The Merry Misogynist

by Colin Cotterill

  Siri blushed and headed out into the sunshine.

  It was a little past one thirty when Siri arrived at Justice. One hour and fifteen minutes past, to be exact. His visit to police headquarters had taken longer than he’d anticipated. Manivone hurried him along the corridor.

  “He’s spewing fire, Doctor,” she said, scurrying ahead. “I swear if he knew which end of a gun was forward, he’d shoot you.”

  “What did I do?”

  “He was expecting you over an hour ago.”

  “I was expecting a comfortable retirement on full pay. You don’t always get what you expect on this planet, Comrade Manivone.”

  “Well, I don’t think he’ll buy an argument like that right now. If you don’t want a lecture, you’re going to have to come up with a good excuse.”

  Siri briefly considered using “Mr. Geung ate my note,” but settled on an excuse that better suited his personality. Manivone knocked on the judge’s door and said, “Judge, Dr. Siri is here.”

  She stepped back to let the doctor go past her only to find him gone. She went outside and looked around but saw neither head nor hair of him.

  “I’m sorry, Judge,” she said. “He was right beside me. Honestly.”

  The judge was too enraged to speak. The pencil snapped between his fingers and half of it jumped up and hit him in the eye. He couldn’t even get ire right. A minute later Manivone returned, this time pushing Siri in front of her. She heaved him into the room and closed the door behind him.

  It only took Siri a few seconds to take in the scene and understand the reason for his summons. Judge Haeng and Vietnamese adviser Phat were sitting at their respective desks. But to one side, seated on the sticky vinyl guest sofa, were three upright gentlemen in gray, pale blue, and brown safari suits respectively. In front of them on the slightly inclining coffee table were several used cups and glasses, hard evidence of the amount of time they’d been there waiting for him. Siri recognized one of the men, Comrade Koomki from Housing.

  Comrade Phat performed an “I did my best” shrug and grinned at the papers in front of him.

  “Siri,” said Haeng in a much deeper voice than Siri had ever heard him use, “where the hell have you been?”

  “To the toilet,” Siri answered honestly. As was custom, he went along the line of sofa sitters and shook their hands. Though his own hand was damp, they had no choice but to respond.

  “For two hours?” Haeng yelled at Siri’s back.

  “No, just now. I was taken short and happened to pass the WC, so I …”

  “I called you here for one thirty.”

  “Right. I had something more important to do.”

  “You … ?” The judge looked and half smiled at the visitors. “These comrades have been here since 1:15.”

  “They refused to leave until you got here,” said the Vietnamese with the slightest of smiles penciled across the bottom of his face.

  “It’s good to see there’s one government department with sufficient time on its hands that it can waste it doing nothing,” Siri said and sat in front of Haeng’s desk. “Not many of us have that luxury.”

  “Siri, this is a serious matter,” growled the judge. “Comrade Koomki here is accusing you of—”

  “I know what he’s accusing me of: charity and kindness. Goodness knows we don’t want any of that kind of behavior in the new republic.”

  “Judge Haeng,” said the little man, “if I may.”

  “Go ahead,” said the judge.

  “Although we have reservations as to the type of person staying at Dr. Siri’s house,” Koomki began, “that is not the matter at hand. We have evidential proof that you, Dr. Siri Paiboun, are not resident at government housing unit 22B742.”

  “Let’s see it,” said Siri.

  Koomki stood and walked to Haeng’s desk. He carried a large gray envelope.

  “My colleagues and I performed five days of surveillance on both unit 22B742 and the commercial property on Fa Ngum Street owned by the doctor’s wife, Madame Daeng.”

  “Good grief,” said Siri, slumping back in the chair. “We have foreigners stealing great chunks of our ancient temple at Wat Poo because the government can’t spring for a couple of guards to look after it, and here we have three grade-two public officials spending a week watching a noodle shop? Surely our nation has better ways to harness your rapacious enthusiasm?”

