“Originally we weren’t going to do it until the weekend. We’d booked a little orchestra, and they weren’t free till Saturday.”
“You booked an orchestra?”
“Just half a dozen traditional instruments. And we should have spent longer paying respect to local balsa trees. But you messed all those plans up with your impatience.”
“Impatience? I’d been making excuses to my boss for a week.”
“Patience shouldn’t expire, son. Everything comes to he who waits.”
“Especially early retirement.”
“When I heard at Mahosot that you were on your way to open the chest, I knew you were in trouble. I raced home and picked up Inthanet and whatever paraphernalia he had ready. We were really pushing our luck with the cassette recorder. The spirits much prefer live music. We swung by a balsa copse and briefly explained what we intended, and got a sort of emergency go-ahead from the spirits there.
“All the time, I was picturing you, haunted by some angry spirits, leaping headfirst through the upstairs window. I was so relieved when we got there and didn’t see your effeminate motor scooter parked nearby or your impatient body splattered in the road.”
“I bet I could have made it all the way to the fountain. But, tell me, how did you get up to the seventh floor without going through the damned door?”
“Inthanet recited a magic mantra and spirited us up through time and space. I felt my body dissolve like sugar in water, and all the parts rose into the air. It was the most wonderful sensation. One minute we were at the fountain, the next we were with the chest.”
They stared at him, open-mouthed.
“You can not be serious.”
“No. Just kidding. We broke in through the side door on the ground floor.” Civilai hit him again with the fan. “Then we used the other stairwell from the fifth to the seventh.”
“What other stairwell?”
“Funny you, as a clever detective, didn’t notice a whole staircase.”
“There was no—”
“Certainly was. We came to the locked door and I thought we’d have to break it down. But Inthanet sensed there was another way. It was at the other end of the building, boarded off, didn’t have a door. The hardboard was just glued on. It came away very easily. The stairs were riddled with white ant, but if you kept to the sides…. There was another board at the top.”
“I’m embarrassed.”
“No need to be. I’m sure the people working there had no idea either. It was probably boarded over long ago when the steps got dangerous. Now, give me a break. I’m getting hungry.”
He smiled and took a large bite out of the sandwich.
“I guess I was lucky, then,” Phosy decided. “Thank you. But you really should have told me what you had lined up.”
“You’re quite right,” Siri chewed. “I apologize. But I was a little preoccupied with being arrested and put on trial.”
“Darned lucky you weren’t convicted to go with it,” Civilai added.
“Surely you don’t still believe I’m guilty.”
“I tell you, Younger Brother, I certainly wouldn’t want to live next door to that man after all the embarrassment you’ve caused him.”
“Don’t worry, Brother. I’ve met people like him before. They talk a lot, but deep down they’re all cowards. I’m more afraid of living next door to Miss Vong. By the way, did I mention to anyone that I have thirty-three teeth?”
It was too hot to drag lunch out any longer, and Siri wheeled his motorcycle to the hospital parking lot. It was already around two, and he was feeling like a schoolboy who’d skipped classes for half a day. He hadn’t seen Mr. Geung for over a week, and he hoped the poor fellow wasn’t bogged down with bodies.
As he walked into the low concrete building, he called out in his friendliest voice: “Anybody in this morgue still alive?” There was no reply. “Hello?”
Mr. Geung came scurrying out of the office half in panic, half in relief at seeing Siri. He was too flustered to speak. He was rocking fit to roll over.
“Calm down, Geung. Calm down.”
Siri led him back into the office, sat him down, and rubbed his shoulders till his breathing returned.
“Now, slowly.”
“It…it…it’s Dtui.”
“Yes?”
“Shhh…she’s dis…appeared.”
Saloop, the lifesaver, had eaten a healthy rice-and-scrap lunch with his fiancée at the ice-works yard. The owners there liked him and encouraged him to hang around. He was different from the other dogs who seemed to only have one thing on their minds.
But today it was too hot to sit around and spoon and she wasn’t in the mood for romance, so he took a leisurely stroll back home. He’d been enjoying the company of the man from the north and felt he should be there more to look after him. People were hopeless on their own.
He stopped to sniff at an occasional post and wall to make sure there were no interlopers in his territory. But sniffing stale urine on a full stomach in that heat naturally made him feel queasy. That’s probably why his canine senses weren’t as keen as usual. It probably explains why he didn’t notice the movement in the yard before he smelled the scent. But the scent was unmistakable.
He hadn’t had a great many opportunities to sample chocolate. It was a luxury so rare, they didn’t even have any at the Lan Xang Hotel. Yet once, when he was a puppy, some rich foreign lady had given him just enough to get him hooked. He’d followed that lady for blocks until she shook him off, but the taste was with him for life.
