He saw Dr. Porn scurrying toward her office.
“Sister,” he called.
A man’s unnecessarily loud voice always caused a stir at the union. Conversations stopped, eyebrows raised, and there was some tutting. But once they saw the fellow was elderly and harmless they went about their business. Porn approached him and squeezed his arm affectionately.
“Civilai, you old goat,” she said. She was a fit fifty with few wrinkles and no eyebrows. “I was sure you and Siri would have died of liver cirrhosis by now. What’s keeping you alive?”
“The thought that every new day we might see the face of one more beautiful woman such as yourself,” said Civilai.
“If I had a suspicion you were flirting, you know I’d interrupt the breastfeeding workshop and tell your wife.”
“Of all the creatures on the planet, only women see ulterior motives in the declaration of their beauty,” he said.
“That’s probably because the butterfly has no idea what you’re saying,” said Porn. She led him into her office and sat him down.
“My wife’s at a breastfeeding workshop?” he asked. “Isn’t it a bit late for that?”
“She’s teaching it,” said Porn.
“Really? I had no idea she was an expert.”
“Most men have no idea of their wives’ capabilities,” she said. “Have you found Geung and Tukta yet?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Why aren’t you out there searching?”
“Because I am here at the union making sure you have it all under control.”
“And there I was thinking you were here to recruit actors for a movie,” she said.
“I don’t really need to be here at all, do I?” said Civilai. “There’s nothing you don’t already know.”
“Oh, we like to have visitors.”
“I assume you’ve already sent out the word for thespians,” said Civilai.
“We have a room at the back full of people waiting for an audition.”
“Really?” he said.
“No,” she replied, “but I’ll let you know when it happens. It’s a project we’d really like to get involved in. I visualize a lot of meaty parts for our sisters.”
“All the main roles as far as I remember.”
“Excellent.”
Only five rooms at the Ministry of Justice had telephone lines and the switchboard was out of order. That suited Judge Haeng because he didn’t want to speak to anyone. He’d told the telephonist to take a message, or if it was important, to make an appointment. But if someone significant phoned, someone who might have a positive influence on his career, she was to sprint up the stairs, bang on his door, and he would run to the phone. But on this occasion the telephone operator was standing in his doorway, puffing and blowing, yet she had no name for the man who had called.
“Have you not yet learned?” Haeng asked her. “You simply tell him I’m not here and take a message.”
“He was quite insistent,” she said.
“We cannot make exceptions just because someone has a louder voice or a threatening tone,” he said. “A good socialist speaks calmly but carries a machete. I mean, a metaphorical machete, of course, not an actual—”
“He said I should tell you the word ‘Skeleton,’” she said.
Judge Haeng was in a crowded office. The clatter of typewriters and the chatter of clerks made it hard to hear the man at the end of the phone. But he did make out the words, “They know.”
“Who? Who knows?” asked the judge.
“The police.”
“They can’t possibly,” said Haeng. “It’s all taken care of.”
“The new chief inspector; the one you said couldn’t last a week on the job, he’s been to the airport.”
“What did he say?”
“It doesn’t matter what he said. He knows. I want him off the case.”
“What?” said Haeng.
“One way or another. I want the chief inspector off my back.”
“I’m in no position to hire and fire policemen. It’s not my responsibility.”
“Then find another way.”
“I . . . I can’t.”
“Then you know what’s going to happen,” said the man.
“What are you saying?”
“It’s up to you. One way or another.”
He was a watchman at the airport at night but Lampuy’s day job was harvesting salt at Ban Bo. The salt seemed to have preserved him in a mummified kind of way. His back and his limbs were stiff and he squinted as if he permanently had something in his eyes. Captain Sihot felt he was interviewing a very tired man.
The captain had worked with Chief Inspector Phosy for a number of years as his sergeant and he knew the ropes. He was a rough old soldier with crumbly teeth but he was honest and totally loyal. That’s why he jumped two ranks when his boss got the CI job. Phosy needed men like Sihot around him.
“Nah, didn’t see nothing,” said Lampuy, looking over his shoulder to see if his foreman was watching.
“That’s because you and your buddy took it in turns to sleep,” said Sihot. “In fact, you missed all but your first two and last two security rounds. That’s the system you had worked out. You did get out of bed long enough to meet a truck.”
“That’s rubbish, that is.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I never sleep at night.”
Sihot already had all the details he needed from the other night guard.
“Look fellah,” said the policeman. “I have a job. You have a job. You shovel salt. I ask questions. If they gave you half a coconut shell to fill your sack instead of a shovel, it’d take you twice as long to do your job, right? It’s the same if you give me bullshit answers. That wastes my time too. Plus, it really pisses me off. You know what I’m saying?”
“Yeah.”
“So, you met a truck.”
“Regular delivery.”
“How often?”
“Twice a week.”
“Always animals?”
“Yeah. They put ’em to sleep so they’re no trouble,” said the guard. “Stink sometimes but we don’t have to handle ’em. We just disinfect the place when they’re gone.”
