Disco for the Departed

by Colin Cotterill

  “You know something I don’t.”

  “The young girl’s been here since the day before yesterday. I don’t know if she’s a relative or just someone from the village who was looking for the old lady. She’d wandered off one day. The girl found her here, spent a minute with her, then ran off home. She came back a few hours later with three pigs and a machete.”

  “How come I haven’t seen her?”

  “She isn’t comfortable with white medicine. She stays hidden out back. Her role’s just to keep the old woman’s feet bathed in blood until it’s all over.”

  “Does she know what’s wrong with the woman?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you bring her to me?”

  “Well …”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Could you change out of your white uniform? She’s quite certain you’re a ghost.”

  Dtui looked down at the only uniform she’d thought to bring with her and smiled. It wasn’t exactly white anymore. “They have ghosts this big up here? All right. Bring her into Mrs. Nuts’s room and I’ll change out of my ghost disguise.” She covered her white uniform with green surgical scrubs.

  Ten minutes later, Meej prodded a girl of about ten into the little ward block occupied only by three heavily drugged patients and Mrs. Nuts. The girl was carrying a jam jar in the bottom of which was a fresh batch of blood. Dtui smiled but the girl recoiled at the sight of her even white teeth. “Do you speak Lao?” Dtui asked.

  The girl looked at Meej. “She doesn’t,” he said.

  “Then can you ask her why she ran home to get the sacrificial pigs?”

  He did. Dtui noticed that all the questions were long and the answers short. “She says the woman’s possessed.”

  “How can she be so sure?”

  The girl pointed to the woman’s mouth, still repeating her weakening chorus. “That,” she said.

  “That what?”

  Mrs. Nuts was still repeating the same words, over and over, in perfect northern Lao dialect.

  “She said the old lady can’t speak Lao. Not a word of it.”

  Dtui raised her eyebrows in surprise and whistled softly. “I see.”

  “And there’s something else,” Meej told her.

  “I doubt it could get any weirder.”

  “It does, Nurse Dtui. She said this voice, the voice the old lady’s using—it doesn’t belong to Mrs. Duaning. Someone else is speaking through her mouth.”

  Comrade Lit arrived at the guesthouse in the middle of the afternoon and found Dr. Siri on the veranda. “Good health, Comrade Doctor.” They shook hands. “I heard about your miracle cure of our … houseguest today.”

  “Nice to see that the grapevine is still up.”

  “I’d like to thank you. It would have been quite difficult if anything had happened.”

  “It was nothing, really.”

  “Nevertheless, the Party offers its sincere thanks, and …”

  “Out with it.”

  “It would be greatly appreciated if the identity of our visitors remained confidential.”

  “Darn, and there I was just about to make an announcement over the national radio network. Who in blazes am I going to tell?”

  “Particularly, I think it would be beneficial”—he lowered his voice—“to keep it from your nurse.”

  “She’s already a security risk?”

  “Not … no, she … Please.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Now, you have some news for me?”

  “More than I expected to have,” the tall man said, seating himself opposite the doctor. Siri poured him a cup of tea from the thermos and left it to cool.

  “I’ve just been speaking to the Immigration Police in Hanoi. I called them yesterday and gave them the names of your Cuban interns. It’s taken them all this time to go through the files. You know what it’s like. It appears neither man left on the flight he was booked on. In fact, there’s no record of their leaving at all.”

  “But they were shipped to Hanoi?”

  “They made it that far. They had a military escort. I talked to the driver. He remembers it clearly.”

  “So may we assume they turned around and came back?”

  “I don’t know. If they did, someone must have noticed. I’ve got my men asking around.”

  “Anything about the Vietnamese colonel?”

  “His name was Ha Hung. I’m afraid I’ve come to a dead end on that investigation—literally. The colonel was killed three months before the cement path was laid.”

  “What were the circumstances?”

  “Hmong ambush.”

  “And what happened to his daughter?”

  “I don’t know. They told me his family went back to Vietnam after the old man’s death. They won’t be easy to trace.”

  “Could you try for me?”

  “Certainly. Anything else?”

  “Dr. Santiago will be dropping by here on his way to Kilometer 8 Hospital. I’ve asked him to take a look at our mummy. See if he recognizes him.”

  “Hmm. I doubt even the great Dr. Santiago could identify what’s left. He’ll probably be too busy chasing around young girls barely old enough to be his granddaughters.” Siri noted his animosity but wasn’t really interested enough to dig down to its roots. Lit looked around. “I can’t help but notice the absence of Nurse Dtui at our last two meetings. I hope it doesn’t have anything to do with my setting her straight the other day.”

  “Son, let me put it this way. You may very well be able to domesticate a gibbon by repeatedly whacking it over the head with a hammer, but people respond less kindly to concussion.”

  “One of my duties is to educate.”

  “You don’t beat people up with a philosophy, young fellow. You introduce them to it, gradually.”

  “You think I was a little too heavy-handed?”

  “I’m sorry to say you’re mired in the shattered cranium school of mentoring. Take it a little easier in future and I’m certain you’ll have more success.”

  “Was Nurse Dtui upset? Is that why she isn’t here?”

