Thirty-Three Teeth

Vientiane, People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, March 1977

The neon hammer and sickle buzzed and flickered into life over the night club of the Lan Xang Hotel. The sun had plummeted mauvely into Thailand across the Mekhong River, and the hotel waitresses were lighting the little lamps that turned the simple sky-blue room into a mysterious nighttime cavern.

In an hour, a large Vietnamese delegation would be offered diversion there by members of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party Politburo. They’d be made to watch poor country boys in fur hats do a Lao falling-over version of cossack dancing. They’d be forced to suck semi-fermented rice whiskey from large tubs through long straws until they were dizzy. They’d finally be coerced into embarrassing dances with solid girls in ankle-length skirts and crusty makeup.

And, assuming they survived these delights, they’d be allowed to return to their rooms to sleep. Next day, with heads heavy as pressed rubber, they’d sign their names to documents laying the foundations for the forthcoming Lao/Vietnam Treaty of Friendship, and they probably wouldn’t remember very much about it.

But that was all to come. The understaffed hotel day shift had been replaced by an understaffed night crew. The sweating receptionist was ironing a shirt in the glass office behind her desk. The chambermaid was running a bowl of rice porridge up to a sick guest on the third floor.

Outside, an old guard, in a jacket so large it reached his knees, was locking the back gate that opened onto Sethathirat Road. At night, the gate kept out dogs and the occasional traveler tempted to come into the garden in search of respite from the cruel hot-season nights. An eight-foot wall protected the place as if it were something more special than it was.

Leaves floated in a greasy swimming pool. Obedient flowers stood in well-spaced regiments, better watered than any of the households outside along the street. And then there were the cages. They were solid concrete, so squat that a tall man would have to stoop to see inside. Two were empty. They housed only the spirits of animals temporarily imprisoned there: a monkey replaced by a deer, a peacock taking over the sentence of a wild dog.

But in the grim shadows of the third cage, something wheezed. It moved seldom, only to scratch lethargically at its dry skin. The unchristened black mountain bear was hosed down along with the bougainvilleas and given scraps from the kitchen from time to time. Its fur was patchy and dull, like a carpet in a well-trodden passage. Buddha only knew how the creature had survived for so long in its cramped jail, and the Lord had been banished from the socialist republic some fifteen months hence.

People came in the early evening and at weekends to stand in front of the cage and stare at her. She stared back, although her glazed bloodshot eyes could no longer make out details of the mocking faces. Children laughed and pointed. Brave fathers poked sticks in through the bars, but the black mountain bear no longer appeared to give a damn.

They naturally blamed the old guard the next day. “Too much rice whiskey,” they said. “Slack,” they said. The guard denied it, of course. He swore he’d relocked the cage door. He’d thrown the leftovers from the Vietnamese banquet into the animal’s bowl and locked the cage. He was sure of it. He swore the beast was still in there when he did his rounds at four. He swore he had no idea how it could have gotten out, or where it could have gone. But they sacked him anyway.

After a panicked search of the grounds and the hotel buildings, the manager declared to his staff that the place was safe and it was a problem now for the police. In fact, he didn’t think it would be wise to mention the escape to his guests at all. As far as he was concerned, the problem was over.

But for Vientiane, it had barely started.

Tomb Sweet Tomb

The sun baked everything in the new suburb. Comrade Civilai stepped from the hot black limousine and, without locking the doors, walked up to the concrete mausoleum where they’d put Dr. Siri. The gate and the front door were open, and he could see clear through to the small yard at the back. There was no furniture to interrupt the view.

He kicked off his Sunday sandals and walked into the front room. It was as if the builders and decorators had just left. The walls were still virgin Wattay light-blue, to match the swimming-pool-colored Wattay airport. They were unencumbered by pictures or posters or photographs of heroes of the revolution. No French plaster ducks flew in formation. No clock ticked. If he didn’t know Siri had lived here for a month, he would have guessed this to be a vacant house.

On his way to the back, he passed a small room where piles of clothes told him he was nearing a primitive life form. In the back yard, he discovered it. Dr. Siri Paiboun, reluctant national coroner, confused psychic, disheartened communist, swung gently on a hammock strung between two jackfruit saplings. A larger man would have brought them both down.

In his shadow, Saloop, rescued street dog and lifesaver, drooled onto the hot earth. He looked up with one eye, decided Civilai was too old and bald to be a threat, and returned to his dream.

A month earlier, the yard had been dirt and debris. Today it was a jungle. Siri had gone to great pains to recreate the environment in which he’d spent the latter forty of his seventy-two years. For the past four weekends, he and his trusted morgue colleagues had set off into the outer suburbs and denuded them unashamedly. They’d transported a variety of trees and shrubs back to this humble bunker-the Party’s thanks for his services.

“I do hope I’m not disturbing you,” Civilai said, knowing full well how disturbing he was being. Siri’s eerie green eyes opened slowly to see his best friend leaning over him.

“Ah, boy. Just put the iced lime juice on the table there and get back to the servants’ quarters post-haste.”

Civilai was two days older than the doctor. Both born in the year of the rabbit, they showed its characteristic industry and guile. Yet neither had exhibited its lustiness: they’d married their first loves and been totally faithful. They were of a rare breed of rabbit in Laos.

“So, this is how the bourgeois medical profession spends its Sundays. Shouldn’t you be out digging ditches for the republic?” He sat back on the wooden cot on the small veranda.

“I’m a frail old man, brother. A day of physical labor could very well put me on the slab. I doubt I have a month left to live as it is. That’s why your politburo buddies should be searching high and low for a coroner to replace me now.”

There was nothing frail about Dr. Siri. He was so far from the black archers of death, he wouldn’t be hearing their arrows thumping into the dry earth for many years to come. His short, solid body still scurried hither and thither like a curious river rat. Younger men were hard-pressed to keep his pace.

His mind, resplendent with its newly honed skills, had become even keener of late. He’d always been a logical man; but in the last five months, he’d acquired the type of knowledge that isn’t given out in universities. For reasons he was still trying to fathom, he’d been delegated Laos’s honorary consul to the spirit world.

This new posting proved ideally suited to his job as the head and only coroner of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. He still hadn’t been able to control the visits from his spirit clients or find a way to ask specific questions of them, but they came to him regularly with clues. What he lacked in experience (he’d only been a coroner for a year), he could often make up for by communing with the dead. His three-dimensional mind had acquired a fourth dimension.

“You know we could never replace you, Little Brother. You’re a legend,” Civilai replied.

“A legend?” Siri slid up the hammock to a sitting position. “Isn’t a legend something that’s long-winded and not widely believed?”

“You’ve got it.”

“Hot, isn’t it?”

“Damned hot.”

This was the hot-season anthem that could be heard ad infinitum around the capital. It had been a particularly hot year so far, so it got even more repetition than usual.

For the first time, Siri noticed the cloth bag that Civilai held on his lap. “You bring me something?”

“Nothing you’d be interested in.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

“The Soviets have been courting us. They want permission to build a satellite dish to spy on the Yanks. While we think about it, they pepper us with these little incentives.” He teased the cap of a bottle from his bag.

“Vodka?”

“Moskovskaya; best you can get. But I don’t suppose you’re thirsty.”

Siri was off the hammock and rattling around in the kitchen for a second glass before the word thirsty had left Civilai’s lips.

The late morning had become late afternoon.

“I don’t know how the Russians can strink-this-duff.” Civilai’s slurring turned the comment into one long word.

“Me, too. No wonder the women are hairier than the women.”

“Men.”

“Where?”

So had the conversation deteriorated. There were two modest glassfuls left in the bottom of the bottle. The friends sat side by side on the long, uncomfortable wooden cot. The garden wasn’t moving at all, but they swayed like survivors in a lifeboat. Civilai looked up at a rolled mosquito net tied above their heads.

“You sleep out here, Li’l Brother?”

Siri shook his head from side to side. “Yes.”

“What’s the point of having a house?”

“That’s it. That’s the very something I asked Judge Haeng. But he wouldn’t let me have the garden without it. He said-Siri put on the whiny high-pitched accent of his young superior- ‘We are senior members of the party, Comrade Siri. As such, we have to lead by example. Sleeping in trees should remain the exclusive domain of the primates.’ I was surprised he knew what a primate was.”

“What have you got against houses?”

“Houses I have not a nothing against. But this isn’t a house. A house is an airy wooden thing on slits that-”

“Stilts.”

“I said that. On slits, that creaks when you walk around. It sways in heavy winds and leaks in the rainy season. This? This is a sarcahoph… a… a saroph… sarpho… sarcophagus.”

“Well said.”

“What is this regime’s fixation on concrete?”

“Sustainability. This house will still be here in a thousand years, after ten generations of your wooden houses have fallen down. Remember the three little pigs.”

“That’s it. It’s a sty.”

“It’s not.”

“Then it’s a tomb. I feel entombed. It’s so morbid in there.” “How can you, of all people, complain about morbidity?”

“I’m a coroner. Not a corpse.”

Civilai laughed and leaned back against the wall. “How are your ghostly friends, by the way?”

Siri looked at him to see whether he was about to make fun of his spiritual connections-as he always did.

“There hasn’t been a lot of activity since the floating Vietnamese last November. But then again, we haven’t had too many mysteries lately.”

“They only come out in times of confusion?”

“No. They’re around all the time. They all make an appearance, but they don’t ne-cessessarily do anything. I get an old lady sitting opposite me in the office late-he hiccupped- excuse me, at night. She just sits there. I keep waiting for her to do something, flash me a tit or some such, but she just sits, chewing betel, staring at me.”

“You know, Siri, sometimes you scare the daylights out of me.” Civilai leaned over and poured the remains of the Soviet bribe into their chipped glasses. “We should finish this up before it eats through the bottom of the bottle.”

“A toast to the illustrious Union of Sovalist Republicists.”

“I don’t think you need any more.”

They quaffed the dregs and Siri got unsteadily to his feet. “Thank God that’s over. Now we can have some deluscious coffee.”

The late afternoon was becoming evening.

The shadows from the instant jungle had fallen across the two pickled patriots and were climbing the concrete wall behind them. The chewy coffee was shocking them out of their Sunday stupors. Civilai made one last attempt to encourage his friend to feel at home.

“I think this place is quite charming.”

“Then I’ll move in with your wife and you can live here.”

“Let me think about that.”

“It was supposed to be a reward, but it’s more like punishment, Older Brother. I’ve got busybody Miss Vong on one side of me and some corrupt local official from Oudom Xay on the other.”

“Surely you could shout that a little bit louder.”

Siri ignored him. “I’ve got a goddamned loudspeaker blaring out diatribes against the non-communist world right there at the corner of the street from five A. goddamnedM. I couldn’t be any more unhappy.”

“All you need here is a good woman to turn it into a home. I don’t suppose you’ve-”

“Don’t.”

“I was only wondering if you’d-”

“Don’t.”

– ”contacted her. That’s all.”

“No. And I won’t. Don’t ask again.”

“Seems silly to me.”

Siri sulked for a moment or two. There had only been one woman, one date, since Boua had died. It was a disaster of a date. Siri knew Lah was a woman he could love. The feeling was returned. Auntie Lah had custom-made baguettes for him at her cart opposite Mahosot Hospital from the first week he arrived there. They joked, they flirted, and she made no secret of the fact she liked him.

Once Boua, his only love, his long-departed wife, had given her postmortem permission, he went at that new romance like a teenager. On the night of the fateful date when he first saw Lah waiting there, glamorous and preening like a Likay queen, the butterflies in his belly had almost lifted him from the seat of his motorbike.

She ran over on her unfamiliar heels and sniffed the air at his cheek. He felt the brush of her lips, and parts of him that had been in hibernation for many years began to stir. It was all marvelously portentous. He was at the precipice overlooking what he knew could be a wonderful final cycle to his life.

He was about to leap when she handed him the gift. It was beautifully wrapped and expensively heavy. She said it was something she’d found at the morning market. She said it was as if it had spoken to her. She believed it could stymie his run of bad luck. He opened the box, and all his hope caved in like some badly built temple stupa.

In the cardboard coffin lay a black amulet eroded by decades of hopeful fingers. It was attached to a fraying leather thong. Siri knew it well.

Lah smiled, expecting a smile in return from her dashing beau. But, instead, the expression on his face frightened her. His unkempt white eyebrows gathered at the center of a furrowed brow. He shook his head slowly and asked “How could you do this?”

“Wha-?”

Siri had sped off on his motorcycle clutching the amulet in his left hand, without saying another word. She watched him go with her cherry-red bottom lip hanging open. Of course she had no idea what she’d done. She thought she was showing him a kindness. She thought she was giving him a token of her affection. But it had turned out to be doom. She never saw him again and never understood why.

Siri had ridden to the Mekhong at its deepest point and hurled the amulet far out into the murky brown water. There were no coincidences any more in his life. That, he knew. Everything was inked on some sacred parchment. Malevolent spirits were in pursuit of him. The previous year at an exorcism in Khamuan, he’d been given this very amulet, an antique black stone, to ward off the evil spirits of the forest; the Phibob. But it had turned out to be a trick. The stone was actually a spiritual lintel that opened a gateway from their world to his. He’d been lucky to survive their attack. Now they wanted revenge on him. Lah had been selected to deliver this omen, and she was in danger as a result. It was clear that she could never be a part of his life. No matter how strongly he felt attracted to her, it was impossible.

Of course, Civilai said that was all a pile of buffalo dung. He said when the chance of a little over-seventy nooky presented itself, one shouldn’t read too much into coincidence. “At our age, my little brother, these opportunities don’t come along every day.”

“It wasn’t a coincidence. I sent those spirits packing, and in so doing I saved the soldiers that were cutting down their trees. They weren’t happy about that. But I tell you, that stone had been destroyed.”

“Did you see that happen with your own eyes?”

“Yes. Well, not with my own eyes. But I saw the dust before the Hmong took it out to the forest.”

“Then you can’t be sure it came from the stone. Mystery one solved.”

“So how did it get here, to Vientiane? How did it get to the market? And of all the people who could have bought it, why Lah?”

“I’m an elder statesman with a not-inconsequential intellect. I can solve many of the conundrums that arise from the day-to-day running of a little country in the southeast of Asia. But I have a one-mystery-a-day quota,” Civilai said. “Release me now. I have to get home to my dear wife. Remind me where my car is.”

“You think you should drive?”

“Certainly. What is there to hit?”

Siri nodded and escorted him to the door. Civilai was right. On a Sunday afternoon in March, Vientiane had the atmosphere of a town in the talons of a deadly plague. A motorcyclist might brave the late-afternoon heat. A dog might lie on the concrete paving stones to burn off the fleas. But most folks were at home, waiting for the sun to go down.

At dusk, the girls would two-up on bicycles and ride slowly along Fangoum Road, catching some small breeze from the river and advertising their availability to boys two-upping in the opposite direction. They would still be mopping their sweating brows with their mothers’ large pink handkerchiefs until long after nightfall. Farewell the Diarrhetic

Old Auntie See lived in a shed behind a peeling white French colonial mansion that now housed five families. For a living, she bought fruit at the morning market, cut it into colorful slices, and sold it from a card table beside her back gate.

Business was never too brisk, since money for luxuries had become scarcer. As a result, her main diet was overly ripe fruit, which saw her spending much of her nights in the tin latrine behind the shed.

On that particular Sunday night, whilst engaged in her dribbly business, she thought she heard a growl. There were footsteps through the undergrowth of her uncared-for garden. They were too heavy to be those of a dog, but somehow too zigzag and rambling to be those of a person. She called out anyway: “Can’t a woman have a shit in peace any more?”

There was no answer. The noises stopped. And after a few more minutes she forgot all about them. Diarrhea, in its most vindictive state, can erase even thoughts of terror.

Some twenty minutes later, she groaned and rearranged her long cotton phasin around her waist. She stepped through the corrugated tin door, and before she could stoop to wash her hands in the paint can basin, that thing was on her. She had no time to scream-to run-or even to turn her head to see what was biting into the back of her neck. With one swipe of its powerful arm, she was dead. Two Dead Men on a Bicycle

Siri arrived at the hospital on Monday morning with a vodka hammer beating and a vodka sickle scything through his head. He guessed he couldn’t have a worse hangover if he’d drunk the formaline straight from the sample bottles. Every step from the motorcycle park to the morgue jarred new agony into his brain. There was no question in his mind that the Soviet Union was doomed.

He walked beneath the French morgue sign, carefully wiped his feet on the American welcome mat, and stepped inside the cool dark single-story building. He immediately sensed one or two presences, but was far too vodka’d to acknowledge them. They could wait.

He walked into his office, whose blue walls had been thoroughly whitewashed again and again until they were gray. Anything that wasn’t blue suited Siri just fine. Nurse Dtui was sitting at her desk.

“Morning, Comrade Siri,” she said, flashing her small, neat teeth but not stirring her large, untidy body.

“Good morning, Dtui.”

Those first words of the day came out like a gravel driveway.

“Oh-ho. Have a bit of a session last night, did we?”

“A cultural experiment.”

He flopped into his chair, and his head turned to percussion. He buried it in his hands.

“Looks like the experiment failed.”

“No, my faithful assistant. Never assume that negative experiences teach you less than positive ones. I have it filed away that in the future, no matter how free, no matter how fascinating the squiggles on the bottle, I shall avoid Russian vodka as if it were a musthy elephant.”

Dtui stood. Her uniform was bleached white and stretched across her large frame like butcher’s paper around a hock of pork.

“What you need is some of my ma’s herbal brew.”

“Oh, no. Don’t say it. Haven’t I suffered enough?”

“Don’t go away.”

She headed for the door.

“Where’s our other soldier?”

“He’s in the examination room getting the new guests ready.” She stopped in the doorway. “You’ll like this one: two men dead on a bicycle in the middle of the street. No spare seat or luggage rack. They were going around Nam Poo fountain in the middle of town. Nothing there could have been going fast enough to hit them. They were found on top of the bike. No blood. This looks like a job for… dah-dah-da-dah.”

“Dtui?”

“… Super Spirit Doc.”

She giggled and walked out of the office. Siri groaned. The last thing he wanted on that particular morning was to cut anyone up. He especially didn’t want anything inexplicable to trouble his hurting head.

Dtui was fumbling in the back of the freezer for the corked bottle that held her mother’s secret brew. Although there was a hospital ban on using the morgue freezers for personal perishables, her ma’s brew looked enough like body waste to fool the most pedantic inspector. It was an evil Macbethian mix of bizarre ingredients that tasted horrible but cured just about anything.

“Wha… wha… what’s that for, Dtui?” Mr. Geung was laying out the second cyclist on the spare aluminum table. Geung was a good-looking man in his forties with pronounced Down-Syndrome features and jet-black hair greased on either side of a crooked center parting. When he asked a question, he had the habit of rocking slightly where he stood. Judge Haeng at the Department of Justice, which oversaw the work of Siri and his team, was lobbying for the removal of the “moron,” but Geung’s condition was neither serious nor disruptive to his work. Although he often became anxious about anomalies outside the regimented pattern of his days, he was a morgue assistant par excellence. He’d been trained with infinite patience by Siri’s predecessor and knew the procedures better than Dtui or Siri himself. He was strong and reliable, and he wielded a mean hacksaw.

“The boss has got himself a hangover,” Dtui said.

Geung snorted a laugh. “Al… alcohol is the elixir of the d… devil.”

“Was that another one of your father’s wisdoms?”

“No. Comrade Dr. Siri… ss… said it when we cut open the drunk fellow on January first.”

That was one other thing. You didn’t want to say anything you’d live to regret when Mr. Geung was around. He didn’t forget much.

