Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

4

The rain had let up briefly sometime on the Monday morning and the toads and frogs were yelling their delight like an orchestra of bedsprings and didgeridoos. All along the river bank young children in their school shirts were scooping the happy beasts into cardboard boxes and cement sacks and escorting them home to the larder. With so little to be had at the fresh market, families grew whatever they could around their homes, raised chickens and improvised. A lot of the stomach-turning but nutritious fare once considered the mainstay of the ignorant country folks had made a comeback on the kitchen tables of the city.

Toads, if one remembered to remove the poisonous skin and eggs, tasted vaguely of duck. Pa dtaek, fermented fish sauce, was so pungent it had to be stored in earthenware jars as far from the house as possible. Snakes made an interesting stew. Then there were the little creepy critters; fat white grubs that smelt bad but tasted fabulous, scorpion claws, fried termites, beetles, grasshoppers, and the absolutely delicious — Michelin five star — red-ants eggs: squishy heaven in every bite.

As Siri walked along that oh-so-noisy river bank on his way to work, he saw a pelican gliding above the surface of the water. It was a marvellous bird, proud and resourceful, and he imagined how it would taste with a little chilli paste and fresh yams. Hungry people made poor environmentalists.

Before reaching the hospital he passed two of the new billboards. If 1977 had been the year of the drought, 1978 had to be the year of the government billboard. They'd sprung up everywhere urging the population to work harder, be honest, love the nation, and grow bananas. A kind critic might have called the artwork naive. Siri had three or four adjectives of his own to describe it. He believed if some archaeologist four hundred years from now were to uncover only billboards as evidence of an ancient civilisation, they would be forced to assume the Lao had been a wooden, asymmetrical, poorly proportioned race with no necks. Their schoolchildren, even at seven or eight years of age, had the traumatised expressions of forty-year-old addicts. And there was no way to distinguish between male and female adults apart from hairstyles or hats. Short-haired, hatless beings were asexual.

If there had been a department of billboards somewhere, it was very likely vying for the role of ministry because it was frighteningly prolific and without shame. At the entrance to the lane leading to Vientiane's largest mosque was a board encouraging everyone to breed pigs. Not twenty metres from the Lao Patriotic Women's Association was another board proudly boasting 'WOMEN — DEVELOPING OUR COUNTRY AS MOTHERS AND LABOURERS'. Siri had hoped the rains would erase all the silly propaganda and let the population think for itself. But they were standing up to the weather better than the leaning front fences and posts.

Inspector Phosy and Sergeant Sihot were waiting for Siri beneath the arch at the mouth of the lane that led into the hospital. The water was ten centimetres deep there and both men had their shoes in their hands and their trouser cuffs rolled up.

"Couldn't you have found a drier place to wait?" Siri asked.

"Your hospital's under water," Phosy complained. "Anywhere else and we'd need oxygen tanks. Are you ready?"

"Ready for what?" Siri asked.

"We thought you'd like to come out with us to visit the crime scenes," Sihot said.

"You have permission from K6?" Siri asked.

"Must have been good wine," Phosy said.

It was fortunate that the Intelligence Section's Willy's jeep had a high wheelbase and four-wheel drive because the road out to K6 was porridge. Phosy drove slowly and Siri sat in the rear seat with Sihot, catching up on the news of victim number two. Sihot was a solid, military type, more chipped out of rock than created. You wouldn't want to hit him on the head with a mallet for fear of damaging the mallet. He lost one page of his notebook in a stormy gust of wind but he assured Siri it contained nothing of any importance.

"Victim number two," he read, shouting above the roar of the troubled engine, "named Khantaly Sisamouth, nickname, Kiang. Age thirty-two. Single. Born in Xieng Khaw, way up north. Taught primary school in the liberated zone for ten years then was sent to Bulgaria to study library science."

"Who did she offend to get that assignment?" Siri asked.

"It sounded like hell to me, too, Doctor."

"Library science in Bulgarian. Poor thing."

"She was there for two years and came back with what they call a certificate in information technology."

"And how did you identify her?"

"Her mother, Doctor. Said her girl hadn't come home on Saturday night. She filed a missing person report at the local political office and they contacted us. She identified her daughter from our Polaroids."

"Did she know where Kiang went to on Saturday night?"

"She had no idea, Comrade. Told the mother she was off for some exercise in the evening. She was all dressed up in her tracksuit. Mother's just recovering from hepatitis so she went to bed early. When she woke up the daughter's bed hadn't been slept in."

"Any connections between the two victims?"

"None that we've found apart from them both studying in the eastern bloc."

"Lovers? Friends? Fencing connections?"

"We're looking into it. Right now, that's all we've got."

