Their footsteps echoed up the teak staircase. They noted how stuffy the place felt. Despite the heat, most of the windows hadn’t been opened since the Americans left. (French culture had briefly been supplanted there by American language classes before the building’s current manifestation.) The only culture not in evidence was Lao. Or perhaps it was.
On the second floor, they passed two rooms empty of furniture and life. The third door was slightly ajar, and through the gap they could see two metal cabinets, an uneven shelf with all its books resting at the low end, and a desk with a man on it.
He slept in his undershirt with a blissful expression on his young face. His ironed white shirt made a scarecrow over his chair. Although it was twenty minutes past one, and officially office hours, Phosy knocked politely and said “I’m sorry.”
As the man didn’t stir, he was about to knock a second time when Siri pushed past him into the room. The doctor was a remarkably patient man, but he had no time for incompetence in the government sector. He and Boua had fought for most of their lives to end corrupt systems and he had no intention of being part of one. In his most officious voice, he belted out: “Good God, man! What do you think you’re doing? This is a government department, not a rest home. What if there was some sporting emergency or something?”
Phosy and Dtui raised their eyebrows at each other.
The man came out of his dream flailing, sending a stand of nicely sharpened pencils on a flight across the room. He leaped from the desktop and into his shoes. The visitors watched as he ran around the desk, gathered his shirt, and put it on. He was a plain-looking man with a naturally confused expression. He sat on the chair, fastened his shirt buttons, and, as if they hadn’t witnessed the entire resurrection, asked his visitors, “May I help you?”
Phosy, smiling, handed him a mimeographed sheet with his photograph stapled to a top corner. This was his ID. The man scrutinized it with great care.
“Police?” he concluded.
“Very good. There was a death in front of The Ministry last night. Maybe early this morning. Are you missing anyone?”
“Now, that’s hard to say.”
“Why?”
“We’re missing people all the time. Staff off in other provinces. People off sick. We haven’t seen the head or deputy head for over a week.”
“Isn’t there some schedule? Some way to check who is supposed to be where?”
“Hmm. No.”
“Where’s the office that arranges all the trips?”
“Oh, right. That would be me.”
“And you don’t keep some kind of list?”
“It’s a good idea, but nobody’s ever asked before. You’d have to go from room to room and see who’s missing.”
So that’s what they did. Siri was impressed that the department of information could provide so little of it. The search began on the second floor and worked its way up. The young man took them to rooms and introduced them to barely-stressed secretaries and average men whose jobs appeared to be to read newspapers, magazines, and novels.
Siri described the dead man at each office in turn, but soon realized that he could be talking about half the men who worked there. They all wore stay-press trousers and vinyl shoes, and were at varying stages of triplicate syndrome.
The administration rooms on the fifth floor were mostly empty, and the door leading to the top two floors was apparently locked. While the staff ran around looking for a key to open it, ever-resourceful Dtui noticed that there was already a key in the lock from the other side. They knocked and shouted for someone to come down and let them up, but when their banging was met by stony silence the worst was assumed.
“Who works up there?” Siri asked.
“Archives,” said the young man. “It’s like our history department. You know? Preservation and the like.”
Siri wondered to himself how much priority the regime was placing on safeguarding the country’s heritage, given that there weren’t even funds available to station guards at the cultural sites. Anyone who fancied a coffee-table bust of the Buddha could just go and help himself.
After no more than two minutes on her knees, with the deft use of her watch pin and the careful placement of a newspaper beneath the door, Dtui was able to remove and retrieve the key on the other side of the door. Phosy looked on in admiration.
“You know? There are one or two unsolved burglary cases from the old regime….”
“Couldn’t have been me, Officer. I wore gloves. Oops.”
They reinserted the key and opened the door, and Phosy led the way up the staircase to the sixth and seventh floors, which were little more than a few rooms attached to the roof. Siri sensed some unsettled force as he followed the others. He didn’t feel confident enough of his instincts to warn anyone to be careful.
The main archive department was one large room on the seventh floor. It was in a terrible state. Pots were shattered and spread across the floor. Maps and stone rubbing sheets had been ripped from the walls. Beyond the mess, two things caught Phosy’s eye. The large glass French windows were open, the glass smashed and the catch broken. Beyond them was a trajectory that would have taken a potential jumper swiftly to the chalk angel marks on the road beside the fountain. But he’d have had to take a run at it.