  “Dtui’s got a much thicker skin than that. No, she’s helping out at Kilometer 8 until the new Cuban doctors get here.”

  “She is quite remarkable.”

  The comment surprised Siri. “I thought you didn’t like her.”

  “On the contrary, Doctor. I’ve been more than impressed from the very beginning. I admit she lacks discipline, but …”

  Siri waited for the “but” to go somewhere but it just dangled. “I’ll be sure to tell her when I see her this afternoon.”

  “You’re going out there?”

  “I’ll go with Santiago. I’m interested to see where the Cubans were billeted, and I’d like to ask around about them.”

  “And you’ll be sure to let me know if you find anything?”

  “Of course.”

  “The Central Administration was most distressed to learn the victim might have been Cuban. Their delegation naturally wants this cleared up as soon as possible. There’s a politburo member coming from Havana for the concert. I’d like to have the culprit locked up by then. I think I should come by and see you this evening so you can tell me what you found out.”

  “Actually, I’m planning to stay out at the hospital tonight.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “Oh, I might be able to help a little bit, and it would be nice to get some sleep. That confounded discotheque dance has managed to wake me up every night since I got here.”

  Lit laughed. “Doctor, this is Vieng Xai.”

  “So?”

  “So there hasn’t been a dance here since the senior members all left for the capital. That’s why next week’s concert is such a big deal.”

  “Comrade Lit. I hear it. I feel the vibration of the speakers.”

  “Perhaps it’s a radio or someone’s record player. What type of m
usic is it?”

  “That annoying American rubbish. The type they used to bounce up and down to in the hotel nightclubs in the old days.”

  “Well, I’ll look into it for you, Doctor. We certainly don’t want our youth polluting their minds with decadent Western pop. But, believe me, Dr. Siri, there never has been a discotheque in Vieng Xai, and as far as I’m concerned, there never will be.”

  At the wheel of his yellow jeep, Santiago arrived at Kilometer 8, like every swashbuckling hero, with a screech of brakes and in a cloud of dust. The beleaguered interns came out to greet him, sighing with temporary relief. Only one person knew who the little white-haired man in the passenger seat was. While the rest of the staff gathered around Santi ago, Dtui strolled over to Dr. Siri.

  He smiled at her ruffled look. “How’s it going, Nurse?”

  She laughed a sort of desperate laugh. “How many years did you do this?”

  Siri climbed from the jeep and wiped the dust from his face with an old towel. “It gets easier after the seventeenth year.”

  “This is my second day and I’m a wreck.”

  They walked into the ward, and Siri briefly summarized the events of those two days from his point of view. “Santiago seems quite certain the body is that of Odon, the smaller of the two interns.”

  “Did you ask him about the parallel scars?”

  “I pointed them out to him and I noticed a look of … I don’t know, not fear exactly … but some darkness came over him. Don’t forget, we can’t speak to each other, so I’m looking forward to your translation later tonight. Meanwhile, what’s to be done here?”

  Siri and Santiago were a formidable team. Dtui followed them on their rounds and assisted them in the four operations they performed. Everything seemed so much more straightforward in their hands. By eight, the wards were settled and the staff was sitting around a table eating a dinner of baked lemur and sticky rice. Santiago preferred to save his comments until the three of them were alone, so Dtui entertained them with the story of Mrs. Nuts. Both surgeons were so fascinated by the tale they went to her ward the second they finished their meal. Dtui was saddened to see how pale the old lady had become. She still spoke in her stolen voice, although now the words issued painfully on labored breaths. They had to lean close to catch them, and her breathing was rank with decay.

  Santiago asked what she was saying.

  “She says, ‘Almost too late,’” Dtui told him.

  “What is?” Siri asked.

  “I think she means she won’t be around for much longer.”

  But Siri believed otherwise. The amulet around his neck was warm against his skin. It seemed to vibrate as if it were receiving an incoming call. The doctor was starting to recognize its signals. He took the old woman’s hand in his and held the amulet in his other. Images fell into his mind that he knew weren’t his own.

  “Dtui, remember what I say,” he called and began to describe what he saw. “Bushes, chest high. I’m falling. Water trickling. Concrete. All of this surrounded by darkness. A door, a very thick metal door, green, too heavy to budge. Hands. Small white hands. My own, as if I’m looking down at myself. There’s blood on them.”

  And then, as if the line were suddenly cut, Siri saw nothing at all. He opened his eyes and the old woman was silent. He knew she was dead. “What did I say?” he asked Dtui.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Not at all.”

  Dtui recited back his words as accurately as she could, then translated for Santiago, who seemed to have no idea what he’d just witnessed. She asked whether anything Siri had seen sounded familiar to him. He shrugged and opined that bushes and water could be anyplace.

  “All right. Let’s start with bushes.” Siri took control. “Is there anyone on staff who’s lived here all their life?” After a consultation they came up with Nang, a jittery nursing orderly who still fainted from time to time at the sight of blood. She seemed delighted to discuss something that wasn’t related to surgery. What Siri wanted to know about was fruit. He didn’t have the sample with him but he was able to describe the berry he’d crushed in his room at the guesthouse. The others looked on, bemused, as they tried to give it a name.