“When you were meeting the truck last night did you see anyone that shouldn’t have been there?”
“Only the transit guy. He’s been there all week. I brought him some bananas.”
“Nice of you,” said Sihot. “You didn’t see a couple?”
“Couple of what?”
“People.”
“No. I signed for the delivery and went back to the guard room.”
“Did you write down the truck registration number?”
“No. Just the invoice numbers. They’re written on the crates.”
“Any idea where the driver went next?”
“No.”
“You didn’t see anything out of the ordinary?”
“No.”
Sihot looked into the squinty eyes and wondered if he could see much of anything.
“Look, brother,” said the night watchman. “It sounds heavy, you know? Airport security guard. Uniforms and everything. But it’s quiet out there. You can hear a truck coming a kilometer away. The airport building’s locked and the cargo in the bay’s too heavy to run off with. It’s a cushy job. Same thing night after night. No reason not to catch a bit of sleep, am I right?”
“Never any surprises?”
“No. Well . . .”
“Well what?”
“I almost shit myself the other night when the government limo turned up out of nowhere.”
Chapter Ten
Get Down’s and Boogie
By the following evening, Madame Daeng was frantic. Still she worked. Still she organized. The illeg
al squatters from Siri’s official government residence: the abandoned, the lost, the disenfranchised—they all chipped in with free labor so no diner had gone hungry that day. But thirty-six hours of searching for Geung and Tukta had come to nothing. Overnight, Daeng had turned from concerned to angry, and she was already planning what to do if anything had happened to her protégés. The news of the airport visit and the truck had complicated matters. They had no idea where that truck might have gone or whether the couple was on board. To keep herself calm she sharpened a complete set of carving knives to a razor edge. Woe betide the next shank of pork that found its way onto her cutting board.
After the evening shift Madam Daeng took a nap and Siri and Civilai sat at a rear table of the restaurant working out camera angles for all the scenes of their screenplay. They were restricted, of course, by having just the one camera—if that—but Siri said the single camera technique would be to their advantage.
“You go to the theatre,” he said, “and you have just the one pair of eyes. But that doesn’t stop you enjoying the play, does it? You don’t suddenly have an urge to climb up to the royal box to get another angle. Your entire experience comes from that one lens: the one in your head. Ours might be the most intimate film ever to win a Palme d’Or.”
To celebrate their future victory, Siri went to the refrigerator and took the last dregs of their vodka from the freezer. He poured two shots and handed one to Civilai. The old man looked forlorn as he stared at his glass.
“What’s wrong?” Siri asked.
“Siri, do you think we have . . . ?”
“Yes?”
“. . . a drinking problem?”
“Goodness me no,” said Siri. “As some famous drunk once said, ‘You drink. You fall over. No problem.’” He raised his glass.
“I’m serious,” said Civilai. “What if all this drinking shortens our lives?”
Siri laughed. “We’re seventy-five, brother,” he said. “If drinking has shortened our lives by even twenty-five percent thus far, that means we’d have lived to a hundred apiece. And how many fun-loving centenarians have you met recently? They’re all withered and immobile. We’re doing a service to our bodies by shortening our lives.”
“I don’t know,” said Civilai. “Dr. Porn was sure we’d both be dead by now.”
“Ah, so that’s it,” said Siri. “You were lured into the enchanted caverns of the women’s union where fairy godmother Porn cast her spell on you again. She’d have us eating watercress baguettes and drinking frog eye juice into eternity. The healthiest fossils on the planet.”
“It’s all right for you,” said Civilai. “You’re possessed. You have a psychic medical team on board with an interest to keep their host alive. When you go, they’re homeless. Nobody cares if I go.”
“I care, you grumpy old bastard. Now drink your medicine and focus on the—”
He was interrupted by the sound of a motorcycle. Daeng came running down the stairs and into the street where Phosy sat on his department Vespa with Dtui and Malee behind.
“Any news?” she said, but the dour expressions on their faces answered the question.
“I’ve had everyone looking for them,” said Phosy. “No sign.”
Madame Daeng began to prepare them a late supper. Siri and Civilai joined them and listened as Phosy recounted the story of his visit to Director Maysuk and, as a finale, about the Zil that arrived at the airport on the morning the skeleton was discovered.
“The watchman said it arrived around three-fifteen,” said Phosy.
“Then it could only have been Judge Haeng’s,” said Civilai. “By that time all the others were accounted for. Am I right?”
“What was he doing there?” asked Daeng.
“No idea,” said Phosy. “If it was an official visit the driver would have had the watchman sign his work document. But this guy didn’t even stop at the gate. Who’s going to chase after a government limo?”
“And the watchman didn’t see who got out?” asked Siri.
“No,” said Phosy. “He went back to his office and told his pal there was a limo parked in front of the administration block. The office light was on so they assumed their boss had an early meeting. They’re not really encouraged to think too much.”
