The Merry Misogynist (20 page)

“They refused to leave until you got here,” said the Vietnamese with the slightest of smiles pencilled across the bottom of his face.

“It’s good to see there’s one government department with sufficient time on its hands that it can waste it doing nothing,” Siri said and sat in front of Haeng’s desk. “Not many of us have that luxury.”

“Siri, this is a serious matter,” growled the judge. “Comrade Koomki here is accusing you of – ”

“I know what he’s accusing me of: charity and kindness. Goodness knows we don’t want any of that kind of behaviour in the new republic.”

“Judge Haeng,” said the little man, “if I may.”

“Go ahead,” said the judge.

“Although we have reservations as to the type of person staying at Dr Siri’s house,” Koomki began, “that is not the matter at hand. We have evidential proof that you, Dr Siri Paiboun, are not resident at government housing unit 22B742.”

“Let’s see it,” said Siri.

Koomki stood and walked to Haeng’s desk. He carried a large grey envelope.

“My colleagues and I performed five days of surveillance on both unit 22B742 and the commercial property on Fa Ngum Street owned by the doctor’s wife, Madame Daeng.”

“Good grief,” said Siri, slumping back in the chair. “We have foreigners stealing great chunks of our ancient temple at Wat Poo because the government can’t spring for a couple of guards to look after it, and here we have three grade-two public officials spending a week watching a noodle shop? Surely our nation has better ways to harness your rapacious enthusiasm?”

“Firstly, I am a grade-three official,” said Koomki. “And secondly, on the contrary, I consider the honesty and transparency of the actions of our high-ranking officials to be a priority in these troubled times.”

“Really? Then let’s bring in an opposition party,” Siri hissed. “That’ll straighten all of us out.”

“Siri,” Judge Haeng interrupted, “can we just see what evidence the comrade has, please?”

“Judge, surely you can’t – ?”

“Siri! Thank you.”

Siri held up his hands in submission, and the small man sneered. He produced a wad of documents from the envelope and fanned them back and forth.

“Your Honour, here – ”

“You aren’t in court, Comrade,” Haeng said. “‘Judge’ will be sufficient.”

“Yes, Comrade.” Koomki nodded. “Here we have five days of surveillance records. They clearly show that Dr Siri was not at unit 22B742 for that period but was unlawfully residing at his wife’s shop.”

“For the entire time?” Haeng asked.

“What?”

“Was Dr Siri at his wife’s establishment for the entire period of the surveillance?”

“Yes, well, no. There were some gaps.”

“How many?”

“Three. Either we saw him leave but not arrive, or vice versa.”

“Three out of five?” The judge raised his eyebrows. “Not a very impressive statistic.”

Siri looked up in surprise.

“He probably slipped in through the back,” Koomki said with confidence.

“I’m a judge, Comrade. I don’t deal with probabilities, only evidence.”

Siri turned to Phat, who was buried in his work.

“Do you have proof that it was actually Dr Siri your man saw at the noodle shop?” Haeng asked.

“Yes, Judge. We have a photograph of him sneaking in at night. Our camera has a gadget that records the date and time.”

“Which is adjustable?”

“Yes, Judge.”

“Meaning you can change the time and date at will.”

Siri leaned forward to make sure the judge hadn’t been replaced while nobody was looking.

“Well, technically.” Koomki was getting flustered. “But of course we wouldn’t falsify evidence.”

“Of course not. Show me the picture.”

Koomki handed him a large coloured zoom shot. In it, a short brown-faced man in goggles and a backward-facing baseball cap was being allowed entrance to the shop by Madame Daeng. Not even Siri could recognize himself.

“And who is this man?” Haeng asked.

“Why, it’s Dr Siri.”

“All I see is a dark-skinned person with glasses.”

“They’re goggles, Judge. He’d just arrived on his motorcycle.”

“Which doesn’t appear in the photograph. Nor does the street address of the shop.” Haeng was at his most belligerent, and Siri had a sudden urge to lean over the desk and kiss him on the nose.

“The fact remains – ” Koomki attempted.

“The fact remains,” Haeng interrupted, “that you haven’t a shred of evidence that would stand up in any court in the land. I’m offended that you even brought this matter before me. Where was your man stationed at unit 22B…whatever?”

