Slash and Burn (5 page)
Siri drank his green Fanta as a sort of visual exclamation mark. It was warm and syrupy and he wished he hadn’t but it was a fittingly dramatic touch. Bounchu wasn’t the type to fly into a rage. One of his qualities as a leader was his poker face. You could never tell whether he was about to shake your hand or shoot you. It wasn’t until he smiled that Siri knew the minister wouldn’t be reaching for his Kalashnikov.
“Siri, old friend,” he said. “We’ve been through a lot together.”
A drastic change of tactic, Siri noted. He recognized the sudden lowering of the red flag and the hoisting of a white one in its place. Now they were old friends?
“I’m really in a tough situation here,” Bounchu said softly. “The prime minister really wants this mission to go well and he insisted I do everything humanly possible to convince you. I don’t want to put any pressure on you, comrade. I know what you’ve been through. But, surely for old time’s sake you could help me out just this once. Five days in the north? Is that too much to ask?”
Siri shook his head slowly.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I’d consider it a personal favor.”
“There might be a way.”
“Name it.”
“So, tell me again,” said Madame Daeng.
“No matter how many times I tell it, the story won’t change,” Siri assured her. “Unless of course you ask me again in three weeks by which time I will have forgotten the original story and be forced to come up with something far more entertaining to tell you.”
Siri was attempting to understand American culture by reading Henry James’s
The American
, translated into French. But either the translator lacked the ability to extract the precious ore from the dense seams in James’s prose, or James learned his craft writing radio scripts for Thai soap operas. Either way, Siri’s confidence was beginning to ebb. He doubted the book would help him understand Americans in the three weeks he had left to familiarize himself. He was thinking of switching to Melville. He had other translated works in his secret library: Harper Lee, even Scott Fitzgerald. He firmly believed that you could learn most about a people by reading the works their academics convinced them were worthy of the title “classical.”
“Then let me just see if I’ve got the facts right,” Daeng continued. She was standing in the doorway of the Paiboun memorial library—their back bedroom—with her arms folded. “Call me cynical if you like….”
“I would never dare.”
“But, for some reason, none of this seems to ring true.”
“Then I must be lying. I’m hurt.”
“Siri, I would never accuse you of lying even if I know for a fact that you were. It’s not what a good wife does. But you do have the ability to leave out strategic parts of stories and what remains, although not exactly a lie, plays a substantially different tune to the truth.”
“So sing me what you have.”
“Minister Bounchu calls you into his office and asks you to lead a team—”
“Technically, General Suvan’s the team leader.”
“Right. But he drools a lot and forgets where he is. He’s obviously only on the team as a charitable political appointee. His name was next in line for a junket.”
“A fair appraisal.”
“And, with no pressure whatsoever from you, no coercion or bribery, the minister accepts the list of names you put together for a task force to head off into the jungle with the Americans. And your list just happens to include your wife, your nurse and her husband, your morgue assistant and your best friend.”
“And Commander Lit from Vieng Xai.”
“Who you befriended on a case.”
“He’s a good man.”
“And Minister Bounchu said, “Good one, Siri. Nice choices.”
“Something not unlike that, yes.”
“Siri?”
“Yes?”
“Did you blackmail the Minister of Justice?”
“How could you even suggest such a thing?”
“Threaten to expose something from his past? Things only a doctor would know?”
“I told you about that?”
“Siri?”
“Absolutely not.”
“You know I’ll find out eventually.”
“Yes, but I enjoy your interrogation methods. Come on, Daeng. We’ll have a grand old time.”
“Which brings me to the purpose of this mission; what you’ve been calling our group vacation to the northeast. We are to team up with a bunch of American professionals and head off into the jungle to look for the remains of a downed aircraft.”
“And its pilot.”
“And you believe this trip won’t be stressful? You do remember you’re convalescing?”
“A stroll in the cool forests. A little scoop here and there with a trowel. Lunch and a little rice whiskey with friendly local hill tribesmen. What better than a week in the cool fresh mountain air of Xiang Khouang? In Europe they pay huge sums of money for alpine spa retreats and here we are getting paid to attend one. Explain to me how that could be a bad thing, Madame Daeng. Nothing to worry about at all.”
