Love Songs From a Shallow Grave

by Colin Cotterill

  “I thought you said they only had one flight in and out every fortnight?”

  “Normally, yes. But this is a special occasion. They’ve laid on an extra flight from Peking. We’ll be going with the Chinese delegation.”

  “Really? That should be fun. You’ll have a chance to tell them what you think of them. When’s the orientation?”

  “Nothing scheduled yet. Why the panic on getting briefed?”

  “I haven’t been out of the country for seven years. I’m interested to know what’s happening out there in the real world.”

  Despite my obstinacy, they continue to bring me my fetid water every couple of hours. Somebody wants to keep me alive—barely. The lights burn on. Time’s dragging like a heavy body over rocks. The whole story is crawling along too slowly to be film. In the cinema I would have made my daring escape hours ago. Certainly, for my sanity, it helps to see it all as theater, the screams broadcast from a tape recorder in the wings. The insect bites merely carefully applied stage makeup. A theatrical slap to the face. It’s only acting. Don’t hide your eyes, son.

  The charcoal has helped. I am back in control, if not of the consistency at least of the timing. I can now wait for the bucket they bring. The boys. The boys with three watches rattling around their wrists like bracelets. The boys not old enough to shave. The clone boys, identical to the one in my dark dream. Playing soldier with live ammunition. A real gun pointed at my forehead. Night after night. That finger, twitching, deciding whether to squeeze the trigger and take this old man out. And some nights he doesn’t. And some nights he does. And on those nights when the gun blasts, I find myself walking through what’s left of my nightmare with nothing above my frayed neck. But even on those headless nights I can hear the eerily beautiful singing. It’s a dream. Who needs ears? All right. All right. Perhaps I sense the sounds. Would that work? The honeydew voice of a man. The words mean nothing to me but I can tell he’s singing to his lover. And each night I wake in a humid inside-the-house sweat and I tell my wife, “Something bad is going to happen.” And Madame Daeng brushes back my hair and says, “It’s only a dream.”

  But it isn’t.

  The key clicks in the lock of the unpainted door. Why lock the door? I’m not going anywhere chained by the ankle to twenty-seven feet of lead pipe, am I now? And sure as hell there wouldn’t be a queue to get in. Why lock the door? Why lock the door? And they don’t need to worry about you folks anymore: you dead ones, you ghosties. You can come and go as you like, lock or no lock. And you came, didn’t you? But you stayed. And you sit, bored out of your minds. Dr. Siri on the stage, forgetting his lines, forgetting his mind, edging on delirium, bordering on insanity. And I understand. Really I do. You aren’t just watching. You’re waiting, aren’t you? Waiting like vultures for me to leave my body and join you on your quest to find a better place. Oh, that’s easy. Anywhere is a better place than this.

  The smiley man is in the doorway. A silent boo and hiss from the mezzanine. The boys unfasten me, force me to get dressed. Wrap a scarf around my eyes. Poke me with their bamboo canes. Whip my legs. It’s only acting, son. You can open your eyes. But then it comes to me, when I should be concentrating on the pain, when I should be fearing what torture I am being led to, it is now I solve the mystery of the three épées. And I know that a man will walk into a concrete yard somewhere, a yard stained with the blood of others, and be shot for something he didn’t do. Riddled with mistaken bullets. Perhaps it has already happened. How long have I been here? The future and the past all hang here in the glow of the overhead lamps, hypnotized by the light, not knowing where to fly.

  Only I can save him, this wrongly convicted man. The proof has been there all the time and I’ve ignored it. “Stop the torture. Somebody hand me a phone. Hey, boy, run this note across the street to Vientiane. Here’s fifty kip. Lassie, girl, go find Judge Haeng. Tell him he’s got the wrong man. I’m sorry, I’m a little tied up or I’d go myself. Tied up, whipped, burned, electrocuted … bits removed and mutilated.”

  I let out a manic laugh in the face of death.

  “I see you’re in good spirits still,” the smiley man says as I’m dragged out like the garbage—stage right. “We’ll see what we can do about that.”

