Colin Cotterill - Anarchy and the Old Dogs

The Pakse Bureau de Poste was housed in a small concrete building covered in flaking gray paint. What had apparently once been a neat, well-cared-for garden hugging the wooden fence had grown wild and unlovable. Thorny sprigs reached out for the old men from between the palings. It was here Siri and Civilai parted company, Siri to fulfill his obligation to the Justice Department, Civilai to see whether the post office could shed any light on the origin of the dentist’s letter. They agreed to meet for lunch at the ferry crossing, where they would pass on the morning’s results.

When Siri arrived at the police station, he failed to disturb the duty officer from the delicate task of removing chin hairs with a pair of tweezers. The officer didn’t even look up from the little round hand mirror he held in front of his face.

Siri said, “Excuse me” and waited for a “Yes, sir. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

It didn’t come.

“Well,” Siri said, “either you have a hearing problem or I became invisible overnight. Which is it?”

The officer nipped and plucked once more before lowering the glass and glaring over it at the intruder.

“And who do you think you are?” he asked. His voice rasped like a man who’d consumed too much spirit the night before.

“I think I’m Dr. Siri Paiboun from the Justice Department, but I confess I haven’t checked my identification papers for a few days.”

There were places where a mention of the Justice Department would snap a government official into a respectful state of mind. Pakse was certainly not one of those places. The officer fished around under his desk for a wastebasket and swept his pluckings into it with the side of his hand. Having done so, he yelled at the top of his voice, “Hey, Tao!”

A middle-aged man in police trousers and an off-white undershirt poked his head out of an office three doors down. He was about Siri’s height but three times his girth. His short gray hair had receded to a point beyond the crown of his head, leaving behind one small circular atoll of bristle at the front.

“What?” he said, apparently suffering from the same throat affliction as his colleague.

“Your Vientiane guy’s here.”

“Good.”

There was no hello. Tao ducked back into the room and left Siri hanging there like crematorium smoke. They’d warned him in Vientiane that in Pakse he might not find the same poor standard of public officialdom that he’d become accustomed to in the capital. They’d told him he should lower his standards even further.

For any northern cadre, a posting to the deep south was the Lao equivalent of a Russian’s banishment to Siberia. The south was still a hotbed of anticommunist feeling. After dark, the authorities could only guarantee security as far as the outer city limits. Beyond that, Royalist insurgents operated with impunity in the villages, spreading dissent and recruiting new troops for the guerrilla war against the socialists. It was an exact reversal of the situation six years earlier when the CIA and Royalists had barricaded themselves inside Pakse, and the Pathet Lao and Vietminh had ruled the roost in the countryside. Pakse always proved to be a burning pot handle for any faction that tried to hold on to it. So police officers transferred from the north had invariably offended somebody in authority or had shown themselves to be unfit for employment anywhere else.

Tao emerged from his office wearing a police hat that was too small for his head and a leather jacket twice his size. He obviously hadn’t noticed how hot and clammy the day was. He strode past Siri and slapped him on the back.

“Come on, old fellow,” he said. “Where’s your car?”

“What car?”

Tao stopped and turned back with an angry look on his face. “They didn’t arrange your transport? I thought you were government.”

“I just work for them, like you.”

“All right. We can go on my bike but you’ll have to pay for the petrol.”

He marched through the large open frontage of the building and out to the dust bowl in front. He’d reached his motorcycle before he realized the Vientiane guy wasn’t following. Siri, smiling, was leaning on the counter.

The pudgy policeman called out, “Oy. Come on. They’re waiting for us. What are you, crippled or something?”

Siri took a small plastic jar of aniseed balls from his top pocket and slowly unscrewed the cap. Tao marched back inside already glossy with sweat. “What are you playing at?”

“Your name’s Tao, right?” Siri said, offering him a handful of aniseed, which was rejected.

“Yeah?”

“Well, Tao. You’re probably the type of man who believes he’s been sent to work in the worst place on the planet. Am I right?”

“I’ve got no time for this. What’s your point?”

“My point is, this is far from the worst place on the planet. There are much worse places than this. Even in Laos there are worse hellholes. There are postings so horrible, Pakse would seem like the Tiger Balm Pleasure Gardens by comparison. And not only do I know where those postings are, I can arrange for people to be sent there.”

“I don’t-”

“So here’s the deal, Officer Tao. I’m going to be here for a few days. While I’m in town, you’re going to call me ‘doctor’ or ‘comrade’ or even ‘sir,’ if you like. Because even though l don’t wear a uniform, I outrank you about twentyfold. When there is a need, you will ferry me around on your decrepit motorcycle without any extortion attempts. It is your duty and you receive a budget to do so. By showing me respect, you’ll see that I can be a very useful contact for you, Officer Tao. Do we understand each other yet?”

Tao looked over Siri’s shoulder to see whether the duty officer had been a witness to his dressing-down, but they were alone at the front desk. He seemed to weigh the offer in his mind, but it really wasn’t that difficult a decision to make.

“All right.”

“All right, what?”

“Doctor?”

“Very good. Shall we go?”

Once the roles were established, Officer Tao became a very jolly little man. He chatted amiably on their journey across town and made it clear to Siri that if there was anything he needed while he was in town, Tao was his man. It took only ten minutes to get to the deputy governor’s house behind the sports stadium. A Land Rover was parked in front, and a large man in a safari suit was sitting cross-legged on the porch.

“You’re honored,” Tao said. “The governor’s here to meet you himself.”

They pulled up beside a lemon ghost tree and Tao removed his hat respectfully. “Governor Comrade Katay, this is Dr. Siri from the Justice Department.”

If he hadn’t been told this was the governor, Siri would have mistaken the nervous-looking character for a janitor. When he stood, it was as if his suit were filled with crumpled newspaper rather than a body. He held out his hand to Siri, who shook it and smiled. There was no power in the governor’s handshake and no confidence in his voice.

“It is you,” the governor said. “I thought it might be. You don’t remember me, do you?”

Siri stared at the large man, trying to place him. If they’d met, it must have been long ago and… Then it came to him.

“The school at Tum Piu,” Siri said. “You taught-what was it? — Lao language?”

Yes, Siri remembered him, a nervous, paranoid teacher, suspecting this student or that of having rightist sympathies. He’d been fed well since those days but the tic below his eye had followed him from the northeast. Siri had been the resident surgeon in the Piu cave hospital, a place now renowned for a Nomad Fighter rocket attack that had cremated all the staff and patients. The school further down the valley had housed the children of the hospital staff and the surrounding villagers. Overnight it became an orphanage. In one of the many quirks of fate that had saved Siri’s life over the years, on the day of the attack he’d been called to Xam Neua to tend to the president.