“They’re like policemen,” he replied. “They’re never around when you need one. Were you in Thakhek when this place blew up?”

“No, Doctor,” she said. “It was chaos here those last few weeks. All local communications had been cut. Nobody knew what was happening in Thakhek. Most of the Lao and Vietnamese fled. Of course the Japanese said nothing about their losses around the region, but we had the BBC from Thailand. We knew they were losing badly.”

She poked a finger under her hairline and had a little scratch. Her hair slipped backward across her scalp and she righted it without embarrassment. Siri wondered why she would choose a silver wig rather than one of the coal-black beauties complete with plastic bougainvilleas on sale at the market.

An continued unabated. “You could feel it, too, in the behavior of the Japanese troops,” she said. “There were deserters. There was unheard-of insubordination amongst the lower ranks. There were uniformed soldiers committing crimes. Miura protected me from drunks on a number of occasions. So we locals headed for the hills. We’d already been approached by the Free Lao insurgents. They had bases. They were recruiting. The jungle towards the Vietnamese border was so dense the Japanese army had never been able to root out rebels.”

“Did you leave, too?” Siri asked Beer.

“You bet your life,” said Beer.

“So neither of you witnessed the mass suicide,” said Siri.

“No,” said Beer.

“Then how can you be sure it happened?”

Beer looked at An.

“Miura and I had become close,” she said. “Before the Chinese arrived he came to stay with me in the caves.”

“He deserted?”

“Yes,” she said. “But he’d never been really accepted by his countrymen. And, by then, there were already a number of Japanese deserters who had sided with what became known as the Viet Minh. Miura told us all about that last day in Thakhek as he had heard it from the superiors who came into town to investigate the incident.”

“How do you suppose they’d go about something like that?” Siri asked.

“About what?” asked Beer.

“Blowing themselves up as a group effort. I mean, they wouldn’t have planned it. They only heard the broadcast in the morning. You don’t have a stash of dynamite in the living room just in case you feel like a dramatic end.”

“Probably hand grenades,” said Beer. “Something like that.”

“I don’t see hand grenades completely destroying a two-story building,” said Siri.

“Well, Doctor, it wasn’t completely destroyed,” said An. “Not by the explosion. The roof and one wall to the living room were gone. And all the wood in the place was burned in the ensuing fire and there were scraps of metal lying around. But then villagers helped themselves to the bricks and the floor tiles and the surviving roofing. They even took the concrete piles. By the time they’d finished there was nothing left.”