“The small wooden cases contained red wine,” said Beer.

“Well, you wouldn’t want Chinese Hor on your tail with cabernet sauvignon in their blood,” said Siri.

“The list of contents looked quite unremarkable,” said Beer. “Apart from the wine and weaponry it was mostly personal items. There was one chest of piastre notes that had since been devalued and were worthless. There was ammunition and sabers and one box of cutlery.”

“Nothing that could be described as treasure,” said Siri.

“Nor of value,” said Beer. “The weapons and parts were obsolete. The banknotes were sodden and worthless, and the wine was corked. But all of it found its way to a warehouse in one of the deserted garrisons.”

“Was there a signature on the invoice?” Siri asked.

“Of course,” said Beer. “The head of the salvage team: Major Uenobu himself.”

“So it’s possible he found something of value in the chests and, as he said, buried it in paperwork where it was forgotten,” said Daeng.

“Until his first mission back to Vietnam, when he retrieved the hidden treasure and used it to buy medicine for the school,” said Siri. “Was there anything else?”

“Two more mentions,” said Beer. “In October he was admitted to a French hospital suffering from ‘shell shock.’ Then in November he was pronounced dead in battle. Your researchers did some cross-referencing and concluded there was no battle anywhere on that day.”

“And there he was traveling south on a pony cart while at the same time lying dead in a nonexistent battle,” said Daeng. “They’d have contacted his family. They’d be mourning his death while here he was having a nice life in Laos. Of course he would have been executed for desertion if they’d found him here.”

“Comrade Beer,” said Siri. “I know you’ve had a busy day with a lot of international travel, but I’d like you to do one more trip for us tomorrow. I want you to ask around at clinics and pharmacies. See if you can find someone who remembers getting paid over the odds in 1943 to administer diphtheria vaccinations across the river. You might want to stir a Japanese officer who didn’t speak into the mix to jog memories. There wouldn’t have been a lot of medical facilities to choose from in wartime Nakhon Phanom.”

“Why do you think the medicine would come from Thailand?” Daeng asked.

“We didn’t have and still don’t have the medicines or the expertise to deal with an epidemic,” said Siri. “He wouldn’t go to the Japanese for help and the French were already rationing food and medicines. I seem to recall Satsai saying a medical unit arrived to administer the vaccinations. We didn’t have such things as medical units over here, not even in Vientiane. It had to be Thai.”