He also took note of the parallel shoes on the floor beside the overturned desk. With all the broken crockery around, it was unlikely the man would have taken them off before the jump. So the chaos had apparently not yet occurred. Phosy stuck his head out the window and looked either side. There was no way an assailant could have left the room via the window and escaped without a parachute. He turned back to see the others starting to clean up the mess.
“All right. Nobody touches anything till my people have had a chance to look around. Now, Mr…. what’s your name?”
“Santhi.”
“Mr. Santhi. Who works in this office?”
“Mrs. Bounhieng. She’s off having another baby. And Mr. Chansri. He’s the director of the archives. And Mr. Khampet.”
“And do either of those two gentlemen fit the description of the chap in the morgue?”
“Oh. Mr. Khampet. Definitely. Mr. Chansri’s an older gentleman, and a little overweight.”
“And where might we find the director of the archives?” Santhi shifted uneasily and looked at the ground. “Did you hear the question?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“He could be at Tong Kankum market.”
“I take it he isn’t on ministry business.”
“He sells fish.”
“Right.”
“I probably shouldn’t have told you. But you understand. We don’t get paid a lot here, so some of us supplement….”
“Mr. Santhi. I’m not a government inspector.” Phosy looked across to see Siri on his haunches looking beneath the heavy wooden workbench. “What’s that?”
“You see this?”
The detective walked across and looked under the bench.
“An old chest.”
“No. It’s a lot more than an old chest. Look. It has the royal seal.”
Embossed onto a solid teak box, an improbable three-headed elephant stood on a podium like some circus freak at the That Luang Festival. It sheltered beneath a multi-tiered umbrella. Only time had removed its glitter. Siri lowered his voice. “The chest has a lot of energy, too. Whatever’s in there is giving off a lot of aggression.”
“Siri, you aren’t having one of your supernatural moments?”
Very few people knew of the extent of Siri’s mystic connections. In fact, only Civilai, Dtui, and Geung, in his own way, knew just how weird the doctor was. Siri had only recently become aware of his gifts himself. On the same visit to his birthplace in Khamuan when the Phibob had been roused, he’d been informed of something remarkable. In truth, he still didn’t believe all the things he’d heard. According to the elders of one small village, Siri was the re-embodiment of Yeh Ming, a powerful Hmong shaman who had lived over a thousand years ago. Since the discovery, Siri had become aware of amazing powers that lurked somewhere deep inside him. As yet, he was unsure of how to use them, and in many ways they frightened the daylights out of him. He’d never directly informed Phosy of his unbidden gifts, but the policeman’s instincts told him all he needed to know.
Siri reached out his hand toward the chest, and then withdrew it suddenly as if a shock had warned him off.
“I’d tell your people to be very careful of this, if I were you. Very careful.”
Siri’s dream that night didn’t answer any questions for him. Mr. A, now positively identified as Khampet, was floating slowly down through the air toward Nam Poo fountain. He floated like a hawk but had a look of horror on his face. The ends of long staves of wood were nailed to his hands and feet. Another entered the back of his neck and appeared to go up into his head. But these didn’t seem to worry him. He was more concerned about what was behind him, and whatever that was, it didn’t appear in the dream shot. The occult cameraman wasn’t giving anything away.
But just for a brief second, not long enough to be certain, Siri may have seen a line of witnesses on the roof above. They seemed happy—or perhaps satisfied would be a better description. In that brief second, he had a feeling they were old performers, the type that wore thick makeup and traditional Lao costumes. They may also have been applauding, but it’s possible that Siri had been trying so hard to see something, he’d imagined the whole thing.
That’s what he believed when he awoke. As was common after he’d had one of his dreams, he found himself in a state that may have been consciousness, or may have been a continuation of the dream. These were the scary moments when the visitors felt so real they could have been in the room with him.
It was quiet. The stars were still blurred by the heat rising from the hot earth, so he was certain he hadn’t been asleep long. He was on the veranda behind his mausoleum. The mosquito net shimmied from a rare puff of summer breeze. It moved again. And again. It was swaying gently in time to some slow but regular stimulus.
Siri turned his head and looked into the darkness, and into the dull eyes of a bear. It was so close, its breath moved the net. It was close enough that Siri could see fresh blood at the corner of its mouth; close enough for him to smell the decay on its teeth.
