The Coroner's Lunch

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 a 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…toknow 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 Lycee 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 Lycee 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.”

“I-”

“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.”

“I-”

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 a jar.

“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.