Thirty-Three Teeth

A Day at the Maul

Mr. Geung was sweeping the deceased cockroaches from the morgue when Siri arrived the next morning.

“Morning, Mr. Geung.”

“G … good health, Comrade Doctor.”

“Any new guests today?”

He was expecting a “no” in response. Geung laughed and looked to the sky as if Siri’s consistent question were the most wondrous greeting a man could receive. He never tired of it. Siri often considered climbing inside his friend’s mind to enjoy some of his simple pleasures.

“New guest in r … r … room one, Comrade Doctor.”

“Oh, no.” Siri moaned. “Isn’t it getting a bit crowded in room one?”

There was only the one freezer. The last Siri had known, Mr. A and Mr. B were already bunked in there on makeshift bamboo rafts that doubled the occupancy potential.

Geung snorted a laugh. “N … n … no. Mr. A and Mr. B went home already.”

“Somebody came for them?”

“Yes.”

Siri walked into the office to find Dtui at her desk poring over the pictures in one of Siri’s old French pathology textbooks. As she studied the black-and-white photo of a man who’d been sliced in half by a locomotive, she chewed on a rice snack wrapped in pig intestine.

“Do you recall the good old days when I’d come in here and find you reading Thai comics?” Siri asked.

“Good health, Doctor.”

“Good health. I hear A and B have left us.”

Dtui put down her greasy snack, wiped her hands on a surgical mask, and picked up the police report.

“Mr. B. Now Kampong Siriwongsri. Glass factory laborer by day. Second-shift security guard by night. He was on his way to work. His wife identified the body and they took him to the temple to get him ready. Mr. A apparently didn’t have anyone to love him, and don’t we know what that feels like. So the Ministry of Sport, Information and Culture has taken responsibility and arranged a cheap ceremony at Ong Deu temple.”

Siri’s mind suddenly jumped to his own death. Who’d take responsibility when he huffed his last breath? Who’d pay for his funeral at some nondescript temple? His friends were all broke. Would Judge Haeng discover some unmined vein of generosity and arrange for the Department of Justice to give him a state funeral? Some hope.

“So …” Dtui was still answering “… it all fits. Mr. B is riding to his second job when Mr. A drops out of the sky and lands on top of him: chances-eleven million to one against. A breaks B’s neck, buckles the bike, and kills himself. Case closed.”

“Except …”

“Except for why. But that’s the police’s problem, not ours, right?”

“Aren’t you just a little curious, Dtui?” “I’m peeing myself with anticipation.”

“Well,” he blushed. “That’s good. I mean, curiosity’s good in this job. Keep it up.”

The poor lady in the freezer had obviously been mauled. The wounds were over twenty-four hours old, and the insects and even her own cat had started on her before she went off from the heat. Her clothes were shredded and black with blood, while her skin was blanched white. There were bite marks on her body, the most traumatic of these being at her neck. Those areas of skin that hadn’t been bitten were raked with scratch marks.

“They found her in the bushes beside her shanty.” Dtui was behind the doctor as he stood at the open freezer, looking at the mess that Auntie See had become.

“Didn’t anyone report it when it happened? There must have been a hell of a lot of noise.”

“Nope.”

“What’s happening to people? Didn’t we used to care for our neighbors?”

“Perhaps they thought it was just a dog fight.”

But there was something wrong with that premise. Even before an autopsy, just looking into the dark freezer, he knew it wasn’t possible. From the size of the visible wounds, the separation between the individual claws, he had a strong feeling this was no dog attack.

The autopsy was new to all of them. Siri was in no position to read up on the latest forensic pathology techniques from around the globe. For one thing, they didn’t get a lot of useful information from the outside world. For another, all the advances were being made in the United States, and Siri’s English stank. He was fluent in Thai, French, and Vietnamese, but these had apparently filled up his language tank, and all attempts at adding English overflowed hopelessly.

But if the rest of the world ever learned Lao, he would certainly have become an authority on innovation in a morgue.

Here he was with a body covered in bite marks, and he needed to confirm whether they were from dogs. So with a modicum of genius, he sent Geung off to the kitchen with a requisition form and started to create dams with adhesive bandages around the most profound marks. When Geung got back, Dtui mixed a thick solution of agar, and they poured it into pools on Auntie See.

“Is this standard procedure?” Dtui wanted to know.

“Well, I hear they use plaster of paris in the West, but we can’t afford that. They don’t even have any in the ‘breaks and fractures’ department of the hospital. So we’ll have to see how this works. Just don’t get peckish and raid the freezer before they set.”

“I won’t.”

