Siri squeezed Daeng’s hand, his eyes already damp with sympathy for his heroine. It promised to be an eleven-tissue movie. But they were barely ten minutes into it when a side door opened and a uniformed Vietnamese entered the theater. He walked brazenly into the bottom right-hand corner of the screen and stood there like an extra, staring into the audience. Some of its members told him to sit down. But he was obviously not interested in the film or the admonitions. He located the person he’d been searching for, pushed along the row, and leaned into the ear of a broad man with a tuft-of-grass haircut. By now, all eyes but Siri’s and Civilai’s were on the drama in silhouette. Wing Zi had been abandoned. The seated man nodded and turned his head to search the audience. The Vietnamese stood to attention midrow, caring not a jot that he was ruining a perfectly good film. But, by now, everyone sensed the urgency of his mission. To Siri’s utter dismay, the broad man pointed to the doctor and rose from his seat. The soldier shouted in Vietnamese above the sound track, “Doctor, come with us.”
Siri remained in his place, attempting to concentrate on the story on the screen. There was nothing he detested more than not being allowed to watch a film to its natural conclusion. In his mind there was no emergency so great as to deprive a man a cinematic climax. The broad man and the soldier had pushed their way to the far aisle, where they both stood looking at the doctor.
“Doctor Siri,” the broad man barked.
“I think you’d better go,” Daeng whispered in Siri’s ear.
“And insult the director?”
“Well, darling, we’re only ten minutes into the film and I’d wager the director’s artistic integrity has already been compromised by Chairman Xiaoping. And, besides, it might be a medical emergency.”
Heads were beginning to turn in Siri’s direction.
“Damn it,” he snarled. “All right. But I expect a detailed blow-by-blow account of the whole thing later.”
“In color,” she promised. Siri huffed and bobbed and bowed his way to the end of the row.
He followed the two men precariously across a walkway of wooden planks on bricks that crisscrossed the flooded sports field. The two men introduced themselves as they walked but neither could be described as friendly. The stout man was called Phoumi, and he was the Lao/Vietnamese head of security at K6. He insisted that he’d met the doctor before but Siri had no recollection. The uniformed Vietnamese officer said he was Major Ton Tran Dung and that he was the officer in charge of the prime minister’s team of bodyguards. Following six assassination attempts, the politburo had decided to assign an elite ten-man Vietnamese army unit on twenty-four-hour watch over the Lao leader. They were supported by a counterpart team of ten Lao People’s Liberation Army personnel. Siri had sought out none of this information and wasn’t all that interested. His mind was still firmly entrenched in the mystery of how the lovely Wing Zi was ever going to find her lost fiancé.
But as they walked through the American streets of K6, he soon became enthralled by this small corner of Lao Americana. Forty acres of suburban USA had been plonked down in the middle of rice fields and fenced in to keep out (or, Civilai argued, in) the riffraff. There was certainly a cultural force field around the place. During the height of the Vietnam War, the United States Agency for International Development had four hundred personnel in Laos, three times that if you counted the CIA, but nobody ever did. Their role was mostly economic, juggling five hundred million aid dollars. There were some showcase development projects and seemingly endless refugee relief programs. Over a million Lao had been displaced by the civil war in the north, and the Royalist ministers, spilling in and out of the rotating-door democracy, had been too busy amassing fortunes to find time for actual aid work.
So USAID served as a surrogate Ministry of Interior, and where better to return after a hard day of running a country than a little slice of American dream right there in the third world? K6 had its own high school, commissary, stables, scout hut, tennis court, and youth club. But most of all, K6 had yards: neat napkin lawns and pretty flower beds and fences around houses that would be perfectly at home in the suburbs of Los Angeles. The christening of K6 had always baffled Siri given that the place had been planned, designed, and built by and for Americans. He’d always expected they’d call it Boone City or Tara or Bedford Falls. But, no, K6 it had been named and K6 it remained today.
