Curse of the Pogo Stick (7 page)

She looked at her new husband. She was very fond of him when he was in his managerial mode. She could almost see the dials clicking over in his brain. She brushed her hand against his arm and he pulled away self-consciously.

“I’ll see whether Security can give me extra copies of the wanted poster,” he said. “It wouldn’t hurt to have them placed around the hospital. It might jog someone’s memory. We can write something like ‘If you see this woman – ’”

“Shoot her!” Dtui cut in.

“I was thinking more of ‘Please report her to hospital officials’ or something, just in case she tries again. It might help if we knew where she got the dead body from. We can’t do anything about that until somebody reports him missing.”

“And the problem with that,” Civilai said, “is that nobody trusts the police enough to report a missing relative.”

Phosy nodded. “I imagine the Lizard selected someone who wouldn’t be missed in a hurry. It’s odds-on she killed him. Meanwhile, we should watch our backs. I have my men guarding all of us but we still need to keep on our toes. We were all involved in messing up the Lizard’s coup plans. I’ll find out what background Security has on her.”

“There is one thing we do know about her that may be in our favour,” Madame Daeng suggested.

“What’s that?” Civilai asked.

“She’s a prima donna, a grandstander. If you think about it, she could just as easily have lobbed that hand grenade in through the window.”

“But that would have been too easy,” Dtui agreed. “She wants us to know how clever she is.”

“Perhaps she even wants us to match wits with her,” Daeng continued. “I’d wager she’s delighted we – that is, you, Dtui – foiled this first attempt.” There was a round of applause for Dtui, who pressed her hands together into a polite
nop
and bowed her head.

“But that means her next attempt could be even harder to detect,” Phosy added.

“Well, she’s met her match with this team,” said Dtui.

“Let’s hope so.”

When the bottle was finished and the meeting broke up, Madame Daeng insisted on walking Civilai out to his car. As a retired elder statesman he’d been provided a vehicle for personal use and a petrol allowance. In the United States, that gift would have taken the form of a new Cadillac. In 1977 Laos it amounted to a cream Citroen with one hubcap missing.

“Are you all right to drive?” Daeng asked as he prised open the door and climbed behind the wheel.

“Why does everybody ask me that?”

“Ooh, I don’t know. Perhaps the amount of drinking you’ve been doing lately makes them nervous.” She handed him the car keys he’d left on the table. “You’re not showing the bottle any respect. Or yourself. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’ve told you…”

“I mean about this investigation. Given your” – she looked back to be sure none of the others had followed them to the car – “involvement in the last coup. The Lizard…”

“Madame Daeng,” he said in a whisper, “I had no personal involvement with the perpetrators of the coup. I was involved in name alone. That woman is intent on hurting good friends of mine. Please don’t think I have any qualms about her being caught. This is personal. It has nothing to do with politics.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“And I wonder if I could ask you not to mention past indiscretions again.”

“Well, that depends, comrade.”

“On what?”

“On whether one day you might like to pay me a visit and talk about it all; how you’re feeling about things. I think it’s all this ‘not mentioning’ that’s driving you into your passionate affair with alcohol.”

Civilai turned the key in the ignition and pulled the starter. The car came to life with all the aggression of a food mixer. He slammed his door and smiled at her through the half-open window before heading off.

She watched him go: a man who had sacrificed his political career with one mad rush of blood to the head. Given his history, she would never really know why he’d allied himself with the coup leaders. But he’d momentarily walked the line between retirement and execution. A man that close to dying a traitor had to have ghosts. She hoped he’d come back to see her someday.

She turned and waved to the armed guards opposite her shop. Phosy had posted a watch on her, on all of them. There was another man at the back of the shop and one more would accompany Dtui back to the police compound. Daeng doubted it would do any good in the face of a serious attack but she admitted there was a good feel to having someone watch her back.

“I’ll bring you boys some hot soup,” she said and walked slowly back to the shop.

