Anarchy and Old Dogs (Dr. Siri Paiboun) (2 page)

Auntie Bpoo wasn't one of those transvestites who fooled the eye from a distance. Even on the darkest of nights she wouldn't be mistaken for anything other than a middle-aged man in women's clothing. In daylight, viewed from the opposite corner of Samsenthai Road, she was a luminous beacon--and definitely a buoy. Her broad shoulders held up the spaghetti straps of a shocking pink halter. Her white stomach hung over the elastic waistband of her leopard-skin leotards like a floe of ice oozing from the freezer of a cheap refrigerator. The rouge on her cheeks and the purple around her eyes were redder and more purple than even the most flamboyant bird of paradise. But her hair, black and cut military short, set off a cream hibiscus blossom tucked behind her ear.

Siri stood in front of the closed-down coffee stand opposite and pretended to be maneuvering a misplaced paving stone back into its spot with his foot. But only the black stupa hunched in its island of overgrown grass took any notice of him. Even through the film of dust that hung over the city's main street like a hazy hangover, Auntie Bpoo was an overstatement. Siri turned and headed back to his motorcycle. What was he thinking? What on earth had crawled into his head? He should have gone straight home like he'd planned.

But no. Here he was contemplating something quite foolish. Perhaps he'd just wanted to see for himself what could possess an otherwise rational nurse to fall for an obvious confidence trick. And who was feeding this roadside duchess? She didn't accept payment but she obviously wasn't starving to death. It was his inner detective that turned Siri around once more and sent him across Vientiane's busiest street. On normal days he would have just launched himself into the road, but, given the day's events, he decided to stop at the curb and look both ways before crossing.

A minute later he was sitting cross-legged on a banana-leaf mat beneath the long evening shadow of the Aeroflot sign. He watched Auntie Bpoo shuffle cards, just shuffle and shuffle, until he was sure the noses of the kings and queens had been scoured completely from their faces. She hadn't looked up at him, not even when he arrived. She hadn't so much as acknowledged his presence. When she spoke at last she began with a poem. At least Siri assumed that's what it was. He'd heard bad poetry before, but Auntie Bpoo's had a depth all her own.

"Dr. Siri," she said. "I've been expecting you."

Siri felt oddly disconcerted that she should know who he was. They'd never met. Perhaps Dtui ...? He coughed to jog the surprise from his voice.

"I'm actually here to tell you--," he began.

"That you think my predictions are a pile of poppycock," she said.

Siri was impressed. Those were the exact words he'd chosen to complete his hijacked sentence. It was either a grand trick or an amazing coincidence.

"Well done. Perhaps you could tell me what I had for dinner yesterday evening," Siri suggested.

"No. I couldn't," Auntie Bpoo growled, and returned her gaze to the cards. "If you want a cabaret, go to Bangkok."

"But I thought that's exactly what you were--an elaborate parlor trick," Siri managed, although he was lacking his usual bravado.

When she looked up at him again, her eyes were the dull silver gray of ball bearings. They seemed to bore into him. "Before the second equinox, Dr. Siri Paiboun, you will have betrayed your country."

"I will what? Don't be ridiculous."

"You came to me. I didn't pursue you."

"I just came to--"

"And hang on to your lucky charm, Doctor. The
Phibob
are lurking. They're waiting for their opportunity."

"Who ... who told you about them?"

Siri felt a cold shudder rise from the pavement and climb his spine. This fortune-teller had access to facts she couldn't possibly have overheard. Dangerous knowledge. The spirits of the forest had hounded Siri to a ledge overhanging the valley of death. They'd hunted down the spirit of the thousand-year-old shaman, Yeh Ming, who'd chosen Siri as his host. But in order to destroy the one, they had to eliminate the other. Siri was in constant fear of them. He reached for his chest where the charmed white amulet, his only protection from the
Phibob,
lay warm against his skin. It was beneath his shirt, impossible to see.

