The Coroner's Lunch

People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, October 1976

Tran, Tran, and Hok broke through the heavy end-of-wet-season clouds. The warm night air rushed against their reluctant smiles and yanked their hair vertical. They fell in a neat formation, like sleet. There was no time for elegant floating or fancy aerobatics; they just followed the rusty bombshells that were tied to their feet with pink nylon string.

Tran the elder led the charge. He was the heaviest of the three. By the time he reached the surface of Nam Ngum reservoir, he was already ahead by two seconds. If this had been the Olympics, he would have scored a 9.98 or thereabouts. There was barely a splash. Tran the younger and Hok-the-twice-dead pierced the water without so much as a pulse-beat between them.

A quarter of a ton of unarmed ordnance dragged all three men quickly to the smooth muddy bottom of the lake and anchored them there. For two weeks, Tran, Tran, and Hok swayed gently back and forth in the current and entertained the fish and algae that fed on them like diners at a slow-moving noodle stall.

Vientiane, Two Weeks Later

It was a depressing audience, and there were going to be a lot more like it. Now that Haeng, the spotty-faced magistrate, was back, Siri would have to explain himself every damn Friday, and kowtow to a man young enough to be his grandson.

In the jargon of the Marxist-Leninists, the sessions were known as “burden-sharing tutorials.” But after the first hour in front of Judge Haeng’s warped plywood desk, Dr. Siri’s burden had become more weighty. The judge, fresh off the production line, had taken great delight in casting un-expert doubts on Siri’s reports and correcting his spelling.

“And what do you put the loss of blood down to?” Judge Haeng asked.

Siri wondered more than once whether he was deliberately being asked trick questions to establish the state of his mind. “Well.” He considered it for a moment. “The body’s inability to keep it in?” The little judge h’mmed and looked back down at the report. He wasn’t even bright enough for sarcasm. “Of course, the fact that the poor man’s legs had been cut off above the knees might have had something to do with it. It’s all there in the report.”

“You may believe it’s all here in the report, Comrade Siri, but you seem to be very selective as to what information you share with your readers. I’d like to see much more detail in the future, if you don’t mind. And to be honest, I don’t see how you can be so sure it was the loss of blood that killed him, rather than, say…”

“Heart failure?”

“Exactly. It would have been a terrible shock when his legs were severed. How do you know he didn’t have a heart attack? He wasn’t a young man.”

With each of the previous three cases they’d debated, Haeng had somehow twisted the facts around to the possibility of a natural death, but this was his most creative suggestion. It struck Siri that the judge would be delighted if all the case reports that came through his office were headed “cardiac arrest.”

True, the fisherman’s heart had stopped beating, but it was the signal announcing his death rather than the cause of it. The newly armor-plated military launch had crashed into the concrete dock at Tar Deua. With all the extra weight, it lay low in the water. Fortunately for the crew, the collision was cushioned by the longboat man standing in his little wooden craft against the wall, with no way to escape. Like a surprising number of fishermen on the Mekhong, he’d never learned to swim.

The overlapping metal deck sliced him apart like a scythe cutting through rice stalks, and the railing pinned him upright where he had been standing. The embarrassed captain and his crew pulled him-his torso-up onto the deck, where he lay in numb confusion, chattering and laughing as if he didn’t know he was missing a couple of limbs.

The boat reversed and people on the bank watched the legs topple into the water and sink. They likely swelled up in a few hours and returned to the surface. They had worn odd flip-flops, so the chances of them being re-united in time for the funeral were poor.

“If you intend to cite a heart attack for every cause of death, I don’t really see why we need a coroner at all, Comrade.” Siri had reached his limit, and it was a limit that floated in a vast distant atmosphere. After seventy-two years, he’d seen so many hardships that he’d reached the calmness of an astronaut bobbing about in space. Although he wasn’t much better at Buddhism than he was at communism, he seemed able to meditate himself away from anger. Nobody could recall him losing his temper.

Dr. Siri Paiboun was often described as a short-arsed man. He had a peculiar build, like a lightweight wrestler with a stoop. When he walked, it was as if his bottom half was doing its best to keep up with his top half. His hair, clipped short, was a dazzling white. Where a lot of Lao men had awakened late in life to find, by some miracle of the Lord above, their hair returned to its youthful blackness, Siri had more sensible uses for his allowance than Yu Dum Chinese dye. There was nothing fake or added or subtracted about him. He was all himself.

He’d never had much success with whiskers, unless you counted eyebrows as whiskers. Siri’s had become so overgrown, it took strangers a while to make out his peculiar eyes. Even those who’d traveled ten times around the world had never seen such eyes. They were the bright green of well-lighted snooker-table felt, and they never failed to amuse him when they stared back from his mirror. He didn’t know much about his real parents, but there had been no rumors of aliens in his blood. How he’d ended up with eyes like these, he couldn’t explain to anyone.

Forty minutes into the “shared burden tutorial,” Judge Haeng still hadn’t been able to look into those eyes. He’d watched his pencil wagging. He’d looked at the button dangling from the cuff of the doctor’s white shirt. He’d stared up through the broken louver window as if the red star were sparkling in the evening sky outside the walls of the Department of Justice. But he hadn’t once looked into Siri’s brilliant green eyes.

“Of course, Comrade Siri, we have to have a coroner because, as you well know, any organized socialist system must be accountable to its brothers and sisters. Revolutionary consciousness is maintained beneath the brilliance of the beam from the socialist lighthouse. But the people have a right to see the lighthouse keeper’s clean underwear drying on the rocks.”

Hell, the boy was good at that: he was a master at coming up with exactly the wrong motto for the right situation. Everyone went home and analyzed their mottoes, and realized too late that they had no bearing on… anything. Siri stared at the sun-starved boy and felt kind of sorry for him.

His only claim to respect was a Soviet law degree on paper so thin, you could see the wall where it hung through it. He’d been trained, rapidly, to fill one of the many gaps left by the fleeing upper classes. He’d studied in a language he didn’t really understand and been handed a degree he didn’t really deserve. The Soviets added his name to the roster of Asian communists successfully educated by the great and gloriously enlightened socialist Motherland.

Siri believed a judge should be someone who acquired wisdom layer by layer over a long life, like tree rings of knowledge, believed you couldn’t just walk into the position by guessing the right answers to multiple choice tests in Russian.

“Can I go?” Siri stood and walked toward the door without waiting for permission.

Haeng looked at him like he was lower than dirt. “I think we’ll need to discuss attitude at out next tutorial. Don’t you?”

Siri smiled and resisted making a comment.

“And, Doctor,” the coroner stood with his nose to the door, “why do you suppose the Democratic Republic issues quality black shoes to its government officials free of charge?”

Siri looked down at his ragged brown sandals. “To keep Chinese factories open?”

Judge Haeng lowered his head and moved it from side to side in slow motion. It was a gesture he’d learned from older men, and it didn’t quite suit him.

“We have left the jungle, Comrade. We have escaped from the caves. We now command respect from the masses, and our attire reflects our standing in the new society. Civilized people wear shoes. Our comrades expect it of us. Do you understand what I’m telling you?” He was speaking slowly now, like a nurse to a senile patient.

Siri turned back to him with no sign that he’d been humiliated. “I believe I do, Comrade. But I think if the proletariat are going to kiss my feet, the least I can do is give them a few toes to wrap their lips around.”

He yanked open the sticky door and left.

Siri walked home through the dusty Vientiane streets at the end of a long Friday. He usually kept a cheery smile on his face for anyone who wanted it. But he’d noticed that fewer people returned it these days. The merchants along his route who knew him always had a friendly comment, but strangers were starting to misread his expression. “What does he know, this little man? What does he have to smile about?”

He passed government women at the end of their day jobs. They wore khaki blouses and traditional black phasin that hung stiffly to their ankles. Each managed to make her uniform unique in some way: a brooch, a different collar, a fold in the skirt that was their own.

He passed schoolchildren in scrubbed white shirts and itchy red scarves. They seemed baffled by their day, too confused to giggle or mess around. Siri felt the same.

He passed dark, half-empty shops that all seemed to sell the same things. He passed the fountain whose spouts had become cave dwellings for insects, and unfinished buildings whose bamboo scaffolding was green with ivy.

It took him twenty minutes to walk home: just enough time to get the annoying image of Judge Haeng out of his mind. Siri was staying in an old French two-story house with a small front garden crammed with vegetables. The building needed just about everything: paint, mortar, uncracked glass, tiles, you name it; but it wasn’t likely to get any of them for some time.

As was its way, Saloop lurched out from the cabbages like a crocodile and, even in semi-consciousness, started to howl at Siri. The dog had howled at him and him alone for the entire ten months he’d been there. Nobody could explain what motivated the slovenly creature to pick on the doctor as it did, but there were things going on in that dog’s mind that no human could fathom.

As it did every day, Saloop’s eerie wail inspired a chorus of barks and howls the length of the street and beyond and, as usual, Siri creaked open the front door to the accompaniment of dogs. He could never sneak home unnoticed. Even the staircase betrayed him. Under his footsteps, its groans echoed in the bare hallway and the loose floorboards announced his arrival on the balcony.

Neither the front door nor the door to his room was locked. There was no need. Crime had stopped. His apartment was at the rear overlooking the little Hay Sok temple. He reversed out of his sandals and stepped inside. There was a desk with books waiting for him at the window. A thin mattress was rolled up against one wall under the skirt of a mosquito net. Three peeling vinyl chairs gathered around a tin coffee table, and a small stained sink perched on a thick metal pipe.

The bathroom downstairs was shared with two couples, three kids, and a lady who was the acting head of the teacher training division at the Department of Education. Such were the spoils of a communist victory. But as conditions were no worse than before, nobody complained. He lit the gas on the one-ring range and boiled his kettle of water for coffee. In a way it felt good to be home.

But this was to be a weekend of strange awakenings. On Friday night he sat at his desk reading by oil lamp until the fussing of the moths got too much for him. His bedroll was placed so he could see the moon emerging from behind one cloud, and the next, and the next, until he was hypnotized into a peaceful sleep.

Siri’s dream world had always been bizarre. In his childhood, the images that lurked there constantly interrupted his sleep. The sane woman who raised him would come to his bed and remind him that these were his dreams inside his head, and nobody had more right to be in there than he. He learned how to walk tall through his nightmares and not to be afraid of what happened there.

Although he stopped being scared, he never did gain control of them. He couldn’t keep out unwanted visitors, for one thing. There were a lot of strangers loitering in his dreams with little or no intention of entertaining him. They lurked, laid about, idled, as if Siri’s head was a waiting room. He often felt as if his was just a backstage to someone else’s dreams.

But the most peculiar visitors to his subconscious were the dead. Since that first mortality, the first bullet-ridden man to die on his operating table, all those who’d passed from here to there in front of him had taken the trouble to pay him a visit.

When he was a young doctor, he’d wondered whether he was being punished for not saving them. None of his colleagues shared these hauntings, and a psychologist he once worked with in Vietnam suggested they were merely manifestations of his own guilt. All doctors wonder whether they could have done more for their patients. In Siri’s case, the learned man believed, these doubts came in visual form. Siri was calmed by the fact that in the dreams the departed didn’t seem to blame him; they were just bystanders, watching events with him. He was never threatened by them. The psychologist assured him this was a good sign.

Since Siri had started working as a coroner, coming into contact with the bodies of people he hadn’t known when alive, these visitations had become more profound. He was somehow able to know the feelings and personalities of the departed. It didn’t seem to matter how long it had been since life had drained from the body; his dream world could spiritually reassemble the person. He could have conversations with the completed whole, and get a feeling of the essence of what that person had been in real life.

Of course, Siri hadn’t been able to mention these reconstructions to his friends or colleagues. He didn’t see it would be to anyone’s advantage to admit that he turned into a raving lunatic after dark. His condition did no harm, and it did encourage him to show more respect to cadavers, once he knew the former owners would be back.

With such mysteries going on in Siri’s sleep, it was hardly surprising he often awoke confused. On this particular Saturday morning, he found himself in one of those neither-one-nor-the-other dimensions. He was aware he was in his room and that two of his fingers had been bitten by midges. He heard the dripping of the tap. He could smell the smoke of leaves burning in the temple yard. But he was still dreaming.

On one of the vinyl chairs there was a man. The morning light filtered through the cloth curtain immediately behind his head. From inside the mosquito net, Siri couldn’t make out his face, but there was no mistaking who he was. He had no shirt and his frail torso was blue with old tattooed mantras. He wore a checkered loincloth, below which two leg stubs rested on the seat. The congealed blood matched the vinyl.

“How are you feeling?” Siri asked him. It was an odd question to pose to a dead man, but this was a dream after all. He became aware of the high-pitched howling of the dogs from the lane out front. All the signs of consciousness were gathering, but the longboat man still refused to leave.

He was sitting, looking back at Siri with a toothless smile smeared across the bottom of his face. Then he glanced away and pointed his long bony finger in front of him. Siri had to sit up against his pillow to see. On the tin coffee table there was a bottle of Mekhong whisky. At least it was a Mekhong bottle, but it contained something darker and denser than it should have. It could have been blood, but that was just Siri’s morbid fancy at work.

He lay back on his pillow and wondered how much more aware of his environment he needed to be before the old man would leave. Then the curtain fluttered slightly and more temple smoke puffed in on the breeze. And in the second he was distracted, a doubt was cast. The fisherman’s head could have been a fold in the curtain, his body the indentation made by countless backs that had slumped in the chair before him.

