“Me too.”
They were there, trespassing in the private grounds of his snooze. They loitered—those malevolent spirits—like teenage thugs, never in focus but there nevertheless. Wherever his afternoon siesta led Dr. Siri Paiboun—down forested paths, through bombed towns—they lurked and watched him pass. He was aware of them in every dream. The Phibob, the ghosts of the forest, had no more useful occupation than to hang about in his subconscious and remind him of the constant threat they posed.
Dr. Siri was the reluctant host of Yeh Ming, a thousandyear-old shaman. During that old witch doctor’s comparatively short stay on earth and his comparatively long sojourn in the afterlife, Yeh Ming had caused no end of grief to the dark spirits and now they sought revenge. “A load of old supernatural pig swill,” some might say, and two years earlier Siri would have been the loudest in the chorus. But now there was not a doubt—no question. Only the charmed stone amulet he wore around his neck hung between Dr. Siri and a nasty end.
Although he hadn’t yet mastered his unwanted life, he’d learned to live it. Despite all this occult thuggery, the old doctor purred in his sleep like a snowy-haired cat. His chin rested on his chest and a barely audible snore resonated through his nostrils. At seventy-three years of age, he’d learned how to sleep through all variety of meetings and conferences undetected. He hadn’t once fallen off his seat. Of course, he was built for balance— short and solid—and from the distance of the speakers’ platform he appeared to be just one more rapt member of the thousand-plus audience, deep in thought. In truth, only the extreme volume of the Vietnamese loudspeakers could have drowned out the collective buzz of hundreds of snoozing cadres. If the generator had failed that chilly afternoon, residents of Xiang Khouang would have gone running to their homes in fear of a plague of bumblebees.
Most of the regional delegates had been up through the night slurping sweet rice whisky through bamboo straws and reminiscing with long-lost allies. Siri, more than most, had endured the thanks of countless old soldiers he’d repaired in battlefront surgery. He’d accepted a glass from each of them and was ill prepared for seven more hours of keynote addresses and reports. It would have been impossible to withstand such torture without the odd nap or two.
It was around three when he regained consciousness in time to learn that “the quintessential socialist is patriotic, technically and managerially competent, morally upright and selflessly devoted to the greater social good,” but he’d forgotten to bring his notepad. He caught sight of his boss, Judge Haeng, nodding enthusiastically in the second row. Siri clicked the bones in his neck and instinctively reached up to scratch the lobe of his left ear. He’d lost it in an altercation a few months before but its spirit continued to tingle. Damned annoying it was. He shifted his weight from buttock to buttock to revitalize his circulation and looked absently around him. The regional representatives sat unfidgeting like maize on a breezeless day, silently counting down the minutes. Although Stalin had never actually bothered to write it down, Siri was aware that a good communist had to be a good Buddhist. Only meditation and a banishment of pain could get one through a day of Party political bull.
Siri looked with admiration along the furrows. Only one undisciplined cadre had succumbed indiscreetly to fatigue. He sat two rows in front, six seats across. Obviously the quarterly Party Planning and Progress Conference had been too much for him. He slumped like a wet rag in his chair, his head hanging uncomfortably backward, staring at the temporary tarpaulin roof. One would have to be extremely tired to adopt such a drastic pose—or dead as an absent earlobe. Siri opted for the latter. He calmly stood, pushed past knees to the end of his row and more knees to the seat of the dead comrade. The disturbance in an, until now, unruffled event caused the speaker on stage to lose his place in his speech and look out at the melee.
Siri, delighted to have an opportunity to make something happen on this otherwise wasted day, felt for a pulse in the old cadre’s neck and shouted with unhidden glee, “This conference has suffered its first fatality. There will undoubtedly be more.”
