Six and a Half Deadly Sins

by Colin Cotterill

  Siri saw Ugly’s ears prick up and eyes spring open. He looked at the body and the monk, and at first, he saw nothing. But then he witnessed something quite bizarre. The monk was checking for a pulse.

  “This one,” he shouted.

  The hand protruding from the shroud grabbed the wrist of the monk. The four guests of honor leapt from their chairs, each drawing weapons from beneath their baggy white shirts. The mourners gasped and ran for cover as Comrade Inthanet the puppet master—posing as the corpse—pulled the shroud from his body, pointed and shouted, “Aha!” All eyes turned to the lead monk, who froze for a few seconds, the cup still in his hand. Then he and his fellows reached for the hems of their robes. They were packing too.

  Now, anyone who’s ever engaged a monk in a gunfight will know a saffron body cloth does not lend itself to a fast draw. Only one was able to retrieve his Colt 45 in time, but before he could aim it, Nurse Dtui was on him, and he was flat on his back on the floor. Mourners charged the other monks. Mr. Geung dived at the ankles of the largest and brought him down. The residents of Siri’s house soon had the younger of the monastic group bound. Only the elder monk still stood.

  Comrade Noo, the Thai forest monk, arrived with a six-meter bamboo ladder and ran it up to the roof beams directly above the funeral table. A plywood partition that had been designed to look like a part of the ceiling structure was pulled aside, and to the amazement of everyone not involved in the subterfuge, Dr. Siri crawled out and began climbing down the ladder.

  The elderly monk screamed and spat and swore and used all his strength to get away. But Daeng had a firm grip of his wrists behind his back, and of course, the old monk was not a man. The Lizard had reached that age when time sucks back one’s skin to leave an asexual skull. She was slight but had a masculine jaw and ravaged skin, and few people would have looked twice at an elderly monk to check his gender. She drew on all her strength to break free but she was running on nostalgia. There was a time that she could have overpowered a strong man, but she was old now and had nothing but vengeance to hold herself together.

  15

  Side Effects

  As, indirectly, the burning down of all his neighbors’ houses had been Siri’s fault, he agreed to rebuild the entire block. A relative in the refugee camp at Ban Vinai had died and left him a small fortune. The Lao administration had reached the stage where they preferred not to know where money came from, as long as it came. The officials at ministries whose duty it had been to trace the origins of donations and investments were now taking a small fee for not looking too closely. That Siri’s windfall had not been deposited in the Banque Pour Le Commerce Exterieur Lao was not a surprise, as putting money there was often like dropping ink into a pool and watching it dissolve.

  Dollars arrived from somewhere every week to pay the builders, and a good, solid row of shop houses was being erected opposite the river. The spying Thais with their high-powered binoculars could only look on in awe at the rate of development.

  Civilai too had seen a run of good fortune. He’d bought a Toyota truck in Thailand, which they’d floated across the river one night on a bamboo raft. The seller assured him it had belonged to a deputy governor who was killed in an accidental drive-by shooting. The official’s own gun was still in the glove compartment, a sort of free gift. They sat, the three of them on their recliners on the bank of the river, but for once, they were not watching the syrupy Mekhong wend its way south. Instead, they were admiring brickwork over a glass of Glenfiddich. Only Ugly had his back turned to the building site.

  “Do you suppose this is what capitalism feels like?” Civilai asked. He was twirling the Toyota key ring around his index finger.

  “I’d rather like to imagine capitalists have to contribute a little bit of labor before amassing their fortunes,” said Siri.

  “I labored for mine,” said Civilai.

  “Really? What did you do, exactly?”

  “I spent several days sitting in a jeep, the rear seat of which was packed with heroin. Given my propensity for hemorrhoids, that was a particularly painful endurance. Tell me the name of yours again.”

  “Schistosomiasis.”

  “I’ll never remember that. Doesn’t it have a friendly local name I can drop at cocktail receptions?”

  “Try ‘snail fever.’ ”

  “Snail fever? You almost died of snail fever? How embarrassing. How do you avoid it? Keeping your distance from French restaurants?”

  Siri and Daeng laughed. Daeng threw an ice cube at Civilai.

  “It doesn’t come from eating them,” said Siri. “They deposit parasites on your skin when you’re in the water. I probably picked it up that day we went to help the fisherwoman. It’s not that uncommon. You find it often in children.”

  “And you, a qualified doctor, couldn’t even diagnose your own snail fever?”

  “I’ve never had it before. It presents a bit like malaria, so I was confused. I’d associated the cold as a symptom, but it was totally unrelated. We’d all just picked up the flu in Vientiane. Having the two at the same time meant my body was less able to fight it off. The local tonics I was taking weren’t strong enough to cope. Snail fever’s quite treatable if you have access to the right medication.”

  “Unlike arsenic poisoning,” said Daeng.

  “Exactly. If I’d been directly exposed to that, I’d be dead and gone by now. It helped no end that the first pha sin was kept in the plastic bag all the time. It reduced our exposure to it.”

  “And there was your little mitten habit,” said Daeng.

