Disco for the Departed

The Million-Spider Elvis Suit

Siri returned to Guesthouse Number One. Santiago dropped him off and, as usual, said several things that Siri didn’t understand. Siri replied equally incomprehensibly, and they parted company with a friendly handshake and a lot of laughter.

While they were still with Dtui at Kilometer 8, Santiago had submitted the circumstantial evidence that had convinced him Isandro and Odon were dabbling in ugly magic. It was quite compelling. Two cases were particularly hard to explain away. The first was that of a Vietnamese woman who had come to Vieng Xai with the Vietnamese engineers. She cooked for them and did their laundry. As it turned out, she was an incurable racist. She believed that black-skinned people were barely a rung above the ape on the ladder of evolution and had no qualms about voicing her opinions. Whenever she saw the two Cubans around the hospital area, she would quite proudly call them monkeys. As she believed they lacked the intellect to speak her language, she even went to the trouble of miming her views for them.

She was an average-looking woman with an unpleasant personality, but lonely men in a foreign country tended to overlook such flaws. So it transpired that the woman fell pregnant. She claimed it was a miracle, a divine conception, and as none of the men stepped forward voluntarily to claim paternity, one by one, the local people started to believe her. They realized this would be the perfect opportunity for her to finger some randy soldier and blackmail him into marriage. Yet she swore to the last she was still a virgin.

Santiago had been away on the early morning she was carried into the hospital. It was her seventh month and something had gone horribly wrong. The young Lao surgeon on duty that night believed the only way to stop her hemorrhaging was to remove the fetus. It was his call and nobody later questioned his judgment. But the woman had died on the operating table. When Santiago returned, the Lao surgeon was inconsolable. He found the boy drunk at midmorning and ranting. Nothing the old doctor did could calm him. He knew this was far more than a doctor’s grief at losing a patient. There had to be something else. Santiago talked to the staff nurse. She told him the surgeon had ordered her out of the theatre before she could get a look at the fetus. He’d carried it himself up to the cave of the dead, where it was to be cremated the following night. Santiago, intrigued by the story, had gone up to the cave and there he found a burlap sack small enough to contain the Vietnamese woman’s baby. What he discovered inside was not human. In the sack was the incomplete fetus of an ape.

Both Siri and Dtui felt they’d been spun a campfire horror yarn, but the teller was impressively calm and sincere. His second tale was no less peculiar. A Party cadre had come from Havana to make an official appraisal of how Cuban aid was being spent at one of the country’s few humanitarian projects overseas. He was due to stay for a week, check the books, and return. It was quite straightforward, but he was an observant man and not without some experience of Palo ways. Yet he was committed to the Cuban Communist Party and had no desire to complicate his life with magic. The Party had taught him that shamanism was one more opiate for a people who would be better off drunk on socialism.

In Vieng Xai, the bookkeeper saw something that concerned him, and he decided to discuss it with Santiago. They had an appointaient to meet one evening at eight, but an hour before that time, Isandro came to Santiago’s office to tell him the accountant had been struck down by some affliction and was clutching his throat, unable to speak. The director went to the man’s bedside and could see he was in agony. They rushed him immediately to the theatre, where Santiago performed an emergency tracheotomy. There was no evidence of disease or trauma to the respiratory tract, so the surgeon concluded the man’s labored breathing resulted from intense pain. After several more exploratory incisions, Santiago found the cause of his problem. The accountant’s epiglottis had turned to wood- more accurately, to a hard substance like the pit of a small peach. The surgeon had no choice but to remove it. They sent the bookkeeper home in a deep coma. When they were putting together his belongings to ship back to Havana, they found a slip of paper in his bag. On it were the names of the two interns, and beside them the man had doodled various Endoke symbols.

Although the monkey fetus story had been secondhand and, to some extent, conjecture, the doctor had seen this bizarre manifestation for himself. Soon after, Santiago discovered the altar, confronted Isandro and Odon, and insisted they return to Cuba.

