Curse of the Pogo Stick (2 page)

“Do you suppose we can leave our little soldier now?” she asked Dtui.

“Absolutely! Let’s go open your restaurant. If he thaws out any more he’ll insist on coming with us.”

Mr Geung agreed to watch the body and the two glowing ladies climbed onto their respective bicycles and rode out of the Mahosot Hospital grounds. They tinkled their bells as they turned left on Mahosot Road even though there was very little chance of being hit by anything but other bicycles. Vientiane was a cyclist’s paradise. Unless they had friends in the Party, very few citizens could afford to fill up their motorcycle tanks with petrol. Cars had become house-front ornaments. The sound of a passing engine prompted little children to run to the street’s edge and wave. Siri might have been right. Laos
was
shrinking back into a pre-industrial age.

Dtui and Daeng rode past peeling signs that pointed to services and establishments that had ceased to exist, past long-since vacated spirit houses and leaning telegraph poles that seemed to be held up by the wires strung between them. The few tarred roads were frayed at the edges like nibbled licorice and the sidewalks were clogged with unkempt patches of grass. They pedalled along the Mekhong past Chantabouli Temple to the little noodle shop Daeng had acquired on her arrival in the city. It wasn’t a particularly bright period to be setting up a new business. But she’d brought with her a reputation as a cordon bleu noodleist. The word had spread and even though it was only eleven thirty, hungry customers were already gathered in front of her shuttered store. When she arrived they cheered and made bawdy comments. Humour was one of the few glues that held people together in hard times.

“Been visiting with your gynaecological nurse, have you, Madame Daeng?” one asked. “I suppose you’ll be making an announcement sometime soon.”

“If I were to make that particular announcement you could expect to see the world press gathered out here,” she said. “Now, move aside and stop your insolence.”

Dtui and the customers helped her open up and move some of the tables out to the street side. They wheeled the portable kitchen to the front of the shop and Daeng lit the twigs and charcoal to get the water boiling. She’d prepared all the ingredients before heading off to the morgue; now she only needed to parboil the noodles. While they were waiting, she poured everyone a cup of cold jasmine tea. At last, Dtui and Daeng stood side by side at the stand dishing out
feu
noodles in deep bowls. When the better part of the crowd was fed, Daeng leaned toward her friend.

“So, are you going to tell me what’s bothering you?” she asked.

“What’s that, auntie?”

“Something’s crawled into your head since we left the hospital.”

“Oh, I don’t know…”

“Tell me.”

“It’s the body. There’s something wrong with it.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I’m just getting one of those feelings. It’s like when Dr Siri tells me I’m looking but I’m not seeing. Or perhaps I’m seeing but I’m not getting it. Oh, listen to me. I’m just trying to be clever like him. I wish he was here, you know?”

“Me too.”

They were there, trespassing in the private grounds of his snooze. They loitered – those malevolent spirits – like teenage thugs, never in focus but there nevertheless. Wherever his afternoon siesta led Dr Siri Paiboun – down forested paths, through bombed towns – they lurked and watched him pass. He was aware of them in every dream. The
Phibob
, the ghosts of the forest, had no more useful occupation than to hang about in his subconscious and remind him of the constant threat they posed.

Dr Siri was the reluctant host of Yeh Ming, a thousand-year-old shaman. During that old witch doctor’s comparatively short stay on earth and his comparatively long sojourn in the afterlife, Yeh Ming had caused no end of grief to the dark spirits and now they sought revenge. “A load of old supernatural pig swill,” some might say, and two years earlier Siri would have been the loudest in the chorus. But now there was not a doubt – no question. Only the charmed stone amulet he wore around his neck hung between Dr Siri and a nasty end.

Although he hadn’t yet mastered his unwanted life, he’d learned to live it. Despite all this occult thuggery, the old doctor purred in his sleep like a snowy-haired cat. His chin rested on his chest and a barely audible snore resonated through his nostrils. At seventy-three years of age, he’d learned how to sleep through all variety of meetings and conferences undetected. He hadn’t once fallen off his seat. Of course, he was built for balance – short and solid – and from the distance of the speakers’ platform he appeared to be just one more rapt member of the thousand-plus audience, deep in thought. In truth, only the extreme volume of the Vietnamese loudspeakers could have drowned out the collective buzz of hundreds of snoozing cadres. If the generator had failed that chilly afternoon, residents of Xiang Khouang would have gone running to their homes in fear of a plague of bumblebees.

