Thirty-Three Teeth

by Colin Cotterill

  “It wasn’t a coincidence. I sent those spirits packing, and in so doing I saved the soldiers that were cutting down their trees. They weren’t happy about that. But I tell you, that stone had been destroyed.”

  “Did you see that happen with your own eyes?”

  “Yes. Well, not with my own eyes. But I saw the dust before the Hmong took it out to the forest.”

  “Then you can’t be sure it came from the stone. Mystery one solved.”

  “So how did it get here, to Vientiane? How did it get to the market? And of all the people who could have bought it, why Lah?”

  “I’m an elder statesman with a not-inconsequential intellect. I can solve many of the conundrums that arise from the day-to-day running of a little country in the southeast of Asia. But I have a one-mystery-a-day quota,” Civilai said. “Release me now. I have to get home to my dear wife. Remind me where my car is.”

  “You think you should drive?”

  “Certainly. What is there to hit?”

  Siri nodded and escorted him to the door. Civilai was right. On a Sunday afternoon in March, Vientiane had the atmosphere of a town in the talons of a deadly plague. A motorcyclist might brave the late-afternoon heat. A dog might lie on the concrete paving stones to burn off the fleas. But most folks were at home, waiting for the sun to go down.

  At dusk, the girls would two-up on bicycles and ride slowly along Fangoum Road, catching some small breeze from the river and advertising their availability to boys two-upping in the opposite direction. They would still be mopping their sweating brows with their mothers’ large pink handkerchiefs until long after nightfall.

  Farewell the Diarrhetic

  Old Auntie See lived in a shed behind a peeling white French colonial mansion that now housed five families. For a living, she bought fruit at the morning market, cut it into colorful slices, and sold it from a card table beside her back gate.

  Business was never too brisk, since money for luxuries had become scarcer. As a result, her main diet was overly ripe fruit, which saw her spending much of her nights in the tin latrine behind the shed.

  On that particular Sunday night, whilst engaged in her dribbly business, she thought she heard a growl. There were footsteps through the undergrowth of her uncared-for garden. They were too heavy to be those of a dog, but somehow too zigzag and rambling to be those of a person. She called out anyway: “Can’t a woman have a shit in peace any more?”

  There was no answer. The noises stopped. And after a few more minutes she forgot all about them. Diarrhea, in its most vindictive state, can erase even thoughts of terror.

  Some twenty minutes later, she groaned and rearranged her long cotton phasin around her waist. She stepped through the corrugated tin door, and before she could stoop to wash her hands in the paint can basin, that thing was on her. She had no time to scream—to run—or even to turn her head to see what was biting into the back of her neck. With one swipe of its powerful arm, she was dead.

  Two Dead Men on a Bicycle

  Siri arrived at the hospital on Monday morning with a vodka hammer beating and a vodka sickle scything through his head. He guessed he couldn’t have a worse hangover if he’d drunk the formaline straight from the sample bottles. Every step from the motorcycle park to the morgue jarred new agony into his brain. There was no question in his mind that the Soviet Union was doomed.

  He walked beneath the French MORGUE sign, carefully wiped his feet on the American WELCOME mat, and stepped inside the cool dark single-story building. He immediately sensed one or two presences, but was far too vodka’d to acknowledge them. They could wait.

  He walked into his office, whose blue walls had been thoroughly whitewashed again and again until they were gray. Anything that wasn’t blue suited Siri just fine. Nurse Dtui was sitting at her desk.

  “Morning, Comrade Siri,” she said, flashing her small, neat teeth but not stirring her large, untidy body.

  “Good morning, Dtui.”

  Those first words of the day came out like a gravel driveway.

  “Oh-ho. Have a bit of a session last night, did we?”

  “A cultural experiment.”

  He flopped into his chair, and his head turned to percussion. He buried it in his hands.

  “Looks like the experiment failed.”

  “No, my faithful assistant. Never assume that negative experiences teach you less than positive ones. I have it filed away that in the future, no matter how free, no matter how fascinating the squiggles on the bottle, I shall avoid Russian vodka as if it were a musthy elephant.”

