In a small dark room behind the Luang Prabang district office, something was wrapped up in an old U.S. Army parachute. The unfriendly local cadre walked across the dirt floor and forced open the shutters. The afternoon shone directly onto the gray silk.
“That’s them,” he said pointing at the heap. “They don’t smell as bad as they used to, but they still turn my gut.”
The man, Comrade Houey, was one of those who had never learned the maxim of not saying anything at all if you have nothing positive to say. He was the provincial chief: the head communist honcho of Luang Prabang, and he had long since foregone politeness and manners as a waste of good grumbling time. Siri disliked his type.
“How long have they been here?”
“Couple of days.”
Siri leaned over and slowly started to unwrap the bullet-holed tarpaulin. Inside, two carbonized corpses were slotted together in fetal position. He looked up at the fat man whose brow was permanently scowling.
“Thanks for taking such good care of them.”
“Good care? What do they want, coffee and room service?” He laughed at his own sarcasm.
“You could have made some effort to keep them separate. If you really wanted an accurate autopsy, you should have—”
“Just as well, then. I don’t want an autopsy at all. You’re here for one reason and one reason only. We just want to know where these bastards come from.”
Siri lowered his head and looked up at the man through the mat of his eyebrows. “You surely don’t mean their nationality?”
“I certainly do. They told me in Vientiane you were some tit-hot genius when it came to solving puzzles. Well, here’s a puzzle. Solve it.”
“Now, wait. It isn’t as easy as that. How the hell am I supposed to know where they came from?”
“You’re the expert.”
“I can probably tell you what killed them, but…”
“Doesn’t take a genius to tell that. Look at ’em. It wasn’t bloody lung cancer. Just get on with it.” He turned and walked to the door.
“Hey.”
“What?”
The man stopped and looked back.
“Where am I supposed to look at them?”
“What? You don’t like a little bit of dirt? Just put some of those newspapers down if you’re afraid of getting your nice white coat dirty.”
Siri was an amazingly calm man. If he ever raised his voice, it was generally a deliberate ploy for the benefit of the misguided person in front of him. He considered it his duty to teach good manners to those whose parents had omitted doing so. He took a deep breath.
“You will find me a clean room—”
“I’ll do no such thing.”
“—and if you interrupt me again, I promise you’ll be very sorry.”
This was a showdown. The man’s alcohol-suffused pores began to turn his bloated face the color of a gibbon’s backside.
“Who do you—?”
“You’ll find me a clean room with a table and—”
The man was fit to burst. He trembled. It was obvious he’d never been spoken back to.
“Don’t…don’t you know who I am?”
“‘Who’ doesn’t matter. I know what you are. And what you are is rude. From now on, I shall tell you exactly what I need, and you’ll arrange it for me. Perhaps it’s you who don’t know who I am, or who I have lunch with every day. I am the national coroner, and as such I deserve more respect than you’ve shown so far. Off with you, and find me a room.”
Siri sat on the pile of books beside the corpses and folded his arms. He could see indecision on the fat man’s face mixed with rage, yet Houey tried one final volley.
“You’ll be sorry for this. I’ll—”
Siri stood up very quickly and stepped toward him. There was no intent of malice, but the man saw it as an attack and hurtled himself out of the shed and across the yard. Siri stood in the doorway and watched him go. He knew the district chief would return with either a loaded pistol or news of a vacant room. He hoped the reference to his lunch companion was enough to make it the latter.
The room had once been a kitchen, but there was a large tiled concrete slab in the center that was ideal for the autopsy.
Siri was alone in there. The two corpses were so crisp, there were unlikely to be any delicate organs to weigh, or stomach contents to analyze. There certainly wasn’t going to be a national emblem tattooed anywhere.
He wrote his observations in a notebook. From the breadth of the skulls, Siri was certain these were males. The smell told him they’d been engulfed in a petroleum fire. It had been intense enough to cremate them rapidly. They had assumed the same attitude, one that suggested they’d been in a sitting position when the flames first hit them. There was no trace left of their feet.
