Thirty-Three Teeth

by Colin Cotterill

  “He’d do. But see. He spends most of his days on his knees in the water.”

  They looked out to the narrow band of river that remained at the end of the dry season. Rajid’s bald head poked from the water like a happy black penis. He was the town nutcase. Nobody knew which traveling Indian family had deserted him as a child some fifteen years before. He was just discovered one day sitting on the steps of the Black Stupa. Locals fed him regularly without question, and he repaid them by smiling and spreading his immutable happiness around Vientiane. He had no home and no need of one.

  “In this heat, I envy the fellow.”

  “It is hot, isn’t it?”

  “Damned hot.”

  Siri sat and started to unwrap his baguette. Since their abortive date, Mrs. Lah had shifted her franchise from the hospital. His lunch now came from a Vietnamese woman at the end of his lane. She offered two choices: sweet or savory. He could never guess what was inside, just by looking. He was often none the wiser after the contents reached his palette. Still, food was fuel.

  “Anything interesting in the paper?”

  Civilai laughed. Printed news under a one-party system rarely exposed, unearthed, or titillated.

  “Czech skiing conditions are improving.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “Football results from Albania. Part seventeen of Lenin’s life story. Our military attaché’s in Cuba.”

  “Anything about Laos?”

  “Laos? Now you’re asking. Laos. Laos. Wait. Here. A photo of happy smiling farm workers in Savanaketh above a story of a bumper cabbage harvest.”

  “They’re standing in a rice field.”

  “Maybe they’re taking a break.”

  Civilai scrunched up the newspaper and threw it over his shoulder. He was a brilliant man who tired easily of bull. He despaired of Laos’s potential that was being wasted by his plodding colleagues. But he definitely agreed that it was far better to be a plodding communist than a rampant capitalist.

  He looked across the Mekhong toward the Thai fascists and bit into his homemade roll. In this heat, he lacked the enthusiasm to eat. There was so little meat on his bones, he was afraid that if he didn’t stop sweating soon, there wouldn’t be anything left of him. He smiled as he remembered his morning meeting.

  “Have you heard about the senator’s visit?”

  “The only way I hear anything is through you, Comrade.”

  “Well, we’ve had a delegation from Washington.”

  “They want their bombs back?”

  “They’re insisting that we give them access to look for MIA’s.”

  “What’s an MIA?”

  “It’s a military person who gets lost in battle.”

  “Wait. I thought they claimed they didn’t have any combat troops in Laos.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So how did any soldiers get lost here?”

  “Perhaps they had their maps upside down.”

  “And do we actually have lost Americans here?”

  “I haven’t seen any. But you can never tell what the LPLA will get up to. The Yanks say they’ve got evidence that there are MIA’s held in camps up on the border.”

  “And they’re insisting…”

  “Yes. There’s a lot of political pressure over there to bring their heroes back home.”

  “Well, if they insist, I suppose we’ll have to cooperate.”

  “That’s right. Wouldn’t want them to start a war or anything.”

  “What do we get out of it?”

  “Aid.”

  “They’ve offered us aid?”

  “Yes.”

  “See? I told you they’d have guilty consciences.”

  By the time they’d plowed their way through the sandwiches and were enjoying some fruit, both men were in their undershirts and seriously thinking about joining Rajid in the murky water.

  “Any interesting dead people this week?”

  “Well, I’m sure you heard about the chap from Info and Culture.”

  “I read the first installment of the report. Can’t see any reason for the fellow killing himself, though.”

  “I think something happened up there that drove him to it. It’s the archive department. Do you know of anything official concerning the Royal Family?”

  “You mean, apart from stripping them of their titles, humiliating them in public, kicking them out of the palace, and stealing their money?”

  “Yeah, apart from that. Something concerning the DSIC.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “There was a trunk up there with a royal seal. It was angry.”

  “An angry seal?”

  “No, the trunk was angry. I don’t know what was in it, but I felt an incredible force.”

  “Enough to throw a man off a roof?”

  “Could be.”

  It was two that afternoon when a second man found himself in a hurry to get away from the Ministry of Sport, Information and Culture. Despite falling four flights of stairs and landing on his head, Constable Nui somehow managed to cheat death. Much of him was broken, and there was some serious internal bleeding that needed emergency surgery to stem. But by five, it looked like he might make it through the night.

  Siri and Inspector Phosy stood at the end of the bed watching the constable’s wife and sisters setting up camp around him. With so few nurses available, families were encouraged to stay the night and look after their own. If they brought bedding, food, and any medicines they could lay their hands on, all the better.

  “We won’t be able to talk to him tonight,” Phosy whispered.

  “What was he doing up there?” Siri asked.

  Phosy led the doctor outside into the hall. “We’d just finished checking out the office. The only thing left was that box of yours. There wasn’t a keyhole or a catch or anything like that. There didn’t seem any way of opening it. So we sent Constable Nui off to get a crowbar.”

  “Risky.”

  “What would you have done?”

  “Left it well alone.”

