“I don’t know. I can’t speak French.”
“Then what’s this?”
“We don’t do languages here.”
“Then, what . . . ?”
The signal began to break up. It deteriorated so rapidly Siri was left in the connecting doorway yelling at himself.
“Wait,” he said. “I lied. I haven’t heard it. What’s the end of the joke?”
But he was alone.
He contemplated opening the door behind him and curling up beside his warm wife, but he gave the door ahead one last push.
And it opened.
He was in an unfamiliar room, and it was nighttime. He stepped through the door. The room was lit only by a street lamp outside the window. Flying insects gathered there in such numbers that the lamplight danced around the room. On the glass windowpane a battalion of lizards dined on the insects. As lizards have no self-control they too would be dead by morning. Stuffed to oblivion.
Siri stood in the room, knowing that he was on the other side for the first time. But there was nobody to talk to. Fearing the visit might be a fleeting one he endeavored to take in as many facts as he could. It was an office. A calendar on the wall told him he was in Thailand as he recognized the photograph of the king. The last date marked was February 7th. There was a desk with drawers, but as Siri wasn’t actually there he couldn’t open them. Nor could he pick up papers or thumb through the books on the shelves. All he could do was observe and remember. There had to be a reason for his being there. On the parquet flooring in front of the desk he noted a large stain the shape of Africa. He memorized the books, mostly academic: history, politics, engineering, science, literature. Most were in Thai, but there were some in English. Some had no lettering on the spine and seemed to contain files.
Near the far door there were chips of plaster that had fallen from the wall. He looked through the window beyond the insect carnage and saw a line of individual houses. Not luxurious but sturdy. Jeeps or pickup trucks parked outside them on a tarmac road. Front garden plants mostly in pots, suggesting the residents didn’t expect to stay long, or the owner did not allow landscaping. Wires overhead. A cat sleeping. Bins for garbage.
One more circuit of the room. Leather chair behind the desk with the stuffing coming out. Guest chair opposite. Lamp with a chain pull. No carpet. He knelt at the litter basket beside the desk, infuriated that he couldn’t unscrew the balls of paper there. Only one envelope offered a clue. It had been ripped in half but was clearly visible. An address was written on it: Than Kritsana Mukum, Dusit Insurance Company, Suan Dusit, Ban . . . There was an error. The Thai word for Bangkok was misspelled, crossed out and scribbled over as if in anger.
There was only one more oddity in the neat office. Siri was on his hands and knees looking under the sofa that was still wrapped in plastic. Beneath it was a hole puncher. It probably had been dropped there and forgotten. He lay on the floor and looked up at the non-moving ceiling fan, and a hand reached out from under the sofa. It stroked his skin before taking hold of his arm.
“Siri,” said Madam Daeng, “I think we should get up now.”
He awoke like a man who had jogged to Bangkok in his sleep. His joints and muscles ached. His first conscious uttering of the day was a groan. He would happily have rolled over and made another attempt at a peaceful sleep. His night’s slumber had begun badly. The almost full moon through the window had been annoyingly hypnotic, and the amulet burned so hot against his chest he’d been forced to take it off and lay it on the floor beside his pillow. Had this led to the breakthrough in the dream audio and the nocturnal trespass?
They sat together at the rattan table, and he told Daeng all about it. They came to the same conclusion. Yes, it must have been the amulet that blocked his communication with the other side. Sure, it kept him alive, but if he really wanted answers to his myriad questions, he had to break his dependence on it from time to time. They just had to be sure they were in an area low on malevolent spirits, and this certainly wasn’t the place to be experimenting.
Siri patted Ugly on the head and walked to the pretty temple garden. The Sangharaj was sitting in the lotus position on an enormous slab of slate beside a pond. His robe was off his shoulders and Siri could see the hieroglyphics of war and age and abuse etched across his back. He was probably in his late eighties, but, unlike the pensioners in fat cities, frugality and common sense had kept him fit and clear-headed.
“Hey, Granddad,” said Siri.
“Go away. I’m meditating,” said the monk.
“No you’re not. You’re reading a magazine. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few glamour girls in those pages.”
The Sangharaj put down his newspaper. “What would someone my age need a glamour girl for?” he asked.
Siri sat beside him on the black slab and looked out over a pond of carp, some big enough to feed a family of ten for a week. “I imagine it mounts up,” he said. “All those years of abstinence.”
“The secret is to abstain from only those supposed pleasures that have been promoted beyond their true value. The advertisers and the pornographers have created needs in us that don’t actually exist.”
“Including lust?”
“Especially lust. Lust is not a necessary thing.”
“I’ll inform Madam Daeng of your ruling.”
“She’s a levelheaded woman, Siri. She knows.”
“Even orangutans scream with pleasure when they mate.”
“Perhaps they’re screaming with joy because they’re propagating the species,” said the monk.
“I doubt I’d be too exited if I came back as a monkey,” said Siri. “Isn’t it funny how it works that way? Man has a good chance to come back as man, or, at a pinch, some superior animal species, but you lot make it hard for a turtle to climb the ladder. I mean, what exactly would an orangutan have to do to amass enough credit to come back as a pornographer?”
