Colin Cotterill - The Woman Who Wouldn't die

‘Frenchmen?’ Siri asked.

‘Ah, there’s one with the gift,’ said the old lady.

‘Well, here’s one without,’ said Civilai. ‘What are we talking about here?’

‘Everyone in these parts knows the story,’ said the fat man. ‘It was the year of our Lord Buddha 2543 …’

‘Of course, it would be,’ said Civilai. ‘Better known as 1910.’

‘You can’t get reliable intelligence these days,’ said Siri.

‘The French bastards convinced the King of Luang Prabang that he should lend them his crown jewels for some world fair over in Europe somewhere,’ said the fat man. ‘In fact it seems pretty damned obvious that they were stealing them. But, what can you do when you’ve got a dozen muskets pointed at your head? They loaded it on a French gunboat called La Grandiere , guarded by six French soldiers, and they set off downriver to Vientiane. But that treasure was cursed. They say a whirlpool surged up out of that deep water and swallowed the boat down in a spot they now call Frenchy’s Elbow. Drowned, all of ’em. In the early days you could see the hull from the bank. Locals passing it on the river would swing by to take a look. They might dive down to see if there was anything to salvage. But every one of them that tried suffered personal or family ills straight after. Deaths or sickness or crop failure. They say one boy got all the way down there into the cabin. It was dark and he was feeling around and his hand fell on the face of a man. He fought the urge to flee and took the man’s hand. He helped himself to a ring. Perhaps that was what triggered the curse. ’Cause when he first dived down there he was just a lad, but when he surfaced with the ring in his hand, he was a grey-haired old man. That was the last time anyone went down there.’

‘And he had a unicorn horn sticking out of his back,’ whispered Daeng to her husband. She too had noticed their upriver floatation.

‘You not buying any of this?’ Siri asked her.

‘The Curse of Frenchy’s Elbow? Come on, Siri. Everyone living near water goes nutty eventually. Loch Ness monsters and Sirens and Great Nagas. It’s a symptom of water vapour inhalation.’

Civilai crawled back to join them.

‘Have you noticed we’re floating against the current?’ he said.

Siri ignored him.

‘What about my dreams?’ said Siri. ‘The naked Frenchmen. You don’t think there could be a boat laden with the crown jewels of Laos down there?’

‘Whether there is or there isn’t,’ said Daeng, ‘some silly curse isn’t going to stop that unit of engineers from digging it out. But I’ll tell you one thing. If there is treasure down there it all makes a lot more sense than a search for a minister’s dead brother. A lot of effort has gone into organizing this and we can’t leave it up to your spirit friends to stop them shipping our treasure off to Thailand.’

‘Irrespective of the fact our old kings pilfered it from some other old kings in the first place?’ said Civilai.

‘It belongs — through the statute of limitations on the possession of regal booty — to Laos,’ she told him.

‘You just made that up,’ said Civilai. ‘It’s extortion paid by vassal states to a tyrant. At the worst they’re stolen goods.’

‘And they’re our stolen goods and I’m not handing them over to the Vietnamese without a fight. Siri?’

‘Yes, my love?’

‘What are you grinning about?’

‘It’s not a grin. It’s a smile of admiration. There’s nothing “used to be” about you. The fire never burned out. You’re as much in love with Laos as you were back then.’

‘And you, old man?’ she said. ‘Are you tired of fighting for this nation of lotus eaters?’

‘Never.’

‘Then let’s not invest all our faith in this stupid curse. Let’s put together a plan B.’

‘I think a plan B might involve a lot of sleeping under trees,’ said Civilai. ‘Digging a boat out of sixty-eight years of silt is no easy matter.’

Like the north-easterly monsoons and feather-duster salesmen, Inspector Phosy was relentless. If something was blocking his path he would chip a way into it until a breakthrough could be made. There were two large rocks currently sitting in front of him and he hadn’t made much of an impression on either of them. The Housing Department had confirmed that Comrade Koomki was missing. The inspector had collected a good deal of evidence that Dr Siri was a mortal enemy of the Housing Allocations head but nothing at all to tie the deceased to the Frenchman. One more setback was that Sergeant Sihot was stuck in a clinic in Xanakham with chronic diarrhoea. He didn’t make it to Pak Lai.

Phosy had also heard back from Vietnam. The reply came via their Intelligence Unit. They had a sprawling complex behind their embassy but seemed to operate independently. Nobody knew what intelligence was being gathered there or why they’d been allowed to set it up in the first place. Phosy recalled that Civilai had lobbied without success to have it shut down.

One result of the recent agreement of friendship and cooperation signed with Hanoi was that the Vietnamese were reluctantly obliged to be friendly and cooperative. This extended to a relationship between law enforcers in both countries. The fax he held in his hand was a perfect example of ‘minimum cooperation’:

Madame Saigna Peung, a Lao citizen, was in possession of a multiple laissez-passer to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. In the past twelve months she has made eight visits. Her papers were cleared each time at Hanoi International Airport. Before this last trip the average time of her stay was three days. Her last recorded visit was in July 1978 and she was in the country for eighteen days.

Madame Saigna Peung had dealings with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam trade office and was involved in importing goods to Vietnam. There is no record of appointments after the third day of this most recent trip. No more information is available.

Signed, Dac Kien. Hanoi Police and International Cooperation and Friendship Representative.

‘No more information is being released, more like it,’ thought Phosy as he walked up the hill to Madame Peung’s luxury house with a view. And what was she doing there for such a long time on this last trip? He doubted she wouldn’t have been followed at least some of that time. It was the socialist way. Surely she hadn’t just disappeared. Phosy had said his hellos in the village, told them he’d be interviewing them individually later, but declined company to visit the house. His first action was to sit in the wooden recliner on the veranda looking down at the village and across the fields to the mountains of Ban Elee. Marx had said, ‘The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.’ Phosy felt the rich on his back as he sat there in front of the big house. What happened to the even distribution of wealth they’d crooned about at the seminars?

But this was not his concern today. He stood and asked the building what had happened on those two weird nights of August. There was no evidence of a break-in at the front door. In fact, you’d probably have needed an armoured car to get through it as the iron latch on the inside had apparently been welded together by a team of swarthy blacksmiths. The rear door had the same impressive apparatus. The windows were all barred. The widow was clearly afraid of losing her money. But there was no evidence anywhere of a forced break-in. He thought about the live-in girl. Whether she might have opened the door for her boyfriend and made up the whole story about being asleep when it happened. On his way to Ban Elee, Phosy had stopped off at the district administration office. He knew a young girl with no travel papers wouldn’t be very far from her residence. In fact she was still registered in her grandmother’s house and hadn’t applied for transit papers. The house was only four kilometres away. He would visit her next.