After a few hours, the agar was solid and looking pretty as birthday-party treats with little turrets of teeth prints. Geung moved them to the refrigerator, and they took Auntie See out for an internal examination.

As a New Year’s present, the Justice Department had furnished the morgue with a Soviet air conditioner so the men no longer had to work in shorts and undershirts. Dtui no longer had to stand in front of the open freezer door to cool off. But the stifling temperature outside that day had defeated ussr technology. There was probably a higher setting, but Siri couldn’t read Russian. So as they stooped over Auntie See, Mr. Geung had to constantly mop brows with a towel.

All they learned was that the lady had lost a great deal of blood. The attack was the probable cause of death, as she had certainly been alive when it began. Her bowels were a mess, but there was nothing life-threatening there. She was otherwise in good shape and should have been able to fight off any normal suburban predator.

Everything came down to the size of the wounds. That’s what continued to worry Siri. While Dtui typed up the report and

Geung scrubbed down the examination room, he studied the marks on the agar molds. He used a ruler to measure the size of the jaw and the spread of the claw marks.

By 11:30, when his assistants were in the dissection room labeling jars, Siri, for no other reason than the dream of the previous morning, had come to the illogical conclusion that Auntie See had been attacked and killed by a bear.

It was lunchtime. Civilai had carried his rolls down to the river-bank and was sitting on the log, waiting for his lunch partner to arrive. He was moderately engrossed in the Siang Pasason newspaper when Siri tapped him on the shoulder.

“Excuse me, sir. Do you mind if I join you?”

“Well, all right. Until someone better comes along.”

“Like Crazy Raj id?”

“He’d do. But see. He spends most of his days on his knees in the water.”

They looked out to the narrow band of river that remained at the end of the dry season. Rajid’s bald head poked from the water like a happy black penis. He was the town nutcase. Nobody knew which traveling Indian family had deserted him as a child some fifteen years before. He was just discovered one day sitting on the steps of the Black Stupa. Locals fed him regularly without question, and he repaid them by smiling and spreading his immutable happiness around Vientiane. He had no home and no need of one.

“In this heat, I envy the fellow.”

“It is hot, isn’t it?”

“Damned hot.”

Siri sat and started to unwrap his baguette. Since their abortive date, Mrs. Lah had shifted her franchise from the hospital. His lunch now came from a Vietnamese woman at the end of his lane. She offered two choices: sweet or savory. He could never guess what was inside, just by looking. He was often

none the wiser after the contents reached his palette. Still, food was fuel.

“Anything interesting in the paper?”

Civilai laughed. Printed news under a one-party system rarely exposed, unearthed, or titillated.

“Czech skiing conditions are improving.”

“That’s a relief.”

“Football results from Albania. Part seventeen of Lenin’s life story. Our military attache’s in Cuba.”

“Anything about Laos?”

“Laos? Now you’re asking. Laos. Laos. Wait. Here. A photo of happy smiling farm workers in Savanaketh above a story of a bumper cabbage harvest.”

“They’re standing in a rice field.”

“Maybe they’re taking a break.”

Civilai scrunched up the newspaper and threw it over his shoulder. He was a brilliant man who tired easily of bull. He despaired of Laos’s potential that was being wasted by his plodding colleagues. But he definitely agreed that it was far better to be a plodding communist than a rampant capitalist.

He looked across the Mekhong toward the Thai fascists and bit into his homemade roll. In this heat, he lacked the enthusiasm to eat. There was so little meat on his bones, he was afraid that if he didn’t stop sweating soon, there wouldn’t be anything left of him. He smiled as he remembered his morning meeting.

“Have you heard about the senator’s visit?”

“The only way I hear anything is through you, Comrade.”

“Well, we’ve had a delegation from Washington.”

“They want their bombs back?”

“They’re insisting that we give them access to look for mia’S.” “What’s an mia?”

“It’s a military person who gets lost in battle.”

“Wait. I thought they claimed they didn’t have any combat troops in Laos.”

“That’s right.”

“So how did any soldiers get lost here?”

“Perhaps they had their maps upside down.”

“And do we actually have lost Americans here?”

“I haven’t seen any. But you can never tell what the lpla will get up to. The Yanks say they’ve got evidence that there are mia’s held in camps up on the border.”

“And they’re insisting …”

“Yes. There’s a lot of political pressure over there to bring their heroes back home.”

“Well, if they insist, I suppose we’ll have to cooperate.”

“That’s right. Wouldn’t want them to start a war or anything.”

“What do we get out of it?”

“Aid.”

“They’ve offered us aid?”

“Yes.”

