The Coroner's Lunch

by Colin Cotterill

  “Dtui, do you want to come and take a look at this?” She hurried over to the bench and lowered her eye to the lens. “What do you see?”

  “Ehhh, green? Little shiny bits?” She moved the slide. “Black? More shiny bits? It’s very pretty. What is it?”

  “Well, this is skin from the area around the nipple that looked burned. The green section could have been caused by copper. The shiny bits are probably metal deposits.”

  “Which means?”

  “I’ll have to do some chemical tests at the lycée, but I’d say these were electricity burns.”

  “Whah?”

  “Electric burns to the nipples and testicles. What does that say to you?”

  “Ouch.”

  He laughed. “Can you try something more detective-like?”

  She thought about it for a few seconds. “Torture?”

  “That’s what it looks like to me. You don’t accidentally electrocute yourself on the nipples and genitalia. I can’t think of any other explanation.”

  “So he was tortured, tied to a rock, and thrown into the reservoir. He must have been a popular lad. You think the torture might have killed him?”

  “There’s no evidence it was terminal, as far as I can see. I suppose the blood in the chest cavity might be connected, but I doubt it. I’ll spend some time with my textbooks. Do you want to write up the report?”

  “Me?”

  “Why not? You’ve seen enough. Just make the letters big enough to read this time.”

  “You want me to type it?”

  “You can type?”

  Geung laughed. “She h…h…has skills.”

  “So it would appear. Don’t you need a typewriter?”

  “It helps. There’s one over in the admin office that they let me practice on.”

  Siri shook his head and tutted. “You know? I think it was very wise of me to choose you to become my new apprentice. Anyone know who that was that came in here and yelled at us?”

  “No.”

  “No.”

  The report was typed, spelled correctly, and on Haeng’s desk an hour before he got back from his domestic tinkering. The body was back in the freezer and the morgue was spick and span. Siri promised not to ride into any walls or broom salesmen, and Dtui let him use the bike. He cycled directly to the lycée.

  Teacher Oum was teaching a class, so he sat outside and enjoyed the sounds of Russian, new history, and political ideology being taught by converted French, English, and ancient history teachers in the various rooms around the quad. They read directly from the Department of Education printouts, and the students copied down what they heard. There were no questions, because the teachers probably didn’t have the answers. But apart from these few additions and subtractions to the curriculum, life hadn’t changed that much for the students and teachers who had stayed behind in the capital.

  It had been a quiet transition from what the president called “a bastardized version of America” to a Marxist-Leninist state. The Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, formerly the Lao Patriotic Front, had planted the seeds of rebellion long before December ’75. Villages already had sympathizers in place and ready to implement new policies. The Pathet Lao already had seats in Parliament and a Party office just a brief swagger from the U.S. Embassy.

  Underground unions at all the major utilities were ready to stop work as soon as they were given the word, and by the time that word arrived, the police and the military were so short of superiors that there was no one to give orders to quash the rebellion. By then, most senior officers had swum or floated across the Mekhong to refugee camps along the border.

  The people of Vientiane were indifferent. They’d lived through the heady days of dollars and corruption and ribaldry, and benefited little from the American presence. Those who got rich during that period didn’t share their ill-gotten wealth with the common folk. Before the Americans had been the French, and the general feeling was: the less said about them, the better.

  No, many of the Lao that stayed on in the capital after the takeover were supportive of the new regime. The feeling was that they couldn’t do much worse than their predecessors, and Lao people were sick and tired of being a foreign-owned colony. If they were to be mismanaged, it was time to be mismanaged by other Lao.

  When the bell rang for the end of the day, the scene became one of happy escape rather than departure. Siri passed the smiling teenagers, and they saluted him with their hands together in a polite nop. Until they got used to the faces of the new administration, it was good policy to nop everyone over fifty.

  Teacher Oum looked up from her theoretical chemistry notes. “Ooh. Two visits in a week. You must be busy.”

  “I think Buddha’s testing me to see whether I’ve abandoned him too.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m sorry, Oum. Can we try that cyanide test again?”

  “What on?” He pulled out the headache pill bottle. “I’m hoping we’ll find some residue in here. But I think the pills themselves are just aspirin. Then there are these.” He produced a small jar with two dead cockroaches in it.

  She laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re handling murder inquiries for the insect community now. You know we don’t have a lot of chemicals left for these tests?”

  “Then let’s make it count.”

  And count it did.

  The Chicken Counter

  On Friday morning, the mystery of the loud-voiced man was solved. Siri and the team were closing up an old lady who’d drunk toilet bleach to relieve her family of the burden of having to look after her. Because it happened in a hospital bathroom, there had to be an autopsy.

  The hospital director, Suk, came to the door and called Siri into the office. The loud-voiced man was standing there with his arms folded high on his chest. The director was another administrator who’d been given authority too young in life and felt obliged to use it. He, too, was threatened by Siri’s disrespectful personality.

  “Siri, this is Mr. Ketkaew.” Siri held out his hand but the man refused to shake it. “I assume you’ve noticed the new structure at the rear of your building.”

  “No.” There wasn’t much need to go round to the back of the morgue when there had been nothing but a deserted lot.

