Disco for the Departed

The White Negro

In the kitchen of the military cave complex, an area once covered in camouflage netting but now open, Comrade Lit, Dr. Siri, and Nurse Dtui stood around a trestle table upon which lay the almost complete cadaver of Isandro Jesъs Montano. Comrade Lit wasn’t feeling his best. In fact, he’d already thrown up once and was planning to do so again. It’s true he was nervous because in less than four days, the entire politburo would be attending a concert not thirty yards from where the body had been found. It’s true he was nervous because the woman whose name he’d already submitted to the Social Relations Committee to become his betrothed, the women who still hadn’t displayed any gratitude for this proposal, was standing no more than a yard from his side. Yet, daunting as these two facts may have been, it was undoubtedly the sight of the body that was causing his stomach to churn.

He had seen the other Cuban, of course, even handled his mummified cadaver. But it had been inhuman, more like a knotted tree branch. This… thing, this was obscene. So alive it might almost rise from the table and take hold of his throat. And how could a man who had been black all his life become so white? There were tints of green and yellow, but much of the bloated skin was ashen, like the flesh of the Chinese Buddha. The doctor had given the condition a name, adipish… adipoch, something like that. But there was no translation for it in Lao. The doctor had remarked on how uncommon it was, but that submerging the body in damp earth in such cold conditions had changed the chemistry of the fat and turned it into a thick, soapy substance that maintained the shape of the original body. According to the doctor, Lit was very lucky to see such a sight in his lifetime.

Lit didn’t feel at all lucky. He just felt sick. The cheesy smell was crawling through the cloth that covered his lower face, and he knew his stomach couldn’t take what the doctor was about to do.

“I’m going in,” Siri said innocently. “Hold on to your breakfast.”

He held a scalpel that glistened in the morning light.

Lit began to sway.

The night officer had awakened the security chief at midnight to tell him the doctor had found the second Cuban. According to the message, there was nothing to be done but guard the body until morning. Lit had arrived at six with two aides and was met in front of the concert cave by a smiling Siri. Without any attempt at disguising their disgust, the aides had manhandled the body from its bath and onto a stretcher. Then they had carried it through the long tunnel to where it now lay.

As they worked, Siri had updated Comrade Lit on everything he’d learned since they’d last met. Lit applauded the coroner’s skill in the art of detection and made copious notes in his book. But now, with the scalpel hovering above the abdomen of the cadaver, he volunteered to make himself scarce and return later when he was feeling better. At that time, and no sooner, he would be happy to hear the results of the autopsy.

Obviously, a rickety table in an open-air kitchen amidst a cloud of curious flies was not the ideal setting for a postmortem examination. The relative wholeness of the body made everything just a little bit less unpleasant. The only sign of disfigurement was an eight-inch incision at the top of the abdomen. The fact that the body had been submerged in damp earth for all this time might have affected the wound’s appearance, but it seemed to Siri that there was no scar tissue or tumor, suggesting that this surgery had taken place after Isandro’s death.

As they worked through the standard autopsy procedures, it was hard to believe this was a five-month-old corpse. Almost immediately, the reason for the hole in the abdomen became apparent. Someone had created the aperture in order to hack through the half inch of tough diaphragm muscle and break into the heart cavity. Once there, they’d carefully cut loose and taken the heart. All of this had occurred after Isandro’s death.

“Can I say, ‘That’s weird’ yet?” Dtui asked.

“Go ahead,” Siri told her.

“That’s definitely weird.”

“And do you know what else is odd?”

“Give me a clue.”

“Do you see any evidence of parallel scars on the chest?”

“You’re right. Not a one. That’s weird, too.”

And they were still left with the dilemma of finding out what actually had killed the Cuban. There were no other wounds, no internal traumas they could find, and without a lab, they weren’t in a position to analyze the stomach contents. Everything pointed to the big man dying peacefully, despite his sparkling good health.

Although they could ascertain what hadn’t happened, rather than what had, Dr. Siri and Dtui were left with a quandary. As they bagged their samples, they went over the scenario of what had taken place that night: The Cubans are seen carrying a comatose, possibly dead Vietnamese beauty to these caves. Isandro dies peacefully and is buried in a watery grave. Later that same night, Odon is killed in horrific fashion, buried alive in concrete. But their lovely victim vanishes without a trace, in some manner avoiding the second grave that may have been intended for her.