“See? I told you they’d have guilty consciences.”

By the time they’d plowed their way through the sandwiches and were enjoying some fruit, both men were in their undershirts and seriously thinking about joining Rajid in the murky water.

“Any interesting dead people this week?”

“Well, I’m sure you heard about the chap from Info and Culture.”

“I read the first installment of the report. Can’t see any reason for the fellow killing himself, though.”

“I think something happened up there that drove him to it. It’s the archive department. Do you know of anything official concerning the Royal Family?”

“You mean, apart from stripping them of their titles, humiliating them in public, kicking them out of the palace, and stealing their money?”

“Yeah, apart from that. Something concerning the dsic.”

“Why do you ask?” “There was a trunk up there with a royal seal. It was angry.” “An angry seal?”

“No, the trunk was angry. I don’t know what was in it, but I felt an incredible force.”

“Enough to throw a man off a roof?”

“Could be.”

It was two that afternoon when a second man found himself in a hurry to get away from the Ministry of Sport, Information and Culture. Despite falling four flights of stairs and landing on his head, Constable Nui somehow managed to cheat death. Much of him was broken, and there was some serious internal bleeding that needed emergency surgery to stem. But by five, it looked like he might make it through the night.

Siri and Inspector Phosy stood at the end of the bed watching the constable’s wife and sisters setting up camp around him. With so few nurses available, families were encouraged to stay the night and look after their own. If they brought bedding, food, and any medicines they could lay their hands on, all the better.

“We won’t be able to talk to him tonight,” Phosy whispered.

“What was he doing up there?” Siri asked.

Phosy led the doctor outside into the hall. “We’d just finished checking out the office. The only thing left was that box of yours. There wasn’t a keyhole or a catch or anything like that. There didn’t seem any way of opening it. So we sent Constable Nui off to get a crowbar.”

“Risky.”

“What would you have done?”

“Left it well alone.”

“Well, we couldn’t do that. This is a possible murder inquiry. Anyway, as we were on our way out, Nui passed us on his way in. I told him to open the chest and bring whatever was inside to the station. Next thing I hear, he’s face down on the fifth-floor landing.”

“Did he get the chest open?”

“No. There are splinters where he tried to force in the metal bar, but he didn’t make any impression on the lid. The trouble is, now none of our men are prepared to go anywhere near it. They say it’s jinxed. So it looks like I’ll have to do it myself.”

“Phosy, can I ask you to leave it alone for a while? You’ll have to trust me about this. Give me some time to find out what’s in there, will you? Please?”

“I shouldn’t.”

“It’s really important.”

Phosy thought about it. “I’ll give you three days. I can’t bluff beyond that. I’ll tell the boss it’s a national treasure and we have to wait for the key.”

“Thanks.”

They walked out of the stuffy hospital building and into an early evening sunshine that still dazzled and blasted them. They stood in the shade of a large henna tree, but there was no breeze to cool them down.

“Hot, isn’t it?”

“Damned hot.”

“Phosy, can I ask you a silly question?”

“Sure.”

“Have there been any reports of … any sightings of … well, wild animals around town?”

He assumed Phosy would laugh, but instead he answered very matter-of-factly.

“Only the bear.”

Siri looked at him, astonished.

“There’s a bear loose?”

“That ragged old heap they kept at the back of the Lan Xang. It got out somehow a few days ago. I’m surprised it had the legs to make it to the wall, let alone over it. Someone reported they’d seen it up by the memorial. God knows how it got up there. There are a couple of army people out with a net looking for it.”

He noticed Siri’s troubled expression. “You got a reason for asking?”

“I think you’d better come to the morgue and take a look at something.”

Siri rode his old motorbike slowly along Lan Xang Avenue on his way home that evening. Families sat by the roadside hoping to catch some breeze from passing cars, waiting for the night to bring relief from the stifling day. Siri was so deep in thought, he’d forgotten to turn on his lights. When suddenly the shadow of the Anusawari monument loomed up in front of him, he flicked the switch and drilled a little hole of light into its base.

On the strength of what he’d seen in the morgue, Phosy had phoned police headquarters and suggested they get an armed unit on the streets looking for the bear. There was now a shoot-to-kill order out on it.

Two things troubled Siri. First was the gap in his knowledge of wild animals. In all his years of jungle campaigns, he’d never seen a live bear. He’d seen several dead, with bullet holes, tied to wooden staves. He’d eaten their meat. But none of that really educated him about the lifestyle of the animal.