Most of the regional delegates had been up through the night slurping sweet rice whisky through bamboo straws and reminiscing with long-lost allies. Siri, more than most, had endured the thanks of countless old soldiers he’d repaired in battlefront surgery. He’d accepted a glass from each of them and was ill-prepared for seven more hours of keynote addresses and reports. It would have been impossible to withstand such torture without the odd nap or two.

It was around three when he regained consciousness in time to learn that ‘The quintessential socialist is patriotic, technically and managerially competent, morally upright and selflessly devoted to the greater social good,’ but he’d forgotten to bring his notepad. He caught sight of his boss, Judge Haeng, nodding enthusiastically in the second row. Siri clicked the bones in his neck and instinctively reached up to scratch the lobe of his left ear. He’d lost it in an altercation a few months before but its spirit continued to tingle. Damned annoying it was. He shifted his weight from buttock to buttock to revitalize his circulation and looked absently around him. The regional representatives sat unfidgeting like maize on a breezeless day, silently counting down the minutes. Although Stalin had never actually bothered to write it down, Siri was aware that a good communist had to be a good Buddhist. Only meditation and a banishment of pain could get one through a day of Party political bull.

Siri looked with admiration along the furrows. Only one undisciplined cadre had succumbed indiscreetly to fatigue. He sat two rows in front, six seats across. Obviously the quarterly Party Planning and Progress Conference had been too much for him. He slumped like a wet rag in his chair, his head hanging uncomfortably backward, staring at the temporary tarpaulin roof. One would have to be extremely tired to adopt such a drastic pose – or dead as an absent earlobe. Siri opted for the latter. He calmly stood, pushed past knees to the end of his row and more knees to the seat of the dead comrade. The disturbance in an, until now, unruffled event caused the speaker on stage to lose his place in his speech and look out at the melee.

Siri, delighted to have an opportunity to make something happen on this otherwise wasted day, felt for a pulse in the old cadre’s neck and shouted with unhidden glee, “This conference has suffered its first fatality. There will undoubtedly be more.”

HOW TO BLOW UP A CORONER

I
n Vientiane, the autopsy of the unknown soldier began four hours late due to the fact that socialism had somehow made time more flexible. There were often situations when 1:00 PM and 5:00 PM were interchangeable. Director Suk and Surgeon Mot got to the morgue at exactly the time everyone was supposed to be on their way home. The director had been diverted to supervise the placement of a flower bed – the hospital’s first – courtesy of the Vietnamese Elderly Widows Union. A regiment of dazzling yellow chrysanthemums stood guard in the centre of the compound. This event had coincided with the arrival of the first batch of nurses trained in Bulgaria. Naturally Suk had to appear in several photographs with the nurses and the flowers and sign endless documents related to both distractions. The doctor had found himself in an unscheduled political lunchtime seminar that dragged on through the afternoon when no consensus could be arrived at with regard to the collectivization of bean farming.

The only good news resulting from this delay was that by now the captain was completely de-iced. Then there was the fact that Dtui had been given four more hours to look at the body and the uniform it had arrived in. It had allowed her time to confirm in her own mind that something was very wrong. She wasn’t absolutely sure what that was, but she was confident enough in her instinct to know that the autopsy could not go ahead.

She was standing by the corpse feeling below the soldiers rib cage when Surgeon Mot marched in.

“Nurse!” he said. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?” He was skinny as a drip of rain down a window with hair like a poorly fitting Beatles wig. He had a large bloated nose and saggy eye bags. Dtui’s first impression was that Surgeon Mot had suffered in East Germany. To compensate for his suffering he’d adopted an inappropriate German arrogance. Dtui could see nothing Lao in him.

“Dr Mot,” she began.

“Nurse, step back, please.”

“But, comrade…”

“Did you not hear me?”

