Love Songs From a Shallow Grave (8 page)

“Won’t be a minute,” he said, heading for the door.

“Take an umbrella.”

Daeng was always one step ahead of her husband.

Siri joined Rajid under the beach umbrella. They were sharing a small rainless cylinder of space and the little man was unpredictable. Sometimes he’d sit with you. Others he’d run and hide like a street cat. This was a sitting night.

“OK, Rajid,” said Siri, sinking down to squat on the back of his heels. “Let’s assume you understand everything I’m saying because I think you do. I know you can write because your father translated your poems for me. And if you can write, you can think,
ergo
, you can understand.”

Rajid’s concentration was already flagging. He seemed to be looking around for some other place to be.

“And, let’s assume,” Siri continued, “that you’re here watching over me because you’re grateful that I saved your life. By the way, I’m glad I did save your life because I think it’s a life worth saving. We’d all be sorry not to have you around. But you’re right. You owe me. A life is a big debt to owe so I’m asking you to repay that debt. I want you to talk to – ”

Rajid sprang from his seat as suddenly as a cricket, but Siri had been expecting it and his reflexes were still sharp. He caught hold of the Indian’s wrist and held it tightly. Rajid squirmed and growled like a trapped animal but Siri wasn’t about to let him go until he was finished with his speech. He anchored his free arm around the umbrella stem and focused on his breathing until the wild man calmed down. It took some while.

At last, Siri continued, “I want you to talk to your father. I know you can speak. I’ve heard you. Your father didn’t kill your family, Rajid.”

The man shook violently but couldn’t break the doctor’s grip.

“The ocean killed them,” said Siri. “The unsafe, unregistered boat killed them. Fate killed them. Hate all of those if you like, but not your father. He suffered even more than you when it happened. But every day he sees you like this he has to relive your family tragedy. I know you see it too. I know you have that same nightmare. I know what you saw disconnected some mechanism in your head and I’d bet you’re as confused as anyone can be. But your father loves you and you’re breaking his heart by punish – ”

Rajid wrenched his arm from Siri’s grasp and twisted his lithe body. He crashed into the umbrella and sent it tumbling into the damp undergrowth. His body fell sprawling onto the mud but he recovered before the doctor could get his bearings and scurried down the river bank and vanished in the darkness. Siri sighed, righted the umbrella and collected the plate of half-eaten dinner. He trudged back towards the shop and looked up to see Daeng enjoying the show from the upstairs window.

“Nicely done,” she called.

BILLBOARD TOP TEN

T
he rain had let up briefly sometime on the Monday morning and the toads and frogs were yelling their delight like an orchestra of bedsprings and didgeridoos. All along the river bank young children in their school shirts were scooping the happy beasts into cardboard boxes and cement sacks and escorting them home to the larder. With so little to be had at the fresh market, families grew whatever they could around their homes, raised chickens and improvised. A lot of the stomach-turning but nutritious fare once considered the mainstay of the ignorant country folks had made a comeback on the kitchen tables of the city.

Toads, if one remembered to remove the poisonous skin and eggs, tasted vaguely of duck.
Pa dtaek
, fermented fish sauce, was so pungent it had to be stored in earthenware jars as far from the house as possible. Snakes made an interesting stew. Then there were the little creepy critters; fat white grubs that smelt bad but tasted fabulous, scorpion claws, fried termites, beetles, grasshoppers, and the absolutely delicious – Michelin five star – red-ants eggs: squishy heaven in every bite.

As Siri walked along that oh-so-noisy river bank on his way to work, he saw a pelican gliding above the surface of the water. It was a marvellous bird, proud and resourceful, and he imagined how it would taste with a little chilli paste and fresh yams. Hungry people made poor environmentalists.

Before reaching the hospital he passed two of the new billboards. If 1977 had been the year of the drought, 1978 had to be the year of the government billboard. They’d sprung up everywhere urging the population to work harder, be honest, love the nation, and grow bananas. A kind critic might have called the artwork naive. Siri had three or four adjectives of his own to describe it. He believed if some archaeologist four hundred years from now were to uncover only billboards as evidence of an ancient civilisation, they would be forced to assume the Lao had been a wooden, asymmetrical, poorly proportioned race with no necks. Their schoolchildren, even at seven or eight years of age, had the traumatised expressions of forty-year-old addicts. And there was no way to distinguish between male and female adults apart from hairstyles or hats. Short-haired, hatless beings were asexual.

