The Coroner's Lunch

To Khamuan by Yak

The Yak-40 lifted uncomfortably, like an overfed goose. Like the two Soviet pilots sitting at the controls, it wasn’t pretty to look at. Siri couldn’t imagine what deal had been struck to make this clumsy airplane and its original crew available twenty-four hours a day to Lao VIPs. Neither could he think what the pilots must have done wrong to be punished so. But for six months it had ferried generals and ministers around the country, courtesy of the Soviet Union.

Siri was the only passenger. The co-pilot pointed to a bench seat and the safety harness when he came aboard, and grunted. That was the end of the in-flight service. But he was glad to be alone. He needed time to think. He’d been in battles, been shot at often enough. But assassination was a different matter altogether. It was personal and rude. He was more angry than afraid.

On his way to the airport he’d made two stops. He’d awakened Nguyen Hong and warned him to be careful. He suggested he write down everything they knew and leave it in an envelope at the embassy, to be opened in case of any “accident.”

Then he’d stopped at Dtui’s. She was already awake. Her mother was in a bad way. Neither of them had slept. This was hardly a time for more bad news. He didn’t mention getting shot at, but he told her if anyone came by to ask, she should deny all knowledge of any case having to do with any Vietnamese. She was a cleaner and Geung was a day laborer, and they wouldn’t know a head from a pair of feet. From his tone, she could tell he was deadly serious.

The plane growled its way south, the Mekhong to its right, the rising sun to its left dazzling through the tiny portholes. Siri felt like there were hornets in his head. It wasn’t just from the vibration of the fuselage: so many ideas were buzzing out of order in there, reality and fantasy were getting jumbled.

He tried to interpret last night’s dream. The Vietnamese were obviously protecting him. Perhaps they were warning him not to trust anyone. Who was the boy with his blood-red smile? What had Siri discovered that made him dangerous enough to kill? Or, more likely, what did they suspect he’d discovered? And who were “they”?

It was clear that he was getting close to an answer, close enough to make one side or the other nervous. He just hoped he could work it all out before they managed to do away with him. How frustrating it would be to spend eternity in the afterlife with an unsolved puzzle.

The Yak bounced along the makeshift Air America air strip in Khamuan as if they’d forgotten to put wheels on the thing. It kicked up clouds of dust and jerked to a stop just as the runway came to an end. The co-pilot came back to open the door and virtually pushed Siri through it. They weren’t stopping. The plane was on its way to Pakse to collect the prime minister and the Cuban delegation.

Siri ran off the runway to avoid being decapitated by the pirouetting Yak, and watched as it hurled itself into the morning sky. Once the engine sounds had faded, there were no others to replace it. He stood at the end of two hundred meters of straight earth surrounded by lush jungle vegetation, alone.

The only comfort he could derive from the situation was that this was Khamuan. This was the province he’d apparently been born in and lived in for the first ten years of his life. He hadn’t been back since. Nothing he saw now brought back any memories. Jungle looked pretty much the same everywhere.

Twenty minutes later, he heard the sound of a vehicle searching for the right gear. It got closer. He left his shady spot and walked out to the strip. An old Chinese army truck lurched through the vegetation at the far end of the runway and stopped there. Siri stood at his end and the truck stayed at the other, like gunslingers weighing each other up.

When it was obvious he wasn’t going to walk to them, the truck sped down the strip and skidded to a halt in front of Siri, leaving him with a coating of dust. Two soldiers jumped down from the truck and saluted.

“Dr. Siri?” Given the circumstances, he wasn’t likely to be anyone else.

“Captain Kumsing?”

“That’s me.” The other man, the one standing back and wearing an unmarked uniform, spoke. “It’s nice of you to come so soon. One more day and the bodies would have been walking around.” It was a joke, but Mrs. Nitnoy, sprang to Siri’s mind.

“Yes. They tend to do that.”

In the truck on their way to the project base, Captain Kumsing did his best to summarize what had been happening out there in the wilds. This, he explained, was a military program. It was a pilot development project to rehabilitate the struggling Hmong districts devastated by years of war. At the same time, they hoped to wean the Hmong off their dependency on their opium crop.

He neglected to mention that the Hmong comprised some 10 percent of Laos’s population and many of them had been on the other side, fighting the communists alongside the Americans. Siri’s immediate but unasked question was why the military would give aid to the Hmong when many other Lao areas were in an equally desperate state.