“I’d like to believe so. Because it might have escaped your memory but not two months ago you were knocking on death’s door … from the inside. And trouble finds you, Siri Paiboun.”
“Trust me. Nothing can go wrong this time.”
Cueball Dave still insisted on the ponytail. He got comments about it all the time. They called him pathetic. Guys over fifty don’t put their hair in a ponytail, they said. It’s an act of desperation, they said, especially when the top of your head’s as white and shiny as a cue ball, hence the nickname. But Cueball Dave didn’t care what they thought. He didn’t want to look like all those other old fogies. It gave him a style. Told them all he wasn’t a bank manager. Told them he had a wild background. And the girls in Pattaya loved tugging on that little tail of his.
He had a comfortable life. He’d lived in Thailand for ten years and couldn’t speak a word of Thai. Waste of time. Stupid tones he couldn’t get his tongue round, and besides, all the night people spoke some kind of English. He had a condominium room he’d bought and paid for, had shares in a restaurant he ate at, a regular bar he drank at, and a dozen or so regular serious night-time relationships. He had a wife and kids somewhere back in Boston, and a pilot’s licence, canceled, in some bureaucrat’s drawer in DC. Life had become very simple for Cueball Dave. There were those who could only dream of such a life. But Dave was always looking for more. Always had his eye open for something better. And then, in a moment of brilliance, he made it happen. Things were about to change.
He was out on the town celebrating his good fortune. He was in a Johnny Walker atmosphere vacuum where everything outside the bubble wasn’t really happening. He might not have been in that bar at all. In front of his nose were the ankles and too-large stiletto heels of a girl in a bikini, dancing—kind of. Some sixties rock was bellowing out of the speakers and there was a sweaty stale strawberry-tinted smell in the air. A dozen cheap air-fresheners hung behind the bar like decorations. A well-groomed homo was making eyes at him from across the stage. There was a gibbon on a chain begging drinks. Someone had rung the free-shots-for-everyone bell by accident earlier and the bar stewards had beaten him up when he refused to pay. Dave was on his third beer mat. The first two were his fretwork initials now. The drunk he’d been talking to had vanished. He wondered how long he’d been alone. He held on to his glass as if he might tip backwards off the stool should he let go of it. Then someone stepped inside his vacuum.
“Excuse me.”
Cueball Dave swiveled his neck around slowly as if it was starting to rust and saw the homo standing there. He was dressed as a man but any Asian in a place like this was after something.
“Look, son. I don’t—” he started.
“I’m sorry to trouble you, but aren’t you David Leon?”
“I might be.”
“You don’t remember me? I was one of your flight mechanics at Udon. Manuel Castillo. Manny. From the Philippines?”
“Well, yeah. Sure,” said Dave. He had no idea who this boy was but he didn’t want to make himself sound like he thought all Asians looked the same. Young for a field mechanic though. Perhaps he’d met him. Too much of a coincidence for it to be a pickup line.
“I’m so happy. I knew it was you,” said the young man.
Manuel Castillo, or whatever his name was, threw his arms around the ex-pilot before the old boy could get out of his way. His cufflink caught on Cueball Dave’s neck. Then the lights went out.
The Baby Booby Agogo didn’t exactly close. It wound down and then wound back up again depending on how many customers were there and how much money they were spending. Cueball Dave wasn’t spending any money and he was taking up valuable space. He’d been unconscious on the countertop for an hour and he made the place look low class. The
mamasan
, a sprightly old lady whose makeup appeared lime green under the mood lights, decided that, regular customer or not, Dave had overstayed his welcome. She shook him roughly but he didn’t react. After her second attempt to rouse him, she felt for his pulse. She was a woman of vast experience so her next reaction was to take out his wallet, remove all but twenty
baht
, replace the wallet and shout for the bar manager. Another customer had chosen the Baby Booby as his final resting place.