They put Isandro, in some semblance of order, into a body bag that the Security Division had left for them, and returned to the guesthouse to get cleaned up. They were still confused, yet strangely invigorated, by the puzzle they had been presented with. It wasn’t yet ten. Panoy knelt with them at the coffee table, playing cards with her good hand. She’d worked her way into the hearts of the guesthouse staff, even that of the frightening manageress who usually waited for Siri and Dtui to leave before coming to play with the girl.

The intake of misguided capitalist lackeys had dried up until after the concert. In two days the first delegates would be arriving in Vieng Xai. Those not invited to stay as honored guests of the Lao politburo members in their houses would be put up here in the guesthouse. It was hoped that Guesthouse Number Two, under construction at a frenzied pace at the far side of town, would be ready to accept the overflow. But, until all this happened, the workers at Guesthouse Number One had nothing much to do other than fall in love with a four-year-old orphan.

Yet, despite their free time, the staff still didn’t allow any flexibility when it came to the guests’ timetable. Siri and Dtui had left before breakfast time, yet still had two hours before they’d be allowed lunch. They sat on the veranda drinking tea and nibbling sunflower seeds, watching Panoy talking happily to the two-dimensional royal family. Fortunately, Lit turned up at ten thirty with two slabs of peanut brittle that the three of them devoured with relish. Putting considerable effort into making eye contact with his intended, Lit told them what he had discovered when he completed the task Siri had entrusted to him earlier.

Before giving up his information, he wanted to firmly establish that what he was about to tell them was absolutely confidential, as it concerned a mission that was still classified. This information could go no further than the veranda upon which they sat. It was, he informed them, a national security issue. Siri reminded him that nobody at the table, including Panoy, was likely to pass anything on to the Americans, so he should get on with it.

“Very well,” Lit began. “The unit-and it was only a unit-that was stationed at the Xam Neua intersection the night Isandro was killed, was a guerilla outfit whose mission was to conduct clandestine operations inside Hmong-occupied territory. It was set up shortly after the ambush of Colonel Ha Hung’s men, two months earlier. A number of its members had been in Ha Hung’s battalion, and most had been involved in the earlier search for their commander’s kidnapped daughter.”

The unit had since been disbanded and the men dispatched to other sections, but Lit proudly produced a carbon copy of the names of its original members. He handed it to Siri, who ran his finger down the list. Although he doubted a list of the names of Vietnamese soldiers would have much meaning to him, one name leaped from the paper. Siri took a pencil from his top pocket and encircled it. He smiled at Dtui and Lit, but didn’t bother to explain.

“Are you free, Comrade Lit?” Siri asked.

“Dr. Siri, in two days, I have to ensure the safety of sixty foreign dignitaries, almost our entire cabinet and forty odd generals. Before then, I have to solve a murder mystery to the satisfaction of the president. If you could do anything to make that possible, I would gladly give up sleeping for the next seventy-two hours.”

“Good. Then let’s go for a drive.”

As Lit drove and Dtui sat silent in the backseat, Siri described, perhaps in too great detail for his auditor’s comprehension, the findings of the autopsy. The young man nodded at the right times, but Siri could see that he was out of his depth. He was doing a job he saw as temporary but knew he had to do to the best of his ability in order to leave it. Thus he was willing to afford Siri every ounce of cooperation he had to offer. Often, Lit looked in his rearview mirror, not to check whether they were being followed, but in order to establish the day’s first eye contact with Dtui. In spite of the width of his mirror and the breadth of his fiancйe, she always managed to be somehow just outside the frame. In fact, the journey almost ended in disaster at one point. Lit, with his eyes on the mirror, failed to notice that the road led directly into the river. Siri had awakened from his catnap just in time to yell a warning.

Siri knew the route well. When they turned off at the appropriate kilometer marker, the same ragamuffin Lao guard was there beneath his straw shelter. They didn’t even stop to be lied to by him. The poor man slowly got his hunting rifle from his shoulder and eventually maneuvered it into a firing position, but by then the jeep was long gone. Not a problem as he didn’t actually have any bullets.

