The Woman Who Wouldn't die
( Dr. Siri Paiboun - 9 )
Colin Cotterill
Colin Cotterill
The Woman Who Wouldn't Die
1
The Used-To-Be Woman
Madame Keui was flesh and blood, or so they claimed, although nobody could remember touching that re-warmed flesh, nor seeing her bleed; not even when a second bullet passed through her. Even so, to all intents and purposes, she was alive in October of 1978 when this story takes place. They’d see her walk along the ridge to collect her groceries or ride her bicycle off into the forest. Some in the village had even heard her speak. She had become Vietnamese, they said. Her Lao was thick with it like too-large lumps of mutton in a broth. She no longer talked directly to the villagers, but strangers from afar came to seek her out. They’d go to her house, a fine wooden structure with expensive Chinese furniture; couples and elderly people and families with children. They’d sit with her in the living area visible from the quiet dirt street. And when they left, those strangers would seem elated as if a heavy rock had been removed from their souls. But when the villagers stopped them to ask what had happened there, they were silent. It was as if they’d forgotten they were ever with her.
And perhaps that was why they called her Keui: Madame Used-To-Be. Because whenever they talked about the beautiful old woman it was in the past tense. ‘There used to be a woman who spoke with many voices.’ ‘There used to be a woman who seemed to get younger as the months passed.’ ‘There used to be a woman whose house gave off a warm yellow glow even when there was no hurricane lamp oil to be had at the market.’ And even though they might have passed her on the street that morning, at the evening meal they’d still say, ‘There used to be a woman in our village who …’
And perhaps that was because two months earlier they’d carried her body to the pyre and watched the flames engulf her.
2
The Ninjas From Housing
They lurked in the shadows of the late evening. They’d waited out three nights of diamante skies, the streets lit by a billion stars. And, at last, a bank of clouds had rolled in and given them this brief cover. There were five of them, each dressed in navy blue, which was as near as damn it to black. And in the starless navy blue of the Vientiane night they would have been invisible were it not for the battery-powered torches each carried. The beams negated all the preparations of dressing darkly and applying charred cork to their faces. But in the suburbs east of the That Luang monument there was as yet no street lighting and there were any number of potholes in which to step. At eleven p.m. most of the householders were asleep and dreaming of better times. For any times were better than these. Only one or two windows gave off an eerie khaki glow from lamps deep inside and one by one these were extinguished as the men passed. Torch beams as loud as klaxons. Everyone in East That Luang knew something was about to go down and they all knew better than to come to their windows to watch.
Still a block away from their objective, the leader crouched on one knee and signalled for his men to turn off their lamps. They were immediately plunged into the impenetrable black belly of a giant naga. None of them dared move for fear that the earth all around them might have subsided. Yet, not wanting to be considered cowardly, none of them turned his torch back on. So there they remained. Petrified by the darkness.
‘Give your eyes a few minutes, lads,’ the leader said in a whisper that seemed to ricochet back and forth through the concrete of the new suburb.
Those few minutes crawled past but still the men’s eyes had not become accustomed to the dark. Even so, their leader stood. They heard the rattle of the large bunch of keys on his belt. They knew it was time to continue the advance on house number 22B742. Butterflies flapped inside them. This would be a moment from which careers were honed. Medals were given for less.
They kept close in single file behind the leader who seemed to have a nose for darkness. Up ahead, their target emerged from the night. The house glowed brazenly. Candles flickered in the two front windows and … could that be the scent of a tune? Yes. Music. Some decadent Western rubbish. The comrades inside were asking for trouble. Begging for it. They’d get what they deserved this night. The front yard was visible now in the candle glow and the men could see one another’s beady eyes. The leader pointed.
‘You and you, around the back,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t let any escape. We take every last man, woman and child.’
The two men ran to the side alley with a crouching gait not unlike that of Groucho Marx. But their flank advance was stymied by the fact that the side gate was locked, or blocked, or perhaps it was just a fence that looked like a gate and was too high to climb. They looked back for advice from their leader but he couldn’t see them in the shadows. Believing the rearguard to be in place, he led the rest of his team up the garden path to the front porch. He was no lover of these room-ridden, occidental-style accommodations. Give him open spaces any day. He reached the door. He had a duplicate key, of course, for number 22B742 but it served no purpose. The door was ajar. He swallowed a gasp and pushed against the heavy teak. The door opened far too obligingly on oiled hinges and if not for a sudden lunge to stop its swing it would have crashed into the hallway wall.
The flutter of candlelight shimmied from open doorways to the left and right, and up ahead a room he knew from previous visits to be the kitchen was shining brightly. That was the source of the decadent music. And that, he knew, was where the transients would be gathered. They’d attempt to flee through the back door and into the trap he had laid. From his side pack he produced a Russian Lubitel 166. Not the most compact piece of equipment but efficient and easy enough to reload. There would be no mistakes this time. He would have them all.
