The smiley man came this afternoon…or evening, whichever it was. He was so polite I was certain this was all some terrible mix-up.
“You must be in pain,” he said in basic high school French. “Never mind. You’ll feel better soon. I’m so sorry for all this inconvenience.”
The words dribbled with insincerity but that brief sharing of language buoyed me. It allowed me to step briefly back inside. He left me a pencil, not sharpened to a point, and a sheet of lined paper torn from a school exercise book. I fired questions at the man’s back: his name, where he’d learned French, what he did, where we all were. But, once the smiley man had given his oh-so-polite speech, his duty was done and he clicked the door latch quietly behind him. I remember you smiled then, you spirits – ironic smiles, every one of you.
They’re still here, the pencil and paper, untouched on the chequered tiles by my right hand.
“Your story,” the smiley man said. “Just tell us your story and you’ll be free to go.”
I sit with my back against the wall, staring at the door. I sigh. I reach for the pencil, angle the paper towards me and begin to write,
“Once upon a time there were three little pigs…”
∗
Dr Siri sat beneath the blazing white strip lights in the morgue at Mahosot. Soviet funding had led to the rewiring of a number of the old French buildings and the three technical advisors who’d come to install the lights insisted that it was vital in a hospital to have a minimum of 73 RNO or BZF, or some such twaddle, of visibility. He had no idea what that meant apart from the fact that if the Great Wall of China was visible from space in daylight, the Mahosot morgue would be a glittering beacon at night, visible from even the most distant solar system. He wore his old sunglasses to reduce the glare and decided that, on Monday, he’d borrow the hospital stepladder and remove two of the parallel tubes before everyone received third-degree burns.
Fortunately, he wasn’t called upon that often to work at night. Even for the living, nothing was that urgent in Vientiane. The dead could always keep for another day. But this had been an exceptional day, and an exceptional case. The poor lady who lay on her side on the cutting table in front of him had been the centre of a political storm for much of the afternoon and evening. Siri had, of course, called Inspector Phosy from the nearest telephone he could find in K6. The inspector was the man responsible for all police matters concerning government officials. Phosy and two of his colleagues had jumped into the department jeep and sped to the scene of the crime.
There followed an unpleasant stand-off during which both the Vietnamese security personnel and the Lao National Police Force had stood toe to toe insisting that they had jurisdiction over the crime. Until it was sorted out, Sri wasn’t allowed to remove the body to the morgue and the victim voiced her discontent by smelling violently. The Vietnamese called in reinforcements from their embassy. The police called in the military. It was starting to look as though 6th Street would be the scene of a new Indochinese war were it not for one simple fact. The movie ended and the polit-buro members, strolling off their stiff legs, came upon the stand-off.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” they said. “Of course this is a Lao matter. Enough of this nonsense.”
Broken Vietnamese faces notwithstanding, the matter was finally resolved. On their way back in the jeep, police inspector Phosy had appeared to be as annoyed with Siri as he was with the entire nation of Vietnam.
“Did I do something wrong?” Siri had asked.
“No.”
“Come on, Phosy. Something’s eating you with a fork.”
“You didn’t get my message last night?”
“The ‘need to see you urgently’ message?”
“Yes, that one.”
“Not until early this morning. Madame Daeng saw it as an amber rather than a red alert.”
“Oh, did she? And this morning?”
“I had a swimming lesson.”
“Don’t make fun of me.”
“I’m serious. The Seniors’ Union has a class on Saturday mornings. They cleaned all the gunge out of the Ian Xang pool.”
“You’re learning to swim, at your age?”
“I’ve found the god of drowning is particularly insensitive to the age of his victims. I’ve had one or two narrow escapes in water lately. I thought it was time to master the element. And if I suddenly have the urge to swim across to Thailand, I could – ”
“And your swimming lesson took precedence over my request to see you?”
“Phosy, you have to admit you’ve become a little oversensitive since you became a father. You’ve had me drop everything and rush to the police dormitory for…for what? A little wind? A touch of diarrhoea? A small – ”
“You can never be too careful.”
