Love Songs From a Shallow Grave (33 page)

“It’s very masculine.”

“The noise had deafened me and I was in this blissful, pristine silence. Everything seemed so peaceful. I looked up and saw this figure leaning over me. I wondered whether it was one of the angels come to collect me but it was Thursday. He pulled me to my feet and cleaned off my face and half-carried me into the darkness beyond the school. I’m sure there was a lot of wildness going on around us then, guards alerted by the gunshot, people searching, tentative shots into the shadows, I don’t know. But it was all such a dream that I felt I was floating off. And they were all around, the spirits of the dead. There were thousands of them lounging about in the deserted suburbs. Slouching in doorways. Crouching by the roadsides. They watched us pass like crowds along the route of a royal motorcade. It was all quite beautiful, I remember. Moving.”

He seemed to be reliving the moment with a smile on his face.

“How did you get out of the city?” Daeng asked.

“Him. Thursday. He was one of theirs too. A Khmer Rouge. He spoke some Vietnamese. He’d been stabbed in the back in one of their purges. He’d been a colonel in the Region Eight command. He knew the city. Knew which parts were occupied, which were deserted. We stayed the first few nights in his relative’s house. There was nobody there. The whole suburb was uninhabited and untouched. It was bizarre. We stayed long enough for us all to recover from our respective injuries and illnesses. There was canned food. We boiled water. My hearing returned. The child somehow shook off a malarial fever.”

“Who was she, the woman?”

“She was nobody. No threat. No reason to be interrogated at all as far as I could see. Her husband had been a schoolteacher. Chinese descent. She had no more idea of what was going on in that place than anybody. Now, Thursday, he was our saviour. His home town was Siem Reap. He had people there, family. It was perhaps a reflection on the oppressive cloud hanging over us that led him to question whether he could trust them. But we had no choice. That’s where we headed. It’s over two hundred kilometres. It took us a week just to get to the outskirts of Udong. Foraging, stealing food, avoiding soldiers. We slept in the day and travelled at night. To our favour, there was chaos everywhere. Nobody knew who was in charge. None of the soldiers had orders. On the few occasions we were discovered, Thursday sprang into Khmer Rouge colonel mode and talked us through. It worked. Most of the young cadres in the villages were desperate for authority figures. There had been so many purges there weren’t enough chiefs for all the Indians.

“Then, one day, we got lucky. Thursday marched us into a village and took over the place. When a supply truck passed through he talked us on to it. I think if he’d set his mind to it, he could have taken over the country all by himself. When we got to Siem Reap we met up with Thursday’s brother and father. They were commanding officers in charge of large units around Angkor Wat. Thursday told them I’d saved his life and that of the young woman and her child. They were nervous about having me there but they agreed they owed me a debt of gratitude. They had to find a way to smuggle me out of the country. And here, my darling Daeng, we arrive at one of the most peculiar elements to my whole story.”

“It couldn’t get any odder, Siri.”

“Trust me, it did. I learned that there are only two air routes into and out of Cambodia. One is a fortnightly flight from Peking. The other is from Bangkok to Siem Reap.”

“You’re not serious?”

“All this while, all through the slaughter and the genocide, they’ve continued to run tourist flights to visit Angkor Wat. It’s absolutely true. Well-heeled Europeans and Americans pop up to the temple, take a few snaps, buy their souvenirs, eat ice cream and none of them are any the wiser that the population around them is being decimated. “Honey, did you hear that? It sounded like a gun’. ‘Don’t be silly, doll. Probably popcorn.” It’s all part of the KR public relations campaign to make the outside world believe everything’s fine and dandy there. I tell you, Daeng, if I wrote this in a story nobody would believe it, but I saw it with my own eyes. I watched them stroll around the ruins and not thirty kilometres away there were graves with bodies four deep.”

“And how did they get you out?”

Siri sighed.

“They shot a Japanese tourist.”

“Siri!”

“I’m not proud of it, and I was in no position to stop it. They didn’t tell me until it was done. Thursday’s brother was in charge of security around the temple. They found a Japanese tourist on one of the guided trips who looked vaguely like me. He was travelling alone. They separated him from his tour group and put a bullet through his head.”

“How could they?”