As if some conductor had swiped his baton through the air, the dog chorus fell silent and Siri was left with the dripping of the tap. There was no doubt now that he was awake. He marveled again at the magic of dreams, his dreams, and chuckled to think that one of his inmates might have been trying to escape.

Suddenly refreshed, and mysteriously elated, he pulled back his mosquito net and got up. He saw the midge that had been trapped inside with him and feasted gloriously on his finger’s blood. It flew to the window and out to boast of its coup.

Siri put on the kettle, drew the ill-fitting curtain, and carried his small transistor radio to the coffee table. It was a sin, but one he delighted in.

Lao radio broadcasts boomed from public address speakers all over the city from five A.M. on. Some lucky citizens had the honor of being blasted from their beds by statistics of the People’s National Rice Harvest coming directly through their window. Others’ house vibrated to reminders that salt borders would keep slugs off their vegetables.

But Siri was in a blissful black hole, far enough from the PA’s for their messages to be no more than a distant hum. He listened instead to his beloved transistor. By keeping the volume down, he could tune into world news on the Thai military channel. The world had receded somewhat on Lao radio recently.

Naturally, Thai radio and television were banned in the People’s Democratic Republic. You wouldn’t be arrested for listening, but your District Security Council member would knock loudly on your door and shout for all the neighbors to hear, “Comrade, don’t you realize that listening to decadent foreign propaganda will only distort your mind? Aren’t we all content here with what we have? Why do we need to give satisfaction to the capitalist pigs by listening to their pollution?”

Your name would be added to a list of grade-four subversives and, theoretically, your co-workers would cease to have complete trust in you. But as far as Siri was concerned, the edict only succeeded in depriving the Lao people of some jolly entertainment.

The Thais were devastated that evil communists had moved in next door, in Laos. Their paranoid military could never be accused of subtlety. Siri loved to listen to their broadcasts. He honestly believed that if the politburo allowed free access to Thai radio, people would decide for themselves which regime they’d prefer to live under.

He’d listened to “expert” commentaries on the Reds’ inborn taste for wife-sharing, an infirmity that caused such confusion in their society that “incest was inevitable.” How communism had led to a dramatic increase in two-headed births he was uncertain, but Thai radio had the figures to prove it.

Saturday morning was his favorite because they assumed the Lao would be gathered by their radios on the weekend, desperate for propaganda. But today Siri was distracted. He didn’t even get around to turning on the radio. He brought his thick brown Vietnamese coffee to the table, sat in his favorite chair, and inhaled the delicious aroma. It smelled a lot better than it tasted.

He was about to take a sip when the light from the window reflected from something in front of him on the surface of the tin coffeetable. It was a circle of water, the kind you get from a damp glass. This was nothing incredible, except that he hadn’t put anything on the table that morning. His cup was dry and it hadn’t left his hand. And in Vientiane’s climate, this moisture could not have been left over from the previous evening.

He drank some coffee and looked at the ring of water calmly, waiting for an answer to come to his mind. He looked up at the chair where the morning shadows had played tricks on him, then back at the table. If he wanted to be perverse, he could remark that the ring was in the spot where the longboat man’s whisky bottle had sat. He turned to the shelf on the wall behind him and ripped a sheet of paper from the roll there.

But when he turned back to the table there was no ring of water.

His second strange awakening that weekend wasn’t so occult. Miss Vong from the Department of Education had a habit of not knocking on the door until after she’d walked through it. She’d often caught Siri putting things on or taking things off, but she always looked at him as if it was his fault. If he’d done the same at her apartment, he’d be facing a court summons for certain.

But on this Sunday morning, he was still fast asleep when she arrived, so he knew it had to be early. The scent of temple incense had already filled the room, but the roosters were still dreaming of magical flights over mountains and lakes.

“Come on, sleepy. Time to get up.”

As she had no children of her own, this annoying woman had taken to mothering everybody. She went to the single curtain and yanked it open. The light didn’t stream in, it oozed. It was an early hour indeed. She stood by the window with her hands on her hips. “We have an irrigation canal to dig.”

His mind groaned. What had happened to weekends, to free time, to days off? His Saturday mornings at work invariably became days, and here they were, stealing his Sunday too. He pried open one eye.

Miss Vong was dressed in corduroy working trousers and a sensible long-sleeved shirt buttoned at neck and wrist. She wore her thinning hair in pigtails and reminded Siri of the Chinese peasant eternalized in Mao posters. Chinese propaganda skimped on facial features, as nature had done with Miss Vong. She was somewhere between thirty and sixty, with the build of an underfed teenaged boy.

“What torture is this? Leave me alone.”

“I will not. You deliberately missed the community painting of the youth center last month. I’m certainly not going to let you miss out on the chance to dig the overflow canal.”

Community service in the city of Vientiane wasn’t a punishment; it was a reward for being a good citizen. It was the authorities’ gift to the people. They didn’t want a single man, woman, or child to miss out on the heart-swelling pride that comes from resurfacing a road or dredging a stream. The government knew the people would gladly give up their only day off for such a treat.

“I’ve got a cold,” he said, pulling the sheet over his head. He heard the tinkle of water filling a kettle and the pop of the gas range. He felt the tickle and heard the rustle of his mosquito net being tethered to the hook on the wall. He heard the swish of a straw brush across his floor.

“That’s why I’m fixing you a nutritious cup of tea with a twist of-”

“I hate tea.”

“No, you don’t.”

He laughed. “I thought after seventy-two years, I might know what I hate and what I don’t.”

“You need to build up your strength for the digging.”

“What happened to all the prison inmates? They used to do all this. Dig ditches, unplug sewers.”

“Dr. Siri, I’m surprised at you. Sometimes I wonder if you really did fight for the revolution. There’s no longer any excuse for the uneducated and ignorant to be doing all our dirty work. We’re all perfectly capable of lifting a hoe and swinging an ax.”

“… and dissecting a cancerous liver,” he mumbled under the cover.

“All our ill-advised criminal types are undergoing re-education at the islands. You know that. Now. Are you getting up, or do I have to drag you out of there?”

He decided to punish her for her unsolicited familiarity.

“No. I’ll get up. But I have to warn you, I’m naked and I have a morning erection. It’s nothing sexual, you’ll understand. It’s a result of pressure on the…”

There was a slight click and the battering of loose boards on the veranda. He peeled down the sheet and looked triumphantly around the empty room.

When he went downstairs, he found two trucks loaded with drowsy silent neighbors, obviously overcome with delight. Area 29C was providing the labor for irrigation canal section 189. It would take the better part of the day, but a sticky rice, salt fish, and tamnin ivy lunch would be provided absolutely free.

He shook off Saloop’s lethargic charge and climbed onto the rear truck. He’d spotted Miss Vong on the front one, lecturing the young couple from the room opposite his. He nodded and joked with his neighbors as the convoy set off. They nodded and joked back. But none of these good moods could be described as sincere.

Despite having joined the Communist Party for entirely inappropriate reasons, Siri had been a paid-up member for forty-seven years. If the truth were to be told, he was a heathen of a communist. He’d come to believe two conflicting ideas with equal conviction: that communism was the only way man could be truly content; and that man, given his selfish ways, could never practice communism with any success. The natural product of these two views was that man could never be content. History, with its procession of disgruntled political idealists, tended to prove him right.

After clawing his way through a French education system dense and overgrown with restrictions against the poor, he had finally proved that a country boy could make something of himself. He found a rare, benevolent French sponsor, who sent him to Paris. There he became a competent but not brilliant medical student. France wasn’t renowned for making life easier for those poor souls born outside its borders. It was every homme for himself.

But Siri was used to struggling. In his first two years at Ancienne, without distractions, he was in the top thirty percent of his class. His tutors agreed he had great promise, “for an Asian.” But like many a good man before him, he soon discovered that all the potential in the world was no match for a nice pair of breasts. He found himself in third-year pathology concentrating not on the huge blackboard crammed with its neat diagrams, but on the slow-breathing sweater of Boua. She was a red-faced Lao nursing student who sat by the window whatever the weather. He could generally tell from the sweater just how cold it was outside. In the summer, it became a slow-breathing blouse with more buttons undone than was absolutely necessary. He barely scraped through pathology and plummeted into the bottom twenty-percent bracket overall.

By the fourth year, he and Boua were engaged and sharing a room so small, the bed had been sawn short so the door could open. She was a healthy, well-curved girl from Laos’s ancient royal capital of Luang Prabang. Her family was blue-blooded Royalist from generations back. But while her parents knelt and bowed at the feet of the passing king and tossed orchid petals before him, she was in her room plotting his demise.

She had learned of the French Communist Party from her first lover, a skinny young tutor from Lyons. At the first opportunity, she set off for her Mecca. Whereas Siri had come to Paris to become a doctor, Boua was studying nursing as a pretext: she was actually in Paris to become the best communist she could be, in order to return to elevate the downtrodden masses in her homeland.

She made it clear to Siri that if he wanted her hand, he had to embrace the red flag also. He did want her hand, and the rest of her, and considered four evenings a week, the odd Sunday, and five francs a month, cheap at half the price. At first, the thought of attending meetings that espoused the fall of the great capitalist empire made him uneasy. He was quite fond of the music of capitalism and fully expected to dance to it as soon as the chance presented itself. He’d been poor all his life, a state he was hoping to recover from as a doctor. But guilt at having such thoughts eventually overtook him.

So it was that communism and Boua conspired to damage his hopes and dreams. By embracing his fiancйe and her red flag, he was slowly tearing himself from the grasp of medicine. In order to pass his fifth year, he had to take several make-up exams. By the time he reached his practicum, he had two black stars on the front of his personal file. They indicated that the student therein had to be an exceptional intern if he didn’t want to be loaded on an early Airopostale flight and forfeit his sponsor’s fees.

Fortunately, Siri was a natural doctor. The patients adored him, and the staff at the Hфtel Dieu Hospital thought so highly of him that the administration asked him to consider staying on in France and working there full-time. But his heart was with Boua, and when she returned to further The Cause in her homeland, he was at her side.

On Monday, Siri walked down to the Mekhong River and stood for a while. The rains had held on stubbornly that year, but he was sure they were now gone for another five months. It was a brisk November morning and the sun hadn’t yet found the strength to dry the grasses on the bank. He let the cool dew soak his feet and wondered how long the Party’s shiny vinyl shoes would survive the next rains.

He walked reluctantly along the embankment and kicked up scents from the Crow Shit blossoms that grew there. On the far bank, Thailand stared rudely back at him, its boats floating close to its waterfront. The river that was once a channel between two countries had become a barrier.

In front of Mahosot Hospital, he sat on a wobbly stool beside the road and ate stale foi noodles purchased from a cart. Nothing really tasted fresh any more. But with all the diseases he’d been exposed to over the years, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to his health. He could probably inject himself with salmonella and it would pass straight through him.

With no other excuses to delay his arrival at work, he walked between the shoebox buildings toward his office. The hospital had been put together without style or grace by the French and was basically a village of concrete bunkers. He hesitated in front of his own building before stepping inside. The sign over the door said MORGUE in French. The mat beneath it, his own personal touch, said WELCOME in English.

Only two of the rooms in the blockhouse had natural light. One of these was his office. He shared it with his staff of two, a staff that Judge Haeng rudely referred to as one and a half.

“Good morning, Comrades.” He walked into the gray cement room and went over to his desk.

Dtui looked up from her Thai fan magazine.

“Good health, doctor.” She was a solid young nurse with a well-washed but rather craggy face and a happy mouth. Her first reaction to everything was to smile, and goodness knows, she didn’t have a lot to smile about.

“I doubt whether the Department of Information and Culture would be happy to see you reading such bourgeois perversions.”

She grinned at the doctor’s comment. “I’m just reminding myself how repulsive the capitalist system can be, Comrade.” She held up a badly registered three-color print of a television star wearing a miniskirt. “I mean, can you see me in something like that?”

Siri smiled to himself and raised his eyebrows. A rocking man in the corner of the office attracted his attention. “Ah, good morning, Mr. Geung.”

The rocking man smiled when he heard his name and looked up. “Good morning, Dr. Comrade. It’s… it’s going to be a hot one.” He nodded his agreement with his own comment.

“Yes, Mr. Geung. I believe you’re correct. Do we have any customers today?”

Geung laughed as he always did at Siri’s permanent joke. “No customers today, Dr. Comrade.”

This was it. This was the team he’d inherited, the job he didn’t want, the life he didn’t expect to be leading. For almost a year, he’d been the country’s head and only coroner. He was the first to confess to his lack of qualifications and his absence of enthusiasm for the job.

The first month of his on-the-job training had been ridiculous. The only Lao doctor with a background in performing autopsies had crossed the river, allegedly in a rubber inner tube, long before Siri’s arrival. So, apart from Mr. Geung, who had acquired a massive but well-concealed body of information as that doctor’s assistant, there was nobody to teach Siri how to do his new job.

So, once he’d agreed to postpone his retirement, he set about learning his trade from a couple of slightly charred French textbooks. He brought an old music stand from the abandoned American school and used it to hold the books open while he cut and sliced away at his first cases. With one eye on the music stand, he performed like a concert coroner playing away on the innards of the corpses. “Turn,” he would say, and Dtui turned the page. He worked through the numbers as recommended by French pathologists of 1948.

He’d performed a good deal of battlefield surgery over the years, but maintenance of the living was a very different science to the investigation of the departed. There were procedures that needed to be followed, observations that needed to be made. He hadn’t expected, at seventy-two, to be learning a new career. When he had arrived in Vientiane for the first time with the victorious Pathet Lao on November 23, 1975, there had been something far more pleasurable on his mind.

