Thirty-Three Teeth

The Inthanet Connection

The two white-haired men woke in a sweat at noon. It was the devil of a hot day without a whisper of a breeze to be had anywhere. It was the type of day that could wilt a metal gatepost. The only thing preventing Siri and Inthanet from waking earlier was the mental exertion of last night’s ceremony. They were so drained, they could have slept through a house fire.

Siri looked over from his cot, Inthanet from his hammock.

“Hot, isn’t it?”

“Damned hot.”

They smiled and scratched and sat up.

“You’ll be keen to get back to Luang Prabang now, I suppose,” Siri said. In their brief time together, Siri and the old showman had become good friends.

“Not at all. Not at all. I’m sixty-eight, brother, and this is my first time away from the north. This is like winning the provincial lottery. How else would I get a free ride on my first-ever airplane? How else would I get to see the great southern capital and reside in a splendid mansion? This is the most fun I’ve had in decades. We found the puppets and got them settled and we pulled a magnificent fast one over your grumpy neighbor. All fun, Siri. All fun. I intend to drag this out for as long as I can. May even do a bit of sightseeing. In fact, you may never get rid of me.”

“You know you’re welcome to stay as long as you like. Just let me know when you’ve had enough, and I’ll put you on the flight home.”

“That’s a deal.”

Siri stared at his roommate and seemed to be weighing up just how close their friendship had become.

“Inthanet.”

“Yes, brother.”

“Could I ask a favor of you?”

“Certainly.”

“It’s quite an unusual one.”

“As if this isn’t wholly an unusual trip.”

“Okay. Don’t go away.”

Siri went into the room where he had piled his clothes and fished his flashlight out of his pack. He came back to the cot where Inthanet now sat and plonked himself beside him.

“I want you to count my teeth.”

Inthanet rolled back with laughter. When it eventually subsided and he realized this was no joke, he took the light and shined it into the doctor’s open mouth.

“Wah, you certainly have a healthy looking set there, brother. I’ve lost most of mine, but this is quite a plantation. Do you mind if I use a finger? I don’t want to lose count.”

Siri could only gargle an okay, as the finger was already on the back molar and sliding around to the incisors on the bottom deck.

“But I suppose that’s one of the benefits of living with nature all those years. No sweets to rot your teeth away. I’m a sucker for candy, I am. We used to give sweets to the kiddies who came to the puppet shows, but I ended up eating more than they did.”

Siri wanted him to stop talking and concentrate on the counting. He didn’t know anyone who could do both at the same time with any accuracy. The finger continued to trip along the row.

“I was going to get some of those false ones, but I thought better of it. I mean, you never really knew whose mouth they’d been in before yours or what they’d been chewing on. So I make do with the dozen I’m left with. Yours are beautiful, though. Just gorgeous. Better than a lot of young fellows.”

He pulled out the finger and wiped it on his loincloth. “Sorry, I suppose I really should have washed this before I put it in your mouth. Still, no harm done.”

“Did you count them?”

“Not much point being in there if I didn’t, brother.”

“How many have I got?”

“Thirty-three, brother. Thirty-three.”

“You don’t s … ”

“Cooee.” The sound of a woman calling them came not from outside the house, but from the back room a few feet away from where they sat on the porch.

“Anyone home?”

The men looked around to see the annoying Miss Vong in the back doorway.

“Yes, I thought I heard voices.”

“Miss Vong, come in, why don’t you?” Siri mumbled.

“Good morning, Mr. Inthanet.”

“Good morning to you, Miss Vong.”

They exchanged a warm smile that surprised Siri.

“You two are acquainted?”

“Of course,” she said. “You abandoned the poor man on his first night here. He was all alone. He would have starved to death if it hadn’t been for me.”

“It’s true, Siri. Miss Vong brought me a super home-cooked dinner, and she even cleaned up the place a bit.”

“I’m sure she did.”

“I’ve brought you two lonely bachelors another little treat. I just fixed up a batch of spicy minced fish.”

As she went into painful detail of how she had prepared this unspectacular dish, Siri lamented the ground that had been lost. Over the previous month, he’d triumphantly reduced the number of charity housework invasions to a trickle. Now,

Inthanet’s arrival had given her new incentive. Inthanet would have to go.

Her arrival also poured soapy water over his revelation. He had thirty-three teeth: him, Prince Phetsarath, and the Lord Buddha. He wanted to shout it. He wanted to celebrate without Miss Vong.

“Vong, this isn’t the weekend, is it? Shouldn’t you be at work?”

“Not this morning, Comrade. We’re off on a fact-finding mission to the southern provinces. We’ll be traveling overnight, so we’ve got the morning off to pack.”

His spirits rose.

