The Merry Misogynist dsp-6

by Colin Cotterill

  "You think he done it, don't you?"

  "It's too early to say, Comrade. But as far as we know he was the last person to see your daughter alive. When I left your farm I stopped by the regional registry office. There was no record of a marriage on March the seventh."

  "No, he…Phan said it was better to register here in Vientiane. He brought all the papers signed and stamped when he turned up for the ceremony. He said Ngam would have more rights here, easier to get a passport, he said. But the ceremony was all proper, brother. We had the local official tie the wrists, and they made their vows. We even had a monk there. In the eyes of heaven it was decent."

  Phosy arrived back from Luang Nam Tha just as the rice truck was pulling out of the hospital grounds. He went straight to the morgue and directly into Siri's office. He was obviously worked up about something.

  "Siri, I did it. I met the — "

  "Good health, Inspector Phosy."

  "What? Yeah, anyway, I — "

  "I'd imagine, as you've been away for a few days, you'd probably want to go directly into the cutting room and say hello to your very pregnant wife."

  Phosy smiled and put his pack on the chair.

  "Exactly what I was planning to do," he said.

  It was a brief reunion because three minutes later he was back.

  "Now," said Siri.

  "Did I just see a body in the truck going out?"

  "You did."

  "Was it…?"

  "It was."

  Siri spent the next fifteen minutes going over the details of his trip north. Phosy was scribbling as fast as he could in his already full notepad, stopping Siri now and then to clarify and expand.

  "I need to get back to headquarters as soon as I can to find out what's happening," Phosy decided. "You know? Most of this country's in an information black hole. People up in Luang Nam Tha get more news from Beijing than they do from Vientiane. Only the military seem to have any operable communication equipment and that's for authorized personnel only. When I was military intelligence I outranked all those stuffed shirts up there. But out of uniform they treated me like I was a pig farmer. I have a good mind — what are you laughing at?"

  Siri swung back onto his favourite two legs of the chair and put his hands behind his head.

  "Phosy, I never begrudge a man a good grumble, but I was rather hoping to hear what transpired in the deep north."

  "You're right." Phosy flipped back through his notes but started to speak without referring to them. "I didn't have any trouble finding the lycee student's sister. But I did have a problem getting her to speak. She denied she'd ever heard the story. It wasn't till I told her I'd travelled half the country just to talk to her and I'd arrest her little sister for lying that her memory started to come back. It turns out she'd picked up the story from her boyfriend. He'd heard it from a fellow who used to be in the army. He was the horse's mouth."

  "He'd seen it for himself?"

  "And tried to forget. It was early in '69. Chaos everywhere. Most of the fighting was concentrated around Huaphan and the east. But it spilled over into the northernmost provinces from time to time. The Royalists were recruiting younger and younger conscripts to defend key installations. Nobody up there really wanted to fight against their own people, but the RLA was one of the few employers that offered a living wage. The young fellow who told the story was called Sida. He'd only been stationed in Luang Nam Tha town for two months. The local police had already fled the scene for fear they'd be shot in their beds by PL sympathizers. The regional army commander had to do something to convince the locals somebody was keeping the peace. He didn't want all-out anarchy. So, as a token gesture, he sent half a dozen of his young boys to man the police box in town. They weren't qualified to do anything but walk around the streets and look official. Heaven forbid they'd have a crime to investigate.

  "Sida's on duty one afternoon when a hunter comes down from the hills and reports he's seen a body. The boy's very first case, not even a drunk and disorderly or littering offence before that. So Sida and his pal follow the hunter up the hill road. They don't expect much of a shock. There's a civil war on. People are getting killed all the time. All they have to do is identify which uniform the victim is wearing and file a report. But twenty metres off the main road they see her."

  "Tied to a tree."

  "Exactly like our girl in Vang Vieng. But this one had been there a little longer. There was significant animal damage so you can imagine the scene. Two young conscripts without any battleground experience…"

  "I'd guess not even war could have prepared them for a sight like that."

  "After they throw up their lunch, they decide they should tell someone. Our boy Sida stays with the body while his pal runs off to find the army commander. And our boy gets bold. He unties the ribbons that bind her hands, and she falls backwards, and that's when he sees the pestle. If he'd had any more lunch…"

  "Did anyone report it?"

  "It all seemed to vanish. The commander told them he'd handle it and that they shouldn't mention a word of it to anyone. I imagine he didn't want a panic on his hands. While Sida was still on duty in the town, not one person came forward to report a missing girl. Case closed."

