“It’s been over two years since the last foreign journalist was here,” said Sixten, one of the Swedes. “The world wants to know what’s really going on.”

With the bar open and no other guests in the room, the evening progressed in a more traditional Lao fashion with bonds made and secrets shared. At one point, Dtui and Phosy were behind the bar fixing a round.

“I don’t think they know you’re the chief of police,” said Dtui.

“I didn’t tell them,” said Phosy.

“They’re very . . . open,” said Dtui.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, all that about the world knowing what’s really going on,” said Dtui. “Shouldn’t they be a little bit more careful about what they say?”

“I think they’re hoping for a reaction,” said Phosy. “Our secret service people can’t do anything when the world knows its journalists are here. If anything happens to them it would be a public relations nightmare. It would defeat the whole point of inviting them. They can say anything they like.”

The evening turned to night and the guests decided it was time to go to eat. Three restaurants had been set aside for the visitors and they opted for the nearest. Despite a lingering paranoia honed over five years of not knowing whom to trust, Dtui liked the foreigners for their openness. Her favorites were Marvin, the gangly Australian, and Jim, the dirty-mouthed but funny Englishman who had given up his British passport and was currently based in Sydney. She and Phosy knew that the pair were already stoned when they’d first arrived. Perhaps they’d been expecting the worst and put up that marijuana force field to withstand another night of sober cultural pleasantries. Neither of them seemed the worse for wear from their smoking. They held their own in the noisy discussions. Marvin had signed on as a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald but he was, in fact, a Lao scholar: an expert in Southeast Asian history and culture. He had come, as he said, “To see what a mess they’d made of his beloved Laos.”

Jim had made a name for himself as a photographer at the height of the aggression in Vietnam. He still carried an interior tiara of shrapnel as a memento. The editor at the Times in England had passed on the Lao invitation to him in anticipation that he might get a picture or two that belied the Soviet claims of peaceful community development under its leadership. He’d suggested Jim write a vignette of socialist Laos with himself as a central character: Sunday Times magazine fodder.