After the landmark party conference of December 5th, the mood had been higher than a rocket. The celebrations were awash in vat after vat of freshly made Lao rice spirits. Cheeks were bruised from manly kisses.

The crown prince, somber from suit to countenance, had read aloud his father’s notice of abdication and, naturally, declined an invitation to join the festivities. The Pathet Lao, after decades of cave-based insurgency, had become the rulers of Laos. The kingdom was now a republic. It was a dream many of the old soldiers, in their heart of hearts, had believed would never come true.

In the spirit of jungle fighters, they moved the trestle tables out of the banquet room and put down straw mats. There they sat in circles relishing their victory. Food and drink were replenished throughout the evening by pretty young cadres in thick lipstick and green uniforms.

Siri figured he’d probably spent more of his life cross-legged on the ground than he had in chairs. He, too, was in a buoyant mood that day, if not for the same reasons as his comrades. He would have returned to his guest house and slept the sleep of the victors if it hadn’t been for Senior Comrade Kham.

The tall, gaunt senior party member took advantage of a vacant spot in the circle beside Siri and sat himself down.

“So, Comrade Siri, we’ve actually done it.”

“So it would seem.” Siri was unused to rice whisky in such volume, and he wasn’t completely in control of his mouth or the tongue inside it. “But I have the feeling we’re here to celebrate the end of something rather than the beginning.”

“Marx tells us that all beginnings are difficult.”

“Nothing you or Marx have ever known could prepare you for the problems you’ve got coming. But, hell, Kham, you certainly shut the doubters up.” He raised his glass and chinked it against Kham’s, but quaffed alone. The comrade’s eyes were couched deep in their sockets, like snakes looking out at the world.

“You say ‘you’ as if you don’t plan to be helping us with our problems.”

Siri laughed. “Comrade Kham, I’m almost as old as the century. I’m tired. I think I’ve earned my small garden and my slow coffee mornings, afternoons of reading for pleasure, and early nights with a sweet cognac to ease me into sleep. “Kham raised his glass to the Prime Minister who sat red-faced and blissfully happy in a far circle. They both drained their glasses and called for another.

“That’s odd. As I recall, you don’t have any family living. How exactly were you planning to support this decadent lifestyle?”

“I assumed that forty-six years of membership of the party would entitle me…”

“To a pension?” Kham laughed rudely.

“Why not?”

Siri always believed, always assumed, that if ever the struggle was won, he would retire. It had been his dream on damp nights in the forests of the north. It was his prayer over the body of every young boy or girl he’d failed to pull back from death. He’d believed for so long that it would happen, he took it for granted that everyone else knew it too.

Kham continued to ridicule his plan. “My old friend, I would have expected you to know better after forty-six years. Socialism means contributing for as long as you still have something to give. When you start to forget where your mouth is and dribble egg down your shirt, when you need to pack towels into your underpants to keep yourself dry, that’s when the State will show its gratitude. Communism looks after its infirm.

“But look at you. You’re still in sparkling health. You have a sharp mind. ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ How selfish it would be to deny your services to the country you’ve striven to free from tyranny.”

Siri looked across to the high circle. The President, a reformed member of the royal family, had a sweet, mascara’d soldier on either side of him and had begun to sing them a revolutionary Vietnamese song. He became the focus of attention and conversations hushed around the room. The song finished half way through the second verse when he forgot the words and the comrades erupted into cheers and applause. A small orchestra of bamboo and wood instruments started up on the stage and the conversations continued in a more dignified manner. Siri hadn’t yet been able to shed his disappointment.

He waited for Kham to finish a heated conversation to his right and engaged him with more force than the man was used to.

“I take it my situation has already been discussed by the politburo.”

“It has. You’ve impressed us all with your quiet dedication over the years.”

“Quiet,” Siri took to mean “passive.” Over the past ten years, he’d ceased to display the revolutionary passion expected of him and had been shunted off to Party Guest House Number Three, away from all the policy-making and decision-taking in Sam Neua. There he tended to damaged cadres returning from the battlefields and lost touch with the zealous comrades and their politics.

Kham eased his haunches against Siri’s and put his arm around him. The doctor was himself a very tactile character but this gesture, in this situation, he considered disrespectful.

“We have allotted you a role of great responsibility.”

The words left Kham as a reward but hit Siri like a splintery wooden club across the face. He needed responsibility like he needed another head.

“Why?”

“Because you are the best man we have for the job.”

“I’ve never been the best man for any job, ever.”

“Don’t be so modest. You’re an experienced surgeon. You have an inquisitive mind and you don’t take things at face value. We’ve decided to make you the Republic’s chief police coroner.” He looked into Siri’s green eyes for a hint of pride, but saw only bewilderment. He might as well have told him he was to be the Republic’s new balloon bender or unicyclist.

“I’ve never done an autopsy in my life.”

“Ah. It’s all the same. Putting them together: taking them apart.”

“It certainly is not.”

He didn’t say this with any aggression but Kham was still taken aback to be contradicted so brazenly. The senior party members had become used to a level of respect. Siri, although always calm and soft-spoken, had a habit of telling them when they were wrong. That was another reason for his removal to the jungle.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I wouldn’t even know where to start. Of course I can’t do it. It’s a huge job. What do you think I am?”

Even with the glow of whisky still shining from his snake eyes, Comrade Kham was obviously disturbed by Siri’s lack of gratitude. He tightened his grip around the old man’s shoulders and barked into his ear.

“I think you are a cog in this great revisionist machine which now powers our beloved country. You are a cog just as I am a cog and The President is a cog. Each cog can help our machine run smoothly. But by the same token, one broken cog can jam and stop the works completely. At this important time in our creation, we need all our cogs meshing and coordinated. Don’t let us down. Don’t stop the machine, Siri.”

He gave one last painful squeeze, nodded, and went off to insert himself into another circle. Siri, in a daze, looked around him at the revisionist mechanics. Lubricated by the alcohol, the wheels had already become misshapen. At one point, two wheels had buckled together into a figure-of-eight. There were big important cogs and little insignificant ones, some of whom had gone off to the toilet and not returned. This left large gaps in their wheels. Others were huddled together in small sub-wheels ignoring the big machine altogether.

Siri, suddenly depressed, explained to his wheel that he had to go pee. He staggered in that direction, but walked past the toilet and through the town hall entrance. Guards on either side of the door raised their rifles in salute. He saluted back and yanked his black necktie off. He walked to one of the boy guards and hooked it over the shiny bayonet, where it swung back and forth.

With a grin and thanks, he waved away the drivers of the black second-hand Russian Zil limousines that were waiting to ferry the comrades to their temporary barracks. It was a chilly December morning and there were no stars in the sky, but the way back was a straight line. He walked unsteadily along a deserted Lan Xang Avenue. Ahead of him was the Presidential Palace and a future he didn’t much want. Comrade Kham’s Wife

Even when times were at their hardest in Vientiane, the old stone kiln near the mosque still fired up at three every morning to produce the best bread to be had in the country. Three bare-chested men stoked the wood fire and kneaded the dough into long fingers and laid them out in rows on rusting black metal trays. There was nothing hygienic about it. But there were those who argued it was the dust, soot, sweat, and rust that made Auntie Lah’s baguettes the sweetest in Vientiane. Her three sons pulled the sizzling loaves from the kiln with their hands wrapped in old grey towels and put them directly onto her cart.

At six every morning, Auntie Lah wheeled her sweet-smelling bread to the corner by the black stupa. By seven-thirty she’d usually sold the lot and returned to the shop for a new batch. These she carted to the corner of Sethathirat and Nong Bon streets, where most of the government departments were. By this time, the baguette trolley had become a customized sandwich deli. Government officials on their way to work could order from the menu of “condensed milk, sardine, or salted buffalo meat,” which she lovingly prepared and garnished for them while they waited.

But there was always one sandwich with extras, wrapped in greaseproof paper, waiting for her very special customer to collect every day. Siri never had to order his fancy. He just ate whatever Auntie Lah felt like making for him. It was always different and always delicious. He paid her at the end of each week, and she never asked for more than her standard rate.

When Siri was too busy to come out himself, he sent Dtui, who swore she could feel the old lady’s disappointment even before she crossed the road.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I can. She’s got a crush on you.” At least seven of Siri’s eight pints of blood rushed to his face. Dtui chuckled and handed him his lunch.

“People our age don’t… well, we just don’t.”

“Fall in love?”

“Certainly not.”

“Rot.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Somchai Asanajinda says as long as your heart can still beat for one, it can always beat for two.”

“Then Somchai Asanajinda obviously isn’t a doctor.”

“Didn’t they let you people watch any films up there in the caves? He’s probably the most famous Thai film star there is.”

“Oh yes? How does a country without any famous films get to have its own famous film star?”

“They have famous films. At least they’re famous in Thailand. They make some lovely films.”

“All shoot-’em-up violence and cheap romance.”

“There. I knew you secretly watched them. Somchai’s like this really old person, but he still talks about love and romance.”

“What is he, forty?”

“Over fifty. “

“Goodness. How do they keep them alive over there?”

“And there’s nothing cheap about romance. There isn’t enough money in the world to buy love.”

Siri looked up from his misspelled report. Dtui was standing with her back to him, looking up through the two remaining slats of the window. Although it was hard to judge from her back, she seemed upset. As far as he knew, she’d never been with a man. Her high standards pretty much eliminated her from the market.

The romance she sought wasn’t to be had here in the morgue. It wasn’t to be found in the single room she shared with her sick mother, and probably it wasn’t in Laos at all. Men were two-dimensional creatures with specific three-dimensional tastes.

There had been eras when large torsos were in high fashion, a symbol of wealth and plenty. Physiology went through cycles. But in the twentieth century, malnutrition was а la mode. Dtui with her laundry-bin build was off the scale. There were no suitors queuing at her door. They wouldn’t have to dig deep to find her kindness and humor, but they didn’t even bring a spade.

When his report was redone, Siri took his sandwich, some bananas, and a flask of tea down to the river bank. Comrade Civilai was already sitting there on their log, sawing at his own home-made baguette with a blunt penknife. Siri laughed and sat beside him. Civilai sniffed at the air.

“Hmm. What do I smell here? Rotting pancreas? Gangrenous kidney?”

“If you do, they’re your own, you old fool. I haven’t so much as unbuttoned a cadaverous jacket all morning.”

“Ah, what a life.” Civilai was still hacking at the stale bread. “Is that what the People’s Revolutionary Party pays you for? Sitting around? Flirting with your nurse? Teaching Igor to clap with both hands at the same time? Shit.” A chunk of sandwich sprang off his lap and rolled down the dusty bank. He re-wrapped the rest of his meal in its newspaper and gave chase.

When the rains returned in the new year, the water would rise to just a few meters from their log. But it was now some thirty meters to the river’s edge, and every foot of dry riverbed had been reclaimed as garden allotments. This was good vegetable-growing dirt.

Civilai began the climb back to their perch, rescuing his crust as he came. He had several lettuce leafs in his top pocket. He was dusty and sweating and hard-pressed for breath.

“I don’t know why you don’t just eat it in one lump like normal people,” Siri said.

Civilai grunted back. “Because,” he huffed, “I am a man of breeding.” He blew the red clay from his sandwich. “Because I don’t want to be caught biting chunks off a log of bread like some caveman. And because my mouth isn’t nearly as large as yours.” Having made his point, he nibbled politely at the bread.

Civilai was Siri’s closest friend in the politburo, and that was probably due to the fact that he, too, was a little mad. But whereas Siri was passively-rebellious mad, Civilai was downright-brilliant mad. He was inspired and eccentric. He’d been the architect of most of the Party’s more adventurous ideas.

He was, however, just a little too fast for the plodding socialist system around him. He reminded Siri of a lively dog he’d seen being taken for a walk by a French lady with the gout. The dog ran back and forth panting and drooling, skipping and tugging at the leash, but nothing it did could make that lady walk faster or change direction. Civilai bore more than his fair share of frustration.

He was a bony little man who wouldn’t have looked out of place pedaling a samlor bicycle taxi. His head had dispensed with the need for hair long ago, and he wore large rimmed glasses that made him look like a big-eyed cricket. He had been born two days before Siri, and thus was barely deserving of the title ai, older brother.

“Your mouth could be every bit as big as mine, Ai, if you just used it a little more often.”

“Oh, god. Here he goes again.”

“I’m ill. I don’t think I’ve got long.” He ripped off the end of his baguette with his teeth and spoke through the bread. “I mean, it’s only common sense. When the old papaya tree stops bearing tasty fruit, you plant new shoots. You don’t wait for it to die first. The party sends off six students to Eastern Europe every three months for medical training. All you need is for one, just one, of those to specialize in post-mortem work.”

“I’m not the representative for medical services,” Civilai shot back.

“No, but you’re a big nob. All you have to do is say so, and they’ll do it.” He took a swig of his tea and handed the flask to Civilai. “I don’t want to be cutting up bodies till the day I become one of them. I need this. I need to know when I can expect a replacement. When I can stop. God knows, I could keel over any second. What would you do then?”

“Eat the rest of your sandwich.”

“What’s the point of pretending to be friendly with a politburo member if I can’t expect a little help from time to time?”

“Can’t you just start, you know, making mistakes?”

“What?”

“As long as they’re happy with you, they’ll keep you on. If you started to-I don’t know-confuse body parts, they might see a more urgent need to replace you.”

“Confuse body parts?”

“Yes. Send your judge friend a photograph of a brain and tell him it’s a liver.”

