Anarchy and Old Dogs (Dr. Siri Paiboun) (11 page)

"Tell me, didn't this boy wash up in Muang Khong or somewhere?"

"Sri Pun Don."

"All right. So what? A hundred miles from his home after I don't know how many hours of being thrashed about by the river. Surely he would have brushed against submerged logs, tree trunks?"

"I thought of that," said Siri, spooning the egg goop into his mouth as if it were food. "So had the family. But think about it. The flow of the Mekhong hasn't yet built up any pace. Logs that have been submerged for months, years? They're soft wood already. You need dry timber to get splinters. And if the damage
was
caused by the river, surely the splinters would be all over, not just on his back."

"What are you going to do about it?"

"I don't know. Obviously, our priority here is the fact that our country may soon be plunged into anarchy. Nonetheless, I've promised the mother I'll do a little rooting around. The community gave me half a dozen mud carp for my troubles."

"I love mud carp."

"Me, too. That's why Daeng and I ate them all last night, sorry. As I say, we have bigger fish to fry, and, to that end, we've made a breakthrough."

Civilai had managed to spear his fried egg with his fork and was holding it above the plate, watching the grease drip. "We have?"

Siri told him everything: the Devil's Vagina tree, the refugee camp connection, the mail service. Yet even as he was telling it, he realized the story lacked the same certainty it had held the previous night. Civilai echoed his thoughts.

"Your friend Daeng did a good job. But don't you think you might be a little too desperate to make a link between all these spare parts? Myths and legends and postal networks don't necessarily spell out a camp-based insurgency, Siri."

"I know, but we've been here almost a week. Do we have anything better? Has all your clandestine networking actually turned anything else up? Be honest now. I've seen how frustrated you're getting. You haven't achieved much, have you?"

"Not a lot."

"Then this is better than nothing. What do we have to lose?"

Civilai gave up on his egg and let it splash back onto the dish.

"Nothing at all. Let's go with it. I'll get in touch with my contacts in Vientiane and see what they can dig up. I imagine we have people placed in all the camps keeping an eye on things."

"Spies, you mean?"

"Observers. They'd know if there was a major plot being arranged. Lots of gossip in the camps. Don't forget we have to be careful who we share this with. I think your friend Daeng should be the end of the grapevine."

"Well ..."

"What?"

"Daeng and Phosy."

"How on earth could you get word to Phosy between last night and now? You've only just crawled out of bed for heaven's sake."

"I was excited. I wrote him a note. Daeng said she could have it on the 6 a.m. bus to Vientiane. She knows the conductor. She was going to get him to drop it off at the morgue when he arrived."

"The morgue? So Dtui's in the loop as well."

"Come on, old brother, if we can't trust them, who can we trust? They've been involved in this from the beginning."

"It's not their reliability I'm concerned about. It's their safety. This is a nasty situation, and they have a not-unwarranted reputation for acting recklessly. Let's just hope they don't do anything silly."

The refugee couple waited until dark before attempting to cross the ink black Mekhong to Thailand. The ever-present cloud had obscured the moon, so only one or two pricks of light from far downriver gave them any sense of space or distance. Without them the couple would have been suffocated by the darkness.

The journey from Vientiane on the dusty, potholed road had left them bruised and parched and particularly grumpy. Of course, Phosy had been in a mood long before the couple had climbed onto the bus in the capital. He'd already been fuming while he waited for the fake laissez-passers at temporary police headquarters. He was a man used to getting his own way and somehow he'd let himself get talked out of his own harebrained scheme and into someone else's. He knew it was madness. He was sure to lose his job. But then again, if they failed in this mission, there might not be a job to lose. There might not be a life to ruin.

As far as that went, Dtui had been right. And, yes, she'd been right, too, about the fact that a couple would draw less suspicion on the Thai side than a single man. Refugees escaped in family groups or in large numbers. A man on his own might be a spy, a communist infiltrator. Alone, he was far more likely to be shot by the Thai border patrol. In fact, Dtui had been right about everything, which was the main reason he was sulking. She'd acted so smug as she ticked off all the logical reasons she should go with him to Ubon, and he couldn't argue against one of them. All she'd left him with was the perennial policeman's fallback: "Because I say so."

She'd laughed at him then, laughed in his face, made him feel as small as the roaches that scurried around their feet in the cutting room. She'd shown him the letter again: scrawled writing, almost incomprehensible to anyone who hadn't spent a year deciphering her boss's notes. It was garbled, as if he was on medication, but there was no doubt to whom he had written:

"Dear Dtui," it said and "Please pass this message on to Phosy." Siri and Civilai obviously saw her as the senior contact. Wasn't that humiliating as well? He really had no choice. The letter hadn't exactly told them they should go to the camp; in fact, it told them not to do anything until they received further instructions. But just how long were they expected to sit around waiting?

So here they were, dressed in their simplest clothes with no possessions other than a small pack containing hurriedly collected paperwork. The house documents and wedding certificate had belonged to Phosy and his wife. Phosy had been an agent of the Pathet Lao long before the communists moved into Vientiane. With the takeover complete, he'd been sent to the northeast for specialist training and to reassure his employers that the soft life in the Royalist capital hadn't distorted his ideals. He'd maintained his cover identity in Vientiane and pretended he was being sent for reeducation. When he returned to his home six months later, his wife and children were gone. She'd taken them across the river with no word of apology. He'd heard nothing from her since. After eighteen months of hoping she might come back or get in touch, he filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion.

Now Dtui was to take the woman's name and become the wife of a temple craftsman, a carver of teak door reliefs. It would provide them with the perfect cover: a career frowned upon by the agnostic socialist authorities. He was an ideal candidate to seek refugee status in Thailand, and Dtui had all the makings of a typical wife.

"You're going to have to get over this, you know?" Dtui said, her feet dangling in the refreshing river water. "We have to get into our roles soon."

"Don't tell me how to do my job," he said, ripping the bark off an innocent sapling.

"You're in a mood."

"So what? We're a married couple, aren't we? This is what marriage is like."

"I'm sorry."

"Now what?"

"If your marriage was like this ... Well, it's a shame, that's all."

He clammed up again.

They were at a spot forty miles downriver from what used to be the ferry crossing between Savanaketh and Muk-daharn. It had closed when the Thais blockaded Laos to prevent socialism from seeping into their country. But eight hundred miles of Mekhong River served as a border between the two, and short of filling it with oil and setting light to it, the Thais knew they could never really police the banks of the river. Phosy and Dtui sat in a spot that was nowhere in particular on the Lao side, directly opposite nowhere in particular in Thailand. It was ideal for discreet crossings. Local entrepreneurs had set up a lucrative business to take advantage of the already disadvantaged. For an extortionate fee they'd row refugees across to where a truck would pick them up and drive them to a main road. Then they were on their own.

Had Phosy been by himself, he would have swum across and saved the money. Dtui was a nonswimmer. On the bus ride he'd suggested someone her shape should be able to float across. He'd immediately regretted saying it but wasn't about to apologize. Dtui, for her part, had ignored him and pretended to sleep most of the way south.

They both looked up when they heard the splashing of oars. It was so dark they didn't spot the skinny craft until it had almost passed them. The oarsman couldn't see them at all.

"Anyone there?" he called.

"Over here," Phosy said. The pilot steered the long boat toward the bank and crashed against the rocks. It was all he could do not to overbalance into the water. His thick, greasy spectacles slipped down his nose.

"Are you sure you'll be able to find Thailand, brother?" Phosy asked.

The oarsman laughed. "No problem. I just row toward the smell of money I know I'll hit it eventually."

Getting Dtui into the craft wasn't an easy matter. She refused to let the men touch her. It wasn't until they were both standing in the water, holding onto the gunwales to stop the boat from rocking, that she managed to lower herself onto the narrow wooden seat. There she sat, holding her breath and looking directly ahead. The men climbed in and they headed off. It was no more than a three-minute boat ride, and like all good businessmen, the oarsman waited until they were midstream and completely at his mercy before revising the fare.

"This is where you pay," he said. "Thirty thousand
kip."

Phosy laughed. "Don't give me that," he said. "I could buy the state ferry for that."

"That's the price, brother. Take it or leave it. It includes the truck pickup on the other side. If you don't pay up, we turn back."

"We don't have that much with us," Dtui told him.

"Yeah, they all say that."

"Is that so?" Phosy asked. He edged closer to the man. Dtui felt the boat rock perilously for a second or two, then heard Phosy's voice as a menacing whisper floating on the water.

"I'm sure you can feel what's pressed up against your neck," he said. "Either you take us across for the fee we agreed on in Savanaketh, or I slit your gullet from ear to ear. Do they all say this as well?"

"Yeah," said the oarsman. "Some of 'em say that."

"And?"

"And I tell 'em it's twenty thousand."

"Good."

The oarsman's cousin looked undernourished and smelled of fish. He had a beaten-up pickup truck that crunched and putted its way from the river along a dirt track. He drove with the headlights off, somehow negotiating the narrow trail by the illumination provided by the dim cab light above his head. He tried to impose a petroleum surcharge but he didn't put a great deal of effort into it and wasn't too disappointed when Phosy told him to take a hike.

"Some of the rich ones just hand it over without a fuss," he said. "You can't blame me for asking."