Captain Kumsing explained that the project had begun in July and was initially under the command of Major Anou, a veteran of Xepon and Sala Phou Khoun. Siri remembered Anou as an ambitious man with relatives in France. He was about fifty and had been in excellent health when they’d met. Siri had given him a medical exam a few years back. That’s why he found it hard to believe that the major had died of a heart attack after only a month at the project site. He had died in his sleep, and the camp medic could find no suggestion of foul play.

They buried the major, as was the custom, and the Vietnamese adviser, Major Ho, took over while they waited for a Lao replacement. After two months, this second major vanished. He wandered off into the jungle and didn’t come back. But few people were surprised. By then he’d already started to talk to himself and act oddly. When he left, he’d been wearing a crown of pak eelert leaves. The Lao assumed he’d been eaten by tigers.

In September, after a period without a commander, two young officers arrived from the north. Both had been newly promoted. The senior of the two took over the role of project director. But after two weeks he developed mysterious stomach cramps. He was in such pain that they flew him to Savanaketh for a checkup. The doctors there could find nothing wrong with him.

He came back with a clean bill of health, and died a week later. He was thirty-four.

His colleague took over. He’d been doing fine until a week ago. He hadn’t had any physical or mental problems. Everyone thought the curse was ended. Then one day he was driving out to view the project site. He liked to drive the jeep himself. There were two other men with him. They warned him he was going a little too fast, considering the state of the road, but he didn’t take any notice. It was as if he wasn’t really himself.

He told them he was going home. He cut across a cleared area of land and stood, actually stood, on the gas pedal. He sort of froze. He was headed straight for this big old teak tree on the far side of the clearing. The men tried to wrestle the wheel from him, but he was solid-like cement, one of them said. When it was clear what was about to happen, the men threw themselves out of the jeep. They had no choice. One of them didn’t make it. He hit his head on a stump and died instantly. The other broke both his legs. He’d looked up in time to see the jeep smash headlong into the tree. His boss was still standing up with his foot on the gas. He flew through the air and hit the tree like a sparrow flying into a pane of glass. Didn’t stand a chance.

Siri was amazed. “Who’s next in the chain of command?”

The captain sucked his teeth. “Me. But we aren’t announcing that. As far as anyone outside knows, there’s nobody in charge. The commander’s office is empty, and we’ve passed the word around that we’re waiting for a new officer from Vientiane.”

“You think that’ll make any difference?” The truck was bobbing along a furrow that had been churned through the thick jungle. It was barely a road, and Siri held on to the dashboard to keep his teeth from being shaken loose.

“Of course. We don’t want them to know who’s in charge. It’s obvious they’re targeting the leaders.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“Well, it’s obvious.”

“Not to me.”

“The Hmong, of course.”

“The Hmong? But I thought you were helping them.”

“Well, yes. Most of them see it like that. But, of course, in every community you’ll find capitalist sympathizers who hold a grudge because they lost.”

“And how do you imagine they’re knocking off your leaders? Surely a bullet or a grenade would be easier than what you’ve described.”

“Ah, they’re cunning. They know that would start a land battle. No, they do it all with their potions.”

“They have potions?”

The captain lowered his voice and was almost inaudible above the sound of the engine. “They’re heathens. They practice witchcraft, Doctor. They have all these poisons and hallucinogens. All they need to do is drop some of these drugs into the water supply or the food.”

“The Hmong are poisoning you to stop you from developing their community?”

“It’s revenge, Dr. Siri. They were brainwashed, you see? The Americans convinced them that us communists would never do anything to help them if we came to power. They don’t realize that we’re all brothers. The Americans managed to make them believe that they aren’t Lao.”

“They’re not.”

“Not technically, Comrade. But they’re family. They may not have been born to Lao parents, but we all live together in the same homeland. A dog or a cat isn’t a human being, but think how many families treat their dogs like a member of the family. It’s the same thing.”

“H’mm. Good point. So you think the dog’s biting the hand that feeds it?”

“In a way, yes. Not the whole pack, Doctor. Just one or two rabid strays. But until we know what poison they’ve been using, we won’t be able to round them up. That’s why we need you.”

They pulled into a sprawling military complex with machinery and vehicles all over. To anyone foolish enough to believe the captain, this would have seemed a humanitarian effort to exceed even the most extravagant of the U.N.’s follies.

