“Where are you going?” Siri asked.

“You don’t expect me to sit beside you if it’s a bomb, do you?”

“I don’t know. It could be romantic, splattered across the Mekong together, our parts floating side by side to Cambodia.”

“There’s nothing romantic about dismemberment, Siri. I’m off to the ladies’ room. You can open it while I’m gone. I’ll listen for the bang.”

Guided by the single lamp in the shop behind her, she scampered up the bank. Not bad for a seventy-year-old. Siri took his penlight out of his top pocket and held it between his teeth—teeth that he could still proudly call his own, all thirty-three of them. From the same pocket he removed a Soviet army knife and flicked open a blade. He sliced through layers of thick masking tape and removed an inner skin of brown paper. Inside that was a plastic bag followed by several layers of Thai newspaper and another plastic bag, all taped securely.

When Daeng returned, Siri was sitting in a pile of assorted wrappings, holding a somewhat smaller parcel in his hands.

“We used to play that when we were children,” she said.

“Play what?”

“You give someone a gift and by the time they’ve unwrapped it there’s nothing inside.”

“How cruel you were,” said Siri. “No, I feel I’m almost down to the meat. Just one more layer of tissue paper and . . . there.”

At last he found what was most certainly a book of some kind. The cover was made of a sort of skin; leather perhaps. It was dotted with a dark mold and smelled rancid. He opened it carefully but all he found were blank pages.

“Hmm,” he said. “That’s odd.”

He turned the book to what should have been the back and there on the rear cover were two small Chinese-looking initials branded onto the skin. He opened it to the back pages, where he was met by line after line of neat handwritten text.

“Chinese?” said Daeng.

“Japanese.”

“Can you read it?”

“I’m afraid not. I picked up the numbers when we were in the underground and the Japanese were threatening to invade. Thought it might be useful for recognizing times and dates in captured documents. But I didn’t get around to the letters. They don’t use the same date system as us. It starts with the reign of the current emperor and that began in . . . 1926. So the number here is probably Showa Eleven. I’m assuming this is a diary and it starts in 1937.”

“And there I was thinking I only married you for your body.”

“It’s a two-for-the-price-of-one package, Daeng. No extra cost for the genius.”

“So, 1937? Japan’s at war with China,” said Daeng.

“This starts July seventh.”

“Stop showing off.”

Siri flipped through the pages, right to left.

“It’s beautifully penned,” he said. “Someone’s obviously put their heart into it. Every page neat and precise. Not a crossing-out or a smudge; not so much as a wine stain. There’s a week or two between each entry. And it looks like the writing gets more confident. Much stronger. It’s as if the writer’s gouging the ink into the paper. And I . . .”