Six and a Half Deadly Sins Read online

  The couple had made themselves a sort of spring-roll casing from the soggy mattresses and quilts and were squashed together as the filling—purely for the preservation of body heat, of course.

  “Still miss the adventure?” Siri asked.

  “Every day with you is a lifetime of adventure, Dr. Siri.” Daeng smiled.

  The residents of Siri’s halfway house for vagrants and strays in Vientiane were thinking about retiring for the night. The children were already in their bedrolls, and the women were waiting for their turns to shower. They’d wash their hair in the afternoon when the sunshine helped to dry it, so they spent as little time as possible on their evening ablutions. It was Mrs. Fah’s turn at the water trough. As there was no lock on the door, she was singing—badly.

  Some of the men were playing their last hand of rummy. Noo the forest monk had accrued a veritable log cabin of toothpicks in winnings, which he promised to donate to a worthy cause. None of the others would accuse him of cheating, although it was quite obvious he had been.

  The transistor played Thai pop from across the river interspersed with monotonous advertisements for luxury items the Lao had long since stopped dreaming of owning. What good was a blender/mixer when there were no fruits and vegetables to blend or mix? They’d paused the game briefly and were listening to how they might change the pigment of their unsightly dark skin through daily applications of Snowflake cream—now available in half-liter jars.

  That’s when they heard the scream. Gongjai, the ex-karaoke lounge hostess, came running into the kitchen wearing her baby-doll nightdress. She was closely followed by two men wielding machetes. “These bastards manhandled me,” said Gongjai.

  “Shut up,” said Machete One.

  “Which one of you’s Nurse Dtui?” said Machete Two. For effect he clunked his machete into the Queen of Hearts on the kitchen table, perhaps envisioning splitting the table in two and everyone saying, “OOH.” Instead, the fat knife embedded itself in the old teak table, and he blushed as he attempted to pull it out.

  A third man, unarmed but naturally frightening with the left side of his face like melted cheese, burst into the kitchen. “Where is she?” he shouted.

  Alerted by the singing from the bathroom, he strode across to the wooden door and kicked it down. Though Mrs. Fah narrowly avoided being hit by the falling door, she did not avoid being seen in all her splendor by everyone in the kitchen. “How rude,” she said, but didn’t hurry to cover herself.

  “The garden!” shouted Half-Face. The man who wasn’t standing on the kitchen table astride his machete like Arthur attempting to free Excalibur ran into the backyard.

  Crazy Rajhid and the lost woman were sitting silently at the garden table staring at each other. Ugly the dog had been tied to a post with heavy-duty electrical cable for fear he might have attempted to follow Siri’s airplane. He obviously hadn’t given up that hope, because he’d patiently spent his days chewing through the copper wire. When he saw an assailant burst through the back door carrying a weapon, he charged. The cable snapped. Ugly soared through the air like a country rocket and buried his fangs in the man’s face. The man screamed, fell backward, lost his machete and landed with a thump on the path. Crazy Rajhid was at the man’s chest like an attack of angina.

  Taking advantage of the distracting sounds from outside, Inthanet the puppet master reached into the shoulder bag that hung from his chair and produced a Browning pistol. He fired twice into the ceiling, then leveled the weapon at Half-Face. Splinters of plywood rained down. The house invader on the table was dragged down to the nicely tiled floor, where he found himself in an armlock and staring into the face of a bald man with no eyebrows.

  “I forgive you,” said Noo.

  Half-Face looked back from whence he’d come, hoping for reinforcements, but the man he’d placed as lookout at the front gate appeared with a teenaged girl clamped onto his back. The fingers of her left hand gouged into his eyes. In her right hand, she held a shaving blade to his throat. Behind him were assorted women and children with bamboo broom handles prodding and poking him into the kitchen.

