Curse of the Pogo Stick (8 page)

The deeper he plunged the ladle, the icier the water, the more alive he became. Then he scooped too low and brought up sand from the bottom of the pool. He was about to empty it out of the gourd when he noticed that he’d caught something other than grit. He reached into the ladle and pulled out a button. Someone had lost a light green button with two sewing holes at its centre. It wasn’t an astounding discovery but something made him reach over to his shirt and slip it into the top pocket. And he thought no more of it. There was too much in his mind to invest a great deal of thought into a button. He had been abducted and had no idea where he was. He was certain there was a negative force nearby, but none of that seemed to matter. He was having a marvellous bath and as he washed the dust out of his snowy white hair he began to sing. It was a Hmong nursery rhyme he’d picked up somewhere along life’s way. It seemed appropriate.

Mtnmmm
…
be good and stay quiet, little baby, Sleep well and deep, For in only a few seconds Father and Mother will return From taking care of the cows
.

He then ad-libbed a line of his own:

Where the bloody hell are you, Mother and Father?

He shook the water from his hair and opened his eyes to see seven females of various shapes and sizes standing in a line watching him. The youngest was no older than twelve; the oldest in her forties. They were dressed in similar black costumes decorated with fine embroidery. They were all smiling with not the slightest flush of embarrassment. Siri, for want of any more fitting recourse, gave a low seated bow. After a slight pause the audience laughed and clapped their hands.

CASHEWS MAKE ME FART

A
lthough it seemed hardly possible, the second attempt on the lives of the coup spoilers was even more dastardly than the first. And more deadly. Phosy had discovered very little about the Lizard. The photograph on the wanted poster was the result of her only arrest. It transpired that she had been caught quite by chance with a forged pass to an official event at the Monument to the Unknown Soldier. It was an award ceremony at which the Medal of the Brave, Level 2, was given posthumously to unsung heroes of the revolution: the People’s Liberation Army equivalent of the Purple Heart. The government decided it needed more role models for the younger generation and was dragging old soldiers from their graves and making them celebrities.

The Lizard had brought a wreath with a card claiming that she was a representative of the Luang Nam Tha Ladies Farming Cooperative. She laid her flowers at the foot of the monument around which stood several senior Party members, the chief of the armed forces, and the president. The Lizard was just about to step back, and presumably retreat, when the unthinkable happened. Against all the odds, the actual representative from the Luang Nam Tha Cooperative was in attendance. She stepped forward to get a better look at the wreath, pointed to the interloper, and shouted, “This woman is an impostor.”

Several officers of the presidential guard piled onto the Lizard and the dignitaries were hurried away. The lady guards of the PLA discovered that the old woman had a Smith & Wesson K-38 Combat Masterpiece, strapped to one thigh beneath her traditional skirt. An inspection of the wreath revealed a time bomb buried in the leaves with less than five minutes left to run on the clock. At the nearest police station they fingerprinted the terrorist and took her photograph before loading her into a closed truck. On her way to the Security Division and inevitable torture, she had smiled at her four armed guards. Between her teeth they saw a small white capsule.

“Ricin,” she told them. “Virtually instantaneous.”

She bit down on the capsule and swallowed it. Although the guards did their utmost to remove the capsule and revive her, she was unconscious within a minute. There was no pulse. They explained what had happened to the officials at Security and the resident medic could not find any vital signs of life.

Somewhere between the moment they laid out her body in an open cell and three the following morning the corpse disappeared. The details were a little foggy. As usual in the socialist state nobody wanted to take the blame. It wasn’t until the same woman was identified from her photograph at a subsequent act of terrorism that the PLA Security Division admitted she must have been alive when they had bagged her body that night. They had no idea how that could have been. There was conjecture that the pill she consumed may have served to slow down her pulse to a point that it was almost undetectable or that she may have actually died and come back to life again. Either way several officers were demoted.

The fingerprint check produced nothing, as almost all of the fingerprint records had been destroyed by the retreating Royalists. The That Luang police station hadn’t actually known what to do with them as they had no relationship with other police forces outside the country. The Vietnamese embassy staff sent a copy to Hanoi but nothing came of it.