The Friendship Hotel in Phonsavan, designed like a hunting lodge, so they say, had originally been called the Snow Leopard Inn. It was very close to the old airfield and a short walk from one of the many jar clusters on the Plain of Jars. The hotel was built and occupied for many years by Corsican drug dealers in the heyday of the plain’s notorious opium trade. The building served as a warehouse for pressed opium and the mafia pilots made daily stops at the heroin processing plants before delivering their wicked wares to the poor saps fighting in Vietnam. When local politics and war forced the Europeans out of business, the building was renovated and rooms were added. There was nothing remarkable about the Friendship Hotel other than the miracle of its continued presence. It stood amid a landscape of craters in the most bombed area of the war. It somehow avoided the total decimation of every recognizable structure from hospitals to pig pens and nobody could explain why it was still standing, not even allowing for the well-documented lack of expertise of the Royal Lao bomber pilots. There was overwhelming evidence of near misses. The surrounding countryside was littered with unexploded ordnance and large signs at the hotel perimeter warned guests not to venture beyond the fence. The signs were written in Lao and Russian.
Whether the USMIA task-force members were aware they’d be sleeping in the one-time hub of the Indochinese drug trade was hard to say. But they’d certainly been briefed on the dangers of taking leisurely strolls through the countryside. The hotel manager, a small bubbly Hmong by the name of Toua, had assured the government that the grounds had been cleared of explosives before the extra bungalows were erected behind the main building. Even so, as they hurriedly assembled the bamboo chalets for the MIA teams, a worker had run his hoe into a cluster bomb and lost a foot. He’d become a member of a sizeable club. Few of the residents of Phonsavan could claim a complete set of limbs or appendages. Between 1964 and 1973 there were some 500,000 bombing missions in Laos. Two-point-three million tons of ordnance were rained upon the land. Almost half of this was in the form of cluster bombs; “bombies” as they were affectionately known. And a third of those hadn’t gone off. Not yet. Since the ceasefire, the sly little devils had claimed another twenty-thousand victims. Operation Rain Dance had begun to pepper the Plain of Jars with bombs in 1969 and no clearance operation could ever rid the region of the danger. To everyone’s relief, nothing untoward had happened since the arrival of the Lao and American delegations at the Friendship Hotel. But manager Toua was keeping his three remaining fingers crossed.
The key personnel of the two delegations were billeted in opposite wings of the lodge in rather basic but clean rooms. Those considered to be of a lower status were put up in the bungalows at the rear. These decisions had been taken by Judge Haeng, who, despite his socialist background, was ever conscious of class and status. The security detail comprised two elderly gentlemen with antique muskets who appeared to be on twenty-four-hour shifts as they were ever-present. Even with the noisy generator rattling and clunking at full throttle, electricity was only available from 6:00 until 9:00
P.M.
Thence, the guests were left to their own devices. Flashlight beams sabred through the curtains of the American west wing and loud but incomprehensible voices were carried away on cool breezes into the tar-black night.
In the east wing, General Suvan, the Lao team leader, had retired early. The old soldier spent a good deal of his time either napping or being completely asleep. Even when he was awake he had that saggy facial skin that made him look as if his features were permanently drowsy. Judge Haeng and his cousin Vinai, the Lao interpreter, were sharing a double. Mumbled secrets could be heard through the stucco walls of their darkened room. These three had been the only “non-negotiable” members of the Lao delegation. Minister Bounchu had to maintain some face, after all.
At the furthest extremity of the east wing, a circle of lit candles inside a circle of people illuminated a dozen bottles of rice whisky. The bottles had handwritten labels and cardboard stoppers wrapped in plastic so their pedigree was in no doubt. The taste, however, was exemplary. The mixer of choice was locally produced papaya juice and the finger food was corned beef from cans and graham crackers, both pilfered from the huge stock of supplies brought in by the Americans.
“Exactly how long are they planning to stay up here?” asked Civilai. The ex-Politburo pain-in-the-backside had beaten his best friend Siri into retirement by twelve months. He’d spent most of that time eating. For many years no more than a stick figure with a balding globe at its apex, Civilai’s parts were slowly starting to swell, led most triumphantly by his stomach. Not fat by any stretch of the imagination but the old gentleman carried his paunch around proudly like a monk with a new silver alms bowl.