The autopsy followed the standard pattern they’d settled into. Siri was beginning to sit back and let Dtui give the commentary while he took notes. She was learning the trade and hoped to be sent to the Eastern Bloc on a scholarship. Her eyes were keen, and she often noticed things that Siri had missed. The only setback to this new system was that nobody could read Siri’s notes afterward. Not even Siri.

As the two bodies in the morgue hadn’t been reported as missing, they would temporarily be known as Man A and Man B.

They were an ill-matched pair. Man A was neatly dressed in a white shirt. He had on an old but quite costly wristwatch, wore permanent-press slacks, and had soft, uncallused hands which suggested he wasn’t used to manual labor. But, as Siri and Dtui both noticed, the most remarkable thing about him was that he was wearing socks. The March temperatures were already hitting 107 degrees. Even in those few offices where ancient French air conditioners waged battle with the heat, the best they could ever achieve was “tepid.” It was never so cold you’d need to wear socks.

No, these socks suggested that the poor man had no choice. Since he had become coroner, Siri had been under pressure to wear the black vinyl shoes provided by the Party. It was an example of what he termed the new “shoe over substance” policy. So far, he’d been able to use his seniority and his stubborn streak to remain in his brown leather sandals. But he knew that if he were finally compressed into those toe-torturers, he certainly would have to wear socks also.

Dtui spoke his thought. “I’d say he’s government.”

“The socks?”

“The fingers.”

She was constantly surprising him. Siri went over and held up Mr. A’s hand. All the fingertips were purple: triplicate syndrome.

It was Civilai who’d coined the phrase to describe the peculiar mauve “bruising” so common in socialist bureaucracies. They were bogged down in paperwork, as there had to be copies for every department. This called into play that miracle of modern office timesaving: carbon paper.

Like its shoes and its hair dye, Laos got its carbon paper from China. So most officials that used it found more ink on themselves than on the paper. Mr. A had thumbed his share of carbon sheets.

They stripped him, bagged and labeled his clothes, and took their allotted four color photographs of his outside. Siri noted that no shoes had arrived with the body. There was a thin trail of congealed blood at the corner of the mouth and severe bruising to the chest and abdomen.

Before beginning an internal examination, Siri decided to prepare Mr. B for the chop also. This would ultimately save time and allow them to make comparisons of their respective injuries. Siri ignored Dtui’s comment that “This is how they do it at the abattoir,” and asked her to voice her observations about Mr. B.

She noted that he was certainly from a different end of town than Mr. A. His clothes were threadbare and quite dirty. His hands were rough and covered in scabs of short nicks as if he’d been cut often.

“So, the question remains,” Siri pondered, almost to himself, “… what were two men from very different backgrounds doing sharing a bicycle at two in the morning?”

“Perhaps,” Dtui suggested, “this one was the chauffeur and he was taking his master home.”

Geung let out one of his farmyard laughs.

“Or perhaps they weren’t on the bicycle at all.” Siri glared. “I’m starting to think the fact they were found with the bike was a coincidence.”

“So, how did they get there?”

“Oh, I don’t know everything, Miss Dtui. Perhaps the old chap ran into the government fellow when he was crossing the road.”

“Yeah? And how fast would he have been pedaling to kill the pair of them?”

“Or, alternatively, the government fellow was riding a motorbike and hit the old boy.”

“And…?”

“And someone ran off with the motorbike.”

“I suppose I could buy that one.”

“Did the police bring in the bicycle, Mr. Geung?”

“It’s round the b… round the b… the back.”

“Good. We can take a look at it later.”

They stripped Mr. B. Apart from his obviously broken neck and the massive bruising associated with vertebral artery trauma, there were no recent abrasions or visible marks on him. They finished up the film and laid him out. There the two corpses reclined on either side of the room, like temple step ornaments.

The dual autopsy took exactly two hours. Mr. A had hemorrhaging around the chest cavity and livor mortis around the main artery common in victims of high-speed collisions, so the motorcycle theory still held. Some trauma had also been sufficiently violent to rupture his testicles. From these initial examinations, Siri surmised that the broken neck had killed Mr. B, and the internal bleeding Mr. A. But there were other tests to do.

Mr. Geung cut through the tough crania with his old hacksaw, and Siri tied cotton around the brains in order to suspend them in Formalin for two or three days until they were set firm enough to cut into.

Dtui took samples of the stomach contents and blood. As they had no lab, there were only limited secrets these could disclose. The next day, Siri would take a ride over to the Lycйe Vientiane, where he would coerce Teacher Oum into using the last of her science lab chemicals on color tests.

Somewhere out at the customs shed, a crate of school chemicals, kindly donated by the high-school cooperative in Vladivostok, had sat for three months collecting paperwork. Even being the national coroner didn’t carry any weight in pushing that old bureaucratic bus up the hill to socialist nirvana.

Dtui, Geung, and Siri sat on their haunches around the bicycle. The rusty thing that had survived many battles would never be ridden again.

“Now, what do you suppose could cause something like this?” Siri asked of no one in particular. The frame supporting the chain was buckled and almost touching the ground. The handlebars leaned back, the seat forward.

“It looks like I sat on it,” Dtui said, causing a laughing fit in Mr. Geung that took a good deal of back-slapping to arrest.

“No,” Siri said at last. “It would take half a dozen Dtuis to do this. But I think I know what could. What side of the fountain were they found on?”

“Ministry side.”

“I think we’d better go and take a look, don’t you?”

“Is your head up to it?”

“Ah, Dtui. There’s nothing like the dissection of corpses and a dollop of your ma’s brew to cure a hangover.”

The Ministry of Sport, Information and Culture currently and unofficially occupied a seven-story building that overlooked the non-spouting fountain at Nam Poo Square. Given the shape of things in Laos, the square was, naturally, a circle. It was surrounded by quaint and largely neglected two-storied buildings that wouldn’t have felt out of place in a small southern French village. It was a sleepy square where old ladies dried white spring-roll wrappings on mesh tables and crazy Rajid the Indian walked slow laps around the dull concrete fountain.

Although the Lao weren’t yet conceited enough to refer to most of their government departments as anything more grand, Vientiane people had begun to call the incongruous building that housed the sports department “The Ministry.” It was probably the size of the place, rather than its grandeur, that impressed them. The old French Cultural Center had all the architectural class of a two-star hotel in a seaside resort. The Sport, Information and Culture people rattled around inside its large rooms like a destitute woman’s beads in a once-full jewelry box.

Mr. Geung had stayed back at the morgue to keep an eye on the guests. Dtui, on her first investigative mission away from the hospital, stood in the middle of the road beside the angels chalked there on the asphalt. Siri was twelve meters away, with his back against the wall of The Ministry. He painted an imaginary arc with his eyebrows from the point where Dtui stood up to the top ledge of the building above him. He shook his head and walked over to the nurse.

“No good?” She asked.

“Well, it isn’t impossible, but… I don’t know. He either took one almighty running jump, or he was tossed. And if someone had thrown him, we would have found marks on his arms or legs. But we didn’t.”

“You don’t think he might have-”

A Vespa scooter came putt-ing around the fountain, causing Siri to leap from its path into the unsuspecting arms of Dtui.

“Dr. Siri. You romantic old thing, you.”

Embarrassed, he untangled himself from her embrace. The scooter stopped a few meters further on, and the rider, a trim attractive man in his forties, looked back and laughed. Inspector Phosy got down, hoisted the silly vehicle onto its stand, and hurried back with a handshake at the ready. Siri grabbed the hand, and the two men patted each other’s backs as they embraced.

“Hot, isn’t it?”

“Damned hot.”

“How’s my favorite policeman?”

“Dr. Siri. I thought you were dead.”

“Don’t you be so sure I’m not.” They broke apart, and Siri looked along the street. “That’s a very impressive cop bike you have. Lilac’s the crime-suppression color of the year, I hear.”

“Be kind, Comrade. These are hard times. We have to take what we can get.” He looked over Siri’s shoulder. “Good health, Dtui. You haven’t lost any weight.”

“And you’re no better looking.”

She shook his hand warmly.

“So,” Siri asked. “How did you get this case?”

“They put me on anything with the word ‘government’ attached to it. As soon as Dtui called and suggested the victim could be a government official, they took me out of the cupboard. How hard do you think this is going to be? Was it a suicide?”

“I don’t know. It’s odd. Unless he was trying to fly, I don’t see why he wouldn’t just drop from the roof. He’d be just as dead without trying to reach the fountain.”

“All right, then. Let’s see if we can get any information from the information department.”

They walked together through the elegant wooden doors and found themselves in a foyer containing nothing but a table. On the table was a small, hand-written sign that said all inquiries upstairs.

Their footsteps echoed up the teak staircase. They noted how stuffy the place felt. Despite the heat, most of the windows hadn’t been opened since the Americans left. (French culture had briefly been supplanted there by American language classes before the building’s current manifestation.) The only culture not in evidence was Lao. Or perhaps it was.

On the second floor, they passed two rooms empty of furniture and life. The third door was slightly ajar, and through the gap they could see two metal cabinets, an uneven shelf with all its books resting at the low end, and a desk with a man on it.

He slept in his undershirt with a blissful expression on his young face. His ironed white shirt made a scarecrow over his chair. Although it was twenty minutes past one, and officially office hours, Phosy knocked politely and said “I’m sorry.”

As the man didn’t stir, he was about to knock a second time when Siri pushed past him into the room. The doctor was a remarkably patient man, but he had no time for incompetence in the government sector. He and Boua had fought for most of their lives to end corrupt systems and he had no intention of being part of one. In his most officious voice, he belted out: “Good God, man! What do you think you’re doing? This is a government department, not a rest home. What if there was some sporting emergency or something?”

Phosy and Dtui raised their eyebrows at each other.

The man came out of his dream flailing, sending a stand of nicely sharpened pencils on a flight across the room. He leaped from the desktop and into his shoes. The visitors watched as he ran around the desk, gathered his shirt, and put it on. He was a plain-looking man with a naturally confused expression. He sat on the chair, fastened his shirt buttons, and, as if they hadn’t witnessed the entire resurrection, asked his visitors, “May I help you?”

Phosy, smiling, handed him a mimeographed sheet with his photograph stapled to a top corner. This was his id. The man scrutinized it with great care.

“Police?” he concluded.

“Very good. There was a death in front of The Ministry last night. Maybe early this morning. Are you missing anyone?”

“Now, that’s hard to say.”

“Why?”

“We’re missing people all the time. Staff off in other provinces. People off sick. We haven’t seen the head or deputy head for over a week.”

“Isn’t there some schedule? Some way to check who is supposed to be where?”

“Hmm. No.”

“Where’s the office that arranges all the trips?”

“Oh, right. That would be me.”

“And you don’t keep some kind of list?”

“It’s a good idea, but nobody’s ever asked before. You’d have to go from room to room and see who’s missing.”

So that’s what they did. Siri was impressed that the department of information could provide so little of it. The search began on the second floor and worked its way up. The young man took them to rooms and introduced them to barely-stressed secretaries and average men whose jobs appeared to be to read newspapers, magazines, and novels.

Siri described the dead man at each office in turn, but soon realized that he could be talking about half the men who worked there. They all wore stay-press trousers and vinyl shoes, and were at varying stages of triplicate syndrome.

The administration rooms on the fifth floor were mostly empty, and the door leading to the top two floors was apparently locked. While the staff ran around looking for a key to open it, ever-resourceful Dtui noticed that there was already a key in the lock from the other side. They knocked and shouted for someone to come down and let them up, but when their banging was met by stony silence the worst was assumed.

“Who works up there?” Siri asked.

“Archives,” said the young man. “It’s like our history department. You know? Preservation and the like.”

Siri wondered to himself how much priority the regime was placing on safeguarding the country’s heritage, given that there weren’t even funds available to station guards at the cultural sites. Anyone who fancied a coffee-table bust of the Buddha could just go and help himself.

After no more than two minutes on her knees, with the deft use of her watch pin and the careful placement of a newspaper beneath the door, Dtui was able to remove and retrieve the key on the other side of the door. Phosy looked on in admiration.

“You know? There are one or two unsolved burglary cases from the old regime…”

“Couldn’t have been me, Officer. I wore gloves. Oops.”

They reinserted the key and opened the door, and Phosy led the way up the staircase to the sixth and seventh floors, which were little more than a few rooms attached to the roof.

Siri sensed some unsettled force as he followed the others. He didn’t feel confident enough of his instincts to warn anyone to be careful.

The main archive department was one large room on the seventh floor. It was in a terrible state. Pots were shattered and spread across the floor. Maps and stone rubbing sheets had been ripped from the walls. Beyond the mess, two things caught Phosy’s eye. The large glass French windows were open, the glass smashed and the catch broken. Beyond them was a trajectory that would have taken a potential jumper swiftly to the chalk angel marks on the road beside the fountain. But he’d have had to take a run at it.

He also took note of the parallel shoes on the floor beside the overturned desk. With all the broken crockery around, it was unlikely the man would have taken them off before the jump. So the chaos had apparently not yet occurred. Phosy stuck his head out the window and looked either side. There was no way an assailant could have left the room via the window and escaped without a parachute. He turned back to see the others starting to clean up the mess.

“All right. Nobody touches anything till my people have had a chance to look around. Now, Mr… what’s your name?”

“Santhi.”

“Mr. Santhi. Who works in this office?”

“Mrs. Bounhieng. She’s off having another baby. And Mr. Chansri. He’s the director of the archives. And Mr. Khampet.”

“And do either of those two gentlemen fit the description of the chap in the morgue?”

“Oh. Mr. Khampet. Definitely. Mr. Chansri’s an older gentleman, and a little overweight.”

“And where might we find the director of the archives?” Santhi shifted uneasily and looked at the ground. “Did you hear the question?”

“Yes.” “Well?”

“He could be at Tong Kankum market.”

“I take it he isn’t on ministry business.”

“He sells fish.”

“Right.”

“I probably shouldn’t have told you. But you understand. We don’t get paid a lot here, so some of us supplement…”

“Mr. Santhi. I’m not a government inspector.” Phosy looked across to see Siri on his haunches looking beneath the heavy wooden workbench. “What’s that?”

“You see this?”

The detective walked across and looked under the bench.

“An old chest.”

“No. It’s a lot more than an old chest. Look. It has the royal seal.”

Embossed onto a solid teak box, an improbable three-headed elephant stood on a podium like some circus freak at the That Luang Festival. It sheltered beneath a multi-tiered umbrella. Only time had removed its glitter. Siri lowered his voice. “The chest has a lot of energy, too. Whatever’s in there is giving off a lot of aggression.”

“Siri, you aren’t having one of your supernatural moments?”

Very few people knew of the extent of Siri’s mystic connections. In fact, only Civilai, Dtui, and Geung, in his own way, knew just how weird the doctor was. Siri had only recently become aware of his gifts himself. On the same visit to his birthplace in Khamuan when the Phibob had been roused, he’d been informed of something remarkable. In truth, he still didn’t believe all the things he’d heard. According to the elders of one small village, Siri was the re-embodiment of Yeh Ming, a powerful Hmong shaman who had lived over a thousand years ago. Since the discovery, Siri had become aware of amazing powers that lurked somewhere deep inside him. As yet, he was unsure of how to use them, and in many ways they frightened the daylights out of him. He’d never directly informed Phosy of his unbidden gifts, but the policeman’s instincts told him all he needed to know.

Siri reached out his hand toward the chest, and then withdrew it suddenly as if a shock had warned him off.

“I’d tell your people to be very careful of this, if I were you. Very careful.”

Siri’s dream that night didn’t answer any questions for him. Mr. A, now positively identified as Khampet, was floating slowly down through the air toward Nam Poo fountain. He floated like a hawk but had a look of horror on his face. The ends of long staves of wood were nailed to his hands and feet. Another entered the back of his neck and appeared to go up into his head. But these didn’t seem to worry him. He was more concerned about what was behind him, and whatever that was, it didn’t appear in the dream shot. The occult cameraman wasn’t giving anything away.

But just for a brief second, not long enough to be certain, Siri may have seen a line of witnesses on the roof above. They seemed happy-or perhaps satisfied would be a better description. In that brief second, he had a feeling they were old performers, the type that wore thick makeup and traditional Lao costumes. They may also have been applauding, but it’s possible that Siri had been trying so hard to see something, he’d imagined the whole thing.

That’s what he believed when he awoke. As was common after he’d had one of his dreams, he found himself in a state that may have been consciousness, or may have been a continuation of the dream. These were the scary moments when the visitors felt so real they could have been in the room with him.

It was quiet. The stars were still blurred by the heat rising from the hot earth, so he was certain he hadn’t been asleep long. He was on the veranda behind his mausoleum. The mosquito net shimmied from a rare puff of summer breeze. It moved again. And again. It was swaying gently in time to some slow but regular stimulus.

Siri turned his head and looked into the darkness, and into the dull eyes of a bear. It was so close, its breath moved the net. It was close enough that Siri could see fresh blood at the corner of its mouth; close enough for him to smell the decay on its teeth.

It was sitting, watching the doctor. He felt its power over him. But Siri wasn’t fearful. Yes, he believed this was unreal in some way, but he also had an instinct that the animal wasn’t there to hurt him. The creature, its inspection over, rose painfully, turned, and walked off into the mobile jungle.

When Siri next awoke, it was certainly morning and the sun was threatening to rise over Miss Vong’s well-scrubbed house. Before he could forget it, and before the government loudspeakers could begin their obnoxious prattle, he reached for the notebook on the table beside the cot. He lit the cooking-oil lamp and wrote down his dream.

Saloop dragged himself toward the light like some obese moth and put his head on the cot. Siri scratched it.

“You didn’t happen to see a bear in the yard this morning, did you?” Siri asked.

As always, Saloop kept his secrets to himself. He’d neglected his duties. He’d been off romancing the bitch at the ice-works. He smelled the intruder when he got back, sure enough. It wasn’t a scent he’d come across before. But it was something big and terrifying. A Day at the Maul

Mr. Geung was sweeping the deceased cockroaches from the morgue when Siri arrived the next morning.

“Morning, Mr. Geung.”

“G… good health, Comrade Doctor.”

“Any new guests today?”

He was expecting a “no” in response. Geung laughed and looked to the sky as if Siri’s consistent question were the most wondrous greeting a man could receive. He never tired of it. Siri often considered climbing inside his friend’s mind to enjoy some of his simple pleasures.

“New guest in r… r… room one, Comrade Doctor.”

“Oh, no.” Siri moaned. “Isn’t it getting a bit crowded in room one?”

There was only the one freezer. The last Siri had known, Mr. A and Mr. B were already bunked in there on makeshift bamboo rafts that doubled the occupancy potential.

Geung snorted a laugh. “N… n… no. Mr. A and Mr. B went home already.”

“Somebody came for them?”

“Yes.”

Siri walked into the office to find Dtui at her desk poring over the pictures in one of Siri’s old French pathology textbooks. As she studied the black-and-white photo of a man who’d been sliced in half by a locomotive, she chewed on a rice snack wrapped in pig intestine.

“Do you recall the good old days when I’d come in here and find you reading Thai comics?” Siri asked.

“Good health, Doctor.”

“Good health. I hear A and B have left us.”

Dtui put down her greasy snack, wiped her hands on a surgical mask, and picked up the police report.

“Mr. B. Now Kampong Siriwongsri. Glass factory laborer by day. Second-shift security guard by night. He was on his way to work. His wife identified the body and they took him to the temple to get him ready. Mr. A apparently didn’t have anyone to love him, and don’t we know what that feels like. So the Ministry of Sport, Information and Culture has taken responsibility and arranged a cheap ceremony at Ong Deu temple.”

