Six and a Half Deadly Sins (10 page)

“No,” said the spokesman. His first lie.

“No, you can’t tell me?”

“No—we … I don’t really …”

In Phosy’s dealings with the Akha, one characteristic had always floated to the surface. Telling an outright lie was a truly uncomfortable experience. They could be annoyingly
direct and blunt to the point of cruelty, but untruths seemed to curdle their blood. Phosy rephrased his question. “Why did the two men meet?”

“A matter.”

“What kind of matter?”

One of the elders, a ginseng root of a man who had thus far remained silent, stood and stretched and cracked several bones in his fingers. “I think it’s time to get to the fields,” he said.

And with that, the meeting broke up. The elders left the hut, being sure to shake the hands of the visitors before leaving. Phosy smiled and said to his baffled observers, “Well, I think that went very well. Don’t you?”

The seven-hour bus ride to Muang Sing had been delayed by Mother Nature and haunted by the ghosts that lurked in machines. The single Look Up tree that lay across the road at kilometer eighteen shouldn’t have presented the problems it did; it was no more than sixty centimeters in diameter, but that was high enough to serve as an impassable buffer to the old bus. There were no axes or machetes on board, and the nearest village was half an hour’s walk. The driver said the situation was hopeless and started to perform a sixteen-point turn on the skinny road.

It was Siri who solved the problem. On the roof of the bus was a basket of cooking pots to be collected by its owner in Muang Sing. The passengers took the pots and filled them with rocks and earth from the roadside embankment. With these they constructed a ramp on and off the log. Naturally, Dr. Siri, a hands-on educator, was wheezing pathetically by the time the bus landed on the far side.

The bus continued its journey. There were several stops for maintenance, which the driver seemed to have mastered
from experience, but the cracked piston was another matter. Ten kilometers from Muang Sing, the engine suddenly had no moving parts and the bus became a landmark. So it was that Siri and Daeng arrived in Muang Sing on a cart pulled by a small pony. The animal and the passengers were coughing loudly. The twelve-year-old driver was not. Dr. Siri examined himself and his wife and announced that they had undoubtedly caught Dtui’s cold. He wasn’t carrying any cold remedies. There was one pharmacy in Muang Sing, but it was dark and shuttered as the pony clopped past. 8
P
.
M
. was well past the town’s bedtime. The travelers couldn’t even find a guesthouse.

At the recommendation of the cart driver, they went to the house of the local cadre in charge of visitors. He checked their
laissez-passer
s. His own residence was already full of Chinese dignitaries, he said, but he led them to a two-story wooden building at the intersection of Muang Sing’s main streets. It had no rooms and, of course, no electricity. The cadre, keen to get back to his more important guests, left them a beeswax lamp, a bucket of drinking water, bedding and four kapok mattresses that smelled of mothballs. The bathroom was way out back, and there was a good deal of wildlife between them and it.

But vermin or no vermin, if old folk have to go, they have to go. Each wrapped against the cold in an embroidered counterpane, Siri and Daeng coughed and spluttered to the outhouse, did their business by lamplight and almost stepped on a rat on the way back.

The couple had made themselves a sort of spring-roll casing from the soggy mattresses and quilts and were squashed together as the filling—purely for the preservation of body heat, of course.

“Still miss the adventure?” Siri asked.

“Every day with you is a lifetime of adventure, Dr. Siri.” Daeng smiled.

The residents of Siri’s halfway house for vagrants and strays in Vientiane were thinking about retiring for the night. The children were already in their bedrolls, and the women were waiting for their turns to shower. They’d wash their hair in the afternoon when the sunshine helped to dry it, so they spent as little time as possible on their evening ablutions. It was Mrs. Fah’s turn at the water trough. As there was no lock on the door, she was singing—badly.

Some of the men were playing their last hand of rummy. Noo the forest monk had accrued a veritable log cabin of toothpicks in winnings, which he promised to donate to a worthy cause. None of the others would accuse him of cheating, although it was quite obvious he had been.

The transistor played Thai pop from across the river interspersed with monotonous advertisements for luxury items the Lao had long since stopped dreaming of owning. What good was a blender/mixer when there were no fruits and vegetables to blend or mix? They’d paused the game briefly and were listening to how they might change the pigment of their unsightly dark skin through daily applications of Snowflake cream—now available in half-liter jars.