  "Did you get this directly from Sida?"

  "No. For obvious reasons, he didn't stick around once the PL took over. It appears he was pretty close to the nurse's boyfriend, though. But you're right, it's all hearsay. Nothing we could use in court. There were one or two little details that make it obvious this was the same perpetrator."

  "Like the ribbon?"

  "And candles…little temple candles. And the pestle was black stone."

  "That's him all right. Did Sida remember any physical signs? Did he notice whether the girl had been strangled?"

  Phosy went through his notes. "No. I get the impression she was pretty far gone as animal feed by the time they found her. I was surprised what a detailed description Sida was able to give his friend. I'd be surprised if he doesn't still have nightmares about it. He talked about her face being gone and one of her fingers hanging off. There was gore every — "

  "Did he say which one?"

  "Which one what?"

  "Which finger was hanging off?"

  "I don't think so. Why?"

  "Ngam, our girl from Vang Vieng, had a broken finger."

  "You think it might be significant?"

  "Just a thought I've been playing with. If it was the ring finger it could mean he was desperate to retrieve the ring. If the fingers had swollen he'd have to break the joint to get it off. It could be an issue he has about marriage."

  "Dr Siri, this lunatic could be killing women all over the country and we'd be none the wiser."

  "Could you contact all the police stations and get them to check their files?"

  "I wish it were that easy, Doctor. Most of the files from the old regime were destroyed before they left. It's taken us this long just to get our own filing system in order. And for the first eighteen months it was a lot like the Royalists in Luang Nam Tha: foot soldiers substituting as policemen. Not all of them could read or write. And even if we did have a system, the thing that scares me is this: in both of these cases the bodies were found quite by chance before they were completely consumed by the forest. If there were other murders we might never learn of them."

  Siri dropped onto all four legs of his chair and pulled out a sheet of blank paper and a pencil from his desk drawer. He made a rough sketch on it. Phosy leaned over the desk to take a look.

  "A panda?" he guessed.

  "It's supposed to be Laos, inspector. And look! Here is Ban Xon, where Ngam met Phan. Here is Vang Vieng, where her body was found. They're forty kilometres apart. Let's assume that he woos and weds them in place A then removes them to place B, just far enough away so that nobody will recognize the body, and nobody will come forward there to report a missing relative. If we apply the same distance rule to your soldier's corpse in Luang Nam Tha, we should assume she was
from Muang Sing or perhaps Na Mo. You're quite right, we may never find other corpses. So what we should be looking for isn't bodies, but reports of country girls who were swept off their feet by smooth city boys and never seen again."

  "Siri, you aren't paying attention. I've just explained that we don't even have a murder data bank. How do you suppose we can get information about missing daughters?"

  "By using a network that cares about such things — a network far more efficient than the police force."

  "Oh really? And what would that be exactly?"

  Dr Siri arrived at the humble tree-bordered office of the Lao Patriotic Women's Association a little after ten. The group had been established in 1955 to mobilize the untapped resource known as women for the Lao People's Revolutionary Party. Lao women were accorded the right to vote three years later in the first coalition elections. Socialism had re-evaluated the status of females and encouraged them to take an active role in the creation of the new socialist state. That encouragement obviously had its limits, as by 1978 there were still no women on the politburo or holding power in the Central Committee. But the network was vast and the benefits to females at both ends of the economic scale were impressive.

  The ladies in their spotless white blouses and carefully folded phasins were filing out of a meeting room with their neatly penned notes and their empty teacups. They looked content, every one of them. Perhaps, Siri thought, it was because they didn't have to work with men. But even when they saw the small smiling doctor standing in the entrance hall they nodded and said, 'Good health' as if his presence hadn't spoiled their day at all. The lady he'd come to meet was one of the last to emerge from the room. She carried a bulky slide projector piled high with study materials.

  "Dr Pornsawan?"

  "Dr Siri. Well, my word. What a sight for sore eyes."

  Despite the danger of being seen to be a chauvinist, he relieved the doctor of most of her papers and left her with the projector. He walked at her side. She was a tidy, compact woman with no bodily excesses, no unnecessary height, and no eyebrows.

  "Still no facial hair, I see." Siri laughed.

  "It seems so silly to draw them on, don't you think? Once the damned things refused to grow back after the nunnery I decided to let them have it their way. Men find it attractive, I'm told."

  "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.

  "Th
e 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.

  "Dtui," said Dtui.