“I doubt any self-respecting orangutan would consider that to be an incentive.”
Siri laughed and threw a pebble in the pond. The fat fish gathered around it.
“Ah, Siri,” said the Sangharaj, “I feel you and I will have such fun discussing our relative values. Me explaining the simplicity of religion. You being wrong about everything.”
“You’ve spoiled that confrontation, I’m afraid,” said Siri. “Because it would come down to me sticking to my principles and you floating away from yours on a plastic boat.”
“Are you a good Communist, Siri?”
“That’s a non sequitur to take my mind off your defection.”
“It’s relevant, trust me. Do you believe everything they tell you? Are you convinced the system works? Are there times when you’re embarrassed to represent the doctrine you’ve dedicated your life to?”
In his mind, Siri knew the answers, of course. He’d been a paid-up member of the Communist Party since Paris, and there were times when it was beautiful, when he and his colleagues were genuinely excited at the potential. They believed all of the unfairness of the world could be fed into the big pork mincer of Communism and come out fine and dandy. And it would fit burger-sized into buns to feed the poor. And everyone would be full and equal. But it didn’t happen. And he wasn’t about to spill his ideological guts to the Sangharaj on their first date. He threw in his own non sequitur.
“Haven’t you ever sinned?” he asked.
“Unless you’re seeking a confession, what would your point be in asking that question?”
“If I really need a point, perhaps it’s that nothing is pure. That mankind is basically flawed. That we all pretend to believe in something but we realize it isn’t exactly right, or even necessary. Everything’s a compromise. There are blemishes and stains, but we ignore them because we desperately want to experience that trust. It’s natural. Faith should be at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. We�
�re so desperate for it we gladly allow ourselves to be shortchanged just so we can believe in something.”
The two men watched the carp roll over each other.
“And love?” asked the Sangharaj.
“The ultimate compromise,” said Siri. “It’s so important to have a partner that we cut and shape our tastes and likes and dislikes and go to great lengths to tolerate differences. We do this so we have someone beside us. In this insane quest for institutional faith we need a sidekick: somebody to give us a daily burst of faith at the grassroots level. A little shot of home belief. In that way when our religions and our politics and our doctrines disappoint us it isn’t so important because we have love. My planet is parched and crumbling, but my bedroom is in full bloom.”
“That’s the part I was waiting for,” came a voice from behind them.
They turned around to see Madam Daeng leaning against a flowering plumeria. The blossoms formed a halo. The monk smiled.
“If only I’d had you two as neighbors in Luang Prabang,” he said, “I might have survived. But all I had was sycophants to the right of me and agnostic cadres to the left. Nobody with me in the middle.”
“We could have had cocktail parties,” said Daeng. She joined them at the pond, keeping a respectful distance from the monk. Her stomach rumbled loudly as she watched the delicious fish, reminding her she hadn’t eaten. But Siri appeared not to share her hunger.
“Suppose you tell us about your friend, the abbot,” he said.
“You really came all this way to help him?” asked Daeng.
The monk studied the bushy tail of a passing cloud. “I came to offer support,” he said. “I’m not sure how much help I can be. We’re Lao, and we have no legal right to interfere here. But the abbot is in a terrible fix. It all started in the Western New Year period. There was a murder in this village. Abbot Rayron told me about it on his last visit to Luang Prabang. An ascetic monk had been staying here at the temple. You’ll learn today just how . . . different this village is. It attracts a number of tourists and researchers and thrill seekers. The visitor was collecting information to better understand religions and had asked to stay for a week. Abbot Rayron is generally here alone, so he appreciates company. They found the young man’s body on the track. It’s a sort of shortcut between the village and the temple, but few people are brave enough to use it. The villagers claim it passes through a part of the forest that is densely populated with ghosts. The monk had been hit on the head with a rock that was found lying nearby.
“The police captain came from Nam Som to investigate. Gumron, he’s a career policeman. Very thorough. He asked around the village, took statements. He took the rock away as evidence even though there are no questions you can ask a rock to learn who wielded it.”
“Fingerprints,” thought Siri to himself. He was a great fan of fingerprinting as a crime-solving method and had used it in the past to prove points. He wondered how advanced a rural Thai police officer might be in forensic skills.
“There was no conclusion,” said the Sangharaj. “The traveling monk had been here for too short a time to have antagonized anyone. He had nothing to steal and was, according to the abbot, a thoroughly likeable fellow. There were no witnesses, no suspects and the case was suspended.”
Ugly staggered across the lawn, looked unenthusiastically at the fish, and crashed sideways into the long grass beside the pond.
“And the second murder?” Daeng asked.
“Exactly a month later,” said the monk. “I suppose it couldn’t be described as a murder as the victim was already deceased. There’s a tradition in the village that dates back to before the temple was built. This compound is comparatively new, you see? It was built in the sixties. Before its arrival the dead would be laid out in a gazebo behind the headman’s house. It was a convenient place from which to carry the body to the pyre. The deceased was a young man who’d died mysteriously in his sleep. It happens a lot here in the northeast. They say it was the work of an evil witch who makes love to sleeping men, but I heard he’d been drinking some locally produced hooch of questionable quality. Anyway, the family came in the morning to take the body to the pyre only to find him on the platform with a ceremonial knife buried in his heart.”