Siri had asked why, if the two men were so powerful, Santiago hadn’t been afraid of retribution. The Cuban had smiled broadly and had slowly begun to unbutton his shirt. Siri and Dtui were astounded by what they saw. A necklace of talismans hung like a mayoral chain of office against his undershirt. This esteemed man of science was adorned with a lei of talismans, dried flowers, nuggets of metal, miscellaneous teeth, and carefully placed knots. It was a wonder he could stand upright under its weight. Siri’s single white amulet paled by comparison. Santiago admitted openly his fear of the two Endoke priests Siri felt oddly comforted that he wasn’t the only man of learning forced to use magic to stay alive.

In his room, Siri began to undress before heading down to the shower. Since his experience at the altar he had felt peculiar. Strange desires were welling up in him. Normally, he spent as little time out of his clothes as he could, but today he felt an odd hankering to look at himself in the closet mirror. This was something he’d avoided doing for a number of years. He was no oil painting. They wouldn’t ever cast a statue of him. But for some reason he felt a surge of pride as he looked at his solid frame. If he dyed his hair he could pass for, what-sixty? Fifty-five? He was strong, virile even. Today, for some reason, he believed he could break rocks with his bare fists, rip the husks off coconuts with his fingers.

He let his gray PL-issue undershorts drop to the floor, and he strode up and down the room, straight backed and buck naked. He let his penis swing from side to side, flexed his biceps, bared his teeth at…

“Can I get you some more tea?” The kitchen lady was standing in the doorway. He hadn’t heard the door open. In her hand she held a fresh thermos. She looked at him sadly as if he were a dementia victim who had lost track of his trousers. “Are you all right, uncle?”

Siri grabbed the quilt from the spare bed and wrapped it around himself. “I’m fine. Thank you.”

An hour later, respectably dressed now but no less embarrassed, he was back at the president’s house. Once more he was standing over the dissected mummy. He’d never revisited a body so many times, but this particular victim kept changing personality the more Siri learned about him. Two things still worried Siri. If the two Cubans had been sent home, what had Odon been doing back at the president’s cave a month later? And if he was being violently beaten and held under cement, what possessed him to hang on to a key? Surely he would have wished to use both hands to defend himself.

Siri fished the key from his pocket and went out onto the balcony of the new house. First he enjoyed the splendid view across the valley. Then he went to the back of the building and strained his neck to look at the very top of the karst cliff. It was from there the boulder had fallen that had led to the discovery of the body. Odd that it should land exactly where it did ten days before the concert. He went to the start of the pathway that led up to the old cave. The broken sections and the boulder were halfway between the house and the cave entrance. What were you doing there, seсor? he wondered.

Once the former cave dwellers’ houses had been completed and all their documents and personal belongings moved into them, there had been no reason, none at all, for the senior cadres to go back into the caves. Such a visit would have been no more likely that the Count of Monte Cristo popping back to the Chвteau d’If to reminisce over the happy times he’d spent there. So the caves were locked to keep out animals and preserve what someday might become historic sites for tourists. What better place? Siri realized. What more unlikely hideout could there be than the vacated caves of the president himself?

He walked up the concrete path, around the removed section, then onto the path again, which brought him to the front door. There was an actual door in a rectangular frame set back from the rock face. Siri had a delightful sense of the absurd, so he visualized ringing a bell, peeking through a mail slot, and wiping his feet on a donkey-hair doormat. But the door was barred and locked, and it would have taken a small brigade of very persistent firemen to break through it. He walked around the rocks to the right of the door heading upward but quickly came to a dead end. He passed the door again heading south, rounded a small outcrop, and came to what must have been a back door.

At first glance, this, too, seemed locked and barred. The cursory inspection of a night watchman would have ascertained as much. But Siri stepped up to the door and looked at the wooden planks that were nailed across it. A thick metal chain with a padlock was wound around two links connecting the door to the frame. It looked impenetrable. He stood back and stared at it like a puzzle. Once he’d taken in the whole scene, he smiled. Before him, he knew, was an optical illusion. He took hold of the handle and tugged at it. The door, complete with its nailed planks and its frame and its metal chain, swung open on oiled hinges.

