Love Songs From a Shallow Grave (24 page)

They emptied their bladders in their respective bathrooms and regrouped in the hallway. As they walked along the light green carpet they heard a loud squeaking, grating sound coming from the floor below. It was unmistakably the sound of Godzilla chewing on a Volkswagen Camper. They walked down a dimly lit stairwell to a reception area whose lights, all but one above the desk, had been extinguished. The staff had fled but for one of the male cadres. He was now shirtless and tending to some business behind the counter. The entrance to the hotel had been blocked by a huge metal roller-grill. Phnom Penh beyond was apparently out of bounds. They were trapped.

They walked to reception and discovered that the clerk was connecting a mosquito net. One end was tied to the switchboard, the other wound around the neck of a stone statue, a poor copy of one of the
apsaras
from Angkor Wat. He seemed annoyed to have been disturbed. After ten minutes of mimes and gestures; bottles, drinking, staggering drunkenness, then down the scale to eating, rice, peanuts, bananas, the cadre was positively livid.

“My brother, Civilai,” Siri said at last, “if our friend has a weapon of any sort down there behind the counter, I feel he’s reached the point at which he’ll use it.”

“Then, I’ll say goodnight.”

“Goodnight and sweet dreams,” they wished the scowling receptionist.

∗

There was no sweetness in Siri’s dream that night. That same disconcerting nightmare was waiting for him. But everything was so much more vivid. The streets through which he walked had acquired a scent, a rancid smell he knew well from his work. The song came at him from everywhere like a sensur-round soundtrack with strings and a harmonious backing group. But it was certainly the same eerily beautiful song.

The boy-soldier who approached him with his pistol raised had a history now. He had a family, brothers and sisters, all hungry, others dead because there were no medicines to cure simple ills. He had been drafted into the military because his mother had no rice to feed him. Siri knew all this, not because he’d been told, but because, in the place where dreams are produced, this was a logical plot development. It made the character more dimensional. We now had reason to feel sorry for the antagonist, to side with him. It created an element of conflict in the conscience of the viewer, in this case, Siri. Something in him wanted the boy to pull the trigger. And, with so much unexpected support, that’s exactly what he did. Siri’s head was gone. Splattered like a kumquat on a busy highway. And the dream-Siri was filled with dread, not because he was headless – inconvenient though it was – but because he was afraid he might stumble into the singer and that would be the end of mankind. He knew there was nothing to pull him back. Finding the origin of the song would signal the end of all hope, worse than anything he’d ever experienced.

The explosion of the gun had reduced the soundtrack to a single beautiful voice. Headless Siri was on his hands and knees. He reached a plot of earth where the sounds climbed up through the dirt and lingered there like invisible music plants. He began to dig down. Something beneath the ground was attempting to dig upwards. Siri was overwhelmed by the wonderful song. The refrain squeezed at his heart strings, squeezed blood out of them, squeezed until they snapped, one by one. His heart, stringless, broke away from his chest like an untethered blimp and was carried off by the music plants, rising, lost in the blood-red sky. As his seventies cultural attache, Dtui – self-confessed addict to Thai pop magazines – would say, it was all very Beatles.

A breath fanned his hand and his fingers felt the outline of a mouth deep in the dirt. These were the lips that sang the love song. He raked away the debris with his fingers so the singer could breathe fresh ait He hurriedly brushed dirt from the nose, from the eyes. The voice was beginning to break. It slipped off key and fell, tumbling through octaves. It came to rest on a deep, bronchial B flat. Siri knew he had to save the tune. With increasing desperation he strove to free the singer from his tomb. He lifted the head and cradled it in his arms, willing the song not to die. And that was when his fingers knew. Beneath their touch the cheekbones rose, the eyebrows bristled. And as he swept back the thick hair, his thumb and forefinger traced the outline of a left ear, missing a lobe.

