“Comrade spirits. It…it has been vested in me, as a…a representative of—” He’d forgotten to breathe and the words stopped. He smuggled in one or two deep breaths to calm himself. “As a representative of the LPRP, to make the following announcement.”
He held out his hand to the head of Security for the document. But the man had turned into some kind of granite bust. Only his eyes moved, scanning back and forth across the faces of the shamans. So Houey wrenched the paper from his hand and read. His own hands shook so badly that it was amazing he could catch up with the typed words.
“You shall be given three…and this wasn’t my idea. You shall be given three alternatives.”
He looked up for a response but received none.
“Firstly, you may go to the Northeast to join the ex-royals.”
A thought occurred to him.
“Of course, you’ll have to make your own arrangements for…well, your own arrangements.”
He was going to add “for transportation,” but thought better of it.
“Secondly, if you intend to stay in Luang Prabang, you will have to work in the service of the temples. A specific….”
He noticed that some of the shamans had started to vibrate, not unlike spin-dryers. It unnerved him.
“A specific temple will be assigned to you, and you will be ordained as temple spirits. Naturally, you’ll have to share the workload.”
The vibrations increased, and one of the whistle-blowers began to back away across the stage.
“Thirdly, if you select neither one nor two, you will be….”
He looked up, wondering if he dared read on. The vibrations were more pronounced, as if the audience was one large jelly. He took another breath. The second whistler was on his way out.
“You will be banished from Laos. Naturally we don’t want to resort to that, so it’s better you take the other alternatives. I suggest you all go away and think about this. I won’t expect your decision right away. We’re all fair here. Is that clear?”
Silence. The Security chief’s chair crashed to the floor as he ran for all he was worth to the back door. Houey stood alone and vulnerable.
“Good. Th…then that concludes our business for th…this evening. So I….”
Foregoing the usual farewell speech, Houey turned, walked at first, then jogged to the exit. The sheet with its three conditions wafted like a leaf, back and forth, down to the wooden stage.
There was a polite pause to give the officials time to get away from the building. But when all was clear, Tik turned, smiled, and nodded to the crowd. The shamans fell into a fit of mirth and merriment unseen in Luang Prabang since the days of the old regime.
Farewell the Beer Smuggler
Ounheuan and his wife had decided on an early night. They had to get up early the next morning to smuggle whiskey and beer from across the river. They weren’t criminals, of course. Most shop owners had to engage in a little rowing in order to have something to sell.
In spite of their good intentions, they hadn’t been able to get a wink of sleep. First, there were the howls. Then there came one almighty dog fight. Now, one of the creatures, obviously injured, was growling and whining in front of Ounheuan’s shop. His wife decided she had tossed and turned enough.
“Oun. Can’t you go down and do something about that?” There was no reply. She thumped him on the shoulder, and he grunted as if barely roused from a deep sleep. “Come on, lizard shit. I know you aren’t asleep. It’s annoying you as much as it is me.”
He continued a well-practiced snore, and she knew the worm had no intention of going down to the street.
“Bum.”
She yanked back her side of the net and got to her feet. Tightening her sleeping cloth above her fleshy breasts, she walked to the window and looked down. A wooden awning jutted out between her and the door of the shop. Although she could hear the wounded dog, she could see nothing in the unlit street.
“Shit.”
There was nothing humane about her going downstairs. She wasn’t about to apply first aid to the bleeding paw of some street dog. Those mongrels would have off your hand as soon as look at you. Probably give you rabies too.
No, the plan was to grab a long stick and prod the creature far enough away that she could get some sleep. She found the perfect thing: a length of lead piping. If the poor thing were too injured to limp away, she could whack it over the head and put it out of its misery.
The padlock was on the inside of two large metal doors that concertina’d together to fill the frontage of their open-terraced store. Still grumbling, she took the key from the glass cabinet and unfastened the lock. The sound of the rusty door scraping along the ground was the last thing Mr. Ounheuan remembered before his pretend sleep became a real one.
When he awoke, the sky was already cobalt blue and he knew they’d overslept. The sun would soon be up and their dealer on the Thai side would take his booze elsewhere. He cursed his stupid wife and turned toward her place on the mattress, but she wasn’t there.
Perhaps she’d gone by herself. Didn’t want to disturb her sleeping loved one. Some blasted hope. He went down to the shop, scratching his crotch through his football shorts.
“Phimpon, what the hell are you playing at?”