How to Blow up a Coroner
In Vientiane, the autopsy of the unknown soldier began four hours late due to the fact that socialism had somehow made time more flexible. There were often situations when 1:00 pm and 5:00 pm were interchangeable. Director Suk and Surgeon Mot got to the morgue at exactly the time everyone was supposed to be on their way home. The director had been diverted to supervise the placement of a flower bed—the hospital’s first— courtesy of the Vietnamese Elderly Widows Union. A regiment of dazzling yellow chrysanthemums stood guard in the center of the compound. This event had coincided with the arrival of the first batch of nurses trained in Bulgaria. Naturally Suk had to appear in several photographs with the nurses and the flowers and sign endless documents related to both distractions. The doctor had found himself in an unscheduled political lunchtime seminar that dragged on through the afternoon when no consensus could be arrived at with regard to the collectivization of bean farming.
The only good news resulting from this delay was that by now the captain was completely deiced. Then there was the fact that Dtui had been given four more hours to look at the body and the uniform it had arrived in. It had allowed her time to confirm in her own mind that something was very wrong. She wasn’t absolutely sure what that was, but she was confident enough in her instinct to know that the autopsy could not go ahead. She was standing by the corpse feeling below the soldier’s rib cage when Surgeon Mot marched in.
“Nurse!” he said. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?” He was skinny as a drip of rain down a window with hair like a poorly fitting Beatles wig. He had a large bloated nose and saggy eye bags. Dtui’s first impression was that Surgeon Mot had suffered in East Germany. To compensate for his suffering he’d adopted an inappropriate German arrogance. Dtui could see nothing Lao in him.
“Dr. Mot,” she began.
“Nurse, step back, please.”
“But, comrade … “
“Did you not hear me?”
At that moment, Director Suk walked into the cutting room and took up a position as far away from the corpse as possible. There was no secret at the hospital that the man hadn’t a stomach for medical matters. He was an administrator. He was followed close behind by a gentleman in uniform whom nobody bothered to introduce. Dtui guessed he was a military observer although the insignia on his uniform was faded from overwashing and he wore white socks that peeked over his boots.
With an unnecessary flourish, Mot pulled back the towel that lay across the lap of the corpse. Dtui grew more anxious. She appealed directly to Suk.
“Director! I strongly recommend you postpone this autopsy.”
“Oh, I see,” said Suk with the usual sarcastic smirk. “Dr. Siri goes away and his nurse takes over the administration of the morgue. Is that the way we run things here?”
Mot reached for the large scalpel and left Dtui with no choice. She stepped across him and grabbed his skinny wrist. She knew if it came to a fistfight she could take Mot but might have trouble with all three of them.
“What the … ?” Mot was shocked.
“Nurse Dtui,” Suk shouted. “What on earth has come over you?”
“This body,” she said. “I think … “
“Well?”
“I think it might be booby-trapped.”
There were a few seconds of stunned silence before the three outsiders burst into laughter. Mot squirmed his hand free from the nurse’s grasp.
“It looks like somebody’s been sniffing the formaldehyde,” he laughed.
Unnoticed, Mr. Geung slipped into the storeroom, leaving Dtui without an ally.
“I’m serious,” she said. “Look there. You’re a doctor. What do you see at the side of his abdomen?”
“Do you suppose we could tell her to leave?” Mot pleaded. “I didn’t undergo six years of training by experts to come home and be lectured by a country girl. This job is difficult enough as
it is.”
Dtui was red faced with anger.
“I agree entirely,” said Suk. “I apologize. Nurse, kindly leave. I’ll see you in my office in the morni—”
But his train of thought was derailed by the sight of Mr. Geung emerging from the storeroom with an AK-47. It was pointed directly at the new surgeon, who fell backward against a chest of drawers.
“Y … you c … can’t laugh at Comrade Dt … Dt … ui,” Geung said. “Ih … ih … it isn’t nice at all.”
“Now, son,” Suk said, as if talking to a wild beast, “calm down. Don’t do anything… .”
Geung swung the AK-47 in his direction and the director flattened himself against the wall like a layer of paint. Only the soldier remained passive. There might even have been a slight glimmer of a smile on his lips.
“Let the nurse say what she has to say,” he suggested.