A MOSQUITO INSIDE THE NET

“I
really don’t know what he’s getting at,” Phosy said, not for the first time. Even though his desk was directly behind that of his superior, Sihot shook his head in response. Phosy held a note from Dr Siri. Daeng had dropped it off after Siri’s departure, a last-minute memo scribbled in Siri’s barely legible hand. Against his better judgement, Phosy had done what the doctor had suggested. He’d listened to Neung’s story. It had been very slick. It explained everything apart from why three victims, all known to the suspect, had been killed. Phosy was disappointed that the doctor could have fallen for it. Of course Neung had it all worked out. It was easy enough to do when the evidence has been handed to him on a plate. Even Phosy could have done that. He was furious that Siri could have been so naive, presenting the accused with the police department’s entire case.

But Phosy had listened patiently and asked the appropriate questions at the end. “Who would want to frame you? Do you have any enemies? Has anybody threatened you?”

And all the answers had been negative. If Neung was about to go to all the trouble of inventing innocent relationships with the victims, surely he could have come up with a scapegoat to divert attention from himself. But, no. And, if it were possible, he made it worse for himself. Phosy had thought to ask whether the initial Z meant anything. And rather than deny it, Neung had the impudence to boast that they’d called him Zorro in Berlin. Something about his style, evidently. He’d been christened by his coach and the name had stuck with his students. Neung hadn’t even the common sense to withhold that juicy fact. So, Phosy had his watertight case and had no doubts in his own mind that he had the right man. No serious doubts. Of course, all criminal cases leave some gaps. But Siri’s note rankled him. It wasn’t a list of chores so much as unanswered questions. And of course he knew the questions. He had them on his own summary paper. He didn’t need Siri to remind him.

Did Chanti suspect his wife was having an affair with Neung?

Did he care?

Why were the Vietnamese so reluctant to hand over the case to us?

Did Kiang see her affair with Neung the same way he did?

Did they fight?

What was the timing of Neung and Jim’s respective arrival in⁄departure from Berlin?

Who was taking painkillers and why? (Does Neung have an injury?
)

Does Neung still have the knife used to cut out the signature?

Does his father think Neung is guilty?

Do you?

Certainly, a lot of it was merely the tying up of loose ends. As a good policeman he would have done that anyway…if they hadn’t been so understaffed. Just him and Sihot and so many reports to write. And what was the point? They had their man, didn’t they?

It was the post script to the note that had most riled the inspector. Just who did this little doctor think he was? Not satisfied with playing detective and telling him how to do his job, he had to interfere in Phosy’s personal matters, too.

Phosy, I’m sorry. I meant to tell you this earlier this evening but I was distracted by the visit to Neung. It would have been better face to face but I’ve lost my chance. It’s quite simple. If you aren’t having an affair, tell your wife, immediately. If you are, stop it
.

Phosy scratched out the entire postscript with his black biro, slashed at it till the paper tore. Still not satisfied, he took a pair of scissors from his pencil drawer and snipped off the bottom of the page. He scrunched it up and threw it into the wastepaper bin.

“Interfering little bastard. None of your business,” he thought. “Who are you to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do? You aren’t even a relative, certainly not my father. Too late now, Siri. Where were you forty years ago when I needed you?”

∗

There weren’t any orphans in Laos, not government-sponsored or otherwise. And that was due to the fact that folks didn’t give children enough time to think they were unloved. If you lost your parents, a relative would step in and fill their sandals as quickly as blood clotting on a wound, barely a scab. If you had the misfortune of losing your whole family, a neighbour would take you in, or someone in the next village. A local headman, perhaps. But, either way, you’d wake up next day with a new family and nobody would harp on your loss. They’d tell you what happened without drama and, no matter how poor, they wouldn’t complain about what a burden you were. At least, that’s the way it had been in Laos. That’s the way it had been for Phosy.

He’d been studying at his primary school one day in the little northern village of Ban Maknow, Lemon Town. His mother and father just happened to be working in the wrong field at the wrong time and were mowed down in crossfire between this or that faction. Someone had come by the school and whispered in the teacher’s ear. As Phosy had no uncles or aunts, he went home that evening with his friend, Pow. Pow’s mother and father already had three other children living with them who had lost their parents in a civil war nobody really understood. It was such a clinical transition that it was several days before Phosy fully realised that he’d never see his parents again. He’d cried, of course. He missed them. But he was already safe and happy before loneliness had a chance to take hold.

