The Coroner's Lunch

by Colin Cotterill

  Siri, in its midst, threw his head back and laughed, and at that second he made a decision. It was the fastest and potentially most dangerous decision he’d made for a long time. “I need to talk to you about a case.”

  “It can wait till Monday.”

  “No. No, it can’t.”

  The inspector looked deep into Siri’s green eyes and nodded. “I’ll come to your rooms this evening.”

  “You know where I live?”

  “I’m the police.”

  Without bothering to explain, Phosy sped off through a shoal of bicycles, leaving the riders choking in black smoke.

  Phosy somehow managed to negotiate the stairs to the landing outside Siri’s door without making a sound despite the loose boards. So when he knocked, Siri jumped. “Come in.”

  The policeman let himself in. He’d already left his shoes outside. He was casually dressed and was holding a bottle. You couldn’t help but respect a man who turned up at your door with a bottle. Siri looked at it. “I hope that isn’t a urine sample you want analyzed.”

  Phosy came inside, quickly located the glasses and started pouring. “It’s only Thai brandy. I should have asked if you drank.” He handed a glass to Siri, who nodded to his generous guest.

  “Is this a service of the new police force?”

  “I was taught to show respect to my seniors.”

  “You don’t have to suck up to me, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Good luck.” They both drank.

  “It seems you learned a lot at that camp.”

  “It was a valuable experience. I can recognize seventy-three varieties of vegetables. I could tell you how old a rice shoot is, or how many months pregnant a buffalo.”

  Siri laughed. “Good luck.”

  “Good luck.”

  They finished the first drink, and Siri took the bottle and poured a second round.

  “So, they didn’t convert you to communism?”

  “They made me aware of the values of the socialist system and the worthy eff—”

  “Okay, okay, I won’t ask you any more questions about the camp. Tell me about Phosy the man.”

  Over the next hour, Siri learned that Phosy had been married and had two children. While he was in the north, they fled across the river; he hadn’t heard from them since. He came back to a house empty of family and furniture, and was currently living in one room.

  Phosy learned that Siri had been married and faithful to only one woman in his life. She had been unwilling to interrupt her contribution to The Cause, so they had never had children. This made loneliness all the more difficult when, eleven years earlier, she’d been killed under mysterious circumstances, leaving Siri with little enthusiasm for life, work, or the furtherance of the Communist Movement.

  It was amazing what two strangers could learn in a short time with the aid of Thai brandy. Interesting, too, that each had weighed up the other so quickly and decided he was to be trusted.

  “So, did you really have a case to discuss, or were you just hoping I’d turn up with some booze?”

  Siri knew he’d gone too far to back out now. He lowered his voice. “I can tell you, but I don’t know if you’d be interested in doing anything about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It could get you in trouble.”

  “What about you? Aren’t you afraid of getting in trouble?”

  “I’m permanently in trouble.”

  “Who told you you could trust me?”

  “Your Mongoloid cousin and your hemorrhoidal sister.”

  They laughed and drained the last dregs from their glasses.

  “You don’t want to believe them. They’ve got big mouths. You got any coffee?”

  While Siri prepared the aluminum filters and spooned in the rich coffee, he reviewed the official version of Mrs. Nitnoy’s passing for Phosy. But when he’d put the steaming cups on the table, he went over and closed the window shutters.

  Mr. Ketkaew’s arrival at the hospital had reminded him there were ears everywhere: in the temple, in the house, in the next room. The Junior Youth League was being trained to listen to the idle talk of their parents and report it. Area security monitors like Ketkaew were lurking by open windows, listening for treason and Thai radio broadcasts. The Lao had been the most easy-going people in the region, but this mistrust was slowly turning them paranoid.

  Siri dragged his chair over beside Phosy’s. His story had arrived at the Tuesday tests. He spoke in a whisper. “There wasn’t a shred of evidence in the brain that she’d been killed by parasites. Nothing. To go that suddenly, there should have been cysts.”