Meanwhile, the two men sent to the back had retraced their steps and were now attempting to round the building on the east side. This too was a problem because they were met by a dog, an ugly, mean-spirited dog who stood and snarled. Drool dripped from its fangs. The men stopped in their tracks. They had reached the rear kitchen window through which a bright light shone on to their uncomfortable situation. Fortunately the dog was chained and beneath the window was a motorcycle. By climbing on to its seat they were able to both avoid the dog and see inside the house. Just as their heads appeared at the mosquito screen, the leader and his two men burst into the kitchen.
‘Freeze!’ shouted the leader and there was a flash, then another from his camera. ‘Don’t anybody …’
But there were no transients in the kitchen, just a solitary old man. He was standing naked in a large zinc bathtub. He was up to his shins in bubbly water and held a particularly impressive loofah. Far from being shocked or embarrassed, the old man laughed, turned away from the men, and loofahed his backside with enthusiasm.
‘Search him,’ shouted the leader. There was no rush to do so. ‘Search all the rooms, the closets, the cupboards, the crawl space beneath the roof.’
His head turned in response to some slight movement through the window screen where he saw the faces of the two men who should have been watching the garden.
‘What are you doing there?’ he shouted.
One of the men waved. The other said, ‘There’s a dog.’
‘Idiots,’ said the leader.
‘Now that’s the kind of sight I’d have gladly sacrificed my left arm — all right, perhaps my gardener’s left arm — to see,’ said Comrade Civilai. In his two years since stepping down from the Lao politburo he had sold his soul to the kitchen. The post-politico Civilai outweighed the bald, skinny central committee member (who had maintained his trim weight by disagreeing with almost every decision the politburo made) by some six kilos.
‘Preferably from the point-of-view of Siri,’ he added. ‘I can’t say I have any great desire to know what the little doctor looks like in the buff.’
His comment was greeted with a round of laughter. As was now the custom, the group had met at Madame Daeng’s noodle shop after closing time on Wednesday evening. It was the rare appointment all of them made the effort to keep and was often the only opportunity they had to catch up on one another’s news. Recently there had been absences. Civilai off chairing cooperative meetings in the provinces. Inspector Phosy burning the midnight beeswax poring over some crime or other. And Dr Siri Paiboun, now into the third week of retirement from his post of national and only coroner, off getting, as he put it, ‘cleansed’. He’d been invited to attend fourteen sessions of ‘debriefing and reaffirmation of political stance’ seminars. These were purportedly compulsory for senior government officials heading into retirement. To keep everyone happy he’d haggled the number down to three. The official running the seminars had had enough of him after the first session and didn’t invite him back after the second. Siri was thus officially disencumbered of Party obligations.
‘Exactly where did you hide everyone?’ Nurse Dtui asked. Her baby, Malee, was gurgling happily on her lap.
‘Huh. Hi … hi … hiding people. That’s a good joke,’ grinned Mr Geung.
‘And it’s information that will only be released on a need-to-know basis,’ said Siri.
‘So much for the one-for-all, all-for-one policy,’ said Civilai. ‘I thought we shared everything.’
He raised his glass of rice whisky which was joined in the air by four more. Mr Geung and baby Malee had yet to develop the habit.
‘To sharing,’ he said.
‘Good luck,’ said Madame Daeng.
‘Good luck,’ repeated them all.
They downed their drinks and Daeng set about refilling the glasses.
‘It’s true, older brother,’ Siri agreed. ‘We do share everything. And this knowledge will also be broadcast. But not just yet. As it stands, disclosing the location would cause a conflict of interest to one of our number.’
‘Meaning me,’ said Inspector Phosy, surreptitiously holding Nurse Dtui’s hand beneath the table, an uncommon gesture between a man and his wife in those parts. It was a habit he had picked up from Siri and Daeng who displayed their affection openly.
‘And meaning you’ve done something illegal … again,’ he added.
‘I’m shocked and stunned,’ said Siri. ‘But if that were indeed the case, you should be grateful I’m keeping my mouth shut. Though tell me, how serious a crime could a frail old man commit?’
This comment was met with a chorus of groans for they all knew that Dr Siri and the law were old adversaries. And, technically, they were all breaking the regulations just by being there that night. All told, assuming a two-year-old counted as a whole person, there were seven of them present. Any meeting of a non-familial group consisting of more than five members was obliged to be accompanied by a certificate of assembly which could be obtained after a long wait at the department of Meetings and Appointments. This was one of the many red ribbons wound around the population of socialist Laos. If the group hadn’t carried the weight it did they would surely have been reported by one of the neighbourhood spies, perhaps a member of the youth movement. But carry some weight it did. Siri and Civilai had accumulated over eighty years of membership of the Communist party between them. Madame Daeng was also owed a great deal by the old men in power. She had been in Vientiane only one year. In that time she had pursued and wed Dr Siri, established the most popular noodle shop in the capital, and helped to solve a number of mysteries that had baffled many. The sixty-seven-year-old had skills far more reaching than the perfect combining of spices and herbs. Hers was a secret past that few in the capital knew of.
