Thirty-Three Teeth

by Colin Cotterill

  She stood very slowly, walked across the room, took Geung’s hand in an extravagant manner, and led him to the door. “Come, Mr. Geung. Let’s go and get started on those excreta samples before they go lumpy.”

  She looked back and caught Haeng squirming. When they’d gone, the judge leaned forward and said “Siri, there’s a military helicopter waiting for you at Wattay.”

  “Why?”

  Before answering, Haeng took a deep breath. He’d run headfirst into Siri’s stubborn streak on a few occasions. “You’re going to Luang Prabang.”

  Siri seemed to consider this for a moment. “When?”

  “Right now. My car’s outside.”

  “But—”

  “This is a national security matter. It’s top secret. That’s why I didn’t risk using the telephone.”

  “What’s it all about?”

  “I’m not terribly clear myself.”

  “Then you needn’t have worried about the phone.”

  “Siri, this order comes from the very top. I don’t have time for any of your temperamental rantings. There’s no choice.”

  Siri wasn’t in the least threatened by the young judge or impressed by orders from the “very top.” But he could see that Haeng was. For the sake of future cooperation from the Justice Department, he decided not to give the man a hard time. And there was one other, more personal, reason why a free trip to Luang Prabang wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

  Luang Prabang was the Royal Capital, the birthplace of his wife, and a very scenic spot, so he’d heard. It was the historic seat of the Lan Xang empire: Lan, a million, Xang, elephants. It was in the mountains and some fifteen degrees cooler than the steampot he was in now. A night up north might not be half-bad at that. He spoke with an excitement in his voice that surprised the judge.

  “Well, let’s not keep the army helicopter waiting.”

  “Eh? Do you need—I don’t know, a toothbrush or anything?”

  Following a similar urgent summons south the previous year, Siri had kept a permanently packed overnight bag in the office. Personally, he traveled light. Most of it was morgue equipment, gloves and wraps.

  “No. Give me five minutes with my team, and I’ll join you in the car.”

  To Haeng, this was a victory of sorts. His first. He decided it deserved a victory lap. He let loose with one of his renowned maxims.

  “That’s the spirit, Siri. It’s moments like this that make the socialist system so great. When the call to arms comes the committed cadre, even on his honeymoon, would gladly climb off his young wife at the crucial moment sooner than let down the Party.”

  If that were so, Siri thought to himself, it might explain the frustrated look he’d often seen on the faces of so many Party members.

  The old Mi-8 “Hip” helicopter swung back and forth beneath its rotor like a poor baby’s crib. The young Lao pilots were friendly enough, but they seemed petrified to find themselves in control of the beast. Siri assumed that they hadn’t long ago passed through the Soviet training course that had farmboys still warm from the backs of buffalo inside a cockpit in three months.

  After the initial “Hot isn’t it?” “Damned hot,” there was too much noise for a conversation. So Siri spent the ninety-minute flight in thought. He was on his way to a place that symbolized Laos to the few people in the outside world who had a clue where Laos was. Yet to him it was another era, another country altogether.

  He had been born somewhere around 2446: the year the West knew as 1903. There was only one person who could have confirmed that, and she’d kept it to herself. So when it eventually came to filling out forms, Siri settled on a date that more or less matched his body.

  He was born into a chaotic Laos that existed because the French colonists said it did. They’d drawn lines here and there on maps, and all that fell within them was known as the administrative district of Laos, the fifth piece in France’s Indo-China set. It seemed not to matter a bit that some thirty ethnic groups gathered in that bureaucratic net were neither of Lao origin, nor subservient to the French. When you trawl for featherback, picking up the odd buk fish is unavoidable.

  Despite this nicely inked border, Laos was a divided country. The king, with French permission, ruled the areas in the north around Luang Prabang. The floating southern provinces, once a separate kingdom, had changed hands ten years earlier from the Thais to the French. They were underpopulated and underproductive and left the invaders with more headaches than looted profits. But as the French still had fertile Thai territory in their sights, the south of Laos was a necessary stepping stone. It was into this area of administrative annoyance that Siri had arrived in the world.