He didn’t get his second fix until fifteen years later when he and Siri moved out here to the suburbs. Those neighbors—the kids that ate better than the president—they had chocolate one day. The scent wafted through the air and pulled him by his nose out of a deep sleep. He went to their gate and saw them chewing on bars of the stuff. They teased and taunted him, pretending to give him some, then pulling it away.
It was more than he could take. He feigned a loss of interest, coiled the inside of his neck like a spring then just as the boy was about to pull the bar away he snapped at it. The kid only just got his fingers away in time. He dropped the bar and Saloop strode off with it, victorious. The children ran inside to tell their mother of the vicious dog that attacked them and took their chocolate.
That was a fortnight ago, and he’d been waiting for a chance to get back into his new drug of choice. This was it. Their gate was open and one of the kids had left a half bar of chocolate right there in the middle of the path, melting under the hot sun. It was too easy. He’d probably be as sick as a…well, he’d probably be sick, but anyone who’s ever suffered an addiction knows you can’t fight it.
He walked slowly along the rock pathway, listening carefully for movement inside the house, but not many people were planning on coming out into the sun on a day like this. And suddenly it was under his nose. He sniffed at its glorious milky sweetness, let his tongue dip into the gooey paste and slurped it up.
Life didn’t get any better than this: a house in the suburbs, a caring master, the love of a good bitch, and chocolate. For a second he wondered if he’d ever been happier.
“A fat one?”
“She is quite large, I suppose.”
“Yeah. She was here. You know where she works?”
“Why do you need to know?”
“For the RR29.”
“RR29?”
“It’s the regulation complaint form that accompanies official telephone calls to law enforcement departments.”
“What did she do?”
“Illegal access to government documents. They said I’d need to find out where she works before they can do anything—especially seeing as she didn’t technically steal anything. So, do you?”
The man sat at a small desk in a room so crammed with piles and boxes of papers, one match would have sent the whole building to ashes in minutes.
So, this was it, Siri thought to himself looking at the vaguely Chinese features of a face slowly adopting the shape and color of a sheet of paper. This was what all the triplicates and quadruplicates came to. Hundreds of officious cadres like this, processing endless documents by hand, passing them on to other paper-faced clerks in other offices, and filing them away in rooms like this. What a system.
This was the filing section of the Department of Corrections. The only appointment marked in Dtui’s log for today was:
8:30 CORRECTIONS
“So, do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Know where she works.”
“No. I have no idea.”
“Then how did you know she was here?”
“You just told me.”
“But why here, at Corrections?”
“It was next on my list. We’re investigating her. She’s tried this kind of thing before.”
“Who’s we?”
Siri produced his well-thumbed letter of introduction from the Justice Department. He was learning that in most cases, just having a document was enough to get him into places. Few bothered to read the long stodgy wording. The letterhead was enough. The clerk sensed he was already involved in a matter of intrigue.
“What’s she done, then?” the clerk asked.
“She goes around impersonating a nurse, you know, goes into this department and that, claiming this and that.”
“Damn. I knew there was something fishy about her. Didn’t look like any nurse I’d ever seen.”
“Suppose you tell me what happened.”
The filing clerk was visibly excited. His dull life desperately needed days such as these.
“She marches in here as if she owns the office and says Dr. Vansana asked her to come and look up something in the files. Dr. Vansana’s the physician we use at the correctional facilities. I mean, ha, as if anyone can just march in and claim to be this or that and get access to my files. I mean, she didn’t have so much as a P124.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I jest you not, comrade. Well, Dr. Vansana’s off at the reservoir today so there wasn’t even any way of checking her story. I wasn’t letting her get her hands in my drawers, I can tell you.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“Right. So she kicked up a fuss and I told her I wasn’t even supposed to be talking to her till I saw an Int5Q, so she should go away and come back with some paperwork. I asked her, ‘Where do you think the country would be if everyone conducted his or her daily business without the correct forms?’”
“Good for you.”
“I can’t even tell you what she said to that. I said ‘Good day’ and went back to my deskwork. She stormed out, and I suppose I eventually calmed down and forgot about her. I found myself engrossed in a rejac. budg. requisition that needed some back-up R11’s. I’m a bit short-staffed right now. Normally I’d have a girl running back and forth to the cabinet room for files, but these days I’m having to do it myself. So I went next door and what do you know? The door was locked. I banged and banged and who should come to the door?”
“I think I know.”