  “What the …?” Half-Face began. “What’s wrong with you guys? These are old men and kids and damned women. Pull yourselves tog—”

  He was interrupted by the excruciating pain of a screwdriver being buried into his shoulder. He turned to see the lost woman at his back, eyes burning like flares, teeth snarling. She yanked out the shaft with little effort and was primed to strike again, this time at his throat. He cringed and sank to his knees, but she had hold of his hair. She looked—to all who witnessed the scene—rapturous. It was Rajhid who caught her wrist before she could plunge it into the invader’s jugular. She had found a reservoir of incredible strength, but the Indian was its equal. Whatever demons were inside of her would have to wait for their exorcism. She settled for slapping the gang leader around the head with her free hand, two, three times. Then, as quickly as it had arrived, her energy was gone, and she was frail and vulnerable again.

  “Help!” came a distant call from out back, accompanied by Ugly on the growls.

  Inthanet walked up to the cowed gang leader. “I’m afraid Nurse Dtui isn’t in right now,” he said. “But if you’d care to leave a message …”

  Daeng and Siri rose with what should have been the sunrise having slept hardly at all. One would fall asleep only to be awoken by the coughing of the other. Eventually they fell into an exhausted trancelike state where they didn’t have the energy to cough or the wherewithal to sleep. Although the temperature hadn’t risen a single degree, they came to sit on the wraparound balcony of the old building to watch for the frenzied comings and goings of Muang Sing’s main intersection. After ten minutes, a cheroot-smoking man on a bicycle squeaked past. It was another fifteen minutes before a woman with a bouncing shoulder cradle full of fruit headed in the same direction.

  That was, apparently, as exciting as things would get. The old couple were left with the feeling they were the last survivors. The mountains that surrounded the town on the maps were not apparent in the flesh. Instead, the mist gradually deleted the buildings only a block from Siri’s viewpoint and left him in the hollow of a cloud. He had no sense of the vibrancy he’d read about in the old tomes of the French explorers. Of the days when Muang Sing market was the Ginza of the Golden Triangle drug trade.

  “Fancy a coffee and croissants?” he asked.

  “I think I’d prefer a bowl of hot stew,” said Daeng. She nodded toward the bank of mist to the east. “Looks like the masses are heading in that direction. I bet the market’s in that fog somewhere. And where there’s croissants and stew, there’s bound to be drugs.”

  “We don’t need drugs,” said Siri. “Water and vitamin C, that’s what’s called for. It’s a nasty cold. It’ll be gone in twenty-four hours. Trust me. I’m a doctor.”

  And with that he fell into another coughing fit.

  Compared to Muang Sing’s downtown, the market was throbbing in a slow, early morning, sleepy kind of way. The morning trade leaned toward fruits, vegetables and opium. Despite all the international suggestions for drug eradication, nobody had come up with a crop that could bring in higher profits. There were no oranges, but Siri bought a large bag of pomegranates, and they gorged and dribbled as they ambled along the aisles. It was still fun to admire the hill tribe women in their traditional costumes—the Akha jangling in their piaster hats and the Hmong in their embroidered finery. They were accompanied by a soundtrack of languages they didn’t recognize and the whinnies of ponies tethered to posts. The clothing and electrical goods stalls didn’t bother to open until after eight, when the villagers had made enough from their cane or bananas or edible wildlife to buy a T-shirt or a battery for the community radio.

  But against the odds, there was one stall selling pha sin. A woman sat cross-legged on top of her cloths in a long Tottenham Hotspur football scarf and earmuffs.

  “Sister,” asked Siri, “where might we find Auntie Kwa? She
’s a weaver.”

  “She’s a common seller,” said the woman with a morose expression. “She’s a mother to ingrates, a wife to a drunk killed in a useless war. She’s the sister to a drug addict. She’s a pauper because nobody has money to buy her beautiful wares. But somewhere deep in all that tragedy, yes, she’s a weaver.”

  The reply was somewhat more complicated than the question deserved, but Madame Daeng got it. “You’re Auntie Kwa,” she said.

  “To some,” said the woman. “To others I’m dirt.”

  Siri unwrapped the half pha sin from its plastic bag and held it up. “Did you weave this?” he asked.

  Auntie Kwa looked at it curiously, then up at the customers. “Oh, it’s you.”