  Dtui stood. Her uniform was bleached white and stretched across her large frame like butcher’s paper around a hock of pork.

  “What you need is some of my ma’s herbal brew.”

  “Oh, no. Don’t say it. Haven’t I suffered enough?”

  “Don’t go away.”

  She headed for the door.

  “Where’s our other soldier?”

  “He’s in the examination room getting the new guests ready.” She stopped in the doorway. “You’ll like this one: two men dead on a bicycle in the middle of the street. No spare seat or luggage rack. They were going around Nam Poo fountain in the middle of town. Nothing there could have been going fast enough to hit them. They were found on top of the bike. No blood. This looks like a job for…dah-dah-da-dah.”

  “Dtui?”

  “…Super Spirit Doc.”

  She giggled and walked out of the office. Siri groaned. The last thing he wanted on that particular morning was to cut anyone up. He especially didn’t want anything inexplicable to trouble his hurting head.

  Dtui was fumbling in the back of the freezer for the corked bottle that held her mother’s secret brew. Although there was a hospital ban on using the morgue freezers for personal perishables, her ma’s brew looked enough like body waste to fool the most pedantic inspector. It was an evil Macbethian mix of bizarre ingredients that tasted horrible but cured just about anything.

  “Wha…wha…what’s that for, Dtui?” Mr. Geung was laying out the second cyclist on the spare aluminum table. Geung was a good-looking man in his forties with pronounced Down-Syndrome features and jet-black hair greased on either side of a crooked center parting. When he asked a question, he had the habit of rocking slightly where he stood. Judge Haeng at the Department of Justice, which oversaw the work of Siri and his team, was lobbying for the removal of the “moron,” but Geung’s condition was neither serious nor disruptive to his work. Although he often became anxious about anomalies outside the regimented pattern of his days, he was a morgue assistant par excellence. He’d been trained with infinite patience by Siri’s predecessor and knew the procedures better than Dtui or Siri himself. He was strong and reliable, and he wielded a mean hacksaw.

  “The boss has got himself a hangover,” Dtui said.

  Geung snorted a laugh. “Al…alcohol is the elixir of the d…devil.”

  “Was that another one of your father’s wisdoms?”

  “No. Comrade Dr. Siri…ss…said it when we cut open the drunk fellow on January first.”

  That was one other thing. You didn’t want to say anything you’d live to regret when Mr. Geung was around. He didn’t forget much.

  The autopsy followed the standard pattern they’d settled into. Siri was beginning to sit back and let Dtui give the commentary while he took notes. She was learning the trade and hoped to be sent to the Eastern Bloc on a scholarship. Her eyes were keen, and she often noticed things that Siri had missed. The only setback to this new system was that nobody could read Siri’s notes afterward. Not even Siri.

  As the two bodies in the morgue hadn’t been reported as missing, they would temporarily be known as Man A and Man B. They were an ill-matched pair. Man A was neatly dressed in a white shirt. He had on an old but quite costly wristwatch, wore permanent-press slacks, and had soft, uncallused hands which suggested he wasn’t used to manual labor. But, as Siri and Dtui both noticed, the most remarkable thing about him w
as that he was wearing socks. The March temperatures were already hitting 107 degrees. Even in those few offices where ancient French air conditioners waged battle with the heat, the best they could ever achieve was “tepid.” It was never so cold you’d need to wear socks.

  No, these socks suggested that the poor man had no choice. Since he had become coroner, Siri had been under pressure to wear the black vinyl shoes provided by the Party. It was an example of what he termed the new “shoe over substance” policy. So far, he’d been able to use his seniority and his stubborn streak to remain in his brown leather sandals. But he knew that if he were finally compressed into those toe-torturers, he certainly would have to wear socks also.

  Dtui spoke his thought. “I’d say he’s government.”

  “The socks?”

  “The fingers.”

  She was constantly surprising him. Siri went over and held up Mr. A’s hand. All the fingertips were purple: triplicate syndrome.

