Thirty-Three Teeth

by Colin Cotterill

  “Suppose you tell me what happened.”

  The filing clerk was visibly excited. His dull life desperately needed days such as these.

  “She marches in here as if she owns the office and says Dr. Vansana asked her to come and look up something in the files. Dr. Vansana’s the physician we use at the correctional facilities. I mean, ha, as if anyone can just march in and claim to be this or that and get access to my files. I mean, she didn’t have so much as a P124.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I jest you not, comrade. Well, Dr. Vansana’s off at the reservoir today so there wasn’t even any way of checking her story. I wasn’t letting her get her hands in my drawers, I can tell you.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “Right. So she kicked up a fuss and I told her I wasn’t even supposed to be talking to her till I saw an Int5Q, so she should go away and come back with some paperwork. I asked her, ‘Where do you think the country would be if everyone conducted his or her daily business without the correct forms?’”

  “Good for you.”

  “I can’t even tell you what she said to that. I said ‘Good day’ and went back to my deskwork. She stormed out, and I suppose I eventually calmed down and forgot about her. I found myself engrossed in a rejac. budg. requisition that needed some back-up R11’s. I’m a bit short-staffed right now. Normally I’d have a girl running back and forth to the cabinet room for files, but these days I’m having to do it myself. So I went next door and what do you know? The door was locked. I banged and banged and who should come to the door?”

  “I think I know.”

  “Her, brazen as anything, comes and opens the door. And she has the nerve to tell me she took a wrong turn and got herself locked in that room with the files. A likely story I do not think. I mean, the lock’s on the inside for the first thing, and there she was opening it. I was flabbergasted. I’d never seen such abuse of the regulations.

  “Of course, what I should have done at that point was restrain her and call for security, the police even. But, well, she was a big girl and I’m not a physically well person, so I instructed her to leave, forthwith. Would you believe she strolled past me smiling without a glimmer of guilt?”

  “I would.” He fought back his own smile.

  “What?”

  “I mean, she’s a hardened criminal. These people have no shame. Too bad you don’t know what file she was looking at.”

  “Ha. Not know? You don’t think I could spend over a year setting up this system and not know what’s been tampered with? She didn’t even bother to put it back in the drawer straight. DC19368.3. That, Comrade, is a criminal record file.”

  “I wish all our witnesses were as diligent as you, comrade. I’m afraid I’ll have to take a look at that file. It’s the only evidence we have against her.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Her name? We refer to her as…as HJJ838.”

  The man jotted it down.

  Twenty minutes later, Siri walked out of the Corrections Department into a brick wall of dry heat. It had to be the hottest damned year he’d ever known. There hadn’t been more than a sneeze of rain since last December. Nothing was really green anymore.

  A depleted flock of bicycle taxi pedalers wilted on their back seats beneath the gray leaves of a peacock-tail tree.

  “Good health,” Siri said hopefully.

  “Good health, Uncle,” a couple replied. They’d seen him arrive on his motorcycle, so they knew there was no chance of a fare.

  “Hot, isn’t it?”

  “Damned hot.”

  “I don’t suppose any of you recall giving a ride to a nurse here this morning, do you? About nine?”

  “I do,” said a bare-chested young man with a stack of coat hangars inside his skin. “There was a heavy one this morning. It was me that took her.”

  “Remember where to?”

  “Out to Silver City, Uncle. Almost killed me it did, day like this.”

  “Thank you.”

  Siri was on his way back to his bike when he glanced across the street. In the heat that shimmered up from the pavement, he saw Saloop sitting with his long tongue flopping out of his mouth.

  “Saloop?” Siri said. “What the heck are you doing here?”

  He remembered the old Lassie black and white films he’d seen at Le Ciné in Paris. Perhaps his dog had come to tell him there was danger back at the house. He couldn’t think how he’d traced him here. He waited for an old Vietnamese truck to pass before going across to see. But once the vehicle and its trailer of tarry black smog had cleared the lane, Saloop had gone.

