“Ooh,” said Siri. “Your wife’s grown horns.”

“She’s bored with being poor, I think,” said Phosy. “She’s waiting for me to accept my first graft so she can buy a refrigerator.”

“I feel that refrigerator will be a long time coming,” said Siri.

“That’s what I try to tell her.”

“Never mind, Dtui,” said Siri. “You’re still comparatively young. It’s not too late to find yourself a sugar daddy.”

“No hope there,” said Dtui. “Sugar daddies like them wafer thin with silicon breasts.”

“Sounds awful,” said Siri. “Give me a good old-fashioned naturally buxom girl any day. But back to hairy nose here. Did he get a share of his daddy’s wealth?”

“They sent Thinh to Italy to study during the war. His family had a lot of mandarin money to invest in Europe. Thinh made a fortune in war profiteering. When Uncle Ho took over Vietnam the Viet Minh found themselves short of funds so they started courting the Bui clan. Thinh brokered a deal for the Italians to drill for oil in the gulf of Tonkin. Thinh ran the company. The income from that amounted to a large chunk of the country’s GNP.”

“And how do you go from that to a cold slab in a foreign country?” Siri asked.

“He was very high-profile in Hanoi and he liked to get away and relax when he had a chance. He had a soft spot for our very own Vang Vieng; peaceful, beautiful scenery and nobody knew him there. He’d fly the family helicopter down. He had a hidden chalet in the hills. He liked nothing more than to hike up to the karsts with a few bottles of very expensive wine in his pack, sit on a ledge, and watch the river. Simple pleasures. In the early days he’d take his wife. I’m told she is a sow of a woman as well as the daughter of a Vietnamese politburo man. She soon tired of those hikes and he soon tired of asking her. He took himself a younger girl to be his minor wife and she was in better shape. Didn’t mind the trekking. They’d sit on the ledge and drink to Mother Nature . . .”

“. . . and probably play a few rounds of paper, scissors, stone,” said Dtui.

“I tell you, Madam Daeng and I never tire of that,” said Siri.

“Thinh could have had his choice of beautiful, loose women to be his mistress,” said Phosy. “But he was apparently a glutton for punishment, and he selected a plain, opinionated girl who was the daughter of a Viet Minh war hero. I hear she has the temper of a rabid Chihuahua. She’s claiming that the major wife was with him on his last trip to Vang Vieng and that she pushed him off a ledge when he was drunk. The wife laughed off that allegation and countered that it must have been the mistress who accompanied Thinh to the mountain and killed him.”