Love Songs From a Shallow Grave

by Colin Cotterill

  “I wasn’t much taken with the security chief myself,” said Sihot. “Now there was a man with a secret if ever I saw one.”

  They were disturbed by a tall man with greased-back hair who came down the front steps to greet them. He wore a spotless white shirt with sleeves folded to his elbows and a tight patent-leather belt that seemed to divide him into segments like an ant.

  “Can I help you Comrades?” he said.

  “Comrade Chanti,” said Sihot, stepping down from the jeep and into a pool of water. He shook the man’s hand and indicated his colleagues. “This is Inspector Phosy of Police Intelligence and Dr. Siri, attached to the Ministry of Justice.”

  They passed on their condolences to the husband of Dew and he suggested they go inside and get out of the damned rain. Despite mumbling that he had a lot of work on his plate, he led them to the canteen, where they ordered a thermos of tea and a plate of two-day-old Chinese doughnuts.

  Phosy took up the questioning where Sihot had left off. They had their tactics worked out.

  “Comrade Chanti,” he said. “This morning we received transcripts of your wife’s courses in the USSR. It appears she learned to fence while she was there.”

  “She what?”

  “She learned to use a sword.”

  Chanti looked surprised.

  “You didn’t know?” Siri asked.

  “No.” The man sipped at his tea.

  “She didn’t tell you about her courses?” Phosy asked.

  “Not a lot,” he replied.

  “You don’t see her for four years and you aren’t interested in what she studied?” Siri pushed.

  “I’m interested. Of course, I’m interested… .”

  “But?”

  “She didn’t get around to mentioning it.”

  “How would you describe your marriage, Comrade?” Phosy asked.

  “If this is an interrogation I should be read my rights or something, shouldn’t I?” Chanti said coldly.

  “I’m afraid the legislators haven’t got around to giving you any rights just yet,” Phosy countered. “So perhaps you could just answer the question.”

  “No need to get defensive,” added Sihot.

  “I’m not. I’m not being defensive. I’m just … I’m just upset.”

  “Of course, you’ve just lost your wife,” Siri sympathized. “It’s only natural for you to be irritable.”

  “I am not … All right. Yes. I suppose I am. I’m sorry. My marriage was … was a typical Lao marriage.”

  “Really?” Phosy asked. “I thought in typical Lao marriages the husband goes out to work and the wife stays home and looks after the children. The wife certainly doesn’t run off for four years and leave her husband to look after two little ones.”

  “I …”

  “How old are your children, Comrade Chanti?” Siri asked.

  “What? How old?”

  “Yes.”

  “Five and … seven?”

  “You don’t sound too sure,” Phosy observed.

  “I’m certain.”

  Sihot produced his notebook from his top pocket. It was bound in a large rubber band that he had trouble removing.

  “According to our files,” he said, “your children are six and eight.”

  “What? Well, yes. That could be right.”

  “You don’t spend much time with your children, do you, Comrade?” Phosy said.

  “I see them.”

  “But you don’t live with them.”

  “Her mother looks after them.”

  “Her?”

  “Dew’s. They stay there. I work long hours. I can’t …”

  “You shouldn’t have to,” Phosy agreed. “It’s a woman’s job.”

  “She had no right to abandon you with them,” Siri put in. “How old was the youngest when she left? One? My word. You must have had a lot of serious discussions about the implications before she left.”

  “She didn’t consult with me. Just announced she was going,” Chanti said.

  “You know? I’d be really pissed if my wife pulled a trick like that on me,” Sihot grumbled, half to himself.

  “It was demeaning,” Chanti confessed.

  “I bet it was,” Phosy agreed. “And finally she comes back and you think it might be all right. Everything might get back to the way it was. You could be together as a family again.”

  “And then she moves in with her mother and the children and tells you she wants a divorce.”

  “You can’t …, “ Chanti began. “Did her mother tell you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it’s not true. She didn’t want a divorce. Just some time to think. We could have sorted it out.”