“He wouldn’t know. He’s got a liver where his brain should be.” They laughed.

“I hope you aren’t insulting the judiciary. I could report you for that.”

“I’ve got nothing against the judiciary.” “Good.”

“Just the arse that’s representing it. How was your weekend?”

“Sensational. Spent both days up in Van Viang at a political Seminar. You?”

“Dug a ditch.”

“How was it?”

“Sensational. My block won first prize in the ‘Uplifting Work Songs’ competition.”

“Well done. What did you win?”

“A hoe.”

“Just the one?”

“We get it for a week each, alphabetically. What’s the big news of the month up on the roundabout?”

“Big news? We made it to the top of a world list last week.”

“Lowest crime?”

“Highest inflation.”

“In the world? Wow. We should have a party or something.”

“Then there’s the ongoing puppet scandal.”

“Tell me.”

“The Party ordered the puppets at Xiang Thong temple in Luang Prabang to stop using royal language, and said they had to start calling each other ‘comrade’.”

“Quite right, too. We have to show those puppets who’s pulling the strings.” Civilai hit him with a lettuce leaf. “What happened?”

“Puppets refused.”

“Subversive bastards.”

“The local party members locked them up in their box, and they aren’t allowed out till they succumb.”

“That’ll teach ‘em.”

They stretched out their lunch for as long as possible before walking across to the hospital with their arms locked together like drunks. At the concrete gate posts, Civilai reminded Siri he was off to the south for a week and he should reserve the log for the following Monday. They said their farewells, and Siri turned up the driveway.

Before he’d gone five meters, he saw Geung loping toward him. The morgue assistant put on his brakes barely two centimeters from Siri’s face. He was excited, and excitement tended to back up his words inside his mouth. He opened it to speak, but nothing came out. He turned blue.

Siri took a step back, put his hands on Geung’s shoulders, and massaged them strongly. “Take a few breaths, Mr. Geung. Nothing is important enough to suffocate for.” Geung did as he was told.

“Now, what earth-moving event took place while I was at lunch?”

“Comrade Kha… Kha… Kha…”

“Kham?”

“Comrade Kham’s…”

“Is here?”

“…’s wife.”

“His wife is here.” Geung was delighted communication had taken place. He snorted, clapped his palms together, and stamped a foot on the ground. Two country bumpkins were walking past. They stopped to watch Geung’s little display. Lao country folk were never too embarrassed to embarrass someone else. One of them turned to the other and said loudly, “A moron.”

Geung turned to them sharply. “It takes one to… to know one.”

Siri was as pleased as the visitors were stunned. He laughed at them, put his arm around Geung, and led him off. “Good for you, Mr. Geung. Who taught you to speak to rude people like that?”

Geung laughed. “You.”

They walked on past the administration building with Geung apparently deep in thought. At last he spoke. “But, really I am a… a moron.”

Siri stopped and turned to him. “Mr. Geung. When are you going to believe me? You aren’t. Your dad was wrong. He didn’t understand. What have I told you?”

“I have a… a…”

“A condition.”

“Called Down Syndrome.” He recited the rest from one of the endless lists that were stored somewhere in his mind. “In some aspects I am slower than other people, but in others I am superior.” They walked on.

“That’s right, and one of the aspects you’re superior in is remembering things, things you learned a long time ago. In remembering things, you are even superior to me.”

Geung grunted with pleasure. “Yes.”

“Yes. And another thing you’re superior in, is ice water.”

“Yes, I am.” Since they’d been banned by the director from keeping personal refreshments in the morgue freezer, the nearest refrigerator was in the staff canteen. Geung enjoyed going there to fetch glasses of water for guests, because the girls flirted with him.

“Is Comrade Kham’s wife here by herself?”

“Yes.”

“Then do you think you could bring her just one glass of ice water? It’s a hot day.”

“I can do that.”

He loped off toward the canteen, and Siri slowed down. He wanted to second-guess Mrs. Nitnoy’s purpose for coming here. Her visits invariably spelled trouble, although he couldn’t recall doing anything wrong of late. She was a strong, loud woman with a large, menacing chest and hips that rolled at you like tank treads. She was a senior cadre at the Women’s Union and carried as much weight politically as she did structurally. Above all else, she was a stickler for rules.

“It has to be the shoes,” he thought. Judge Haeng had reported his disobedience, and he’d called in the big gun. She was here to force his feet into sweaty vinyl shoes that would leave him crippled. She’d be sitting at his desk watching the clock to see how late he was getting back from lunch. She’d be superficially jolly and shake his hand and ask after his health, and then humiliate him.

He was feeling sick to his stomach when he walked under the MORGUE sign. He stood at the door to his office and counted to three before confidently striding in. Dtui was alone at her desk reading something she hurriedly stuffed into a drawer.

“Mrs. Nitnoy?”

“In the freezer.”

His face went blank and his mind followed. “Wha-?”

“They brought her in just after you left for lunch.”

“What happened to her?” He sat heavily on his squeaky chair.

“She died.”

“Well, I’d hope so if she’s in the freezer. What did she die of?”

She looked up at him and, predictably, smiled. “I’m a nurse. You’re a coroner. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to tell us?”

“Could you perhaps give me a start? Who brought her in? What did they say?”

“Two drivers from the Women’s Union. They said she was sitting having lunch, dribbled a little bit, and keeled over. They checked her pulse and she was dead. The Union doctor told them to bring her here as it was a… what do you call it? It was an unnatural death.”

Siri was disturbed to find that his first feeling wasn’t of compassion for the poor woman, but of relief that he didn’t have to wear vinyl shoes. His second feeling was anxiety. This, after ten months, would be his first high-profile case. A lot of senior party people would be looking over his shoulder. He pondered the possible consequences.

“Does Comrade Kham know?”

“He’s in Xiang Khouang. They phoned him. He said go ahead with the autopsy. He’s flying back this evening.”

“I suppose we should get on with it, then.” He stood, took a deep breath, and walked through to the examination room. Mr. Geung was already in there, standing in front of the freezer, rocking anxiously, a glass of ice water in one hand, a tissue in the other.

It was about four-thirty by the time all the textbook procedures were completed. She’d been measured, but not weighed because they didn’t have a scale. Earlier in the year, they’d experimented with two bathroom scales. Siri and Geung weighed themselves on each, then held up the corpse between them. Due to some obscure law of physics, the body only ever weighed half of what it should have. So they abandoned weighing altogether.

At one point, Siri leaned over the woman’s face. He called to Geung.

“Mr. Geung. Your nose is better than mine. What do you smell here?”

Geung didn’t need to lean. He’d smelled it already. “Balm.”

“Very good. Let’s get the old girl undressed, shall we?”

“And nuts.”

“What?”

“Balm and nuts. I… I smell nuts.”

Siri didn’t smell the nuts or know what Geung was talking about, but he got Dtui to note it down anyway.

Once Mrs. Nitnoy’s clothes had been inspected and bagged, the body was photographed. The hospital budget allowed one roll of color film per seven bodies, which meant one full-body front, one full-body back, one topical specific to the area of cause. The one or two leftover shots were technically for contentious areas of the anatomy, but often got used up on group photographs of nurses who wanted to send them back to their families in the countryside.

On either side of Mrs. Nitnoy’s formidable chest, Dr. Siri made incisions that came together at the base of her sternum and ran down to her pubic bone. Thus the autopsy began.

Everything he did, he explained very slowly, because Dtui had to write it all down in the notebook, and she didn’t take shorthand.

Siri used the old bone cutters to get through her rib cage and, one by one, he described, weighed, and labeled the organs, and Dtui jotted down irregularities in her book. Siri then used a fine scalpel to define the scalp, which he pulled forward over poor Mrs. Nitnoy’s face. While he began a more detailed inspection of the organs at the examination bench, Mr. Geung set about the cranium.

Although a requisition was in for an electric saw and the hospital board was considering it, in the meantime they had no choice but to use a hacksaw. It was the department’s good fortune that sawing was one of Mr. Geung’s superior skills. With his tongue poking from the corner of his mouth, he painstakingly and expertly cut deep enough to penetrate the skull, but not so deep as to damage the brain. It was a skill Siri had been unable to master.

The morgue at the end of 1976 was hardly better equipped than the meatworks behind the morning market. For his own butchery, Siri had blunt saws and knives, a bone cutter, and drills inherited from the French. He had his personal collection of more delicate scalpels and other instruments. There were one or two gauges and drips and pipettes and the like, but there was no laboratory. The closest was forty kilometers away, across the border in Udon Thani, and the border was closed to the dreaded communist hordes.

There was an old microscope Siri had requisitioned from the stores at Dong Dok pedagogical institute. If they ever reopened the science department, it would likely be missed. Even though the microscope was an ancient relic of bygone biologists and should have been in a museum, it still magnified beautifully. It was just that the slide photographs in his old textbooks were so blurred, he couldn’t always tell what he was looking for.

Most of the results from Siri’s morgue relied on archaic color tests: combinations of chemicals or litmus samples. These were more suitable for telling what wasn’t, rather than what was. Assuming the necessary chemicals were available at Lycйe Vientiane’s chemistry department, Siri could usually eliminate fifty possible causes of death, but still be left with a hundred and fifty others.

So it was hardly surprising, when four-thirty came around, that he hadn’t the foggiest idea what had killed Mrs. Nitnoy. He could give a list as long as your distal tibia of things that hadn’t. She hadn’t been hit by a train (as there were none in Laos). She hadn’t been shot, stabbed, suffocated, or had her limbs severed by an army launch. But as she’d been in a crowded room when she died, these were no great discoveries.

Some witnesses said she’d choked on her food, but the absence of any in her esophagus and the abruptness of her death said otherwise. Without a lab, it was next to impossible to check for poison unless you knew which it was, and as the lady had been eating from a communal table it was quite unlikely she alone would have died.

In the absence of Judge Haeng and his helpful advice, Siri had taken particular pains to establish that she hadn’t died from a heart attack. There was no evidence of an occlusion or thrombosis.

He’d read about forensic scientists around the world who reveled in mysteries such as these. He wasn’t yet one of them.

Just as Dtui and Geung were leaving for the hospital gardens to do their hour of vegetable tending, the clerk from the director’s office came rushing in to tell them that Comrade Kham would be arriving at Wattay Airport at six and they were to wait. Siri told his co-workers he’d stay behind himself and that they should go.

He sat at his desk looking through Dtui’s notes. She wrote so small, he considered using the microscope to read them. Instead, he spent the next hour pumping his reading spectacles back and forth in front of his eyes trying to focus on the words.

This ultimately gave him a headache and he ended up writing the second half of his report from memory.

It was nine before Senior Comrade Kham turned up, and there was whisky on his breath. His mouth was the only indication of sadness on his face, and it seemed to Siri he was straining to keep a smile inverted.

“I’m so sorry about your loss, Comrade.”

“Where is she?”

“In the freezer.” Siri stood and gestured for the man to follow him to the examination room.

“Where are you going?”

“I thought you’d want to see the body.”

“Heavens no. She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Absolutely.”

Kham walked past him and sat at Siri’s desk, which forced Siri to sit at Dtui’s. The Party man thumbed idly through the papers in front of him. “Have you… er, cut her open?”

“Mm-hm.”

“I’m sorry. You could have made better use of your time. I know what it was that killed her.”

“You do? Well, thank God for that. I have no idea.”

“I’ve been warning the silly woman for years it’d kill her. But I suppose if you’re addicted, you don’t listen to common sense, eh, Siri?”

“What exactly was she addicted to?” He hadn’t found any puncture marks on her arms and her liver was pretty as a picture. “Lahp.”

“Lahp? Damn.” It should have been so obvious, it was embarrassing. As a doctor in the jungle, he’d seen countless deaths as a result of lahp or pa daek or any of a number of other raw meat or fish concoctions the farmers ate with reckless abandon.

Raw flesh works as a healthful meal only if it’s fresh. Bacteria get into it very fast, and the parasites work their way around the body. If you’re lucky you may just end up with abscesses, cramps, and chronic diarrhea for the rest of your life.

But there is a strain of more adventurous parasite that lays eggs in the anterior chamber of the eye. From there it either migrates through the retina, or burrows its way into the brain. One minute you’re feeling fine and showing no symptoms; the next, you’re on a table at the morgue. Siri noticed the comrade was still talking.

“… eating pork lahp since she was a girl. Loved the stuff. It gave her no end of trouble with her guts, but she swore the body eventually built up an immunity to the germs. I detest the stuff, but she couldn’t get enough. All our friends could tell you.

“I stopped off at the police department on my way here and told them all about it. There won’t be anyone filing an unnatural death certificate for this case.”

Siri was still shaking his head. “It was silly of me not to think of it. I didn’t imagine a woman like Mrs. Nitnoy eating raw pork.”

“Why not? She was just a country girl. You could dress her up but you’d never get the stink of buffalo out of her skin.” Siri couldn’t really understand why Kham was talking about his wife like this. In generosity he put it down to shock.

“Well, in that case, I’ll just do one or two last checks, finish the report, and-”

“Oh, I think you can probably finish the report without disturbing her again. We want to get her cremated as soon as possible. Her family and friends are anxious to give her the last rites. They’re waiting for her at the temple.”

“But I need to…”

“Siri, my old friend.” Kham stood and came over to sit on Dtui’s desk, looking down at the doctor. “As a medical man, you’re a scientist. But even a man of science needs to show sensitivity to culture and religion. Don’t you see?”

This was good, coming from a member of the committee that had removed Buddhism as a state religion and banned the giving of alms to monks.