Under a makeshift palm-leaf shelter behind the empty command office, two large caskets lay side by side. Bare-chested soldiers carried them inside and placed them on trestle tables that wobbled under their weight. The men pried off the lids to reveal Kumsing’s predecessor and his companion. They were wrapped in natural tobacco leaves and garnished with herbs. This reduced the smell and kept the bodies in remarkably good condition. There was minimal insect damage.

The camp medic was a twenty-year-old, trained as a field nurse on dummy patients without blood. He and a middle-aged woman from the mess tent were assigned to help Siri with the autopsies. If he’d ever had doubts as to his good fortune at having Geung and Dtui at the morgue, the following six hours dispelled any of them. These two were worse than hopeless.

Even before the bone cutters had begun their cracking of the first rib cage, the boy was throwing up through the open window. He repeated this trick a dozen times during the day. The woman didn’t stop gabbing the whole time, asking silly questions, getting in Siri’s way to get a better look at the fellow’s insides. She had to get it all right to tell the girls back at the canteen. With those two, and the huge flying insects that buzzed in his face like little helicopters, the ordeal was a nightmare.

It wasn’t even a nightmare with a happy ending. He wanted very much to find clear signs of natural causes of death, but he couldn’t. Neither was there anything to suggest foul play in either man. The junior officer’s collision with the tree had made an awful mess of him. Some thirty-eight bones were broken and the skull was shattered. But it was all postmortem. He’d died some time before his jeep hit the tree.

Both men had been in prime physical condition, strong and healthy; but, for some reason, they’d simply stopped living. He couldn’t understand it, and he knew that wasn’t an answer Captain Kumsing would want to hear. The only other option was, indeed, that someone had used a toxin that left no obvious signs.

Siri put the men back together as best he could without assistance, and soldiers came to replace them in the caskets. It was usual, with deaths such as these, that didn’t result from natural causes, for the bodies to be buried as soon as possible without any ceremony at the graveside. They couldn’t be cremated, because the belief was that their souls weren’t yet ready to go to heaven.

Superstition, religion, and custom often overlapped in Laos, and even Siri, who had no spiritual beliefs, found nothing strange about such a practice. It was just the way it had always been. The bones would be left to commune with the earth until the family decided a fitting period had passed. Then the body, if the family could find it, would be dug up and cremated withfull ceremony.

Siri went to see Kumsing in the project office that he shared with five enlisted men. He was sitting at a far desk, the smallest desk in the office. Siri noticed how the thin man twitched as he worked and wondered whether the tic was a result of the stress he was under. He wore a white T-shirt as a disguise for his rank and had forbidden anyone to salute him. Siri decided that if the Hmong didn’t get him, he’d probably worry himself to death.

He took the captain outside and explained what he’d found and what he hadn’t. They walked together across the clearing. Even in Vientiane, Siri had never seen so much earth-moving equipment in one place.

“So, are you saying they died of natural causes?”

“No, I’m saying I found no evidence they died of unnatural causes. But neither did I find indications of natural death.”

“But the captain crashed into a damn tree. Don’t tell me that didn’t kill him.”

“He was dead before he hit it.”

“That’s not possible. The men said he was standing up with his foot on the accelerator, yelling his heart out. You must have got it wrong.”

“I’d feel a lot better if I did get it wrong. But there’s no doubt in my mind. The tree didn’t kill him, and a heart attack didn’t kill his mate. I couldn’t see any evidence they’d been poisoned by anything traditional. But I’ve heard of potions that can kill a man without leaving obvious signs. It would take a lifetime to test for all of them.”

This debriefing obviously wasn’t pleasing Kumsing, whose tic became more pronounced the more he heard. He thrashed the side of his fatigues with a sprig of young bamboo.

“Have you interviewed the locals?” Siri asked.

“The Hmong? They just deny everything. They aren’t likely to give up one of their own. They’re peculiar people, all that spirit-worship mumbo-jumbo. It wouldn’t surprise me if they have one of those witch doctors with his own factory turning out poisons and crazy drugs.”

“How far is it to the nearest village?”

“Four, five kilometers. Why?”

“I need to go and talk to them.”

“Oh. That won’t do you any good.”