  “So you thought,” Siri said. “But then you find out she has a lover. After all that waiting, supporting her children… .”

  “I … I didn’t know.”

  “Of course, you couldn’t have been certain.” Phosy kept up the attack. “But when she’s been back only two months and tells you she has an assignment at K6 and she’ll be working nights, staying out there. All those soldiers …”

  “How must you feel?” Sihot tutted and shook his head.

  “I wanted …”

  “Yes?”

  “I wanted it all to be over.”

  “Well, it certainly is now, “ Phosy reminded him.

  “Not like that.”

  “But ‘like that’ is how it ended. A sword through the heart.”

  “Look, you can’t do this to me.” There was a fire burning in Chanti’s eyes. “It’s not fair. Just leave me alone.”

  “One final question, if I may, Comrade,” Sihot asked. “Do you happen to know of a woman called Khantaly Sisamouth? Or you might know her better by her nickname: Kiang.”

  “No,” said Chanti.

  The three investigators looked at one another. After working long enough in crime prevention, a policeman, even an amateur medical sleuth, learns to recognize the “paradoxical no.” The paradoxical no is a cunning little beast because it has the appearance of a “no,” but it is clearly a “yes” in costume. Comrade Chanti was lying to them.

  What they all believed would be the final stop of the day was at the Sisangvone primary school. Although Monday classes hadn’t been interrupted, the classroom that had been the scene of the previous day’s murder had been sealed off and its children distributed to other rooms. The head teacher unlocked the door and stood back to let them in.

  “Do you always keep this locked when there’s no class?” Phosy asked.

  The tall but undernourished teacher shook his head and a pencil fell out from behind his ear.

  “No,” he said, bending to retrieve it. “Usually not. I put a padlock on it when the sergeant here told me to keep the children out.” He started to unfasten the wooden shutters.

  “You aren’t afraid of things being stolen?” Phosy asked.

  The head teacher laughed. “What’s to steal? We’ve just the one set of books for the teachers, none for the children. We buy our own chalk and keep it with us.” He fished out two sticks from his top pocket as evidence. “And the desks and chairs are so old they have French chewing gum stuck to the bottom of them.”

  Siri smiled and shook the teacher’s hand as he walked into the classroom. The lack of books evidently extended to a lack of paper and paint. The few pictures on the walls were drawn in pencil on flaps torn from cardboard boxes. The desks and chairs had been pushed against the walls, leaving an empty space in the center of the room. Once varnished, the wooden floor had been buffed gray by generations of feet and scratched to high heaven by the shifting of furniture. This was a classroom with a history.

  “Comrade, could you tell the doctor what you told us?” Sihot asked of the teacher.

  “All right,” he said. “I came in on Sunday morning at about seven. My wife and I live in a shared house down the street so I can walk here. The local youth movement conducts a “political pathfinders” session on Sunday morning
s for the older children. We use this room cause it’s the biggest. Sometimes they like to do activities where the kids have to move around. When I got in, I was surprised to see all this furniture moved back. But I assumed the youth cadres had come early to set things up. I started to open the shutters. That’s when I noticed the young lady.”

  Siri walked to the blackboard. It was made of sao wood, a type of oak, hard enough to make boats out of. The point of the sword had entered the board at a height almost level with his own heart. The thrust must have been terribly powerful. Powerful enough to keep the victim on her feet. The blood had formed a figure eight—shaped stain where she’d been standing.

  “Our last class was on Saturday morning,” the teacher was saying in the background. “After that, I went from room to room making sure nobody had left anything behind. Forgetful bunch, these children. I shut all the doors. I had a regional educational administrators’ meeting in the afternoon and went straight home after that.”

  “So nobody was here in the afternoon or evening” Siri asked.

  “Sometimes the children like to come and sit and play. I don’t begrudge them that. This isn’t much on atmosphere but it’s better than the crowded conditions some of them have to put up with at home. But the weather’s been shocking lately. You saw the football field, or rather, you didn’t. It looks like a paddy field. Not many people want to leave their homes in weather like this.”