Once the Americans were evacuated in ’75, almost the entire Lao cabinet had selected themselves homes on the range and moved in. Other regimes might have burned the compound to the ground as a show of anti-US sentiment, but the Pathet Lao retained an admirable practical streak. Initially it was an act of arrogance as much as a desire for Western living, although some of the politburo members seemed to be getting a little too comfortable with their washing machines and barbecues. Some had rescued the rose bushes and tomato plants and weren’t ashamed at being seen mowing their own lawns.
Siri and his guides turned left on Sixth Street, whose sign was far more pretentious than the street itself. The words “No Thru Road” were stenciled on a short board opposite. The drainage system was doing a good job of keeping the roads flood free. There were only four ranch-style houses on the cul-de-sac. Each of them was undergoing repossession by Mother Nature. It was into the first of these jungle bungalows that Dung led Siri and the security chief. Twice, Siri had asked what this was all about and twice he’d been ignored. He wasn’t in the best of moods. The constant drizzle had soaked into his bones. They walked through the open front gate and turned, not to the house but toward the carport. An overhead fluorescent lamp flickered and buzzed like a hornet in a jar. It was midafternoon. Siri wondered why they hadn’t turned it off.
At the rear of the carport was a small wooden structure, seven by seven feet, two and a half meters tall with a sloping concrete tile roof. A Vietnamese security guard stood at ease in front of it with his pistol holstered. Ton Tran Dung nodded at the soldier, who produced a flashlight from his belt and handed it to his superior officer.
“There’s a light inside,” Major Dung said, “but the bulb appears to have burned out. It was the smell that alerted our patrol.” Siri had picked up on it even before they turned into the street. It was an odd combination of jasmine and herbs and stewed blood.
“Our protocol is that if anything odd comes up, they’re to contact me directly,” Dung said. “So I was the first one to go into the room. I came as fast as I could, noticed the heat and the scent of blood, then I opened the door and that’s when I found her.”
Chief Phoumi grabbed the flashlight from Dung and grimaced as he did so. A bandage protruded from beneath the cuff of the man’s shirt. Phoumi used his other hand to pull the wooden handle. An overpowering stench appeared to push the door open from the inside. Siri felt a wave of warm air escape with it. Inside, the box was dark, lit feebly by what light could squeeze through a small air vent high in one wall. But it created only eerie black shapes. Phoumi turned on the flashlight, and he and Siri stepped up to the doorway. The beam immediately picked out the naked body of a woman seated on a wooden bench. At first glance, she appeared to be skewered to the backrest by a thin metal pole that entered her body through the left breast. A trail of blood snaked down her lap to the floor.
“Do we know who she is?” Phoumi asked Dung.
“Yes, sir. Her name is Dew. She was one of the Lao counterparts on the bodyguard detail. New girl. She went off shift at seven yesterday evening. Didn’t report in for duty this morning. And …”
The major gestured that he’d like to talk privately.
“Excuse us, Doctor,” Phoumi said and walked toward the house, where he huddled with the Vietnamese. He’d taken the flashlight with him so all Siri could see by the natural light through the door was a towel, bloodied, crumpled on the floor at the girl’s feet. Instinctively, he knew it was important in some way. The two men returned and Phoumi handed Siri the flashlight.
“All right, Doctor?” was all he said.
Sir
i was fluent in Vietnamese and he was used to the brusqueness of the language, but he was struck by how unemotional these men had been.
“Yes?” Siri said.
“Perhaps it would be appropriate if you inspected the body. Just to be sure, you know?”
“To be sure she’s dead, you mean?” Siri smiled. “She’s got a metal spike through her heart. I think you can be quite sure she won’t recover.”
“Then, time of death, physical evidence, anything you can come up with will be useful.”