His new father was a carpenter. He carved temple doors and fine furniture and all seven of the children, five boys and two girls, learned to use woodworking tools at an early age. There was no secondary schooling in those parts so Phosy had hoped his new father would take him on as an apprentice as he had done with his eldest son. But when Phosy was ten, a young man had come to the village. He was educated and well-spoken. In the open-sided village meeting hut, he explained to all the parents how he had been plucked from a place very much like this when he was a boy. How he’d been given the opportunity to study in the liberated zones in the north-east. He’d graduated from high school there and gone on to further education in Vietnam. He told them that they’d recently opened a new school and that they could take eight hundred new students. All food and board would be taken care of.

A week later, Phosy, Pow, and their sister, Beybey, were in a covered truck heading across the country. Phosy felt something in his stomach that he would later come to recognise as betrayal. They’d given him away. The family he’d loved had handed him over to a stranger. He couldn’t understand it but life was travelling too quickly to analyse. They taught him things in the liberated zones. He learned how the French colonists had stolen their land. He learned how the rich landowners had taken advantage of the common people. He learned how to be angry and to punch his fist into the air and shout, “Liberation!” He learned how to shoot guns and kill. And, by the time he reached seventeen, he and his false siblings were junior officers in the new Lao People’s Liberation Army. All three of them were so entangled in the revolution they hadn’t found time to go back to visit the family that had raised and cared for them…and given them away.

Phosy rose fastest through the ranks. He had an inquisitive mind and, once he reached the position of colonel, he was transferred to military intelligence and trained in the art of espionage just outside Hanoi. With a new identity, he arrived in Vientiane in 1965 and began work as a carpenter. Other LPLA men and women had been trickled into the mainstream of royalist society, spreading their beliefs subtly from the inside, passing on intelligence, preparing for the day revolution would come. They became known as the mosquitoes inside the net, these sleeper agents, ready to sting when the time was right.

But, while he was waiting, something occurred that Phosy hadn’t prepared for. He fell in love. There was probably a whole chapter in the Indochinese Communist Party spy handbook detailing the dangers of falling in love whilst engaged in subversive activities. But Phosy was emotionally lost and in need of confirmation that someone might want him. He married and they produced first a boy, then a girl, and that old feeling of family returned to him. That warm comforting glow of belonging took over Phosy’s life. At times it seemed more important than nationhood. The revolution took a back seat to Phosy’s family.

But the revolution came anyway. It came swiftly on the heels of the Vietminh victory in Saigon and without the wholesale bloodshed that had been envisaged. And the Pathet Lao moles in their burrows in Vientiane celebrated quietly. The status quo had changed but there were still enemies. The new socialist government couldn’t decide what to do with its spies. Under the guise of re-education, Phosy and his colleagues were recalled to the north-east and new roles were allocated. He was away for three months and when he returned to the capital, his wife and children were gone. Gone, the neighbours said, to a refugee camp on the Thai side. They’d paid a fisherman for a night passage to Nong Kai. Gone because his wife was afraid of the communists. Afraid of what they might do to her. Gone because Phosy hadn’t been able to tell her he was the enemy.

Phosy left Vientiane and rejoined his unit in the northeast. Three families had deserted him. Phosy was a serial orphan. Love crumbled in his hands like hearts moulded from fine sand. Why invest? Why waste all that emotion? He’d met nurse Dtui. He’d liked her. He’d made her pregnant. He’d offered to marry her. She’d asked him if he could love her and he’d told her no, but he was prepared to marry her anyway. That had been good enough for Dtui and for him, companionship without fear of heartbreak. Then Malee had come along, the sweetest button of a babe. She had smiled and he’d remembered all the other smiles that had trapped him. He watched them together, Dtui and her baby, and he’d seen treachery in their eyes. He watched how she controlled the mind of the little girl. How would they break him, these two? Every day he was afraid he’d come home and find them gone. And the conflict was killing him, splitting him apart. On one side was the feeling that there was nothing on the earth so full of wonder as the love of a family. And on the other was the certainty that they would desert him. Either in death or in deceit they would go away and leave him without hope. How dare he tell them he loved them?