Six and a Half Deadly Sins (20 page)

“You remember this?” Dtui asked the postman, holding up a photo of the half
-sin
Siri had left behind.

“No,” said the postman, barely looking at the photo.

Growing up, Dtui had always seen mail delivery as a social occupation. Its perpetrators were friends to all, caring and happy. So it didn’t take her long to realize that this postman was in the wrong profession. “It’s a
pha sin
,” she said.

“I can see that.”

“You de—delivered it,” said Geung. “When?”

“Look, lady, call the monkey off, will you?”

“You’ll answer his questions,” said Dtui. “And show some manners if you don’t want to lose your job.”

“Who do you think you—?”

“The post office put the
pha sin
in your delivery pouch on the sixteenth,” said Dtui. “It wasn’t received until the eighteenth. What did you do with it for two days?”

“I don’t know nothing about it.”

“Perhaps I can … I c-c-can jog your memory,” said Geung. “It had no reeeeturn address and a faint f-f-frank stamp. You were supposed to coll—”

“Collect a fine,” said the postman. “I don’t have enough years left to wait for you to finish a sentence, boy. Yeah, I remember. I handed it over the day I got it. And I collected the fine. You can check the ledger.”

“We did,” said Dtui. “And we found the signed document. But that wasn’t the owner’s signature.”

“That’s none of my business.”

“In fact it is. You’re supposed to get a positive identification of the owner before you hand over mail. That’s the rule of the post office.”

“She walked out of the front yard. I told her about the fine. She handed it over without question. Who but the owner’s going to do a thing like that?”

“So you didn’t ask to see her national citizen card?”

“She said she was his wife,” said the postman.

“An-an-and I’m the king of Thailand,” said Geung.

Dtui suppressed a laugh. “What did she look like?” she asked the flustered postman.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Try,” said Geung.

“Skinny. Old. Long grey hair in a chinois. Neat. Polite.”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Geung and kissed him on the forehead.

Agnes arrived in Un Mai long before the fictitious deadline that would signal hostilities between Laos and China. The
old boys still had no great hunger despite their encounter with the Chinese third army. The only pharmacy in town was boarded over. The neighbors said the owner was Chinese. He’d fled with his family. They also gave directions to the house of Kew, the granddaughter of the famous but sadly departed Grandmother Amphone. Compared to border transgressions, the treasure hunt was becoming something of a triviality.

“Do you suppose that might have been the purpose of this wild goose chase?” Civilai asked as they crossed the small bridge before the village.

“What?”

“To have us arrive here in time to meet the invaders. To avert disaster.”

“I doubt it,” said Siri. “These clues were laid two or three months ago. I shouldn’t think the Chinese had a date in mind back then. And I doubt even more that anyone could have predicted when we’d be here.”

“That’s too bad. I’d rather like to go home now. Adventure isn’t nearly so thrilling when you have a cold.”

“It’s flu. It’ll pass.”

“So you keep telling me. But I can never forget that you’re a coroner rather than an MD. All I can hear is, ‘It was flu. He passed away.’ ”

“More people worldwide die of being sucked into pneumatic airplane toilets every year than influenza.”

The house they were looking for stood alone beside a disused rice field.

“You made that up.”

“Prove me wrong.”

Kew, Grandmother Amphone’s granddaughter, was about fifty and had a skeletal system that seemed too large for her.
Bones jutted out at the pelvis and shoulders and connected poorly at the elbows. She walked to meet the jeep like a knight in armor but she was soft-spoken and easy to like.

“You are the gentleman come to collect the
pha sin
,” she said, not a question.

“You’re expecting us?” said Siri.

“She said you’d come.”

She had the two old men sit under a breadfruit tree, where a plastic jug of water was waiting for them.

“And who is ‘she,’ exactly?” asked Civilai.

“She never did give me her name,” said the woman, joining them on a wooden bench. “But she spent an entire day here looking at my grandmother’s
sin
s. She was very knowledgeable.”