  “Firstly, I am a grade-three official,” said Koomki. “And secondly, on the contrary, I consider the honesty and transparency of the actions of our high-ranking officials to be a priority in these troubled times.”

  “Really? Then let’s bring in an opposition party,” Siri hissed. “That’ll straighten all of us out.”

  “Siri,” Judge Haeng interrupted, “can we just see what evidence the comrade has, please?”

  “Judge, surely you can’t—?”

  “Siri! Thank you.”

  Siri held up his hands in submission, and the small man sneered. He produced a wad of documents from the envelope and fanned them back and forth.

  “Your Honor, here …”

  “You aren’t in court, Comrade,” Haeng said. “‘Judge’ will be sufficient.”

  “Yes, Comrade.” Koomki nodded. “Here we have five days of surveillance records. They clearly show that Dr. Siri was not at unit 22B742 for that period but was unlawfully residing at his wife’s shop.”

  “For the entire time?” Haeng asked.

  “What?”

  “Was Dr. Siri at his wife’s establishment for the entire period of the surveillance?”

  “Yes, well, no. There were some gaps.”

  “How many?”

  “Three. Either we saw him leave but not arrive, or vice versa.”

  “Three out of five?” The judge raised his eyebrows. “Not a very impressive statistic.”

  Siri looked up in surprise.

  “He probably slipped in through the back,” Koomki said with confidence.

  “I’m a judge, Comrade. I don’t deal with probabilities, only evidence.”

  Siri turned to Phat, who was buried in his work.

  “Do you have proof that it was actually Dr. Siri your man saw at the noodle shop?” Haeng asked.

  “Yes, Judge. We have a photograph of him sneaking in at night. Our camera has a gadget that records the date and time.”

  “Which is adjustable?”

  “Yes, Judge.”

  “Meaning you can change the time and date at will.”

  Siri leaned forward to make sure the judge hadn’t been replaced while nobody was looking.

  “Well, technically.” Koomki was getting flustered. “But of course we wouldn’t falsify evidence.”

  “Of course not. Show me the picture.”

  Koomki handed him a large colored zoom shot. In it, a short brown-faced man in goggles and a backward-facing baseball cap was being allowed entrance to the shop by Madame Daeng. Not even Siri could recognize himself.

  “And who is this man?” Haeng asked.

  “Why, it’s Dr. Siri.”

  “All I see is a dark-skinned person with glasses.”

  “They’re goggles, Judge. He’d just arrived on his motorcycle.”

  “Which doesn’t appear in the photograph. Nor does the street address of the shop.” Haeng was at his most belligerent, and Siri had a sudden urge to lean over the desk and kiss him on the nose.

  “The fact remains—,” Koomki attempted.

  “The fact remains,” Haeng interrupted, “that you haven’t a shred of evidence that would stand up in any court in the land. I’m offended that you even brought this matter before me. Where was your man stationed at unit 22B … whatever?”

  “The tree opposite,” called the man in question.

  “Then, Dr. Siri, can you give me a good reason why this man might not have seen you leave or arrive at your house?”

  Siri took the judge’s lead.

  “Certainly.” He thought for a moment. Haeng tapped his half
pencil on the desk. “I park my motorcycle in the unfinished project behind my house and leave and enter through the hole in the back fence. That way I don’t wake up the children when I arrive late.”

  “There you have it,” said Haeng.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” said Koomki.

  Judge Haeng stood and put one knuckle on the desk. “What doesn’t make any sense,” he said, “is you petty bureaucrats with your silly rules wasting the time of hardworking forty-year members of the Communist Party. I’ve humored you, looked at your evidence, and it is ridiculous. I’d like you to go back to your department and reevaluate your roles in our society. Remember …”

  “Motto time,” thought Siri.

  “ … the washerwoman takes her laundry to the line and shakes out the creases before hanging out the clothes. Does she look around for those shaken-out creases when she’s finished? No. A good Party member understands that not everything has an explanation and knows when to give up. I would like you to deliberate on that thought on your way out, Comrades. Good afternoon.”