  “Monkey ball plums,” said the girl at last. “That’s what you’re talking about.”

  “And where can they be found?” Siri asked.

  “All over if you know where to look. They grow on the karsts. At the market they pay well for this fruit, so a lot of village people go looking for it. More than a few people have been blown up while out scrounging for monkey ball plums.”

  “Can you find them around here?”

  “Of course, at certain times of the year. All the mountains at Kilometer 8 have bushes where they grow.”

  “Do you want to share what this is all about, Doc?” Dtui asked.

  “Clues,” Siri told her. “We mustn’t ignore any clues. Like the green door. Ask Santiago again if he remembers any green doors.”

  She did just that and watched the Cuban flick mentally through all the doors he’d known in his life. At last he asked her whether she was sure it was green and not blue. Siri had no recollection at all of his vision and could not confirm the color.

  “If we say blue,” Dtui asked, “would that make any difference?”

  Santiago told her that indeed it would. The bomb doors at the old hospital were heavy metal, and they were blue.

  “And where is the old hospital?”

  He pointed through the window to the black shape of the mountain. It stood out from the indigo sky, looming over them like a giant raven.

  She translated for Siri, who knew the hospital well. When they’d moved everything down from the original buildings, the old place was abandoned and closed up. There was no way in. The bombproof doors had been locked to keep out inquisitive children from the middle school down the hill. But in his mind all the pieces fit together: the berries, the doors, the water, and the concrete.

  “Who has the key?” he asked.

  Santiago took them to the administration office, unlocked the desk drawer, and rifled through the bunches of keys till he found the one that should have opened the old hospital main-door padlock. From the store cupboard he took a machete and three battery packs that powered headband-mounted lamps; their hands would be free. He led the way along the overgrown path that snaked up to the nearest entrance to the hospital. The door was nine inches thick and hadn’t been opened for a few years. It took the combined effort of all three pulling on the handle to budge it enough to permit them to squeeze through the gap.

  A sad, musty odor escaped as they entered. The hidden vents that brought air from above were clogged with weeds, and the air they walked into was old and stale. The histories of the hospital’s victims still clung to the place. But Siri recognized something else deep inside its unrelenting blackness—the smell of a recent death. Dtui took a little longer to identify the scent. She and Siri switched on their batteries, and the three headlight beams swept back and forth across twelve hundred square meters of gray stone. The old doctors had spent many hours inside this hidden chamber, so the only thing that surprised them was the absence of sound—no scurrying of animals, no chirping of bats. It was as if nature had been too afraid to take over the vacated premises.

  But Dtui stood open-mouthed at the sight before her, amazed that in wartime, under a barrage of bombing, such an incredible feat of construction had been achieved. Conduits in the cement floor allowed natural water from the surrounding mountains to pass through the cavern. There were operating rooms and offices off the main chamber and cleverly designed latrines that allowed effluent to flow away from the ward. Then the beam of her lamp caught a shape in the center of the vast concrete floor. It was a body. Its limbs were bent at impossible angles. As they walked toward it, they could see that she had been a woman in her early twenties. From her state they could tell she’d been dead more than twenty-four hours.

  Directly above her, weeds dangled from one of
the ventilation shafts, a perfectly round hole some two meters across. Siri knew the vent angled upward to a spot on the mountain slope, invisible from the sky, where fresh air would be drawn into the hospital by means of a pump. The pump was long gone, and all that remained was a hole, an almost invisible hole into which some unsuspecting woman collecting berries might drop.

  Santiago bent over the body and looked at the dead woman. Dtui translated the words he spoke.

  “The doctor’s very impressed. He really wants to know how you were able to find her. But he’s sorry that you were too late to help Miss Panoy.”

  “No,” Siri said, strafing his beam across the cavern. “This isn’t Panoy. The spirit of this woman spoke to us through the old Hmong, but she wasn’t talking about herself. She had to be dead already to communicate in that way. There must be someone else here.”

  Dtui passed on the message to Santiago, who joined them in a continued search. The water in the old aqueduct had been diverted to the village at the foot of the mountain but the open drains still remained. Water still trickled through them. In some spots they were a meter deep, and that was where Santiago found Panoy. He called her name and dropped down into the channel beside her. She was about four years old. She was seriously injured and weak from hunger, but miraculously she was still alive.

  Santiago called up to the others that he believed she could be saved. He climbed from the trench with the girl in his arms and walked quickly through the blue door. Dtui and Siri couldn’t keep up with him. They stood at the entrance and watched the energetic old Cuban scurry down the slope to the new hospital. Dtui put her arm around Siri’s shoulder and smiled at him.

  “Nice one, Dr. Siri. How do we explain all this to Santiago?”

  “Much as I appreciate the benefits of a good lie, I fear we may have to tell him the truth.”

  “You sure? Lying might be easier.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that skinny old lion will have a problem with this. I get the feeling he’s seen it all before.”

  She turned her head and her light beam drilled into the metal door beside them. “Tell me something. What color is this, Doc?”

  “Green.”

  “You’re color-blind, aren’t you?”