  “Then I suggest you come and take a look.”

  The three of them marched around the corner of the morgue building, where they were confronted by a small bamboo hut. It contained a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet, and a blackboard. Over the door was a hand-painted sign that read KHON KHOUAY REPRESENTATIVE.

  The Khon Khouay were the neighborhood spies, lovingly known as “chicken counters” by the locals. It was their function to keep a rein on affluence and extravagance. Usually, they were part-timers who accepted their role reluctantly on top of other responsibilities. That Mr. Ketkaew had his own office and a real sign suggested he was taking his position seriously.

  “Mr. Ketkaew has been assigned to area 18. As the hospital is in the center of that area, we have the honor of allowing him to set up his office here.” The way he said “honor” suggested to Siri that it was anything but. The hospital, far from being wealthy, was struggling to make ends meet. The last thing it needed was a chicken counter, particularly an enthusiastic one.

  Ketkaew spoke up. He was a man with no volume control. “So I’m not having any more of those stinks coming out of your place. You understand?”

  Siri didn’t really know how to react. He’d seen these officious little men before, sampling their first taste of power. At best, they could be annoying. But there were times, if you got on the wrong side of them, that they could be downright dangerous. “Mr. Ketkaew, perhaps you could suggest to me how to stop dead bodies from smelling bad.”

  Ketkaew had to think about it. “Can’t you spray them with something?”

  “You mean like air freshener?”

  “Something like that.”

  Siri laughed. Even the director suppressed a smile. “I’m
afraid we aren’t legally allowed to do that. The law clearly states you cannot spray anything sweet-smelling on a body that affects the natural odor. It’s an infringement of human rights.”

  “Well, I suppose you’ll just have to close the windows then. I can’t be expected to work with such a damned stink.”

  “You want us to close the windows? In that case, we’ll have to spend scarce hospital money on an air conditioner. You do want us to breathe, don’t you?” Ketkaew shrugged his shoulders as if he didn’t care. “The best solution would be for Director Suk to move your office somewhere else so you don’t have to put up with it.”

  Suk cut in. “No. No, I’m afraid this is the only spot we can provide in the hospital grounds. There are one or two sites outside the—”

  “Absolutely not. I insist on being on-site in order to do my job to my maximum efficiency.”

  It all became clear to Siri, then. The hospital didn’t want Ketkaew there, but couldn’t really refuse. So they put him behind the morgue, hoping the smell would drive him out. As far as he could see, Siri was likely to be the one to suffer most. Why did these things always happen on Fridays! He began to observe them creeping up on his calendar with feelings of dark foreboding. And he still had Judge Haeng to look forward to.

  It was difficult for Judge Haeng to discuss Siri’s “attitude” at the second burden-sharing tutorial because they weren’t alone. In the second guest chair sat a dapper man in his forties who probably hadn’t looked much different in his twenties. He had an amusing, softly handsome face and was built for speed. He didn’t say much.

  Judge Haeng introduced him formally. “I should like to introduce to you Inspector Phosy of the National Police Force. The inspector has just returned from a very successful training period in Viengsai. He is now ready to return to his responsibilities as a senior investigator here in Vientiane.”

  Siri leaned over and shook Phosy’s hand. It was a long handshake that seemed to be extracting information from him. Most people shook hands in Laos, and a person developed a sense of what to expect from different types of shakes: sincerity, impatience, weakness. Siri wondered what he’d just given away.

  He thought about the policeman. “Away for training in Viengsai” meant re-education. All of the students at the Police Academy and their superiors had been invited to the north for training when the Pathet Lao took control, partly to establish where their loyalties lay. If Phosy had only just returned, he’d been in the camp for a year. Siri wondered how that would affect a man. So far, he’d laughed at all Haeng’s jokes and agreed with everything he said. It was starting to annoy Siri. Haeng coughed.

  “I wanted to have you both here to talk about the bodies that were retrieved from Nam Ngum,” Haeng started.

  “Bodies?”

  “Yes, Doctor. There were two.”

  “Nobody told me that. Why did we only get one at the morgue?”

  “All in good time, Siri. Phosy, did you get the copy of Siri’s report that I sent to your department?”

  “Yes, Comrade Judge. It’s right here. It was very thoughtful of you to send it.”

  “It was no more than the courtesy we expect between different arms of the legal mechanism. If I’d got it earlier, so would you have.” He glared at Siri who smiled, undamaged.

  “Excellent, sir.” Siri was beginning to wonder how long it would be before the policeman walked over and polished Haeng’s fly buttons.

  “Where’s the other one?” Siri asked.

  “At the Vietnamese Embassy.”

  “I didn’t know they had a freezer there.”

  “They don’t. I believe they have him on ice.”

  “What for?”

  “Until their own coroner can get here.”

  “Their own…they don’t trust me?”

  “It isn’t a question of trust, Siri. If they find the same evidence of torture on their man as you did on yours, this could become a very embarrassing international incident.”

  “What makes him ‘their man’?”

  “This.” Haeng held out a small folder, expecting Siri to come and get it. Instead, the puppy-dog detective leaped to his feet and handed the file to Siri. He remained standing at Siri’s shoulder and was first to comment when the photos of the corpse came into view.