  “Couldn’t the parasites have set up home somewhere else?”

  “If they had, she would have been in agony for some time. The brain was the only location that might have caused her to switch off suddenly like that. So we did tests at the high school. We found a high concentration of cyanide in the stomach.”

  “Cyanide?” They were both sobering up quite quickly.

  “A lethal dose. I’d siphoned off some stomach fluid for the records but hadn’t kept any solids. The waste was all thrown out on Monday. By the time it became clear it could be useful, it had all been incinerated.

  “My guess is that not all of the tablet had dissolved in her stomach. What hadn’t been absorbed into the blood before she died gave off fumes in the furnace. It isn’t airtight. The janitor who does the burning was off sick the next day. He showed distinct signs of cyanide poisoning. I found some dead roaches around the furnace and we tested them. They were positive.”

  “Why do you assume the cyanide was in a tablet?” Phosy was leaning forward. He hadn’t touched his coffee. Siri told him about Mrs. Nitnoy’s hangover and the pills.

  “I was hoping we’d be able to find traces of cyanide in the bottle but, actually, we struck oil.”

  “Another pill?”

  “There were three tablets left in the bottle. One of them was cyanide. It had been filed down to look exactly like the others. The other ladies at the Women’s Union had been very lucky.”

  “So, someone put two cyanide tablets into a bottle of headache pills. They didn’t know when she’d take them, but I suppose that wasn’t important. Have you told Comrade Kham all this?”

  “Ah, now, this is where things start to get complicated.” He told Phosy about the comrade’s visit to the morgue on Monday and the disappearance of the report. He didn’t mention that Mrs. Nitnoy had briefly come back to life.

  The detective whistled long and low and drained his coffee cup. “This is a fine mess.”

  “I was thinking of waiting to see whether my unfinished report turns up as the official statement.”

  “Was it signed?”

  “Not when it left me.”

  “Good, yes. That would be very incriminating. I don’t think you should make this official until we know more about it. The Justice Department doesn’t have a great deal to do these days. Something like this would float up through the system in no time. What do you suppose your friend Haeng would do with it?”

  “That’s just it: I don’t know how anyone would react. When we were in the north, justice sort of took care of itself. There was an honor system. But now that we’ve become civilized, a lot of people seem to be assuming roles left over from the old regime. I don’t know who to trust.”

  After another coffee, the two men went downstairs. Saloop was on the night shift. It was eleven and he was wide awake. He bounded up to Siri’s leg and barked at it with his nose inches away from a potential kick in the jowls. He seemed unaware of the danger.

  “What’s with the dog?”

  “Doesn’t like me. Loves everyone else. Dogs have always had a problem with me. Never known one that didn’t act like this.”

  “That’s odd.”

  He looked up. The wooden shutter of the front bedroom window creaked shut. Siri followed his gaze.

  “Night, Miss Vong.” Sh
e didn’t answer. He knew she’d want to get a look at whoever had been getting rowdy with Siri upstairs. If she had any romantic yearnings at all, she would be impressed by this good-looking policeman.

  As he was getting on his old bike, and the dog-howl chorus struck up in the streets around them, Phosy leaned close to Siri’s ear. “Give me some time to think about this case before we do anything.”

  “We?”

  Both men smiled as Phosy kicked the motorcycle to life and sped off. Siri was left alone in the middle of the lane in a bank of smog, susceptible to dog attacks. Despite all the threats, he’d never been bitten by a dog, not once. Miss Vong’s shutter was slightly ajar again.

  “Night, Miss Vong.”

  “Go to bed, Dr. Siri.”

  On Saturday, Siri was deservedly dull-headed. The chair squeaked when he leaned back from his thick forensic pathology text. He put his hand on his forehead and scoured the French department of his memory for a word. He knew it was in there. He’d put it in almost fifty years before and hadn’t had cause to remove it. But for the life of him he couldn’t find it.

