Thirty-Three Teeth

by Colin Cotterill

Civilai went over to him and shook his hand. He looked up through his unfashionable glasses but didn’t bother to stand.

  “Comrade Kim, how nice to see you again,” said Civilai without enthusiasm.

  It was translated by one of the damp shirts, but there was no verbal reply, just a nod. Civilai dragged Dtui up beside him.

  “This is Nurse Dtui. She’s a soldier in the revolution to cure the sick, toiling day and night to look after our small but blossoming proletariat and make them well enough to further the cause of the blah, blah, blah, etcetera, etcetera. You know the lines,” he said to his Korean-speaking aide. The man had recently returned from Pyong Yang.

  “Just keep the bull going till I get back.”

  He smiled at the visitor and walked Dtui to the door.

  “Who was that?”

  “Secretary of the North Korean Workers’ Party. Next president. Son of present President Kim, a.k.a. ‘Living God.’ I’m supposed to keep the bundle of joy entertained while he’s in town.”

  “You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”

  “Really? If you knew what cultural delights the boy finds entertaining, you wouldn’t be enthusiastic either.”

  “I tell you one thing, Uncle.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He wouldn’t get a date if he wasn’t the son of a Living God.”

  At Wattay in the late afternoon, the Antonov 12 bounced along the runway until it came to a skidding halt. The previous year, in one of the major policy decisions of the Transport Department, perhaps the only one, Air Lao had become Lao Aviation. But the only investment that entailed was a few pots of paint. Bits still fell off during turbulence and on the few days it was working, passengers still vanished in a fog of air-conditioning.

  The plane purred with achievement some eighty meters from the arrival shed so the passengers would have to plod across the sticky tarmac with their bags. As per Siri’s confusing instruction, Dtui had commandeered a songtaew taxi and told the driver to wait with her. She saw her boss come down the wobbly airplane steps from the rear door. He waited at the bottom until a sprightly old man with cropped white hair joined him. They walked quickly toward the shed, engaged in a serious conversation.

  Siri gave a pleased smile and waved when he saw his assistant perspiring in the uncooled arrival lounge. She was behind a short barrier that separated the arrivers from the waiters. This was a domestic flight, but there were two officers in a booth checking every passenger’s laissez passer.

  Siri was escorting an illegal traveler bereft of paperwork, so this could have been the start of a bureaucratic nightmare. But as he’d assumed, it turned out to be quite simple. The officers only checked the papers of those who crowded around them waving their travel documents and their house registrations and their birth certificates and their lists of signatures. One could avoid this melee by not going to the booth at all.

  Siri and his friend skirted around the riot and walked past the man on the barrier with the confidence of travelers whose documentation was in order. It helped to be met by a nurse in uniform and a driver. You had to be someone for such a reception.

  “Dtui, this is Mr. Inthanet. He’s—”

  Before Siri could complete the introduction, two policemen in non-matching uniforms strode up to the group. One of them held a small passport-sized photograph. Dtui recognized the men.

  “Dr. Siri Paiboun?” one policeman asked, although he apparently knew already.

  “Yes.”

  “You are under arrest, Comrade. Please come with us.”

  Everyone but Siri seemed surprised.

  “May I ask you what the charges are?”

  “They’ll tell you at the police station, Doctor.”

  The other policeman took Siri’s arm lightly and gestured for him to head outside with them. The prisoner looked back at the amazed faces of Inthanet, Dtui, and the songtaew driver. He held up four fingers to his traveling companion and winked.

  “Don’t panic,” he said, smiling. “Please take Mr. Inthanet to my house and make him comfortable. I’ll be there shortly.”

  But the last they saw of Siri that day was the back of his head in the police truck being driven out of the airport carpark. Dtui looked at the mysterious visitor, smiled, shrugged her shoulders, and said:

  “Hot, isn’t it?”

  “Damned hot,” he replied.

