Six and a Half Deadly Sins

by Colin Cotterill

  “But why?” Daeng asked.

  “Money,” said Civilai. “Eventually everything’s about money.”

  “But these workers were earning peanuts. It would be like stealing rice from a beggar.”

  “On an individual basis, perhaps,” said Civilai, “but look at the mathematics. You wipe out a maintenance team, and you collect twenty-six salaries. Add to this the earnings they have in their bedrolls or their money belts. It was 1976. There were no banks. No money transfer agencies. They wouldn’t trust anyone to take the money home for them. They’d do a six-month stint in Laos and carry their salaries around with them until it was time to go home. They might even ask the paymaster to hang on to their money until they left the job. If you eliminated them after they’d been here for several months, you could make a nice little income.”

  “And there would be no accounting for losses,” Siri added. “They’d been recruited by an agent on the Chinese side, brought to a remote area in a foreign country at a time when nobody knew who was in control. An illiterate foreign laborer disappears. The family back in China waits a year for him to come home. They make a complaint to their local cadre. A slow and indifferent inquiry is conducted, and the findings come out something like, ‘Look, lady, your son ran away from the road crew. He found a local girl and married her.’ End of story. This is outlaw country where people like Goi reign. Nobody cares.”

  “Somebody cares,” said Daeng. “Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to get us involved. Whoever put together this chain of clues knows what happened here. They understand they can’t tell the local authorities, and they’d be very unlikely to interest anyone in Vientiane. But someone knew about you, Siri. Perhaps they had dealings with you somewhere down the line. They knew you wouldn’t be able to resist a mystery like this. You were their only hope.”

  “What can I do?” Siri asked.

  “Collect enough evidence to bring Goi to justice,” said Daeng.

  “We don’t even have any bodies,” Siri reminded them.

  “Then let’s start digging,” said Daeng.

  “But let us dig intelligently,” said Civilai. “I for one would prefer to use an implement rather than scratch around with my bare fingers.”

  “Fear not,” said Siri. “We have a Willys.”

  Clamped to the underside of the jeep were a spade and a pick. Admittedly they were suitable for diggers of short stature, which under normal circumstances would have included Siri. But Daeng forbade him from physical labor.

  “Look at you, Dr. Siri,” she said. “You’re in no fit state to stand up, let alone dig.”

  The normal Dr. Siri would have argued, but the unwell Siri recognized his limitations. He was ill. Very ill, and in need of rest. “In that case, I shall show you where to dig,” he said, and climbed into the jeep.

  The earth in the dell was soft from the seasonal floods, and Siri began to drive up and down the gully. Civilai and Daeng sat on the log sections and watched him for some ten minutes. The dirt sank beneath his wheels with every run, all but in two spots where slight mounds appeared.

  “He exhibits signs of cleverness from time to time,” said Civilai.

  “He married me,” said Daeng by way of confirmation.

  Siri cut the engine and leaned back in the seat. “I’d have a go over there if I were you.”

  Civilai and Daeng did as they were told, but they were a meter down in one of the mounds and still had no evidence of a burial. They were about to give up and divert their attention to the other mound when Civilai’s shovel hit something solid. Together they cleared away the dirt with their hands, and sure enough, there was a large round table of concrete beneath them. So slapdash was the finishing that the fingers of a human hand protruded from it at one corner. Only one finger was missing: the pinky of the left hand.

  “Shit,” said Daeng. “It’s true.” She sat back on her haunches and shook her head.

  Siri left his seat and came over to see what they’d found. “I’d wager this isn’t the only site,” he said.

  “How many times do you think they got away with this?” Daeng asked.

  “How many sins were there?”

  “Seven. You don’t think …?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if we found a burial ground like this at every site we visited,” Siri said. “Everywhere Goi and his associates set up camp with his maintenance crew. I bet he massacred every last one of them and stole from them. That was his initial funding for bigger and worse things. I imagine the skeletons in our new friend’s killing fields lay far and wide.”