“Captain, the only way we can isolate the drug, if there was a drug, would be to find out what varieties they use out there. Get samples and take them back to do tests in Vientiane. Until that happens, we won’t know the cause of death, and you can’t arrest anyone. Are you with me?”

“I suppose so.”

“Good. I’ll need a driver.”

“You want to go now?”

“No time like the present.”

“But it’ll be dark in a few hours.”

“Then it’s just as well that I’m not afraid of the dark, isn’t it?”

They were driving along an overgrown gully similar to the one by the airfield. Siri suspected these tracks couldn’t be seen from the air, and were probably set up by smugglers. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was just like this, a tunnel through jungle. It was no wonder the Americans had been unable to shut it down. The Hmong must have learned the trick from their enemy.

Captain Kumsing had opted not to come along on this journey. He’d sent Siri with a driver and a younger captain. The driver was the friendlier of the two.

Siri asked whether they’d be able to see the project site on the way.

“No, sir. It’s over that way about thirteen kilometers.”

“Really? Seems a bit odd you’d set up a crop substitution project so far from the villages you’re helping.”

The driver laughed. “Yes, sir. It does, doesn’t it?”

The captain glared at Siri, but it didn’t stop him smiling. In fact he kept smiling until a large black shape came hurtling at the windscreen with a thud. The shape flapped against the glass and flew up over the roof of the cab. Siri and the captain both shielded their eyes, but the driver seemed used to it.

“Damn thing.”

“What on earth was that?”

“Crows, sir. They get sport out of buzzing our transport.”

“Crows? Is it normal to find crows this far from cities? I thought they were flying rats.”

“I’m not a bird man, me. I know a lot about fish, but-” The crow came at the truck again, this time at the side window where the captain slapped at it. He fought to get the window up, and the angry bird bloodied his hand with its beak.

“Shit!”

Siri helped fight it off until the window was up and the bird flew back into the trees. The driver wound up the window on his side.

“Never seen one as frisky as that. Must be the time of day. You know, I say crows, plural, but I guess there might just be the one. Those brown chest markings, I recognize them. I’ve seen that fellow before.”

The captain sucked at the blood on his wrist and mumbled under his breath. Siri reached into his pack for antiseptic.

“You want me to look at that?”

“It’s nothing.” And he didn’t mean it wasn’t a serious wound. He meant it was nothing. He held up his wrist and in spite of the blood they’d all seen, there wasn’t a mark.

The driver whistled. “Now, that’s odd.”

As they neared the village, they passed an army guard post. The sentry waved them through. The road opened into a clearing where thirty or forty bamboo-and-grass huts sat on either side of a small stream. Narrow paths criss-crossed in all directions, and at every intersection there was a small structure like a bridge, too small for even a child to cross. The newer ones were decorated with flowers and incense sticks. Older ones had been ignored and left to fall into decay. The driver saw Siri looking.

“They’re bridges so the lost souls can find their way back to their bodies.” He laughed.

“Heathens,” the captain muttered. Every tree on their way in to the village was circled with colored cloth and white strings. Many had trays of offerings and piles of stones in front of them. Siri thought it was all rather charming, and somehow familiar.

Two more armed soldiers came to meet the truck. The army appeared to be providing very generous security to the villagers of Meyu Bo. One of the soldiers was holding a walkie-talkie and was telling headquarters that the doctor had arrived.

Half a dozen village elders had been herded together into a reception committee for the eminent guest from the capital that they didn’t want. They were to stand a few paces back until called upon to offer a sincere welcome.

“Don’t expect anything in the way of manners,” the captain told Siri when they were out of the truck. “They’re an ignorant lot.”

One of the guards led Siri to the elders, who stood counting their toes like schoolchildren. They knew not to speak until they were spoken to.

“Elders of Meyu Bo, this is Dr. Siri Paiboun.”

Despite their own status, the four men and two women held their palms together high in front of their faces as the army had instructed them. They were surprised when Siri returned the nop, beginning even higher and with a deeper bow. That was when they bothered to look at him, and that was when they noticed. They all noticed. They stood transfixed by the sight of the little doctor who stood in front of them.

The elders looked sideways at each other to be sure they were all seeing the same miracle. Siri and the soldiers began to feel uneasy. The captain spoke.

“Don’t just stand there like buffalo. Don’t you have something to say to your guest?”

