Free Disco for the Departed by Colin Cotterill Page A

...?"
    The soles of the woman's feet were caked in some maroon substance. "Has she been walking anywhere?" Dtui asked.
    "No. As far as I know, she hasn't moved. And this doesn't look like clay."
    Dtui scratched at one sole with her fingernail. She knew exactly what she was seeing. "It's congealed blood," she said.
    "Why would she have ...? Are there any wounds?"
    Dtui took a damp cloth from the basin beside the bed and carefully rubbed at one foot. "No."
    "Then how ...?"
    "It doesn't look random, Singsai. Look at this other foot. It's as if someone painted symbols onto her soles."
    "With blood? Whatever for?"
    "That Hmong intern might have some idea."
    "Right. I don't want to wake him now, but in the morning I'll be very interested to see if he has an explanation."
    "Me, too," Dtui said. "Me, too."
    Two more emergencies during the night meant that Dtui didn't actually get to sleep until after seven. The breeze through the thin cotton curtains woke her at ten. Before heading for the main block, she stopped by to see Mrs. Nuts. She still lay staring at the ceiling but her tune had changed during the night.
    "Panoy is weak now. Panoy is weak," she said.
    "Who is Panoy?" Dtui asked.
    "Panoy is weak."
    Dtui pushed back the woman's white hair from her face and put her palm on the woman's cold brow. Her skin seemed dull, as if she were covered in dust. Her pulse was slow. She wondered whether Mrs. Nuts would make it through the day. Before she left the room, Dtui pulled up the blanket to look at her feet. The left sole, the one she'd wiped clean earlier that morning, was once again covered in dried blood.

    Dr. Siri was downstairs in the guesthouse dining room reading a month-old copy of Pasason Lao. There was a picture of his old friend Civilai shaking hands with a Mongolian diplomat. Both were smiling, neither convincingly. He could tell exactly what Comrade Civilai, his only ally on the politburo, was thinking. It reminded him of an earlier time and two more idealistic people.
    For years, Siri and his wife, Boua, had been members of the Lao Issara, the Free Lao resistance. But Boua was working her way toward a more disciplined independence from the French than just being a nuisance to the colonists. She was the devout communist of the pair, and it was she who led Siri to Hanoi and into the Nguyen Ai Quoc college. There he learned his Vietnamese and attended classes in communist ideology. He was baptized in red paint, held under until he breathed Lenin and defecated Marx. And with this new vital system he'd gone out into the Vietnamese countryside and convinced the farmers that nothing but communism could free them from the yoke of French colonization. He'd worked in field hospitals throughout the north of the country, and even after eighteen straight hours of bloody surgery, he'd still find time to engage the villagers in ideological debates.
    It was a period in his life he came to refer to as "the years they borrowed my mind." It wasn't until he met another enthusiastic cadre, a serious member of the Lao People's Party and lifelong communist named Civilai, that Siri was able to put everything into perspective. Although he'd been trained to report comrades who strayed from the axiomatic straight and narrow, Civilai was so experienced and so obviously intelligent that Siri had no choice but to listen and reevaluate his own clouded beliefs. Civilai loved communism. There was no question of his loyalty to the Party. But he believed that communism should work without scaring the daylights out of people. For his opinions he was labeled an eccentric. He was too senior and too well respected by the masses to be kicked off the central committee, but he was kept backstage.
    Siri had immediately warmed to Civilai's middle path so he, too, had been ostracized by the top men of the Party. While Boua soldiered on in her attempts to educate a nation of proletariat, Siri hung up his red flag and became a full-time doctor. That was probably when