All this had taken place long before Phosy returned from the north-east and became attached to police headquarters. Although his office was supposed to be provided copies of army security files, in reality it took a walk down Route That Luang and a cup of hot tea with the clerk at the station before he could get his hands on them. The story hadn’t made it into the newspaper of course. It was negative news and the authorities held the view that the population didn’t need any more of an excuse to be dissatisfied with their government. As the people knew they wouldn’t be reading about murder and intrigue, very few of them bothered to read the paper at all. Although it was considered confidential and for official eyes only, Phosy had passed the report on to his wife. He believed it was helpful for her to understand just how devious their foe could be.

Now Nurse Dtui was attempting in turn to pass on the salient points of their predicament to Mr Geung. They were squashed between the shelving units in the storeroom out of earshot of the office. The auditors had been particularly animated all day as they’d reached the bottom drawer of the cabinet, which was empty but for three final sets of records, Dtui’s old Thai
Movie Fan
magazines, and a concrete imprint of a bear’s paw. They could smell that the end of their work at the morgue was in sight. They sounded positively jolly as they discussed their next mission. Nevertheless, Dtui kept her voice down as she drilled Geung in safety precautions.

“All I’m saying, honey,” she summarized, “is that you have to be careful.”

“Oh…of the Lizard.”

“Of anything and anybody that looks different or out of place. Don’t talk to any strangers. Don’t accept any gifts.”

“What a…about from the p…post lady?”

The auditor’s conversation stopped and Dtui listened for footsteps on the concrete floor She heard none.

“Letters should be all right,” she continued. “But check that you know where the parcels come from. Ask the post lady, “Where does this come from?” All right?”

“All right. A…and if it comes from Comrade Dr Siri ih…it’s OK.”

“Right.”

“Th…the Post Lady said it was.”

“Good. If she says it comes from – What do you mean, ‘said’?”

“The Post Lady s…said the p…parcel came from Comrade Dr Siri.”

“When?”

“This…morning. Sh…she said it was from the north. It w…was to me. It had m…m…my name written on it. And Comrade Nurse Dtui. But m…my name was first.” He smiled with pride and held up his chin.

“You didn’t open it?”

Geung laughed. “It was for m…me and you.”

“I get that. But did you open it?”

“Yes.”

“What was in it?”

“Cashew cakes.”

“Did you eat any?”

“Nnno! Cashews make me f…fart.”

“Where did you put them?”

“…and burp.”

“Geung, where are they?”

“On the f…filing cabi…net.”

Dtui moved so fast Geung wasn’t sure she’d ever been there. He followed. She wasn’t in the cutting room or the vestibule. He eventually caught up with her in the office. She was on her knees on the file-littered floor beside one of the auditors. Both men appeared to be taking a nap. There was froth around their mouths as if they’d just cleaned their teeth and not rinsed. The cashew cake box was upside down on the ground. Dtui was taking one man’s pulse, raising his eyelid. From the expression on her face it was evident the men weren’t really asleep at all.

“Th…they’re dead?” he asked.

“Yes, pal. Dead as Uncle Ho.”

At that evening’s meeting, Phosy summed up the events of the day for the team. The box and its brown-paper wrapping with Dr Siri’s careful but barely legible handwriting were undoubtedly genuine. The parcel had been postmarked November 29, two days after Siri arrived in Xiang Khouang. According to the central Bureau de Poste, as there were so many VIPs in the north, the Xiang Khouang office had doubled its efforts to distribute mail daily. The package would therefore have travelled on the army transport the following day. As the clerk at Mahosot collected the hospital’s mail each morning, the parcel more than likely arrived in the mail room – actually a spare desk in the clerk’s office – on the first of December. That was the day of the bombing attempt. Somewhere amongst her other duties, the hospital mail clerk would get around to checking names against the list of patients and pencil in the ward or department number. The duty orderly known to Mr Geung as the Post Lady would then distribute the mail the following morning.

