Six and a Half Deadly Sins

by Colin Cotterill

  She handed him a small knife from amongst the instruments in her shirt pocket. From the hem, Siri produced one more flattened roll of paper. It appeared to be another page ripped from a ledger. Again, it was written in Chinese in five columns. But unlike the previous page, this was lined and written in a much neater hand.

  “Are there any Chinese living here?” Siri asked.

  “Mr. Lee, our pharmacist, was the last,” she said. “They’ve all been told to go. But if it’s a translation you want, I’d be pleased to do that for you.”

  “You read Chinese?”

  “I spent twelve years at school in Shanghai. Our family made a lot of money in China from our granny’s sins. She was quite a celebrity across the border. She sent all her grandchildren there to study. The opportunities were much better up north. Look, it’s too late for you to travel. Why don’t I make you a good hot meal, and we’ll look through your clues together. I’ll send my husband to the market to get some natural remedies for your condition. You both look like you could use some rest.”

  “Well, nice to see you at last,” came a voice, bass, sarcastic.

  “Bpoo?”

  The concoction Kew’s husband had returned with from the market was vaguely alcoholic and most certainly opium based. For a while, Siri’s dreams sped by in color like billboards outside a train. And then he was on the Normandy Express, and Aunti Bpoo the transvestite fortune teller was seated opposite. Her demise had gone no length toward bringing down her weight. She leaned forward and put a hand on his knee.

  “So this is a dream, right?” he asked.

  “As opposed to …?”

  “To reality. Actual conversation.”

  “Call it what you like.”

  “Why can’t we talk when I’m conscious?”

  “Because you don’t believe.”

  Auntie Bpoo stood on the seat and started a very slow striptease.

  “Believe in what?” Siri asked.

  “In us.”

  “Of course I believe in you. How can I not? I see you all the time. Do you really have to do that?”

  “Your scientific side continues to reject us. Your doctor logic.”

  She peeled off a long green opera glove. The other passengers on the train, some of whom Siri recognized from obituary photographs, began to clap—egging her on. She found the rhythm and let her micro-skirt slide to the seat. Fortunately she was wearing thick tights with designs of cakes on them.

  “But the doctor is part of me,” said Siri. “How can I ignore him without leaving myself … incomplete?”

  “Take the potion,” she said.

  “What potion?”

  “You know what potion. The brew the witch gave you in Muang Xai.”

  Bpoo pulled her tank top up over her pot belly, over her empty bra.

  “She said there might be … side effects,” said Siri.

  “So what?” said Bpoo.

  The tank top across her face caught on her earring and disoriented her. She spun around, lost her footing on the seat and fell to the floor with a thump. Siri felt the same thump and awoke on the floorboards in the backroom of Kew’s house. Civilai snored beside him.

  9

  The Black-Clad, Evil-Eyed Men at Dr. Dooley’s Place

  The door to Dr. Dooley’s clinic guesthouse burst open, and two black-clad evil-eyed men ran inside. Each held a flashlight.

  “In here,” said one of them.

  The other came to join him, and they found the old woman facedown on the bed. The room smelled of vomit and booze. On a bedside table was a teaspoon. Evil-Eye Number One dabbed a finger into it but he knew what it would contain even before he tasted it. He nodded.

  His partner slapped the old woman across the face five, six, seven times. There was no reaction. “Is she alive?” Evil-Eye Number One asked.

  His partner shone the light on the woman’s face and pried open her eyelids. The pupils were full stops. She was out of it.

  They tore the place apart: the furniture, the out-of-tune piano, inside the ceiling tiles. They threw the old woman out of the bed and sliced open the mattress. There was no sign of the stash. In desperation they dragged her to the shower, turned the water on cold and left her lying there. Still she didn’t come to. They walked around the building looking for signs of recent digging. They broke into the old operating theater. It was a shell.

