Siri looked at him, astonished.
“There’s a bear loose?”
“That ragged old heap they kept at the back of the Lan Xang. It got out somehow a few days ago. I’m surprised it had the legs to make it to the wall, let alone over it. Someone reported they’d seen it up by the memorial. God knows how it got up there. There are a couple of army people out with a net looking for it.”
He noticed Siri’s troubled expression. “You got a reason for asking?”
“I think you’d better come to the morgue and take a look at something.”
Siri rode his old motorbike slowly along Lan Xang Avenue on his way home that evening. Families sat by the roadside hoping to catch some breeze from passing cars, waiting for the night to bring relief from the stifling day. Siri was so deep in thought, he’d forgotten to turn on his lights. When suddenly the shadow of the Anusawari monument loomed up in front of him, he flicked the switch and drilled a little hole of light into its base.
On the strength of what he’d seen in the morgue, Phosy had phoned police headquarters and suggested they get an armed unit on the streets looking for the bear. There was now a shoot-to-kill order out on it.
Two things troubled Siri. First was the gap in his knowledge of wild animals. In all his years of jungle campaigns, he’d never seen a live bear. He’d seen several dead, with bullet holes, tied to wooden staves. He’d eaten their meat. But none of that really educated him about the lifestyle of the animal.
He’d read stories of North American grizzlies and polar bears ripping people to shreds. Yet in all his years, he hadn’t once heard of an Asian black bear attack. Perhaps the victims didn’t live to tell the tale. Then again, with all the maltreatment this old girl had suffered over the years, she could have been out for revenge.
After work, he’d stopped at the Lan Xang and seen the state of the cage she’d been kept in. He talked to one of the long-term chambermaids, who told him how cruel people could be to her. He needed to find an animal expert. He wanted to know just what this sad creature was capable of.
He rode through the permanently open gates into the huge flat concrete yard that five months earlier had been the site of the That Luang Festival. Thousands of people had jostled and laughed and flirted there. Now it was like some large school playground during exams.
He pulled up beside the lonely white memorial dedicated to the Unknown Soldier. At the far end of the ground, the custard-yellow stupa of That Luang, in need of some attention, stared back. Some hundred meters away, a little boy in underpants kicked a tin can. Its noise echoed loudly back and forth between the two monuments.
Here was where they had sighted the bear. That was Monday, just before midnight. He looked across the yard, beyond the stupa to the road. And on the far side of that road was his own lane.
This was the second thing that worried him. The bear had come to him in his sleep early that morning. But if the bear had actually materialized as a spirit, it had to be dead. That was logical. So why had nobody found its body? And if it wasn’t dead, that meant the foul-breathed creature that woke him had been alive and still dripping with the blood of its victim.
He turned off his engine twenty meters from his house and wheeled the bike into his front yard, but Miss Vong still caught him. She had to shout to be heard above the loudspeaker booming from the corner of the street. It was detailing how long to soak jackfruit skins to make the best hair conditioner.
“Good evening, Comrade Doctor. Hot, isn’t it? I’ve just made some nice taro gruel.”
“Good for you, Miss Vong.”
“I’ll bring you some over.”
“No, thank you.”
“Yes, I will. You have a shower and I’ll be there in half an hour.”
He was about to make an excuse but her head was already back inside her gate. She was a thoroughly annoying woman, spindly and plain as a hand-rolled cigarette. She’d been his neighbor in town before the apartment house they had lived in blew up, and the planning department assumed they’d want to be close in their new allocation. Thankfully, her work at the Education Department kept her out of Siri’s hair for long periods.
He stood in front of his own gate and looked at the larger, far more beautiful house of his other neighbor, who was a government cadre from Oudom Xay. The man’s silent children were riding in the street on their brand-new bicycles. Scotch whiskey cartons and a stereo packing case had been stacked beside the dustbins for a month so everyone could see just how proudly corrupt the man was.
Siri wondered what huge favor was being repaid to this small-town headman from the north who sat on a rocking chair on his porch every evening cleaning a pistol. He ignored all his neighbors, just as he seemed to take no interest in his own family. If he worked, he did so in the hours when Siri was sleeping.
