Six and a Half Deadly Sins

by Colin Cotterill

  “So you’re saying that they over-ordered so they could sell the surplus?” said Daeng.

  “Given the Neanderthal conditions up here in 1976, I’d say buyers for stolen building supplies would have been few and far between,” said Civilai. “But let’s keep that as one option.”

  “Then perhaps that’s why the team leader changed personnel so often,” said Daeng. “So nobody would notice the oversupply.”

  “So let’s look at the two names on the worker list that are ever present,” said Civilai. “And assume that they’re the ones in on the scam. The top one here—Gwan Jin—would have to be the team leader. This other one—Gwan To—has the same surname, so he might be a relative.”

  “Gwan Jin is on the same salary as the others,” said Daeng. “Wouldn’t the team leader be on a higher rate?”

  “The Chinese reds like to give the impression everyone’s equal. Bosses and bottom-feeders on the same salary. The foreman wouldn’t complain if he was milking the project and banking the profits.”

  “I don’t buy any of this,” said Siri. “Back then, the Chinese had checkpoints all the way to the border. The only roads in and out were the ones they were building or maintaining. They’re not going to let their road crews drive through with truckloads of pilfered building supplies.”

  “I agree,” said Civilai. “I think the only way to sort this out would be to go to one of the sites.”

  “The bullet could be a warning for us not to get too close,” said Daeng.

  “I think it’s too late for that,” said Civilai. “What the …?”

  Out of the darkness came a figure riding a bicycle. He was carrying a bucket. He let the bike drop to the ground and dragged his feet up to the balcony, then stood in front of them as if awaiting instructions. Daeng and Siri ignored him.

  “What do you want?” Civilai asked. “Wait! I recognize … My God. It’s him.”

  “More ice,” said Daeng, who nodded at the evil-eyed man. He stepped up and put the fresh ice bucket on the table in front of them. He carried himself like an inflatable paddling pool with a fast leak.

  “How on earth …?”

  “Be back here at seven sharp,” Siri told the man, who returned to the bicycle and vanished back into the darkness.

  “How did that happen?” asked Civilai, too stunned to put ice in his glass.

  “You said you didn’t want to know,” Daeng reminded him.

  “What I didn’t want to know was how he died. Not how he became an indentured servant ice-bringer. Last time I saw him, he was tied to a post and spitting at me.”

  “It was quite simple,” said Daeng.

  “I doubt that.”

  “It was Siri’s idea. We took our prisoner to the front steps of the clinic, chained him up and let him watch while I cut open the twenty bags and scattered the heroin over the dry clay in front of the building.”

  “You never did,” said Civilai, moribund.

  “Yes,” said Daeng. “Then Siri and I did a sort of restrained waltz to tread the powder well into the ground until there was nothing left to snort, inject or serve with lemonade. The thug watched open-mouthed as half a million dollars’ worth of dope was rendered useless.”

  “We said to him, ‘Do you understand what just happened?’ ” said Siri. “He couldn’t bring himself to speak. ‘We just danced your stash into the dust,’ I said. ‘Do you know what that means?’ He shook his head. ‘It means two things. One, that you now have to account to your boss for the loss of twenty kilos of pure heroin. Your boss will assume that you and your partner stole it, and he’ll kill you. If you run away, he’ll find you because there’s nowhere to run to that you can’t be found. But of course, you know that. Do you know what else it tells you?’ He shook his head again. All the cocky bravado was gone. ‘It tells you that twenty kilograms of heroin is small change to people like us. Don’t let appearances fool you. In a day, we produce a hundred kilograms. We have direct markets in France. We don’t have to torture and kill people because we are a business conglomerate and we pay our employees very handsomely. Our network is bigger than you could imagine. We know all about your boss and his insignificant operation. We’ll be dealing with him soon enough, if you know what I mean. You’re a small-time courier and collection agent. But that isn’t to say we don’t have positions for people such as yourself. I’m giving you a chance to come over to us. You’d start at the bottom, of course. Rock bottom. But in a year, maybe two, you’d likely be heading a district drug cartel. We reward good employees.’ ”

  “In fact we probably didn’t need to go into all that detail,” said Daeng. “I think we had his undivided attention once he’d watched all that heroin destroyed. He became very docile after that.”

