Love Songs From a Shallow Grave (3 page)

“I think I got here just in time.”

“I’ve a good mind to invite you to the cinema tomorrow.”

“We haven’t got a cinema.”

“K6. They’ve fixed the projector There’s a film showing in the afternoon. A romance, according to Civilai.”

“And we have tickets?”

“Not exactly.”

“I rather saw that as a yes or no question.”

“Then, yes.”

THE TRAIN FROM THE XIANG WU IRRIGATION PLANT – THE MOVIE

D
r Siri and his good lady waltzed in through the double doors with such confidence and aplomb that the quiet usher didn’t dare ask to see the tickets they didn’t have. There were polite, nostalgic greetings from the old politicians who stood in the side aisles mingling. There wasn’t one of them who hadn’t tangled with Siri at one time or another, so their offers of, ‘We must find some time to get together so our wives can become acquainted’ had as much life expectancy as storm ants. The women looked down their noses at Daeng’s ankle-length
phasin
skirt. There was an accepted socialist mid-calf standard these days which supposedly allowed freer movement to labour for the Party. Daeng had refused to cut her beautiful old skirts and, had anyone asked, she would have reminded them you couldn’t do much hard labour in a skirt whatever its length.

Had he been a more diplomatic sort, a man of Siri’s calibre would have soared heavenward through the ranks of these old soldiers. A forty-eight-year Communist Party membership and a degree in medicine from Europe had to count for something. But there wasn’t a person in the room he hadn’t belittled or insulted. A man with no mind to compromise is condemned to sit in the back stalls watching the stars on the screen. So, after a few brief and unnecessary bites at conversation, Siri and Daeng seated themselves in the eighth row chewing on sweet chilli guava and waiting for the show. There was a mumbled comment from the projectionist and the audience, very noisily, took to its seats. Civilai arrived late. As it was impolite to push his way along the rows to an empty place, he accepted a supplementary fold-up chair from the usher and sat to one side. He didn’t seem particularly surprised to see Siri and Daeng. Siri casually mentioned to Daeng that their friend had his shirt buttoned incorrectly.

Although the gathering was missing a president, a prime minister and three politburo members, if a person happened to have anti-communist leanings and a large bomb, this would have been a particularly fruitful place to explode it. The room was a Who’s Who of leading cadres, high-ranking officials, ministers, Vietnamese advisors, and foreign ambassadors. Judging from the turnout, it appeared there was a large population of dignitaries starved of entertainment.

The main feature was a Chinese film entitled
The Train from the Xiang Wu Irrigation Plant
. The cultural section of the Chinese embassy had gone to a good deal of trouble in first translating, then applying Lao language subtitles to several of their popular films. In a back room, half a dozen Russian-language spectaculars, also with Lao subtitles, lay waiting for their opportunity to bedazzle the Lao leaders. For the cinema fan, being a political ping-pong ball had its benefits.

The lights were doused and a small window someone had forgotten to board over was quickly patched. The conversations subsided to a mumble. Siri held his breath waiting for that magical sound that announced the coming; the clack, clack, clack of the film through the projector. And there it was. The screen was blasted with light and the film leader numbers began to flash before them. If Civilai had been beside him, they would have counted aloud together, “eight…seven…six.”

∗

Following what feels like a day and a half of credits, the film finally opens in a busy urban train station. The vast majority of extras milling about on the platforms are in uniform. Everything on the screen is either spearmint-chewing-gum green or stale-tobacco brown. Even the train standing in the station seems to have been spray painted to reflect the green⁄brown ambiance of the scene. Suddenly, there’s a flash of red, a small communist flag rises above the heads of the sombre crowd. We pan down to see a hand clutching the bamboo stick that the flag is attached to. It works its way forward like a bloody shark-fin churning through a green-brown sea. At last we see that holding the flag is a stomach-curdlingly beautiful young lady, Ming Zi, in the uniform of the Chinese People’s Revolutionary Army. She anxiously scours the faces of the passengers alighting from the train. A slightly off-key string orchestra is somewhere behind her, lost in the crowd. Her face is a live pallet of clearly recognisable emotions: elation, frustration, false hope, disappointment. Until we finally cut to her alone on a porter’s cart. We zoom in to a close-up of the flag on her lap. Tears fall onto it like raindrops, staining it drop by drop – through the magic of special effects – from brilliant red to chewing-gum green. To add insult to her injury, the porter steps up to Ming Zi and reclaims his cart. The brokenhearted girl walks forlornly along the deserted platform as the sun sets in the sky behind her. It is an uncommonly chewing-gum green day in Peking.

∗

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 theatre. 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. Ming Zi had been abandoned. The seated man nodded and turned his head to search the audience. The Vietnamese stood to attention mid-row 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 soundtrack, “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 colour,” 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 criss-crossed 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 his name was 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 Ming 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 riff-raff. 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 programmes.

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 the Interior, and where better to return to after a hard day of running a country than a little slice of the 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 gardens; neat napkin lawns and pretty flowerbeds 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 seventy-five, almost the entire Lao cabinet selected themselves a home 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 6
th
Street whose sign was far more pretentious than the street itself. The words ‘No Thru Road’ were stencilled 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 it 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 towards the carport. An overhead fluorescent lamp flickered and buzzed like a hornet in a jar. It was mid afternoon. Siri wondered why they hadn’t turned it off.

At the rear of the carport was a small wooden structure, two-by-two metres, two-and-a-half metres tall, with a sloping concrete tile roof. A Vietnamese security guard stood at ease in front of it with his pistol holstered. Major Ton Tran Dung nodded at the soldier who produced a torch 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 over 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 torch from Dung and grimaced as he did so. Siri noticed a bandage 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 torch 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 back rest 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 towards the house where he huddled with the Vietnamese. He’d taken the torch with him so all Siri could see by the natural light through the door was a bloodied towel, 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 torch.

“All right, Doctor?” was all he said.

Siri 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, hand-made variety. He’d sampled one himself during a medical seminar in Vladivostok. In a Russian 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 away. Moisture and pungent scents still clung to the ceiling and the walls.