The Coroner's Lunch

Death by Intercourse

“Good morning, Siri.” Professor Mon was the director of the Lycee Vientiane. He was also Teacher Oum’s father. He was standing uneasily in the vestibule. He didn’t want to go into the morgue examination room, so Siri came out to meet him.

“Mon, how are you doing?” They shook hands.

“Fairly well, I suppose. I have a letter here addressed to you and Oum.” He handed a grey envelope to Siri. The stamp was from the U.S.S.R. “I think it’s about the chemicals you asked for.”

“It’s unopened.”

“There’s no one to open it.”

“Oum?”

“You obviously haven’t heard. They picked her up just after you left. They took her for re-education up in Viengsai.”

“Teacher Oum? What the hell for?”

“They said she’d picked up some radical ideas in Australia. They said her attitude was detrimental to the struggle against individualist thinking.”

“That’s ridiculous. What about the baby?”

“Her mother and I.”

“Look, Mon. This is absurd. I’ll talk to some people. I mean, she’s virtually my assistant. She’s the only chemist I’ve got access to. I’m sure for that reason alone….”

“If you could. We are quite anxious.”

“Don’t worry, friend. We’ll get her back.”

When Mon had left, Siri stood in the vestibule fitting one more piece into his scenario jigsaw. Not a coincidence, this. Not at all. It was so frustrating not being able to contact Nguyen Hong.

An unfortunate old gentleman chose that morning to pass away in the hospital operating room, and was sent to the morgue for an immediate autopsy. Siri was asked to confirm that there’d been no malpractice. It was ten, and he had to meet Civilai at twelve. He didn’t like to leave a job in the middle, but this job was going to take a long time. So they made preliminary notes and put the body in the freezer until after lunch. Suk, the director, was furious, but Siri didn’t care much.

He was seated on the log by the river some ten minutes before Civilai arrived.

“Where’s our other member?” Civilai asked.

“I think he must have drowned the other day.”

“Or the fascists got him. I bet they can’t make him talk. Can you believe those Thai tin soldiers? They take over the country by force, then issue a statement that we’re an unlawful governing power. What balls they have!”

“What have you got for me?”

“Oh, sit down, Civilai. Relax. How are you, Civilai?” his brother prompted.

“Civilai.”

“All right. I suppose your life is in danger,” Civilai conceded. “You’d be proud of me. I’ve been a good spy. But I’ve had to share this with a few people to get the information.”

“That’s not a problem. I think it’s time to share what we’ve got with everyone you trust. The more people who know…”

“…the less likely you are to get your brain splattered all over your front door.”

“They’ve sent Teacher Oum to Viengsai.”

“The chemist girl? H’mm.”

“Somebody’s covering up.”

“I’ll see if I can find out who gave that order.”

Siri pulled four sheets of paper from his pocket and unfolded them. Neither man had thought about eating his lunch. “I’ve been putting all the bits and pieces together. I’ve come up with a hypothesis.”

Civilai looked at the untidy notes. “Brother, I’d have to be an Egyptologist to understand that garbled mess. Let’s start off with what I’ve found out and see how it fits your theory.

“The Vietnamese delegation was here at the invitation of the Security Section chief. They were coming to identify a suspected traitor. It was all supposed to be very hush-hush. One of your Vietnamese had been involved in a covert operation in the south. There was an ambush and all the Vietnamese were killed, except for him. He’d been shot up pretty badly and everyone assumed he was dead.”

“That’s Hok, the last fellow we found at the dam. He had a hole in him as wide as the Pha Ban cave.”

“Well, he must have done a very good job of playing possum, because when the Hmong commanders came down to inspect the damage, they had no idea he could see them. According to your Hok, there was an elderly man there in plain clothes, acting as a sort of adviser. But Hok had seen him once, about two weeks before, in an LPRA uniform.”

“Hok had a hell of a wound. How sure could he have been that it was the same man?”

“He was positive. He’d seen him around at the Operations Headquarters up at the border. They’d spoken a couple of times. He was there the day they planned the mission that turned into a disaster. The VC found the aftermath of that massacre, and Hok, who was barely alive. They flew him back to Hanoi.

“As soon as he recovered enough to be angry, he was telling everyone about the adviser. He must have convinced people in high places, because they took our ambassador to see him. He contacted us, and we invited Hok to come over and help us identify the man.”

“Couldn’t they just send pictures?”

“What pictures? The regimental yearbook? How many pictures have you had taken over the last twenty years, Siri?Anti-government rebels don’t pose in uniform as evidence for possible treason hearings.”

“All right, all right. So, as soon as Hok was well enough to travel, they sent him here.”

“With a Vietnamese colonel and a driver. They had top-level clearance.”

“Well, that makes it even less likely we’d torture them, doesn’t it?”

“Not necessarily. A Lao officer advising the Hmong! That doesn’t look good for us. The Vietnamese were already suspicious before this happened. And there was all the secrecy on this side. Not many knew about it, only the Security Section, a few top Party people, not including me, the prime minister, the president. The idea was not to alert the guy we were on to him.”

“So, he’s still out there somewhere, and now there’s no one to identify him. Did we get any information at all?”

“His rank. He was a major.”

“Can’t we find out which of our majors were hanging around at the Operations Center when Hok was there?”

“We’re working on that. But it’s a large center and people come and go all the time. It’s not like we have an efficient records system of placements and troop movements.”

“Anything on the Black Boar?”

“God, you’re so demanding. You’d better remember me in your will for all the help I’m giving you.”

“You’ll be gone before me, pal.”

“I don’t see anyone shooting at me.”

“There will be, after today. I bet there’s someone with a long-range rifle up on a rooftop right now with you in his sights.”