  “Traditional Vietnamese tattoos. Very distinctive.”

  “Yes, very distinctive indeed,” Siri agreed. He was quite surprised at just how clear they were. “At what point was he rerouted to the Vietnamese Embassy?”

  “Someone at the dam recognized the tattoos. They called the embassy, who sent one of their advisers.” There was no shortage of Vietnamese “advisers” around the capital. Cynics—and Siri was one of the founding fathers of cynicism—suggested that there was so much advice from Hanoi being passed around, it wouldn’t be long before the official language changed to Vietnamese. “You can imagine how delicate the matter is,” Haeng droned on. “A Vietnamese national being interrogated and tortured in Laos. The cabinet discussed it yesterday. We’re going to request that you be allowed to observe their autopsy and compare notes.”

  “Request? Why request? This is Laos. Shouldn’t we be insisting?”

  “It isn’t as easy as that.”

  “It should be. We aren’t her next province yet, you know.”

  “Siri, if you’re going to spend time with the Vietnamese, I suggest you watch your mouth. They aren’t quite as understanding as we are.”

  The meeting went on longer than usual, as Haeng felt obliged to outline all the cases that he and Siri had “cooperated” on. But as long as the doctor kept his mouth shut, it was comparatively painless. Things seemed to be winding down—Siri looking toward the door and escape—when Haeng coughed again.

  “I’ve been thinking, Doctor. Now that the work of your department is being recognized by the police, I believe it’s time for you to get rid of the moron.”

  Siri shuddered. “The moron? Oh, I don’t know. I know he has his off-days, but I don’t think that’s enough reason to kick Director Suk out of his job. He has a family. Please give him another chance.”

  “Director…? Goodness, no, Siri. I’m talking about the retard you have as your morgue laborer. I’m prepared to offer a full salary for that position now.”

  “I’m so pleased. Mr. Geung will be delighted when I tell him he can have a living wage.”

  “Pay attention. I’m telling you to get rid of him and hire a normal person.”

  “I can’t get rid of him. He’s the only one there who knows what to do.”

  “He’s mentally deranged.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder in your case, Doctor.”

  Siri sighed. “Judge Haeng, Mr. Geung has a mild strain of Down Syndrome. His condition makes him ideally suited for repetitive work. My predecessor spent a good deal of time teaching him his job. He isn’t going to forget it. He isn’t dangerous or clumsy, and his condition isn’t likely to offend any of the clients we get passing through our place.

  “He’s been at the morgue for three years, so when I say he knows the work better than I do, I’m not being facetious. He’s constantly reminding me of procedures I’ve forgotten, and where things are stored. He has an amazing memory, and my nurse Dtui and I love him very much.”

  Haeng was becoming agitated. He tapped his pencil on the table so hard the lead broke. “I’m overwhelmed with emotion. I can barely keep my eyes dry. But now let us return to rational thought for a second. Can you imagine how this would look if a visiting dignitary came to tour the hospital?”

  “And I wasn’t wearing my plastic shoes, and Dtui forgot to put on her underwear—”

  “Doctor!”

  “Visiting dignitaries don’t go anywhere near morgues; and if by some miracle they did, they’d be struck by the compassion our great and farsighted republic shows by hiring three minority groups to work together in the same office. You have women, retarded, and horribly old people, all ther
e on show.”

  Phosy, who had been silent and unflinching throughout this embarrassing confrontation, suddenly cleared his throat loudly and offered: “I have a Mongoloid cousin. He doesn’t do any harm. He even fries us bananas every Friday. Most of the time we even forget he’s nuts.”

  Siri and Haeng turned to look at the policeman, who wasn’t making eye contact with either of them.

  That simple comment poured oil on the troubled waters in Judge Haeng’s office. It also let the judge know he was outnumbered. He agreed that Geung could stay on, pending an external assessment, but that he certainly wasn’t qualified for the raise Haeng had mentioned.

  With that, the meeting ended. Siri and Phosy shook the judge’s hand and walked to the door together. But before following Siri into the hall, Phosy turned back.

  “Comrade Judge, I feel compelled to tell you that today’s meeting has been a great inspiration to me. I hope it won’t embarrass you too much if I say that my confidence and my faith in the socialist system become re-ignited whenever I meet people such as yourself. I’m so happy that my country has figureheads like you to look up to.”

  Hearing this from his spot in the hall, Siri felt like throwing up. When the policeman eventually joined him, they walked in silence along the concrete passageway to the carpark. This was the man they’d given Siri to work with, so, like it or not, he had to be polite. He watched him put his notebook into the pannier at the front of his old French motorbike.

  “So, does your cousin live with your family?”

  The policeman looked down at his boots. “What cousin’s that?”

  “Your banana-frying Mongoloid cousin.” There wasn’t a reaction. “You haven’t got one, have you?”

  Inspector Phosy straddled his bike. The slightest of smiles creased his lips. “I’ve got a sister with hemorrhoids.” He kick-started the bike four or five times before it engaged. There was a fearsome noise from the engine. Black smoke belched from the exhaust and neither rose nor dissipated.