  Tearing in the main chest artery could be caused by high speed collision, or precipitation. What the hell was precipitation?

  The pages of his French dictionary had become welded together after a typhoon the previous year, and he hadn’t been able to get his hands on a new one.

  “It’ll come,” he said. He leaned back as far as his chair would go, with his hands behind his head. “It’ll come.” He looked to the doorway and was startled to see a thin person in a much larger man’s uniform standing there. It was a uniform he knew very well, that of the ex-North, now entire, Vietnamese army. But he couldn’t recall seeing one so sparingly filled. It brought to Siri’s mind the monster body suits he’d seen in Japanese science fiction films. The man’s neck emerged from a collar that had space for three other necks. The rest of the uniform hung off him as if it were suspended from a hook. He spoke to Siri in Vietnamese.

  “I’m looking for Dr. Siri Paiboun.”

  Siri’s Vietnamese was heavily accented but otherwise fluent. He’d spent fifteen years in the north of that country, training at first to be a revolutionary. But finally, when they realized his limitations as a guerrilla, they had him working in field hospitals with the Viet Cong.

  “You’ve found me.”

  The man smiled with relief and walked uncomfortably over to the desk. He blushed and shook Siri’s hand. “I have to apologize for the….” He looked down at his own chest.

  “The uniform? Did you lose a bet?”

  The Vietnamese laughed. “No. It was the only one they had available at the embassy.”

  “So why wear it?”

  “I was brought in as a military adviser. The ambassador’s afraid that if I walked around in civilian clothes I could, technically, be shot as a spy.” Siri laughed. The story was even funnier than the uniform. “I’m Doctor Nguyen Hong.”

  “Then drape yourself over that chair and tell me what I can do for you.”

  Nguyen Hong smiled and sat opposite Siri. “I believe you had an alleged drowning victim in here this week.”

  “Ahh. The twin. You’re a forensic scientist.”

  “Just an old coroner, actually.”

  In the doorway he hadn’t looked so old, but close up Siri could see the hair was a little too black, and the teeth were a little too large for the mouth. He was probably the same age as Siri, but with some renovations.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I was hoping I’d be able to take a look at your victim. I suppose there’s an official way of asking, but I prefer the ‘front up and try’ method.”

  “Me too.”

  “Good. There is every reason to believe your chap’s Vietnamese as well. But without the tattoos we had no right to claim him. I don’t suppose you’d know what a fuss this is all causing back in Hanoi.”

  “What kind of a fuss?”

  “The story’s going around that you’ve kidnapped and tortured our citizens. They’re eager to find out how official it was.”

  “Why would anyone assume it was official? It could have been a drug deal or—”

  “We’ve identified our man. He was a government representative, Nguyen Van Tran. He was part of a delegation that disappeared after they crossed the border into Laos at Nam Phao. They were on their way here to Vientiane, but never showed up. Their mission was top secret.”

  “How many of them in the delegation?”

  “Three. Two officials and a driver.”

  “And you ID’d your man from the tattoos?”

  “No, we have fingerprints and dental records, and there was a ring.”

  “He was still wearing a ring?”

  “Yes. His father’s name was engraved on the inside. There wasn’t anything about the tattoos in his military file, so he must have got them after he enlisted.”

  “Do you have the records of all three men?”

  Nguyen Hong folded back his long sleeve and reached into his satchel. He produced three manila folders and put them on the desk in front of Siri. “Help yourself.”

  Siri opened the three files and looked at the photographs. The second was familiar.

  “I reckon this is ours.”

  “Then that’s the driver. His name is Tran as well.”

  “All right, Doctor. I suggest we take our respective files and reports to the canteen, have a bite to eat, and swap stories. I don’t suppose you’d like to shed that uniform and borrow a white coat, would you?”

  “I’d love to.”

