Six and a Half Deadly Sins (21 page)

What type of woman would go to so much trouble? What type of woman would have access to deadly poison? Who would hate Dr. Siri and Madame Daeng so? Nurse Dtui could think of only one person, and she was dead: executed for crimes against the state based largely on evidence from Siri and Daeng. The spy they called The Lizard had already made elaborate attempts on the lives of the couple. It had been one of the first cases they’d all worked on together. Dtui had kept Lizard’s wanted poster. It had once hung on various walls around the town, but now it was in a drawer at the morgue. After her class, she’d taken the poster to the post office and caught the obnoxious postman coming off his shift.

“Your b-b-b-b-boyfriend not with you, honey?” he asked.

She held up the poster. “Is this the woman?” she asked. “The woman you gave the parcel to?”

“What do I get if I tell you?”

“You get me not going home to tell my policeman husband how unpleasant you are. Is this the woman?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

Nurse Dtui had never felt so alone. She’d been used to group support in troubled times. Late nights around a table at Madame Daeng’s noodle shop, Daeng and Siri and Civilai. And her husband Phosy. Where the hell was Phosy? She needed confirmation that she’d interpreted everything correctly. She had a clue now, and a suspect, but no idea what to do about either. She went to see the only ally she had. Mr. Geung could neither read nor tie his shoelaces, but he had a memory that would shame an elephant. She found him rocking in a non-rocking chair in front of the hospital dorm.

“Geung,” she said, “do you remember the night at the Russian Club when we celebrated the death of The Lizard?”

Of course he did.

“I had a beer,” he said. It had been a rare indulgence.

“Yes, but—”

“I … I vomited in the Mekhong.”

“Good job. But do you recall anything that was said that night? Anything that might have suggested the execution of The Lizard could have been canceled?”

He didn’t have to think. “No.”

“Right. I didn’t think so. So there was nothing suspicious? Nothing that made you wonder?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, well. It was worth asking. Thanks, pal.”

“Yes m-m-m-means yes,” he said.

“I know. Wait. You mean there was something?”

“The ring,” he said.

“What ring? Oh, shit. Right. The ring.”

In a final moment of remorse, on the eve of her execution, The Lizard had apologized to Siri and Daeng. She had taken a very expensive ring off her finger and told them the bastard soldiers would only steal it once she was shot by the firing squad. She told them if they took it to the Russian Club, the owner would take it in lieu of payment for a night of food and
drink for them and all their friends. She explained that only the manageress of that establishment would know the worth of the ring.

And she’d been right. They’d eaten and drunk to excess that night and all had appropriate hangovers the following day. And nobody had given a second thought to the ring. Could it have contained a message?

The Russian Club had changed management shortly after, and none of them had followed up with the military. There was a slim chance that the ring had alerted allies of The Lizard’s location and led to a rescue.

That faint hope was enough for Dtui. The military would never announce or admit to such a debacle, and there was no way a simple nurse would be given such information.

So there she was in police headquarters, sitting opposite Sergeant Sihot. He’d been a good soldier, but he would never be a general. He filled in the forms and listened politely, but he didn’t put on his bulletproof armor and charge into battle. That’s what Phosy would have done. That’s why she needed her husband.

Sergeant Sihot listened to the entire story of the
pha sin
and the poison. Dtui told him about the deceased woman who might have come back to life in order to kill Siri and Daeng. In fairness, he listened with a straight face.

When the story was told, he put down the pen and leaned back in his creaky chair. “Must say, it all sounds a bit espionage-like to me,” he said.

“Espionage-like?” said Dtui. “Of course it was espionage-like. She was a spy. That’s what they do. All you’d have to do is get in touch with the military and get a confirmation she was executed.”

He pursed his lips. “Oooh,” he said. “That wouldn’t be easy at all.”

“Why not?”

“Military and police. We don’t get along that well.”

“How could you not? You were a colonel in the military. Phosy was a general. The police force is just an offshoot of the army. There must be people over there you can ask.”

“I suppose so,” Sihot said without enthusiasm.

“You suppose …? All right. Then bear this in mind while you consider it. Our friends Dr. Siri and Daeng went up-country to follow up on where the mystery finger came from. They’d already been exposed to arsenic. They took half the
sin
with them. They were already ill when they left. But what if The Lizard’s up there too? What if she’s exposed them to more of the stuff? What if she wants to watch them have a slow and painful death? Could you live with that?”

“That’s an awful lot of conjecture, young Dtui.”

“You’re right. But we live in a time where it’s advisable to expect the worst. Could you at least promise me you’ll contact the military and ask about The Lizard? A man of your resources must have old friends in the armed forces.”

Sihot smiled. He was missing a good number of teeth. “I’ll try,” he said.

She stood to leave. “And it would be a good opportunity to have the military get in touch with Phosy and get him on the case.”

“He’ll be in touch,” said Sihot. “Don’t worry.”

Buddhism probably prepared a man to lay in a puddle of effluent for long periods in total darkness. But Phosy wasn’t Buddhist, and his eclectic animist upbringing hadn’t helped at all. He needed to keep his mind active through some activity other than meditation. The endless hours of arse-numbing political seminars had trained him to look fascinated while plotting long-term projects; his thirst for revenge on toothless Goi would have kept him alive for weeks. He had formulated a plan. It wasn’t perfect, but he was hardly in a state to expect perfection.

He had also kept his mind alive by retracing the events of the morning the two headmen had purportedly killed each other. Once he’d studied the bodies and applied logic to the findings, it had become obvious what had actually transpired. He would never be able to prove it, and he decided it would be more than his life was worth to run his suspicions by the perpetrators.