“The tree opposite,” called the man in question.

“Then, Dr Siri, can you give me a good reason why this man might not have seen you leave or arrive at your house?”

Siri took the judge’s lead.

“Certainly.” He thought for a moment. Haeng tapped his half pencil on the desk: “I park my motorcycle in the unfinished project behind my house and leave and enter through the hole in the back fence. That way I don’t wake up the children when I arrive late.”

“There you have it,” said Haeng.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Koomki.

Judge Haeng stood and put one knuckle on the desk. “What doesn’t make any sense,” he said, “is you petty bureaucrats with your silly rules wasting the time of hardworking forty-year members of the Communist Party. I’ve humoured you, looked at your evidence, and it is ridiculous. I’d like you to go back to your department and re-evaluate your roles in our society. Remember…”

“Motto time,” thought Siri.

“…the washerwoman takes her laundry to the line and shakes out the creases before hanging out the clothes. Does she look around for those shaken-out creases when she’s finished? No. A good Party member understands that not everything has an explanation and knows when to give up. I would like you to deliberate on that thought on your way out, Comrades. Good afternoon.”

The laughter was raucous enough for the nurse to come in from the next ward and tell them not to get Comrade Rajid too excited. He was still weak, she told them, but she couldn’t help noticing a broad smile on his face. Two of the three beds in the dingy Mahosot ward were unoccupied. The third was surrounded by people on plastic stools. There was Mr Tickoo, whose sleeping bag was rolled up beneath his son’s bed, then Siri, Dtui, with Malee at her breast; Civilai, Geung, and Phosy. They’d just heard Siri’s rendition of the previous day’s meeting at Justice.

“See?” said Dtui. “Judge Haeng’s secretly liked you all along.”

“I was beginning to think so,” Siri agreed. “He let me thank him a few times, accepted my gratitude humbly, then limped out leaning on his cane. But it was soon explained to me what was going on. You’ll recall, I’d enlisted the aid of the Vietnamese adviser to help me overcome Housing. It turned out he had access to information that not many others knew. It transpires, for example, that Judge Haeng as a government employee has housing allocated to him. But recently, the honourable judge completed the building of a very fine two-storey villa on the way to Dong Dok Institute. It was rumoured that a certain young lady chanteuse at the Anou Hotel is currently residing in his official residence in town. Comrade Phat, as an adviser, merely pointed out to Haeng what an unfortunate precedent it would set to allow Housing to successfully evict the lodgers at my bungalow and sully my name. Haeng obviously agreed.”

They laughed again.

“Darn it,” said Civilai. “And here I was thinking the tin man had found his heart.”

“And here I am thinking it’s time to shake out the creases from Rajid’s sheets and let him get some rest,” Dtui announced with a laugh. She stood with her baby and let everyone have a little hand squeeze and cheek sniff of Malee before stepping out. Geung followed her. Mr Tickoo stacked the stools and bowed a goodbye to his son’s guests.

Phosy cornered Siri and Civilai and told them he wanted a word with them. They went to the canteen and ordered three glasses of Mahosot coffee, a gooey brew rumoured to have polished off a number of patients who might have pulled through otherwise. They sat by an open window where the scent from the hairy jasmine bushes overwhelmed the general antiseptic atmosphere of the hospital. A fan above their heads kept off the evening mosquitoes.

“All right, boys. Here’s the latest,” Phosy said. “First, we’ve had no luck at all with the ministries, the Central Committee, or any of the aid programmes. No projects planned or executed in or around Vang Vieng on the dates our villain was there.”

“Damn,” said Siri.

“Doctor, as soon as I got your information yesterday, I contacted the police station in Pakse. It’s one of the few places you can get a phone call through to these days. They’re a bit behind in submitting their case ledgers. They still had the last two years’ books down there. I thought it might take a few days for them to go through them, but one of the officers remembered a complaint filed by the parents of a missing girl. It rang a bell with the sergeant when I mentioned the logging concession incident.”

“I know the officers in Pakse,” said Siri. “There wasn’t a lot of bell ringing going on down there.”

