Six and a Half Deadly Sins

by Colin Cotterill

  They rounded one of many sharp bends and came to a second barrier. This was merely a single line of rocks. Siri braked, and even before the jeep had shuddered to a stop, they were surrounded by dozens of armed soldiers. They swarmed down on the jeep from every direction in their almost-matching green uniforms and dented helmets. They were yelling and screaming in Chinese and punching the muzzles of their weapons toward the old men.

  “Don’t put up your hands,” said Civilai.

  “Are you mad?” Siri asked.

  “Just trust me. Keep your hands down.”

  The swarm had reached the jeep, and despite the fact that neither Siri nor Civilai could understand Chinese, it was evident the gentlemen would have been most grateful if the Lao should put up their hands and, perhaps, get out of the jeep. One soldier went so far as to fire a bullet above their heads to emphasize the seriousness of the situation. Instead, Civilai slowly raised his letter of introduction and held it in front of his face. He smiled as if it were an invitation from the Chinese Premier himself.

  An officer barked an order, and some of the men stood back to let him approach the jeep. He said something in Chinese, and Civilai replied in Lao, “I do not speak Chinese.”

  The officer tried again in English. Civilai’s only competence in those two languages was to recognize them. He replied in French, “I do not speak English.” As the officer had apparently run out of languages, Civilai said in Lao, “Sir, the least you can do is have the decency to learn the language of the country you’re invading.”

  The officer snatched the paper from Civilai and looked at its unfathomable lettering. He was obviously unsure as to how to proceed. The lack of fear on the faces of the old men, their refusal to adopt a pose of subjugation, and their ages called for the intervention of a higher authority. He barked another order.

  One soldier handed his gun to a colleague and climbed all over the two old men, apparently in search of weapons. He found none. The officer called his unit to regroup, all but a dozen who took up positions around the jeep. The others scrambled up the rise and were swallowed by the thick vegetation. The only sounds that remained were the chirping of birds and the clicks of the cooling jeep.

  “Well,” said Siri, looking around at the silent circle of armed men, “if I was feeling a bit better, I could take them on.”

  “If you were feeling better—and if you were Bruce Lee,” said Civilai.

  “You’ll recall that the twelve men Bruce engages are invariably armed with little balsa-wood sticks or bath sponges. I haven’t yet seen him take on submachine gunners.”

  “All right, boys?” Civilai shouted. “Anyone here speak Lao?”

  If they did, nobody owned up.

  “Where do we stand, brother?” Siri asked.

  “I suppose that depends on whether we’ve run into a small advance party or the entire Chinese Third Army. My intuition tells me the latter.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because they left us here rather than take us to their camp, where we’d see just how large a force they have. Once we knew that, they’d probably have no choice but to shoot us. I imagine their commander will want to know why we’re here and how much we—and by we, I mean the Lao government—know of their plan. As the roadblock wasn’t up yesterday, and we’re about twenty kilometers from the border, I suspect they’ve only just arrived. They would have hoped to make it to the Vietnamese border without any resistance. I suspect that this is the second front, hoping to sneak across Laos unnoticed.”

  Siri had a huge grin on his face.

  “What are you smiling about?” Civilai asked.

  “You.”

  “What about me?”

  “For all the years I’ve known you, I thought you were quite useless.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I mean, pleasant company, but not exactly practical. I thought your diplomacy was all tea and compliments and taking foreign leaders to ‘wink, wink’ traditional masseurs. I’ve never been with you in your element before. I’m impressed. What’s our next move?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Don’t spoil it for me. Surely you had all this planned out back in Vientiane?”

  “I didn’t expect for one second we’d actually find an invading army up here.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t panic. I’ll think of something.”

  Nothing happened for forty minutes. The guards got hot once the sun had broken through the mist, and they retreated to the shade of the trees. The old boys’ adrenaline drained rapidly, leaving only the symptoms of flu, diarrhea and nausea that had been Siri’s travel companions for much of the journey. They were dozing in their non-reclining seats when they were roused by the sound of a snapping to attention. They opened their eyes to see the first officer and a high-ranking commander marching toward them accompanied by a man both Siri and Civilai recognized immediately. Colonel Bouaphan had been the Lao Vice Minister of Economic Affairs until a year before. One day he’d emptied the contents of his office safe and left a note to say he’d be defecting to Communist China. Nobody, including his wife, cared very much, and nobody had heard from him since.

  The first officer barked something, and the defector stepped forward. He wore a Chinese uniform that was too small for him. “Hello, comrades,” said Bouaphan. He was pigeon-toed and pigeon-chested which made him look a lot like … a pigeon.

  “How’s treachery treating you?” asked Civilai.

  “Ooh, can’t complain. The food’s good, and I have a sweet new wife. How’s poverty and mismanagement?”

  “At least it’s our poverty and mismanagement,” said Siri.

  The officer barked again. His oral skills all seemed to be canine.

  “Right,” said Bouaphan. “So I’m in a bit of a spot here.”

  “I really hope we’ll be able to help you out of it,” said Civilai.