“I-”

“She’s suffered enough indignities for one day. Let her rest in peace, eh?”

“Comrade Kham, I didn’t write the law. I can’t issue a death certificate until I’ve confirmed it was parasites that finished her off.”

Kham stood and smiled warmly. “I understand that. Of course I do. What kind of a politburo member would I be if I attempted to ignore the regulations?” He walked to the doorway and stood in the frame. “That’s why I’ve decided to have her own surgeon sign the certificate.”

“What?”

“I’m so sorry you were troubled today, Comrade Siri. But as there is no suggestion of foul play, there really was no need for an autopsy. I must say, for a man who hates his job so much, you do it quite meticulously. I’m very impressed.”

He walked out and left Siri sitting alone at Dtui’s desk turning things over in his mind. Kham had known there was to be an autopsy. He’d given the go-ahead over the phone. Now he was saying there was no need. Siri had wasted three hours looking for a cause of death. That time could have been cut in half if he’d known what he was looking for.

He gazed over at his own desk. There was something out of place there. But before he could organize that thought, he was disturbed by a commotion outside. He took one more quick look at his desk before walking out to see what was happening.

He encountered a group of men who were wheeling a hospital trolley that carried a basic but oversized wooden coffin. Kham walked behind them in the shadows.

“You’re taking her right this minute?”

The men pushed the coffin past him and into the examination room. Kham followed as far as the alcove. It was dark there.

“The family are all waiting.”

Siri looked at the tall man and was overwhelmingly conscious of a dark image some three meters behind him. For some unknown reason it filled him with dread. It wasn’t clear, and there wasn’t enough light to distinguish features, but its shape reminded him exactly-exactly of Mrs. Nitnoy.

He recalled the longboat man he’d seen in the semiconsciousness of morning. That had been frightening enough. But then he had had sleep as an excuse. Here he was wide awake. This was no dream. He was seeing the outline of a woman who lay dead in the freezer in the far room. She was standing, shaking. She tensed. She readied herself and charged at the comrade’s back with all the ferocity of a bull intent on goring him.

She ran at him with her full force, and if she’d been real she would certainly have knocked him off his feet. For a brief second the light from the examination room caught her face. Siri had no doubt it was her, nor did he doubt her look of pure hate. But when her body met her husband’s, she vanished.

Comrade Kham shuddered.

“How do you stand this building? The drafts give me goose bumps.” He turned to the space behind him at which Siri was still staring. “That the freezer in there?”

Siri’s old heart was galloping. He couldn’t speak. The best he could manage was to stumble past Kham into the examination room where the pallbearers were waiting patiently. He went to the freezer and with an unsteady hand pulled down the lever that unfastened the door. It opened slowly.

She was still there, still just as dead as she’d been at lunchtime. Siri hadn’t really believed he’d find her there. He reached into the freezer and trembled as he pulled back the pale blue sheet that covered the head. The face lay slack across the skull. It didn’t wink or give any signs it had been out haunting.

Siri tucked the sheet under Mrs. Nitnoy’s body like a shroud to protect her from the rough hands and eyes of the men who had come for her. He pulled out the wheeled platform, stood back and allowed them to take her. Her big feet stuck out like flippers. The men lifted her more gently than they seemed capable of, and lowered her into her box.

“She is all… back together, is she?” Kham asked. “We don’t want bits of her dropping off on the way home, do we, boys?” The men laughed nervously, more because of who he was than because they saw any humor in what he said. If his insensitivity was to be put down to shock, he must have been deeply disturbed by his wife’s death.

But Siri no longer believed this. He looked at Kham, looked directly into his eyes, and the senior comrade turned away, with a hint of embarrassment and something more. Siri didn’t speak again. Kham walked outside.

The laborers maintained a respectful verbal silence and tacked the lid on the coffin as quietly as their hammers would allow. They struggled to wheel the comrade’s wife back through the door. Due to the extra weight, the wheels yanked the trolley to the right and it crashed into the door frame. The bearers reversed once, but the trolley continued to swerve to the right. It refused to be wheeled out to the yard.

With no small effort, the men were forced to lift the cart and its cargo and carry it through the doorway. Comrade Kham was waiting for them outside, a cheap, fast-burning cigarette between his lips. He had nothing to say either. He walked beside the trolley, frustrated by its zigzag trajectory, and disappeared with it around the end of the building.

Siri stood below the MORGUE sign, his head tilted like a dog listening. But this old dog was paying attention to the debate going on inside his head. He took deep breaths to calm his nerves, but his pulse was still racing.

Half his mind told him to walk away, go home, leave all the doors open, the lights on. Just get out of there and never come back. But the saner half, the scientist half, told him not to be ridiculous. He turned and walked back through the small vestibule and to the examination room.

It was lighted by a flickering fluorescent tube. He stood beneath it in the center of the room and listened. He could make out the moths bouncing against the mosquito netting at the window, and the buzz of the light above. He could hear distant muffled conversations from the hospital and the crowing of a cock rehearsing. But that was all he heard.

A cockroach scurried by his feet and across to the storeroom. There weren’t enough disinfectants on the planet to keep a hospital free of roaches in Southeast Asia. Dtui and Geung mopped and scrubbed four times a day and put down poison and sticky traps, but creatures who had survived the freezing of the earth and the meteor were smart enough to survive Siri’s morgue.

He followed the creature into the storeroom and switched on the light. A dozen accomplices joined the roach in scurrying for gaps and shadows. Everything in the room was double wrapped or trapped in screwtop jam jars so the vermin had no hope of feasting on the samples that lined the shelves. But the aroma of death pervaded the place and to a cockroach, that was like the scent of jasmine on a warm evening.

The shelves were set out in library rows with only enough space to pass between them sideways. He inserted himself between rows three and four and edged down to the specimen jars. Just above his head, Mrs. Nitnoy’s brain hung in a noose of cotton in its own small pond of formalin. The cotton prevented it from becoming misshapen against the bottom of the jar. By the next morning, it still wouldn’t be set hard enough to dissect. But perhaps in a few days the comrade’s wife would have something to tell them after all.

When Mr. Geung arrived at the morgue on Tuesday morning, Dr. Siri was already at the workbench. The specimen jar was in front of him, empty, and he was about to slice into Mrs. Nitnoy’s brain.

“Hel… hello, Dr. Comrade.”

Siri looked up. “Good morning Mr. Geung.”

Geung stood unsteady, staring. “You’re here.”

“I know I am.” Siri understood the problem. Geung was always the first to arrive. He’d never walked in to find the doctor at work this early, and it threw him out of kilter. He needed order and consistency. Despite the illogic of it, Siri asked, as usual, “Any customers today, Mr. Geung?”

Geung laughed and clapped. “No customers today, Doctor.” Reoriented, he put his rice basket on his desk and began the morning clean. Siri stooped back to his work.

“Well! Did you lock yourself in the morgue last night?” Dtui was at the door smiling at him.

“It isn’t unknown for me to be here early, nurse.”

“No. It’s not unknown for snow to fall in Vietnam either. But it still makes the front page of the newspaper.” She noticed the freezer door open. “She out jogging?”

Siri laughed. “If I’d known you were so funny in the morning, I’d have come early every day. Her husband took her home last night.”

“How romantic.”

Dtui also went to the office to deposit her lunch on her desk. She bumped into Geung in the doorway.

“‘Good morning, handsome man,’ ” he prompted. “Good morning, handsome man,” she said. “Good morning, beautiful woman. Joke?” “What has two wheels and eats people?”

“Don’t know.”

“A lion on a bicycle.” Geung laughed so enthusiastically, she found herself joining in. Siri in the next room got caught up in the merriment. He felt a sort of fatherly pride that his staff got along so well together. This was obviously a morning ritual he never got to see. He doubted whether Geung got all Dtui’s jokes, but he knew he’d still be able to recite them verbatim six months later.

He stared at the brain on the glass tray in front of him. He hadn’t given it sufficient time to set properly. It sprawled like a blancmange. But he didn’t want to wait; for his own peace of mind he had to know. He used his longest scalpel and cut carefully through the brain with one neat slash. He repeated this action several more times until the brain sat in slices like a soggy loaf of bread. He gently separated the sections and used a large magnifying glass to inspect each one.

Dtui, with a surgical mask over her face against the dust, was sweeping in the storeroom.

“Dtui, bring me the camera, will you?”

She looked at him with her brow furrowed. “The camera?”

“Yes, please.”

“Well…”

“What’s wrong?”

“There are only three exposures left on the film.”

“That’s enough.”

“Doctor, Sister Bounlan’s wedding party is tonight. I was…”

“I sympathize with her. But this is more important. Believe me.”

Once he’d saved and labeled the samples, Siri announced he’d be going out for a while. He collected a plastic bag full of liquid, and some vials, and left. He didn’t say where he was going.

He walked out of the morgue and past his old crippled motorcycle. It had lain collecting dust and cobwebs in the cycle park for three months. He couldn’t afford the new carburetor it needed. He was about to check to see how much money he had on him for the taxi songtaew fare when he had an idea. He turned back to the morgue and surprised Dtui reading.

“Dtui.”

“Oh, my God. Don’t do that. You scared the life out of me.”

“Then don’t do things you’d be scared to be caught doing. How did you get here today?”

“Eh? Same as every day. On my bicycle.”

“Good. I want to borrow it.”

“What for?”

“What for? What do people usually use bicycles for?”

“You aren’t going to ride my bike.”

“And why not?”

“I’d never be able to forgive myself if you… well, you know.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Look, doctor. You aren’t a young man.”

“Are you suggesting I’m too old to ride a bicycle?”

“No.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“That over the age of seventy, the odds of having a heart attack rise forty percent every year.”

“God, so I’m already at 120 percent. They aren’t good odds.”

“Okay. Maybe I got the figures wrong. But I don’t want my bicycle to be the cause of your death.”

“Dtui. Don’t be ridiculous. I swear I won’t have a heart attack. Just lend me the bike.”

“No.”

“Please.” His green eyes became moist. That always melted her.

“All right. But on two conditions.”

“I’m sure I’ll regret this, but what are they?”

“One, that you ride slowly and stop if you feel tired.”

“Certainly.”

“And two, that you train me to be the new coroner.”

“What?”

“Doctor Siri. There you are begging the Health Department to send someone to train in Eastern Europe and not getting anywhere.”

“No.”

“Whereas here you have a young intelligent nurse, absorbent as blotting paper, enthusiastic as a puppy, resilient as a… a… brick, already in place, eager to be your apprentice.”

“No.”

“And then you could say you have this bright girl who already trained as a coroner and she’s ready to go to further her education in Bulgaria or some such place.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You aren’t the type.”

“Because I’m a girl?”

“Because you read comics and fan magazines.”

“I need stimulation.”

“I can’t believe you’re even asking. You’re a bubblehead. When did you suddenly develop an interest in pathology?”

“I’ve always been interested. But you don’t give me a chance to do interesting things. You treat me like a secretary.”

Geung walked in on them with a bucket in one hand and a mop in the other.

“Are you h… having a fight?” He smiled.

Siri grabbed the bike key from Dtui’s desk. “No. We aren’t having a fight. Nurse Dtui is just trying to extort three years of free education and a tour of Europe out of me in return for twenty minutes on her bicycle. That’s fair, don’t you think?”

Dtui stormed out the door. “Take the damn bike.”

Considerably more than twenty minutes later, Siri found himself in front of a small house overlooking the grand yellow stupa. He hadn’t ridden a bicycle for thirty years. He should have got off and rested half way up Route That Luang when the air went out of him and his legs began to wobble. But he wanted to show Dtui just how resilient the over seventies could be.

“Hello, Uncle.” Teacher Oum stood by the open door and looked at the wheezing old doctor, wondering why he wasn’t speaking. She didn’t really know what to do to help him get his breath, so she did nothing. She was a scientist, not a nurse.

Oum was a prettily oval teacher at Lycйe Vientiane. She was particularly attractive to a man like Siri, who found her worth almost killing himself for, for two reasons. First, she was the last surviving teacher of practical chemistry in the country. Siri was desperate for chemicals, and she had them. If you have the key, the color resulting from the mix of body fluids and chemicals can answer a lot of questions.

Oum had recently returned from Australia, where she’d obtained a degree in chemical engineering and lived with a sexually active Sydney boy named Gary. This left her with a knowledge of chemical compounds unequaled in Laos, a fluent grasp of the English language, and a one-year-old son with red hair.

English was Siri’s second attraction to her. He had a handbook from Chiang Mai University that unlocked many of the color-test mysteries. If it had been in Thai or French or even Vietnamese, it would have been invaluable to him in his work. But it was, sadly, in English. The poor doctor could boast a vocabulary of some eleven words in the English language, and those he pronounced so horribly nobody knew what he was saying.

So Siri needed Teacher Oum not only for her chemicals, but also to decipher the text that showed how to use them.

“What’s in the bag?”

Siri still had hold of a small plastic bag fastened at the top with rubber bands. His breath and his voice were returning. “Stomach contents.”

“Mmm. Nice. Other people bring soy milk or ice coffee.”

“Sorry.”

“You had breakfast yet?”

“No.”

An hour later, they were at the school. On Tuesdays she didn’t teach till ten. By holding on to his arm while he sat on his bike, she’d been able to drag him alongside her motorcycle. He was a little stressed from trying to keep his wheels from crashing into her, or diving into a pothole.

