The Coroner's Lunch

by Colin Cotterill

  Siri stopped and turned to him. “Mr. Geung. When are you going to believe me? You aren’t. Your dad was wrong. He didn’t understand. What have I told you?”

  “I have a…a…”

  “A condition.”

  “Called Down Syndrome.” He recited the rest from one of the endless lists that were stored somewhere in his mind. “In some aspects I am slower than other people, but in others I am superior.” They walked on.

  “That’s right, and one of the aspects you’re superior in is remembering things, things you learned a long time ago. In remembering things, you are even superior to me.”

  Geung grunted with pleasure. “Yes.”

  “Yes. And another thing you’re superior in, is ice water.”

  “Yes, I am.” Since they’d been banned by the director from keeping personal refreshments in the morgue freezer, the nearest refrigerator was in the staff canteen. Geung enjoyed going there to fetch glasses of water for guests, because the girls flirted with him.

  “Is Comrade Kham’s wife here by herself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then do you think you could bring her just one glass of ice water? It’s a hot day.”

  “I can do that.”

  He loped off toward the canteen, and Siri slowed down. He wanted to second-guess Mrs. Nitnoy’s purpose for coming here. Her visits invariably spelled trouble, although he couldn’t recall doing anything wrong of late. She was a strong, loud woman with a large, menacing chest and hips that rolled at you like tank treads. She was a senior cadre at the Women’s Union and carried as much weight politically as she did structurally. Above all else, she was a stickler for rules.

  “It has to be the shoes,” he thought. Judge Haeng had reported his disobedience, and he’d called in the big gun. She was here to force his feet into sweaty vinyl shoes that would leave him crippled. She’d be sitting at his desk watching the clock to see how late he was getting back from lunch. She’d be superficially jolly and shake his hand and ask after his health, and then humiliate him.

  He was feeling sick to his stomach when he walked under the MORGUE sign. He stood at the door to his office and counted to three before confidently striding in. Dtui was alone at her desk reading something she hurriedly stuffed into a drawer.

  “Mrs. Nitnoy?”

  “In the freezer.”

  His face went blank and his mind followed. “Wha—?”

  “They brought her in just after you left for lunch.”

  “What happened to her?” He sat heavily on his squeaky chair.

  “She died.”

  “Well, I’d hope so if she’s in the freezer. What did she die of?”

  She looked up at him and, predictably, smiled. “I’m a nurse. You’re a coroner. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to tell us?”

  “Could you perhaps give me a start? Who brought her in? What did they say?”

  “Two drivers from the Women’s Union. They said she was sitting having lunch, dribbled a little bit, and keeled over. They checked her pulse and she was dead. The Union doctor told them to bring her here as it was a…what do you call it? It was an unnatural death.”

  Siri was disturbed to find that his first feeling wasn’t of compassion for the poor woman, but of relief that he didn’t have to wear vinyl shoes. His second feeling was anxiety. This, after ten months, would be his first high-profile case. A lot of senior party people would be looking over his shoulder. He pondered the possible consequences.

  “Does Comrade Kham know?”

  “He’s in Xiang Khouang. They phoned him. He said go ahead with the autopsy. He’s flying back this evening.”

  “I suppose we should get on with it, then.” He stood, took a deep breath, and walked through to the examination room. Mr. Geung was already in there, standing in front of the freezer, rocking anxiously, a glass of ice water in one hand, a tissue in the other.

  It was about four-thirty by the time all the textbook procedures were completed. She’d been measured, but not weighed because they didn’t have a scale. Earlier in the year, they’d experimented with two bathroom scales. Siri and Geung weighed themselves on each, then held up the corpse between them. Due to some obscure law of physics, the body only ever weighed half of what it should have. So they abandoned weighing altogether.

  At one point, Siri leaned over the woman’s face. He called to Geung.

  “Mr. Geung. Your nose is better than mine. What do you smell here?”

  Geung didn’t need to lean. He’d smelled it already.

