The following year, amid the political upheaval, and with the Royalists scurrying across the Mekhong, the Miss Sangkhan beauty pageant had been cancelled. "Next year," she was told. "Next year everything will return to normal, and your daughter will take the Miss Sangkhan crown." But in some stuffy socialist meeting, a decision was made that beauty competitions were one more vestige of the decadent society the Party was trying to sweep out. The shows insulted women. They were cattle markets. They were demeaning. And so, all beauty pageants were banned immediately.
Ngam had reached her peak at sixteen. Few winners of the Miss Sangkhan crown had been older than seventeen. She was aging rapidly, and there was no indication that the Pathet Lao would change its mind. The world of Mongaew and her family had come crashing down. But there was hope that their daughter's beauty might still rescue them from poverty. In desperation, Mongaew started taking her girl to night-time wedding receptions in the district. Some evenings they'd walk for two hours to the house of the happy couple. Mongaew had decided that if Ngam was not to be the star she deserved to be, at least she would be married to a local man with influence. Perhaps the son of a cadre.
And one night, her revised prayer was answered. The man from Vientiane was so dashing. He was supervising a road project, staying with the headman, well mannered with a wonderful sense of humour. He was groomed and polite, and he had a truck, of all things. Mongaew fell in love with him at first sight. And, it was evident to everybody in attendance that night that the visitor had an eye for Ngam. Things seemed to happen so fast from there on. It was like a fairy tale played at three times its normal speed: an engagement, love letters from the capital, a brief return visit, a reception and, in the blink of an eye, their daughter was gone. All Mongaew had to do now was sit and wait for the cheques to arrive. But all she got was a coroner from Mahosot and news that her precious daughter was dead.
As Siri rode along the dirt highway, he couldn't get the thought of the charming stranger out of his head. Phan, the nickname of a hundred thousand: Sisouphan, Thongphan, Bouaphan, Houmphan, all whittled down to Phan. No address, no family name, no photographs. He came. He saw. He destroyed. Already Siri had the antagonist taped to the dartboard of his mind. At last, somebody to blame. Someone to hate. A small lead in the case. A family to claim a lost body. A very successful day, but not a happy one.
"You're late," Daeng told the cinnamon-coated man who'd arrived at her shop after dark. There was a bright flash from the vegetation across the street. They both looked up in time to see a man with an old-fashioned camera turn and run down the riverbank.
"I think someone just took a candid photograph of us," said Daeng.
"Pasason Lao newspaper doing a photographic feature on celebrity couples in Vientiane, I wouldn't wonder." Siri smiled.
"You're sure it wasn't the Department of Housing?"
"No, they're such nice people. Why would they go to so much trouble?" They walked hand in hand into the closed shop. "What time is it?"
"Nine."
"Too late for a palace hunt?"
"It's up to you. You look exhausted."
"You can't see how I look. I have a two-centimetre-thick layer of grime on me. A quick bath and I'll be fine. I could use some excitement."
"Have you eaten?"
"I wouldn't say no to a number two. I hope you sold enough noodles this week to pay for the cost of today's petrol."
"Can't you claim it on your expense account?"
"I'm a coroner playing policeman. Who's going to pay for that? Phosy was uncontactable in the north, so I took it upon myself. Nobody rewards individual initiative in this regime."
"Don't worry, my love. I'll support your intrigues even if I have to resort to selling my body." She kissed his dusty cheek. "As long as you tell me exactly what happened today, in gory detail."
"Accompany me to the bath, Madame Daeng, and I'll disclose everything."
The map was beautifully illustrated like a wayward doodle, but its intricacy made it hard to follow. The river was easy enough to identify as it was a long chain of tiny smiling fishes. The outline of Nam Poo Fountain was the easternmost point. The Kokpho turn-off, which ultimately led to the airport, was marked with an aeroplane. Daeng drove them about four hundred metres beyond the intersection and parked. There were still patches of forest on this stretch of the river, and it felt so remote it seemed impossible that there was a city just half a kilometre away.
"All right," Siri said, holding his torch up to the map. "There's something that looks like a snake drinking from the river."
"Hmm. You'd expect snakes to change location from time to time, unless it's a dead one."
"Or unless it's a pipe. Perhaps it's not drinking at all."
"An overflow?"
"It could be."
Siri waded through the tall lemongrass to the river's edge and waved his light up and downstream. There was no obvious plumbing. He was about to return to the road when he felt some kind of mound beneath his feet. It was more solid than the crunchy clay all around. He traced its path with his foot until he arrived at the mouth of a pipe.
"Any luck?" Daeng called out.
"More like divine inspiration. I was right on top of it. I'm at the serpent's jaws."
"Is it wide enough to crawl through?"
"Perhaps for an Indian fakir. Not for two old souls like us."
He returned to the bike and looked at the map once more.
"Then it's easy," said Daeng. "We follow the pipe at surface level."
They shone their lights across the road in the direction from which the pipe originated. There was nothing but bush. It was a long vacant lot between two empty houses. It seemed to be crammed with all the remaining monsoon forest in the country.