"I don't see what's here and now," the transvestite told him. "I see what's to come. But often the future explains the present."

Suddenly and inexplicably, she began to giggle shrilly. A dog in the gutter fled in panic. It seemed to Siri, amidst a sudden atmosphere of foreboding, that the monster sitting before him might have swallowed a young girl whole.

"Oh, my. It's late," the little girl said in her tiny voice. "Just think of little me walking home through the dark streets. I have to scamper."

She quickly gathered her cards and her bag and shooed Siri off the mat so she could roll it up. All these actions she completed like a ballerina on heroin. Auntie Bpoo had turned into a silly feminine thing that Siri wanted to slap the senses back into, but naturally he didn't. She still outweighed him by some eighty pounds. Instead, he stood back in the Aeroflot doorway and watched her escape, stepping mincingly, hurriedly, past the black stupa. Siri was breathless and dumbfounded. There were few living beings that could make him feel inferior, but Auntie Bpoo, the transvestite fortune-teller, had joined their ranks.

One hand protruded stiffly from beneath the white sheet. It lay, palm upward, on the side table, as if begging for the return of its life. Mourners in all white or all black filed past the body in disorderly fashion. One by one they dipped a tin cup into a clay water pot and trickled a little onto the ash gray fingers. They begged forgiveness from the corpse just in case there were any forgotten misdemeanors they had committed. Four monks sat to one side, chanting behind their ceremonial fans like shy table-tennis players. The
sai sin
string circled them and looped down to the body, a karmic telegraph, passing their messages through to the deceased. Dtui stood at her mother's feet and thanked the visitors for coming. They smiled. She smiled. They joked. She laughed. There was nothing to be gained by turning a funeral into something depressing.

There were drinks in the yard of the little temple laid out on a long trestle table under the shade of a scrambled egg tree. There guests could sit and remember their nice friend Manoluk. They'd probably get rowdy and raucous after a few glasses of rice whisky and tell bawdy stories of her youth. If they didn't know any, they'd make them up. Certainly, they'd talk of the eleven children she'd borne, and their thoughts would come to rest on Dtui, the only one she'd been able to keep alive, the one she'd spoiled and toiled to provide an education for. They'd raise their glasses to the big soft nurse and shout "Good luck" and play a few hands of cards before staggering off home. They would shed no unlucky tears to jinx Manoluk's journey to Nirvana. Only in their dreams would their true sorrow show itself.

At 6 a.m., Siri had awakened in a sweat with the image of Auntie Bpoo still in his head. He'd dreamed of slow dancing with her in a French bordello. Her makeup had smeared onto his cheeks, giving him the appearance of a Comanche warrior. Members of the Lao People's Party politburo were sitting around him at low tables wearing French berets. They cast circumspect glances in the direction of the dance floor. Siri looked over the hairy shoulder of his partner and counted them off, one by one. The president, of course; the prime minister; the heads of education and of agriculture. He'd located seven of the eight members but had no time to work out who was absent because a bomb--albeit a black, ball-shaped cartoon bomb--came flying through a window. It exploded and blew them all to kingdom come.

There was pitch-blackness and the pungent odor of fried bodies, and that was when Siri emerged from his dream. He recalled how bright the colors had been there compared to the washed-out hues that surrounded him in his room. How fruity the bordello wine, how sweet the Gitanes' smoke that hung in the air. All that flavor had gone and he was left with drabness and the monotonous sobbing of a young woman. It took him some minutes to identify the sound as coming from Dtui in the next room.

He found her lying beside her mother's body on the single mattress. For many painful years, Manoluk had tolerated the pain of cirrhosis as she provided for her girl. Once Dtui graduated, the roles had been reversed, and the larger part of the daughter's wages had gone toward expensive medication that had never actually performed the miracles claimed. They'd merely kept her mother alive and in pain-- until now. As Siri looked on from the doorway he wondered whether Dtui's tears were of grief or relief. Her mother had finally stopped suffering. If the mattress had been wider, or Dtui and Manoluk narrower, he would have joined them there. He would have held Dtui's hand and absorbed some small part of her sadness.

