Thirty-Three Teeth

by Colin Cotterill

  “In Luang Prabang, in a house on Kitsalat near the palace, is a man called Inthanet. Go and see him if you have a chance. He might be able to help.”

  The sun was rapidly burning through the morning mist that loitered along the river and the surrounding hills. The pony was still tethered to the front steps of the house, but Siri’s groin ached from the previous day’s journey. Much of his trip back to the city was beside, rather than on top of, the relieved little horse.

  When they finally reached Luang Prabang, he returned the pony to Miss Latsamy’s brother and repaid his kindness by lancing and treating a boil on his shoulder. He needed to remind himself occasionally that he still had the ability to solve the problems of the living.

  He walked along Photisalat, past the squat two-story buildings squashed together like uneven books on a library shelf. Their bindings were all sunburned browns, dusty yellows and greens. A grandmother on one upstairs balcony smiled through a bloody betel-nut mouth when he winked at her.

  He paused in front of the old Royal Palace, reluctantly donated to the State as a museum. Its tall lush palms still stood at attention beside the dirt drive. Above the portal, the same royal emblem he’d seen on the chest at the Information Ministry stood out in gold relief from a red background. It was partially masked by the new national flag but not yet defaced. He wondered where his gardener friend might be at that moment, whether he’d ever see the inside of his palace again.

  He would seek out Mr. Inthanet, but not yet. He walked away from the modest downtown, and trees soon became more common than buildings. He stopped two monks in brown woolen hats and asked for directions to That Luang temple. They steered him there via lefts and rights at this type of tree and that type of bush. All the royal street signs had been taken down.

  When he arrived at the whitewashed wall of the small temple, an armed guard at the gate stopped him by waving in his face.

  “The temple’s closed, Comrade.”

  “Of course. I know,” Siri said confidently. “I’m here to see the crash site. I’m from the Department of Justice in Vientiane.”

  “Oh.”

  Siri produced his foolscap ID. The boy didn’t look much further than the letterhead, and the doctor wondered whether he could read.

  “Nobody told me.”

  “Comrade Houey sent me.”

  “Oh.”

  Siri put his paper back into his cloth shoulder bag and walked past the guard as if everything had been sorted out. He gave the boy a friendly nod and went up the steps to the mound upon which Wat That Luang sat. At the top, the dry earth yard was shaded by lush old pagoda trees, and the temple buildings were quaint and sadly run down. There were no monks around. Siri could see that an area of the grounds had been cordoned off by a tall wall of blue plastic sheeting nailed to bamboo poles. He walked through the flap in the plastic, and an astonishing scene presented itself before him.

  To one side, a trail of blackened debris gouged through the yard and settled at the crumpled and burned-out wreck of a helicopter. To the other, a large old elephant was harnessed to twelve meters of thick chain. The rusting metal looped down, then up, around the waist of a badly damaged black stupa that leaned sideways like the great Tower of Pisa.

  Two mahouts were securing the chain to the elephant’s sides. A man in a paper-thin white shirt stood pointing in the direction he intended the stupa to fall. Two more armed guards stood behind him. Siri walked confidently up to the man and smiled.

  “It was damaged by the crash?”

  The man turned but didn’t seem all that surprised to see Siri. They shook hands, and the white-shirted man nodded toward the precarious relic.

  “The helicopter apparently caught it as it was coming down. You from the town hall?”

  “No. I’m the coroner. I’ve been working on the pilots. You aren’t from around here?”

  “I’m sent by the Buddhist Sangha Council. I just got in this morning on the bus. I’m here to supervise the demolition of this here stupa. It’s dangerous like this. We wouldn’t want it to fall on some little child, would we? All alterations to temple structures, be they as a result of planning or of acts of the Lord himself, have to be cleared by the Council.”

  It was one of those unnecessarily long answers you get from someone feeling guilty about something.

  “This is quite a security force for such a little stupa.”

  “Well, there’s the—how can I say it? There’s the historical implication of this moment, and of course there’s the danger of pillaging.”