The science lab was poorly equipped. Oum’s office was a walk-in cupboard with shelves reaching to the ceiling, a tiny workbench, and two stools. The shelves were stacked with hundreds of neat bottles with handwritten labels that boasted they contained all kinds of sulphates and nitrates. Unfortunately, most of the boasts were as empty as the bottles. Generous American donations had long since dried up and the room contained mostly what was available locally. That wasn’t much. Oum had tried to keep a little of everything for old times’ sake, but Siri’s visits had seriously depleted her stocks.

Together, they’d submitted proposals through the Foreign Aid Department, but they knew they were low on the list. There were shortages of everything. So one Sunday they’d sat down and painstakingly copied letters in Russian and German, which they sent off directly to schools and universities in the Soviet bloc. They’d had no response thus far.

Siri produced the dog-eared Chemical Toxicology lab manual from his cloth shoulder bag. It was a stapled brown roneo copy he’d brought back from Chiang Mai. It was only printed on one side, and his detailed notes from Teacher Oum’s translations filled the blank backs.

“What are we looking for today, uncle?”

“Let’s start with cyanide.”

“Ooh. Poison.” She turned to the cyanide page and looked down the various tests. “We haven’t done poison before. You don’t sound like you’re sure.”

“You know me, Oum. I’ve never been that sure of anything. This is another guess. But there are a couple of clues.”

“Tell me.” She was pulling down jars from the shelves and checking to see how much she had left of the various chemicals she needed.

“Well, first of all, she, the victim, died suddenly without displaying any outward signs of distress. Secondly, her insides were particularly bright red. What are you sniffing that for? They don’t spoil, do they?”

“No, I get a little buzz. Want some?”

“No, thanks. Thirdly, my Mr. Geung noticed something strange while we were cutting. He said he smelled nuts.”

“Nuts?”

“He couldn’t really identify what type of nuts, but my guess is almonds. There aren’t that many nuts with distinctive smells.”

“Well, surely you and the nurse would have smelled it.”

“Not necessarily. A lot of people aren’t able to distinguish that particular smell. Some of Mr. Geung’s senses are quite well developed. I’m wondering if someone slipped her a pill somehow. The most common one available is cyanide. If I still had the body, there are other signs I could be looking for.”

“You lost the body?”

“It was reclaimed by the family.”

Oum looked up at him. “That’s a coincidence.”

“What is?”

“I hear Comrade Kham’s wife passed away suddenly yesterday and he went by the morgue and kidnapped the body.”

“Really? Where did you hear a thing like that?”

“This is Vientiane, not Paris.”

She was right, of course. In Laos, the six-degrees-of-separation rule could easily be downgraded to three, often to two. The population of Laos had dwindled to under three million, and Vientiane didn’t contain more than 150,000 of them. The odds of knowing, or knowing of, someone else were pretty good.

“That’s true. In Paris you don’t have rumor and scandal crawling out of the trash, or up from the drains. If Vientiane folk don’t hear anything scandalous for two days, they just make it up to keep the momentum going.”

“So, you’re telling me the stomach contents you brought to me for breakfast have nothing to do with-”

“Oum, my love. I promise if you don’t ask me that question, I won’t lie to you.”

“Then I won’t ask. Let’s get on with it. There are three color tests for cyanide in the magic book. I’ve got the chemicals to do two of them.”

Siri pulled two plastic film containers from his bag.

“I have her urine and blood here too, so we’ll need to do three samples for each test.”

“Yes, sir. You don’t have any other bits of the comrade’s wife in that bag, do you?”

He looked at her with his angriest and least convincing expression.

“Oum. If I’m right about her, the fewer people who know about it the better. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah. I do. Really. Don’t worry.”

It was lunchtime when Siri returned to the morgue. Auntie Lah had already sold out of baguettes and gone home, but Mr. Geung had kindly picked up the coroner’s lunch and left it on his desk. The office was deserted, so Siri went down to the log and sat alone, eating and thinking. He was surprised to hear Geung’s voice very close behind him.

“Dtui. She… she went home.” Siri turned. His lab assistant was leaning over him like a schoolteacher with his finger pointed at Siri’s nose.

“Oh, hello, Mr. Geung. Thanks for getting my-”

“You were very bad.”

“What?”

“You were very very very bad.”

“What did I do?” He felt curiously nervous.

“She isn’t… isn’t… isn’t a bubblehead. She’s a nice girl.”

“It was very bad to say th… th… those things to her.”

Siri thought back to what he’d said. It hadn’t occurred to him anything he said could offend her. He didn’t think she was offendable. “Did you say she’d gone home?”

“Yes.”

“But she never goes home for lunch. And I had her bicycle.”

“She’s gone home because she’s sad. You made her sad.”

But Geung was finished. He turned and walked back to the hospital.

“Mr. Geung?”

He didn’t look back.

Siri had never been to Dtui’s place. It was tucked behind the national stadium in a row of shanties that housed people who’d come down from the north to help rebuild the country. The huts were supposed to be temporary, but no one had yet been rehoused after almost a year. The senior cadres had priority for the new housing that was being built out in the suburbs. The little cogs would have to wait.

As he had no numbers or names to go by, it took him a while to find Dtui’s shed. It was latticed banana leaf with gaps at the corners and between the sheets. Lao workmen had a knack for making the temporary look temporary. There was a shared bathroom at one end of the row.

On the floor in the center of the hut’s only room, there were two unrolled mattresses with a large woman on each. Dtui was one of them. She was reading a Thai magazine.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

Dtui and her mother looked up in surprise to see the doctor at the door, but it was only Dtui who sprang to her feet. She appeared to be devastated that Siri was seeing the conditions she lived in. She didn’t say anything at first, perhaps waiting for her boss to complain about her absence from work. But he didn’t speak.

“Ma, this is Doctor Siri.”

The old lady was lethargic and slow to focus on him. She obviously couldn’t move from where she lay. “Good health, Doctor. Sorry I can’t get up.”

“Ma’s got cirrhosis. I told you about it.”

“Yes. Good health, Mrs. Vongheuan.” It seemed peculiar to be wishing good health to a woman who was clearly not healthy at all. But such was the national greeting. The woman had been ill for years from a liver fluke she had picked up in the north.

Dtui took hold of the doctor’s arm and led him outside. Knickerless toddlers ran amok and rolled in the dust. A dog growled instinctively when Siri passed it. Dtui led him up toward the stadium wall where there were no neighbors to overhear. Siri had an apology prepared, but she beat him to it.

“I’m sorry, Doc. I was up all night with Ma. I didn’t mean to lose it. I was…”

“I just came by to ask you if you’d do me the honor of being my apprentice at the morgue.”

“Ah, no. You’re just saying that because I went nutty. You don’t have to do-”

“I’m serious. I was thinking about it just before I rode your bicycle into the wall of the Presidential Palace.”

“You…?”

“I think you need to get those brakes looked at.”

“I never go fast enough to need brakes. Did you really…?”

“It’s downhill all the way from That Luang, and it didn’t occur to me to check the brakes before I set off. I shot through the center of the Anusawari Arch, and I was traveling at about 120 kilometers an hour by the time I passed the post office. It was a bit of a blur.”

“Doctor.”

“I confess I didn’t actually crash into the palace. But that was only thanks to the poor man selling brooms and brushes beside the road. I decided he’d be much softer than the wall. We both came out of it quite well: I didn’t break anything, and he sold three brooms to the morgue.” “And the bike?”

“The Chinese aren’t very good at making shoes, but they put together bicycles you couldn’t destroy with mortar fire. So will you?”

“Will I what?”

“Be my apprentice.”

“You’re damn right I will.”

“Good. Before I leave, I may as well take a look at your mother.”

“You fancy her?”

“The cirrhosis, girl. The cirrhosis.”

On Wednesday, Siri was the first one at work again. As if Geung weren’t confused enough already, he walked out back to the furnace to find his boss on his hands and knees in the concrete trough, putting dead cockroaches into ajar.

“Morning, Mr. Geung. Any new customers today?”

“No new customers today, Dr. Comrade.” Geung laughed but stood watching Siri. “That… that’s dirty. You shouldn’t play there.”

“Mr. Geung, you’re quite right. This is where you put the bags before they get thrown in the furnace, right?”

“Yes.”

“The janitor doesn’t seem to be around. Do you know if he burned our waste yesterday?”

“He must. He must. It’s the rules. He must destroy all hospital waste no more than twelve hours from when it arrives. He must.”

“Twelve hours. So what we threw out on Monday evening would have been sitting here overnight?

“Yes.”

“Good. Please put our little friends here in the refrigerator while I go and get cleaned up.”

“Ha. Little friends.” Geung laughed and ran off inside with the jar.

Siri showered, changed, and again left at about ten without telling them where he was going.

He crossed the road in front of the hospital and picked up his lunch from Auntie Lah. Following Dtui’s comments on Monday, he took the trouble to notice a blush in the lady’s cheeks. For a second, he believed there may have been some truth in it. They exchanged polite conversation for a few minutes, and then he said “Good health” and walked on.

“The hospital’s that way, brother Siri,” she reminded him.

“I’m playing hooky. Don’t tell the director.”

“You should play hooky with me sometime.”

He laughed.

She laughed.

There was something.

He walked along the river and turned onto one of the small dirt lanes. The Lao Women’s Union was housed in a two-storey building whose frontage was overgrown with flowering shrubs. They’d been tended to look natural but were kept under total control. The Union sign had been freshly repainted. A slight dribble of white descended from one letter.

He walked into a bustling foyer where everyone seemed to have urgent business, and he wasn’t part of it. He had to throw himself in front of one fast-moving girl to ask his question.

“Do you know where I can find Dr. Pornsawan?” She was flustered. “Oh, she’s around somewhere. Do you have an appointment?”

“No. Do I need one?”

“You should have phoned. It’s chaotic here today. The wife of the president of Mongolia’s coming.”

Siri felt like he’d come to a strange foreign land. So much speed. So much activity. Appointments. Telephones. He didn’t feel like he was in Laos at all. His wasn’t an appointment culture: you’d turn up; you’d see if the person was there; you’d sit and wait for an hour if he was, go home if he wasn’t.

Who were they, these women of the Union with their alien ideas? And why was there so much excitement about the wife of the president of Mongolia?

After flustering two more busy women, he finally found Dr. Pornsawan in the canteen putting up decorations hand-made from plastic drinking straws. There was a huge banner behind the stage that said WELCOME TO OUR FRIENDS FROM MONGOLIA in Lao and French, two languages the president’s wife probably couldn’t read.

Pornsawan was less flustered and more accommodating than her sisters. She’d heard of the famous Dr. Siri and had some unaccountable professional respect for him. But she still forced him to tie cotton threads to blue and red drinking straws while they spoke. She was a slender lady in her thirties, and she had no eyebrows. She’d briefly entered a nunnery where they had been shaved off and hadn’t ever grown back. She was so devoid of vanity, she didn’t bother to have new ones tattooed or even to draw them on. It left her with a very clean look.

“You’re here about Mrs. Nitnoy.”

“Yes. You were at the table with her when she died?”

“Directly opposite.”

“And she ate from communal plates?”

“Ah. Now, this is intriguing.”

“What is?”

“You’ve done the autopsy and you still think she was poisoned.”

Siri’s cheeks become a little more flushed than normal. “I don’t have any idea.”

“Of course not. Sorry.” She smiled at the straws in her hand. “She ate the same food as all of us, and we’d already started when she got here. She took a few mouthfuls of sticky rice, dipped in chili and fish sauce. At about the second or third mouthful, before she could swallow it, her eyes seemed to cloud over. She spat out the rice, dribbled slightly, and collapsed onto the table.

“I tried to resuscitate her, but I believe she died very suddenly. She didn’t choke, didn’t turn blue. She just died. I tried to massage her heart, gave her mouth-to-mouth, but I didn’t feel there was much hope.”

“Do you know anything about gnathostomiasis?”

“Yes. I’ve lost enough patients over the years to parasites. But that’s not what killed Mrs. Nitnoy.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a very painful death. It comes upon you suddenly, but the last few minutes are agony. Mrs. Nitnoy was perfectly normal until a few seconds before she died.”

“You’re quite right. You seem to have noticed a lot of detail.”

“I was talking to her all the time.”

“Do you know if she had a headache?”

“Why, yes. It’s strange you should ask. That’s what we were talking about. She had a horrible hangover. Mrs. Nitnoy liked her beer, and there had been a reception the night before. She’d had a little bit too much and woke up with a splitting headache. If it hadn’t been for the preparations for today’s visit, she’d probably have taken the day off.”

“Did she take anything for it?”

“She had a bottle of painkillers.”

“Does she have her own desk here?”

“She had her own office, but you won’t find the pills there. She kept them in her handbag.”

“That didn’t come to the morgue with her.”

A supervisor glided through the room yelling urgent instructions.

“No. It was here, but a serious-looking army officer in dark glasses came by to pick it up during the afternoon.”

Siri raised his eyebrows. She responded in kind, only to a lesser degree. “He said she had some sensitive documents in her bag and he’d been instructed to come and pick it up.”

“By?”

“His superiors. I didn’t get any names.”

“Did he take anything else? Anything from the desk?”

“No. Just the bag.”

“I don’t suppose you had a chance to look in that bag?”

“Dr. Siri. What type of woman do you take me for?” She climbed on the chair and hung another chain of decorations. The stage was starting to look like a marquee that had been shredded in a monsoon. “Our design specialist assures us this is all beautiful. Do you think it is?”

“I think it shows a great deal of failed initiative.”

She laughed. “I take it your tact got you into the position you find yourself in today.”

“Very much so, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t be afraid. We need more people with the courage to say what they feel. It’s getting rarer.” She stepped down. “Slippers.”

