Curse of the Pogo Stick Read online

  She turned and waved to the armed guards opposite her shop. Phosy had posted a watch on her, on all of them. There was another man at the back of the shop and one more would accompany Dtui back to the police compound. Daeng doubted it would do any good in the face of a serious attack but she admitted there was a good feel to having someone watch her back.

  “I’ll bring you boys some hot soup,” she said and walked slowly back to the shop.

  A Mugging in the Otherworld

  It was an alleyway dimly lit by slightly bent street lamps that had barely enough strength to turn the black night gray. The paving stones beneath his feet were ill matching, some rising abruptly from the sidewalk. Dr. Siri wore sandals but his footsteps clopped like horseshoes on the stones. Chalked roughly all around were the outlines of murder-scene bodies, deformed and chilling. He was walking fast, stumbling, wheezing from the pressure on his old lungs. The walls on either side of him reached so high he could see no summit. He looked back, stumbled again. He could sense his own fear like something living and moving between the layers of his skin. He passed a dark doorway, four legs and the end of a baseball bat all that was visible, the upper torsos drowned in a shadow as black as misery.

  “Well, what do we have here, Danny?” a deep voice groaned from the darkness, Lao but with a New York accent. Siri hurried past and the two figures stepped out of the shadow and fell into step behind him.

  A second voice: “Looks like a Red gook to me.”

  “Me too. What do you think you’re doing here, Red gook?”

  Siri didn’t dare answer or look back. He quickened his pace but his pursuers stayed with him.

  “Shit, man, are you lost.”

  “He’s looking for a girl, ain’t you, commie gook? That’s whatcha doing in our neighborhood.”

  “Is that right, commie?” Siri heard the slap of a baseball bat into a palm. A spitting noise. But up ahead he could see the gaudy neon of a nightclub. There were people milling around in front of it only eighty yards away. If only … He reached for the amulet beneath his shirt.

  “Hell! That ain’t gonna do you no good, old man.”

  “You’re gonna need something bigger’n that to get past us, gook.”

  “You know, Danny boy? I’d say this little guy’s making his way to the Pheasant.”

  The name above the nightclub door was visible now through the glare: the Silver Pheasant. It flashed thousands of colored lightbulbs. Siri heard music. Some kind of jazz. He believed it was possible now. All he needed to do was cross the—but they were on him. They grabbed his arms and yanked him onto his back. They stood over him, one with a baseball bat held above his head. Siri could see them now, angry, menacing. They wore blue jeans and boots and were twice his size. Still alive, they would have been even bigger. But all that remained of them now was gray skeletons with enormous eyeless skulls, their clenched fists like knots of ginseng.

  “They play baseball back in Commie Land, gook?”

  And the bat came crashing down.

  Siri gasped and his head wrenched to one side to avoid the blow. And he smelled stew and death. And suddenly there was no dark street or skeletons in blue jeans. Just a room with split bamboo walls and light streaming in through gaps in a thatched roof in need of repair. He was lying on a bamboo platform above a dirt floor where a fine white longhaired dog sat staring at him. Small black pigs grunted and scurried around aimlessly. Siri was damp with sweat but not harmed. He’d been dressed in a quilted military topcoat against the cold. He felt drowsy and a little nauseous, which he attributed to some form of sedative. All around him was that unmistakable smell he knew so well from the morgue.

  He got carefully to his feet and stepped down onto the packed earth. He removed the coat and laid it behind him on his bedding. His sleeping berth was no more than a large hutch in a house with four or five similar compartments. Against the walls stood farming implements, large cane baskets, one or two crossbows, and a large foot-operated rice crusher. A small family altar to the house spirits took pride of place on a shelf opposite the front door. He walked around his hutch and into the main area of the house where the central pillar rose up to the rafters. And tied to that pillar was an old woman. She was dressed in a beautiful ornate, hand-embroidered Hmong costume: a black, long-sleeved jacket and a heavy pleated skirt that came to her knobby knees. A single silver torque at her neck almost doubled her weight.

  There was no question she was dead. Despite attempts to mask the smell with burning incense and candles there was no mistaking it. Either she had already begun to shrink or the costume was too big for her. Her head receded into the collar like that of a frightened tortoise. Siri had been to Hmong houses where the deceased was laid out on a platform before the funeral but had never seen a corpse suspended from the house post. She was high enough for the pigs not to reach her feet but Siri wondered why the dog hadn’t made a play for her. Hungry dogs are most insensitive to the sanctity of human death.

  He left the stench behind him and walked out through the open doorway to a splendid vista across a range of rolling hills. The air was so fresh and biting it brought on a coughing fit. The sun battled with the winter chill to maintain a pleasant mean. He was in a village. There was no gate or fence. There were some fifteen wooden or bamboo huts similar to but smaller than the one he’d come from. There was a chicken coop, a large cage full of mynah birds, and what he imagined to be a stable, albeit an empty one. The village land had been cleared of trees but behind the huts, a mountain continued upward to a point where it was topped with vegetation like a bad haircut. Water flowed to each house from a higher source along a network of bamboo guttering. More pigs and dogs mingled with goats and the odd cow like mismatched party guests—but there were no people.