  “Bricks?”

  “Goodness, no. A lot of these very old stupas, particularly up here in the north, contain a good deal of—” he lowered his voice “—treasure. As you know, the slaves of capitalism often gain merit by donating large sums of gold and jewels to temples. In the olden days, the abbots used to keep their treasures safe from invading armies by entombing them within the structure of the stupa.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  Cynical, Siri wondered whether the Buddhist Council would have shown this enthusiasm if the helicopter had toppled a wall or a temple roof. But he gave the man the benefit of the doubt.

  “Good luck.”

  He walked over to the crashed helicopter and used a spine of metal to ferret through the ashes. The fire had been hot enough to melt the windshield and parts of the fuselage. All that remained of the seats were the stubs of springs.

  As he suspected, there was nothing new to be learned there. He found the melted clip of a seat belt, and slivers of tin around the site that were obviously from exploding petrol cans. Everything confirmed the findings from the autopsy. He just wanted to announce quietly to himself how clever he was. Being right can be a very satisfying experience.

  Surprisingly, the craft wasn’t armor-plated. There were several bullet holes in the fuselage, and it obviously wasn’t a military vehicle. Siri assumed the pilots had invested all their hopes in getting in and out and away with the minimum of fuss. They certainly hadn’t been expecting the barrage they got, and had had no defense against it. For some reason, the military had been expecting them.

  Job done, he went back to the treasure hunt. The elephant was secured and one mahout was on its neck. The other stood behind, jabbing a large wooden spike into the animal’s rear end. The links of the chain groaned and the crunch of four-hundred-year-old brickwork disturbed the previous silence of the temple. But still nothing, neither the elephant nor the stupa, showed any noticeable movement. It was a frieze with sound.

  Siri stood behind the white-shirted official.

  “You’ve probably noticed already….”

  “What’s that, Comrade?”

  “The skid marks behind the helicopter.”

  The chain groaned once more. “Yes?”

  “Well, if that were indeed the trajectory, and it does appear that it worked up a good head of speed before it stopped, I don’t see how it could possibly have nicked your stupa on the way down.”

  The man’s amicable nature seemed to retract like the head of a turtle. “Those were the official findings submitted in the official report from the Luang Prabang regional office, sir. They are far more knowledgeable than you or I on matters such as this. Surely you aren’t suggesting this is a coincidence? What else could have caused it?”

  “I’m certainly not a ballistics specialist, but that hole in the side of the stupa…just a guess, mind you, but if there were a mortar placement, say, at the base of Phousy Hill up there, and if it were taking potshots at the helicopter after it was already on its way down, it certainly could have caused a lot of damage.”

  The man was turning most indignant. “I hope you don’t think one of our own people could be responsible for the destruction of this historic site.”

  Siri could tell this man was no kindred spirit. He smiled and looked ahead. “That elephant doesn’t look too well.”

  The noble beast suddenly took one unexpected backward step and broke most of the bones in the foot of the
man with the spike. It then wavered slightly, like a hot-air balloon in a thermal, and sank onto its front knees. In spite of the blasphemous yelling of the rear mahout, it managed a dignified death. It looked to either side for the most comfortable landing; then, like the good socialist slave it was, it leaned to its left.

  The ground beneath Siri’s feet shook when the elephant crashed onto the earth. The neck mahout leaped to the ground and ran to help his screaming friend. With not one more thought for the dying animal, he offered himself as a crutch and guided his colleague toward the gate.

  Siri walked to the shallow-breathing elephant and knelt at its head. The mahouts he’d known in the jungle would mourn for days if they lost such a proud animal. But cities and mercenary cowboys were gradually destroying those bonds. They could replace an elephant like a flat tire. This animal deserved better: it deserved respect.

  He lay his palm flat beside the animal’s cloudy eye and whispered incantations still engraved on his memory from his days as a novice. The guards looked on in amazement.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Giving the thing its last rites, by the look of it.”