A MUGGING IN THE OTHERWORLD

I
t was an alleyway dimly lit by slightly bent street lamps that had barely enough strength to turn the black night grey. The paving stones beneath his feet were ill matching, some rising abruptly from the sidewalk. Dr Siri wore sandals but his footsteps clopped like horseshoes on the stones. Chalked roughly all around were the outlines of murder-scene bodies, deformed and chilling. He was walking fast, stumbling, wheezing from the pressure on his old lungs. The walls on either side of him reached so high he could see no summit. He looked back, stumbled again. He could sense his own fear like something living and moving between the layers of his skin. He passed a dark doorway, four legs and the end of a baseball bat all that was visible, the upper torsos drowned in a shadow as black as misery.

“Well, what do we have here, Danny?” a deep voice groaned from the darkness, Lao but with a New York accent. Siri hurried past and the two figures stepped out of the shadow and fell into step behind him.

A second voice: “Looks like a Red gook to me.”

“Me too. What do you think you’re doing here, Red gook?”

Siri didn’t dare answer or look back. He quickened his pace but his pursuers stayed with him.

“Shit, man, are
you
lost.”

“He’s looking for a girl, ain’t you, commie gook? That’s whatcha doing in our neighbourhood.”

“Is that right, commie?” Siri heard the slap of a baseball bat into a palm. A spitting noise. But up ahead he could see the gaudy neon of a nightclub. There were people milling around in front of it only eighty yards away. If only…He reached for the amulet beneath his shirt.

“Hell! That ain’t gonna do you no good, old man.”

“You’re gonna need something bigger’n that to get past us, gook.”

“You know, Danny boy? I’d say this little guy’s making his way to the Pheasant.”

The name above the nightclub door was visible now through the glare: the Silver Pheasant. It flashed thousands of coloured lightbulbs. Siri heard music. Some kind of jazz. He believed it was possible now. All he needed to do was cross the – but they were on him. They grabbed his arms and yanked him onto his back. They stood over him, one with a baseball bat held above his head. Siri could see them now, angry, menacing. They wore blue jeans and boots and were twice his size. Still alive, they would have been even bigger. But all that remained of them now was grey skeletons with enormous eyeless skulls, their clenched fists like knots of ginseng.

“They play baseball back in Commie Land, gook?”

And the bat came crashing down.

Siri gasped and his head wrenched to one side to avoid the blow. And he smelled stew and death. And suddenly there was no dark street or skeletons in blue jeans. Just a room with split bamboo walls and light streaming in through gaps in a thatched roof in need of repair. He was lying on a bamboo platform above a dirt floor where a fine white long-haired dog sat staring at him. Small black pigs grunted and scurried around aimlessly. Siri was damp with sweat but not harmed. He’d been dressed in a quilted military topcoat against the cold. He felt drowsy and a little nauseous, which he attributed to some form of sedative. All around him was that unmistakable smell he knew so well from the morgue.

He got carefully to his feet and stepped down onto the packed earth. He removed the coat and laid it behind him on his bedding. His sleeping berth was no more than a large hutch in a house with four or five similar compartments. Against the walls stood farming implements, large cane baskets, one or two crossbows, and a large foot-operated rice crusher. A small family altar to the house spirits took pride of place on a shelf opposite the front door. He walked around his hutch and into the main area of the house where the central pillar rose up to the rafters. And tied to that pillar was an old woman. She was dressed in a beautiful ornate, hand-embroidered Hmong costume: a black, long-sleeved jacket and a heavy pleated skirt that came to her knobby knees. A single silver torque at her neck almost doubled her weight.

There was no question she was dead. Despite attempts to mask the smell with burning incense and candles there was no mistaking it. Either she had already begun to shrink or the costume was too big for her. Her head receded into the collar like that of a frightened tortoise. Siri had been to Hmong houses where the deceased was laid out on a platform before the funeral but had never seen a corpse suspended from the house post. She was high enough for the pigs not to reach her feet but Siri wondered why the dog hadn’t made a play for her. Hungry dogs are most insensitive to the sanctity of human death.

