Colin Cotterill - Disco for the Departed

“What?”

“I wonder if we’re not seeing what we’ve been told to see.”

“What should we do?”

“We could go back to Vientiane, tell everyone Inspector Maigret and his faithful lieutenant have solved yet another dastardly crime, and know deep down that we haven’t…”

“I like the second alternative.”

“I thought you might.”

Dr. Sounsak, the young physician who had purportedly aborted the monkey’s fetus from the Vietnamese maid, was one of the few Lao involved in the shady dealings of the Cubans. Although Dr. Sounsak had since been transferred to a hospital in Savanaketh province, Miss Bong, the lady he’d been dating at the time, was still living in the village at Kilometer 8. This gossip had been provided enthusiastically by the kitchen staff at the guesthouse.

Siri and Dtui had put together a hypothesis-an alternative scenario for the mysterious events in Huaphan the previous year. Working along this shadow plotline, they were going back over events, reexamining issues. Miss Bong was a sturdy, sunburned woman with a back already crooked from a lifetime of stooping in paddy fields. They found her planting young rice shoots, apparently too busy to stop her work to talk. This was obviously a subject she wasn’t particularly happy to discuss.

Dtui wasn’t too happy either. “Is this field safe to walk around in?” she asked.

“No safer than any other, auntie,” Miss Bong told her. Dtui was prematurely exploded by the reply. Her pieces flew in a million directions. “Auntie?” The woman was a good ten years older than she. Had she aged that much over the past week? But once she’d collected her parts into a semblance of decorum, she noticed neither Siri nor the woman had spotted her detonation. It was a wound she’d have to bear alone.

“Couldn’t you stop for a moment and talk to us?” Siri was saying. “I’m getting a stiff neck.”

“We have to get these in before the big rains come,” Miss Bong said. “Can’t be wasting my time with idle chat.” It was clear she hoped her rudeness would make the city folk leave her alone.

“All right.” Siri sat on the bank of the field. “Then tell us about Comrade Sounsak.”

“Nothing to tell.”

“You were going out with him when-”

“We were engaged,” she interrupted.

“Sorry. You were engaged to Comrade Sounsak at the time he had a strange and rather disheartening experience at the hospital.”

“Yeah? What was that then?”

“Something involving the fetus of a monkey?”

She looked at Siri the way you would a lizard attempting to open a can of corned beef. “Eh?”

“He didn’t tell you about it?”

“We didn’t talk a lot about monkeys.”

“About a pregnant Vietnamese woman who produced a stillborn ape? He didn’t mention that to you?”

The woman looked at Dtui. “Is your granddad all right?”

Dtui sighed, then spoke slowly to her because she obviously wasn’t very bright. “There was a Vietnamese housekeeper,” she said. “She used to cook for the engineers working on the hospital here.” The woman began to positively punch the poor little shoots into the mud. “Did you know her?”

Siri saw that the woman’s body answered yes. “What can you tell us about her?”

Comrade Sounsak’s erstwhile fiancйe stopped her work and lifted her head to the intruders. “What can I tell you? What can I not tell you? I can tell you she was a whore, and a gobbler-upper of other women’s men, and a devil. Is that enough for you?”

Siri cast a look at Dtui that suggested the next question would be better coming from her. She picked up on it.

“What did the bitch do to you, sweetie?” she asked.

Miss Bong turned her back on Siri and directed her venomous eyes at Dtui. “She preyed on them-men who were in happy, loving relationships. She flashed her well-used Vietnamese titties at them and swished her squashy hips and lured our men away.”

“The whore,” Dtui agreed. “And your man…?”

“Was swept away like the rest of ‘em. And when she fell pregnant, what fool was it dumb enough to front up and take responsibility for being the father? She was the inkwell on the paymaster’s desk. Every man in the village had dipped his pen there at the end of the month, but my stupid Sounsak was the only one to own up.”

“And?”

“And she had it. He even birthed it himself.”

“And it survived?” Siri asked.

“I wish it hadn’t.”

“What happened to them?”

“Ran off that same night. Acting like they were in love or something. Never saw him again.” Her eyes were starting to dampen.

“That’s terrible,” Siri nodded, although his expression was more one of fascination. “Did you ever hear anything about the woman and the two black Cubans?”

“Oh, yes. She had a special grievance against those two.”

“She didn’t like blacks?”

“She would have done, given a chance. They were the only two with enough sense to leave the devil alone. She tried all her tricks, but she couldn’t get those two boys into her bed. We heard her boasting that it wouldn’t be long before she got that big one between her legs. Then, when her sex wiggles didn’t work on him, she tried the little one, but he wasn’t having none of her either. So she went around telling everyone they was-you know-together.”

“That’s the kind of thing she was saying?” Siri asked.

“She was the sort that couldn’t believe a man could resist her if he was a real man.”

As they drove back to the guesthouse, Dtui looked at her boss. He had a glazed look on his face that she’d seen a few times before. “So, do we now have a complete understanding of what happened?” she asked.

“We’re getting there, dear nurse.”

“She could have been lying.”

“Possible.”

“Or her fiancй didn’t tell her what really happened up there. He could have been trying to protect her.”

“That’s possible, too. But there’s one more possibility that I want to ride with.”

“Good, I’ll eventually work it all out, too, once I get over the trauma of suddenly becoming middle-aged. What’s next?”

“Sleep. We should turn in for the night. I have several phone calls to make to Vientiane, then I’m hoping for a dream or two. I’m sure your fiancй has given up waiting for us tonight. In the morning, we’ll go for a little drive. If everything works out the way I hope, things should make themselves crystal clear before the end of the day. I think we could even stick around for the concert the following evening without feeling too guilty about leaving our Mr. Geung alone in the morgue all this time. I bet the poor chap’s bored out of his mind.”

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

“Civilai?”

“Yes. Who’s that?”

“The empress dowager of China.”

“Siri? Is that you? Awful line. God, you sound like you’re standing in a tub of lard.”

“Yes. It’s my new hobby. Have you missed me?”

“Have you gone somewhere?”

“I’m in Huaphan.”

“Really? I’m off there myself, for the concert.”

“I hope they aren’t letting you sing.”

“No, I’ll just be doing my exotic dance. You know, the one with the feathers?”

“I’ll make sure not to eat anything greasy before it starts. Look, I need a favor.”

“You surprise me.”

“Do you have anyone there who can speak Spanish?”

“Yes. Why?”

“What time is it in Cuba?”

The crow and the sparrow lay in the paddy mud, barely breathing. Their eyes were glazed. Two men knelt over them: the teacher and the acolyte. Behind them stood an elderly couple, darker than the night around them. The woman put her hand on the young man’s shoulder and told him to go ahead. The teacher nodded and the dark-skinned novice took the birds gently in his hands and held them together as if in a prayer. He pressed his palms together, softly at first, then, as the birds became one, he clasped his fingers shut and squeezed till a slither of smoke escaped from his grasp and wafted upward. He opened his palms, and the birds, and the old couple, and the teacher were gone. But the novice remained. He smiled at the observer of this dream, and slowly, without the aid of language, set about explaining to Siri what he had just witnessed. Before the morning sun rose, the old doctor understood everything.