  “I must admit it’s a better result than I expected,” said Civilai. “But it doesn’t actually explain the whiskey or the ice.”

  “Well,” said Daeng, “when you went to bed so early, we decided to take a stroll over to see our friends Lola and Bobby. They’d told us all about their overloaded larder, full of ingredients that would be invaluable in a San Francisco kitchen but which have absolutely no use at all here.”

  “Like fifty kilograms of baking powder and no oven to bake anything in,” said Siri. “So we told them we could find a home for it to benefit the rural poor. Lola packed twenty kilograms of it in Jiffy bags for us.”

  “We replaced the flour in the canvas bag and hid the stash,” said Siri.

  “That’s a relief,” said Civilai. “My nest egg is safe.”

  “While we were there, Bobby showed us his latest invention,” said Daeng. “A refrigerator powered by a motorcycle engine. It was no larger than a toaster oven because it had in fact once been a toaster oven, but it really did freeze. He is something of a genius. He hasn’t yet worked out how to stop everything in the fridge turning to ice, but that too will come. Meanwhile, he has ice.”

  “I joked that with all that ice, it was a pity we didn’t have anything to put it in,” said Siri. “And Bobby said, ‘Oh, man, Siri. You’d be shocked how many donors in the old country consider alcohol to be somewhere near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.’ And he opened a cupboard, and there was a regiment of full bottles. ‘Take ’em all,’ Bobby said. ‘Me and Lola don’t drink.’ We could have stocked up for a month, but we decided we needed our wits about us to deal with this drug lord and his honchos. Another drink?”

  11

  Nobodies

  The Chinese invasion of Vietnam was in its third week. For reasons observers failed to understand, the Chinese didn’t launch an offensive through Laos along the road to Dien Bieng Phu even though this would have given them a tactical advantage. Instead they advanced on two fronts, continuing attacks on Lang Son, Sa Pha and Pang Tho. The Chinese were losing a lot of men in the fighting and were being held off in remote areas in which they’d expected to meet little resistance. The Vietnamese village militia was a potent defensive force.

  As the Americans had demonstrated admirably in the Second Great War, friends and neighbors who happen to have been born in a country you’re at war with suddenly join the ranks of the enemy. You send them off to camps, reclaim your lent lawn mower, grab their best LPs and start talking about them as “them.” But Laos didn’t have any camps, so a new wave of ethnic Chinese migrants found themselves on the night ferries to Thailand. Hundred-year-old businesses shut down. In Vietnam, second-generation Chinese who barely spoke their mother’s language were paying gold for seats on fishing boats to Australia. Suddenly, everyone hated their Chinese populations. Or perhaps they’d always hated them but had no excuse for doing so. How can you trust such a successful race?

  Muang Sing was still quiet. The second thug hadn’t shown up for his allotted 7 A.M. delivery; Siri assumed he’d taken to the hills. So our three intrepid explorers set off to visit the nearest site listed on the Chinese work roster: the village of Seuadaeng. It was the home of Auntie Kwa, the weaver they’d met at her stall at the mornin
g market. It was the one location they had yet to visit. Some three kilometers before the village, they came to a small bridge that gave credence to Civilai’s recollection of seeing a single pipeline bridge at every site. Nothing elaborate. Merely a conduit for the wet season waters, a slight incline with concrete posts to mark the pipeline.

  “This is it,” he said. “Kilometer seven. Right here on the work roster.” He climbed down from the jeep and began to pace out the width of the empty road.

  “See?” he said. “In the dry season, you’d have no idea the runoff from the rivers would come this far. No sign of a stream at all. But in the rains, the road would be washed out if it weren’t for this simple little bridge. They’ve done a good job.”