  “Well, we couldn’t do that. This is a possible murder inquiry. Anyway, as we were on our way out, Nui passed us on his way in. I told him to open the chest and bring whatever was inside to the station. Next thing I hear, he’s face down on the fifth-floor landing.”

  “Did he get the chest open?”

  “No. There are splinters where he tried to force in the metal bar, but he didn’t make any impression on the lid. The trouble is, now none of our men are prepared to go anywhere near it. They say it’s jinxed. So it looks like I’ll have to do it myself.”

  “Phosy, can I ask you to leave it alone for a while? You’ll have to trust me about this. Give me some time to find out what’s in there, will you? Please?”

  “I shouldn’t.”

  “It’s really important.”

  Phosy thought about it. “I’ll give you three days. I can’t bluff beyond that. I’ll tell the boss it’s a national treasure and we have to wait for the key.”

  “Thanks.”

  They walked out of the stuffy hospital building and into an early evening sunshine that still dazzled and blasted them. They stood in the shade of a large henna tree, but there was no breeze to cool them down.

  “Hot, isn’t it?”

  “Damned hot.”

  “Phosy, can I ask you a silly question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Have there been any reports of…any sightings of…well, wild animals around town?”

  He assumed Phosy would laugh, but instead he answered very matter-of-factly.

  “Only the bear.”

  Siri looked at him, astonished.

  “There’s a bear loose?”

  “That ragged old heap they kept at the back of the Lan Xang. It got out somehow a few days ago. I’m surprised it had the legs to make it to the wall, let alone over it. Someone reported they’d seen it up by the memorial. God knows how it got up there. There are a couple of army people out wit
h a net looking for it.”

  He noticed Siri’s troubled expression. “You got a reason for asking?”

  “I think you’d better come to the morgue and take a look at something.”

  Siri rode his old motorbike slowly along Lan Xang Avenue on his way home that evening. Families sat by the roadside hoping to catch some breeze from passing cars, waiting for the night to bring relief from the stifling day. Siri was so deep in thought, he’d forgotten to turn on his lights. When suddenly the shadow of the Anusawari monument loomed up in front of him, he flicked the switch and drilled a little hole of light into its base.

  On the strength of what he’d seen in the morgue, Phosy had phoned police headquarters and suggested they get an armed unit on the streets looking for the bear. There was now a shoot-to-kill order out on it.

  Two things troubled Siri. First was the gap in his knowledge of wild animals. In all his years of jungle campaigns, he’d never seen a live bear. He’d seen several dead, with bullet holes, tied to wooden staves. He’d eaten their meat. But none of that really educated him about the lifestyle of the animal.

  He’d read stories of North American grizzlies and polar bears ripping people to shreds. Yet in all his years, he hadn’t once heard of an Asian black bear attack. Perhaps the victims didn’t live to tell the tale. Then again, with all the maltreatment this old girl had suffered over the years, she could have been out for revenge.

  After work, he’d stopped at the Lan Xang and seen the state of the cage she’d been kept in. He talked to one of the long-term chambermaids, who told him how cruel people could be to her. He needed to find an animal expert. He wanted to know just what this sad creature was capable of.

  He rode through the permanently open gates into the huge flat concrete yard that five months earlier had been the site of the That Luang Festival. Thousands of people had jostled and laughed and flirted there. Now it was like some large school playground during exams.

  He pulled up beside the lonely white memorial dedicated to the Unknown Soldier. At the far end of the ground, the custard-yellow stupa of That Luang, in need of some attention, stared back. Some hundred meters away, a little boy in underpants kicked a tin can. Its noise echoed loudly back and forth between the two monuments.

  Here was where they had sighted the bear. That was Monday, just before midnight. He looked across the yard, beyond the stupa to the road. And on the far side of that road was his own lane.

  This was the second thing that worried him. The bear had come to him in his sleep early that morning. But if the bear had actually materialized as a spirit, it had to be dead. That was logical. So why had nobody found its body? And if it wasn’t dead, that meant the foul-breathed creature that woke him had been alive and still dripping with the blood of its victim.

  He turned off his engine twenty meters from his house and wheeled the bike into his front yard, but Miss Vong still caught him. She had to shout to be heard above the loudspeaker booming from the corner of the street. It was detailing how long to soak jackfruit skins to make the best hair conditioner.

  “Good evening, Comrade Doctor. Hot, isn’t it? I’ve just made some nice taro gruel.”

  “Good for you, Miss Vong.”

  “I’ll bring you some over.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Yes, I will. You have a shower and I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  He was about to make an excuse but her head was already back inside her gate. She was a thoroughly annoying woman, spindly and plain as a hand-rolled cigarette. She’d been his neighbor in town before the apartment house they had lived in blew up, and the planning department assumed they’d want to be close in their new allocation. Thankfully, her work at the Education Department kept her out of Siri’s hair for long periods.

  He stood in front of his own gate and looked at the larger, far more beautiful house of his other neighbor, who was a government cadre from Oudom Xay. The man’s silent children were riding in the street on their brand-new bicycles. Scotch whiskey cartons and a stereo packing case had been stacked beside the dustbins for a month so everyone could see just how proudly corrupt the man was.

