Six and a Half Deadly Sins (23 page)

“Brilliant,” said Civilai. “You didn’t need me at all.”

“What do you make of the requisition order?” Daeng asked.

“You know, the more I drink, the more insightful I become,” said Civilai.

They topped him up. There were two ice cubes in the bucket, and they gave him both. He refused the cool water in which they’d been floating. “Give me a moment,” he said.

He slid the documents closer to the yellow glow of the candle and pored over them. Siri and Daeng held hands and enjoyed the warmth of the blankets they were wrapped in. Siri’s cough had become a permanent wheeze.

“Very well,” said Civilai, at last, holding out his glass like a fortune teller who refused to divulge the future without having his palm crossed with gold. They topped him up again. “We have inconsistencies,” he said.

“Good,” said Daeng.

“It occurs to me that the volume of the order far exceeds the needs of the job.”

“What do you mean?” Daeng asked.

“Well,” said Civilai, “let’s assume that a typical road is six meters wide. We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say eight. And let’s give them an extra meter on either side to help divert any water flow. That means they’d need maximum ten meters of concrete piping from one side to the other. Here, they’ve ordered twenty meters per job.”

“Couldn’t they have laid two lanes of piping?” Siri asked.

“Of course they could, little brother. But did you notice any double lanes of piping on any of the roads we’ve been on this past week?”

“You’re joking.”

“You did?”

“No, I mean, you’re joking if you think I might have noticed pipes on our road trip.”

“I don’t think he’s joking, Siri,” said Daeng.

“Civilai?”

“Observation,” said the old politburo man. “When you balance budgets, you have to keep an eye on where the money’s going. Things like public address systems and paving stones and pipes. You have to keep your eyes open. If you don’t, there’ll always be someone waiting to rip you off. Look at how much cement they put in for. There’s enough to build a full-size replica of the Taj Mahal.”

“So you’re saying that they over-ordered so they could sell the surplus?” said Daeng.

“Given the Neanderthal conditions up here in 1976, I’d say buyers for stolen building supplies would have been few and far between,” said Civilai. “But let’s keep that as one option.”

“Then perhaps that’s why the team leader changed personnel so often,” said Daeng. “So nobody would notice the oversupply.”

“So let’s look at the two names on the worker list that are ever present,” said Civilai. “And assume that they’re the ones in on the scam. The top one here—Gwan Jin—would have to be the team leader. This other one—Gwan To—has the same surname, so he might be a relative.”

“Gwan Jin is on the same salary as the others,” said Daeng. “Wouldn’t the team leader be on a higher rate?”

“The Chinese reds like to give the impression everyone’s equal. Bosses and bottom-feeders on the same salary. The foreman wouldn’t complain if he was milking the project and banking the profits.”

“I don’t buy any of this,” said Siri. “Back then, the Chinese had checkpoints all the way to the border. The only roads in and out were the ones they were building or maintaining.
They’re not going to let their road crews drive through with truckloads of pilfered building supplies.”

“I agree,” said Civilai. “I think the only way to sort this out would be to go to one of the sites.”

“The bullet could be a warning for us not to get too close,” said Daeng.

“I think it’s too late for that,” said Civilai. “What the …?”

Out of the darkness came a figure riding a bicycle. He was carrying a bucket. He let the bike drop to the ground and dragged his feet up to the balcony, then stood in front of them as if awaiting instructions. Daeng and Siri ignored him.

“What do you want?” Civilai asked. “Wait! I recognize … My God. It’s him.”

“More ice,” said Daeng, who nodded at the evil-eyed man. He stepped up and put the fresh ice bucket on the table in front of them. He carried himself like an inflatable paddling pool with a fast leak.

“How on earth …?”

“Be back here at seven sharp,” Siri told the man, who returned to the bicycle and vanished back into the darkness.

“How did that happen?” asked Civilai, too stunned to put ice in his glass.

“You said you didn’t want to know,” Daeng reminded him.