  The first eight years of his life were a blank and a mystery. His early recollections were of an aunt: a stiff-backed, broad-nosed woman who told him nothing of his parents. And he knew nothing about her. She’d been a rare educated woman, and, between tending her rice and her livestock, she schooled the boy in her rattan hut.

  She was a humorless hag with as much love in her as a dag on a goat’s backside. But Siri had a huge appetite for learning. He’d wondered since whether he’d tried so hard to study because he wanted the woman’s respect. If she did respect his hard work, she never let him know.

  His home then had been Khamuan, a lush forested province that leaned against the mountains of the Annamite Highlands. But when he was ten years old, the woman set off with him on an unannounced two-day trek. It took them to a paved road, a sight he’d never before seen. There were to be many more spectacles. A truck took them along that marvelously potholed road all the way to a city. It was called Savanaketh, and it stood on the east bank of the Mekhong.

  The woman must have told him a dozen times to close his mouth as she dragged him around that city; but to a boy from the bush, it was a wonder. She found a temple she’d been searching for, and he sat on a wall in front of it while she talked to the abbot in the refectory. As she walked past Siri on her way out, she muttered something about being good, and that was the last he ever saw of her.

  The boy, who knew nothing of Buddhism, was shorn, draped in itchy saffron robes, and turned into a novice. He studied the scriptures until they oozed from his ears like sap from a bloated rubber tree, but he also discovered another world of knowledge. There was very little written in the Lao language in those days, a situation that hadn’t improved much since. To really become a scholar, he had to fathom the mystery of the shelves of thick books that filled a small room behind the abbey. They were all written in French.

  Madame Le Saux was a missionary with the tiny Église St. Étoine, who had come to Laos for the very purpose of rescuing third-world children from poverty and ignorance. Like a large number of upper-class French spinsters, she didn’t possess many skills that poor, ignorant Lao children would find useful. So, in Siri, she suddenly had her raison d’être. He was her boy, her apprentice, her justification for being there.

  She had the ego to believe that Siri’s rapid grasp of French was of her doing. He took to the language like a lizard to a fluorescent lamp, and by the end of two years had consumed most of the books in the temple library. She gave him the tools, but the labor was his alone.

  He scored top marks on the entrance test for the exclusive lycée, and his mentor gladly paid all the fees. By the time he was eighteen, he’d absorbed everything the school had to offer and was still hungry for more. Strings were pulled, documents of noble birth were forged, and Siri had a scholarship to a reasonable medical school in Paris. There he met, wooed, and wed Boua.

  In 1939, with Hitler already making reservations for the trip to Paris, Siri and Boua boarded an airplane belonging to the fledgling Air France Company that took them to Bangkok. He held his new medical certificate. She held a nursing diploma and a letter of introduction from the French Communist Party to one of its founder members: Ho Chi Minh.

  So, there it was in a nutshell. Poverty led him to religion, religion to education, education to lust, lust to commun
ism. And communism had brought him back full circle to poverty. There was a Ph.D. dissertation waiting to be written about such a cycle.

  Through the scratched window, he saw the sun reflect golden from half a dozen temple stupas. Two rivers converged, and a white shrine, like a delicious meringue, sat on top of a hill overlooking the old royal palace. This had to be Luang Prabang.

  Carbon Corpses

  In a small dark room behind the Luang Prabang district office, something was wrapped up in an old U.S. Army parachute. The unfriendly local cadre walked across the dirt floor and forced open the shutters. The afternoon shone directly onto the gray silk.

  “That’s them,” he said pointing at the heap. “They don’t smell as bad as they used to, but they still turn my gut.”

