Colin Cotterill - Curse of the Pogo Stick

“Right. But didn’t that inspire us to think laterally? And didn’t that period of thought lead to our brilliant insight?”

“Your brilliant insight.”

“It was our idea.”

“I remember exactly how it went. You said, ‘If you were the assassin, Dtui, what would be going through your mind on the day of the bombing?’ And I said I’d want to make sure my bomb actually went off and did its damage, seeing as there’d be no chance of its making the evening agricultural broadcast on the wireless. And you said, ‘That means the bomber would have to be on the hospital grounds that afternoon.’’’

“It was the only way he could be sure.”

“And you said, ‘Perhaps we could ask the staff whether they noticed anyone hanging around all afternoon on Friday.’’’

“Right, but it was you who remembered the nurses and the photographs. It wouldn’t have entered my head.”

“Yes it would. And it probably won’t help anyway. When the prints come back from the shop tomorrow all we’ll see is smiling nurses and flowers. Not a bomber in sight. He’s hardly likely to pose with them, is he now?”

“So little faith in one so young. Remember, anything’s possible.”

“There must be more we can do. If only we could get access to the army bomb squad report or the police investigations. I’m sure we could do more than the boy wonders.”

“Until Siri and Phosy come back it’s just you and me. I have all kinds of contacts in high places in the south but nobody up here-not yet.”

Dtui poured Daeng another shot from the misty bottle and filled her own glass with water. They toasted the diners across the river.

“I do,” Dtui said.

“Do what?”

“Have an influential friend. You do too. Or at least an ex-influential friend.”

“You don’t mean Civilai?”

“I certainly do.”

“Oh, Dtui. He’s retired.”

“Cronyism doesn’t just go away overnight.”

“He isn’t going to be in any state to help us.”

A few months earlier Siri had uncovered a plot to overthrow the Lao government. Dtui and Phosy had crossed over to a refugee camp in Thailand to spy on the deposed Royalists. Information they gleaned there had led to the failure of the coup. But in the aftermath, Siri had discovered that his old friend, Civilai, was in line to take a post in the proposed revolutionary administration. He was a traitor, a fact that only Siri and Daeng were privy to. Civilai had taken early retirement in return for their silence. Daeng doubted the old politician would be prepared to step back into the quicksand from which he’d so recently escaped.

Dtui knew none of this.

“Let’s find out,” she said.

In the words of Comrade Civilai, the rainy season of ‘77 had been as brief and unconvincing as a politician’s credibility… and he should know. Since his strongly encouraged retirement from the politburo three months earlier, officially for health reasons, he’d had a lot of free time to perfect his witticisms. His best friend, Dr. Siri, had been afraid the traumatic events leading up to the old man’s fall from grace might have driven him to despair and an early visit to the pyre. But far from it. Civilai had expanded in all directions like a man released from the grip of atmospheric pressure. His mind had been given rein to consider philosophies beyond Marx and Lenin. He’d begun to listen to the lyrics of his grand-niece’s pop music and see merit in them. He’d started reading the novels hidden in his loft and breathing in their beauty. Not since his French education had his mind been so liberated.

His body too had expanded. His skin no longer stuck to his bones like pie crust. Always a food connoisseur, Civilai now had endless hours to engage in his passion. He delighted in his wife’s cooking and experimented with his own. He invited friends for dinners, performing miracles with the scant offerings on sale at the morning market and the Party co-op. He had, they all agreed, blossomed and bloated as a result of his divorce from politics.

Dtui and Daeng sat with him at the round kitchen table in a house that had once belonged to the director of the American high school at kilometer 6. It was what the English would call a bungalow and what the Lao would call a rather pointless style of architecture-not raised from the ground on stilts to allow the air to circulate and the floods to pass beneath. Windows of glass that magnified the rays of the sun. A toilet with a communal seat that encouraged the exchange of germs and disease. But the senior Party members didn’t live there because it was practical. They’d moved into the walled US compound to thumb their socialist noses at the Americans. They’d endured and survived the endless air raids on their cave enclaves in the northeast for thirty years. The enemy owed them.

Daeng was pleased to see how well the old comrade was looking.

Dtui, like the rest of Laos, saw him as an elder statesman in frail health who had retired gracefully. But there was nothing frail about him on this day.

“I must say it’s rare that I get two voluptuous lady visitors at the same time,” he said. “Nice to see I haven’t lost that magnetism. How did you get here?”

“On our bicycles,” Dtui told him.

“All this way? And you with your arthritis, Madame Daeng.”

“Can’t let a little chronic pain spoil a day out, comrade,” she told him.

“That’s the spirit. Then I think you both deserve a drink for making it here.”

“I’m on the baby wagon, uncle,” Dtui confessed. “But Madame Daeng got quite sloshed at lunchtime. I think that’s why she can’t feel her legs.”

“Nice to see,” said Civilai, pulling down several bottles from the Formica wall cabinet. “Then she’ll need topping up.”

“Where’s Madame Nong today?” Dtui asked, wondering whether Civilai’s wife would let him tipple in the afternoon if she were around.

“Women’s Union excursion… again. She’s been signing up for all of them since I became redundant. Can’t really understand it. You’d think she’d want to spend all her time cleaning up after me, wouldn’t you?”

“You’d think so.” Daeng smiled. “We girls are mysterious creatures.”

“No arguments from me there.” Civilai nodded, arriving at the table with three full glasses with lime slices hanging onto them for dear life. “So, what can I do for you, ladies?”

They sat and drank their vodka sodas-one without vodka, two with little soda-while Dtui told Civilai all about the peculiar happenings at the morgue and the reluctance of the police and the army to share their findings. He agreed that, although there were several dozen people who might like to give Siri a good slapping, none that he could think of disliked the doctor enough to blow him up. He recalled one attempt on the coroner’s life a year before but as far as he knew there had been nothing personal about it and the perpetrator was safely behind bars.

“When’s Siri due back? Civilai asked.

“Tomorrow evening,” Dtui told him.

“Then we’d better get cracking. We can’t have our chief and only coroner killed by some maniac, can we now?”

“You think you can help?” Dtui asked.

“Undoubtedly. If a respected Party dinosaur can’t call in a favor or two, who the blazes can?”

Some people just die. Siri had come to that conclusion after many years of careful observation. They don’t necessarily die of anything, they just get old, everything gives up, and they pass away. It’s as simple as that. There are those who describe it as dying of old age but that puts old age in the same category as bubonic plague and the Black Death. There really is nothing dangerous about old age and there’s no reason to be afraid of it. It certainly hadn’t done Dr. Siri any harm. He’d been passing through its hallowed halls for some years and it hadn’t killed him