The Coroner's Lunch

The Boatman’s Requiem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you mind if we take a walk?”

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

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

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

“The longboat man?”

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

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

“Me?”

“Yes. How long had you been…in control of your boat?”

There was a long hesitation. “I mean, this is a new unit. Only just been set up.”

“I understand. So? Months? Weeks?”

“A week.”

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

“Stressful?”

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

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

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

“It’s very peaceful.”

“How fast do you travel?”

“Ten knots. That’s the rule.”

“What a good job. I should apply.”

Bounheng laughed again a little nervously.

“But I….”

“What?” the captain asked.

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

“No. Come on.”

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

“Yes?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you…?”

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

“Are you suggesting…?”

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

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

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

“Them?”

“The crew.”

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

Bounheng faced him, his eyes red with tears.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything certainly was not.

“Any new customers, Mr. Geung?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, Dr. Comrade.”

“What’d he die of?”

“Drowned.”

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

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

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

Geung shook his head violently. Dtui looked indignant.

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

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

“Like a common thief.”

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

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

“The autopsy book?”

“Yes.”

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

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

“Do we know what she died of yet?”

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

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

“The Comrade Doctor is…is nuts today.”