Curse of the Pogo Stick (5 page)

The decision to hold the national conference in the old city of Xiang Khouang had been pure showmanship. After a prolonged period of Royalist-American bombing, the only structures still standing were one house, a broken hospital wing, and a twenty-foot Buddha with half a head and shrapnel wounds. There was nowhere to eat or sleep or even to hold a conference in the devastated place. But the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party had a point to make regardless of the inconvenience to the participants. The stage and a thousand chairs and countless tarpaulins had been trucked down from Phonsavan, the new provincial capital. And there in the centre of the main street they gave their speeches and clapped and let the defeated enemy know who was in charge. All around them in the pockmarked landscape, several thousand tons of unexploded ordnance lay hidden beneath the dried mud. Leisurely strolling during the breaks was strongly discouraged. For the same reason there were no sightseeing tours arranged to the Plain of Jars. Instead, each participant had been given a colour postcard of a buffalo beside an ancient four-foot pot in his orientation folder.

At the end of each day, the delegates had been bused back to Phonsavan to eat and sleep in preparation for the next day’s ordeal. And it was in a dining hall storeroom that Siri now sat. An hour and two more beers after his arrival he’d hidden the empty bottles behind a stack of mandarin oranges and gone to the door with his bag. Judge Haeng and two officials were seated at a table in the dining room.

“It’s done,” Siri said and he laid the death certificate in front of the judge. It read ‘cardiac arrest’.

“See, Siri?” Haeng said. “See? That wasn’t so difficult, was it?”

“Judge Haeng,” Siri nodded, “you’re right again. Oh, by the way, I redressed him for collection.”

Siri was sure the officials would order one or two labourers to remove the cadaver. Nobody would think to check under the shirt. Comrade Singsai would return to his family with his body and his dignity intact.

“Oh, Siri,” Haeng called after him as he headed out into the evening chill. “Get to bed. We’re off early in the morning.”

Siri’s response wasn’t audible, which was perhaps just as well.

EXPOSED NURSES

T
he hospital had allowed the new nurses ten exposures on the official Mahosot camera. It was a Brownie, a souvenir of the American days when money was available and the stores had been stocked with medicines and equipment. But now, as Director Suk made perfectly clear, the camera was not for recreational purposes. It was for recording medical achievements (of which there had been none to date), documenting autopsies, and recording historical events. The arrival of the first batch of nursing students to return from Bulgaria was technically a historic event so the girls had been given permission to use up the remaining exposures on the film as long as they also captured the chrysanthemums. Dtui accompanied the nursing cadre when she went to pick up the photographs from the pharmacy behind the evening market. Developing photos had become something of a sideline for the pharmacist since film was hard to come by and so few people had moments to celebrate. He’d made copies of the Mahosot pictures for each of the eight nurses. But one of the young ladies had been so impressed by the facilities at the country’s leading hospital, she’d fled the dormitory and was last seen floating across the Mekhong holding onto an inflatable neck brace. That left one set of photos for Dtui.

With the office still inhabited by auditors, Dtui and Daeng spread the pictures across the dissecting table.

“Where do we start?” Dtui asked.

“Well, anyone with binoculars and a false moustache,” Daeng said. “If that fails we’ll settle for someone who looks out of place.”

That objective was simplified by the fact that seven of the ten photos were exclusively of seven smiling nurses, one unsmiling nurse, and a flower bed.

“I don’t suppose the nurse who absconded had anything to do with it, do you?” Dtui asked.

“I imagine there are easier ways to get into the hospital grounds than spending four years in Sofia, but we won’t rule it out.”

“Right!”

One of the remaining three snaps was a very good picture of the morgue itself with nurses pointing to the sign and one young thing pretending to be in the throes of a horrible death. That left only two with people in the background. One, of the nurses walking across the grounds, contained a handful of patients who had been shooed from the wards to enjoy the therapeutic rays of the sun. They all looked convincingly ill. Only the last shot offered any hope. It was what is known in photographic terminology as a mistake. In the foreground was an out-of-focus breast and an arm, but in the background was a panorama of three hospital buildings with several dozen people standing and seated and walking about. They were far too small to identify Neither Daeng’s reading glasses nor the base of a petri dish could magnify them to any recognizable size.