“What?”

“She carried her slippers around in her bag. The Party insisted she wear black vinyl shoes with heels for public engagements. She hated them. They gave her blisters. So she had these soft slippers she put on whenever she could.” Siri smiled. “What is it?”

“Nothing. What else did she have in there?”

“Now you think I’m a snoop.”

“Snooping’s good for the regime.”

“Really? All right. Little stuff, mainly. Address book. Keys. Smelling salts. Balm. Name cards. That was about all.”

“Did you look at the name cards?”

“Doctor Siri.”

“Sorry. No makeup, lipstick?”

“Frowned upon, and quite expensive now.”

“So, apart from the address book, there wasn’t really anything in there that could be called ‘sensitive papers’?”

“No.”

“And it was all carried off by the serious officer.”

“… Yes.” It was neither a firm nor an automatic “yes.”

“Dr. Pornsawan?”

“Almost all. “

“Apart from?”

“Well, the reason I know what was in her bag was because I went into it to borrow her headache pills. One or two of the ladies were traumatized by what happened to Comrade Nitnoy.”

“And you didn’t put them back.”

“Medicines are hard to come by. And in all the rush…”

“But the ladies you gave the pills to didn’t suddenly collapse on the table, so…”

“So we may eliminate the pills as potential causes of death.”

“I’d like to take what’s left, if you don’t mind. There may have been some allergic reaction. Not that I have the resources to find out what that might have been.”

“I’ll go and get them. Can I ask you why you thought she might have had a headache?”

“During the autopsy I noticed the smell of Tiger Balm. It was concentrated around her temples. That usually suggests a headache.”

“Excellent. You know, this is all rather exciting. Could you hook this last chain up over the stage? Afraid we haven’t got any balloons.” She ran off and left him to hang the decoration.

While he was up on the rickety chair hooking the straws over some convenient nails, he thought about what she’d said. It really was quite exciting, this inquiry. He had to admit he was enjoying the cloak-and-daggery of it all. He was glad to be out of the morgue talking to live people, exceeding his very limited authority. It was the first time since the job began that he could feel his adrenaline pumping.

“There are only three left, I’m afraid.” Puffing and blowing, Dr. Pornsawan held out a small brown bottle. “That probably isn’t a wise choice of chair, the legs aren’t glued.” Siri got down in a hurry, leaving a strand of straws dangling above the podium. But it was too late to do anything about it.

The frenzy at the Lao Women’s Union grew to a riot. Siri and Pornsawan looked to the door where a small army of men in ceremonial uniforms was slowly seeping into the almost-ready dining room. The men took up positions along the walls.

“Oops. Looks like our guest is early. You may have to join us for lunch, Doctor.”

“I’d sooner not. Why all the fuss about the wife of a Mongolian president?”

“They’re giving the LWU a sizable grant to develop education for girls in the provinces.”

Siri wondered what the Mongolians would be getting in return, but didn’t let his cynicism show. He thanked Dr. Pornsawan and headed toward the one set of doors leading into and out of the canteen. In the confused scrum at the doorway, he ran into a small woman whose features had all gathered at the center of her face. She was surrounded by larger people in suits and silks. The small woman, assuming, as he was a man, that he had to be someone important, reached out to shake his hand.

Siri transferred his baguette to his left hand and returned the handshake. She had a good grip for a president’s wife.

She looked beside her at the interpreter and asked him a question. He asked a similar question of the Chinese interpreter beside him, who finally asked the Lao/Chinese interpreter, who asked Siri who he was.

“I’m the official food taster. You can never be too sure.” He bowed politely and walked on. By the time the Chinese whisper had made it back to the President’s wife, he was already out under the warm mid-day sun. The Boatman’s Requiem

As he was quite a way from his riverside log, and hungry, he walked down to the nearest point on the Mekhong and found a shady spot under a tree where he could eat his baguette in peace. He particularly enjoyed his lunch that day. He was overcome with a peculiar feeling that, as he didn’t feel the way he normally did, he probably didn’t look the same either. He imagined himself to be in disguise.

During his stay in Paris decades before, he’d taken delight in the weekly serializations of one Monsieur Sim in the L’Oeuvre newspaper. They followed the investigations of an inspector of the Paris police force who was able to solve the most complicated of mysteries with the aid of nothing more lethal than a pipe of tobacco.

By the time he got to Vietnam, Siri was more than pleased to learn that Monsieur Sim had restored his name to its full Simenon, and that Inspector Maigret mysteries were now appearing as books. The French in Saigon had shelves of them, and a number found their way north to be read by those communist cadres who’d spent their formative years in France.

Siri had been able to solve most of the mysteries long before the detective had a handle on them-and he didn’t even smoke. Now, below the swaying boughs of the samsa tree, he felt a distinct merging. The coroner and the detective were blending. He liked the way it felt. For a man in his seventies, any stimulation, should it be kind enough to offer itself, had to be grasped in both hands.

He walked back along the river, but when he reached the intersection that would have taken him back to his morgue, he responded not to obligation, but to instinct. He flagged down a songtaew, one of the dwindling number of taxi trucks plying the Vientiane streets. He told the driver where he wanted to get off, and squeezed amid the zoo of villagers already crammed inside. The songtaew followed the river east, away from the town. It was never so full it couldn’t pick up more passengers.

Twenty minutes later, Siri was helped down by a strong girl who held a cockerel under her other arm. He paid his fifty liberation kip to the driver, crossed the road, and stood for a moment in front of the newly christened Mekhong River Patrol, wondering what he was doing there. The MRP, a navy of sorts in a landlocked country, had the near-impossible task of policing the long river border.

The pilots of the hurriedly converted river ferries were army men, trained in two weeks to operate boats that were so noisy you could hear them a mile off. Anyone crossing the river illegally, unless they were stone deaf, could easily hide themselves until the armor-plated craft chugged on by.

Siri was directed out back to the boat captains’ dormitory. There, the night-shift skippers sat playing cards, or stood in circles kicking a rattan ball back and forth. He was in luck. Following an unfortunate accident, the person he sought had been transferred to the night patrol. Siri found Captain Bounheng rocking back and forth on a cane chair, like an old man. He was only in his twenties.

Siri introduced himself and shook the young captain’s hand.

“Do you mind if we take a walk?”

Bounheng was confused but followed Siri out across the dry rice fields. “Is this normal?”

“For a coroner to follow up on cases? Oh, yes. It happens all the time. I spend as much time interviewing as I do looking at dead bodies. It’s all very mundane. Reports. You know.”

Bounheng seemed a little more at ease after that. “He never should have been there.”

“The longboat man?”

“We were docking. He was fishing in an illegal spot.” The captain was deliberately striding ahead of Siri, who was hard pressed to keep up with him.

“I understand. The old fool. These fishermen are an ignorant crowd. Never do what they’re told.” He jogged round in front of the fleeing man. “Can I ask about you?”

“Me?”

“Yes. How long had you been… in control of your boat?” There was a long hesitation. “I mean, this is a new unit. Only just been set up.”

“I understand. So? Months? Weeks?”

“A week.”

“And I imagine it’s really stressful work.” “Stressful?”

“I’d say so. Patrolling against attacks from anti-communists from across the river.”

Bounheng laughed involuntarily. “Dr. Siri, I’d been up-country fighting hand to hand for two years. This is a holiday cruise compared to that. No anti-communist in his right mind’s going to launch an armada across the river in a built-up area. The most stressful thing we ever see is villagers swimming across to Thailand. With the river this low, there are plenty taking their chances.”

“So what you’re saying is that it’s a bit of a slack posting.”

“It’s very peaceful.”

“How fast do you travel?”

“Ten knots. That’s the rule.”

“What a good job. I should apply.” Bounheng laughed again a little nervously.

“But I…”

“What?” the captain asked.

“No, it’s not important. I’ve got enough for my report. It doesn’t matter.” “No. Come on.”

“Well, if you were traveling at ten knots and coming in to land…” “Yes?”

“Why didn’t you have time to stop when you saw the longboat man?”

Bounheng immediately broke eye contact and set off again on his escape across the fields. “Like I said, he shouldn’t have been there.”

“But you’d have had a pilot, watching. Right?”

Bounheng was obviously used to having a wristwatch that had somehow taken leave of him. He looked at the back of his wrist and swore unnecessarily and loudly when he noticed it was missing. “I’ve got to get back. Like you say, you’ve got enough for your report.”

“Of course, I’m sorry to keep you so long. Thanks for your cooperation.”

On the walk back, Bounheng slowed down a little and regained some of his composure. That was until he noticed Siri was no longer beside him. He turned back to see the doctor standing stock-still in the middle of the dead paddy, looking down at the unwatered stubble.

“What is it, Doctor?” He went back to see what Siri was looking at. But the doctor wasn’t actually looking at anything. He was putting together a hypothesis. When he started to chuckle, the captain felt uneasy.

“Doctor?”

Siri gazed up at him, and then looked him directly in the eye.

“All right, son. Here’s my theory. It may just be the foolish imagination of an old man, but hear me out. It seems to me, there’s a lot of smuggling goes on across the river. Most of the cigarettes and liquor we get in Laos come from Thailand.”

“What are you…?”

“Just listen up.” Siri noticed how the remaining friendly color had bleached from Bounheng’s face. He stood with his hands on his waist. “I believe you boat captains are… tempted to turn a blind eye from time to time. Maybe even change your schedule.”

“Are you suggesting…?”

“I’m suggesting for every two hundred crates of whisky you don’t see cross over…” Bounheng turned his back on Siri “… one crate may very well find its way aboard the river patrol boat as a sort of thank-you. I’m suggesting that on the evening the longboat man lost his legs and his life, the crew of your boat and its skipper were pissed as newts. I’m suggesting you were all so drunk, you had not a brass kip of control over your vessel; over the boat you’d only learned to operate a week earlier.”

He saw a slight shudder pass across Bounheng’s young shoulders and walked closer to him. “I’m suggesting the longboat man wasn’t in the wrong place, but that you were. And by the time you realized it, you were so close to the wall of the bank that you had no time to pull up. I’m suggesting Mekhong Whisky killed the old fisherman.”

He turned to see Bounheng’s face. Tears were rolling down his cheeks and his mouth was contorted with pain. Siri stood there, silent and overwhelmed at his own revelations. The adrenaline had sunk to his stomach, and it fluttered there like moths trapped in a jar. It was some minutes before the young man was able to speak. He couldn’t look at Siri. “Which… which one of them told you?”

“Them?”

“The crew.”

“No, son. I haven’t talked to your crew, or to any witnesses.”

Bounheng faced him, his eyes red with tears.

“It was the longboat man himself that told me.”

The captain dropped his head and sobbed as if the weight of the river were crushing his chest. Siri, too embarrassed to merely stand back and witness the man’s suffering, stepped up and put his arms around him. He felt Bounheng’s body throb with grief, and could understand how much the boy had already suffered for his foolishness. There was nothing to be said.

By some miracle of timing and history, he’d avoided man’s justice. But for many years to come, he’d suffer the justice of remorse, the nightmares of guilt. A soldier may kill a thousand of the enemy in battle and not feel a thing. But the death of one innocent man lodges itself in the conscience forever.

When he could stand it no longer, Siri pulled himself away and searched for a pen and paper in his shoulder bag. On the back of an old envelope, he wrote down some information he remembered from his autopsy report. He forced the paper into Bounheng’s hand.

“Boy. This is the name of the fisherman, and his home village. I believe they have a small altar there. It might help you to go there and talk to him.”

Siri walked slowly back across the fields toward the road. Step by step, the significance of what had just happened pulled him down below the surface of common sense. His old heart started beating like a giant catfish caught in a net. Somehow he’d known. Somehow, the longboat man’s visit had told him. But where was the logic in that? What was the scientific explanation?

He felt no gloating, no pride in what he’d just been able to achieve. He was walking a narrow path between fear and excitement, between power and powerlessness, between sanity and… He didn’t want to think about what was happening to him.

Two, then three songtaews went past him on their way back into town. They beeped their hoarse horns begging him to climb in, but he let them go. He sat under a jackfruit tree and went over the meeting in his mind. He went over it, and over it, and over it. But if he’d hoped for an explanation to come to him, he was going to be disappointed.

“Oh. Good to see you. We assumed you’d died of old age.”

Mr. Geung laughed at, and repeated, Dtui’s irreverent comment.

“We, ah… ah… ah… assumed you died of old age.”

It was after three, and Siri had been missing for over five hours. The army sergeant had asked them where he was. The Nam Ngum Dam security chief had asked them where he was, and Judge Haeng, on the telephone, had asked them where he was. But no one could answer. The staff consensus was that he was now in serious shit.

But, here Dr. Siri was, smiling, in the office doorway. There was a cheeky, somewhat youthful expression on his face. He strode in and went to his desk as if everything were normal.

Everything certainly was not.

“Any new customers, Mr. Geung?”

Geung searched for stock answer number two. “We have a guest in room number one.”

It wasn’t the answer Siri was hoping for. He wanted peace. He wanted to go home. He had enough on his mind already without yet another body in the freezer.

Dtui waltzed over to his desk with a bigger grin than usual on her craggy face. “I probably don’t need to tell you how upset Judge Haeng was to find you out of your office during working hours. As your loyal assistant and official trainee, I was planning to lie and tell him you’d just stepped out for a minute. But he already had a couple of witnesses in his office saying you’d been gone most of the day.”

Siri didn’t seem to care. He continued to smile. “What did he want?”

“He’d love it if you could phone him back before nightfall, because he has several questions to ask you about our new guest.”

