also by colin cotterill
The Coroner’s Lunch
Thirty-Three Teeth
Disco for the Departed
Anarchy and Old Dogs
Curse of the Pogo Stick
The Merry Misogynist
Love Songs from a Shallow Grave
Slash and Burn
The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die
Six and a Half Deadly Sins
I Shot the Buddha
The Rat Catchers’ Olympics
Don’t Eat Me
The Second Biggest Nothing
Copyright © 2020 by Colin Cotterill
Published by
Soho Press, Inc.
227 W 17th Street
New York, NY 10011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cotterill, Colin, author.
Title: The delightful life of a suicide pilot / Colin Cotterill.
ISBN 978-1-64129-177-4
eISBN 978-1-64129-178-1
Subjects: 1. Paiboun, Siri, Doctor (Fictitious
character)—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939-1945--Southeast Asia--Fiction. 3. Laos—Fiction. 4. Thailand--Fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6053.O778 D45 2020
823'.914—dc23 2019051328
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For her invaluable contribution to the research behind this last book in the Dr. Siri series, I should like to thank my wife and best friend, Kyoko, who also cooks a jolly good quiche. For their last-minute reading of the rough manuscript, my thanks to Kirk, Robert, Lizzie, David, Rachel, Kate, Bob, Leila, and Steve. Thanks, too, to Margaret and Charlie whose contributions have made this a better book. If you want to delve more deeply into the world of yokai, please visit the amazing yokai.com website. And for their belief in Dr. Siri over the years and their boundless enthusiasm, I should like to dedicate this book to the lovely people at Soho Press to thank them for making me feel special. Sayonara.
Chapter One
Every Body Has a Story to Tell
There was a myth. Not a ghostly urban legend that might cause little children to wet their beds, but a disturbing notion nevertheless. It was likely begat from the mischievous storytelling of a doctor not unlike Siri Paiboun, the ex-national coroner of the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, who was known to smudge the lines between fact and fiction. The myth went something like this: after you’re dead, your hair and nails will mysteriously continue to grow. Any qualified physician would snigger at such a thought. But no matter how unlikely the possibility, there were those who swore to have witnessed such a phenomenon. And all those doubting so-called “experts” needed to do was to take the key from beneath the welcome mat at the Mahosot Hospital morgue in Vientiane, let themselves into the cutting room, and slide out the only occupied freezer tray. And once they pulled back the sheet they would see for themselves. Comrade Thinh still sported a fine head of hair that was just a little too long to be called respectable. His nostril hair, on the other hand, had sprouted remarkably since his arrival on the slab. It was currently a good six centimeters long. Mr. Geung, the lab assistant, had already combed it into a neat mustache and was certain that before too long, there would be enough for a goatee.
Comrade Thinh’s corpse had been in the morgue for almost a week with nothing to do but nurture this nasal display while his wife and his mistress argued their respective cases for taking the corpse home. It was fortunate for Thinh that he was dead because the two women were loathsome creatures. He’d probably inflicted a broken neck upon himself to be rid of them. The decision was currently in the hands of an ad hoc council composed of members of the Vietnamese Central Committee, naturally, all men. That it should be under consideration by such a lofty team was a testament to the importance of the deceased and the potential ramifications of sending him off to the wrong pyre.
Dr. Siri was no longer connected with the morgue in any official capacity. His lot now lay behind the portal of his wife’s noodle shop, where he sat between shifts at a rear table with a cup of coffee and a book, any book. His illegal library had been destroyed some years earlier, and 1981 Laos was not a world hub of literature. The one bookshop had five Lao translations of Soviet Communist rhetoric, a shelf of official reports, and a three-year archive of the weekly edition of the Passasson Lao newsletter. The rest of the space was occupied by dusty sports equipment and stuffed endangered creatures with marbles for eyes and the terror of that final chase frozen on their faces. But once you have a reading habit it’s a bugger to shake off. No love nor money could produce a Proust or Victor Hugo in Vientiane, so Siri read the minutes of the last Central Committee conference and the proposal for the next three-year development plan. And, of course, he read and reread the script of his motion picture that would never make it as far as the silver screen. He yearned for something creative and stimulating to enliven his dull days. As is often the case, a strong-enough yearning was just enough to tweak fate into action.
