Dr Siri Paiboun 06 (2009) - The Merry Misogynist

by Colin Cotterill

  “And I’m one of them.”

  “You’re so sweet. Are you here to see me?”

  “If you have a few minutes.”

  “Your projects are always worth finding a few minutes for, Comrade. Come up to my office.”

  The telling of the whole tale took twenty minutes and Dr Pornsawan’s tears flowed for nineteen of them.

  “I swear,” she said when he was done, “in all my years of tending to women in the most wretched conditions, I have never heard of such a filthy aberration. What has happened to our society that such horror could occur, Siri? Something in me prays that this isn’t just the beginning of the release of the demons. The wars inured us to atrocities, and the demons grew inside. Are they just now showing themselves?”

  “I really don’t want to believe so, Comrade. This is one renegade devil.”

  “And we have to stop him, by God we have to.” She slapped her desk and all her pencils changed position.

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “How can we help?”

  Siri described the type of man they were looking for. He wanted to hear of families whose daughters had been whisked away and vanished without a trace. He wanted to hear gossip of smooth suitors, of truck owners, of seducers of entire villages. He wanted anecdotes, rumours, and hearsay. He wanted women in the markets to include it in their morning news reports and army wives to make mention of it during village workshops. Missing daughters had to be significant news in the women’s networks.

  “How soon can you start?” Siri asked.

  “Yesterday!”

  “That should do it.”

  10

  DANCING WITH DEATH

  When Comrade Civilai arrived at the morgue that lunchtime he was surprised to find everyone busy in the cutting room. It was Saturday – a half day. They should have all been on their way home. But he didn’t want to disturb them. As a new retiree he found himself bothering a lot of people. He’d pop by his old office to say hello, and they’d be glad to see him, but busy. He’d offer his advice here and there – his seventy-three years of experience – surely somebody would want some of that? But all he seemed to do was get in the way. So he baked.

  He sat at Siri’s desk with a dozen lemon meringue tarts on a tin tray. He felt a little foolish. He’d imagined walking into the morgue, everybody free, jumping for joy at the sight of his lemon meringues, Dtui running off to fetch coffee from the canteen. Then sitting around the office cracking egg jokes and eating tarts.

  But they were busy.

  He decided to give them five – no, ten – minutes, then leave. He’d attach a note to the tarts and go. Or he’d take them with him somewhere else. Somewhere he’d be appreciated. There was no shortage of people in need of lemon meringue. He stretched out his long legs and one foot kicked a large cardboard box on the floor.

  ∗

  Siri removed his rubber gloves and went to the sink to wash his hands.

  “Right,” he said. “If that wasn’t the silliest task we’ve performed here I’d say it ranks in the top three.”

  “Come on, Doc,” Dtui said. “It was a public service.”

  “It was a private service, and I feel like an accessory.”

  The deputy minister of sport had arrived at the morgue before midday with his mother on a stretcher. The old lady had just passed away, but on her deathbed she’d asked to see the family diamonds for the last time. Reluctantly, the deputy had brought her the seven tiny cut stones that would pass down to him and his wife once his mother was gone.

  “Let me touch them,” the old lady had said.

  Who could refuse a dying wish? Her son had placed them on her withered palm and seen the expression change on her face. She’d smiled and, according to one of the gardeners who’d helped carry the litter, said something like, “You’ve been drooling over these all my life. Now you’re really going to have to work for them, you greedy ingrate.” With that she threw the diamonds into her mouth, reached beside the bed for a glass of water, and washed them down. That had been both her final act of defiance and her final act.

  So how else would one remove one’s inheritance gracefully from a dead mother? The deputy had even written himself an official extraction order on ministry stationery. Siri knew this wasn’t the last he’d be seeing of the freshly mined lady, and he’d whispered an apology before releasing her body to her son. He hadn’t bothered to wash off the stones before handing them over.