Ten minutes later, Siri, Lit, and Dtui were sitting around a table in a tent that contained nothing else. Siri had pulled his old friend, Captain Vo, to one side to explain the situation. This was no longer just an informal chat. Events had reached an official level that involved military protocol and records and witnesses. So while the Vietnamese were setting up all the official rigmarole, Siri had nothing to do but sit between Dtui and Lit like an Italian grandmother chaperoning a date. Dtui was grateful; Lit, annoyed.

The silence was relieved by a procession of serious men in dress uniform who filled up all but one of the remaining seats around the table. It occurred to Siri that this was probably not the most likely atmosphere in which to induce a career soldier to admit to premeditated murder. In his head, he went through a number of strategies for eliciting a confession, but even as Sergeant Major Giap walked escorted into the tent, saluted, and sat in the final seat, Siri still hadn’t the vaguest idea of how he could get the man to talk. As it turned out, he had nothing to worry about. Captain Vo took the lead.

“Sergeant. Major Giap…?”

“Yes, sir?”

“In January of this year, you were a member of a unit of Vietminh troops stationed twenty miles from Xam Neua.”

Giap looked around at the faces of the strangers and realized the army expected him to tell what he knew, secret operation or not. “That’s right, sir.”

“One night,” Vo continued, “a tradesman working in Vieng Xai came to your camp and reported that he’d seen the two missing Cubans. Is that correct?”

Siri supposed that if the sergeant major had said no at this point, the matter might be dropped. But once again the old soldier looked around at the expressionless faces of his accusers and seemed to know instinctively that these were all questions to which there were already answers.

“Yes.”

The captain looked harshly into his eyes. Siri saw that this was no longer the laughing man with whom he’d played chess deep in nameless jungles. Captain Vo had hardened into a leader who demanded unswerving loyalty and total honesty from the men under him.

“When Dr. Siri was here before,” he continued, “you apparently found it unnecessary to mention this rather important fact. Could you explain to us why that was?”

“He didn’t ask, sir.”

The captain quickly produced a smile that covered a lot of fury. “He’s asking now, Sergeant Major.”

There was no halfway for the old soldier: he could be silent and get shot, lie and get shot, or spill the beans and get court-martialed and then get shot. It wasn’t a great choice. This was the Vietnamese army. There was nowhere to appeal. If you screwed up, justice was swift.

“We were picked individually by our lieutenant,” he began. As he spoke, one of the uniformed officers recorded his words in shorthand. “He rushed around and only selected those of us who’d served directly under the colonel. Some of us had been involved in the search for his daughter. We were given the choice to join in or not. Of course, we all did. There were seven of us, I suppose eight, if you include the old Hmong scout. It all had to be discreet-no guns. We had no authority to do what we planned to do. We made a vow not to talk to anyone about it, whatever happened.

“We set out as quick as we could. We weren’t sure how long the Cubans were going to be around. We went in one truck, parked half a mile from the cave, and ran in.”

“What did you take as weapons?” the captain asked.

“We all had knives. A couple of the men had crossbows for long distance.”

Siri mentally slapped himself for not thinking of this. Of course there was no bullet in Odon’s wound. It hadn’t been caused by a gun at all. If he’d been hit by a crossbow bolt, the attacker would have pulled it out, leaving a wound identical to that of a bullet. He looked at Dtui to see if she’d also worked it out, then realized she was sitting in ignorance, listening to a language she’d never had cause to learn.

Lai continued. “We went into the military caves from both ends. The lead man in each team had a lamp with a red filter. The team that entered through the auditorium saw her first. After all the searching, it was heartbreaking. I can’t begin to tell you how infuriated we were at that sight. She was dead, sir.”

“Miss Hong Lan?” Siri asked, although he was an outsider at this military tribunal.

“Not just dead, Doctor. Gutted. She was lying there in a wet grave with her insides hanging out. Carved up, by the look of it. But you’d have to stick in the knife and move it around to get the size of wound she had on her. It was sick, really sick. It had to be the damned Cubans who did it.”

“You only saw the one body?” Siri asked.

“One was enough.”

“Sergeant Major, this is important.” Siri knew he was hijacking the inquiry but there were a number of questions that had to be asked in a hurry. “Where exactly was the body?”

“In a grave. There was that little stream running through the cave and the hole was just beside it.”

“But there was only the one grave.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And was it completely uncovered?”

