The Rat Catchers' Olympics

by Colin Cotterill

  “Have you found a motive?” asked Lenin Cap.

  “I’d believed old Pinit had something to tell me about the assassination attempt in Moscow,” said Phosy, “and that was why someone silenced him. But I realize now he was just pleased that I was onto the wrong man. When he was sure I suspected the Olympic shooter he was only too willing to lead me off down a cul-de-sac. He was about to spin me a lie or two when he got shot. That’s what threw me off.”

  “And you know who killed him?” asked Mint, the owner.

  “I eliminated my first choice,” said Phosy. “And that only left me with you gentlemen. Our victim, Pinit, knew I was coming here because he had access to private telexes. But none of you did. So, given the fact that you’re all so ancient I wondered what role history might have played in the killing. Pinit had been planted in the Royal Lao Army by the Pathet Lao. So, of course, he knew a lot of soldiers from the old regime. When we took over the country, most of the royalists fled across the river to avoid getting placed in reeducation camps. Others did their best to vanish by changing their identity.

  “Pinit didn’t need to do any of that because he was one of ours. He was a hero of the revolution. But he was a threat, too. He could recognize old royalist soldiers. He’d never been here to the Good Luck Café before. He only came to listen to me. See what I knew. But what if he turned up that Sunday and recognized one of you? There you are with your new life, safe, new family. And suddenly there’s this threat hanging over you. You’re not even really certain he remembers you but there’s that risk. Do you let him go and take a chance, or do you remove the threat?”

  “This is really exciting,” said Oval Man.

  “I think I should break out a drink of something stronger than coffee,” said Mint the owner. “Anyone fancy a drink?”

  The clientele cheered as he went into the kitchen for a bottle and glasses.

  “There were twenty or thirty of us that morning,” said Trench Coat. “Are you going to arrest all of us?”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary,” said Phosy. “Once I had my theory together, and I have to thank an old friend for pointing me in the right direction, the answer was logical.”

  “How many of us come to breakfast with a sniper rifle down our trousers?” said Flakey.

  “Absolutely right,” said Phosy.

  A round of applause for Flakey.

  “And the answer is, none,” said Lenin Cap. “It has to be someone who could get home and back in time to shoot the old fellow.”

  “And given our lack of speed that leaves just the one,” said Trench Coat.

  All eyes turned to the kitchen. Mint was not returning with a bottle.

  “Well, I’ll be buggered,” said Lenin Cap.

  “Shouldn’t you be chasing him down the road?” asked Flakey.

  “And what kind of chief of police would I be if I had to do my own chasing?” said Phosy.

  The sound of police whistles sliced through the early morning silence.

  He had been as overwhelmed as his countrymen and women by the poignancy of the Closing Ceremony. He had shed tears. He’d joined his teammates that final evening but, unlike most of them, he’d kept his drinking to a minimum. Self-control was his preservation. He’d endeared himself to the other members of the squad and would return to his country with his pride intact, as would they all.

  In that other matter, his planning and the execution of that plan had been meticulous. On their first evening in Moscow he’d phoned Manoi and introduced himself by his Lao name but not, of course, by his family connections. He’d merely said he was a member of the Lao Olympic squad and was paying courtesy calls to eminent Lao residing in Moscow. He said he had a gift from the Minister of Sport and asked permission to deliver it in person.

  He’d arrived at the apartment building with two beautifully wrapped presents. A gruesome woman at a desk in the reception area spoke into a walkie-talkie and pointed him to the elevator. The bodyguard on the third floor insisted on opening the presents before he’d be allowed inside the apartment. He watched the bodyguard unwrap the first. The box contained two layers of banana rice puddings wrapped in plastic.

  “I’m sorry,” said the bodyguard, “but I have to taste one of these. You’d better tell me now if there’s something poison in here.”

  The bodyguard survived. The visitor said that the second box was exactly the same as the first and once he’d paid his respects to Comrade Manoi he would be taking it to the Lao Ambassador. He’d rather not disturb the beautiful wrapping or have any of them missing. Perhaps he could leave it with the bodyguard outside the apartment? The man agreed. The whole conversation had been in Russian.

  Manoi came to the door to welcome his guest whom he didn’t recognize. He accepted the gift and extended his thanks to the Minister of Sport. He opened the box and ate one of the puddings. He asked one or two perfunctory questions about the team’s chances, showed him around the apartment, then turfed him out so he could dress for some social event. It had been no more or less than the visitor had expected. He reclaimed the second wrapped present from the bodyguard, said he couldn’t be bothered to wait for the elevator and walked down the staircase.

  There were two apartments on the second floor. From the street he’d established that there were no lights on in either. He rang the doorbell to the apartment directly beneath that of Manoi and waited. He rang again. Once he was certain there was nobody in, he picked the lock and went inside. He turned on the light in the small hallway. It was a typical, fussy overstuffed apartment of the upper-middle class. There were so many ornaments a team of parlor maids could spend their entire careers there and still not rid the place of dust.

