In the sixteenth century the Lao king had moved the capital from Luang Prabang in the north to a run-down, almost indefensible ancient kingdom on the bank of the Mekhong. With all the advisers at his right hand, one might surely have mentioned the fact that on the far bank of that same river—a stretch of water sometimes so low and slow you could wade across it—lived the Thais: the mortal enemy of the Lao. To nobody’s surprise, Vientiane was sacked on a number of occasions and finally left in ruins. Only its old stupas and one temple remained standing but even these had been tunneled into and looted by scavenging Chinese bandits. And there, the old city rotted, strangled by the encroaching jungle, ignored, until deep into the nineteenth century.
Enter the French. Following a treaty with the Siamese, the east bank of the Mekhong was ceded to the invaders from Europe. Vientiane was dug from the forest, replanned and rebuilt in French colonial style. Temples grew around the crippled stupas, and That Luang, the soul of the Lao nation, was recreated from French missionary etchings of centuries past. The buildings were a confused mismatch of Asian frugality and modest European splendor. It was a typical Southeast Asian city as conceived on a budget on a drawing board in Paris. Just as in Saigon and Phnom Penh, the colonists had always known what the locals wanted better than the natives knew themselves. And the children grew up believing that this was their style, their architecture, and they were annoyed that the hokey temples didn’t make any attempt to fit it. But there it was, voilà, la nouvelle Vientiane, renamed to accommodate the French inability to pronounce the original name: Viang Chan.
And now, that same Vientiane, which had once been consumed by jungle, was being washed away by unseasonal and unceasing rains. Like ice cubes in a sink, the buildings seemed to be melting away, first their mustard colors, then their shapes. The streets of brown mud melded into the shopfronts and invaded front yards. The heavy hibiscus bushes sagged and spread and blended together like slowly collapsing jellies. And, in their still-religious hearts, the Vientonians, who had prayed for rain for most of the previous year, were beginning to pray for it to stop.
Sunday was the day that Daeng shut her noodle shop and she and Siri would spend all their time together. Since the early rains had begun to thunder down on the city, just negotiating the motorcycle around town had become an adventure. There were potholes so deep it was believed they tunneled all the way through to Melbourne, Australia. There were stretches of mud so slick it was like riding on hair oil, spots where you couldn’t tell the road from the river. It made the city they lived in a wonderfully unpredictable place. On this particular Sunday their plan had been to have no plan. They might just slither around town or chance the northern road to Thangon and enjoy a fish lunch by the ferry crossing. Or they might hit a submerged rock and spend the day in a motorcycle repair shop. It didn’t matter either way as long as they were together.
But Inspector Phosy had other plans for them. They were eating their pre-Sunday adventure breakfast behind the loosely pulled-together shutters when they heard a thump against the metal.
“We’re closed,” Daeng called.
“Siri, it’s me,” came Phosy’s voice.
The doctor thought he heard the splash of disappointment dropping into his belly. “We’re shut anyway,” he said. Then, under his breath, he whispered to Daeng, “A million kip says it’s grippe.”
“Don’t,” Daeng said. “He’s just a concerned father.”
“He’s a … Ah! Phosy. Come in. Had breakfast yet?”
Daeng was already dishing out an extra bowl. Phosy had squeezed in between the shutters but paused there and gazed back toward the riverbank.
“Did you know Crazy Rajid is camped opposite your shop?” he asked.
“Yes,” Siri nodded. “He’s been there on and off for a month.”
“We’re assuming he’s watching out for Siri,” Daeng added. “Of course, it’s hard to tell for certain.” She put the bowl of rice porridge on the table and poured a glass of fresh orange juice from the jug. “We’re guessing he thinks he owes us a debt of gratitude.”
“For saving his life? Well, he should,” Phosy said coldly. “I can’t think of anyone else who’d go to so much trouble to help a fool.”