"How do we get through that?" Siri asked.
"Determination," Daeng replied and produced a frightening machete from her shoulder bag. She crossed the road and shone her beam along the green barricade. Siri joined her. "Right, down there," she said.
She had picked out a low, dark tunnel of leaves that looked like a small animal track.
"That would involve crawling," Siri pointed out.
Daeng was already on her hands and knees hacking at the leaves.
"I'll go first and let you look at my bottom," she said.
"Aha, lead on, my Amazon."
The slow, bestial crawling lasted no longer than five minutes before they arrived at a clearing. This was no accident of nature. The clearing was a perfect square, twelve by twelve metres, probably levelled for a building project then abandoned. At its centre, just as the map promised, was Crazy Rajid's palace. In the illustration it had all the splendour of the Taj Mahal with domes and minarets and a platoon of guards. In the real world it was a structure made entirely of old television sets. They were piled six high in one continuous square with no apparent entry point. They appeared to be cemented together with river mud. The turrets were formed of radiograms spaced along the parapet. Siri and Daeng stood behind their torches in awe of its weirdness.
"Now how do you suppose he did that?" Daeng asked.
Siri shook his head and laughed. "Offhand I see three possibilities. One, the TVs were already abandoned here and he just rearranged them into a palace. Two, they were dumped in the river by the consumerist Thais and washed up by the overflow. Or, three, he just rescued dead and dying TV sets from around the town and carried them here. Whichever it is, it's good to see he hasn't been wasting his time for the past ten years."
They walked around the outside of the structure to see if there was a way in. There was not.
"You don't suppose he's inside there, do you?" Daeng asked.
"Rajid, are you in there?" Siri called.
There was no answer.
"How do we get in?" he asked.
"Must be a magic word. What was the old Roman spell?"
"Abracadabra."
"Abracadabra," Daeng repeated.
Nothing happened.
"Well, as we'
ve solved the riddles and come all this way," Siri decided, putting down his pack and walking to the television wall, "I think we only have one way to claim our prize." He reached up to the top of the wall and pulled at the volume control of one of the smaller sets. As one might expect, river mud does not make a particularly effective cement. The mortar crumbled and the set fell at Siri's feet. "Aha," he sang. "We have breached their defences. The palace will soon be ours."
Daeng joined him in his pillage and within seconds they had a fairly large gap through which to step. At the centre of the compound lay the open grate of a large drain. This was obviously Rajid's entry and exit point. Apart from some fifty forks jabbed into the earth all around, the only furnishing was a cardboard box. Siri picked his way between the forks and opened the flaps.
"Anything interesting?" Daeng asked.
"Bones," Siri told her.
"My word. Whose?" She was on her knees again inspecting the cutlery.
"They're old. I mean very old. And there's broken pottery in here and what looks like hair."
"Oh dear."
"What is it?"
"The forks. They're gravestones."
"Eh?"
"Frogs, by the look of it although I'm not planning to go through the lot to see if they're all the same."
"I remember he has a fondness for amphibians."
"Does any of this help us to know where he's gone?"
"Not at all."
"But you have to admit he is a wonderfully peculiar little chap." She used the fork to replace the dirt on the frog she'd just unearthed and said a short prayer for its soul.
9
THE LAO PATRIOTIC WOMEN'S ASSOCIATION
Siri sat on the wicker chair in front of Madame Daeng's shop, going through the contents of the box one more time. In total, there were ten mostly broken bones, five shards of pottery, and a small tangled mass of hair. Daeng was inside preparing the breakfast so their conversation was shouted.
"I can't imagine where he got all this stuff," Siri yelled.
"What?" She couldn't hear him above the sound of the charcoal cracking in the flames.
"I say, some of these shards seem really old."
"How does the bone look in the cold light of day?"
"None of them is complete but I'd say this one is part of a humerus."
"How can you be sure it's not a goat's hind leg?"
"Please, madam. I'm a professional."
In fact, Siri wasn't at all certain. His experience was exclusively with human bones in human bodies. The context rather gave it away. He'd never studied the difference between human and animal bones and never performed surgery on anything with four legs. There might have been a course entitled 'Etudes Ancienne Comparee et Methodique des Squelettes de Caprines et Vertebres Humains, 101', but, if so, he had long forgotten it. For all he knew, the human humerus might have been identical to the hind leg of a goat.
He rubbed his eyes to get them to focus. He'd slept poorly. Another nightmare had awakened him at two a.m. It was her: the ugly pregnant woman with the worms and the dead dog. He woke with such a heavy weight on his chest it was as if she had been sleeping on top of him. He could almost smell her sweat. His lungs wheezed. Daeng had awakened too and asked him if he was all right. He'd considered telling her the truth but there were times when the truth didn't help anybody.
He looked up as a man in a postal worker's uniform pedalled up on a bicycle whose parts were clearly held together by string and wishes.
"You're open then?" the man said, stepping from the precarious machine.
He arrived at the shop at the same time every morning and said the selfsame thing every time. Normally he'd settle on a table near the entrance without waiting for a response, but today he surprised Siri by handing him an envelope.