“But if it was Haeng, it would make no sense at all,” said Daeng. “If we’ve got this all worked out right, Judge Haeng arranged to meet this fictitious VIP at the airport the previous morning, so he’d have an excuse to put the skeleton in his trunk. He removed the trunk key from the bunch so the driver wouldn’t find it. That night he pretended to be drunk, commandeered the Zil, and left the skeleton at the arch. He’d successfully done what he set out to do, whatever that was. All that remained then was to drive up and down the river and be seen a few times.”
“He couldn’t have known that the driver would discover the key was missing, or that the curfew patrol would identify him,” said Siri, “but basically it didn’t matter. Until we came along he thought he’d got away with it.”
“So why would he go back to the airport in the middle of all this?” said Daeng.
“There’s only one person who can answer that,” said Phosy, “and I think the judge has reached his desperation level.”
“Why so?” asked Civilai.
“I got this on my desk as I was leaving this evening,” said Phosy. He unfolded two sheets of typed paper and laid them on the table. “It’s signed and stamped by the Vice Minister of Justice, but I happen to know he’s off in Hanoi. It’s an urgent request for me to attend a seminar in Houay Xai. There was a plane ticket stapled to it. I checked. There is a seminar in Houay Xai but it’s about border demarcation. Nothing to do with me at all.”
“The judge is trying to get you out of town,” said Daeng.
“So it seems.”
“I think it’s time for that serious talk,” said Siri.
“I have to be careful,” said Phosy. “There’s no precedent for this. Arresting a judge is in the same category as staging a coup. You’re bringing down a pillar of the establishment. You have to be really sure of your accusations.”
Siri put down the ministry order and shook his head. “Look,” he said, “I don’t like the fellow, never have. We’ve got all kinds of personal smut against him. We’ve got a certain letter we use to blackmail him whenever we need a favor. So, I suppose you could say that we’ve kept him in the game. He still has his position because we haven’t disclosed what we know about him. That, in an odd way, makes us all culpable for what he does.”
“Are you making excuses for him?” Dtui asked.
“Not at all,” said Siri. “But I get a feeling he’s involved in something that’s beyond him. I don’t believe he killed the girl or was involved in her torture. He hasn’t got the balls for it. And I think there had to be a really good reason why he’d go through all this Zil intrigue. The faked letter from the vice minister is the last straw. Everything’s gone wrong for him. He’s about to cave in.”
“Siri’s right,” said Daeng, serving up a large bowl of fried rice. “If we don’t intervene soon he’s likely to do something even more stupid. Don’t forget he’s not that aware.”
“I’ll take him in tomorrow morning,” said Phosy. “You know I was hoping my first case would be a little less . . . What the . . . ?”
Phosy was looking over Siri’s shoulder toward the open shutter. The others turned their heads. Standing in the shadows beyond the doorway were two familiar characters.
“Hello,” said Mr. Geung.
“Hello,” said Tukta.
Geung’s stutter made his stories hard work to listen to. Tukta spoke quite well but rarely and reluctantly. So, they’d developed a technique where one plugged into the gappy dialogue of the other to keep things flowing. The group ignored the fact that the couple smelled of animal excrement after their time on the road.
They couldn’t abide the thought of waiting any longer for their story and the returnees were most keen to tell it.
“We decided to to . . .”
“To go to the airport,” said Tukta. “Geung was full of the spirits of the civets. They were calling him.”
“You speak civet?” Civilai asked.
Everyone told him to shut up but Geung and Tukta thought the question was worth a laugh.
“Go on,” said Daeng.
“After work we too-too-took a tuktuk to the airport,” said Geung.
“We talked to Uncle Sommad in the airport waiting room for a while,” said Tukta.
“But I I I could hear the civets calling me,” said Geung. “There was a a t-t-truck come but that w-w-wasn’t where the civets were.”
“They were on the other side of the runway under gravel,” said Tukta.
“Their ssspirits were sad.”
“Geung said there were ten of them. We sat with them for a few minutes. I sang them a song.”
“Wa-wa-one couldn’t see.”
“Some bad person had stuck a chopstick in its eye. Others were sick. I think it’s good for them they were all dead.”
“Th-th-th . . .”
“The truck was unloading some big crates,” said Tukta. “Two men were throwing them on the ground. Not careful at all. The men went for a smoke. We went and looked. I couldn’t see so good but Geung said there were animals in the crates.”
“They w-w-were all sad.”
“I started to cry. Geung cried too. One bear was dead.”
“And we g-g-got on the t-t-truck.”
“We squashed in the corners like slugs so the driver didn’t see us. It was magic.”
“And the truck w-w-went out and w-w-we went out and drove and drove.”
“Why?” asked Dtui.
“We we we . . .”
“We wanted to see where the animals came from,” said Tukta.
“We drove and drove and drove and—”
“All right, we appreciate the distance,” said Civilai. “Where did you go exactly?”
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