Before going inside, Siri reached into his cloth bag for his flashlight. He paused briefly to admire the brilliance of the faux-locked door, then let it shut silently behind him. PL caves were part natural, part sculpted. Where alcoves didn’t exist, rooms were constructed of plywood to give the feeling of a rather claustrophobic motel. Each cave had an airtight room with a pump and fallout-shelter doors in case of chemical weapon attacks. For some reason, perhaps because the Americans really didn’t know they were there, the Pathet Lao in their Vieng Xai caves had escaped such vulgar onslaughts.

He followed his flashlight beam through the Stone Age apartment. He’d only visited it once before when one of the president’s sons had been ill. It had been more homey then. There had been pictures and carpets and ornaments. With the generator lights and a good imagination you could have been in a bungalow on the Black Sea. Now, it was just a cave. Siri opened the last door off the old meeting room, expecting to find it just as empty as all the others, but the door nudged something. He shone his light inside and took a look. It was crammed with all kinds of ill-matching objects like a jackdaw’s cache.

Somehow he knew. This was where Odon had stayed after his return from Hanoi. Siri imagined him holed up here under the noses of the LPLA. The stone grate in the corner, directly under the air vent, still had a sooty black pot standing on it. The long straw nest must have been his bed. A green plastic pail with a broken handle still contained drinking water, and, standing against the wall, was the only piece of furniture in the entire place: a tall wooden wardrobe. Even before he approached it and tried the door, he knew it would be locked and that the key in his hand would open it. Even so, he tugged at the handle first and thought he heard a sound from inside. The key turned easily in the lock and he pulled open the door. Although it appeared empty at first glance, something fled past his ear from out of the darkness. He was too slow to catch it in the beam of his light but he sensed rather than heard the soft flapping of wings. He assumed it was a bat but it was already out of the room. He looked into the closet again-a simple rectangle with a shelf at the top and a rail for hangers. That was it- no clothes, nothing. There wasn’t even a mirror on the inside of the door. He wondered why a man would lock an empty cupboard and hang on to the key even when he was under attack. Even when he knew his life was about to end.

Siri ran his hand around the back edges and corners inside the old wardrobe to find the hole or gap through which the bat had entered. Failing, he started again, more carefully this time, pushing at the wood to find a spot that might give way. He tapped the solid teak of the sturdy old structure and stood back, scratching his head. There was nothing. There was no possible way for the bat to have entered that closet. None at all. Of course, that made no sense. The key was in the hand of a man who’d been buried in cement five months ago. For the bat to have survived for that length of time, there would have to have been large amounts of food in there with it. Even if it had managed to eat all that food, it would have done an awful lot of shitting in five months. There was no sign, visual or olfactory, of that. Siri was flummoxed.

“All right,” he said aloud, his words bouncing around the inside of the cave. “Then there had to be another key in someone else’s possession. Whoever that was-and let’s, for argument’s sake, say it was Isandro-must have taken out whatever was in the cupboard and put a bat in its place. Perhaps it was an accident and he didn’t see the creature fly in. But why would he bother to relock an empty wardrobe?” Siri was no expert on the eating habits of bats. All he knew was that they tasted like duck and were very good for your health. But he assumed a bat could live no longer than two weeks without food or drink. That would suggest Isandro had still been in the cave for several months after his friend was killed.

He knew there were more holes in his hypothesis than there were pots in the Plain of Jars. But at least now he had one; it gave him something to work from. He spent the next half hour searching through the contents of the room. Everything was veiled in a shimmering layer of spiderwebs that reflected the torchlight like frost. There was one knapsack; small piles of clothing; a shaving and washing kit; some Spanish language books; candles; two Soviet-issue Makarov Pistolets, both unloaded; small packets of dried rations-tea, coffee, powdered milk; a tray of what had once been vegetables-now fossils; matches; and an old flashlight whose batteries had leaked and left a crusty white layer on everything around it.