As if to emphasise the point, the next half-empty page flipped from his notebook and curled away in the slipstream of the jeep.?

At K6, a very reluctant Comrade Phoumi was there to meet them. The rain had started again, a depressing northern European sprinkling. The guards from the PM's protection team were lined up in front of the sauna. But, with so much military testosterone on display, there wasn't one umbrella between them. Dr Siri, who had fewer problems displaying his feminine side, emerged from the jeep hoisting a bright yellow umbrella with orange toadstools and lime-green goblins. No words were spoken.

Phoumi and Major Dung led the way to the door of the bungalow in whose yard sat the carport and the sauna. The windows were all open to ventilate a house that had obviously not been occupied for some time. Phosy and Sihot sat at the kitchen table with their notepads and it was agreed the security personnel would come to be interviewed one by one. As had been hastily arranged, Comrade Viset, a Vietnamese-speaking Lao attached to military intelligence, was to act as translator. As the first two interviewees were Phoumi and Dung, an atmosphere of belligerence and non-cooperation was established early on.

Siri was not privy to the events in the front kitchen. He had been encouraged by Phosy to 'float around' and pick up information outside. The unguarded sauna structure was his first stop. Somebody had replaced the burnt-out bulb, probably the investigators. He turned on the light and sat on the lower bench. As he studied the simple packing-case structure he became more and more convinced that neither of the weapons, the knife nor the epee, could have been concealed. For confirmation, he prodded and poked every wooden slat, every roof tile, every floorboard. It was what it appeared to be, a wooden box with a gas tank and a pile of stones. No secret compartments. No trickery. But, just as the burning light in the carport had worried him two days earlier, the light inside the sauna now gave him the same troubled feeling. The light had been switched on and had burnt out. It seemed very likely that once he had done the job, the killer had turned on both lights to…what? To attract attention? Had he wanted the body to be found quickly?

Siri went outside and located the Vietnamese sentry he'd spoken to on Saturday. He was standing towards the rear of the interview queue and Siri pulled him to one side. The doctor had a theory and he was about to test it with a blatant lie.

"We have a problem," Siri said to the young man after a few niceties. "I believe you know what that problem is."

The soldier looked at Siri and hesitated before he spoke.

"I don't understand, sir."

"You told me you'd stood behind your major and seen the state of the girl inside."

"So?"

"There was no light inside. From a metre beyond the doorway you couldn't have seen anything but her feet. Everything was in shadow. No windows."

"I saw her."

"I believe you did, but not then. Once he'd witnessed what was inside that room, the major closed the door and came looking for the head of security. He left you there and told you not to let anyone in the sauna."

"That's right, he did."

"And everyone left, apart from you."

"What are you trying to say?"

"That you were curious, so you went in and took a peek for yourself."

"That's a lie. No, sir. I would never do that."

"Is that so?"

"It is."

"Then, you see that up there?" Siri pointed to a box attached to one of the posts that carried the power cables.

"Yes."

"You know what that is?"

"It's a junction box." The soldier was sweating.

"Is it? You forget where you are. You've heard of the CIA, I assume?"

"Of course."

"Then you know what they're capable of. They're fanatical about surveillance. Every house in this compound has a camera and microphone trained on it. You see that lump at the bottom?"

"It…it's a nut."

"Of course it's supposed to look like a nut. It's a closed-circuit camera lens. The images are all fed back to a central console behind the scout hut. You're a TV star, my boy."

Siri was holding his poker hand — six high — and he was calling. There followed a tense moment of silence.

"I just wanted a quick look," the soldier confessed. Siri sighed but kept quiet. "I wanted to…you know? I was curious. I didn't…I didn't do anything."

"But you removed the towel from her lap."

"I just slid it down a little bit, that's all. And it slipped between her legs. I was about to put it back but I heard you all coming along the street. I barely made it out in time."

"It was on her lap when you went in?"

"Yeah, covering her…you know."

"Yes, I know. Thank you."

Siri sent the man back to the queue. He'd heard exactly what he was hoping for. If the towel had been on her lap when she was killed it would have been as bloody as hell. It would have soaked up several litres of blood. But it hadn't. The only explanation was that the killer had placed the towel across her lap after he'd killed her for modesty. It was a polite, very Lao gesture at the end of an horrific, very un-Lao murder. And it left Siri with no idea of what kind of killer he should be looking for.

The doctor returned to the sauna and processed this new information as he sat on the wooden bench. He felt a presence in the little room, not vivid enough to be described as a visitation and several layers away from communication as if it stood behind five plates of opaque glass. But he was sure Dew's spirit was there. The girl who had died with a smile on her face and a question mark above her head was trying to get in touch but neither he nor she knew how to go about it.

