The Coroner's Lunch

by Colin Cotterill

  “No connection with a high-speed collision?”

  “None he could tell.”

  Rajid, the crazy Indian, was walking along the bank toward them. He wore his only sarong, a threadbare old thing. He was an unkempt but very handsome young man who was kept alive by the generosity of the shopkeepers who’d known him since he was a child. They’d never heard him speak.

  He sat cross-legged a few feet from the old men and started to play with his penis. The log where they sat was just as much the Indian’s as theirs.

  “Hello, Rajid.”

  “Hi, Rajid.” But he had better things to do than respond.

  For some unfathomable reason, Civilai lowered his voice to continue his interrogation of Siri. “Any indication from your friend as to why the Viets are accusing us of this, rather than the Hmong? If they drove through Borikhumxai, they were asking to get themselves kidnapped by their old enemies.”

  “Right. But there are two reasons why they don’t think that happened. And I won’t charge you for all this free intelligence you’re extorting from me. One, they had an armed escort all the way to Paksan. From there, the road was well policed and considered secure. They were last seen at Namching, just sixty kilometers from Vientiane.

  “Second, if they didn’t make it to the city, why would the kidnappers go to the trouble of driving them through all the roadblocks, through Vientiane and eighty kilometers north to dump them in the dam? There are plenty of bodies of water in the south, even the river.

  “So the skeptics in Hanoi are suggesting that they did make it to Vientiane, but were picked up by our security units, arrested, or something.”

  “For what?”

  “They haven’t told me yet.”

  “Who?”

  “The spirits.”

  As always, Civilai fell about laughing at the very mention of Siri’s spirits. The doctor’s ongoing burden was just a long running joke to Ai. He was too much of a pragmatist to take any of it seriously. He got nimbly to his feet, put his arms straight in front of him, and began to hop up and down like a Hong Kong ghost. “Ooooh, Doctor Siri, help me. The Pathet Lao electrocuted my nipples because I didn’t stop at the traffic light.”

  Siri laughed reluctantly at the ridiculous sight of his friend prancing around like a ghoul. They never saw him like this at politburo meetings.

  The joke was, of course, topical in that the Vientiane administration was at that moment debating whether to invest in a seventh traffic light and who should operate it. The volume of traffic didn’t warrant such a major investment, but they were worried about the image a lack of lights might project overseas. The Department of Transport had acquired a report that showed that of all capital cities, only Bujumbura had fewer traffic lights. At the meeting, Civilai had brightened the ridiculous proceedings by suggesting the costs could be halved due to the fact there were so many red lights left over from the old regime. They’d only have to buy green ones.

  “You old fool. Sit down and act your age. Forget I said anything.”

  Civilai, laughing but winded, sat himself back on the log and swigged at the coffee Siri held out for him.

  “You don’t waste any time, older brother.”

  “What ‘any time’ don’t I waste, little brother?”

  “You only got back yesterday. Your meeting with Haeng could only have been this morning.”

  “What makes you think…? Aha, what a mind for one so old and feeble. You didn’t tell me about the electric nipples, did you? I wouldn’t make much of a criminal, would I?”

  “You just aren’t used to dealing with a supreme intellect.”

  “Well, supremo, what’s the next stage in your investigations?”

  “Nguyen Hong and I are taking the bus up to Nam Ngum.”

  “Honeymoon?”

  “Fishing trip.”

  “The third body?”

  “There’s a chance all three were planted there together. Maybe Hok just hasn’t had a chance to escape his rock yet. If he’s still under water, his body should be better preserved than the Trans. It could tell us more.”

  “You taking your snorkel?”

  “I can’t swim.”

  “So that’s why you’re still in Laos!”

  They finished the coffee and did their best to ignore Rajid making whoopee with himself along the bank.

  The Pathological Rebel

  Dr. Siri,

  You are to go to Khamuan as soon as possible. Contact me for details.

  Haeng.

  “What?” Siri looked up at Geung, the harbinger of doom, who looked back at him blankly. “Where did you get this, Mr. Geung?”