Also in the restaurant was Mr Geung, a proud flag-bearer for the ranks of Down’s syndrome. Until recently he had worked as the most able morgue assistant. But, upon Siri’s retirement, and the official closure of that establishment, Mr Geung had been bound for the red tag bag room — the hospital laundry where all the unspeakable body parts and waste were separated from the linens. In a daring last-minute rescue, Siri had brought Mr Geung to Daeng’s shop where he served noodles and made delicious coffee with a full three centimetres of condensed milk in each glass.
Inspector Phosy, as he had done many times before, pretended not to have heard of Dr Siri and his illegal activities. In a country without a constitution or a body of laws, the term ‘illegal’ was debatable anyway. He had to admit he could thank this group for some of the fluffiest feathers in his cap. Their victories in the field of crime suppression had propelled him to the rank of Senior Head of Crime Division — Political Branch. This was a promotion accompanied by a monthly rise in salary of 400 kip — about a dollar fifty — a metal filing cabinet and his own garden rake.
His wife, Nurse Dtui, also left in limbo by the closure of the Mahosot Hospital morgue, had finally been transferred to the old Lido Hotel which now housed the National School of Nursing. She was teaching basic physiology and Russian language. The former because she had seen and handled more internal organs than anyone else on the staff. The latter because, until her untimely pregnancy, she had been on her way to the Eastern bloc to become qualified in a field in which she already excelled — forensic pathology. With Malee rocking back and forth in a small hammock at the front of the classroom, she would attempt to explain Russian grammar to young hill-tribe girls who barely understood Lao.
‘Just to put our minds at ease, little brother,’ said Civilai, ‘you haven’t done away with them all, have you? Sacrificed them so the Housing Department wouldn’t get its greasy hands on them?’
‘They’re all alive and well,’ said Siri.
‘All eleven of them,’ said Daeng.
‘Eleven? Ah, I knew it.’ Civilai nodded his head. ‘You’ve been putting together a football team. Secretly training them at your house.’
‘Just providing a home for the homeless,’ said Siri. ‘Taking in waifs and strays.’
‘I’ve warned you about this,’ said Inspector Phosy. ‘How many times have I warned you? Our Party can handle it. There’s a policy to-’
‘There’s a policy to clear people off the streets by whatever means is available.’ Siri raised his voice. ‘Cram them into crowded little rooms with no services just to make the place look neater. The temples are full of such people. I have a perfectly good house over there in That Luang provided by the committee. It has running water and electricity — once they’ve worked out how to connect it. What’s so wrong with allowing my fellow human beings to share in my good fortune?’
‘The fact that you don’t live there, for one,’ said Phosy. ‘You live here above the shop. The truth is you shouldn’t even have been allocated an official residence.’
‘I’m a senior Party member,’ said Siri.
He stood and put his hand on his heart. Madame Daeng and Civilai laughed and followed suit. Civilai began to hum ‘La Marseillaise’.
‘I am a seasoned field surgeon having survived some five hundred campaigns,’ said Siri. ‘I was educated in France and I speak three languages.’
‘Four if you include double-Dutch,’ said Civilai.
Siri ignored him. ‘I am an advisor to prime ministers and presidents — a man loved and admired by the masses. I deserve my house and, damn it, I should be allowed to decide what I do with it. If I so wish to cover it in ice cream and lick it, that is my prerogative.’
Mr Geung clapped loudly.
‘They’ll find them you know,’ said Phosy. ‘You can’t get away with hiding eleven people in this day and age.’
‘I bet you I can,’ Siri said.
3
The Man With a Star on His Forehead
‘Ah, Siri,’ said Judge Haeng. With his pimples and watery eyes and green safari shirt, the prematurely middle-aged man looked more like a frog at a desk than t
he head of the Public Prosecution Department. He stood and offered his hand to the white-haired doctor but, as always, avoided staring into his deep green eyes. He’d had nightmares about those eyes sucking him inside that cantankerous old head full of horrible things. Siri gave a cursory shake to the outstretched hand because he knew this show of politeness came as a result not of love for his fellow man but of blackmail. The doctor was a collector of news, you see. He had the goods on a number of senior officials gleaned from eve-of-battle confessions, records of embarrassing medical procedures, and access to official government files written in French, which few in the ruling Pathet Lao could read. He had come across information that, should it fall into the wrong hands, might signal the end of the judge’s very comfortable lifestyle. It might even lead to a spell of re-education in a distant province from which many did not return.
Judge Haeng was the type of man who would happily arrange for an accident to befall a blackmailer. But Siri was the cordon bleu of blackmailers. All his news was stored in a number of ‘Open in the event of my untimely death’ metal deposit boxes in Laos and overseas, a fact that all his victims were made aware of from the outset. A fact that was a total fabrication. They were under his mattress. Apart from his wife, nobody else knew this tasty information. But Siri used this weapon not for evil or for financial gain, but for good. There was nothing like a little incentive to keep a government official on the straight and narrow.
‘I … er … read your complaint,’ said Haeng. ‘I haven’t yet submitted it to the Ministry of the Interior.’
‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ Siri asked. ‘You’ve had it three days.’
‘I know. I know and I’m sorry. I just … Why don’t you take a seat?’
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