If the sacrificial items had been removed from Kilometer 8, there was no sign of them in this room or anywhere in the president’s cave. If Odon had continued to practice black magic upon his return, he’d practiced it somewhere else.

Siri was surprised to find the passports of both men inside an old tin can standing on a makeshift shelf. With them were bundles of Lao kip rolled in rubber bands. They were beautifully printed with a broad-jawed, crew-cut king glaring defiantly, but, as a result of two devastating devaluations and a switch to the watery liberation kip, they presently had no value beyond the aesthetic.

Siri had seen enough and he was feeling claustrophobic. He went back to the side door and stepped into the glaring daylight. As his eyes became used to the dazzle, he looked down to see that his dark blue safari shirt and black trousers had picked up a thick layer of white dust. He was about to slap at himself to shake it off when he noticed the dust was moving. He scooped the side of his hand against his sleeve and looked more closely. He was surprised but not startled to find that he was covered from collar to cuff in tiny white spiders. As he’d cleared away their webs in order to search the room, the owners had one by one attached themselves to his clothing. He looked admiringly at himself-millions of tiny spiders reflected the sunlight like a slowly shifting Elvis Presley suit.

Siri arrived back at Guesthouse Number One to find Lit’s jeep parked out front. He wondered why it was that he was doing most of the work on this murder inquiry himself while the head of the security division made brief guest appearances and took a lot of notes. As he was climbing the front steps, an answer of sorts came to him. Lit, just as Santiago had suggested, was an administrator. He was faithful to the Party and was being promoted vertically-this month, head of security; next month, head of sanitation. It had very little to do with ability and everything to do with trust. He’d never been a policeman, had no investigative training, and didn’t have a clue how to handle this, his most serious high-profile crime. He had men under him who might have been competent police officers, but he couldn’t be seen relinquishing control over anything so important. So Siri was his solution.

“Dr. Siri, I didn’t think you’d ever return,” the chief said, rising from his seat to shake the doctor’s hand.

“Comrade Lit, you could have come by Kilometer 8 at any time. You knew where I was.”

“Didn’t want to disturb you all. I know how hectic it can get out there. Come to the dining room. I brought us some Vietnamese beer. I can’t wait to hear how our investigation’s going.”

The beer turned out to be a mistake. It was warm and slightly flat, and Siri knew from experience he’d have a thumping headache the following morning. But the debriefing was pleasant enough. Omitting only the encounter with the spirit of Odon and the bat, he told Lit everything exactly as it had happened-the altar, the sacrifices, the secret hideout in the president’s cave. Lit took notes and looked impressed. That seemed to be the sum total of his contribution. He’d had no luck locating Colonel Ha Hung’s family and hadn’t found anyone who’d seen the two Cubans returning from Hanoi. Siri wondered whether the man was actually trying.

One thing that had been niggling at Siri was why the powers-that-be would spend a lot of money constructing a nice pathway from the president’s house to his cave, as the cave was deserted and nobody had shown a moment’s interest in it since it fell vacant. Lit reminded him that this was a historic site like Lincoln’s cabin or Hitler’s bunker and that, in the not too distant future, large parties of tourists would be making pilgrimages to Vieng Xai to see where the proud and glorious republic had taken shape.

That reason satisfied Siri, although he had trouble imagining bus tours to Vieng Xai. They drank their beer from teacups, and Lit drove off into a mist that had arrived along with the night.

Now Siri found himself sitting on the veranda with a strong coffee. He missed the sound of the klooee playing its single tune. The upstairs guard was gone, the plywood partition disassembled, and the rooms empty. None of the staff seemed to know, or was prepared to say, where the royal family had been moved to, but he doubted he’d ever see them again. The kitchen people had gone to bed and made Siri promise to take his cup to his room when he retired. The cups, like the plates and cutlery, were numbered and had to be accounted for at the end of each month.

