Curse of the Pogo Stick (20 page)

“Comrade, who did you see?”

“Your people, Dtui and Geung. I can’t see them turning up for work on time tomorrow.”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know who’s footing the bill but there seemed to be enough beer bottles on the table to put the glass factory on double shift again.”

“You’re sure it was them?”

“Come on, Siri. How likely is it I’d mistake Geung and Dtui for any other couple?”

THE RUSSIAN CLUB

T
he Russian Club wasn’t a club and it wasn’t exclusively for Russians. It was a wooden restaurant, open to the elements on three sides, that sat brazenly beside the Mekhong. Two of its music speakers were deliberately turned towards the river to disturb the Thais. There was probably a pair of binoculars or two trained on the clientele most nights, perhaps even a camera with a telescopic lens. The customers of the Russian Club liked to boast of their inclusion in Thai anti-communist files whenever they enjoyed a night out there.

The club had once been a favourite haunt of foreign correspondents, the last of whom had been kicked out earlier that year. Now the only news to escape the country was gleaned from the gossip of refugees. The place had been taken over by Eastern European experts, Vietnamese advisers, the odd expatriate diplomat, and one or two foreign teachers who had, curiously, been allowed to stay. Lao were in the minority and included guests and counterparts of the experts, those with connections, and those who had converted their savings to gold before the value of the
kip
plummeted to below that of used cigarette papers.

Not wanting to leave Danny and Eric unguarded on the back of the motorcycle, Siri carried them up the steps and into the busy restaurant. He walked along the rows of tables and the patrons there, assuming he was selling something, either averted their eyes or waved him away.

The table he was searching for stood back near the serving hatch. Had there been a national lottery, this certainly would have been the scene of the grand prize winning victory party. Defeated plates were piled high at its centre and empty bottles were crammed onto the white tablecloth like penguins on a rapidly melting iceberg. Around it sat characters with faces as red and expressive as the villains in Chinese operas.

Civilai and Madame Daeng conspired on the far side. Mr Geung, famous for becoming intoxicated on half a glass of straw-fruit juice, was glowing like a New Year’s lantern. Phosy was laughing at the joke of some gentleman in uniform. Only one person sat sober, relishing the atmosphere and popping spring rolls into her mouth. It was Dtui who first caught sight of the doctor.

“Dr Siri!” she announced to the whole restaurant and, presumably, to the Thai military opposite. The cheer from his colleagues prompted the Europeans to raise their own glasses and toast the newcomer. His friends gathered around him and patted his back and dragged another chair across for him to join them. He was placed between Daeng and Mr Geung. Daeng took hold of his hand.

“Did somebody’s birthday slip my memory?” Siri asked. His relief at finding them alive filled him with joy.

“We’ve been to court,” shouted Civilai. He put his arm around the soldier. “This learned gentleman is our barrister.”

The table cheered again, raised their glasses to the barrister, and ordered more beer. The soldier saluted, inadvertently poking himself in the eye as he did so. The party had evidently been going on for some while.

“Well, the verdict was obviously in your favour,” Siri decided.

“It was never in doubt if the truth be told,” Phosy slurred.

A fresh plate arrived and Siri was plied with a little of everything that was left over.

“I trust you’re going to tell me all about it,” Siri said, opting for beer with ice cubes, a rare luxury.

“All in good time,” said Civilai. “First a toast to our returned hero. To Siri, for completing a perfect day.”

All of them filled, then raised, then emptied their glasses.

“Good to see you back, Doc,” Dtui said, raising her green Fanta bottle. She refilled Siri’s beer glass with the other hand.

“And now,” Phosy announced, “Dr Siri will tell us all about his abduction.”

“I’d rather…” Siri began but was drowned out by another cheer and the clinking of cutlery on empty bottles.

And so, for half an hour, Siri recounted the highlights of his adventures in the north-east leaving out his shamanic journey to the Otherworld and not mentioning General Bao at all. The audience managed to be spellbound and raucous at the same time. He had them crying with mirth as he described Judge Haeng’s exploits and he saw tears in Dtui’s eyes when he told them of the plight of the Hmong. Daeng held on to him the whole time and stared into his gorgeous green eyes.