Rajid was certainly crazy—mad as a lark—but he was no fool. He had migrated to the region from India with his father, mother, and three siblings. The ship they traveled in had gone down in a heavy sea and only Rajid and his father, Bhiku, had been spared. The disaster had turned the young man’s mind and he never again spoke to his father. The old man, who worked as an underpaid cook at the Happy Dine Indian restaurant, was still of the opinion that his son had been struck mute. But Siri and Phosy had heard Rajid speak and the young man wrote weird but wonderful prose in Hindi. No, there was a good deal going on in the Indian’s head, he was not a fool at all. But seeing Rajid camped out in the pouring rain beneath a beach umbrella night after night, a person would have to believe there were power lines down somewhere between his brain and his common sense.
Phosy paused and watched the Indian playing with a toad. To the policeman’s mind, the two creatures were equally mindless. He shook his head and came to sit at the table. Once there, he said nothing and tucked into the meal as if he had a reservation. Daeng smiled at Siri.
“What brings you out on a drizzly Sunday morning, Inspector?” she asked.
“Bad news,” Phosy said. “As if we haven’t had enough. We’ve found another one.”
“Another what?” Siri asked.
“Another dead girl.”
“Lord help us,” said Daeng.
“Fully clothed, this time,” Phosy said between spoonfuls. “Wearing a tracksuit. We found her in a school classroom. But it was a sword. Just the same as the girl yesterday. Through the heart.”
“When did you … ?” Siri began.
“Two hours ago. The head teacher at Sisangvone primary school went in early to prepare for the Sunday Junior Youth Movement meeting and he found her in the room skewered to the blackboard.”
“Through the heart?” Siri considered the scene. “So she was standing? Held up by the sword?”
Phosy nodded.
“That must have taken a lot of strength.” Daeng thought aloud.
“Is she still there?” Siri asked.
“No,” said Phosy. “We took her over to the morgue. We got Director Suk out of bed and had him open up for us. Sorry. I know this is your family day …”
“I can’t understand what’s happening to this country,” Daeng sighed. She had already abandoned her breakfast along with her hope for mankind. “It’s not even May and we’ve had seven murders in the country already this year. And all women. It’s almost as if Laos is doing its utmost to keep up with North America. Vientiane is turning into New York City.”
“Madame Daeng,” Phosy said, “seven murders in New York would be one slack afternoon. We have a long way to go before things get that bad.”
“I’m sorry, Inspector,” she said. “But seven murders is seven murders too many as far as I’m concerned. We’ve had our wars. We’ve killed our brothers because this or that politician or general told us to. But it’s over. Can’t we enjoy our peace yet? Can’t we stop all this insanity?”
“I agree,” Phosy said, rising from his seat and wiping his mouth with a tissue. “And there’s no time like the present.” He drained his glass of juice and nodded. “Thank you for breakfast. Doctor?”
Siri hurried upstairs to change and followed Phosy to the morgue on his Triumph. As Phosy’s Intelligence Section had used up its petrol allowance for the month, Phosy was on the department’s lilac Vespa. For once, Siri thought it wise not to make fun of the policeman about his effeminate mount. This was a different Phosy from the man he’d befriended two years earlier, from the cheerful policeman who’d married Siri’s assistant, Nurse Dtui. Something had happened. A peculiar intensity had landed on Phosy like an enormous blot and suffocated his sense of humor. Siri wondered whether it was the job, whet
her it had started to infect him. Dealing daily with the depraved, confronting the face of evil in so many dark corners had to have an effect. For a man who’d grown up believing that the Lao were inherently good and kind, it must come as a shock to learn that his fellow man and woman were just as capable of committing atrocities as the foreign devils.
When Siri arrived at the morgue, Mr. Geung, Phosy’s Sergeant Sihot, and Nurse Dtui were there in the office waiting for him. Phosy followed the doctor inside and was obviously surprised to see his wife there.
“Where’s the baby?” he asked Dtui accusingly.
Dtui smiled. It was a smile that usually made people feel at ease but it apparently had little effect on Phosy.
“She’s at the Sunday crèche,” Dtui said.