“Will you be gone for many months?”

“Only four days. I’ll be back before you know it. I’ll take this into the kitchen and cover it.” She walked inside with the bowl of fish lahp. In the distance they heard her say “Whoo, this kitchen could do with a good dusting.”

“Not necessary, Miss Vong.”

Siri and Inthanet smiled at each other and made faces as they probably had behind the teacher’s back in primary school. Siri lowered his voice to ask: “What did you do with the dinner she brought you?”

“Not even your dog could get through it. I thought she might check the garbage can, so I gave it a decent burial over there under the papaya tree.”

“Then I should abandon hope of papayas growing any time soon.”

It reminded Siri he should dig up the machete before it started to rust. They laughed again and listened to the swish of the duster and the humming of a happy woman, born to clean.

It was as Siri was riding off on his motorcycle and Inthanet was closing the gate behind him that Mr. Soth, the neighbor, realized how cruelly he’d been cheated. He stood on a chair on his veranda and could see over the wall. There was a pair of them. He was mortified. How dare they? How dare anyone make fun of him?

Of course, it hadn’t just been a case of mistaken identity. Inthanet had had to go to some effort to look like Siri. There was the walk of course, that tumbling forward walk that moved Siri around as fast as it did. But Inthanet had been a very fine actor in his day. There were some minor kapok additions to his eyebrows and the donning of Siri’s favorite blue peasant suit, and Inthanet didn’t even recognize himself. How could the neighbor know it wasn’t Siri?

The doctor had seen Soth on the morning of the felling of the speaker pole. After all the secrecy and planning, it was infuriating to be caught red-handed in a suburb where not a soul wandered after midnight. He’d honed his machete to an edge so fine, it could slice through communist red tape. He’d figured on no more than ten swings to bring down the nasty speaker and he’d be back in his cot before the world was any the wiser.

How could he have taken account of mysterious Mr. Soth? How was he to know the man’s habits? What right did he have to be awake at such an unhealthy hour? There was nothing to do in that place before dawn. But there he was, awake and brimming with vigilance.

On the flight from Luang Prabang, Siri and Inthanet had hatched this plot, along with several other contingencies. Dtui had told her boss on the phone about the visiting policemen and Tik, the old shaman, had been overwhelmed with a premonition of Siri rotting in jail. So Mr. Soth’s initiative and Siri’s arrest were both inevitable. The play was written and the action followed the script. But there was to be an unexpected last act.

Apart from being a creep, Mr. Soth was also a bad loser. He hadn’t reached the economic heights and moral depths he occupied today by accepting humiliation. Revenge didn’t have to be too complicated. A simple killing would do.

It was lunchtime, so Siri drove directly to the river, parked beneath a golden shower tree, and walked over to Civilai and Phosy on their regular log. Both men were eating with their right hands and fanning themselves, geisha-like, with their left. The cheap Singha Beer logo fans from Thailand barely managed to slide the sweat across their foreheads. There was no natural movement in the air, and the river edged along so slowly it threatened to stop completely.

“Got anything to eat?” Siri asked.

“Will you listen to that.” Civilai looked at Phosy without bothering to greet the newcomer. “The man makes over fifteen dollars a month, and he still has the gall to mooch off poor folk like us.”

“Come on, you old miser. I know you’ve got a stash there in that bag.”

Civilai reluctantly reached into the brown paper parcel and pulled out one of his wife’s healthy sandwiches. Their bread habit had taken hold in France during their studies. Rightly or wrongly, but mostly wrongly, doughy white bread had been one of the few luxuries they’d dreamed of through their decades in the jungle.

Where the young men had baser, more animal priorities when sent to Hanoi for training or meetings, Siri and Civilai’s first saliva-ridden thoughts were of crusty French baguettes and sumptuous fillings. They’d been delighted to see the cheap bread industry alive and well when they marched into Vientiane in ‘75, and proceeded to make up for time lost in the wilds of Houaphan.

“Hot, isn’t it?”

“Damned hot.”

“Damned hot.”

“I’ve got thirty-three teeth.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“No, really, I-”

“I think this temperature’s driving everyone a little batty,” Civilai said.

“What’s the latest?” Phosy asked.

“Well, top of the loony list is that most of the politburo are talking about banning festivals because they encourage spontaneity. ‘Over my dead body,’ I say. Then this morning, the Thai foreign minister announced that the Lao king, whom we all know is presently holidaying in the sunny wilds of Houaphan, was rescued from Luang Prabang by a crack Thai guerrilla unit and would see out his days on Thailand’s sunny southern island of Phuket.”

“I really do have-”

“Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, the Yanks, following a brief experiment with enlightenment, have reintroduced corporal punishment. I think everyone needs to take a nice cold shower. I even got a peculiar phone call from your nurse this morning, Siri.”