  “Boo” and “hiss,” cries the silent audience.

  * * *

  There was no sound of footsteps, only the hushed click of the latch and the door opened.

  “You should be a spy,” Siri said.

  “Can’t sleep?” Daeng asked.

  Siri was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the home library, a desk lamp leaning over his shoulder like a curious, light-headed stork. Sunrise wasn’t that far off. A book, heavy as a temple lintel, pinned the old doctor to the ground.

  “Camus,” he said.

  “The soap people?

  “That’s Camay. Distant relative.”

  “Does he have a cure for insomnia?”

  “Who has insomnia? Just a peculiar dream. I wasn’t in a hurry to get back into it.”

  She sat on the cot.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “It involved children and guns.”

  “Then perhaps you shouldn’t …”

  “I’ve had a thought.”

  “Good. Then all this was worthwhile.”

  “Your question about Eastern European alumni and clubs and reunions.”

  “Civilai squashed me flat as a postage stamp on that one.”

  “He did, but he shouldn’t have. There is something. Imagine you’ve spent four years in Bulgaria and you’ve just come back to Laos. What is it you need?”

  “Food that isn’t dripping with fat?”

  “No! I mean, yes. But something else. You’ve spent four years learning and speaking a foreign language. You have knowledge. Skills that you learned in that language. Do you just switch that all off when you come home?”

  “You find someone who speaks the same language to keep your hand in.”

  “You could, but I can’t imagine a day when we Lao would sit down and speak to each other in Bulgarian just to maintain a language. It isn’t natural. And it’s far too active for us. There’s a less stressful, passive outlet.”

  “Books.”

  “Exactly. And where would Russian, German, and Bulgarian speakers go to keep up with the news and the latest technical advances in their adopted countries?”

  Daeng clicked her fingers.

  “The government bookshop on Sethathirat.”

  “It’s the only place. Lao translations of Marx, Lenin, and Engels. Socialist newsletters and magazines in foreign languages. Poster-sized photographs of politburo members. All those perfect gifts for birthdays and weddings.”

  “The victims could have met there, browsing, shared their experiences, and become friends. And …”

  “And that’s where they met him.”

  “The sword coach. Bravo. At 3:00 am it all sounds perfectly plausible. But now you have to put in some sleeping hours so you’re alive enough to follow up on this train of thought in the morning.” She stood up and stretched her aching legs. “Does your author have a parting comment for us before we retire?”

  “You know, I think he does,” Siri said. He heaved back the pages to a strip of paper that poked forlornly upward and ran his finger down the page until he found the quotation he’d discovered earlier.

  “I know of only one duty,” he read. “And that is to love.”

  “I think I’m going to like Mr. Camay.” Daeng smiled.

  The male clerk at the government bookshop was ugly enough to draw tears from a lime. It was as if he had breathed in too heavily one day, perhaps in shock, and his skin and all his features had been sucked inward, stopping only when they hit solid bone. But his teeth, the only camel teeth in the whole of the PDR of Laos, stood out proudly from his jaw like a prehistoric jetty. He was tall and gaunt and ungainly, and more than a few prospective customers had taken one step into the store—seen him standing the
re behind the counter like hell’s own gatekeeper—and withdrawn in terror. Even Siri balked momentarily when he saw him through the glass window. When the doctor pushed open the door, a brass bell tinkled above his head like a small idea.

  “Comrade,” the clerk sang, “welcome.”

  It was a peculiar bookshop, dark in spite of the large windows, and unfriendly. There weren’t walls of book spines to walk along and browse. The scant reading material there was displayed flat on boards like beef or fish at a country market. One or two selected tomes were held captive in glass cabinets. In two minutes a customer could perform one perfunctory circuit of the room—feigning interest in this or that—then be on his way. But Siri had cause to stay longer. During his circuit, he identified Russian, German, and—although he wasn’t certain—what looked like Bulgarian magazines. The clerk, with nothing else to do, had observed Siri’s every move.