Siri’s mind suddenly jumped to his own death. Who’d take responsibility when he huffed his last breath? Who’d pay for his funeral at some nondescript temple? His friends were all broke. Would Judge Haeng discover some unmined vein of generosity and arrange for the Department of Justice to give him a state funeral? Some hope.

“So…” Dtui was still answering “… it all fits. Mr. B is riding to his second job when Mr. A drops out of the sky and lands on top of him: chances-eleven million to one against. A breaks B’s neck, buckles the bike, and kills himself. Case closed.”

“Except…”

“Except for why. But that’s the police’s problem, not ours, right?”

“Aren’t you just a little curious, Dtui?” “I’m peeing myself with anticipation.”

“Well,” he blushed. “That’s good. I mean, curiosity’s good in this job. Keep it up.”

The poor lady in the freezer had obviously been mauled. The wounds were over twenty-four hours old, and the insects and even her own cat had started on her before she went off from the heat. Her clothes were shredded and black with blood, while her skin was blanched white. There were bite marks on her body, the most traumatic of these being at her neck. Those areas of skin that hadn’t been bitten were raked with scratch marks.

“They found her in the bushes beside her shanty.” Dtui was behind the doctor as he stood at the open freezer, looking at the mess that Auntie See had become.

“Didn’t anyone report it when it happened? There must have been a hell of a lot of noise.”

“Nope.”

“What’s happening to people? Didn’t we used to care for our neighbors?”

“Perhaps they thought it was just a dog fight.”

But there was something wrong with that premise. Even before an autopsy, just looking into the dark freezer, he knew it wasn’t possible. From the size of the visible wounds, the separation between the individual claws, he had a strong feeling this was no dog attack.

The autopsy was new to all of them. Siri was in no position to read up on the latest forensic pathology techniques from around the globe. For one thing, they didn’t get a lot of useful information from the outside world. For another, all the advances were being made in the United States, and Siri’s English stank. He was fluent in Thai, French, and Vietnamese, but these had apparently filled up his language tank, and all attempts at adding English overflowed hopelessly.

But if the rest of the world ever learned Lao, he would certainly have become an authority on innovation in a morgue.

Here he was with a body covered in bite marks, and he needed to confirm whether they were from dogs. So with a modicum of genius, he sent Geung off to the kitchen with a requisition form and started to create dams with adhesive bandages around the most profound marks. When Geung got back, Dtui mixed a thick solution of agar, and they poured it into pools on Auntie See.

“Is this standard procedure?” Dtui wanted to know.

“Well, I hear they use plaster of paris in the West, but we can’t afford that. They don’t even have any in the ‘breaks and fractures’ department of the hospital. So we’ll have to see how this works. Just don’t get peckish and raid the freezer before they set.”

“I won’t.”

After a few hours, the agar was solid and looking pretty as birthday-party treats with little turrets of teeth prints. Geung moved them to the refrigerator, and they took Auntie See out for an internal examination.

As a New Year’s present, the Justice Department had furnished the morgue with a Soviet air conditioner so the men no longer had to work in shorts and undershirts. Dtui no longer had to stand in front of the open freezer door to cool off. But the stifling temperature outside that day had defeated ussr technology. There was probably a higher setting, but Siri couldn’t read Russian. So as they stooped over Auntie See, Mr. Geung had to constantly mop brows with a towel.

All they learned was that the lady had lost a great deal of blood. The attack was the probable cause of death, as she had certainly been alive when it began. Her bowels were a mess, but there was nothing life-threatening there. She was otherwise in good shape and should have been able to fight off any normal suburban predator.

Everything came down to the size of the wounds. That’s what continued to worry Siri. While Dtui typed up the report and

Geung scrubbed down the examination room, he studied the marks on the agar molds. He used a ruler to measure the size of the jaw and the spread of the claw marks.

By 11:30, when his assistants were in the dissection room labeling jars, Siri, for no other reason than the dream of the previous morning, had come to the illogical conclusion that Auntie See had been attacked and killed by a bear.

It was lunchtime. Civilai had carried his rolls down to the river-bank and was sitting on the log, waiting for his lunch partner to arrive. He was moderately engrossed in the Siang Pasason newspaper when Siri tapped him on the shoulder.

“Excuse me, sir. Do you mind if I join you?”

“Well, all right. Until someone better comes along.”

“Like Crazy Raj id?”

“He’d do. But see. He spends most of his days on his knees in the water.”

They looked out to the narrow band of river that remained at the end of the dry season. Rajid’s bald head poked from the water like a happy black penis. He was the town nutcase. Nobody knew which traveling Indian family had deserted him as a child some fifteen years before. He was just discovered one day sitting on the steps of the Black Stupa. Locals fed him regularly without question, and he repaid them by smiling and spreading his immutable happiness around Vientiane. He had no home and no need of one.

“In this heat, I envy the fellow.”

“It is hot, isn’t it?”

“Damned hot.”

Siri sat and started to unwrap his baguette. Since their abortive date, Mrs. Lah had shifted her franchise from the hospital. His lunch now came from a Vietnamese woman at the end of his lane. She offered two choices: sweet or savory. He could never guess what was inside, just by looking. He was often none the wiser after the contents reached his palette. Still, food was fuel.

“Anything interesting in the paper?”

Civilai laughed. Printed news under a one-party system rarely exposed, unearthed, or titillated.

“Czech skiing conditions are improving.”

“That’s a relief.”

“Football results from Albania. Part seventeen of Lenin’s life story. Our military attachй’s in Cuba.”

“Anything about Laos?”

“Laos? Now you’re asking. Laos. Laos. Wait. Here. A photo of happy smiling farm workers in Savanaketh above a story of a bumper cabbage harvest.”

“They’re standing in a rice field.”

“Maybe they’re taking a break.”

Civilai scrunched up the newspaper and threw it over his shoulder. He was a brilliant man who tired easily of bull. He despaired of Laos’s potential that was being wasted by his plodding colleagues. But he definitely agreed that it was far better to be a plodding communist than a rampant capitalist.

He looked across the Mekhong toward the Thai fascists and bit into his homemade roll. In this heat, he lacked the enthusiasm to eat. There was so little meat on his bones, he was afraid that if he didn’t stop sweating soon, there wouldn’t be anything left of him. He smiled as he remembered his morning meeting.

“Have you heard about the senator’s visit?”

“The only way I hear anything is through you, Comrade.”

“Well, we’ve had a delegation from Washington.”

“They want their bombs back?”

“They’re insisting that we give them access to look for mia’S.” “What’s an mia?”

“It’s a military person who gets lost in battle.”

“Wait. I thought they claimed they didn’t have any combat troops in Laos.”

“That’s right.”

“So how did any soldiers get lost here?”

“Perhaps they had their maps upside down.”

“And do we actually have lost Americans here?”

“I haven’t seen any. But you can never tell what the lpla will get up to. The Yanks say they’ve got evidence that there are mia’s held in camps up on the border.”

“And they’re insisting…”

“Yes. There’s a lot of political pressure over there to bring their heroes back home.”

“Well, if they insist, I suppose we’ll have to cooperate.”

“That’s right. Wouldn’t want them to start a war or anything.”

“What do we get out of it?”

“Aid.”

“They’ve offered us aid?”

“Yes.”

“See? I told you they’d have guilty consciences.”

By the time they’d plowed their way through the sandwiches and were enjoying some fruit, both men were in their undershirts and seriously thinking about joining Rajid in the murky water.

“Any interesting dead people this week?”

“Well, I’m sure you heard about the chap from Info and Culture.”

“I read the first installment of the report. Can’t see any reason for the fellow killing himself, though.”

“I think something happened up there that drove him to it. It’s the archive department. Do you know of anything official concerning the Royal Family?”

“You mean, apart from stripping them of their titles, humiliating them in public, kicking them out of the palace, and stealing their money?”

“Yeah, apart from that. Something concerning the dsic.”

“Why do you ask?” “There was a trunk up there with a royal seal. It was angry.” “An angry seal?”

“No, the trunk was angry. I don’t know what was in it, but I felt an incredible force.”

“Enough to throw a man off a roof?”

“Could be.”

It was two that afternoon when a second man found himself in a hurry to get away from the Ministry of Sport, Information and Culture. Despite falling four flights of stairs and landing on his head, Constable Nui somehow managed to cheat death. Much of him was broken, and there was some serious internal bleeding that needed emergency surgery to stem. But by five, it looked like he might make it through the night.

Siri and Inspector Phosy stood at the end of the bed watching the constable’s wife and sisters setting up camp around him. With so few nurses available, families were encouraged to stay the night and look after their own. If they brought bedding, food, and any medicines they could lay their hands on, all the better.

“We won’t be able to talk to him tonight,” Phosy whispered.

“What was he doing up there?” Siri asked.

Phosy led the doctor outside into the hall. “We’d just finished checking out the office. The only thing left was that box of yours. There wasn’t a keyhole or a catch or anything like that. There didn’t seem any way of opening it. So we sent Constable Nui off to get a crowbar.”

“Risky.”

“What would you have done?”

“Left it well alone.”

“Well, we couldn’t do that. This is a possible murder inquiry. Anyway, as we were on our way out, Nui passed us on his way in. I told him to open the chest and bring whatever was inside to the station. Next thing I hear, he’s face down on the fifth-floor landing.”

“Did he get the chest open?”

“No. There are splinters where he tried to force in the metal bar, but he didn’t make any impression on the lid. The trouble is, now none of our men are prepared to go anywhere near it. They say it’s jinxed. So it looks like I’ll have to do it myself.”

“Phosy, can I ask you to leave it alone for a while? You’ll have to trust me about this. Give me some time to find out what’s in there, will you? Please?”

“I shouldn’t.”

“It’s really important.”

Phosy thought about it. “I’ll give you three days. I can’t bluff beyond that. I’ll tell the boss it’s a national treasure and we have to wait for the key.”

“Thanks.”

They walked out of the stuffy hospital building and into an early evening sunshine that still dazzled and blasted them. They stood in the shade of a large henna tree, but there was no breeze to cool them down.

“Hot, isn’t it?”

“Damned hot.”

“Phosy, can I ask you a silly question?”

“Sure.”

“Have there been any reports of… any sightings of… well, wild animals around town?”

He assumed Phosy would laugh, but instead he answered very matter-of-factly.

“Only the bear.”

Siri looked at him, astonished.

“There’s a bear loose?”

“That ragged old heap they kept at the back of the Lan Xang. It got out somehow a few days ago. I’m surprised it had the legs to make it to the wall, let alone over it. Someone reported they’d seen it up by the memorial. God knows how it got up there. There are a couple of army people out with a net looking for it.”

He noticed Siri’s troubled expression. “You got a reason for asking?”

“I think you’d better come to the morgue and take a look at something.”

Siri rode his old motorbike slowly along Lan Xang Avenue on his way home that evening. Families sat by the roadside hoping to catch some breeze from passing cars, waiting for the night to bring relief from the stifling day. Siri was so deep in thought, he’d forgotten to turn on his lights. When suddenly the shadow of the Anusawari monument loomed up in front of him, he flicked the switch and drilled a little hole of light into its base.

On the strength of what he’d seen in the morgue, Phosy had phoned police headquarters and suggested they get an armed unit on the streets looking for the bear. There was now a shoot-to-kill order out on it.

Two things troubled Siri. First was the gap in his knowledge of wild animals. In all his years of jungle campaigns, he’d never seen a live bear. He’d seen several dead, with bullet holes, tied to wooden staves. He’d eaten their meat. But none of that really educated him about the lifestyle of the animal.

He’d read stories of North American grizzlies and polar bears ripping people to shreds. Yet in all his years, he hadn’t once heard of an Asian black bear attack. Perhaps the victims didn’t live to tell the tale. Then again, with all the maltreatment this old girl had suffered over the years, she could have been out for revenge.

After work, he’d stopped at the Lan Xang and seen the state of the cage she’d been kept in. He talked to one of the long-term chambermaids, who told him how cruel people could be to her. He needed to find an animal expert. He wanted to know just what this sad creature was capable of.

He rode through the permanently open gates into the huge flat concrete yard that five months earlier had been the site of the That Luang Festival. Thousands of people had jostled and laughed and flirted there. Now it was like some large school playground during exams.

He pulled up beside the lonely white memorial dedicated to the Unknown Soldier. At the far end of the ground, the custard-yellow stupa of That Luang, in need of some attention, stared back. Some hundred meters away, a little boy in underpants kicked a tin can. Its noise echoed loudly back and forth between the two monuments.

Here was where they had sighted the bear. That was Monday, just before midnight. He looked across the yard, beyond the stupa to the road. And on the far side of that road was his own lane.

This was the second thing that worried him. The bear had come to him in his sleep early that morning. But if the bear had actually materialized as a spirit, it had to be dead. That was logical. So why had nobody found its body? And if it wasn’t dead, that meant the foul-breathed creature that woke him had been alive and still dripping with the blood of its victim.

He turned off his engine twenty meters from his house and wheeled the bike into his front yard, but Miss Vong still caught him. She had to shout to be heard above the loudspeaker booming from the corner of the street. It was detailing how long to soak jackfruit skins to make the best hair conditioner.

“Good evening, Comrade Doctor. Hot, isn’t it? I’ve just made some nice taro gruel.”

“Good for you, Miss Vong.”

“I’ll bring you some over.”

“No, thank you.”

“Yes, I will. You have a shower and I’ll be there in half an hour.”

He was about to make an excuse but her head was already back inside her gate. She was a thoroughly annoying woman, spindly and plain as a hand-rolled cigarette. She’d been his neighbor in town before the apartment house they had lived in blew up, and the planning department assumed they’d want to be close in their new allocation. Thankfully, her work at the Education Department kept her out of Siri’s hair for long periods.

He stood in front of his own gate and looked at the larger, far more beautiful house of his other neighbor, who was a government cadre from Oudom Xay. The man’s silent children were riding in the street on their brand-new bicycles. Scotch whiskey cartons and a stereo packing case had been stacked beside the dustbins for a month so everyone could see just how proudly corrupt the man was.

Siri wondered what huge favor was being repaid to this smalltown headman from the north who sat on a rocking chair on his porch every evening cleaning a pistol. He ignored all his neighbors, just as he seemed to take no interest in his own family. If he worked, he did so in the hours when Siri was sleeping.

Saloop barked a welcome from forty meters down the lane and plodded happily toward home. Siri watched his belly swing from side to side and wondered where he was getting fed. The bucket of rice and scraps Siri left out in the morning was invariably untouched by evening.

“Welcome home, brave housedog.”

Saloop stretched up for a headrub.

“You realize the house could have been broken into while you were off doing whatever it is you do?”

In fact, that wasn’t true. No breaking would have been necessary. With all known criminals under lock and key on the islands in Nam Ngum Reservoir, few people bothered to lock their doors now. To be honest, Siri didn’t have anything worth stealing anyway.

He removed a mysterious object from his motorbike and carried it into the house. It was wrapped and taped in a blanket. Saloop followed curiously, wagging his tail. The doctor lit a lamp and took his secret all the way through to his yard to a grave he’d pre-dug for it. He’d estimated the length almost perfectly. In that far corner of the garden, in a spot hidden from prying eyes, he buried the blanket and what it contained.

He was brushing the earth from his trousers when he noticed the corrugated fence. It separated his home from one that was under construction at the back. Eventually they’d get around to building a wall. When the workers had put up this fence, it had been nailed firmly to four bamboo posts that marked the edge of his plot. It was eight feet tall and had probably been a temporary border to many homes before this.

But it was no longer fixed. At his end, it hung from one single tack and was slightly buckled, as if someone had leaned heavily against it and popped out the nails.

He lifted the flap, held up his lamp, and looked at the slow progress of the foundations there. He saw the piles of sand, still where they’d been when he moved in. But there was something curious about the nearest pile. He went through the gap and knelt down to get a better look.

There were footprints-two clear ones-which were neither human nor dog. Both were pointing in his direction. A shudder crept up his spine. Could it really have been the killer bear in the living flesh that had woken him that morning?

If so, why was Siri still alive? Das Capital Royal

Civilai? It’s Siri.”

“Siri? You’re using a telephone. Next thing they know, you’ll be-”

“Right. But no time for sarcasm just now.”

“Oh? Okay. What do you want?”

“I need an animal expert.”

“Any particular breed?”

“Bears.”

“You never fail to astound me, Dr. S. I’ll ask around.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh. And I think I’ve got something on your mysterious chest at the DSIC.”

“Excellent. You can tell me all about it at lunch.”

Siri put down the receiver, thanked the hospital clerk, and walked back to the morgue. But even though there was a lot to be learned from Civilai that day, Siri wasn’t going to be able to make lunch. In fact, although he didn’t know it yet, he wasn’t even going to be in Vientiane.

The sand had been packed quite tightly at the construction site, but the cement Siri mixed the night before had still spread a good deal. He and Dtui sat at his desk comparing the concrete cast with the agar scratch marks. They measured the separation between the claws. It wasn’t identical but the difference wasn’t great enough to preclude them coming from the same creature.

“Dtui, if it was the bear that ripped Auntie See apart, that same bear came to visit me on Tuesday.”

“Wow. You saw it?”

“I thought it was a dream. But dreams don’t pull down fences and leave footprints.”

“How come you’re still alive?”

“That’s a good question.”

“And one you’ll have to wait for an answer to.”

Siri and Dtui both looked up to see where the whiny voice had come from. In the doorway, a thin, well-dressed man in his early thirties stood with his hands on his hips. The hot weather had inflamed his acne to the point that it seemed to glow on his cheeks.

“Goodness, Judge Haeng. What an honor.” Siri smiled.

Dtui made the man a polite nop with her palms tightly together. “Good health, Comrade Judge.”

The man responded to neither the nop nor the words. He sat at Dtui’s desk and fanned himself in exaggerated fashion with the papers he carried.

“Hot, isn’t it?” she tried again, but he ignored her.

“If I could trust any of the fools in my office not to run off and go shopping before they brought you a message, I wouldn’t have to be here myself. But this is an emergency, and it has been entrusted to me.”

Mr. Geung had seen the judge arrive and had gone for a glass of cool ice water from the canteen. It was one of the services he happily provided. When he got back, he put it down in front of the ruddy man and looked at his blemished skin as he said “Good h… h… health, Com… Comr…”

“Heaven help us. Does he ever get to the end of a sentence?”

“He’s overwhelmed by your omnipotence.” Siri smiled again.

“I’m not about to consume any liquids in this place, am I? Tell him to take this away.”

“He speaks Lao quite well.”

“I’m sure he does, eventually. Take it away.” He despaired of the fact that Geung ignored him and stood his ground, just as he despaired because his department was hiring a mongoloid when they had the budget for a “normal” person. But Siri was unshakable. He said the day Geung left, he’d follow.

“What’s so urgent?”

“It’s a delicate matter. You two go and find something to do.”

Siri smiled at Dtui. “I think he means you two.”

She stood very slowly, walked across the room, took Geung’s hand in an extravagant manner, and led him to the door. “Come, Mr. Geung. Let’s go and get started on those excreta samples before they go lumpy.”

She looked back and caught Haeng squirming. When they’d gone, the judge leaned forward and said “Siri, there’s a military helicopter waiting for you at Wattay.”

“Why?”

Before answering, Haeng took a deep breath. He’d run headfirst into Siri’s stubborn streak on a few occasions. “You’re going to Luang Prabang.”

Siri seemed to consider this for a moment. “When?”

“Right now. My car’s outside.”

“But-”

“This is a national security matter. It’s top secret. That’s why I didn’t risk using the telephone.”