  “I never will get that dog,” Siri said to himself.

  Getting Warmer

  Before the Silver City trip, Siri stopped off at the morgue to see whether Dtui had made an appearance. All he found was Geung sweeping grooves into the concrete floor. At the hospital administration office, Siri called Phosy and by a one-in-a-hundred chance found him at his desk. He told Siri about the appointment he’d completely forgotten the previous evening with Dr. Vansana. He also told him to call back if Dtui still hadn’t shown up by five. It was already nearly four.

  There was one more stop before Silver City. He arrived at the ugly shanty behind the high wall of the national stadium and walked along the narrow dirt lane, wading through a flock of newborn chicks. At Dtui’s banana-leaf door, he called out Manoluk’s name before going in.

  “Ooh, come in, Doctor. Haven’t seen you for ages.”

  Dtui’s mother lay as always on the thin mattress in the center of the room. The head of the standing fan cluttered and groaned back and forth but did a poor job of lowering the temperature in the stuffy slum. She’d never looked well in all the time Siri had known her, but she’d looked a lot worse than she did today. He didn’t want to distress her by discussing Dtui’s disappearance.

  “Good health, Mrs. Manoluk. How you feeling?”

  “Just fine,” she lied. “What brings you?”

  “I was visiting the family of one of our deceased around here,” he lied back. “Thought I’d drop in and see how you’re doing.”

  He reached into his shoulder bag for his traveling doctor kit.

  “Actually, I haven’t been in the morgue all day. I hope Dtui’s looking after the show for me.”

  “Must be, Doctor. She left here bright and early this morning. Can’t think where else she’d be, unless she took off across the river.”

  This was a long-standing joke in Vientiane. If so-and-so was late or his brother missed a day at work, they’d talk about him taking a swim to Thailand. It was only partly said in jest, as there were very few of the population of 150,000 who hadn’t given it a thought.

  “No plans to go and have her hair done, manicure?”

  “Goodness me, no. Can you imagine Dtui with a permanent wave?”

  Damn. So, whatever came up was sudden and unplanned. Before leaving, as was his habit, he gave the old woman a check-up. They chatted, and he left some herbal tea to help her sleep. There were the constant cries of babies, the yelling of neighbors, the dogs. He wasn’t sure tea would help her sleep through that. He really needed to get her into a better place.

  Warmer Still

  He was on his motorcycle, heading at last to Silver City. It was like riding into the blast of a hair-dryer set on hot. The sweat that had soaked him at Manoluk’s dried the moment he stepped out into the sunshine. Now his shirt was burning his skin. The heat didn’t help his troubles at all. There was one thing he couldn’t get out of his mind. Dtui was one of the world’s great carers. She knew about Geung’s condition and that he’d be frantic with worry about her. She wasn’t the type to be away all day without getting word back to him. Siri was sure something had happened to her.

  For the first time, his wrinkled letter didn’t impress the guards at the gate of the Secret Police HQ one little bit. The man on his stepladder looked down through the peep hatch and read it while Siri held it up to him.
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  “No. Nothing to do with us. Sorry, Comrade. Can’t let you in.”

  After a good deal of contrived pouting and hammering and threatening from the doctor, the guard brought his commanding officer who, in turn, brought Mr. Phot, the interpreter. They still wouldn’t let Siri inside, but they did allow Phot to go out and talk to him. He brought out a large white parasol and opened it over their heads.

  “What exactly have you got in there that’s so top secret?” Siri asked.

  “Mystery,” was the reply. “People always need to think there’s something going on. It keeps them on their toes. If the proletariat knew we didn’t actually have any secrets, they wouldn’t respect us nearly as much.” Siri smiled. “So, you’re Dtui’s boss. She told me about you.”

  “Has she been here today?”

  “It was a flying visit.”

  “Can you tell me what she wanted?”

