Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

jumbo. Why would a woman so worldly, so astute, put so much effort into superstition? He was reaching for the patron saint of French firemen when Madame Daeng came down the stairs.
    “Don’t you dare,” she called.
    “I was just – ”
    “Then don’t. A woman’s spirit house is her soul. Leave it alone.”
    “You’re an enigma, Madame Daeng.”
    “And plan to stay that way.”
    A lilac Vespa stopped directly beneath the shop awning and a rain-sodden Phosy climbed from its seat.
    “Will it ever stop raining?” he asked nobody in particular He kicked off his sandals and shook himself like a dog before entering. He carried a wad of papers wrapped in several plastic bags. They were obviously more important than himself in shorts and a T-shirt. At the sound of the bike, Siri had shelved his book and come downstairs.
    “No Sihot?” he asked.
    “Family crisis,” Phosy told him. “Seems the more relatives you have to live with the more crises you have to endure.”
    “And where’s Dtui?” Daeng asked.
    Phosy hesitated.
    “She’s not here? I came straight from the ministry,” he said. “Haven’t had a chance to go home.”
    “You were at the ministry dressed like that?” she asked.
    “Er, no. I have…I have spare clothes at the office.”
    On their way to the meeting table, Siri and Daeng exchanged one of their now customary glances. Once they were seated, Civilai, oblivious to any domestic drama, opened the proceedings. Siri noticed that his friend was wearing the same clothes he’d worn the last time they’d seen him.
    “As instructed,” Civilai began, “I performed my underhand duties at K6. Being a resident there and having no known police background, I was able to do my spying with relative ease. As you know, in my dotage I have become something of an Adonis in the kitchen. So, on Thursday I took a tray of sweet, freshly baked macaroons to the old stable building which the Vietnamese use as their centre of operations. As I am a frail and harmless pensioner, but fluent in Vietnamese, the guards quickly opened up to me and started to share secrets. My macaroons have that effect on people. The soldiers made no secret of the fact that they dislike their commander, Major Dung. They don’t like his womanising ways or his personality, but they all agreed he is a man with many skills. Most pertinent of these is that the major is an expert in amongst other things, a Vietnamese martial art called quoc ngu . It is, basically, the use of a double-edged sword. And he brought at least one with him.”
    “I knew it,” Siri said.
    “One of the men had seen him practising with-it in the clearing behind the stables,” Civilai added.
    “What about fencing swords?” Phosy asked.
    “Nobody I spoke to there knew what fencing was so I can’t answer that. The macaroons ran out before I could get any more information about Dung. But, as an aside, I enquired about the project being undertaken by Electricite du Lao. It appears that both the auditorium and the houses around the garden sauna are included in the rewiring schedule. Your Comrade Chanti would surely have been at both locations, at least during the planning stage.”
    “Sihot went to talk to him today,” Phosy told them. “We’ll see what he had to say for himself tomorrow.”
    Civilai accepted a glass of rum and soda from Madame Daeng with an overly polite nod. No Thai hooch this but genuine Bacardi he’d brought along himself, courtesy of the president. He sipped at his drink, smacked his lips and said, “Which brings me finally to the groundsman, Miht. I’d seen him around often but never had cause to talk to him. He turned out to be a very knowledgeable fellow. But he couldn’t come up with a memory of a Lao⁄Vietnamese couple with a daughter who trained with the American doctors. He was, without a shadow of a doubt, lying to me.”
    “What makes you think that?” Phosy asked.
    “Well, he isn’t the only survivor from the old to the new regime. There are two or three more who stayed on to ring in the new. One of them is called Comrade Tip, the washing lady. She maintains the small laundry at K6. My wife used to take our bedding there because our line isn’t strong enough to hold up all those wet sheets and covers. Comrade Tip knew exactly who I was talking about. She couldn’t remember the mother’s name but the father was a cook⁄handyman called Rote. Their daughter was a precocious girl called Jim. She’d done really