"It couldn't get any odder, Siri."
"Trust me, it did. I learned that there are only two air routes into and out of Cambodia. One is a fortnightly flight from Peking. The other is from Bangkok to Siem Reap."
"You're not serious?"
"All this while, all through the slaughter and the genocide, they've continued to run tourist flights to visit Angkor Wat. It's absolutely true. Well-heeled Europeans and Americans pop up to the temple, take a few snaps, buy their souvenirs, eat ice cream and none of them are any the wiser that the population around them is being decimated. "Honey, did you hear that? It sounded like a gun'. 'Don't be silly, doll. Probably popcorn." It's all part of the KR public relations campaign to make the outside world believe everything's fine and dandy there. I tell you, Daeng, if I wrote this in a story nobody would believe it, but I saw it with my own eyes. I watched them stroll around the ruins and not thirty kilometres away there were graves with bodies four deep."
"And how did they get you out?"
Siri sighed.
"They shot a Japanese tourist."
"Siri!"
"I'm not proud of it, and I was in no position to stop it. They didn't tell me until it was done. Thursday's brother was in charge of security around the temple. They found a Japanese tourist on one of the guided trips who looked vaguely like me. He was travelling alone. They separated him from his tour group and put a bullet through his head."
"How could they?"
"Life has no value to these people. It was like slaughtering a chicken. They handed me his clothes and his passport, decorated me in dark glasses and a hat, and put me on the Thai Airways flight back to Bangkok. It was as simple as that."
Daeng wiped the tears from Siri's eyes with her finger then attended to her own.
"They gave me the man's wallet as well. He had Thai baht. Lots of them. In Bangkok I strolled through immigration. The officer stamped the passport without even bothering to look at me. I found a bus to Nong Kai then travelled out to Si Chiangmai. I sat for a day opposite your shop, Daeng. It seemed so far. It should have been the easy part but I didn't know how to get across. I talked to fishermen. None of them was game to chance a trip over here. They'd all lost friends to Lao bullets. So I studied the current. I walked three kilometres upstream and selected myself a log and dived in."
"You poor man. You've only had four swimming lessons."
"That's true," he laughed. "But I graduated from the leg-kicking class. I was trusting the log to do the rest. Even so, it's a lot easier in a pool than at the mercy of her highness, the Mekhong, and this broken hand didn't help. I almost didn't make it. I was flying past your shop and I was still three metres from the bank. I made the mistake of leaving my log and attempting to splash my way ashore. I was sure I'd performed all the regulation arm and leg movements but they didn't appear to stop me sinking below the surface. I kicked like a mule, took in several litres of water and was washed up in front of the Ian Xang Hotel. I walked back here along the bank. I was a little confused by then. I couldn't remember where I lived until I saw the beach umbrella."
"I thought you were Rajid."
"You'd be surprised how much we have in common."
22
The second coming of Siri was generally considered a miracle in Vientiane. He was met by smiles wherever he went. In fact, the doctor had returned to a more caring city. His Vientiane had a far greater appeal once it was compared to Phnom Penh. Yes, the regime had been infected with the same corruption as its predecessors. Yes, they incarcerated old royalists and killed the odd dozen here and there with hard labour. Yes, they were driving the Hmong from their homes. Yes, they forced everyone to study Marx and Lenin and no, they didn't have a crumbling clue how to run a country. But, odd as it seemed, deep down they had respect for their fellow man. It showed itself in peculiar ways, but the Lao — even after being slapped about by this or that oppressor for a century — still held on to their humanity.
Siri had seen the dark side. He'd retrieved his amulet from a headless corpse in a high-school playground and he'd dug the body of a poet from the ground with his bare hands. He'd killed a man who probably didn't want to be doing what he was doing and the life of an innocent Japanese man had been taken purely for Siri's own convenience. And now, he'd had enough of death. It was time to step away from the spirits. Dr Siri had submitted his resignation along with his official report every month since the end of 1975. Every month it had been rejected, or, more accurately, ignored. But when he strode into Judge Haeng's office, slapped his resignation onto the desk and said, "You have three months to find a new coroner or do without one," nobody had any doubts that he was serious. Siri had earned his retirement. He had survived the killing fields. He was on life's overtime and nobody had the nerve to begrudge him.
Police work? That was a different matter. That was fun. That wasn't messing with the dead. It was, in many respects, striving for the rights of the living. They couldn't keep a good closet detective down. It was a Saturday evening and Siri and Inspector Phosy were seated on a mat at the back of the evening market. Four glasses stood at various angles on the uneven ground in front of them, two were half full. Two Thumbs had obliged them by lowering their umbrella. There were stars in the sky at last and the drinkers wanted to see them. The first rule of cigarette and alcohol stall management was that the customer was always right until they ran out of money.
"It looks like we're still recognizing the Khmer Rouge," Phosy said. He hadn't known whether to broach the subject of Kampuchea but he had questions he wanted answered.
"Their embassy's still open but I've been smelling the odd scent of combustible chemicals from Daeng's kitchen," Siri smiled. "So, don't be surprised if you wake up one morning and there's a mushroom cloud where their embassy used to be."
As often occurred in these encounters, Phosy was only half certain that was a joke so he ignored it.
"It's hard to believe all that horror is going on right next door," he said. "But you've recovered from your ordeal remarkably. I thought you'd be a wreck for months after what you went through."
Siri smiled and looked around. He had recovered quite remarkably. Since that first morning back he'd averaged twenty minutes sleep a night. And those tiny pecks of sleep were crammed so full of the most horrific nightmares he got more rest when he was awake. He hadn't been able to keep food down so he was on a diet of rice porridge. Anybody passing his bathroom would swear some farm animal was being strangled inside. He still couldn't write with his right hand and he was deaf in one ear. At the slightest unexpected sound he'd jump a foot in the air and his heart would race for five minutes before it could be stilled. He would put his hand to his face and find tears on his cheeks and, at any time of the day or night, images of the dead Khmer were inside his head. Quite a remarkable recovery.
"There used to be an expression," he said. "'There's always someone worse off than you.' But when you get to the Khmer, you're at the end of the line, Phosy. It now reads, 'There's always someone worse off than you, unless you're Cambodian.' They call the system there Angkar. It's a political machine that has everyone hypnotised. Mindless. I can't believe there's any place worse than Kampuchea, Phosy."
"How did…? Ah, never mind."
"Go ahead."
"How did you occupy your mind through all those hours of being locked up?"
"It's pretty much the same as enduring political seminars. You've been through it. Songs. I sang a lot of Mo Lum country songs to myself and made up a few dozen more in my mind."
"I'd like to hear them sometime."