It was sitting, watching the doctor. He felt its power over him. But Siri wasn’t fearful. Yes, he believed this was unreal in some way, but he also had an instinct that the animal wasn’t there to hurt him. The creature, its inspection over, rose painfully, turned, and walked off into the mobile jungle.
When Siri next awoke, it was certainly morning and the sun was threatening to rise over Miss Vong’s well-scrubbed house. Before he could forget it, and before the government loudspeakers could begin their obnoxious prattle, he reached for the notebook on the table beside the cot. He lit the cooking-oil lamp and wrote down his dream.
Saloop dragged himself toward the light like some obese moth and put his head on the cot. Siri scratched it.
“You didn’t happen to see a bear in the yard this morning, did you?” Siri asked.
As always, Saloop kept his secrets to himself. He’d neglected his duties. He’d been off romancing the bitch at the ice-works. He smelled the intruder when he got back, sure enough. It wasn’t a scent he’d come across before. But it was something big and terrifying.
Mr. Geung was sweeping the deceased cockroaches from the morgue when Siri arrived the next morning.
“Morning, Mr. Geung.”
“G…good health, Comrade Doctor.”
“Any new guests today?”
He was expecting a “no” in response. Geung laughed and looked to the sky as if Siri’s consistent question were the most wondrous greeting a man could receive. He never tired of it. Siri often considered climbing inside his friend’s mind to enjoy some of his simple pleasures.
“New guest in r…r…room one, Comrade Doctor.”
“Oh, no.” Siri moaned. “Isn’t it getting a bit crowded in room one?”
There was only the one freezer. The last Siri had known, Mr. A and Mr. B were already bunked in there on makeshift bamboo rafts that doubled the occupancy potential.
Geung snorted a laugh. “N…n…no. Mr. A and Mr. B went home already.”
“Somebody came for them?”
“Yes.”
Siri walked into the office to find Dtui at her desk poring over the pictures in one of Siri’s old French pathology textbooks. As she studied the black-and-white photo of a man who’d been sliced in half by a locomotive, she chewed on a rice snack wrapped in pig intestine.
“Do you recall the good old days when I’d come in here and find you reading Thai comics?” Siri asked.
“Good health, Doctor.”
“Good health. I hear A and B have left us.”
Dtui put down her greasy snack, wiped her hands on a surgical mask, and picked up the police report.
“Mr. B. Now Kampong Siriwongsri. Glass factory laborer by day. Second-shift security guard by night. He was on his way to work. His wife identified the body and they took him to the temple to get him ready. Mr. A apparently didn’t have anyone to love him, and don’t we know what that feels like. So the Ministry of Sport, Information and Culture has taken responsibility and arranged a cheap ceremony at Ong Deu temple.”
Siri’s mind suddenly jumped to his own death. Who’d take responsibility when he huffed his last breath? Who’d pay for his funeral at some nondescript temple? His friends were all broke. Would Judge Haeng discover some unmined vein of generosity and arrange for the Department of Justice to give him a state funeral? Some hope.
“So…” Dtui was still answering “…it all fits. Mr. B is riding to his second job when Mr. A drops out of the sky and lands on top of him: chances—eleven million to one against. A breaks B’s neck, buckles the bike, and kills himself. Case closed.”
“Except….”
“Except for why. But that’s the police’s problem, not ours, right?”
“Aren’t you just a little curious, Dtui?”
“I’m peeing myself with anticipation.”
“Well,” he blushed. “That’s good. I mean, curiosity’s good in this job. Keep it up.”
The poor lady in the freezer had obviously been mauled. The wounds were over twenty-four hours old, and the insects and even her own cat had started on her before she went off from the heat. Her clothes were shredded and black with blood, while her skin was blanched white. There were bite marks on her body, the most traumatic of these being at her neck. Those areas of skin that hadn’t been bitten were raked with scratch marks.
“They found her in the bushes beside her shanty.” Dtui was behind the doctor as he stood at the open freezer, looking at the mess that Auntie See had become.
“Didn’t anyone report it when it happened? There must have been a hell of a lot of noise.”
“Nope.”
“What’s happening to people? Didn’t we used to care for our neighbors?”
“Perhaps they thought it was just a dog fight.”
But there was something wrong with that premise. Even before an autopsy, just looking into the dark freezer, he knew it wasn’t possible. From the size of the visible wounds, the separation between the individual claws, he had a strong feeling this was no dog attack.
