Don't Eat Me

by Colin Cotterill

  “Had you seen him before that?”

  “Never, Uncle,” she said.

  “Liar!” shouted Haeng.

  She poked her tongue out at him and sat down.

  “And let’s suppose Miss Soukjanda is telling the truth and she and Miss Vatsana were there at the airport shed on the night of the nineteenth,” said Civilai. “And let us suppose one of the two men in attendance was Judge Haeng. It’s conceivable that Miss Vatsana did overdose and that the two men believed she was dead. I hope, for her sake that she was. As I have no evidence to support the alternative, I will also assume that the overdose was an accident and not premeditated.”

  “Oh, so I am a suspect in a murder trial now, am I?” said Haeng.

  Civilai ignored him. “But either way,” he continued, “the judge had spent over two months establishing a false relationship between Miss Vatsana and Chief Inspector Phosy. The girl’s death gave Haeng the launch pad for an all-out assault. When the body had been eaten to the bone, he and Maysuk disposed of the civets. It was possible they were afraid an autopsy of the bodies might reveal the drugs they gave Miss Vatsana that night. They buried the animals at the back of the airport grounds and burned the crate to destroy any trace evidence that might prove Miss Vatsana had been killed there.”

  “I want it on record that I am deeply offended by these allegations,” shouted the judge. “I demand that this man be silenced.”

  “Noted,” said the minister.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Pop Goes the Weasel

  One of the air conditioners had stopped working so there was a lot of impromptu flip-flop fanning going on in courtroom one. But nobody would have dreamed of walking out. People outside had come to the nailed-shut windows and were struggling to hear the proceedings through the glass. There was no television station to cover the event but Laos had its own oral communication network that stretched back hundreds of years. Quite soon, even before it was concluded, those at the market would be gossiping about the trial of Chief Inspector Phosy.

  “This brings me to events of August twenty-second and Judge Haeng’s elaborate plot to frame the chief inspector,” said Civilai. “Phosy was at the airport that morning to meet a VIP under instructions from the Ministry of Justice. We have the carbon copy of the memo sent from Judge Haeng’s office. Phosy did request a car from the police pool but only because he had to deliver a stash of war weapons confiscated during police raids. When his meeting at Wattay did not materialize he took the weapons to the national armory where they were signed in by the clerk. That document is also submitted here as evidence.”

  “Then how did the hair and bone samples get into the trunk of that car?” asked the old general. It was his first question of the tribunal.

  “We can only assume they were planted there,” said Civilai. “As the war booty contained a leaky canister, the staff at the armory sprayed the trunk with a fire extinguisher and hosed it clean. It’s unlikely any human evidence could have survived that.”

  “Pure garbage conjecture,” said the judge. The remaining air conditioners were no longer keeping him cool. He took off his jacket.

  “On that evening, Judge Haeng went to the Soviet residence and established through a witness that there was no body in the trunk of the Zil. We can only assume that this trickery was designed to mislead the chief inspector and cause him to make false assumptions. There was a period of fifty minutes between the judge leaving the party in the limousine and finally logging it in at the Zil lot. We wondered why he decided to leave the vehicle in the street rather than drive it inside. It was badly parked so one might guess that he was still drunk at that stage. But what if there was another reason? What if the person who dropped off the limousine was not Judge Haeng?”

  The judge laughed shrilly. He seemed to have lost some of that early bristle. “Rot,” he said, “rot, rot, rot.”

  But the audience was gripped.

  “We checked the statements of the curfew guards,” said Civilai. “They’d seen several Zils after twelve-thirty on the morning of the twenty-third: three Soviet Embassy vehicles and a private car that we confirmed was that of the Swedish ambassador who had attended the reception. Two of the patrols also noted having seen an old military truck with a faulty cam shaft belt. Our friends from the armed forces ministry checked their transportation data but could find no trace of our noisy truck. We had better luck with the air force. It’s still a very small air force so it didn’t take them long to recognize one of their three vehicles. This truck, it turns out, was an old Kaiser left over from the US occupation. The fliers used it for carrying engine parts over short distances. And it was usually parked behind the maintenance shed at Wattay airport. They confirmed that the airport director had a spare key.”