“Her, brazen as anything, comes and opens the door. And she has the nerve to tell me she took a wrong turn and got herself locked in that room with the files. A likely story I do not think. I mean, the lock’s on the inside for the first thing, and there she was opening it. I was flabbergasted. I’d never seen such abuse of the regulations.
“Of course, what I should have done at that point was restrain her and call for security, the police even. But, well, she was a big girl and I’m not a physically well person, so I instructed her to leave, forthwith. Would you believe she strolled past me smiling without a glimmer of guilt?”
“I would.” He fought back his own smile.
“What?”
“I mean, she’s a hardened criminal. These people have no shame. Too bad you don’t know what file she was looking at.”
“Ha. Not know? You don’t think I could spend over a year setting up this system and not know what’s been tampered with? She didn’t even bother to put it back in the drawer straight. DC19368.3. That, Comrade, is a criminal record file.”
“I wish all our witnesses were as diligent as you, comrade. I’m afraid I’ll have to take a look at that file. It’s the only evidence we have against her.”
“What’s her name?”
“Her name? We refer to her as…as HJJ838.”
The man jotted it down.
Twenty minutes later, Siri walked out of the Corrections Department into a brick wall of dry heat. It had to be the hottest damned year he’d ever known. There hadn’t been more than a sneeze of rain since last December. Nothing was really green anymore.
A depleted flock of bicycle taxi pedalers wilted on their back seats beneath the gray leaves of a peacock-tail tree.
“Good health,” Siri said hopefully.
“Good health, Uncle,” a couple replied. They’d seen him arrive on his motorcycle, so they knew there was no chance of a fare.
“Hot, isn’t it?”
“Damned hot.”
“I don’t suppose any of you recall giving a ride to a nurse here this morning, do you? About nine?”
“I do,” said a bare-chested young man with a stack of coat hangars inside his skin. “There was a heavy one this morning. It was me that took her.”
“Remember where to?”
“Out to Silver City, Uncle. Almost killed me it did, day like this.”
“Thank you.”
Siri was on his way back to his bike when he glanced across the street. In the heat that shimmered up from the pavement, he saw Saloop sitting with his long tongue flopping out of his mouth.
“Saloop?” Siri said. “What the heck are you doing here?”
He remembered the old Lassie black and white films he’d seen at Le Ciné in Paris. Perhaps his dog had come to tell him there was danger back at the house. He couldn’t think how he’d traced him here. He waited for an old Vietnamese truck to pass before going across to see. But once the vehicle and its trailer of tarry black smog had cleared the lane, Saloop had gone.
“I never will get that dog,” Siri said to himself.
Getting Warmer
Before the Silver City trip, Siri stopped off at the morgue to see whether Dtui had made an appearance. All he found was Geung sweeping grooves into the concrete floor. At the hospital administration office, Siri called Phosy and by a one-in-a-hundred chance found him at his desk. He told Siri about the appointment he’d completely forgotten the previous evening with Dr. Vansana. He also told him to call back if Dtui still hadn’t shown up by five. It was already nearly four.
There was one more stop before Silver City. He arrived at the ugly shanty behind the high wall of the national stadium and walked along the narrow dirt lane, wading through a flock of newborn chicks. At Dtui’s banana-leaf door, he called out Manoluk’s name before going in.
“Ooh, come in, Doctor. Haven’t seen you for ages.”
Dtui’s mother lay as always on the thin mattress in the center of the room. The head of the standing fan cluttered and groaned back and forth but did a poor job of lowering the temperature in the stuffy slum. She’d never looked well in all the time Siri had known her, but she’d looked a lot worse than she did today. He didn’t want to distress her by discussing Dtui’s disappearance.
“Good health, Mrs. Manoluk. How you feeling?”
“Just fine,” she lied. “What brings you?”
“I was visiting the family of one of our deceased around here,” he lied back. “Thought I’d drop in and see how you’re doing.”
He reached into his shoulder bag for his traveling doctor kit.
“Actually, I haven’t been in the morgue all day. I hope Dtui’s looking after the show for me.”
“Must be, Doctor. She left here bright and early this morning. Can’t think where else she’d be, unless she took off across the river.”
This was a long-standing joke in Vientiane. If so-and-so was late or his brother missed a day at work, they’d talk about him taking a swim to Thailand. It was only partly said in jest, as there were very few of the population of 150,000 who hadn’t given it a thought.
“No plans to go and have her hair done, manicure?”
“Goodness me, no. Can you imagine Dtui with a permanent wave?”