  “Right. That helped too. I always use plastic gloves when I’m handling evidence. It’s a policy I’ve tried to ingrain in the idiots at police headquarters. But even with gloves I feel that if all the sins had been treated with Paris Green like the first one, the close proximity to them in my backpack would still have killed me. Of course we know now that it was only the original skirt that was treated. The Lizard had no idea about the treasure trail, nor did she know there was a finger hidden in the hem. She merely diverted the mail to see whether there was anything in there she could use against us. When she found the sin, she decided to bleach the bottom of it and redye it with Paris Green. She’s the type who’d have such things lying around. That was the bleach we found traces of on the finger.”

  “Why didn’t the finger turn green also?” Civilai asked.

  “The compound is more like a paint than a dye,” said Siri. “It didn’t penetrate the thick cloth completely. She’d probably have applied it with a brush. When it was dry, she washed off the residue, dried it and had it redelivered to our house. Then she sat back and waited for it to kill us. Of course it would have been far simpler for her to knock on the door and shoot us to death, but that isn’t her style. She needs people to know how clever she is.”

  “When did you first know about the poison?” asked Civilai.

  “In the letter Dtui sent with Madame Chanta,” said Siri. “The one I read to Daeng on my deathbed. That was the first I knew that the Lizard had survived and that she was out to get us.”

  “So that’s when I decided to kill my husband,” said Daeng. “The timing was perfect. He looked so awful.”

  “Thank you for sharing it with me there and then,” said Civilai.

  “We needed your reaction to be authentic,” said Daeng. “You are quite a horrible actor.”

  “Perhaps not as melodramatic as Mr. Geung at the temple the other day,” said Siri. “It was lucky he broke down before the monks arrived. They’d have known for sure it was a setup.”

  “We needed everyone at the Lu village to believe Siri was dead,” said Daeng. “We only shared the truth with you and Phosy later. That’s why we whisked the doctor away in the jeep so quickly. The Lizard has a network. She would have been able to trace back to see that Siri’s condition was getting worse as the trip progressed. She would have assumed it was the effects of the poison. And of course, it helped that she’d been expecting one of us to die.
But this was the Lizard. She’s taken deviousness to a new level. And she knew we were capable of matching her cunning. She would have found it impossible to resist checking for herself that Siri was gone. We were certain she’d be there at the funeral.”

  “And we’re certain she’s …?”

  “No doubt about it,” said Siri. “The military didn’t take any chances. They were embarrassed to have lost her the first time around. They marched her directly in front of the firing squad. There are photos. The commander asked me if I’d like a couple for the album. I declined.”

  The moon had started to rise behind the new rafters on the roof. Siri and Daeng walked Civilai to his truck. “Is this a bullet hole?” asked Daeng, twiddling her finger in a perfectly round puncture in the tailgate.

  “Air vent,” said Civilai.

  “And what’s next on Civilai’s shopping list?” asked Siri.

  “Ooh, I don’t know. I was thinking of doing a bit of Robin Hooding like yourself. Handing over wads of cash to those less blessed by the gods of illicit drugs. But then I decided it would only make them miserable. We have to keep the poor content with what they have. Wasn’t it Marx who said, ‘An increase in wages arouses in the worker the same desire to get rich as in the capitalist, but he can only satisfy this desire by sacrificing his mind and body’? I wouldn’t want to be responsible for that.”

  Siri laughed, slapped him on the back and said, “And wasn’t it Irving Berlin who told us, ‘The world would not be in such a snarl, had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl.’ ”

  There was no roof on their new shop, but what of it? The nights were star-studded, and the second floor of the new building was complete apart from walls and windows and floor tiles. There was a mattress at the top of a wooden ladder that would soon be a flight of stairs. It was house enough for them. Daeng climbed the ladder with a spring in her steps.

  Siri followed close behind. “So how are you feeling about it?”

  “I told you,” she said. “It’s perfect. I love my new legs.”

  It had been two weeks since Madame Daeng drank the voodoo woman’s concoction. Within a week, the ever-present aches had subdued. She could walk without a limp. She had turned her back on the opium.

  “I didn’t mean the arthritis,” he said. “I meant the … side effect.”

  “It’s … I don’t know. I suppose I’m getting used to it.”

  “Do you think it’s stopped growing?”

  “It seems to have. And to be honest, I could tolerate it being as long as a king cobra rather than spending the last of my years a slave to rheumatism. No. It could have been much worse. What if it were a horn?”

  “You’d have to wear a hat.”

  “A long pointed one.” She lay back and admired the stars. “You don’t mind it, do you?”

  “Not at all. In fact I find it rather erotic.”

  “Siri, you would find a tin tea kettle erotic.”

  “If you were wearing it, my love.”

  “Thank you.”

  They heard the frenzied scurry of Ugly chasing a water rat in the road below. Then silence.

  “And what of my affliction?” Siri asked.

  “Hardly noticeable.”

  “That’s good. Good night, Daeng.”

  “Good night, Siri.”

  She turned to kiss him good night.

  He wasn’t there.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With great thanks to Carol C, Sut, Grant, Robert, Leila, Bryan, Chantavon, Bounlan, Kathy R, Martin, Kyoko, Governor X, Micky M, Lizzie, Dad, Rachel, Tony, Tang, Bambina and David.

  In loving memory of Ethel Violet Victoria Cotterill, who never read these books but loved them still.

  And in dedication to Sombath Somphone, who we all hope will return from the phi bung bot and rematerialize someday.