  “We have the latest Your Country—Your Livestock from Romania, just in,” he said with an imperfectly straight face. “Hot off the press.”

  “I think I’ll wait for the translation,” Siri decided.

  “Very well,” said the clerk. He was either smiling or suffering some inward agony.

  “Have you worked here long?” Siri asked.

  “Worked and managed since we opened,” the clerk said proudly. “I do all the book work and conceive of and execute the displays. Every month or so, as new books arrive, I change the theme to stimulate consumer interest. It’s one of the skills I learned overseas.”

  Siri looked around in search of a theme.

  “This month is … ?” he asked.

  “Red,” said the man, without a hint of sarcasm.

  “Red?”

  “Naturally, there aren’t always enough pure red covers to do the display justice. But as you can see, there’s pink and mauve and purple, all within the same segment of the spectrum, to accentuate the mood. Last month was—”

  “No, don’t tell me. Blue?”

  The clerk laughed. It was a horrid sight.

  “Good guess,” he said, “but that was February. March was black and white. As you can imagine, we don’t have too many covers in black and white in this modern age, but by opening each book at its title page …”

  “It must have been a sight to see. I wish I’d been here.” Siri shook his head in amazement as he looked around. It was true—the red book covers were inside the display cabinet like gallery exhibits. “Tell me, Comrade, do you have many returnees from the Eastern Bloc coming to use your service?”

  “Returnees are our burgeoning target market, Comrade. As the number of returnees swells, I imagine in ten years we’ll have to move to larger premises.”

  “But right now?”

  “You have to understand,” said the clerk, pointing a spindly ginseng finger at the doctor. “Not many of our brothers and sisters have returned to Laos this soon.”

  “I do understand that. I’m just interested. How many returnees do you have subscribing to, say … Russian journals?”

  The clerk reached below the counter for a ledger thick as a doorstep. He opened the cover and flipped two or three pages. He labored over the list for longer than necessary.

  “Four,” he said.

  “Hmm. Then I imagine the odds of two customers actually bumping into each other are quite remote.”

  “Unless they’re in the reading room at the same time.”

  “You have a reading room?”

  “A small one. But I encourage customers to use it when they’re here. I provide tea in there. On occasions the odd sesame biscuit.”

  “Could I see it?”

  “Certainly.”

  The clerk walked around the counter on his long uncoordinated legs. Siri’s chin came to his solar plexus. He led the doctor to a door at the rear of the store and opened it to reveal a small windowless room that could have been the parlor of an elderly Royalist. Two comfortable sofas scattered liberally with unmatching cushions bordered a large teak coffee table with a cotton doily at its center. Resting upon that was a basket of colorful but unconvincing plastic flowers. Around the walls were large tourist posters of Moscow, Berlin, Belgrade, and Prague, a handwritten sign saying welcome to our reading room in eight languages, and butterflies, a lot of three-dimensional butterflies, cut out of colored paper. To one side a taller table held a tin tray with upturned cups, a sugar dish in a moat of water to discourage ants, and a large pink flowery thermos.

  Ignoring the absence of natural light and the leaning toward kitsch, it was a pleasant room. Some love had gone into it, some appreciation that customers might lack a convivial place to read in their crowded dormitories. And if two customers should be here at the same time with common experiences from Europe, otherwise incompatible people might become friends. And what better place for a killer to stalk his victims?

  “Comrade.” Siri turned to the clerk who was standing uncomfortably close. “Do the names Hatavan Rattanasmy, Khantaly Sisamouth, or Sunisa Simmarit mean anything to you?”

  Siri bunched his fists in hope as the man considered his question.

  “Yes,” said the clerk.

  “Which one?”

  “All of them.”

  Madame Daeng’s noodle shop was fast becoming the surrogate after-hours police briefing room. While he waited for the actual police officers to arrive, Civilai stood beneath the altar Daeng had lovingly built and decorated. It was a two-story affair attached to the main pillar of the building. It was traditional to have a spirit house outside as a boarding inn for the displaced spirits of the land, but the authorities were finicky about residents displaying their animism blatantly in public. So Daeng had flown in the face of tradition and brought the land spirits inside. She had even dared to house them under the same roof as the ancestral shrine.