Damn. So, whatever came up was sudden and unplanned. Before leaving, as was his habit, he gave the old woman a check-up. They chatted, and he left some herbal tea to help her sleep. There were the constant cries of babies, the yelling of neighbors, the dogs. He wasn’t sure tea would help her sleep through that. He really needed to get her into a better place.
Warmer Still
He was on his motorcycle, heading at last to Silver City. It was like riding into the blast of a hair-dryer set on hot. The sweat that had soaked him at Manoluk’s dried the moment he stepped out into the sunshine. Now his shirt was burning his skin. The heat didn’t help his troubles at all. There was one thing he couldn’t get out of his mind. Dtui was one of the world’s great carers. She knew about Geung’s condition and that he’d be frantic with worry about her. She wasn’t the type to be away all day without getting word back to him. Siri was sure something had happened to her.
For the first time, his wrinkled letter didn’t impress the guards at the gate of the Secret Police HQ one little bit. The man on his stepladder looked down through the peep hatch and read it while Siri held it up to him.
“No. Nothing to do with us. Sorry, Comrade. Can’t let you in.”
After a good deal of contrived pouting and hammering and threatening from the doctor, the guard brought his commanding officer who, in turn, brought Mr. Phot, the interpreter. They still wouldn’t let Siri inside, but they did allow Phot to go out and talk to him. He brought out a large white parasol and opened it over their heads.
“What exactly have you got in there that’s so top secret?” Siri asked.
“Mystery,” was the reply. “People always need to think there’s something going on. It keeps them on their toes. If the proletariat knew we didn’t actually have any secrets, they wouldn’t respect us nearly as much.” Siri smiled. “So, you’re Dtui’s boss. She told me about you.”
“Has she been here today?”
“It was a flying visit.”
“Can you tell me what she wanted?”
“Don’t see why not. It was about something the Russian had started to say on her first visit. She hadn’t really taken much notice then, or perhaps I didn’t do a very good job of translating. He’d made a comment about the teeth marks.”
“The tiger’s?”
“He was sure it was some type of cat. A tiger was the most likely candidate. But there was something odd about them.”
“What kind of odd?”
“He said he’d never seen such sharp canines before. The indentations almost ran to a point. It was almost as if they’d been deliberately sharpened.”
“Sharpened? Why would anyone want to do that, and how?”
“Good questions, doctor. But it certainly makes the creature you’re looking for one scary old foe, don’t you think?”
They both stood reflecting on that for a few seconds.
“Hot, isn’t it?”
“Damned hot.”
Getting Cooler
As he’d heard, Dr. Vansana was off at the reservoir. Siri sat in the back yard of his house downwind from a simply enormous fan that Sam, the doctor’s wife, had dragged out from inside. It was about three feet across and felt something like flying behind an Antonov 12. He had to hold his lemon tea with both hands.
“This is the coolest I’ve felt all day,” he yelled above the growl of the motor.
“I’m so glad you aren’t one of those vain men who wears a toupee. It would be in Nong Kai by now,” his hostess said.
He laughed, but she could tell he was deeply worried about Nurse Dtui.
“I just wish there was more I could do to help. I think I’ve told you everything we talked about last night.”
“But your husband was convinced this Seua fellow wasn’t the mass murdering type?”
“Absolutely. Vansana was quite disturbed after Dtui left, in fact. He was certain she was on the wrong track. But she seemed so convinced there was a connection. And to make matters even worse, she thought that connection might be supernatural. I’m afraid my husband doesn’t hold with that kind of talk. He’s a scientist.”
“Yes. I used to be, too. I can understand his feelings. Did she give you any idea of where she was planning to go today, apart from the Corrections Office?”
“That was it, I’m afraid. She mentioned she wished she knew more about spirits and werewolves. Nothing else.”
“Sorry, do you have a telephone?”
“Yes, Doctor. The regime kindly let us keep ours. The neighbors weren’t so lucky. Thank goodness Vansana’s a medical man.”
Siri tried to get through to Civilai and Phosy. Both were out of the office and neither had left messages to say when or if they’d be back. It was five already, and the last time anyone had seen Dtui was around ten that morning. He went off to the Police Department to file a missing persons complaint even though, without Phosy’s personal attention, he didn’t have much faith in the ability of the police force to find her.
Where had she gone after Silver City? What was preventing her from phoning or coming back? Perhaps she’d had an accident. For the moment, her trail had gone cold.
Freezing
She couldn’t believe how cold it was in that place when the air outside was so hot. Or perhaps it was just a nervous reaction to fear. She felt down the front of her uniform. It was caked in some kind of mud. Some of it was hard. It occurred to her it might have been her own blood. There was no way of telling. There were certainly injuries.