Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

spearmint-chewing-gum green or stale-tobacco brown. Even the train standing in the station seems to have been spray painted to reflect the green⁄brown ambiance of the scene. Suddenly, there’s a flash of red, a small communist flag rises above the heads of the sombre crowd. We pan down to see a hand clutching the bamboo stick that the flag is attached to. It works its way forward like a bloody shark-fin churning through a green-brown sea. At last we see that holding the flag is a stomach-curdlingly beautiful young lady, Ming Zi, in the uniform of the Chinese People’s Revolutionary Army. She anxiously scours the faces of the passengers alighting from the train. A slightly off-key string orchestra is somewhere behind her, lost in the crowd. Her face is a live pallet of clearly recognisable emotions: elation, frustration, false hope, disappointment. Until we finally cut to her alone on a porter’s cart. We zoom in to a close-up of the flag on her lap. Tears fall onto it like raindrops, staining it drop by drop – through the magic of special effects – from brilliant red to chewing-gum green. To add insult to her injury, the porter steps up to Ming Zi and reclaims his cart. The brokenhearted girl walks forlornly along the deserted platform as the sun sets in the sky behind her. It is an uncommonly chewing-gum green day in Peking.
∗
    Siri squeezed Daeng’s hand, his eyes already damp with sympathy for his heroine. It promised to be an eleven-tissue movie. But they were barely ten minutes into it when a side door opened and a uniformed Vietnamese entered the theatre. He walked brazenly into the bottom right-hand corner of the screen and stood there like an extra staring into the audience. Some of its members told him to sit down. But he was obviously not interested in the film or the admonitions. He located the person he’d been searching for, pushed along the row and leaned into the ear of a broad man with a tuft-of-grass haircut. By now, all eyes but Siri’s and Civilai’s were on the drama in silhouette. Ming Zi had been abandoned. The seated man nodded and turned his head to search the audience. The Vietnamese stood to attention mid-row caring not a jot that he was ruining a perfectly good film. But, by now, everyone sensed the urgency of his mission. To Siri’s utter dismay, the broad man pointed to the doctor and rose from his seat. The soldier shouted in Vietnamese above the soundtrack, “Doctor, come with us.”
    Siri remained in his place, attempting to concentrate on the story on the screen. There was nothing he detested more than not being allowed to watch a film to its natural conclusion. In his mind there was no emergency so great as to deprive a man a cinematic climax. The broad man and the soldier had pushed their way to the far aisle where they both stood looking at the doctor.
    “Doctor Siri,” the broad man barked.
    “I think you’d better go,” Daeng whispered in Siri’s ear.
    “And insult the director?”
    “Well, darling, we’re only ten minutes into the film and I’d wager the director’s artistic integrity has already been compromised by Chairman Xiaoping. And, besides, it might be a medical emergency.”
    Heads were beginning to turn in Siri’s direction.
    “Damn it,” he snarled. “All right. But I expect a detailed blow-by-blow account of the whole thing later.”
    “In colour,” she promised. Siri huffed and bobbed and bowed his way to the end of the row.
    He followed the two men precariously across a walkway of wooden planks on bricks that criss-crossed the flooded sports field. The two men introduced themselves as they walked but neither could be described as friendly. The stout man was called Phoumi, and he was the Lao⁄Vietnamese head of security at K6. He insisted that he’d met the doctor before but Siri had no recollection. The uniformed Vietnamese officer said his name was Ton Tran Dung and that he was the officer in charge of the Prime Minister’s team of bodyguards. Following six assassination attempts, the politburo had decided to assign an elite ten-man Vietnamese army unit on twenty-four-hour watch over the Lao leader. They were supported by a counterpart team of ten Lao People’s Liberation Army personnel. Siri had sought out none of this information and wasn’t all that interested. His mind was still firmly entrenched in the mystery of how the lovely Ming Zi was ever going to find her lost fiancé.
    But, as they walked through the American