The Merry Misogynist

him because it paralleled a case he’d handled the previous year. The Ian Xang Hotel had previously imprisoned live animals for the edification of the general public. One black bear had been the star attraction until it was freed. Siri could imagine Rajid wandering into the Ian Xang grounds and watching the poor old girl behind her bars. Somewhere there lay the secret to the location of Rajid’s palace.
    “What time is it?” Siri asked.
    “Who cares?” answered Daeng.
 
    The grounds of the Ian Xang were spacious for a Lao hotel. There was some thick tropical vegetation, native flowers that had been dug up and replanted in unnatural rows, and a swimming pool that was starting to look more like a lotus pond. It had so many leaves floating on it a skinny teenager could have walked across its surface without getting wet.
    Siri and Daeng had strolled through reception arm in arm as if they owned the place. They dismissed the night clerk with a ‘Don’t even think about asking us a question’ look and ambled towards the door that gave access to the grounds. To any observer they were merely guests who intended to take a short promenade before retiring to their suite. Once they were outside they were alone. Squashed up against one wall there were four cages that had housed a variety of wild inmates in their time. Currently they served as an aviary. There was a crane in one, a dowdy hornbill in the next, a couple of dubious characters that looked like chickens in heavy make-up in the third, and a male peacock with barely enough space to spread his impressive tail in the last.
    “Where was the bear?” Daeng asked.
    “That one.”
    Siri pointed to the sad hornbill.
    “She looks depressed,” Daeng decided. “Why can’t they let her just wander around the grounds?”
    “That’s the problem with birds. They have this nasty habit of flying.”
    “She’s lovely. I doubt there are many of these left in the wild.”
    “It’s her own fault. Look at all that meat. She’d make three square meals. She’s in the cage for her own protection.”
    Siri had spent much of his life in the jungle and had eaten every endangered species there was. In those days a man didn’t give a hoot about the survival of an avian family lineage. It was them or us. If a hornbill with a machete had run across Siri in the bush and hacked him to death, he would have succumbed in good grace: a victim of the survival of the fittest rule. He believed that if God made you colourful, overweight, and delicious and didn’t give you any survival skills, you deserved to get eaten.
    Daeng obviously didn’t see it that way. Siri knew straight away what his unblushing bride had in mind. There were large padlocks on the cages, but he knew his lady had ways and means.
    “Can we solve the last riddle before you liberate her?” he pleaded.
    “What does he say about the sun?”
    “The all-night sun.”
    They looked up simultaneously at the single electric bulb that dangled in front of the cages. There were other bulbs that hung here and there from the same untidy cable. One hung by the pool, another by the garbage bins. The extension to the cages was nailed to a tree.
    “Our night sun’s up that tree, Siri.”
    “I can see that.”
    “Well, you surely don’t expect me to climb up there in my condition?”
    Siri had climbed enough trees in his life, but none since he had turned seventy. He held up his fist.
    “Surely not,” said Daeng, but she knew this was the only solution. She raised her own fist to the same height as his and stared into his eyes. Their version of rock-paper-scissors was elephant (fist), mouse (palm), and ant (little finger). The elephant crushed the mouse, the mouse squashed the ant, and the ant crawled up the elephant’s trunk and paralyzed his brain.
    They shook their fists twice and disclosed their opening gambits for the first round: Siri-elephant, Daeng-mouse. The second shake was Daeng-ant, Siri-elephant. All even. Everything came down to the last shake. They glared into one another’s eyes and let loose their final creatures.
    Siri-mouse…Daeng-ant.
    “Shit,” said Daeng.
    Luckily she was wearing fisherman’s trousers and not a skirt. There was no need to disrobe. She walked once around the tree and homed in on her branch of choice. Faster than Siri’s eye could follow she was up on the first hub and above the dangling bulb.
    “You’re only part human,” he called up to her.
    She edged along the branch.