“What’s it all about?”

“I’m not terribly clear myself.”

“Then you needn’t have worried about the phone.”

“Siri, this order comes from the very top. I don’t have time for any of your temperamental rantings. There’s no choice.”

Siri wasn’t in the least threatened by the young judge or impressed by orders from the “very top.” But he could see that Haeng was. For the sake of future cooperation from the Justice Department, he decided not to give the man a hard time. And there was one other, more personal, reason why a free trip to Luang Prabang wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Luang Prabang was the Royal Capital, the birthplace of his wife, and a very scenic spot, so he’d heard. It was the historic seat of the Lan Xang empire: Lan, a million, Xang, elephants. It was in the mountains and some fifteen degrees cooler than the steampot he was in now. A night up north might not be half-bad at that. He spoke with an excitement in his voice that surprised the judge.

“Well, let’s not keep the army helicopter waiting.”

“Eh? Do you need-I don’t know, a toothbrush or anything?”

Following a similar urgent summons south the previous year, Siri had kept a permanently packed overnight bag in the office. Personally, he traveled light. Most of it was morgue equipment, gloves and wraps.

“No. Give me five minutes with my team, and I’ll join you in the car.”

To Haeng, this was a victory of sorts. His first. He decided it deserved a victory lap. He let loose with one of his renowned maxims.

“That’s the spirit, Siri. It’s moments like this that make the socialist system so great. When the call to arms comes the committed cadre, even on his honeymoon, would gladly climb off his young wife at the crucial moment sooner than let down the Party.”

If that were so, Siri thought to himself, it might explain the frustrated look he’d often seen on the faces of so many Party members.

The old Mi-8 “Hip” helicopter swung back and forth beneath its rotor like a poor baby’s crib. The young Lao pilots were friendly enough, but they seemed petrified to find themselves in control of the beast. Siri assumed that they hadn’t long ago passed through the Soviet training course that had farmboys still warm from the backs of buffalo inside a cockpit in three months.

After the initial “Hot isn’t it?” “Damned hot,” there was too much noise for a conversation. So Siri spent the ninety-minute flight in thought. He was on his way to a place that symbolized Laos to the few people in the outside world who had a clue where Laos was. Yet to him it was another era, another country altogether.

He had been born somewhere around 2446: the year the West knew as 1903. There was only one person who could have confirmed that, and she’d kept it to herself. So when it eventually came to filling out forms, Siri settled on a date that more or less matched his body.

He was born into a chaotic Laos that existed because the French colonists said it did. They’d drawn lines here and there on maps, and all that fell within them was known as the administrative district of Laos, the fifth piece in France’s Indo-China set. It seemed not to matter a bit that some thirty ethnic groups gathered in that bureaucratic net were neither of Lao origin, nor subservient to the French. When you trawl for featherback, picking up the odd buk fish is unavoidable.

Despite this nicely inked border, Laos was a divided country. The king, with French permission, ruled the areas in the north around Luang Prabang. The floating southern provinces, once a separate kingdom, had changed hands ten years earlier from the Thais to the French. They were underpopulated and under-productive and left the invaders with more headaches than looted profits. But as the French still had fertile Thai territory in their sights, the south of Laos was a necessary stepping stone. It was into this area of administrative annoyance that Siri had arrived in the world.

The first eight years of his life were a blank and a mystery. His early recollections were of an aunt: a stiff-backed, broad-nosed woman who told him nothing of his parents. And he knew nothing about her. She’d been a rare educated woman, and, between tending her rice and her livestock, she schooled the boy in her rattan hut.

She was a humorless hag with as much love in her as a dag on a goat’s backside. But Siri had a huge appetite for learning. He’d wondered since whether he’d tried so hard to study because he wanted the woman’s respect. If she did respect his hard work, she never let him know.

His home then had been Khamuan, a lush forested province that leaned against the mountains of the Annamite Highlands. But when he was ten years old, the woman set off with him on an unannounced two-day trek. It took them to a paved road, a sight he’d never before seen. There were to be many more spectacles. A truck took them along that marvelously potholed road all the way to a city. It was called Savanaketh, and it stood on the east bank of the Mekhong.

The woman must have told him a dozen times to close his mouth as she dragged him around that city; but to a boy from the bush, it was a wonder. She found a temple she’d been searching for, and he sat on a wall in front of it while she talked to the abbot in the refectory. As she walked past Siri on her way out, she muttered something about being good, and that was the last he ever saw of her.

The boy, who knew nothing of Buddhism, was shorn, draped in itchy saffron robes, and turned into a novice. He studied the scriptures until they oozed from his ears like sap from a bloated rubber tree, but he also discovered another world of knowledge. There was very little written in the Lao language in those days, a situation that hadn’t improved much since. To really become a scholar, he had to fathom the mystery of the shelves of thick books that filled a small room behind the abbey. They were all written in French.

Madame Le Saux was a missionary with the tiny Йglise St. Йtoine, who had come to Laos for the very purpose of rescuing third-world children from poverty and ignorance. Like a large number of upper-class French spinsters, she didn’t possess many skills that poor, ignorant Lao children would find useful. So, in Siri, she suddenly had her raison d’кtre. He was her boy, her apprentice, her justification for being there.

She had the ego to believe that Siri’s rapid grasp of French was of her doing. He took to the language like a lizard to a fluorescent lamp, and by the end of two years had consumed most of the books in the temple library. She gave him the tools, but the labor was his alone.

He scored top marks on the entrance test for the exclusive lycйe, and his mentor gladly paid all the fees. By the time he was eighteen, he’d absorbed everything the school had to offer and was still hungry for more. Strings were pulled, documents of noble birth were forged, and Siri had a scholarship to a reasonable medical school in Paris. There he met, wooed, and wed Boua.

In 1939, with Hitler already making reservations for the trip to Paris, Siri and Boua boarded an airplane belonging to the fledgling Air France Company that took them to Bangkok. He held his new medical certificate. She held a nursing diploma and a letter of introduction from the French Communist Party to one of its founder members: Ho Chi Minh.

So, there it was in a nutshell. Poverty led him to religion, religion to education, education to lust, lust to communism. And communism had brought him back full circle to poverty. There was a Ph.D. dissertation waiting to be written about such a cycle.

Through the scratched window, he saw the sun reflect golden from half a dozen temple stupas. Two rivers converged, and a white shrine, like a delicious meringue, sat on top of a hill overlooking the old royal palace. This had to be Luang Prabang. Carbon Corpses

In a small dark room behind the Luang Prabang district office, something was wrapped up in an old U.S. Army parachute. The unfriendly local cadre walked across the dirt floor and forced open the shutters. The afternoon shone directly onto the gray silk.

“That’s them,” he said pointing at the heap. “They don’t smell as bad as they used to, but they still turn my gut.”

The man, Comrade Houey, was one of those who had never learned the maxim of not saying anything at all if you have nothing positive to say. He was the provincial chief: the head communist honcho of Luang Prabang, and he had long since foregone politeness and manners as a waste of good grumbling time. Siri disliked his type.

“How long have they been here?”

“Couple of days.”

Siri leaned over and slowly started to unwrap the bullet-holed tarpaulin. Inside, two carbonized corpses were slotted together in fetal position. He looked up at the fat man whose brow was permanently scowling.

“Thanks for taking such good care of them.”

“Good care? What do they want, coffee and room service?” He laughed at his own sarcasm.

“You could have made some effort to keep them separate. If you really wanted an accurate autopsy, you should have-”

“Just as well, then. I don’t want an autopsy at all. You’re here for one reason and one reason only. We just want to know where these bastards come from.”

Siri lowered his head and looked up at the man through the mat of his eyebrows. “You surely don’t mean their nationality?”

“I certainly do. They told me in Vientiane you were some tit-hot genius when it came to solving puzzles. Well, here’s a puzzle. Solve it.”

“Now, wait. It isn’t as easy as that. How the hell am I supposed to know where they came from?”

“You’re the expert.”

“I can probably tell you what killed them, but…”

“Doesn’t take a genius to tell that. Look at ‘em. It wasn’t bloody lung cancer. Just get on with it.” He turned and walked to the door.

“Hey.”

“What?”

The man stopped and looked back.

“Where am I supposed to look at them?”

“What? You don’t like a little bit of dirt? Just put some of those newspapers down if you’re afraid of getting your nice white coat dirty.”

Siri was an amazingly calm man. If he ever raised his voice, it was generally a deliberate ploy for the benefit of the misguided person in front of him. He considered it his duty to teach good manners to those whose parents had omitted doing so. He took a deep breath.

“You will find me a clean room-”

“I’ll do no such thing.”

“-and if you interrupt me again, I promise you’ll be very sorry.”

This was a showdown. The man’s alcohol-suffused pores began to turn his bloated face the color of a gibbon’s backside.

“Who do you-?”

“You’ll find me a clean room with a table and-”

The man was fit to burst. He trembled. It was obvious he’d never been spoken back to.

“Don’t… don’t you know who I am?”

“‘Who’ doesn’t matter. I know what you are. And what you are is rude. From now on, I shall tell you exactly what I need, and you’ll arrange it for me. Perhaps it’s you who don’t know who I am, or who I have lunch with every day. I am the national coroner, and as such I deserve more respect than you’ve shown so far. Off with you, and find me a room.”

Siri sat on the pile of books beside the corpses and folded his arms. He could see indecision on the fat man’s face mixed with rage, yet Houey tried one final volley.

“You’ll be sorry for this. I’ll-”

Siri stood up very quickly and stepped toward him. There was no intent of malice, but the man saw it as an attack and hurtled himself out of the shed and across the yard. Siri stood in the doorway and watched him go. He knew the district chief would return with either a loaded pistol or news of a vacant room. He hoped the reference to his lunch companion was enough to make it the latter.

The room had once been a kitchen, but there was a large tiled concrete slab in the center that was ideal for the autopsy.

Siri was alone in there. The two corpses were so crisp, there were unlikely to be any delicate organs to weigh, or stomach contents to analyze. There certainly wasn’t going to be a national emblem tattooed anywhere.

He wrote his observations in a notebook. From the breadth of the skulls, Siri was certain these were males. The smell told him they’d been engulfed in a petroleum fire. It had been intense enough to cremate them rapidly. They had assumed the same attitude, one that suggested they’d been in a sitting position when the flames first hit them. There was no trace left of their feet.

Remarkably, although their bodies and faces had been reduced to carbon, the top quarters of their heads were comparatively unscathed. Their hair was singed but in place, and a line of skin, free of soot, followed the hairline of each man.

With a blunt scalpel, he began to probe at the outer layers that were now a fusion of skin and clothing. With no microscope and no laboratory he’d have to get samples from various locations to take back to Vientiane before he could be absolutely sure of what he was seeing. In the meantime he had to trust his nose. The scent of burned leather was oddly distinct from that of burned skin. He found traces of it at the truncated ankles and at the waists.

This suggested to him that both men had been wearing high-top leather boots and belts. If he ever got to the site of the fire, he’d probably find buckles there to confirm his theory. He also discovered traces of some thick synthetic material welded to the left shoulder and chest of one man and the right shoulder and chest of the other.

He was about to cut into the bodies when he was disturbed by a light tap at the door.

“Come in.”

The door opened slightly and a middle-aged woman with a pleasant face and long healthy hair put her head through the gap. She was deliberate in not looking in the direction of Siri or the bodies.

“Dr. Siri. I’m Latsamy. Comrade Houey has assigned me to take care of you while you’re here.”

Siri melted at the sound of her musical Luang Prabang dialect. There was no tune more erotic in the whole of Laos than the spoken song of a Luang Prabang girl. “Do you need anything?” she asked.

“Perhaps you could just stand here and talk to me for a few hours.”

It was unlikely. She still wasn’t able to turn her head in the direction of the corpses.

“I would like to avoid such a thing if I could, Uncle.”

“Am I that unpleasant?”

“Not you, Uncle, them. I’d be as sick as a vomit bird if I had to look at those things. I don’t know how you can do it. Would you like some tea or anything?”

“Tea would be very nice, thank you.”

Once the door was closed, he reproached himself for flirting. He was old enough to know better. He knew he was a harmless old codger, but he’d probably frightened the girl.

He returned his attention to the bodies. Cutting into them was like retrieving baked roots from an earthen kiln. The heat had done a thorough job of overcooking everything. The angle of the pelvic indentation and the narrow sacrum confirmed that these were male. From the lengths of the femurs he assumed they were of small stature, more likely Asian than Caucasian.

He used a chisel to force open the jaws. The upper incisors curved into the shape of a shovel. This single fact put them into the Mongolian category. There was over an eighty-percent chance that these two poor gentlemen had been Asian. Either that, or they were Finnish. That was as close as he was ever likely to get to establishing their nationality. There was no fancy foreign dental work, no rings or bracelets, and they weren’t talking: not yet, anyway.

It was while he was digging around in one lower abdomen that his tea arrived. It slid in on a chair between the open door and its frame without a word from the server. Siri was about to take a tea break when his scalpel struck metal. It had been his intention to use his cheat list at the back of his notebook to estimate the age of the men from wear and tear on their pelvic bones. But the bullet proved far more interesting.

It was wedged against the pubic crest. Tracing its trajectory was a complex and delicate matter. The damage the bullet had caused was well hidden by the contraction of the muscles. But as he slowly worked his way south, he came across a second bullet, then, at the anus, a third. The bullets had almost certainly entered the body from below.

Inspired by this discovery, he checked the other body and found two bullets. They were higher, almost at the base of the rib cage, but they too had entered from below. All these incidental clues tripped over one another on their way to one conclusion.

He sat on the chair by the door and drank his cold tea. The bodies, like dismembered model kits, sat on the slab looking back at him. He doubted, from the attitude of his host, whether these two would be getting any kind of funeral service. But he still wanted to put them back together, make them look respectable. He had a feeling they’d be back.

By the time his work was complete, it was already mid-afternoon. It had been a long day, and he was exhausted. He poked his head out of the room and found the lovely Miss Latsamy embroidering the hem of a traditional Lao skirt. She was very adept, and Siri thought she would make a fine surgeon-as long as she didn’t have to look at the bodies.

“Miss Latsamy.” He joined her in the vestibule. “I have three favors to ask.”

“I was told to give you whatever you want.” She blushed at how that came out.

“Good. Then first, I’d like you to go to the least political temple you can think of in Luang Prabang and tell the abbot that we have two bodies here that would very much like to be buried. As the deaths were violent, there probably won’t be a cremation ceremony until the spirits are settled, but it would be nice if they could be buried on temple ground.”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“Secondly, I have to go to a place called Pak Xang this afternoon.”

“Oh.”

“Oh, what?”

“Comrade Houey said you’d be going back to Vientiane this afternoon. The helicopter’s waiting.”

“Comrade Houey made a mistake. I have some business of my own here. I’ll be going back tomorrow. Do you think you can find me some transport to Pak Xang?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“And I suppose it’s time for me to report to the comrade about my findings. It would probably be better if he came here so I could show him what I’ve got. But it’s up to him. Wherever we are, I doubt he’ll be very happy with what I have to say.”

“He never is.”

“I see that.”

“Asian? Damned Asian? Is that the best you can do?” The district chief had come to the room with a short blunt man who seemed to be some type of bodyguard. He nodded aggressively at the end of each utterance that passed the boss’s lips.

“Yes.”

“Well, that isn’t good enough. It takes you three hours and all you discover is that these two could be from anywhere?”

“In Asia, yes.”

“Some genius you turned out to be.”

“There is one other thing.”

“What?”

“Tomorrow morning I need to go and see the crash site.”

“Well, you can’t… What crash site?”

“Where the helicopter came down. These two were pilots.”

“Who the hell told you?”

“They did.”

“Eh? Well, you’re wrong. Totally wrong.”

“Am I? Let’s look at the facts. They were burned in a sitting position. They wore uniforms. Originally they were wearing helmets but I assume your rescue team helped themselves to souvenirs.”

“How could you…?”

“They were strapped in with seat belts and couldn’t get away from the fire. The blast at their feet was extreme and the flames spread so fast, I’m assuming they were covered in fuel from the explosion. That tells me they were carrying a lot of spare gas in the cockpit, which in turn makes me think they expected to be traveling a long distance or carrying a lot of weight.

“And of course, the fact that they’d both been shot a number of times didn’t give them much of a chance of getting out of the burning chopper. The closeness and angle of the bullets suggest they weren’t traveling very fast. That’s why I’m assuming it was a helicopter rather than a plane. I’ve retrieved the bullets, all ak47, lpla issue. So whoever these two gentlemen were, they were probably gunned down by our people. How am I doing?”

Houey looked at the nodding guard and laughed. The man laughed nervously back.

“Our visiting genius from the capital has been doing a lot of guessing. Too bad he isn’t much of a guesser.” He turned to Siri. “No, Comrade. You’re wrong.”

“I don’t think so.”

Houey huffed, and the two men left the room without further comment.

Miss Latsamy stepped into the doorway after they’d gone. Staring at the window, she said “Uncle, can you ride a horse?”

It was barely a horse. It was more a pony with a paunch. But Siri had ridden many such creatures in his time in the mountains. Indeed, he quite relished the thought of returning to the saddle. Pak Xang was about fifteen kilometers from Luang Prabang, a distance he used to cover regularly between villages in his days with the Viet Minh.

But the old Lao saying “A year away from the nipple can make a baby nauseous of breast milk” was coined neither for fun nor for scholastic debate. His motorcycle saddle had made him soft. Five kilometers out of town, he negotiated the animal out of its happy canter and into a more leisurely trot. Old dears on bicycles with huge bundles of lemon grass overtook him. The journey took ninety minutes, not much faster than if he and the animal had changed places. Forbidden Fruit

Still sore, Siri walked away from his sister-in-law’s simple house feeling even sadder than when he had arrived. Everything about Wilaiwan reminded him of his wife. The way she smiled, her walk, even the widow’s peak that stood on her forehead like the prow of a great white ship.

The sisters had been born nine months apart: yield from the sibling production line so common in well-off families of the old regime. Boua, his wife, had been the middle child of nine and the only rebel. While her family was in the royal capital working under the king’s patronage, Boua was in France training to overthrow the royal family and rescue her country for communism.

She had returned to Laos after eight years, with ideals and a rather baffled doctor husband called Siri. But she never came back to Luang Prabang. Instead, she dragged her lover through the jungles of Vietnam and northern Laos and joined the Pathet Lao in their struggle against tyranny.

Now she was dead, and Siri had come to let her sister know how she had lain on a grenade and pulled the pin to end the confused misery that haunted the final years of her life. In some way, she had expected to erase the depression that had infected her and then spread to her sad husband.

But, of course, he didn’t tell her. How could he? Honesty can be a dirty gift. It can muddy a sparkling stream of memories. So he said there had been a raid. She’d died a brave patriot as she’d lived, full of hope for a new regime.

Wilaiwan received the news passively and silently, and together they’d sat on the old wicker chairs on the veranda and let tears roll down their faces without embarrassment.

As there wasn’t but an hour of daylight left, she invited him to stay the night. Her husband had caught two juicy catfish that were keen to be eaten with some homemade rice wine. So Siri went for a walk to build up an appetite and a better mood.

He crossed the dusty intersection that marked the center of the village and found the riverbank. There, he followed a river, creamy brown like slow-moving cafй au lait. He stepped carefully to avoid setting off the dog fart flowers. The setting sun seemed to walk along the opposite bank, dodging between the trees. Toward Luang Prabang, stodgy hills were patchy with slashed fields that looked from a distance like painful skin grafts.

