Colin Cotterill - The Merry Misogynist

The following year, amid the political upheaval, and with the Royalists scurrying across the Mekhong, the Miss Sangkhan beauty pageant had been cancelled. "Next year," she was told. "Next year everything will return to normal, and your daughter will take the Miss Sangkhan crown." But in some stuffy socialist meeting, a decision was made that beauty competitions were one more vestige of the decadent society the Party was trying to sweep out. The shows insulted women. They were cattle markets. They were demeaning. And so, all beauty pageants were banned immediately.

Ngam had reached her peak at sixteen. Few winners of the Miss Sangkhan crown had been older than seventeen. She was aging rapidly, and there was no indication that the Pathet Lao would change its mind. The world of Mongaew and her family had come crashing down. But there was hope that their daughter's beauty might still rescue them from poverty. In desperation, Mongaew started taking her girl to night-time wedding receptions in the district. Some evenings they'd walk for two hours to the house of the happy couple. Mongaew had decided that if Ngam was not to be the star she deserved to be, at least she would be married to a local man with influence. Perhaps the son of a cadre.

And one night, her revised prayer was answered. The man from Vientiane was so dashing. He was supervising a road project, staying with the headman, well mannered with a wonderful sense of humour. He was groomed and polite, and he had a truck, of all things. Mongaew fell in love with him at first sight. And, it was evident to everybody in attendance that night that the visitor had an eye for Ngam. Things seemed to happen so fast from there on. It was like a fairy tale played at three times its normal speed: an engagement, love letters from the capital, a brief return visit, a reception and, in the blink of an eye, their daughter was gone. All Mongaew had to do now was sit and wait for the cheques to arrive. But all she got was a coroner from Mahosot and news that her precious daughter was dead.

As Siri rode along the dirt highway, he couldn't get the thought of the charming stranger out of his head. Phan, the nickname of a hundred thousand: Sisouphan, Thongphan, Bouaphan, Houmphan, all whittled down to Phan. No address, no family name, no photographs. He came. He saw. He destroyed. Already Siri had the antagonist taped to the dartboard of his mind. At last, somebody to blame. Someone to hate. A small lead in the case. A family to claim a lost body. A very successful day, but not a happy one.

"You're late," Daeng told the cinnamon-coated man who'd arrived at her shop after dark. There was a bright flash from the vegetation across the street. They both looked up in time to see a man with an old-fashioned camera turn and run down the riverbank.

"I think someone just took a candid photograph of us," said Daeng.

"Pasason Lao newspaper doing a photographic feature on celebrity couples in Vientiane, I wouldn't wonder." Siri smiled.

"You're sure it wasn't the Department of Housing?"

"No, they're such nice people. Why would they go to so much trouble?" They walked hand in hand into the closed shop. "What time is it?"

"Nine."

"Too late for a palace hunt?"

"It's up to you. You look exhausted."

"You can't see how I look. I have a two-centimetre-thick layer of grime on me. A quick bath and I'll be fine. I could use some excitement."

"Have you eaten?"

"I wouldn't say no to a number two. I hope you sold enough noodles this week to pay for the cost of today's petrol."

"Can't you claim it on your expense account?"

"I'm a coroner playing policeman. Who's going to pay for that? Phosy was uncontactable in the north, so I took it upon myself. Nobody rewards individual initiative in this regime."

"Don't worry, my love. I'll support your intrigues even if I have to resort to selling my body." She kissed his dusty cheek. "As long as you tell me exactly what happened today, in gory detail."

"Accompany me to the bath, Madame Daeng, and I'll disclose everything."

The map was beautifully illustrated like a wayward doodle, but its intricacy made it hard to follow. The river was easy enough to identify as it was a long chain of tiny smiling fishes. The outline of Nam Poo Fountain was the easternmost point. The Kokpho turn-off, which ultimately led to the airport, was marked with an aeroplane. Daeng drove them about four hundred metres beyond the intersection and parked. There were still patches of forest on this stretch of the river, and it felt so remote it seemed impossible that there was a city just half a kilometre away.

"All right," Siri said, holding his torch up to the map. "There's something that looks like a snake drinking from the river."

"Hmm. You'd expect snakes to change location from time to time, unless it's a dead one."

"Or unless it's a pipe. Perhaps it's not drinking at all."

"An overflow?"

"It could be."

Siri waded through the tall lemongrass to the river's edge and waved his light up and downstream. There was no obvious plumbing. He was about to return to the road when he felt some kind of mound beneath his feet. It was more solid than the crunchy clay all around. He traced its path with his foot until he arrived at the mouth of a pipe.

"Any luck?" Daeng called out.

"More like divine inspiration. I was right on top of it. I'm at the serpent's jaws."

"Is it wide enough to crawl through?"

"Perhaps for an Indian fakir. Not for two old souls like us."

He returned to the bike and looked at the map once more.

"Then it's easy," said Daeng. "We follow the pipe at surface level."

They shone their lights across the road in the direction from which the pipe originated. There was nothing but bush. It was a long vacant lot between two empty houses. It seemed to be crammed with all the remaining monsoon forest in the country.

"How do we get through that?" Siri asked.

"Determination," Daeng replied and produced a frightening machete from her shoulder bag. She crossed the road and shone her beam along the green barricade. Siri joined her. "Right, down there," she said.

She had picked out a low, dark tunnel of leaves that looked like a small animal track.

"That would involve crawling," Siri pointed out.

Daeng was already on her hands and knees hacking at the leaves.

"I'll go first and let you look at my bottom," she said.

"Aha, lead on, my Amazon."

The slow, bestial crawling lasted no longer than five minutes before they arrived at a clearing. This was no accident of nature. The clearing was a perfect square, twelve by twelve metres, probably levelled for a building project then abandoned. At its centre, just as the map promised, was Crazy Rajid's palace. In the illustration it had all the splendour of the Taj Mahal with domes and minarets and a platoon of guards. In the real world it was a structure made entirely of old television sets. They were piled six high in one continuous square with no apparent entry point. They appeared to be cemented together with river mud. The turrets were formed of radiograms spaced along the parapet. Siri and Daeng stood behind their torches in awe of its weirdness.

"Now how do you suppose he did that?" Daeng asked.

Siri shook his head and laughed. "Offhand I see three possibilities. One, the TVs were already abandoned here and he just rearranged them into a palace. Two, they were dumped in the river by the consumerist Thais and washed up by the overflow. Or, three, he just rescued dead and dying TV sets from around the town and carried them here. Whichever it is, it's good to see he hasn't been wasting his time for the past ten years."

They walked around the outside of the structure to see if there was a way in. There was not.

"You don't suppose he's inside there, do you?" Daeng asked.