But then the divers’ heads appeared above the choppy water and each had a broad smile on his face.
‘Have a nice time?’ asked Madame Daeng, sniffing the air around Siri like a dog taking in the hindquarters of an interloper.
‘I’m lucky to be alive,’ he told her. ‘Our pilot trained on Dumbo the elephant.’
‘This Dumbo wears lavender perfume?’
Siri didn’t hear. He looked out over the balcony. The river was so crowded with craft you could step from one to the next and reach the far bank. Daeng wore sunglasses and had a half-empty beaker beside her on the rattan table. There too sat her notebook and a pen.
‘Ice tea?’ he asked.
‘Mekhong whisky and water,’ she told him.
‘At eleven a.m.?’
‘I’m on vacation.’
‘Are your legs playing up?’
‘Will you stop talking about my damned legs,’ she growled. ‘My legs are fine. I’m more than just a pair of legs, you know? Ask about my elbow, why don’t you? My fish-gutting skills. My ability at mental arithmetic. Just leave my bloody legs alone.’
‘I … how many glasses have you had?’
She ignored the question. Siri brought over the second deckchair and set it up beside hers. He sat. Silent. Decided this was as good a time as any to keep his mouth shut. They watched the chaos on the river for a good ten minutes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘No problem.’
‘So. What happened upriver?’
‘Are there any other words I shouldn’t use? Buttocks, for example.’
She smiled.
‘Just shut up and tell me about the trip,’ she said.
‘How can I shut up and-?’
‘Siri!’
‘We had a lovely time, impending death notwithstanding.’
‘Did you find the brother?’
‘We’re not sure. There is something just below the mud.’
‘A boat?’
‘It’s likely. They poked it with sticks and estimated it was about five metres long. The mechanic said it might be a rock but the deaf and dumb fellow seemed pretty excited.’
‘So, she’s legitimate then, your witch.’
‘It’s too early to confirm but too eerie to ignore.’
‘But you have a gut feeling.’
‘She is rather impressive.’
Daeng took up her glass and drank from it.
‘Right,’ she said.
‘Any luck with 1910?’
‘I found the one and only Pak Lai schoolteacher.’
‘Oh, well done.’
‘He graduated from fifth grade. Didn’t make it as far as high school history.’
‘Oh.’
‘And, are you sure it was a date?’
‘What else might it be?’
‘A telephone number?’
‘I just couldn’t imagine a royal spirit giving me his telephone number. Did you …?’
‘There’s no phone here. Or, rather, there are four phones but no line. This area isn’t a priority … for anything. Do you think we might use the helicopter radio to call Phosy?’
‘They’ve gone already. Popkorn and his frightful wife went directly back to Vientiane after dropping us off.’
‘Madame Peung didn’t go with them?’
‘No, the minister said he’d send a team of military engineers. Madame Peung will greet them and lead them to the site. Could be tomorrow or the day after. Meanwhile, she’s invited us to dinner at the governor’s house tonight.’
‘You naturally accepted.’
‘Would have been rude not to. And it’s an opportunity to talk. We had precious little time this morning and it was hellish noisy on the flight. She’s a difficult woman to tie down. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to get her alone for a little while and do a bit of probing.’
Madame Daeng knocked back her drink and stood.
‘Steady on, ma fille,’ said Siri.
‘I can look after myself,’ she snapped. ‘Always could.’
9
Nobody had laid claim to the cadaver of short stature. It was Monday and Inspector Phosy had left a number of messages with the Housing Department asking them to let him know whether Comrade Koomki turned up for work that morning. There had been no reply. And so he sat at his desk. He’d progressed to a rank where a quick response to a call for help was no longer his concern. This was largely a desk job. Promotion generally led one away from the work one enjoyed and into a state of inertia.
Still unable to get word to Siri and Daeng in Sanyaburi, Phosy had nothing to do other than thumb through the incident files on his desk. It had been a weekend of misadventure rather than crime. A grandmother in Amone had made a cake. She had mistakenly mixed the eggs and lard with gunpowder instead of flour. The oven blew up but as she had rushed to the bathroom to take care of business she was unharmed. Then there was the gardener at the Lane Xang hotel who had slipped on wet leaves and broken his head in the empty swimming pool. And the mysterious disappearance of one of the three hundred stone busts of the president recently arrived from Romania. More likely a miscounting of stock than a theft.
Nothing there called for his professional expertise. So he allowed himself some time to mull over the odd situation they’d encountered in Ban Elee. Phosy was a simple policeman — a hero of the revolution perhaps but uncomplicated in terms of seeing and believing. He could gather facts, analyse them and draw conclusions. Perhaps the only man he’d met who could better him at detection was Dr Siri himself.
The fact that such a logical man as Siri claimed to see ghosts had always been a mystery to the inspector. Phosy had no personal contact with the spirits. He didn’t pay homage to his ancestors or apologize to the land spirits for cutting down a tree. On his trip out to Ban Elee, he had encountered ten villagers who claimed to have witnessed a reincarnation. He knew uneducated people were given to animist beliefs and leaned on the side of gullibility. But what did they have to gain by inventing this bizarre story? What would be the point of setting up such an elaborate scam? No, unlike Siri and Dtui who were prepared to accept such events as paranormal, Phosy was an investigator. He would investigate until there was nothing left unexplained and only then would he be prepared to join the ranks of the unhinged.
‘The facts,’ he said out loud, then internalized the rest when he saw the clerks were looking at him. The wife of a royalist general most certainly had a security file and he’d gone in early this morning to dig it out. It sat beside the incident reports on his desk. He’d been through it already. It wasn’t particularly meaty. As a widow she’d continued to export timber to Thailand through old contacts in the Thai military. This with the blessing of the Party. The wealthy had not been summarily shipped off to re-education and stripped of their belongings. The Pathet Lao had a country to run and they needed this back-up capitalist base to be able to afford to do so. Not all the successful business people fled across the Mekhong. Many were courted and encouraged.
Madame Peung was one such socialist socialite. A few years ago she’d been introduced to similarly well-heeled capitalists in Vietnam and import-export deals had been signed. Following her last business trip to Hanoi she was shot and killed. This is where the personal information file ended. There was a police report paper-clipped to the cover. The killing had been investigated by a cadre called Ekapat, serving as district police officer at kilometre fifty-six. Phosy had Ekapat’s file at hand also. He had been transferred from military unit eighty-seven in Houaphan. He had spent most of his army service in the catering corps and attended the rapid conversion course to make him a policeman just four months earlier. To his credit, he did travel a great distance on his bicycle to reach Ban Elee. These were his findings: