Colin Cotterill - The Woman Who Wouldn't die

‘Where is she, Geung?’ he asked. ‘What’s he done with her?’

Mr Geung sat on the step beside the doctor.

‘Com … Comrade Daeng won’t come to a party without her doctor,’ he said.

‘You’re right,’ Siri agreed. ‘This would be too much for her. She’d look for somewhere quiet. Somewhere she could …’

Siri got to his feet and stumbled down the old stone steps.

‘I know,’ he said as they exited the temple grounds. ‘I know where she’ll be.’

He stole one of the lighted torches that stood beside the gate and broke into a trot across the green, back in the direction from which he’d first come. He ignored the pain in his old lungs. There was a buzz now that ran through his nerves. This was more than concern. This was fear. His body was on alert. He ran along the side of the French residence building and into the garden at the rear. He could see the wooden swing by the grey light of the moon. It still rocked slightly as if caught in a strong breeze, of which there was none. Ugly reached it first but braked suddenly as if he’d run into a wall. His ears tucked back. His tail drooped. He turned and slouched behind Dr Siri. The moon passed behind a cloud and the only light now came from Siri’s torch.

‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘No, please.’

He held the torch forward and approached the swing. At night, lit by fire, blood tended to stand out like oil. The swing and its supports and the sand beneath it were as black as charcoal. As black as murder. There were shards of broken glass all around. Siri couldn’t find enough oxygen to fill his chest. He felt faint. He knew someone had died in this place not a few minutes before. At any second he expected the spirit of his wife to come to him, caress his cheek before heading to the waiting room. Perhaps she would speak to him. He was empty of hope.

Ugly, whose sense of smell was deficient in many ways, had picked up a scent. He stood at the point where the lawned garden abutted the jungle and he barked. It was the first time Siri had heard him do so. The doctor had no strength to follow him. No will.

‘Geung, go and look,’ he said.

Without questioning, Mr Geung took the torch from the doctor and followed the dog into the bushes. Siri lowered himself to the ground where he sat cross-legged, eyes closed, searching desperately through the lost souls for one he might recognize. He could not continue in the world without Daeng. She had become everything to him. She was his raison d’etre .

‘Com … Comrade Doctor,’ came Geung’s voice. ‘Not dead yet.’

Siri was across in a blur. He ignored the branches that thrashed at his face as he made his way to the flame.

‘Still alive,’ he thought. ‘A chance. A pinch of hope. I can save-’

But just then a cold damp wind blew into him. It was like a wet raincoat wrapping itself around him in search of a warm body. He recognized it as a brand new spirit, lost, as they usually were. Disoriented. If it was Daeng he didn’t want to remember her like this, because in a second it was gone and he was left with nothing more than a shudder.

He trudged the last few metres to where the body lay and the cloud pulled back for the moon to illuminate the scene like the opening of a theatre curtain. He sighed and looked down at the body. It was … wrong. Gory but wonderful. It was a long body. Siri’s heart clanged inside him like a pachinko ball. One rarely used the word tall when describing a man face down. The intestines trailed away from the body like the string of a downed kite. They seemed endless. One might have imagined him out here in the jungle attempting to gather together his wayward insides. The doctor had never been so delighted to see a dead body. Not even the corpses of his enemy on the battlefield had given him any joy. He wanted to fall to his knees and kiss both cheeks but first he had to see the victim. With Geung’s assistance he knelt beside the body and flipped him on to his back. He was surprisingly light, padded with several layers of clothing for the appearance of bulk. In reality he was little more than a skeleton. His face was white. Above his right eye was the starred scar of early smallpox.

It was a knife wound. The blade had sliced through four layers of cloth before slitting a neat gash across his stomach. It was a classic hara-kiri insert. Across and up. You would live to see your stomach spill out, perhaps even walk away with your insides cradled in your arms. But the loss of blood would defeat you soon enough. It was the expertise of a professional assassin and he only knew one. The souvenir that Madame Daeng had taken from Frenchy’s Elbow had not been a Buddha image. Of course not. She had returned for the Vietnamese man’s knife. The rock she’d coveted at the dock had been used to sharpen it to a razor’s edge. She’d known even then that her killer would come for her this night. But had she survived the battle? There had been a vast amount of blood at the murder scene. Was it too much for one person? Was she now lying wounded somewhere in this thick jungle? Once more, Geung’s logic overcame Siri’s fears.

‘When I worked in … in … in … the red tag bbbag room,’ he said, ‘the first thing I did after ehhhvery load was I washed off the blood.’

‘The river,’ said Siri.

They headed in the direction of the slow-moving Mekhong. The moon had turned the night into a grey afternoon. Everything was clear. The revellers had abandoned the riverside and gone to the temple to listen to the closing concert. Geung and Siri stood on the bank. They could hear first the generator roar, then the microphone screech, then the singer miss three notes on her way into a popular Thai song before being belatedly joined by a guitar.

‘See anything?’ asked Siri.

Geung and Ugly scanned the surface of the river. There was nobody.

‘Daeng!’ Siri shouted. ‘Daeng!’

He noticed that Ugly was focused on something upriver. The dog’s tail signalled that it wasn’t an unpleasant sighting. They heard a cheer from the drinkers on the guest house balcony. And there, some fifty metres away, was a tractor inner-tube rotating slowly as it followed the river. And at its centre was a grinning Madame Daeng. She waved as she passed them on the current. Mr Geung blushed and looked away because, by the light of the full moon, he had clearly seen Comrade Madame Daeng’s naked breasts.

‘No, I mean, not the result,’ said Civilai. ‘I saw the result. In fact I helped scoop the result into a plastic bag. What I’m after is the details. Exactly how did you avoid getting brained?’

The ferry was twenty minutes from Vientiane. Civilai had been hounding Madame Daeng the whole journey. They sat on their deckchairs with the last of the beers they’d confiscated as evidence from Governor Siri’s supply.

‘You might as well tell him,’ said Dr Siri. ‘You know he’ll never let up.’

‘I really don’t like to dwell over things like that,’ said Daeng.

‘Not dwelling, Daeng,’ said Civilai. ‘Debriefing is what it is. A necessary military tactic to bring a conflict to a satisfactory end. Look, I promise this is the last time. When next you slice somebody open with a fish knife, I swear I won’t even ask.’

‘I want to … to know too,’ said Mr Geung.

‘Oh, very well.’

‘Excellent,’ said Civilai.

He left his chair and sat at her feet like a handmaiden.

‘First of all, how did you know he was there?’ he asked.

‘They were all talking about him,’ said Daeng. ‘I heard them as we walked back to the administration building. Only a few people had actually seen him but word spread like foot rot. They called him “the tall Soviet”. Russians are the only Westerners they’ve seen here for the past three years so that was their guess. But I didn’t see any foreigners at the races or at the festivities and there was precious little point in being in Pak Lai if he didn’t want to enjoy the party. So I knew it was my Frenchman.’