Curse of the Pogo Stick (4 page)

No, it wasn’t the Hmong Siri was afraid of. He’d been in battles all his life and survived. A bullet to the head wouldn’t have been that much of an upheaval to him now. What distressed him was the thought of being stuck in the jungle with spotty-faced Judge Haeng for a month. That, he decided, would be a slow and agonizing way to go.

There wasn’t a lot for individuals to do on a Sunday in Vientiane. At least from Monday to Saturday a person could work for next to no pay and spend her evenings doing community service for the sheer joy of it. But Daeng was officially a business proprietor and Dtui had recently moved to her new husband’s rooms at the police compound so neither was registered for the Sunday community development programmes. This meant there wasn’t even a slim hope of clearing garbage from the banks of the irrigation ditch or laying gravel on a dirt road while singing ‘The Blood We Shed for the Republic Has Turned to Sweat.’

So, instead, they rode their bicycles to the little metal bridge at kilometre 2 that crossed over to Don Chan.

The river island was man-made, the Mekhong having been diverted into an aqueduct to supply water for the city long before the establishment of the Nam Ngum waterworks. In the rainy season nothing more than a humble stub poked from the water, but now the island and its sandbar stretched way back past the city. Small holders and farmers had rebuilt their bamboo huts and fresh green vegetables sprouted in abundance. It was the ideal spot for a picnic. Dtui and Daeng’s spread consisted of river-fish cakes, sapodilla-flavoured rice wine, and of course, vegetables with still-beating hearts plucked from the earth before them. They sat at the top of an eight-foot-high bank, close enough to Thailand to see their affluent neighbours taking lunch, sitting at tables watching their poor Lao neighbours cross-legged on the grass getting pickled.

“Do you think they wish they were here?” Dtui asked.

With the baby working on its personality inside her, she’d decided this would be her last drinking day. Even so she sipped modestly at the sweet wine. Daeng was a serious drinker and she more than made up for Dtui’s abstinence.

“Why not?” Daeng replied. “I’ve seen wild birds in the branches of trees looking enviously at caged song doves. We all of us want what we can’t have. Do you wish you were there?”

“I was there, briefly. I liked everything about it. It’s so modern. The stores have so much choice compared to ours. They’re crammed with all kinds of goodies. But…I don’t know, I wondered where it would end. You get a rice cooker and you lust for an oven. You get an oven and you want a chef to come and cook for you. Once you get into that cycle you can never be satisfied.”

“So, you prefer having nothing.”

“I appreciate things more. And I don’t have
nothing
. I have friends. I have a reasonably good life – a socially responsible job – experiences. I mean, how many people get to hang out with a legend of the underground movement?”

“Oh dear. You can’t believe everything Siri tells you, you know.”

“Yes I can. He’s told me all about you. He says what he believes. That’s why I respect him. I wish I had nerve enough to blurt out what I actually feel, like he does.”

“That luxury comes with age. When you’re younger, you don’t always get away with saying what you believe, particularly in this type of system.”

“Did you think it would end up like this? When you were fighting the French? Did you think the alternative to colonialism would be so…so claustrophobic? Did you think we’d be looking over our shoulders all the time worrying we might be doing or saying something to offend the Party?”

“We’re in transition, Dtui. Things will get better. At least we Lao are in control of our own destiny now.”

“If you don’t count the Vietnamese ‘advisers’.”

“We’ll shake them off. Have faith. The worst is behind us. We haven’t known real peace for my entire lifetime. Let’s sit back and enjoy it while we’ve got it. By the way, my glass is empty.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

They lay back in the thick buffalo forehead grass for a while and listened to the slow, soothing motion of the river trickling through the reeds.

“I’m starting to feel guilty,” Dtui confessed.

“How so?”

“I feel like we should be off catching the bomber.”

“I’ve told you. Patience is a vital component of a successful investigation. Rushing into it without a plan is a waste of human resources.”

“The trip to the police station yesterday was a complete waste of human resources. What did the boy say? “And why should we share our findings with you two…ladies?” Talk about insolence.”

“Right. But didn’t that inspire us to think laterally? And didn’t that period of thought lead to our brilliant insight?”

