The Merry Misogynist

that looks like a snake drinking from the river.”
    “Hmm. You’d expect snakes to change location from time to time, unless it’s a dead one.”
    “Or unless it’s a pipe. Perhaps it’s not drinking at all.”
    “An overflow?”
    “It could be.”
    Siri waded through the tall lemongrass to the river’s edge and waved his light up and downstream. There was no obvious plumbing. He was about to return to the road when he felt some kind of mound beneath his feet. It was more solid than the crunchy clay all around. He traced its path with his foot until he arrived at the mouth of a pipe.
    “Any luck?” Daeng called out.
    “More like divine inspiration. I was right on top of it. I’m at the serpent’s jaws.”
    “Is it wide enough to crawl through?”
    “Perhaps for an Indian fakir. Not for two old souls like us.”
    He returned to the bike and looked at the map once more.
    “Then it’s easy,” said Daeng. “We follow the pipe at surface level.”
    They shone their lights across the road in the direction from which the pipe originated. There was nothing but bush. It was a long vacant lot between two empty houses. It seemed to be crammed with all the remaining monsoon forest in the country.
    “How do we get through that?” Siri asked.
    “Determination,” Daeng replied and produced a frightening machete from her shoulder bag. She crossed the road and shone her beam along the green barricade. Siri joined her. “Right, down there,” she said.
    She had picked out a low, dark tunnel of leaves that looked like a small animal track.
    “That would involve crawling,” Siri pointed out.
    Daeng was already on her hands and knees hacking at the leaves.
    “I’ll go first and let you look at my bottom,” she said.
    “Aha, lead on, my Amazon.”
    The slow, bestial crawling lasted no longer than five minutes before they arrived at a clearing. This was no accident of nature. The clearing was a perfect square, twelve by twelve metres, probably levelled for a building project then abandoned. At its centre, just as the map promised, was Crazy Rajid’s palace. In the illustration it had all the splendour of the Taj Mahal with domes and minarets and a platoon of guards. In the real world it was a structure made entirely of old television sets. They were piled six high in one continuous square with no apparent entry point. They appeared to be cemented together with river mud. The turrets were formed of radiograms spaced along the parapet. Siri and Daeng stood behind their torches in awe of its weirdness.
    “Now how do you suppose he did that?” Daeng asked.
    Siri shook his head and laughed. “Offhand I see three possibilities. One, the TVs were already abandoned here and he just rearranged them into a palace. Two, they were dumped in the river by the consumerist Thais and washed up by the overflow. Or, three, he just rescued dead and dying TV sets from around the town and carried them here. Whichever it is, it’s good to see he hasn’t been wasting his time for the past ten years.”
    They walked around the outside of the structure to see if there was a way in. There was not.
    “You don’t suppose he’s inside there, do you?” Daeng asked.
    “Rajid, are you in there?” Siri called.
    There was no answer.
    “How do we get in?” he asked.
    “Must be a magic word. What was the old Roman spell?”
    “Abracadabra.”
    “Abracadabra,” Daeng repeated.
    Nothing happened.
    “Well, as we’ve solved the riddles and come all this way,” Siri decided, putting down his pack and walking to the television wall, “I think we only have one way to claim our prize.” He reached up to the top of the wall and pulled at the volume control of one of the smaller sets. As one might expect, river mud does not make a particularly effective cement. The mortar crumbled and the set fell at Siri’s feet. “Aha,” he sang. “We have breached their defences. The palace will soon be ours.”
    Daeng joined him in his pillage and within seconds they had a fairly large gap through which to step. At the centre of the compound lay the open grate of a large drain. This was obviously Rajid’s entry and exit point. Apart from some fifty forks jabbed into the earth all around, the only furnishing was a cardboard box. Siri picked his way between the forks and opened the flaps.
    “Anything interesting?” Daeng asked.
    “Bones,” Siri told her.
    “My word. Whose?” She was on her knees again inspecting the