Colin Cotterill - Curse of the Pogo Stick

Phosy nodded. “I imagine the Lizard selected someone who wouldn’t be missed in a hurry. It’s odds-on she killed him. Meanwhile, we should watch our backs. I have my men guarding all of us but we still need to keep on our toes. We were all involved in messing up the Lizard’s coup plans. I’ll find out what background Security has on her. “

“There is one thing we do know about her that may be in our favor,” Madame Daeng suggested.

“What’s that?” Civilai asked.

“She’s a prima donna, a grandstander. If you think about it, she could just as easily have lobbed that hand grenade in through the window.”

“But that would have been too easy,” Dtui agreed. “She wants us to know how clever she is.”

“Perhaps she even wants us to match wits with her,” Daeng continued. “I’d wager she’s delighted we-that is, you, Dtui-foiled this first attempt.” There was a round of applause for Dtui, who pressed her hands together into a polite nop and bowed her head.

“But that means her next attempt could be even harder to detect,” Phosy added.

“Well, she’s met her match with this team,” said Dtui.

“Let’s hope so.”

When the bottle was finished and the meeting broke up, Madame Daeng insisted on walking Civilai out to his car. As a retired elder statesman he’d been provided a vehicle for personal use and a petrol allowance. In the United States, that gift would have taken the form of a new Cadillac. In 1977 Laos it amounted to a cream Citroen with one hubcap missing.

“Are you all right to drive?” Daeng asked as he prized open the door and climbed behind the wheel.

“Why does everybody ask me that?”

“Ooh, I don’t know. Perhaps the amount of drinking you’ve been doing lately makes them nervous.” She handed him the car keys he’d left on the table.” You’re not showing the bottle any respect. Or yourself. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’ve told you…”

“I mean about this investigation. Given your”-she looked back to be sure none of the others had followed them to the car-”involvement in the last coup. The Lizard…”

“Madame Daeng,” he said in a whisper, “I had no personal involvement with the perpetrators of the coup. I was involved in name alone. That woman is intent on hurting good friends of mine. Please don’t think I have any qualms about her being caught. This is personal. It has nothing to do with politics.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“And I wonder if I could ask you not to mention past indiscretions again.”

“Well, that depends, comrade.”

“On what?”

“On whether one day you might like to pay me a visit and talk about it all; how you’re feeling about things. I think it’s all this ‘not mentioning’ that’s driving you into your passionate affair with alcohol.”

Civilai turned the key in the ignition and pulled the starter. The car came to life with all the aggression of a food mixer. He slammed his door and smiled at her through the half-open window before heading off.

She watched him go: a man who had sacrificed his political career with one mad rush of blood to the head. Given his history, she would never really know why he’d allied himself with the coup leaders. But he’d momentarily walked the line between retirement and execution. A man that close to dying a traitor had to have ghosts. She hoped he’d come back to see her someday.

She turned and waved to the armed guards opposite her shop. Phosy had posted a watch on her, on all of them. There was another man at the back of the shop and one more would accompany Dtui back to the police compound. Daeng doubted it would do any good in the face of a serious attack but she admitted there was a good feel to having someone watch her back.

“I’ll bring you boys some hot soup,” she said and walked slowly back to the shop.

It was an alleyway dimly lit by slightly bent street lamps that had barely enough strength to turn the black night gray. The paving stones beneath his feet were ill matching, some rising abruptly from the sidewalk. Dr. Siri wore sandals but his footsteps clopped like horseshoes on the stones. Chalked roughly all around were the outlines of murder-scene bodies, deformed and chilling. He was walking fast, stumbling, wheezing from the pressure on his old lungs. The walls on either side of him reached so high he could see no summit. He looked back, stumbled again. He could sense his own fear like something living and moving between the layers of his skin. He passed a dark doorway, four legs and the end of a baseball bat all that was visible, the upper torsos drowned in a shadow as black as misery.

“Well, what do we have here, Danny?” a deep voice groaned from the darkness, Lao but with a New York accent. Siri hurried past and the two figures stepped out of the shadow and fell into step behind him.

A second voice: “Looks like a Red gook to me.”

“Me too. What do you think you’re doing here, Red gook?”

Siri didn’t dare answer or look back. He quickened his pace but his pursuers stayed with him.

“Shit, man, are you lost.”

“He’s looking for a girl, ain’t you, commie gook? That’s whatcha doing in our neighborhood.”

“Is that right, commie?” Siri heard the slap of a baseball bat into a palm. A spitting noise. But up ahead he could see the gaudy neon of a nightclub. There were people milling around in front of it only eighty yards away. If only… He reached for the amulet beneath his shirt.

“Hell! That ain’t gonna do you no good, old man.”

“You’re gonna need something bigger’n that to get past us, gook.”

“You know, Danny boy? I’d say this little guy’s making his way to the Pheasant.”

The name above the nightclub door was visible now through the glare: the Silver Pheasant. It flashed thousands of colored lightbulbs. Siri heard music. Some kind of jazz. He believed it was possible now. All he needed to do was cross the-but they were on him. They grabbed his arms and yanked him onto his back. They stood over him, one with a baseball bat held above his head. Siri could see them now, angry, menacing. They wore blue jeans and boots and were twice his size. Still alive, they would have been even bigger. But all that remained of them now was gray skeletons with enormous eyeless skulls, their clenched fists like knots of ginseng.

“They play baseball back in Commie Land, gook?”

And the bat came crashing down.

Siri gasped and his head wrenched to one side to avoid the blow. And he smelled stew and death. And suddenly there was no dark street or skeletons in blue jeans. Just a room with split bamboo walls and light streaming in through gaps in a thatched roof in need of repair. He was lying on a bamboo platform above a dirt floor where a fine white longhaired dog sat staring at him. Small black pigs grunted and scurried around aimlessly. Siri was damp with sweat but not harmed. He’d been dressed in a quilted military topcoat against the cold. He felt drowsy and a little nauseous, which he attributed to some form of sedative. All around him was that unmistakable smell he knew so well from the morgue.

He got carefully to his feet and stepped down onto the packed earth. He removed the coat and laid it behind him on his bedding. His sleeping berth was no more than a large hutch in a house with four or five similar compartments. Against the walls stood farming implements, large cane baskets, one or two crossbows, and a large foot-operated rice crusher. A small family altar to the house spirits took pride of place on a shelf opposite the front door. He walked around his hutch and into the main area of the house where the central pillar rose up to the rafters. And tied to that pillar was an old woman. She was dressed in a beautiful ornate, hand-embroidered Hmong costume: a black, long-sleeved jacket and a heavy pleated skirt that came to her knobby knees. A single silver torque at her neck almost doubled her weight.