Colin Cotterill - Anarchy and the Old Dogs

“Very well,” said Siri, knowing there was no time to introduce the couple to Daeng’s noodle stall. “You seen Uncle Civilai?”

“He’s still in his room, I imagine,” Dtui said. “He wasn’t hungry. I get the feeling last night’s session took its toll. He hasn’t been down all day.”

“I’ll go and bang on his door for half an hour.”

“I’m sure that’ll make him feel much better,” Dtui laughed. “Remind him we have to be at the airport at four thirty.”

“I will.”

Siri walked slowly up to the second floor and stopped in front of Civilai’s door to catch his breath. Pakse would be the death of him yet. He tried the handle. The door was unlocked. It creaked as he opened it and walked inside. Civilai was still sitting in the same chair, now facing the window. He was looking up at the bruised clouds that gave the room a shadowy evening feeling.

“Should I turn on the light?” Siri asked.

“The power’s off again,” Civilai said without turning. “We have a hydroelectric dam pumping out 150 megawatts of electricity and we still can’t keep the lights working. I imagine the man who pulls the lever is off at a seminar someplace.”

“The phone downstairs hardly works even when there is electricity,” Siri said. He sat in the other rattan chair and watched the same heavy clouds rapidly turn to charcoal. “That would have been annoying for you, considering all that contact you had to make with Vientiane.”

Civilai cast him a brief angry glance. “I’ve been waiting for this. Don’t play Inspector Maigret with me, Siri. Not with me.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? Tell me your next comment wasn’t going to be something like, ‘At least you kept in shape running back and forth to the post office to call your people.’’’

“It was going to be a little funnier, but, yes, something like that.”

“And then I say, ‘Right, I should have taken a room above the post office,’ and you jump to your feet and say, ‘Aha, got you.’ Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been everywhere that has long-distance phones, haven’t you? The radio station, the army?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“You already know.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“The only place that’s seen you is the Bureau de Poste and that was yesterday. You apparently made quite a few calls. The woman hadn’t seen you at all before that.”

“Which means?”

“It means a lot of things. It means you’ve been lying ever since we got here. You weren’t in touch with anybody at all. Yesterday you warned all your coup pals to get out of town. It means you’ve betrayed your country, betrayed me- betrayed us.”

“Betray is a relative term. In your case you could look at it as protection. Does that make it feel any better, little brother? What you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you. How’s that?”

Siri laughed. “Protection? How nice of you. You give yourself a vacation on the strength of my forging you a health certificate. You pretend you’re coordinating some huge undercover counterrevolution and all the time you’re-what? — hiding. You’re biding your time and making sure l didn’t stir up any trouble for your coup mongers. Who exactly do you believe you were protecting me from?”

“From your eternal worst enemy.”

Siri got to his feet and stood between Civilai and his cloud gazing.

“No, this is no time to be condescending. We both know you weren’t here for my benefit. Damn it, you even got to me. You made me feel ashamed that I was interfering with your ‘official’ work. All the time I’ve been interpreting your moods as the result of things I’d done wrong. Hell, I even apologized. But I had nothing at all to do with your being a pain in the arse. It was all your doing. What on earth were you thinking?”

He waited for a response but Civilai still hadn’t looked him directly in the eye. Siri raised his voice. “That wasn’t intended as a rhetorical question. I really do need to know what the hell you were thinking.” Civilai remained silent.

“Damn it. After all the years we’ve known each other, you think you can do something like this?”

At last, Civilai’s eyes connected with Siri’s. But they were wet, vacuous eyes like those of a fish staring from a bowl.

“Marvelous,” he said. “So you really do have all the pieces. I had a feeling you’d work it out sooner or later.”

“Yes, I have all the bloody pieces. I wouldn’t have even considered this discussion unless I was absolutely certain you’d lost your old fool mind. I sat at Daeng’s going over things. There were too many questions that didn’t seem to fold neady into how this crisis was resolved. I wondered how you could possibly have been in touch with Vientiane if the hotel phone didn’t operate long distance. I wondered why you didn’t consider contacting the Vietnamese. You’d said something about not wanting them to have more control over us than they already did. But of all the players in this, they were the ones with a vested interest in keeping the Thais out. It was a last resort but I calculated we’d reached that stage already.”

“So it was you who alerted them?”

“Too true, it was me.”

“You couldn’t stop your meddling, could you? Despite everything I said.”

“My meddling might just have saved a lot more unnecessary bloodshed.”

“My hero.”

“Then I went over the note again. There was still one part that didn’t make sense to me. Daeng suggested I go to see an old Frenchman who lives here. He spent much of his life as a linguist. He interpreted for the colonists, then married a Lao lass, and settled down. He gave me a brief lesson in transcription.”

“Spare me.”

“Not on your life. I have a lot of ammunition and nobody else to shoot. Suffer it! We Lao don’t get many opportunities to see our names in Roman script. The Frenchman told me that most Civilais who work for foreigners or study overseas would spell their name with an S. He believes only those who wanted to make a statement about being civilized or a servant of civilization would spell it as you do.”

“Far too deep, brother. The school administrators saddled me with it before they shipped me off to Paris. I couldn’t do a thing about it.”

“Whatever you say. But either way the Frenchman was confident that in certain circumstances-for example, if an American-educated Lao transcribed a Lao name into English-your initials might very well be SS.”

“Can we stop yet?”

“Dtui had thrown us all with her translation of 2PM. She’d guessed it was a time reference so we all but stopped looking at it. The Frenchman pointed out that “PM” could just as well refer to prime minister. Prime minister number two. You were about to become the deputy prime minister in an illegitimate government.”

“And?”

“And I’m back to my original question. What were you thinking? And more important, why did you even begin to think about getting involved without consulting me? I’m your closest friend, goddamn it. I could have talked some sense into you. What was it, blackmail? Did they threaten your family?”

Civilai closed his watery eyes and rested his head back on the chair.

“No.”

“Then what hold did they have over you?”

“What is it we do when we’re together, Siri?”

“I give up.”

“How do we entertain ourselves during our long drunken bouts of clarity?”

“I…”

“I’ll tell you. Eighty percent of our topic of conversation is about the inadequacy of our government, the government we fought for thirty years to install.”

“It’s not-”

“The government that should have learned from the mistakes of all the fools who ran the country before it. Instead, we’ve just given a new twist to inefficiency, made it more creative. We are a socialist administration and socialism is the building, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the material base for communism. You had to memorize that, too, remember? Well, I don’t see myself under the dictatorship of any proletariat. The people are suffering no less than they always were.”