‘It … it must be a very heavy hand,’ said Mr Geung.
‘Again,’ Civilai shouted.
The oars dug in with unprecedented coordination. The boat lunged. The hand conceded. It took some ten minutes to reach the bank. If the team had put this much effort into the races they would certainly have fared better. At the bank, the water they bailed out of the craft was half sweat.
Siri and Daeng were out of the boat and up to their waists in the river. Still they held the delicate hand between them.
‘This is who I think it is, isn’t it?’ said Daeng.
‘Yes,’ Siri replied.
Two of the few crew members under fifty jumped from the boat and, careful not to touch the body, they ducked below the surface. When they re-emerged, one of them said, ‘It’s no wonder we had trouble. She’s roped to some bloody great hunk of machinery.’
The two men dragged it to the bank and Siri and Daeng found Madame Peung’s body much easier to slide up on to the grass. Her ankle was tied by a short rope to an air compressor. Daeng told them she’d seen it the night before, stowed to the stern of the frigate. Siri could see no wounds. There were no bloodstains on her clothes. If her raised arm was a conscious effort, he had to assume she’d died from drowning. Yet in most cases, the victim’s face would be contorted in agony. Madame Peung seemed almost to be smiling. Even in death she was beautiful.
‘Awfully bad luck,’ said Civilai, who leaned from the longboat. ‘Fancy her getting her foot tangled up in the rope just as the compressor was about to fall overboard.’
‘You’d think she’d have seen it coming,’ said Daeng, and winced at her own insensitivity.
Siri felt a good deal sorrier for the death of Madame Peung than he had been for the loss of his books. She’d been kind to him. He liked her. But, quite clearly, the villains had no further use for her. If the water at that spot had been just twenty centimetres deeper, they’d have passed her by. But had she made some supernatural afterlife effort to raise her arm? To be seen? To have her body put down with respect so her spirit might move on? He wouldn’t have put it past her.
With the compressor as their reward — thirty kilograms of scrap metal — the two men agreed to sit with the corpse until the longboat passed on the return journey. They kept their distance from her. Siri had considered it disrespectful to go into battle with a body on board. Daeng and Geung took the two empty paddle spots and joined the uncoordinated splash upriver. Siri had several excuses for not picking up an oar, not least of these his injuries sustained in a run-in with the Khmer Rouge. Any other man would have enjoyed the three months of bed rest the doctors had recommended. Siri had been repainting the bathroom Wattay blue after only a week. A bathroom that was now in ruins. A good enough reason not to waste time painting bathrooms. Civilai cited the loss of his right earlobe as the reason why he didn’t rush for the vacant paddles.
The conversation amongst the rowers had taken a more serious tone. The discovery of the body had shifted them into a superstitious frame of mind. There was speculation that the great naga had taken another soul because the race organizers had banned the final party. This was where everyone took to the river in anything that could float to thank the great serpent for not flooding them the previous year. There would always be a lot of drinking and at least one near-fatality.
‘Civilai?’ said Siri.
‘Yes, brother?’
‘We’re heading after a boat with a machine gun attached to it and ten armed soldiers on board.’
‘It won’t come to that, Siri.’
‘If we happen to round a bend and there they are, they might come at us.’
‘And?’
‘And I think we should at least explain to our shipmates what we’re doing here.’
‘They didn’t ask when we set off.’
‘They hadn’t seen a dead body tied to an air compressor when we set off. We might need their help.’
And so, with the oars raised and their chests heaving, the crew listened to Civilai’s abridged version of why they were pursuing a Lao naval vessel.
‘Where would they be heading?’ asked one shirtless fat man with stomachs piled on his lap like hillside paddy fields.
‘It’s a point exactly twenty-two kilometres upriver,’ said Siri.
This was followed by a mass exchange of nods and a soundtrack of ‘Oh, yes.’
‘Sharp bend in the river? Rock cliff?’ asked the fat man.
‘Well, yes,’ said Siri.
Smiles. Chuckles. Knowing looks.
‘Frenchy’s Elbow. Might as well just leave your Vietnamese to it,’ said the old lady with the short oar. ‘They’ll be taken care of, all right.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Daeng.
‘It’s started,’ said the headman. ‘One body already and they haven’t even arrived there.’
‘Is there something at this place?’ Siri asked, although he knew there was.
‘Not something you could poke in the eye with a stick,’ said one woman. ‘But something just the same.’
‘Are there bodies there?’ Siri asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ said the headman. ‘Plenty. But your minister won’t be finding his brother at Frenchy’s Elbow.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because the boat at the bottom of the river there went down about the same time your minister was born.’
A shudder ran up Siri’s neck. Nobody was rowing. The river was running fast from the floods in China. Yet they were floating at some speed … against the current.
‘Frenchmen?’ Siri asked.
‘Ah, there’s one with the gift,’ said the old lady.
‘Well, here’s one without,’ said Civilai. ‘What are we talking about here?’
‘Everyone in these parts knows the story,’ said the fat man. ‘It was the year of our Lord Buddha 2543 …’
‘Of course, it would be,’ said Civilai. ‘Better known as 1910.’
‘You can’t get reliable intelligence these days,’ said Siri.
‘The French bastards convinced the King of Luang Prabang that he should lend them his crown jewels for some world fair over in Europe somewhere,’ said the fat man. ‘In fact it seems pretty damned obvious that they were stealing them. But, what can you do when you’ve got a dozen muskets pointed at your head? They loaded it on a French gunboat called La Grandiere, guarded by six French soldiers, and they set off downriver to Vientiane. But that treasure was cursed. They say a whirlpool surged up out of that deep water and swallowed the boat down in a spot they now call Frenchy’s Elbow. Drowned, all of ’em. In the early days you could see the hull from the bank. Locals passing it on the river would swing by to take a look. They might dive down to see if there was anything to salvage. But every one of them that tried suffered personal or family ills straight after. Deaths or sickness or crop failure. They say one boy got all the way down there into the cabin. It was dark and he was feeling around and his hand fell on the face of a man. He fought the urge to flee and took the man’s hand. He helped himself to a ring. Perhaps that was what triggered the curse. ’Cause when he first dived down there he was just a lad, but when he surfaced with the ring in his hand, he was a grey-haired old man. That was the last time anyone went down there.’
‘And he had a unicorn horn sticking out of his back,’ whispered Daeng to her husband. She too had noticed their upriver floatation.
‘You not buying any of this?’ Siri asked her.
‘The Curse of Frenchy’s Elbow? Come on, Siri. Everyone living near water goes nutty eventually. Loch Ness monsters and Sirens and Great Nagas. It’s a symptom of water vapour inhalation.’
Civilai crawled back to join them.
‘Have you noticed we’re floating against the current?’ he said.
Siri ignored him.
‘What about my dreams?’ said Siri. ‘The naked Frenchmen. You don’t think there could be a boat laden with the crown jewels of Laos down there?’
‘Whether there is or there isn’t,’ said Daeng, ‘some silly curse isn’t going to stop that unit of engineers from digging it out. But I’ll tell you one thing. If there is treasure down there it all makes a lot more sense than a search for a minister’s dead brother. A lot of effort has gone into organizing this and we can’t leave it up to your spirit friends to stop them shipping our treasure off to Thailand.’