According to official work application forms and Party records of affiliation with organizations, Phosy and Dtui were atheists. Not surprisingly, anyone who filled in a form in the People’s Democratic Republic checked “atheist” in the religion box. It was circumspect to do so: “opium of the people” and all that. But the Lord Buddha isn’t a deity who just goes away when you fill in a form. There were very few Lao who didn’t offer Him their thanks on the rare occasion when things went right. His was a good old-fashioned religion that didn’t cause wars or advocate hatred of the beliefs of others. And, at the end of the eightfold path, a Buddhist could expect his remains to be barbequed to the size of a pillbox and placed on the family altar.
So, for two latent Buddhists like Phosy and Dtui to be strolling around a Christian graveyard in the heat of the midday sun was a little overwhelming. Only a few feet below them lay the complete and nicely dressed remains of hundreds of God worshippers, any one of whom could break through the earth and wrap his or her bony fingers around the trespassers’ necks, just like in the movies.
“I’m not sure I can do this,” Dtui confessed.
“Take a deep breath.”
The Vientiane Catholic Cemetery was out on route 13 at kilometer 9. It was a walled field and most of the graves and stones were squashed to one end as if for warmth or companionship. The occupants were a peculiar mix of European, Chinese, and Lao. The planners had given the bodies very little space to stretch out and relax in the afterlife. Phosy had never learned Western script so Dtui led them from stone to stone translating as she went. Fortunately, the headstone they were looking for was in the first corner of the cemetery they searched. They’d headed for the newest-looking stones and the best-kept graves. The wide plot had one headstone for both father and son. It was inscribed in English: “Here lie two Warriors named Fa Ngum. May their Souls rest in Peace.”
“Well, that’s marvelous,” said Dtui in her loud huffy voice. “Now what are we supposed to do, interview them?”
She kept the thought to herself that this was exactly the situation in which you could use a Dr. Siri, communicator with the dead. She knew her husband wasn’t a great fan of superstitious mumbo jumbo. They gazed around. There appeared to be no office. One elderly gentleman with long unkempt hair stood glaring at a headstone. He held a small bouquet of lifeless flowers in front of his crotch. In the next row, a worker with a long-handled rake removed leaves from the walkway. He was a short man with sunburned skin and unkempt whiskers growing in thickets here and there across his chin. His smile was no more than a single drawn line on a cartoon face but it made him look like a man who enjoyed his work.
Phosy called over to him. “I was wondering…?”
“Good health,” the man said, his smile opening to show a full set of white teeth.
“Good health. I wanted to know if there might be an administration office somewhere where we could inquire about a grave here.”
“Used to be, sir. Shut down when the French left. There’s just me now.”
“For the whole place?”
“Yes, sir. They don’t cause me a lot of trouble.”
Phosy walked between the graves to join the worker. Dtui held back and looked discreetly at the mourner. The old man hadn’t put down his flowers. He was standing there either mouthing a prayer or inflicting a curse.
“Have you been here long?” Phosy asked the worker.
“Twenty-seven years, sir.”
“Really? So who pays your salary now that there are no French?”
“There’s a fund. The bereaved pay into it for the upkeep. No graves to dig these days, just trimming grass and cleaning up.”
“Then you’d know a thing or two about the graves?”
“Yes, sir. More than a thing or two no doubt. What one was you interested in?”
“The two Fa Ngums.”
“Oh, yes, sir. Tragic! Just tragic. Father and son massacred on the same day.”
“Does the boy’s mother, the wife of the officer, does she come to pay her respects?”
“Yes.” He nodded at Dtui, who’d joined them. “Good health, ma’am.”
“When was the last time you saw her?” she asked.
“Ooh, let me see. Must have been a few weeks ago. Yes, that’d be right. She travels a lot, I believe. Lovely woman.”
“So she’s here often?”
“Yes, ma’am. Could turn up at any time.”
Dtui felt the whisper of premonition shudder through her bones.
“Would you happen to know whether there’s a record of who pays for the stones and contributes to the upkeep?” Phosy asked.
“Ooh, that would have been with the French curate, sir. Long gone, I’m afraid. No idea where that’d be now.”