After two days at the busy hospital, he was enjoying the late-night peace of Vieng Xai. Despite having the makings of a city, it was still inhabited by country people who went to bed early and rose with the sun. He enjoyed the feeling of cold and a damp sky so low he felt he could stand on a chair and reach into it. He enjoyed the distant crowing of badly tuned cockerels and the barking of lemurs high on the karsts. He felt a marvelous peace. And then, as if the god of unhappiness had caught him enjoying himself, the blasted discotheque started up. It was no record player, no radio broadcast. The ground beneath him trembled from the bass. He heard youths whooping along to a chorus they didn’t know the words to.

He hadn’t yet had the opportunity to go to his room, so his bag with its flashlight was still beside him on the seat. Something urged him to go and see for himself-to follow the beat and see where it led. An echo in a valley littered with stone outcrops can be deceptive, but he guessed the sounds were coming from the direction of the military cave complex. It was about half a mile away, beyond the football field. He emptied the grounds of his coffee and put the cup in his bag. The walk would have proven difficult without the flashlight. There were no stars, no moon, and with all the guesthouse staff in bed, no lights from anywhere to guide his way. Only the throbbing of the ground beneath his feet and the increased volume of the music gave him direction. But something odd began to happen as he pursued the sound. He got rhythm.

Siri and Boua had slow danced in little student cafйs in Paris during their years of study. When they’d returned to Laos, they’d enjoyed the drunken lumwong circle dances, a slow-motion swatting of mosquitoes to music. But none of these demanded a great sense of rhythm, which was just as well because Siri didn’t have one to speak of. He wasn’t a natural head nodder or foot tapper, yet here he was, amazingly, walking in time to the beat. His hips were actually swaying. The middle finger of his right hand began to strike repeatedly against its thumb like a match on a damp box. It was a bizarre but not totally unpleasant experience. He felt some inexplicable connection to the music that he wouldn’t previously have believed possible.

He crossed the potholed football field and headed along the dirt track that led to the general’s house and the army caves behind it. He’d been to them a number of times. Above were the cave apartments of the military hierarchy. Below was an enormous natural cavern that had been converted into an auditorium. There was a concrete stage at one end with a deep orchestra pit in front of it. The ground rose in gentle tiers to the rear wall where the mouth of the cave was wide enough to let in natural light during the day and a current of cool air at night. It had a flow of spring-water to quench the thirst of concertgoers and acoustics to shame La Scala.

This was to be the site of the following week’s Friendship and Cooperation Concert, an all-star event to mark the signing of the Lao-Vietnamese Twenty-Five-Year Treaty of Cooperation and Friendship. All the old cave dwellers would return for a nostalgic weekend. They’d entertain their foreign guests in the smart new houses, and on Sunday night, bring them to this underground marvel to watch the top Vietnamese dancers and musicians perform. Then, they would lumwong themselves to rice-whisky oblivion before being carried back to their lodgings. Siri had asked Lit why all the entertainment was Vietnamese. Huaphan province protruded geographically into its neighbor like a large lady’s bottom sticking out of a bathroom window, but as far as the doctor knew, it was still Laos. Lit recited all the appropriate propaganda-“showing respect to its Vietnamese guests,” “learning from more experienced performers,” but he hadn’t been able to explain why Laos couldn’t produce one act to impress its visitors.

These thoughts were going through Siri’s left-right bobbing head as he reached the vortex of the noise. He told himself this must be a rehearsal. They were testing the sound system, checking the acoustics for the microphone. Disco music was all they had on tape. It was a logical explanation and he could probably bring himself to forgive them. He’d spent his last thirty years around soldiers for whom the phrase “following orders” overrode all social and moral considerations.