The metal door was open and the key poked invitingly from the padlock. “Oh, right. Let’s just leave the place wide open so anyone can help themselves to—”
He’d reached the doorway and froze there, hardly believing what he saw. Two black crows flapped but stood their ground. The gravel front of his shop was alive with the squirming bodies of cockroaches. There were thousands of the little buggers feasting on some sticky substance he couldn’t make out in the half-light. He assumed it was some sort of treacle.
But then he recognized the remains. Two, perhaps three dogs had been ripped apart. He picked up a length of lead pipe that lay in the doorway and went at the crows that were feeding on them. They retreated the length of the pipe, but still didn’t fly away from their dream breakfast.
It was then, beneath their flapping wings, that Ounheuan noticed something that turned his stomach. He could barely breathe. He sank to his knees and vomited. He couldn’t bring himself to look again. But even though his eyes were clenched shut, he could still see the image of the hand. His wife’s wedding ring on the middle finger glinted in the rising sunlight.
It was no dream. Siri was unequivocally dead—in Nirvana, he hoped. Even if points were lost for being a communist, he trusted he’d earned enough to be in heaven rather than the other place. He saw no fire, heard no pop music, and smelled no opium smoke, so his hopes were high.
“Have you forgiven me, Lord?”
It was the trunk that confused him.
He’d arrived back at the temple long after midnight. When he left the Town Hall, the celebrations were still raging. No guards had stayed around to lock up.
It was the most fun Siri could remember having for a very long time. The impromptu show: the shamans impersonating the officials, the heated debate the spirits may have had as to which option to choose, the transportation problems in getting them to the Northeast. It was sparklingly brilliant entertainment for a town whose heart had been removed. But his assumption that no spirits had been awakened and summoned by the phony séance was a mistaken one.
At That Luang temple, the night guard was asleep beside the staircase. Siri walked to the prayer hall and retrieved his small bag from behind the Buddha images. He dug through the contents, retrieved his waistcloth, stripped, and went out to the earthen jars to bathe.
He was on his way back when the disturbance began in his ears. At first he assumed it was water lodged there, and he shook his head to free it. But the pressure turned to a sound. It was an annoying single note, metallic, at a pitch that set his teeth on edge. He looked around the yard to see where a machine could be to make such a row.
The temple dogs slept at peace. The birds roosted in the tree branches, all undisturbed by the jarring sound. It was evidently exclusively his. He followed it to its source, the destroyed stupa inside the blue wall. The closer he got, the more deafening the sound became, the more painful the pressure on his eardrums. He looked into the foundation of the stupa base lit by a generous moon but saw nothing. Yet instinctively he knew there had to be something in there inviting him to come closer.
He climbed over into the square of bricks and picked his way carefully to the center. There he cleared a place to kneel and began to dig with his hands. Beneath the rubble, the earth was soft, mulched, teeming with the warm bodies of earthworms. The deeper he dug, the louder became the sound.
He was so focused on his task, he didn’t notice what was happening around him. The destroyed stupa was slowly reforming. The bricks were reattaching, the mortar hardening. But Siri had only one thing on his mind: to stop the awful sound.
Although he couldn’t yet see it, his hand arrived upon the source of his discomfort. As soon as he took hold of the cool stone, he knew what had lured him there. He could feel the leather thong attached to its loop at the top of the black amulet. He knew the shape and the slight ripples of its indentations. He could feel the power of Phibob that now had a hold of him. It was pulling him—pulling with the strength of a thousand malevolent spirits—pulling him with the conviction of righteous revenge—to his death.
He felt his arm being wrenched downward through the soft earth writhing with the bodies of maggots and centipedes. They attached themselves to his naked skin and helped to drag him down. He couldn’t let go of the amulet even when his shoulder was flush with the ground. Like a man about to vanish under water, he looked up to take a last gulp of air.
That’s when he saw that the stupa was complete and he was entombed. The air was musty with the exhalations of four hundred years. That was the last taste on his final breath. That lungful didn’t last him long once he was buried and traveling on down through the earth. He held it for as many seconds as he could, but he knew it was futile. He was packed in dirt. There was no point in trying to breathe again. All he could do was wait.
As a coroner he knew the process well. His face twitched as the muscles went into spasm. The death rattle rose in his throat, and he allowed himself one last agonized struggle until his heart stopped beating. Just before the machinery shut down completely, the metallic drone stopped and he heard his name called. It was a beautiful sound. Hearing is the most stubborn of the senses and the last one to leave a dying person.
