‘Have a nice day out, did you, Comrade Coroner?’ he slurred.
‘Yes, thanks,’ said Dr Siri, grabbing the governor’s arm to help himself out of the boat.
The governor yanked his elbow away indignantly.
‘You do realize there’s a unit of soldiers here waiting for your professional self to identify a body.’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘They can leave. It’s not the man we were looking for.’
He helped Daeng and Geung out of the unstable craft leaving Civilai to sort it out for himself. The governor didn’t like being dismissed.
‘How can you be so sure? You haven’t even looked at the bodies.’
Siri walked away. Daeng was on the river bank picking out a large stone that seemed to have taken her fancy. She turned back and smiled at the governor.
‘It’s nothing you need to concern yourself with,’ she said. ‘You’re just the governor. But here’s a coup for you. Down there in the dinghy is the body of the woman, Madame Peung, who was invited here by the minister. About ten kilometres upstream is the air compressor she was tied to before she was thrown into the river. She was killed by somebody on that boat. So you have a murder inquiry to conduct. Good luck.’
‘I … I …’
‘Yes?’
‘We don’t have any police stationed here.’
‘Well, you’re going to have to find some,’ said Civilai, clambering out of the boat. ‘The minister’s going to want answers.’
‘It’s the last night of the races,’ said Governor Siri.
‘Then you’d better get some coffee inside you and get cracking.’
‘Oh, by the way,’ said Daeng. ‘The doctor and I will be changing our room. The one we’re in is crowded and smells of beer. We’ll take the room Madame Peung was in. She won’t be using it.’
‘What about the brother?’ asked the governor.
‘Oh, right. Forgot to tell you …’
With the rooms sorted out, the corpse billeted, and the Vietnamese engineers under a sort of open-air house arrest until someone could formally investigate the death of Madame Peung, Civilai and Mr Geung took a stroll to the temple which was the centre of the evening’s activities. The old politburo man still couldn’t quite get it. People were dancing and singing and joking without even the vaguest hint of alcohol. It didn’t seem natural. The crew on the boat had glowed with that same generic joy. The buzz of being together with friends. Freedom from an endless war. Freedom to work the land and earn enough to feed the family and put a little aside for these three days off a year when their village could drag its boat to the river, laugh, capsize, collide, win a prize for the slowest time or the fattest rower, throw the winners into the water, launch all the boats to pay homage to a great serpent. That’s what they were on: the euphoria of simplicity.
‘Geung,’ Civilai asked, ‘when do you suppose I first entered that state that convinced me I had to be drunk before I could enjoy life?’
‘You’re an ad … dict,’ said Geung.
‘Yes, indeed. Should I give it up, do you think?’
‘No.’
‘You were supposed to say “yes”.’
‘It’s too late. The drunk Comrade Civ … Civilai is the real Comrade Civilai now.’
Geung saw a dart stall with bright balloons on a board. He was a hot shot with a dart so he abandoned Civilai and jogged over to it. The old man, his mouth open just a fraction, watched him go. He wanted to defend himself somehow but had no idea how to do so. He wondered exactly when it was that the drunk Civilai had taken the alpha role in his personality. It was troubling. He decided he could really use a drink.
Dr Siri had supervised the overnight stowage of Madame Peung. Tobacco leaves were the wrapping of choice for a dead body but Pak Lai had none. Instead she was laid in a half section of concrete piping and garnished with hay and marijuana. After dinner, with Daeng’s blessing, he had returned to check on the body. He was a little disappointed to find her lying there still. He wondered whether reincarnation was a buy-one-get-one-free deal, that we were all allowed one return. He pulled over a ten-litre paint tin and sat beside the woman who twice used to be.
‘How is everything?’ he asked.
The gentle smile was still on her lips as if she were keeping a secret. There had been no contact at all since her death. Siri had been hoping she would come to him somehow — offer herself up as his spirit mentor. He needed her to continue the tutorials that had brought him to the edge of two-way communication. He’d been the thickness of a TV screen away from a conversation with a dead king. And now she was gone. Her eyes were closed but all the while he pictured the Wolf Man scene when everyone knew Lon Chaney was dead but his eyes had sprung open and given Siri a near-bowel-evacuation in the front row of the picture house.
He edged his paint tin a little closer.
‘So, you have nothing to say to me?’ said Siri.
He waited for an answer. Looked around for subliminal messages. Closed his eyes in search of a vision. The chickens clucked in the next room. He wondered if that were a sign. He clucked back. He waited. No. They were just chickens. He was alone again. His two guides were lost, Auntie Bpoo, the cantankerous transvestite fortune-teller, to her going away party in a week, and Madame Peung, silent as the grave. Why was this all so difficult? He just wanted to talk to ghosts. That was all.
*
Inspector Phosy had little use for a clock. He worked until the work was done or until he fell face down on to his desk from fatigue. As his office was only twenty minutes on foot from the police dormitory, he used the walk to clear his head of all the legal clutter. Apart from the passing curfew patrols there was nobody on the street after ten. He could admire the stars and take lungfuls of air that weren’t seasoned with smog or smoke. He could filter out the news he would not tell his wife, like a description of the crushed face of the Lane Xang Hotel gardener they’d pulled from the pool. He could organize the unavoidable, like his imminent dispatch to Vieng Xai to train another batch of reluctant soldiers in the art of policing.
The voice came from a bank of hedges he’d just passed.
‘I have a gun pointed at the back of your head,’ it said. ‘I never miss. Don’t turn around.’
The accent was Vietnamese. Phosy stopped and held up his palms in front of him. He was unarmed.
‘Good boy,’ said the voice.
‘What do you want?’ Phosy asked.
‘Facts.’
‘The Ministry of Information has a whole department full.’
‘Don’t get cute, cop. The last patrol passed three minutes ago. It’ll be an hour before the next one finds your body. Nobody around to hear the shot. Keep that in mind next time you get the urge for stand-up comedy.’
‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’
‘That’s better,’ said the voice.
Phosy had a suspicion the man was speaking from the back of his throat to sound more threatening. The gunman stepped out of the vegetation and came up close behind Phosy. So close that the policeman felt the mouth of the gun in the small of his back. It was a stupid move. Amateurish. It told Phosy three things: exactly where the weapon was, exactly where his adversary was, and the fact that the fellow didn’t have a lot of experience in this hoodlum game.
Phosy spun to one side, swept the gun away with his right hand and thumped his left fist into the side of the gunman’s face. He was out of practice but he still heard the satisfying click of a cheekbone fracturing. The rest of the punches had probably been unnecessary but Inspector Phosy was very touchy about having guns pointed at him.
Madame Daeng had headed away from the riverbank foolishness and the noise of revellers and found that old wooden swing in the garden of the administrator’s office. She lowered herself slowly on to the seat and listened to the cries of the cicadas. She admired the panorama of stars, the trails of lightning bugs joining the celestial dots. She considered her good fortune and sighed with every memory that came to her. To have succeeded and survived. To have known great people. To have been reunited with the love of her life. And what a good life it had been.