  They decided the only choice they had was to wait until she came out of her drug-induced stupor and beat it out of her. They knew from experience, given her state, that she wouldn’t be conscious for another three, four hours. So they left her soaked in the shower stall, and each made a nest from the shredded mattress kapok and curled up to sleep.

  It couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes later that Evil-Eye Number One was awoken by a flicker of light. A single candle burned across the room. In its staccato flame he could just make out the sleeping form of his sidekick. The candle painted a hideous shadow on the man’s face. His tongue hung loose like a dog’s, and there was … was that blood seeping from a wound on his neck, or just a trick of the light? Evil-Eye pushed himself up on one elbow to get a clearer look, but a boot to his neck forced him back down with a crunch. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the old woman standing over him with a penknife in her hand. It was dripping blood. She was smiling.

  “That’s not possible,” he wheezed, the boot constricting his larynx.

  “Slap an old lady, would you?” she said. “Nasty bastard.”

  After talking to the postman, Dtui had yet again been told at the long-distance phone booth that communication with Luang Nam Tha was impossible. Not even Party members were getting through these days. Altogether preoccupied, she taught her lone afternoon class at the nursing college. In the summary session, she appreciated for once the dearth of questions from the would-be—heaven help them—nurses. Her mind had wandered elsewhere. She was positing the ridiculous.

  She considered the postman’s description of the woman he’d met in front of Siri’s house. Who was she? She had brazenly stolen a pha sin that had been sent to Dr. Siri. She perhaps thought it was a gift unbeknownst that there was a severed finger sewn into the hem. Or had she put it there? She had, overnight, bleached one segment of the skirt. She had applied a coat of Paris Green, a toxic pigment rich in arsenic. Two days later, she or a colleague had delivered the altered sin to Dr. Siri’s house knowing full well that prolonged exposure to the material would sicken and eventually kill anyone in close proximity to it.

  What type of woman would go to so much trouble? What type of woman would have access to deadly poison? Who would hate Dr. Siri and Madame Daeng so? Nurse Dtui could think of only one person, and she was dead: executed for crimes against the state based largely on evidence from Siri and Daeng. The spy they called The Lizard had already made elaborate attempts on the lives of the couple. It had been one of the first cases they’d all worked on together. Dtui had kept Lizard’s wanted poster. It had once hung on various walls around the town, but now it was in a drawer at the morgue. After her class, she’d taken the poster to the post office and caught the obnoxious postman coming off his shift.

  “Your b-b-b-b-boyfriend not with you, honey?” he asked.

  She held up the poster. “Is this the woman?” she asked. “The woman you gave the parcel to?”

  “What do I get if I tell you?”

  “You get me not going home to tell my policeman husband how unpleasant you are. Is this the woman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  Nurse Dtui had never felt so alone. She’d been used to group support in troubled times. Late nights around a table at Madame Daeng’s noodle shop, Daeng and Siri and Civilai. And her husband Phosy. Where the hell was Phosy? She needed confirmation that she’d interpreted everything correctly. She had a clue now, and a suspect, but no idea what to do about either. She went to see the only ally she had. Mr. Geung could neither read nor tie his shoelaces,
but he had a memory that would shame an elephant. She found him rocking in a non-rocking chair in front of the hospital dorm.

  “Geung,” she said, “do you remember the night at the Russian Club when we celebrated the death of The Lizard?”

  Of course he did.

  “I had a beer,” he said. It had been a rare indulgence.

  “Yes, but—”

  “I … I vomited in the Mekhong.”

  “Good job. But do you recall anything that was said that night? Anything that might have suggested the execution of The Lizard could have been canceled?”

  He didn’t have to think. “No.”

  “Right. I didn’t think so. So there was nothing suspicious? Nothing that made you wonder?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, well. It was worth asking. Thanks, pal.”

  “Yes m-m-m-means yes,” he said.

  “I know. Wait. You mean there was something?”

  “The ring,” he said.

  “What ring? Oh, shit. Right. The ring.”