He had promised never to set foot in the morgue again but there was something about postmortem nostril hair growth that was far too tempting to pass up. As soon as Mr. Geung arrived for his evening noodle shift and passed on the news of the body in the freezer, Siri was on his bicycle and peddling in the direction of Mahosot with Ugly, the thrice-almost-dead mongrel, trotting along behind. There were no cars on the road. A recent survey had suggested there was a total of fourteen thousand motor vehicles in Laos. Eleven thousand had no access to gasoline because the scant offerings were monopolized by the government. Children were growing up bemused by these four-wheeled, moss-covered monuments in front yards.
It was a balmy evening that followed a balmy day at the end of a balmy month. The hot season lurked beyond the mountains of Vietnam, awaiting its cue to bake the Lao capital, but until it made its entrance the calm evenings brought out a procession of girls and boys doubling up on bicycles like amusement park duck targets hoping to be hit with a smile or a nod. They pedaled so slowly it was inconceivable the momentum was enough to hold them upright. Siri had invented the word “ertia,” which was a microscopic step up from “inertia” and perfectly described flirtatious cycling. He shamelessly teased the girls he passed and they pretended not to hear him. But there was no disguising the small curl of lip, the flutter of eyelashes. No woman is deaf to a compliment.
The morgue door was ajar. Siri left the bicycle and Ugly in the shade of a nipplewort tree and kicked off his old leather sandals in the foyer. He passed the office where he’d sat many hours trying to make sense of ancient French forensic pathology texts and entered what was called the cutting room. There, leaning over the freezer tray, were Chief Inspector Phosy and his wife, Nurse Dtui. They looked up mid-chuckle.
“Ah, Siri,” said Phosy. “I didn’t think you’d be able to stay away.”
“I’ve spent too many happy hours staring into offal to give it all up completely,” said Siri.
“Have you seen this, Doc?” asked Dtui. She was pretty and slightly more rounded than usual. He refrained from asking her if she was pregnant just in case she wasn’t.
“I hope you aren’t making fun of the dead,” said Siri.
He joined them and couldn’t hold back a guffaw of his own when he saw the corpse. Mr. Geung had fashioned a splendid mustache; it was true it had outgrown a Poirot and was approaching the realm of a Fu Manchu. Siri tugged on it to be sure it wasn’t a practical joke. It held firm.
“Well, I’ve seen some things,” said Siri, “but this takes the
prawn cracker.”
“Do you think there’s any connection between the nose hair and the death?” Phosy asked playfully.
“Not for me to say anymore,” said Siri. “Whose case is it?”
“Dr. Mot announced the cause of death,” said Dtui.
“Ah, then we’ll never know for certain,” said Siri, no fan of the current coroner, a recent returnee from the Eastern bloc. As Siri often said, it was a miracle he’d graduated after studying in a language he couldn’t speak. He did have a certificate suggesting he was qualified to perform autopsies. It was framed and hanging on his office wall beside a similar certificate claiming he was proficient in porcelain glazing.
“And what brings you both here, apart from the obvious sideshow?” Siri asked.
“I was asked to investigate the case personally,” said Phosy.
“I thought they’d strapped you behind a desk.”
“They let me out every now and then for delicate matters,” said the policeman.
“What’s delicate about this?” Siri asked. “I heard from my inside source that your man here had too much to drink and fell off a cliff. What Mr. Geung couldn’t tell me was why all this warrants so much attention.”
“And that all comes down to who he is,” said Phosy.
“Who is he?”
“Does the name Bui Sok Thinh ring a bell?”
“Not a tinkle.”
“He was the son of Bui Kieu.”
“Still nothing ringing in my ears.”
“Perhaps he was after your time,” said Phosy. “He’s one of the richest men in Vietnam.”
“I thought we’d obliterated wealth,” said Siri. “Did something happen to communist dogma while I was napping?”
“The inevitable happened, Doc,” said Dtui. “It’s the same here. Lots of good intentions but no money. A few years of failed cooperatives and natural disasters and there’s no budget for infrastructure. So we fall back on good old cronyism. We call the rich guys back from lifelong banishment overseas, borrow a few billion here, make a few deals there.”
“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.”
“Why do we think either of them had to be there?”
“A goat herder saw this Vietnamese man hiking there last weekend. He was with a woman. Too far away to identify her.”
“And what’s to be gained by killing him?”