“So there’s no way we could contact Fa Ngum’s wife?” Dtui said.
“Tell the truth, ma’am, the ledger wouldn’t have helped anyway in such a case.”
“It didn’t have names and addresses?”
“Oh, indeed it did, but she wasn’t the one what paid. It was the older lady. The soldier’s mother who took it upon herself. She’s getting on a bit now.”
“You know her?”
“Yes, sir. Had to go by her place once or twice to pick up wreaths.”
“Then you know where she lives?”
“Oh, yes. It’s that big old mansion down by Wat Tai on the river. She lives there by herself now.”
“Excellent.” Phosy smiled. “We’re very much obliged to you, comrade.”
“You’re welcome, sir, ma’am.”
The worker bowed politely and returned to his raking.
“What do you say?” Phosy asked Dtui. “One more stop for the day? It’s on the way home.”
“Look, I don’t feel comfortable wandering around with”-she lowered her voice-”that maniac on the loose.”
“Nothing’s happened to us.”
“No! But we’ve had armed guards all week.”
“She’d have no idea where we are. Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Sometimes you just don’t think like a policeman.”
“And sometimes you think too much like one.”
“You can be very annoying, Phosy. This is positively the last stop, but only if little Malee here and her big ma can get a glass of iced tea on the way. My throat’s as dry as the crypt. No offense,” she said, looking along the ordered rows of passй Frenchmen. Apart from the worker, they were alone now in this eerie place. Above ground, anyway.
The large metal gate was ajar and so clogged with weeds and vines it had apparently been open for a very long time. Phosy drove through the gap into the broad dirt yard. When he cut the motor no sounds emanated from inside the old two-story French mansion. It was the color of a neglected tooth. Several rows of red clay pots stood guard around it. At some stage they’d contained pretty bougainvillea and mimosa and magnolia but now their dark skeletons poked from the cracked earth in crippled poses. The wooden shutters at the front of the house were closed. At one time blue, they’d been lashed the color of a shipwreck by the monsoons.
It was a mansion barely in the mood for visitors. If the front door hadn’t been open and the front step littered with shoes paired off like parentheses, Phosy and Dtui might have given up on the place. Instead, they walked up the two large steps and peered inside.
“Good health,” Phosy called. “Anyone home?”
They heard the distant voice of a woman.
“We’re out back,” she shouted. “Come on through.”
In a Lao house, before the days of suspicion and paranoia, this had been a normal thing. No chain locks or spy holes. A visitor received a friendly welcome no matter how dirty his feet or empty his belly.
“Just two new friends,” Dtui called as they walked through the large open-plan front room that smelled to Phosy like muddy football boots left to dry in the sun. There was dust in the air.
“Out here! Just follow my voice,” the woman called.
Dtui and Phosy arrived at a large well-lighted kitchen. Three unshuttered windows opened onto a jungle of a backyard. An old lady was bent over a stone sink with her back to the guests. She wore a ridiculously long phasin and a head scarf of the type favored by the queen of England on hunting trips.
“We’re sorry to disturb you,” Dtui said.
“Oh, my dears. No problem at all,” replied the woman.
As she turned she seemed to uncurl and become a lot taller than she’d first appeared. In her right hand she held an M-1911 pistol. With her left she undid the scarf and let her long gray hair fall past her shoulders. Phosy reached for Dtui’s hand.
The Lizard walked confidently toward them. “I think I’m supposed to say something like, ‘Aha so we meet again, Inspector Phosy.’ At least that’s the type of thing Moriarty would have said.”
She unfastened the phasin and it dropped to the floor. Underneath she was wearing chic European trousers.
“But, of course, what would a Red know of literature and culture? I could say in English, ‘Welcome to my parlor’ and even if I bothered to translate it, you still wouldn’t have a clue what I’m talking about. I’m afraid this trap for common flies might appear a little over-elaborate but what terrible fun. You see, we’ve had little to do but twiddle our thumbs since you spoiled our nice coup d’йtat.”
“How could you know we’d be here?” Phosy asked, his arm around Dtui.