“What I didn’t want to know was how he died. Not how he became an indentured servant ice-bringer. Last time I saw him, he was tied to a post and spitting at me.”

“It was quite simple,” said Daeng.

“I doubt that.”

“It was Siri’s idea. We took our prisoner to the front steps of the clinic, chained him up and let him watch while I cut open the twenty bags and scattered the heroin over the dry clay in front of the building.”

“You never did,” said Civilai, moribund.

“Yes,” said Daeng. “Then Siri and I did a sort of restrained
waltz to tread the powder well into the ground until there was nothing left to snort, inject or serve with lemonade. The thug watched open-mouthed as half a million dollars’ worth of dope was rendered useless.”

“We said to him, ‘Do you understand what just happened?’ ” said Siri. “He couldn’t bring himself to speak. ‘We just danced your stash into the dust,’ I said. ‘Do you know what that means?’ He shook his head. ‘It means two things. One, that you now have to account to your boss for the loss of twenty kilos of pure heroin. Your boss will assume that you and your partner stole it, and he’ll kill you. If you run away, he’ll find you because there’s nowhere to run to that you can’t be found. But of course, you know that. Do you know what else it tells you?’ He shook his head again. All the cocky bravado was gone. ‘It tells you that twenty kilograms of heroin is small change to people like us. Don’t let appearances fool you. In a day, we produce a hundred kilograms. We have direct markets in France. We don’t have to torture and kill people because we are a business conglomerate and we pay our employees very handsomely. Our network is bigger than you could imagine. We know all about your boss and his insignificant operation. We’ll be dealing with him soon enough, if you know what I mean. You’re a small-time courier and collection agent. But that isn’t to say we don’t have positions for people such as yourself. I’m giving you a chance to come over to us. You’d start at the bottom, of course. Rock bottom. But in a year, maybe two, you’d likely be heading a district drug cartel. We reward good employees.’ ”

“In fact we probably didn’t need to go into all that detail,” said Daeng. “I think we had his undivided attention once he’d watched all that heroin destroyed. He became very docile after that.”

“I must admit it’s a better result than I expected,” said Civilai. “But it doesn’t actually explain the whiskey or the ice.”

“Well,” said Daeng, “when you went to bed so early, we decided to take a stroll over to see our friends Lola and Bobby. They’d told us all about their overloaded larder, full of ingredients that would be invaluable in a San Francisco kitchen but which have absolutely no use at all here.”

“Like fifty kilograms of baking powder and no oven to bake anything in,” said Siri. “So we told them we could find a home for it to benefit the rural poor. Lola packed twenty kilograms of it in Jiffy bags for us.”

“We replaced the flour in the canvas bag and hid the stash,” said Siri.

“That’s a relief,” said Civilai. “My nest egg is safe.”

“While we were there, Bobby showed us his latest invention,” said Daeng. “A refrigerator powered by a motorcycle engine. It was no larger than a toaster oven because it had in fact once been a toaster oven, but it really did freeze. He is something of a genius. He hasn’t yet worked out how to stop everything in the fridge turning to ice, but that too will come. Meanwhile, he has ice.”

“I joked that with all that ice, it was a pity we didn’t have anything to put it in,” said Siri. “And Bobby said, ‘Oh, man, Siri. You’d be shocked how many donors in the old country consider alcohol to be somewhere near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.’ And he opened a cupboard, and there was a regiment of full bottles. ‘Take ’em all,’ Bobby said. ‘Me and Lola don’t drink.’ We could have stocked up for a month, but we decided we needed our wits about us to deal with this drug lord and his honchos. Another drink?”

The Chinese invasion of Vietnam was in its third week. For reasons observers failed to understand, the Chinese didn’t launch an offensive through Laos along the road to Dien Bieng Phu even though this would have given them a tactical advantage. Instead they advanced on two fronts, continuing attacks on Lang Son, Sa Pha and Pang Tho. The Chinese were losing a lot of men in the fighting and were being held off in remote areas in which they’d expected to meet little resistance. The Vietnamese village militia was a potent defensive force.