  “We had a couple of our men talk to the kids, Doctor,” Sihot said. “None of them were here Saturday afternoon or evening. Nobody saw anything.”

  Siri stopped suddenly and stared at the wall beside the door, then up at the ceiling.

  “Head teacher, you don’t have electricity.”

  “No, Comrade,” replied the teacher. “Education keeps telling us they’ll have us connected up by the end of the year. They’ve been saying that for two years.”

  Siri was confused. Even if he was two hours out with his estimation of the time of death, which he doubted, it would still have been dark in this classroom. Too dark to accurately spear somebody in the heart. Either the perpetrator was carrying a flashlight or …”

  Siri walked around the room with Sihot close behind, his notepad at the ready. The doctor found what he was looking for on a desk at the front near the wall. It was just a small heap of wax molded around an empty circle of space.

  “Do you use candles often, Comrade?” he asked the teacher.

  “No, Comrade. Beyond our budget, I’m afraid,” he replied.

  “Then it would appear our killer brought them with him and took them home when he was through.”

  They found similar deposits of wax on six of the desks. There might have been more, removed along with the candles.

  “Not exactly floodlighting,” Siri said, “but enough to light up their dueling arena.”

  “You think they were sword fighting in here?” Phosy asked.

  “They cleared a space, lit up the room. Our victim was dressed for sport. It’s as good a guess as any, I’d say.”

  “And you,” Phosy looked at Sihot. “What’s wrong with you, man? Do you have pebbles there for eyes? I send you here to investigate and you can’t even see great lumps of wax?”

  Sihot bunched up the corners of his mouth. Not a sulk exactly, more an attempt not to burst into tears. It saddened Siri to see a strong man embarrassed and he was surprised. He’d never known Phosy to rebuke his men in public. In fact, the inspector wasn’t given to outbursts. He would normally shake his head and privately bemoan the lack of gray matter in the police force. This was particularly out of character. Something was wrong.

  “Any chance she died by accident?” Phosy asked Siri, still staring at Sihot.

  “I doubt that,” Siri said. “If they were just sparring, they’d have some cork thingamabobs on the ends of their weapons. At the very least they’d be fighting with blunt swords. The épée we pulled out of the victim was sharpened to a fine edge. The killer knew exactly what he was doing.”

  The jeep went by police headquarters with the intention of dropping off Sihot. There was a lot of paperwork that hadn’t been started. The plan from there was for Phosy to drive Siri to the morgue, return the Willys to the garage, and go through the data they’d collected on the two victims, looking for connections. But, as Civilai often said, “Intentions can be as flimsy as toilet paper in a cheap bar.”

  As they pulled into the compound, a police boy dressed in a shirt so big it made him look as if he’d shrunk overnight leapt from the guard booth and waved his arms.

  “Should I drive over him?” Sihot asked.

  “Better stop, I suppose,” Phosy told him.

  The boy ran around to the inspector in the passenger seat.

  “Sir, you have to go to K6,” he said. “There’s been a murder.”

  Given the pace of communication in the Republic, it wasn’t unthinkable for this to have been the message from two days hence, just having reached the guard post. But Phosy had a bad feeling that wasn’t the case.

  “Who told you?” he asked.

  “Vietnamese security guy on a motorcycle, about an hour ago,” said the boy.

  The Case of the Three Épées

  In the ever-flowing words of ex-politburo member Civilai, before the épée murders, time in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos had been speeding by like a thirty-yearold Peugeot on blocks. The country had been stone-cold frozen to the edge of its seats waiting for news of the two major initiatives of 1978. After three years of planning, the cooperative movement was finally launched as outlined in the order Number 97: Regulation of Cooperative Farming. Under this accelerated program the government was certain it would be self-sufficient in food grains by 1981. The economy would be revived and the purest tenet of communism would be realized at the rice roots level.