"What's this?" Siri asked.
In most places, a postman handing over a letter would not prompt such a question. But Lao postmen had recently ceased their habit of delivering letters. As the populace and the government cultivated their respective paranoias, fewer people were prepared to hand over their secrets to anyone in a uniform. Notes would be delivered by bus drivers or friends allowed to travel up-country or relatives going off to 're-education' camps.
Almost everything from outside the country passed through a Bureau de Poste department known as the Sensitive Issues Section. There mail was opened, read, censored with black ink, and put in large wooden crates for collection. Anything in a foreign language was deemed too sensitive for the Sensitive Issues Section largely because there was nobody on staff who could read it. These letters were filed and never seen again.
"It's a letter," said the postman. "I recognized your name so I thought I'd bring it along. Sorry it's open."
Siri took it. "Thank you, Comrade. Has it been…?"
"I think they looked at it and realized it was from a child so there aren't any marks on it."
The postman went into the shop where he was greeted warmly by Madame Daeng. Other customers were arriving on foot. The aroma must have worked its way around the downtown area already. Siri took a moment to appreciate the large Lao farm implement dedication stamp that took up a quarter of the envelope then pulled out the single sheet of lined notepaper. At first glance, it did appear to be written in a child's hand, but he noted that it was just a little too careful and too deliberate. Dear Uncle Siri, How are you? We went to the Buddha Park on the weekend. It was such Fun. There were big animals and a giant pumpkin. I think your little twins would really like it. We're going again on March 30. If you take them I can show them around. With love, Your niece, Bao
Siri smiled, looked up at the blue sky, and said a thank you to the various gods he'd recruited to make this message possible. Bao was a Hmong girl Siri had met a few months earlier when he was in the north-east. The villagers had been about to join the long march to Thailand. Many were escaping repercussions from the Pathet Lao administration and their Vietnamese allies for siding with the Americans during the war. One of the girls in the village had just given birth to twins, and they had asked Siri to transport them to Vientiane with him and take care of them. Travelling with babies was a danger. Many Hmong had been exposed to the enemy by the crying of young children. This letter meant they had survived the journey and were ready to reclaim their young ones.
It changed his mood completely. He walked through the shop with his letter and his cardboard box and greeted the early diners. He walked over to Daeng and kissed her cheek. The gesture drew jeers and snickers from the men in the room who probably wished they had that kind of relationship with a woman.
"What?" Siri asked them. "You've never seen a man kiss his lovely wife before?"
"I didn't even kiss mine when she was eighteen and beautiful," called one middle-aged man.
"More fool you, brother."
"Thank you," said Daeng. "But what specifically was that for?"
He whispered in her ear, "The twins will be leaving us at the end of the month."
She squealed her delight. "Your Hmong friends?"
"It looks like they made it. Some of them at least."
"Your little general?"
He held up the letter and smiled.
"Bao wrote."
"Siri, I'm so happy for you. See what a little faith can do? Go get yourself ready for work, and I'll bring you up a number two. Oh, what a good start to the morning."
Naturally, that had been the high point of Siri's day. The boulder of happiness began to roll down the hill of inevitable disappointment almost as soon as he reached the morgue. Ngam's father, Boonhee, was waiting for him in the office. The man had come to claim his daughter's remains and take her home. He hadn't yet worked out how he was going to achieve that feat given that he had no money and no vehicle. After some deliberation, Siri sent Dtui to the clerk's office to make a phone call to the Cooperative Development Works.
She asked to speak to the driver who worked the Vang Vieng to Ban Xon route. They were in luck. He was still at the ya
rd and scheduled to leave with an empty truck after breakfast. Dtui reminded him about his behaviour at the morgue the previous day. Sober, he was a humble and sensible man who was happy to accept this opportunity to put back the pieces of his 'broken' face in the eyes of Dr Siri and his nurse. He agreed to take Mr Boonhee and the body of the invisible woman home.
Boonhee thanked everyone at the morgue for their help. While they wrapped and loaded the body, Siri sat with him in the office.
"How is Mongaew taking it?" he asked.
"Don't think she'll ever get over it," the farmer said. "This was all her doing. She thinks that because of her, Ngam never had a normal life. And just when it finally starts to go right…"
"I know." Siri was tempted to say she shouldn't blame herself, but deep down he knew she should. What she had put her daughter through was inexcusable. So, instead, he nodded.
"Comrade Boonhee, we, I mean the police, have been in touch with the Highways Department. They do have a Phan or two but not one who was away in your district on the dates you gave me. In fact, they don't have any projects in progress or planned for Ban Xon."
"Well, that don't make sense." Boonhee was still trying to work it all out. "Phan stayed at the headman's place. He had a letter and everything."
"Comrade Boonhee, I took a detour via Vang Vieng on my way back yesterday and I talked to a police sergeant who's investigating this case. He'll be travelling up to talk to your headman very soon. If there was a letter of introduction there should be a name and position on it. That might help us locate him."
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