But he was confident he had reached the actual scenario. The wounds on the bodies were most certainly those from sharpened bamboo poles—there was no doubt about that. The curious part was how both men had as many wounds
on their backs as they did on their fronts. These might have occurred on one corpse as the impending victor gave chase to his opponent and administered the final blows. But there were no circumstances that he could imagine whereby the two men were both attacking and retreating. In a stand-up fight, the rivals would be facing each other.

So how did the wounds arrive on the backs of the fighters? There was only one possibility. They were attacked by somebody else, or rather, by a group armed with the same type of sharpened bamboo poles as those of the headmen. But who could have been responsible for such a thing? The Chinese road gang had no vested interest in the duel. If one of the headman’s own villages had been involved, that headman would surely have only attacked the opposing headman. So what group would stand to gain from the death of both of them?

At Phosy’s embarrassing dénouement in the clearing, only one section of the crowd had shown any pleasure at his announcement that he was unable to declare a winner from the two villages. The mysterious tribeswomen whose youngster had caused the lust-fest in the first place had clapped and grinned when they heard the girl would not become the possession of either camp. Of course, who would want to see such a prize condemned to poverty in a dirty village in the middle of nowhere? No. They had better things planned for their nubile virgin princess. A rich city type. A dowry. Aid. By killing the two headmen, the girl was back on the market.

When the zinc roof to his tomb opened this time, he was prepared for it. When he heard the padlock being unfastened, he closed his eyes tight against the glare, took a deep breath and twisted around to be facedown. There he lay perfectly still. As still as death. The same hand grabbed his collar, but the material ripped. There was yelling. Someone had climbed down into the grave and was manhandling him
out. He took a long slow breath through his nose and was dumped on the dirt.

Someone felt for a pulse. Phosy was a man who took a pride in keeping his pulse to himself. Dtui, an experienced nurse, had only been able to find it on rare occasions, all of those after sex. She’d pronounced him dead many an early morning. His veins were deep and embedded in a thick endoplasm.

He doubted his captors would give him mouth-to-mouth. A finger lifted his eyelid, but he was already staring at the inside of his brain, another trick he’d learned at Siri’s slab. There were punches and kicks. He’d expected those. There was angry shouting in a strange language. The voices were probably saying what a coward this Vientiane policeman was, taking his own life.

But then he was ignored. One eye closed. One turned in on itself. No sounds. Patience. He was dead. He’d lie there all day if necessary, fighting back the goosebumps. He wondered how they’d dispose of his body. It was a matter he’d given a lot of thought to while down under.

But he didn’t have long to wait. Another hand, this one smaller, took ahold of his ankle and dragged him slowly across the dirt. His body bumped over a step. His back and his wrists with their open sores sent slithers of lightning pain through his body. His physical self could take no more abuse, but his confidence grew. Somehow he would harness that confidence to find the strength to escape. To have his revenge.

Still not prepared to look around him for fear of being discovered, he kept still, but he could hear the labored breathing of the man dragging him. A wheeze, spitting, a cough, and then his leg was allowed to drop to the ground. They had reached their destination. Phosy had envisioned a pit rather than an individual grave. A pit where other corpses lay and no hurry to fill it in. He was ready for that. There were
other possibilities. Benzene and a Bic lighter, weighted down and thrown into a pond. As long as his hands were tied, he couldn’t foresee a way out of either. He wasn’t Houdini.

He lay on his side. He decided to take a chance and bring down his lazy eye. He saw nobody. He was on a flat surface. The warehouse was some thirty meters away. It was a lone building surrounded by vegetation. He heard another cough, and then a pair of skinny feet in flip-flops stood directly in front of his face. One foot stepped on his chest. He anticipated another kick, but instead the foot rolled him gently onto his back.

And there was nothing beneath him. He dropped like a shot partridge. He watched the sky, then the cliff, race past him. He was in free fall and knew he had time for no more than a kiss from the heart for his wife and child. And were it not for some blessed rock that jutted from the cliff and knocked him unconscious, he knew that he would have fallen forever. And all the spirits that lie in wait for falling men would have taken over his body and carried its soul to their hell long before the body hit the ground.

Siri and Civilai arrived in Muang Sing at exactly lunchtime as planned. Only they were a day late. On the road they’d been sharing their opiate dreams of the previous night. Although they’d both rationed the natural remedies from Kew, they’d topped up after breakfast and enjoyed a hilarious drive back. And their colds were all but forgotten, though the symptoms remained. It was Civilai who recommended they become addicts.

“I’m sure you wouldn’t want conflicting addictions,” said Siri.

“Opium and …?”

“Food,” said Siri. “You haven’t stopped eating since you
left the politburo. Look at you. You look like a gecko with a basketball down his trousers.”

They’d laughed for a kilometer.

“Geckos don’t wear trousers,” said Civilai at last.

More laughter.

“Opium is so much more plentiful up here than food,” Civilai added. “Did I ever tell you how the CIA were producing heroin here and sending it to their own troops in Vietnam?”

“On a number of occasions.”

“Ironic, isn’t it? The British get the Chinese addicted to opium. The Chinese get the hill tribes to produce it, then kick them out when they refuse to pay tax on it. The hill tribes flee south, and the French buy up all the stocks to subsidize their occupation of Indochina. Then the Americans fund a war with it. And here they all are, blaming us for the flood of drugs on the streets of Paris and London and New York.”

“Not to mention the Germans,” said Siri.

“Damn, did they invade us too?”