  The ancestors lived upstairs in a one-foot-square box behind a barricade of Buddhas, incense sticks, wooden elephants, Chinese and Indian deities, a half bottle of red Fanta, and Sainte-Barbe, the patron saint of firemen whom Daeng had rescued from the bin of one of the French oppressors back in the fifties. Downstairs lived the rehoused phaphoom. These spirits of the earth were unashamed capitalists. Like the poor Lao who lusted after the consumer items they heard about on Thai radio, the phaphoom were far more cooperative when bribed. A free lodging wasn’t always enough. Madame Daeng’s spirit house was straight from the high-society catalogs. Inside was all the doll furniture she could cram into the space: a miniature refrigerator, TV, bathtub, wardrobe, and shoe rack. Parked on a ledge in front were a toy school bus and a Mercedes-Benz with diplomatic plates just in case they felt like an excursion.

  Civilai chuckled to himself. Daeng was married to a man who lived among spirits. Surely, with such personal contact, she could dispense with all this mumbo jumbo. Why would a woman so worldly, so astute, put so much effort into superstition? He was reaching for the patron saint of French firemen when Mme Daeng came down the stairs.

  “Don’t you dare,” she called.

  “I was just …”

  “Then don’t. A woman’s spirit house is her soul. Leave it alone.”

  “You’re an enigma, Madame Daeng.”

  “And plan to stay that way.”

  A lilac Vespa stopped directly beneath the shop awning and a rain-sodden Phosy climbed from its seat.

  “Will it ever stop raining?” he asked nobody in particular. He kicked off his sandals and shook himself like a dog before entering. He carried a wad of papers wrapped in several plastic bags. They were obviously more important than he was as he wore only shorts and a T-shirt. At the sound of the bike, Siri had shelved his book and come downstairs.

  “No Sihot?” he asked.

  “Family crisis,” Phosy told him. “Seems the more relatives you have to live with, the more crises you have to endure.”

  “And where’s Dtui?” Daeng asked.

  Phosy hesitated.

  “She’s not here? I came straight from the ministry,” he said. “Haven’t ha
d a chance to go home.”

  “You were at the ministry dressed like that?” she asked.

  “Er, no. I have … I have spare clothes at the office.”

  On their way to the meeting table, Siri and Daeng exchanged one of their now customary glances. Once they were seated, Civilai, oblivious to any domestic drama, opened the proceedings. Siri noticed that his friend was wearing the same clothes he’d worn the last time they’d seen him.

  “As instructed,” Civilai began, “I performed my underhanded duties at K6. Being a resident there and having no known police background, I was able to do my spying with relative ease. As you know, in my dotage I have become something of an Adonis in the kitchen. So on Thursday I took a tray of sweet, freshly baked macaroons to the old stable building that the Vietnamese use as their center of operations. As I am a frail and harmless pensioner, but fluent in Vietnamese, the guards quickly opened up to me and started to share secrets. My macaroons have that effect on people. The soldiers made no secret of the fact that they dislike their commander, Major Dung. They don’t like his womanizing ways or his personality, but they all agreed he is a man with many skills. Most pertinent of these is that the major is an expert in, among other things, a Vietnamese martial art called quoc ngu. It is, basically, the use of a double-edged sword. And he brought at least one with him.”

  “I knew it,” Siri said.

  “One of the men had seen him practicing with it in the clearing behind the stables,” Civilai added.

  “What about fencing swords?” Phosy asked.

  “Nobody I spoke to there knew what fencing was so I can’t answer that. The macaroons ran out before I could get any more information about Dung. But, as an aside, I inquired about the project being undertaken by Electricité du Lao. It appears that both the auditorium and the houses around the garden sauna are included in the rewiring schedule. Your Comrade Chanti would surely have been at both locations, at least during the planning stage.”