At that moment, Director Suk walked into the cutting room and took up a position as far away from the corpse as possible. There was no secret at the hospital that the man hadn’t a stomach for medical matters. He was an administrator. He was followed close behind by a gentleman in uniform whom nobody bothered to introduce. Dtui guessed he was a military observer although the insignia on his uniform was faded from overwashing and he wore white socks that peeked over his boots.

With an unnecessary flourish, Mot pulled back the towel that lay across the lap of the corpse. Dtui grew more anxious. She appealed directly to Suk.

“Director! I strongly recommend you postpone this autopsy.”

“Oh, I see,” said Suk with the usual sarcastic smirk. “Dr Siri goes away and his nurse takes over the administration of the morgue. Is that the way we run things here?”

Mot reached for the large scalpel and left Dtui with no choice. She stepped across him and grabbed his skinny wrist. She knew if it came to a fistfight she could take Mot but might have trouble with all three of them.

“What the…?” Mot was shocked.

“Nurse Dtui,” Suk shouted. “What on earth has come over you?”

“This body,” she said. “I think…”

“Well?”

“I think it might be booby-trapped.”

There were a few seconds of stunned silence before the three outsiders burst into laughter Mot squirmed his hand free from the nurse’s grasp.

“It looks like somebody’s been sniffing the formaldehyde,” he laughed.

Unnoticed, Mr Geung slipped into the storeroom, leaving Dtui without an ally.

“I’m serious,” she said. “Look there. You’re a doctor. What do you see at the side of his abdomen?”

“Do you suppose we could tell her to leave?” Mot pleaded. “I didn’t undergo six years of training by experts to come home and be lectured by a country girl. This job is difficult enough as it is.”

Dtui was red faced with anger.

“I agree entirely,” said Suk. “I apologize. Nurse, kindly leave. I’ll see you in my office in the morni – ”

But his train of thought was derailed by the sight of Mr Geung emerging from the storeroom with an AK-47. It was pointed directly at the new surgeon, who fell backwards against a chest of drawers.

“Y…you c…can’t laugh at Comrade Dt…Dt…ui,” Geung said. “Ih…ih…it isn’t nice at all.”

“Now, son,” Suk said, as if talking to a wild beast, “calm down. Don’t do anything…”

Geung swung the AK47 in his direction and the director flattened himself against the wall like a layer of paint. Only the soldier remained passive. There might even have been a slight glimmer of a smile on his lips.

“Let the nurse say what she has to say,” he suggested.

“Well, thank you,” Dtui said, one wary eyebrow cocked in Mr Geung’s direction. “What a girl has to do to get a word in these days.” She smoothed down her white uniform, which strained at the buttons when she pushed forward her ample chest.

“Dr Mot,” she said. “I’m sorry to have to do it like this but, well, you just wouldn’t listen and it might very well be a matter of life and death. Admittedly it might also be a false alarm but no harm in being careful, I say. Don’t you agree?”

The gun swung back towards him and he nodded enthusiastically.

“Good, then perhaps you could tell us what you see there at the side of the abdomen.”

The surgeon stepped up to the body. “Of course, it’s a wound.”

“Excellent. And what type of a wound is it?”

“Apparently a new one. The stitches haven’t yet been removed.”

“Right. Now take a closer look at that wound, would you?”

He leaned over it. “But it’s just a regu – Oh, my. That’s odd.”

“What is?” the soldier asked.

“There’s been no healing, there’s no scar tissue at all.”

“And that means?”

“That this incision was made post-mortem,” Dtui cut in.

“Why would anyone want to open a corpse and sew it up again?” asked the soldier.

“Exactly. And there’s something else,” she said. “Feel this, Doctor.”

She gently guided the surgeon’s hand to a point just below the rib cage. “Don’t press too hard now.”

The doctor ran his finger back and forth.

“It feels like some kind of protrusion. A broken bone? No, it’s too narrow.”

“There’s one exactly the same on the other side,” she told him.

“Really? How peculiar.”

“My guess,” Dtui said, “is that something was put inside this fellow’s stomach after he died.”

“Whatever for?” Suk asked, scraping himself from the wall.

“If it’s a practical joke,” Dtui said, “it’s a very elaborate, even a sick one. The only logical explanation I can see is that someone’s sent us an exploding corpse.”

“Oh, I say,” said Mot, taking a step back. “Who would do such a thing?”