Colin Cotterill - Disco for the Departed

The incubation period for the disease is five to seven days. A little after that, you’ll know whether the strain is one that will make you violently ill but not kill you, or whether you’ve contracted the bleeding fever, which will usually finish you off painfully but quickly. Even in the absence of the rains, tens of thousands of lives had been claimed by the wicked daytime blood thieves in a single year. This year’s epidemic originated in the north of Vientiane province, probably in the area around the dam.

Geung slapped at his arm a fraction of a second too late. He picked his attacker from his skin. She was a tiny thing, black-and-white-striped and bloody. He wondered how such a small thing could bleed so much.

People had been incredibly kind to the odd man who passed through village after village on his long march down the western shore of the reservoir. Before the days of political deception and fragmentation, this had always been the Lao way. If a stranger came to your house, you would offer him what you had to help him on his way. Even families with barely enough food for their own children would break off some of their sticky rice and prepare a separate bowl of spicy vegetable sauce for a visitor. There had always been trust and respect.

In the large cities, that feeling was all but gone. But in the small villages, the elders still held out hope that Laoness wouldn’t be destroyed by politics. They fed Geung, gave him balm for his skin, dressed his blisters, and offered him a bed for the night. They had to shout loudly now to be heard because all sounds had become an underwater buzz to him. Although they all tried, no one could dissuade him from his foolish desire to complete his walk to the capital. They yelled, “Good luck” and watched him limp his way south. Everyone doubted he’d live long enough to complete the trip.

Mr. Geung was getting a bad, bad feeling, too. He’d walked more than he ever had in his life. Already he could feel his strength draining away. He couldn’t count how many daybreaks he’d woken to or how many flat footsteps he’d trodden. Strange things had begun to happen in his head. He felt sure he was becoming a moth. The only thing in his mind was the electric lightbulb of Vientiane. It dazzled him, casting his actual surroundings into a fog, and filled his head so completely he often didn’t know where he was or who he was talking to. Every woman he met, he called Dtui. Every man he addressed as Comrade Doctor.

Siri and Dtui sat silently on the concrete path not far from the broken slabs. The “evidence” continued to sleep off the trauma she had undergone beneath the watchful eyes of the guesthouse maid. There was no sun and the sky promised a depressing period of rain-not a good old central plains monsoon, but a slow, drizzly rain that could soak into a man’s mind and dampen his mood. A line of red ants had found Siri on their proposed parade route. Before heading back in the direction from which they’d come, each ant stepped forward to take a look at the doctor like visitors at a mausoleum.

“Perhaps we’re looking in the wrong places,” Dtui said at last. Siri had taken her to see the Cuban hideout and the eerie altar room. They’d found no new clues at either.

“Or not looking in enough right places. I feel perhaps we aren’t talking to the right people.”

“You’re right. Let’s start talking,” Dtui agreed.

“Any suggestion as to where we might start?”

“Right here under our backsides.” Siri raised an eyebrow. “Look at all this concrete. How long do you suppose it took to build this path?”

“A couple of men? One or two weeks.”

“And the Cubans were right here in the cave behind them all that time? Don’t you wonder if they might have seen something?”

“Excellent. Yes, indeed. That’s the kind of… concrete thinking that will get you to the Eastern Bloc.”

“Doc…”

“I’m sorry.”

The guesthouse truck arrived in Xam Neua an hour later. Tracing the contractors had been comparatively simple. One main team did most of the cement work on government projects. They were presently working on the new police station down by the bridge. The foreman of the team was an old soldier whom Siri knew from several campaigns. The cement layer’s name was Bui, and he had the type of face and build that doesn’t undergo any drastic changes between sixteen and sixty. In Laos, the odds of bumping into people one knew were far from astronomical. In fact, it happened all the time. Dtui was impressed that, excluding high-ranking bureaucrats, everyone was truly delighted to be reunited with their old friend Dr. Siri.

They sat together on the newly dried concrete floor of a room that would soon house a police lieutenant. Bui wished he had whisky to welcome the doctor, but they had to settle for warmish water that smelled vaguely of paint thinner. Once they’d caught up with one another’s news, Siri told the old man why he was in the northeast and asked whether Bui might have any information that could help them. He never expected the response that he got. Dtui’s instincts had, as they say, hit the water buffalo right in the balls.

As they sipped their water, a light drizzle floated down from the clouds, and Bui told them the story of what had happened one day in January.

“It was a Tuesday if I remember rightly,” he began. “The reason I know that is because the president’s footpath was the last one we did and some inspector was due in on the Wednesday flight to check that we’d got it all done. There were only two flights a week then. Well, we were only just on schedule. We found ourselves working late into Tuesday evening to get it done. So it turned out we were walking back down to our huts in the dark.

“There were three of us and we were all tuckered out, looking forward to a good meal and our beds. We’d just got to the football field. As usual, there was a mist, one of those that makes you shudder just walking through it. That was when we saw them.”

“The Cubans?” Siri asked.

“And the girl.”

“Hong Lan? The Vietnamese?”

“Can’t be sure it was her, but we’d all heard the stories about black magic and the kidnapping and all. The bigger of the two, he had the girl in his arms, you know? The way you carry an old person. She looked drugged.”

“Or dead?” Dtui asked.

“Could have been. Her arms were dangling down, and her head was hanging. They walked out of the mist about thirty yards ahead of us. Me and the boys froze. It was like something out of one of them Hong Kong ghost films. The big guy was in front with the girl, walking slow. About five paces back was the little one, and he had this knife, more like a sword, really. Whatever it was, it looked like it could do a lot of damage.”

“Did they see you?”

“If they did, they didn’t let on. But, to tell the truth, it was as if they couldn’t see much of anything-like they were in a trance.”

“Where were they heading?” Siri asked. “Straight for the military complex.”

“The concert hall cave?”

“In that direction. So we waited till they were gone, long gone, before we said anything. Even then we whispered. Sound carries on the mist. We got into a huddle and decided what we ought to do. We knew the Vietnamese had been looking for the girl, but the mother had left already-gone back to Hanoi, I heard. So one of the boys rode his bicycle over to the army post-the one that used to be up at the Xam Neua intersection. You remember it?”

“It was still there? I thought all the Vietminh pulled out at the end of ‘75.”

The old soldier laughed but didn’t bother to explain away that particular piece of PL trickery.

“And what happened?” Dtui asked.

“Well, that was it.”