Although there was no fence to announce it, he soon found himself in a fruit orchard. A longboat was moored against a simple wooden dock. The trees were neatly ranked but showing the effects of neglect. They were swollen with fruit. Some had rotted and dropped to the grass below. The sight may not have caused a flicker of interest to any other traveler, but to Siri it was uncanny. It baffled him that there were no signs of bird or insect damage. No animals had come to steal the luscious fallen oranges or nibble at the low-hanging pears. He walked along the rows; mangosteens, rambutans, rose apples, all proudly ripe and unviolated. It was astounding. Apparently, not even man, the most insatiable predator of all, had been scrounging from this Garden of Eden.

There was a feeling there. Not his usual creepy “somebody dead hanging around” feeling, but an aura of sorts: a protection, as if something were watching over the trees and the spirits that resided in them. He felt safe under its gaze.

He was curious to know where he was and to learn more about the exotic strains of fruit, many of which he’d never seen before. He walked up and down the lush green rows. They’d have needed three or four waterings a day through this particularly dry summer season to keep them so bountiful. It wasn’t till his last sweep that he came upon a gardener.

The old man wore a conical Vietnamese hat tied under his chin with a bright red cloth. He had on a navy blue peasant’s jacket and shorts. He stood inside the canopy of an orange tree, pruning up into the branches. Siri couldn’t make out much of his looks.

“Good health, friend,” Siri began.

The man didn’t interrupt his work to reply. “How would you be, friend?”

“You have some remarkable fruit trees here.”

“Thank you. I’m afraid they’ve been neglected of late. I haven’t been able to get out here for some time.”

The man’s voice was soft, somehow worldly and, Siri thought, kind. He guessed he was around his own age.

“I don’t seem to recognize a lot of these varieties.”

“No? Know fruit, do you?”

“Most of the jungle types, and the usual imports.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have seen a lot of these. If you’ve got a few minutes, grab those pruning clippers and give me a hand to cut back some branches. They won’t get a lot of attention from now on.”

“That’s a shame. Why not?”

Either the man didn’t answer or Siri couldn’t hear through the foliage. He looked in the basket, where he found an elegant pair of pruning clippers and a beautifully gilded set of shears in the shape of herons necking.

“You take your gardening seriously.”

“It isn’t something you can half do.”

Siri went to the orange tree beside his friend’s and started on the old, low branches.

“It’s peaceful here. How come you haven’t been able to come?”

“It’s the new regime, Brother. They’re very strict here in Luang Prabang. They don’t like us moving around too much.”

“But this is a thriving orchard. It needs someone to look after it. You could feed a battalion of soldiers just from the produce here. You could certainly keep the villagers nearby alive.”

The old man stopped clipping. “Hmm. Could do, I suppose. Except the people in these parts are somewhat loath to sample the fruits from this particular garden.”

“Why’s that?”

“I take it you aren’t from around here.”

“No. I’m part of the invading hordes. Spent most of my troubled life in the jungles of Houaphan and North Vietnam.”

“Ah. You’re one of them. That explains it. Then you wouldn’t know whose orchard this is.” There was a pause. “It belongs to the Royal Family, or what’s left of it.”

“All right. Then that might explain why the people aren’t stealing His M’s tasty fruits. But I don’t really see how it keeps the birds and the bugs away.”

“Ah, yes. Very observant of you. That is a little harder to explain.”

He moved out from his tree and went to the next in the row after Siri’s. Through the leaves, the doctor saw him in patches. He had a slow, somewhat pained gait but kept his back straight. He had the bearing of a Royal gardener. No doubt about it. Siri could almost feel the old fellow’s pride at tending such fine trees. It seemed cruel for the Party to keep him away from a job he loved.

Once he’d entered the next orange-leaf umbrella, the man said “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, friend, but Luang Prabang is rather a magical place. There are many stories I could tell you.”

The sun had given up hope, and Siri was aware he had a walk ahead of him in the dark. He lowered the clippers and sighed. “How did you get here, old fellow?” “Boat.”

“Do you suppose they’ll let you come back tomorrow?”

“No. This is the end.”

He made it sound like something other than a ban on gardening. If this were really his last visit, this pruning would seem to be more an act of desperation-or rebellion. Siri came out of his blackening hood of leaves and stood in the open. A large moon was already in the ascent.

“Then are you going back to town tonight?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I have to go to my sister-in-law’s for dinner. But I’d be very interested to hear your stories. Couldn’t you stay here tonight and go back in the morning?”

“It would upset an awful lot of people,” the old man laughed. “But I suppose I could. A raspberry to them all.”

Still, he hadn’t emerged from his own shroud of oranges.

“That’s good. Listen. I’ll see what food I can rescue. You must be hungry. Maybe a bottle of rice whiskey? How does that sound?”

The clipping stopped. “That’s very kind of you. Yes, very kind. I’ll be here. Look for the fire.”

The gardener’s hand reached out through the leaves as if it belonged to the tree itself. The wrist was white with a thick wad of tied strings. The hand was blistered from the day’s exertions. Siri shook it and felt a sudden stab of sadness. This was a man at the end of hope. He needed cheering up. Farewell the Women’s Unionist

It was about this time, probably as Siri was passing through the village on his way to Wilaiwan’s house, that primary school teacher Chanmee was riding her bicycle along Khouvieng. The old bull testicle trees arched over the lane and blocked the moonlight. Without lamps, it was only her white blouse that gave her any substance on that dark stretch of road.

She hated traveling in the dark, but Wednesday was the meeting of her branch of the Lao Women’s Union. She had to attend. This was always a scary journey for her. At times, a car’s headlights would illuminate her way briefly, then plunge everything back into darkness.

She was straining her tired eyes for tree roots and potholes. No cars had passed for several minutes, and the street was so black that she decided to climb down from the bike and walk beside it. It was eerily quiet on that stretch, and the squeak from her front wheel was her only comfort.

Then there was the other sound. It came from behind her, somewhere off in the frangipani bushes. She stopped for a second to listen. It was a deep, steady growl like a painful snore. She assumed it to be a dog and wondered if it was injured. She’d never experienced any hostility from dogs, yet there was something sinister about this sound. It worried her enough to make her climb back on the bike.

The bushes rustled and a twig snapped, and she pushed down hard and too hastily on the pedal to try to build up some speed. The tightness of her phasin skirt restricted her movement, and her shoe slid from the pedal. The bicycle veered to the right and dipped into a deep rut. She overbalanced sideways.

Too slow to right herself, she tumbled onto the hard earth verge, the bicycle with her. She held her breath to listen for the growl. She looked around at the shadows. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound. She laughed out loud at her foolishness.

She untangled herself from the bike and was about to get to her feet when the creature was on her. The huge first bite muted her scream. Blood soaked quickly into the white blouse. In less than thirty seconds she was dead. Garden of Earthly Delights

Two hours later, Siri was back at the orchard. His hosts were early sleepers, unused to company. In his sack he had two bottles of earthy rice whiskey, the remains of the river fish, and a container of sticky rice. This would be a fitting last meal for a man who loved his vocation.

The moon had lit his path from, and back to, the orchard, like a lighthouse beacon guiding a foreign ship. He walked the aisles of fruit trees, breathing in their sweet nighttime scents. A blind man could have identified each tree.

The gardener had abandoned his futile task and was sitting between Siri and a blazing fire. A good pile of lopped branches was at his side, and the smoke carried the scent of the trees they came from. The man was stockier than he’d appeared earlier, and he hunched forward slightly as he stared at the flames.

Siri announced his arrival. “Good health, friend.”

“Welcome back.”

Siri put his aid package on the ground in front of the old man and the bottles clinked together as he pulled them from the sack.

“This should soften the pain of saying goodbye to your friends here, eh?”

He chuckled and turned to the old man. It was his intention to shake his hand to re-launch their friendship. But as he moved out of the line of the fire, the flames lit up the hooded eyes of the gardener. Siri froze. His own face must have reflected his shocked disbelief at what he was seeing.

The firelight shone directly onto the man’s wide round features. The mouth spread slowly into a broad smile of neat teeth. It wasn’t a face Siri had seen in the flesh, but it was one he knew only too well. It was a face he’d seen on 8mm film in the caves of Houaphan, accompanied by the jeers and laughter of the cadres. It was a face he’d carried to the market, folded in his shoulder bag. It was a face on propaganda posters they’d used in hate sessions at endless political seminars.

The man spoke through his smile. “I hope this doesn’t disqualify me from having a drink.”

“It isn’t Dom Perignon.”

“Thank goodness for that.”

The king, into his second year of unemployment, leaned forward to shake the hand Siri had misplaced somewhere between them. “My name’s-”

“Yeah. I know. Bugger me. This is one for the books. I’m Siri, Siri Paiboun. Am I supposed to… I don’t know… curtsy or something?”

“I doubt that would do either of us any good. For heaven’s sake, sit down and open a bottle.”

Siri did as he was decreed, but he couldn’t help laughing at the weirdness of the moment. He poured the whiskey into two half-coconut shells and handed one to the old man.

“What exactly are you doing here?” Siri asked.

“Bidding, as you rightly say, farewell to my trees. This is the place I’ll miss most. Good health.”

He gestured the coconut shell toward his guest, then took a swig. Siri was already aware of just how awful the homemade brew was, but the king showed no reaction to it.

“Good health.” Siri drank and winced. “Yecch. I reckon we could piss this out as weed killer by the end of the night.”

They both laughed.

“What brings you here, Comrade Siri?”

“Some mysterious emergency. I’m the national coroner, for want of a better one. They asked me to identify a couple of crispy fliers. The local Party head expected me to tell him their names and addresses. In return, he wasn’t prepared to tell me a damn thing.”

“I think you’ll find they’re both Lao royalists.”

“What do you know?”

“There was an attempt, the day before yesterday, to take my family and me out of the country. One of the helicopters was shot down. I imagine that’s where your fliers are from. I’m sure your lpla people would like to confirm that they had connections to the old Royal Lao Government. The helicopter crashed in the grounds of That Luang temple. You should go and take a look there.”

“Is that why you’re leaving?”

“They want me somewhere less accessible from Thailand.”

“You seem to be taking it all remarkably calmly.”

“I’m resigned to it. It’s been coming for some time.”

“Since the abdication?”

“Long before that, I’m afraid. Our royal line has lost its kwun.”

Even born-again-agnostic Siri was shocked to hear such a statement. Lao tradition had it that all living beings were in possession of a kwun: something between a soul and a spirit. Humans were said to have thirty-two kwun. In times of bad fortune, some of the kwun may flee, and shamans are called in to invite them to return. Only in serious illness or death does the kwun desert its host completely.

Siri looked at the man’s wrists, heavy with loops of unspun white thread. When begging the kwun to return, it was usual to circle the wrists of the unlucky one with strings and knot them. Somebody close to the king had been doing some serious negotiating with the spirit world.

“You really believe that?”

“There’s no doubt.”

“When did it happen?” He refilled the coconut shells.

“When I came along.”

“Now, you’re just being hard on yourself.”

“It’s a fact. Indisputable. In my father’s time, he and my uncle, Phetsarath, were in harmony with the spirits. This orchard was theirs. Are you sensitive to necromancy, Dr. Siri?”

“I’m afraid I am.”

“Then you can probably feel the spirits of the trees here and the hold they have over this region. I’m told it’s very strong. I cannot feel it myself. The whole of Luang Prabang is evidently bristling with the ghosts of previous kings and queens and their offspring. There’s been a magical connection between the Royal Capital and the occult since the days of my great ancestor, King Fa Ngum. It was he who brought the first spirits to this place. He had thirty-three teeth, you know?”

“He what?”

“Thirty-three teeth. It’s almost unheard of. The Lord Buddha also had thirty-three, and although he never mentioned it, the dental records showed that my uncle had thirty-three teeth as well. It’s a sign, an indication that you’ve been born as a bridge to the spirit world.”

“And you believe all this?” Siri asked as he began to use his tongue to count the teeth in his own mouth.

“There’s been too much evidence to doubt it.” Siri noticed for the first time that a cricket had come to rest on the old king’s shoulder. “Do you recall that your Viet Minh friends tried to invade Luang Prabang in the early fifties?”

“Yes.” Siri lost count of his teeth.

“What reason did they give for their failure?”

“Hmm, let me think. Something about the place being heavily fortified and manned with well-armed French militia.”

“Ha. So I thought. The French didn’t get here in time. All we had was a handful of old retainers with rusty hunting rifles. A crochet society could have invaded us. The advisers told my father we were doomed and that he should flee.

“But he stayed. That night, he gathered the shamans, and they called on the spirits to protect the capital. The following dav, the Viet Minh were advancing upon us. They were so cocksure, they were already divvying up the spoils as they marched. But suddenly they began to fall.”

“In what way?”

“Just drop. A number were taken by some mysterious palsy. They lost all their strength. Their eyes rolled in their sockets and they couldn’t speak. More and more fell to this mysterious disease, until the commanders called a halt to the advance. They had to drag the stricken men back on bamboo travoises.

“Their medics couldn’t fathom what ailment had struck them down or how to treat them. But the next day, they awoke, right as rain. So they came at us again. And the same thing happened.”

“I admit, I didn’t hear that version. I would have remembered it if I had.”

“You don’t believe it?”

“Over the last six months, I’ve started to believe almost everything.”

“In my uncle’s case, I saw it for myself. We would spend a day with him in Luang Prabang, then someone would arrive from Vientiane and tell you he’d spent the same day with him there. He could be at two or three places at once. On one occasion, I saw him rise from the ground. He just levitated.”

“Ah, so this isn’t the first time you’ve tried my sister-in-law’s homemade rice whiskey?”

They both laughed.

“But, Dr. Siri, I don’t have any of these gifts. When I was born, the shamans predicted that the kwun would leave the royal line along with me, that I wouldn’t live out my reign. When my father died, I knew I didn’t have the power to hold on to the magic that had helped us survive for so many centuries.”

Siri shook his head. “No. This is history, my friend. A revolution has nothing to do with appeasing the spirits. You’re a victim of politics, not destiny.”

“I agree that there are semantics involved. Even from the practical point of view, I have little leverage. My supporters have all fled. I have two confidants that I would trust with my life, but most of the entourage gave us lip service until they knew our fate. If my father were here, the kwun would show him the way to overcome your politics. It hasn’t shown me. I’m told it’s getting weaker day by day. When they move us from Luang Prabang, the connection will be severed. Our will cannot survive a move.”

“Ah. Don’t be so cheerful. They’ll just put you up in a camp for a few months, give you some Marxist propaganda to memorize, then bring you back a new improved born-again commie royal. They’ll hold you up as an example for the masses.”

“There will be no coming back.”

“Now, why do you have to talk like that?”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. Let’s speak of more delightful things-to counteract the bitter agony of this paint thinner we’re drinking.”

“Thank God for that. I was starting to think you were actually enjoying the stuff.”

“May I ask how your revolution’s going?”

“Revolutions always go more smoothly around a campfire in the jungle than they do in real life.”

“You’ll forgive me if I say you don’t come across as a hardened socialist.”

“It’s a bit of an anticlimax.”

“I understand. I heard your prime minister’s inspirational speech on the radio. I think the expression he used was ‘no major achievements in the first year of office.’ I was sure he could have found one little thing to boast about.”

“I think the takeover took us all by surprise. It happened so suddenly.”

“Twenty years is hardly sudden,” remarked the king.

“Ah, but that’s just it. All the sitting around tends to make you stodgy and lethargic. You get to wonder whether your revolutionary dream will ever come true. Then-poof-there you are running a country. The pl was swept into power in Laos on the back of the angry North Vietnamese dragon.”

“You’ve always held on to its tail.”

“That’s true. But I believe we’re a more gentle version.”

“The hundred thousand people that fled across the river didn’t appear to think so.”

“They were running away from the unknown rather than the reality. We’re quite sweet, really.”

The king sipped at the whiskey and turned the natural grimace it produced into a wry smile. “So you haven’t been sending officials from the old regime to concentration camps?”

“I think the Party refers to them as re-education camps. They’re like holiday camps with barbed wire and hard labor. Look, I know what you’re saying. I share some of your concerns. I don’t like locking people up for their beliefs. But I also understand that-at least in these early days-there’s a need for stability. The lprp can’t afford to have vocal dissent stirring up anti-government feeling. They’ve got enough problems without that.”

“But-”

“And you have to admit that your old government officials and military and police weren’t exactly angels of purity. The Security Council’s been uncovering evidence of unbelievable corruption all the way up the ladder.”

“I’m sure it won’t take your new officials long to master the fine art of graft. Greed is sadly inherent in the soul of man.”

“Again, I agree. But we do have a lot of good people. They really have the well-being of Laos at heart. You don’t spend half your adult life in caves if your intention is to make yourself wealthy. They may not be popular in the towns, but let’s not forget that eighty-five percent of the population works the land. With all due respect, the old regime pretty much let them get on with it. You bought their products at a fraction of market value and didn’t do a thing to help them through droughts and epidemics.”

“And your communist brothers and sisters will.”

“I think they’ll try.”

“Then let us thank the Lord Buddha for that.”

Even while his words were still floating there in the air, Siri wondered whether he really believed what he’d just said. So many of those jungle dreams seemed to evaporate when exposed to reality. Once the cadres moved into the cities, the shoes of the old regime began to fit them quite well. There was already a rumor that officials at the Agricultural Ministry were taking kickbacks and rerouting seed stocks.

When he was at the temple in Savanaketh, Siri had read a translation of Animal Farm as a French primer. He had thought it was a story about animals on a farm. It wasn’t until it was condemned by the Communist Party in Paris as capitalist propaganda that he read it again as a political statement. He was starting to recognize some of the beasts.

Time passed quickly, and the two old men discussed Orwell and Voltaire, Engels and Guizot and Vailland, Cйsaire, spiraling down to Simenon and Hergй, wisely veering away from politics as the liquor slowly took hold.

In one of their last moments of sober clarity, Siri and the king had the brilliant idea of mixing Wilaiwan’s lethal brew with the juice of some succulent fruits from the orchard. The result was an ideal aperitif to accompany the fish and the rice, and the perfect antidote to depression.

When the whiskey bottles were empty, the two men lay side by side on a mat of lush grass, exhausted from a final bout of laughter, invigorated by talk of literature and music, at peace and at one with the aromatic fruit. There, Siri watched the cricket on the king’s shoulder, licking its fingernails, and he slowly joined the old regent in sleep.

As the spirits resided in the trees, and the fruit grew on those trees and that fruit was now inside Siri, it was no surprise that his sleep should be filled with the light and color of a spectacular dream.

It was day. He was in the orchard, but the orchard was enormous. The trees stretched far into the sky. The tree spirits were everywhere, dancing, singing, having a thoroughly good time. It was an animated Hieronymus Bosch scene similar to the one he’d seen in a visiting exhibition at the Louvre in Paris. In fact, it was exactly that scene, except all the participants were Lao and not quite as naked.

Male angels juggled ripe oranges that had once been the breasts of the nymphs who cheered them on. The grand old dowager, Lady Tani, strummed on her Lao harp beside her dazzling yellow banana tree. Gooseberry sprites performed aerobatics. The whispering ghosts moved from spirit to spirit, telling them their futures and collecting star fruits as payment.

Siri and the king sat cross-legged beneath a mulberry fig tree, watching the extravaganza around them. Banyan tree angels stood guard behind them. His Majesty was in full white ceremonial garb, and medals glittered like treasure on his chest. A footman with a straggly gray beard dangling from the point of his chin stood a pace back from him.

Cicadas sang in tune like a choir. Color-coordinated butterflies circled in swarms so dense, they changed the hue of the sky at will. The footman announced the arrival of guests, and the king looked to Siri to see if he approved. The doctor raised an eyebrow and waved his hand. It was a gesture he remembered from the bald king in the Hollywood film that had insulted Siam and thus delighted the Pathet Lao.

“Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera,” he said, for no other reason than it was the only line he remembered from that picture show.

The footman returned with two handsomely hobbling pilots who, due to the absence of feet, carried their expensive leather boots under their arms. They were Lao and they greeted their king in royal language.

“Sire, we shall try once more.”

“We were betrayed, Lord. They were expecting us. There is a traitor in your camp.”

With that, the footman exploded horribly, bits of him flying in all directions. Siri looked around to see whether there were accusing eyes pointed at him. But suddenly there were no eyes to point. When he looked back, the king was gone. All that remained was a plate of crispy fried crickets and a side dip.

The pilots were standing back to back as if primed for an attack. The cowardly spirits were retreating to their trees, blending into the bark, merging with the branches, sinking into the roots. A wind rose, rustling the leaves. It grew until it began to shake the succulent fruits from the trees.

Left were Siri and the two pilots in a storm-darkened vignette. One pilot turned to him and nodded. “We are grateful.”

And with that, the two men burst into flames, burned to ash, and were blown away by the frantic wind. The tree leaves all around flapped in panic, as if in the grip of a monsoon. Alone, Siri listened to a roar of distant thunder, a roar of a beast, the gnar of terror. Toward the south, the trees were bending as if to clear the path of the creature that owned the terrible roar. The sky was black now, and Siri tensed for the storm.

He was learning to be an observer in his own dreams. Years before, he had felt obliged to be a participant; he’d played the roles and assumed the appropriate emotions. But now he watched them like a man in the front row of an empty cinema. He convinced himself that he wouldn’t be killed by the villain or truly loved by the heroines.

But something about the sound of the creature there that crashed through the jungle was a warning to him. This was beyond a dream, too real. It was a sign that he should expect to hear this sound in his waking hours and that it would be a critical moment. He knew somehow that he had to be aware of this sound because it had connections to the killings in Vientiane and could signal the end of him.

And he awoke, or perhaps he didn’t, and he was in a box. It was black and musty and he could see nothing, but he knew he was in a box. Logically he assumed it was that final box, that he had succumbed to that incontrovertible last argument with nature. But no.

He smelled the smoke of a cheap cigarette. He felt the warm spray of something mildly caustic against his face. It smelled of liquor. There was a creak, and the lid of the box opened and light rushed in on him. Faces looked down at him: blanched, unemotional faces. Some had lips the color of a new wound; some wore jewels that neither glittered nor suggested wealth; all had empty black two-dimensional eyes that tapered to lizard tails.

Siri was small and shrunken, as if he were their toy. He looked up. They looked down. There were no sounds. For the longest time they stared up and down at each other, until the lid of the box slowly closed and Siri was back in the musty dark. But he had committed their faces to memory.

When the actual morning brought its actual awakening, Siri was disoriented and alone. The scents of the heavy fruits were still all around him, but they seemed overly sweet, offering a final advertisement of their ripeness before all was lost. The feeling of being protected was gone. He heard the scurrying of animals and saw briefly a marmot carrying off a ripe orange in its mouth. The branches buzzed with insects.

He turned to his side and saw the indentation of the king, like a cartoon accident in the thick grass. In the dip where the head had lain, the cricket from the king’s shoulder lay dry and lifeless. Lao tradition had it that the kwun materialized in the form of a cricket. If that was true, the king had been right: the kwun had left him. 999,999 Elephants

Siri went to bid goodbye to his sister-in-law and her husband, who were already toiling in the rice field. They were making their contribution to the cooperative, which allowed them to work one small corner of the land they had once owned. It was the land Wilaiwan had been awarded as a senior court dancer. The royal seal on her document meant no more now than her bourgeois skills.

“Thank you for loving my sister,” she said, pulling her saucer-shaped hat back from her eyes. She hadn’t asked where he’d spent the night. She’d learned not to ask too many questions, even of a relative. He’d already decided against telling her of his visit with the king. It would have been too distressing for a royalist to hear of the loss of the royal kwun.

“It was my pleasure, and that’s the truth of it.”

“I’m glad she had you.”

“Wan, I have a small mystery I’m trying to solve.”

“I doubt I could help with the type of mystery you’re engaged in.”

“I’m not so sure. In Vientiane, there’s a teak chest with a royal seal. It’s about the size of a child’s coffin. It doesn’t have any keyhole or handle, and it seems impossible to open. I believe there’s some great force inside.”

“I’m sure there are many such chests of looted royal treasures in Vientiane.” She bit her tongue.

“I’ve imagined faces,” he continued, “white unemotional faces with extreme makeup and elaborate headgear. There’s also some connection with tobacco smoke and alcohol.” Her face showed some recognition. “Does that remind you of something?”

“In Luang Prabang, in a house on Kitsalat near the palace, is a man called Inthanet. Go and see him if you have a chance. He might be able to help.”

The sun was rapidly burning through the morning mist that loitered along the river and the surrounding hills. The pony was still tethered to the front steps of the house, but Siri’s groin ached from the previous day’s journey. Much of his trip back to the city was beside, rather than on top of, the relieved little horse.

When they finally reached Luang Prabang, he returned the pony to Miss Latsamy’s brother and repaid his kindness by lancing and treating a boil on his shoulder. He needed to remind himself occasionally that he still had the ability to solve the problems of the living.

He walked along Photisalat, past the squat two-story buildings squashed together like uneven books on a library shelf. Their bindings were all sunburned browns, dusty yellows and greens. A grandmother on one upstairs balcony smiled through a bloody betel-nut mouth when he winked at her.

He paused in front of the old Royal Palace, reluctantly donated to the State as a museum. Its tall lush palms still stood at attention beside the dirt drive. Above the portal, the same royal emblem he’d seen on the chest at the Information Ministry stood out in gold relief from a red background. It was partially masked by the new national flag but not yet defaced. He wondered where his gardener friend might be at that moment, whether he’d ever see the inside of his palace again.

He would seek out Mr. Inthanet, but not yet. He walked away from the modest downtown, and trees soon became more common than buildings. He stopped two monks in brown woolen hats and asked for directions to That Luang temple. They steered him there via lefts and rights at this type of tree and that type of bush. All the royal street signs had been taken down.

When he arrived at the whitewashed wall of the small temple, an armed guard at the gate stopped him by waving in his face.

“The temple’s closed, Comrade.”

“Of course. I know,” Siri said confidently. “I’m here to see the crash site. I’m from the Department of Justice in Vientiane.”

“Oh.”

Siri produced his foolscap id. The boy didn’t look much further than the letterhead, and the doctor wondered whether he could read.

“Nobody told me.”

“Comrade Houey sent me.”

“Oh.”

Siri put his paper back into his cloth shoulder bag and walked past the guard as if everything had been sorted out. He gave the boy a friendly nod and went up the steps to the mound upon which Wat That Luang sat. At the top, the dry earth yard was shaded by lush old pagoda trees, and the temple buildings were quaint and sadly run down. There were no monks around. Siri could see that an area of the grounds had been cordoned off by a tall wall of blue plastic sheeting nailed to bamboo poles. He walked through the flap in the plastic, and an astonishing scene presented itself before him.

To one side, a trail of blackened debris gouged through the yard and settled at the crumpled and burned-out wreck of a helicopter. To the other, a large old elephant was harnessed to twelve meters of thick chain. The rusting metal looped down, then up, around the waist of a badly damaged black stupa that leaned sideways like the great Tower of Pisa.

Two mahouts were securing the chain to the elephant’s sides. A man in a paper-thin white shirt stood pointing in the direction he intended the stupa to fall. Two more armed guards stood behind him. Siri walked confidently up to the man and smiled.

“It was damaged by the crash?”

The man turned but didn’t seem all that surprised to see Siri. They shook hands, and the white-shirted man nodded toward the precarious relic.

“The helicopter apparently caught it as it was coming down. You from the town hall?”

“No. I’m the coroner. I’ve been working on the pilots. You aren’t from around here?”

“I’m sent by the Buddhist Sangha Council. I just got in this morning on the bus. I’m here to supervise the demolition of this here stupa. It’s dangerous like this. We wouldn’t want it to fall on some little child, would we? All alterations to temple structures, be they as a result of planning or of acts of the Lord himself, have to be cleared by the Council.”

It was one of those unnecessarily long answers you get from someone feeling guilty about something.

“This is quite a security force for such a little stupa.”

“Well, there’s the-how can I say it? There’s the historical implication of this moment, and of course there’s the danger of pillaging.”

“Bricks?”

“Goodness, no. A lot of these very old stupas, particularly up here in the north, contain a good deal of-” he lowered his voice “-treasure. As you know, the slaves of capitalism often gain merit by donating large sums of gold and jewels to temples. In the olden days, the abbots used to keep their treasures safe from invading armies by entombing them within the structure of the stupa.”

“Oh, I see.”

Cynical, Siri wondered whether the Buddhist Council would have shown this enthusiasm if the helicopter had toppled a wall or a temple roof. But he gave the man the benefit of the doubt.

“Good luck.”

He walked over to the crashed helicopter and used a spine of metal to ferret through the ashes. The fire had been hot enough to melt the windshield and parts of the fuselage. All that remained of the seats were the stubs of springs.

As he suspected, there was nothing new to be learned there. He found the melted clip of a seat belt, and slivers of tin around the site that were obviously from exploding petrol cans. Everything confirmed the findings from the autopsy. He just wanted to announce quietly to himself how clever he was. Being right can be a very satisfying experience.

Surprisingly, the craft wasn’t armor-plated. There were several bullet holes in the fuselage, and it obviously wasn’t a military vehicle. Siri assumed the pilots had invested all their hopes in getting in and out and away with the minimum of fuss. They certainly hadn’t been expecting the barrage they got, and had had no defense against it. For some reason, the military had been expecting them.

Job done, he went back to the treasure hunt. The elephant was secured and one mahout was on its neck. The other stood behind, jabbing a large wooden spike into the animal’s rear end. The links of the chain groaned and the crunch of four-hundred-year-old brickwork disturbed the previous silence of the temple. But still nothing, neither the elephant nor the stupa, showed any noticeable movement. It was a frieze with sound.

Siri stood behind the white-shirted official.

“You’ve probably noticed already…”

“What’s that, Comrade?”

“The skid marks behind the helicopter.”

The chain groaned once more. “Yes?”

“Well, if that were indeed the trajectory, and it does appear that it worked up a good head of speed before it stopped, I don’t see how it could possibly have nicked your stupa on the way down.”

The man’s amicable nature seemed to retract like the head of a turtle. “Those were the official findings submitted in the official report from the Luang Prabang regional office, sir. They are far more knowledgeable than you or I on matters such as this. Surely you aren’t suggesting this is a coincidence? What else could have caused it?”

“I’m certainly not a ballistics specialist, but that hole in the side of the stupa… just a guess, mind you, but if there were a mortar placement, say, at the base of Phousy Hill up there, and if it were taking potshots at the helicopter after it was already on its way down, it certainly could have caused a lot of damage.”

The man was turning most indignant. “I hope you don’t think one of our own people could be responsible for the destruction of this historic site.”

Siri could tell this man was no kindred spirit. He smiled and looked ahead. “That elephant doesn’t look too well.”

The noble beast suddenly took one unexpected backward step and broke most of the bones in the foot of the man with the spike. It then wavered slightly, like a hot-air balloon in a thermal, and sank onto its front knees. In spite of the blasphemous yelling of the rear mahout, it managed a dignified death. It looked to either side for the most comfortable landing; then, like the good socialist slave it was, it leaned to its left.

The ground beneath Siri’s feet shook when the elephant crashed onto the earth. The neck mahout leaped to the ground and ran to help his screaming friend. With not one more thought for the dying animal, he offered himself as a crutch and guided his colleague toward the gate.

Siri walked to the shallow-breathing elephant and knelt at its head. The mahouts he’d known in the jungle would mourn for days if they lost such a proud animal. But cities and mercenary cowboys were gradually destroying those bonds. They could replace an elephant like a flat tire. This animal deserved better: it deserved respect.

He lay his palm flat beside the animal’s cloudy eye and whispered incantations still engraved on his memory from his days as a novice. The guards looked on in amazement.

“What’s he doing?”

“Giving the thing its last rites, by the look of it.”

“He must be nuts.”

But Siri continued until he could no longer see his reflection in the milky iris. The eye no longer saw. The elephant no longer lived. And at that moment, a surge, like a massive overdose of Vietnamese coffee, passed through Siri’s body. The breath was sucked from him, and his heart jived out of control in his chest. He knew right away that the spirit of the old beast had passed through him and that something undefinable had been left there. Even after his pulse slowed, he knew there was a difference about him.

He was distracted from his thoughts by the sound of crumbling masonry. Some reaction had been started by the elephant’s tug-of-war. Old natural mortar was slowly turning to dust, and the clay bricks it once held secure were sliding from their housings, changing position.

Soon there was nothing to hold up the leaning structure, and the stupa flopped to the earth. It disintegrated inelegantly, as if it could never have stood up to the elements of centuries. There was very little noise; no trumpets or choirs, nothing grand to suggest that history had tumbled.

The official and his guards rushed over to the stupa’s base, which stood square and hollow like an old wishing well. But their wishes were not to come true. Even before they started to scoop the wayward bricks from the base, they knew this was an empty stupa. The early enthusiasm of the guards gradually turned to languor, and after twenty minutes they showed no interest whatsoever in shoveling.

The official was left with nothing but professional obligation. He noted the time of the destruction for his report and wrapped one small brick in a sheet of newspaper to take back with him on the bus. He photographed the pile of bricks and the dead elephant. That meant more unnecessary paperwork. Siri was sitting in the shade of a nearby frangipani, still trying to count his teeth. Years of spice had numbed the tip of his tongue. Hard labor in the jungle had desensitized his fingertips.

“Nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine,” he said.

“What was that, comrade?”

“Well, if this is Lan Xang, home of the million elephants…”

The official gave a polite chuckle.

“Yes. I see. Very droll.” He replaced his papers in his plastic briefcase with the camera and the brick. “Excuse me. I have a bus to catch.”

Siri had been offered a bus ticket back to Vientiane by the District Chief, which he had naturally refused. Nothing would possess him to make that spine-jarring journey. He would take the plane or wait for the helicopter. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t available. It didn’t matter that it was off on some top-secret mission. It didn’t matter if he did have to wait two more days. He was flying back, and that was final.

The guards had gone, and he was alone in the temple grounds. It was blissfully peaceful. The main sala was a simple white rectangular building, but he was fascinated by the beautiful carvings on the black hardwood doors. There was something mystical about the figures that played there: the angels, the naga, the children of old kings. He walked closer to look at the expressions on their faces. Each had the same troubled look. They gazed directly into Siri’s eyes, and something about their fear told him “Beware.”

He shrugged off the feeling that came over him and set about hunting for accommodation. The monks had been temporarily removed, and a perfectly good dormitory terrace stood empty behind the prayer chapel. Bedrolls were piled at the far end in pyramids. As he wouldn’t be leaving that day, he could think of no better place to spend the night. He carried a mattress into the chapel and laid it out beneath the watchful gold eye of the Lord Buddha.

Siri found Miss Latsamy in the City Law Administration Office where she worked for three dollars a month. She was stamping official seals onto documents that stood in rectangular towers across her desk. She looked up when he came in. “Ah. Hello, Uncle.”

“Hello, Miss Latsamy. I was hoping you could tell me where I might find Comrade Houey.”

She looked up at the clock on the wall.

“I don’t think you can. He’s preparing for… for the…” she didn’t know what to call it “… the thing.”

“The thing?”

Miss Latsamy looked across at the lady at the desk opposite, who raised a well-crayoned eyebrow. She said nothing.

“It doesn’t really have a name, I don’t think, Uncle. Comrade Houey called all the shamans to a meeting in the Town Hall. Anyone who refuses will be arrested. They all have to bring their paraphernalia with them, because there’s going to be a…”

“A thing.”

“Right.”

“What time’s the meeting?”

“Seven. But it’s only for shamans.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Miss Latsamy. Don’t you know I’m the embodiment of a thousand-and-fifty-year-old holy man from Khamuan?”

She eyed him up and down. “You don’t look it.”

“It’s very kind of you to say so.” The Daughter That Lived

Teacher Chanmee arrived at the morgue early in the afternoon. She was there on the bed of a pickup truck when Dtui got back from lunch.

“Hot, isn’t it?”

“Damned hot.”

“This is for you, Mrs.”

The hospital driver was keen to get a signature on his chit and offload the body.

“If you called me ‘Miss,’ I might think about it.”

Mr. Geung arrived just as she was signing. He wheeled out the morgue trolley and took the new guest to the examination room. As he was preparing to slot her into the freezer, Dtui came up behind him and looked at the body.

“See that, Mr. Geung? Those marks are almost identical to the ones on Auntie See.”

He continued to prepare the teacher for storage.

“Let… let’s w… wait for the Comrade Doctor.”

“Wouldn’t you trust me to cut her up, pal?”

“Dr. Siri is a… a doctor.”

“And what am I?”

“A girl.”

“What about when I come back from four years’ study in the Soviet Union with a coroner’s certificate? Will I still be just a girl then?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“Then you… you… you’ll be an old girl.”

He kept his face straight for as long as was humanly possible, then snorted his laugh. She picked up the bone cleaver and chased him around the dissection table.

Dtui was the unbreakable one. She was the survivor of a litter of children who all left life before puberty. Had they lived, she would now have five brothers and five sisters. But they hadn’t been as lucky or as hardy or wily as she proved to be. She went beyond the point that had taken most of her siblings: the crossroads where childbirth and death meet. Without the assistance of immunization, her body had fought off all the usual childhood diseases, and the curse of accidents had passed over her roof to give grief to the next household.

Her mother, Manoluk, had invested eleven lives of love into her surviving daughter. When her soldier husband was lost in one more meaningless battle, she brought her to Vientiane. Here she cooked and cleaned and washed for strangers and pushed Dtui through school. It wasn’t until her daughter stood on the platform receiving her nursing diploma from the wife of the viceroy that she allowed herself to relax.

Cirrhosis took her almost immediately. It was as if the bacteria itself had waited for Dtui to graduate. Years of bad diet and poor living conditions took their toll on her tired body, and by her daughter’s third paycheck, Manoluk was already too weak to work.

The morgue position paid only a dollar a month more than the wards, but for Dtui every dollar counted. She didn’t particularly like the idea at first. She’d entered nursing to keep people alive, not put them in jars. But the morgue dollar and another from overtime paperwork helped pay for the drugs that kept her ma alive.

The previous coroner had been a kind man, a pencil-thin bachelor trained in France. He helped Dtui out whenever he could, but he was helping many others on his modest salary and she didn’t like to ask for more. He had escaped across the river with all the others, not knowing what punishment his sophisticated family name might bring down upon him.

The Pathet Lao takeover could have been a disaster for Manoluk, had Dtui missed any paychecks. Nobody was sure whether they’d keep their jobs in the new regime, or be paid, or be sent for re-education. Dtui and Geung went to the morgue every day as usual and mopped and dusted and whacked cockroaches, waiting for some news of their fate. But in the beginning it turned out that the new system worked in their favor. The government made a demonstrative point of helping the disadvantaged. Although money became scarcer and virtually disappeared after two drastic devaluations, Dtui was able to stock up on rice and canned supplies.

