Six and a Half Deadly Sins (5 page)

Siri smiled and sat opposite her. “Have a good day, dear?” he asked.

“I’m torn between chronic boredom and insanity,” she told him, allowing the wood to drop onto the table. “You?”

“I have a story to tell you,” he said. “The wheels are in motion. Or, as Judge Haeng might say, ‘A good socialist does not smash a snowman with a hammer because he knows that when things warm up, the snowman will be a small puddle of water, and buying the hammer would have been an unnecessary expense.’ ”

“It had better start melting soon, Siri,” said Daeng. “The old fellow who sells grass brooms came by today, and I was tempted to throw myself at him—to beg him to take me away.”

“You made the right choice to stay, my beloved.” And he told her about his adventure at the room of young Miss Singxay. “It’s only a matter of time before our judge is free to abuse his position again.”

“Time we haven’t got. Why don’t we just jump on the Triumph and head north?”

“We used up our petrol allowance riding back from the pump.”

“Wasn’t Communism supposed to make poverty bearable?”

“I kept telling you, ‘Charge more for the noodles, Daeng.’ Did I not say that? But no. We had the restaurant full every day and barely broke even. With a bit of commercial tweaking, we could have had our own Lear jet by now. I could fly you north.”

“If we had a jet, I’m starting to think I’d sooner go in the opposite direction.”

“Shock and horror,” said Siri. “Not to evil capitalist Thailand? You don’t mean that, surely? You spent the greater part of your life fighting for the socialist revolution.”

“And what do we have to show for it, Siri? Membership to
an empty co-op, shoddy Soviet appliances and no say at all in how the place is run. We’ve watched the officials siphon off a little bit here and a little bit there to feather their nests just like it used to be in the old days. Just like it always will be. Rajhid!” she yelled, causing her husband to jump. “You step back behind that bush, or I’ll bring the ax out.”

The children fled in horror at the sound of her voice and the sight of the Indian’s nakedness. Rajhid grabbed a flower pot to mask his organ and retreated inside the house, causing a long-overdue moment of mirth for Siri and Daeng. Siri lost control of his cough again.

“What you need is some cough linctus,” said Daeng.

“What you need is a romantic stroll,” Siri said at last.

“If only,” replied Daeng. “I’ve had my mobility allowance for the day.”

“I wasn’t suggesting you use your legs.”

“How else would I stroll?”

“Your bottom looks in good shape to me.”

It was five kilometers to the river, and Fa Ngum Road was already dark and deserted by the time they got there. The Pigeon had footrests for a passenger to stand astride the rear wheel and hold the rider’s shoulders, but only the snazzy Thai bikes had a spare seat at the back. So Siri had put Daeng on the saddle and wheeled her the entire way. Ugly trotted ahead as scout. The road was in poor repair, so a good deal of the effort went into avoiding potholes. Normally Siri’s wife would have insisted on pedaling part of the way, but this evening she held on to the handlebars and enjoyed the ride. She was in a bad way.

They stopped in front of the burned-out remains of their restaurant. The charred beams were lit only by a moon smile. They turned to the river upon which the lights of Thailand flitted and flickered. Sri Chiang Mai opposite was hardly even a town, but still it shone brightly like a diamante necklace on
a velvet cloth. Tourists on the far bank might have been asking what had happened to Vientiane. “It’s so dark over there,” they’d say. “That’s a city?”

Siri and Daeng sat on their recliners still embedded on the riverbank. It was the time of the evening they enjoyed most: the bats swooping, the bloodthirsty mosquitoes departed, the night jasmine giving off its scent and the road empty. This was the time they swore they could still feel the beating heart of a grand city underfoot.

“You wouldn’t really want to live over there, would you?” Siri asked.

“I’d like to see it, just once.”

“You didn’t bring your spectacles?”

“You know what I mean. Not just this. All of it: Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Phuket and its sea. Cinemas and vast restaurants where the waiters need roller skates just to get from the table to the kitchen. The Emerald Buddha they stole from us. I’d like to see it all with my own eyes.”

“Then I’ll take you.”

“Thank you.”

“We might need a windfall. I suppose I could swim over and get some lottery tickets.”

