The Merry Misogynist (12 page)

Geung raised his arm.

“Yes, Mr Geung?”

“I will.”

“Go ahead.”

Geung put his hands together and muttered a quick prayer of apology before very excitedly reaching down into the bowels of the Buddha. He rummaged around for a few seconds before re-emerging with a small roll of paper. He handed it to Siri, who unrolled it to reveal a page of unfathomable Hindi letters.

“Mr Tickoo,” Siri shouted, “Bhiku.”

“Wake up, Mr Tickoo!” Daeng yelled even louder, her voice echoing around the silent neighbourhood. They stood in front of the shutters of the Happy Dine Indian restaurant, looking up at the gaping open window on the second floor. Geung’s dormitory at Mahosot and Dtui’s police hostel room weren’t far from the temple, so they’d agreed to walk each other home, leaving Siri and Daeng to pursue what was hopefully the last instalment of the riddle. They all hoped this final clue would lead them to Prince Crazy Rajid’s palace. Mr Tickoo’s face arrived at the window with a smile that lit up the sidewalk around them.

“It is even more fiendish,” said Rajid’s father. Mr Tickoo was sitting inside the restaurant with Siri and Daeng. The fluorescent tube above them was buzzing and cutting out every now and then like at an amateur discotheque. It was annoying but the note kept them spellbound. They watched the Indian consider and contemplate and finally compose. They sipped their tea impatiently, waiting for the last word of the last line. When it arrived and Bhiku looked up with a satisfied smile, they pirouetted the notepad around to see its Lao translation.

One million pachyderms

And one spirited bear

Look sadly at the all-night sun
.

Siri looked up from the paper as if he’d won the national lottery.

“Why so smug?” Daeng asked.

“I’ve got it,” he replied.

“Already?”

“More by luck than intelligence, my love.”

“Well, that’s no fun at all. Don’t tell me the answer. Let me get it for myself. Pachyderms…the old word for…”

“Elephants,” Siri put in.

“I said don’t tell me. I knew that. So obviously a million old elephants equals Ian Xang. Name of the ancient kingdom of Laos.”

“And?”

“Several businesses.”

“The largest being?”

“The Ian Xang Hotel?”

“Spot on.”

Mr Tickoo clapped his hands. “My word,” he said. “It’s like watching the gods laying out their plan for the universe. Such brilliance.”

Daeng and Siri looked at each other.

“Don’t let yourself be diverted by conceit,” Siri said.

Daeng continued, “I know I’m close here. A bear. The logo on a bottle or a can? No? A bearskin rug? A certain configuration of stars? Spirit…a drunken bear? A dead bear? A dead bear at the Ian Xang Hotel…the empty cages.”

“You are remarkable.” Siri smiled and squeezed her hand. The riddle had only been simple for him because it paralleled a case he’d handled the previous year. The Ian Xang Hotel had previously imprisoned live animals for the edification of the general public. One black bear had been the star attraction until it was freed. Siri could imagine Rajid wandering into the Ian Xang grounds and watching the poor old girl behind her bars. Somewhere there lay the secret to the location of Rajid’s palace.

“What time is it?” Siri asked.

“Who cares?” answered Daeng.

The grounds of the Ian Xang were spacious for a Lao hotel. There was some thick tropical vegetation, native flowers that had been dug up and replanted in unnatural rows, and a swimming pool that was starting to look more like a lotus pond. It had so many leaves floating on it a skinny teenager could have walked across its surface without getting wet.

Siri and Daeng had strolled through reception arm in arm as if they owned the place. They dismissed the night clerk with a ‘Don’t even think about asking us a question’ look and ambled towards the door that gave access to the grounds. To any observer they were merely guests who intended to take a short promenade before retiring to their suite. Once they were outside they were alone. Squashed up against one wall there were four cages that had housed a variety of wild inmates in their time. Currently they served as an aviary. There was a crane in one, a dowdy hornbill in the next, a couple of dubious characters that looked like chickens in heavy make-up in the third, and a male peacock with barely enough space to spread his impressive tail in the last.