“I imagine the complaint wouldn’t have been remembered, and perhaps not even filed at all, if it hadn’t been for the peculiar events that surrounded it,” Phosy continued. “The mother was still upset about what happened, or almost happened, to her daughter at the concession. The girl had promised solemnly that she’d phone her at the Bureau de Poste on a certain day at a certain time. The mother and father travelled overnight to be there. She didn’t call. The parents waited there for five hours. They tried to get through to the Vientiane number the groom had given them for emergencies but the post office clerk told them there was no such code. That’s when they went to file with the police.

“It was while they were telling their story that the sergeant tied it together with another case being looked into. And this sounds very much like our villain. There’d been a complaint about a false laissez-passer. You both know how it works – when you travel between provinces you have to report at a police box.”

“Do they take down licence plate numbers?” Siri asked excitedly.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Typical. Something that might have been useful…”

“There are army barricades that take down plate numbers, but they tend to ignore anything that isn’t privately owned. We’re checking with the military posts down there anyway. All they do at the migration checkpoints is slowly and painfully copy down all the information on the laissez-passer and write the date in an exercise book. That information goes to the central registry in Pakse, where somebody else copies it out of the exercise book and into a bigger book – ”

“So on ad infinitum,” said Civilai.

“Well, it turns out that the registrar who noted the information was out drinking one night with a couple of mates from the Champasak Forestry Department – ”

“Which I believe is now officially known as the Champasak Deforestry Department,” Civilai cut in again.

“Are you going to let me finish, Comrade?”

“Sorry.”

“He told his drinking friends that he’d noticed Forestry had a bigwig from Vientiane in town. They said they hadn’t heard about it. They mentioned it to their regional boss, and he confirmed there weren’t any visitors from anywhere around the date noted in the book, hence the fake laissez-passer complaint. After further investigation they found that the impostor had checked out of the province at the same checkpoint two days later. Don’t forget it takes a while for the checkpoint information to reach the city. These were exactly the dates the parents of the missing girl claimed her suitor was in town. He was calling himself Khamphan this time, by the way. There aren’t that many non-military strangers hanging around so the Pakse police put two and two together.”

“Brilliant,” Siri said. “And what did they do about it?”

“Nothing,” Phosy confessed. He stirred the coffee and condensed milk together in the glass. It was barely liquid. “They thought it was just a lover’s tryst, that the fellow faked the pass so that he could marry his fiancée. They didn’t see it as very important.”

“That’s more like the police force we know and love,” Siri decided. “So the story ends there?”

“Yes. We’re gathering information about any ongoing projects within a day’s drive of Attapeu town over that period. We’re going back to all the same ministries. You see, Phan told the parents he was heading north to Vientiane on the night of the wedding. But he didn’t cross the northern border. He crossed back into Attapeu. He’d told the parents he’d arranged a laissez-passer for his new bride but there was no mention of her in the ledger at the police checkpoint.”

Civilai whistled. “So he killed her in Champasak because it was easier than getting her across the border.”

“Either that or he just snuck her across after dark when the police were partying or fast asleep. He could have bribed his way through the barrier with her.”

“I’d go with the first theory myself,” said Siri.

“Me too,” Phosy agreed.

Despite its heat, Siri cradled his glass between his palms, putting off the drinking for as long as possible.

“So,” he said, “what we have here is a nasty piece of work who’s travelling around the country on some official business. It’s work that involves returning after two weeks to – I don’t know – to follow up or something. He has influence because he’s able to falsify documents that pass cursory inspection. He has a truck, which suggests he’s at least the head of a section or department.”

“With a very generous gas allowance, judging from all the travelling he’s been doing,” Phosy added.

“Quite. So it’s a project that’s far more important than the usual road measuring or rice testing – ’Let’s look like we’ve actually done something’ – mission. He goes out to the countryside some way from his actual project site and assumes a false identity. He woos a country girl, takes advantage of her naivete, and she falls in love with him. He promises to come back and marry her. Two weeks later he’s in the village bamboozling everyone with all the paperwork he’s put together. He convinces them he’s registered the marriage and arranged travel documents, and he whisks her off on their wedding night.”