The autopsy was new to all of them. Siri was in no position to read up on the latest forensic pathology techniques from around the globe. For one thing, they didn’t get a lot of useful information from the outside world. For another, all the advances were being made in the United States, and Siri’s English stank. He was fluent in Thai, French, and Vietnamese, but these had apparently filled up his language tank, and all attempts at adding English overflowed hopelessly.
But if the rest of the world ever learned Lao, he would certainly have become an authority on innovation in a morgue. Here he was with a body covered in bite marks, and he needed to confirm whether they were from dogs. So with a modicum of genius, he sent Geung off to the kitchen with a requisition form and started to create dams with adhesive bandages around the most profound marks. When Geung got back, Dtui mixed a thick solution of agar, and they poured it into pools on Auntie See.
“Is this standard procedure?” Dtui wanted to know.
“Well, I hear they use plaster of paris in the West, but we can’t afford that. They don’t even have any in the ‘breaks and fractures’ department of the hospital. So we’ll have to see how this works. Just don’t get peckish and raid the freezer before they set.”
“I won’t.”
After a few hours, the agar was solid and looking pretty as birthday-party treats with little turrets of teeth prints. Geung moved them to the refrigerator, and they took Auntie See out for an internal examination.
As a New Year’s present, the Justice Department had furnished the morgue with a Soviet air conditioner so the men no longer had to work in shorts and undershirts. Dtui no longer had to stand in front of the open freezer door to cool off. But the stifling temperature outside that day had defeated USSR technology. There was probably a higher setting, but Siri couldn’t read Russian. So as they stooped over Auntie See, Mr. Geung had to constantly mop brows with a towel.
All they learned was that the lady had lost a great deal of blood. The attack was the probable cause of death, as she had certainly been alive when it began. Her bowels were a mess, but there was nothing life-threatening there. She was otherwise in good shape and should have been able to fight off any normal suburban predator.
Everything came down to the size of the wounds. That’s what continued to worry Siri. While Dtui typed up the report and Geung scrubbed down the examination room, he studied the marks on the agar molds. He used a ruler to measure the size of the jaw and the spread of the claw marks.
By 11:30, when his assistants were in the dissection room labeling jars, Siri, for no other reason than the dream of the previous morning, had come to the illogical conclusion that Auntie See had been attacked and killed by a bear.
It was lunchtime. Civilai had carried his rolls down to the riverbank and was sitting on the log, waiting for his lunch partner to arrive. He was moderately engrossed in the Siang Pasason newspaper when Siri tapped him on the shoulder.
“Excuse me, sir. Do you mind if I join you?”
“Well, all right. Until someone better comes along.”
“Like Crazy Rajid?”
“He’d do. But see. He spends most of his days on his knees in the water.”
They looked out to the narrow band of river that remained at the end of the dry season. Rajid’s bald head poked from the water like a happy black penis. He was the town nutcase. Nobody knew which traveling Indian family had deserted him as a child some fifteen years before. He was just discovered one day sitting on the steps of the Black Stupa. Locals fed him regularly without question, and he repaid them by smiling and spreading his immutable happiness around Vientiane. He had no home and no need of one.
“In this heat, I envy the fellow.”
“It is hot, isn’t it?”
“Damned hot.”
Siri sat and started to unwrap his baguette. Since their abortive date, Mrs. Lah had shifted her franchise from the hospital. His lunch now came from a Vietnamese woman at the end of his lane. She offered two choices: sweet or savory. He could never guess what was inside, just by looking. He was often none the wiser after the contents reached his palette. Still, food was fuel.
“Anything interesting in the paper?”
Civilai laughed. Printed news under a one-party system rarely exposed, unearthed, or titillated.
“Czech skiing conditions are improving.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Football results from Albania. Part seventeen of Lenin’s life story. Our military attaché’s in Cuba.”
“Anything about Laos?”
“Laos? Now you’re asking. Laos. Laos. Wait. Here. A photo of happy smiling farm workers in Savanaketh above a story of a bumper cabbage harvest.”
“They’re standing in a rice field.”
“Maybe they’re taking a break.”
Civilai scrunched up the newspaper and threw it over his shoulder. He was a brilliant man who tired easily of bull. He despaired of Laos’s potential that was being wasted by his plodding colleagues. But he definitely agreed that it was far better to be a plodding communist than a rampant capitalist.