If there had been a department of billboards somewhere, it was very likely vying for the role of ministry because it was frighteningly prolific and without shame. At the entrance to the lane leading to Vientiane’s largest mosque was a board encouraging everyone to breed pigs. Not twenty metres from the Lao Patriotic Women’s Association was another board proudly boasting ‘WOMEN – DEVELOPING OUR COUNTRY AS MOTHERS AND LABOURERS’. Siri had hoped the rains would erase all the silly propaganda and let the population think for itself. But they were standing up to the weather better than the leaning front fences and posts.

Inspector Phosy and Sergeant Sihot were waiting for Siri beneath the arch at the mouth of the lane that led into the hospital. The water was ten centimetres deep there and both men had their shoes in their hands and their trouser cuffs rolled up.

“Couldn’t you have found a drier place to wait?” Siri asked.

“Your hospital’s under water,” Phosy complained. “Anywhere else and we’d need oxygen tanks. Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?” Siri asked.

“We thought you’d like to come out with us to visit the crime scenes,” Sihot said.

“You have permission from K6?” Siri asked.

“Must have been good wine,” Phosy said.

It was fortunate that the Intelligence Section’s Willy’s jeep had a high wheelbase and four-wheel drive because the road out to K6 was porridge. Phosy drove slowly and Siri sat in the rear seat with Sihot, catching up on the news of victim number two. Sihot was a solid, military type, more chipped out of rock than created. You wouldn’t want to hit him on the head with a mallet for fear of damaging the mallet. He lost one page of his notebook in a stormy gust of wind but he assured Siri it contained nothing of any importance.

“Victim number two,” he read, shouting above the roar of the troubled engine, “named Khantaly Sisamouth, nickname, Kiang. Age thirty-two. Single. Born in Xieng Khaw, way up north. Taught primary school in the liberated zone for ten years then was sent to Bulgaria to study library science.”

“Who did she offend to get that assignment?” Siri asked.

“It sounded like hell to me, too, Doctor.”

“Library science in Bulgarian. Poor thing.”

“She was there for two years and came back with what they call a certificate in information technology.”

“And how did you identify her?”

“Her mother, Doctor. Said her girl hadn’t come home on Saturday night. She filed a missing person report at the local political office and they contacted us. She identified her daughter from our Polaroids.”

“Did she know where Kiang went to on Saturday night?”

“She had no idea, Comrade. Told the mother she was off for some exercise in the evening. She was all dressed up in her tracksuit. Mother’s just recovering from hepatitis so she went to bed early. When she woke up the daughter’s bed hadn’t been slept in.”

“Any connections between the two victims?”

“None that we’ve found apart from them both studying in the eastern bloc.”

“Lovers? Friends? Fencing connections?”

“We’re looking into it. Right now, that’s all we’ve got.”

As if to emphasise the point, the next half-empty page flipped from his notebook and curled away in the slipstream of the jeep.

∗

At K6, a very reluctant Comrade Phoumi was there to meet them. The rain had started again, a depressing northern European sprinkling. The guards from the PM’s protection team were lined up in front of the sauna. But, with so much military testosterone on display, there wasn’t one umbrella between them. Dr Siri, who had fewer problems displaying his feminine side, emerged from the jeep hoisting a bright yellow umbrella with orange toadstools and lime-green goblins. No words were spoken.

Phoumi and Major Dung led the way to the door of the bungalow in whose yard sat the carport and the sauna. The windows were all open to ventilate a house that had obviously not been occupied for some time. Phosy and Sihot sat at the kitchen table with their notepads and it was agreed the security personnel would come to be interviewed one by one. As had been hastily arranged, Comrade Viset, a Vietnamese-speaking Lao attached to military intelligence, was to act as translator. As the first two interviewees were Phoumi and Dung, an atmosphere of belligerence and non-cooperation was established early on.