That’s how things still were. Manoluk had her better and worse days. Mostly she just lay and read. Like the mysterious monk had predicted, ma was having a better year. Her cirrhosis wasn’t getting any worse, but she still needed medical attention that wasn’t available in Laos. If Dtui got the posting to the Soviet Bloc, she could live dirt-cheap and send the living allowance back. It was double her salary. Girls she knew were doing just that.

She could dream of finding a wealthy man to marry and end all their suffering, but although the Lord had blessed her with intelligence and kindness, He hadn’t made her slender or pretty enough, so their future was in her hands.

She sat in the dim glow of the desk lamp staring at the molds in front of her on the desk. She was wearing her Chinese overalls and a thin layer of red dust. Earlier, at the hospital garden allotment, she’d been assigned to rescue as many gaaw turnips as she could from the impenetrable crust of the back lots. Those that hadn’t been baked by the heat had become inedible fossils. She should have gone straight home to see how Manoluk was doing, but instead she’d become fascinated by this case. She’d made agar casts of the teethmarks on teacher Chanmee and was comparing them with the two other sets. Whatever had savaged the teacher had also bitten deep into the throat of Auntie See. There was no doubt about it.

Although the front morgue door was open, she heard a knock on the frame outside. She called out: “Who is it?”

“Civilai.”

“Come in, Comrade.”

Civilai walked through the dark vestibule and into the office.

“Hello, Dtui. Siri not here?”

“He’s not back yet.”

“Ah, those Luang Prabang girls.”

“He sent a message this afternoon that he’s trying to get a flight. There’s some problem with his paperwork.”

“You surprise me.”

“They say he can’t get a laissez passer out of Luang Prabang because he didn’t have one to get in. So, officially he shouldn’t be there.”

“Ridiculous. This was official business.”

“It was, but the doc didn’t come back when he was supposed to. He missed his helicopter ride. I think he upset the local governor as well.”

“He never gets too old to break the rules, does he? I’m convinced if he weren’t the national coroner, he’d be in prison.”

Dtui sucked air through her clenched teeth.

“What is it?”

“He might end up in prison anyway.”

Civilai shook his head and went to sit at the doctor’s desk. “What’s the old dog done now?”

“I don’t know, Uncle. But two uniformed policemen have been here twice looking for him. They say they have a warrant.”

“What for?”

“His arrest.” “What on earth do they think he’s done?”

“They wouldn’t tell me.”

“I’ll get Phosy to look into it. We can’t have our only forensic surgeon locked up. I’ll see what I can do about his travel pass, too.”

“Thanks, Comrade.”

He looked around at the office. “Hot, isn’t it?”

“Damned hot.”

“What’s that you’ve got there?”

“Teeth marks.”

“Aha.”

He carried his chair over to her desk and looked at the clear gray molds. He poked a finger into the side.

“This looks like…”

“It is.”

“Very ingenious. Did you think of it?”

“I was just about to, but Siri got there first. A second case came in today with identical marks to those on the old lady. We think it’s a bear.”

“In Vientiane?”

“One escaped from the garden of the Lan Xang.”

“Not that old dishrag? It hardly seemed alive. But I bet it had a chip on its shoulder. Now I see why Siri had me hunting for an animal expert.”

“Did you find one?”

“I certainly did. He apparently knows something about bears, too.”

“Good. I can’t wait for Siri to get back and sort this all out.”

Civilai looked at her through his thick glasses. “Well, don’t then.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t wait.”

“You mean I…?”

“Siri always says you’re five times smarter than he is, not that that’s so difficult. But you seem like a very able young lady. I’ll arrange the paperwork, and you can go talk to the fellow.” Dtui’s smile surpassed the glow from the lamp. “If you think you’re up to it.”

“You bet your red flag I am, Uncle.”

“Good. That’s settled then.”

“What do I need paperwork for?”

“You can’t just waltz up and start chatting to foreigners, you know.”

“He’s foreign?”

“Russian. Like the vodka.”

“Oh.”

The pervading atmosphere of socialist xenophobia in and around Vientiane had added to the culture of mistrust. Although there were very few actual spies, there were enough imagined ones to keep everyone on their toes. The Lao didn’t dare go up to a foreigner in the street, because they didn’t know who might be watching or what they might be thinking about the relationship.

The remaining foreign teachers or long-term residents found themselves with fewer and fewer friends the longer they stayed. Maids and gardeners and drivers had to report weekly to the Department of Foreign Affairs. They reported car registration numbers, overheard conversations, and names of suspicious visitors. It was frightening to imagine such power in the hands of a maid.

Although the politburo was keen to accept foreign aid from the Soviets and Vietnamese and to invite their experts to act as advisers, they didn’t actually want too much mixing with the common people. So it was that Dtui spent a sleepless night worrying about her date with the foreign devil on the following morn.

She’d never spoken to a white man before. Doin’ the Exorcism Conga

The compact Luang Prabang Town Hall was more romantically lit than usual. They’d brought in an extra supply of beeswax lamps, as per instructions from the Department of Culture. They certainly weren’t to use electricity, as the manual said it disturbed the natural harmonics. The building was draped in white threads, and candles on small clay stands burned along the perimeter walls.

If there had been any tourists, this would certainly have been a highlight of the slide show back home. Except that they wouldn’t have gotten in. Siri stood in the shadows opposite and watched a bizarre parade of witch doctors arriving, as if out of various dreams, to be frisked by two tough soldiers at the gate.

Those without spiritual connections were turned away and joined the large crowd of bemused locals gathered beyond the wall. They pointed to well-known but barely-seen shamans like stars arriving at the Oscars. One wizard-like man with thick white hair down to his naked knees drew “ahh’s” of admiration from the gathering. Two short round Hmong women, like zeros, came together with a stick-like man in red.

There were old ladies in white sheets wheeling barrows of artifacts, men in eyeless hoods guided by young children, animals in sacks squealing anticipation of a sacrifice, small troupes of cymbalists clattering around intoxicated mediums, and transvestites in makeup brighter than the lamps. The carnival of freaks was interspersed with wise folks who had found shamanism thrust upon them and had no desire to turn themselves into circus performers.

Siri attached himself to the tail of the parade and flashed his ID. Once inside, he was overwhelmed by the humidity and the scents of the assembled witchery. Incense smoke of contradicting spells tangled like clothes in a washing machine. Excremental odors of petrified piglets and body sweat and cheap cigarettes all wafted through the room.

The authorities had laid out folding wooden chairs in neat rows as if this were a gathering of normal people attending a political seminar. On the raised platform stood a table with four seats and name place-cards. As yet, the owners of the names had not taken their seats. They were waiting for the assembly to settle down before making an entrance.

But this was an assembly of the unsettleable. They sprawled and faced about and ambled around, greeting old friends and arguing old scores. They turned their chairs into walking creatures that mingled with them. And soon the raised table was a forgotten focal point overlooking an unruly scrum. It was all most sociable, but terribly un-socialist.

Siri was content to squat against the side wall and watch the show, but the white-haired man caught sight of him and walked unsteadily over. As he got closer, Siri could see there was little more to him than hair. He was a skeleton painted pale pink.

“Yeh Ming, Yeh Ming. How would you be?” the old man asked. He seemed truly delighted to see Siri, or whoever it was he saw. He held out a sprig of finger-bones that Siri shook carefully. The sound of the man coming down to sit beside him was like a wind charm being lowered to the ground. Siri was surprised that his hidden shaman was so obvious to this old man.

“You know Yeh Ming?”

“Certainly. Certainly. How could I not? You’re an ancestor to many of us.”

“You know, I haven’t actually met Yeh Ming myself. I only found out about him last year.”

“You could do worse, boy, much worse. You see that particularly obnoxious looking woman there with the glued hair? She carries around the unsettled spirit of Sisadtee, who died a horrible death. She spends all her time seeking revenge on those who cut off her limbs.”

“Is there any chance that I could talk to you about Yeh Ming? There are a lot of things I need to learn.”

“Why not? Why not? Come by tomorrow, around the second sunrise.”

“Where do I find you?”

“You know the Pak Ou caves?”

“I’ve heard of them.”

“I’ll wait for you there.”

“When exactly is the second sunr-?”

His question was drowned out by the shrill blasts of two referees’ whistles. The sound cut through all the chatter. The four local dignitaries had arrived at the high table and were being ignored. The men at either end had taken out their whistles to shut up the audience. Between the blowers sat Comrade Houey and his tough friend who was, according to his name card, the head of Provincial Security.

Even with all the whistling, it was still some minutes before the chairs were turned and half-turned toward the stage and the noise had abated. One of the whistlers began a well-worn introduction to his boss.

“Respected comrade brothers and sisters, the Northern Lao Administration of the Democratic Republic is honored to have you here this evening. It gives me great pleasure to introduce the holder of no fewer than twenty-eight distinguished service citations, two medals of…”

He went on. Siri whispered to his partner: “Do you have any idea what this is all about?”

“Oh yes. Oh yes. But I came anyway. I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.”

“… His Honor, Comrade Governor Houey.” The other three men at the table applauded. The audience didn’t, although one of the sacrificial cocks crowed in its sack. Houey stood and looked with arrogance around the room.

“Comrade shamans,” he began. “This morning, the king and queen, the crown prince, and several members of the former royal family were transported, for their own safety, to the Northeast.”

There were dissatisfied murmurs from the crowd. Siri now understood where his helicopter had gone. Houey didn’t pause for effect. “As you all know, since December of 1975, the man you referred to as ‘king’ has been a normal citizen like you or me.”

“But without the respect,” someone shouted.

“Who was that?” Houey asked angrily.

“Sorry,” said the heckler in a softer voice. “It’s one of my malevolent spirits. I can’t stop his outbursts.”

Comrade Houey looked sternly at the simple man who was calmly whittling a wooden doll.

“Considering the harm the royals have done to our beloved homeland over the centuries, Comrade, your king can think himself very lucky that he’s still alive. If this were Russia, they would all have been in the pit long ago. You tell your malevolent spirit that.”

“He heard, boss.”

Some of the shamans tittered, and Comrade Houey got the feeling that he was being made fun of. He wasn’t a man who took abuse in any form. He had to bring these mumbo-jumbo charlatans into line. He was wearing a thick gray shirt, Lao style, outside his trousers. Through the material, he took hold of the butt of the handgun tucked into his belt. Most of the guests noticed the gesture but didn’t appear to worry about it at all. Houey continued.

“Because of the influence you people have been allowed over the years, most of the general population up here is in fear of the spirits. This seriously affects their concentration when it comes to studying the doctrines of Marx and Lenin. There isn’t enough room in the simple mind of the rural poor for conflicting influences. The only spiritual stimulation they need is of a political nature. One man, one doctrine.”

“Which one?”

It was the same rude spirit speaking through the whittler.

“What?”

“Well, you said there can only be one politico-spiritual influence, one doctrine. But you mentioned two: Marx and Lenin. That’s confusing for the brainless peasants. Which one do they choose, arsehole?”

“Guards. Take this man-”

“It’s not me!” the man protested.

“-and his malevolent spirit outside.”

Two men in uniform escorted the embarrassed shaman out of the room. He walked calmly, but his resident troublemaker protested and blasphemed all the way to the door and beyond it.

“Pagan commie leeches. King killers. Organ suckers!”

When he was gone, Houey took a deep breath and continued.

“I’m delighted to announce that on this historic day, marked by the long-overdue erasure of the vestiges of the illegal royal bourgeoisie, the so-called royal spirits are also to be disbanded.”

There was a shocked buzz of comments around the room. Some laughed.

“Quiet! I’ve called you here today because you are going to summon the spirits and give them an ultimatum.” The murmur became a sea of bold comments and jokes. The audience laughed at each one-liner, and order was lost. The men on the stage reached for their whistles, but a much calmer sound quieted the rabble. Siri’s partner had begun to speak. His voice somehow threw a blanket of respectful silence over the others.

“If you please, Comrade Houey. It isn’t that easy.”

Houey looked for the source of the comment and saw the white-haired man and Siri for the first time. He became very angry.

“Is that you speaking, or are you a damned ventriloquist’s dummy as well?”

The man rose silently and far more elegantly than he had sat down. It was as if he were rising to full height in an elevator.

“No, sir. It is I. I am Tik Kwunsawan. I was the official court spiritual counselor to the late king. Forgive me for speaking out of line, but requesting the spirits to attend isn’t like calling pupils into a classroom. The conditions-”

“Well, Comrade Tik Kwunsawan, this is no request. If the spirits wish to be a part of the new democratic republican network, they have to toe the line. This is a State directive.”

“The State may as well order a rainbow, Comrade.”

“Sit yourself back down, old man. You don’t have any exclusive rights on the spirit world. Look.”

He held up the stapled booklet that was in front of him on the table.

“This is the official manual, issued by the Department of Culture in Vientiane, for the summoning of spirits.”

No joke could have drawn a bigger laugh than that. Not even Tik, rejoining Siri on the floor, could hold back his laughter. Siri recalled his visit to the Ministry the day after the suicide. He imagined the officials in one of those bare offices poring over the texts to remove all the religious and royal references from the ceremony. He was surprised there was enough left to make a manual. But it was significant that they hadn’t seen fit to ban the practice altogether. Too many of the country’s remaining three million people had come through life on the wings of the spirits to banish them completely.

The whistlers brought the crowd back to order, but before Houey could continue, the glue-haired woman asked: “If you can do it all with that little book, why do you need us at all?”

“Right,” echoed the audience.

Houey shook his head and smiled. “This is the very essence of socialism, my sister. We work together as a team. You help me and I help you. Despite our differences, despite our deep resentments and doubts, cooperation turns us into one single body. We are all here ultimately for one purpose.”

“And what is today’s purpose, Young Brother?” Tik asked in his quiet voice that still carried to the rafters of the building. Houey nodded to a sheet of paper in his colleague’s hand.

“We shall be giving the spirits this ultimatum.” Tik held back his smile. “They will have three choices. Three choices are very fair, I believe, considering the State has no legal obligation to them. The first-”

“Wait,” Tik said. “If these are conditions for the spirits, they should be here to listen, don’t you think?”

Siri looked around. It was obvious that the shamans were confused. How could they bring the spirits to a place like this? Houey consulted with his table mates. “That won’t be necessary.”

“How else can we be sure to get the message to all of them?” Tik asked.

“We were thinking you could sort of pass it on to them once we’d left, or when you got home.” Houey seemed to be getting paler.

“Goodness me, no. Much easier if they hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. Let’s bring them here.”

“That really isn’t-”

“Brother and sister shamans,” Tik said in a louder voice, slowly rising to his full height, “let us invite the spirits to attend their final meeting.’’

“I don’t th-”

But Tik had already begun a peculiar dance. He chanted in a tongue that neither Siri nor the others present had ever heard. If anything, it bore a close resemblance to a North American Indian rain dance.

Tik moved slowly toward the throng, raising his hands to call down the spirits and stamping his feet in time with his chant. At first the shamans looked on as if senility had taken him. But then one Hmong little lady zero stood and followed him, copying his rhythm and his gestures. She chanted counterpoint to his bass.

The men on the stage looked sideways at one another, not knowing how to react or what to say. This wasn’t what they had planned. One by one, the shamans stood and joined the line. One child dragged her hooded father by the hand. A toothless gash appeared on one ancient woman’s face, and she leaped to her feet, twirling and yelling like a young girl.

Siri had never attended a mass sйance before and he was unsure of the protocol. But there was one point of which he had no doubt: there wasn’t a hope in heaven or hell that this fiasco would bring any spirits into the Luang Prabang Town Hall. He laughed to himself, got to his feet, and joined the conga.

The rhythm was strong now, and all the guests were riding the giant eel around the room. Those with instruments played them. Those without screamed and whooped and looked upward to the invisible heavenly ropes, down which the imaginary ghosts would descend. Without warning, Tik stopped and turned his head so suddenly toward the top table that the four men held on to their heartbeats. The room shushed.

“They’re coming,” Tik said in a whisper. He looked up, reached his hands to the ceiling and seemed to swell up. “Welcome.” All the others followed suit. Some twitched, as if the fit of the arriving spirits didn’t match their bodies. Some gulped them in like air. Some took handfuls of them and forced them into their ears.

And, like a sudden audience of zombies, Tik and the shamans turned toward the stage as slowly as melting ice, as silent as the graves from which the spirits had supposedly come. With eyes large and unblinking, they stared at Houey with their teeth bared.

The cadres on the stage were apparently in some kind of trance too. They looked down on the sea of drooling, staring people possessed by god knew how many angry spirits. It was a situation the manifesto hadn’t prepared them for. The crotch of the Security Officer’s trousers was already a noticeably darker green than the rest of his uniform. Siri could just see the parchment-white face of Comrade Houey. He had to give the governor credit: he didn’t run. In fact, although his voice trembled, he attempted to continue his speech.

“Comrade spirits. It… it has been vested in me, as a… a representative of-” He’d forgotten to breathe and the words stopped. He smuggled in one or two deep breaths to calm himself. “As a representative of the lprp, to make the following announcement.”

He held out his hand to the head of Security for the document. But the man had turned into some kind of granite bust. Only his eyes moved, scanning back and forth across the faces of the shamans. So Houey wrenched the paper from his hand and read. His own hands shook so badly that it was amazing he could catch up with the typed words.

“You shall be given three… and this wasn’t my idea. You shall be given three alternatives.”

He looked up for a response but received none.

“Firstly, you may go to the Northeast to join the ex-royals.”

A thought occurred to him.

“Of course, you’ll have to make your own arrangements for… well, your own arrangements.”

He was going to add “for transportation,” but thought better of it.

“Secondly, if you intend to stay in Luang Prabang, you will have to work in the service of the temples. A specific…”

He noticed that some of the shamans had started to vibrate, not unlike spin-dryers. It unnerved him.

“A specific temple will be assigned to you, and you will be ordained as temple spirits. Naturally, you’ll have to share the workload.”

The vibrations increased, and one of the whistle-blowers began to back away across the stage.

“Thirdly, if you select neither one nor two, you will be…”

He looked up, wondering if he dared read on. The vibrations were more pronounced, as if the audience was one large jelly. He took another breath. The second whistler was on his way out.

“You will be banished from Laos. Naturally we don’t want to resort to that, so it’s better you take the other alternatives. I suggest you all go away and think about this. I won’t expect your decision right away. We’re all fair here. Is that clear?”

Silence. The Security chief’s chair crashed to the floor as he ran for all he was worth to the back door. Houey stood alone and vulnerable.

“Good. Th… then that concludes our business for th… this evening. So I…”

Foregoing the usual farewell speech, Houey turned, walked at first, then jogged to the exit. The sheet with its three conditions wafted like a leaf, back and forth, down to the wooden stage.

There was a polite pause to give the officials time to get away from the building. But when all was clear, Tik turned, smiled, and nodded to the crowd. The shamans fell into a fit of mirth and merriment unseen in Luang Prabang since the days of the old regime. Farewell the Beer Smuggler

Ounheuan and his wife had decided on an early night. They had to get up early the next morning to smuggle whiskey and beer from across the river. They weren’t criminals, of course. Most shop owners had to engage in a little rowing in order to have something to sell.

In spite of their good intentions, they hadn’t been able to get a wink of sleep. First, there were the howls. Then there came one almighty dog fight. Now, one of the creatures, obviously injured, was growling and whining in front of Ounheuan’s shop. His wife decided she had tossed and turned enough.

“Oun. Can’t you go down and do something about that?” There was no reply. She thumped him on the shoulder, and he grunted as if barely roused from a deep sleep. “Come on, lizard shit. I know you aren’t asleep. It’s annoying you as much as it is me.”

He continued a well-practiced snore, and she knew the worm had no intention of going down to the street.

“Bum.”