There was another embarrassing silence before the village headman, Tshaj, took one hesitant step forward. His hands were still pressed together in front of his face. His Lao was strongly accented.

“It is you, is it not?”

“I hope it is,” Siri said. He stepped forward to shake the headman’s hand, but the old man retreated back to the others.

“Heathens,” said the captain. It was obvious he felt no compassion for the proud race that had been his enemy for over a decade.

The elders were huddling and chattering nervously in Hmong. They were plainly confused about something, their nops still frozen in front of them.

The driver stepped forward and shook his head. “I’ve seen ’em nutty before, but they’re breaking all the records today. They usually can’t wait to get all this official stuff over and done with and get back to whatever fool thing it is they do here.”

Siri attempted to take another step forward, but this time all the elders retreated together. He didn’t know what to make of it.

“Is there something wrong?”

“How did you come here?” one of the women asked.

“Yak-40.” There was silence. “I flew.”

The elders chattered again even more excitedly. Then the same woman boldly ventured forward from the group and reached out for Siri’s arm. Her hand was shaking. She seemed relieved when she found flesh and bone inside his shirt sleeve. She reported back to the others, and the atmosphere automatically changed.

They all gathered around Siri, touching him, smiling, asking questions in Hmong as if he was a long-lost friend. The military men didn’t know what to make of it. The captain called out to him. “You been here before or something?”

“Never,” Siri smiled.

“Mad, all of ’em.”

The elders half-led, half-carried Siri off to the meeting hut. He was baffled but enjoying the attention. They sat him in the place of honor on the floor facing the doorway, and brought water and sweets for him to eat. The soldiers, they just ignored.

Again and again they tried to ask him questions in Hmong. Each time he told them in Lao that he didn’t speak the language. They laughed. He laughed. The soldiers yawned.

Finally the elders settled in a circle around him, leaving a few respectful meters either side of him. Their numbers had swollen now to about twenty. They all introduced themselves, but the only names he remembered were Tshaj, the headman, Nabai, the woman who had inspected him for flesh, Lao Jong, a tall, grinning, toothless man, and Auntie Suab, the second lady elder, who was tiny. She smiled so sweetly that Siri could tell she’d broken many hearts in her life. The captain sat unsmiling inside the doorway with his boots pointed at the circle.

Slowly the light dimmed as more and more villagers came to peer at the amazing sight in the meeting hut. They blocked out the light in the doorway and the windows. The eyes of the children filled the gaps between the banana-leaf walls. Siri could have led them on longer, but he started to feel guilty for taking advantage of this mistaken identity.

“This is all very pleasant,” he said. “But it’s true what the soldiers said.” He was surprised to hear himself use the Hmong word for soldiers. He must have picked it up somewhere. “I really am Siri Paiboun from Vientiane. I’m the coroner [he used the expression ‘ghost doctor’ to help them understand] at Mahosot Hospital. I’m sure I look like someone you know, but I’m afraid I’m not him.”

They didn’t reply, just stared at him, smiling. He wondered whether they understood.

“Just who do you think I am?”

“You are Yeh Ming,” the headman said without hesitation. The villagers all around them gasped.

“I wish I were,” Siri laughed. “He must be quite a warrior. What does he do, old Yeh Ming?” The expression quite a warrior was a Hmong phrase he didn’t remember knowing.

Auntie Suab spoke quietly and seriously, as if this were some type of test. “Yeh Ming is the greatest shaman.”

“Yeh Ming has supernatural powers,” Tshaj added. “One thousand and fifty years ago, you…he…drove back twenty thousand Annamese with just one ox horn.”

“A thousand and fifty years ago?” Siri laughed again, and all the Hmong laughed with him. They were a good audience. “It’s true I am beginning to show my age, but a thousand and fifty years? Don’t be cruel to an old man.”

Nabai spoke. “This isn’t the body you used then. You couldn’t fight off half a Vietnamese with the body you have now.”

“That’s very kind of you.” That was another Hmong expression. It was obviously a very simple language if he could pick it up just by being around these people. “But if I’ve changed bodies, how do you know it’s me?”

The captain finally lost interest in this fiasco and went off to eat with the guards.

“A body is easy to shed,” Tshaj explained, “but the eyes will always be there. You can’t replace the river-frog emeralds. Zai, the rainbow spirit, turned two river frogs into emeralds to thank the first shaman for giving him more colors. They’re passed from body to body.”