  He went to the far edge of the road where a concrete pipe protruded less than a meter into the lowland beneath the verge. “There,” he said. “Six meters. What did I tell you? What would they need twenty meters of piping for?”

  “Water towers?” Daeng suggested.

  “Do you see one?”

  “No.”

  “And why build a water tower?” Civilai continued. “This is three days’ work at the most.”

  Daeng looked around. There were no buildings to be seen. No cows in the dry fields. In fact, the only life was a girl coming in their direction on a bicycle.

  “Maybe she …?” Siri began.

  “Let me,” said Daeng. She limped along the road to greet the girl, who braked and looked like she considered turning around.

  “Hello, little sister,” Daeng shouted.

  The girl didn’t reply. She looked querulously at Daeng.

  “Do you speak Lao?” Daeng asked.

  “Little bit,” said the girl, so quietly the rustling grass almost drowned out the sound.

  “Do you know Auntie Kwa?” Daeng asked as she mimed the weaving process.

  The girl let out a brief smile, then recaptured it. She nodded.

  “She’s my good friend,” said Daeng. “We’re going to visit her. Is she home?” She finally reached the girl.

  “She at the market,” said the girl. “I go now.” She put her foot on the pedal, but Daeng leaned against the metal basket.

  “Wait,” said Daeng. “Let me rest first. Do you remember when the workmen came to fix this road?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Men. Chinamen. Thai Lu.”

  A bolt of anger passed across the girl’s face. She remembered right enough, and it clearly wasn’t a good memory.

  “What happened?” Daeng asked.

  The girl shook her head and tried again to push down on the pedal.

  “Where was their camp?” Daeng asked. “Where did they sleep?”

  The girl pointed to a dip beyond a copse of trees some fifty meters away. “Sleep there,” said the girl. Then added the word, “Always.”

  She pushed past Daeng and cycled away at speed.

  Daeng returned to join the men. “Something odd,” she said, and told them what the girl had said.

  “What’s odd is that they’d pitch camp so far from the road and in a dip,” said Civilai. “According to the roster, they were here in the rainy season. There’s high ground there on the other side. Why wouldn’t they pitch camp there?”

  “Perhaps they didn’t want to be seen doing whatever it was they were doing,” said Daeng.

  They walked across the crusty earth to a point beyond the trees. There were the remains of three bamboo sheds.

  “Well, they were obviously here for longer than the three days,” said Siri. “You don’t bother to build a hut unless you’re staying for a while. For just three days they’d use tents or sleep under the stars. They must have used this base for other work around Muang Sing.”

  “If they were here long enough, they might have used the pipe segments to line a well,” said Daeng.

  “Possible,” said Civilai. “But they were here because there was too much water. I doubt they needed to dig for it.”

  “Look,” said Siri.

  He was crouching down. The others came over to look. There at the doctor’s feet was a spent bullet, slightly buckled. There was another a few meters away. Over the next twenty minutes, they found five more.

  “They’re the same caliber as the one we found in the hem of the sin,” said Daeng. “I wonder what they were shooting at.”

  “If they stayed for a while, they’d have to get permission from the headman in Seuadaeng,” said Siri. “He might be the person to ask. Let’s pay him a visit.”

  “Ah, yes,” said the headman after handing Civilai back his well-used laissez-passer. He was the rosy brown of chestnuts. “I remember the crew. They were here for three weeks. They fixed our road, then went off on other day trips.”

  “Did you have any trouble with them?” asked Civilai.

  “Trouble? No. Goodness me, no trouble at all. Very polite they were. You know, they were all Lu, like us. From China, but the same language. Same culture. We look after our brothers and sisters. It’s like me, you see? I’m from a Lu village down south. Our beloved government transferred me up here to be headman. And look … I accepted immediately, no worries. I have great friends already and an industrious wife.”