  “What’s wrong with you people?” said Haeng, addressing the committee. “Why are you taking all this in so intently? Why aren’t you questioning the lack of witness statements? The flawed evidence? The . . . the total bull of it all? Come to your senses, why don’t you? You’ve already heard what happened that night. Whose side are you on?”

  The minister scowled at the judge. “Haeng,” he said, “why don’t you take a seat and loosen your collar?”

  “My . . . ?”

  “Sit!” said the vice minister.

  The judge reluctantly ambled to his table and flopped down onto his chair.

  “So,” said Civilai, “what was a truck from the airport doing in the middle of Vientiane on the morning a skeleton was discovered? Could it have been that Maysuk, the airport director, was delivering the skeleton to the arch while Haeng laid a false trail to distract the chief inspector? That in itself would have been enough to establish an alibi for the judge because around the time the skeleton was deposited, the judge’s Zil was seen at a number of locations down by the river. But that leaves two questions unanswered. If Judge Haeng was driving the Zil, why didn’t he show his face to the attendant at the limousine lot to leave no doubt as to his identity? And why was the Zil seen entering Wattay airport forty minutes before it was logged in at the lot? By then all the other Zils had been signed in. Only the judge’s car remained on the road.”

  “Ah, I think if Comrade Civilai had bothered to check the records he’d see that the airport watchman lied about seeing a Zil that night,” said the judge.

  “And I think if we ask him to step back into the courtroom we’ll hear how his statement was coerced under threats to his family,” said Civilai.

  “Who made those threats?” asked the minister.

  “One of the ex-policemen hired by Judge Haeng,” said Civilai. “He too has confessed.”

  “Again, my word against that of an ignoramus,” said Haeng.

  “But you have to admit these ignoramus words are piling up,” said Civilai. “Once we assured the watchman you’d be in no position to follow through on those threats to his family he was only too pleased to affirm his original statement that he’d seen a Zil arrive at the airport shortly after three-fifteen. We timed the journey. With no traffic it was possible to get from Wattay to the Zil parking lot in fifteen minutes.”

  The judge got to his feet again. This time he ignored the committee and addressed the audience. “What we have here is very simple,” he said. “It is the trial of a corrupt police officer. A man who has abused his position and lied and cheated and killed innocent people. But suddenly our official court hearing is invaded by his cronies and the whole proceedings are suddenly about me. Do you see how devious they are? This is our chance, brothers and sisters, to be rid of their type once and for all. If we don’t, they will continue to make a mockery of the system. To make fun of those of us in authority. They are like naughty children with no respect for their parents. A good socialist . . . (Phosy knew the judge only resorted to maxims when he was on the back foot.) . . . is like a bird in flight. He approaches the tree and instinctively he knows what branc
h he belongs on. He does not attempt to land immediately on the top branches because that is—”

  “We only have the room for another hour!” shouted Dr. Siri to a gale of laughter. There was nobody to call, “order.”

  “See?” said Haeng. “See? This is exactly my point. Immature people like this can only bring down the system.”

  His voice had become whiny.

  “Again, noted,” said the minister who was clearly losing patience with the judge.

  “Where was I?” said Civilai. “Ah, yes. The strange decision to park the Zil outside the lot. One possible reason for this dichotomy arrived in our interview with Maysuk’s minor wife, Miss Soukjanda. When describing her lover she often cited his fear of ghosts. He was a most superstitious man, which perhaps explains how the judge had been able to manipulate him so easily. The director believed in the oddest things. For example, he was certain that merely shaking hands with an insane person would transfer the insanity. In the same light, it was beyond question that handling a corpse would open a channel for the spirits to enter one’s soul. So, with such beliefs, Maysuk was the most unlikely person to be entrusted with the delivery of a dead body. To him, the skeleton was the portal for everything evil. Miss Soukjanda believed that her lover would sooner die than come in contact with a corpse.”