  “He must be nuts.”

  But Siri continued until he could no longer see his reflection in the milky iris. The eye no longer saw. The elephant no longer lived. And at that moment, a surge, like a massive overdose of Vietnamese coffee, passed through Siri’s body. The breath was sucked from him, and his heart jived out of control in his chest. He knew right away that the spirit of the old beast had passed through him and that something undefinable had been left there. Even after his pulse slowed, he knew there was a difference about him.

  He was distracted from his thoughts by the sound of crumbling masonry. Some reaction had been started by the elephant’s tug-of-war. Old natural mortar was slowly turning to dust, and the clay bricks it once held secure were sliding from their housings, changing position.

  Soon there was nothing to hold up the leaning structure, and the stupa flopped to the earth. It disintegrated inelegantly, as if it could never have stood up to the elements of centuries. There was very little noise; no trumpets or choirs, nothing grand to suggest that history had tumbled.

  The official and his guards rushed over to the stupa’s base, which stood square and hollow like an old wishing well. But their wishes were not to come true. Even before they started to scoop the wayward bricks from the base, they knew this was an empty stupa. The early enthusiasm of the guards gradually turned to languor, and after twenty minutes they showed no interest whatsoever in shoveling.

  The official was left with nothing but professional obligation. He noted the time of the destruction for his report and wrapped one small brick in a sheet of newspaper to take back with him on the bus. He photographed the pile of bricks and the dead elephant. That meant more unnecessary paperwork. Siri was sitting in the shade of a nearby frangipani, still trying to count his teeth. Years of spice had numbed the tip of his tongue. Hard labor in the jungle had desensitized his fingertips.

  “Nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine,” he said.

  “What was that, comrade?”

  “Well, if this is Lan Xang, home of the million elephants….”

  The official gave a polite chuckle.

  “Yes. I see. Very droll.” He replaced his papers in his plastic briefcase with the camera and the brick. “Excuse me. I have a bus to catch.”

  Siri had been offered a bus ticket back to Vientiane by the District Chief, which he had naturally refused. Nothing would possess him to make that spine-jarring journey. He would take the plane or wait for the helicopter. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t available. It didn’t matter that it was off on some top-secret mission. It didn’t matter if he did have to wait two more days. He was flying back, and that was final.

  The guards had gone, and he was alone in the temple grounds. It was blissfully peaceful. The main sala was a simple white rectangular building, but he was fascinated by the beautiful carvings on the black hardwood doors. There was something mystical about the figures that played there: the angels, the naga, the children of old kings. He walked closer to look at the expressions on their faces. Each had the same troubled look. They gazed directly into Siri’s eyes, and something about their fear told him “Beware.”

  He shrugged off the feeling that came over him and set about hunting for accommodation. The monks had been temporarily removed, and a perfectly good dormitory terrace stood empty behind the prayer chapel. Bedrolls were piled at the far end in pyramids. As he wouldn’t be leaving that day, he could think of no better place to spend the night. He carried a mattress into the chapel and laid it out beneath the watchful gold eye of the Lord Buddha.

  Siri found Miss Latsamy in the City Law Administration Office where she worked for three dollars a month. She was stamping official seals onto documents that stood in rectangular towers across her desk. She looked up when he came in.

  “Ah. Hello, Uncle.”

  “Hello, Miss Latsamy. I was hoping you could tell me where I might find Comrade Houey.”

  She looked up at the clock on the wall.

  “I don’t think you can. He’s preparing for…for the…” she didn’t know what to call it “…the thing.”

  “The thing?”

  Miss Latsamy looked across at the lady at the desk opposite, who raised a well-crayoned eyebrow. She said nothing.

  “It doesn’t really have a name, I don’t think, Uncle. Comrade Houey called all the shamans to a meeting in the Town Hall. Anyone who refuses will be arrested. They all have to bring their paraphernalia with them, because there’s going to be a…”

  “A thing.”

  “Right.”

  “What time’s the meeting?”