Once he was drained of stories, he insisted they tell him why they were celebrating. But the curfew beat them to it. The taped music stopped midsong and already policemen on bicycles sat by the roadside, more of a reminder than a threat. Drinking large amounts of alcohol night after night begins to form a chemical chain that eventually turns into one long state of fuddlement. All Siri had needed to do was top up his alcohol reserve. He was as drunk as any of them when they stood to leave on uneasy legs. Madame Daeng’s shop was a mere two riverside blocks away so they all agreed to make their way there. Siri wisely left the motorcycle in front of the restaurant, but as he walked away he heard…

“Uncle! Uncle!” Their middle-aged waitress came clopping down the steps after him on clog-like sandals. In her arms she had a parcel. “You forgot this.”

What nightmares Siri could have looked forward to if he’d left the remains of Danny and Eric under a seat in a beer hall. He’d never want to go to bed again. He thanked the waitress with a tip and refused to tell her what exactly the parcel contained.

At Madame Daeng’s the general feeling was that they’d all had more than enough to drink so why not have some more. She opened two bottles of rice whisky and set about boiling water for coffee. The food was settling in the stomachs of the revellers so the mood was slightly less playful although there wasn’t a moment when someone or other wasn’t raising a laugh. The barrister, it turned out, wasn’t a barrister at all. He was a driver, which Civilai pointed out was far more useful than a barrister. He was attached to the Security Division and he had to return their truck in one piece. So he opted for coffee as did Dtui and Mr Geung.

“Right,” Siri shouted at last. “Is anybody going to tell me where the funding came from for the overindulgence tonight? I know you didn’t dip into the morgue budget ‘cause that wouldn’t have covered the first plate of river shrimp.”

“It was a sort of…donation,” Phosy said.

“Our benefactor told us to go and have a good time,” Dtui added. “So we did.”

“And who was that?”

“The woman who tried to kill you when you weren’t here,” Dtui told him, bringing a sobering coffee to everyone at the table.

“I…I did…n’t kill the auditors,” Geung stated proudly.

“You certainly didn’t,” Dtui told him. She patted his hand. At last his conscience was clear.

“Why on earth not?” Siri asked. “I would have.”

“We know you would,” she laughed. “That’s why they sneaked in while you were away.”

“You know” – Siri was getting frustrated – “why don’t we just start at the beginning and tell old Uncle Siri exactly what he’s missed.”

And so they did. Like puzzlers putting together an enormous jigsaw, they provided Siri with the pieces of their story. Siri’s head flicked back and forth as they each contributed their parts, adding missing details and colour, and, in Civilai’s case, the odd fabrication. At one stage the driver excused himself and left. But the story continued to the point where Phosy and Dtui were in the kitchen surrounded by geriatric villains with guns. Siri, a mystery devotee, was captivated.

“So, don’t stop,” he pleaded. “What happened?”

“Ah, well,” Civilai said. “For the sake of prolonging the tension, we’ve omitted one or two small details. With your permission, ladies and gentlemen, I shall fill in the gaps.”

He stood for effect.

“You see? At our meeting the previous evening, the one where Mrs Bounlan so conveniently showed up…”

“Dropped onto our plate like the answer to a prayer, you might say,” Phosy added.

“Thank you. At that meeting, we had agreed to treat anything out of the ordinary as a potential threat. We knew how clever the Lizard could be and we had to be just as devious.”

“If we hadn’t come to that decision when we did,” Madame Daeng called from the hearth, “we might have gone along with Bounlan’s story.”

“She was most convincing,” Civilai agreed. “While she was still there we even made the mistake of deciding that Phosy and Dtui would go out to Dong Dok the next day. I’m sure she was delighted. They’d expected us to follow that lead blindly. The Royalists destroyed all the student records before they fled so it was unlikely we could be sure who had been enrolled in which courses. But they didn’t destroy the financial files. The Department of Education has records of all the courses they offered in the year Bounlan mentioned. I paid the records office a visit first thing the next morning and the clerk was only too pleased to go through the files with me. They were somewhat mildewy and rat gnawed but still in order.”

“There was no in-service course for external teachers in 1964,” Phosy interrupted.

“If I may continue,” Civilai huffed, “there was no course for external teachers in 1965, 1966 or ‘67 or ‘68. In fact, Dong Dok didn’t run any external courses at all in those days. Red light number one.”

“Meanwhile,” Dtui joined in, “Phosy and I were having a leisurely breakfast at home. Civilai got a note to us telling us Bounlan had been lying and our Plan 34B should go into effect.”