Saloop barked a welcome from forty meters down the lane and plodded happily toward home. Siri watched his belly swing from side to side and wondered where he was getting fed. The bucket of rice and scraps Siri left out in the morning was invariably untouched by evening.
“Welcome home, brave housedog.”
Saloop stretched up for a headrub.
“You realize the house could have been broken into while you were off doing whatever it is you do?”
In fact, that wasn’t true. No breaking would have been necessary. With all known criminals under lock and key on the islands in Nam Ngum Reservoir, few people bothered to lock their doors now. To be honest, Siri didn’t have anything worth stealing anyway.
He removed a mysterious object from his motorbike and carried it into the house. It was wrapped and taped in a blanket. Saloop followed curiously, wagging his tail. The doctor lit a lamp and took his secret all the way through to his yard to a grave he’d pre-dug for it. He’d estimated the length almost perfectly. In that far corner of the garden, in a spot hidden from prying eyes, he buried the blanket and what it contained.
He was brushing the earth from his trousers when he noticed the corrugated fence. It separated his home from one that was under construction at the back. Eventually they’d get around to building a wall. When the workers had put up this fence, it had been nailed firmly to four bamboo posts that marked the edge of his plot. It was eight feet tall and had probably been a temporary border to many homes before this.
But it was no longer fixed. At his end, it hung from one single tack and was slightly buckled, as if someone had leaned heavily against it and popped out the nails.
He lifted the flap, held up his lamp, and looked at the slow progress of the foundations there. He saw the piles of sand, still where they’d been when he moved in. But there was something curious about the nearest pile. He went through the gap and knelt down to get a better look.
There were footprints—two clear ones—which were neither human nor dog. Both were pointing in his direction. A shudder crept up his spine. Could it really have been the killer bear in the living flesh that had woken him that morning?
If so, why was Siri still alive?
“Civilai? It’s Siri.”
“Siri? You’re using a telephone. Next thing they know, you’ll be—”
“Right. But no time for sarcasm just now.”
“Oh? Okay. What do you want?”
“I need an animal expert.”
“Any particular breed?”
“Bears.”
“You never fail to astound me, Dr. S. I’ll ask around.”
“Thank you.”
“Oh. And I think I’ve got something on your mysterious chest at the DSIC.”
“Excellent. You can tell me all about it at lunch.”
Siri put down the receiver, thanked the hospital clerk, and walked back to the morgue. But even though there was a lot to be learned from Civilai that day, Siri wasn’t going to be able to make lunch. In fact, although he didn’t know it yet, he wasn’t even going to be in Vientiane.
The sand had been packed quite tightly at the construction site, but the cement Siri mixed the night before had still spread a good deal. He and Dtui sat at his desk comparing the concrete cast with the agar scratch marks. They measured the separation between the claws. It wasn’t identical but the difference wasn’t great enough to preclude them coming from the same creature.
“Dtui, if it was the bear that ripped Auntie See apart, that same bear came to visit me on Tuesday.”
“Wow. You saw it?”
“I thought it was a dream. But dreams don’t pull down fences and leave footprints.”
“How come you’re still alive?”
“That’s a good question.”
“And one you’ll have to wait for an answer to.”
Siri and Dtui both looked up to see where the whiny voice had come from. In the doorway, a thin, well-dressed man in his early thirties stood with his hands on his hips. The hot weather had inflamed his acne to the point that it seemed to glow on his cheeks.
“Goodness, Judge Haeng. What an honor.” Siri smiled.
Dtui made the man a polite nop with her palms tightly together. “Good health, Comrade Judge.”
The man responded to neither the nop nor the words. He sat at Dtui’s desk and fanned himself in exaggerated fashion with the papers he carried.
“Hot, isn’t it?” she tried again, but he ignored her.
“If I could trust any of the fools in my office not to run off and go shopping before they brought you a message, I wouldn’t have to be here myself. But this is an emergency, and it has been entrusted to me.”