“Well, that’s the splendor of the chase, my silly policeman. Every move you made today has been orchestrated. We challenged ourselves, you see. We wondered whether we’d be clever enough to persuade the fish to leave the sanctity of their pool and come in search of the hook. But there I go mixing my metaphors horribly-flies and fish-shame on me. Never mind.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Dtui asked.
“Cue the curtain call.” The woman beamed. “The gentleman behind you-No, you may look, it isn’t a trick-”
The couple turned their heads to see Ajan Ming framed in the doorway like an old master with a Beretta. He nodded politely.
“-we shall call person D.”
The door to the maid’s room off the kitchen opened and through it walked Mrs. Bounlan and the worker from the cemetery. They bowed and seemed disappointed not to receive a round of applause.
“Our final two cast members,” the Lizard said. “And I think we’ll use their stage names, Mr. C and Miss B. And of course there’s me, A-scriptwriter and extra. You know, it is terribly hard to remain humble when you’re as good as we are.”
She strutted around her grounded fish, close enough for them to see the madness in her beady eyes.
“You’ll notice how we were able to lure you just a little bit farther and farther from your allies, checking at each stage that you’d fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. Making certain that you hadn’t contacted anyone to pass on the information you’d learned.”
B and C came to sit at the kitchen table while D held his position at the rear.
“You were interesting adversaries for a little while-very well done with the bomb thing, by the way-but enough’s enough. All that’s left is to decide how unpleasantly you’re going to meet your respective ends. Of course, it will have to be something so terrible your super Dr. Siri turns somersaults when he sees your remains. An angry foe doesn’t think straight and we need him at his most vulnerable. We have something very special planned for him. It’s rather a pity that you won’t be around to see it.”
She turned her back on them and reached into a drawer. When she turned around she was holding a rusty fish gutter in her gnarled hand.
“Now, who’s first?”
Dr. Siri had become very fond of his captors as they sang and joked and prepared for the burial of Mrs. Zhong. Given the amount of preparation involved and the serious absence of men who normally bore the brunt of the heavy work, it was reluctantly decided that the search for weak-minded Assistant Haeng would have to wait till late afternoon, perhaps even the following day. Siri was concerned for the life of his boss but there was nothing he could do. He knew his own lab assistant, Mr. Geung, had survived several nights alone in the jungle, but Mr. Geung was only mentally handicapped. He wasn’t a high-court judge, a man trained to interpret and assess and deliberate. Haeng had nothing practical in his arsenal. Every dictum in the world lined up one after the next wouldn’t stop a man from being eaten by a tiger. Geung would climb a tree. Even down to the last gulp, Haeng would be citing how unconstitutional it was to consume a government official. Heavens, the man had even managed to run away from his own soldiers. If he’d survived these last few days, Siri would be astonished. But death? That’s life.
And death was the business of the morning. Much of that business was dedicated to shaking off the evil spirits that, given free access, would have made off with Auntie
Zhong’s soul as soon as look at it. With the dark forces milling around the front door of the house like annoying press photographers, the girls surreptitiously cut a hole in the side wall and sneaked her out on a stretcher. The four bearers were dressed as men in hopes the gods wouldn’t notice the digression from tradition. They bore down the hill at a cracking pace, Siri hot on their heels, hard-pressed to keep up.
The transvestite stretcher bearers would jog off in one direction, giving the impression they were heading directly for the grave. Then, Nhia, the head pallbearer, would shout, “Left” or “Right” in a basso voice and the team would suddenly change direction. In soccer, this tactic was known as “throwing a dummy.” Any pursuing spirit not fooled back at the house would be going so fast that the change of tack would hopefully send it careening on down the hillside like a puppy on waxed parquet. Just to make sure, the tactic was repeated six or seven times before they finally headed west-the ultimate direction of every burial.
By the time he’d worked out this ruse, Siri was so out of breath he sat on the hillside and watched the entourage zigzag down the hill. With a little common sense he was able to work out their final destination and arrived there at roughly the same time as Auntie Zhong. Dia was there playing the departing dirge on a geng. She performed with such skill her manly face assumed an air of divine beauty. The other women stood around in their finest costumes, each wearing a tiara of silver coins. A buffalo was tethered to a post near the grave and Elder Long crouched, raiding the divining horns in a large Christmas Special Hershey Bar jar. As soon as the body arrived and was lowered onto a temporary platform, he emptied the horns onto the ground. Their positioning would tell the assembled guests whether Auntie Zhong accepted the buffalo as a parting gift. As it was too dangerous to travel between villages at this time, the assembled guests amounted to the women, Siri, and a few goats.