  In a final moment of remorse, on the eve of her execution, The Lizard had apologized to Siri and Daeng. She had taken a very expensive ring off her finger and told them the bastard soldiers would only steal it once she was shot by the firing squad. She told them if they took it to the Russian Club, the owner would take it in lieu of payment for a night of food and drink for them and all their friends. She explained that only the manageress of that establishment would know the worth of the ring.

  And she’d been right. They’d eaten and drunk to excess that night and all had appropriate hangovers the following day. And nobody had given a second thought to the ring. Could it have contained a message?

  The Russian Club had changed management shortly after, and none of them had followed up with the military. There was a slim chance that the ring had alerted allies of The Lizard’s location and led to a rescue.

  That faint hope was enough for Dtui. The military would never announce or admit to such a debacle, and there was no way a simple nurse would be given such information.

  So there she was in police headquarters, sitting opposite Sergeant Sihot. He’d been a good soldier, but he would never be a general. He filled in the forms and listened politely, but he didn’t put on his bulletproof armor and charge into battle. That’s what Phosy would have done. That’s why she needed her husband.

  Sergeant Sihot listened to the entire story of the pha sin and the poison. Dtui told him about the deceased woman who might have come back to life in order to kill Siri and Daeng. In fairness, he listened with a straight face.

  When the story was told, he put down the pen and leaned back in his creaky chair. “Must say, it all sounds a bit espionage-like to me,” he said.

  “Espionage-like?” said Dtui. “Of course it was espionage-like. She was a spy. That’s what they do. All you’d have to do is get in touch with the military and get a confirmation she was executed.”

  He pursed his lips. “Oooh,” he said. “That wouldn’t be easy at all.”

  “Why not?”

  “Military and police. We don’t get along that well.”

  “How could you not? You were a colonel in the military. Phosy was a general. The police force is just an offshoot of the army. There must be people over there you can ask.”

  “I suppose so,” Sihot said without enthusiasm.

  “You suppose …? All right. Then bear this in mind while you consider it. Our friends Dr. Siri and Daeng went up-country to follow up on where the mystery finger came from. They’d already been exposed to arsenic. They took half the sin with them. They were already ill when they left. But what if The Lizard’s up there too? What if she’s exposed them to more of the stuff? What if she wants to watch them have a slow and painful death? Could you live with that?”

  “That’s an awful lot of conjecture, young Dtui.”

  “You’re right. But we live in a time where it’s advisable to expect the worst. Could you at least promise me you’ll contact the military and ask about The Lizard? A man of your resources must have old friends in the armed forces.”

  Sihot smiled. He was missing a good number of teeth. “I’ll try,” he said.

  She stood to leave. “And it would be a good opportunity to have the military get in touch with Phosy and get him on the case.”

  “He’ll be in touch,” said Sihot. “Don’t worry.”

  10

  Geckos Don’t Wear Trousers

  Buddhism probably prepared a man to lay in a puddle of effluent for long periods in total darkness. But Phosy wasn’t Buddhist, and his eclectic animist upbringing hadn’t helped at all. He needed to keep his mind active through some activity other than meditation. The endless hours of arse-numbing political seminars had trained him to look fascinated while plotting long-term projects; his thirst for revenge on toothless Goi would have kept him alive for weeks. He had formulated a plan. It wasn’t perfect, but he was hardly in a state to expect perfection.

  He had also kept his mind alive by retracing the events of the morning the two headmen had purportedly killed each other. Once he’d studied the bodies and applied logic to the findings, it had become obvious what had actually transpired. He would never be able to prove it, and he decided it would be more than his life was worth to run his suspicions by the perpetrators.

  But he was confident he had reached the actual scenario. The wounds on the bodies were most certainly those from sharpened bamboo poles—there was no doubt about that. The curious part was how both men had as many wounds on their backs as they did on their fronts. These might have occurred on one corpse as the impending victor gave chase to his opponent and administered the final blows. But there were no circumstances that he could imagine whereby the two men were both attacking and retreating. In a stand-up fight, the rivals would be facing each other.