“Your wife’s a nurse. And she’s a very competent one. She can handle all these things.”
“Dr Siri, Dtui comes from a bloodline of disaster. Her mother lost ten children during or shortly after birth. Our country has a horrible record. Twenty per cent of kids don’t make it to their first birthdays. Forty per cent don’t reach eleven.”
“And I guarantee not one of them had a mother who was a qualified nurse and a father who could afford to put regular meals on the table. The only danger little Malee has, as far as I can see, is that her father’s going to coddle her to death. Tell me, what was last night’s emergency?”
“If you aren’t going to take it seriously…”
“Come on. I’m listening.”
“She’s yellow.”
“All over?”
“It’s hepatitis.”
“What does Dtui say?”
“She doesn’t know. She’s got other things on her mind.”
“What does she say?”
“She said it’s the light through the curtains.”
“What colour’s the curtain?”
“White.”
“Phosy?”
“Creamy white.”
“It’s yellow, Phosy. I’ve seen it. Yellow with cartoon dogs or some such.”
“The baby still looked yellow when I took her outside.”
“Then stop taking her outside. Goodness, man. It’s the rainy season. She’ll catch a real disease. Then you’ll have something to complain about.”
Phosy hadn’t appreciated the lecture. He’d sent two of his men with Siri to offload the corpse and retreated to his office to write his angry report. Madame Daeng had taken the motorcycle home from K6. Siri would be a little while settling poor Dew in at the morgue, then he’d walk back. He wished he could be home with his lovely new books but he needed time alone with the corpse to organise his thoughts. Dew still had a lot of talking to do, he decided. She knew her killer. That much was certain. Their midnight sauna pointed to the possibility that they were lovers. This rendezvous, he decided, was passion. The type of passion that makes you crazy enough to risk your career and your freedom for a few moments of pleasure. When he was young, Siri had known that passion himself.
He hadn’t had time to search for a false compartment in which the killer might hide a sword. But he was convinced he wouldn’t have found one. If you were planning to kill a lover, there were far more convenient – and much shorter – weapons that would have been easier to conceal. It was almost as if the épée was symbolic, perhaps even part of the ritual. He wondered if the épée was the message itself. What if it wasn’t hidden at all? What if the girl knew she was about to die? Had she wanted to be killed? Had she brought it herself?
As often occurred in these confusing, ghost-ridden years of his life, Siri felt a familiar anger. He was the host, like it or not, of a thousand-year-old Hmong shaman by the name of Yeh Ming. It was like a gall-bladder infection, but of the soul. There was nothing tangible inside to operate on. He was stuck with this presence and still hadn’t mastered the art of living with his ancestor. He’d wondered often whether the fault lay in his failure to grasp the true essence of religion. If he’d been a better
Buddhist perhaps he could beat the eight-fold path to his spiritual back door, burst into the projection booth and catch old Yeh Ming tangled up in a thousand years of celluloid. Couldn’t they then have sat down together, organised everything into reels, and canned and labelled them? Neither of them would have been confused. Then perhaps, just perhaps, he’d have some control over the spirits that flickered back and forth across his life. Perhaps Dew’s soul could stroll up the central aisle and calmly explain why she was lying before him with a sword through her heart.
But, as it stood, Siri’s connection to the afterlife was held together with old string. And, once again, he had to resort to the resources of his own mind, cover the dreams and premonitions in a blanket, and look at the facts. See what was right there in front of him. He used a pair of salad tongs to pick up the towel from its steel tray. That towel had worried him since he’d first seen it. What was it doing there on the floor covered in blood? No, not covered exactly. He laid it out across the second gurney and looked at the pattern. It was less saturated than he’d first thought. The blood had gathered at the centre like an ink blot test and all the corners but one were white. It didn’t make sense to him. If it had been used to clean up after the murder, the stain would be patchier, streaked. This looked as if blood had merely seeped into it from one corner.