  “I see,” said Haeng. “Now we’re calling in ghosts to give evidence?”

  The demeanor of authority he’d worn so splendidly on the first three days was looking threadbare and ill-fitting. Phosy recognized a man in sharp decline.

  “So,” said Civilai, “we considered another scenario to explain the events of that morning. Haeng, having convinced Maysuk that he was party to a murder and, at the very least, would be jailed for covering it up, now found himself with an accomplice. The judge’s plan was complex. He explained to Maysuk how it would lead the police in a merry dance and all eyes in a subsequent investigation would be on Haeng. Maysuk would take the military truck with the skeleton aboard into Vientiane. At a prescribed juncture, Maysuk would offload the body at the arch. Nobody would even remember the old truck.

  “But, of course, Haeng’s accomplice would have nothing to do with such a plan. He refused to handle the skeleton. The judge had to rethink his subterfuge. What he came up with was equally clever. Haeng loaded the skeleton into the truck and convinced Maysuk that merely driving with a dead body did not constitute handling. There would be no vengeance from the other side. Somewhere at the start of Haeng’s drunken Zil ride, at some unlit spot, they arranged to meet. There, they exchanged vehicles. Maysuk would continue to drive the Zil erratically around the town to be seen by the curfew units as often as possible. Haeng would wait in the shadows in the army truck until the curfew team passed the arch and then sit the skeleton under the light. The decision to display the corpse at the arch was undoubtedly made because the act would be seen as a political statement. Chief Inspector Phosy was responsible for all crimes aimed at the government. Haeng knew Phosy would take a personal interest in such an event. It took the judge no time at all to drag the skeleton to the arch and be on his way. After the limousine was signed in, he would pick up Maysuk a few blocks away, drive to his apartment and send Maysuk back to the airport with the truck. It was an operation of spider web precision.

  “What Haeng didn’t know at the time was that Maysuk, sitting in the truck waiting in the dark, half a bottle of gin in his gut, a dead body behind him wrapped in a plastic sheet, started to panic. And with panic came some sort of paranoid clarity. He could see how Haeng’s plan served mostly to provide the judge with an alibi whereas Maysuk would have no alibi at all. Nobody but Haeng had seen him that morning. If the body was discovered and the truth of Miss Vatsana’s death came out, Maysuk would be the chief suspect. So he laid out a plan of his own.

  Once he and Haeng had exchanged vehicles, Maysuk abandoned his instructions to drive aimlessly around for half an hour and headed directly to the airport in the limousine. He went to his office, turned on all the lights and made sure the guards knew he was there. There weren’t that many private phones but his was a priority position so he called his major wife. Woke her up. We’ve spoken to her. She remembered some garbled nervous stream of consciousness. She assumed he was drunk which, after throwing down the rest of the gin, he was. She wasn’t surprised. He drank a lot. He told her if anyone asked, that he’d phoned her at 3 a.m. and they’d talked for half an hour. She could tell the time. It was actually 3:22 a.m. and in the two years they’d been married they’d never spoken for longer than five minutes at a time. The call that morning lasted no more than two minutes. She wasn’t fond of her husband and, yes, she knew he had a girlfriend. But that didn’t worry her because she had one too. Theirs was a marriage of family lineage with no love lost or gained. She drew the line at lying at his say-so.”

  Phosy looked across the room to the prosecution table where Judge Haeng had put on headphones and was listening to a cassette recorder that wasn’t plugged in. He seemed to be twitching.

  “As far as we know,” said Civilai, “beyond traditional graft, Maysuk had never been involved in criminal activities. He’d certainly never been party to a killing. He had no idea what length of time constituted an alibi, so with the soul of the dead woman leaning over his shoulder and a second bottle of gin open on his desk, he wrote a brief confession.”

  Civilai removed a sheet of paper from his file.