Remarkably, although their bodies and faces had been reduced to carbon, the top quarters of their heads were comparatively unscathed. Their hair was singed but in place, and a line of skin, free of soot, followed the hairline of each man.
With a blunt scalpel, he began to probe at the outer layers that were now a fusion of skin and clothing. With no microscope and no laboratory he’d have to get samples from various locations to take back to Vientiane before he could be absolutely sure of what he was seeing. In the meantime he had to trust his nose. The scent of burned leather was oddly distinct from that of burned skin. He found traces of it at the truncated ankles and at the waists.
This suggested to him that both men had been wearing high-top leather boots and belts. If he ever got to the site of the fire, he’d probably find buckles there to confirm his theory. He also discovered traces of some thick synthetic material welded to the left shoulder and chest of one man and the right shoulder and chest of the other.
He was about to cut into the bodies when he was disturbed by a light tap at the door.
“Come in.”
The door opened slightly and a middle-aged woman with a pleasant face and long healthy hair put her head through the gap. She was deliberate in not looking in the direction of Siri or the bodies.
“Dr. Siri. I’m Latsamy. Comrade Houey has assigned me to take care of you while you’re here.”
Siri melted at the sound of her musical Luang Prabang dialect. There was no tune more erotic in the whole of Laos than the spoken song of a Luang Prabang girl. “Do you need anything?” she asked.
“Perhaps you could just stand here and talk to me for a few hours.”
It was unlikely. She still wasn’t able to turn her head in the direction of the corpses.
“I would like to avoid such a thing if I could, Uncle.”
“Am I that unpleasant?”
“Not you, Uncle, them. I’d be as sick as a vomit bird if I had to look at those things. I don’t know how you can do it. Would you like some tea or anything?”
“Tea would be very nice, thank you.”
Once the door was closed, he reproached himself for flirting. He was old enough to know better. He knew he was a harmless old codger, but he’d probably frightened the girl.
He returned his attention to the bodies. Cutting into them was like retrieving baked roots from an earthen kiln. The heat had done a thorough job of overcooking everything. The angle of the pelvic indentation and the narrow sacrum confirmed that these were male. From the lengths of the femurs he assumed they were of small stature, more likely Asian than Caucasian.
He used a chisel to force open the jaws. The upper incisors curved into the shape of a shovel. This single fact put them into the Mongolian category. There was over an eighty-percent chance that these two poor gentlemen had been Asian. Either that, or they were Finnish. That was as close as he was ever likely to get to establishing their nationality. There was no fancy foreign dental work, no rings or bracelets, and they weren’t talking: not yet, anyway.
It was while he was digging around in one lower abdomen that his tea arrived. It slid in on a chair between the open door and its frame without a word from the server. Siri was about to take a tea break when his scalpel struck metal. It had been his intention to use his cheat list at the back of his notebook to estimate the age of the men from wear and tear on their pelvic bones. But the bullet proved far more interesting.
It was wedged against the pubic crest. Tracing its trajectory was a complex and delicate matter. The damage the bullet had caused was well hidden by the contraction of the muscles. But as he slowly worked his way south, he came across a second bullet, then, at the anus, a third. The bullets had almost certainly entered the body from below.
Inspired by this discovery, he checked the other body and found two bullets. They were higher, almost at the base of the rib cage, but they too had entered from below. All these incidental clues tripped over one another on their way to one conclusion.
He sat on the chair by the door and drank his cold tea. The bodies, like dismembered model kits, sat on the slab looking back at him. He doubted, from the attitude of his host, whether these two would be getting any kind of funeral service. But he still wanted to put them back together, make them look respectable. He had a feeling they’d be back.
By the time his work was complete, it was already mid-afternoon. It had been a long day, and he was exhausted. He poked his head out of the room and found the lovely Miss Latsamy embroidering the hem of a traditional Lao skirt. She was very adept, and Siri thought she would make a fine surgeon—as long as she didn’t have to look at the bodies.
“Miss Latsamy.” He joined her in the vestibule. “I have three favors to ask.”
“I was told to give you whatever you want.” She blushed at how that came out.