  “A ma…ma…man on a motorcycle.”

  “What’s happening to this job? For nine months we plod along nicely: a couple of old ladies, the odd electric shock, and a bicycle fatality. No murders, mysteries, or mayhem. Then, all of a sudden, the body business explodes like an atomic bomb. I’ve got corpses coming out of my ears.”

  Geung looked at Siri’s ears but didn’t see the corpses. The doctor briefly considered using the telephone, but opted instead to walk across the street to the Justice Department. He waited forty minutes till Haeng was free.

  “Siri, come in. The army has…sit down, for goodness sake. The army has contacted us for urgent assistance in Khamuan. You’ll be leaving tomorrow.”

  “But I’m—”

  “It appears there has been a series of mysterious deaths amongst the upper ranks of military personnel working on an agricultural—”

  “I—”

  “—an agricultural development project down there. Neither the army nor the police have been able to ascertain the cause of death. Until they get an official appraisal, they can’t begin to know if it’s natural or whether a crime has been committed.”

  Siri still hadn’t sat. He stood waiting for Haeng to look at him, but the judge was reading a report, or pretending to. “That’s all. See my clerk for the details.”

  “Are you telling me to drop the Vietnam case and run off to the south?”

  “Case? Case? Case?” Siri wondered whether the record had stuck. “Siri, you’re a coroner, and not a very good one at that. You’re sent bodies. You examine them. You send me the results of your findings.

  “Coroners don’t have cases. Judges have cases. Police have cases. You, Siri, have dead bodies. You have two such bodies waiting for you in Khamuan. I’m getting a little tired of you putting yourself above your station. Don’t start getting too big for your…old brown sandals.” He smiled minutely at his own cleverness, but still he hadn’t looked Siri in the eye. “Now get out.”

  Siri stood a while and collected his thoughts. He turned and walked to the door. Judge Haeng listened for the sound of it opening and closing, but instead he heard the click of the lock. Something dropped suddenly in his chest. He glanced up to find Siri looking back over his shoulder at him.

  “What are…?”

  Siri walked back to the desk, rounded it, and sat on the corner a few centimeters from Haeng’s shirtsleeve. The young judge was looking confused, somehow vulnerable. Siri grabbed the annoyingly tapping pencil from his hand and pointed it at him.

  “Listen, son. I know you have to seem to be what you are. I know you’re probably nervous, lost from time to time. I understand how overwhelming all this must be for you. But I don’t intend to put up with your insecurity any more.”

  “How dare—”

  “Don’t. Don’t say anything that might make me state my opinions as to your qualifications to be doing this job.” The judge squirmed slightly in his chair. He seemed sulkier, younger, with every word Siri quietly spoke.

  “Even though I happen to know you got this position because of your relatives—”

  “I—”

  “—you undoubtedly have skills, otherwise they wouldn’t have taken the chance with you. You wouldn’t have survived the U.S.S.R.”

  “I—”

  “But I’m doing a very difficult job too. I
’m doing it reluctantly, and I’m doing it poorly because I don’t have the right facilities or resources or experience. You, boy, aren’t making it any easier for me.

  “Whether you or I like it or not, I’m the head coroner. From now on, I shall handle the ‘cases’ that come through my office as I see fit. I shall follow up on them whenever I deem it necessary, and I shall send you reports that state my opinions when I’m ready to. Once they’re signed, there will be no amendments made to suit your statistics. Close your mouth, for goodness sake.”

  Haeng put his lips together. They appeared to be quivering.

  “If my talking honestly like this offends you, I’m very sorry. I apologize to your mother, who probably loves you in spite of everything. I apologize to her for the fact that I have to remind you to be respectful to your elders.

  “If I’ve succeeded only in driving the thought of revenge into your head, let me remind you that I’m seventy-two years old. I’m twenty-two years beyond the national life expectancy. I’ve exceeded. I’m on overtime. In my natural life, I’ve already experienced any form of punishment you could come up with. Basically, there’s nothing you can do to me to fill me with even a smidgen of dread.