The driver eventually reached a paved road, swung left, and turned on his headlights. They didn't do a much better job of illuminating the road than the overhead light. They soon passed a signpost in Thai that said UBON RACHATHANEE EIGHT-FIVE KILOMETERS. Most literate Lao could read Thai script. Phosy knew they wouldn't make it as far as Ubon. He wondered where the driver planned to let them off to make their own way to the city, and he didn't have to wait long for an answer. Three miles from the sign, a well-lighted border-patrol police hut loomed up ahead. Jutting into the road was a red sign that told vehicles to HALT TO CHECK but there was nobody around to force them to stop. They could have kept going, but the cousin slowed down.

"What the hell are you doing?" Phosy asked, reaching for the gear stick, but the truck was already coming to a stop.

"No problem, brother," the cousin said. "All's normal. Just have to stop here for a second."

He rolled onto the gravel in front of the hut and beeped his horn. From the rear a man appeared, digging a toothpick between his gappy teeth. As he passed the hut he reached in and produced a fearsome-looking M16 assault rifle. He was followed by a second man, this one in uniform, who'd already shouldered his weapon. There was no urgency in their movements. It was just another night at work. They walked to the truck, leveled their guns at the passenger window, and motioned for the latest batch of refugees to get out.

"Come on, both of you," one said. "Don't try anything. You're under arrest. Come out with your hands in the air."

It was a flat non-emotive rendition that Dtui guessed the man had given every night that week and for many months before. As she and Phosy were climbing out of the truck, the second guard went around to the driver's window and handed him a small brown envelope.

"Thanks, Dim," he said. "How's the wife?"

"Still a pain in the arse."

Dtui could hear the laughter behind them as she and her "husband" were marched at the end of a gun into a small unlit shed.

"Well, damn it, stop them then."

"Can't! The telegram got here after they'd left already."

"They're insane."

Siri smiled and nodded his agreement. "But didn't we do things like that when we were young and our balls still swung proudly before us? You have to admire them."

"Do you admire a moth's courage at flying into a candle flame? God, Siri. I thought you liked them."

"I do. And I'd be sorry to lose them. But they've set out so there's no point in grieving. We can't alter events, so we should take advantage of them. This way, we'll have our own spies in the camp."

"If they aren't shot getting there. And if by some miracle they make it, how are you proposing to communicate with them?"

"They'll find a way."

"You still see this as one big adventure, don't you?"

"The alternative being to get frustrated and angry and worry myself into a not-so-early grave?"

"The alternative being to take the situation seriously."

"What's the difference?"

"The difference is quite fundamental. I'm in a position to affect the situation, so I take it seriously. You know you can't change anything so you treat it like a joke. I can't afford to do that."

The vacuum that followed wasn't even a Lao silence. Sound had been erased from the room. Siri could feel the pulse throbbing in his wrists. He could feel the weight of his heart. So many thoughts and emotions rushed through his mind he couldn't begin to reckon with them.

"Look, I'm sorry," Civilai said. "I didn't ..."

"Yes, you did."

They sat staring at each other, both smiling, neither happy. Siri stood and squeezed his friend's shoulder on his way to the door. Fifteen minutes later he returned, carrying a tray. On it was a bottle of whisky, a bucket of ice, two small bottles of soda, a jug of water, and a packet of prawn crackers. He put the tray on the coffee table and sat back in his seat.

"You think I'm that easy?" Civilai said, his smile now sincere.

"It's never failed before. You've hardly touched a drop since we got here. It's obviously what you're lacking."

Civilai took up the role of barman. "I'm sorry about what I said, Comrade. It's just that I'm desperate. I'm not really me these days," he said, making ice music inside the glasses.

"All the more reason to get pie-eyed."

And pie-eyed they got. They'd had a frustrating time in the south, but both men understood there was little to be achieved by returning to Vientiane. The whisky went some way toward easing the tension that had been growing between them. It reminded them of what they'd been through together, but it didn't help bring Siri back into his friend's circle of trust.

Siri walked into the room carrying a tray. On it was a bottle of whisky, a bucket of ice, two small bottles of soda, a jug of water, and a packet of prawn crackers. He put the tray on the coffee table and sat back in his seat.

"I'm suffering deja vu," Civilai confessed.

"That first time was just an illusion," Siri said. "This is the real thing."

"You do recall I'm supposed to be convalescing? I'm suffering from chronic hemorrhoids, you know."

"Then I won't let you sit on my lap. Pour!"

Civilai prepared the first two drinks of the second act and the old soldiers sipped them as if they were tasting whisky for the first time.

"A good year," Siri said.

"Nineteen seventy-seven, I'm tempted to say."

"Know what I think, old brother?"

"Nobody ever knows what you think."

"I think we should go take a look at the Champasak palace."