The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot

by Colin Cotterill

  “I fell asleep,” he said.

  “Almost as soon as everyone left.”

  “I suddenly felt exhausted.”

  “You got blown up.”

  “Right. The details are a bit fuzzy. Would you like to talk me through it?”

  She manipulated him into a spoon position. He didn’t groan so she was sure there were no serious injuries.

  “We came back to the guesthouse,” she said. “You were unlocking the door but I noticed scratch marks around the handle. I heard a pin drop. I threw myself at you.”

  “As you always have.”

  “I need to give you a quick seminar on booby traps at this juncture,” she said. “There are indoor booby traps and outdoor booby traps. If our door had opened outward, the attacker would only need to fasten a grenade to something in the room that didn’t move and tie the string from the grenade pin to the inside door handle. The victim opens the door, pulls out the pin, steps inside, and bam! You wouldn’t be here listening to this.”

  “I feel I need to thank the gods for indoor booby traps,” said Siri.

  “The indoor booby trap is more complicated,” said Daeng. “You duct-tape the grenade to the floor facing away from the door. You find a length of cane or a chopstick. You tape one end to the door and the other to the grenade pin. Thus, when you open the door, you push the stick, which pushes the pin out of the grenade. This is much better for us.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the doorframe takes the bulk of the force of the explosion. You feel the blast. It knocks you off your feet but you’re not hit by twenty kilograms of teak.”

  “Just by a flying wife.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I assume you’ve learned this from experience.”

  “Terrorist school.”

  “Where do the two thugs fit in?” Siri asked.

  “Ah, right. This might be a little violent for your taste.”

  “I’ll chance it.”

  “There we were on the ground, you because you’d been hit by the blast, me because I’d thrown myself at you. You were unconscious. I was winded and I needed to take a couple of minutes to pull myself together. It was dark out there. In fact, the only light was from the room curtain, which was smoldering. But it was enough to see this dark shape climbing over the balcony railing, followed by another. I’ve found that curious onlookers usually take the stairs so I knew these two ninjas were up to no good. One of them was holding a machete. He walked over to you and put two fingers on your neck to see if you were alive. He raised his weapon. He was there to finish you off, then me, no doubt. As you know, Siri, I still have a few moves.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “And I recall someone famous once saying ‘the best form of attack is to run screaming in the opposite direction.’”

  “It was in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War,” said Siri.

  “So I got to my feet and ran screaming. As I expected, both of them gave chase. I was the one they were after, you see? No offense intended.”

  “I should be grateful.”

  “It was lucky I wasn’t dressed for a night out. Wearing a phasin would have made everything very difficult. I’d gone with the unflattering fisherman’s pants and a peasant jacket. That fashion choice gave me a few options. When I was sure the first of the thugs was close enough, I fell forward onto my left side, which left my right leg free to place a kick upward between the man’s legs.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I knew he’d be busy counting his testicles for a while so I turned my attention to thug two, alias Big Daddy. He was surprised to see his accomplice on the ground. He charged at me waving his machete, shouting ‘Ghrrarr’ or something like that. I knew from experience that would-be assassins who make wild animal noises when they attack lack confidence and are probably low on swordsmanship skills. Plus I knew he was stupid. Why else would they come to finish us off with knives after they’d woken up half the town with a grenade? Why not bring a gun? In fact, why bother with the grenade at all? Just shoot us, why don’t they?”

  “Sound advice which I’m pleased they didn’t have access to,” said Siri.

  “I could only assume they wanted it to be dramatic,” said Daeng. “A lesson to anyone who messes with Big Daddy. Being blown up and hacked to pieces makes a statement.”

  “Loud and clear.”

  “Now, despite all this thought I was putting into the fight, I was still on the ground and he came at me with his machete raised, using his free hand to cover his delicate parts. This left him a little unbalanced. I feint right. That’s where he aims the blade. I flip to my left. The blade skims my hip and sinks into the coconut wood of the balcony. He’s totally off-balance now. I trip him with my lower legs, he lets go of the machete and falls backwards and I’m on him.”