  He paced the apartment as he had done in the apartment above and found the area directly beneath Manoi’s TV room. There, he unwrapped the ambassador’s present. The box contained plastic explosive. He wasn’t short of hiding places. Most of the dressers and cabinets had probably not been opened since Napoleon’s aborted invasion two hundred years before. He settled on the bottom drawer of a bureau which stuck so obstinately he knew it was never used. He put in the explosive, armed it and connected the remote control. He turned off the light, closed the front door, and left with the empty present box under his arm.

  All he had to worry about was the timing. Manoi had to be in front of his TV. He phoned the night before the famous race-walk marathon and told Manoi that, based on times and the current form of the international athletes, there was a very strong chance of a medal. If that happened, the first medal for a Lao athlete in the Olympic Games, there would be unprecedented media interest. They’d want to interview a significant Lao, fluent in Russian, who could explain exactly what this glory meant to a small landlocked country in Indochina.

  He put down the phone knowing he’d hooked the bastard. At exactly 6 p.m. the following evening he’d arrived on the street in front of the apartment block. There was a condemned building opposite. The fire escape was gated at the ground floor. The gap beneath it would have been too narrow for the average Russian but a slim Lao could squeeze through with no problem at all. From the third floor balcony he could see clearly across to the room opposite. Manoi was watching the television, the bodyguard was looking over his shoulder. The timing was perfect.

  Only one small matter disturbed him. The old couple on the second floor were at home and they too were watching TV. They were everybody’s grandparents, fluffy and white and chubby. But perhaps it was their destiny that they’d stayed home that evening. If so, there was no point in feeling guilty. He looked back at Manoi’s room. The maid was just arriving with a tray of drinks. Too bad for her, too. He pushed the button of his remote control and it was all over.

  That had been eleven days ago. There had been nothing in the news or on TV. He’d scoured them patiently every day. He’d made it a rule to visit the old brain-dead general most days. In the beginning
the old man had telexes strewn around the room like confetti. Every day he’d offer to clean up the unread papers. The general missed his batman so he was pleased to have a young fellow look after him. He seemed to have a fondness for strong, good-looking men.

  But now it was all over, or it should have been. They’d met with the administrators before lunchtime on the last day. It was supposed to be a quick debriefing in the unused conference room but the general had a speech written so it took him an hour to get through it. They’d all expressed thanks and respect back and forth using the same formal language that killed true emotion in even the smallest of meetings. They promised to keep in touch and Civilai handed out the official souvenir programs. The pouch at the back contained photographs of the competitor whose name was written on the front of the program.

  Perhaps it was then, walking back to the dormitory room for the last time, that he allowed himself a brief feeling of confidence. His father had warned him about complacency. He’d always said that when you stopped looking over your shoulder that was when the tiger pounced. And, sure enough, the tiger pounced.

  He was back in his room. He’d packed his bag already and was about to fold the souvenir program into the side pocket of his suitcase. He thumbed through it briefly to look at the photos and a single sheet of paper fell out. The message was hand-written in Lao.

  I know what you did and I don’t have a problem with it. But they know in Vientiane too so you can’t take the flight today. They’ll be waiting for you at the airport.

  Meet me at the Traktir tavern on Volchansk two blocks north of Manoi’s apartment building, or what’s left of it. I’ll have a new ID and travel documents for you. A friend.

  He hadn’t heard from Comrade Thonglai for a week so he’d assumed everything was fine. They’d agreed only to contact each other if something went wrong. Now this. His heart sank. In his plan—his miraculous plan—he’d go back to Laos with his head held high. He’d get a wife and they’d produce more children than they could afford to feed and at last he’d be happy. How did they find out? How did anyone back home have the resources to work out what he’d done?

  He considered ignoring the message, getting on the plane and facing the music. Comrade Thonglai was still an influential man. The money he’d been promised was there somewhere and it would buy an awful lot of policemen and prosecutors. But then, “friend” knew what he’d done. He’d be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life, waiting for the tiger to go for his neck.

  So he decided to meet, go to the bar, and see just how many teeth the tiger had. Then he’d make his decision. He put his suitcase on the shuttle bus, told his roommates he’d be making his own way to the airport, and took the metro to Park Kultury. The tavern wasn’t that hard to find. One question to one local and he was there. The place was almost empty at that time, hungry-looking, as if waiting for the drunks to return from the countryside. It was unusual to find a Russian restaurant without a crowd. There was just one table full and one old woman in a gingham dressing gown sitting by herself. She hissed as he walked past her.

  “Sss, foreigner,” she said, but didn’t look up from her drink. It wasn’t so much an accusation, more some sort of traditional greeting.

  The barman, a pasty young man, said, “Don’t mind her,” as he’d probably said every day to every foreigner who’d entered their ratty establishment.

  “Do you speak Russian?” said the barman as an afterthought.

  “Yes,” said the new arrival.

  “What can I get you?”

  “A beer,” he said, even though he had no intention of drinking it.

  He took it to a table at the back near the toilets. It was as far from the old woman as he could get. He sat and stared at her. He wondered whether she had some innate ability to recognize foreign blood. His question was answered when a young man with a large briefcase entered.