“Not exactly, Doctor. Her legs were covered in sand, and there was a little spade there, like we’d disturbed the Cubans before they could finish the job.”

“And the water had washed the blood from the body?”

“That’s right.”

“Was there any blood anywhere else? Any suggestion there’d been a fight of some kind?”

“Didn’t notice any. But don’t forget we were using torches with red filters.”

“What happened next?” the captain asked.

“We went looking for the bastards. We didn’t think it was just that they should get away with it. We figured if they’d heard us coming and run off, they couldn’t be that far away. The Hmong scout picked up a track outside the concert cave, running feet.”

“Just the one track?”

“Yes, sir. We figured the Cubans had escaped in different directions. We searched I don’t know how long. An hour? Two? Then we found one of them up there in front of the president’s old cave. He was singing, sir. I swear he was singing. He was wearing just this pair of old football shorts and dancing and goddamned singing. Sir, people like that don’t deserve a fair trial. We got him with a crossbow, but it didn’t finish him off. He was still staggering around. We were on him, all of us. I tell you, he was strong, strong as an ox. But we hadn’t planned on the cement thing.”

“But you had planned to kill him,” the captain said.

“Not really, sir.”

“You took knives and crossbows.”

“Just for self-defense, sir.”

“I don’t believe you. Go on.”

“Sir. Well, the cement was there and it was still wet. When we pushed him under, he sort of came out of a trance and realized what was happening. He fought like a tiger- scratching, kicking. Then he went quiet. The archer pulled out his bolt, we smoothed the cement, and got the hell out before anyone could come and see what all the singing and screaming were about.”

The men around the table sighed audibly when he stopped talking.

“Sergeant Major,” the captain asked, “did you find the second man?”

“No, sir. We went back the next night but there was no trace.”

“And what did you do with the girl?”

“We filled in the grave, took her out to the truck, and

brought her back to the camp. The lieutenant got in touch with the mother in Hanoi and explained what had happened. We thought she’d travel back or ask for her daughter’s body to be shipped there for a funeral, but she didn’t. She just told us to give the girl a decent burial and send her a lock of her hair.”

“Where did you bury her?” Siri asked.

Thangon was a small enough village for everyone to know everyone else and their business. Even the people on the ferry had recognized young Geung. He’d been a celebrity, after all, one of the town crazies, for eighteen years of his life. Mr. Watajak hadn’t exactly been delighted to see his son, but he put on a show for all the neighbors. Geung’s father was alone now and getting old. His wife had left her drunken husband long ago. All the kids had grown up and gone to the city. Apart from his monthly trips to Vientiane to coerce money from his offspring, he stayed in or around his little hut. This was the same hovel in which Geung had been born and lived before his move to Mahosot.

When Geung had emerged from his exhausted sleep that first morning, and seen everything as he remembered it, it was as if everything he’d experienced-Vientiane, the morgue, Dr. Siri, Dtui, the trip to Luang Prabang-had all been part of his coma. None of the dream had really happened, and he was still a teenager in Thangon. He called to his brothers and sisters, called to his mother, but only his father came. Except his father was much older than he should have been-and the house was dusty and empty.

The neighbors came by regularly to bring food and drink and put balm on Geung’s dry skin. He remembered their faces. He remembered the old midwife, who had been old when she birthed Geung and was still old today. She used a syringe to drain the fluid from Geung’s ears, a duty she’d performed regularly while he was growing up, and as ever, hers was the first voice to enter his head when his hearing returned.

“It’s lovely to see you back, young Geung.”

Hearing brought him back to reality. He could make out questions now from the curious visitors and answer them. In a place with no electricity and no other entertainment, people came by to listen to his memories of the hospital and Dr. Siri’s morgue-the cases they’d worked on. Of course, his version was simplified and left out some rather vital details, but for the simple people of Thangon, that was probably not a bad thing.

There was no way he could know what was slowly happening there in his old home. His father, the wise seer, in order to feather his own financial nest, had turned out children with the same regularity as a factory producing meatballs. The people of Tnangan had said, “How clever he is, that Watajak. Seven kids and he’ll never have to work again.” And here he was today sitting in the shadows like a fool. Who respected him now? Who listened to him? He watched as people came to hear the wise words of his son. The moron had become a genius.