  “You see,” said Bouaphan, “I had certain influence in the decision to pass innocently through Lao territory on our way to Dien Viang Phu. My appraisal was that—given the Lao inability to tie its own bootlaces—you’d not realize we were here until long after we entered Vietnam. So what I’d like to know is how you found us.”

  Civilai smiled and said, “I seem to recall underestimation was your forte back at the finance ministry. That’s why nobody particularly missed you when you left.”

  Bouaphan didn’t find the comment funny.

  Siri coughed. It started as a don’t push your luck cough but soon became bronchial.

  “You be nice now, Comrade Civilai,” said Bouaphan. “I’m the only one who can get you out of here in one piece.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” said Civilai. “You know who I am. Do you really think I’d just happen to be here on vacation? We’ve been monitoring your troop buildup for a week.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I know for a fact you don’t have the resources.”

  “We don’t, no. But our new Big Brother does. The Soviets have been very interested in your movements. You’d be surprised what technical strides they’ve made since the tsars moved on. My mission here is to politely ask you to turn around and cross back over the border to avert, amongst other things, a third world war. If you refuse, and if my brother here and I do not arrive in Un Mai in an hour, not only will your advance meet heavy resistance long before you reach the Vietnamese border, but your retreat will have been cut off completely, and you’ll be stranded here.”

  The commander had said nothing thus far, but Siri noticed that he had his head bowed slightly. He was listening to a short man who stood directly behind him. This, Siri realized, must have been an official translator. It appeared that the Chinese did not completely trust their defector.

  “Utter nonsense,” said Bouaphan. “There have been no Lao troops anywhere near this border.”

  “You seem to have also underestimated the hill tribe militia,” said Civilai. “With Soviet comradeship comes Soviet funding. It’s amazing how unified a country can b
ecome with a few rubles jingling in its pockets.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Bouaphan.

  “I don’t care,” said Civilai.

  There was a moment of silence during which a great deal of brain matter was stirred. It was Siri who broke the deadlock. “Young man,” he called.

  The interpreter leaned out from behind the officer and pointed to himself, eyebrows raised.

  “Yes, you,” Siri continued. “Tell your boss that this is Laos. We’ve been an ally to China since our ancestors taught you how to make gunpowder and the paper to write about it. We’re two old men in a jeep. We’re here in the spirit of friendship. We don’t want Chinese corpses on our soil. Tell him to go home and kiss his wife and think of another plan.”

  The interpreter did his job, ignoring the interruptions of Bouaphan’s stilted Chinese. The commander stared at the old men in the jeep, who shrugged and did their utmost to seem indifferent. There followed a heated discussion, a bark, and the men fell in. They followed their commander back up the rise. Before disappearing behind the tree line, the officer stopped and handed something to one of his men. The soldier ran down to the jeep and gave Siri back his key. Bouaphan was left in the no-man’s-land he’d created for himself.

  “You’d better run and say farewell to your sweet concubine,” shouted Civilai. “I think you’ve underestimated yourself into a political toilet.”

  The defector was lost for words. He jogged up the hill every inch a pigeon, even down to the egg he’d laid for himself.

  Siri and Civilai enjoyed five minutes of silent isolation until they sighed in unison, then laughed.

  “Do you suppose anyone in Vientiane will believe this?” Siri asked.

  “That we averted a Chinese invasion?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not on your life.”

  “Too bad. I’m long overdue a medal.”

  “Nice touch, that wife-kissing line.”

  “Civilai, you are the maestro of diplomacy. I’m going to put you in my will.”

  “You have nothing I want.”

  After another frustrating hour of attempting to get word to Phosy and Siri, Nurse Dtui, with Mr. Geung in tow, found the postman who had delivered the poisoned pha sin to Dr. Siri. He was sitting under a tree munching instant noodles directly from the packet. He washed it down with red sugar water. He was a man in need of nutritional advice amongst other things.

  “Hello, Uncle,” she said.

  He looked up at her, then across to Geung. “Taking the moron for a walk, are you?”

  If it was a joke, it was bettered by Geung saying, “If you don’t have s-s-s-something nnnice to say, don’t say any—anything.”

  “You remember this?” Dtui asked the postman, holding up a photo of the half-sin Siri had left behind.

  “No,” said the postman, barely looking at the photo.

  Growing up, Dtui had always seen mail delivery as a social occupation. Its perpetrators were friends to all, caring and happy. So it didn’t take her long to realize that this postman was in the wrong profession. “It’s a pha sin,” she said.

  “I can see that.”

  “You de—delivered it,” said Geung. “When?”

  “Look, lady, call the monkey off, will you?”

  “You’ll answer his questions,” said Dtui. “And show some manners if you don’t want to lose your job.”

  “Who do you think you—?”

  “The post office put the pha sin in your delivery pouch on the sixteenth,” said Dtui. “It wasn’t received until the eighteenth. What did you do with it for two days?”

  “I don’t know nothing about it.”

  “Perhaps I can … I c-c-can jog your memory,” said Geung. “It had no reeeeturn address and a faint f-f-frank stamp. You were supposed to coll—”

  “Collect a fine,” said the postman. “I don’t have enough years left to wait for you to finish a sentence, boy. Yeah, I remember. I handed it over the day I got it. And I collected the fine. You can check the ledger.”