  So how did the wounds arrive on the backs of the fighters? There was only one possibility. They were attacked by somebody else, or rather, by a group armed with the same type of sharpened bamboo poles as those of the headmen. But who could have been responsible for such a thing? The Chinese road gang had no vested interest in the duel. If one of the headman’s own villages had been involved, that headman would surely have only attacked the opposing headman. So what group would stand to gain from the death of both of them?

  At Phosy’s embarrassing dénouement in the clearing, only one section of the crowd had shown any pleasure at his announcement that he was unable to declare a winner from the two villages. The mysterious tribeswomen whose youngster had caused the lust-fest in the first place had clapped and grinned when they heard the girl would not become the possession of either camp. Of course, who would want to see such a prize condemned to poverty in a dirty village in the middle of nowhere? No. They had better things planned for their nubile virgin princess. A rich city type. A dowry. Aid. By killing the two headmen, the girl was back on the market.

  When the zinc roof to his tomb opened this time, he was prepared for it. When he heard the padlock being unfastened, he closed his eyes tight against the glare, took a deep breath and twisted around to be facedown. There he lay perfectly still. As still as death. The same hand grabbed his collar, but the material ripped. There was yelling. Someone had climbed down into the grave and was manhandling him out. He took a long slow breath through his nose and was dumped on the dirt.

  Someone felt for a pulse. Phosy was a man who took a pride in keeping his pulse to himself. Dtui, an experienced nurse, had only been able to find it on rare occasions, all of those after sex. She’d pronounced him dead many an early morning. His veins were deep and embedded in a thick endoplasm.

  He doubted his captors would give him mouth-to-mouth. A finger lifted his eyelid, but he was already staring at the inside of his brain, another trick he’d learned at Siri’s slab. There were punches and kicks. He’d expected those. There was angry shouting in a strange language. The voices were probably saying what a coward this Vientiane policeman was, taking his own life. />
  But then he was ignored. One eye closed. One turned in on itself. No sounds. Patience. He was dead. He’d lie there all day if necessary, fighting back the goosebumps. He wondered how they’d dispose of his body. It was a matter he’d given a lot of thought to while down under.

  But he didn’t have long to wait. Another hand, this one smaller, took ahold of his ankle and dragged him slowly across the dirt. His body bumped over a step. His back and his wrists with their open sores sent slithers of lightning pain through his body. His physical self could take no more abuse, but his confidence grew. Somehow he would harness that confidence to find the strength to escape. To have his revenge.

  Still not prepared to look around him for fear of being discovered, he kept still, but he could hear the labored breathing of the man dragging him. A wheeze, spitting, a cough, and then his leg was allowed to drop to the ground. They had reached their destination. Phosy had envisioned a pit rather than an individual grave. A pit where other corpses lay and no hurry to fill it in. He was ready for that. There were other possibilities. Benzene and a Bic lighter, weighted down and thrown into a pond. As long as his hands were tied, he couldn’t foresee a way out of either. He wasn’t Houdini.

  He lay on his side. He decided to take a chance and bring down his lazy eye. He saw nobody. He was on a flat surface. The warehouse was some thirty meters away. It was a lone building surrounded by vegetation. He heard another cough, and then a pair of skinny feet in flip-flops stood directly in front of his face. One foot stepped on his chest. He anticipated another kick, but instead the foot rolled him gently onto his back.

  And there was nothing beneath him. He dropped like a shot partridge. He watched the sky, then the cliff, race past him. He was in free fall and knew he had time for no more than a kiss from the heart for his wife and child. And were it not for some blessed rock that jutted from the cliff and knocked him unconscious, he knew that he would have fallen forever. And all the spirits that lie in wait for falling men would have taken over his body and carried its soul to their hell long before the body hit the ground.