Siri was sulking and didn’t respond.

“I’d settle for an air-conditioned office,” Phosy lamented.

“The cutting room at the morgue’s got ac,” Siri reminded them. “You could both come and hang out there. I’d even let you-”

“I don’t think we need to know, thanks.”

“How’s your body double?” Civilai asked.

“I can’t think what you mean.” Siri sat between the two men and unwrapped his lunch. “I personally don’t see any similarity between Mr. Inthanet and myself. Do you, Inspector?”

“You’re both conniving old bastards.”

“I mean, physically.”

“Come on, old fellow. We’re waiting to hear about your friend and the complete royal puppet story.”

“And a few missing details about last night,” Phosy added.

Siri washed down a mouthful of bread with a swig from Phosy’s iced coffee flask. The ice hadn’t survived the day.

“Well, it isn’t really that complicated, boys. Older Brother, do you think you could wave that thing a bit harder? It’s hot here.”

Civilai hit him with the fan.

“Thank you. Where should I start? When I was in Luang Prabang, I asked around about the chest I’d seen at the Ministry. When I described it, I was put in touch with our friend Inthanet. He was one of the five surviving keepers of the Royal Xiang Thong temple puppets. They’d been quiet for a while.”

“I seem to recall that my cabinet banned them from using royal language in performances, and the puppets refused,” Civilai grinned.

“That’s right. The chest was ceremonially closed and stored at Xiang Thong. It was your classic puppet-politburo standoff. But the puppets had no intention of coming out, so it looks like the government went in after them.

“Some men in safari suits came one day and grabbed the chest. Nobody was sure who they were or where they were planning to take the puppets. The abbot charged with their safekeeping was shown a government directive that the chest was to be moved for security reasons. When the abbot asked for details, they told him it was all confidential. There wasn’t much he could do about it.

“And that’s how the chest ended up in the archive department of the Ministry and why all hell broke loose. You see, the chest can’t be opened by just anyone whenever they feel like it. The spirits of the puppets are incredibly powerful and amazingly temperamental. They were already-”

“How can puppets have spirits?” Civilai interrupted.

“What?”

“Puppets aren’t people, and they aren’t dead. So how-?”

“Ah, but the puppets are made of balsa, and before the wood to carve them is cut from the tree, the puppet-maker has to get permission from the tree spirits. The balsa is a gentle wood and spirits are plentiful in it. When they learn that the wood is going to be made into the image of a person, it’s awfully tempting for the more nostalgic spirits to jump ship and settle in the form of the puppet. It’s as if they’ve returned to their lost host.

“The balsa spirits attract others to the puppets: dead puppeteers, artisans, dancers, until each one has a personality and a force of its own. Inthanet knows all of them and how to open and close the chest without offending them. When I told him I’d seen the royal seal on a box at the Ministry, he was only too pleased to come with me to Vientiane. He’s quite a character. You’d like him, brother. He’d never been out of Luang Prabang in his life.”

Phosy stood and walked toward the crest of the riverbank before it dropped steeply to the shallow river.

“All right. That explains who Inthanet is. Now let’s cut to last night. I still have one or two little mysteries of my own to solve. When was this ceremony planned, may I ask?”

“Originally we weren’t going to do it until the weekend. We’d booked a little orchestra, and they weren’t free till Saturday.”

“You booked an orchestra?”

“Just half a dozen traditional instruments. And we should have spent longer paying respect to local balsa trees. But you messed all those plans up with your impatience.”

“Impatience? I’d been making excuses to my boss for a week.”

“Patience shouldn’t expire, son. Everything comes to he who waits.”

“Especially early retirement.”

“When I heard at Mahosot that you were on your way to open the chest, I knew you were in trouble. I raced home and picked up Inthanet and whatever paraphernalia he had ready. We were really pushing our luck with the cassette recorder. The spirits much prefer live music. We swung by a balsa copse and briefly explained what we intended, and got a sort of emergency go-ahead from the spirits there.

“All the time, I was picturing you, haunted by some angry spirits, leaping headfirst through the upstairs window. I was so relieved when we got there and didn’t see your effeminate motor scooter parked nearby or your impatient body splattered in the road.”

“I bet I could have made it all the way to the fountain. But, tell me, how did you get up to the seventh floor without going through the damned door?”

“Inthanet recited a magic mantra and spirited us up through time and space. I felt my body dissolve like sugar in water, and all the parts rose into the air. It was the most wonderful sensation. One minute we were at the fountain, the next we were with the chest.”

They stared at him, open-mouthed.

“You can not be serious.”