Siri shrugged and walked carefully into the room. Although he’d suspected as much, it was obvious that this was a sauna, albeit a small, homemade variety. He’d sampled one himself during a medical seminar in Vladivostok. In Russia and in winter the sauna had been a godsend, but in tropical Laos where a five-minute stroll on a humid afternoon would flush out even the most stubborn germs, it seemed rather ludicrous. An old Chinese gas heater stood in the middle of the floor surrounded by a tall embankment of large round stones. A bowl of dry herbs and flowers sat beside it on the wooden planks. Siri presumed it had once contained water or oil but if so, the liquid had evaporated. Moisture and pungent scents still clung to the ceiling and the walls.
There were two benches, one low, upon which the body now sat, and one opposite about one and a half feet higher. Siri placed the flashlight on the floor and knelt in front of the victim. He put his hands together in apology before beginning his examination. The weapon, which from outside had appeared to be a metal spike, was in fact a sword. To be more exact, it was an épée. Siri knew it well. His high school in Paris had provided after-hours classes in swordsmanship. It was a course the doctor had failed—twice. He hadn’t been able to come to grips with all that delicate prancing and twiddling when the underlying principle must surely have been to kill the opponent or be killed. Despite the fact that he’d continuously overpowered his sparring partners, he’d ultimately been expelled from the class. The instructors had cited his two-handed running charge and his cry of “Die, you bastard,” as reason enough to deny him a passing grade.
Yes, the weapon here with its broad-bulbed hand guard was certainly an épée. He couldn’t recall having seen one in Laos before. It had entered the woman’s chest between the fourth and fifth ribs. It had most certainly punctured her heart. A trail of blood had drained from the wound, down her stomach, across her thigh, and into a large puddle on the wooden floorboards at her feet. He felt her joints. Rigor mortis begins to show after two hours and peaks at twelve. Judging from the stiffness, it was Siri’s educated guess that the poor woman had died somewhere between 10:00 pm and 2:00 am. As he seldom carried his rectal thermometer to the cinema, that was as close as he could get for now.
He reached behind her and confirmed that the sword had been thrust with such force that it had impaled her against the wooden bench. A trail of blood led from the exit wound and down into the cracks of the seat. The serene expression on her face and her relaxed sitting position told Siri that she was either looking forward to the experience of dying, or that the attack had come as a complete surprise. There were no indications she’d been shocked to see the weapon or made any effort to save herself. Her eyes were closed and there was a curl at the corner of her mouth that could once have been a smile. He was about to turn away when he noticed a fresh scar on the inside of her left thigh. There was very little bleeding, which suggested it had been inflicted after her heart had ceased to beat. It was in the shape of an N or a Z, hurriedly carved on her skin.
Which brought him back to the towel that lay at her feet. It was stained with blood but the corners confessed to its original whiteness. Siri couldn’t see how it fitted into the scenario. Whose blood was this? Had the assailant attempted to stanch the flow? Or during the attack, had the murderer injured himself? Siri turned to the seat opposite. There were no blood stains. This was presumably where the murderer had sat, he and his victim both naked, enjoying a sauna on a rainy Friday night. He tried to imagine the scene. They would have put their clothes outside under the carport to keep them out of the steam. In that case, the carport light would have been turned off or they’d have risked being discovered. So why turn it back on again when it was all over? And where were her clothes? And, the twenty-billion kip question, where, in a box with two benches and a gas heater, would you conceal a three-foot-long sword? He began to test the wooden slats of the walls to see if there was a secret compartment, but Phoumi poked his head into the room.
“Doctor? Have you finished examining the body?” he asked.
“Yes, I was just …,” Siri began.
“Good. Then I think you can tell us your findings and we’ll handle everything else.”
Siri shone the flashlight into the security chief’s face.
“I assume, by ‘handle everything,’ you mean contact the national police force so they can conduct an inquiry?”
Phoumi laughed rudely.
“They’ll be informed of the findings, of course,” he said. “But this whole area is under my jurisdiction, and the victim is a member of our security team. We’ll take care of it.”
Siri abandoned his search and stood in the doorway.
“This may look like a foreign country,” he said. “But the fact remains we are still in Laos and the victim is a Lao.”