  “Balm.”

  “Very good. Let’s get the old girl undressed, shall we?”

  “And nuts.”

  “What?”

  “Balm and nuts. I…I smell nuts.”

  Siri didn’t smell the nuts or know what Geung was talking about, but he got Dtui to note it down anyway.

  Once Mrs. Nitnoy’s clothes had been inspected and bagged, the body was photographed. The hospital budget allowed one roll of color film per seven bodies, which meant one full-body front, one full-body back, one topical specific to the area of cause. The one or two leftover shots were technically for contentious areas of the anatomy, but often got used up on group photographs of nurses who wanted to send them back to their families in the countryside.

  On either side of Mrs. Nitnoy’s formidable chest, Dr. Siri made incisions that came together at the base of her sternum and ran down to her pubic bone. Thus the autopsy began. Everything he did, he explained very slowly, because Dtui had to write it all down in the notebook, and she didn’t take shorthand.

  Siri used the old bone cutters to get through her rib cage and, one by one, he described, weighed, and labeled the organs, and Dtui jotted down irregularities in her book. Siri then used a fine scalpel to define the scalp, which he pulled forward over poor Mrs. Nitnoy’s face. While he began a more detailed inspection of the organs at the examination bench, Mr. Geung set about the cranium.

  Although a requisition was in for an electric saw and the hospital board was considering it, in the meantime they had no choice but to use a hacksaw. It was the department’s good fortune that sawing was one of Mr. Geung’s superior skills. With his tongue poking from the corner of his mouth, he painstakingly and expertly cut deep enough to penetrate the skull, but not so deep as to damage the brain. It was a skill Siri had been unable to master.

  The morgue at the end of 1976 was hardly better equipped than the meatworks behind the morning market. For his own butchery, Siri had blunt saws and knives, a bone cutter, and drills inherited from the French. He had his personal collection of more delicate scalpels and other instruments. There were one or two gauges and drips and pipettes and the like, but there was no laboratory. The closest was forty kilometers away, across the border in Udon Thani, and the border was closed to the dreaded communist hordes.

  There was an old microscope Siri had requisitioned from the stores at Dong Dok pedagogical institute. If they ever reopened the science department, it would likely be missed. Even though the microscope was an ancient relic of bygone biologists and should have been in a museum, it still magnified beautifully. It was just that the slide photographs in his old textbooks were so blurred, he couldn’t always tell what he was looking for.

  Most of the results from Siri’s morgue relied on archaic color tests: combinations of chemicals or litmus samples. These were more suitable for telling what wasn’t, rather than what was. Assuming the necessary chemicals were available at Lycée Vientiane’s chemistry department, Siri could usually eliminate fifty possible causes of death, but still be left with a hundred and fifty others.

  So it was hardly surprising, when four-thirty came around, that he hadn’t the foggiest idea what had killed Mrs. Nitnoy. He could give a list as long as your distal tibia of things that hadn’t. She hadn’t been hit by a train (as there were none in Laos). She hadn’t been shot, stabbed, suffocated, or had her limbs severed by an army launch. But as she’d been in a crowded room when she died, these were no great discove
ries.

  Some witnesses said she’d choked on her food, but the absence of any in her esophagus and the abruptness of her death said otherwise. Without a lab, it was next to impossible to check for poison unless you knew which it was, and as the lady had been eating from a communal table it was quite unlikely she alone would have died.

  In the absence of Judge Haeng and his helpful advice, Siri had taken particular pains to establish that she hadn’t died from a heart attack. There was no evidence of an occlusion or thrombosis.

  He’d read about forensic scientists around the world who reveled in mysteries such as these. He wasn’t yet one of them.

  Just as Dtui and Geung were leaving for the hospital gardens to do their hour of vegetable tending, the clerk from the director’s office came rushing in to tell them that Comrade Kham would be arriving at Wattay Airport at six and they were to wait. Siri told his co-workers he’d stay behind himself and that they should go.

