The Merry Misogynist dsp-6

by Colin Cotterill

  "Yes, sir. Sorry."

  "You'll stay on the bus till you get to Paknyun. I need all the information I can get from the people who attended the wedding. Don't tell them we might have found the missing daughter. It's possible we won't be able to identify these bones. I don't want to upset them unduly."

  "But you think it's her?"

  "Yes, Tham. I do."

  When the police jeep pulled up outside Daeng's noodle shop, it was already three p.m., and Madame Daeng was sitting outside on a rattan chair. She was dressed in her thick gabardine workers' trousers, a loose-fitting blue shirt, and boots. Since her move to Vientiane she'd worn her hair short and wild. Now she'd greased it back, and at first glance Phosy thought she was a man. He jumped from the jeep and looked behind Daeng to see a CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE sign on the shop shutter.

  "Madame Daeng, what's so urgent?"

  "What on earth kept you, Phosy? I've been waiting for hours." She threw a pack into the back of the jeep.

  "I just got back," he said, eyeing the bag. "I dropped some bones off at the morgue. I didn't get the message till I met the clerk."

  "Are you alone?"

  "I dropped Tham off at a bus stop. Why?"

  "I think you're going to need to pick up one or two officers on the way."

  "On the way where?"

  "To the Thon River." She walked past him and climbed up to the passenger seat.

  "What are you talking about? I've just driven all the way from Pakxan. What's at the Thon River?"

  "Your murderer, Inspector. Siri left already. He has a three-hour start on us."

  "What's all this 'us'? If you're serious about the murderer being at Thon, I'm certainly not going to take an elderly lady with me. It would be more than my job's worth."

  "Well, Phosy, that would be a terrible shame, because then you wouldn't get to hear about it. Dr Siri will be massacred, the killer will claim his next victim, and you will have — dare I say it — egg on your face."

  "Madame Daeng, listen! Withholding evidence is a serious offence. It's not a game."

  "I'm not withholding anything. I'm just planning to tell you on the journey."

  Phosy slapped the fender of the jeep and hurt his hand.

  "You aren't going to bully me into this. Besides, you can't go to the Thon River. You don't have a laissez-passer to leave Vientiane Prefecture."

  "But you have one. Nobody's going to notice a frail old lady. I'll scrunch down on the floor under a blanket. They won't search your vehicle. You're a policeman. Now come on. It's getting late."

  "Madame Daeng, I — "

  "You're wasting valuable time."

  Phosy was still fuming as they neared the intersection at Sangkam. The road was in an awful state. Daeng sat beside him on the passenger seat and the two young officers he'd requisitioned from HQ sat in the back. She'd told him the entire story as Siri had told it to her, and he didn't like it one tiny bit.

  "How could you let Siri go after him?" Phosy asked.

  Daeng laughed. "How could I stop him? You know Siri as well as I do. I could say, 'Siri, please don't go' and he'd go anyway, and we'd both feel bad. Or I could give him my blessing and a bag of noodles for the journey, and only I'd feel bad."

  "You're each as ornery and obstinate as the other," he yelled above the drone of the engine. "When you first suspected it might have something to do with the Census Department you should have contacted me straight away. I'm sick of you two playing detective."

  "You weren't here. Your office was empty. Somebody had to play policeman."

  "There were other officers around."

  "Like them?" Daeng nodded to the rear-view mirror. Phosy looked at the hairless faces of the two young men he'd snatched from headquarters. They were still twenty kilometres from their destination, and they already looked as if they might wet themselves with fear. "What would they have done?"

  "And what, tell me, is a seventy-three-year-old man going to do?"

  "You have a short memory, Phosy. Just how many of your cases have been solved by the doctor?"

  Phosy didn't answer. He sulked all the way past the intersection. The window wipers smeared an omelette of insects across the thick glass. The jeep listed left and right as it negotiated the deep truck furrows. Eventually the policeman deigned to speak.

  "I think he's got this one wrong," he said.