“The first wife stands to inherit a hell of a lot,” said Phosy. “If she’s convicted of murder, the money will go to the minor wife. And the concubine’s father happens to be on the board of directors of the drilling company. He’ll no doubt be pushing for an inquiry.”
“Any children?”
“No.”
“Other siblings?”
“Apparently not.”
Siri looked around at the morgue he’d worked in for five years. In that time, it had been refurbished first by the Chinese, then by the Soviets, but it still looked neglected. The air conditioner wheezed. The corpse carts limped like old supermarket trolleys. Not even Mr. Geung’s “Twelve Puppies to Make You Laugh” wall calendar could inject any passion into that old building. Siri walked to the freezer that had not contained Comrade Thinh and fought with the handle for a few seconds as always. Inside were the jar of water and four tumblers. Mr. Geung always left them there just in case the morgue had visitors. They didn’t see a lot of use. Naturally, there was no ice. The freezers got their name from a short-circuiting accident following which Nurse Dtui and Daeng had spent several hours attempting to thaw out a body with the aid of kettle steam and a two-bar heater. The equipment had frozen nothing since. Siri poured his guests a glass of cool water each and returned to the matter at hand.
“All right,” he said, “even if one of the women in his life was there, how do we know he just couldn’t stand them anymore and stepped off the ledge to be rid of them?”
“Everyone who knew him swears he’s the last person on earth who’d commit suicide; fun-loving, over the moon with the Italian project. He even seemed fond of the women in his own way. No business pressure. No political bullying. He loved his life.”
“Yet here he is,” said Siri. “Dtui, why didn’t you do the autopsy?”
“I’m just a nurse,” she said.
“A nurse with a deep knowledge of forensic pathology,” Siri countered.
“But no certificate on my wall,” said Dtui. “Not even in porcelain varnishing.”
“I’ll print you one,” said Siri. “It seems all you need these days is a bit of paper with one illegible signature at the bottom.”
He pulled back the sheet that covered the corpse.
“Look,” he said. “Dr. Mot didn’t even bother to cut our friend here open.”
“Said it wasn’t necessary,” said Phosy. “Said it was obvious the victim had died from multiple injuries sustained whilst bouncing off rocks on his way down the cliff. Said the empty bottles proved that he was so drunk he probably didn’t feel it.”
“May I?” Siri asked.
“Go ahead,” said Phosy.
Siri turned the corpse on its side and studied the back.
“No handprints, no bruises, no indication he was hit with anything,” he said. “It is possible he stepped up to relieve himself,
took one pace too many, and peed himself to death.”
“Then why would the wives deny they were there?” Dtui asked. “They could have explained what happened and there’d be no evidence to say otherwise.”
“Unless it wasn’t one of them,” said Phosy.
“Good thinking,” said Siri.
“I’m wondering whether he went to Vang Vieng alone last weekend, met a local girl, and took her up into the mountains,” Phosy continued. “She might have panicked when he made advances and pushed him away.”
“Even if it was an accident, she’d still have given birth to a buffalo from the shock of it,” said Siri.
“No way she’d admit to being there,” said Dtui.
“And Vang Vieng’s a small community,” said Phosy. “They’d set up a force field around one of their girls.”
“You wouldn’t even get to talk to her,” said Dtui.
“Unless we could convince her we know it was an accident,” said Siri, lowering the corpse onto its back.
“How would we go about that?” Phosy asked.
“I have no idea just yet, but every body has a story to tell if you just show a little patience. Do you suppose our intrepid Dr. Varnish has exhausted all his autopsy skills?”
“He said there’s nothing more to be learned,” said Dtui.
“Then he wouldn’t mind me tinkering a little.”
“I doubt he’d notice.”
“Splendid. Then I shall return tomorrow at dawn with my tool kit and my faithful lab assistant.”
Chapter Two
My Friends Call Me Toshi
Dr. Siri arrived at the noodle shop a little too early to beat the evening rush. Diners had already filled the small open-fronted restaurant but they weren’t there for the Mekong views. They’d come to enjoy the best noodles in the capital. Government workers in khaki or white shirts had eaten away the frustrations of another day of paperwork and inefficiency. Lady teachers in stiff cotton phasin skirts had kicked off their uncomfortable shoes beneath the tables and sighed off another day of explaining how Marxist-Leninism had affected the shifting of the tectonic plates. Karl and Vladimir had been a busy pair since ’75.
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