  She climbed down from her perch. “Did I weave that? Yes and no,” she said as she rummaged around in a large pack, finally producing another plastic bag, this one stapled shut. “I’m to give you this,” she said, and handed it to Siri. “Glad to be rid of it. It’s brought me nothing but bad luck.”

  Siri doubted whatever was in the bag could curse her life to a greater extent than she herself. He ripped open the staples, reached into the bag and pulled out another pha sin.

  “Don’t open that here,” said Auntie Kwa.

  “It’s just a rectangle of fabric,” said Siri.

  “It’s never that.”

  Siri unfolded it anyway, took hold of the corners and let it drape to the ground. To his untrained and disappointed eye, it looked rather similar to the one they’d received in Vientiane. There were one or two minute differences that he would have called insignificant. He started to run his fingers around the hem.

  “Do you know where this is from?” asked Daeng.

  “No,” said Auntie Kwa, and looked away.

  “It’s Lu, isn’t it?” said Daeng.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Siri. “Could I borrow some scissors?”

  “What for?”

  “Look here,” he said, and handed her the sin. “Feel this?”

  She reached out and squeezed the hem. “What is that?” she asked.

  “I’m guessing it’s a finger,” he told her.

  “A what?” said Auntie Kwa, stepping back in horror.

  “A severed finger like the one you sent to me in Vientiane.”

  “Are you mad? I never did any such thing.”

  “Sister,” he said, “I work for the Ministry of Justice. We found a finger in the hem of the pha sin you’ve admitted you wove. That makes you a murder suspect.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “If this second one also contains a finger, that’s what we at Justice call a … a double-digit dilemma. You’re in a lot of trouble. Now … the scissors, if you’d be so kind.”

  Auntie Kwa handed him a pair of shears as big as his chest. Daeng laughed. “Could you just pick the hem for us?” she asked the woman.

  Reluctantly, Auntie Kwa took hold of the cloth and began to pick with a thin blade. As in most markets, this small but significant break from early morning tradition had attracted a silent gathering of curious onlookers come to see what the outsiders were doing. Shoppers in blankets tied at the waist with string or in ex-army trenchcoats crowded in on the old couple.

  “I didn’t do this. I didn’t do this,” Auntie Kwa mumbled. She didn’t dare look inside even when the opening was wide enough. She handed the skirt to Siri, who probed into the hem with a pair of tweezers from his morgue kit. He withdrew the object slowly, but it wasn’t a finger he found in there. It was a bullet of a type he didn’t recognize.

  “That’s not a finger,” said Auntie Kwa.

  “It’s no less incriminating,” said Siri. “It could be the bullet that killed the owner of the finger, for all we know. I think you’d better tell us everything.”

  “I had nothing to do with this,” she said. “There’s nothing to tell. I sold one of my sins to some woman. She gave me twice what I asked for it. Then she handed me this plastic bag and told me an old man would bring back my sin one day, and I was to give him the bag—this one. I never even opened it.”

  “When was this?” Daeng asked.

  “About six weeks ago.”

  “What did she look like?” asked Siri.

  “Normal. Nothing special. Not tall, not short. About my age.”

  The gathered onlookers had begun a mumbled translation for their fellow tribesmen.

  “Lao?” asked Siri.

  “Far as I could tell. I didn’t check her ID.”

  “How was she traveling?” asked Daeng.

  “Just turned up on foot here, like you two.”

  “Do you know anyone who’s missing a finger?” Siri asked.

  “No, I do not,” Auntie Kwa replied.

  “All right,” said Daeng. “Then that brings us to the original question. Where was this second sin made?”

  “Really, I don’t know.”

  “Look carefully,” said Siri.

  “It’s a cheap rip-off,” she said. “Poor quality. A Lu design, but nothing personal about it. We Lu take a pride in our weaving. It’s a family-based tradition in the villages. This was probably made over the border in a sweatshop. That’s why nobody buys my high-class sins anymore. They go for the cheap ones.”

  “Over the border?” said Daeng. “You mean, in China?”