  Siri was grumbling and wiping his hands when he walked into his office. He’d expected to see worms, so he was pleasantly surprised to find Civilai at his desk rummaging through his bones.

  “Hello, old brother,” said Siri.

  “Siri, you have a box of ancient relics.”

  “I do?”

  “Some of this crockery’s five hundred years old.”

  “And how would you know such a thing?”

  “I have skills.”

  “I know you do. I just didn’t realize they stretched to archaeology.”

  “Don’t forget they had me showing all those bored foreign dignitaries around the museums. I’ve had to explain all this stuff a thousand times. It sticks. You can recognize pottery from its glaze and ribbing. This translucent green glaze was typical of the stuff they dug up from the old kilns on Tar Deau Road in 1970. This is valuable.”

  Siri took up a sliver of pottery in his left hand and a lemon meringue tart in his right.

  “So tell me,” he said, “why would Crazy Rajid have a box of valuable ancient relics?”

  “These are Rajid’s? Have you found him yet?”

  “No, but I think we must be getting close.” He told Civilai the whole story about the Indian’s father and the family disaster and the riddles, pausing only to swallow bites of pastry. Mr Geung went for coffee, and the four of them sat around eating and discussing Rajid.

  “The question remains, where else could he have gone?” said Dtui. “We’ve been to the edges of his universe. He’s never been missing this long. Something must have happened to him.”

  Siri looked over her shoulder and saw Saloop amble into the office. The creature walked up to Dtui, managed one pathetic tail wag, and put his head on her lap. Siri was surprised to see his nurse reach for her leg as if she were about to pat Saloop on the head. Instead she scratched her knee. She was, of course, unaware of the dog’s presence. Only Siri saw the animal.

  Dtui continued. “It just frightens me that he might be in trouble and we can’t help him.”

  Saloop looked up at the doctor and raised one side of his brow, and finally Siri came to, crawled from his stupidity like a fly pulling itself free of paint. He excused himself, walked out of the room, out of the morgue, and around to the rear of the building. There was nothing back there but a vacant office and a ladder. Siri walked through the open doorway, stood in the middle of the floor, and danced. He jigged and he polkaed and he Highland flung and he sang some nonsense he’d learned on his travels and then he laughed. Anyone passing at that moment might have assumed he was an old man in the grip of a chronic alcohol binge, but he had never felt more sober or more alive. The omens that had hounded him for the past week, the feeling that death was getting closer, none of this had been directed at Siri. He was not going to die – Rajid was.

  He walked back into his office still carrying that wonderful and awful feeling and fought to keep the smile from his lips.

  “I’ve had a premonition,” he said. “Rajid’s in very serious trouble.”

  Both Civilai and Dtui knew of Siri’s dalliance with the spirits, and Geung didn’t really seem to care. Nobody was surprised when he made his announcement.

  “How serious?” Civilai asked.

  “If we don’t find him soon he’ll die.”

  “Any location or characters attached to this premonition?” Dtui asked.

  Siri quickly shuffled through his week of dreams and visions, substituting Rajid for himself.

  “A pregnant woman,” he said.
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  “Dtui,” said Dtui.

  “No, the one I mean is ugly, and I think she’s buried. Been buried for a long time. There must be a connection here too.” He went to the box of relics and rummaged through them. As soon as he made contact with the bones, a realization swept over him. “Oh, my word. Of course.”

  “What?” asked Dtui, Civilai, and Geung at the same time.

  “The pillar of the city: Si Muang Temple. The founding of Vientiane,” said Siri.

  “Fifteen…?” Civilai began.

  “Fifteen sixty something,” said Siri. “Could this pottery date from then?”

  “Very likely,” said Civilai. “They dragged an ancient Khmer pillar from somewhere as the heart of the new Vientiane. They dug a huge pit to bury it and threw in valuables and pots and keepsakes that held meaning to the people at the ceremony.”

  “They didn’t tell us all this in school in the north,” Dtui said.

