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NURSES
    T he hospital had allowed the new nurses ten exposures on the official Mahosot camera. It was a Brownie, a souvenir of the American days when money was available and the stores had been stocked with medicines and equipment. But now, as Director Suk made perfectly clear, the camera was not for recreational purposes. It was for recording medical achievements (of which there had been none to date), documenting autopsies, and recording historical events. The arrival of the first batch of nursing students to return from Bulgaria was technically a historic event so the girls had been given permission to use up the remaining exposures on the film as long as they also captured the chrysanthemums. Dtui accompanied the nursing cadre when she went to pick up the photographs from the pharmacy behind the evening market. Developing photos had become something of a sideline for the pharmacist since film was hard to come by and so few people had moments to celebrate. He’d made copies of the Mahosot pictures for each of the eight nurses. But one of the young ladies had been so impressed by the facilities at the country’s leading hospital, she’d fled the dormitory and was last seen floating across the Mekhong holding onto an inflatable neck brace. That left one set of photos for Dtui.
    With the office still inhabited by auditors, Dtui and Daeng spread the pictures across the dissecting table.
    “Where do we start?” Dtui asked.
    “Well, anyone with binoculars and a false moustache,” Daeng said. “If that fails we’ll settle for someone who looks out of place.”
    That objective was simplified by the fact that seven of the ten photos were exclusively of seven smiling nurses, one unsmiling nurse, and a flower bed.
    “I don’t suppose the nurse who absconded had anything to do with it, do you?” Dtui asked.
    “I imagine there are easier ways to get into the hospital grounds than spending four years in Sofia, but we won’t rule it out.”
    “Right!”
    One of the remaining three snaps was a very good picture of the morgue itself with nurses pointing to the sign and one young thing pretending to be in the throes of a horrible death. That left only two with people in the background. One, of the nurses walking across the grounds, contained a handful of patients who had been shooed from the wards to enjoy the therapeutic rays of the sun. They all looked convincingly ill. Only the last shot offered any hope. It was what is known in photographic terminology as a mistake. In the foreground was an out-of-focus breast and an arm, but in the background was a panorama of three hospital buildings with several dozen people standing and seated and walking about. They were far too small to identify Neither Daeng’s reading glasses nor the base of a petri dish could magnify them to any recognizable size.
    “Damn,” said Dtui.
    “Patience,” said Daeng. “We’ll find a way to enlarge them.”
     
    On the map provided by the Xiang Khouang constabulary, the road to Luang Prabang was a distinct red line. It began in the old capital of Muang Khun and headed north-west through Phonsavan, the replacement capital, which was still not entirely built. It proceeded past the Plain of Jars before wriggling its way west to Luang Prabang. And, indeed, the journey to just beyond the Phonsavan intersection was comparatively smooth and untroubled. The convoy consisted of two armoured vehicles, two Land Rovers, and one open jeep crammed with armed guards. Its composition belied the theory that there was no longer an enemy to be afraid of.
    The first Land Rover contained the deputy head of the National Police Coordinating Committee, his Vietnamese adviser, and Comrade Colonel Phat, the adviser from Hanoi attached to the Justice Department, or, more specifically, attached to Judge Haeng. Since the signing of the Treaty of Cooperation and Friendship in July, there was hardly a department head who didn’t sport his own Vietnamese minder like an