Phoumi’s smile, his body language, and especially the way he reached for Siri’s arm and squeezed it were all so condescending Siri had a mind to knee him.
“Then, if it is indeed a Lao problem,” the chief said, “I suppose we should let the Lao prime minister decide what is appropriate. You will take his word on it, I assume?”
“He’s home?” Siri asked.
“His house is a few blocks from here.”
Siri knew where the PM’s house was. He’d been there a number of times. But that wasn’t an answer to the question he’d asked. He walked out of the sauna and sat on the step.
“Well, of course, the word of the prime minister is more than enough for me. Let’s go and see him.”
He swore, if Phoumi laughed again … If he flashed those “everybody’s friend” perfect teeth just one more time, Siri would run inside, remove the épée from the corpse, and find a warmer scabbard for it.
“Doctor, surely even you understand that the PM can’t just receive unscheduled visits,” said the security head. “Even with an appointment it could be two or three days. I tell you what, I’ll go and see him and bring his response. That good enough for you?”
In fact, Siri understood a lot of things. He understood, for example, that the PM had given up his ticket to the movie that afternoon because he was on an unannounced visit to the USSR. He’d left for Moscow the previous day. It helped to have a man on the inside even if it was only Civilai.
“Then I think you should go talk to him,” Siri agreed. “I’ll wait here.”
Phoumi was incensed.
“I hadn’t realized how much more complicated you’d make things for us. I wanted a medical opinion, not a standoff,” he said. “Couldn’t you just take my word for it that your leader will ask us to take care of this? Do we really need to disturb him?”
“I think so,” Siri smiled.
Phoumi and the tall, lanky Major Dung hesitated, then walked off with great reluctance to their fictional meeting with the absent prime minister. Siri was left alone with the sentry. The soldier looked uncomfortable. Siri decided to take advantage of the fact that nobody had introduced him and act like someone of importance. He walked to the edge of the carport where the rain fell in strings from the corrugated roof. He washed his hands under them.
“Been a long day, I imagine,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Were you on the detail that discovered the body?”
“I was, sir.”
The boy hadn’t looked once into Siri’s frog green eyes.
“Must have been a shock. Did you know her?”
“She’s new. Didn’t speak a lot of Vietnamese. Friendly enough, thoug
h.”
“And nice looking.”
“Not bad, sir. Not really my type.”
“I gather your patrol was just strolling past and some body smelled something odd. Is that right?”
“Not exactly, Comrade. There was no patrol scheduled. The major sent us out specially.”
“Major Dung?”
“Yes, sir. I gathered there’d been a report of something odd over in this sector. He sent half a dozen of us down to take a look.”
“That’s a lot of men—I mean, just for taking a look.”
“Probably thought there was a security breach.”
“I imagine.”
“And we got down here and we could all smell it: a sickly, sweet smell.”
“Who went in first?”
“None of us. We knew that stink only too well. One of the men went back to get the major. The rest of us hung around outside. When he arrived, he went to the door and took a look inside. I was standing behind him. I saw the girl. Shocking, it was.”
“When was this?”
“I don’t know. About half an hour ago … an hour?”
“And Major Dung went straight over to the cinema to find Security Chief Phoumi?”
“So it seems. He sent the other men back to the barracks and left me here to watch the crime scene.”
“Good. Very good. And, apart from the major, nobody else went into the box?”
“No, sir.”
“Any idea who reported the ‘something odd’?”
“You’d have to ask the major that.”
“I’ll do just that. I imagine he’ll be back very soon. I just have to go see someone for a minute. Tell him I’ll be right back.”
“I will, sir.”
“By the way, was this overhead light on when you got here?”
“Yes, sir.”
Siri walked out into the drizzle and headed across Sixth Street. He had an urge to take out an umbrella and dance in the puddles. He also had a very strong feeling that he’d just been lied to.
Love Songs From a Shallow Grave Page 3