Siri was not privy to the events in the front kitchen. He had been encouraged by Phosy to ‘float around’ and pick up information outside. The unguarded sauna structure was his first stop. Somebody had replaced the burnt-out bulb, probably the investigators. He turned on the light and sat on the lower bench. As he studied the simple packing-case structure he became more and more convinced that neither of the weapons, the knife nor the épée, could have been concealed. For confirmation, he prodded and poked every wooden slat, every roof tile, every floorboard. It was what it appeared to be, a wooden box with a gas tank and a pile of stones. No secret compartments. No trickery. But, just as the burning light in the carport had worried him two days earlier, the light inside the sauna now gave him the same troubled feeling. The light had been switched on and had burnt out. It seemed very likely that once he had done the job, the killer had turned on both lights to…what? To attract attention? Had he wanted the body to be found quickly?

Siri went outside and located the Vietnamese sentry he’d spoken to on Saturday. He was standing towards the rear of the interview queue and Siri pulled him to one side. The doctor had a theory and he was about to test it with a blatant lie.

“We have a problem,” Siri said to the young man after a few niceties. “I believe you know what that problem is.”

The soldier looked at Siri and hesitated before he spoke.

“I don’t understand, sir.”

“You told me you’d stood behind your major and seen the state of the girl inside.”

“So?”

“There was no light inside. From a metre beyond the doorway you couldn’t have seen anything but her feet. Everything was in shadow. No windows.”

“I saw her.”

“I believe you did, but not then. Once he’d witnessed what was inside that room, the major closed the door and came looking for the head of security. He left you there and told you not to let anyone in the sauna.”

“That’s right, he did.”

“And everyone left, apart from you.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“That you were curious, so you went in and took a peek for yourself.”

“That’s a lie. No, sir. I would never do that.”

“Is that so?”

“It is.”

“Then, you see that up there?” Siri pointed to a box attached to one of the posts that carried the power cables.

“Yes.”

“You know what that is?”

“It’s a junction box.” The soldier was sweating.

“Is it? You forget where you are. You’ve heard of the CIA, I assume?”

“Of course.”

“Then you know what they’re capable of. They’re fanatical about surveillance. Every house in this compound has a camera and microphone trained on it. You see that lump at the bottom?”

“It…it’s a nut.”

“Of course it’s supposed to look like a nut. It’s a closed-circuit camera lens. The images are all fed back to a central console behind the scout hut. You’re a TV star, my boy.”

Siri was holding his poker hand – six high – and he was calling. There followed a tense moment of silence.

“I just wanted a quick look,” the soldier confessed. Siri sighed but kept quiet. “I wanted to…you know? I was curious. I didn’t…I didn’t do anything.”

“But you removed the towel from her lap.”

“I just slid it down a little bit, that’s all. And it slipped between her legs. I was about to put it back but I heard you all coming along the street. I barely made it out in time.”

“It was on her lap when you went in?”

“Yeah, covering her…you know.”

“Yes, I know. Thank you.”

Siri sent the man back to the queue. He’d heard exactly what he was hoping for. If the towel had been on her lap when she was killed it would have been as bloody as hell. It would have soaked up several litres of blood. But it hadn’t. The only explanation was that the killer had placed the towel across her lap after he’d killed her for modesty. It was a polite, very Lao gesture at the end of an horrific, very un-Lao murder. And it left Siri with no idea of what kind of killer he should be looking for.

The doctor returned to the sauna and processed this new information as he sat on the wooden bench. He felt a presence in the little room, not vivid enough to be described as a visitation and several layers away from communication as if it stood behind five plates of opaque glass. But he was sure Dew’s spirit was there. The girl who had died with a smile on her face and a question mark above her head was trying to get in touch but neither he nor she knew how to go about it.

“If you have anything to tell me,” he said quietly, “now would be a really good time.”

But, if she did, she kept it to herself and Siri, as frustrated by the spirit world as ever, walked out of the sauna and into a deluge of rain that darted accusingly like index fingers out of the black clouds. He could have taken shelter beneath the carport but it was full of soldiers so he jogged with blind conviction out of the gate and into the street. By the time he reached the house opposite he was already two kilograms heavier from the water soaked into his clothes. Beneath the porch roof a man in his early fifties sat on a breeze block with a broom leaning against the front door of the house beside him. Siri joined him and they both laughed.