  “‘If things go badly,’” he wrote, “‘this is my apology to the girl we killed.’” The note is signed, dated and stamped. He was a most thorough public official. He filed the letter under C for confession in his cabinet, left on all the lights and went back to the Zil. He drove into town and arrived at the lot at exactly 3:50 a.m. He shouted for the attendant to come and get the car and walked west two blocks, where he met the judge in the now-empty truck. Haeng had no idea that Maysuk had driven to the airport that morning. He still believed the director had been driving around as instructed. He didn’t learn the truth until later. Once he realized Maysuk was a threat to their plan he had no choice but to be rid of him.”

  The minister tilted his head to one side.

  “Judge Haeng,” he shouted.

  The judge pretended to be listening to something else. The minister shouted again and Haeng removed the headphones.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “What do you have to say to this new version of events?”

  “It seems you’ll believe whatever you choose to believe,” said the judge. “Goodness knows I’ve put in enough hours at your flaky, badly run ministry to earn at least an iota of respect for my work. Some trust. Some support. I cannot begin to tell you how hurt I am that you should side with this rabble.”

  Malee, ever fatigued by the constant babble of adults was already asleep in her father’s arms. He rocked her gently, thrilled beyond words to be reunited with the simplest of pleasures. Not only was he loved and respected again, he was exonerated. Against the far wall, Daeng held Siri’s hand, not so much as a show of love, more to keep him anchored there. This would be a bad time to be floating off to some other dimension. Siri himself was staring with admiration at his old friend Civilai. He looked a lot like an overgrown cricket but Civilai, the lawyer and the diplomat, was a class act. Siri saluted him.

  “And so, to pad out the files, you invite complaints,” said Civilai, addressing the judge. “You collect comments from remote villages concerning Chief Inspector Phosy’s anti-trafficking units. They’re reports from local cadres and they aren’t complaining about the results of the missions, merely inappropriate paperwork. The units have, in reality, been a tremendous success. But one man dies of a heart attack and another kills himself and suddenly this elite police force is labeled a death squad. You have gathered every negative opinion and collated them over there in that fat file. And they’re all meaningless.”

  Civilai walked to Haeng’s table and made a show of lif
ting the file of complaints. “Five years of obsessive stalking,” he said. “This isn’t an investigation into the behavior of a flawed police officer. It’s an album of lies. But it’s an impressive file. The collection of witness statements alone is most convincing even though most of them are forged. Our Judge Haeng has everything dated, as well as signed affidavits and discrete photographs. I’d say it’s the most comprehensive paperwork I’ve seen in all my years of administration. If I were the judge’s employer I would have found every page credible. It’s Haeng’s pièce de résistance. His life’s work. His Das Kapital.”

  Civilai paused for effect and looked into the faces of the audience.

  “But it’s all fiction,” he said. “Every word. The witness statements were not written by the witnesses. The tape recordings were selectively chosen. The evidence was planted. But the report came from a credible source: the head of the Public Prosecution Department. It was convincing. Nobody would blame you, minister, for—”

  “Don’t even start with the condescension,” said the minister. He slouched forward onto the table in front of him and looked at his thumbs. “I get it,” he said. “I’m ashamed. I authorized warrants and arrests and detentions based on the pile of buffalo dung you’re holding there. I didn’t call for independent assessments. I was bamboozled by a man whose enthusiasm overwhelmed me and for that I am most sorry. I trusted this weasel and that makes me every bit as guilty as he is.”

  Judge Haeng, clearly overwhelmed by events, paced to the front wall and stood beneath the gallery of old soldiers. He looked up at them.

  “Marvelous, old comrades,” he said. “Marvelous. Two weeks ago you tell me what a credit I am to the development of a just legal system in the republic. Now you unilaterally decide I’m a weasel. Shouldn’t we have a vet here to test the veracity of such a claim? Perhaps have the great Dr. Siri test my stomach contents for insects and small game? Must be a few snakes in there, right?”