“Theirs is an eating culture,” Siri explained to him. “Like the Thais. Whereas we’re more of a drinking culture. Good luck!”
He raised his glass and all those seated around on the grass floor matting mirrored the gesture and echoed “Good luck” in hushed but enthusiastic tones. They swigged their fruity nightcaps.
“And here’s to Malee,” Siri continued. “Beautiful daughter of Nurse Dtui here and her handsome beau, Inspector Phosy.” Again the group raised their glasses and swigged. “Malee is experiencing her first week away from her parents. Let’s hope she doesn’t get into any bad habits at the state crèche.”
“Here here,” said Dtui.
“And,” Siri said, “as the scene at Wattay airport was characteristically chaotic and I didn’t get a chance to introduce him properly, allow me to welcome our old friend, Commander Lit from the security division. The Minister insisted we have someone from security on the team and I could think of nobody better.”
The applause was deliberately muffled as nobody wanted to alert Judge Haeng to their soiree. Lit was a tall, gangly bespectacled man, stiff as a teak plank. His smile was easy and his eyes keen.
“Lit has recently been promoted and transferred to the third garrison in Vientiane, “Siri added. “I had the pleasure of working with him in Vieng Xai and I know he’ll be a most splendid member of our team.”
Siri could have added more. He could have mentioned, for example, that the young officer had been so taken with his Nurse Dtui during that trip that he had asked her to marry him. As Dtui had turned him down and as her current husband was now sitting beside her, Siri decided nothing would be gained from that announcement apart from a little sport with Inspector Phosy. But that could wait. “Lit,” he said, “there are some people here you don’t know. This gentleman to my left is our morgue expert and the most hard-working person in Vientiane: Mr. Geung Watajak. Geung, you really don’t have to stand u—oh, very well.”
Even though he was drinking nothing but papaya juice, Geung made standing up look difficult. The flickering of the candles seemed to disorient him. His balance secured, he held up his glass and said, “I … I … am very proud.”
With that he knocked back his juice like a Glaswegian downing a dram of Scotch and they never did learn what he was proud of. Given Geung’s “situation,” Siri had expected him to take time over agreeing to accompany them north, or even to refuse to come. But Geung’s loyalty to the Mahosot morgue, a commitment which had on one occasion almost killed him, was unshakeable. He’d never been invited on a field trip before. He was always the man left behind to sweep away the cockroaches and welcome new guests into the freezer. So when they announced he’d be coming along, his face had lit up like the floodlights at the That Luang Festival. Romance was obviously a minor league activity for Mr. Geung. He’d been able to talk of nothing but the trip for two weeks and had taken that long to pack. It was astounding how a man with no possessions could fill a large suitcase as he did. The morgue seemed a lot emptier once he’d loaded up his bag. They all toasted him, upended their glasses and leaned into the circle of light for refills. Geung lowered himself back onto the mat and Siri continued the introductions.
“Beside Nurse Dtui, who you know,” he said with a wink, “is Vientiane’s one and only competent police officer, Inspector Phosy.” Phosy always looked a lot smaller than he was when compared to his large rosy wife. But he was all muscle and brawn. He received his applause with a deep, overly respectful
nop
.
“Next,” said Siri, “a legend in the underground resistance forces against the French, a spy of many faces, never discovered by the enemy, a woman with an intellect so high that she married me”—riding the groans—“and the maker of the best noodles on this and probably every other planet, I present you, Madame Daeng.”
After accepting her applause, Daeng reminded Siri that the candles had grown a lot shorter since he started speaking.
“Right,” he agreed. “Which fittingly brings us to the last of our team, a young lady who—”
“What do you mean, the last?” said Civilai most indignantly. “What about me?”
“What about you?”
“Don’t I deserve an introduction?”
“You always told me you’re a man who doesn’t need one, old brother.”
“That only applies to people who’ve heard of me.”
“I thought everyone had heard of you. Good and bad.”
“I’ve been out of circulation. Even the memory of the brightest star fades in the night.”