  He called out a hello that echoed across the hills but received only an oink in reply. This kidnapping had a very casual feel to it. As there was no guard to overpower or horse to flee on, he decided to look around. All the other houses were shut up, the doors secured with chains and large padlocks. Behind one of the huts was a small copse of tall trees, the tallest of which had been left standing untrimmed. It was lavishly decorated with colored ribbons and sparkly tin and surrounded with little offerings. This, Siri knew, was the sanctuary for the spirits of the land and the trees that the Hmong had taken. Allowing them the tallest of the trees was a sort of compromise, much better than having them haunt your house.

  Having no desire to go back to spend time with his suspended housemate, Siri followed the bamboo pipes in search of the water source. He decided an icy bath was exactly what he needed to shake away the effects of the anesthetic. As he climbed the hill and neared the foliage, cold winds seemed to surf across the mountaintops and cut through him like the reaper’s scythe. Entering the trees was like crossing some official temperature median. It became eerily cold and silent. Something seemed to be sending him a warning. The amulet around his neck buzzed against his flesh.

  No more than twenty yards along the forested track there appeared one more small house off to the side. It was buried deep in vegetation with only the front visible through a tunnel of overhanging trees and dangling vines. Siri had never seen an isolated hut in a Hmong village. The inhabitants liked to group closely together for safety and social cohesion. There was no advantage in living separately. He left the well-worn track and approached the house. As he got closer, he began to feel a peculiar sensation. There was a sort of physical presence, not spiritual, not the usual friendly house and field spirits that protected the Hmong, but a tangible threat. It was as if the vegetation around him seethed with resentment. The pathway through the arched trees leading to the house was barred with a symbolic fence of interwoven bamboo latticework. It was grotesquely daubed with dried blood and chicken feathers. This too Siri had seen before in front of the houses of Hmong suffering from sickness or of women in the throes of childbirth. It merely signaled that a visitor should not enter. But none of the fences in his memory had been this elabo
rate. Nor had they shown evidence of such wholesale massacre of fowl. Nor had he witnessed the presence of handmade dolls. Crudely formed from straw and sticks, they sat or lay around the fence in the hundreds. Some had begun their lives as vegetables or tarot roots, others were simple twig people.

  Beyond the latticed fence, four land bridges had been erected. These small bamboo structures were miniature reconstructions of actual bridges but in this case they had no water to cross. They traditionally offered a shortcut for lost souls to return to their host. One was customary. Four suggested a hell of a lot of souls had gone missing from this particular house.

  “Hello?” Siri called. “Anyone there?” Silence. “Do you need any help? I’m a doctor.”

  He tried again in Hmong. The language flowed effortlessly off his tongue. This was one of the peculiar side effects of discovering his shaman roots. Until two years earlier, the language had remained dormant inside him like a mammoth frozen in a glacier. If his unknown parents had been Hmong, the old woman who raised him had given no indication of it. The only legacy he had from them was his eyes—greener than the lushest of grasses on the hills that rolled all around—and this language he’d never learned. But it drew no response. He thought he heard a sound—a low continuous growl— although he couldn’t be certain it wasn’t coming from his own head. He wondered whether the place might be deserted like all the others. There was no padlock on the door but he wasn’t about to break the taboo and enter a marked house without permission.

  The trail continued up into the mountain. The branches of bamboo gutter had converged to become just one single aqueduct at ground level. He followed it for another hundred yards and there he found a spring and a small rock pool. It looked coolly inviting but he had better manners than to bathe in the village water supply. Instead he removed his clothes, sat to one side of the pool, and used a long-handled gourd to ladle the icy water over himself. The sensation was exactly what his body needed. Every gourdful sent a million tiny needles into his skin, Mother Nature’s own acupuncture.

  The deeper he plunged the ladle, the icier the water, the more alive he became. Then he scooped too low and brought up sand from the bottom of the pool. He was about to empty it out of the gourd when he noticed that he’d caught something other than grit. He reached into the ladle and pulled out a button. Someone had lost a light green button with two sewing holes at its center. It wasn’t an astounding discovery but something made him reach over to his shirt and slip it into the top pocket. And he thought no more of it. There was too much in his mind to invest a great deal of thought into a button. He had been abducted and had no idea where he was. He was certain there was a negative force nearby, but none of that seemed to matter. He was having a marvelous bath and as he washed the dust out of his snowy white hair he began to sing. It was a Hmong nursery rhyme he’d picked up somewhere along life’s way. It seemed appropriate.

  Mmmmm … be good and

  stay quiet, little baby,

  Sleep well and deep,

  For in only a few seconds

  Father and Mother will return

  From taking care of the cows.

  He then ad-libbed a line of his own: Where the bloody hell are you, Mother and Father?

  He shook the water from his hair and opened his eyes to see seven females of various shapes and sizes standing in a line watching him. The youngest was no older than twelve; the oldest in her forties. They were dressed in similar black costumes decorated with fine embroidery. They were all smiling with not the slightest flush of embarrassment. Siri, for want of any more fitting recourse, gave a low seated bow. After a slight pause the audience laughed and clapped their hands.