  “Don’t see why not. It was about something the Russian had started to say on her first visit. She hadn’t really taken much notice then, or perhaps I didn’t do a very good job of translating. He’d made a comment about the teeth marks.”

  “The tiger’s?”

  “He was sure it was some type of cat. A tiger was the most likely candidate. But there was something odd about them.”

  “What kind of odd?”

  “He said he’d never seen such sharp canines before. The indentations almost ran to a point. It was almost as if they’d been deliberately sharpened.”

  “Sharpened? Why would anyone want to do that, and how?”

  “Good questions, doctor. But it certainly makes the creature you’re looking for one scary old foe, don’t you think?”

  They both stood reflecting on that for a few seconds.

  “Hot, isn’t it?”

  “Damned hot.”

  Getting Cooler

  As he’d heard, Dr. Vansana was off at the reservoir. Siri sat in the back yard of his house downwind from a simply enormous fan that Sam, the doctor’s wife, had dragged out from inside. It was about three feet across and felt something like flying behind an Antonov 12. He had to hold his lemon tea with both hands.

  “This is the coolest I’ve felt all day,” he yelled above the growl of the motor.

  “I’m so glad you aren’t one of those vain men who wears a toupee. It would be in Nong Kai by now,” his hostess said.

  He laughed, but she could tell he was deeply worried about Nurse Dtui.

  “I just wish there was more I could do to help. I think I’ve told you everything we talked about last night.”

  “But your husband was convinced this Seua fellow wasn’t the mass murdering type?”

  “Absolutely. Vansana was quite disturbed after Dtui left, in fact. He was certain she was on the wrong track. But she seemed so convinced there was a connection. And to make matters even worse, she thought that connection might be supernatural. I’m afraid my husband doesn’t hold with that kind of talk. He’s a scientist.”

  “Yes. I used to be, too. I can understand his feelings. Did she give you any idea of where she was planning to go today, apart from the Corrections Office?”

  “That was it, I’m afraid. She mentioned she wished she knew more about spirits and werewolves. Nothing else.”

  “Sorry, do you have a telephone?”

  “Yes, Doctor. The regime kindly let us keep ours. The neighbors weren’t so lucky. Thank goodness Vansana’s a medical man.”

  Siri tried to get through to Civilai and Phosy. Both were out of the office and neither had left messages to say when or if they’d be back. It was five already, and the last time anyone had seen Dtui was around ten that morning. He went off to the Police Department to file a missing persons complaint even though, without Phosy’s personal attention, he didn’t have much faith in the ability of the police force to find her.

  Where had she gone after Silver City? What was preventing her from phoning or coming back? Perhaps she’d had an accident. For the moment, her trail had gone cold.

  Freezing

  She couldn’t believe how cold it was in that place when the air outside was so hot. Or perhaps it was just a nervous reaction to fear. She felt down the front of her uniform. It was caked in some kind of mud. Some of it was hard. It occurred to her it might have been her own blood. There was no way of telling. There were certainly injuries.

  She’d been thrown to the ground and dragged like a sack of black beans and left where she now sat. Her chest, her face, her thighs were bruised and possibly bleeding. There was no light, not a trickle. The treacly blackness, the thin bad-tasting air, and the noises, these were the devils that made her physical health seem unimportant. They slowly added layer by layer to the horror of what she had stumbled upon.

  There was nothing she could do but sit with her back against the wall and listen. Back and forth it paced, panting and shuffling and gurgling from its throat. Then there was the smell. She’d been in the morgue long enough to recognize death, but this was more. The blood and the death mingled with the creature’s own stink as if it were a part of it.

  She had never feared more for her life. She could never have been more certain that this was her last day, and it was her own stupid fault. Why, she wondered at first, was she still alive when all the others had been killed instantly? But as her mind cleared, the reason became obvious. This was the final day of the solstice when the moon would be at its fullest. The others had been killed over the five days leading up to this night. The beast was waiting for that moon to rise before taking its final sacrifice. In a few hours, she would be just like the other women, except here in this cold black place nobody would ever find her body.

