Six and a Half Deadly Sins

by Colin Cotterill

  “Hmm, you won’t get much luck there,” said Inthanet.

  “Why not?”

  “You haven’t heard what happened?”

  “No.”

  “He’s out of Justice. They’ve got him running a training course at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs pending an inquiry.”

  “What did he do?” asked Daeng. “He was head of Public Prosecution last time I saw him.”

  “There were rumors,” said Inthanet.

  “About what?”

  “Suggestions he had a stable of young women cached around Vientiane.”

  “Well, he does,” said Siri.

  “Turns out he beat some of them up, and they went to the Women’s Union. They put pressure on Justice to investigate. Justice had no choice but to move him to an inactive post.”

  “Who’s he training?” asked Daeng.

  “Domestic staff.”

  Siri and Daeng both laughed. The silent woman’s eyes twinkled.

  “What on earth does Haeng know about domestic service?” asked Siri. “And what’s it got to do with Foreign Affairs?”

  “It’s a spy school,” said Inthanet. “Anyone working for foreigners in Vientiane has to attend. All the maids, the gardeners, the cooks—they’re all highly trained undercover operatives.”

  “Nonsense,” said Siri.

  “All right, perhaps they don’t get down to the microcameras and the phone bugging and the James Bond level of spying, but they do have classes on eavesdropping and personal document browsing. They have to file a weekly report on all visitors to the house, car registrations, names.”

  “Good grief,” said Siri. “What has our world come to? How do you know all this?”

  “My fiancée,” said Inthanet. “She’s a cook. She’s had to take the course to get her license.”

  “I thought your fiancée was a basket weaver,” said Daeng.

  “No, that was my previous fiancée. This is a more serious engagement.”

  “You do know you don’t have to propose to every woman you go out with?”

  “Madame Daeng, you’d be surprised how grateful women can be when a man even mentions marriage. They develop an ability to see beyond his flaccid muscles and wrinkled demeanor.”

  “You’re a dirty old man, Comrade Inthanet.”

  The dirty old man smiled at the silent woman, who smiled back briefly.

  “We have to rescue Judge Haeng,” said Siri. “Get him back at Justice where he belongs.”

  “He’s a woman beater,” Daeng reminded him.

  “He has flaws,” said Siri, “but I don’t see him beating anyone up, do you? He might hire someone else to do it, but he wouldn’t get his own hands bloody.”

  “Am I right in thinking this new campaign has little to do with your respect for the judge and the pursuance of fair play?” asked Daeng.

  “You’re absolutely right, Daeng. We have to get ourselves to Luang Nam Tha, and he’s the man who can get us there.”

  The next day, Siri rode the old Pigeon bicycle along a dusty lane to the Lao Women’s Union. Ugly the dog trotted beside. The low grey building lay shrouded in well-cared-for vegetation. The fine weather that had begun sometime around August was now into its sixth month. This was something of a disappointment to the government. The floods and droughts of the previous three years had provided timely excuses for things going wrong. Now the only disasters were those they created themselves. Currently, as an excuse for the shortages around Vientiane, the authorities were blaming the Cambodian invasion and the humanitarian aid Laos was pumping into that country. In fact, their one-off aid package came to a paltry million dollars, and that had been borrowed from Vietnam. The markets were empty because the farmers had stopped producing more than they needed to survive.

  The cool, sunny days of January were kind to the garden. In spite of the Party directive that all available space should be planted with vegetables and fruit, the Auntie’s Tendon, the Pulling-Down Elephant and the Farting Spirit flowers all vied for prominence in the front yard; the Maiden’s Breasts were resplendent in their yellow tassels. Clearly, the women of the union were aware that in hard times, the sight of a beautiful garden had a most energizing effect. Siri took some time to sniff on his way into the reception area.

  “Hello, Dr. Siri,” said the happy, hoppy young woman who came to meet him. She bounced from foot to foot and held out her hand. Handshakes had entered Laos with the French and been consolidated by Communism, but this new phenomenon of women offering their hand was hard for an old man to get used to. He never knew what to do with it. He tickled her fingertips.