He was aware that his pupils were dilating, and he could feel the warmth seep from his body. In another hour he would be stiff with rigor mortis. There was no more movement, just the calm that comes from sensing the cells and tissues dying at their own sweet pace, a process that could take weeks to complete. His goosebumped skin would be the last to submit to death.
In less time than it takes for a fish to fry, the nerves feeding the cortex of his brain would be gone and whatever feeling remained would come as an observer hovering outside the packet he’d once lived in. By then, it would be as useless as one of the plastic bags that floated down the Mekhong.
He looked up into the golden light that showered onto him, and through the beams he saw the smile of the Lord. He sighed and smiled back at his maker. It was a relief, after all. He felt no bitterness. He’d had enough of life. He wasn’t depressed, just bored. It was as if he’d read the book of living and knew how it ended. There was nothing more to learn. He abandoned the body and reached out to Buddha.
That’s when the Great Plan proved to have a page or two missing. The Lord’s head shook from side to side as if he didn’t want Siri after all. His face distorted and out of it grew a trunk. It snaked down to where the soul of Siri hovered and blasted the dead doctor with a torrent of warm breath that stank of stale peanuts.
Dtui, reflecting the bright sunlight from her crispy white uniform, stood at the gates of Silver City. This was neither a city nor silver. It was a walled-off compound two minutes’ walk from the new Monument to the Unknown Soldier. It was reputedly from here that the KGB did its spying. Some said it was the Soviet Union’s response in Southeast Asia to the American spy factory in Bangkok. But very few people had actually been inside to report on what other evils it contained.
Ironically, before they were turfed out, the American Secret Service had operated from this same compound. Some people speculated that “silver” referred to the glint of sunlight from the refined opium on its way to the troops in ’Nam.
Dtui scanned the tall green gate and the walls to either side, but saw no sign of a bell. The paint was dusty, so she kicked at the metal. It sounded much louder than she’d intended. There were a few silent moments before she heard a soft “Who is it, and what do you want?”
“I’m nurse Chundee Chantavongheuan.”
Such was the name with which she had been christened, although it didn’t get a lot of use. At birth, it was customary in Laos to give your children ugly nicknames to ward off baby-hungry spirits. There were Pigs and Prawns and Camels and no end of Dtuis—Fatties. Many Dtuis grew up to be slim and beautiful, but Chundee Chantavongheuan lived up to her name. “I’m here to see Mr. Ivanic. I have an appointment.”
A small square spyhole opened near the top of the gate, and a man looked down at her. He was either very tall or standing on a chair. She held up her paperwork from Civilai.
“Okay.”
One flap of the gate was unlocked and held ajar, barely wide enough for her to squeeze through the gap. A second guard stood inside with a brand-new AK47. The stock was still in its plastic wrapping. Guard One wasn’t tall. He had a stepladder.
Dtui found herself between two sets of gates, like a security airlock. Before they could let her through the second gate, they had to lock the first and follow certain procedures. The small guard reached out as if to frisk the big nurse, but she took a step back.
“Think again.”
“I have to search you.”
“Over my dead body. Look in the bag if you like.”
He did look in the bag and found the agar molds.
“What are these?”
“Top secret.”
“Oh. Okay.”
There was a pause.
“Hot, isn’t it?”
“Damned hot.”
With that, they unlocked the second gate and prodded her into the compound. It was a sprawling area with lovely old jujube trees and a mishmash of buildings that made the place look like an open-air museum of bad architecture. She’d expected one of the guards to follow her in, but the gate was re-bolted behind her and she was alone.
She walked to the nearest building, a two-story wood-and-brick affair that was neither a house nor an office. She stood in the open doorway and called out: “Sorry. Is somebody here?” There was the sound of scurrying, as if some animal had been disturbed, then silence. “Hello?”
A good-looking young man in rolled-up shirtsleeves, slacks, and bare feet came from one of the rooms wiping his hands. He stopped suddenly at the sight of the white-clad nurse before him.
“Eh?”
“Good health.”
Over the man’s shoulder she saw a girl in a military uniform emerge from the same doorway and head off in the opposite direction.
“My name’s Chundee Chantavongheuan. I have an—”
“—appointment to see Mr. Ivanic. Yes, I was expecting you. They didn’t tell me you were a nurse.” He shook her hand and smiled. “I’m Phot. I’ll be translating for you.”
He slipped his feet into leather sandals in the doorway, and they walked across the compound. Dtui felt somewhat unnerved to be so close to this young man who must have had women falling at his feet. He wore his good looks like a comfortable old jacket.
