Hmong New Year passed virtually unnoticed in Vientiane and, as December held no other significant dates for celebration, January arrived unannounced. The weather, for once, gave nobody cause for complaint. The sky was blue and cloudless and the city was fanned day and night by cooling breezes. Locals had taken to wearing mufflers round their necks and socks inside their flip-flops. Walkers everywhere crunched through unswept leaves. The pool at the Lan Xang Hotel was off-limits because the water was cold and the lifeguard refused to jump in if anyone got into trouble. Although the Lao wouldn’t have their own new year for another three months, the West was calling this 1978 and hailing it as the dawning of the age of computers. Half a million were already in use around the world and predictions were that this number might double by the end of the century. Like the news of Charlie Chaplin’s death and the decision by Sweden to ban aerosol cans, the revelation passed Vientiane by without even staring in the window.
For reasons best known to himself, Judge Haeng had taken to using a cane following the trauma of his ordeal in the northeast. There was nothing at all wrong with his leg but Siri assumed that once the cast was off his arm he had no cause to tell strangers of his bravery otherwise.
“There must have been thirty of them,” he’d declare, gazing out into the misty beyond of his memory. “Tough, mountain warriors, trained to kill. They picked off Siri straightaway but I was able to evade them for four days, living wild in the jungle. Surviving off the land. Hampered by life-threatening injuries, I relied on training from my days in the underground to get through it all. A good socialist must be ambidextrous: able to chop down a mighty teak tree with his left hand and darn a shirt with his right. You have to understand the jungle, to love and respect it like a wife.
“After a while I felt concerned about Dr. Siri. He isn’t a young man and we must have compassion for our senior citizens. I went in search of him. I feared not for my own life but ultimately I succumbed to my injuries and to the dreaded malaria. See this bruising on my hands? Further evidence of the ravages of the disease.”
Siri had smiled when the story made it back to him. Only Haeng could have caught malaria at that altitude. It wasn’t till the Hmong were forced down to lower elevations that the mosquito joined the list of their enemies. Siri waited for the day when he’d be summoned to the Department of justice to find Haeng with a nose so long he couldn’t get out of his office. Siri, meanwhile, had one or two cases a week to keep himself and his team moderately busy.
Nothing more was heard of the Lizard and her cohorts but a nasty thought had crossed Siri’s mind. These were the days when people could vanish without a physical trace and, over time, be deleted completely from memory. But one matter still lingered and made the old doctor shake his head from time to time. Why, he wondered, would a woman about to be executed make a gift of a valuable ring to the very people who had condemned her to death? Was it merely a final act of bravado from an arrogant woman or had there been one spell left in her cauldron? According to the Security Division, the firing squad had done its duty on the morn, but would they admit to losing the Lizard a second time? The manageress still presided over her clients at the Russian Club and nothing untoward had happened to suggest anything had gone wrong. Siri had nothing but a creeping tingle at the back of his neck to keep him company.
Fortunately, he had something else to occupy his mind. Following his return from Xiang Khouang, Siri had taken up a cause. He had canvassed both the Lao and Vietnamese military in an effort to make them accountable for their handling of Hmong refugees. He wanted a commitment that they would have safe passage when fleeing to Thailand. It was Civilai’s opinion that if Siri hadn’t been friendly with certain influential members of the military he too would have vanished without a trace for such foolishness. Siri countered that he was just reminding them of their own policy.
“According to your politburo, the Hmong are Lao citizens,” he told Civilai. “The official line is, ‘All Lao citizens are equal before the law irrespective of ethnic origin.’ They have the same rights as we do.” “And we have rights?”
“By comparison.”
“Keep on pushing the army, you stubborn old fart, and we’ll see how strong your rights are.”
So Siri, being Siri, kept on pushing. He ran into the same rehashed diatribe about national security and the US-led insurgency but not one sensible argument as to why unarmed women and children and old people posed a threat to the nation. If they were dangerous then surely the army ought to be glad they were leaving. It soon became clear that the issue was not a centrally agreed upon policy but rather left up to the whim of the regional army commander in each of the provinces. He heard that some units coming across caravans of Hmong escorted them back home and sent the seniors for reeducation, where they learned that this was a multicultural society and even the most impoverished and ignorant had an opportunity for advancement. But the officers he spoke to also conceded there might be the odd patrol leader with a well-founded grudge who would execute first and consider the moral implications later over a drink.
He heard more disturbing rumors that the new Soviet planes were being used to drop liquid chemicals on caravans of refugees although that wasn’t a policy anyone he spoke to cared to discuss. Whatever the truth, an alarming number of refugees fleeing their homes weren’t reaching the camps in Thailand and Siri didn’t like that fact. But, as Civilai said, he was getting closer to that ‘Has anyone seen Siri lately?’ moment. For a month he had attempted to beg a brief interview with Commander
Khoumki, the chief of staff of the armed forces. He’d known the lad in the field and had once removed a bullet from his intestines. Under fire in the jungle he’d considered their relationship to be a close one. But Khoumki had risen through the ranks and left all those nonprofit forest love affairs behind. Now he was inaccessible and would have remained so had Siri not crossed the line.
It was obvious that playing by the rules wasn’t getting him anywhere so he resorted to the unthinkable. He spent one afternoon in the cutting room painting a large sign. It read,