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as I can see, is that her father’s going to coddle her to death. Tell me, what was last night’s emergency?”
    “If you aren’t going to take it seriously…”
    “Come on. I’m listening.”
    “She’s yellow.”
    “All over?”
    “It’s hepatitis.”
    “What does Dtui say?”
    “She doesn’t know. She’s got other things on her mind.”
    “What does she say?”
    “She said it’s the light through the curtains.”
    “What colour’s the curtain?”
    “White.”
    “Phosy?”
    “Creamy white.”
    “It’s yellow, Phosy. I’ve seen it. Yellow with cartoon dogs or some such.”
    “The baby still looked yellow when I took her outside.”
    “Then stop taking her outside. Goodness, man. It’s the rainy season. She’ll catch a real disease. Then you’ll have something to complain about.”
    Phosy hadn’t appreciated the lecture. He’d sent two of his men with Siri to offload the corpse and retreated to his office to write his angry report. Madame Daeng had taken the motorcycle home from K6. Siri would be a little while settling poor Dew in at the morgue, then he’d walk back. He wished he could be home with his lovely new books but he needed time alone with the corpse to organise his thoughts. Dew still had a lot of talking to do, he decided. She knew her killer. That much was certain. Their midnight sauna pointed to the possibility that they were lovers. This rendezvous, he decided, was passion. The type of passion that makes you crazy enough to risk your career and your freedom for a few moments of pleasure. When he was young, Siri had known that passion himself.
    He hadn’t had time to search for a false compartment in which the killer might hide a sword. But he was convinced he wouldn’t have found one. If you were planning to kill a lover, there were far more convenient – and much shorter – weapons that would have been easier to conceal. It was almost as if the épée was symbolic, perhaps even part of the ritual. He wondered if the épée was the message itself. What if it wasn’t hidden at all? What if the girl knew she was about to die? Had she wanted to be killed? Had she brought it herself?
    As often occurred in these confusing, ghost-ridden years of his life, Siri felt a familiar anger. He was the host, like it or not, of a thousand-year-old Hmong shaman by the name of Yeh Ming. It was like a gall-bladder infection, but of the soul. There was nothing tangible inside to operate on. He was stuck with this presence and still hadn’t mastered the art of living with his ancestor. He’d wondered often whether the fault lay in his failure to grasp the true essence of religion. If he’d been a better Buddhist perhaps he could beat the eight-fold path to his spiritual back door, burst into the projection booth and catch old Yeh Ming tangled up in a thousand years of celluloid. Couldn’t they then have sat down together, organised everything into reels, and canned and labelled them? Neither of them would have been confused. Then perhaps, just perhaps, he’d have some control over the spirits that flickered back and forth across his life. Perhaps Dew’s soul could stroll up the central aisle and calmly explain why she was lying before him with a sword through her heart.
    But, as it stood, Siri’s connection to the afterlife was held together with old string. And, once again, he had to resort to the resources of his own mind, cover the dreams and premonitions in a blanket, and look at the facts. See what was right there in front of him. He used a pair of salad tongs to pick up the towel from its steel tray. That towel had worried him since he’d first seen it. What was it doing there on the floor covered in blood? No, not covered exactly. He laid it out across the second gurney and looked at the pattern. It was less saturated than he’d first thought. The blood had gathered at the centre like an ink blot test and all the corners but one were white. It didn’t make sense to him. If it