  The laughter was raucous enough for the nurse to come in from the next ward and tell them not to get Comrade Rajid too excited. He was still weak, she told them, but she couldn’t help noticing a broad smile on his face. Two of the three beds in the dingy Mahosot ward were unoccupied. The third was surrounded by people on plastic stools. There was Mr. Tickoo, whose sleeping bag was rolled up beneath his son’s bed, then Siri, Dtui, with Malee at her breast; Civilai, Geung, and Phosy. They’d just heard Siri’s rendition of the previous day’s meeting at Justice.

  “See?” said Dtui. “Judge Haeng’s secretly liked you all along.”

  “I was beginning to think so,” Siri agreed. “He let me thank him a few times, accepted my gratitude humbly, then limped out leaning on his cane. But it was soon explained to me what was going on. You’ll recall, I’d enlisted the aid of the Vietnamese adviser to help me overcome Housing. It turned out he had access to information that not many others knew. It transpires, for example, that Judge Haeng as a government employee has housing allocated to him. But recently, the honorable judge completed the building of a very fine two-story villa on the way to Dong Dok Institute. It was rumored that a certain young lady chanteuse at the Anou Hotel is currently residing in his official residence in town. Comrade Phat, as an adviser, merely pointed out to Haeng what an unfortunate precedent it would set to allow Housing to successfully evict the lodgers at my bungalow and sully my name. Haeng obviously agreed.”

  They laughed again.

  “Darn it,” said Civilai. “And here I was thinking the tin man had found his heart.”

  “And here I am thinking it’s time to shake out the creases from Rajid’s sheets and let him get some rest,” Dtui announced with a laugh. She stood with her baby and let everyone have a little hand squeeze and cheek sniff of Malee before stepping out. Geung followed her. Mr. Tickoo stacked the stools and bowed a goodbye to his son’s guests.

  Phosy cornered Siri and Civilai and told them he wanted a word with them. They went to the canteen and ordered three glasses of Mahosot coffee, a gooey brew rumored to have polished off a number of patients who might have pulled through otherwise. They sat by an open window where the scent from the hairy jasmine bushes overwhelmed the general antiseptic atmosphere of the hospital. A fan above their heads kept off the evening mosquitoes.

  “All right, boys. Here’s the latest,” Phosy said. “First, we’ve had no luck at all with the ministries, the Central Committee, or any of the aid programs. No projects planned or executed in or around Vang Vieng on the dates our villain was there.”

  “Damn,” said Siri.

  “Doctor, as soon as I got your information yesterday, I contacted the police station in Pakse. It’s one of the few places you can get a phone call through to these days. They’re a bit behind in submitting their case ledgers. They still had the last two years’ books down there. I thought it might take a few days for them to go through them, but one of the officers remembered a complaint filed by the parents of a missing girl. It rang a bell with the sergeant when I mentioned the logging concession incident.”

  “I know the officers in Pakse,” said Siri. “There wasn’t a lot of bell ringing going on down there.”

  “I imagine the complaint wouldn’t have been remembered, and perhaps not even filed at all, if it hadn’t been for the peculiar events that surrounded it,” Phosy continued. “The mother was still upset about what happened, or almost happened, to her daughter at the concession. The girl had promised solemnly that she’d phone her at the Bureau de Poste on a certain day at a certain time. The mother and father traveled overnight to be there. She didn’t call. The parents waited there for five hours. They tried to get through to the Vientiane number the groom had given them for emergencies but the post office clerk told them there was no such code. That’s when they went to file with the police.

  “It was while they were telling their story that the sergeant tied it together with another case being looked into. And this sounds very much like our villain. There’d been a complaint about a false laissez-passer. You both know how it works—when you travel between provinces you have to report at a police box.”

