"I'll go first and let you look at my bottom," she said.
"Aha, lead on, my Amazon."
The slow, bestial crawling lasted no longer than five minutes before they arrived at a clearing. This was no accident of nature. The clearing was a perfect square, twelve by twelve metres, probably levelled for a building project then abandoned. At its centre, just as the map promised, was Crazy Rajid's palace. In the illustration it had all the splendour of the Taj Mahal with domes and minarets and a platoon of guards. In the real world it was a structure made entirely of old television sets. They were piled six high in one continuous square with no apparent entry point. They appeared to be cemented together with river mud. The turrets were formed of radiograms spaced along the parapet. Siri and Daeng stood behind their torches in awe of its weirdness.
"Now how do you suppose he did that?" Daeng asked.
Siri shook his head and laughed. "Offhand I see three possibilities. One, the TVs were already abandoned here and he just rearranged them into a palace. Two, they were dumped in the river by the consumerist Thais and washed up by the overflow. Or, three, he just rescued dead and dying TV sets from around the town and carried them here. Whichever it is, it's good to see he hasn't been wasting his time for the past ten years."
They walked around the outside of the structure to see if there was a way in. There was not.
"You don't suppose he's inside there, do you?" Daeng asked.
"Rajid, are you in there?" Siri called.
There was no answer.
"How do we get in?" he asked.
"Must be a magic word. What was the old Roman spell?"
"Abracadabra."
"Abracadabra," Daeng repeated.
Nothing happened.
"Well, as we've solved the riddles and come all this way," Siri decided, putting down his pack and walking to the television wall, "I think we only have one way to claim our prize." He reached up to the top of the wall and pulled at the volume control of one of the smaller sets. As one might expect, river mud does not make a particularly effective cement. The mortar crumbled and the set fell at Siri's feet. "Aha," he sang. "We have breached their defences. The palace will soon be ours."
Daeng joined him in his pillage and within seconds they had a fairly large gap through which to step. At the centre of the compound lay the open grate of a large drain. This was obviously Rajid's entry and exit point. Apart from some fifty forks jabbed into the earth all around, the only furnishing was a cardboard box. Siri picked his way between the forks and opened the flaps.
"Anything interesting?" Daeng asked.
"Bones," Siri told her.
"My word. Whose?" She was on her knees again inspecting the cutlery.
"They're old. I mean very old. And there's broken pottery in here and what looks like hair."
"Oh dear."
"What is it?"
"The forks. They're gravestones."
"Eh?"
"Frogs, by the look of it although I'm not planning to go through the lot to see if they're all the same."
"I remember he has a fondness for amphibians."
"Does any of this help us to know where he's gone?"
"Not at all."
"But you have to admit he is a wonderfully peculiar little chap." She used the fork to replace the dirt on the frog she'd just unearthed and said a short prayer for its soul.
9
Siri sat on the wicker chair in front of Madame Daeng's shop, going through the contents of the box one more time. In total, there were ten mostly broken bones, five shards of pottery, and a small tangled mass of hair. Daeng was inside preparing the breakfast so their conversation was shouted.
"I can't imagine where he got all this stuff," Siri yelled.
"What?" She couldn't hear him above the sound of the charcoal cracking in the flames.
"I say, some of these shards seem really old."
"How does the bone look in the cold light of day?"
"None of them is complete but I'd say this one is part of a humerus."
"How can you be sure it's not a goat's hind leg?"
"Please, madam. I'm a professional."
In fact, Siri wasn't at all certain. His experience was exclusively with human bones in human bodies. The context rather gave it away. He'd never studied the difference between human and animal bones and never performed surgery on anything with four legs. There might have been a course entitled 'Etudes Ancienne Comparee et Methodique des Squelettes de Caprines et Vertebres Humains, 101', but, if so, he had long forgotten it. For all he knew, the human humerus might have been identical to the hind leg of a goat.
He rubbed his eyes to get them to focus. He'd slept poorly. Another nightmare had awakened him at two a.m. It was her: the ugly pregnant woman with the worms and the dead dog. He woke with such a heavy weight on his chest it was as if she had been sleeping on top of him. He could almost smell her sweat. His lungs wheezed. Daeng had awakened too and asked him if he was all right. He'd considered telling her the truth but there were times when the truth didn't help anybody.
He looked up as a man in a postal worker's uniform pedalled up on a bicycle whose parts were clearly held together by string and wishes.
"You're open then?" the man said, stepping from the precarious machine.
He arrived at the shop at the same time every morning and said the selfsame thing every time. Normally he'd settle on a table near the entrance without waiting for a response, but today he surprised Siri by handing him an envelope.
"What's this?" Siri asked.
In most places, a postman handing over a letter would not prompt such a question. But Lao postmen had recently ceased their habit of delivering letters. As the populace and the government cultivated their respective paranoias, fewer people were prepared to hand over their secrets to anyone in a uniform. Notes would be delivered by bus drivers or friends allowed to travel up-country or relatives going off to 're-education' camps.
Almost everything from outside the country passed through a Bureau de Poste department known as the Sensitive Issues Section. There mail was opened, read, censored with black ink, and put in large wooden crates for collection. Anything in a foreign language was deemed too sensitive for the Sensitive Issues Section largely because there was nobody on staff who could read it. These letters were filed and never seen again.
"It's a letter," said the postman. "I recognized your name so I thought I'd bring it along. Sorry it's open."
Siri took it. "Thank you, Comrade. Has it been…?"
"I think they looked at it and realized it was from a child so there aren't any marks on it."
The postman went into the shop where he was greeted warmly by Madame Daeng. Other customers were arriving on foot. The aroma must have worked its way around the downtown area already. Siri took a moment to appreciate the large Lao farm implement dedication stamp that took up a quarter of the envelope then pulled out the single sheet of lined notepaper. At first glance, it did appear to be written in a child's hand, but he noted that it was just a little too careful and too deliberate. Dear Uncle Siri, How are you? We went to the Buddha Park on the weekend. It was such Fun. There were big animals and a giant pumpkin. I think your little twins would really like it. We're going again on March 30. If you take them I can show them around. With love, Your niece, Bao
Siri smiled, looked up at the blue sky, and said a thank you to the various gods he'd recruited to make this message possible. Bao was a Hmong girl Siri had met a few months earlier when he was in the north-east. The villagers had been about to join the long march to Thailand. Many were escaping repercussions from the Pathet Lao administration and their Vietnamese allies for siding with the Americans during the war. One of the girls in the village had just given birth to twins, and they had asked Siri to transport them to Vientiane with him and take care of them. Travelling with babies was a danger. Many Hmong had been exposed to the enemy by the crying of young children. This letter meant they had survived the journey and were ready to reclaim their young ones.