The Coroner's Lunch

by Colin Cotterill

  Every now and then, Siri recognized passersby and tried to greet them. There were friends from the north, colleagues, even Dtui and Geung were walking along that street. But he was embarrassed, because every time they came to say hello, the Vietnamese fought them off. Tran, Tran, and Hok looked as they must have looked in life. They seemed happy, enjoying their rude work. They didn’t speak, just shielded Siri and hurried him along the road.

  A child in the crisp elementary-school uniform of the republic stood in front of them. He looked nervous and held a pencil in one hand and a pad of paper in the other. Even though Siri’s entourage could have trampled over him, he bravely stood his ground and held out the pad. He wanted Siri’s autograph. The four men stopped.

  The doctor reached forward. He cupped his fingers as if he were holding a treat and crouched down. The child smiled; what teeth he had were red with betel nut. He took a step forward, but before Siri could take the pencil from him, the Vietnamese pounced on the child and beat him. They kicked and trampled him. Siri was appalled. He tried to pull the men off, but they had immense strength.

  Through the hole that passed through Hok’s chest, he could see the boy’s face. He was dying, but he was changing also. The childlike face peeled away to reveal the face of an old man. The guards stood back and the man, now dressed in the uniform of the People’s Liberation Army, lay dead in a pool of blood. Beside him was a broken syringe; Siri had mistaken it for a pencil. The acid it contained bubbled and hissed on the sidewalk. A crowd had formed of the people who’d passed them earlier. Each of them held a syringe that dripped with acid.

  Siri snapped awake from his dream and was suddenly fearful of the silence and darkness around him. There was no moonlight. Although he could see nothing, he had a feeling there were people in the room. He could sense their movements.

  “Who’s there?”

  There was no answer. He pulled his mosquito net to one side and held his breath. He concentrated on the blackness, trying to pick out familiar shadows in the room, movement, but he couldn’t even see the outline of the window.

  The dog chorus rose gradually in the distance, pained, high-pitched howls. And out of that chorus came the voices. He knew whose they were. There were three, speaking Vietnamese. Chanting, rather: “The black boar is still here. The black boar is still here.”

  And Siri woke again. This time the alarm clock yanked him conscious. It was still dark, but some dull natural light now bled through the window. The luminous dials of the clock confirmed that it was indeed four-thirty. He felt like he hadn’t slept at all. The mosquito net was off him, and the insects had feasted on his blood.

  He dressed clumsily, grabbed his bag, and walked downstairs in some sort of trance. He used his flashlight to illuminate the way. The front door creaked open, and he shined the beam out along the path. Saloop wasn’t on duty, and the house seemed oblivious to his leaving. He closed the door and used the light to inspect it. It was about twelve centimeters thick and must have been magnificent when the house was still loved and the hinges oiled, the panels varnished. Now it was clumsy and crooked.

  He felt a chill when the light of the torch found the two bullet holes at chest level. There was no question what they were. The shells hadn’t been able to pass through the solid teak. If Siri hadn’t bent down when he did, he was certain those two shells would now be in him.

  To Khamuan by Yak

  The Yak-40 lifted uncomfortably, like an overfed goose. Like the two Soviet pilots sitting at the controls, it wasn’t pretty to look at. Siri couldn’t imagine what deal had been struck to make this clumsy airplane and its original crew available twenty-four hours a day to Lao VIPs. Neither could he think what the pilots must have done wrong to be punished so. But for six months it had ferried generals and ministers around the country, courtesy of the Soviet Union.

  Siri was the only passenger. The co-pilot pointed to a bench seat and the safety harness when he came aboard, and grunted. That was the end of the in-flight service. But he was glad to be alone. He needed time to think. He’d been in battles, been shot at often enough. But assassination was a different matter altogether. It was personal and rude. He was more angry than afraid.

  On his way to the airport he’d made two stops. He’d awakened Nguyen Hong and warned him to be careful. He suggested he write down everything they knew and leave it in an envelope at the embassy, to be opened in case of any “accident.”

