The Merry Misogynist

at police headquarters and told him that if the fuzziness ever cleared, Phosy would give him half a bottle of Thai rum in thanks.
    Later that same day, Phosy was bumped from the Luang Nam Tha flight in favour of some visiting VIPs from North Korea and several Party officials. He didn’t have any strings to pull higher than that. On Wednesday the flight didn’t take off as the visibility at their destination was poor due to crop burn offs. So it was Thursday, and he was killing time at the morgue before heading off to Wattay Airport for his third attempt. They were all in the cutting room – Siri, Dtui, and Mr Geung. Phosy was leaning against the freezer door.
    “B…be careful, Comrade Ph…Phosy,” Geung said. “You might f…f…freeze your eggs.” Geung laughed uproariously and the others chuckled along with him. The egg joke frenzy had gripped a Vientiane that was obviously in need of cheering up. When word got out that the prime minister himself had been in the limousine involved in the great scramble it had become something of a national campaign. Molutn singers, the common man’s humorists, had already performed several live versions of the saga. It had even found its way into Geung’s simple humour reservoir.
    “Steady, Geung.” Dtui smiled. “We don’t want little Malee hearing dirty jokes at her age.”
    Geung bent forward and touched Dtui’s enormous belly. “Sorry, Malee,” he said.
    “How much longer do you plan to keep the girl on ice?” asked Phosy, tapping on the freezer door.
    “Really, I don’t like to keep anyone in there for too long,” Siri confessed. “If we don’t find a family for her soon we’ll have to take her to the temple and give her an anonymous send-off. They don’t like that.”
    They all knew what he meant.
    “Anything on Crazy Rajid?” Phosy asked.
    “No sign of him,” said Siri. “It’s been two weeks already since anyone last saw him.”
    “Of course he might have just wandered off,” Phosy reminded them. “That’s what street people do. He could be anywhere.”
    “I don’t know.” Dtui shook her head. “He wandered pretty close to home as a rule. I mean to his dad’s home.”
    “Who’d have thought Crazy Rajid had a father?” said Phosy. “And could write. Wonders will never cease. Any luck with the second riddle?”
    “Not exactly,” said Siri. “I think the combination of its being written by a madman and translated from Hindi makes it doubly difficult.”
    “But he isn’t a madman, is he, Dr Siri?” Dtui asked. “I mean, he wasn’t born crazy. It was a trauma in his childhood that made him like this.”
    “You’re right,” Siri agreed. “And he may very well have a treatable condition for all we know. But we don’t have the expertise or the resources here to do anything for him. We can barely treat basic medical conditions.”
    Phosy took the note from Siri. “It’s obvious there’s a sane person in there somewhere or he wouldn’t be able to write things like this.” He unrolled the paper and read aloud,
In the belly of the brainless one ,
Made in Thailand .
Watched by four thousand eyes .
    “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it sane,” said Dtui.
    “It’s a riddle, Nurse,” Siri reminded her. “It’s supposed to be confusing.”
    “Then it succeeds,” she decided.
    “Made in Thailand. Made in Thailand.” Phosy seemed to hope that repeating it might make it clearer. “Should we be thinking dirty?”
    “I think Madame Daeng and I have been through all the dirty possibilities,” said Siri with a slight blush.
    “Is…is four thousand m…more than am…million?” Geung asked.
    “No, mate,” Dtui told him, “it’s not that many. But it’s a hell of a lot of eyes.”
    “We thought ‘brainless one’ might refer to the grand assembly building,” Siri confessed. “But we would never know which seat to look under.”
    “The national stadium?” Phosy offered.
    “Come off it.” Dtui laughed. “When was the last time they got more than fifty people watching anything there?”
    “True.”
    “Because if…if…if it’s a million…” Geung persisted.
    “It could be the spot where the Thai military intelligence put their telescope to watch what we’re doing over here,” Dtui suggested.
    “Not sure Crazy Rajid can swim that far,” Siri smiled.
    “…then th…there’s at least a m…million eyes at…at…at Wat Si Saket.”
    “Then there’s…What was that, Geung?” Dtui