“Be … cause Dr. Siri was being nnnnaughty,” he whispered. “I didn’t want to tell on him.”
“So what the hell was I doing in there?” Siri asked himself.
“And why don’t you remember?” Dtui asked.
“I should turn myself in.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Daeng told him. “You get out of breath lifting a chicken wing. You did not strangle a hundred-kilogram man to death and drag him across the room.”
“How can you be so sure?” he said. “A lot of peculiar things have been happening to me recently. I may be capable of anything.”
“Not murder, my love.”
“I’ll have to tell Phosy.”
“Yes, I think you will. But he’ll say exactly the same thing. And you really don’t need to tell the Americans.”
“I told Second Secretary Gordon I’d share everything.”
“Not this, Siri. Trust me.”
“Then I need to go and see someone.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
Siri took their flashlight and walked along the corridor and around to the rear of the main building. The light attracted one of the old guards who insisted on following close behind. When he arrived at the rearmost cabin, Siri turned to the old man and said, “I’ll be all right now, thank you.”
But the guard didn’t leave. He merely took a step back and held on to a toothless smile. A faint yellow glow was seeping through the crack around the door. Siri sighed and knocked. Auntie Bpoo opened the door. To the doctor’s horror, she was wearing a flowing black negligee and high-heeled shoes.
“What kept you?” Bpoo asked.
Before walking past her and into the room, Siri looked back over his shoulder to see that the guard’s smile now occupied most of his face like a tunnel. Farewell to Yeh Ming’s reputation in the northeast. The small cabin was lit by seven red candles around the headboard of the bed.
“What do you know?” Siri asked as soon as Bpoo had closed the door.
“I know that one day Mount Aconcagua and the Himalayas will be the only land masses visible above the oceans.”
“About last night.”
“Oh, that.”
She went to sit on the bed and crossed her legs slowly. If she hadn’t been a fifty-year-old man it would have been an evocative gesture. She patted the mattress beside her. Siri put his hands on his hips.
“Given your proximity to the end of your life, I wasn’t about to let you go wandering around alone in the middle of the night.”
“You followed me?”
“Of course I did. I crouched in the shadows like a sleek black panther.”
“What did you see?”
“You were in some sort of a trance. First you climbed in the sleazy major’s window, then poor lovestruck Mr. Geung arrived and peeked in and went away, then you garrotted the American and climbed out again.”
“I…? You saw me…?”
“Only joking, sweetheart. I didn’t see any such thing. No idea what you were doing. It was all rather dull, really. You were in there for half an hour.”
“You didn’t go and take a look through the window?”
“You can’t be serious. You expect me to tramp through a turnip plot in my eighty-thousand-
“Bpoo. I don’t remember any of it. Do you think there was some supernatural connection?”
“You’re the shaman. Not me.”
“You have contact with the spirit world.”
“They only call me when your phone’s off the hook.”
“Come on. I’m serious. What do you think happened last night? Something drew me to that room.”
“Rooms are just slabs of concrete and plaster and tacky fauxwood paneling. They have no particular life or afterlife of their own. If you were summoned it would have been by a spirit. A particularly pushy one.”
“The major’s?”
“Well, no offence to the departed, but I didn’t get the impression he had a particularly awesome aura. No, it would have been somebody else.”
“How can I find out?”
“The spirit wanted you there for a reason. Something happened in that room, something significant. I would begin my investigation there.”
“You think the room’s haunted.”
Bpoo laughed.
“Ghosts have much better things to do than haunt, Siri.”
“Like what?”
“Like going into the trainee nurses’ shower room and watching them undress. Spirits are perverts just like the rest of us. If it makes you feel better, you weren’t the only one with an interest in that room last night.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’d seen somebody else go in that room earlier. But he used the door.”
“Who?”
Siri returned to his room with the guard chuckling a few meters behind him. The doctor shone his flashlight on the bed to be sure it was Madame Daeng sleeping there then climbed beneath the covers.
“Is that perfume I smell?” she asked.
“Yes. I was in Bpoo’s room.”
“It’s nice. I’ll have to ask her where she got it.”
“Daeng.”
“Yes, my husband?”
“I think Judge Haeng might have killed Major Potter.”
“That’s just wishful thinking.”
He breathed heavily.
“I’m not so sure. Bpoo saw him go into Potter’s room earlier that night.”
17
It transpired that very few of the team members had managed a particularly restful night of sleep. For want of something to do, most had arrived in dribs and drabs long before the morning meal was served. They all went first to the large picture windows and looked out at a view that ended four meters beyond. A murky sky pressed down on the Friendship Hotel. A pocket of gloom was closing in on them. For those privy to the fact that the major’s death was not a suicide, the feeling permeated that an unidentifiable danger was squeezing them into a corner. The smoggy mist and a lack of oxygen gave the place the feel of an Andean mountain village. Breath was no longer taken for granted. Even those with no hereditary respiratory problems were wheezing. Headaches abounded. At breakfast there were baggy eyes and long canine yawns and heads nodding over empty place mats.
Siri and Daeng arrived just as the sausages and spicy salad left the kitchen on large trays. Before the couple could take a seat, Second Secretary Gordon called Siri over to his table where Dr. Yamaguchi and Auntie Bpoo were already seated. Siri had naturally told his wife about the autopsy but the Americans weren’t to know that and they