  The man, Comrade Houey, was one of those who had never learned the maxim of not saying anything at all if you have nothing positive to say. He was the provincial chief: the head communist honcho of Luang Prabang, and he had long since foregone politeness and manners as a waste of good grumbling time. Siri disliked his type.

  “How long have they been here?”

  “Couple of days.”

  Siri leaned over and slowly started to unwrap the bullet-holed tarpaulin. Inside, two carbonized corpses were slotted together in fetal position. He looked up at the fat man whose brow was permanently scowling.

  “Thanks for taking such good care of them.”

  “Good care? What do they want, coffee and room service?” He laughed at his own sarcasm.

  “You could have made some effort to keep them separate. If you really wanted an accurate autopsy, you should have—”

  “Just as well, then. I don’t want an autopsy at all. You’re here for one reason and one reason only. We just want to know where these bastards come from.”

  Siri lowered his head and looked up at the man through the mat of his eyebrows. “You surely don’t mean their nationality?”

  “I certainly do. They told me in Vientiane you were some tit-hot genius when it came to solving puzzles. Well, here’s a puzzle. Solve it.”

  “Now, wait. It isn’t as easy as that. How the hell am I supposed to know where they came from?”

  “You’re the expert.”

  “I can probably tell you what killed them, but…”

  “Doesn’t take a genius to tell that. Look at ’em. It wasn’t bloody lung cancer. Just get on with it.” He turned and walked to the door.

  “Hey.”

  “What?”

  The man stopped and looked back.

  “Where am I supposed to look at them?”

  “What? You don’t like a little bit of dirt? Just put some of those newspapers down if you’re afraid of getting your nice white coat dirty.”

  Siri was an amazingly calm man. If he ever raised his voice, it was generally a deliberate ploy for the benefit of the misguided person in front of him. He considered it his duty to teach good manners to those whose parents had omitted doing so. He took a deep breath.

  “You will find me a clean room—”

  “I’ll do no such thing.”

  “—and if you interrupt me again, I promise you’ll be very sorry.”

  This was a showdown. The man’s alcohol-suffused pores began to turn his bloated face the color of a gibbon’s backside.

  “Who do you—?”

  “You’ll find me a clean room with a table and—”

  The man was fit to burst. He trembled. It was obvious he’d never been spoken back to.

  “Don’t…don’t you know who I am?”

  “‘Who’ doesn’t matter. I know what you are. And what you are is rude. From now on, I shall tell you exactly what I need, and you’ll arrange it for me. Perhaps it’s you who don’t know who I am, or who I have lunch with every day. I am the national coroner, and as such I deserve more respect than you’ve shown so far. Off with you, and find me a room.”

  Siri sat on the pile of books beside the corpses and folded his arms. He could see indecision on the fat man’s face mixed with rage, yet Houey tried one final volley.

  “You’ll be sorry for this. I’ll—”

  Siri stood up very quickly and stepped toward him. There was no intent of malice, but the man saw it as an attack and hurtled himself out of the shed and across the yard. Siri stood in the doorway and watched him go. He knew the district chief would return with either a loaded pistol or news of a vacant room. He hoped the reference to his lunch companion was enough to make it the latter.

  The room had once been a kitchen, but there was a large tiled concrete slab in the center that was ideal for the autopsy.

  Siri was alone in there. The two corpses were so crisp, there were unlikely to be any delicate organs to weigh, or stomach contents to analyze. There certainly wasn’t going to be a national emblem tattooed anywhere.

  He wrote his observations in a notebook. From the breadth of the skulls, Siri was certain these were males. The smell told him they’d been engulfed in a petroleum fire. It had been intense enough to cremate them rapidly. They had assumed the same attitude, one that suggested they’d been in a sitting position when the flames first hit them. There was no trace left of their feet.

  Remarkably, although their bodies and faces had been reduced to carbon, the top quarters of their heads were comparatively unscathed. Their hair was singed but in place, and a line of skin, free of soot, followed the hairline of each man.