“They say there are still four hundred people crossing every day to get away from Laos.”

“There are midnight ferry services,” Siri told her. “They pay off the Thai sentries.”

“That’s why it feels so empty here.”

“They’ll come back,” said Siri, squeezing her hand. “They’ll go to the West and get rich and come back and hire people like you and me as domestic servants.”

“We’re destined to be poor, Siri.”

“But lucky, Daeng. Poor but lucky.”

Inspector Phosy’s hindquarters were numb. He’d been on and off the road for two and a half days. The blacktop had ended about fourteen kilometers out of Vientiane, and he saw little evidence of paving thereafter. He’d taken one of the police headquarters’s jeeps, but there was a new policy of sharing and brotherhood between ministries. The announcement that a vehicle with a supply of petrol would be heading north yielded passage for the new head of the teaching college in Thangon, the next governor of Udomxai, and two engineers trained in Bonne who were being posted in Luang Prabang to stop the erosion of the river.

From Luang Prabang to Luang Nam Tha, apart from a few hitchhikers, Phosy had been on his own. He used to love the life of an adventurer, the freedom of making his own decisions and living on his wits. But of late he’d begun to relish the domestic life. He enjoyed being at home with his wife, Nurse Dtui, and Malee, their daughter. Simple things like growing beans and repairing bicycle punctures had become so important. As a revolutionary and a spy, he’d had all the excitement he needed. Now, as head of Police Intelligence, he had reached a position that involved a good deal of sitting and writing and eating coconut macaroons. He’d become used to going home at five and spending all day Sunday with his family—even when they were engaged in gratuitous acts of socialist group activity. He’d learned that weeding footpaths with a baby strapped to one’s back and a wife cracking jokes at one’s side could be surprisingly enjoyable.

He loved his wife but he would never tell her so. He’d made that mistake with his first family, and they’d fled to America without a trace. That experience had left him with a feeling that admitting to love was the kiss of death to a relationship. Like mistakenly calling the spirit of the rains by name and watching the clouds vanish above your head. Driving alone on bad roads gave a man far too much
time to weigh the good against the bad. Bad invariably won through.

So there he was in Luang Nam Tha. Another cowboy town. He’d been to so many. Big dusty villages dotted along the roadside. Chickens and ducks cohabiting as if they had no idea they were different species. Babies with plump bottoms. Old women with saggy tops. Cobwebbed motorcycles. No paint. The Lao countryside always gave him a feeling of reluctant attempts to restart. Of bombed-out villages being rebuilt without enthusiasm. Of people who had seen enough resurgences to know they’d be short-lived. The early inhabitants of Luang Nam Tha had settled on a river that flooded regularly. The villagers considered flooding to be their karma. So when the new authorities told them to relocate ten kilometers to higher ground, most did not. Thus, Luang Nam Tha became a place of two extremes—one underwater, one deserted. In the latter, buildings were built and roads were laid, and government offices were erected, but nobody lived there.

And it was into this ghostly quiet place that Phosy drove at 10
P
.
M
. His headlights were the only illumination. He had a map with the town police station clearly marked, but nothing around him resembled the lines on the paper. There was nobody on the street to ask, but there was a black sky salted with stars from one horizon to the other. There was far more action in that sky than there was on the ground, meteoroids shooting back and forth like drunken fireflies. So he unfastened the canvas roof of his jeep, lay on the rear seat wrapped in a blanket and allowed the universe to lull him to sleep.

He was awoken rudely by a scruffy-bearded man in a wool cap poking him with a stick. The sun had began to rise
somewhere behind an eerie lilac mist. There was barely enough light to make out the toothless features on the face of his assailant.

“You Phosy?” said the man.

“Inspector Phosy.”

The man continued to poke. “The rank doesn’t make you any more of a Phosy, does it?” he said.

Phosy thought of mornings gently woken by Nurse Dtui’s fingers on his cheek and the words, “I’ve made coffee.” This compared poorly to those awakenings.

“If you don’t stop poking me with that stick, I’ll break your arm,” said Phosy, not sure how he might go about it shrouded in a blanket as he was.

The man glared at him, then his mouth opened into a ghastly gash of a smile. There wasn’t so much as a stub of a tooth. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s more like it. Move your arse. We’re waiting for you at the police station.”