  “We did,” said Dtui. “And we found the signed document. But that wasn’t the owner’s signature.”

  “That’s none of my business.”

  “In fact it is. You’re supposed to get a positive identification of the owner before you hand over mail. That’s the rule of the post office.”

  “She walked out of the front yard. I told her about the fine. She handed it over without question. Who but the owner’s going to do a thing like that?”

  “So you didn’t ask to see her national citizen card?”

  “She said she was his wife,” said the postman.

  “An-an-and I’m the king of Thailand,” said Geung.

  Dtui suppressed a laugh. “What did she look like?” she asked the flustered postman.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Try,” said Geung.

  “Skinny. Old. Long grey hair in a chinois. Neat. Polite.”

  “Thank you,” said Mr. Geung and kissed him on the forehead.

  Agnes arrived in Un Mai long before the fictitious deadline that would signal hostilities between Laos and China. The old boys still had no great hunger despite their encounter with the Chinese third army. The only pharmacy in town was boarded over. The neighbors said the owner was Chinese. He’d fled with his family. They also gave directions to the house of Kew, the granddaughter of the famous but sadly departed Grandmother Amphone. Compared to border transgressions, the treasure hunt was becoming something of a triviality.

  “Do you suppose that might have been the purpose of this wild goose chase?” Civilai asked as they crossed the small bridge before the village.

  “What?”

  “To have us arrive here in time to meet the invaders. To avert disaster.”

  “I doubt it,” said Siri. “These clues were laid two or three months ago. I shouldn’t think the Chinese had a date in mind back then. And I doubt even more that anyone could have predicted when we’d be here.”

  “That’s too bad. I’d rather like to go home now. Adventure isn’t nearly so thrilling when you have a cold.”

  “It’s flu. It’ll pass.”

  “So you keep telling me. But I can never forget that you’re a coroner rather than an MD. All I can hear is, ‘It was flu. He passed away.’ ”

  “More people worldwide die of being sucked into pneumatic airplane toilets every year than influenza.”

  The house they were looking for stood alone beside a disused rice field.

  “You made that up.”

  “Prove me wrong.”

  Kew, Grandmother Amphone’s granddaughter, was about fifty and had a skeletal system that seemed too large for her. Bones jutted out at the pelvis and shoulders and connected poorly at the elbows. She walked to meet the jeep like a knight in armor but she was soft-spoken and easy to like.

  “You are the gentleman come to collect the pha sin,” she said, not a question.

  “You’re expecting us?” said Siri.

  “She said you’d come.”

  She had the two old men sit under a breadfruit tree, where a plastic jug of water was waiting for them.

  “And who is ‘she,’ exactly?” asked Civilai.

  “She never did give me her name,” said the woman, joining them on a wooden bench. “But she spent an entire day here looking at my grandmother’s sins. She was very knowledgeable.”

  “What did she look like?” asked Siri.

  “You don’t know her? I assumed you’d met.”

  “Why?”

  “She talked about you so affectionately. That’s why I agreed to let her take one of the collection with her. She said you’d be bringing it back. You do have it, I hope?”

  Siri opened his pack and pulled out the latest sin. “I’m afraid the seam is a little unraveled,” he said.

  “Nothing that can’t be repaired,” Kew said, inspecting the returned skirt.

  “So … the woman?” said Civilai.

  “Oh, sorry, yes. She
was pleasant enough. Elderly. Long hair. Rather thin.”

  “She didn’t mention what she intended to do with the sin?” Civilai asked.

  “I rather got the idea it was something like a game,” she said. “I’m supposed to give you the next clue. Wait, I’ll get it for you. Help yourselves to the water.”

  She disappeared into the house, and the old boys drank heartily from the jug. “Some game,” said Civilai.

  Kew returned with a familiar plastic bag and watched as Siri unfastened the staples and pulled out the next pha sin. It was markedly different from all the others. The colors were brighter, and there were more bands with pink and blue and green elephants parading along a high track and brown-and-orange deer heading in the opposite direction below.

  “What number is this?” Civilai asked.

  “Seven,” said Siri. “Six and a half in hand.”

  “My, so many,” said the woman. “What fun.”

  “What fun, indeed,” said Siri. “I don’t suppose you recognize this weave, my dear?”

  “Of course I do,” she said. “It’s what you might call a nouveau Lu. There’s a village south of Luang Nam Tha on the river. They’re producing some really exotic sins. Far more modern than anyone else.”

  This sounded familiar to Siri. “About eleven kilometers south?” he asked.

  “About that, yes.”

  “You know the place?” Civilai asked.

  “It appears we’ve come full circle,” said Siri. “When Daeng and I first arrived in Luang Nam Tha, the owner of the guesthouse where we took lunch was from a Lu village eleven kilometers down the river. It has to be the same place.”

  “Well, thank goodness for that,” said Civilai. “At last we can stop somewhere long enough to get well and start drinking again.”

  Siri was picking at the hem of the newest sin. “What are you doing?” asked the woman.

  “A clue has been sewn into the hem of each of the sins,” said Siri.

  “How delightful,” said the woman. “Here.”