If he’d been in France or England he could have taken samples of the woman’s blood, and samples from the towel, rushed them off to Serology and had a result – match or no match – before dinner. But he was in Laos and what Mahosot Hospital classified as a blood unit was old Mrs Bountien and an antique microscope. And she had a market garden of yams to look after so she only came in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Siri considered walking over to the dormitory and inviting Mr Geung to help him with the autopsy but he decided to let his assistant enjoy his leisure hours in peace. Siri turned on the noisy Russian air-conditioner, put on his attractive green Chinese overalls and his rubber gloves, and turned towards his corpse. Dew had the build of a short, 48-kilogram-class weightlifter. She was attractive but not classically pretty. She was strongly built, not unlike Siri’s first wife. He got the impression she could have looked after herself in a struggle. He took hold of the handle of the sword and was beginning to wonder whether he’d have the strength to remove it.
“Y…you’ll hurt your b…back.”
Siri turned and smiled. The Mr Geung radar never failed. Siri only had to stroll past the morgue on a weekend and Mr Geung would know. He’d be there like a shadow beside him. The morgue and the life and death it contained was Mr Geung’s home.
“Mr Geung,” said Siri. “Looks like we have a guest.”
“You didn’t…didn’t call me.”
“What for? You have the nose of a dog, my friend. I knew you’d be here.”
“Ha, I have a dog nose.” Geung sniffed like a bloodhound and walked to the storeroom to put on his apron. Canine sniffs and grunts and laughter emanated from behind the door. His condition was really only a problem to other people, those who felt uncomfortable around him, people like Judge Haeng. But Mr Geung pottered around inside his Down’s Syndrome taking pleasure from simple things, enjoying the love he felt from his morgue family, doing his job. And his job was to assist Dr Comrade Siri. But the doctor couldn’t help but notice there was something oddly different about Geung today. He decided he would bring it up once their work was done.
Siri held on to Dew’s shoulders while Geung, in one glorious Excaliburic flourish, grabbed the handle bowl in both hands and yanked the épée from her chest. Siri looked at the congealed blood trail that led from her heart. He picked up the towel and spread it across her groin, lining up the stains like a piece of a large puzzle. It fitted but it didn’t solve anything. He was almost convinced the blood on the towel had come from the deceased. It had clearly been on her lap at some stage. But, what he couldn’t explain was why the towel was stained but had not been saturated by the considerable flow of blood that would have gushed from the wound. Nor could he imagine why it was on the floor when they discovered the body. There had been no blood on Dew’s hands.
The autopsy took the standard two hours and produced no astounding revelations. She was fit, healthy, and had, at some stage, given birth. She had been killed almost immediately the sword pierced her heart and she had probably felt little pain. The murderer had either known exactly where to find the heart, and been skilful enough to impale it, or he had been very lucky. The shallow N or Z mark on her thigh was another matter. Siri knew it had not been inflicted by the sword as there had been very little bleeding, barely a trickle. The épée must have killed her first. But this meant the killer must have used a different weapon to sign his work. From the width of the cut and the condition of the skin, Siri assumed a small flat-bladed knife had been used, perhaps a sharp penknife. But it was a hurried, botched job. A last-minute thought perhaps? No. The killer had gone to the trouble of bringing the knife. Why hurry the final touch? Was he disturbed? Frightened? Disgusted at what he’d done? Siri hated autopsies that left more questions than answers.
For want of a police forensic investigation unit, Siri took the liberty of dusting (as they called it overseas) for fingerprints. He had a fine mixture of chalk and magnesium prepared for just such an eventuality. Despite the fact that he and Geung had been very careful not to touch the sword handle, it yielded no prints. Either it had been wiped clean or the killer had worn gloves. Perhaps a lesser investigator might have given up at that point, but Siri, guided by the guile of his hero Maigret of the Paris Sûreté, continued his curious dust down the shaft. And there he found it. One clear print at the top of the blade. He was proud of himself but had no idea what to do with his find. There may have been some simple way of recording the print but he hadn’t yet learned that skill. So he put the épée on the top shelf in the storeroom and hoped the ceiling lizards wouldn’t lick away his evidence.