As she certainly wasn’t in Xiang Khouang during that period and as she had very good reason not to go near the Bureau de Poste, the Lizard had to have intercepted the parcel in the mail room on the day she planned to blow up the coroner. As his name was marked on the package as sender, she had to know the doctor wouldn’t be there. She probably took the parcel hoping she’d be able to do some more damage with it. She had carefully removed the wrapping and interfered with the contents. At the Lycee Vientiane, Teacher Oum was currently experimenting with Dr Siri’s famous colour tests to determine what poison was used. She’d told them she’d get back to them in the morning.

The clerk had no recollection of the parcel either disappearing or reappearing, although she remembered pencilling in the morgue building number when it first arrived. She admitted she has spent most of her day out of the office but as the Lizard’s photograph had been posted all around the hospital, it would have to be assumed the woman had used an accomplice to return Dr Siri’s package to the unattended parcels pile.

Phosy, Dtui, Madame Daeng, and Civilai sat in silence around the slightly warped table. Although there was nothing more they could have done, they all, unreasonably, felt responsible for the auditors’ deaths. Mr Geung was taking it worse than any of the others and hadn’t spoken since the bodies were discovered. They knew they should have been more careful. They should have warned the clerk to look out for strange packages. But a parcel from Dr Siri himself? How could any of them have suspected…?

“So, to sum up,” Civilai said, “we’re no better off than we were last meeting and we’re two auditors short, We don’t know anything new apart from the fact that the Lizard may or may not have an accomplice – more than likely an entire underground cell.”

“And we have no better idea of how we can find her,” Dtui added, just to make them even more dispirited. For a while, the only sound in the small noodle shop came from the ceiling lizards slurping up parked moths, and the ice in the bucket shifting as it melted. They all jumped and their hearts skipped a beat when a woman’s loud voice, burst upon their meditation.

“Excuse me!”

The metal shop-front shutters pulled together like a huge concertina but tonight they were open a foot to let in some air. A well dressed woman in a traditional Lao costume was peering in through the gap. One of the armed policemen had accompanied her to the door. They all laughed to mask their embarrassment. What kind of investigation team were they to be frightened to death by an old lady?

“Sorry, love,” Daeng shouted. “We’re closed.”

“Er, at the hospital they told me I might be able to find Nurse Dtui here,” the woman’s large voice belted forth.

Although this was certainly not the Lizard, there was a pervading atmosphere of nervous tension among the group. Any stranger presented a potential threat.

“Who shall I say is looking for her?” Phosy asked.

“She doesn’t know me,” the woman yelled, “but my name’s Bounlan. My cousin’s just getting over hepatitis at Mahosot.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Thank you. It’s just…well, I saw the poster there in the ward.”

“Have you seen her? The woman?” Phosy stood and walked over to the door. The visitor was in her sixties and wearing too much make–up. He wondered whether she was a traditional singer on her way to work.

“No,” she said. “Well, not recently anyway.” She lowered her voice at last. “But I know who she is.”

EAT, DRINK, AND BE UNFAITHFUL

I
t was normal for Hmong men to take their meal around the main hearth and the women to eat together at a smaller grate. But here in the main house, Siri, the seven women he’d flashed at earlier, and one man of about Siri’s own age sat together in one friendly circle cross-legged on a straw mat. The pigs had been banished to the yard but a white dog paraded around the perimeter of the circle and was rewarded with titbits. The animal wouldn’t have been so lucky at any other village Siri had been to. Everyone in the house had plugs of folded mint leaves protruding from their nostrils. The body of the old lady continued to hang from the main pillar. Before the meal the girls had treated her with some sweet ointment that had temporarily hidden the stink, but it wasn’t long before the rotting organs overpowered the scent and all the guests were forced to plug their noses.

Siri had more questions than a new history examination paper but it was impolite to jump straight into them before the time was right. He hoped that moment would come soon because curiosity was killing him. The old man opposite was presumably the village elder. The concept of headman and leader and supervisor and such had been imposed on the hill tribes by the colonists. Left to their own devices, each household and family group would look after itself without need of a figurehead. The host had a face as leathery as a monkey’s palm, spiky white hair, and a wispy moustache. He moved with difficulty, a condition Siri assessed to be due to some form of lumbago. But there was nothing wrong with his humour, and when the women had led Siri down to the house, he’d gushed over the old doctor as if the two celestial brothers had floated down on their cloud for tea. But there had been no actual conversation.