  “Like a cougar,” said Siri.

  “More like . . . well, all right. Cougar’s fine. As I don’t want to damage my fingers, I beat him around the face and neck with the heels of my hands, left, right, left, right. Blood everywhere. Teeth flying. But ninja one is back on his feet. He’s staggering towards me, fist raised. He hasn’t learned anything in those thirty seconds. I roll to my right and land another kick on his groin.”

  “Ooh.”

  “He screams and drops like a sack of walnuts and I follow up by rearranging his face. Daddy is in the crawl position, blinded by the blood. I yank the machete from the plank and I hit him twice with the handle. He drops flat on his stomach. And that was when the guesthouse manager and his wife and some of the new guests appeared.”

  “You don’t have a mark on you?” said Siri.

  “I knew you wouldn’t want me to spoil my looks.”

  They lay for a long time counting each other’s heartbeats, listening to the ceiling lizard politics.

  “Siri,” she said at last.

  “Yes, my warrior queen?”

  “When the grenade went off you disappeared for a few seconds.”

  “I know. It was about twenty minutes on the other side.”

  “Did you see Civilai?”

  “He sends his love. We won’t be hanging out together anymore.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine. I have you.”

  They were woken next morning by the sound of the whirring helicopter rotor. Roper had told them amid the chaos of the night before that he felt it would be best to get himself and the girls out of Thakhek as soon as possible. He’d invited Siri and Daeng to go with him but they opted to stay because things were starting to get interesting at last.

  “What time is it?” Siri asked.

  Daeng looked at the alarm clock.

  “Seven,” she said.

  “I thought we’d have time to say goodbye to the girls,” said Siri.

  “Me too. Never mind. We’ll see them when we get back, and after the drama last night I’d feel more comfortable if they were in Vientiane away from the traffickers. Are you still up for another trip along the love tunnel?”

  “Of course,” said Siri. “Isn’t that why we’re still here? Why would you ask?”

  “Because you were almost blown to bits last night. I thought you might need a day to recuperate.”

  “You’re talking to Siri the Invincible, don’t forget. At our age, every day has to be seized. But I do have one small request.”

  “Yes?”

  “I was hoping we might take a little detour before heading for the cave.”

  “Somewhere nice?”

  “Thailand,” said Siri.

  Daeng raised her eyebrows. “Missing your girlfriend already?” she said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Yokai

  They’d met Beer at his boat, where he appeared to spend that part of his life he hadn’t bequeathed to Dr. Siri. They’d paddled across to Thailand even befo
re the river guards were out of bed. The monks were still shuffling unenthusiastically in search of alms. Most shop shutters were down. Before nine, Siri, Beer, and Daeng were drinking green tea in Kyoko’s little office at the community center. Daeng was a fast reader of personalities. She could see sincerity in the blink of an eye. She found it impossible to dislike the Japanese. In Daeng’s mind, there were attractive women who didn’t deserve their looks and there were those who were so accomplished and modest that good looks were totally permissible. Kyoko’s enthusiasm worked its way into Daeng’s blood and shortly after they met they were friends. Siri was pardoned, although he wasn’t sure what for.

  “Look at my eyes,” said Kyoko. “They are the eyes of somebody who doesn’t sleep anymore. I’ve been through all the files you gave me. I’ve read and reread the diary. I’ve tried to forgive Hiro for the atrocities he was party to in Manchuria but I cannot. I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt that he must have written the way he did because he was afraid someone would find his diary, but I could not. I was struggling to find a reason to like him. I wondered whether he had some coded system to hide his true feelings; something hidden in the text. So I started to analyze the Japanese language.”

  “And?” said Daeng.

