The Coroner's Lunch

Tran the Elder

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

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

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

A pretty girl was filing. She turned to see who had come in.

“I need to call the Justice Department.”

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

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

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

“Do what?”

“Make the telephone call for me.”

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

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

“Hello?”

There was no response.

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

“No.”

“Doctor?”

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

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

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

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

“Number?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secondly….

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

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

Siri didn’t look up. “Get out.”

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

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

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

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

“Secondly….”

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

“What causes that?”

“No idea. We’ll look it up later.”

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

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

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

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

“Which means?”

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

“Whah?”

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

“Ouch.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Me?”

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

“You want me to type it?”

“You can type?”

Geung laughed. “She h…h…has skills.”

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

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

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

“No.”

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What can I do for you?”

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

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

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

“Then let’s make it count.”

And count it did.