“Damn,” said Dtui.

“Patience,” said Daeng. “We’ll find a way to enlarge them.”

On the map provided by the Xiang Khouang constabulary, the road to Luang Prabang was a distinct red line. It began in the old capital of Muang Khun and headed north-west through Phonsavan, the replacement capital, which was still not entirely built. It proceeded past the Plain of Jars before wriggling its way west to Luang Prabang. And, indeed, the journey to just beyond the Phonsavan intersection was comparatively smooth and untroubled. The convoy consisted of two armoured vehicles, two Land Rovers, and one open jeep crammed with armed guards. Its composition belied the theory that there was no longer an enemy to be afraid of.

The first Land Rover contained the deputy head of the National Police Coordinating Committee, his Vietnamese adviser, and Comrade Colonel Phat, the adviser from Hanoi attached to the Justice Department, or, more specifically, attached to Judge Haeng. Since the signing of the Treaty of Cooperation and Friendship in July, there was hardly a department head who didn’t sport his own Vietnamese minder like an unwanted hump. The judge himself had opted to ride in the second Land Rover with Siri and a bodyguard. This was not an indication of his growing fondness for the coroner but rather an escape from more unwanted advice. Siri had offered to travel in the jeep with the soldiers but Haeng reminded him of how inappropriate that would be for a man of his standing. Siri pointed out that socialism had removed class barriers but the judge threw an axiom into the ring for which there was no rhyme or reason or riposte: “The yellow-headed cornsucker bird can be starved and beaten and spun around a hundred times and transported a thousand miles but still its innate instinct will lead it home to a familiar land. In the same way, the common man will always know where he belongs.”

With that bafflingly cruel aphorism still in his head, Siri had cornered Phosy, his favourite policeman and surrogate son-in-law. He’d begged the officer to accompany him on the trek.

“I need a human being to talk to,” he’d pleaded. But Phosy was assigned to bigger cheeses than Dr Siri and there was nothing he could do about it. Siri was on his own.

Despite the fact that their mission was supposed to instill confidence in the beleaguered law enforcement officers of Xiang Khouang, the only professional stop they made that first day was at a little police box in Ban Latngon. The officer wasn’t in attendance but they knew he couldn’t be far because his uniform and underwear were drying on a string line beside it. As they sat waiting for his return, Siri could hear the secret language of the
geng
wafting down from the hills. And some of the sounds were taking on the form of words to him. He was certain he heard the name of his inner shaman, Yeh Ming, and something about a young girl and a demon. But the words were often lost in the notes like a puzzle and when he looked around at the other members of his party, it occurred to him he was the only one paying attention to the music. He wondered whether anyone else could even hear it.

After half an hour they gave up on the errant policeman and left him a note before resuming their journey. As Siri had feared, Haeng wasn’t the type of passenger who sits staring idly at the passing scenery. He’d had many years of experience of pummelling people into submission with his points of view. Along the way he’d memorized a thousand Party slogans and made up a thousand more. He was the type who never asked a question that warranted more than a yes or no reply, so when they first stopped to shoot rabbits – the polite man’s euphemism for having a wee – Siri had found himself a painful lip bush. The leaves were spongy and surprisingly sound resistant. He’d used them during the war to block out the headache of constant mortar fire. He assumed that if they were able to deaden the percussion of battle they should be more than adequate to erase the inane chatter of Judge Haeng. All Siri needed to do was nod or shake his head from time to time and his superior was satisfied.

Cloaked in this new peace, Siri took in the spectacular scenery. He’d lived in it, of course, but in war one never had the luxury of appreciating the beauty of nature. Every hill, every mountain had been a threat then. But in the slow-moving convoy that took them through Latngon and further west toward Kasong, he had the time and space to enjoy his splendid country. Every turn in the road revealed a new calendar photograph. The mountains rose from misty valleys like Chinese watercolours. It was the land of birds, of jungle sounds, and of lushly delicious vegetation. He was delighted that the fighting hadn’t destroyed it all. Thankfully, Mother Nature always managed to find a way of repairing man’s abuse of her. And no more than twelve kilometres from Ban Kasong she even began to stamp her authority.