In the stuffy heat of August, there was little time to lose. During the day, the housemates joined together to prepare for the bathing rites and the initial ceremony. Siri's household was a menagerie of misfits. Mrs. Fah and her children delivered the hastily written announcements. Mr. Inthanet, the puppeteer, drove his fiancee's old truck to the temple. And Comrade Noo, the renegade Thai forest monk, was already addressing the body's spiritual needs on the flatbed behind. Dtui had taken the day off to arrange the catering. Lao funerals gave people a hearty appetite, and the problems of feeding the guests kept her mind from feeling sorry for itself.

They'd all chipped in the few
kip
they had to spare for whatever happened to be available at the fresh market. Shopping in Vientiane had become a lottery. Fruits and vegetables had vanished one by one from the stalls. Farmers were allowed to feed their families but were taxed heavily for anything they produced for sale. It was one more astoundingly silly policy. Far from filling the markets with fresh produce and the treasury with much needed revenue, it succeeded in reversing history to a time when the Lao traditionally produced no more than was absolutely necessary to survive. Nobody could accuse the rural Lao of rising to a challenge. Attempting to piece together a menu from the stalls of brown legumes and flyblown buffalo meat had certainly kept Dtui's mind off her mother.

Only Dr. Siri had made it to work that day. He'd paid the bulk sum of the funeral expenses; they'd agreed at least one person should be at work to earn next month's humble salary. He'd spent the day with the crumpled body of the blind man. Performing the autopsy by himself had made him realize how much he'd come to depend on his morgue team. He missed Dtui's concise note taking and sharp observations. He missed Mr. Geung (presently convalescing from a near death encounter with a mosquito), who manhandled bodies and sawed through bones apparently without effort. By the late afternoon, Siri slumped, exhausted, on a stool beside the body. He'd somehow managed to fold it into one of the brand-new red PVC body bags so generously provided by the Soviet Union.

All that remained was to sign the death certificate and to trace the deceased's family so they could be notified. Siri was rummaging through the dead man's clothes for clues when he looked up to see a neat fellow of around forty-five walk into the cutting room. He had the slim build and good looks of a man who took care of himself, but the frayed shirt of one who didn't.

"Are you looking for something that'll fit you?" he asked Siri.

"Aha, Phosy. The capital's only middle-aged policeman. How are you, son?"

"Undernourished but otherwise happy, thanks. You?"

"Sparkling. Just sparkling." Siri peeled off one rubber glove and shook his friend's hand enthusiastically. Inspector Phosy smiled and returned the enthusiasm. "What brings you to my morgue?" Siri asked.

"Your traffic accident, of course."

"Why? I thought you only handled cases with government connections."

"Right you are. And the weapon in question was an army logging truck, was it not?"

"Of course. Well, I don't suspect foul play, if that's what you're after. You might be able to charge the driver with negligence if he hadn't fled the scene and vanished. Poor fellow's probably scared out of his wits they might execute him. But I believe they found the accelerator had stuck. You might stand a better chance of suing the Chinese for selling us their crappy old army surplus vehicles in the first place."

"I'll bear that in mind. How about the victim?"

"No idea where he's from. Blind chap."

"He didn't have his name and address written inside his shirt in case he got lost?"

"In braille? No such luck. But he did have this with him." Siri held up a fawn-colored envelope addressed to "Mr. Bounthan, Vientiane Central Post Office, PO Box 53, Vientiane Prefecture." The stamp had been postmarked twice: once, six days earlier in Pakse--the largest city in the south--and once, the previous day in Vientiane.

"Well, that's good," Phosy said. "We know he has a first name that matches thirty percent of the male population, and no surname."

"Doesn't help much, does it?"

"Let's have a look inside."