Two tasks remained. Firstly, he would return to the scene of the crime and search for a hiding place for both a sword and a knife. Secondly, whilst there, he might even have another conversation with the Vietnamese guard who’d been given sentry duty in front of the K6 sauna. And then there was one more, very serious matter, not related to the murder. He walked to Geung who was scrubbing the overalls in the deep tub.
“Mr Geung,” he said.
“Yes, Comrade Doctor?”
“Your hair.”
Geung smiled. “I…I’m very sexy.”
“Who did that to you?”
“It…it…it’s a permanent wave. Nurse Dtui put it o…on my hair.”
“And you let her?”
“I’m very ss…sexy.”
“Irresistible.”
“Thank you.”
“I think we need to have a word with Nurse Dtui.”
3
GRUEL AND UNUSUAL
Not for any religious conviction, Sunday was a day of rest in Vientiane. It had certainly been the Sabbath when the French oppressors ruled the roost and it was a habit that carried forward even after the churches were closed and the preachers sent on their way. Although they would never admit it, there was a number of reasons for communist Vientiane to stick with old colonial trends. In fact, historically, had it not been for the French, there would have been no Vientiane in 1978.
In the sixteenth century the Lao king had moved the capital from Luang Prabang in the north to a run-down, almost indefensible ancient kingdom on the bank of the Mekhong. With all the advisors at his right hand, one might surely have mentioned the fact that on the far bank of that same river – a stretch of water sometimes so low and slow you can wade across it – lived the Thais: the mortal enemy of the Lao. To nobody’s surprise, Vientiane was sacked on a number of occasions and finally left in ruins. Only its old stupas and one temple remained standing but even these had been tunnelled into and looted by scavenging Chinese bandits. And there the old city rotted, strangled by the encroaching jungle, ignored, until deep into the
nineteenth century.
Enter the French. Following a treaty with the Siamese, the east bank of the Mekhong was ceded to the invaders from Europe. Vientiane was dug from the forest, replanned and rebuilt in French colonial style. Temples grew around the crippled stupas and That Luang, the soul of the Lao nation, was recreated from French missionary etchings of centuries past. The buildings were a confused mismatch of Asian frugality and modest European splendour. It was a typical South-east Asian city as conceived on a budget on a drawing board in Paris. Just as in Saigon and Phnom Penh, the colonists had always known what the locals wanted better than the natives knew themselves. And the children grew up believing that this was their style, their architecture, and they were annoyed that the hokey temples didn’t make any attempt to fit it. But there it was, voila, la nouvelle Vientiane, renamed to accommodate the French inability to pronounce the original name: Viang Chan.
And now, that same Vientiane which had once been consumed by jungle was being washed away by unseasonal and unceasing rains. Like ice-cubes in a sink, the buildings seemed to be melting away, first their mustard colours, then their shapes. The streets of brown mud melded into the shop fronts and invaded front yards. The heavy hibiscus bushes sagged and spread and blended together like slowly collapsing jellies. And, in their still-religious hearts, the Vientonians, who had prayed for rain for most of the previous year, were beginning to pray for it to stop.
Sunday was the day that Daeng shut her noodle shop and she and Siri would spend all their time together. Since the early rains had begun to thunder down on the city, just negotiating the motorcycle around town had become an adventure. There were potholes so deep it was believed they tunnelled all the way through to Melbourne, Australia. There were stretches of mud so slick it was like riding on hair oil, spots where you couldn’t tell the road from the river. It made the city they lived in a wonderfully unpredictable place. On this particular Sunday their plan had been to have no plan. They might just slither around town or chance the northern road to Thangon and enjoy a fish lunch by the ferry crossing. Or they might hit a submerged rock and spend the day in a motorcycle repair shop. It didn’t matter either way as long as they were together.
Dr Siri Paiboun: Love Songs from a Shallow Grave (2010) Page 4