“What did she look like?” asked Siri.

“You don’t know her? I assumed you’d met.”

“Why?”

“She talked about you so affectionately. That’s why I agreed to let her take one of the collection with her. She said you’d be bringing it back. You do have it, I hope?”

Siri opened his pack and pulled out the latest
sin
. “I’m afraid the seam is a little unraveled,” he said.

“Nothing that can’t be repaired,” Kew said, inspecting the returned skirt.

“So … the woman?” said Civilai.

“Oh, sorry, yes. She was pleasant enough. Elderly. Long hair. Rather thin.”

“She didn’t mention what she intended to do with the
sin
?” Civilai asked.

“I rather got the idea it was something like a game,” she said. “I’m supposed to give you the next clue. Wait, I’ll get it for you. Help yourselves to the water.”

She disappeared into the house, and the old boys drank heartily from the jug. “Some game,” said Civilai.

Kew returned with a familiar plastic bag and watched as Siri unfastened the staples and pulled out the next
pha sin.
It was markedly different from all the others. The colors were brighter, and there were more bands with pink and blue and green elephants parading along a high track and brown-and-orange deer heading in the opposite direction below.

“What number is this?” Civilai asked.

“Seven,” said Siri. “Six and a half in hand.”

“My, so many,” said the woman. “What fun.”

“What fun, indeed,” said Siri. “I don’t suppose you recognize this weave, my dear?”

“Of course I do,” she said. “It’s what you might call a
nouveau
Lu. There’s a village south of Luang Nam Tha on the river. They’re producing some really exotic
sin
s. Far more modern than anyone else.”

This sounded familiar to Siri. “About eleven kilometers south?” he asked.

“About that, yes.”

“You know the place?” Civilai asked.

“It appears we’ve come full circle,” said Siri. “When Daeng and I first arrived in Luang Nam Tha, the owner of the guesthouse where we took lunch was from a Lu village eleven kilometers down the river. It has to be the same place.”

“Well, thank goodness for that,” said Civilai. “At last we can stop somewhere long enough to get well and start drinking again.”

Siri was picking at the hem of the newest
sin.
“What are you doing?” asked the woman.

“A clue has been sewn into the hem of each of the
sin
s,” said Siri.

“How delightful,” said the woman. “Here.”

She handed him a small knife from amongst the instruments in her shirt pocket. From the hem, Siri produced one more flattened roll of paper. It appeared to be another page
ripped from a ledger. Again, it was written in Chinese in five columns. But unlike the previous page, this was lined and written in a much neater hand.

“Are there any Chinese living here?” Siri asked.

“Mr. Lee, our pharmacist, was the last,” she said. “They’ve all been told to go. But if it’s a translation you want, I’d be pleased to do that for you.”

“You read Chinese?”

“I spent twelve years at school in Shanghai. Our family made a lot of money in China from our granny’s
sin
s. She was quite a celebrity across the border. She sent all her grandchildren there to study. The opportunities were much better up north. Look, it’s too late for you to travel. Why don’t I make you a good hot meal, and we’ll look through your clues together. I’ll send my husband to the market to get some natural remedies for your condition. You both look like you could use some rest.”

“Well, nice to see you at last,” came a voice, bass, sarcastic.

“Bpoo?”

The concoction Kew’s husband had returned with from the market was vaguely alcoholic and most certainly opium based. For a while, Siri’s dreams sped by in color like billboards outside a train. And then he was on the Normandy Express, and Aunti Bpoo the transvestite fortune teller was seated opposite. Her demise had gone no length toward bringing down her weight. She leaned forward and put a hand on his knee.

“So this is a dream, right?” he asked.

“As opposed to …?”

“To reality. Actual conversation.”

“Call it what you like.”

“Why can’t we talk when I’m conscious?”

“Because you don’t believe.”

Auntie Bpoo stood on the seat and started a very slow striptease.