Siri noticed Phosy jerk his head toward the door as if he wanted to talk to his wife out of earshot of the others. Everyone noticed the gesture including Dtui, who chose to ignore it. Phosy, obviously frustrated, was forced to resort to a strained laugh and a warning couched as a joke.
“You do know our daughter’s only three months old?” he mumbled to the woven plastic rug.
“And what better time to start socializing?” Dtui said.
It was clear that if they’d been alone, a serious domestic dispute would have exploded at this point. It was Siri who snipped the red wire.
“We have a body in the cutting room,” he said. “It’s Sunday and everyone’s irritable, especially me. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can return to our loved ones.”
It almost worked. Everyone snapped into action apart from Mr. Geung, who stood rocking in the corner by his desk. This was peculiar given that he usually led the charge into the examination room.
“Mr. Geung?” said Siri.
“I …”
“Yes?”
“I … I don’t have.”
“Have what Geung?”
“A … a loved one.”
There was no sadness in his words. It was merely a statement, like not having a bicycle or change for five hundred kip. He lived in a dormitory with three other male hospital employees and hadn’t seen his distant family for a year. Siri could have ignored the comment and joked about it, but had this been a movie, it would have been the point when the audience would have broken into a spontaneous “Ahhh” and some old lady in the front row would have cried loudly into her handkerchief. Although Siri was certain he felt much worse than Geung about this state of affairs, or lack of, he walked across the room and put his arm around his friend’s shoulder.
“Little brother,” he said, “there are forty nurses working at this hospital and I know for certain every one of them is in love with you.”
“It’s d … different love,” Geung said immediately, as if he’d put many hours of thought into the mechanics of love.
“It’s better love,” Siri said. “It’s permanent. It has nothing to do with changing moods and passion.” As soon as the words left his mouth, Siri realized that passion was a concept that would take more years of understanding than the doctor had left on the earth. “It’s better.”
“It … it … it’s better,” Geung repeated. But like a philosophical parrot he added a line of his own. “Better than a real g … girlfriend.”
“Much better,” said Siri with little conviction. He walked them both into the next room but his mind lagged a few steps behind. Once again, increasingly happy to unload the weight of the world onto his own shoulders, Siri decided to see what he could do about finding Mr. Geung a girlfriend … whether he wanted one or not. It couldn’t be that difficult, he decided. As simple as pulling together the banks of the Mekhong to reunite the Lao and the northeastern Thais.
Once again the autopsy was straightforward. Siri estimated the time of death to have been around 9:00 pm the previous evening. The young woman was probably in her midthirties, very attractive, in good physical shape but soft, not the same taut muscles as the previous victim. She had been killed by one single thrust of an épée that passed directly through the center of her heart. As with the other girl, there were three lines etched onto the inside of her left thigh. This time the signature was more clearly a Z. The killer would have had to pull down the nylon tracksuit bottom to make his mark. He’d taken his time on this one and, as there was very little bleeding, it had obviously been cut there after the girl’s death. Sergeant Sihot assured him the victim had been properly attired when she was discovered. The mark brought to Siri’s mind the brand of Zorro, the masked swordsman, a part played so convincingly by Douglas Fairbanks.
Siri dusted the épée for prints but it yielded none. He had Geung put it on the shelf beside the first weapon and the body joined its predecessor in the morgue freezer. The bamboo tray Siri had built himself had been replaced by a Chinese stainless-steel retractable shelf unit that could, at a pinch, accommodate three bodies in the single cooler.
Siri, Dtui, Civilai (who had been alerted to the new murder by Daeng when he stopped by the shop), and the two policemen sat in the morgue office drinking lethal Mahosot hospital coffee and eating Civilai’s homemade brownies. The chocolate chips tasted a little like shotgun pellets but hospital coffee had a reputation for dissolving anything.
“So far,” Sergeant Sihot began, “we haven’t been able to identify this second victim. We’re working on it. Nobody’s reported a missing person as far as we know. But we have amassed a good deal of information about victim number one.”