  Then he’d stopped at Dtui’s. She was already awake. Her mother was in a bad way. Neither of them had slept. This was hardly a time for more bad news. He didn’t mention getting shot at, but he told her if anyone came by to ask, she should deny all knowledge of any case having to do with any Vietnamese. She was a cleaner and Geung was a day laborer, and they wouldn’t know a head from a pair of feet. From his tone, she could tell he was deadly serious.

  The plane growled its way south, the Mekhong to its right, the rising sun to its left dazzling through the tiny portholes. Siri felt like there were hornets in his head. It wasn’t just from the vibration of the fuselage: so many ideas were buzzing out of order in there, reality and fantasy were getting jumbled.

  He tried to interpret last night’s dream. The Vietnamese were obviously protecting him. Perhaps they were warning him not to trust anyone. Who was the boy with his blood-red smile? What had Siri discovered that made him dangerous enough to kill? Or, more likely, what did they suspect he’d discovered? And who were “they”?

  It was clear that he was getting close to an answer, close enough to make one side or the other nervous. He just hoped he could work it all out before they managed to do away with him. How frustrating it would be to spend eternity in the afterlife with an unsolved puzzle.

  The Yak bounced along the makeshift Air America air strip in Khamuan as if they’d forgotten to put wheels on the thing. It kicked up clouds of dust and jerked to a stop just as the runway came to an end. The co-pilot came back to open the door and virtually pushed Siri through it. They weren’t stopping. The plane was on its way to Pakse to collect the prime minister and the Cuban delegation.

  Siri ran off the runway to avoid being decapitated by the pirouetting Yak, and watched as it hurled itself into the morning sky. Once the engine sounds had faded, there were no others to replace it. He stood at the end of two hundred meters of straight earth surrounded by lush jungle vegetation, alone.

  The only comfort he could derive from the situation was that this was Khamuan. This was the province he’d apparently been born in and lived in for the first ten years of his life. He hadn’t been back since. Nothing he saw now brought back any memories. Jungle looked pretty much the same everywhere.

  Twenty minutes later, he heard the sound of a vehicle searching for the right gear. It got closer. He left his shady spot and walked out to the strip. An old Chinese army truck lurched through the vegetation at the far end of the runway and stopped there. Siri stood at his end and the truck stayed at the other, like gunslingers weighing each other up.

  When it was obvious he wasn’t going to walk to them, the truck sped down the strip and skidded to a halt in front of Siri, leaving him with a coating of dust. Two soldiers jumped down from the truck and saluted.

  “Dr. Siri?” Given the circumstances, he wasn’t likely to be anyone else.

  “Captain Kumsing?”

  “That’s me.” The other man, the one standing back and wearing an unmarked uniform, spoke. “It’s nice of you to come so soon. One more day and the bodies would have been walking around.” It was a joke, but Mrs. Nitnoy, sprang to Siri’s mind.

  “Yes. They tend to do that.”

  In the truck on their way to the project base, Captain Kumsing did his best to summarize what had been happening out there in the wilds. This, he explained, was a military program. It was a pilot development project to rehabilitate the struggling Hmong districts devastated by years of war. At the same time, they hoped to wean the Hmong off their dependency on their opium crop.

  He neg
lected to mention that the Hmong comprised some 10 percent of Laos’s population and many of them had been on the other side, fighting the communists alongside the Americans. Siri’s immediate but unasked question was why the military would give aid to the Hmong when many other Lao areas were in an equally desperate state.

  Captain Kumsing explained that the project had begun in July and was initially under the command of Major Anou, a veteran of Xepon and Sala Phou Khoun. Siri remembered Anou as an ambitious man with relatives in France. He was about fifty and had been in excellent health when they’d met. Siri had given him a medical exam a few years back. That’s why he found it hard to believe that the major had died of a heart attack after only a month at the project site. He had died in his sleep, and the camp medic could find no suggestion of foul play.