  With a blunt scalpel, he began to probe at the outer layers that were now a fusion of skin and clothing. With no microscope and no laboratory he’d have to get samples from various locations to take back to Vientiane before he could be absolutely sure of what he was seeing. In the meantime he had to trust his nose. The scent of burned leather was oddly distinct from that of burned skin. He found traces of it at the truncated ankles and at the waists.

  This suggested to him that both men had been wearing high-top leather boots and belts. If he ever got to the site of the fire, he’d probably find buckles there to confirm his theory. He also discovered traces of some thick synthetic material welded to the left shoulder and chest of one man and the right shoulder and chest of the other.

  He was about to cut into the bodies when he was disturbed by a light tap at the door.

  “Come in.”

  The door opened slightly and a middle-aged woman with a pleasant face and long healthy hair put her head through the gap. She was deliberate in not looking in the direction of Siri or the bodies.

  “Dr. Siri. I’m Latsamy. Comrade Houey has assigned me to take care of you while you’re here.”

  Siri melted at the sound of her musical Luang Prabang dialect. There was no tune more erotic in the whole of Laos than the spoken song of a Luang Prabang girl. “Do you need anything?” she asked.

  “Perhaps you could just stand here and talk to me for a few hours.”

  It was unlikely. She still wasn’t able to turn her head in the direction of the corpses.

  “I would like to avoid such a thing if I could, Uncle.”

  “Am I that unpleasant?”

  “Not you, Uncle, them. I’d be as sick as a vomit bird if I had to look at those things. I don’t know how you can do it. Would you like some tea or anything?”

  “Tea would be very nice, thank you.”

  Once the door was closed, he reproached himself for flirting. He was old enough to know better. He knew he was a harmless old codger, but he’d probably frightened the girl.

  He returned his attention to the bodies. Cutting into them was like retrieving baked roots from an earthen kiln. The heat had done a thorough job of overcooking everything. The angle of the pelvic indentation and the narrow sacrum confirmed that these were male. From the lengths of the femurs he assumed they were of small stature, more likely Asian than Caucasian.

  He used a chisel to force open the jaws. The upper incisors curved into the shape of a shovel. This single fact put them into the Mongolian category. There was over an eighty-percent chance that these two poo
r gentlemen had been Asian. Either that, or they were Finnish. That was as close as he was ever likely to get to establishing their nationality. There was no fancy foreign dental work, no rings or bracelets, and they weren’t talking: not yet, anyway.

  It was while he was digging around in one lower abdomen that his tea arrived. It slid in on a chair between the open door and its frame without a word from the server. Siri was about to take a tea break when his scalpel struck metal. It had been his intention to use his cheat list at the back of his notebook to estimate the age of the men from wear and tear on their pelvic bones. But the bullet proved far more interesting.

  It was wedged against the pubic crest. Tracing its trajectory was a complex and delicate matter. The damage the bullet had caused was well hidden by the contraction of the muscles. But as he slowly worked his way south, he came across a second bullet, then, at the anus, a third. The bullets had almost certainly entered the body from below.

  Inspired by this discovery, he checked the other body and found two bullets. They were higher, almost at the base of the rib cage, but they too had entered from below. All these incidental clues tripped over one another on their way to one conclusion.

  He sat on the chair by the door and drank his cold tea. The bodies, like dismembered model kits, sat on the slab looking back at him. He doubted, from the attitude of his host, whether these two would be getting any kind of funeral service. But he still wanted to put them back together, make them look respectable. He had a feeling they’d be back.

  By the time his work was complete, it was already mid-afternoon. It had been a long day, and he was exhausted. He poked his head out of the room and found the lovely Miss Latsamy embroidering the hem of a traditional Lao skirt. She was very adept, and Siri thought she would make a fine surgeon—as long as she didn’t have to look at the bodies.

  “Miss Latsamy.” He joined her in the vestibule. “I have three favors to ask.”

  “I was told to give you whatever you want.” She blushed at how that came out.