  “I’d be delighted if you fired me, absolutely ecstatic. Sending me north for re-education would be heaven. I’d be packed before you could shake a pencil. It wouldn’t even be much of a loss to end up in front of a firing squad. Now, I imagine that puts you in a difficult situation, because I no longer intend to take your rudeness.

  “Here’s what I’m going to do. Tomorrow, the Vietnamese coroner and myself are going to Nam Ngum Reservoir. We’ll spend a night there, maybe two. I’ll come back here and run tests in my morgue, and consult with Dr. Nguyen Hong. Then, when I’m certain I can’t do anything else in Vientiane, I may very well consider a trip to Khamuan.

  “By that time, you will have arranged travel papers for me, and negotiated a flight south on one of the military transports. I’m too old to drive down there on roads full of holes. I’ll also need a small per-diem in case of eventualities. You’ll have reminded the military that there’s only one coroner and he has a very full caseload. As far as I know, the Justice Department isn’t subordinate to the military in peacetime. We’re doing them a favor.

  “I’m leaving now.” He stood and handed the pencil back to Haeng. “Naturally, I won’t tell anyone we’ve had this little talk. Whether you discuss it is up to you. In the future, you’ll treat me with civility, and I shall offer you my experience and cooperation to help turn you, bit by bit, into the type of judge you should be.”

  Haeng had stared into his powerful green eyes the whole time, hypnotized. Siri nodded, turned, walked to the door, and polished one sandal on the back of his trousers before leaving the eerily silent room.

  A Little Fishing Trip

  “Well, I must say this is a lot more civilized than the bus.” Siri and Nguyen Hong sat in the back seat of the black limousine looking at the driver’s thick neck crammed into a tight Vietnamese military uniform. Nguyen Hong was wearing something that fit him better for the trip.

  “The ambassador wouldn’t dream of letting me travel anywhere on public transport. He says there are bandits everywhere.”

  “And he thinks we’d be safer in a big expensive car?”

  “There is an escort.” They looked out through Siri’s window at the short but jolly armed escort on his post office motorcycle. A hunting rifle was slung over his shoulder. An ambush would wipe the lot of them out in seconds.

  “I don’t think your ambassador gets out much.”

  “Siri, I’ve been reading up on the resilience of the sphincter.” Siri chuckled.

  “And they say the Vietnamese aren’t a cultured race.”

  “You know we were wondering whether the bowels could have filled with reservoir water naturally over two weeks?” Both bodies had what they considered to be an abnormally large quantity of water in them. “Given the minimal fish and algae damage to the internal organs, the books say the muscle contraction would likely have made the bowels relatively watertight. There shouldn’t have been that much water inside.”

  “Come on, Hong. Don’t we have enough mysteries already? Perhaps they were thirsty and drank a lot of lake water before they were killed.”

  “None of that water had passed through the kidneys.”

  “Then, what are you saying?”

  “Have you ever been water-skiing, Siri?”

  “Oh. All the time. I often hook up the line behind the yacht when I’m on a cruise.”

  Nguyen Hong laughed. The driver looked at Siri in the rearview mirror and despised him for his wealth.

  “Don’t tell me you have?”

  “I had a privileged youth, before I saw the light.”

  “Goodness. So, what’s it like?”

  “Water-skiing? Invigorating.”

  “And there’s a connection between that and the sphincters of Tran and Tran?”

  “I’m not sure. There may be. You see, I wasn’t the world’s best water-skier. I spent more time falling down than skiing. And there’s no better way to give yourself an enema than to….”

  “I get the point. So, do we assume the Trans were merrily water-skiing on Nam Ngum Reservoir?”

  “Hardly. But if they’d been dragged behind a boat….”

  “The effect would have been the same. Very clever. And that could have been part of the torture. God, I hope the torturers got something out of them. They certainly put a lot of effort into getting them to talk. You think they really had anything that important to say? You aren’t keeping anything from me, are you?”