“Don’t tell me it’s another celebrity.”

“Nobody knows who he is. But he’s certainly got a lot of people interested in him. They all want to know what he died of.”

“Mr. Geung.” Siri looked over, and Geung stopped rocking. “You saw the body?”

“Yes, Dr. Comrade.”

“What’d he die of?”

“Drowned.”

“Excellent. There you have it, Dtui. If Judge Hinge-face calls back, that’s the initial diagnosis. Tell him I’ll be in touch in the morning.”

He started to claw through the papers on his desk as if he were missing something important. Dtui and Geung looked at each other, mystified.

“Have you two moved anything from here in the last couple of days?”

Geung shook his head violently. Dtui looked indignant.

“I wouldn’t dream of touching your desk.”

“Then where’s the…?” He cast his mind back to the day of Mrs. Nitnoy’s autopsy. He’d been working on the report till late, until… That was it. That was the “something different.” On the night Comrade Kham sat at his desk and talked him out of doing any more tests on his wife, the report had been there in front of him. The bastard had stolen it.

“Like a common thief.”

“Who is?” Dtui was looking to defend her honor.

“Not you two. We’ve had a nasty low-life in here ‘borrowing’ reports. Dtui, you still have your notebook?”

“The autopsy book?” “Yes.”

“Yeah. It’s here in the drawer.” She pulled it open and produced the notebook.

“Good girl. I’ll borrow that, if I may, and start a new report on Mrs. Nitnoy.” He walked over and took it from her.

“Do we know what she died of yet?”

“Not quite. But she certainly didn’t die of lahp. And neither of you can mention that outside this room. Got that?” They nodded. “It’s starting to look like somebody wants this case closed in a hurry. We, my children, are no longer common coroners. We are investigators of death. Inspector Siri and his faithful lieutenants. All for one and one for all.” He walked over to the doorway, turned back to his team, clicked the heels of his sandals together, and saluted. He smiled and chuckled his way out the main door and into the carpark. Through the skylight, they could hear him singing the French national anthem until he was finally out of earshot.

Inside, the office was silent. The cockroaches were quiet. For once, Dtui didn’t know what to say. Even Geung, from his other dimension, could recognize the abnormal when he saw it.

“The Comrade Doctor is… is nuts today.” Tran the Elder

With all the excitement, it was a wonder that it was still only Thursday. Siri arrived at work refreshed and packing new energy. Again, he was the first there. He unlocked the building, opened the windows, and sent more cockroaches scurrying for cover.

Before embarking on the great telephone adventure, he went to visit the guest in room one. He wasn’t a pretty sight. The puffy skin had begun to shift, as if it had been removed and replaced in a hurry. It was beginning to develop a waxy brown texture that suggested, without any further investigation, that the body had been in the water for two to three weeks. Siri pulled the cover back completely and noticed a thick tourniquet of plastic twine several layers thick around the left ankle. The skin had been worn completely through from the tightness of it. He made a mental note that the blood had settled at the back of the body and around the legs. If he’d been floating since he died, hypostasis would have been evident at the front of the corpse. But there was none.

He noticed all these things but replaced the sheet and set off to find the expert who understood the magic of telephone technology.

A pretty girl was filing. She turned to see who had come in. “I need to call the Justice Department.”

“The phone’s on the table behind you, Doctor. Just write the number in the book, who spoke to who, and for how long.”

She turned back to the cabinet. Siri stood there uneasily, not yet ready to look at the telephone. She glanced back over her shoulder to see him still in the same position.

“I thought you might do it,” he said quietly.

“Do what?”

“Make the telephone call for me.”

“No. It’s just a regular phone. You don’t need an operator.”

He looked around at the somber black machine and walked tentatively toward it. Its numbers peeked out at him from the portholes of the dial. He studied it for a while and carefully picked up the handset. He held it to his ear and listened to the warm buzz.

“Hello?”

There was no response.

“You have used a telephone before?” She’d deserted her filing and come to stand behind him. It was the moment of truth. He confessed.

“No.”

“Doctor?”

It did seem rather hard to believe that in seventy-two years, Siri hadn’t once handled a phone. But Laos wasn’t a phone culture. There were fewer than nine hundred working telephones in the entire country, and most of those were in government offices. Even during Laos’s dizzy heights of corruption, only the very well-off families had had their own phones.

To a poor student in France, a phone had been out of the question and, besides, there had been nobody to call. But even then he’d had a phobia about the things. So it was hardly surprising, for a man who’d spent most of his life in jungles, that the skill of manipulating the dreaded machine had passed him by.

“I’ve spoken into field walkie-talkies, but there was always a technician there to twirl the handle.” He smiled.

She was obviously a charitable girl, because she became teary-eyed to find herself in the presence of such a disadvantaged elderly doctor. She took the handpiece from him and smiled back. “What’s the number?”

“Number?”

After a while, she found the Department of Justice in the very slim telephone directory and taught him how to steer the dial around the face of the machine. It was all annoyingly uncomplicated in the end.

As he’d hoped, Judge Haeng had just left for court to preside on another divorce case. The man had a file jam-packed with domestic disputes and paternity suits, but nothing that could in seriousness be called a crime. Haeng’s clerk, Manivone, assured Siri that the judge was livid and expected to find the autopsy report on his desk when he came back from court that afternoon.

Siri asked after her new baby and her husband’s pig problem, and slowly grew quite comfortable with the telephone in his hand. The girl virtually had to tear it away from him in case anyone was trying to get through.

So, Siri had achieved two major feats before the day was barely underway: he’d used a telephone virtually by himself, and he’d communicated with the Justice Department without actually having to talk directly to the annoying little man in the flesh. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to compete the trifecta with the autopsy.

Dtui, more enthusiastic than ever, stood with her notepad poised as Siri restated his previous observations. He noticed several other odd indicators on the ill-fitting skin. Most obvious of these were what looked like burn marks around the nipples and genitalia, but nowhere else.

Dtui quite rightly pointed out that the string round the ankle indicated that he’d been tied to something heavy and sunk. But she made one other observation that Siri hadn’t thought of. “Why didn’t they use cord or wire or something?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you’re going to the trouble of weighing the guy down, you shouldn’t use crap string like this. Everyone knows this cheap Vietnamese nylon stuff doesn’t last very long in water. They used to use it to tie up bamboo for scaffolding. Then in the rainy season it would all fall down ‘cause the string rotted.”

“Hmm. Maybe it’s all they had handy. They might have been in a hurry. But that’s a good point. Write it down.” She did so, proudly.

The last note they made, before Siri started to cut, was of the expression on the man’s face. The jaw was locked open and there was a look of horror that none of them had seen before on a corpse. It was unlikely to have happened post-mortem.

Once he was inside the corpse, and they’d recovered from the unpleasant stench, there were one or two more surprises waiting for Siri. With the body so deteriorated, it would have been very difficult to categorically state that drowning was the cause of death. But the opposite wasn’t true. There were ways to show that it wasn’t.

It takes some four minutes to drown in fresh water. In that time, about half the circulating blood is suffused with this intaken liquid. The water, and the algae it contains, will have been pushed into the far recesses of the lungs if the victim was still breathing when he entered the water.

Siri took samples from the stomach, lungs, and arteries, but his first instinct told him that the corpse was already dead when he went into the water. Nothing indicated he’d still been breathing or that his heart had been beating. But Mr. Geung could be forgiven for his assessment of the previous day. All the other signs were there. The man had spent two or three weeks in the water. That was certain.

Secondly…

A man with an extremely loud voice suddenly appeared in the doorway. He had a cloth over his mouth and looked at the team as if he’d caught them being naughty.

“What’s all this bloody stink you’re making in here?”

Siri didn’t look up. “Get out.”

“Not until you stop making this wretched stink. What’s that you’ve got there? A body, is it?”

“Mr. Geung. Could you remove that very rude person from our morgue?”

Geung went at him, but the invader retreated to the alcove before he could do any damage. Still he shouted. “I’m going to report you all to the hospital director I am. Damned stink. It’s not good enough.”

Siri laughed, none the wiser. “Where were we?”

“Secondly…”

“Right. Secondly, there seems to be some anomaly around the chest cavity. There’s livor mortis around the main artery, which suggests heavy internal bleeding.”

“What causes that?”

“No idea. We’ll look it up later.”

He found nothing else. The liver showed the effects of alcohol, but not enough to have killed him. The heart and brain gave nothing away. While Dtui and Geung sewed up, Siri checked the skin samples under the microscope.

“Dtui, do you want to come and take a look at this?” She hurried over to the bench and lowered her eye to the lens. ‘What do you see?”

“Ehhh, green? Little shiny bits?” She moved the slide. “Black? More shiny bits? It’s very pretty. What is it?”

“Well, this is skin from the area around the nipple that looked burned. The green section could have been caused by copper. The shiny bits are probably metal deposits.”

“Which means?”

“I’ll have to do some chemical tests at the lycйe, but I’d say these were electricity burns.”

“Whah?”

“Electric burns to the nipples and testicles. What does that say to you?” “Ouch.”

He laughed. “Can you try something more detective-like?”

She thought about it for a few seconds. “Torture?”

“That’s what it looks like to me. You don’t accidentally electrocute yourself on the nipples and genitalia. I can’t think of any other explanation.”

“So he was tortured, tied to a rock, and thrown into the reservoir. He must have been a popular lad. You think the torture might have killed him?”

“There’s no evidence it was terminal, as far as I can see. I suppose the blood in the chest cavity might be connected, but I doubt it. I’ll spend some time with my textbooks. Do you want to write up the report?”

“Me?”

“Why not? You’ve seen enough. Just make the letters big enough to read this time.”

“You want me to type it?”

“You can type?”

Geung laughed. “She h… h… has skills.”

“So it would appear. Don’t you need a typewriter?”

“It helps. There’s one over in the admin office that they let me practice on.”

Siri shook his head and tutted. “You know? I think it was very wise of me to choose you to become my new apprentice. Anyone know who that was that came in here and yelled at us?”

“No.”

“No.”

The report was typed, spelled correctly, and on Haeng’s desk an hour before he got back from his domestic tinkering. The body was back in the freezer and the morgue was spick and span. Siri promised not to ride into any walls or broom salesmen, and Dtui let him use the bike. He cycled directly to the lycйe.

Teacher Oum was teaching a class, so he sat outside and enjoyed the sounds of Russian, new history, and political ideology being taught by converted French, English, and ancient history teachers in the various rooms around the quad. They read directly from the Department of Education printouts, and the students copied down what they heard. There were no questions, because the teachers probably didn’t have the answers. But apart from these few additions and subtractions to the curriculum, life hadn’t changed that much for the students and teachers who had stayed behind in the capital.

It had been a quiet transition from what the president called “a bastardized version of America” to a Marxist-Leninist state. The Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, formerly the Lao Patriotic Front, had planted the seeds of rebellion long before December ‘75. Villages already had sympathizers in place and ready to implement new policies. The Pathet Lao already had seats in Parliament and a Party office just a brief swagger from the U.S. Embassy.

Underground unions at all the major utilities were ready to stop work as soon as they were given the word, and by the time that word arrived, the police and the military were so short of superiors that there was no one to give orders to quash the rebellion. By then, most senior officers had swum or floated across the Mekhong to refugee camps along the border.

The people of Vientiane were indifferent. They’d lived through the heady days of dollars and corruption and ribaldry, and benefited little from the American presence. Those who got rich during that period didn’t share their ill-gotten wealth with the common folk. Before the Americans had been the French, and the general feeling was: the less said about them, the better.

No, many of the Lao that stayed on in the capital after the takeover were supportive of the new regime. The feeling was that they couldn’t do much worse than their predecessors, and Lao people were sick and tired of being a foreign-owned colony. If they were to be mismanaged, it was time to be mismanaged by other Lao.

When the bell rang for the end of the day, the scene became one of happy escape rather than departure. Siri passed the smiling teenagers, and they saluted him with their hands together in a polite nop. Until they got used to the faces of the new administration, it was good policy to nop everyone over fifty.

Teacher Oum looked up from her theoretical chemistry notes. “Ooh. Two visits in a week. You must be busy.”

“I think Buddha’s testing me to see whether I’ve abandoned him too.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I’m sorry, Oum. Can we try that cyanide test again?”

“What on?” He pulled out the headache pill bottle. “I’m hoping we’ll find some residue in here. But I think the pills themselves are just aspirin. Then there are these.” He produced a small jar with two dead cockroaches in it.

She laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re handling murder inquiries for the insect community now. You know we don’t have a lot of chemicals left for these tests?”

“Then let’s make it count.”

And count it did. The Chicken Counter

On Friday morning, the mystery of the loud-voiced man was solved. Siri and the team were closing up an old lady who’d drunk toilet bleach to relieve her family of the burden of having to look after her. Because it happened in a hospital bathroom, there had to be an autopsy.

The hospital director, Suk, came to the door and called Siri into the office. The loud-voiced man was standing there with his arms folded high on his chest. The director was another administrator who’d been given authority too young in life and felt obliged to use it. He, too, was threatened by Siri’s disrespectful personality.

“Siri, this is Mr. Ketkaew.” Siri held out his hand but the man refused to shake it. “I assume you’ve noticed the new structure at the rear of your building.”

“No.” There wasn’t much need to go round to the back of the morgue when there had been nothing but a deserted lot.

“Then I suggest you come and take a look.”

The three of them marched around the corner of the morgue building, where they were confronted by a small bamboo hut. It contained a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet, and a blackboard. Over the door was a hand-painted sign that read