As the Americans had demonstrated admirably in the Second Great War, friends and neighbors who happen to have been born in a country you’re at war with suddenly join the ranks of the enemy. You send them off to camps, reclaim your lent lawn mower, grab their best LPs and start talking about them as “them.” But Laos didn’t have any camps, so a new wave of ethnic Chinese migrants found themselves on the night ferries to Thailand. Hundred-year-old businesses shut down. In Vietnam, second-generation Chinese who barely spoke their mother’s language were paying gold for seats on fishing boats to Australia. Suddenly, everyone hated their
Chinese populations. Or perhaps they’d always hated them but had no excuse for doing so. How can you trust such a successful race?

Muang Sing was still quiet. The second thug hadn’t shown up for his allotted 7
A
.
M
. delivery; Siri assumed he’d taken to the hills. So our three intrepid explorers set off to visit the nearest site listed on the Chinese work roster: the village of Seuadaeng. It was the home of Auntie Kwa, the weaver they’d met at her stall at the morning market. It was the one location they had yet to visit. Some three kilometers before the village, they came to a small bridge that gave credence to Civilai’s recollection of seeing a single pipeline bridge at every site. Nothing elaborate. Merely a conduit for the wet season waters, a slight incline with concrete posts to mark the pipeline.

“This is it,” he said. “Kilometer seven. Right here on the work roster.” He climbed down from the jeep and began to pace out the width of the empty road.

“See?” he said. “In the dry season, you’d have no idea the runoff from the rivers would come this far. No sign of a stream at all. But in the rains, the road would be washed out if it weren’t for this simple little bridge. They’ve done a good job.”

He went to the far edge of the road where a concrete pipe protruded less than a meter into the lowland beneath the verge. “There,” he said. “Six meters. What did I tell you? What would they need twenty meters of piping for?”

“Water towers?” Daeng suggested.

“Do you see one?”

“No.”

“And why build a water tower?” Civilai continued. “This is three days’ work at the most.”

Daeng looked around. There were no buildings to be seen. No cows in the dry fields. In fact, the only life was a girl coming in their direction on a bicycle.

“Maybe she …?” Siri began.

“Let me,” said Daeng. She limped along the road to greet the girl, who braked and looked like she considered turning around.

“Hello, little sister,” Daeng shouted.

The girl didn’t reply. She looked querulously at Daeng.

“Do you speak Lao?” Daeng asked.

“Little bit,” said the girl, so quietly the rustling grass almost drowned out the sound.

“Do you know Auntie Kwa?” Daeng asked as she mimed the weaving process.

The girl let out a brief smile, then recaptured it. She nodded.

“She’s my good friend,” said Daeng. “We’re going to visit her. Is she home?” She finally reached the girl.

“She at the market,” said the girl. “I go now.” She put her foot on the pedal, but Daeng leaned against the metal basket.

“Wait,” said Daeng. “Let me rest first. Do you remember when the workmen came to fix this road?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Men. Chinamen. Thai Lu.”

A bolt of anger passed across the girl’s face. She remembered right enough, and it clearly wasn’t a good memory.

“What happened?” Daeng asked.

The girl shook her head and tried again to push down on the pedal.

“Where was their camp?” Daeng asked. “Where did they sleep?”

The girl pointed to a dip beyond a copse of trees some fifty meters away. “Sleep there,” said the girl. Then added the word, “Always.”

She pushed past Daeng and cycled away at speed.

Daeng returned to join the men. “Something odd,” she said, and told them what the girl had said.

“What’s odd is that they’d pitch camp so far from the road and in a dip,” said Civilai. “According to the roster, they were here in the rainy season. There’s high ground there on the other side. Why wouldn’t they pitch camp there?”

“Perhaps they didn’t want to be seen doing whatever it was they were doing,” said Daeng.