"If you have anything to tell me," he said quietly, "now would be a really good time."

But, if she did, she kept it to herself and Siri, as frustrated by the spirit world as ever, walked out of the sauna and into a deluge of rain that darted accusingly like index fingers out of the black clouds. He could have taken shelter beneath the carport but it was full of soldiers so he jogged with blind conviction out of the gate and into the street. By the time he reached the house opposite he was already two kilograms heavier from the water soaked into his clothes. Beneath the porch roof a man in his early fifties sat on a breeze block with a broom leaning against the front door of the house beside him. Siri joined him and they both laughed.

"Looks like it might rain," the man said. He was slight but muscular, with skin as brown as lacquered teak. A weather-beaten Vietnamese peasant hat sat on the balcony in front of him.

"Rain? Feels more like ball bearings," Siri corrected him. They laughed again. Siri sat on the front step beside the man and squirmed in his wet underwear. "Been busy?"

"Can't get much done in this weather," the man said. "The radio seems to think there are monsoons queued up like bicycle taxis just over the border,"

Despite his appearance, the man spoke with a certain refinement and an almost unperceivable tinge of an accent. Siri recalled a conversation he'd had with the king before he was sent north. This man had a similar way about him, a modest class.

"Is this your house?" Siri asked. It was an unnecessary question because the extended buttocks bushes were overgrown and knocking at the windows and the lawn grass was taller than the average goat. The man laughed.

"No, sir," he said. "I work here at K6. I'm Miht. I look after the verges and the trees. Cut the odd lawn every now and then. I'd need a chainsaw for this one, mind."

To Siri's ear, the word 'sir' had come reluctantly from the man's lips.

"Been working here long?" he asked.

"More than ten years now."

"That long? So, you'd remember the good old American days."

"That I would."

"I thought that generation of Lao servants had all left along with the USAID people."

"And you'd be right. The cooks, the housekeepers and drivers, most of them fled. But, to tell the truth, I didn't have anywhere to go. I was just a handyman around the place. I didn't work specifically for any family. I imagine the Pathet Lao didn't see me as a threat. There are half a dozen of us old-timers still working here."

"They pay you?"

"Rice ration, sir. Free room to sleep in. Can't complain."

They chewed on sweet stems of grass and watched the restless Vietnamese soldiers opposite.

"What a performance, eh?" Siri said.

"You're with the police?"

"No, brother."

"Really? I thought I saw you arrive with the police."

"And so you did. I'm the coroner, Siri Paiboun. They had me look at the body."

"I see."

"Did you know the people who lived in that house?" Siri asked.

"A few passed through in my time."

"Do you recall who it was that put up the sauna?"

"Of course, the last couple, the Jansens. I was the one who found the wood for them."

"What were they like?"

"Nice enough. Husband was very keen. He was working on education projects, I seem to recall. She was just a housewife but she was kind, you know? Some of the wives of the experts got stuck into the gin but Mrs Jansen got involved with projects too. She helped out with scholarships, that kind of thing."

"You seem to know a lot about them."

"I got most of it from their house staff. I'm not much of a one for English language. I'd be out front trimming the trees and the houseboys and maids would come trotting down the driveways with all the latest gossip. I wasn't that interested but it passed the time."

"How many staff did they have?"

"They had a fellow that cooked for them. His wife would come in three days a week to clean. And there was a gardener who doubled as their night watchman."

"Why do you suppose they built a sauna in the middle of the tropics?"

"Mr Jansen was from Sweden or Iceland. Somewhere like that. He believed you couldn't get all the poison out of your system unless you had a good steam."

"And everyone knew it was here?"

"In those days they did. You couldn't keep a secret then. They tried to get the Lao staff to sample it but nobody was game. It seemed like a silly idea if you ask me. I can't imagine what a Lao girl was doing in there in the middle of the night."

"Do you know if anyone else has used it since the Americans left?"

"I can't remember seeing anyone over here at all. They didn't put any of their people in these houses by the external wall. They were afraid it'd be too easy to lob a hand grenade over. Not safe, they said. So they let all these places turn to jungle. As far as I know, none of the new regime people had any idea what it was. Just thought it was a box, probably."

"Is there any way in and out of the compound apart from through the main gate?"

"There used to be, brother. Just before the Americans left there were more holes than a mesh stocking. The staff used them to smuggle out equipment and furniture; parting gifts from the Americans before they were kicked out. But when the Pathet Lao boys moved in they patched up most of them."

"Most of them?"

"The old hands know of one or two places you could still get under the wall."

"So it would be possible for someone without a pass to get into the compound."

"Technically. You'd have to be careful to avoid the security patrols. Trigger-happy bunch. They'd probably shoot you before they asked who you were."