  It was Civilai who’d coined the phrase to describe the peculiar mauve “bruising” so common in socialist bureaucracies. They were bogged down in paperwork, as there had to be copies for every department. This called into play that miracle of modern office timesaving: carbon paper.

  Like its shoes and its hair dye, Laos got its carbon paper from China. So most officials that used it found more ink on themselves than on the paper. Mr. A had thumbed his share of carbon sheets.

  They stripped him, bagged and labeled his clothes, and took their allotted four color photographs of his outside. Siri noted that no shoes had arrived with the body. There was a thin trail of congealed blood at the corner of the mouth and severe bruising to the chest and abdomen.

  Before beginning an internal examination, Siri decided to prepare Mr. B for the chop also. This would ultimately save time and allow them to make comparisons of their respective injuries. Siri ignored Dtui’s comment that “This is how they do it at the abattoir,” and asked her to voice her observations about Mr. B.

  She noted that he was certainly from a different end of town than Mr. A. His clothes were threadbare and quite dirty. His hands were rough and covered in scabs of short nicks as if he’d been cut often.

  “So, the question remains,” Siri pondered, almost to himself, “…what were two men from very different backgrounds doing sharing a bicycle at two in the morning?”

  “Perhaps,” Dtui suggested, “this one was the chauffeur and he was taking his master home.”

  Geung let out one of his farmyard laughs.

  “Or perhaps they weren’t on the bicycle at all.” Siri glared. “I’m starting to think the fact they were found with the bike was a coincidence.”

  “So, how did they get there?”

  “Oh, I don’t know everything, Miss Dtui. Perhaps the old chap ran into the government fellow when he was crossing the road.”

  “Yeah? And how fast would he have been pedaling to kill the pair of them?”

  “Or, alternatively, the government fellow was riding a motorbike and hit the old boy.”

  “And…?”

  “And someone ran off with the motorbike.”

  “I suppose I could buy that one.”

  “Did the police bring in the bicycle, Mr. Geung?”

  “It’s round the b…round the b…the back.”

  “Good. We can take a look at it later.”

  They stripped Mr. B. Apart from his obviously broken neck and the massive bruising associated with vertebral artery trauma, there were no recent abrasions or visible marks on him. They finished up the film and laid him out. There the two corpses reclined on either side of the room, like temple step ornaments.

  The dual autopsy took exactly two hours. Mr. A had hemorrhaging around the chest cavity and livor mortis around the main artery common in victims of high-speed collisions, so the motorcycle theory still held. Some trauma had also been sufficiently violent to rupture his testicles. From these initial examinations, Siri surmised that the broken neck had killed Mr. B, and the internal bleeding Mr. A. But there were other tests to do.

  Mr. Geung cut through the tough crania with his old hacksaw, and Siri tied cotton around the brains in order to suspend them in Formalin for two or three days until they were set firm enough to cut into.

  Dtui took samples of the stomach contents and blood. As they had no lab, there were only limited secrets these could disclose. The next day, Siri would take a ride over to the Lycée Vientiane, where he would coerce Teacher Oum into using the last of her science lab chemicals on color tests.

  Somewhere out at the customs shed, a crate of school chemicals, kindly donated by the high-school cooperative in Vladivostok, had sat for three months collecting paperwork. Even being the national coroner didn’t carry any weight in pushing that old bureaucratic bus up the hill to socialist nirvana.

  Dtui, Geung, and Siri sat on their haunches around the bicycle. The rusty thing that had survived many battles would never be ridden again.

  “Now, what do you suppose could cause something like this?” Siri asked of no one in particular. The frame supporting the chain was buckled and almost touching the ground. The handlebars leaned back, the seat forward.

  “It looks like I sat on it,” Dtui said, causing a laughing fit in Mr. Geung that took a good deal of back-slapping to arrest.

  “No,” Siri said at last. “It would take half a dozen Dtuis to do this. But I think I know what could. What side of the fountain were they found on?”