  "Why so?"

  "The girl up in the north — the case I went up there to investigate — it happened way back in '69. The Census Department was run by the old regime in those days. There's nobody left from that era."

  "I've been thinking about that too, Phosy. Siri placed this man Buaphan's accent as from the central region, and cultured. I can't work out what someone like that is doing working for the Republic on an official project. The doctor suggested he might be from an influential family that had bought him a position. If that's so, he might well have spent time up north with the Royalists during the war. He might have been an engineer or something. Plus she might have been his first victim. If he started his killing spree back then he wouldn't have needed the Census Department job as a pretext to move around and attack these girls. There was chaos. He would have had ample opportunity. He liked it so much he got a job with the new regime so he could continue his hobby."

  "You think somebody high profile would take such a gamble?"

  "Why not, Phosy? You've seen how arrogant he is. He believes he's better than all of us. He's planned it all so carefully. He can't imagine anyone catching him. In his mind, he's God."

  16

  SWIMMING THROUGH ROCKS

  Phan sat naked and cross-legged beneath the tree he'd selected on his previous visit. He welcomed the ravenous red ants and vampiric mosquitoes that chewed at his flesh. Eventually they too would learn he was invincible. By the light of the candles he looked through the documents one last time: the registration of marriage, the housing certificate, the laissez-passers, permission from the Social Relations office, bank statements, a police letter verifying that he was unmarried and not wanted for any crimes, birth certificate, Party membership record, and, just for icing on the cake, a full curriculum vitae.

  He lay back on the itchy grass and sighed. How wonderful it was to live in a state where the actual person was no longer important. Everything existed only on paper, including him. A man who merely walked the earth with nothing but breath and a strong beating heart was no longer a man in the Democratic Republic of Laos. God had been replaced by an earthbound bookkeeper.

  "I carry identification, therefore I am," he said. And in this incarnation he was Phumphan Bourom of the Irrigation Department: a senior engineer with a degree from East Germany. He would overwhelm the village with his paperwork, let them mull over it, knowing there was no way for them to verify its authenticity before the wedding. It was all signed and stamped by respected cadres in the capital. The village heads would co-sign the forms and give the go-ahead for a ceremony that had already been planned. It was inevitable because the responsibility had been removed from their shoulders. There was nothing a local administrator liked more than having someone else make decisions for him.

  Than sat up on his elbows and looked for the eleven billionth time at the celestial error between his legs, hoping that overnight it might have made up its mind. This way or that? One or the other?

  His mother had made that call early on in his life. She'd thought the little dresses and pink ribbons from the missionary's sewing box might prod her son?daughter off the fence.

  "But she's getting so tall," dumb Father had said. "The face isn't a girl's at all."

  Mother ignored him. She persevered. She even coached her only child in the arts of womanhood.

  A mockery at school.

  Every single waking day a nightmarish humiliation.

  Swimming through rocks.

  The word 'Miss' was on his national identity card so this gawky, hairy-chinned female, still in his mother's pink ribbons, waded uncomfortably through life
to the age of fourteen. And then, all at once, the strings snapped.

  There was a war on. Neighbours were shocked but not particularly surprised to find the husband and wife hacked to death in their own home with a machete. The odd daughter was missing, presumed violated and dead. And Phan's life began. It was an awful, violent period in Laos, but his country wasn't unused to such brutality. There were unnecessary deaths and, in the confusion, identities became vacant. Phan began his metamorphosis, stepping out of one skin and into the next and the next, becoming more confident with each shedding. He tried on other men's lives as if he were trying on shirts at the market. He was a patriot fleeing the Royalists, a deserter escaping from the Reds, a pacifist seeking refuge from aggression. With each stage he deliberately became more of a man in his own mind. And to complete the transition — to prove that he had been meant to be male all along — he decided to take a wife.