“Believe in what?” Siri asked.

“In us.”

“Of course I believe in you. How can I not? I see you all the time. Do you really have to do that?”

“Your scientific side continues to reject us. Your doctor logic.”

She peeled off a long green opera glove. The other passengers on the train, some of whom Siri recognized from obituary photographs, began to clap—egging her on. She found the rhythm and let her micro-skirt slide to the seat. Fortunately she was wearing thick tights with designs of cakes on them.

“But the doctor is part of me,” said Siri. “How can I ignore him without leaving myself … incomplete?”

“Take the potion,” she said.

“What potion?”

“You know what potion. The brew the witch gave you in Muang Xai.”

Bpoo pulled her tank top up over her pot belly, over her empty bra.

“She said there might be … side effects,” said Siri.

“So what?” said Bpoo.

The tank top across her face caught on her earring and disoriented her. She spun around, lost her footing on the seat and fell to the floor with a thump. Siri felt the same thump and awoke on the floorboards in the backroom of Kew’s house. Civilai snored beside him.

The door to Dr. Dooley’s clinic guesthouse burst open, and two black-clad evil-eyed men ran inside. Each held a flashlight.

“In here,” said one of them.

The other came to join him, and they found the old woman facedown on the bed. The room smelled of vomit and booze. On a bedside table was a teaspoon. Evil-Eye Number One dabbed a finger into it but he knew what it would contain even before he tasted it. He nodded.

His partner slapped the old woman across the face five, six, seven times. There was no reaction. “Is she alive?” Evil-Eye Number One asked.

His partner shone the light on the woman’s face and pried open her eyelids. The pupils were full stops. She was out of it.

They tore the place apart: the furniture, the out-of-tune piano, inside the ceiling tiles. They threw the old woman out of the bed and sliced open the mattress. There was no sign of the stash. In desperation they dragged her to the shower, turned the water on cold and left her lying there. Still she didn’t come to. They walked around the building
looking for signs of recent digging. They broke into the old operating theater. It was a shell.

They decided the only choice they had was to wait until she came out of her drug-induced stupor and beat it out of her. They knew from experience, given her state, that she wouldn’t be conscious for another three, four hours. So they left her soaked in the shower stall, and each made a nest from the shredded mattress kapok and curled up to sleep.

It couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes later that Evil-Eye Number One was awoken by a flicker of light. A single candle burned across the room. In its staccato flame he could just make out the sleeping form of his sidekick. The candle painted a hideous shadow on the man’s face. His tongue hung loose like a dog’s, and there was … was that blood seeping from a wound on his neck, or just a trick of the light? Evil-Eye pushed himself up on one elbow to get a clearer look, but a boot to his neck forced him back down with a crunch. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the old woman standing over him with a penknife in her hand. It was dripping blood. She was smiling.

“That’s not possible,” he wheezed, the boot constricting his larynx.

“Slap an old lady, would you?” she said. “Nasty bastard.”

After talking to the postman, Dtui had yet again been told at the long-distance phone booth that communication with Luang Nam Tha was impossible. Not even Party members were getting through these days. Altogether preoccupied, she taught her lone afternoon class at the nursing college. In the summary session, she appreciated for once the dearth of questions from the would-be—heaven help them—nurses. Her mind had wandered elsewhere. She was positing the ridiculous.

She considered the postman’s description of the woman he’d met in front of Siri’s house. Who was she? She had brazenly stolen a
pha sin
that had been sent to Dr. Siri. She perhaps thought it was a gift unbeknownst that there was a severed finger sewn into the hem. Or had she put it there? She had, overnight, bleached one segment of the skirt. She had applied a coat of Paris Green, a toxic pigment rich in arsenic. Two days later, she or a colleague had delivered the altered
sin
to Dr. Siri’s house knowing full well that prolonged exposure to the material would sicken and eventually kill anyone in close proximity to it.