  12

  The Seventh Deadly Sin

  There really was no other choice but to proceed to the site at the end of the loop, the Thai Lu village eleven kilometers down the Nam Tha River where the seventh sin was produced. It wasn’t the type of place you’d have to search for because it sat quite boldly beside the road to Luang Nam Tha. The village straddled the river, but there was no bridge. Villagers had become used to wading the wide shallow water course to visit friends or shop or run to meet guests who stopped on the roadside high above.

  “It would appear they’re expecting us,” said Civilai.

  A throng of children had scaled the steep hill and were huddled around the jeep. “It’s him,” said one child, pointing at Siri as if he were a pop star.

  There was a group “Ooh” and a lot of incomprehensible Lu, and the girl who had recognized Siri said in Lao, “This way, Grandfather. Follow us.”

  “This is peculiar,” said Civilai.

  By now, Siri barely had the strength to walk. Daeng and Civilai propped him up on either side. They followed the children down to the river valley, across the pleasantly cold water and up the far bank to the schoolroom. It was a bamboo-and-straw affair with a dirt floor. But there were enough decorations and flowers to suggest it was a well-loved building. A blackboard message shouted WELCOME, DR. SIRI AND OTHER RESPECTED GUESTS in chalk. Some of the children showed the guests to their benches, and others brought them cool drinks.

  “Do you suppose they do this for anyone who happens to stop on the road?” Civilai asked.

  They sipped at their drinks and watched through the large classroom window as a group of adults gathered downriver and began to walk up along the track. Most of them were women. It didn’t take long before first one, then two others became recognizable. There was Nang Uma, the young woman who ran the riverside guesthouse in Luang Nam Tha. Beside her was Auntie Kwa, the grumpy weaver they’d met at the morning market in Muang Sing. But to their utter surprise, behind them, as neat and presentable as ever, came Madame Chanta from the Women’s Union, the woman who’d first pointed them northward on their hunt for the source of the severed finger. They walked into the classroom and immediately went to their guests.

  “Congratulations on uncovering all our clues,” said Madame Chanta, walking from visitor to visitor and shaking their hands. “Dr. Siri, I have a letter here for you from your Nurse Dtui. Oh, my. What on earth is wrong with you?”

  “Fear not,” Siri said, taking the letter and ripping it open. “I’ll live long enough to discover what this show is all about.”

  Madame Chanta called to a wine-bottle shaped woman and spoke to her in Lu. The woman ran off. “We’re getting you something,” Madame Chanta said. “Something natural.”

  Siri laughed as best he could. “I’m in this state because of local remedies,” he said. “I’m being naturopathed to death. What I need is some good old chemical compounds in familiar wrappings. Something so far from the tree that no natural contents are even mentioned on the packet.” Then he buried his mind in the thick wad that was Dtui’s letter.

  “You’re Lu?” said Daeng, ignoring her husband.

  “My father was,” said Chanta. “My mother was Lao Loom. She was a buyer of pha sins for the royal family. I continue her work in a small way in projects for the Union. I train country girls to master the skills that a generation of wars has wiped out. Even here in the north, w
eaving is a dying art. On your journey you’ve seen what’s left of a Thai Lu cottage industry that just thirty years ago boasted a hundred and eighty looms. Mothers and daughters working together. When I traveled around the north collecting pha sins and laying out the clues for you, I was shocked at how few Lu weavers remained.”

  “All right,” said Civilai. “Very sad, but why did you set up this corny treasure hunt? Why couldn’t you just stop off at the Minorities Committee and tell them what you suspected? The police department, even?”

  “I lodged a complaint there a year ago, comrade,” she said. “I went back every month to see what had been done about it. I’m always told it’s pending. That there were more pressing matters. I think that means they didn’t believe me.”

  “I understand that,” said Daeng, “but at the very least, couldn’t you have come to me and Siri and told us directly what you suspected?”