  “Seven. But it’s only for shamans.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Miss Latsamy. Don’t you know I’m the embodiment of a thousand-and-fifty-year-old holy man from Khamuan?”

  She eyed him up and down. “You don’t look it.”

  “It’s very kind of you to say so.”

  The Daughter That Lived

  Teacher Chanmee arrived at the morgue early in the afternoon. She was there on the bed of a pickup truck when Dtui got back from lunch.

  “Hot, isn’t it?”

  “Damned hot.”

  “This is for you, Mrs.”

  The hospital driver was keen to get a signature on his chit and offload the body.

  “If you called me ‘Miss,’ I might think about it.”

  Mr. Geung arrived just as she was signing. He wheeled out the morgue trolley and took the new guest to the examination room. As he was preparing to slot her into the freezer, Dtui came up behind him and looked at the body.

  “See that, Mr. Geung? Those marks are almost identical to the ones on Auntie See.”

  He continued to prepare the teacher for storage.

  “Let…let’s w…wait for the Comrade Doctor.”

  “Wouldn’t you trust me to cut her up, pal?”

  “Dr. Siri is a…a doctor.”

  “And what am I?”

  “A girl.”

  “What about when I come back from four years’ study in the Soviet Union with a coroner’s certificate? Will I still be just a girl then?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  “Then you…you…you’ll be an old girl.”

  He kept his face straight for as long as was humanly possible, then snorted his laugh. She picked up the bone cleaver and chased him around the dissection table.

  Dtui was the unbreakable one. She was the survivor of a litter of children who all left life before puberty. Had they lived, she would now have five brothers and five sisters. But they hadn’t been as lucky or as hardy or wily as she proved to be. She went beyond the point that had taken most of her siblings: the crossroads where childbirth and death meet. Without the assistance of immunization, her body had fought off all the usual childhood diseases, and the curse of
accidents had passed over her roof to give grief to the next household.

  Her mother, Manoluk, had invested eleven lives of love into her surviving daughter. When her soldier husband was lost in one more meaningless battle, she brought her to Vientiane. Here she cooked and cleaned and washed for strangers and pushed Dtui through school. It wasn’t until her daughter stood on the platform receiving her nursing diploma from the wife of the viceroy that she allowed herself to relax.

  Cirrhosis took her almost immediately. It was as if the bacteria itself had waited for Dtui to graduate. Years of bad diet and poor living conditions took their toll on her tired body, and by her daughter’s third paycheck, Manoluk was already too weak to work.

  The morgue position paid only a dollar a month more than the wards, but for Dtui every dollar counted. She didn’t particularly like the idea at first. She’d entered nursing to keep people alive, not put them in jars. But the morgue dollar and another from overtime paperwork helped pay for the drugs that kept her ma alive.

  The previous coroner had been a kind man, a pencil-thin bachelor trained in France. He helped Dtui out whenever he could, but he was helping many others on his modest salary and she didn’t like to ask for more. He had escaped across the river with all the others, not knowing what punishment his sophisticated family name might bring down upon him.

  The Pathet Lao takeover could have been a disaster for Manoluk, had Dtui missed any paychecks. Nobody was sure whether they’d keep their jobs in the new regime, or be paid, or be sent for re-education. Dtui and Geung went to the morgue every day as usual and mopped and dusted and whacked cockroaches, waiting for some news of their fate. But in the beginning it turned out that the new system worked in their favor. The government made a demonstrative point of helping the disadvantaged. Although money became scarcer and virtually disappeared after two drastic devaluations, Dtui was able to stock up on rice and canned supplies.

  That’s how things still were. Manoluk had her better and worse days. Mostly she just lay and read. Like the mysterious monk had predicted, ma was having a better year. Her cirrhosis wasn’t getting any worse, but she still needed medical attention that wasn’t available in Laos. If Dtui got the posting to the Soviet Bloc, she could live dirt-cheap and send the living allowance back. It was double her salary. Girls she knew were doing just that.