There was the crack of a branch from the tree above their heads. Both men moved faster than they had for many years. They were twenty meters farther along the riverbank before Siri looked back. He stopped and caught his breath.

“Rajid. What the hell are you doing up there?” Civilai turned back to see the crazy Indian high in the tree, mouthing one of his silent laughs. He’d had his thrill for the day.

“I bet he’s a spy. He’s probably fluent in six languages.” They put their arms around each other’s shoulders and laughed as they walked back to the log. They unwrapped their sandwiches and ate for a while until their nerves had settled. Siri spoke.

“Now, Black Boar?”

“According to my sources, Black Boar was the code name of an American Marine special operations unit. They did a lot of nasty stuff inside Vietnam during the war. They were out of uniform and nobody officially claimed them, but word was they were attached to the CIA.”

“Wasn’t everyone?”

“They did a lot of damage. Why did you want to know about them?”

“What if they’ve moved over here?”

“Doing what?”

“Same kind of thing. Causing trouble.”

“You think this torture mystery might have something to do with them? I can’t imagine a bunch of Americans living here without anyone reporting them.”

“Why not? There are still a lot of Hmong villages to hide in. Goodness knows, the Yanks would love to see our regime collapse.”

“Okay. Show me everything you’ve got so far. I’ll tell you how silly it all sounds, then I’ll go and pass it on to the Security Section.” He looked up at Rajid hanging still from a branch like a bat. “And keep your voice down.”

The autopsy that afternoon took longer than Siri had expected because he was diverted by the fact that the elderly gentleman had a six-inch nail in his intestine. They photographed it and Siri spent a couple of hours working out how it could have killed him. In the end, it turned out it hadn’t. It had been in there for a considerable time, and how it got there would have to remain a mystery. He already had enough of those to solve.

The cause of death, it turned out, was sexual intercourse. The man was scheduled for an appendectomy. Due to the shortage of nursing staff, friends and relatives were invited to sleep with patients overnight and look after them. This usually only involved curling up on the floor, but this particular gentleman had recently found himself a very young wife. Her close proximity on the eve of his big operation led to a spontaneous burst of sexual activity. He complained to her almost immediately of a splitting headache, but he endured it till time came to enter the operating room. As he’d been sedated beforehand, he was unable to alert doctors to his incredible pain, and just as they were about to cut into his stomach, he died of a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. His brain had popped. If Siri hadn’t wasted so much time on the intestine and had moved onto the brain, he would have found it right away. But it was obvious to his devoted staff that Dr. Siri’s mind was on other, more important things.

“Anyway, let this be a lesson to you, Dtui. Sex can kill you.”

“I should be so lucky.”

Mr. Geung snorted.

While they were clearing up, the mail arrived. It included a package from Sayabouri with two rolls of autopsy photos in it. When Dtui went up to type the report, she took them up to the library to file under “P.” But she was back, breathless, five minutes later.

“Doc, there’s an urgent call from Vietnam.”

Watching Siri and Dtui “run” to the administration block would have saddened even the most benevolent of athletic coaches. Siri thought about the man in the freezer as he ran up the steps, his head pounding. He wheezed into the phone mouthpiece, unable to catch his breath or hold his heart still.

“Siri? Dr. Siri? Is that you?” Siri nodded his head. “Siri?”

“Nguyen?”

“Good God. What’s wrong?”

“Ex…ercise. You…talk.”

“What? All right. I believe this is what happened. I believe the men didn’t die as a result of the torture. Two of them, I’m quite sure, died of air embolism.”

“Of what?” He didn’t know the term in Vietnamese.

“They had air injected into their veins.”

“We didn’t see any evidence of that.”

“That’s just it. After seventy-two hours, most of the indications are gone. There’s a slight chance you’d notice something on an X-ray, but we didn’t have one at our disposal. Plus we weren’t really looking for it. It’s going to be very difficult to prove. I may have found puncture marks in one of the veins, but they’re all very badly deteriorated.

“All three men have that same round bruise under the burning. I believe it’s the mark from the nozzle of some kind of pump, or a very large syringe. They would have had to punch it in to penetrate the muscle. Even then, it demanded a great deal of skill. I’m thinking they used the excessive electrical burns to cover up the marks.”

“So why do you say only two died from this air embolism?”

“Tran, the driver. He certainly died from the internal bleeding we found around the aorta. Perhaps because he was fatter than the others, they had trouble locating a vein. I still don’t know what caused the bleeding.”

“I might know. Look into the possibility that he fell from a height, perhaps from an aeroplane.”

“Do you know something?”

“Just guessing right now, but I’ve got a friend checking reports of unauthorized air traffic three or four weeks ago around the reservoir. And listen, do you know where you can find Tran’s wife? Tran the colonel?”

“His wife? I can find out.”

“Try to talk to her. Ask her about her husband’s tattoos.”

“What specifically?”

“Get her to describe them. Maybe you could show her the photos. Ask her if there’s anything different about them. Whether they’ve been altered in any way. I imagine he-”

The line was cut. That wasn’t such an unusual thing in those days, but in the current atmosphere of suspicion, he was ready to assume the worst. He waited another half hour, but Nguyen Hong didn’t call back.

He walked slowly back to the morgue, weighing the new information against his hypothesis. In his office, he found Inspector Phosy waiting for him.

“You look exhausted,” the inspector told him.

“Hello, Phosy.” They shook hands. “I’m afraid the last few days have started to catch up with me. It’s hard to get my mind around everything. You just get back?”

“No, I got in early this morning. Went home and caught up on some sleep.”

“Seminar?”

“They like to keep reminding me how lucky I am to be in the socialist system. But it wasn’t so bad. Did you get my note?”

“Your note? Oh, goodness, yes. That seems so long ago. We have a lot to talk about.”

“Good.”

“You thirsty?”

“Always.”