He’d read stories of North American grizzlies and polar bears ripping people to shreds. Yet in all his years, he hadn’t once heard of an Asian black bear attack. Perhaps the victims didn’t live to tell the tale. Then again, with all the maltreatment this old girl had suffered over the years, she could have been out for revenge.

After work, he’d stopped at the Lan Xang and seen the state of the cage she’d been kept in. He talked to one of the long-term chambermaids, who told him how cruel people could be to her. He needed to find an animal expert. He wanted to know just what this sad creature was capable of.

He rode through the permanently open gates into the huge flat concrete yard that five months earlier had been the site of the That Luang Festival. Thousands of people had jostled and laughed and flirted there. Now it was like some large school playground during exams.

He pulled up beside the lonely white memorial dedicated to the Unknown Soldier. At the far end of the ground, the custard-yellow stupa of That Luang, in need of some attention, stared back. Some hundred meters away, a little boy in underpants kicked a tin can. Its noise echoed loudly back and forth between the two monuments.

Here was where they had sighted the bear. That was Monday, just before midnight. He looked across the yard, beyond the stupa to the road. And on the far side of that road was his own lane.

This was the second thing that worried him. The bear had come to him in his sleep early that morning. But if the bear had actually materialized as a spirit, it had to be dead. That was logical. So why had nobody found its body? And if it wasn’t dead, that meant the foul-breathed creature that woke him had been alive and still dripping with the blood of its victim.

He turned off his engine twenty meters from his house and wheeled the bike into his front yard, but Miss Vong still caught him. She had to shout to be heard above the loudspeaker booming from the corner of the street. It was detailing how long to soak jackfruit skins to make the best hair conditioner.

“Good evening, Comrade Doctor. Hot, isn’t it? I’ve just made some nice taro gruel.”

“Good for you, Miss Vong.”

“I’ll bring you some over.”

“No, thank you.”

“Yes, I will. You have a shower and I’ll be there in half an hour.”

He was about to make an excuse but her head was already back inside her gate. She was a thoroughly annoying woman, spindly and plain as a hand-rolled cigarette. She’d been his neighbor in town before the apartment house they had lived in blew up, and the planning department assumed they’d want to be close in their new allocation. Thankfully, her work at the Education Department kept her out of Siri’s hair for long periods.

He stood in front of his own gate and looked at the larger, far more beautiful house of his other neighbor, who was a government cadre from Oudom Xay. The man’s silent children were riding in the street on their brand-new bicycles. Scotch whiskey cartons and a stereo packing case had been stacked beside the dustbins for a month so everyone could see just how proudly corrupt the man was.

Siri wondered what huge favor was being repaid to this smalltown headman from the north who sat on a rocking chair on his porch every evening cleaning a pistol. He ignored all his neighbors, just as he seemed to take no interest in his own family. If he worked, he did so in the hours when Siri was sleeping.

Saloop barked a welcome from forty meters down the lane and plodded happily toward home. Siri watched his belly swing from side to side and wondered where he was getting fed. The bucket of rice and scraps Siri left out in the morning was invariably untouched by evening.

“Welcome home, brave housedog.”

Saloop stretched up for a headrub.

“You realize the house could have been broken into while you were off doing whatever it is you do?”

In fact, that wasn’t true. No breaking would have been necessary. With all known criminals under lock and key on the islands in Nam Ngum Reservoir, few people bothered to lock their doors now. To be honest, Siri didn’t have anything worth stealing anyway.

He removed a mysterious object from his motorbike and carried it into the house. It was wrapped and taped in a blanket. Saloop followed curiously, wagging his tail. The doctor lit a lamp and took his secret all the way through to his yard to a grave he’d pre-dug for it. He’d estimated the length almost perfectly. In that far corner of the garden, in a spot hidden from prying eyes, he buried the blanket and what it contained.

He was brushing the earth from his trousers when he noticed the corrugated fence. It separated his home from one that was under construction at the back. Eventually they’d get around to building a wall. When the workers had put up this fence, it had been nailed firmly to four bamboo posts that marked the edge of his plot. It was eight feet tall and had probably been a temporary border to many homes before this.

But it was no longer fixed. At his end, it hung from one single tack and was slightly buckled, as if someone had leaned heavily against it and popped out the nails.

He lifted the flap, held up his lamp, and looked at the slow progress of the foundations there. He saw the piles of sand, still where they’d been when he moved in. But there was something curious about the nearest pile. He went through the gap and knelt down to get a better look.

There were footprints-two clear ones-which were neither human nor dog. Both were pointing in his direction. A shudder crept up his spine. Could it really have been the killer bear in the living flesh that had woken him that morning?

If so, why was Siri still alive?