  Weretiger

  It wasn’t until he arrived at Hay Sok temple that Siri realized he didn’t know the name of the monk he’d come to find. The moon was rising fast, and the temple grounds stood out in its light like the national stadium under floodlights.

  He walked around the inside of the whitewashed wall until he got to the stretch that had been blown up the previous year, along with his house. The monks had done a good job of fixing it. There was no longer a hole to look through; but by standing on the incinerator, he could see the far side. The ruins of his former house still lay there. The rubble hadn’t been collected, and the side wall still warped and leaned inward. All but one, they’d been lucky to get out before the place collapsed.

  “Are you up there thanking your lucky stars, Yeh Ming?”

  The monk stood behind him, his pate freshly shorn. He wore his saffron wrap as a loincloth. In the moonlight, Siri noticed the rings of tattooed mantras around his upper arms and across his chest. It perhaps explained his magical abilities. Somehow the monk knew all about Siri and Yeh Ming. It was he who had rescued the white talisman, he who had predicted that Dtui’s mother would have a better year.

  “I am that,” Siri smiled. “It’s been a while. How have you been?”

  He sat down on top of the incinerator.

  “You’ll eventually come to understand that luck and coincidence aren’t connected. It wasn’t a coincidence that your dog led you away from the house that night. It was no coincidence that the Indian tackled your policeman friend last evening.”

  Siri laughed.

  “Is there anything you don’t know?”

  “Oh, yes. So many things, but not those things that concern you, Yeh Ming.”

  “Who are you exactly?”

  “You don’t need to know that. I see you’re wearing the talisman.”

  In fact he could see no such thing, not with his eyes anyway. It was around the doctor’s neck beneath his shirt.

  “It makes my skin itch.”

  “You were fortunate in Luang Prabang. Didn’t I tell you to wear it always?”

  “I was always poor at taking advice. But I think I get the idea now.”

  “Good. What brings you here?”

  “I thought you were all-seeing, all-knowing.”

  “Only in spiritual matters.”
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  It was an odd comment that Siri would come to dwell on later.

  “What do you know about weretigers?”

  “More than I care to.” He walked over and joined Siri on the incinerator. “A weretiger is a tiger spirit that can from time to time possess the soul of a woman or man.”

  “And vice versa?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Could it be a man who turns into a tiger?”

  “We are talking about spirits, Yeh Ming. Spirits don’t turn people into animals. They may make them believe they are this or that beast, but there’s no physical manifestation.”

  Siri was taken aback.

  “What? What about werewolves?”

  The monk laughed.

  “I’d say you have wasted too many hours watching motion picture films.”

  It was true. Siri and Boua had sat through many hours of Lon Chaney with a face like a chihuahua biting into the necks of unsuspecting village folk. Given all that had happened to Siri over the last fifteen months, the least he expected was a parade of ghouls and monsters.

  “Then explain this,” he said. “A man is released from Don Thao. He claims to be the host of a weretiger. A few days later comes the first of three killings, all showing evidence of a tiger’s bite and scratch marks.”

  The monk looked perplexed.

  “I cannot.”

  “Is there a possibility?”

  “As it indeed happened, there has to be a possibility. But in all these years, I’ve never seen or heard of such a thing.”

  Siri shook his head and looked up at the huge moon.

  “Do you think there could be a connection with the moon?”

  “When did the killings take place?”

  “The first was on the eighth. Then the tenth and eleventh.”

  “The moon isn’t symbolic of spirit activity, but it is a great source of energy that unleashes a number of innate abilities and quirks. There are theories that the full moon can trigger electrical impulses in the mind. Not all insanity is connected to evil spirits.”

  “Where do they hang out? Weretigers.”

  “You mean apart from within the souls of humans?”

  “Yes.”