“Your brilliant insight.”

“It was our idea.”

“I remember exactly how it went. You said, “If you were the assassin, Dtui, what would be going through your mind on the day of the bombing?” And I said I’d want to make sure my bomb actually went off and did its damage, seeing as there’d be no chance of its making the evening agricultural broadcast on the wireless. And you said, “That means the bomber would have to be on the hospital grounds that afternoon.””

“It was the only way he could be sure.”

“And you said, “Perhaps we could ask the staff whether they noticed anyone hanging around all afternoon on Friday.””

“Right, but it was you who remembered the nurses and the photographs. It wouldn’t have entered my head.”

“Yes it would. And it probably won’t help anyway. When the prints come back from the shop tomorrow all we’ll see is smiling nurses and flowers. Not a bomber in sight. He’s hardly likely to pose with them, is he now?”

“So little faith in one so young. Remember, anything’s possible.”

“There must be more we can do. If only we could get access to the army bomb squad report or the police investigations. I’m sure we could do more than the boy wonders.”

“Until Siri and Phosy come back it’s just you and me. I have all kinds of contacts in high places in the south but nobody up here – not yet.”

Dtui poured Daeng another shot from the misty bottle and filled her own glass with water. They toasted the diners across the river.

“I do,” Dtui said.

“Do what?”

“Have an influential friend. You do too. Or at least an ex-influential friend.”

“You don’t mean Civilai?”

“I certainly do.”

“Oh, Dtui. He’s retired.”

“Cronyism doesn’t just go away overnight.”

“He isn’t going to be in any state to help us.” Daeng knew of several other reasons why the ex-politburo member would be reluctant to help them. A few months earlier, Siri had uncovered a plot to overthrow the Lao government. Dtui and Phosy had crossed over to a refugee camp in Thailand to spy on the deposed Royalists. Information they gleaned there had led to the failure of the coup. But in the aftermath, Siri had discovered that his old friend, Civilai, was in line to take a post in the proposed revolutionary administration. He was a traitor, a fact that only Siri and Daeng were privy to. Civilai had taken early retirement in return for their silence. Daeng doubted the old politician would be prepared to step back into the quicksand from which he’d so recently escaped.

Dtui knew none of this. “Let’s find out,” she said.

In the words of Comrade Civilai, the rainy season of ‘77 had been as brief and unconvincing as a politician’s credibility…and he should know. Since his strongly encouraged retirement from the politburo three months earlier, officially for health reasons, he’d had a lot of free time to perfect his witticisms. His best friend, Dr Siri, had been afraid the traumatic events leading up to the old mans fall from grace might have driven him to despair and an early visit to the pyre. But far from it. Civilai had expanded in all directions like a man released from the grip of atmospheric pressure. His mind had been given rein to consider philosophies beyond Marx and Lenin. He’d begun to listen to the lyrics of his grandniece’s pop music and see merit in them. He’d started reading the novels hidden in his loft and breathing in their beauty. Not since his French education had his mind been so liberated.

His body too had expanded. His skin no longer stuck to his bones like pie crust. Always a food connoisseur, Civilai now had endless hours to engage in his passion. He delighted in his wife’s cooking and experimented with his own. He invited friends for dinners, performing miracles with the scant offerings on sale at the morning market and the Party co-op. He had, they all agreed, blossomed and bloated as a result of his divorce from politics.

Dtui and Daeng sat with him at the round kitchen table in a house that had once belonged to the director of the American high school at kilometre 6. It was what the English would call a bungalow and what the Lao would call a rather pointless style of architecture – not raised from the ground on stilts to allow the air to circulate and the floods to pass beneath. Windows of glass that magnified the rays of the sun. A toilet with a communal seat that encouraged the exchange of germs and disease. But the senior Party members didn’t live there because it was practical. They’d moved into the walled US compound to thumb their socialist noses at the Americans. They’d endured and survived the endless air raids on their cave enclaves in the north-east for thirty years. The enemy owed them.

Daeng was pleased to see how well the old comrade was looking. Only she and Siri knew the actual reason for his retirement and both had sworn not to discuss it again. Dtui, like the rest of Laos, saw him as an elder statesman in frail health who had retired gracefully. But there was nothing frail about him on this day.