  Chanta sat at a spare desk and smiled. “Sister Daeng,” she said, “do you recall a visit you paid to the union earlier in the year? You were telling us about the delegations you received from the downtrodden, the victims of crime and abuse.”

  “I do recall that,” Daeng said.

  “And do you also remember telling us about the problem you had discerning fact from fiction? About the storytellers who engaged you both in fantastic flights of fancy? Of tales that were just too bizarre to be true?”

  Daeng nodded.

  “But in all those visits,” Chanta continued, “did you ever hear of anything so farfetched as an ugly, small-statured man with no physical strength who was able to establish a reign of terror? Whose name made grown men tremble? Who had been able to fund a drug empire from the blood of hundreds of his own tribe? You don’t know me very well, Sister Daeng. There was no reason for you to believe a story from me than from any other of your couriers of the implausible.”

  “And so, the mystery hunt.”

  “One day, Dr. Porn and I were discussing Dr. Siri’s fascination with cinema and crime fiction. I had a script that I really wanted somebody to read, but you had a queue of needy. I had to pitch my screenplay in a way that would really …” She stopped for a minute as a noisy Chinese truck crawled past the village on the main road. “… that would really distinguish my story from all the others.”

  “And how could you fail to get my attention with a finger in a skirt hem and a tasty clue to its origin?” said Siri.

  “I knew Madame Daeng would seek out an expert on pha sins from the north, and that expert would naturally be me. The only mystery was the color of the cloth you showed me. I knew Auntie Kwa only used blue cloth, so I was shocked when you showed me the sin with the green hem in your garden that evening. But I was unable to contact Auntie for an explanation.”

  “I still don’t get it,” said Auntie Kwa. “I’d posted my blue material as Madame Chanta instructed me. I greased the paper so the frank stamp would be worn off in transit and didn’t put a return address. I was expecting you to come and see me, but I had no idea why the cloth had changed color. So I just played along. Sent you on to the next clue.”

  Siri held up the letter in front of him. “I believe I can explain exactly how that happened.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” said Auntie Kwa. “We’ve all been wondering.”

  “So you’re all in on it?” said Civilai.

  “We had to get you up here,” said Chanta. “To get you personally involved. To meet the players. To understand why we little people can’t do anything to stop the horror that has taken over our province.”

  “We suspected the worst at Seuadaeng when we heard the shots,” said Auntie Kwa. “We went there hoping to reclaim the bodies and cremate them. But they were buried in concrete. All we could retrieve was one finger. We knew who was responsible, so the little finger was symbolic. For a number of years we preserved it in formalin and displayed it on our altar. We had no idea there would be other atrocities.”

  “How many maintenance teams were there?” asked Civilai.

  “It went on for a year,” Chanta told him. “All the workers who disappeared were Lu from the Chinese side. Foreman Goi assumed that because they were Chinese, the Lao Lu wouldn’t particularly care what happened to them. He figured we were too self-centered and stupid to notice what was going on in our midst. But we’re the same blood. Our ancestors lived and worked and fought alongside one another. We all heard the rumors, but it took us some time to believe them. None of us wanted to imagine that a man could be so despicable. Foreman Goi was smart. There’s no denying that. He got the work done. He could communicate with both sides, keep the books straight, iron out little administrative bumps. His only problem was the unreliable Thai Lu workers who—according to him—ran off on payday to the nearest booze shop and were never seen again. Drunkards, every one of them. Philanderers. They felt sorry for him in Peking. They admired how he could be so efficient in the face of such an unreliable workforce. How he could always recruit new workers. He was their star.”

  She seemed exhausted from the telling of her story. The villagers standing around the room hung their heads as if desperation were too heavy a hat to bear.