“Good. Then first, I’d like you to go to the least political temple you can think of in Luang Prabang and tell the abbot that we have two bodies here that would very much like to be buried. As the deaths were violent, there probably won’t be a cremation ceremony until the spirits are settled, but it would be nice if they could be buried on temple ground.”
“Yes, Uncle.”
“Secondly, I have to go to a place called Pak Xang this afternoon.”
“Oh.”
“Oh, what?”
“Comrade Houey said you’d be going back to Vientiane this afternoon. The helicopter’s waiting.”
“Comrade Houey made a mistake. I have some business of my own here. I’ll be going back tomorrow. Do you think you can find me some transport to Pak Xang?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“And I suppose it’s time for me to report to the comrade about my findings. It would probably be better if he came here so I could show him what I’ve got. But it’s up to him. Wherever we are, I doubt he’ll be very happy with what I have to say.”
“He never is.”
“I see that.”
“Asian? Damned Asian? Is that the best you can do?” The district chief had come to the room with a short blunt man who seemed to be some type of bodyguard. He nodded aggressively at the end of each utterance that passed the boss’s lips.
“Yes.”
“Well, that isn’t good enough. It takes you three hours and all you discover is that these two could be from anywhere?”
“In Asia, yes.”
“Some genius you turned out to be.”
“There is one other thing.”
“What?”
“Tomorrow morning I need to go and see the crash site.”
“Well, you can’t…. What crash site?”
“Where the helicopter came down. These two were pilots.”
“Who the hell told you?”
“They did.”
“Eh? Well, you’re wrong. Totally wrong.”
“Am I? Let’s look at the facts. They were burned in a sitting position. They wore uniforms. Originally they were wearing helmets but I assume your rescue team helped themselves to souvenirs.”
“How could you…?”
“They were strapped in with seat belts and couldn’t get away from the fire. The blast at their feet was extreme and the flames spread so fast, I’m assuming they were covered in fuel from the explosion. That tells me they were carrying a lot of spare gas in the cockpit, which in turn makes me think they expected to be traveling a long distance or carrying a lot of weight.
“And of course, the fact that they’d both been shot a number of times didn’t give them much of a chance of getting out of the burning chopper. The closeness and angle of the bullets suggest they weren’t traveling very fast. That’s why I’m assuming it was a helicopter rather than a plane. I’ve retrieved the bullets, all AK47, LPLA issue. So whoever these two gentlemen were, they were probably gunned down by our people. How am I doing?”
Houey looked at the nodding guard and laughed. The man laughed nervously back.
“Our visiting genius from the capital has been doing a lot of guessing. Too bad he isn’t much of a guesser.” He turned to Siri. “No, Comrade. You’re wrong.”
“I don’t think so.”
Houey huffed, and the two men left the room without further comment.
Miss Latsamy stepped into the doorway after they’d gone. Staring at the window, she said “Uncle, can you ride a horse?”
It was barely a horse. It was more a pony with a paunch. But Siri had ridden many such creatures in his time in the mountains. Indeed, he quite relished the thought of returning to the saddle. Pak Xang was about fifteen kilometers from Luang Prabang, a distance he used to cover regularly between villages in his days with the Viet Minh.
But the old Lao saying “A year away from the nipple can make a baby nauseous of breast milk” was coined neither for fun nor for scholastic debate. His motorcycle saddle had made him soft. Five kilometers out of town, he negotiated the animal out of its happy canter and into a more leisurely trot. Old dears on bicycles with huge bundles of lemon grass overtook him. The journey took ninety minutes, not much faster than if he and the animal had changed places.
Still sore, Siri walked away from his sister-in-law’s simple house feeling even sadder than when he had arrived. Everything about Wilaiwan reminded him of his wife. The way she smiled, her walk, even the widow’s peak that stood on her forehead like the prow of a great white ship.
The sisters had been born nine months apart: yield from the sibling production line so common in well-off families of the old regime. Boua, his wife, had been the middle child of nine and the only rebel. While her family was in the royal capital working under the king’s patronage, Boua was in France training to overthrow the royal family and rescue her country for communism.