  He sat at his desk looking through Dtui’s notes. She wrote so small, he considered using the microscope to read them. Instead, he spent the next hour pumping his reading spectacles back and forth in front of his eyes trying to focus on the words. This ultimately gave him a headache and he ended up writing the second half of his report from memory.

  It was nine before Senior Comrade Kham turned up, and there was whisky on his breath. His mouth was the only indication of sadness on his face, and it seemed to Siri he was straining to keep a smile inverted.

  “I’m so sorry about your loss, Comrade.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In the freezer.” Siri stood and gestured for the man to follow him to the examination room.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I thought you’d want to see the body.”

  “Heavens no. She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Kham walked past him and sat at Siri’s desk, which forced Siri to sit at Dtui’s. The Party man thumbed idly through the papers in front of him. “Have you…er, cut her open?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “I’m sorry. You could have made better use of your time. I know what it was that killed her.”

  “You do? Well, thank God for that. I have no idea.”

  “I’ve been warning the silly woman for years it’d kill her. But I suppose if you’re addicted, you don’t listen to common sense, eh, Siri?”

  “What exactly was she addicted to?” He hadn’t found any puncture marks on her arms and her liver was pretty as a picture.

  “Lahp.”

  “Lahp? Damn.” It should have been so obvious, it was embarrassing. As a doctor in the jungle, he’d seen countless deaths as a result of lahp or pa daek or any of a number of other raw meat or fish concoctions the farmers ate with reckless abandon.

  Raw flesh works as a healthful meal only if it’s fresh. Bacteria get into it very fast, and the parasites work their way around the body. If you’re lucky you may just end up with abscesses, cramps, and chronic diarrhea for the rest of your life.

  But there is a strain of more adventurous parasite that lays eggs in the anterior chamber of the eye. From there it either migrates through the retina, or burrows its way into the brain. One minute you’re feeling fine and showing no symptoms; the next, you’re on a table at the morgue. Siri noticed the comrade was still talking.

  “…eating pork lahp since she was a girl. Loved the stuff. It gave her no end of trouble with her guts, but she swore the body eventually built up an immunity to the germs. I detest the stuff, but she couldn’t get enough. All our friends could tell you.

  “I stopped off at the police department on my way here and told them all about it. There won’t be anyone filing an unnatural death certificate for this case.”

  Siri was still shaking his head. “It was silly of me not to think of it. I didn’t imagine a woman like Mrs. Nitnoy eating raw pork.”

  “Why not? She was just a country girl. You could dress her up but you’d never get the stink of buffalo out of her skin.” Siri couldn’t really understand why Kham was talking about his wife like this. In generosity he put it down to shock.

  “Well, in that case, I’ll just do one or two last checks, finish the report, and—”

  “Oh, I think you can probably finish the report without disturbing her again. We want to get her cremated as soon as possible. Her family and friends are anxious to give her the last rites. They’re waiting for her at the temple.”

  “But I need to…”

  “Siri, my old friend.” Kham stood and came over to sit on Dtui’s desk, looking down at the doctor. “As a medical man, you’re a scientist. But even a man of science needs to show sensitivity to culture and religion. Don’t you see?”

  This was good, coming from a member of the committee that had removed Buddhism as a state religion and banned the giving of alms to monks.

  “I—”

  “She’s suffered enough indignities for one day. Let her rest in peace, eh?”

  “Comrade Kham, I didn’t write the law. I can’t issue a death certificate until I’ve confirmed it was parasites that finished her off.”

  Kham stood and smiled warmly. “I understand that. Of course I do. What kind of a politburo member would I be if I attempted to ignore the regulations?” He walked to the doorway and stood in the frame. “That’s why I’ve decided to have her own surgeon sign the certificate.”

  “What?”

  “I’m so sorry you were troubled today, Comrade Siri. But as there is no suggestion of foul play, there really was no need for an autopsy. I must say, for a man who hates his job so much, you do it quite meticulously. I’m very impressed.”