  “Foreigner,” hissed the old woman.

  “Don’t mind her,” said the barman. “What can I get you?”

  “I’ll have a tea,” said the new arrival and he went to sit opposite the man at the rear table.

  “So you don’t only interpret?” he said.

  Roger smiled and sipped his tea, which was cold.

  “I have a life outside the Olympics,” he said.

  “And how do I fit into that life?” he asked.

  “I establish that you are no risk and I hand over your new identity and the means to get to your new home,” said Roger.

  He patted the briefcase.

  “Just how many people know?” he asked.

  “Me,” said Roger, “and your sponsor back in Laos.”

  “Why are you involved?”

  “Comrade Thonglai wanted someone to watch over you. Make sure everything worked out. That was a very neat job, by the way. Very professional. Shame about the innocents.”

  “There are no innocents,” he said. “Doing nothing doesn’t make a person guiltless. The silent majority can be held responsible for the rise of every tyrant in the world.”

  “Including Manoi?”

  “He would have been the next.”

  “So you nipped the autocracy in the bud.”

  “You could put it like that,” he said. “History won’t remember the little people that got in the way. I mean, look where we are.”

  “In a tavern,” said Roger.

  “We’re in a public place. There’s a barman, a couple of old men and a fat drunk, so you thought this would be a safe place to meet. But you didn’t consider for a second that I’d already killed four bystanders just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why do you think I’d have any hesitation in removing the witnesses after I shoot you?”

  “Wh . . . why would you want to shoot me?” Roger asked.

  “Because you’re an overconfident boy with documents in your suitcase that might or might not be of use to me. But, more importantly, you’re the only person in Moscow who knows what I’ve done. And if you’d thought this through you’d know the most logical scenario would be for me to kill you and take your briefcase. Who would bother to look too deeply into a gangland shooting in a tavern?”

  Roger’s face color and confidence ebbed rapidly.

  “Are you seriously considering this?” he asked.

  “Shooting you? No. It would give the tavern keeper time to grab whatever archaic World War Two weapon he has hidden behind his bar. The odds are better with this.”

  He was up, leaning across the table with the switchblade in his hand before Roger could take a breath. He was about to slice it across the young man’s throat when a hand reached out and grabbed his wrist. He’d been so intent on watching the barman that he hadn’t considered someone might come out of the toilets behind him. Madam Daeng had a vice-like grip on the knife hand. From the other side came Dr. Siri with a right and then a left hook to his head that rendered the man incapable of retaliation. He was dazed and confused. He gave up the switchblade without protest.

  “You could have prevented that much sooner, you know?” said Roger, still ashen-faced and a little damp in the crotch.

  “We wouldn’t have let him kill you,” said Daeng.

  “Goodness me, no,” said Siri.

  They tied the assassin’s hands to the wooden chair behind him. The barman seemed to have no interest at all in what was happening in his tavern. As the attackers and the victim were all Asian he thought he should let them sort it out for themselves. Asians, as they say, is Asians.

  When the assassin came around he was still in his seat and Daeng was drinking his beer. Combat always made her thirsty. He smiled.

  “How did you know?” he asked.

  “We didn’t,” said Siri.

  “But you put the note in my program,” he said.

  “Not only yours,” said Siri. “I put it in the programs of everyone
who didn’t have an alibi at the time of the race. My favorite was still Colonel Fah Hai. He was never accounted for and I didn’t particularly like him. But then last night something occurred to me that made me add your name to my list.”

  “And what was that?” he asked.

  Daeng ordered three more beers and three vodka chasers.

  “I looked at the route map of the twenty-kilometer walk,” said Siri. “And I thought about the race. There you were, stride for stride with the leaders all the way to the fork in the river. You were looking strong and confident. There wasn’t a sudden surge in the pace but even so you dropped back. You dropped back so far and so suddenly that the cameras weren’t interested in you anymore. The race passed under Krymsky Bridge, just half a kilometer from Manoi’s building. There wasn’t much of a crowd around there. No offense, but people aren’t that interested in walking. You’d paced the route countless times. You knew there were bushes at the edge of the park. You were wearing a T-shirt. We’d thought that was odd at the time but now we get it. All you had to do was take off your numbered singlet and put it in your waist pack and suddenly you were just a tourist enjoying the balmy summer evening.”

  “Brilliant,” said Khamon.

  “But all that achieved was to tell me that technically you couldn’t be discounted as a suspect. No more than that.”

  “So,” said Daeng, “we put notes in the programs of each of our potential assassins. It would have meant nothing at all to anyone who was innocent but would resonate in the mind of the actual killer. And what do you know? Here you are.”

  “But I’m still baffled,” said Siri. “Why did you put in such a performance? Surely it would have made more sense to have just floated along at the back and dropped out unnoticed. You could have walked to the building, blown up your victim and given up on the race completely. But there you were on national television. Half the world was rooting for you. You even had the balls to do the big finish. I don’t get it. It seems to me you were challenging fate that evening; mocking it, even.”