  They buried the major, as was the custom, and the Vietnamese adviser, Major Ho, took over while they waited for a Lao replacement. After two months, this second major vanished. He wandered off into the jungle and didn’t come back. But few people were surprised. By then he’d already started to talk to himself and act oddly. When he left, he’d been wearing a crown of pak eelert leaves. The Lao assumed he’d been eaten by tigers.

  In September, after a period without a commander, two young officers arrived from the north. Both had been newly promoted. The senior of the two took over the role of project director. But after two weeks he developed mysterious stomach cramps. He was in such pain that they flew him to Savanaketh for a checkup. The doctors there could find nothing wrong with him.

  He came back with a clean bill of health, and died a week later. He was thirty-four.

  His colleague took over. He’d been doing fine until a week ago. He hadn’t had any physical or mental problems. Everyone thought the curse was ended. Then one day he was driving out to view the project site. He liked to drive the jeep himself. There were two other men with him. They warned him he was going a little too fast, considering the state of the road, but he didn’t take any notice. It was as if he wasn’t really himself.

  He told them he was going home. He cut across a cleared area of land and stood, actually stood, on the gas pedal. He sort of froze. He was headed straight for this big old teak tree on the far side of the clearing. The men tried to wrestle the wheel from him, but he was solid—like cement, one of them said. When it was clear what was about to happen, the men threw themselves out of the jeep. They had no choice. One of them didn’t make it. He hit his head on a stump and died instantly. The other broke both his legs. He’d looked up in time to see the jeep smash headlong into the tree. His boss was still standing up with his foot on the gas. He flew through the air and hit the tree like a sparrow flying into a pane of glass. Didn’t stand a chance.

  Siri was amazed. “Who’s next in the chain of command?”

  The captain sucked his teeth. “Me. But we aren’t announcing that. As far as anyone outside knows, there’s nobody in charge. The commander’s office is empty, and we’ve passed the word around that we’re waiting for a new officer from Vientiane.”

  “You think that’ll make any difference?” The truck was bobbing along a furrow that had been churned through the thick jungle. It was barely a road, and Siri held on to the dashboard to keep his teeth from being shaken loose.

  “Of course. We don’t want them to know who’s in charge. It’s obvious they’re targeting the leaders.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Well, it’s obvious.”

  “Not to me.”

  “The Hmong, of course.”

  “The Hmong? But I thought you were helping them.”

  “Well, yes. Most of them see it like that. But, of course, in every community you’ll find capitalist sympathizers who hold a grudge because they lost.”

  “And how do you imagine they’re knocking off your leaders? Surely a bullet or a grenade would be easier than what you’ve described.”

  “Ah, they’re cunning. They know that would start a land battle. No, they do it all with their potions.”

  “They have potions?”

  The captain lowered his voice and was almost inaudible above the sound of the engine. “They’re heathens. They practice witchcraft, Doctor. They have all these poisons and hallucinogens. All they need to do is drop some of these drugs into the water supply or the food.”

  “The Hmong are poisoning you to stop you from developing their community?”

  “It’s revenge, Dr. Siri. They were brainwashed, you see? The Americans convinced them that us communists would never do anything to help them if we came to power. They don’t realize that we’re all brothers. The Americans managed to make them believe that they aren’t Lao.”

  “They’re not.”

  “Not technically, Comrade. But they’re family. They may not have been born to Lao parents, but we all live together in the same homeland. A dog or a cat isn’t a human being, but think how many families treat their dogs like a member of the family. It’s the same thing.”

  “H’mm. Good point. So you think the dog’s biting the hand that feeds it?”

  “In a way, yes. Not the whole pack, Doctor. Just one or two rabid strays. But until we know what poison they’ve been using, we won’t be able to round them up. That’s why we need you.”

