Slash and Burn

Oscar ran the garage. It was all sweet. Life. Love. Grease. There wasn’t the excitement but that wasn’t a bad thing. Excitement just meant there was a chance you’d get your testicles blown off. He could do without that kind of excitement. Here he had boxing and jai alai to get his pulse racing.

There was a match tonight. Jets vs. Redemption. He had money on the reds. He’d take the truck over there. Pick up his cousin Poco on the way. It was a sticky night. He’d already taken a shower and put on his lucky turquoise shirt but he was sweating so bad he was thinking of taking another. He looked out the kitchen window and was pissed off to see the light on in the garage. Oscar was away in Samal so he guessed some customer had come in hoping for a rush job, had the nerve to turn on the light. Some people had more balls than manners. But no matter how much the guy offered, he wasn’t going to get service on pelota night.

When Nino walked in the back door of the service area, a darkskinned man was standing looking under the hood at the 1961 Cadillac engine Nino and Oscar had been sweating over for a month.

“Sorry, guy,” Nino said. “Nobody working tonight.”

“That’s OK,” said the man. “I was just passing through, wondering if you might have a job opening.”

Nino looked the stranger up and down. He wasn’t dressed like the type of man who enjoyed getting grime under his fingernails. He was too … finicky looking. He had a comb stuck in his hair at the back like he’d been grooming that morning and forgotten it was there. Some of the kids today thought that was a statement. Nino thought it was stupid. And, of all things, in spite of the heat, the guy was wearing a jacket and showed no sign of sweating.

“We do all our own repairs here, pal. Me and my brother. We only take on work the two of us can handle. Sorry.”

The stranger shrugged.

“No problem. Thought I’d ask anyway.” He took one more look at the engine. “Excuse me saying so, but you do realize you’ve screwed up the carburetor assembly?”

“What are you talking about?” Nino had never screwed up anything to do with an engine.

“Here,” said the guy. “You’ve put the throttle lever in upside down.”

Nino hurried over to the car and looked under the hood.

“Are you crazy?” he said. “That is a perf-”

He barely felt the pin prick of the needle in his neck and, in a breath, it was all over for Nino Sebastian.

3

PEACH

The rainy season, which usually fell between April and August in the north of Laos, had begun in March this year and run out of juice by June. Although the Mekhong was still bloated with floodwaters from China, and storms were lashing the south, rain hadn’t hit Vientiane for a month. Lao meteorologists, recently trained in East Germany, were saying that industrialization in the West-but most likely in North America-was altering the environment. They were calling for a symposium of Communist states to discuss the role of capitalism on climate change. There was very little the Americans couldn’t be blamed for in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos and, to be fair, most of the accusations were warranted.

Vientiane was a city of red-dirt side streets and paved main roads laid by the same Americans who were now screwing up the weather. The continuous early rains of 1978 had flushed the dirt out of the lanes and onto the main roads. Gardens and rice paddies and empty dirt plots had spread to all points of the compass. The entire city had been reclaimed by dirt. The gutters were clogged. The potholes were concealed. The footpaths, where they existed, were no higher than the roadways. This massive mud pie was baked beneath a scorching July sun and inevitably the dust arrived. A cat passing in front of your house could kick up more dust than a herd of wildebeests galloping across the Kalahari. There was too much to sweep away. Hot though it was, people shuttered their windows and closed their doors. Those with hoses and who were connected to the main supply were out front every sunrise washing down the street. But by midday the red mist was back. The official dust season was several months away so there was a real threat that Vientiane might just vanish completely; unrecognizable as a city in satellite images.

Siri had his spare sarong wrapped round his face to keep the dust out of his mouth. He wore his old dark-lens goggles and a Castro hat and looked like a very suspicious character when he pulled up in front of the Ministry of Justice. He’d had a choice, of course. The note from his nemesis, Judge Haeng, had simply told him to be at the judicial office by one. He could have torn it up. He was retiring. What could they do to him? But Siri had a mischievous streak and he enjoyed nothing more than rubbing his boss the wrong way. He wouldn’t have many more opportunities. The guard at the gate saluted. The boy had no weapon and his uniform was three non-matching shades of green. Siri, still disguised as a terrorist, climbed from his bike and walked up to the booth.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked the boy.

“No, Comrade,” came the reply accompanied by another salute.

“So, for all you know I could be here to assassinate the judge and the minister. I might have dynamite strapped inside my jacket.”

The boy looked doubtful.

“It … it’s possible, I suppose.”

“And I still get a salute?”

“It’s what they told me to do, uncle.”

“Just that?”

“Yes.”

“Heaven help us,” Siri grumbled, walking away from the guard and up to the steps of the ministry. “What a system,” he said aloud to nobody. “All cock-a-doodle and no do. The place is falling down around us and all we get are salutes.”

He kicked the dust from his sandals at the top of the steps and walked through to the reception area. The place was deserted. There were eight typewriters without typists and one large administrator’s desk without Manivon, the ministry secretary. Siri was certain that if an enterprising burglar were to have stumbled into the ministry that day, he could elicit the aid of the guard out front to carry the machines to a waiting samlor bicycle taxi. The place was going to the dogs. He’d be well off away from it.

His mood no better, he strutted along the open air corridor and pushed open the door to Judge Haeng’s office without knocking. The door slammed into something large and soft, then gave way. Siri stepped inside the small room which was lit only by one window with a bank of cracked louvres. Amongst his illicit books, Siri had a thick pictorial travelogue of the world’s wonders and he noticed how the sunlight squeezing through that little window cast Stonehenge-like shadows in a room filled to bursting with enormous Westerners. Some were seated, some standing, some wore uniforms, others merely sweated in clothes inappropriate for a July room with one ceiling fan. There were men, all oily white, and two women. One of the latter reminded Siri of a bewigged Sumo wrestler in a sundress.

This thought notwithstanding, he didn’t want to forget his manners. He walked from person to person shaking hands and saying, sabai dee-good health. All returned his handshake-not a dry palm in the house. Some repeated the greeting. Others made remarks in what he recognized as English, which was one of the many languages he didn’t speak. As he circled the room he felt like a tourist amongst the giants of Easter Island. At the far side of the room he encountered Judge Haeng sitting at his desk holding on to a tired smile. His greasy hair hung over one puffy, acned cheek. This was a condition Siri knew to be exacerbated by heat and stress. He guessed the little judge was feeling both.

“Siri? Is that you?” he asked.

At first it seemed like a bizarre question, as if the man had become sightless overnight. But then Siri remembered he was still disguised. The room became a little lighter when he removed his tinted goggles, and cooler when he took off his hat and scarf. The guests in the room also seemed somewhat more at ease with him unwrapped.

“What’s all this then?” Siri asked the judge.