“Life has no value to these people. It was like slaughtering a chicken. They handed me his clothes and his passport, decorated me in dark glasses and a hat, and put me on the Thai Airways flight back to Bangkok. It was as simple as that.”

Daeng wiped the tears from Siri’s eyes with her finger then attended to her own.

“They gave me the man’s wallet as well. He had Thai baht. Lots of them. In Bangkok I strolled through immigration. The officer stamped the passport without even bothering to look at me. I found a bus to Nong Kai then travelled out to Si Chiangmai. I sat for a day opposite your shop, Daeng. It seemed so far. It should have been the easy part but I didn’t know how to get across. I talked to fishermen. None of them was game to chance a trip over here. They’d all lost friends to Lao bullets. So I studied the current. I walked three kilometres upstream and selected myself a log and dived in.”

“You poor man. You’ve only had four swimming lessons.”

“That’s true,” he laughed. “But I graduated from the leg-kicking class. I was trusting the log to do the rest. Even so, it’s a lot easier in a pool than at the mercy of her highness, the Mekhong, and this broken hand didn’t help. I almost didn’t make it. I was flying past your shop and I was still three metres from the bank. I made the mistake of leaving my log and attempting to splash my way ashore. I was sure I’d performed all the regulation arm and leg movements but they didn’t appear to stop me sinking below the surface. I kicked like a mule, took in several litres of water and was washed up in front of the Ian Xang Hotel. I walked back here along the bank. I was a little confused by then. I couldn’t remember where I lived until I saw the beach umbrella.”

“I thought you were Rajid.”

“You’d be surprised how much we have in common.”

MY MAMA SOLD THE BUFFALO AND BOUGHT A ROCKET LAUNCHER

T
he second coming of Siri was generally considered a miracle in Vientiane. He was met by smiles wherever he went. In fact, the doctor had returned to a more caring city. His Vientiane had a far greater appeal once it was compared to Phnom Penh. Yes, the regime had been infected with the same corruption as its predecessors. Yes, they incarcerated old royalists and killed the odd dozen here and there with hard labour. Yes, they were driving the Hmong from their homes. Yes, they forced everyone to study Marx and Lenin and no, they didn’t have a crumbling clue how to run a country. But, odd as it seemed, deep down they had respect for their fellow man. It showed itself in peculiar ways, but the Lao – even after being slapped about by this or that oppressor for a century – still held on to their humanity.

Siri had seen the dark side. He’d retrieved his amulet from a headless corpse in a high-school playground and he’d dug the body of a poet from the ground with his bare hands. He’d killed a man who probably didn’t want to be doing what he was doing and the life of an innocent Japanese man had been taken purely for Siri’s own convenience. And now, he’d had enough of death. It was time to step away from the spirits. Dr Siri had submitted his resignation along with his official report every month since the end of 1975. Every month it had been rejected, or, more accurately, ignored. But when he strode into Judge Haeng’s office, slapped his resignation onto the desk and said, “You have three months to find a new coroner or do without one,” nobody had any doubts that he was serious. Siri had earned his retirement. He had survived the killing fields. He was on life’s overtime and nobody had the nerve to begrudge him.

Police work? That was a different matter. That was fun. That wasn’t messing with the dead. It was, in many respects, striving for the rights of the living. They couldn’t keep a good closet detective down. It was a Saturday evening and Siri and Inspector Phosy were seated on a mat at the back of the evening market. Four glasses stood at various angles on the uneven ground in front of them, two were half full. Two Thumbs had obliged them by lowering their umbrella. There were stars in the sky at last and the drinkers wanted to see them. The first rule of cigarette and alcohol stall management was that the customer was always right until they ran out of money.

“It looks like we’re still recognizing the Khmer Rouge,” Phosy said. He hadn’t known whether to broach the subject of Kampuchea but he had questions he wanted answered.

“Their embassy’s still open but I’ve been smelling the odd scent of combustible chemicals from Daeng’s kitchen,” Siri smiled. “So, don’t be surprised if you wake up one morning and there’s a mushroom cloud where their embassy used to be.”

As often occurred in these encounters, Phosy was only half certain that was a joke so he ignored it.

“It’s hard to believe all that horror is going on right next door,” he said. “But you’ve recovered from your ordeal remarkably. I thought you’d be a wreck for months after what you went through.”