Mr. Geung had seen the judge arrive and had gone for a glass of cool ice water from the canteen. It was one of the services he happily provided. When he got back, he put it down in front of the ruddy man and looked at his blemished skin as he said “Good h…h…health, Com…Comr…”
“Heaven help us. Does he ever get to the end of a sentence?”
“He’s overwhelmed by your omnipotence.” Siri smiled again.
“I’m not about to consume any liquids in this place, am I? Tell him to take this away.”
“He speaks Lao quite well.”
“I’m sure he does, eventually. Take it away.” He despaired of the fact that Geung ignored him and stood his ground, just as he despaired because his department was hiring a mongoloid when they had the budget for a “normal” person. But Siri was unshakable. He said the day Geung left, he’d follow.
“What’s so urgent?”
“It’s a delicate matter. You two go and find something to do.”
Siri smiled at Dtui. “I think he means you two.”
She stood very slowly, walked across the room, took Geung’s hand in an extravagant manner, and led him to the door. “Come, Mr. Geung. Let’s go and get started on those excreta samples before they go lumpy.”
She looked back and caught Haeng squirming. When they’d gone, the judge leaned forward and said “Siri, there’s a military helicopter waiting for you at Wattay.”
“Why?”
Before answering, Haeng took a deep breath. He’d run headfirst into Siri’s stubborn streak on a few occasions. “You’re going to Luang Prabang.”
Siri seemed to consider this for a moment. “When?”
“Right now. My car’s outside.”
“But—”
“This is a national security matter. It’s top secret. That’s why I didn’t risk using the telephone.”
“What’s it all about?”
“I’m not terribly clear myself.”
“Then you needn’t have worried about the phone.”
“Siri, this order comes from the very top. I don’t have time for any of your temperamental rantings. There’s no choice.”
Siri wasn’t in the least threatened by the young judge or impressed by orders from the “very top.” But he could see that Haeng was. For the sake of future cooperation from the Justice Department, he decided not to give the man a hard time. And there was one other, more personal, reason why a free trip to Luang Prabang wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Luang Prabang was the Royal Capital, the birthplace of his wife, and a very scenic spot, so he’d heard. It was the historic seat of the Lan Xang empire: Lan, a million, Xang, elephants. It was in the mountains and some fifteen degrees cooler than the steampot he was in now. A night up north might not be half-bad at that. He spoke with an excitement in his voice that surprised the judge.
“Well, let’s not keep the army helicopter waiting.”
“Eh? Do you need—I don’t know, a toothbrush or anything?”
Following a similar urgent summons south the previous year, Siri had kept a permanently packed overnight bag in the office. Personally, he traveled light. Most of it was morgue equipment, gloves and wraps.
“No. Give me five minutes with my team, and I’ll join you in the car.”
To Haeng, this was a victory of sorts. His first. He decided it deserved a victory lap. He let loose with one of his renowned maxims.
“That’s the spirit, Siri. It’s moments like this that make the socialist system so great. When the call to arms comes the committed cadre, even on his honeymoon, would gladly climb off his young wife at the crucial moment sooner than let down the Party.”
If that were so, Siri thought to himself, it might explain the frustrated look he’d often seen on the faces of so many Party members.
The old Mi-8 “Hip” helicopter swung back and forth beneath its rotor like a poor baby’s crib. The young Lao pilots were friendly enough, but they seemed petrified to find themselves in control of the beast. Siri assumed that they hadn’t long ago passed through the Soviet training course that had farmboys still warm from the backs of buffalo inside a cockpit in three months.
After the initial “Hot isn’t it?” “Damned hot,” there was too much noise for a conversation. So Siri spent the ninety-minute flight in thought. He was on his way to a place that symbolized Laos to the few people in the outside world who had a clue where Laos was. Yet to him it was another era, another country altogether.
He had been born somewhere around 2446: the year the West knew as 1903. There was only one person who could have confirmed that, and she’d kept it to herself. So when it eventually came to filling out forms, Siri settled on a date that more or less matched his body.