She had returned to Laos after eight years, with ideals and a rather baffled doctor husband called Siri. But she never came back to Luang Prabang. Instead, she dragged her lover through the jungles of Vietnam and northern Laos and joined the Pathet Lao in their struggle against tyranny.
Now she was dead, and Siri had come to let her sister know how she had lain on a grenade and pulled the pin to end the confused misery that haunted the final years of her life. In some way, she had expected to erase the depression that had infected her and then spread to her sad husband.
But, of course, he didn’t tell her. How could he? Honesty can be a dirty gift. It can muddy a sparkling stream of memories. So he said there had been a raid. She’d died a brave patriot as she’d lived, full of hope for a new regime.
Wilaiwan received the news passively and silently, and together they’d sat on the old wicker chairs on the veranda and let tears roll down their faces without embarrassment.
As there wasn’t but an hour of daylight left, she invited him to stay the night. Her husband had caught two juicy catfish that were keen to be eaten with some homemade rice wine. So Siri went for a walk to build up an appetite and a better mood.
He crossed the dusty intersection that marked the center of the village and found the riverbank. There, he followed a river, creamy brown like slow-moving café au lait. He stepped carefully to avoid setting off the dog fart flowers. The setting sun seemed to walk along the opposite bank, dodging between the trees. Toward Luang Prabang, stodgy hills were patchy with slashed fields that looked from a distance like painful skin grafts.
Although there was no fence to announce it, he soon found himself in a fruit orchard. A longboat was moored against a simple wooden dock. The trees were neatly ranked but showing the effects of neglect. They were swollen with fruit. Some had rotted and dropped to the grass below. The sight may not have caused a flicker of interest to any other traveler, but to Siri it was uncanny. It baffled him that there were no signs of bird or insect damage. No animals had come to steal the luscious fallen oranges or nibble at the low-hanging pears. He walked along the rows; mangosteens, rambutans, rose apples, all proudly ripe and unviolated. It was astounding. Apparently, not even man, the most insatiable predator of all, had been scrounging from this Garden of Eden.
There was a feeling there. Not his usual creepy “somebody dead hanging around” feeling, but an aura of sorts: a protection, as if something were watching over the trees and the spirits that resided in them. He felt safe under its gaze.
He was curious to know where he was and to learn more about the exotic strains of fruit, many of which he’d never seen before. He walked up and down the lush green rows. They’d have needed three or four waterings a day through this particularly dry summer season to keep them so bountiful. It wasn’t till his last sweep that he came upon a gardener.
The old man wore a conical Vietnamese hat tied under his chin with a bright red cloth. He had on a navy blue peasant’s jacket and shorts. He stood inside the canopy of an orange tree, pruning up into the branches. Siri couldn’t make out much of his looks.
“Good health, friend,” Siri began.
The man didn’t interrupt his work to reply. “How would you be, friend?”
“You have some remarkable fruit trees here.”
“Thank you. I’m afraid they’ve been neglected of late. I haven’t been able to get out here for some time.”
The man’s voice was soft, somehow worldly and, Siri thought, kind. He guessed he was around his own age.
“I don’t seem to recognize a lot of these varieties.”
“No? Know fruit, do you?”
“Most of the jungle types, and the usual imports.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have seen a lot of these. If you’ve got a few minutes, grab those pruning clippers and give me a hand to cut back some branches. They won’t get a lot of attention from now on.”
“That’s a shame. Why not?”
Either the man didn’t answer or Siri couldn’t hear through the foliage. He looked in the basket, where he found an elegant pair of pruning clippers and a beautifully gilded set of shears in the shape of herons necking.
“You take your gardening seriously.”
“It isn’t something you can half do.”
Siri went to the orange tree beside his friend’s and started on the old, low branches.
“It’s peaceful here. How come you haven’t been able to come?”
“It’s the new regime, Brother. They’re very strict here in Luang Prabang. They don’t like us moving around too much.”
“But this is a thriving orchard. It needs someone to look after it. You could feed a battalion of soldiers just from the produce here. You could certainly keep the villagers nearby alive.”
The old man stopped clipping. “Hmm. Could do, I suppose. Except the people in these parts are somewhat loath to sample the fruits from this particular garden.”