The rains had long since ceased in the north-east but the road had yet to recover from them. The ruts in the dirt track they called a highway were deep and crested as if a choppy sea had been carved out of dry mud. In places there was nothing flat to drive on at all. The soldiers in the lead car would jump from their vehicle with spades and attempt to level a way through the clay breakers. They were barely thirty kilometres from Phonsavan when the captain in charge – the setting sun already turning him into a silhouette – summoned the men to pitch their tents and call it a day.

Siri unplugged the leaves from his ears and smiled at Judge Haeng;

“Not bad,” he said. “Thirty kilometres already. At this rate you’ll be my age by the time we get to Luang Prabang.”

“Yes, Doctor?” said Haeng. “And where will that leave you?”

“In a far better place, Judge.”

In the jungles of Xiang Khouang there were wild tigers, Malay bears, and wolves. Very few of them lusted for human flesh but the ominous night chorus they broadcast would leave a young city boy with fears for his life. Although Haeng had grown up in the north-east he wasn’t the hardy, outdoors type. The son of an affluent Chinese businessman who chose his allies well, Haeng had been a child of the Party, a red scarf-wearing zealot, the type who gladly informed on his schoolmates. While his father was trafficking arms in one direction and opium in the other, Haeng’s Lao mother had nurtured in her son a sense of fair play and equality, but as in most privileged upbringings, equality didn’t amount to giving away their wealth and sharing what they had with the lower classes. This dichotomy had continued to confuse young Haeng even when his father decided the time was ripe to send his eldest son to study in the Eastern Bloc. A second boy was sent to China and a third to Australia to hedge all bets. One could never tell in which direction the political winds would blow in the region.

Even in Laos the businessman had been canny. Unbeknownst to the Pathet Lao, the astute Chinese had played both sides right up until the cease fire in ‘73. When it became clear the Royalists were unlikely to triumph, he focused his allegiance and large sums of money on the communists. By then the ideological investment he’d made in his first son was reaping dividends. Haeng was already a senior Party Youth cadre in the Soviet Union and had done well in school. He’d studied law to a level students from the third world were permitted to reach and it seemed plausible the boy would soon be able to return to Laos in some senior management position. But his father wanted more. It took a generous contribution to the Soviet Ministry of Justice to persuade them that an expeditious course in advanced law for Indochinese students would be invaluable to his son. So, in nine months, a second-class law degree that carried no weight in the USSR was upgraded to a judgeship in Laos, which had even less meaning.

While his fellow Party members had lived in caves for a generation, Haeng had managed to completely avoid fighting and roughing it in the jungle. In fact, hard as it might be to believe, he’d lived something of a playboy lifestyle in Moscow. Even in the sixties there was fun to be had in the Soviet Union for the children of the Marxist capitalists. He had lived well there and returned reluctantly to Laos to take over a justice system vacated by the fleeing Royalists. There was no longer a constitution, which meant there were no laws so his role was largely ornamental. Other than trying the odd divorce, frolicking with cheap and easy nightclub singers, and drinking the nights away, he had little to busy himself with.

But there was plenty to occupy his mind on this first night of their road trip. He lay wide awake in his tent as the light from the fire danced its fingers against the canvas. The ground was hard and lumpy. The air was so cold he could see his breath. And, all around, wild beasts reminded him that he was invading their territory. He hated the prime minister’s office for ordering this tour but he knew these were early days in his climb to power. He was an outsider in this bureaucracy of old men and, as such, wasn’t particularly trusted by any of them. He had a good deal of favour currying to do before they’d accept him into their inner circle. And one thing Judge Haeng was good at, one might even say virtuoso, was kissing arse.

December in the mountains of Xiang Khouang was too cold and high for mosquitoes. Siri slept in a hammock slung between two sturdy drooping breast-fruit trees. Wrapped in a blanket, he smiled up at the stars that extended from horizon to horizon. They shone brightly like sunlight squeezing in through nail holes in the atmosphere. He breathed in the scents: the night orchids that hid their beauty shyly during the day and blossomed under moonlight, the release sourness plants, and the sudden love vegetables. He listened to the jungle musical: the choir of birds and beasts that sang through the night. The air was so fresh he could feel his insides waking from a long polluted hibernation.