The Merry Misogynist

believe that but for the tragedy, he would have been a scholar in the classics. A university lecturer. Of course our caste would have prevented this but I believe in my heart he had the ability. In his odes he writes that he is a prince. In order to find his palace of the One Hundred and Eleven Eyes, the common man must solve three riddles. The first riddle talks of the lace beneath the old French lady’s skirt. I wonder if he sees the colonial building as an old French lady.”
    “Do you have all three riddles?”
    “Solving the first will lead to the second, and so on.”
    “Have you looked under the old lady’s skirt?”
    “Sadly, sir, I don’t have my son’s head for literature, or yours for science. I am a humble cook.”
    “Right. We can discuss that later. Do you have the full riddle somewhere?”
    “It is upstairs.”
    “Do you have time to translate it for me?”
    “It would be my pleasure, sir.”

5
DOOMED
    W hen Siri got back to the morgue there were three messages waiting for him. Unfortunately, their waiting area was between the ears of Mr Geung. Nurse Dtui was off at a nursing lecture at the new Ministry of Health so the messages had been given orally to the morgue assistant. It took a while to extract them. The easiest to understand was that a small man and two taller men had been by asking where Dr Siri was. The doctor knew exactly who they were and was pleased he’d been out of the office when they came. But he knew he had to go on the attack against the thugs from Housing. The second message was that Inspector Phosy would call, although the time had become lost in the muddle of juggling three pieces of information at the same time. The third message was impossible to decipher.
    “A…she w…wasn’t her. But the other h…her was was on…on dragging.”
    Siri knew his friend had reached his ‘full’ mark and didn’t press him. He left Geung in the cutting room and went into his office to see if Dtui had left a note. Halfway across his room he stopped. There were a dozen worms squirming on his desk and they didn’t hurry away when they saw him. The same ominous feeling came over him, the vague scent of damp earth, the sense of time running out. He heard a step behind him.
    “Dr Siri?”
    If his skin hadn’t been on so tight he would have jumped out of it. He turned to see the hospital clerk in the doorway.
    “Yes?”
    “Doctor? Are you all right?”
    “Yes.”
    “You have another phone call.”
    This time, Phosy was still on the line when the coroner reached the administration office. Siri wondered exactly how much red tape would have to be unwrapped to get a phone extension over at the morgue. He didn’t need all this exercise. His lungs had been giving him trouble of late. He wheezed once or twice into the mouthpiece.
    “Siri?”
    “Phosy?”
    “Any news?”
    “Lots. Just let me…catch my breath. You go first.”
    “Nothing at all from the photo. I did meet a weaver who recognized the ribbon. She gave me the name of a shop in Vientiane that sells it. It isn’t available up here apparently. That might lead to something. And I’ve been sharing your theory about the shrouded rice worker. I got some interesting reactions to that. I told people to spread it around and one farmer got back to me. He told me the driver of the truck that picks up his excess rice for the government tax mentioned something similar once.”
    “How similar?”
    “Well, you know what stories are like up here. It was about a woman he’d seen working the fields who wasn’t really a woman.”
    “And she was a…?”
    “The locals told the driver she used to be a woman – and this is from him, not me – but she drank from a cursed pool, and it turned her invisible. So they wrapped her up from head to foot so she wouldn’t frighten outsiders.”
    “And he believed them?”
    “He’s a truck driver.”
    “Did your farmer recall where this invisible woman was seen…or not seen?”
    “He couldn’t remember. But we’re looking for the driver. We’ve got his name. It shouldn’t take long. Are you ready to speak yet?”
    “I am, and it’s important. Let’s hope we don’t get cut off. I went to the lycee and met teacher Oum. I mentioned the condition of our corpse, and she’d heard the same story from one of her students over a year ago.”
    “The same story?”
    “The beautiful girl, the strangulation, the tree, the pestle.”
    “Shit.”
    “Exactly. I went to meet the