  “I found nothing. Every Japanese page was clinical and unemotional. I was about to give up but then I did make a discovery, not in the Japanese pages but in the Lao segment. I’m still attempting to read everything, but what intrigued me was that there was no mention of Hiro’s commanding officer or his unit in the official files, yet they feature so prominently in the Lao half.”

  “I may be able to explain that,” said Siri. “We met a Japanese deserter in Thakhek by the name of Yuki-san. He knew Hiro. He believed that Hiro and his team came too early to be listed in the documents. In fact, they might have been responsible for keeping the records, which would be reason enough to write themselves out of the history.”

  “That’s quite interesting,” said Kyoko. “But I don’t think so. In fact, I know for certain that his unit did not exist.”

  The visitors sat forward on their seats.

  “Tell us,” said Daeng.

  “Look at this,” said Kyoko.

  She removed a roll of papers from her bag and opened them on the desk. The pages contained columns of Japanese characters that meant nothing to the Lao or to Beer.

  “My instincts were sparked by the names of Toshi’s coworkers and of Toshi himself, for that matter,” she said. “He introduces them all phonetically using Lao letters, but he very kindly adds the Japanese characters—that we call kanji—in parentheses. I might have ignored them but for the fact that most of the names are unusual. Of course they could all be the names of Japanese men. But imagine a list of Frenchmen. You’d expect to find one or two Martins, a Thomas or two, a Petit; traditional names with one or two unusual names like Quint thrown in. But you wouldn’t expect to find ten Frenchmen with bizarre names on the same list. So I wrote down here the original kanji spelling for each of the men in Toshi’s unit. All of them were completely odd.”

  “How do you mean?” Siri asked.

  “Well, for example, ‘Kyo’ in my name could be written using any one of twenty different kanji with twenty different meanings. You wouldn’t expect your mother to choose a horrible name for her daughter, so you’d look for the meaning amongst the lovely kanji like ‘reverent’ or ‘respectful.’ But the mothers of the men in Toshi’s unit must have hated their sons. Either that or Toshi was trying to tell us something. Of course it all comes down to interpretation, but here is a list of the meanings of the names Toshi gave to his team.”

  She pointed to the names one by one.

  “If we are to believe the kanji, Major General Dorari Momoyotsu might very well have been ‘a blasphemous mad donkey with four spleens,’” she said. “Lance Corporal Hokofugu Hama is ‘a leftover fish with a tiny banana.’ Warrant Officer Ukabane Orimimi is ‘a lying corpse with blocked ears.’ Oshiira’s ‘a mute pain in the arse who lost his vegetables,’ Tetsukimo is ‘a licentious being with a gall bladder like noodles,’ and Konko ‘a spittle of old cannabis roots.’ Our friend Toshi obviously had tremendous fun selecting the most insulting names. You see? As I say, it could have just been a joke, his way of making fun of his fellow soldiers or of protecting them. But I didn’t think so. The only positive impression I had of him from the earlier diary in Japanese was how methodical he was. There had to be something else.

  “Look at my lists. These are the alternative ways we could write the names of the men in Toshi’s unit. Some have up to thirty options. At first, I didn’t know what I was looking for. I looked through the lists trying to match this or that kanji, and it was in the kanji of Jame Nomishige that I had a breakthrough. I saw something I recognized. I’m from Tokushima and our local folklore has a character called Yama Jiji. Japan has many cautionary tales to keep our children in line. If you don’t eat your vegetables the carrot monster will come and bite off your feet; that type of thing. And over the years these demons took on form and became monsters in the fairy tales. Yama Jiji is a demon who knows exactly what you’re thinking. You can’t keep a secret from him. I used to be petrified by stories about him. So when I saw the words ‘Yama’ and ‘Jiji’ in my list of possible hidden kanji names for Captain Jame Nomishige, it seemed to be too much of a coincidence. At first I laughed. It was like finding Santa in one column and Claus in another: a funny coincidence.