“What do you all do here?” she asked.
“Oh. Absolutely top secret. Can’t possibly tell you.”
“All right.”
“But these two buildings are Lao secret police.”
She laughed.
“They spend most of their time planning ways to infiltrate the insurgency groups and bug foreign embassies. That little warehouse is ‘weapons training.’ Soviets and Lao with a dozen words in common learning how to arm and disarm bombs. Most of us give the place a wide berth.”
“I get the idea you aren’t secret police.”
“Hell, no. I was doing engineering in Moscow. The bastards dragged me out with a year to go on my degree so I could come here and help them make sense of their Soviet allies. They say if I give them three years, they’ll have their own people back from Russia and I can go finish my Master’s.”
They walked to the far end of the compound, and a small troupe of stocky Lao women in sequined tops and tights walked between the buildings.
“My God, why are they walking around in their underwear?”
“That’s their uniform. This is the performing arts end of the yard. Those girls are training to be acrobats. Lao girls are self-conscious about wearing tights and leotards, so the Russians make them dress like this all day till they get used to it. The Soviets have been here for six months, training them in circus skills. There are all types: jugglers, trampolinists, trapeze artists.”
“What’s wrong with Lao performing arts?”
Before he could answer, a deep roar diverted their attention. As they rounded the gymnasium, they came face to face with a black puma at the end of a long leash. It was only three bounds and a leap from the man at the other end of the rope. He was in his fifties and wore impressive thigh-high boots. Dtui doubted he could see those boots himself, as his stomach bloated out in front of him like an enormous ball of cheese. His darkly handsome eyes peered from a nest of curly red hair that wove into a wild crimson beard.
In his left hand he held a short whip, a seemingly ineffective weapon against such a potentially dangerous creature. But the beautiful black animal prowled obediently to an overturned oil drum and climbed onto it. There she sat and reared upward, clawing her fists through the warm air.
A small class of young men, most of them weighing not half of the creature they were watching, sat cross-legged in the shade of an egg yolk tree.
“That’s your Mr. Ivanic,” Phot told her. “This is what he does for a living.”
Ivanic cracked the whip lightly. The animal stepped slowly to
the ground and stood looking at the students like a diner perusing a menu. Ivanic walked toward the back of the gym where cages were lined up beneath a canopy of coconut leaves. He tugged gently at the puma’s leash, and she started to follow him.
This was a duty she’d performed daily for several weeks without much thought. But on this day something got into her. Whether it was crankiness from the breezeless heat, or boredom at the unchanging diet, it’s hard to say. It was as if it just occurred to her that a rope didn’t work in both directions. There was nothing restraining her from the big man’s back.
She quickened her pace so the rope sagged, then broke into a loping run. The students gasped but were too shocked to call out. The puma was already at the base of her leap, coiling into a spring, split seconds from her prey. Dtui screamed.
Then suddenly without turning or changing his pace, Ivanic cracked the whip underarm and behind him. The very tip of the leather snapped against the animal’s snout. She shook her head angrily and stumbled over her bent front legs, turning a complete somersault and landing a foot from where the Russian now stood.
She was more humiliated than injured. The students clapped in appreciation, but Ivanic called something out to them. One of the other interpreters standing behind them translated his words.
“Mr. Ivanic reminds you how important it is to let your animal know that you’re always awake, always alert, and that you have eyes in your arse.”
The students laughed and clapped again and Ivanic led the humbled animal to its cage. It entered with no further fuss. Dtui and Phot walked over to it. There were four mesh cages the size of rattan ball courts. The puma’s neighbors were a small Lao wildcat and a very old lion whose ribs protruded like some ancient xylophone. The fourth cage was shrouded completely in long, worn stage curtains. There were other animals, untethered elephants, deer, and buffalo that wandered around the courtyard in pairs, as if in search of an ark.
Phot spoke to Ivanic, who seemed delighted to see him. They joked about something; then, with a big smile, the Russian reached out one dinner plate of a hand to Dtui and gave her the once-over with his eyes. She shook his hand but avoided the stare.
“Mr. Ivanic is always happy to see a big woman in a uniform,” Phot translated.
Although her mother had warned her that all Western men were lecherous dogs, the greeting caught her off guard. For once in her life, she didn’t have a cutting response. “I’m glad Mr. Ivanic has time to see me.”
