The Merry Misogynist

voice. Madame Daeng’s smiling face loomed in the rear-view mirror as she rose from behind the back seat. Phosy slammed on the brakes and ran into a tall clump of swollen-finger grass. All three men turned to see her, large as life, clutching the roof.
    “Madame Daeng? What the…?” Phosy yelled.
    “I told you I could scrunch up to almost nothing,” she smiled.
    “But where were you?”
    “Under the tarpaulin behind the back seat.”
    “There’s barely ten centimetres down there.”
    “I’m pliable.”
    Phosy was furious. “Get out!” he said.
    She laughed. “What, here?”
    “I told you to stay at Natan.”
    “You want me to walk all the way back there on my arthritic legs?”
    Phosy hammered his fists against the steering wheel.
    “Madame Daeng, if you were a man I’d punch you on the nose, I swear I would.”
    “If you did, even if I weren’t a man, I’d punch you back.”
    The young officers laughed.
    “You two can wipe those smiles off, right now.”
    “Listen, son,” she said, “believe me, I can help. If I thought I’d hamper your investigation I wouldn’t have come. Really I wouldn’t.”
    “I know your history. But that was…”
    “Then you know I can only be an asset. Siri’s up here somewhere and, brave as he is, I want to be around to…to support him. That’s what couples do. And, Phosy, a steering wheel can only take so much abuse.”
    Phosy gave one last punch then put his hands on his head. He knew when he was beaten.
    “Let this be a lesson to you boys,” he said to the policemen. He left it there, and they didn’t ever learn what the lesson was. Phosy reversed out of the grass and drove in silence to Ban Noo.
 
    Comrade Ying Dali, the one-time North Vietnam region 6 boxing champion, now gone to seed, sat beneath a camouflaged tarpaulin receiving piles of paper from two colourful characters: one with a cheroot hanging from her lip, the other with a crossbow strapped to his back. Phosy killed the overheated engine and watched.
    “According to Siri’s description, he’s one of the two junior officials,” Daeng said. Phosy kept quiet.
    They waited until the boxer was alone before strolling across to him. They were in a village so basic the main house was a thatch of twigs. They were well-plaited twigs but really nothing to stop a good wolf puff. It was a picturesque place with a stream, like an illustration for a month on a calendar: heaven, unless you had to live in such an isolated place with no power or sanitation or medicines. The boxer stood when the strangers reached his lean-to.
    “Comrades?” he said.
    Phosy introduced himself and his men, ignoring Daeng completely. He announced that they were investigating a murder in the district. It was a small untruth only in that the offence had not yet taken place. He hoped he wasn’t tempting fate.
    “Can you tell us exactly how your system here works?” he asked Ying.
    “Well, it’s quite simple,” Ying began. “We draw up an area into grids. We come in and identify literate people. We pay them a few kip , and they take our questionnaires off to the surrounding minority villages. We come back two weeks later, and they bring us the results. We check that everything’s in order, pay them the rest of their fees, and give the documents to the section head to collate.”
    “Comrade Buaphan?” Phosy asked, consulting an imaginary list in his notebook.
    “That’s right.”
    “How do you get them to him?”
    “Depends. If he’s busy he sends the driver. But he prefers to drive himself. He’s a bit touchy about his truck.”
    “And is that the only communication you have – the truck? I mean you don’t have walkie-talkies or such?”
    “No, they don’t work over these distances, and the mountains block shortwave signals as well. So we rely on the truck to ferry messages back and forth.”
    “So for long periods you wouldn’t know what the other two men are up to, whether they’re at their bases or not?”
    “Well, that’s true. But I mean, we can tell. If the work’s not done we know who’s been slacking off. Comrade Buaphan’s always efficient.”
    “Do you know anything about Comrade Buaphan’s personal life?” Phosy asked.
    “No. He’s a bit of a loner. When we aren’t on the road – I mean, outside office hours – we never see him.”
    “Does he have family?” Daeng asked from her rearguard position out in the sun. Phosy turned and glared at her.
    “He had a wife once, I