He flipped open his notepad and all the pages fluttered onto the floor. The others helped him retrieve them but it took him a few minutes to put them in order.
“Sorry. Thank you,” he said at last. “Have to get that fixed. All right. Victim number one is … was Hatavan Rattanasmy. Known by the nickname of Dew. She’s twenty-nine years of age … I mean, she was.”
“Sihot, will you forget tenses and just give us the facts?” Phosy snapped.
“Yes, Inspector. Born in Bokeo. Married with two children. Her husband was … I mean, is a head technician with Electricité du Lao. Dew returned from the Soviet Union in January this year. She’d just completed a four-year course in internal security in Moscow. Before she left she’d been a lieutenant in the People’s Revolutionary Army. When she got back she’d done so well they promoted her to the rank of major and assigned her to the prime minister’s security detail.”
“Any connections with fencing?” Civilai asked.
“We’re waiting for the military to release her records,” Phosy answered. “We do know that she took a number of physical fitness and self-defense courses. We just aren’t sure which ones she enrolled in.”
“How did you get the personal information if the army hasn’t released her file?” Siri asked.
“From the husband,” Sihot told him.
“Any emotions?” Dtui asked. “Was he distraught? Bawling his eyes out?”
Sihot thought back to his interview.
“No,” he said. “He seemed quite calm. Cheerful even.”
“His wife’s just been killed and he was cheerful?” Dtui asked.
“The man just discovered his wife was with a stranger, naked in a … a steam room at two in the morning,” Phosy cut in. “I can see a case for saving face during an interview, can’t you?” Siri noticed a glare shared between the couple.
“Any views on who the lover might have been?” Civilai asked.
“I have to say the Vietnamese security people aren’t the most forthcoming group,” Sihot confessed. “In fact, they wouldn’t speak to me. I got the odd brief grunt from the Lao security chief, Phoumi, but he wasn’t very helpful. I got a feeling they’re all holding something back. I did have more luck with the Lao counterparts on the bodyguard team. The Vietnamese didn’t give them much of a direct role, it seems. There was a comment that our people are treated more like civilian security guards than trained soldiers. And language was a problem, too. Dew had Russian, as did a few of the Vietnamese, so she acted as a translator from time to time. Mostly th
e ‘Tell them to do this or that’ kind of thing.”
“How many women are there on the Lao team?” Dtui asked.
“Two others beside Dew. One on the Vietnamese detail.”
“Any inappropriate advances from the men?” Siri asked.
“Not from the enlisted men,” Sihot recalled. “I got the sense they felt intimidated by Dew. Plus she was married.”
“Not the enlisted men?” Siri pushed. “But something from the officers? Major Dung?”
During their brief encounter the previous day, Siri had gleaned the impression the Vietnamese was something of a playboy. He had that cinema-idol sleaze to him. He was used to getting his way with women.
“He did try it on with one of the Lao girls,” Sihot said. “She wasn’t interested. Or so she told me.”
“Plus they didn’t share a common language,” Civilai reminded them. “He wouldn’t have been able to pile on the charm. But with Dew he could communicate directly.”
“Do we know anything about Dew’s marriage?” Dtui asked. “Was it a happy one?”
Again Phosy jumped in. “She’d left him with two kids for four years. A man might take objection to being treated like a babysitter while his wife went off to play in Europe. What do you … ?”
He was interrupted by a loud crunch. Sergeant Sihot had bitten into a chocolate chip and a corner of one tooth had snapped off. The policeman retrieved it from the debris and held it up proudly. His smile revealed that this wasn’t the first time his teeth hadn’t been up to a challenge.
“No worries,” he said. “Happens all the time. Teeth like chalk, my wife says.”
“Sue the bastard, Sihot,” Siri laughed. “Comrade Civilai shouldn’t be allowed in a kitchen. His wife would be only too glad to get her oven back, isn’t that right, old brother?”
Love Songs From a Shallow Grave Page 5