The thick gooseberry bushes that had once disguised the mouth of the cavern had been cleared, so Siri walked unhindered up to the entrance. There was a high stile fashioned out of stone that he had to climb over before reaching the steps that led down into the hall. But from the top of the rock he was able to see all the way to the stage. His breath left him. He sat on the stile with a bump. A second later and his legs would have given way. The concert hall was full-full to overflowing-full to rib-crushing, joint-jumping insanity. He had no idea where the music was coming from. There was no deejay on the stage, no visible sound system, but the music was loud and throbbing. He tapped his foot to the beat and scanned the assembled throng in disbelief. These weren’t trendy young kids in wide-collared shirts and flared trousers. They were common folk. They were farmers, mothers with babies strapped to their backs, old men. The only teenagers he saw wore stained uniforms and confused expressions as if they’d stumbled in by mistake. Rarely in Huaphan had such a diverse crowd assembled in one place to share an experience so enthusiastically.

Apart from a fondness for jazz, Siri had no interest in American music and would have failed the simplest quiz on its origins and genres. But either from Dtui or the other nurses at Mahosot, he’d heard the word disco. He’d been amazed at how it had managed to squeeze through the gaps in anti-American feeling. After he’d learned what it was called, he heard it often on Thai radio broadcasts. It was for sale on the black market for commandeered U.S. belongings. Lao bands sneaked numbers into their repertoires and fooled the government spies into thinking it was ethnic tribal music. And here it was now in the concert cave in Huaphan.

Circulation had returned to Siri’s legs and they were swaying like windshield wipers to the music. His brief feeling of panic had turned to excitement. He’d known immediately what these enthusiastic partygoers had in common.

They’d all been deprived the opportunity to enjoy life without fear. They were the innocent victims of the endless war. All they asked was to live their simple lives, but they’d made one mistake. They’d been born in a province that had become a political front line. For reasons they didn’t really understand, they were the enemy, and what good is war, what is its point, if nobody suffers? The dancers at the disco-cave concert had all suffered to varying degrees, then the suffering had stopped. They had died. Siri had never been exposed to anything like this magnitude of spiritual boogie. He was a relative novice. He’d heard voices but never seen such a sight as this. Three ghosts were a crowd to him.

A week earlier, he would have smiled and gone home at this point. There would have been nothing to be gained by staying. But tonight he found himself walking down the steps to join the dancers. He knew he was hosting a spirit with rhythm and who was he to begrudge the man his final bop? No one showed any hostility toward the old doctor. Nobody paid attention to him. It was as if he were the only one who wasn’t there. He pushed his way politely through the crowd without actually making contact and began moving in ways he’d never before moved.

A half hour later he was still there, still dancing. He was exhausted but he couldn’t stop. He knew the anatomy of the human body intimately and could account for aches in every one of his muscles, but he was just a vehicle tonight. His failing breath wheezed like a Bulgarian air-conditioning unit. The music seemed louder, thumping against his ears. People crowded in on all sides. Flashing lights from nowhere blinded him. One spotlight seemed to pick him out-spot prize-top dancer-crowd recedes-he struts his stuff alone-the microphone: “Hey!”

He said, “Hey.”

“Hey, comrade.”

He said, “Hey, comrade.”

“What do you think you’re doing?”

He said, “Wha…” Siri looked into the bright spot and then beyond it. There was now just the one light. It was being held by a man in an army jacket several sizes too big for him and a knitted hat. He was directing his flashlight directly into Siri’s face. The doctor looked around at the cold, deserted limestone cavern.

“You got no right to be here. What are you playing at alone in the dark?” the old watchman asked. “You drunk or something?”

Siri stood bent forward with his hands on his knees, struggling for breath. His body had just completed the Alpine section of the Tour de France. He knew he wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning. But as soon as he had the breath and the strength, he started to laugh. The watchman was sure Siri was crazy and took a step back.

“Sorry, comrade,” Siri said at last. “Rehearsing for next week’s show.”

“You don’t say. That doesn’t seem right to me, making an old fella like you perform. They should be ashamed of themselves.”

“I’m a lot younger than I look, brother.”

“Well, I suppose you must know what you’re doing. Don’t you stay here all night, now.”

“I won’t. Thanks.”

The beam swung around and the watchman followed it into an ominous tunnel on the far side of the auditorium. Siri remained standing in the center of the huge, peopleless discotheque feeling more than a little silly, but somehow invigorated.