“Very well,” said Siri. “This old gentleman, this fading starlet, used to be Comrade Civilai of the Politburo. He was once fully twinkling—a somebody. He is now commander-in-chief of the larder. A politico of pies and pastries. A diplomat of the dining room table. A—”
“They get it,” said Civilai, helping himself to another cornedbeef canapé.
“And now to our guest,” said Siri. “We welcome to this informal first night meeting, Miss Peach Short. Yes, undoubtedly a spy from the far west wing, but as Judge Haeng has already discovered, a spy easy on the eye.”
After very polite thanks at being invited to join the Lao team, Peach looked seriously around the table.
“You do realize I’m underage for all this drinking, don’t you?” she giggled.
“Ha!” said Civilai. “Age is far too abstract a concept to be “under.” This is Laos. We mature much faster over here. Nurse Dtui’s daughter has already won the crèche cocktail mixing competition two months running. And this is an initiation. This is where we find out just how Lao you are. You can obviously talk the talk, but can you drink the drink?”
“He’s right,” said Daeng. “Unless you’ve made a complete fool of yourself in public at least once, you can’t really be called one of us.”
“At least once,” Civilai added.
Peach took a deep breath, threw back her drink in one gulp, and reached for the bottle. The cheer was a little over the top. With luck, the sound of the Americans yelling at each other might have drowned it out.
“Exactly how old are you?” Dtui asked.
“Seventeen and eleven months.”
“You see?” said Civilai. “If she was from the tribes she’d have four children by now. But how did the daughter of a missionary learn to drink, little daughter?”
“Mom and Dad did the remote village thing,” she told him. “They schooled my brothers and sister and me at home and let us run wild with the local kids. When we grew up they trusted us to have the common sense to know what was right. But by then our right was more the village’s right than theirs. We did stuff we still haven’t gotten around to telling the folks about. Best they don’t know, I say. I guess it’s what you deserve for naming all your kids after fruit.”
“Boys too?” Civilai asked.
“Melon and Mango.”
“Poor lads.”
“And where’s your family now?” Daeng asked.
“They were asked politely by the local cadre if they wouldn’t mind leaving the country. Most of the independent missionaries were thrown out when the PL took over. They were too poor, I guess. Your authorities only turned a blind eye to the religious groups with enough money to invest in development projects.”
Siri smiled. She was fearless. If ever Haeng stopped drooling for five minutes to listen to what she was saying, he’d hate her.
“Why didn’t you go with them?” Phosy asked.
“Where to? Indiana? No way. I wouldn’t know what to do there. I don’t know those people. This is my home. I applied for a teaching job on local rates and got it. Not enough to live on but these little junkets sustain me when they come along. Mom and Dad are pissed at the communists. They’re fund-raising right now to support the insurgency. How Christian is that?”
“I don’t think you should be telling us,” said Dtui.
“What can I say? You can’t choose your father.”
“A father’s goodness is as big as a mountain,” said Daeng, who had a Lao saying for most occasions.
“I had my own ears and eyes, auntie,” Peach replied. “First you hear it, so you must see it. Once you’ve seen it, so you must make a judgement with your heart. This is my judgement. I’m staying here.”
A counter Lao saying.
“Very well,” Siri said. “As Madame Daeng quite rightly points out, candles are not forever. So, before we are forced into our bunks, probably to be blown to kingdom come if any of us walks in our sleep, I’ve asked Peach to tell us what she’s learned from the American contingent about the mission we’re here for.”
“At last,” said Comrade Lit.
“I’m glad somebody knows,” said Civilai.
“All right,” said Peach. “Your Judge Haeng was supposed to pass all this on but he’s not in the mood, for some reason. He asked me if I’d do it. This is what I’ve learned. Or, at least, what they told me at the briefing. We are here to find one Captain Boyd Bowry or his remains. When he disappeared in 1968 he was twenty-four years of age, which would make him thirty-four if he’s still alive. He was a helicopter pilot attached to the Air America program out of Udon Thani in Thailand. I assume you all know about Air America?”
“Perhaps you could give us a quick overview so we know how the Americans see it,” Siri suggested.