That’s when they heard the scream. Gongjai, the ex-karaoke lounge hostess, came running into the kitchen wearing her baby-doll nightdress. She was closely followed by two men wielding machetes. “These bastards manhandled me,” said Gongjai.

“Shut up,” said Machete One.

“Which one of you’s Nurse Dtui?” said Machete Two. For effect he clunked his machete into the Queen of Hearts on the kitchen table, perhaps envisioning splitting the table in two and everyone saying, “OOH.” Instead, the fat knife
embedded itself in the old teak table, and he blushed as he attempted to pull it out.

A third man, unarmed but naturally frightening with the left side of his face like melted cheese, burst into the kitchen. “Where is she?” he shouted.

Alerted by the singing from the bathroom, he strode across to the wooden door and kicked it down. Though Mrs. Fah narrowly avoided being hit by the falling door, she did not avoid being seen in all her splendor by everyone in the kitchen. “How rude,” she said, but didn’t hurry to cover herself.

“The garden!” shouted Half-Face. The man who wasn’t standing on the kitchen table astride his machete like Arthur attempting to free Excalibur ran into the backyard.

Crazy Rajhid and the lost woman were sitting silently at the garden table staring at each other. Ugly the dog had been tied to a post with heavy-duty electrical cable for fear he might have attempted to follow Siri’s airplane. He obviously hadn’t given up that hope, because he’d patiently spent his days chewing through the copper wire. When he saw an assailant burst through the back door carrying a weapon, he charged. The cable snapped. Ugly soared through the air like a country rocket and buried his fangs in the man’s face. The man screamed, fell backward, lost his machete and landed with a thump on the path. Crazy Rajhid was at the man’s chest like an attack of angina.

Taking advantage of the distracting sounds from outside, Inthanet the puppet master reached into the shoulder bag that hung from his chair and produced a Browning pistol. He fired twice into the ceiling, then leveled the weapon at Half-Face. Splinters of plywood rained down. The house invader on the table was dragged down to the nicely tiled floor, where he found himself in an armlock and staring into the face of a bald man with no eyebrows.

“I forgive you,” said Noo.

Half-Face looked back from whence he’d come, hoping for reinforcements, but the man he’d placed as lookout at the front gate appeared with a teenaged girl clamped onto his back. The fingers of her left hand gouged into his eyes. In her right hand, she held a shaving blade to his throat. Behind him were assorted women and children with bamboo broom handles prodding and poking him into the kitchen.

“What the …?” Half-Face began. “What’s wrong with you guys? These are old men and kids and damned women. Pull yourselves tog—”

He was interrupted by the excruciating pain of a screwdriver being buried into his shoulder. He turned to see the lost woman at his back, eyes burning like flares, teeth snarling. She yanked out the shaft with little effort and was primed to strike again, this time at his throat. He cringed and sank to his knees, but she had hold of his hair. She looked—to all who witnessed the scene—rapturous. It was Rajhid who caught her wrist before she could plunge it into the invader’s jugular. She had found a reservoir of incredible strength, but the Indian was its equal. Whatever demons were inside of her would have to wait for their exorcism. She settled for slapping the gang leader around the head with her free hand, two, three times. Then, as quickly as it had arrived, her energy was gone, and she was frail and vulnerable again.

“Help!” came a distant call from out back, accompanied by Ugly on the growls.

Inthanet walked up to the cowed gang leader. “I’m afraid Nurse Dtui isn’t in right now,” he said. “But if you’d care to leave a message …”

Daeng and Siri rose with what should have been the sunrise having slept hardly at all. One would fall asleep only
to be awoken by the coughing of the other. Eventually they fell into an exhausted trancelike state where they didn’t have the energy to cough or the wherewithal to sleep. Although the temperature hadn’t risen a single degree, they came to sit on the wraparound balcony of the old building to watch for the frenzied comings and goings of Muang Sing’s main intersection. After ten minutes, a cheroot-smoking man on a bicycle squeaked past. It was another fifteen minutes before a woman with a bouncing shoulder cradle full of fruit headed in the same direction.