She yanked back her side of the net and got to her feet. Tightening her sleeping cloth above her fleshy breasts, she walked to the window and looked down. A wooden awning jutted out between her and the door of the shop. Although she could hear the wounded dog, she could see nothing in the unlit street.

“Shit.”

There was nothing humane about her going downstairs. She wasn’t about to apply first aid to the bleeding paw of some street dog. Those mongrels would have off your hand as soon as look at you. Probably give you rabies too.

No, the plan was to grab a long stick and prod the creature far enough away that she could get some sleep. She found the perfect thing: a length of lead piping. If the poor thing were too injured to limp away, she could whack it over the head and put it out of its misery.

The padlock was on the inside of two large metal doors that concertina’d together to fill the frontage of their open-terraced store. Still grumbling, she took the key from the glass cabinet and unfastened the lock. The sound of the rusty door scraping along the ground was the last thing Mr. Ounheuan remembered before his pretend sleep became a real one.

When he awoke, the sky was already cobalt blue and he knew they’d overslept. The sun would soon be up and their dealer on the Thai side would take his booze elsewhere. He cursed his stupid wife and turned toward her place on the mattress, but she wasn’t there.

Perhaps she’d gone by herself. Didn’t want to disturb her sleeping loved one. Some blasted hope. He went down to the shop, scratching his crotch through his football shorts.

“Phimpon, what the hell are you playing at?”

The metal door was open and the key poked invitingly from the padlock. “Oh, right. Let’s just leave the place wide open so anyone can help themselves to-”

He’d reached the doorway and froze there, hardly believing what he saw. Two black crows flapped but stood their ground. The gravel front of his shop was alive with the squirming bodies of cockroaches. There were thousands of the little buggers feasting on some sticky substance he couldn’t make out in the half-light. He assumed it was some sort of treacle.

But then he recognized the remains. Two, perhaps three dogs had been ripped apart. He picked up a length of lead pipe that lay in the doorway and went at the crows that were feeding on them. They retreated the length of the pipe, but still didn’t fly away from their dream breakfast.

It was then, beneath their flapping wings, that Ounheuan noticed something that turned his stomach. He could barely breathe. He sank to his knees and vomited. He couldn’t bring himself to look again. But even though his eyes were clenched shut, he could still see the image of the hand. His wife’s wedding ring on the middle finger glinted in the rising sunlight. That Old Dead Feeling

It was no dream. Siri was unequivocally dead-in Nirvana, he hoped. Even if points were lost for being a communist, he trusted he’d earned enough to be in heaven rather than the other place. He saw no fire, heard no pop music, and smelled no opium smoke, so his hopes were high.

“Have you forgiven me, Lord?”

It was the trunk that confused him.

He’d arrived back at the temple long after midnight. When he left the Town Hall, the celebrations were still raging. No guards had stayed around to lock up.

It was the most fun Siri could remember having for a very long time. The impromptu show: the shamans impersonating the officials, the heated debate the spirits may have had as to which option to choose, the transportation problems in getting them to the Northeast. It was sparklingly brilliant entertainment for a town whose heart had been removed. But his assumption that no spirits had been awakened and summoned by the phony sйance was a mistaken one.

At That Luang temple, the night guard was asleep beside the staircase. Siri walked to the prayer hall and retrieved his small bag from behind the Buddha images. He dug through the contents, retrieved his waistcloth, stripped, and went out to the earthen jars to bathe.

He was on his way back when the disturbance began in his ears. At first he assumed it was water lodged there, and he shook his head to free it. But the pressure turned to a sound. It was an annoying single note, metallic, at a pitch that set his teeth on edge. He looked around the yard to see where a machine could be to make such a row.

The temple dogs slept at peace. The birds roosted in the tree branches, all undisturbed by the jarring sound. It was evidently exclusively his. He followed it to its source, the destroyed stupa inside the blue wall. The closer he got, the more deafening the sound became, the more painful the pressure on his eardrums. He looked into the foundation of the stupa base lit by a generous moon but saw nothing. Yet instinctively he knew there had to be something in there inviting him to come closer.

He climbed over into the square of bricks and picked his way carefully to the center. There he cleared a place to kneel and began to dig with his hands. Beneath the rubble, the earth was soft, mulched, teeming with the warm bodies of earthworms. The deeper he dug, the louder became the sound.

He was so focused on his task, he didn’t notice what was happening around him. The destroyed stupa was slowly reforming. The bricks were reattaching, the mortar hardening. But Siri had only one thing on his mind: to stop the awful sound.

Although he couldn’t yet see it, his hand arrived upon the source of his discomfort. As soon as he took hold of the cool stone, he knew what had lured him there. He could feel the leather thong attached to its loop at the top of the black amulet. He knew the shape and the slight ripples of its indentations. He could feel the power of Phibob that now had a hold of him. It was pulling him-pulling with the strength of a thousand malevolent spirits-pulling him with the conviction of righteous revenge-to his death.

He felt his arm being wrenched downward through the soft earth writhing with the bodies of maggots and centipedes. They attached themselves to his naked skin and helped to drag him down. He couldn’t let go of the amulet even when his shoulder was flush with the ground. Like a man about to vanish underwater, he looked up to take a last gulp of air.

That’s when he saw that the stupa was complete and he was entombed. The air was musty with the exhalations of four hundred years. That was the last taste on his final breath. That lungful didn’t last him long once he was buried and traveling on down through the earth. He held it for as many seconds as he could, but he knew it was futile. He was packed in dirt. There was no point in trying to breathe again. All he could do was wait.

As a coroner he knew the process well. His face twitched as the muscles went into spasm. The death rattle rose in his throat, and he allowed himself one last agonized struggle until his heart stopped beating. Just before the machinery shut down completely, the metallic drone stopped and he heard his name called. It was a beautiful sound. Hearing is the most stubborn of the senses and the last one to leave a dying person.

He was aware that his pupils were dilating, and he could feel the warmth seep from his body. In another hour he would be stiff with rigor mortis. There was no more movement, just the calm that comes from sensing the cells and tissues dying at their own sweet pace, a process that could take weeks to complete. His goosebumped skin would be the last to submit to death.

In less time than it takes for a fish to fry, the nerves feeding the cortex of his brain would be gone and whatever feeling remained would come as an observer hovering outside the packet he’d once lived in. By then, it would be as useless as one of the plastic bags that floated down the Mekhong.

He looked up into the golden light that showered onto him, and through the beams he saw the smile of the Lord. He sighed and smiled back at his maker. It was a relief, after all. He felt no bitterness. He’d had enough of life. He wasn’t depressed, just bored. It was as if he’d read the book of living and knew how it ended. There was nothing more to learn. He abandoned the body and reached out to Buddha.

That’s when the Great Plan proved to have a page or two missing. The Lord’s head shook from side to side as if he didn’t want Siri after all. His face distorted and out of it grew a trunk. It snaked down to where the soul of Siri hovered and blasted the dead doctor with a torrent of warm breath that stank of stale peanuts. The Randy Russian

Dtui, reflecting the bright sunlight from her crispy white uniform, stood at the gates of Silver City. This was neither a city nor silver. It was a walled-off compound two minutes’ walk from the new Monument to the Unknown Soldier. It was reputedly from here that the kgb did its spying. Some said it was the Soviet Union’s response in Southeast Asia to the American spy factory in Bangkok. But very few people had actually been inside to report on what other evils it contained.

Ironically, before they were turfed out, the American Secret Service had operated from this same compound. Some people speculated that “silver” referred to the glint of sunlight from the refined opium on its way to the troops in ‘Nam.

Dtui scanned the tall green gate and the walls to either side, but saw no sign of a bell. The paint was dusty, so she kicked at the metal. It sounded much louder than she’d intended. There were a few silent moments before she heard a soft “Who is it, and what do you want?”

“I’m nurse Chundee Chantavongheuan.”

Such was the name with which she had been christened, although it didn’t get a lot of use. At birth, it was customary in Laos to give your children ugly nicknames to ward off baby-hungry spirits. There were Pigs and Prawns and Camels and no end of Dtuis-Fatties. Many Dtuis grew up to be slim and beautiful, but Chundee Chantavongheuan lived up to her name. “I’m here to see Mr. Ivanic. I have an appointment.”

A small square spyhole opened near the top of the gate, and a man looked down at her. He was either very tall or standing on a chair. She held up her paperwork from Civilai.

“Okay.”

One flap of the gate was unlocked and held ajar, barely wide enough for her to squeeze through the gap. A second guard stood inside with a brand-new ak47. The stock was still in its plastic wrapping. Guard One wasn’t tall. He had a stepladder.

Dtui found herself between two sets of gates, like a security airlock. Before they could let her through the second gate, they had to lock the first and follow certain procedures. The small guard reached out as if to frisk the big nurse, but she took a step back.

“Think again.”

“I have to search you.”

“Over my dead body. Look in the bag if you like.”

He did look in the bag and found the agar molds.

“What are these?”

“Top secret.”

“Oh. Okay.”

There was a pause.

“Hot, isn’t it?”

“Damned hot.”

With that, they unlocked the second gate and prodded her into the compound. It was a sprawling area with lovely old jujube trees and a mishmash of buildings that made the place look like an open-air museum of bad architecture. She’d expected one of the guards to follow her in, but the gate was re-bolted behind her and she was alone.

She walked to the nearest building, a two-story wood-and-brick affair that was neither a house nor an office. She stood in the open doorway and called out: “Sorry. Is somebody here?”

There was the sound of scurrying, as if some animal had been disturbed, then silence. “Hello?”

A good-looking young man in rolled-up shirtsleeves, slacks, and bare feet came from one of the rooms wiping his hands. He stopped suddenly at the sight of the white-clad nurse before him.

“Eh?”

“Good health.”

Over the man’s shoulder she saw a girl in a military uniform emerge from the same doorway and head off in the opposite direction.

“My name’s Chundee Chantavongheuan. I have an-”

“-appointment to see Mr. Ivanic. Yes, I was expecting you. They didn’t tell me you were a nurse.” He shook her hand and smiled. “I’m Phot. I’ll be translating for you.”

He slipped his feet into leather sandals in the doorway, and they walked across the compound. Dtui felt somewhat unnerved to be so close to this young man who must have had women falling at his feet. He wore his good looks like a comfortable old jacket.

“What do you all do here?” she asked.

“Oh. Absolutely top secret. Can’t possibly tell you.”

“All right.”

“But these two buildings are Lao secret police.”

She laughed.

“They spend most of their time planning ways to infiltrate the insurgency groups and bug foreign embassies. That little warehouse is ‘weapons training.’ Soviets and Lao with a dozen words in common learning how to arm and disarm bombs. Most of us give the place a wide berth.”

“I get the idea you aren’t secret police.”

“Hell, no. I was doing engineering in Moscow. The bastards dragged me out with a year to go on my degree so I could come here and help them make sense of their Soviet allies. They say if I give them three years, they’ll have their own people back from Russia and I can go finish my Master’s.”

They walked to the far end of the compound, and a small troupe of stocky Lao women in sequined tops and tights walked between the buildings.

“My God, why are they walking around in their underwear?”

“That’s their uniform. This is the performing arts end of the yard. Those girls are training to be acrobats. Lao girls are self-conscious about wearing tights and leotards, so the Russians make them dress like this all day till they get used to it. The Soviets have been here for six months, training them in circus skills. There are all types: jugglers, trampolinists, trapeze artists.”

“What’s wrong with Lao performing arts?”

Before he could answer, a deep roar diverted their attention. As they rounded the gymnasium, they came face to face with a black puma at the end of a long leash. It was only three bounds and a leap from the man at the other end of the rope. He was in his fifties and wore impressive thigh-high boots. Dtui doubted he could see those boots himself, as his stomach bloated out in front of him like an enormous ball of cheese. His darkly handsome eyes peered from a nest of curly red hair that wove into a wild crimson beard.

In his left hand he held a short whip, a seemingly ineffective weapon against such a potentially dangerous creature. But the beautiful black animal prowled obediently to an overturned oil drum and climbed onto it. There she sat and reared upward, clawing her fists through the warm air.

A small class of young men, most of them weighing not half of the creature they were watching, sat cross-legged in the shade of an egg yolk tree.

“That’s your Mr. Ivanic,” Phot told her. “This is what he does for a living.”

Ivanic cracked the whip lightly. The animal stepped slowly to the ground and stood looking at the students like a diner perusing a menu. Ivanic walked toward the back of the gym where cages were lined up beneath a canopy of coconut leaves. He tugged gently at the puma’s leash, and she started to follow him.

This was a duty she’d performed daily for several weeks without much thought. But on this day something got into her. Whether it was crankiness from the breezeless heat, or boredom at the unchanging diet, it’s hard to say. It was as if it just occurred to her that a rope didn’t work in both directions. There was nothing restraining her from the big man’s back.

She quickened her pace so the rope sagged, then broke into a loping run. The students gasped but were too shocked to call out. The puma was already at the base of her leap, coiling into a spring, split seconds from her prey. Dtui screamed.

Then suddenly without turning or changing his pace, Ivanic cracked the whip underarm and behind him. The very tip of the leather snapped against the animal’s snout. She shook her head angrily and stumbled over her bent front legs, turning a complete somersault and landing a foot from where the Russian now stood.

She was more humiliated than injured. The students clapped in appreciation, but Ivanic called something out to them. One of the other interpreters standing behind them translated his words.

“Mr. Ivanic reminds you how important it is to let your animal know that you’re always awake, always alert, and that you have eyes in your arse.”

The students laughed and clapped again and Ivanic led the humbled animal to its cage. It entered with no further fuss. Dtui and Phot walked over to it. There were four mesh cages the size of rattan ball courts. The puma’s neighbors were a small Lao wildcat and a very old lion whose ribs protruded like some ancient xylophone. The fourth cage was shrouded completely in long, worn stage curtains. There were other animals, untethered elephants, deer, and buffalo that wandered around the courtyard in pairs, as if in search of an ark.

Phot spoke to Ivanic, who seemed delighted to see him. They joked about something; then, with a big smile, the Russian reached out one dinner plate of a hand to Dtui and gave her the once-over with his eyes. She shook his hand but avoided the stare.

“Mr. Ivanic is always happy to see a big woman in a uniform,” Phot translated.

Although her mother had warned her that all Western men were lecherous dogs, the greeting caught her off guard. For once in her life, she didn’t have a cutting response. “I’m glad Mr. Ivanic has time to see me.”

With the Russian’s hand uncomfortably against the small of her back, they all walked into the little gym. There they sat around a small card table at one end. At the other, young women were sending their limbs in directions Dtui could never have imagined sending hers. One young lass stood on one leg and held the other against her cheek, the toes pointing to the ceiling. Ivanic noticed Dtui’s grimace.

“Mr. Ivanic asked whether you can do that.”

“Yes, easy. As long as the leg wasn’t attached to me any more.”

The Russian laughed with his whole body and went to give her a hug. She avoided it by bending down to her bag. She dug out the concrete cast and laid it on the table.

“Could Mr. Ivanic tell me what animal produced these marks?”

Ivanic took up the concrete mold and spread his huge hand over it. He looked up at Dtui, not smiling now.

“Mr. Ivanic wonders where you got this print.”

“It was from my boss’s garden.”

“So there isn’t a connection between this and the killings of the women?”

“You know about that?”

“Remember where you are, Nurse Chundee.”

“Right. Secret Police, I forgot. No, this one wasn’t connected to the killings.”

“Mr. Ivanic believes this is the print of a Malay black bear. He estimates it to be quite large for its breed.”

“Did he ever see the bear at the Lan Xang?”

The response was quite heated.

“Mr. Ivanic is very angry at the treatment that bear received. He’s delighted the animal escaped.”

“Is this print likely to have been made by that bear?”

“It’s very likely.”

“Does he believe that bear could have killed two people?”

The response was long and seemingly complicated. Phot had to ask for clarification of a number of points. Dtui’s eyes wandered again to the poor deformed girls and the knots they were tying themselves into.

“Mr. Ivanic is most concerned that there is a ‘shoot to kill’ order out on the bear. He has tried without success to convince the director here to rescind the order.”

“Why?”

“According to him, there’s no way an Asiatic bear could do the damage we’ve heard about.”

“But they are carnivorous.”

“Yes, but they’re the most passive of the carnivores. They may eat small slow animals or kill something wounded and eat that, but it’s very unlikely they’d attack a large animal. It’s unthinkable that they might attack and kill man.”

“Even if they’d been tortured by man?”

Phot asked the question and smiled at the answer.

“Revenge is a trait exclusive to us humans. Animals don’t get even. They can be very forgiving.”

“Is it totally impossible?”

“It’s so unlikely, it’s hardly worth thinking about.”

Dtui took out the two agar molds and put them on the table. Mr. Ivanic clapped his hands and said something to make Phot laugh.

“Mr. Ivanic says if he’d known we were having a party, he would have brought something to drink.”

“Well, you keep him away from these jellies. They were set on the skin of dead people.”

“These are the marks from the bodies?”

“Yes.”

Phot explained and Ivanic looked very seriously at them. Again he held his huge hands over the marks to judge the size. Then he shook his head.

“Are they bear teeth?”

“No.”

“How can he be so sure?”

“Mathematics.”

“Mathematics?”

“Mr. Ivanic says bears have forty-two teeth. Whatever bit into the flesh of these unfortunate women had fewer. Even if all the teeth didn’t leave a mark, there still isn’t enough space from the back teeth to the front. His guess is around thirty.”

“And what would that make it?”

“Mr. Ivanic says it was a cat.”

“I take it he isn’t talking about a lap cat.”

“He’s referring to a very large cat.” Ivanic said something, stood, and walked toward the door. “We should follow.”

In front of the cage where the defeated puma now lay, Ivanic formed his hand into the shape of a jaw and opened his fingers toward the animal. It responded with a relatively subdued growl and gave Dtui a view of its awesome teeth.

“Wow. What was your puma doing on the night of the ninth?” she asked through Phot. The Russian laughed and squeezed her shoulder.

“Mr. Ivanic said she was with him all night, officer. But the cat you’re looking for is even bigger than this one.”

“How much bigger?”

“Perhaps a tiger.”

“He thinks there’s a tiger on the loose in Vientiane?”

“He agrees it doesn’t sound very likely.”

“Could he be wrong about the number of teeth?”

The men got into a discussion. “Even if he were wrong about the numbers, and I doubt he is, the set of the mouth is different. Cats’ teeth are shaped for cutting. The bear’s are adapted for grinding. Your mold shows teeth that could only have been for cutting. In fact, Mr. Ivanic can’t recall ever seeing such sharp teeth. It was as if…”

A deep drowsy growl came from the covered cage. Dtui looked up and didn’t notice the exchange of glances between the trainer and the interpreter.

“What’s in there?”

“It’s just another animal.”

“What type?”

“It’s a panda.”

“Why’s the cage covered?”

“Mr. Ivanic says the animal has just recently arrived from China and it’s reacting badly to the heat, as we all are. In such circumstances, pandas are known to regress and become nocturnal until they can acclimatize.”

“So it sleeps in the day and gets rowdy at night?”

“Something like that.”

“But it’s a bear?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think I could take a look at its teeth? I just want to try to understand the differences Mr. Ivanic has described for myself.”

“It’s sleeping.”

“Maybe it sleeps with its mouth open. I do.”

A discussion ensued between the men, and it was clear that they disagreed on the decision. Mr. Ivanic seemed to think it was all right as long as they didn’t wake the creature. The Russian untied the edge of the curtain, took Dtui by the hand and led her into the flap between the drape and the bars of the cage. The thick material did a good job of keeping out the sun. The only light oozed up from the points where the curtains didn’t quite reach the ground.