So it was his eyes. It all came down to the fact that he had green eyes. Through the course of the discussion and the meal that followed, he wasn’t able to convince them he wasn’t a one-thousand-year-old shaman, not even by showing them his motorcycle license. Even when they’d persuaded him to stay the night with them, and the captain and the driver had gone back and left him in the charge of the permanent village guards, he still wasn’t comfortable. He felt embarrassed to be receiving food and lodging on the strength of his similarity to Yeh Ming. But he was having a good time.

The business he’d come to resolve had been shuffled to the side somehow. But he thought that as a respected imposter, he’d eventually get more answers than the captain. He was sitting at the edge of the village under a rustic pavilion with the senior men. They were into the second bottle of the most delicious fruit-flavored rice whisky he’d ever tasted.

“I want to tell you all why I’m here,” he said.

Tshaj interrupted him. “We know why you’re here.”

“You do? Why, then?”

“You’re here for the dying soldiers.”

“That’s true. Can you tell me what killed them?”

“Yes.”

Sweet Auntie Suab arrived at the crucial moment. She was a maker and distributor of amulets and she carried a large collection to the table.

Tshaj was annoyed. “Suab, this is a men’s meeting.”

“I’m so sorry, brother. But this can’t wait until morning.” She dumped the assortment of pendulums and amulets and religious and sacrilegious artifacts on the table in front of Siri and stood back. Siri laughed.

“Oh, God. Don’t tell me I have to wear all these.” The others laughed too.

Suab shook her head. “No, Yeh Ming, only one. I blessed one of them with your spell.”

“Which one?”

“You’ll know.”

“How?”

“It’ll come to you.”

Siri raised his eyebrows and looked down at the thirty-something medallions in front of him. He’d pick the wrong one and perhaps they’d take him more seriously as a coroner. The odds were in his favor. He knew it would dispel the magic of the evening, but perhaps that was a good thing.

He reached across the table for the largest amulet. It was an ugly, dust-covered lump. He felt sure if Suab had blessed an amulet for him, she would have doused it, or anointed it, or at the very least dusted it off. This was easy.

But as he reached across, the ever-dangly button on his shirt cuff became anchored on something. He lifted his arm to find he’d hooked a small black prism on a leather thong. The amulet was so old that any characters or images that had once been etched on it were now rubbed away.

“Yes.” Auntie Suab said with a sigh. “Yes.”

“No, wait. That wasn’t fair. Best out of three?” But it was over.

Suab gathered up the failed medallions and, with a satisfied smile, walked off to leave the men and the blessed amulet to their business.

“That was weird,” Siri conceded.

“Aren’t you going to put it on?” one of the men asked.

“Certainly not. I’m not about to start believing all this nonsense.”

“Then you won’t be pleased to hear how the soldiers died,” said Tshaj.

“Don’t tell me it was voodoo.” He disguised his unease with another giggle, but noticed how Lao Jong and a man so dark Siri could barely see him exchanged a guilty look. Because it was one of his duties as head of the village, Tshaj assumed the role of story-teller. The others refilled the glasses and leaned back in their seats.

“The soldiers came half a year ago. They said they were coming to help us. They said they needed to clear forest land so we’d have somewhere to plant crops to replace our opium.

“We’ve always grown opium. We don’t do much with itourselves. Use it as medicine sometimes, eat it when there’s no food. But it was our only cash crop for a long time. It was good enough for the French. They bought every kilo we could produce. And the Americans refined it in Vientiane and sold it to their own troops in Saigon.

“But the good People’s Democratic Republic decided it was a terrible thing. They said we have to substitute something else for it. Something healthful. If you ask me, I’d say they just wanted to keep our income down, so there’s no chance of our funding an uprising.

“We’ve been watching the soldiers clear the forests, and we’ve been waiting and waiting to see what substitute crops they were going to plant for us. Hectares and hectares they’ve cleared.”

Siri nodded. “I thought as much. Do you know where they’re selling the timber?”

“Oh, yes,” the dark man said. “It goes through Vietnam and gets shipped off to the enemies of the Chinese, to Formosa.”

“Really? I wonder just how much of those profits is being shared with the government.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to us,” Tshaj said. “If the army gets the profit, or the government gets the profit, it’s all the same to us out here. We don’t get anything.”