He left the stench behind him and walked out through the open doorway to a splendid vista across a range of rolling hills. The air was so fresh and biting it brought on a coughing fit. The sun battled with the winter chill to maintain a pleasant mean. He was in a village. There was no gate or fence. There were some fifteen wooden or bamboo huts similar to but smaller than the one he’d come from. There was a chicken coop, a large cage full of mynah birds, and what he imagined to be a stable, albeit an empty one. The village land had been cleared of trees but behind the huts a mountain continued upward to a point where it was topped with vegetation like a bad haircut. Water flowed to each house from a higher source along a network of bamboo guttering. More pigs and dogs mingled with goats and the odd cow like mismatched party guests – but there were no people.

He called out a hello that echoed across the hills but received only an
oink
in reply. This kidnapping had a very casual feel to it. As there was no guard to overpower or horse to flee on, he decided to look around. All the other houses were shut up, the doors secured with chains and large padlocks. Behind one of the huts was a small copse of tall trees, the tallest of which had been left standing untrimmed. It was lavishly decorated with coloured ribbons and sparkly tin and surrounded with little offerings. This, Siri knew, was the sanctuary for the spirits of the land and the trees that the Hmong had taken. Allowing them the tallest of the trees was a sort of compromise, much better than having them haunt your house.

Having no desire to go back to spend time with his suspended housemate, Siri followed the bamboo pipes in search of the water source. He decided an icy bath was exactly what he needed to shake away the effects of the anaesthetic. As he climbed the hill and neared the foliage, cold winds seemed to surf across the mountaintops and cut through him like the reaper’s scythe. Entering the trees was like crossing some official temperature median. It became eerily cold and silent. Something seemed to be sending him a warning. The amulet around his neck buzzed against his flesh.

No more than twenty yards along the forested track there appeared one more small house off to the side. It was buried deep in vegetation with only the front visible through a tunnel of overhanging trees and dangling vines. Siri had never seen an isolated hut in a Hmong village. The inhabitants liked to group closely together for safety and social cohesion. There was no advantage in living separately. He left the well-worn track and approached the house. As he got closer, he began to feel a peculiar sensation. There was a sort of physical presence, not spiritual, not the usual friendly house and field spirits that protected the Hmong, but a tangible threat. It was as if the vegetation around him seethed with resentment. The pathway through the arched trees leading to the house was barred with a symbolic fence of interwoven bamboo latticework. It was grotesquely daubed with dried blood and chicken feathers. This too Siri had seen before in front of the houses of Hmong suffering from sickness or of women in the throes of childbirth. It merely signalled that a visitor should not enter. But none of the fences in his memory had been this elaborate. Nor had they shown evidence of such wholesale massacre of fowl. Nor had he witnessed the presence of handmade dolls. Crudely formed from straw and sticks, they sat or lay around the fence in the hundreds. Some had begun their lives as vegetables or tarot roots, others were simple twig people.

Beyond the latticed fence, four land bridges had been erected. These small bamboo structures were miniature reconstructions of actual bridges but in this case they had no water to cross. They traditionally offered a shortcut for lost souls to return to their host. One was customary. Four suggested a hell of a lot of souls had gone missing from this particular house.

“Hello?” Siri called. “Anyone there?” Silence. “Do you need any help? I’m a doctor.”

He tried again in Hmong. The language flowed effortlessly off his tongue. This was one of the peculiar side effects of discovering his shaman roots. Until two years earlier, the language had remained dormant inside him like a mammoth frozen in a glacier. If his unknown parents had been Hmong, the old woman who raised him had given no indication of it. The only legacy he had from them was his eyes – greener than the lushest of grasses on the hills that rolled all around – and this language he’d never learned. But it drew no response. He thought he heard a sound – a low continuous growl – although he couldn’t be certain it wasn’t coming from his own head. He wondered whether the place might be deserted like all the others. There was no padlock on the door but he wasn’t about to break the taboo and enter a marked house without permission.

The trail continued up into the mountain. The branches of bamboo gutter had converged to become just one single aqueduct at ground level. He followed it for another hundred yards and there he found a spring and a small rock pool. It looked coolly inviting but he had better manners than to bathe in the village water supply. Instead he removed his clothes, sat to one side of the pool, and used a long-handled gourd to ladle the icy water over himself. The sensation was exactly what his body needed. Every gourdful sent a million tiny needles into his skin, Mother Nature’s own acupuncture.