  He knew how to talk to girls. He'd been one. He'd heard them gossip and understood what they expected. He was in Luang Nam Tha in the north, living the life of a man whose papers he'd taken: a man who lay wounded on a battlefield. After learning a little about his family and history Phan had finished him off with a bayonet. In the skin of this man, Phan had met a girl. She was beautiful and innocent and so in love with him he could sense the warmth emanate from her body when they were close. He felt something for her too, although he wasn't sure what to call it. He believed, somewhere in his confusing emotional spin drier of a soul that this was the solution to the puzzle. Everything would find its true place once he became a husband.

  The ceremony had been simple: sweet, and low-key with only her close friends and relations. He'd charmed them all. They loved him. They'd set aside a room for the newly married couple behind the family house. It was a simple thatched building. As sound travelled unimpaired through bamboo the parents had arranged to be discreetly absent.

  Phan had planned it in his head. It was to be a slow, romantic night. As they held each other in the lamplight he would explain his circumstances. She might be a little surprised, but she would hear him out. After a moment of thought she would tell him that she loved him for himself — that everything else was unimportant.

  But the drink had turned her mind. As soon as they were alone, she tore at his clothing like some wild beast. He held her off, tried to engage her in conversation, but she seemed unnaturally obsessed with his body. "Very well," he thought, "let her see me. That might work just as well." But first she touched him between the legs, then she sat back to look, and her mouth fell open. She ceased her attack and fell backwards against the wall of the building. The posts and beams shuddered. It was the mocking expression on her face, not the subsequent laughter that left a scar branded on his soul and closed down his heart. It was a look of disgust — one that he would see in the eyes of every woman he met from that day forward.

  He'd strangled her to death that night there in her parents' back room. He'd driven his medical supply truck a hundred kilometres south to the outskirts of Nam Tha, parked beside the highway, and carried her body into the undergrowth. It was all over. But as he headed into the town in search of a new battlefront and a new identity, thoughts of his untouched bride flooded his mind. She was his. In the eyes of the Lord Buddha and the Royalist government, she belonged to him. She'd sworn her devotion. He had the paperwork to prove it. The fact that she was dead didn't terminate that contract. He could still have the honeymoon he'd imagined in his dreams.

  It took him most of the day to put together the equipment and supplies he needed. When he found her again he was dismayed to discover her body so ravaged by nature in such a short time. But it didn't matter. He wined and dined her, told her his secret, and at last, he gave her the pleasure she'd so obviously craved. He tied her to a tree with ribbon and, as he sat naked admiring his new bride, he became aware of a powerful joy that had welled up inside him. He had never experienced such elation. The feeling was deep in his groin, exactly as he'd always imagined it to be. He had experienced some kind of sexual pleasure. He was complete.

  That seemed far in the past to him now. There had been so many disruptions since then. Political changes were being made all around him. After the ceasefire in '72 he moved to Vientiane and adopted an identity nobody could question. A lot of new people were arriving and leaving each day. The Royalists could see the inevitable Red sun dawning on their empire and, one by one, they slipped across the river, unannounced, under cover of darkness. Than had merely stepped into the shadow one of them left behind. He found work, did well, and as good men were hard to find in the empty city, he was offered a position with the Census Department. It was ideal: travel, anonymity, a veritable factory of documentation. Everything was set for him to prove his masculinity again and again without fear of discovery.

  He had wrested possession of the truck from the imbecile and left him doing some inane, unnecessary task. Than would spend this night here in the bridal suite remembering each detail of the honeymoons he'd enjoyed with his five wives and the pleasure he'd given them. He'd dream of tomorrow's wedding and the seduction of the bright and beautiful teacher, Wei, and he'd sleep the sleep of a man — a real man.

  Phosy drove into Natan at nine a.m. He stopped once or twice to ask directions to the house of the resident government cadre, but it wasn't really that difficult to spot: the largest wooden building on the main street. They parked opposite and stepped down from the jeep to stretch like waking cats. It had been a bone-jarring ride, and they were exhausted. For Phosy it had been a day of particularly slow hours. The administrator came out of his house before they could knock or shout hello. He was a young man relying on one or two chin hairs to lend him an air of authority.