  “So, how do you know Dr. Siri?”

  A Land Without Lawyers

  On the Saturday morning, the three observers watched the condemned man eat three hearty breakfasts. There were metal bars between Siri and his friends. Dtui, Phosy, and Civilai watched him chewing happily on glutinous rice, and raw fish in a sauce spicy enough to self-combust. None of them spoke because they were still too dumbfounded.

  It was Phosy who first learned of the heinous crime Siri was accused of. He called Civilai and told him. Dtui only found out about it when she turned up at the jail. She couldn’t believe her ears. They were all too shocked to discuss it. So they merely watched Siri eat the breakfasts each of them had brought for him.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” Siri asked at last looking up from his food. “It is hard to eat in front of a committee…. Hot, isn’t it?”

  Still there was silence. Even though the door to the cell was open and the guard had gone for coffee, the guests had preferred to sit outside. This made Siri feel like one of the animal exhibits at the Lan Xang Hotel. Eventually, Civilai gave in. He shook his head and said “Siri, you’re the national coroner.”

  “That’s not my fault. I didn’t ask to be.”

  Civilai found this response to be amazingly flippant, even for Siri.

  “Fault or no fault, you are it. You represent the Party. Whatever entered your head to do such a thing?”

  Siri wiped chili sauce from his chin.

  “Now there you go. What happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’? Thank goodness I’m not being judged by a jury of my peers. You’d all see me to the gallows.”

  “Then tell us you didn’t do it.”

  “I’m not making any statements until my lawyer gets here.”

  “You haven’t got a lawyer. In fact, I doubt whether there are any left in Laos. They’re damned fine swimmers, I hear.”

  “What about you? You studied law.”

  “I’m not representing you. I think you’re as guilty as Nixon himself.”

  Dtui couldn’t hold back a little laugh. Siri didn’t notice.

  “It shouldn’t make any difference what you believe,” he said. “You just have to convince them.”

  “Siri, in two hours you have to go up in front of Haeng. You may recall that you haven’t exactly endeared yourself to the judge over the past six months. In fact, it could be said that you’ve crawled under his skin at every opportunity. And you have to defend yourself against charges that could very well result in your incarceration on Don Thao for the remainder of your sorry life. Personally, I think it’s time you started to take this seriously.”

  “Hear, hear,” Dtui agreed.

  Siri put out the spice fires burning in his chest with a swig of Dtui’s home-squeezed juice.

  “Ah, Dtui. Your mom squeezes a grand guava.”

  “Siri!”

  “Relax, brother. They won’t get me. Even if they try, all I have to do is point them in the direction of January 1976.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “That’s the day your revolutionary council set a match to all the books. And one of those books happened to have the national constitution written in it. And once that had gone up in smoke, all the laws went up with it. Remember?”

  Phosy felt obliged to enlighten the good doctor. He was a policeman, after all, and he knew about abuse of the system only too well.

  “Comrade, let’s for a second forget about laws. Let’s imagine instead that you’ve pissed off the people that run the country. Let’s suppose that they can make up a fitting punishment off the top of their heads. What if
they decide that letting you off will be a signal to all the other citizens to do anything they like and get away with it? Not having laws goes in their favor. They can do what they like with you.”

  “You’re still all assuming I’m guilty.”

  “I’m not,” Dtui said faithfully.

  “Thank you.”

  Trials were a rarity in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic in those days. The hearing of Siri’s case was closed to the public to avoid hysteria. In fact, beyond the police and the Department of Justice, nobody knew about it. Not much negative publicity for Party members made it into the Siang Pasason newspaper.

  As this was merely a hearing, it was conducted in the Justice canteen. The tables had been rearranged to give it the feeling of a real courtroom. Judge Haeng, in a nice pink shirt with collar buttons, sat at the front table by himself.