“Where was the bear?” Daeng asked.

“That one.”

Siri pointed to the sad hornbill.

“She looks depressed,” Daeng decided. “Why can’t they let her just wander around the grounds?”

“That’s the problem with birds. They have this nasty habit of flying.”

“She’s lovely. I doubt there are many of these left in the wild.”

“It’s her own fault. Look at all that meat. She’d make three square meals. She’s in the cage for her own protection.”

Siri had spent much of his life in the jungle and had eaten every endangered species there was. In those days a man didn’t give a hoot about the survival of an avian family lineage. It was them or us. If a hornbill with a machete had run across Siri in the bush and hacked him to death, he would have succumbed in good grace: a victim of the survival of the fittest rule. He believed that if God made you colourful, overweight, and delicious and didn’t give you any survival skills, you deserved to get eaten.

Daeng obviously didn’t see it that way. Siri knew straight away what his unblushing bride had in mind. There were large padlocks on the cages, but he knew his lady had ways and means.

“Can we solve the last riddle before you liberate her?” he pleaded.

“What does he say about the sun?”

“The all-night sun.”

They looked up simultaneously at the single electric bulb that dangled in front of the cages. There were other bulbs that hung here and there from the same untidy cable. One hung by the pool, another by the garbage bins. The extension to the cages was nailed to a tree.

“Our night sun’s up that tree, Siri.”

“I can see that.”

“Well, you surely don’t expect me to climb up there in my condition?”

Siri had climbed enough trees in his life, but none since he had turned seventy. He held up his fist.

“Surely not,” said Daeng, but she knew this was the only solution. She raised her own fist to the same height as his and stared into his eyes. Their version of rock-paper-scissors was elephant (fist), mouse (palm), and ant (little finger). The elephant crushed the mouse, the mouse squashed the ant, and the ant crawled up the elephant’s trunk and paralyzed his brain.

They shook their fists twice and disclosed their opening gambits for the first round: Siri-elephant, Daeng-mouse. The second shake was Daeng-ant, Siri-elephant. All even. Everything came down to the last shake. They glared into one another’s eyes and let loose their final creatures.

Siri-mouse…Daeng-ant.

“Shit,” said Daeng.

Luckily she was wearing fisherman’s trousers and not a skirt. There was no need to disrobe. She walked once around the tree and homed in on her branch of choice. Faster than Siri’s eye could follow she was up on the first hub and above the dangling bulb.

“You’re only part human,” he called up to her.

She edged along the branch. “I don’t see anything that looks like a note,” she said. “We might have outsmarted ourselves again.”

“Can you get closer to the bulb? They’d have to replace them regularly so take a look at the socket.”

Daeng hung like a sloth. She reached down and, sure enough, wrapped around the socket and held in place with a rubber band was a slip of paper: the last clue. A map.

“Are we or are we not a team?” she asked.

It wasn’t easy to disagree with a sixty-six-year-old lady hanging upside down from a tree.

“We are indeed,” he said.

AN INVISIBLE RICE FARMER

P
han had the letter written already. His handwriting was impeccable: not one questionable vowel or missing tone marker. The paper was headed Department of Water Management, and the contact details had a false telephone number and post office box number. All he needed to add was the date and the name of the recipient
.

Dearest – 
How did she spell her name? Oh, yes
 – Wei,

I am back in Vientiane, although my heart is still in your village with you and all the wonderful people I met on my trip. I cannot concentrate on my work because you are in my mind all the time. My life has suddenly changed because of you.

I received wonderful news today. I have to return to your area on – 
he checked the schedule on the wall
 – March 26 to do a follow-up to my project there. I will only be there for a day or two. When I heard this news I felt so happy because it means I can see you again. I have been afraid we wouldn’t get together for three or four months. Sadly, this will be my last trip of the year. It pains me that our marriage will be such a long way off.

That is why I want to make this presumptuous suggestion. The thought of being apart from you for so long makes me feel ill; so, if you are willing, I have a solution. My darling, what if we were to marry during this coming visit? I know it’s short notice, and you might have trouble making arrangements, but I would be so happy if you could return to Vientiane with me as my wife. I have a nice home here, and I believe we would have a chance to go to Eastern Europe soon for my work. I would be so honoured if you could be there at my side.

