Colin Cotterill - Disco for the Departed

Siri ran his hand around the back edges and corners inside the old wardrobe to find the hole or gap through which the bat had entered. Failing, he started again, more carefully this time, pushing at the wood to find a spot that might give way. He tapped the solid teak of the sturdy old structure and stood back, scratching his head. There was nothing. There was no possible way for the bat to have entered that closet. None at all. Of course, that made no sense. The key was in the hand of a man who’d been buried in cement five months ago. For the bat to have survived for that length of time, there would have to have been large amounts of food in there with it. Even if it had managed to eat all that food, it would have done an awful lot of shitting in five months. There was no sign, visual or olfactory, of that. Siri was flummoxed.

“All right,” he said aloud, his words bouncing around the inside of the cave. “Then there had to be another key in someone else’s possession. Whoever that was-and let’s, for argument’s sake, say it was Isandro-must have taken out whatever was in the cupboard and put a bat in its place. Perhaps it was an accident and he didn’t see the creature fly in. But why would he bother to relock an empty wardrobe?” Siri was no expert on the eating habits of bats. All he knew was that they tasted like duck and were very good for your health. But he assumed a bat could live no longer than two weeks without food or drink. That would suggest Isandro had still been in the cave for several months after his friend was killed.

He knew there were more holes in his hypothesis than there were pots in the Plain of Jars. But at least now he had one; it gave him something to work from. He spent the next half hour searching through the contents of the room. Everything was veiled in a shimmering layer of spiderwebs that reflected the torchlight like frost. There was one knapsack; small piles of clothing; a shaving and washing kit; some Spanish language books; candles; two Soviet-issue Makarov Pistolets, both unloaded; small packets of dried rations-tea, coffee, powdered milk; a tray of what had once been vegetables-now fossils; matches; and an old flashlight whose batteries had leaked and left a crusty white layer on everything around it.

If the sacrificial items had been removed from Kilometer 8, there was no sign of them in this room or anywhere in the president’s cave. If Odon had continued to practice black magic upon his return, he’d practiced it somewhere else.

Siri was surprised to find the passports of both men inside an old tin can standing on a makeshift shelf. With them were bundles of Lao kip rolled in rubber bands. They were beautifully printed with a broad-jawed, crew-cut king glaring defiantly, but, as a result of two devastating devaluations and a switch to the watery liberation kip, they presently had no value beyond the aesthetic.

Siri had seen enough and he was feeling claustrophobic. He went back to the side door and stepped into the glaring daylight. As his eyes became used to the dazzle, he looked down to see that his dark blue safari shirt and black trousers had picked up a thick layer of white dust. He was about to slap at himself to shake it off when he noticed the dust was moving. He scooped the side of his hand against his sleeve and looked more closely. He was surprised but not startled to find that he was covered from collar to cuff in tiny white spiders. As he’d cleared away their webs in order to search the room, the owners had one by one attached themselves to his clothing. He looked admiringly at himself-millions of tiny spiders reflected the sunlight like a slowly shifting Elvis Presley suit.

Siri arrived back at Guesthouse Number One to find Lit’s jeep parked out front. He wondered why it was that he was doing most of the work on this murder inquiry himself while the head of the security division made brief guest appearances and took a lot of notes. As he was climbing the front steps, an answer of sorts came to him. Lit, just as Santiago had suggested, was an administrator. He was faithful to the Party and was being promoted vertically-this month, head of security; next month, head of sanitation. It had very little to do with ability and everything to do with trust. He’d never been a policeman, had no investigative training, and didn’t have a clue how to handle this, his most serious high-profile crime. He had men under him who might have been competent police officers, but he couldn’t be seen relinquishing control over anything so important. So Siri was his solution.

“Dr. Siri, I didn’t think you’d ever return,” the chief said, rising from his seat to shake the doctor’s hand.

“Comrade Lit, you could have come by Kilometer 8 at any time. You knew where I was.”

“Didn’t want to disturb you all. I know how hectic it can get out there. Come to the dining room. I brought us some Vietnamese beer. I can’t wait to hear how our investigation’s going.”

The beer turned out to be a mistake. It was warm and slightly flat, and Siri knew from experience he’d have a thumping headache the following morning. But the debriefing was pleasant enough. Omitting only the encounter with the spirit of Odon and the bat, he told Lit everything exactly as it had happened-the altar, the sacrifices, the secret hideout in the president’s cave. Lit took notes and looked impressed. That seemed to be the sum total of his contribution. He’d had no luck locating Colonel Ha Hung’s family and hadn’t found anyone who’d seen the two Cubans returning from Hanoi. Siri wondered whether the man was actually trying.

One thing that had been niggling at Siri was why the powers-that-be would spend a lot of money constructing a nice pathway from the president’s house to his cave, as the cave was deserted and nobody had shown a moment’s interest in it since it fell vacant. Lit reminded him that this was a historic site like Lincoln’s cabin or Hitler’s bunker and that, in the not too distant future, large parties of tourists would be making pilgrimages to Vieng Xai to see where the proud and glorious republic had taken shape.

That reason satisfied Siri, although he had trouble imagining bus tours to Vieng Xai. They drank their beer from teacups, and Lit drove off into a mist that had arrived along with the night.

Now Siri found himself sitting on the veranda with a strong coffee. He missed the sound of the klooee playing its single tune. The upstairs guard was gone, the plywood partition disassembled, and the rooms empty. None of the staff seemed to know, or was prepared to say, where the royal family had been moved to, but he doubted he’d ever see them again. The kitchen people had gone to bed and made Siri promise to take his cup to his room when he retired. The cups, like the plates and cutlery, were numbered and had to be accounted for at the end of each month.

After two days at the busy hospital, he was enjoying the late-night peace of Vieng Xai. Despite having the makings of a city, it was still inhabited by country people who went to bed early and rose with the sun. He enjoyed the feeling of cold and a damp sky so low he felt he could stand on a chair and reach into it. He enjoyed the distant crowing of badly tuned cockerels and the barking of lemurs high on the karsts. He felt a marvelous peace. And then, as if the god of unhappiness had caught him enjoying himself, the blasted discotheque started up. It was no record player, no radio broadcast. The ground beneath him trembled from the bass. He heard youths whooping along to a chorus they didn’t know the words to.

He hadn’t yet had the opportunity to go to his room, so his bag with its flashlight was still beside him on the seat. Something urged him to go and see for himself-to follow the beat and see where it led. An echo in a valley littered with stone outcrops can be deceptive, but he guessed the sounds were coming from the direction of the military cave complex. It was about half a mile away, beyond the football field. He emptied the grounds of his coffee and put the cup in his bag. The walk would have proven difficult without the flashlight. There were no stars, no moon, and with all the guesthouse staff in bed, no lights from anywhere to guide his way. Only the throbbing of the ground beneath his feet and the increased volume of the music gave him direction. But something odd began to happen as he pursued the sound. He got rhythm.