  “Hello, Boun,” he said. “Is your boss in?”

  “She’s in a meeting,” said the girl.

  “You know, if this country just allowed a couple of hours between meetings, we might actually have time to achieve something.”

  “Are you still whinging, Dr. Siri?” came a voice from behind him.

  He turned to see Dr. Porn heading a small posse of women out of the meeting room. As always, she looked neat but flustered. Sweat glistened on her hairless brow.

  “Still no luck with the eyebrows?” Siri smiled.

  “I was thinking of starting steroid injections,” she said. “But I couldn’t picture myself with a beard. Get in here.”

  She took his arm and led him into her office. There was no door. For the next fifteen minutes, over a cup of tea, she told him all the details of Judge Haeng’s violent attacks on two young women. The evidence against the judge was overwhelming. He had arrived at their rooms in the dark while they were sleeping. He had spoken to them; then, with no provocation, he had beaten them. She showed him the photographs they’d taken of the two victims. Two days after the attack, the bruises were still prominent.

  “What did the judge say?” Siri asked.

  “He’s denied it, of course. Said he’d been set up.”

  “Did the girls say he’d done anything like this before?”

  “No. It appeared to be one insane night of frenzied violence. We weren’t in a position to have him tested for drugs or alcohol, but all the indications are that he was high on something.”

  Siri shook his head.

  Siri rode his old Pigeon over the hill to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Ugly the dog continued to trot happily beside him. The day ran hot and cool in spasms as the air currents wrestled for dominance in the dusty city. The sun glided from cloud to cloud, and some flocks of birds headed south while others headed north. These were uncertain times.

  The guard at the ungated entrance to the ministry was overweight. Siri recalled a health department memo circulated during his first year in Vientiane. It suggested that overweight people were not to be trusted. They symbolized overindulgence, a lamentable capitalist trait. To the doctor’s mind, the young man in unmatching fatigues was more a symbol of a glandular disorder and intolerance.

  The guard yelled at Siri. “Hey, you! You can’t leave that bicycle propped up against the gatepost like that. And where do you think you’re going with that mangy dog? You’re not entering this building with that thing.”

  It was a bold effort from an unarmed man whose inner thighs rubbed together as he walked, but Siri and Ugly ignored him. The guard took a step toward them, and Ugly snarled. The guard took a step back. “I’ll be reporting this,” he shouted.

  Siri nodded.

  The class for domestics was being conducted out of a bunker-like room to one side of the dirty two-story ministry. There was a small glassless window on either side of the doorway, and both shutters and the door were thrown open as if gasping for air. Some forty servants of assorted ages, sizes and genders were squashed onto small benches behind squat desks. Each person held a pencil over a sheet of paper, but nobody was writing, and as far as Siri could see, the papers were untouched. Judge Haeng wore a grey safari shirt with darker grey sweat circles at the armpits, and he had violently inflamed acne around the gills. He was attempting to teach the art of gleaning relevant informa
tion from householders who spoke in foreign languages. This lesson might have been effective in French, as there were ex-nannies of French children still in domestic service. It might have even worked in English for the ex-employees of the Americans at Kilometer Six. But the vast majority of foreign experts now were from the Soviet Bloc, some two thousand Russians, and the Soviets, anxious to hang on to their humble per diems, were reluctant to take on local staff. And those who did, like the ambassador and the head of the cultural center, found themselves speaking French or English when dealing with servants. So to Siri, the listening comprehension exercise—a chalk sentence written in Russian, and transcribed and translated in Lao, WE ARE PLANNING TO OVERTHROW THE LAO GOVERNMENT—was somewhat overambitious.

  Siri and Ugly sat at a bench outside the classroom and enjoyed another twenty minutes of Judge Haeng’s suffering.