  Siri took over. “Before they could plant this two tons of stone in its hole, they had to placate the spirits of the land whom they were about to dispossess. The elders called for a sacrifice. They’d left it until a bit late in the day, and there weren’t that many volunteers. But then one wronged woman swollen with child ran forward. “Take me, take me,” she cried and leaped into the pit. The ropes were cut, the pillar dropped, and the pregnant lady was suddenly lacking a dimension. I didn’t make the connection because I’d always imagined the sacrificed girl to have been a gorgeous flaxen-haired beauty. But the vision of a woman I’ve been having all week was frightening in its ugliness. I can’t think how she managed to get herself pregnant in the first place.”

  “You’ve been having these visions all week?” Dtui asked.

  “And you’re just telling us now?” Civilai chimed in.

  “Yes, but you see, I didn’t relate the spectres to Rajid. I thought it was…eh, bo ben nyang. It doesn’t matter what I thought. The important thing is that on the site of the burial of the pillar they built Si Muang Temple, and I have a strong feeling Rajid’s there. I think his time’s running out.”

  11

  BROKEN WATER

  Civilai’s ancient cream Citroen with one hubcap missing sped toward Si Muang. It was less than two kilometres from Mahosot but urgency made the distance more daunting. Civilai drove directly into the temple grounds and stopped only half a metre from the ordination hall that guarded the pillar. Despite all the noise they’d made, there was nobody around to chastise them. They alighted – Dtui, Siri, and Civilai (Geung had been placed in charge of the morgue) – ran through the empty vestibule, and into the pillar sanctum.

  If it hadn’t been for the patchy gilding and the string of unlit coloured Christmas lights, the pillar of the city might have been mistaken for a lump of rock. It rose from a high platform surrounded by plastic flowers in various stages of bleaching, several guardian Buddhas, and an impressive array of unconnected artefacts, presumably placed there to pick up holy vibrations. Siri walked around to see if there was a way inside the platform but it was a solid block.

  “Now what do we do?” Dtui asked.

  “I have no idea,” Siri confessed.

  “Have another premonition, quick.”

  “I can’t just conjure them up.”

  “Why not?”

  “They arrive whenever they’re in the mood. I’ve told you. I’m not the one in control here.”

  “Then let’s find somebody who is,” said Civilai and went in search of a monk or a curator. He returned a few moments later with a young man who had all the appearances – shaved head, victimized expression – of being a monk, but wore only royal blue soccer shorts.

  “This fellow knows Rajid,” said Civilai.

  The young man covered his chest with his arm as if he were ashamed of his nipples.

  “He used to come often,” said the monk, “but I didn’t know his name. We’d feed him if we had anything to give and let him wander around. He was harmless enough.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?” Dtui asked.

  “Ooh, I don’t know. A few weeks? Three perhaps?”

  Siri recalled the worms and the scent of wet earth. “Do you have any catacombs here, son?” he asked.

  The soccer monk laughed. “We flood here every wet season, uncle. If there were chambers down below they’d be mud by now. That’s why they started to put in the pipes.”

  “Pipes?” Siri perked up at the mention. “Where do they run?”

  “They don’t, uncle. They were supposed to drain out the rainwater. The temple grounds are half a metre lower than the streets in front and back. In the monsoons it’s like living in a rice paddy. They were going to lay the pipes from here all the way down to the river, but the project was put on hold when the new people took over.”

  “How far did they get?” Civilai asked.

  “I don’t know. About seven metres? They dug the trench, put in the pipes, then didn’t come back. We had to fill in the trench ourselves. They didn’t even make it as far as the road.”

  “Are there drains?” Siri asked.

  “They didn’t get around to putting any in.”

  “So there’s no way down?”

  “Wouldn’t make any difference if there was.”

  “Why not?”

  “The pipe’s only twenty centimetres in diameter.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” Siri was annoyed.