“I must say it’s rare that I get two voluptuous lady visitors at the same time,” he said. “Nice to see I haven’t lost that magnetism. How did you get here?”

“On our bicycles,” Dtui told him.

“All this way? And you with your arthritis, Madame Daeng.”

“Can’t let a little chronic pain spoil a day out, comrade,” she told him.

“That’s the spirit. Then I think you both deserve a drink for making it here.”

“I’m on the baby wagon, uncle,” Dtui confessed. “But Madame Daeng got quite sloshed at lunchtime. I think that’s why she can’t feel her legs.”

“Nice to see,” said Civilai, pulling down several bottles from the Formica wall cabinet. “Then she’ll need topping up.”

“Where’s Madame Nong today?” Dtui asked, wondering whether Civilai’s wife would let him tipple in the afternoon if she were around.

“Women’s Union excursion…again. She’s been signing up for all of them since I became redundant. Can’t really understand it. You’d think she’d want to spend all her time cleaning up after me, wouldn’t you?”

“You’d think so.” Daeng smiled. “We girls are mysterious creatures.”

“No arguments from me there.” Civilai nodded, arriving at the table with three full glasses with lime slices hanging onto them for dear life. “So, what can I do for you, ladies?”

They sat and drank their vodka sodas – one without vodka, two with little soda – while Dtui told Civilai all about the peculiar happenings at the morgue and the reluctance of the police and the army to share their findings. He agreed that, although there were several dozen people who might like to give Siri a good slapping, none that he could think of disliked the doctor enough to blow him up. He recalled one attempt on the coroner’s life a year before but as far as he knew there had been nothing personal about it and the perpetrator was safely behind bars.

“When’s Siri due back?” Civilai asked.

“Tomorrow evening,” Dtui told him.

“Then we’d better get cracking. We can’t have our chief and only coroner killed by some maniac, can we now?”

“You think you can help?” Dtui asked.

“Undoubtedly. If a respected Party dinosaur can’t call in a favour or two, who the blazes can?”

Some people just die. Siri had come to that conclusion after many years of careful observation. They don’t necessarily die
of
anything, they just get old, everything gives up, and they pass away. It’s as simple as that. There are those who describe it as dying of old age but that puts old age in the same category as bubonic plague and the Black Death. There really is nothing dangerous about old age and there’s no reason to be afraid of it. It certainly hadn’t done Dr Siri any harm. He’d been passing through its hallowed halls for some years and it hadn’t killed him.

Comrade Singsai had passed away in his sleep during an excruciatingly long speech discussing the allocation of cattle. It was rather sad that his last memory on earth might have been how to encourage bulls to increase their semen count. But he was old and he’d endured a full life. He hadn’t been able to summon the energy to pull himself out of a pleasant dream and back into that never-ending conference. Who could blame him? Siri was sorely tempted to write ‘He just died’ on the death certificate but he knew that wouldn’t satisfy anyone. He’d invited Haeng and a couple of the other seniors to observe the autopsy, and, as he expected, they’d declined.

Siri was surrounded by five-litre cans of exotic fruits from China, crates of vegetables, stacks of packs of processed meat, sacks of rice, large bottles of soft drink syrup, tins of sardines and pilchards and a whole wall of goods labelled in Russian that could have been anything. There was enough to feed a medium-sized town for a year. And tucked at the back of the potatoes were several pallets of Vietnamese 33 beer in dusty bottles. In the arsenal of most coroners is a piece of equipment known as a skull chisel. It’s primarily used to separate the calvarium from the lower skull but it has a useful secondary purpose in that it opens beer bottles very well. Siri looked at his watch, popped a 33, and made himself comfortable on the rice sacks.

From somewhere beyond the formality of the Party gathering, the mystical sounds of a
geng
pipe drifted across the plain. He’d heard it before on the grounds of Mahosot before leaving Vientiane. He let the music seep into the pores of his skin and smiled at familiar phrases and intimate passages. It was a magical, heavenly refrain that felt out of place in such a godless spot.