  “I’ve told you all I know. And I’m certain the driver knew nothing. All he could have disclosed was how many kilometers to the liter his jeep did.”

  “Well, if I was the driver I would have told them that at the first sign of danger. Wouldn’t you, driver?” The driver ignored him and concentrated all his energy on rounding potholes and scattering pedestrians.

  At the reservoir they met the Nam Ngum district chief, who introduced them to the two fishermen who’d found the Trans. The second of these two poor fellows had been sitting in his boat minding his own business, when a Tran came shooting up out of the water like a missile. The brown, misshapen face looked right at the fisherman before flopping back down. It almost gave him a heart attack.

  When Siri told the district chief what he had in mind, he knew there wouldn’t be a long queue of volunteers. Even the best divers in the district would balk at going down in search of a three-week-old corpse. There was a healthy tradition of folklore and superstition around the lake villages, and the discovery of two bodies had shaken most folks up. But in a fishing community there’s always one old-timer who’ll do anything for a couple of kip. In this case it was Dun. Dun couldn’t even afford a boat. He usually just waded into the lake to his waist and cast his oft-repaired net into the water a few dozen times. He lived on the low-IQ sprats and water vermin that didn’t have the savvy to avoid him.

  “Sure, I’ll do it…for five hundred kip.”

  Since the devaluation in June, the kip had settled at two hundred to the U.S. dollar. He was pushing his luck to ask for such a huge sum, but he fully expected the city fellows to bargain him down. They didn’t. They gave him half in advance. It was his lucky day.

  The second fisherman took Dun out to where he’d been frightened by the sudden appearance of Tran, and Siri and Nguyen Hong stood on the shore with the chief. Dun put on the goggles Siri had brought from town and slid over the side of the boat still wearing his shirt. He wasn’t down for more than five seconds before he came up gasping for air. The chief explained it was a result of all the smoking he did. While Dun dove, and choked, dove and choked, Siri got the chief to fill in some of the details of the day they’d found the tattooed man.

  “Exactly who was it that identified the marks as Vietnamese?”

  “Oh, I was quite certain myself. But it was confirmed by this militar
y chap. He said he’d been stationed over there in Vietnam, and he recognized the tattoos straight away.”

  “Is he still around?”

  “No. He wasn’t from here. He was just doing a survey.”

  “On what?”

  “Boat traffic back and forth to the rehabilitation islands, he said.”

  They could see the two islands in the distance: Don Thao for the male villains and addicts, and Don Nang for the ladies. Siri dreaded to think what type of rehabilitation was going on there.

  “Did you see his orders?”

  “Goodness no, Doctor. People in uniforms don’t like to be bullied by laypeople, and he did have a big gun, so I didn’t ask.”

  Out by the boat, old Mr. Dun was starting to look like a drowning victim himself. Nguyen Hong was concerned.

  “Do you think we should call him back in? I don’t think he’s going to make it.” Siri nodded and they were just about to yell to the fisherman, when Dun stopped coming back up.

  “Oh, shit.” They shielded their eyes from the glaring sun and scanned the water for any sign of Dun. The surface was smooth as glass and the man in the boat seemed unconcerned by what horror might have been going on below him.

  Both doctors knew that in fresh water the diver had a little over four minutes. Nguyen Hong had been checking his watch. “Three. Why doesn’t the fisherman go down and help him?”

  Siri asked the chief.

  “He says he’s not a very good swimmer. No point in losing both of them.”

  It was a little over the four-minute mark when Dun popped out of the water, his face smiling and purple. It was dramatic last-minute stuff, like Houdini. Dun held up his hand to wave and to show he was holding something. It seemed to be the end of a rope. When he yanked on it, first a foot, then a leg rose out of the water. Hok had been retrieved.

  In order to get at the body before the air had a chance to speed up the decomposition, the two coroners set up a makeshift morgue in an empty concrete room behind the dam. The chief’s wife kept running in and out with tea.