  Young Mr. Sounieng, arguing for the State, sat at another table with the chief witness to Haeng’s left. Siri, arguing for himself, had his own table to the right. The small official group of onlookers sat on chairs facing them all. Civilai and Phosy were amongst them.

  The accuser, and the insistent pursuer of action on the matter, was Siri’s silent neighbor, Soth, the crooked official from Oudom Xay. He glared across at the accused with a half toothpick protruding from his snarling gray teeth.

  Credit had to be given to Judge Haeng. He was certainly out of his depth, still having presided over nothing more taxing than divorces and domestic disputes. But he had all the formal language down and he kept order quite nicely.

  Everything sank or floated on the evidence of the only witness. Haeng called him to describe in his own words what he’d seen on the night of the ninth. Soth was obviously a man who considered the outcome of the trial a formality.

  “It was about four of the morning,” he said. “I’m a light sleeper, so when I heard the sound it woke me up straight off. I forgot where I was for a minute and thought someone was chopping down trees in the forest. Then I remembered we was in the suburbs. So I grabbed me handgun and walked out into the—”

  “Did anyone else hear this supposed sound?” Siri interrupted.

  “He can’t ask me questions,” Soth protested.

  “In fact he can,” said Haeng. “Dr. Siri is representing himself at this hearing, so he has a right to cross-examine.”

  “Good on you, son,” Siri mumbled.

  The man glared at them both.

  “Don’t seem fair, if he’s the accused.”

  “Just answer,” Haeng said. “We’d all appreciate it.”

  “I sleep at the front. Me wife and the kids sleep at the back.”

  “So in fact they didn’t hear?” the judge asked.

  “Doubt it. I didn’t ask them. But I certainly did. I went out to the lane and looked up the end of it. And I see him standin’—”

  “For the court’s benefit, would you be kind enough to give us a name? For the records.”

  Actually this wasn’t a trial and there wasn’t a stenographer, so there were no records, but the judge certainly had a handle on the proceedings.

  “Him. Dr. Siri Paiboun,” said the man. “He was standing down the end of the lane with a machete, and he was chopping away at the pole what holds up the government speaker.”

  “The radio speaker?”

  “That’s it.”

  “So, what did you do?”

  “Do?”

  “Yes. You had a gun. Did you try to stop him?”

  “Yeah, of course. Well, no, not exactly stop him. It was too late. He’d cut a sizeable bite out of the pole, so when I went out it was already swaying back and forward. The wire was stretching till it was the only thing holding the pole up. Then it snapped and the whole lot come crashing down. The speaker got smashed to bits. It was total vandalistic desecration of government property; an act of treason against the great LPRP.”

  “So then what did you do?”

  “Went back to bed. Nothing you can do at four in the morning. I reported it the next day, but the perpetrator had already fled the city in panic.”

  “Thank you.”

  Judge Haeng tapped his pencil loudly on the desk in front of him as he chewed over the facts. It annoyed everybody in the canteen. He finally looked up at Siri.

  “Dr. Siri, these are indeed serious charges. Do you have anything to say?” Siri stood. “Doctor, this is a hearing, you don’t have to stand up.”

  “I prefer to. If I may, I’d like to ask the witness one or two further questions.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Now, sir. You say this dream you—”

  “Dr. Siri!”

  “Sorry, your honor…this scene you witnessed was at four A.M.”

  “You know it was.”

  “Just yes or no will do.”

  “Yes,” Soth snarled.

  “Well, as far as I can recall, the area around the radio post is overhung with large trees. On the ninth the moon was already quite full.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Then the trees must have cast quite a shadow. It would have been very difficult to identify a person standing there.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my eyes. I saw what I saw.”

  “Just yes or no.”

  “I saw you.”

  “Even though the pole is…was fifty meters from your front gate?”

  “I saw you.”

  “I’m sure you saw something, sir. But you must agree that everything comes down to your eyesight.”

  “It’s perfect.”

  “Really? It wasn’t so perfect last night, was it?”