  The wife looked up from her scrubbing, a baby strapped to her back and another at her feet. She looked drained as a result of her industry.

  “Did anything … unusual … happen on the night they struck camp?” asked Daeng.

  “Unusual in what way?”

  “Did you hear any shots fired?”

  “Shots? Well, of course they were hunting down there. There’d be rifle fire from time to time. But nothing out of the ordinary. What exactly is your purpose for being here, comrades?”

  Civilai butted in. “The Chinese road program is being phased out,” he said. “Our beloved government would like to identify workers who were particularly conscientious in their endeavors to assist us in the development of our nation. We have medals to give out.”

  “I see,” said the headman. “Then you’ve come to the right place. You won’t find anyone better than the man who ran that maintenance team. The Chinese recognized his diligence. He went from head of that small team to become the head foreman of the entire workforce.”

  “His name wouldn’t be”—Siri looked at his paper—“Guan Jin, by any chance?”

  “Yes, I believe that is his full name,” said the headman. “A most helpful and intelligent man.”

  “Do you know whether he’s still around these parts?” Daeng asked.

  “Why, yes, comrade. In fact I saw him just yesterday. He’d be easy enough to find. Just ask anyone where you might find Goi.”

  “Goi?”

  “That’s right. It’s his Lao nickname.”

  The visitors exchanged glances. Another piece had slotted into place. They gave their thanks and returned to the jeep. As they were climbing in, the industrious wife ran out with a basket of fruit. The headman looked on proudly from the doorway. The woman put the basket on Daeng’s lap.

  “Thank you,” said Daeng.

  “Thank you for visiting,” said the woman. She kept a tight grip on Daeng’s wrist. “The night they finish camp,” she said hurriedly and with a tremor in her voice, “there are shooting and scream. Twenty-six shot. One—one—one—one, like that.”

  “So where to?” asked Civilai.

  “Back to the camp,” said Siri.

  “Goi,” said Daeng. “The little finger himself.”

  Goi was a common word for the smallest of the litter. As soon as the headman mentioned the foreman’s nickname, they’d all remembered the severed pinky. Had the first clue been the identity of the perpetrator?

  “You do realize the headman is, in some respect, in cahoots with this Goi?” asked Civilai.

  “Yes. But he won’t expect us to go back to the camp,” said Siri. “He thinks we’re after the foreman.”

  “There’s just the one road. Anyone passing would see us parked.”

  With that
the jeep veered across the road, careened down the embankment and began to bump over the dried paddy fields.

  “Four-wheel drive,” mouthed Siri into the rearview mirror.

  “I believe Madame Daeng with her natural padding would be better placed on this backseat,” said Civilai. “The springs have all but given up on me.”

  With that he took off, his head hitting the canvas roof.

  “That will teach you not to insult a full-figured woman,” said Daeng.

  They parked behind the small oasis of vegetation and went back to the area where they’d found the bullets. They each sat on a slice of tree that had been placed around a hearth. For several minutes they sat still and contemplated. It was Daeng who spoke first.

  “Twenty-six shots,” she said. “Thirty-one names on the work roster.”

  “And not a gunfight,” said Siri. “The shots were spaced out. An execution. What do you suppose happened that night?”

  “We are reading quite a lot into a brief statement from a miserable woman,” Civilai reminded them.

  “She was shaking,” said Daeng. “She was terrified. I get the feeling she was taking a chance to talk to us at all.”

  “Come on,” said Siri. “We’re all thinking the same thing.”

  “It’s just so … so obscene,” said Daeng.

  “It would fit in with the missing supplies,” said Siri. “Twenty-six bodies buried in soft earth would be found soon enough. Dogs or wild animals would dig them up. The floods would wash them out. If I were about to make twenty-six bodies disappear forever, I could think of no better way than to bury them in cement in concrete pipe segments.”

  “And they’d even dig their own graves,” said Civilai. “None of them would question a foreman who told them to dig wells in the middle of nowhere. Probably think it was some long-term plan.”