‘What is it with you two?’ Civilai asked.
‘So, this is the way it looks,’ said Daeng, ignoring the question. ‘The cruiser has indeed headed upstream, presumably with Madame Peung who has a Vietnamese accent and her deaf and dumb brother who may or may not whisper in Vietnamese late at night, and a unit of Vietnamese soldiers, but without their unbiased medical observer. I take it everyone has spotted the Vietnamese connection here.’
‘Did you get anything from the cruiser’s Lao captain?’ Civilai asked.
‘All I could tell was that he’d been briefed privately by the minister. He was under the impression they were there to retrieve the remains of Lao soldiers trapped in the hull of a boat. The minister’s brother was one of them. They’d bring out all the remains and have the coroner sort out who was who. He was told not to interact with the Vietnamese engineers which wasn’t that hard considering he couldn’t speak Vietnamese and they can’t speak Lao. He was angry about being the taxi service.’
‘Then that would suggest the minister believes that’s why they’re here,’ said Civilai. ‘What news from the engineers?’
‘They think it’s a boat rescue too,’ said Siri. ‘They were instructed to free a small vessel from the mud at the bottom of the river and winch it to the bank. They have sub-aqua equipment. They aren’t particularly happy about it. They were complaining about all that effort and manpower just for a few Lao bones.’
‘So, there you have it,’ said Civilai. ‘What’s the mystery here? It all fits. Brother. Bones. Ancestors. Happiness. Wife stops nagging. Minister gets some sleep.’
‘What do you make of it, Geung?’ Siri asked.
Mr Geung’s insights were invariably right on the money. Except he hadn’t spoken since his confession to the doctor that he’d slept with his wife. It was obviously worrying him. He had yet to stop blushing. There was, of course, nothing to be embarrassed about. Madame Daeng returns home after a late-night tipple with the navy to find two men asleep in her bed. Neither is her husband. She goes downstairs. Geung’s room is unlocked. She crawls beneath the mosquito netting, curls up in an empty space on the vast mattress and sleeps like a babe. Had she been less tipsy she would have considered Mr Geung’s fragile emotions and the fact that he had a fiancee back in Vientiane. Mr Geung, being Mr Geung, would have no choice but to tell Tukda of his indiscretion and the relationship would be on shaky ground.
‘You have to pun … punish Madame Daeng,’ said Geung as if the party in question were not sitting there in front of him.
‘I promise. I shall,’ said Siri.
‘She was bad.’
‘I know she was. I shall take the leather thong to her this very night.’ (She kicked him under the table.) ‘But in the meantime we’re working here. We are presented with a mystery which appears not to be mysterious. Given all we’ve been through, that in itself is mysterious. If everything is going as expected, why do we all feel so uncomfortable? Something is wrong, Geung. Tell us what it is.’
Geung looked away from the doctor and stared out across the river. The new day’s races were about to start but he wasn’t focused on the boats. He was quiet for so long they thought he was still sulking, until he said, ‘The ele-phants.’
‘What about them?’ Civilai asked.
‘Why are the elephants here?’
They all looked at the small herd, all bloated with water and the mahout rocking in the breeze in his hammock.
‘Of course,’ said Civilai. ‘That’s it.’
12
‘But he knew,’ said Phosy.
‘Keep your voice down,’ whispered Dtui. ‘I’ve finally got her to sleep.’
‘If he knew’ — his voice was lower but no less angry — ‘why in hell’s name didn’t he tell me?’
‘Well, firstly because you were off in Vieng Xai at one of your midweek junkets.’
‘It was a training course. And that’s irrelevant. He could have left a note. He could have told you.’
‘Secondly, there wasn’t actually anything to tell. The Frenchman wasn’t a menace at that stage. Siri was making enquiries because an old friend of Madame Daeng was trying to get in touch.’
‘You think Siri would go to all the trouble of talking to the German second secretary and the head of the Roads Project if he wasn’t suspicious? They were tight-lipped about it until I told them what their lost tourist had achieved in a few short days. That’s when they put me on to the caretaker at the French embassy. He admitted Siri had been there to look at the archives. He said he didn’t know what the doctor had found and he wouldn’t let me go in to take a look. Said I needed a higher level of clearance. And he was jumpy. He was hiding something. I know he was.’
Dtui turned her smile towards her sleeping child. She and Madame Daeng had few secrets. She knew exactly what the caretaker was hiding.
‘So what do we have on our evil Frenchman?’ she asked.
‘Just his fake name and the fact that he forged his travel documents and his work placement. The French embassy in Bangkok faxed a photograph. I’ve sent copies of it everywhere. Nobody answering to that name has left the country by air or by ferry so I’m working on the theory that he’s still around. He’s gone to ground. We’ve searched every boat out of the city. Road blocks on every track heading west. If he’s on his way to Pak Lai he must be on foot. And if that’s the case, Siri and Daeng will be back anytime soon.’
‘So you keep saying. Civilai will bring them back. Sergeant Sihot will bring them back. Where are they then?’
‘I don’t know, Dtui. I don’t know.’
It hadn’t been so hard. A fistful of American dollars and a modest fishing boat became a moonlit ferry. You could get shot from either bank of the Mekhong but even soldiers had to sleep. You picked your moment. The fisherman was nervous about rowing across on such a clear night with sentries dotted along the bank. The nerves were misplaced. He should have been focused on his passenger. That’s where the real danger lay. Twenty metres from Thailand and the tyre iron had sent the wiry brown man to the bottom of the great river.
He knew they’d be watching for him on the way to Pak Lai. The west was closed to him. But the south was hospitable. Thailand needed its tourist dollars and it honed its Thai smiles and its few words of English to suck out every last coin. Foreigners were shown respect, even the ones who deserved none. Barnard had no entry permit, but nobody asked. Transport was efficient and trouble free. He took the local bus to Chiang Khan and on to Bo Phak. And in under six hours he was in Boh Bia staring at a line of forest which the locals told him was the border with Laos. You could pick your spot. More dollars bought an unnecessary porter and a guide and three asses. It seemed no time at all before they had negotiated the heavily wooded trail through Sanyaburi and arrived at the Mekhong at a spot upriver from some madness of a festival. Cancer will take you the moment you yield to it, but he had that one motivating factor that could drive the terminally ill — that kept them going against all the odds. For some it was love. Family. For some it was a simple thing like adding to the count of bird songs and sunrises. For Barnard it was the dream of leaning over the dead body of Madame Daeng with the blood still warm on his tyre iron.
‘It could easily take us a few months, you realize?’ said Madame Daeng.
They sat dead centre in the longboat of the Uphill Rowing Club. It had taken the crew only five minutes to lose their first heat of the day which sent their average to zero points. Despite the generous atmosphere of a Lao boat race, losing every event and causing damage to others meant that you were disqualified from even the losers’ wooden spoon race in which both boats won a prize. The URC was just about to return home with nothing to show for its efforts until Madame Daeng made them a proposition.