That was, apparently, as exciting as things would get. The old couple were left with the feeling they were the last survivors. The mountains that surrounded the town on the maps were not apparent in the flesh. Instead, the mist gradually deleted the buildings only a block from Siri’s viewpoint and left him in the hollow of a cloud. He had no sense of the vibrancy he’d read about in the old tomes of the French explorers. Of the days when Muang Sing market was the Ginza of the Golden Triangle drug trade.

“Fancy a coffee and croissants?” he asked.

“I think I’d prefer a bowl of hot stew,” said Daeng. She nodded toward the bank of mist to the east. “Looks like the masses are heading in that direction. I bet the market’s in that fog somewhere. And where there’s croissants and stew, there’s bound to be drugs.”

“We don’t need drugs,” said Siri. “Water and vitamin C, that’s what’s called for. It’s a nasty cold. It’ll be gone in twenty-four hours. Trust me. I’m a doctor.”

And with that he fell into another coughing fit.

Compared to Muang Sing’s downtown, the market was throbbing in a slow, early morning, sleepy kind of way. The morning trade leaned toward fruits, vegetables and opium. Despite all
the international suggestions for drug eradication, nobody had come up with a crop that could bring in higher profits. There were no oranges, but Siri bought a large bag of pomegranates, and they gorged and dribbled as they ambled along the aisles. It was still fun to admire the hill tribe women in their traditional costumes—the Akha jangling in their piaster hats and the Hmong in their embroidered finery. They were accompanied by a soundtrack of languages they didn’t recognize and the whinnies of ponies tethered to posts. The clothing and electrical goods stalls didn’t bother to open until after eight, when the villagers had made enough from their cane or bananas or edible wildlife to buy a T-shirt or a battery for the community radio.

But against the odds, there was one stall selling
pha sin.
A woman sat cross-legged on top of her cloths in a long Tottenham Hotspur football scarf and earmuffs.

“Sister,” asked Siri, “where might we find Auntie Kwa? She’s a weaver.”

“She’s a common seller,” said the woman with a morose expression. “She’s a mother to ingrates, a wife to a drunk killed in a useless war. She’s the sister to a drug addict. She’s a pauper because nobody has money to buy her beautiful wares. But somewhere deep in all that tragedy, yes, she’s a weaver.”

The reply was somewhat more complicated than the question deserved, but Madame Daeng got it. “You’re Auntie Kwa,” she said.

“To some,” said the woman. “To others I’m dirt.”

Siri unwrapped the half
pha sin
from its plastic bag and held it up. “Did you weave this?” he asked.

Auntie Kwa looked at it curiously, then up at the customers. “Oh, it’s you.”

She climbed down from her perch. “Did I weave that? Yes and no,” she said as she rummaged around in a large pack,
finally producing another plastic bag, this one stapled shut. “I’m to give you this,” she said, and handed it to Siri. “Glad to be rid of it. It’s brought me nothing but bad luck.”

Siri doubted whatever was in the bag could curse her life to a greater extent than she herself. He ripped open the staples, reached into the bag and pulled out another
pha sin.

“Don’t open that here,” said Auntie Kwa.

“It’s just a rectangle of fabric,” said Siri.

“It’s never that.”

Siri unfolded it anyway, took hold of the corners and let it drape to the ground. To his untrained and disappointed eye, it looked rather similar to the one they’d received in Vientiane. There were one or two minute differences that he would have called insignificant. He started to run his fingers around the hem.

“Do you know where this is from?” asked Daeng.

“No,” said Auntie Kwa, and looked away.

“It’s Lu, isn’t it?” said Daeng.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do,” said Siri. “Could I borrow some scissors?”

“What for?”

“Look here,” he said, and handed her the
sin.
“Feel this?”

She reached out and squeezed the hem. “What is that?” she asked.

“I’m guessing it’s a finger,” he told her.

“A what?” said Auntie Kwa, stepping back in horror.

“A severed finger like the one you sent to me in Vientiane.”

“Are you mad? I never did any such thing.”

“Sister,” he said, “I work for the Ministry of Justice. We found a finger in the hem of the
pha sin
you’ve admitted you wove. That makes you a murder suspect.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“If this second one also contains a finger, that’s what we
at Justice call a … a double-digit dilemma. You’re in a lot of trouble. Now … the scissors, if you’d be so kind.”