stood to leave. “I’ll pass on the message.”
“You. Is this, er, someone I might know?”
“Probably not. Bye.”
“I know a lot of people, you know. What’s her name?”
“Vong.”
“Vong what? I’ve got several Vongs in my district. Where does she work?” Siri noticed a pearl of saliva at the corner of the man’s mouth.
“Department of Education. Right in the middle of your domain of responsibility, if I’m not mistaken. She was here the other day, noticed you diligently performing your revolutionary duties, and I swear I saw the poor lady blush. She asked me about you.”
Ten minutes later, Siri was back in his office with a big naughty smile on his chops.
“Oh, to be a lizard on the wall of Vong’s office when the chicken counter comes a-wooing.”
Eight o’clock arrived and he stood under the morgue sign, waiting to welcome his staff. He’d missed them. At 8.15 he was still standing there; no sign of Dtui or Mr Geung. He went back inside to check the calendar, but there was no mention of a national holiday. He paced anxiously up and down in the car park. He wasn’t worried about their being late. He was more concerned about their being dead. The shells in his pocket rattled together as he walked.
At nine-thirty, Siri was sitting outside the office of Suk, the hospital director. Suk had ignored Siri on the way to a staff meeting, then ignored him again on his way back. Right now there was a North Korean pharmaceutical company rep in with him. Communism matched up some strange bedfellows.
When the Korean left, Siri slipped onto the warmed seat he’d vacated.
“Well, Dr Siri. You finally ran out of holiday money.”
“It was a case. I was sent by the Justice Department.”
“For an autopsy that took a week.”
“For two autopsies that took two days. The rest of the time, I was getting over malaria.”
Before becoming a paper-shuffler, the director had been a doctor. He looked Siri up and down for some sign of a man who’d just gotten over a disease that killed twelve thousand Lao a year.
“I’m delighted you survived.”
“Thanks. Where is my staff?”
“They were reassigned.”
Siri felt a tremendous relief. “They can’t be reassigned without my agreement.”
“Really? Well, as you weren’t here, nobody objected. We’re very understaffed, as you know. I wasn’t about to let a qualified nurse sit around reading comic books on the off chance you might come back.”
“Where is she?”
“Urology.”
Siri chuckled. “That’ll teach her. What about Geung?”
“He’s digging a sewage trench.”
“He’s an experienced morgue technician.”
“His absence of written qualifications makes him a sewage-trench digger.”
“I want them back.”
“You have nothing for them to do.”
“I’ll have a body by one-thirty.”
“How can you be so sure? You planning on killing someone yourself?” Suk laughed at his own wit until he noticed the macabre way Siri was eyeing him.
¦
“Hello, Doctor.”
“How you doing? You got my nurse, Dtui, in here?”
“Sure do. She’s out back. Go on through.”
An elderly lady was up on a couch naked from the waist down. Dtui in plastic gloves crouched between her legs. She looked up and seemed truly delighted to see Siri.
“Doc? Thank God. Rescue me. Take me back to the morgue. If I have to insert my fingers in one more grumpy old lady, I’ll scream.”
The lady tried to cover herself up.
“It’s okay. I’m a doctor.”
“Actually, he’s a coroner. But live ones, dead ones, they’re pretty much the same to him.”
It was too much for the lady, who wrapped her
“I can see why you prefer to work with corpses. But fear not, Nurse Dtui. You’ll both be back in the morgue this afternoon. Anything unusual happen while I was away?”
“Nothing much. Your Vietnamese mate’s gone back to Hanoi.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Probably. But we had no idea what it was.”
“Did he leave anything for me?”
“His report and a letter or something.”
“Good.”
“Given there’s lots of secret stuff I don’t know about, I hid ‘em.”
“Good girl. Where are they?”
“In the hospital library. Under ‘V’. You know nobody ever goes up there.”
He decided to leave the Vietnamese report where it was. He was certain somebody would like to get their hands on it. He spent a few minutes breaking the law back in his office, then set off on Dtui’s bicycle towards Dongmieng.
The temple at Sri Bounheuan was just as well cared for as Hay Sok behind his house, but the atmosphere there was more frenetic. The departments of Culture and Education had set up a pilot literacy project. All the monks, regardless of educational backgrounds, had been recruited to teach.
The current philosophy was that Buddha was a communist. He’d given up his status and wealth as a protest against capitalism, and had striven to break down class barriers. As a reflection of these socio-politico-economic roots, monks were being yoked to blackboards up and down the country.
The number of liberated Lao citizens attending school had risen 75 per cent since the Pathet Lao takeover. Lao radio never let anyone forget that. It didn’t mention what they did in the schools they attended, or the near- absence of qualified teachers. And it didn’t say that the burden of this new education system fell broadly on the shoulders of the monkhood.
They’d built rows of banana-leaf classrooms and filled them with logs split down the centre for benches. The students ranged from five-year-old orphans to sixty-five-year-old grandmothers. They didn’t have any books or pencils, and the blackboards were the backs of old royalist billboards. They may not have been learning a lot, but they all seemed to be having a good time.
The abbot was up a crooked bamboo ladder painting a stupa. His robe was tied up between his legs like an orange nappy. He was turning the dirty grey tope into a light blue birthday cake.
“Shouldn’t that be white?” Siri asked.
For some reason, the only paint to be had for the previous few months had been swimming-pool blue, a colour that was slowly becoming synonymous with the new regime. The airport already blended nicely with the sky. Civilai argued it was the committee’s long-term plan to paint everything Wattay blue so astronauts would be able to recognise Laos from space.
“I don’t care if it’s black, as long as we can keep the elements off it for another year.” The abbot hooked the paint can over a cement elephant’s trunk and came down. He looked over the top edge of his glasses at his visitor. “I seem to remember you.”
“So you should, Abbot. We were in Pakse together about two hundred years ago.”
“Well, I’ll be…Siri, isn’t it?” Siri smiled and started to make an obeisance, but the old abbot grabbed his hand and pumped away at it. “You don’t look any different.”
“Really? You mean I was a wrinkled old codger with a stoop, even then?”