“Actually, there was just the one plan,” Daeng put in. “We assumed someone would be watching Dtui and Phosy so we made it obvious they’d be going to Dong Dok without an armed escort.”

“I called the hospital on the communal police dormitory phone and told them I’d be at the college,” Dtui said. “And Phosy worked on the Vespa.”

“Civilai collected me on his motorcycle,” Daeng said. “The car would have been too conspicuous. We took some old work clothes and guns and a few disguises I had left over from the old days and we sniffed around at Dong Dok.”

“Cleverly disguised as road sweepers,” Civilai added. “We saw this chap hanging around the English Department. He was well dressed but he didn’t seem to be going anywhere. I asked some students and they said they’d never seen him before. I watched him for a bit and what do you know? He had a walkie-talkie in his briefcase. Of course nobody at the institute is likely to question a man with a radio. They’d just assume he was a spy and leave him alone. It would appear he got a message from his lookout telling him Phosy and Dtui were on their way.”

“And he happened to just be leaving his ‘class’ when we arrived,” Phosy said.

“There was a real Ajan Ming at the department…” Civilai began.

“But this wasn’t him,” said Daeng.

“You can imagine them sitting around plotting it all, can’t you?” Dtui said. She put on her evil-old-lady voice. “‘How clever can we be to fool these communists? Let’s add a little bit of irony here, a touch of religious symbolism there.’”

“But you do have to remember, they had to make sure we wouldn’t be alerted, wouldn’t be tempted to bring in the troops,” Phosy added. “This way they could check at each stage that it was just you and me. Very clever.”

“You sound like you admire them,” Dtui said.

“Well, no. I feel like they’re sad old Royalists with too much time on their hands. But brilliant old Royalists. They wanted to make it as complicated as possible. Like Madame Daeng said, they could just as easily have lobbed in a hand grenade that night of the first meeting.”

“But then they would have had to deal with the guards,” Civilai reminded him. “This way they could lure you away. They probably had something just as convoluted planned for me and Siri. But we digress…there we were at the coffee shop at Dong Dok. And when Ajan Ming suggested the cemetery…”

“…we passed that information on to our own spies,” said Phosy.

“I left a note on the coffee-shop table for our sweepers to pick up,” Dtui smiled. “And we made it clear in front of Ming that we’d be stopping off somewhere for lunch on our way there.”

“To give our team time to arrive,” Phosy added and sipped at his coffee.

“I’ve never known you to stay quiet for so long,” Civilai said to Siri.

“I’m fascinated.”

“And it gets better, little brother. Daeng and I sped off to the cemetery. I adopted my ‘hairy mourner’ disguise…”

“That was my wig,” Daeng added.

“…and I visited my dear wife’s grave. I hope their God will forgive me for ripping off flowers from someone else’s headstone. Shortly after I got there, a little fellow with a rake showed up. When Phosy and Dtui arrived, he started work.”

“He would have known we didn’t have any way to contact the authorities. I’m sure we were followed the whole time,” Phosy said. “So he was confident enough to send us on to the next leg of our guided ambush.”

“Our little tiff at the cemetery convinced him we’d get iced tea and then go on to the house from there.” Dtui squeezed Phosy’s arm. “I personally think we could make it on Thai daytime television.”

Mr Geung snorted a laugh. “Ha, C…Comrade Dtui on Thai TV. Yes, I…I want to see it.”

Everyone laughed except Siri.

“Next! Next! What happened then?”

“Phosy and Dtui were tailed again,” Civilai told him. “This time we saw him. The so-called Ajan Ming, in a baseball cap and dark glasses. He followed them all the way to the house and went in after them. The trap was sprung.”

“We’d been in public places up until then where we were sure they wouldn’t try anything,” Phosy said.

“Even so, you were taking an unnecessary risk,” Siri reminded him.

“We’d been at risk every moment since the bomb was planted. This way we could at least have some say in our destiny.”

“Point taken.”

“And we believed they’d want to talk to us before they did anything. We’d foiled not one but two of their clever little assassination attempts. They wanted us to know who was in charge. They had to introduce themselves or the whole charade thing would have been for nothing. They’d want us to know there wasn’t a chance of their being caught. Once we went missing, they knew the police trail would go cold after Dong Dok. They could even keep using the house. They might even have tried the cemetery routine on Comrade Civilai and Daeng. We thought they’d boast about that.”