  “So, Dr. Siri,” she said, “what were the Thai Lu to do? The complaints from families didn’t come through the official bureaucracy. They arrived along traditional routes: word of mouth and familial ties. And where did the telling end? With a rare educated Lu woman in Vientiane who taught people how to weave. How else could she tell her tale other than through the cloths that bound our people together? I’m afraid not all of our weavers could join us here today; Madame Duang in Muang Xai apparently slipped back into some other dimension. And of course we lost our sister in Muang Long.”

  She squeezed the hand of the weaver standing beside her; the weaver bowed her head in respect.

  “But her death was not in vain,” Chanta continued, “because in that simple scene you were able to witness the natural escalation of Goi’s empire. In that first year, he makes enough from robbing the dead to buy up a stock of opium. From there he brings in chemists from China to produce pure heroin. He has his mobile team passing the villages to pick up the stashes and send them back across what is a very porous border. With the latest events—the invasion and all—there’s been a mad rush to pick up long-term stashes like the one in Muang Long and get them out before all the road teams are kicked out of the country.”

  “Do you think Goi’s left already?” Daeng asked.

  “No,” said Civilai.

  They all looked at him.

  “It was part of the arrangement,” he said. “We asked the maintenance team to stay and continue with their program to make all the roads passable. It was a sort of token gesture to let the Chinese know we’re just bowing to international pressure. He’s here somewhere.”

  “And I imagine he’s stopped massacring his work crews,” said Siri. “By now he’d have a loyal team, a sort of personal entourage of thugs to protect him. It’s what all the tsars do.”

  Daeng looked at Siri and smiled. She knew this addendum was for her benefit. Drug lords did not take kindly to the theft of their hard-earned stashes or the murder of their henchmen.

  The remainder of the day was something akin to a United Nations workshop, albeit with practical outcomes and a budget that ran to a few baskets of sticky rice. The weavers and the elders and the visitors from Vientiane split into groups and drew up a list of contingencies and resources and other considerations to successfully wage war with a drug baron. They skipped the how will this make you feel? part of the process because it was damned obvious they’d all feel a lot better knowing they weren’t going to be murdered in their bedrolls at night.

  One of the major components of the resulting plan was the immediate involvement of Inspector Phosy, who, the weavers were convinced by their visitors, would stop heaven and earth to capture a freak like Goi. Siri had been disappointed not to make contact with their friend while he was in the north, but a villager was dispatched to Luang Na
m Tha post office to attempt to make contact with the inspector upon his return to Vientiane. Just that small hope seemed to make everyone feel much calmer about events.

  The Lu prepared a huge meal for their saviors and talked confidently yet drunkenly of a grassroots militia that would turn the tide against the pervading drug politics in the north. Siri had retired early and was unconscious the second his head hit the pillow. Before retiring for the night, Madame Daeng walked Chanta to a bench in the little village square. The path was lit by a vast ocean of stars. They held hands as they bathed in its glow.

  “I imagine you’re starting to panic around now,” said Daeng.

  “I haven’t slept a night since it all started,” Chanta confessed.

  “You’ve done a great thing.”

  Chanta looked at her role model. “That sounds like one of those ‘You’ve been a great asset to the company but …’ introductions.”

  “Not at all. Well … perhaps a little,” said Daeng. “You are unquestionably brilliant, but don’t forget the best armies keep their generals way behind the front line. You shouldn’t be up here. You can better fight this fight in Vientiane.”

  “You don’t think we can win this battle, do you?”

  Daeng laughed. “Well, let me just think. You’re asking me whether I believe a small group of weavers can vanquish a tyrant who has enough money to buy half a country. I’ll be honest. You cut off the head of the naga, and within seconds a new head grows out of the neck. And you can hack away all day and night, and at one stage you notice that there are two heads now growing out of the neck. All you get is a lot of blood and a sore arm.”

  “This isn’t exactly an inspirational talk.”

  “It could be if you’re inspired at the end of it to go back to Vientiane.”

  “Daeng, I’ve given these people hope.”

  “And that’s enough. Now we go back to the capital and put together a strategy to overwhelm Goi. You don’t beat people like him on the battlefield.”