Lao Jong spoke up from the far end of the long table the Americans had left as their only memento. “The animals are fleeing from the saws, so we have to go further to hunt. Some of our young men are away for weeks at a time, looking for game. The water in our stream is polluted by the silt that’s running down from the hills. But these are just physical problems.”

“Yes, they’re only physical problems,” Tshaj continued. “We’ve suffered many physical ills over the years and survived. That’s not what frightens us here. It wasn’t physical things that killed your soldiers. As you know well, Yeh Ming, powerful spirits abide in the jungle. [Siri rolled his eyes.] Most are kind, helpful spirits, but there are many malevolent lost souls out there. They leave the bodies of the troubled dead and reside in the trees with the nymphs and the ghosts.”

“A bit like sub-letting, you mean?”

Tshaj ignored the smiling doctor. “When we cut down a tree for our huts, or to make space to plant crops, we ask for permission from the tree spirits. We make offerings, sacrifices sometimes, as our own shaman sees fit. Usually, the spirits will move on without blaming us. After all, we have to live together, share what resources we have. That’s the way it has always been.

“Some of the trees in these parts are as old as the land itself. The spirits have become powerful here. When the soldiers came, they didn’t ask permission. They didn’t show any respect. They didn’t sacrifice a buffalo or consult a shaman. They just started cutting. And they cut and cut and hauled the timber away in trucks. They cut hundreds, thousands of trees.

“Can you imagine? Even the most benevolent spirits have become evil. They all seek revenge.”

“The tree spirits killed the soldiers?” Siri knocked back his liquor and his glass was refilled. “How did they do that, exactly? Lightning?”

“Possession.”

“Oh, come on.”

Toothless Mr. Lao Jong leaned forward onto the table and looked into Siri’s eyes.

“You, of all people, should know about that.”

“I should?”

“Think of your dreams.”

Siri shuddered. “What do you know about my dreams?”

“I know you can’t keep the spirits in any more.”

“I-”

“Mr. Lao Jong is our Mor Tham, our spirit medium. He can see. He knows you’re a shaman.”

“I am not.” Lao Jong’s uninvited intrusions were beginning to get as annoying as his gummy smile.

“The dogs know it.”

“What dogs?”

“They all know who you are. They know what lives inside you.”

“The only thing living inside me is nausea. This stuff is making me feel ill.”

“It shouldn’t. It’s all from the forest.”

The crowd of men around Siri was beginning to blur. The alcohol was deceptively strong, and the topic of conversation was giving him the willies. But deep down in his agnostic scientific soul, he wanted all this talk of ghosts and mediums to be true. He wanted there to be something else, something illogical. He’d been confined and restricted by science all his life, and he was prepared to break free.

But this? This was all talk: all superstitious claptrap from a bunch of old drunk village Hmong. They got lucky. Everyone has dreams. The dog comment was just a guess. Basically it was all crap. He stood shakily, excused himself, and asked to be taken to his bed. The whisky was beginning to make him confused. Two of the men came smiling to prop him up from either side and began to lead him off. But before they had gone far, Tshaj called out to him.

“Yeh Ming.” Siri and his props turned back. “I speak a few words, just enough to get by. But no one else at this table tonight speaks Lao.”

That was the last thought to enter Siri’s swimming head. They walked him to the guest hut and laid him down, but he wouldn’t remember any of that. He was unconscious long before.

It shouldn’t have surprised him, given all the talk and the setting and the whisky, but his dream that night was a spectacle.

He was dressed as a Hmong of a thousand years hence. For reasons known only to the Great Dream Director, he was riding Dtui’s bicycle through a fairy-tale jungle. He didn’t see the trees as trees, but rather as the spirits that inhabited them. They twirled together from the roots to high up in the sky. They were kind and welcoming, just as Tshaj had described them. Many were women, beautiful women, whose long hair curled into, and became, the grain of the wood.

It was a happy place; he seemed to know all the spirits, and they liked him. But the bicycle was squeaky and its noise awoke a black boar that had been asleep behind the bushes. Its fangs were still bloody from a kill. The tree spirits called out to Siri, warning him, but he seemed unable to move. The bicycle was locked with rust. Heaven knows why he didn’t get off and run for his life.