  Civilai and Phosy exchanged a low-eyebrow glance. Judge Haeng stared quizzically at Siri.

  “You think not?” the man said mockingly. “Well, it was good enough to see you. You think I didn’t see you?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I saw you all right, and I brought the evidence here. You think this kind of thing’s going to scare someone like me?”

  He reached into his shoulder bag hooked over the back of the chair. Mr. Sounieng, the prosecutor, obviously wasn’t expecting any evidence. He shrugged toward the judge. Soth produced a small wooden image. It was porcupined with pins like a West Indian voudou doll.

  “See, Judge?”

  He held it up so that Haeng and the observers could get a good look at it.

  “If this isn’t harassment of a key witness in a treason trial, I don’t know what is. He crept up and hung it off me front porch early this morning. I saw him.”

  Haeng called for one of the guards to bring him the doll, even though he could have just reached out and got it himself. When it arrived, he studied it. It bore not the slightest resemblance to the witness.

  “And you saw Dr. Siri hang it there this morning?”

  “As clear as I see you, Your Honor.”

  Of course, that was the end of the hearing. Siri was given back his belongings and allowed to go home. If the case hinged on the eyewitness, and the eye of the witness saw a man on his front porch who was actually under lock and key in the Sethathirat police station at the time, that had to be the end of the case. Even if one were convinced Siri had wielded the machete as most of the observers were, one would have to admit it was a thoroughly effective technicality. Even the witness was struck silent by its blow.

  When Dtui—on her lunch break—arrived at the canteen, it was all over. Phosy filled her in with the details, and they had a cup of iced Chinese tea to toast the doctor’s survival.

  “Of course, they’ll put up another pole,” Phosy said.

  “Probably, but at least he’ll get a couple of weeks of peace.”

  “I’m guessing he didn’t think it’d cause such a stink. He probably assumed the neighbors would be delighted and nobody’d report it.”

  “I’m sure this has taught him a lesson. You have to love him, though, don’t you?”

  “Certainly do.”

  They sipped at their tea with smiles on their faces.

/>   “Hot, isn’t it?”

  “Damned hot.”

  “Phosy?”

  “What, Dtui?”

  “Can I ask you something about the bear chase?”

  “All right.”

  “I know we convinced you that the killings were done by the bear.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s the bear any more.”

  “You think there’s something else running round biting big chunks out of people?”

  “It’s all very odd. According to an expert, the marks aren’t from a bear’s teeth. They’re more likely to be from….”

  “Go on.”

  “A tiger.”

  Phosy spat out the mouthful of tea he’d just taken and coughed a laugh to follow it.

  “Really? So we now have a bear and a tiger and goodness knows how many other wild animals all running around Vientiane, and nobody’s seen any of them? What? Are they in disguise?”

  “Right. It’s ridiculous, I know. But something’s killing people and if it isn’t the bear, what I want to know is what or who could be doing all this damage. If nobody’s seen an animal, it has to be a person. Phosy, I want to go to the islands on Nam Ngum Reservoir.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “Every convicted, known, or suspected murderer is locked up there. If it isn’t an animal doing these things, I want to know who could be capable of it.”

  “There are two things you’re forgetting, Nurse Dtui.”

  “What?”

  “One, I’m a policeman, and you—and I’m not denigrating your calling—are a lab nurse. I investigate crimes. You look at pimples under a microscope. That’s the way of the world. If anyone were to go to Don Thao Jail, it would be me.”

  “Great. When you going?”

  “Second, if your killer were in Don Thao Jail, he’d be in Don Thao Jail. Anyone who got over the wall, got past the trigger-happy guards, and avoided the mines would doubtless drown on the swim to the mainland. And then there’s the teeth. Wouldn’t he have to have a mouth the size of a wok to keep those teeth in? What about that little problem?”

  “I just look at pimples. You’re the investigator. That’s for you to work out. So?”

  “So?”