He looked across the Mekhong toward the Thai fascists and bit into his homemade roll. In this heat, he lacked the enthusiasm to eat. There was so little meat on his bones, he was afraid that if he didn’t stop sweating soon, there wouldn’t be anything left of him. He smiled as he remembered his morning meeting.
“Have you heard about the senator’s visit?”
“The only way I hear anything is through you, Comrade.”
“Well, we’ve had a delegation from Washington.”
“They want their bombs back?”
“They’re insisting that we give them access to look for MIA’s.”
“What’s an MIA?”
“It’s a military person who gets lost in battle.”
“Wait. I thought they claimed they didn’t have any combat troops in Laos.”
“That’s right.”
“So how did any soldiers get lost here?”
“Perhaps they had their maps upside down.”
“And do we actually have lost Americans here?”
“I haven’t seen any. But you can never tell what the LPLA will get up to. The Yanks say they’ve got evidence that there are MIA’s held in camps up on the border.”
“And they’re insisting…”
“Yes. There’s a lot of political pressure over there to bring their heroes back home.”
“Well, if they insist, I suppose we’ll have to cooperate.”
“That’s right. Wouldn’t want them to start a war or anything.”
“What do we get out of it?”
“Aid.”
“They’ve offered us aid?”
“Yes.”
“See? I told you they’d have guilty consciences.”
By the time they’d plowed their way through the sandwiches and were enjoying some fruit, both men were in their undershirts and seriously thinking about joining Rajid in the murky water.
“Any interesting dead people this week?”
“Well, I’m sure you heard about the chap from Info and Culture.”
“I read the first installment of the report. Can’t see any reason for the fellow killing himself, though.”
“I think something happened up there that drove him to it. It’s the archive department. Do you know of anything official concerning the Royal Family?”
“You mean, apart from stripping them of their titles, humiliating them in public, kicking them out of the palace, and stealing their money?”
“Yeah, apart from that. Something concerning the DSIC.”
“Why do you ask?”
“There was a trunk up there with a royal seal. It was angry.”
“An angry seal?”
“No, the trunk was angry. I don’t know what was in it, but I felt an incredible force.”
“Enough to throw a man off a roof?”
“Could be.”
It was two that afternoon when a second man found himself in a hurry to get away from the Ministry of Sport, Information and Culture. Despite falling four flights of stairs and landing on his head, Constable Nui somehow managed to cheat death. Much of him was broken, and there was some serious internal bleeding that needed emergency surgery to stem. But by five, it looked like he might make it through the night.
Siri and Inspector Phosy stood at the end of the bed watching the constable’s wife and sisters setting up camp around him. With so few nurses available, families were encouraged to stay the night and look after their own. If they brought bedding, food, and any medicines they could lay their hands on, all the better.
“We won’t be able to talk to him tonight,” Phosy whispered.
“What was he doing up there?” Siri asked.
Phosy led the doctor outside into the hall. “We’d just finished checking out the office. The only thing left was that box of yours. There wasn’t a keyhole or a catch or anything like that. There didn’t seem any way of opening it. So we sent Constable Nui off to get a crowbar.”
“Risky.”
“What would you have done?”
“Left it well alone.”
“Well, we couldn’t do that. This is a possible murder inquiry. Anyway, as we were on our way out, Nui passed us on his way in. I told him to open the chest and bring whatever was inside to the station. Next thing I hear, he’s face down on the fifth-floor landing.”
“Did he get the chest open?”
“No. There are splinters where he tried to force in the metal bar, but he didn’t make any impression on the lid. The trouble is, now none of our men are prepared to go anywhere near it. They say it’s jinxed. So it looks like I’ll have to do it myself.”
“Phosy, can I ask you to leave it alone for a while? You’ll have to trust me about this. Give me some time to find out what’s in there, will you? Please?”
“I shouldn’t.”
“It’s really important.”
Phosy thought about it. “I’ll give you three days. I can’t bluff beyond that. I’ll tell the boss it’s a national treasure and we have to wait for the key.”
“Thanks.”
They walked out of the stuffy hospital building and into an early evening sunshine that still dazzled and blasted them. They stood in the shade of a large henna tree, but there was no breeze to cool them down.
“Hot, isn’t it?”
“Damned hot.”
“Phosy, can I ask you a silly question?”
“Sure.”
“Have there been any reports of…any sightings of…well, wild animals around town?”
He assumed Phosy would laugh, but instead he answered very matter-of-factly.
“Only the bear.”