  He walked out and left Siri sitting alone at Dtui’s desk turning things over in his mind. Kham had known there was to be an autopsy. He’d given the go-ahead over the phone. Now he was saying there was no need. Siri had wasted three hours looking for a cause of death. That time could have been cut in half if he’d known what he was looking for.

  He gazed over at his own desk. There was something out of place there. But before he could organize that thought, he was disturbed by a commotion outside. He took one more quick look at his desk before walking out to see what was happening.

  He encountered a group of men who were wheeling a hospital trolley that carried a basic but oversized wooden coffin. Kham walked behind them in the shadows.

  “You’re taking her right this minute?”

  The men pushed the coffin past him and into the examination room. Kham followed as far as the alcove. It was dark there.

  “The family are all waiting.”

  Siri looked at the tall man and was overwhelmingly conscious of a dark image some three meters behind him. For some unknown reason it filled him with dread. It wasn’t clear, and there wasn’t enough light to distinguish features, but its shape reminded him exactly—exactly of Mrs. Nitnoy.

  He recalled the longboat man he’d seen in the semiconsciousness of morning. That had been frightening enough. But then he had had sleep as an excuse. Here he was wide awake. This was no dream. He was seeing the outline of a woman who lay dead in the freezer in the far room. She was standing, shaking. She tensed. She readied herself and charged at the comrade’s back with all the ferocity of a bull intent on goring him.

  She ran at him with her full force, and if she’d been real she would certainly have knocked him off his feet. For a brief second the light from the examination room caught her face. Siri had no doubt it was her, nor did he doubt her look of pure hate. But when her body met her husband’s, she vanished.

  Comrade Kham shuddered.

  “How do you stand this building? The drafts give me goose bumps.” He turned to the space behind him at which Siri was still staring. “That the freezer in there?”

  Siri’s old heart was galloping. He couldn’t speak. The best he could manage was to stumble past Kham into the examination room where the pallbearers were waiting patiently. He went to the freezer and with an unsteady hand pu
lled down the lever that unfastened the door. It opened slowly.

  She was still there, still just as dead as she’d been at lunchtime. Siri hadn’t really believed he’d find her there. He reached into the freezer and trembled as he pulled back the pale blue sheet that covered the head. The face lay slack across the skull. It didn’t wink or give any signs it had been out haunting.

  Siri tucked the sheet under Mrs. Nitnoy’s body like a shroud to protect her from the rough hands and eyes of the men who had come for her. He pulled out the wheeled platform, stood back and allowed them to take her. Her big feet stuck out like flippers. The men lifted her more gently than they seemed capable of, and lowered her into her box.

  “She is all…back together, is she?” Kham asked. “We don’t want bits of her dropping off on the way home, do we, boys?” The men laughed nervously, more because of who he was than because they saw any humor in what he said. If his insensitivity was to be put down to shock, he must have been deeply disturbed by his wife’s death.

  But Siri no longer believed this. He looked at Kham, looked directly into his eyes, and the senior comrade turned away, with a hint of embarrassment and something more. Siri didn’t speak again. Kham walked outside.

  The laborers maintained a respectful verbal silence and tacked the lid on the coffin as quietly as their hammers would allow. They struggled to wheel the comrade’s wife back through the door. Due to the extra weight, the wheels yanked the trolley to the right and it crashed into the door frame. The bearers reversed once, but the trolley continued to swerve to the right. It refused to be wheeled out to the yard.

  With no small effort, the men were forced to lift the cart and its cargo and carry it through the doorway. Comrade Kham was waiting for them outside, a cheap, fast-burning cigarette between his lips. He had nothing to say either. He walked beside the trolley, frustrated by its zigzag trajectory, and disappeared with it around the end of the building.

  Siri stood below the MORGUE sign, his head tilted like a dog listening. But this old dog was paying attention to the debate going on inside his head. He took deep breaths to calm his nerves, but his pulse was still racing.