Siri slit open the envelope with a scalpel and pulled out a single sheet of paper. It was white, lined, and folded in half. Siri opened it and glared at the paper.

"Now that's odd," he said.

"What does it say?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing at all?"

"Take a look."

Phosy held up the paper by one corner and looked closely at both sides. It was blank.

"What do you make of it?" Siri asked.

"I suppose it makes sense. Him being blind and all."

Siri laughed. "Ah, nice to see crime prevention in such good hands."

"All right. So why would anyone go to the trouble of sending an empty sheet of paper?"

"We have to assume it meant something to the deceased. I don't suppose ...?" He took the paper from Phosy and held it up to his nose. He sniffed lightly and shook his head. Then he took a deeper draft. "Eureka. What does this smell like to you, Inspector?"

Phosy sniffed. "I don't know. Sulphur?"

"Almost right. Copper sulphate to be exact. It's a common pesticide, very effective poison on humans, too. And it has to be damned strong or, given my present condition, I wouldn't be able to smell it at all. So what does that suggest to you, my crime-fighting friend?"

"It was sent by an assassin who hoped the blind man would eat it, thus killing himself without leaving a trace?"

"Phosy, I don't think you're taking this investigation seriously. Take your active imagination on a walk though the field of espionage."

"Siri, I did all my training in the northeast of Laos. I'm a sticky-rice-and-raw-fish policeman. You know that. I've never been inside a crime laboratory in my life. I rely on earthy logic and gut instinct to solve my cases. Don't try to baffle me with exotic scents and all that CIA hocus-pocus."

"Very well. In that case, I suspect what we have here is a message written in invisible ink."

Phosy raised one eyebrow. "And how would an old bush surgeon know a thing like that?"

"Inspector Phosy, allow me to reintroduce you to Inspector Maigret of the Paris Palais de Justice. I became very involved in a number of his cases as they were outlined on the pages of his
L'Oevre
while I was in France. Unlike ourselves, Inspector Maigret has the very good fortune to be fictional, and thus can dispense with such human annoyances as inefficiency and budget restraints. He always gets his man. In one particular case, a junior minister wrote to his mistress on laundry tickets in invisible ink so her husband wouldn't be suspicious. Naturally, the husband found out and dispatched the blackguard, but the point is, Maigret described the constituents of the ink and its reagent in great detail. Being of a scientific bent, I retained that information and carry it to this day in my remarkable mind. If this is indeed a hidden message, all we need is sodium carbonate--common washing soda--to be able to read it."

"I'm impressed. And all this time I thought there was nothing positive to be gained from reading mysteries."

"You'd be surprised."

"Got any?"

"Washing soda? Not on me. But I bet our Mr. Geung has a supply in his broom closet." Siri vanished into the store room and emerged a few seconds later with a large jar. "I'd say this is it."

"And where is Mr. Geung today?"

Siri began diluting the washing soda with water. "Right. You don't know about our recent adventures. We have a lot to catch up on. We almost lost Geung to dengue fever last month."

"Damn. Is he all right?"

"He will be. I admit he's dragging out his convalescence. Pretty nurses waiting on him hand and foot. If I were a cynic, I'd say he's milking it for all the attention he can get. Meanwhile, I'm left doing all the unskilled labor myself, which is exactly when you realize there's nothing unskilled about labor."

He used a fine brush to dab the weak solution onto the note. "Well, what do you know?" The characters on the paper materialized slowly as if they were waking from a long sleep. None were immediately recognizable as words. It was more of a list than a message. Siri knew the individual letters from French but could understand nothing. It was apparent that the note he held was not written in a language he'd ever had cause to learn.

"So, what does it say?" Phosy asked.

"Haven't got a clue."

"Hmm. Remarkable mind."

"What was that?"

"Nothing."

"I'm inclined to believe this is written in code, but I think we should check it with an English speaker just to be sure. What do you say we do a little investigating?"