He was born into a chaotic Laos that existed because the French colonists said it did. They’d drawn lines here and there on maps, and all that fell within them was known as the administrative district of Laos, the fifth piece in France’s Indo-China set. It seemed not to matter a bit that some thirty ethnic groups gathered in that bureaucratic net were neither of Lao origin, nor subservient to the French. When you trawl for featherback, picking up the odd buk fish is unavoidable.
Despite this nicely inked border, Laos was a divided country. The king, with French permission, ruled the areas in the north around Luang Prabang. The floating southern provinces, once a separate kingdom, had changed hands ten years earlier from the Thais to the French. They were underpopulated and underproductive and left the invaders with more headaches than looted profits. But as the French still had fertile Thai territory in their sights, the south of Laos was a necessary stepping stone. It was into this area of administrative annoyance that Siri had arrived in the world.
The first eight years of his life were a blank and a mystery. His early recollections were of an aunt: a stiff-backed, broad-nosed woman who told him nothing of his parents. And he knew nothing about her. She’d been a rare educated woman, and, between tending her rice and her livestock, she schooled the boy in her rattan hut.
She was a humorless hag with as much love in her as a dag on a goat’s backside. But Siri had a huge appetite for learning. He’d wondered since whether he’d tried so hard to study because he wanted the woman’s respect. If she did respect his hard work, she never let him know.
His home then had been Khamuan, a lush forested province that leaned against the mountains of the Annamite Highlands. But when he was ten years old, the woman set off with him on an unannounced two-day trek. It took them to a paved road, a sight he’d never before seen. There were to be many more spectacles. A truck took them along that marvelously potholed road all the way to a city. It was called Savanaketh, and it stood on the east bank of the Mekhong.
The woman must have told him a dozen times to close his mouth as she dragged him around that city; but to a boy from the bush, it was a wonder. She found a temple she’d been searching for, and he sat on a wall in front of it while she talked to the abbot in the refectory. As she walked past Siri on her way out, she muttered something about being good, and that was the last he ever saw of her.
The boy, who knew nothing of Buddhism, was shorn, draped in itchy saffron robes, and turned into a novice. He studied the scriptures until they oozed from his ears like sap from a bloated rubber tree, but he also discovered another world of knowledge. There was very little written in the Lao language in those days, a situation that hadn’t improved much since. To really become a scholar, he had to fathom the mystery of the shelves of thick books that filled a small room behind the abbey. They were all written in French.
Madame Le Saux was a missionary with the tiny Église St. Étoine, who had come to Laos for the very purpose of rescuing third-world children from poverty and ignorance. Like a large number of upper-class French spinsters, she didn’t possess many skills that poor, ignorant Lao children would find useful. So, in Siri, she suddenly had her raison d’être. He was her boy, her apprentice, her justification for being there.
She had the ego to believe that Siri’s rapid grasp of French was of her doing. He took to the language like a lizard to a fluorescent lamp, and by the end of two years had consumed most of the books in the temple library. She gave him the tools, but the labor was his alone.
He scored top marks on the entrance test for the exclusive lycée, and his mentor gladly paid all the fees. By the time he was eighteen, he’d absorbed everything the school had to offer and was still hungry for more. Strings were pulled, documents of noble birth were forged, and Siri had a scholarship to a reasonable medical school in Paris. There he met, wooed, and wed Boua.
In 1939, with Hitler already making reservations for the trip to Paris, Siri and Boua boarded an airplane belonging to the fledgling Air France Company that took them to Bangkok. He held his new medical certificate. She held a nursing diploma and a letter of introduction from the French Communist Party to one of its founder members: Ho Chi Minh.
So, there it was in a nutshell. Poverty led him to religion, religion to education, education to lust, lust to communism. And communism had brought him back full circle to poverty. There was a Ph.D. dissertation waiting to be written about such a cycle.
Through the scratched window, he saw the sun reflect golden from half a dozen temple stupas. Two rivers converged, and a white shrine, like a delicious meringue, sat on top of a hill overlooking the old royal palace. This had to be Luang Prabang.