the place. They dismissed the night clerk with a ‘Don’t even think about asking us a question’ look and ambled towards the door that gave access to the grounds. To any observer they were merely guests who intended to take a short promenade before retiring to their suite. Once they were outside they were alone. Squashed up against one wall there were four cages that had housed a variety of wild inmates in their time. Currently they served as an aviary. There was a crane in one, a dowdy hornbill in the next, a couple of dubious characters that looked like chickens in heavy make-up in the third, and a male peacock with barely enough space to spread his impressive tail in the last.