“What type of knife?” asked Siri.
“I believe it was a prop once used for exorcisms.”
“And where might that have come from?”
The monk smiled. “You’ll see,” he said.
“So two criminal acts a month apart but no evidence they were connected,” said Daeng.
“No. But on this occasion there was a witness. A young girl had been doing her ablutions late at night behind her hut. Through the gaps in the bamboo shower room she saw a monk.”
“But it would have been dark,” said Siri.
“Full moon,” said the Sangharaj. “Just as the murder of the traveling monk had been on the night of the full moon a month earlier.”
“Not the most sensible night to be doing evil deeds,” said Daeng. “No cover of darkness.”
“The same police captain came,” said the old monk, “Gumron. He asked around again, but this time he wasn’t satisfied with the answers. He interviewed Abbot Rayron and asked him why he was in the village late at night. The abbot said that he wasn’t. As the abbot was the only monk known to be in the vicinity at the time, either he or the girl was lying. The inquiry again ground to a halt for lack of evidence, but the seeds of suspicion had been sown.”
“And the third murder was also on a full moon?” said Daeng.
“A month ago,” said the Sangharaj. “The village elders had been playing cards and drinking and getting raucous as they do. Most rowdy of them all was Loong Gan, age ninety-seven, oldest man in the village, illegitimate children in the hundreds. Abbot Rayron had cornered him earlier in the day and told him it wasn’t too late to change his ways. Of course it was, but it’s a standard pep talk to steer him from the hells. We’re obliged to run it by those of little hope. They’d had one of their customary slagging matches, and Rayron had perhaps uttered one or two small insults that he hadn’t learned from the temple.
“The next day they found Loong Gan facedown in a paddy, strangled with his own loincloth and slashed to pieces. And here everything comes together. Not one but three witnesses saw drunken Loong Gan being helped back to his hut on the arm of Abbot Rayron. And in front of the police captain one shy boy stepped up to admit that on the night of the death of the wandering monk, the first murder, he’d seen two monks, one following the other in the direction of the temple path. So it was all cut and dried. The captain arrested Abbot Rayron and took him to the police station in Nam Som. There is no tradition here of allowing a suspect one phone call. A local man would rely on his family to prove him innocent as nobody can afford a lawyer. But the abbot was familiar with the head of the police, who allowed him to make a call to a number in Nong Khai to explain his plight. The jungle telegraph carried that message all the way to me in Luang Prabang.”
“Why isn’t he still in jail?” asked Siri.
“Because, for as long as it lasts, I’m the Supreme Patriarch of Laos, and the police lieutenant is a very religious man. I vouched for the abbot, and he is here under my house arrest, at least until the judge gets here.”
“Judges do house calls?” said Daeng.
“Not exactly,” said the Sangharaj. “It’s complicated. They aren’t exactly judges, more like traveling public prosecutors with the right to make judgments on certain issues.”
“Like Judge Bao Gong,” said Siri who was a huge fan of the stories of the Chinese street judge. “He travels the land dispensing wisdom and justice in even measures. A pleasantly mannered man who can hang you.”
“I don’t think they can carry out the executions themselves,” said the Sangharaj. “But they can refer you to courts in the cities where the prosecutor’s assessm
ent of a case is invariably not questioned. So I don’t think I’m understating their power.”
“So how long do we have to sort this all out?” asked Daeng.
“Prosecutor Suthon will be hearing the abbot’s case tomorrow afternoon. They have a sort of courtroom in Nam Som.”
“That’s not much time, is it?” said Siri. “As I see it, there are two possibilities. The first is that he did it, which makes him a nutcase who deserves whatever the Thai justice system doles out to him. The second is that he’s being framed. It really isn’t that hard to shave your head and get ahold of saffron robes. They give them away at temple fetes. At night, even under a full moon, all you ever notice are the body shape, the shiny head and the robes. So the method’s simple enough. All we need then is motive. Do you suppose there might be anyone in the village with a grudge against the abbot? Anyone who might see the temple as a threat to traditional beliefs? Any possible conflicts of faith?”
The Sangharaj turned to Siri, and another laugh rose from his gut. It was an infectious bronchial chortle, the type you’d expect from quarry workers or smokers who drank too much. He probably hadn’t found a lot to laugh about of late, so Siri didn’t begrudge him. But they had no idea what he was laughing about. It took some minutes for the rapture to die down.
“I think it’s time you visit Sawan Village,” said the Sangharaj.
For the first time since his rescue, Ugly the dog wasn’t at Siri’s heel when he set off along the shortcut trail to the village. The dog sat and stubbornly refused to take another step. So unexpected was it that Siri didn’t even notice his absence until they were halfway along the track. He whistled. The dog didn’t come.
“Weird,” Daeng told the monk. “That dog goes everywhere with the doctor. If he wasn’t afraid of being inside buildings I’m sure he would sleep with us.”
“It won’t be the last weirdness you see today,” said the Sangharaj.
“I have to warn you we’re rather hard to shock,” said Siri.
I Shot the Buddha Page 9