“No. Just kidding. We broke in through the side door on the ground floor.” Civilai hit him again with the fan. “Then we used the other stairwell from the fifth to the seventh.”

“What other stairwell?”

“Funny you, as a clever detective, didn’t notice a whole staircase.”

“There was no-”

“Certainly was. We came to the locked door and I thought we’d have to break it down. But Inthanet sensed there was another way. It was at the other end of the building, boarded off, didn’t have a door. The hardboard was just glued on. It came away very easily. The stairs were riddled with white ant, but if you kept to the sides … There was another board at the top.”

“I’m embarrassed.”

“No need to be. I’m sure the people working there had no idea either. It was probably boarded over long ago when the steps got dangerous. Now, give me a break. I’m getting hungry.”

He smiled and took a large bite out of the sandwich.

“I guess I was lucky, then,” Phosy decided. “Thank you. But you really should have told me what you had lined up.”

“You’re quite right,” Siri chewed. “I apologize. But I was a little preoccupied with being arrested and put on trial.”

“Darned lucky you weren’t convicted to go with it,” Civilai added.

“Surely you don’t still believe I’m guilty.”

“I tell you, Younger Brother, I certainly wouldn’t want to live next door to that man after all the embarrassment you’ve caused him.”

“Don’t worry, Brother. I’ve met people like him before. They talk a lot, but deep down they’re all cowards. I’m more afraid of living next door to Miss Vong. By the way, did I mention to anyone that I have thirty-three teeth?”

It was too hot to drag lunch out any longer, and Siri wheeled his motorcycle to the hospital parking lot. It was already around two, and he was feeling like a schoolboy who’d skipped classes for half a day. He hadn’t seen Mr. Geung for over a week, and he hoped the poor fellow wasn’t bogged down with bodies.

As he walked into the low concrete building, he called out in his friendliest voice: “Anybody in this morgue still alive?” There was no reply. “Hello?”

Mr. Geung came scurrying out of the office half in panic, half in relief at seeing Siri. He was too flustered to speak. He was rocking fit to roll over.

“Calm down, Geung. Calm down.”

Siri led him back into the office, sat him down, and rubbed his shoulders till his breathing returned.

“Now, slowly.”

“It … it … it’s Dtui.”

“Yes?”

“Shhh … she’s dis … appeared.”

Saloop, the lifesaver, had eaten a healthy rice-and-scrap lunch with his fiancee at the ice-works yard. The owners there liked him and encouraged him to hang around. He was different from the other dogs who seemed to only have one thing on their minds.

But today it was too hot to sit around and spoon and she wasn’t in the mood for romance, so he took a leisurely stroll back home. He’d been enjoying the company of the man from the north and felt he should be there more to look after him. People were hopeless on their own.

He stopped to sniff at an occasional post and wall to make sure there were no interlopers in his territory. But sniffing stale urine on a full stomach in that heat naturally made him feel queasy. That’s probably why his canine senses weren’t as keen as usual. It probably explains why he didn’t notice the movement in the yard before he smelled the scent. But the scent was unmistakable.

He hadn’t had a great many opportunities to sample chocolate. It was a luxury so rare, they didn’t even have any at the Lan Xang Hotel. Yet once, when he was a puppy, some rich foreign lady had given him just enough to get him hooked. He’d followed that lady for blocks until she shook him off, but the taste was with him for life.

He didn’t get his second fix until fifteen years later when he and Siri moved out here to the suburbs. Those neighbors-the kids that ate better than the president-they had chocolate one day. The scent wafted through the air and pulled him by his nose out of a deep sleep. He went to their gate and saw them chewing on bars of the stuff. They teased and taunted him, pretending to give him some, then pulling it away.

It was more than he could take. He feigned a loss of interest, coiled the inside of his neck like a spring then just as the boy was about to pull the bar away he snapped at it. The kid only just got his fingers away in time. He dropped the bar and Saloop strode off with it, victorious. The children ran inside to tell their mother of the vicious dog that attacked them and took their chocolate.

That was a fortnight ago, and he’d been waiting for a chance to get back into his new drug of choice. This was it. Their gate was open and one of the kids had left a half bar of chocolate right there in the middle of the path, melting under the hot sun. It was too easy. He’d probably be as sick as a … well, he’d probably be sick, but anyone who’s ever suffered an addiction knows you can’t fight it.

He walked slowly along the rock pathway, listening carefully for movement inside the house, but not many people were planning on coming out into the sun on a day like this. And suddenly it was under his nose. He sniffed at its glorious milky sweetness, let his tongue dip into the gooey paste and slurped it up.

Life didn’t get any better than this: a house in the suburbs, a caring master, the love of a good bitch, and chocolate. For a second he wondered if he’d ever been happier.