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “The good news,” Dtui said, “is that we won’t have to go burrowing around underground. Heaven knows how much we all enjoy that.”

  The three of them were sitting on one of the concrete benches donated to the temple by a follower who had long since fled. A fearful monkey king watched over them. They were shaded by a mango tree but it was still painfully hot. Dtui fanned herself with a handful of calling cards from her purse.

  “The bad news,” Civilai continued, “is that we aren’t any closer to finding poor Rajid. Everything here’s above ground. Looks like your premonition was a false alarm, little brother.”

  “I don’t believe that.” Siri shook his head. “There was all that paraphernalia. He had to get that from somewhere.”

  “It could have been any one of fifty temples in a five-kilometre radius.”

  “But this one matches: the pregnant woman, the age of the pots. We know he was nosing around underground.”

  “But certainly not here,” Civilai decided.

  “It must be the pipes,” Siri said. “They must be bigger than the monk remembers them.”

  “Look” – Civilai put his hand on Siri’s shoulder – “we aren’t likely to bring spades and dig up the entire temple grounds, are we now? Why don’t we go together to the Iand Department on Monday morning and see if they have a record of any tunnels or underground chambers around here.”

  “Monday’s too late.”

  “Well, you were wrong about Si Muang Temple; perhaps you’re wrong about his dying too.”

  Siri bit his lip.

  “I think we should all go home and have a nice rest,” said Dtui. “I’m sure the solution will come to us in a flash after a little sleep.” She put her hand on her belly. “I feel like I’m carrying the entire politburo around, and they’re starting to give me indigestion.”

  “You’re right.” Siri nodded. “I apologize for my over-enthusiasm. Let’s go back – ”

  “Good.”

  “After one quick circuit of the temple.” Siri stood. “Nurse, you may stay here on this shady bench and wait for us. If you feel a birth coming on, just scream and we’ll come running.”

  After probing around the gardens and the monks’ quarters, and a very thorough search of the old Khmer ruins, Siri and Civilai stood on the shady side of the stupa. Apart from one poorly renovated patch halfway up, the chedi was a sad structure. The Thais would have cemented it over and painted it gold long ago but here it stood like a stack of charred rusks. To their right a concrete lion sat obediently on a plinth, and s
leeping in its shade was Saloop.

  “This is the place. He has to be here somewhere,” Siri said. “We can’t – ”

  He was interrupted by a woman’s scream.

  “Somebody sounds distressed,” Civilai decided.

  Another scream.

  “If I didn’t know better,” Siri smiled, “I’d say that was our own Nurse Dtui having a little fun with us.”

  The third scream was straight out of Bride of Frankenstein, and it didn’t end.

  Phosy, Siri, and Civilai paced up and down in front of the maternity theatre at Mahosot like three expectant fathers. In front, in this case, meant under the stars and beneath the electric bulb that burned over the door. A cloud of flying ants competed with them for space and forced the men back whenever they dared step forward to listen at the door. The short-lived and very annoying creatures usually appeared as a result of sudden rainstorms, but there hadn’t been a drop since November. Civilai put it down to the fact that Dtui’s water had broken with such force, the insect kingdom had interpreted it as the coming of the monsoons. Dtui hadn’t been in the mood to see the funny side of that. Whatever the reason, the theatre had been forced to close its doors and shutters to keep the insects out.

  “You were supposed to be a doctor,” Phosy said angrily.

  Siri raised his eyebrows. “And when did I cease to be?”

  “There you were, forcing her to work and having her traipse around hot temples on the day she was giving birth to our baby.”

  “Phosy, these things are unpredictable. The baby doesn’t have a wall calendar in there. She comes when she’s ready. She just happened to be ready a few weeks before we were expecting her. It happens.”

  Phosy seemed to be enjoying his bad mood.

  “Why does everyone keep assuming the baby’s a girl?” he asked.

  “Auntie Bpoo, the fortune-teller, told us,” Siri smiled.