  "Can I help you, Comrades?" he asked. Phosy and the policemen showed him their identification papers.

  "We are here on a very serious police investigation," Phosy told him. "We need to contact the team collating the census data immediately."

  "You mean immediately now?" the cadre asked.

  "Unless you know of any other type of immediately."

  "Well, that might be a problem."

  "Why?" asked Phosy.

  "The census people did pass by earlier, and they presented their credentials. But after they left here they were due to split up. They said they've got data to collect from twenty districts in two days. The only way they can do that is to set up three bases to make it more convenient for the collectors to get to."

  "Presumably they told you where they'd be based?"

  "My deputy, Comrade Sounthon, organized it for them. But he's off on a night hunt with the locals. You know? Headlamps, shooting lorises and other nocturnal game."

  "Animals too drowsy to run away," Daeng remarked.

  "Does anyone else have any idea where we can find the census collators?" Phosy asked.

  "One or two people, Comrade Inspector, but they're all out on the hunt."

  "Damn."

  "Have you had an old fellow on a motorcycle here this evening asking the same question?" Daeng asked.

  "Not that I've heard, Auntie, and I hear most things."

  Daeng involuntarily squeezed Phosy's arm.

  "What time are you expecting your deputy back?" the policeman asked.

  "Sun-up usually."

  Phosy looked at his weary passengers.

  "All right. Then we could use a few hours' sleep. Can I trouble you for accommodation?"

  "Guesthouse is just around the corner, Comrade. Turn left at the tyre repairers."

  What the cadre had described to be the cheapest rooms in the province had every right to be. The kapok mattresses smelled of sweat and worse, and the stuffing had coagulated into lumps. The patter of tiny feet on the tin roof hinted at an all-night squirrel hoedown. Phosy had long since given up the thought of sleep. He sat on the veranda steps drinking weak tea from the communal thermos and waited for the sun. He hadn't said anything to Daeng but he was worried about Siri. Out here they weren't far from the Thai border. R
ebels occupied the hills and insurgents crossed the river to create havoc. Bandit gangs and renegade gunmen often hijacked lone vehicles. A Triumph motorcycle in good condition would be quite a catch. He hadn't thought to ask at the police boxes they'd passed whether they'd sighted the doctor, and now, deprived of sleep and mad at everyone, he imagined all the fates that might have befallen his friend.

  "Can't sleep, Inspector?" Phosy turned his stiff neck to see Daeng behind him in the candlelight. She came to sit beside him on the step, and he poured her tea.

  "The kids up too?" she asked.

  "No, they're made of putty. They could sleep on a pile of jackfruit."

  "Jackfruit sounds quite comfortable compared to the beds in there."

  The indigo sky had begun to pass through less depressing hues on its journey to blue, and the sounds of happy voices hummed in the distance.

  "I wonder if that's our hunting party returning," Phosy said.

  "I do hope so. I would like to get away early."

  Phosy smiled. "Oh, no, Madame Daeng. You blackmailed your way onto the jeep yesterday. You aren't going to get away with that again."

  "Inspector, you wouldn't leave a girl alone in the wilds?"

  "There's a good restaurant on the main street. You can swap noodle stories with the owner. This is a police inquiry, not a tour. You'll stay in town and we'll pick you up on our way back."

  "You're sure you can't use an extra gun?" She patted her fat handbag.

  "If I thought for a second you'd brought a weapon with you, I'd have you in handcuffs right now."

  "Why didn't I get offers like that before I got married?"

  "Madame Daeng!"

  "All right. I'm joking. I'll swap recipes and crochet while you're away doing manly things."

  "Good."

  The voices had become louder now, and a small posse of happy hunters loomed through the morning mist along the unlit street. At first it appeared they were dressed in large animal suits, but it was merely that they were festooned with carcasses. If there was a more frightening gallery of rare, beautiful, and bleeding creatures, Daeng hadn't seen it.