Siri smiled and looked around. He
had
recovered quite remarkably. Since that first morning back he’d averaged twenty minutes sleep a night. And those tiny pecks of sleep were crammed so full of the most horrific nightmares he got more rest when he was awake. He hadn’t been able to keep food down so he was on a diet of rice porridge. Anybody passing his bathroom would swear some farm animal was being strangled inside. He still couldn’t write with his right hand and he was deaf in one ear. At the slightest unexpected sound he’d jump a foot in the air and his heart would race for five minutes before it could be stilled. He would put his hand to his face and find tears on his cheeks and, at any time of the day or night, images of the dead Khmer were inside his head. Quite a remarkable recovery.

“There used to be an expression,” he said. “‘There’s always someone worse off than you.’ But when you get to the Khmer, you’re at the end of the line, Phosy. It now reads, ‘There’s always someone worse off than you, unless you’re Cambodian.’ They call the system there Angkar. It’s a political machine that has everyone hypnotised. Mindless. I can’t believe there’s any place worse than Kampuchea, Phosy.”

“How did…? Ah, never mind.”

“Go ahead.”

“How did you occupy your mind through all those hours of being locked up?”

“It’s pretty much the same as enduring political seminars. You’ve been through it. Songs. I sang a lot of Mo Lum country songs to myself and made up a few dozen more in my mind.”

“I’d like to hear them sometime.”

“I doubt that. Unless the title ‘My mama sold the buffalo and bought a rocket launcher’ appeals to you. Then there were word games and mathematics puzzles. Not to mention solving real life mysteries. I have to say there was a long period there when you squatted in my mind, Inspector Phosy.”

“Me?”

“I was very afraid of the outcome.”

“Of the three-épée case?”

“I was afraid you might miss the clues. I underestimated you, and for that I apologise deeply.”

“No need to apologise. You had every right to be afraid. My investigation concluded with half-a-dozen bullet holes in Comrade Neung. End of case. It wasn’t until I started to think like you that I saw things the way they really were.”

“We can’t think the thoughts of others, Phosy.”

“Maybe not. But we can open our minds and let other people’s thoughts in.”

“I’m sure Comrade Neung will be eternally grateful you did. Tell me, at what point did you work it all out?”

“When I read the diary. There were a lot of thoughts at the back of my mind. I’d wondered about the monogram. They’d called Neung Zorro over there. It was a sort of playful joke. But Neung was embarrassed by it. He certainly didn’t give me the impression he was so proud of it he’d use it as his signature. He didn’t tell anyone when he came back. Not even his father. So I wondered who’d know about it. It had to be someone he met in Germany.”

“So, by this stage you’d dismissed Neung as a suspect?”

“Not out with the garbage exactly but certainly not at the front of the queue.”

“But it was while you were reading the diary that it came to you?”

“As clear as day. The whole tone of her writing felt wrong. I mean, she was a dull, average-looking, short woman on the heavy side. And she’s writing about a jock, a good-looking jock who’s after her. Basically, a nice guy. I mean, she should be so lucky.”

“There are those who might accuse you of sexism with such a view, Phosy.”

“Stuff them. Human nature is human nature and I didn’t see anything about Jim that would make a man leave his senses. She wasn’t exactly the fascinating type. She didn’t seem to have an enchanting personality. And he was a fencing champion. If he’d been that way inclined he wouldn’t have gone after a girl from his home town. I’m sure he could have had all the hanky-panky he could find time for. And there was something eerie about her diary.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I only got the translation, but it was like reading fiction, Siri. According to what she wrote she’d just been raped and she was using all this flowery language and smelling his sweat on her skin. I’ve never met an abused woman who’d rush off to write about it in her diary without taking a shower and a few days to recover. And she’s calling him the devil taking her soul and, I don’t know, it was just too much. And I started to wonder who was stalking who.”

“Bravo.”

“She’d known him since K6. She was a kid following around this good-looking smart older boy. Budding crush material. She knew what he liked to do. Where he went to school. Knew about his dad teaching him fencing. And he goes to study and she goes off to work at the clinic up north. And she’s good. Smart as shit. Everyone knows she’ll make a hell of a doctor. But the Americans flee the scene and Jim has the option to move to America. They offer her a scholarship. But she stays on at the clinic. Why would she want to do that? Love for the nation? Or love for something else?