“Well, thank you,” Dtui said, one wary eyebrow cocked in Mr. Geung’s direction. “What a girl has to do to get a word in these days.” She smoothed down her white uniform, which strained at the buttons when she pushed forward her ample chest.
“Dr. Mot,” she said. “I’m sorry to have to do it like this but, well, you just wouldn’t listen and it might very well be a matter of life and death. Admittedly it might also be a false alarm but no harm in being careful, I say. Don’t you agree?”
The gun swung back toward him and he nodded enthusiastically.
“Good, then perhaps you could tell us what you see there at the side of the abdomen.”
The surgeon stepped up to the body. “Of course, it’s a wound.”
“Excellent. And what type of a wound is it?”
“Apparently a new one. The stitches haven’t yet been removed.”
“Right. Now take a closer look at that wound, would you?”
He leaned over it. “But it’s just a regu—Oh, my. That’s odd.”
“What is?” the soldier asked.
“There’s been no healing, there’s no scar tissue at all.”
“And that means?”
“That this incision was made postmortem,” Dtui cut in.
“Why would anyone want to open a corpse and sew it up again?” asked the soldier.
“Exactly. And there’s something else,” she said. “Feel this, Doctor.”
She gently guided the surgeon’s hand to a point just below the rib cage. “Don’t press too hard now.”
The doctor ran his finger back and forth.
“It feels like some kind of protrusion. A broken bone? No, it’s too narrow.”
“There’s one exactly the same on the other side,” she told him.
“Really? How peculiar.”
“My guess,” Dtui said, “is that something was put inside this fellow’s stomach after he died.”
“Whatever for?” Suk asked, scraping himself from the wall.
“If it’s a practical joke,” Dtui said, “it’s a very elaborate, even a sick, one. The only logical explanation I can see is that someone’s sent us an exploding corpse.”
“Oh, I say,” said Mot, taking a step back. “Who would do such a thing?”
“Someone who doesn’t like coroners,” Dtui guessed. “Or, more specifically, someone who isn’t fond of Dr. Siri. I’d guess they didn’t know he’d be off partying in the north.”
The soldier pushed past Geung and stepped up to the table. “If she’s right, your nurse here might just have saved our lives.”
“If she’s right,” said Suk with one eye on the AK-47. “It sounds pretty far-fetched to me.”
“There’s something else,” Dtui continued. The captain’s uniform jacket was hung over the back of a chair. She held it up and poked her finger through a small hole in the back. “Do you know any officers in peacetime who’d knowingly wear a jacket with a bullet hole in the back? There isn’t a corresponding hole in our corpse so I know it isn’t his.”
“You’re right,” said the soldier. “No commanding officer would let him walk around with a hole in his jacket. He might not even be military at all. Someone could have dressed up this body in an old army uniform.”
“Why?” Suk asked.
“Because they knew there wouldn’t be an autopsy otherwise,” Dtui supposed. “But if the corpse is a dead soldier, they knew we’d insist on one. What do you say, Doctor?”
Mot shook his head in bewilderment.
“I’d say nurses have come a long way since I went off to the Eastern Bloc.”
“We still can’t be certain,” Suk said. “We have to confirm this booby-trap theory or we’ll all look like fools. Look, can’t you get this idiot to put down his weapon?”
“It’s just a decoration, Director,” the soldier said. “No moving parts, I’d bet.”
“Well spotted,” Dtui laughed. “It was a prop in the Red Ballet. They came to give us a show last month and left it behind. Our Mr. Geung wouldn’t have dared pick it up if it was real. He doesn’t have a violent bone in his body, do you, love?”
Geung smiled his gap-toothed grin and offered the stage prop to the director, who waved it away angrily.
“As for the bomb theory,” she continued. “We can’t be certain how sensitive it is. I suggest we carefully put him back in the freezer and ice him again. Once he’s good and hard we could pop him over to the X-ray Department and see what we’re dealing with.”
“Excellent idea,” said the soldier. “And in the meantime I’ll get in touch with our bomb-disposal people and have them standing by just in case. Very well done, lass. Very well done.”