The boar charged. He looked up at the spirits but they couldn’t do anything to help. When he looked back, a small woman was standing between him and the boar. She seemed fearless, even when the boar leaped from the ground and soared through the air toward her. Before it could strike, she held up the black amulet in front of its face, and it turned from muscle and fur into a black sheet of burned paper. It floated harmlessly to the ground and crumbled.

She turned to Siri. He’d expected to see the sweet face of Auntie Suab, but instead it was the same old man’s face with its betel-nut red mouth that had lain dead at the feet of the Vietnamese in his previous dream. (He must have been making a guest appearance.) He ignored Siri and went from tree to tree ripping down the spirits and the nymphs and putting them into a Coca-Cola bottle. Even before the bottle was full, the trees were empty of spirits, and he vanished. All that was left was Siri on his rust-locked bicycle surrounded by trees that were now just wood.

He heard the sound of chewing, and looked back over his shoulder to see that the jungle floor behind him was a vivid green. The color seemed to vibrate as it reflected in his eyes. And as he watched, the carpet of green spread closer and closer to him. And when it was close enough, he could tell that this was a swarm of green caterpillars. He looked back; everything in its path had been destroyed, devoured by the hungry insects.

The bark of the trees around him was stripped away, the leaves were gone in seconds, and slowly the tree trunks were leveled. When there were no more trees, the caterpillars caught sight of Siri. They crawled all over him and Dtui’s bicycle, and just as they’d eaten everything else, they began to chew their way through him as he watched calmly. It tickled. Very soon, Siri could feel himself inside the caterpillars.

A flock of crows swooped down and ate the caterpillars that contained small bits of Siri. Then whales somehow managed to eat the crows. And the whales were swallowed up by volcanoes and suddenly Siri, or at least bits of Siri, was in every creature and every geological feature on Earth. It was one hell of a good finish.

“Yeh Ming.”

Siri knew neither where nor, momentarily, who he was. He looked up to see the pretty face of a girl like a tree nymph looking down at him.

“The elders wish to invite you to breakfast.”

She was speaking Hmong, and he understood. She blushed at his smile and left him alone. He was on the floor of a simple hut on a mattress of straw. He felt immaculate, invincible, and incredibly hungry. When he sat up, he felt something at his neck. It was the black amulet. He didn’t take it off.

The jeep came to pick Siri up after ten. The guards had called through to headquarters earlier and warned them that the doctor was acting oddly. They were afraid he might have been doped. They reported the previous night’s proceedings.

At headquarters, Siri jumped from the jeep like a young man and strode into the hidden commander’s office. The men there looked up at him; he thought he detected some mistrust in their eyes.

When he saw the doctor, Kumsing rose and walked over to him. “Outside.” He took Siri’s arm roughly and led him through the door. When they were far enough away from the building, Kumsing spoke angrily. “All right. Suppose you tell me just what your game is.”

“Well, I used to box.”

“You know what I mean. What exactly have they sent you here to do?”

“They sent me to answer your request for a coroner.”

“And I suppose it’s just a coincidence that you speak fluent Hmong?”

“Given that there’s only one coroner in the country, you’d have to assume yes, it is a coincidence.”

“Why didn’t you see fit to mention it to me?”

“Well, firstly because it’s none of your business. And secondly because I didn’t know.”

Kumsing looked at him in amazement. “Didn’t know? You didn’t know you could speak Hmong? Don’t insult my intelligence, Doctor.”

“I promise you, when I arrived in Saravan, I couldn’t speak a word of it. But I believe there may be a scientific explanation for that.”

“What’s that round your neck?”

“It’s a magic amulet.”

“My men tell me you’ve been here before. The Hmong knew you. You omitted to tell me that, as well.”

“Well, I probably forgot. It was a long time ago. About a thousand years, to be exact. At that time I defeated twenty thousand Annamese with an ox horn. I have to assume it was a rather large one.”

Kumsing’s expression turned from anger to concern. “They haven’t…done anything to you, have they?”

“You mean hypnotized me and turned me into a lunatic? No. I don’t think so. This is the way I’ve always been. It was quite an amazing visit, mind you.”

“Did you get the samples?”

“Their potions? No. They didn’t use any. Captain Kumsing, I suggest you come to your office with me and listen to a most strange tale. Twenty-four hours ago, if someone had told it to me, I would have had them committed to an asylum. But, like me, I think you’ll eventually come to believe that there may be only one way to save your life.”