  “Do they take down license plate numbers?” Siri asked excitedly.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Typical. Something that might have been useful …”

  “There are army barricades that take down plate numbers, but they tend to ignore anything that isn’t privately owned. We’re checking with the military posts down there anyway. All they do at the migration checkpoints is slowly and painfully copy down all the information on the laissez-passer and write the date in an exercise book. That information goes to the central registry in Pakse, where somebody else copies it out of the exercise book and into a bigger book—”

  “So on ad infinitum,” said Civilai.

  “Well, it turns out that the registrar who noted the information was out drinking one night with a couple of mates from the Champasak Forestry Department—”

  “Which I believe is now officially known as the Champasak Deforestry Department,” Civilai cut in again.

  “Are you going to let me finish, Comrade?”

  “Sorry.”

  “He told his drinking friends that he’d noticed Forestry had a bigwig from Vientiane in town. They said they hadn’t heard about it. They mentioned it to their regional boss, and he confirmed there weren’t any visitors from anywhere around the date noted in the book, hence the fake laissez-passer complaint. After further investigation they found that the impostor had checked out of the province at the same checkpoint two days later. Don’t forget it takes a while for the checkpoint information to reach the city. These were exactly the dates the parents of the missing girl claimed her suitor was in town. He was calling himself Khamphan this time, by the way. There aren’t that many nonmilitary strangers hanging around so the Pakse police put two and two together.”

  “Brilliant,” Siri said. “And what did they do about it?”

  “Nothing,” Phosy confessed. He stirred the coffee and condensed milk together in the glass. It was barely liquid. “They thought it was just a lover’s tryst, that the fellow faked the pass so that he could marry his fiancée. They didn’t see it as very important.”

  “That’s more like the police force we know and love,” Siri decided. “So the story ends there?”

  “Yes. We’re gathering information about any ongoing projects within a day’s drive of Attapeu town over that period. We’re going back to all the same ministries. You see, Phan told the parents he was heading north to Vientiane on the night of the wedding. But he didn’t cross the northern border. He crossed back into Attapeu. He’d told the parents he’d arranged a laissez-passer for his new bride but there was no mention of her in the ledger at the police checkpoint.”

  Civilai whistled. “So he killed her in Champasak because it was easier than getting her across the border.”

 
“Either that or he just snuck her across after dark when the police were partying or fast asleep. He could have bribed his way through the barrier with her.”

  “I’d go with the first theory myself,” said Siri.

  “Me too,” Phosy agreed.

  Despite its heat, Siri cradled his glass between his palms, putting off the drinking for as long as possible.

  “So,” he said, “what we have here is a nasty piece of work who’s traveling around the country on some official business. It’s work that involves returning after two weeks to—I don’t know—to follow up or something. He has influence because he’s able to falsify documents that pass cursory inspection. He has a truck, which suggests he’s at least the head of a section or department.”

  “With a very generous gas allowance, judging from all the traveling he’s been doing,” Phosy added.

  “Quite. So it’s a project that’s far more important than the usual road measuring or rice testing—‘Let’s look like we’ve actually done something’—mission. He goes out to the countryside some way from his actual project site and assumes a false identity. He woos a country girl, takes advantage of her naïveté, and she falls in love with him. He promises to come back and marry her. Two weeks later he’s in the village bamboozling everyone with all the paperwork he’s put together. He convinces them he’s registered the marriage and arranged travel documents, and he whisks her off on their wedding night.”

  “To a honeymoon in hell.” Civilai sighed.

  “You aren’t wrong, brother.”

  “Then why would somebody so smart be so sloppy?” Civilai asked.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, he was clever enough to fool the regional cadres, and parents and village elders, and then he left the bodies no more than twenty meters from a main road where anyone might stumble across them.”

  “I think that’s the point,” said Phosy. “He wants the bodies to be found.”

  “Exactly,” Siri agreed. “It completes the humiliation of the women.”

  “Who is he, Doctor?” Phosy asked. “I mean what’s going on in his head? What are we looking for exactly?”

  Siri stood his spoon in his coffee and let it go. It didn’t fall to the edge, just stood there, trapped.