  But the leaders soon realized that, like communism, collectivism worked much better on paper than on dirt. The five cooperative principles as per order Number 98d had been sound enough: 1. Volunteerism. 2. Mutual benefit. 3. Democratic management. 4. Planned production. 5. Distribution of produce and profit according to labor performed with the right attitude. Thirty to forty families would be gathered together in one collective and all their resources pooled. Each man and woman would receive work points based on an eight-hour day. Technically, the families would be able to join and leave at will.

  But villages in Laos had traditionally been self-sufficient. They hadn’t given anything to the government and the government hadn’t given them anything back. So questions were asked such as, “Why should we start sharing now?”

  Siri explained the problem to Dtui like this:“Farmer A has two buffaloes and a hectare of land. Farmer B has one buffalo and half a hectare. A smiling cadre arrives at the village one day and congratulates them on their acceptance into the greater cooperative network. He informs them that, as from today, they have one and a half buffaloes each and three-quarters of a hectare of rice field to tend. Farmer B runs off to tell his wife of their good fortune while Farmer A sits on a rock wondering where he went wrong.

  “In fact, if the system had operated truly on a voluntary basis, everyone would have volunteered themselves out. As a result, they were strongly urged—often by the toothless smile of an AK-47—to give it a go for three years. Of the five principles of cooperative farming it was soon clear that only those who had nothing to begin with would progress with any joy past the first. Yet the leaders not only believed the system would be successful, they also held that the agronomic revolution would miraculously transform Laos from an agricultural economy to a technologically advanced socialist state. Naturally, in order to get there, they had to do a little work on the raw material, the Lao themselves.”

  The second initiative, a big public relations push for ’78, planned to coincide with the billboard invasion, was the creation of Socialist Man. A sort of poor relative of Super-, Bat-, and Spiderman, Socialist Man was the ideological Frankenstein of the Party. He was the embo
diment of everything perfect in a good socialist. He was steadfast, had a spirit of solidarity, was a good father, and respected the laws. One evening, Siri, Daeng, and Civilai had even gone so far as to design him a costume: a green leotard to represent the young rice shoots; rubber boots to keep his feet dry, naturally; a red cape adorned with a hammer and sickle; and a scabbard for his hoe. Daeng had been insistent there should be a New Socialist Woman to keep him company. If any of them had had even the remotest skills as artists they would have produced an entire comic book, perhaps even submitted it to a publisher in New York, and—ignoring the irony completely—become wealthy capitalists.

  So, given the lack of other stimulating news, it was evident why the deaths of three apparently unrelated women—all skewered with a weapon 99.9 (recurring) percent of the population had never heard of—were the talk of the markets and the Lao Patriotic Women’s Association tearooms.

  When Siri and the two detectives had arrived back at K6 on that painfully long and wet Monday, Security Chief Phoumi was at the gate to meet them and he was looking far more ruffled than he had been during the investigation of the first murder. He sat in the back of the jeep and directed Sihot to the auditorium. Siri knew it well. It was the same hall in which he had watched ten minutes of The Train from the Xiang Wu Irrigation Plant not two days earlier. During the American days it had been an open-air gymnasium, basically a roof on posts with a stage for dramas. Not given to openness or drama, the Pathet Lao had bricked it up, attached air conditioners, and had been using it as a meeting hall.

  The jeep splashed to a halt at the foot of the steps and they hurried up to the auditorium doors and pushed through a gaggle of onlookers and into the hall. The chairs had been stacked neatly to one side and there was a pile of tumbling mats and gym equipment at the rear of the room, presumably left over from the high-school days. Whereas the previous two murder scenes had been comparatively neat, almost serene, the auditorium was a bloody mess. A crimson trail of drag marks and splashes began at the mats and snaked across the concrete floor in the direction of the stage, where the victim lay in a crumpled heap. She was facedown on the handle of the sword with the blade sticking out of her side like a toothpick in a cocktail sausage. Siri and Phosy exchanged glances.