With the Russian’s hand uncomfortably against the small of her back, they all walked into the little gym. There they sat around a small card table at one end. At the other, young women were sending their limbs in directions Dtui could never have imagined sending hers. One young lass stood on one leg and held the other against her cheek, the toes pointing to the ceiling. Ivanic noticed Dtui’s grimace.
“Mr. Ivanic asked whether you can do that.”
“Yes, easy. As long as the leg wasn’t attached to me any more.”
The Russian laughed with his whole body and went to give her a hug. She avoided it by bending down to her bag. She dug out the concrete cast and laid it on the table.
“Could Mr. Ivanic tell me what animal produced these marks?”
Ivanic took up the concrete mold and spread his huge hand over it. He looked up at Dtui, not smiling now.
“Mr. Ivanic wonders where you got this print.”
“It was from my boss’s garden.”
“So there isn’t a connection between this and the killings of the women?”
“You know about that?”
“Remember where you are, Nurse Chundee.”
“Right. Secret Police, I forgot. No, this one wasn’t connected to the killings.”
“Mr. Ivanic believes this is the print of a Malay black bear. He estimates it to be quite large for its breed.”
“Did he ever see the bear at the Lan Xang?”
The response was quite heated.
“Mr. Ivanic is very angry at the treatment that bear received. He’s delighted the animal escaped.”
“Is this print likely to have been made by that bear?”
“It’s very likely.”
“Does he believe that bear could have killed two people?”
The response was long and seemingly complicated. Phot had to ask for clarification of a number of points. Dtui’s eyes wandered again to the poor deformed girls and the knots they were tying themselves into.
“Mr. Ivanic is most concerned that there is a ‘shoot to kill’ order out on the bear. He has tried without success to convince the director here to rescind the order.”
“Why?”
“According to him, there’s no way an Asiatic bear could do the damage we’ve heard about.”
“But they are carnivorous.”
“Yes, but they’re the most passive of the carnivores. They may eat small slow animals or kill something wounded and eat that, but it’s very unlikely they’d attack a large animal. It’s unthinkable that they might attack and kill man.”
“Even if they’d been tortured by man?”
Phot asked the question and smiled at the answer.
“Revenge is a trait exclusive to us humans. Animals don’t get even. They can be very forgiving.”
“Is it totally impossible?”
“It’s so unlikely, it’s hardly worth thinking about.”
Dtui took out the two agar molds and put them on the table. Mr. Ivanic clapped his hands and said something to make Phot laugh.
“Mr. Ivanic says if he’d known we were having a party, he would have brought something to drink.”
“Well, you keep him away from these jellies. They were set on the skin of dead people.”
“These are the marks from the bodies?”
“Yes.”
Phot explained and Ivanic looked very seriously at them. Again he held his huge hands over the marks to judge the size. Then he shook his head.
“Are they bear teeth?”
“No.”
“How can he be so sure?”
“Mathematics.”
“Mathematics?”
“Mr. Ivanic says bears have forty-two teeth. Whatever bit into the flesh of these unfortunate women had fewer. Even if all the teeth didn’t leave a mark, there still isn’t enough space from the back teeth to the front. His guess is around thirty.”
“And what would that make it?”
“Mr. Ivanic says it was a cat.”
“I take it he isn’t talking about a lap cat.”
“He’s referring to a very large cat.” Ivanic said something, stood, and walked toward the door. “We should follow.”
In front of the cage where the defeated puma now lay, Ivanic formed his hand into the shape of a jaw and opened his fingers toward the animal. It responded with a relatively subdued growl and gave Dtui a view of its awesome teeth.
“Wow. What was your puma doing on the night of the ninth?” she asked through Phot. The Russian laughed and squeezed her shoulder.
“Mr. Ivanic said she was with him all night, officer. But the cat you’re looking for is even bigger than this one.”
“How much bigger?”
“Perhaps a tiger.”
“He thinks there’s a tiger on the loose in Vientiane?”
“He agrees it doesn’t sound very likely.”
“Could he be wrong about the number of teeth?”
The men got into a discussion. “Even if he were wrong about the numbers, and I doubt he is, the set of the mouth is different. Cats’ teeth are shaped for cutting. The bear’s are adapted for grinding. Your mold shows teeth that could only have been for cutting. In fact, Mr. Ivanic can’t recall ever seeing such sharp teeth. It was as if….”
A deep drowsy growl came from the covered cage. Dtui looked up and didn’t notice the exchange of glances between the trainer and the interpreter.
“What’s in there?”
“It’s just another animal.”
“What type?”
“It’s a panda.”
“Why’s the cage covered?”