Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

streets of K6, he soon became enthralled by this small corner of Lao Americana. Forty acres of suburban USA had been plonked down in the middle of rice fields and fenced in to keep out (or, Civilai argued, in ) the riff-raff. There was certainly a cultural force field around the place. During the height of the Vietnam War, the United States Agency for International Development had four hundred personnel in Laos, three times that if you counted the CIA, but nobody ever did. Their role was mostly economic, juggling five-hundred million aid dollars. There were some showcase development projects, and seemingly endless refugee relief programmes.
    Over a million Lao had been displaced by the civil war in the north and the royalist ministers, spilling in and out of the rotating door democracy, had been too busy amassing fortunes to find time for actual aid work.
    So, USAID served as a surrogate Ministry of the Interior, and where better to return to after a hard day of running a country than a little slice of the American dream right there in the third world? K6 had its own high school, commissary stables, scout hut, tennis court, and youth club. But most of all, K6 had gardens; neat napkin lawns and pretty flowerbeds and fences around houses that would be perfectly at home in the suburbs of Los Angeles. The christening of K6 had always baffled Siri given that the place had been planned, designed and built by and for Americans. He’d always expected they’d call it Boone City or Tara or Bedford Falls. But no, K6 it had been named and K6 it remained today.
    Once the Americans were evacuated in seventy-five, almost the entire Lao cabinet selected themselves a home on the range and moved in. Other regimes might have burned the compound to the ground as a show of anti-US sentiment, but the Pathet Lao retained an admirable practical streak. Initially it was an act of arrogance as much as a desire for western living, although some of the politburo members seemed to be getting a little too comfortable with their washing machines and barbecues. Some had rescued the rose bushes and tomato plants and weren’t ashamed at being seen mowing their own lawns.
    Siri and his guides turned left on 6 th Street whose sign was far more pretentious than the street itself. The words ‘No Thru Road’ were stencilled on a short board opposite. The drainage system was doing a good job of keeping the roads flood-free. There were only four ranch-style houses on the cul-de-sac. Each of them was undergoing repossession by Mother Nature. It was into the first of these jungle bungalows that Dung led Siri and the security chief. Twice, Siri had asked what it was all about and twice he’d been ignored. He wasn’t in the best of moods. The constant drizzle had soaked into his bones. They walked through the open front gate and turned, not to the house, but towards the carport. An overhead fluorescent lamp flickered and buzzed like a hornet in a jar. It was mid afternoon. Siri wondered why they hadn’t turned it off.
    At the rear of the carport was a small wooden structure, two-by-two metres, two-and-a-half metres tall, with a sloping concrete tile roof. A Vietnamese security guard stood at ease in front of it with his pistol holstered. Major Ton Tran Dung nodded at the soldier who produced a torch from his belt and handed it to his superior officer.
    “There’s a light inside,” Major Dung said, “but the bulb appears to have burned out. It was the smell that alerted our patrol.” Siri had picked up on it even before they turned into the street. It was an odd combination of jasmine and herbs and stewed blood.
    “Our protocol is that if anything odd comes up, they’re to contact me directly,” Dung said. “So I was the first one to go into the room. I came over as fast as I could, noticed the heat and the scent of blood, then I opened the door and that’s when I found her.”
    Chief Phoumi grabbed the torch from Dung and grimaced as he did so. Siri noticed a bandage beneath the cuff of the man’s shirt. Phoumi used his other hand to pull the wooden handle. An overpowering stench appeared to push the door open from the inside. Siri felt a wave of warm air escape with it. Inside, the box was dark, lit feebly by what light could squeeze through a small air vent high in one wall. But it created only eerie black shapes. Phoumi turned on the torch and he and Siri stepped up to the doorway. The beam immediately picked out the naked body of a woman