Colin Cotterill - Disco for the Departed

Although the monkey fetus story had been secondhand and, to some extent, conjecture, the doctor had seen this bizarre manifestation for himself. Soon after, Santiago discovered the altar, confronted Isandro and Odon, and insisted they return to Cuba.

Siri had asked why, if the two men were so powerful, Santiago hadn’t been afraid of retribution. The Cuban had smiled broadly and had slowly begun to unbutton his shirt. Siri and Dtui were astounded by what they saw. A necklace of talismans hung like a mayoral chain of office against his undershirt. This esteemed man of science was adorned with a lei of talismans, dried flowers, nuggets of metal, miscellaneous teeth, and carefully placed knots. It was a wonder he could stand upright under its weight. Siri’s single white amulet paled by comparison. Santiago admitted openly his fear of the two Endoke priests Siri felt oddly comforted that he wasn’t the only man of learning forced to use magic to stay alive.

In his room, Siri began to undress before heading down to the shower. Since his experience at the altar he had felt peculiar. Strange desires were welling up in him. Normally, he spent as little time out of his clothes as he could, but today he felt an odd hankering to look at himself in the closet mirror. This was something he’d avoided doing for a number of years. He was no oil painting. They wouldn’t ever cast a statue of him. But for some reason he felt a surge of pride as he looked at his solid frame. If he dyed his hair he could pass for, what-sixty? Fifty-five? He was strong, virile even. Today, for some reason, he believed he could break rocks with his bare fists, rip the husks off coconuts with his fingers.

He let his gray PL-issue undershorts drop to the floor, and he strode up and down the room, straight backed and buck naked. He let his penis swing from side to side, flexed his biceps, bared his teeth at…

“Can I get you some more tea?” The kitchen lady was standing in the doorway. He hadn’t heard the door open. In her hand she held a fresh thermos. She looked at him sadly as if he were a dementia victim who had lost track of his trousers. “Are you all right, uncle?”

Siri grabbed the quilt from the spare bed and wrapped it around himself. “I’m fine. Thank you.”

An hour later, respectably dressed now but no less embarrassed, he was back at the president’s house. Once more he was standing over the dissected mummy. He’d never revisited a body so many times, but this particular victim kept changing personality the more Siri learned about him. Two things still worried Siri. If the two Cubans had been sent home, what had Odon been doing back at the president’s cave a month later? And if he was being violently beaten and held under cement, what possessed him to hang on to a key? Surely he would have wished to use both hands to defend himself.

Siri fished the key from his pocket and went out onto the balcony of the new house. First he enjoyed the splendid view across the valley. Then he went to the back of the building and strained his neck to look at the very top of the karst cliff. It was from there the boulder had fallen that had led to the discovery of the body. Odd that it should land exactly where it did ten days before the concert. He went to the start of the pathway that led up to the old cave. The broken sections and the boulder were halfway between the house and the cave entrance. What were you doing there, se с or? he wondered.

Once the former cave dwellers’ houses had been completed and all their documents and personal belongings moved into them, there had been no reason, none at all, for the senior cadres to go back into the caves. Such a visit would have been no more likely that the Count of Monte Cristo popping back to the Chвteau d’If to reminisce over the happy times he’d spent there. So the caves were locked to keep out animals and preserve what someday might become historic sites for tourists. What better place? Siri realized. What more unlikely hideout could there be than the vacated caves of the president himself?

He walked up the concrete path, around the removed section, then onto the path again, which brought him to the front door. There was an actual door in a rectangular frame set back from the rock face. Siri had a delightful sense of the absurd, so he visualized ringing a bell, peeking through a mail slot, and wiping his feet on a donkey-hair doormat. But the door was barred and locked, and it would have taken a small brigade of very persistent firemen to break through it. He walked around the rocks to the right of the door heading upward but quickly came to a dead end. He passed the door again heading south, rounded a small outcrop, and came to what must have been a back door.

At first glance, this, too, seemed locked and barred. The cursory inspection of a night watchman would have ascertained as much. But Siri stepped up to the door and looked at the wooden planks that were nailed across it. A thick metal chain with a padlock was wound around two links connecting the door to the frame. It looked impenetrable. He stood back and stared at it like a puzzle. Once he’d taken in the whole scene, he smiled. Before him, he knew, was an optical illusion. He took hold of the handle and tugged at it. The door, complete with its nailed planks and its frame and its metal chain, swung open on oiled hinges.

Before going inside, Siri reached into his cloth bag for his flashlight. He paused briefly to admire the brilliance of the faux-locked door, then let it shut silently behind him. PL caves were part natural, part sculpted. Where alcoves didn’t exist, rooms were constructed of plywood to give the feeling of a rather claustrophobic motel. Each cave had an airtight room with a pump and fallout-shelter doors in case of chemical weapon attacks. For some reason, perhaps because the Americans really didn’t know they were there, the Pathet Lao in their Vieng Xai caves had escaped such vulgar onslaughts.

He followed his flashlight beam through the Stone Age apartment. He’d only visited it once before when one of the president’s sons had been ill. It had been more homey then. There had been pictures and carpets and ornaments. With the generator lights and a good imagination you could have been in a bungalow on the Black Sea. Now, it was just a cave. Siri opened the last door off the old meeting room, expecting to find it just as empty as all the others, but the door nudged something. He shone his light inside and took a look. It was crammed with all kinds of ill-matching objects like a jackdaw’s cache.

Somehow he knew. This was where Odon had stayed after his return from Hanoi. Siri imagined him holed up here under the noses of the LPLA. The stone grate in the corner, directly under the air vent, still had a sooty black pot standing on it. The long straw nest must have been his bed. A green plastic pail with a broken handle still contained drinking water, and, standing against the wall, was the only piece of furniture in the entire place: a tall wooden wardrobe. Even before he approached it and tried the door, he knew it would be locked and that the key in his hand would open it. Even so, he tugged at the handle first and thought he heard a sound from inside. The key turned easily in the lock and he pulled open the door. Although it appeared empty at first glance, something fled past his ear from out of the darkness. He was too slow to catch it in the beam of his light but he sensed rather than heard the soft flapping of wings. He assumed it was a bat but it was already out of the room. He looked into the closet again-a simple rectangle with a shelf at the top and a rail for hangers. That was it- no clothes, nothing. There wasn’t even a mirror on the inside of the door. He wondered why a man would lock an empty cupboard and hang on to the key even when he was under attack. Even when he knew his life was about to end.