  “Ministry side.”

  “I think we’d better go and take a look, don’t you?”

  “Is your head up to it?”

  “Ah, Dtui. There’s nothing like the dissection of corpses and a dollop of your ma’s brew to cure a hangover.”

  The Ministry of Sport, Information and Culture currently and unofficially occupied a seven-story building that overlooked the non-spouting fountain at Nam Poo Square. Given the shape of things in Laos, the square was, naturally, a circle. It was surrounded by quaint and largely neglected two-storied buildings that wouldn’t have felt out of place in a small southern French village. It was a sleepy square where old ladies dried white spring-roll wrappings on mesh tables and crazy Rajid the Indian walked slow laps around the dull concrete fountain.

  Although the Lao weren’t yet conceited enough to refer to most of their government departments as anything more grand, Vientiane people had begun to call the incongruous building that housed the sports department “The Ministry.” It was probably the size of the place, rather than its grandeur, that impressed them. The old French Cultural Center had all the architectural class of a two-star hotel in a seaside resort. The Sport, Information and Culture people rattled around inside its large rooms like a destitute woman’s beads in a once-full jewelry box.

  Mr. Geung had stayed back at the morgue to keep an eye on the guests. Dtui, on her first investigative mission away from the hospital, stood in the middle of the road beside the angels chalked there on the asphalt. Siri was twelve meters away, with his back against the wall of The Ministry. He painted an imaginary arc with his eyebrows from the point where Dtui stood up to the top ledge of the building above him. He shook his head and walked over to the nurse.

  “No good?” She asked.

  “Well, it isn’t impossible, but…I don’t know. He either took one almighty running jump, or he was tossed. And if someone had thrown him, we would have found marks on his arms or legs. But we didn’t.”

  “You don’t think he might have—”

  A Vespa scooter came putt-ing around the fountain, causing Siri to leap from its path into the unsuspecting arms of Dtui.

  “Dr. Siri. You romantic old thing, you.”

  Embarrassed, he untangled himself from her embrace. The scooter stopped a few meters further on, and the rider, a trim attractive man in his forties, looked back and laughed. Inspector Phosy got down, hoisted the silly vehicle onto its stand, and hurried back with a handshake at the ready. Siri grabbed the hand, and the two men patted each other’s b
acks as they embraced.

  “Hot, isn’t it?”

  “Damned hot.”

  “How’s my favorite policeman?”

  “Dr. Siri. I thought you were dead.”

  “Don’t you be so sure I’m not.” They broke apart, and Siri looked along the street. “That’s a very impressive cop bike you have. Lilac’s the crime-suppression color of the year, I hear.”

  “Be kind, Comrade. These are hard times. We have to take what we can get.” He looked over Siri’s shoulder. “Good health, Dtui. You haven’t lost any weight.”

  “And you’re no better looking.”

  She shook his hand warmly.

  “So,” Siri asked. “How did you get this case?”

  “They put me on anything with the word ‘government’ attached to it. As soon as Dtui called and suggested the victim could be a government official, they took me out of the cupboard. How hard do you think this is going to be? Was it a suicide?”

  “I don’t know. It’s odd. Unless he was trying to fly, I don’t see why he wouldn’t just drop from the roof. He’d be just as dead without trying to reach the fountain.”

  “All right, then. Let’s see if we can get any information from the information department.”

  They walked together through the elegant wooden doors and found themselves in a foyer containing nothing but a table. On the table was a small, hand-written sign that said ALL INQUIRIES UPSTAIRS.

  Their footsteps echoed up the teak staircase. They noted how stuffy the place felt. Despite the heat, most of the windows hadn’t been opened since the Americans left. (French culture had briefly been supplanted there by American language classes before the building’s current manifestation.) The only culture not in evidence was Lao. Or perhaps it was.

  On the second floor, they passed two rooms empty of furniture and life. The third door was slightly ajar, and through the gap they could see two metal cabinets, an uneven shelf with all its books resting at the low end, and a desk with a man on it.