  “Yes. No, perhaps not China. You see this fabric? The green hem beneath the brocade? That’s Burmese. Here in Muang Sing we only produce black, indigo and blue.”

  “And is there a trade in green fabric between Muang Sing and Burma?”

  “No, too far. Not enough interest. If we needed it, we could get it cheaper from the Chinese.”

  “So if I wanted to buy Burmese cloth …?”

  “You’d go to Chiang Kok, on the Mekhong.”

  “Do you know any Lu weavers over there?” Siri asked.

  “There’s only the one. Her name’s Peu Jin. She lives by the river.”

  “No, wait,” said Daeng. “That doesn’t make sense. You say they don’t produce green cloth here. But the sin that was sent to us—the sin you wove—has a green hem. So doesn’t that make it Burmese?”

  “No, sister. That’s why I said yes and no when you asked me if it was mine. I did weave that cloth, but I used good old-fashioned Muang Sing spun cotton. Someone’s dyed the hem green, and a shoddy job they made of it too.”

  “Why would they do that?” Siri asked.

  “Your guess is as good as mine, old man.”

  Inspector Phosy had spent the night in his jeep on a remote hill. He’d found paranoia had saved his life on several occasions. In this case, it was more like a shivery touch of the inevitable that kept him away from his boardinghouse. He’d broken the face of probably the most influential villain in the province. Following his initial interviews at the Yao village, Phosy had driven his Chinese guests back to the border crossing at Pang Hai. From there they’d found their own transportation to the trade commission in Meng La.

  Lieutenant Tang on the Lao side had been interested to hear of the inspector’s run-in with Foreman Goi. The lieutenant had collected a good deal of information about the toothless one. His interest had been piqued following a visit the foreman had paid him a year earlier. Goi had quite openly suggested mutual rewards in turning a blind eye to certain imports and exports. Ninety times out of a hundred, such a deal would have been accepted, and a Lao military man on five dollars a month could have himself a very cozy life. But Lieutenant Tang was no ordinary soldier. He was one of those rare devout communists who detested capitalist doctrines and the selfish pursuit of money. He could most certainly not be bought. He slept in a rattan hut, drank in moderation and wrote daily to his wife and children. Phosy liked him.

  Over coffee, Phosy heard that toothless Goi was actually called Guan Jin. He was Thai Lu but born on the Chinese side of the border. Like the Lao, the Lu race had been cut in half by a random demarcation. Goi had studied engineering in Peking and risen
to the rank of sergeant in the People’s Liberation Army. He had been accused of some unlisted infringements that were never proven, but he had been kicked out of the military. Soon he was managing engineering crews as a civil engineer in the southern provinces. There his language skills made him invaluable to the monolingual Chinese. His personal record was clouded with accusations of violence, cruelty and profiteering, but his professional accomplishments were many. His teams were always the most efficient and effective. His projects were concluded under budget and to the satisfaction of the regional cadres. Once the Chinese road program was launched in Laos, Goi was given instructions to get the job done without draining the limited resources of the People’s Republic of China. It appeared nobody looked too deeply into how he achieved that.

  Rumors were a national pastime in Laos, and nowhere were they more extravagant than along the border. But even if rumors about Foreman Goi were greatly exaggerated, they all pointed in one direction. The man was criminally insane. There were stories of executions, of beatings and torture. Goi had become a dark legend in the north, and his name spread fear in the hearts of those who worked for and with him. Phosy had felt that manic energy, and there was no doubt in his mind that Foreman Goi was a dangerous man. To make matters worse, his influence extended beyond Luang Nam Tha all the way to the capital. He had to have contacts in Vientiane to have been able to gather information about Phosy’s wife and child. Those same contacts proved a constant threat to their lives. Phosy could have called for backup from Vientiane, but he felt he’d need a small army to compete with Goi and his road builders. And waging war against a warlord had never proven wise or successful.

  Phosy and Tang might have been able to glean more information from Vientiane about Goi’s record, but communication had been down for twenty-four hours. The border post was completely cut off from the outside world. Even their shortwave signals had been blocked. And, for some reason, traffic into Laos from China had halted completely.