too too bad. A good communist does not shake his comrade by the hand and stab him in the back at the same time.”
Siri matched the man’s smile.
“I imagine I’d need a very long knife with a curve on it to achieve such a feat,” Siri said. “Or perhaps a scythe. Yes, that might work. Otherwise I’d have to let go of the hand then run round the back. But, by then you’d know what my intention was, wouldn’t you.”
“What are you…?
“Dear Judge Haeng, I don’t need to do anything behind your back. If you ever threaten me again with your menacing handshake, or insult my friends and family, you’ll have me to deal with face to face. What you’ve experienced of me so far is nothing compared to what you’ll get if you don’t back off. You aren’t my boss any more. You’re just another annoying civil servant.”
He removed his hand from its clammy nest, and left a fuming judge smiling at himself.
Before heading off to the helicopters, Major Potter singled out Cousin Vinai from the herd and put his arm around the interpreter’s shoulder as if they’d been friends for years. The major yelled to get everyone’s attention, pointed at Vinai and said a few words. There was something in Vinai’s eyes that Siri recalled witnessing in the expression of a deer they’d cornered in a deadend gorge during the fighting. It was that “on a spit by supper time” look. He gazed around desperately for Peach but she was nowhere to be seen. He was on his own.
“The … er, major would like to say how impressed he is with the record of the Pathet Lao over the first three years of their administration,” said Vinai.
Judge Haeng and General Suvan clapped but a worm of suspicion had already crawled through the minds of the other onlookers. Siri looked at Dtui who shook her head. Major Potter spoke again. Vinai, still scanning the room for Peach, said, ‘The major is saddened when … he sees so much destruction in this area … caused by the bombing.”
Haeng and Suvan clapped again. Siri sighed.
“Vinai, please tell the major we’re interested to know whether he’s been to Laos before,” Civilai shouted.
“No, this is his first trip,” said Vinai, without translating.
“Ask him,” said Civilai.
“I…?”
“Ask him.”
Vinai turned to the major, looked up into his puffy face and spoke very quietly. Potter listened attentively then seemed to ask for clarification. Vinai spoke again. The major removed his arm from Vinai’s shoulder and looked around, presumably for Peach. The American spoke once more, slower, enunciating every word with such precision that Mr. Geung could have understood it. Vinai, aware now that his grasp on credibility was slipping, said, “The major was here … on holiday.”
Like the US cavalry, Peach arrived at that moment and fell into a discussion with Potter. It appeared the major wanted to wish everyone good luck on the day’s mission, lay down a few simple ground rules and inform the teams of the subgroups they’d be working in. Nothing at all about holidays. At some time during this housekeeping talk, Cousin Vinai slunk away.
When the others were loading the choppers, Siri, Commander Lit, Phosy and Civilai found him hiding in his room and surrounded him. Phosy had been designated the roles of good, bad and only cop while the others looked menacing.
“Comrade Vinai,” said Phosy.
“Yes?” said Vinai.
“The English language.”
“What about it?”
“Do you speak it?”
“I am the head of the foreign languages department affiliated to the Ministry of Justice.”
“Congratulations. But the question was, do you speak English?”
“I’ve translated entire documents into Lao.”
“From English?”
“Some.”
“And so you speak it?”
There followed a long pause during which Vinai appeared to be searching the ceiling for an answer.
“Not exactly,” he said.
The Lao felt obliged to inform the Americans of this turn of events. In fact, they had no choice. The loss of an interpreter was crucial to their work. They found Peach and took her to the major’s room where the team leader was sitting on the edge of his mattress going over a map of the region. The corner of a crate of whiskey peeked from beneath the bed between his feet. He crossed his legs to hide it. They tried to be as diplomatic and humble as possible, explaining that although Vinai was a leading authority on English language text, he had little opportunity to listen to the spoken form and he found the American accent to be almost incomprehensible. The major seemed unfazed by this news.
“Major Potter says it’s no big deal,” Peach translated. “We should just use the big woman.”
Siri assumed the major was referring to Dtui. Yes, she was … not fat exactly but casually ovoid. Definitely not big by American standards. And she most certainly had a vast repertoire of vocabulary that would be ideal when dealing with the forensic surgeon. But he didn’t understand how the major would know such a thing. He stared at Phosy whose buckled eyebrows seemed to mirror his own confusion.
“How does the major know about Nurse Dtui’s English skills?” Siri asked Peach.
“He’s not talking about Dtui,” she said after a short interlude.
“Then…?”
“He means the large gruff Lao woman who traveled on our helicopter yesterday. I didn’t notice her myself. The major says her English is fluent.”
“There weren’t any Lao scheduled to travel on your flight apart from the pilots,” Commander Lit said. “I checked the security arrangements.”
“This one turned up late. Your chopper had taken off and she hitched a ride with us.”
“But our team was complete, too,” Phosy said, shaking his head. “That’s why we took off. Nobody was missing.”
“And where is she now?” asked Civilai. “I didn’t notice any strange Lao in the breakfast room.”
Peach asked the major who laughed and got clumsily to his feet, nonchalantly back-heeling the crate under the bed as he did so. He put his arm around Civilai and led him to the window. He’d obviously missed the cultural sensitivity day at orientation. He pulled the flimsy curtain aside and pointed to a spot way beyond the back fence almost twenty meters into the no-go area. There on a deckchair in a one-piece orange bathing suit was a rotund woman in dark glasses and a sunhat. All this, irrespective of the fact that the morning sun had barely made a crack in the early mist.
“What on earth…?” said Commander Lit. “None of that land out there has been cleared of unexploded ordnance. Didn’t she see the signs? What’s she playing at? Is she mad? Who is she?”
But the other Lao in the group knew only too well who had followed them to Xiang Khouang, and it wasn’t a
Auntie Bpoo was as common a figure around the downtown area of Vientiane as Eros was to London and Jesus to Rio. A man, most certainly; deep voiced and pot-bellied and solid as a wad of sticky rice, but a slave to cross-dressing. He read palms and predicted the future on street corners and fooled nobody with his zebra-striped tank tops and lime green hotpants. But put him in a silk suit, plaster him in make-up and stick a permed wig on his head and he might just fool a helicopter full of Americans. Because that’s what had happened.
Far from being angry, Siri was impressed that the fortune-teller had been able to pull it off. The doctor hadn’t an inkling that Auntie Bpoo spoke English, but that didn’t surprise him either. He, she-and she preferred to be called “she”-was a remarkable … woman. Although she pretended that her soothsaying was a scam, that she just wanted an excuse to sit and talk to people, to make friends and be accepted in Lao society, Siri knew for a fact that she had an uncanny gift. Tangled deep in her quirkiness and her unfathomable poems and her mood and gender swings, was a person who actually could see the future. Siri needed someone like her to help explain his own untrained