It was almost midnight before everything was sorted out. It transpired that Dtui’s hunch had been spot-on. There was nothing subtle about the device in the captain’s stomach cavity. It consisted of a spring steel hacksaw blade bent around and fastened with fishing line like a very taut bow. Halfway down the bow was a hand grenade whose pin was attached by a second wire to the opposite side of the blade. The entire stomach sack had been removed, presumably to prevent leaking stomach acid from dissolving the wire prematurely. The device was placed in such a way as to leave the tips of the bow pressed against the abdomen wall. A normal Y incision as performed by even the most incompetent of coroners would have sliced through the fishing line. The bow would have sprung apart, thus removing both the pin from the grenade and the presiding pathologist from life on earth. Dr. Mot, Director Suk, Geung, and the unnamed soldier undoubtedly owed Dtui their lives.
Madame Daeng could only laugh when she discovered they’d been taking tea beside a booby-trapped corpse. Her reaction surprised Dtui no more than the old lady suggesting they warm up the body together in the first place. She’d been a resistance fighter, a saboteur, probably an assassin. What was one little bomb in one more dead body to Mme Daeng? Now troubled by arthritis and forced to wear glasses to read, she described herself as “just another old biddy.”
But there was no missing the spark in her eye or the fire on her tongue. No white cotton-wool perm for her. She wore her hair short and wild. Had there been an ocean and a navy to sail it in Laos, she’d have outdrunk every man. And she knew stories that would make a monk’s toenails fall out.
Dtui had liked Daeng from the moment she’d laid eyes on her and, given their admiration for the same man, it was inevitable they’d end up best friends. Unlike most Lao, Dtui wasn’t one to respect the elderly per se, but she found herself deferring to the old lady. It was Saturday and the lunchtime rush had subsided. They sat at a table at the front of the shop eating boiled peanuts and watching the herons surf the breezes above the Mekhong. It occurred to those who took in the view with a cynical eye that the far bank was getting farther away. In the two years since the communists had taken over Laos, the river had become a sea, their tiny country, an island. In the first year people had abandoned her for fear of political persecution. Now they were taking their chances crossing the river because they couldn’t feed their children. Pasason Lao newspaper that week had rather smugly announced that the per capita
income had soared to ninety American dollars per annum. It didn’t mention that one in four children didn’t make it to the age of five. The people across the border in the refugee camps ate better. Dtui had briefly tasted that freedom but she was Lao down to her roots and for better or worse— mostly worse—she loved her country.
Like notes on a bar of music, a flock of birds had come to perch on the telegraph wires opposite. Daeng had been attempting to hum the tune they wrote. She gave up and looked at her friend.
“Is anybody investigating it?” she asked.
“As much as they’re able. Half the Vientiane police force is up in Xiang Khouang protecting the delegates at the conference.”
“Including your adorable husband.”
“They might have to bring Phosy back. It was an assassination attempt against government employees. That’s right up his alley. The army doesn’t want to have anything to do with the story anymore. Once they realized the corpse wasn’t military they pulled out. It’s a civil case now and the regular witless wonders of the constabulary are on it. Some teenager in his big brother’s uniform came to interview us this morning. He had me fill out a crime questionnaire. I wasn’t supposed to talk about anything that wasn’t mentioned on the form. Can you believe it?”
Daeng swept the empty peanut shells into a hill on the tabletop.
“So, in reality, until Phosy gets back there is nobody investigating.”
“Right.”
“Then I don’t suppose anyone would object if … “
“… we asked a few questions of our own? Shouldn’t think so. Where do you think we should start?”
“I suggest we make a list of people who might want to see Siri dead. Anyone he’s antagonized recently.”
“A list like that would include half of the politburo, but I doubt they’d go so far as to blow him up. Although I’m not so certain about his boss, Judge Haeng.”
A Fate Worse than Death
“Do you really think it was necessary to yell it out at the top of your voice, Siri?”
Curse of the Pogo Stick Page 2