  “Serves him right,” came a voice from inside Siri’s head. Only Siri could hear it. Very few living people shared the secrets of the comings and goings between his ears. It was all a little complicated. Dr. Siri, you see, was a carrier. His chief passenger was Yeh Ming, a thousand-year-old Hmong shaman. Yeh Ming had made a number of dangerous enemies in the spirit world and was currently holed up inside the doctor. He made no comments at all, and Siri had no direct contact with him, but those with abilities could sense the shaman’s spirit. Then there were several personal ghosts, like the mother he couldn’t remember and his ex-dog. And somewhere off in the distance, there were the hushed breaths of several thousand troubled Khmer who’d stowed away when he left Cambodia.

  But now, as if the afterlife wasn’t crowded enough, he heard the voice of Auntie Bpoo, the transvestite fortune teller. She’d died a few months earlier and stepped rudely into his subconscious. He’d hoped she might act as a guide to make sense of all the madness in his head, but although he could hear her voice, they had yet to hit on a two-way method of communication. It was as if someone had left the microphone on and the background noise was constantly audible. Every now and then Bpoo would step up to the mike and make a comment such as, “Serves him right.” Siri still believed everything was learnable, but for now he had to live with dead people in his head and no control whatsoever over when or how they communicated with him.

  Finally, the judge dismissed the students with the motto, “A good socialist is like a motorcar. At the pump of life, he is filled with valuable information which he uses to complete his journey. And any information that is contradictory or anticommunist he allows to blow out of his exhaust pipe.” The students fled like a group stirred by an air-raid siren. Siri walked into the classroom to find the judge seated at the teacher’s table with his head cupped in his hands. He may have been crying.

  “Developed a soft spot for any of your housemaids yet?” Siri asked.

  The judge looked up with the expression of a drowning man now handed a heavy rock. “Siri,” he said, and buried his face back into his hands.

  “You have very nice handwriting,” said Siri. It was probably the first compliment he had ever paid the judge. Undoubtedly the last.

  “What do you want?” the judge asked through his fingers.

  “My wife and I would like to go to Luang Nam Tha.”

  The judge looked up again and laughed. “Siri, do you not see where I am?”

  “I see it.”

  “Then?”

  “I can get you out.”

  “If I, as the head of Public Prosecution, can’t get myself out, how could somebody like you expect to?”

  “Well, Judge, you have to remember that I am much cannier than you. I thought you would have learned that by now. All we need is an agreement. I get you back in your old job, and you send Daeng and me up north.”

  The judge drummed his overly long fingernails on the desktop. He looked beyond Siri as if addressing someone standing at the back of the room. “Why would anyone want to go to Luang Nam Tha?” he asked.

  “Tourism. Is it a deal?”

  “There’s no possible way you—”

  “Is it a deal?”

  The judge selected a sarcastic smirk from his repertoire of annoying expressions. “If by some miracle you were able to re-establish me in my previous position, yes. I give you my word.”

  “Good, but I don’t put much faith in your word, which is why I brought this.” Siri reached into his shoulder bag and produced a sheet of paper.

  “What is that?” the judge asked.

  “It’s a copy of a letter you wrote applying for immunity in the USA.”

  The judge turned the color of sand. “You told me you … You said you’d destroyed it.”

  “I did, didn’t I?” Siri smiled. “It would appear my word is no more tangible than yours.”

  “Siri, you have to know this. I was framed,” said the judge with a sincere expression on his insincere face.

  “You mean the women set themselves up in love nests around the town and coerced you to sleep with them?”

  “No, look. I might have done that.”

  “Might have?”

  “All right. Yes. I did it. Come on, Siri. You’re a man. You know what it’s like. It’s hard to turn down some of these girls. I am, after all, very attractive.”

  Siri was surprised the man had been able to say that with a straight yet pockmarked face.

  “And I’m single,” the judge continued. “Single men have liaisons. It’s nature’s calling card. All the species do it.”

