‘That’s two hundred kilometres from Luang Prabang.’
‘He escaped by boat, she says. Succumbed to his injuries before he could get to a qualified medic. It’s not clear where he got off the boat. A lot of the river round there is deep in jungle. No settlements. It appears that’s where the mystic radio waves ran into some interference.’ He laughed at his own cleverness. ‘That’s why the witch needs to go there and take a look for herself.’
‘Good grief. You’re sending me on holiday with a witch?’
‘You don’t need to have any direct dealings with her. Just wait around. On the off chance she turns up with a body, you do the examination.’
‘Why is it that people hand me bones and expect me to know whether the skeleton was a paid-up member of the local trade union?’
‘I’ve made it easy for you, Siri. Major Ly, that’s the name of the brother, had been injured in a grenade explosion a year before he disappeared. He’d had work done in Hanoi to put his chin back together. There’s a screw in his jaw. The doctor was Cuban. He kept records and an X-ray. I’ll have them for you before you go.’
‘You seem confident I’ll agree to all this.’
‘Ah, Siri. You’re a curious man. Retirement doesn’t suit you at all. You love mysteries like this.’
‘I don’t know. I’ll see what Madame Daeng says.’
‘That’s the spirit. A good soldier-’
‘Right. I’ve had my socialist maxim for the day already. When’s the supposed departure?’
‘Thursday. I know you’ll do the right thing.’
Siri stood and considered his next action carefully. Then he reached into his shoulder bag and produced an envelope which he handed to the judge.
‘What’s this?’ asked Haeng.
‘It’s a letter from some judge asking the US consulate if he can have a condominium overlooking the Pacific in exchange for the odd secret.’
‘I …’
‘It’s the original. I didn’t make any copies. I’d hurry up and burn it if I were you.’
Siri rode his bicycle home along Fahngoum Road. Ugly the dog trotted behind him. It was a remarkably fine day. There was a cool breeze off the Mekhong and the sky was, at last, the colour of the airport: Wattay blue. It still seemed to be the only paint colour available in the city. The small maggot blooms along the roadside were a wash of colours but smelt like vomit. To his right, every other shop and restaurant he passed was padlocked and shuttered. The river road had been a happier place when the Americans ruled the roost. Beer and girls and loud music that lurched across the river and collided with loud music from Thailand. Now, on the Lao side, the cicada male voice choir was the loudest sound you could expect. Vientiane was a green city. That isn’t to say a Western-type city with sporadic outbreaks of controlled vegetation, but a forest of a city with big sprawling trees along the roadways and patches of jungle that would one day give themselves up to development — but not without a fight. The plants ruled and, thanks to them, the city breathed. The street was paved but covered in mud and there were no cleaners to dig down to the concrete. Siri’s tyres left slalom grooves. His was the only transport on the road.
He caught a brown flash of movement low on the bank of the river. At first he thought it was an animal. A wild cat. But as he squinted against the bright sun Siri could see that it was a man. Naked. Indian. He seemed to be tracking the squeaky bicycle like a jungle predator. Hopping from bush to bush. Crazy Rajid had apparently arrived at the belief that if he were undressed he would be invisible. If anyone spotted him he could merely freeze in position certain that he had blended into the surroundings. He was Vientiane’s own street person. Mad as a sack of rats. Unpredictable. Uncommunicative. Yet with a frozen pond of skills Siri had only just broken the surface of. He waved at the loping vagabond. Crazy Rajid froze in position. Siri looked around as if wondering where he’d gone. Rajid’s face broke into a vast white smile.
Siri laughed. It had been a fun day. He’d left the judge gaping like a mortar wound to the chest. He hadn’t really expected a ‘thank you’. Giving him back his letter had been a difficult decision to make. By holding on to it, the doctor could have kept the man chained indefinitely. The official would continue to be polite and efficient and respectful to his elder. But, to be honest, where was the fun in that? Since their first meeting in 1975, the year the Communists took over the country, the year Siri was railroaded into a job he didn’t want, Judge Haeng had been a wonderful nemesis. Incompetent but wielding great power. Awash with misguided self-confidence. Slippery as a freshly peeled mango. Judge Haeng had been the face of the Party. Siri couldn’t break the Party, but my word he could break the face. That’s why he’d released the judge from his spell. He wanted the battle to continue.
And what joy this new mission offered. A witch, no less. A woman who could trace the dead. He’d heard of them, the ba dong. There were many in Vietnam. There had been incredible stories. A rescue team directed by map to a remote mountainous crop and to within a metre of a shallow grave. Nothing visible above the surface. This was the world that Siri was inadequately a part of. In spite of his own common sense and his medical training, he was well aware that he hosted the spirit of a thousand-year-old shaman. His scientist self had immediately fallen into a fit of denial. He’d argued himself silly that possession was biologically impossible. He’d attributed his visions to dreams, to drunken hallucinations, to heatstroke. But after some time, when the spirits began to make direct communication, supernature and nature collided unmistakably. He was left with no alternative argument. There was, without a shadow of a doubt, a spirit world. And once his stubborn streak had let go of his prejudices, they came. In ones and twos at first, leaving clues. Making efforts to establish a two-way link. He saw them. He heard them too, albeit in a tinny second-hand form through his own mind. He even felt the icy blades of the malevolent few who wanted his resident shaman annihilated. And the more he believed, the more he saw. In their hundreds on the old battlefields. In their tens of thousands in Cambodia. And it came to the point where they were as much a part of his landscape as his wife Daeng, and his friends, and everything else he had come to see as normal.
But there was a blockage. He didn’t know where the main pipeline to the afterlife was clogged or how to clear it, but he still could not conduct any two-way conversations with his visitors. It was as if he were on one bank of the Mekhong and they were over there on the Thai side. They’re waving and shouting but he can’t hear. And so they resort to pantomime. Charades for the hard-of-channelling. Most of the time he didn’t get it. He had no idea what they were trying to tell him. When a murder case was resolved by more scientific means he would look back over his dreams and his encounters and slap his ever-bruised forehead. ‘So that’s what they meant.’ It was like looking at the filled-in crossword on the solutions page of Le Figaro.
He was tired of guessing. He needed a tutor. He believed that, like the sciences, the super-sciences could be learned from an expert. He’d met one such seer: Auntie Bpoo the transvestite fortune-teller. One had to look beyond her sumo build and her penchant for the type of clothing one might see in Pigalle late in the evening. He-she had the direct line. There was no question. He-she could have taught Siri everything. But he-she, and she preferred to be referred to as she, was a most exasperatingly certifiable human being. Siri had recently hounded her for tutorials but she had been occupied to the point of unavailability by ‘the do’.