  They pulled into a sprawling military complex with machinery and vehicles all over. To anyone foolish enough to believe the captain, this would have seemed a humanitarian effort to exceed even the most extravagant of the U.N.’s follies.

  Under a makeshift palm-leaf shelter behind the empty command office, two large caskets lay side by side. Bare-chested soldiers carried them inside and placed them on trestle tables that wobbled under their weight. The men pried off the lids to reveal Kumsing’s predecessor and his companion. They were wrapped in natural tobacco leaves and garnished with herbs. This reduced the smell and kept the bodies in remarkably good condition. There was minimal insect damage.

  The camp medic was a twenty-year-old, trained as a field nurse on dummy patients without blood. He and a middle-aged woman from the mess tent were assigned to help Siri with the autopsies. If he’d ever had doubts as to his good fortune at having Geung and Dtui at the morgue, the following six hours dispelled any of them. These two were worse than hopeless.

  Even before the bone cutters had begun their cracking of the first rib cage, the boy was throwing up through the open window. He repeated this trick a dozen times during the day. The woman didn’t stop gabbing the whole time, asking silly questions, getting in Siri’s way to get a better look at the fellow’s insides. She had to get it all right to tell the girls back at the canteen. With those two, and the huge flying insects that buzzed in his face like little helicopters, the ordeal was a nightmare.

  It wasn’t even a nightmare with a happy ending. He wanted very much to find clear signs of natural causes of death, but he couldn’t. Neither was there anything to suggest foul play in either man. The junior officer’s collision with the tree had made an awful mess of him. Some thirty-eight bones were broken and the skull was shattered. But it was all postmortem. He’d died some time before his jeep hit the tree.

  Both men had been in prime physical condition, strong and healthy; but, for some reason, they’d simply stopped living. He couldn’t understand it, and he knew that wasn’t an answer Captain Kumsing would want to hear. The only other option was, indeed, that someone had used a toxin that left no obvious signs.

  Siri put the men back together as best he could without assistance, and soldiers came to replace them in the caskets. It was usual, with deaths such as these, that didn’t result from natural causes, for the bodies to be buried as soon as possible without any ceremony at the graveside. They couldn’t be cremated, because the belief was that their souls weren’t yet ready to go to heaven.

  Superstition, religion, and custom often overlapped in Laos, and even Siri, who had no spiritual beliefs, found nothing strange about such a practice. It was just the way it had always been. The bones would be
left to commune with the earth until the family decided a fitting period had passed. Then the body, if the family could find it, would be dug up and cremated with full ceremony.

  Siri went to see Kumsing in the project office that he shared with five enlisted men. He was sitting at a far desk, the smallest desk in the office. Siri noticed how the thin man twitched as he worked and wondered whether the tic was a result of the stress he was under. He wore a white T-shirt as a disguise for his rank and had forbidden anyone to salute him. Siri decided that if the Hmong didn’t get him, he’d probably worry himself to death.

  He took the captain outside and explained what he’d found and what he hadn’t. They walked together across the clearing. Even in Vientiane, Siri had never seen so much earth-moving equipment in one place.

  “So, are you saying they died of natural causes?”

  “No, I’m saying I found no evidence they died of unnatural causes. But neither did I find indications of natural death.”

  “But the captain crashed into a damn tree. Don’t tell me that didn’t kill him.”

  “He was dead before he hit it.”

  “That’s not possible. The men said he was standing up with his foot on the accelerator, yelling his heart out. You must have got it wrong.”

  “I’d feel a lot better if I did get it wrong. But there’s no doubt in my mind. The tree didn’t kill him, and a heart attack didn’t kill his mate. I couldn’t see any evidence they’d been poisoned by anything traditional. But I’ve heard of potions that can kill a man without leaving obvious signs. It would take a lifetime to test for all of them.”

  This debriefing obviously wasn’t pleasing Kumsing, whose tic became more pronounced the more he heard. He thrashed the side of his fatigues with a sprig of young bamboo.