  Nguyen Hong changed, and Siri put together his carbon copy of the autopsy report. Then the two set off for a real coroner’s lunch in the canteen. Given the topic of their conversation, they were guaranteed a table to themselves.

  Autopsy Envy

  “Word’s on the streets, I go away and leave you for a couple of days and you’re already in bed with the Vietnamese.”

  “I knew you’d be jealous.”

  It was Monday, and Siri and Civilai sat on their log washing down their rolls with tepid southern coffee. They looked out at the sleek white tern flying a foot from the surface of the river. It swooped down for a fish, thrust its beak in too deep, and crashed, somersaulting with the current.

  “I bet that hurt.”

  “Does the committee have a problem with me consorting with the Viets? They are still our allies, aren’t they?”

  The battered tern, its feathers flustered, broke triumphantly through the surface of the water with the fish in its beak. The two old friends put down their plastic cups and applauded.

  “There are allies and there are allies, Siri. There’s how we see them and how they see themselves. To us, the advisers are resources we can use or ignore as we see fit. They believe they’ve been allocated to this or that department to steer our policies closer to their own, to make us more dependent on them.

  “The more advisers we allow in, the more Hanoi sees us as an appendage. That’s why we have a deliberate but unofficial policy of ignoring 40 percent of what they tell us.”

  “Even if it’s good advice?”

  “We don’t throw it out completely. Rather, we store it away until the chap’s gone off, frustrated at our non-compliance; then we dig it out and pretend it was ours all along.”

  “How does my flirtation with the Vietnamese coroner fit into your unofficial policy?”

  “Well, as long as we’re getting something out of it…. He is sharing information with you, isn’t he?”

  “Everything he knows, I know. The only problem is that we have different results for our two bodies.”

  “That’s undoubtedly your mistake. You aren’t really very good, are you?”

  “I assumed I’d messed up when I saw his results. My fellow was apparently the driver, Tran. He was in worse shape than the Tran they had on ice at the Vietnamese Embassy.”

  “Are they all called Tran over there?”

  “Only the ones that aren’
t called Nguyen. Anyway, our Tran had been laid out at the local temple for a couple of days while they worked out what to do with him. But then they found the other Tran, the one with the Vietnamese tattoos, so naturally they contacted the Vietnamese Embassy.

  “Once a body’s out of the water, it deteriorates quite rapidly, so my Tran was in a horrible state when I got him. They packed their Tran in ice and waited for Nguyen Hong to come and take a look. The ice made a mess of their corpse too. So neither of us had optimal material to work with.”

  “Excuses accepted. Did you two agree on anything?”

  “We’re both quite certain they didn’t die from drowning. We also agreed they’d been weighted down.”

  “So they weren’t supposed to be found?”

  “That depends on whether you adhere to the Dtui theory.”

  “Which is?”

  “If they’d really wanted the bodies to stay down, they would have used flex or wire, something that doesn’t dissolve that fast.”

  “Brilliant. So if we accept the Dtui hypothesis, whoever dumped them in the water wanted them bobbing back up. Do you know what they died of?”

  “Well, mine appears to have had a major trauma in his chest artery. Nguyen Hong’s seen it often in motorcycle victims: high-speed collisions.”

  “And as he was the driver, we could surmise that their car had an accident.”

  “Could be.”

  “Did you get to see his Tran as well?”

  “I’m sneaking in to the embassy this afternoon when all the dignitaries are at the reception. You people are never short of receptions, are you?”

  Civilai rolled his eyes. He was obviously slated to meet the Cuban delegation too.

  “That’s why it’s called the Communist ‘Party,’ and not the Communist ‘sit down and get some work done’.”

  Siri laughed.

  “What about the rumors that these fellows had been tortured?”

  “True as far as I can tell. Both of them.”

  “How peculiar. Why would anyone want to torture a driver?” “This case has more questions than answers, I’m afraid. According to Nguyen Hong, his man may have died from the torture.”