  “Not too many tortoises use government-allocated housing with box-spring mattresses smuggled in from Thailand,” said Siri, citing information Auntie Bpoo had passed along before she passed away. As well as being a very effective psychic, the old transvestite had been inordinately nosy. The temptation to rummage through the minds of important people had proved irresistible to her.

  “How do …?”

  “I have sources.”

  “Siri, I merely found accommodation for a few poor homeless girls. The rooms were empty. With all the red tape, it takes a year, sometimes two, to match families with appropriate accommodation. And all that time the places remain vacant. I was merely utilizing resources. Our President encouraged us to do so. A good socialist can—”

  “Don’t.”

  “I swear I did not lay a hand on those women … in a violent way.”

  “Then why would they claim you had? And two of them, no less.”

  “I really don’t understand it. One of them I hadn’t seen for a month, and suddenly she arrives at the Women’s Union with bruises.”

  Siri, it must be remembered, had no positive feelings toward Judge Haeng. There had been no bonding between them on any level. From experience he knew that the judge was a cheat and a liar. But he wasn’t a particularly good one, and this current routine would have been far beyond the little man’s acting ability. But what would the girls have to gain by inventing such a story? With the judge ousted from his position or, worse, incarcerated, their small comparatively luxurious lifestyles would dissolve. They’d be back in the fields.

  Siri took down the addresses of the judge’s concubines and said he would pay them a visit.

  2

  The Chicken Autopsy

  On the next leg of his Vientiane bicycle tour, Siri leaned the Pigeon against a recently decapitated tree in front of the Mahosot morgue. Several other trees had been similarly butchered in his absence, yet the grounds remained neglected and sad. Grass grew on the footpaths but not on the old lawn. Weeds had taken over the flower beds. The laboratory goats who reluctantly donated their blood once a week in the interests of medical science looked gaunt and in need of transfusions themselves.

  Siri and Ugly wiped their feet on a new plastic mat that had replaced Siri’s old “Welcome” rug and walked inside. The morgue felt devoid of life. Mr. Geung was no longer there. The morgue assistant during Siri’s entire tenure had been a man blessed with the innocence of Down syndrome. For many years he had swept and dusted the building, changed the broken louvers and the burned-
out lightbulbs. But with Siri’s retirement, Mr. Geung had been removed from hospital service. Until the blaze, he had worked at Daeng’s restaurant. Then, twice unemployed, he had headed off to the village of his fiancée, Tukta, to spend time on her family farm—now part of one more disastrous cooperative.

  The morgue was largely unused these days, but Siri had arranged to meet Nurse Dtui for a little nostalgic slab work. Dtui had been the third member of his highly successful team. Together they had solved cases that had left the police baffled. They’d received no official kudos for their work, but 1978 Laos wasn’t known for its compliments.

  Siri entered the cutting room to discover Dtui hacking away at a plucked chicken with a number-seven cleaver. Her large frame rocked back and forth to an unheard rhythm. Her daughter, Malee, lay in a hammock suspended between the freezer door and a concrete pillar.

  Siri stood beside Dtui and admired her work. “Accident?” he asked.

  “Murder,” said Dtui. “A wrung neck. See the ecchymosis to the clavicle and the lateral neck abrasions and bruising?”

  “Do you have enough forensic evidence to put the killer away?”

  “No need. It was me. I confess.”

  “Motive?”

  “Dinner.”

  “Fair enough. I don’t suppose you’d let me make a Y incision just for old times’ sake?”

  “Are you bored, Doc?”

  “To death. How are classes going at the old Lido?”

  “Excruciating. Nursing students so young and so countrified, they still giggle whenever I refer to sexual organs. ‘Penis’ brings the house down. And the ministry hasn’t paid us teachers since October. They must think I’m there for the fun of it. This was the last chicken standing. We’re on yams and dirt when this is gone. Phosy’s police pig bank dried up at the end of last year, so no pork. The markets are empty. The farmers are so against all that cooperative nonsense, they’ve stopped breeding. I mean, the animals. Not amongst themselves.”

  “I gathered that.”