“Why’s that?”
“I take it you aren’t from around here.”
“No. I’m part of the invading hordes. Spent most of my troubled life in the jungles of Houaphan and North Vietnam.”
“Ah. You’re one of them. That explains it. Then you wouldn’t know whose orchard this is.” There was a pause. “It belongs to the Royal Family, or what’s left of it.”
“All right. Then that might explain why the people aren’t stealing His M’s tasty fruits. But I don’t really see how it keeps the birds and the bugs away.”
“Ah, yes. Very observant of you. That is a little harder to explain.”
He moved out from his tree and went to the next in the row after Siri’s. Through the leaves, the doctor saw him in patches. He had a slow, somewhat pained gait but kept his back straight. He had the bearing of a Royal gardener. No doubt about it. Siri could almost feel the old fellow’s pride at tending such fine trees. It seemed cruel for the Party to keep him away from a job he loved.
Once he’d entered the next orange-leaf umbrella, the man said “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, friend, but Luang Prabang is rather a magical place. There are many stories I could tell you.”
The sun had given up hope, and Siri was aware he had a walk ahead of him in the dark. He lowered the clippers and sighed. “How did you get here, old fellow?”
“Boat.”
“Do you suppose they’ll let you come back tomorrow?”
“No. This is the end.”
He made it sound like something other than a ban on gardening. If this were really his last visit, this pruning would seem to be more an act of desperation—or rebellion. Siri came out of his blackening hood of leaves and stood in the open. A large moon was already in the ascent.
“Then are you going back to town tonight?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I have to go to my sister-in-law’s for dinner. But I’d be very interested to hear your stories. Couldn’t you stay here tonight and go back in the morning?”
“It would upset an awful lot of people,” the old man laughed. “But I suppose I could. A raspberry to them all.”
Still, he hadn’t emerged from his own shroud of oranges.
“That’s good. Listen. I’ll see what food I can rescue. You must be hungry. Maybe a bottle of rice whiskey? How does that sound?”
The clipping stopped. “That’s very kind of you. Yes, very kind. I’ll be here. Look for the fire.”
The gardener’s hand reached out through the leaves as if it belonged to the tree itself. The wrist was white with a thick wad of tied strings. The hand was blistered from the day’s exertions. Siri shook it and felt a sudden stab of sadness. This was a man at the end of hope. He needed cheering up.
Farewell the Women’s Unionist
It was about this time, probably as Siri was passing through the village on his way to Wilaiwan’s house, that primary school teacher Chanmee was riding her bicycle along Khouvieng. The old bull testicle trees arched over the lane and blocked the moonlight. Without lamps, it was only her white blouse that gave her any substance on that dark stretch of road.
She hated traveling in the dark, but Wednesday was the meeting of her branch of the Lao Women’s Union. She had to attend. This was always a scary journey for her. At times, a car’s headlights would illuminate her way briefly, then plunge everything back into darkness.
She was straining her tired eyes for tree roots and potholes. No cars had passed for several minutes, and the street was so black that she decided to climb down from the bike and walk beside it. It was eerily quiet on that stretch, and the squeak from her front wheel was her only comfort.
Then there was the other sound. It came from behind her, somewhere off in the frangipani bushes. She stopped for a second to listen. It was a deep, steady growl like a painful snore. She assumed it to be a dog and wondered if it was injured. She’d never experienced any hostility from dogs, yet there was something sinister about this sound. It worried her enough to make her climb back on the bike.
The bushes rustled and a twig snapped, and she pushed down hard and too hastily on the pedal to try to build up some speed. The tightness of her phasin skirt restricted her movement, and her shoe slid from the pedal. The bicycle veered to the right and dipped into a deep rut. She overbalanced sideways.
Too slow to right herself, she tumbled onto the hard earth verge, the bicycle with her. She held her breath to listen for the growl. She looked around at the shadows. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound. She laughed out loud at her foolishness.
She untangled herself from the bike and was about to get to her feet when the creature was on her. The huge first bite muted her scream. Blood soaked quickly into the white blouse. In less than thirty seconds she was dead.