I would understand completely if this is not convenient for you, but I hope with all my heart that you agree. I apologize if this letter is too formal and not chatty. I have never had the opportunity to write a letter of love before, so I’m not certain how to go about it.

I miss you so much that my eyes are wet with tears as I write this. I pray that you are thinking of me and that we can be together soon and for ever.

With all my heart,

Phan

He shook his head and let out a little puff of air. He wrote the name of his betrothed and her address on the envelope and ran the gummed edge across the damp sponge that sat permanently on the desk before sealing it. There was a longdistance bus scheduled to leave the next morning for Natan. He’d give the driver a few
kip
to drop it off on his way through her so-called town
.

He had to play the game carefully. There were so many things that could go wrong. The last one – the ridiculous white girl with her imperfect hands and ugly feet – white cotton socks on the wedding night. He put that down as a fault in his vetting process. But she was beautiful, there was no question about that at all. Every man in the district wanted her. And who won her? Phan, the man
.

That’s why he was so proud of his kills. Five already in a little over two years, and that wasn’t including the whore. He never included the whore. She was ancient history. This was his new life with its new meaning. Five was a good catch. And this Wei, she didn’t have the looks of the last girl but she had bearing and education. Those two attributes didn’t exactly add up to class but she was a step up. He was honing his skills, attracting a better-quality victim. Naivete in the inferior female gender knew no barriers. They were all pretty damned gullible
.

Between Madame Daeng’s hours at the shop and Dr Siri’s commitments at the morgue, there were only a few times when the couple could get together for adventures. These amounted to before six in the morning, when Daeng started to get her noodle broth brewing; after eight p.m., when the evening rush subsided; or Sundays. As they hadn’t returned from the Ian Xang Hotel until after eleven the previous night, not even the excitement of having a hand-drawn map was enough to deprive them of a few hours of sleep. They’d opted to leave their search for Crazy Rajid’s palace until the following night. Siri’s morning was occupied with sweeping imaginary worms off his desk and forming a philosophy of life in time for his death, and with having the strangled lady investigation dropped squarely on his lap.

When two clearly drunk but ominously heavy men wandered into the morgue at nine, yelling and screaming with the scent of stale rice liquor on their breath, Siri was inclined to send them packing.

“This is a hospital,” he said. “At least have the decency to sober up before you come staggering around here.”

He didn’t have anything against drunks per se – goodness knows he’d been one often enough – but there was a time and a place. Nine in the morning in a morgue was neither.

“You a doctor?” asked the less sotted of the two. “We’re looking for a doctor.”

“I’m a coroner,” Siri told him. “Come back when you’re dead.”

“What’s his name?” one man asked his colleague.

“Who?”

“The doctor they told us. Come and see Dr – shit, what was his name?”

By now, Geung and Dtui were at the office door squaring up to the intruders, ready to throw them out.

“Dr Sorry,” slurred the other drunk.

“Siri,” said the first, “Siri Pai…something.”

“I think you two should go away and come back when you regain possession of your minds,” Siri told them. He stepped over a sleeping dog that nobody else saw and came around to their side of the desk.

“But the police sent us,” said the first man.

“They sent you here? Why?”

“We was looking for the inspector.”

He held out a slip of paper with Phosy’s name and number written on it but dropped it and watched it float under the desk. His colleague fell to his knees to give chase.

“Don’t bother,” Siri said. “I saw it.” But the second man was already on the trail of the elusive slip of paper. He tried to rise when he heard Siri’s voice but, forgetting he was under a desk, banged his head on its underside and crashed back to the floor. This caused both men to laugh hysterically.

“Dtui, get my gun,” said Siri. Siri didn’t have a gun but Dtui ran off to get it anyway.

“No,” shouted the first drunk. He threw his hands in the air. “Don’t shoot. The cop said if I could remember who told me about the invibisible rice worker he’d give me a half…I mean a full bottle of Thai rum.”