The stench of the man’s breath wafted over Phosy. “And who are you?” Phosy asked, peeling himself from the blanket and taking in his surroundings. He’d parked badly a few meters from the edge of the road where a footpath might someday appear. There was no likelihood he’d be blocking traffic. The town was silent. A few buildings along the main street had opened their shutters but didn’t appear to have anything on sale.

“None of your business,” said the man. “Call me one more person who doesn’t want you here.”

Phosy smiled, then glared back at him. The man’s hair crawled from beneath his hat like that of some hippie artist, and apart from a good pair of boots, his clothes were well used and unwashed. There was nothing new or fresh or tasteful about him. Phosy guessed him to be around fifty, although his drawn cheekbones and cavernous mouth made him look older. His Lao was accented.

“You work for the tourist board?” Phosy asked.

“Listen, smartarse,” said the man. “You get this all wrong and you’ll know who I am soon enough.”

“What?”

“Up here, your rank and your lifelong commitment to the socialist cause don’t mean shit. You’re in no-man’s-land. There’s a statement waiting for you at the police station. You walk in. You sign it. You turn your jeep around, and you go home. Easy job. When it’s done, you might even find an envelope stuffed with banknotes under the dash. But you do anything more or less than that, and you won’t go home at all. Never.”

“Are you …?”

“Or you go home wrapped in tobacco leaves, and Dtui meets your corpse at the airport.”

A chill wind seemed to blow through Phosy’s body as if he were ripped and holed and hung out on a line. His head filled with the sort of fury that banged drums and imploded the skull. He made a lunge at the man, who merely stepped to one side to expose a second man standing behind him with an AK-47 aimed at the jeep. This one was built like the side of a mountain.

Phosy had a natural tendency toward revenge, but tangled with his rage were questions:
How does this freak know about Dtui? Who is he and why is he so confident?

“There I go again,” said the toothless man. “I didn’t plan to go on to part two of the program quite so soon. But you didn’t show up last night when you were supposed to. That pissed me off. I would have bought you a few drinks and got into the financial side of things on a social level. Money’s no object, you see? I’d much sooner not have to resort to, you know, having your relatives killed. But time’s pressing.”

Phosy’s fingernails cut deep into his palms until blood ran down his fingers. He had no choice. His face didn’t betray the
horror in his heart. Neither did his voice. “Brother,” he said, “I’m a public servant. I get nineteen dollars a month and stale rice. You know I have a family to support. Nothing about this crap job is important enough to put my wife and child at risk. Let’s talk money.”

The toothless man’s jaundiced eyes stared at Phosy. He looked up at the sky as if everything he ever suspected was confirmed:
Police. Corrupt, every last one of them.

“Glad to hear that, Inspector,” he said. “You sign the statement, and we’ll talk money. You can trust me.”

“All right. Where’s the police station?”

“Follow us.”

“So how did Judge Haeng avoid the guillotine?” Civilai asked.

“Well, he was innocent.”

“History has proven time and time again that innocence does not preclude having your head severed, Little Brother.”

“Well, in this case, there was empirical evidence in written and audio formats. We have tapes.”

“Heaven help us. Technology arrives in the People’s Democratic Republic. We’re doomed. You do know the tape will have drooped from the heat and become inaudible long before the trial?”

“There won’t be a trial. Everything was settled amicably out of court. Too much embarrassment all round to go public.”

The old gentlemen were back on their favorite log, studying the sand bank rising from the water like a friendly whale. They’d given baguettes a rest and were enjoying some of Madame Daeng’s number two noodles instead. She had provided them several choices in a tiffin that had fit neatly in the basket of the Pigeon. Ugly waited patiently for leftovers.

“So how did she do it, and why?” Civilai asked.

“I suppose the most mysterious aspect of the case was why the girl was madly in love with Judge Haeng,” said Siri.

“Even the Phantom of the Opera found love,” Civilai reminded him.

“She obviously could see beyond his looks and his personality,” Siri agreed.

“Rich family. Influence.”

“You had a rich family and influence, brother, but you didn’t get a date till you were forty.”

“But what a date that was. Now, back to the story.”