  “But I continued my search and, remarkably, in the columns of another name, Taigou the dog, I found kanji that spelled out Okami. This too rang a bell. I phoned my sensei in Bangkok—and I must tell you she has started to look forward to my calls—and she immediately identified Senbiki Okami as being another demon. Toshi’s faithful dog is an evil spirit. She gave me a list of all the yokai she could remember.”

  “Yokai?” said Daeng.

  “Yes, they’re devils. They are the many demons that haunt our sleep. With her suggestions I quickly found one more, Aka Name, in the name of Oshiira, the toilet cleaner. My sensei asked me to fax her my lists so she could save me time in my search. In fact I knew she was as addicted to the puzzle as I was.”

  “So Toshi was stationed in Thakhek with a gang of devils?” said Siri.

  Given his own run-ins with malevolent spirits, Siri didn’t see it as at all strange that a unit of Japanese soldiers should include creatures from the dark side.

  “What about Toshi himself?” asked Daeng.

  “I couldn’t find any hidden devils in his name,” said Kyoko.

  “But he’s hanging out with lowlifes,” said Daeng. “He must be one of them.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Siri. “We know Hiro exists as Toshi. Perhaps he gave his unit mates nicknames to protect their real identities.”

  “And he gave them all devil names?” said Daeng.

  “I suppose it might have been his private joke,” said Kyoko. “I’ll see what my sensei says and I’ll let you know.”

  She poured them all tea. Beer helped himself to more cookies.

  “It’s funny,” said Kyoko. “When I first met Dr. Siri I knew he was the type of man who’d be married to a remarkable woman. I’m always right about these things.”

  If there had been even an ice cube of doubt in Daeng’s mind that Kyoko was extraordinary it melted right there and then.

  In the boat to the caves, Siri and Daeng didn’t bother to shout above the roar of the engine because they were both lost in their own thoughts. Siri was imagining Toshi’s life in Laos. He had decided to give some credence to the fact that Toshi had changed the names of his friends and himself as a sort of protection. Perhaps they had something to fear. He was based so far from the fighting it would have been easy to forget there was a war at all. He obviously enjoyed his time here. Perhaps there was a girlfriend, but there was also a wife and children back home he’d only mentioned once
in the entire diary. Perhaps he had deserted from the army and moved into the jungle. Many had.

  But Siri felt the key was not in what they knew already but in what they did not. It lay in those missing years before the diary began, somewhere around Toshi’s arrival in Indochina. The five pages torn from the diary. The end of the love tunnel. And, in his soul, Siri knew there was more to be learned about the tragic day at the end of the invasion when twenty Japanese officers killed themselves for honor.

  To fill some of those gaps, Siri had asked Beer to stay on the Thai side and contact Cindy at the US embassy in Cambodia. He was to ask whether she’d been able to find any records pertaining to Hiro Uenobu, the pilot. He should also return to Kyoko’s office later to see whether her sensei had been able to put more names to demons. It was just as well that Beer felt as comfortable in Thailand as he did in Laos. He had friends on both sides. But there was another reason Siri preferred Beer not accompany them to Sawan on this occasion. He was certain their Vietnamese guide and the teacher, Satsai, knew each other, and that the relationship was not warm enough for either of them to admit it. On this trip to confront the teacher, Siri didn’t want any added complications.

  Daeng was in a world of her own.

  “What are you thinking?” Siri shouted.

  “Nothing,” yelled Daeng.

  “Not true.”

  “Perhaps I’m wondering how I can replace Civilai in your life,” she said. “Your jokes that only old men with a French education can understand. Your cultural references that we country Lao are baffled by. Your intellects. Your world knowledge. I could never match him for all that.”

  Siri took her hand and held it to his chest.

  “Daeng, do you really not know how vital you are to my well-being? I can’t count how many times you’ve saved my life, reined in my insanity, made light of my senility. Surely you know what cancels out every one of those superficial moments shared by two cranky old men.”

  “Noodles?”

  “Love, Daeng. Love.”