  Cashews Make Me Fart

  Although it seemed hardly possible, the second attempt on the lives of the coup spoilers was even more dastardly than the first. And more deadly. Phosy had discovered very little about the Lizard. The photograph on the wanted poster was the result of her only arrest. It transpired that she had been caught quite by chance with a forged pass to an official event at the Monument to the Unknown Soldier. It was an award ceremony at which the Medal of the Brave, Level 2, was given posthumously to unsung heroes of the revolution: the People’s Liberation Army equivalent of the Purple Heart. The government decided it needed more role models for the younger generation and was dragging old soldiers from their graves and making them celebrities.

  The Lizard had brought a wreath with a card claiming that she was a representative of the Luang Nam Tha Ladies Farming Cooperative. She laid her flowers at the foot of the monument around which stood several senior Party members, the chief of the armed forces, and the president. The Lizard was just about to step back, and presumably retreat, when the unthinkable happened. Against all the odds, the actual representative from the Luang Nam Tha Cooperative was in attendance. She stepped forward to get a better look at the wreath, pointed to the interloper, and shouted, “This woman is an impostor.”

  Several officers of the presidential guard piled onto the Lizard and the dignitaries were hurried away. The lady guards of the PLA discovered that the old woman had a Smith & Wesson K-38 Combat Masterpiece strapped to one thigh beneath her traditional skirt. An inspection of the wreath revealed a time bomb buried in the leaves with less than five minutes left to run on the clock. At the nearest police station they fingerprinted the terrorist and took her photograph before loading her into a closed truck. On her way to the Security Division and inevitable torture, she had smiled at her four armed guards. Between her teeth they saw a small white capsule.

  “Ricin,” she told them. “Virtually instantaneous.”

  She bit down on the capsule and swallowed it. Although the guards did their utmost to remove the capsule and revive her, she was unconscious within a minute. There was no pulse. They explained what had happened to the officials at Security and the resident medic could not find any vital signs of life.

  Somewhere between the moment they laid out her body in an open cell and three the following morning the corpse disappeared. The details were a little foggy. As usual in the socialist state nobody wanted to take the blame. It wasn’t until the same woman was identified from her photograph at a subsequent act of terrorism that the PLA Security Division admitted she must have been alive when they had bagged her body that night. They had no idea how that could have been. There was conjecture that the pill she consumed may have served to slow down her pulse to a point that it was almost undetectable or that she might have actually died and come back to life again. Either way several officers were demoted.

  The fingerprint check produced nothing, as almost all of the fingerprint records had been destroyed by the retreating Royalists. The That Luang police station hadn’t actually known what to do with them as they had no relationship with other police forces outside the country. The Vietnamese embassy staff sent a copy to Hanoi but nothing came of it.

  All this had taken place long before Phosy returned from the northeast and became attached to police headquarters. Although his office was supposed to be provided copies of army security files, in reality it took a walk down Route That Luang and a cup of hot tea with the clerk at the station before he could get his hands on them. The story hadn’t made it into the newspaper of course. It was negative news and the authorities held the view that the population didn’t need any more of an excuse to be dissatisfied with their government. As the people knew they wouldn’t be reading about murder and intrigue, very few of them bothered to read the paper at all. Although it was considered confidential and for official eyes only, Phosy had passed the report on to his wife. He believed it was helpful for her to understand just how devious their foe could be.

  Now Nurse Dtui was attempting, in turn, to pass on the salient points of their predicament to Mr. Geung. They were squashed between the shelving units in the storeroom out of earshot of the office. The auditors had been particularly animated all day as they’d reached the bottom drawer of the cabinet, which was empty but for three final sets of rec
ords, Dtui’s old Thai Movie Fan magazines, and a concrete imprint of a bear’s paw. They could smell that the end of their work at the morgue was in sight. They sounded positively jolly as they discussed their next mission. Nevertheless, Dtui kept her voice down as she drilled Geung in safety precautions.

  “All I’m saying, honey,” she summarized, “is that you have to be careful.”

  “Oh … of the Lizard.”

  “Of anything and anybody that looks different or out of place. Don’t talk to any strangers. Don’t accept any gifts.”

  “What a … about from the p … post lady?”

  The auditor’s conversation stopped and Dtui listened for footsteps on the concrete floor. She heard none.

  “Letters should be all right,” she continued. “But check that you know where the parcels come from. Ask the post lady, ‘Where does this come from?’ All right?”

  “All right. A … and if it comes from Comrade Dr. Siri i … it’s OK.” “Right.” “The … the post lady said it was.” “Good. If she says it comes from—What do you mean, ‘said’?”

  “The post lady s … said the p … parcel came from Comrade Dr. Siri.”

  “When?”

  “This … morning. Sh … she said it was from the north. It w … was to me. It had m … m … my name written on it. And Comrade Nurse Dtui. But m … my name was first.” He smiled with pride and held up his chin.

  “You didn’t open it?”

  Geung laughed. “It was for m … me and you.”

  “I get that. But did you open it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was in it?”