  Siri wondered what huge favor was being repaid to this small-town headman from the north who sat on a rocking chair on his porch every evening cleaning a pistol. He ignored all his neighbors, just as he seemed to take no interest in his own family. If he worked, he did so in the hours when Siri was sleeping.

  Saloop barked a welcome from forty meters down the lane and plodded happily toward home. Siri watched his belly swing from side to side and wondered where he was getting fed. The bucket of rice and scraps Siri left out in the morning was invariably untouched by evening.

  “Welcome home, brave housedog.”

  Saloop stretched up for a headrub.

  “You realize the house could have been broken into while you were off doing whatever it is you do?”

  In fact, that wasn’t true. No breaking would have been necessary. With all known criminals under lock and key on the islands in Nam Ngum Reservoir, few people bothered to lock their doors now. To be honest, Siri didn’t have anything worth stealing anyway.

  He removed a mysterious object from his motorbike and carried it into the house. It was wrapped and taped in a blanket. Saloop followed curiously, wagging his tail. The doctor lit a lamp and took his secret all the way through to his yard to a grave he’d pre-dug for it. He’d estimated the length almost perfectly. In that far corner of the garden, in a spot hidden from prying eyes, he buried the blanket and what it contained.

  He was brushing the earth from his trousers when he noticed the corrugated fence. It separated his home from one that was under construction at the back. Eventually they’d get around to building a wall. When the workers had put up this fence, it had been nailed firmly to four bamboo posts that marked the edge of his plot. It was eight feet tall and had probably been a temporary border to many homes before this.

  But it was no longer fixed. At his end, it hung from one single tack and was slightly buckled, as if someone had leaned heavily against it and popped out the nails.

  He lifted the flap, held up his lamp, and looked at the slow progress of the foundations there. He saw the piles of sand, still where they’d been when he moved in. But there was something curious about the nearest pile. He went through the gap and knelt down to get a better look.

  There were footprints—two clear ones—which were neither human nor dog. Both were pointing in his direction. A shudder crept up his spine. Could it really have been the killer bear in the living flesh that had woken him that morning?

  If so, why was Siri still alive?

  Das Capital Royal

  “Civilai? It’s Siri.”

  “Siri? You’re using a telephone. Next thing they know, you’ll be—”

  “Right. But no time for sarcasm just now.”

  “Oh? Okay. What do you want?”

  “I need an animal expert.”

  “Any particular breed?”

  “Bears.”

  “You never fail to astound me, Dr. S. I’ll ask around.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Oh. And I think I’ve got something on your mysterious chest at the DSIC.”

  “Excellent. You can tell me all about it at lunch.”

  Siri put down the receiver, thanked the hospital clerk, and walked back to the morgue. But even though there was a lot to be learned from Civilai that day, Siri wasn’t going to be able to make lunch. In fact, although he didn’t know it yet, he wasn’t even going to be in Vientiane.

  The sand had been packed quite tightly at the construction site, but the cement Siri mixed the night before had still spread a good deal. He and Dtui sat at his desk comparing the concrete cast with the agar scratch marks. They measured the separation between the claws. It wasn’t identical but the difference wasn’t great enough to preclude them coming from the same creature.

  “Dtui, if it was the bear that ripped Auntie See apart, that same bear cam
e to visit me on Tuesday.”

  “Wow. You saw it?”

  “I thought it was a dream. But dreams don’t pull down fences and leave footprints.”

  “How come you’re still alive?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “And one you’ll have to wait for an answer to.”

  Siri and Dtui both looked up to see where the whiny voice had come from. In the doorway, a thin, well-dressed man in his early thirties stood with his hands on his hips. The hot weather had inflamed his acne to the point that it seemed to glow on his cheeks.

  “Goodness, Judge Haeng. What an honor.” Siri smiled.

  Dtui made the man a polite nop with her palms tightly together. “Good health, Comrade Judge.”

  The man responded to neither the nop nor the words. He sat at Dtui’s desk and fanned himself in exaggerated fashion with the papers he carried.

  “Hot, isn’t it?” she tried again, but he ignored her.

  “If I could trust any of the fools in my office not to run off and go shopping before they brought you a message, I wouldn’t have to be here myself. But this is an emergency, and it has been entrusted to me.”

  Mr. Geung had seen the judge arrive and had gone for a glass of cool ice water from the canteen. It was one of the services he happily provided. When he got back, he put it down in front of the ruddy man and looked at his blemished skin as he said “Good h…h…health, Com…Comr…”

  “Heaven help us. Does he ever get to the end of a sentence?”

  “He’s overwhelmed by your omnipotence.” Siri smiled again.

  “I’m not about to consume any liquids in this place, am I? Tell him to take this away.”

  “He speaks Lao quite well.”

  “I’m sure he does, eventually. Take it away.” He despaired of the fact that Geung ignored him and stood his ground, just as he despaired because his department was hiring a mongoloid when they had the budget for a “normal” person. But Siri was unshakable. He said the day Geung left, he’d follow.

  “What’s so urgent?”

  “It’s a delicate matter. You two go and find something to do.”

  Siri smiled at Dtui. “I think he means you two.”