Eight times Long cast the horns and eight times his wife rejected the buffalo. He walked over to the body, which was dressed in its very best costume-a pleated skirt that had taken six months to weave, dye, and embroider, a skirt that would be worn only once.
“You old bat,” he said playfully. “Cantankerous to the last. It’s all we have. You know I’d love to sacrifice you a whole herd of cattle but we’re at the end of the livestock. Perhaps you’d like us to bring your father over and offer him to the gods?”
Siri turned to Bao. “Her father?”
“The white dog,” she said. “It arrived in the village one day. Hmong women are naturally suspicious of strange dogs but Zhong was certain the animal was her dead father returned from heaven. He’d been cruel to dogs all his life so she believed the gods had punished him like this. From that day till her death she spoiled the animal rotten.”
On the ninth cast of the horns, the old lady relented and the buffalo was condemned to death. Chia walked over to Siri carrying an enormous ax and handed it to him. His heart stopped. Siri, for all his faults, could not kill. Since he’d become so well acquainted with the afterlife, he’d found it impossible-mosquitoes and small underfoot insects not included-to take a life. He couldn’t even bring himself to strangle a chicken or allow a fish to drown in air. But he was the only male guest and the heavens and the middle earth were counting on him to make Zhong’s transition complete. He looked at the proud old beast. He really didn’t want to be haunted for all eternity by a vengeful buffalo.
With the ax behind his back, he walked to the tethered animal, who chomped happily on the fresh grass around her hooves. She was probably thinking what a pleasant day out this was-music, a show, and a meal. She couldn’t wait to tell the pigs when she got back. Siri knew he had no choice. He prayed to the ancestors for a way out but nothing was immediately forthcoming. So he lofted his ax and stood before the buffalo, who suddenly realized all eyes were on her. With a beard of grass hanging from her mouth she looked up at the old man in front of her. In his hand she saw the hoisted ax and, through whatever process an ox makes connections to past events, something seemed to register in her slow brain. And when she realized what was about to happen, her heart, already heavy with hay, gave out. She keeled to one side, took one more chew of her grass, and passed away. To Elder Long it was confirmation. One more miracle. Yeh Ming had felled a buffalo with his mind. He became even more convinced that the trouble that haunted their village could be cured.
The interment that followed went according to plan.
Yer, playing a pipe, and Phia, carrying a burning brand, led the bearers to the grave site. When the pipe ceased its lament, all the women screamed, laughed, and ran as fast as they could back to the hut, leaving Long and Siri alone with the body.
“What happened?” Siri asked.
“Women aren’t allowed to see what happens next,” Long told him. “How’s your back?”
The two old men lifted Zhong’s stretcher and carried her to an open coffin embedded in the ground. They laid her inside, broke up the bier, and put it on top of the body. While Siri burned incense and set light to the spirit papers, Long fired an arrow from a consecrated crossbow across his dead wife. He said the final prayers, they put the lid on the coffin, and covered it with earth. Siri was feeling appropriately solemn until Long smiled and slapped him on the back.
“One down, three more to go,” he said. “Let’s hope the others outlast me.”
“The other what?”
“I’m married to three more of those girls, Yeh Ming. I only wish I had the energy and the years to enjoy them all.”
Siri laughed. “I assume Auntie Zhong knew about that.”
“It was her idea. She would have had me marry all of them but the rest share our surname. They’d lost their men. I was the only bull left in the herd. Zhong was only too pleased at the thought of having me out of her nest for a few nights a week. But I wouldn’t go. Refused point-blank. Not while she was alive. We’d been together fifty years. Fifty years, Yeh Ming. You can’t suddenly be unfaithful after all that time, can you now?”
Siri dwelled for a moment on his lifetime marriage to Boua. He’d felt the same way.
“You can’t,” he said.
“I’ll miss her.”
“She’ll be glad to hear that.”
“But, now she’s gone…”