Thirty-Three Teeth

Das Capital Royal

"Civilai? It’s Siri.”

“Siri? You’re using a telephone. Next thing they know, you’ll be-”

“Right. But no time for sarcasm just now.”

“Oh? Okay. What do you want?”

“I need an animal expert.”

“Any particular breed?”

“Bears.”

“You never fail to astound me, Dr. S. I’ll ask around.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh. And I think I’ve got something on your mysterious chest at the DSIC.”

“Excellent. You can tell me all about it at lunch.”

Siri put down the receiver, thanked the hospital clerk, and walked back to the morgue. But even though there was a lot to be learned from Civilai that day, Siri wasn’t going to be able to make lunch. In fact, although he didn’t know it yet, he wasn’t even going to be in Vientiane.

The sand had been packed quite tightly at the construction site, but the cement Siri mixed the night before had still spread a good deal. He and Dtui sat at his desk comparing the concrete cast with the agar scratch marks. They measured the separation between the claws. It wasn’t identical but the difference wasn’t great enough to preclude them coming from the same creature.

“Dtui, if it was the bear that ripped Auntie See apart, that same bear came to visit me on Tuesday.”

“Wow. You saw it?”

“I thought it was a dream. But dreams don’t pull down fences and leave footprints.”

“How come you’re still alive?”

“That’s a good question.”

“And one you’ll have to wait for an answer to.”

Siri and Dtui both looked up to see where the whiny voice had come from. In the doorway, a thin, well-dressed man in his early thirties stood with his hands on his hips. The hot weather had inflamed his acne to the point that it seemed to glow on his cheeks.

“Goodness, Judge Haeng. What an honor.” Siri smiled.

Dtui made the man a polite nop with her palms tightly together. “Good health, Comrade Judge.”

The man responded to neither the nop nor the words. He sat at Dtui’s desk and fanned himself in exaggerated fashion with the papers he carried.

“Hot, isn’t it?” she tried again, but he ignored her.

“If I could trust any of the fools in my office not to run off and go shopping before they brought you a message, I wouldn’t have to be here myself. But this is an emergency, and it has been entrusted to me.”

Mr. Geung had seen the judge arrive and had gone for a glass of cool ice water from the canteen. It was one of the services he happily provided. When he got back, he put it down in front of the ruddy man and looked at his blemished skin as he said “Good h … h … health, Com … Comr …”

“Heaven help us. Does he ever get to the end of a sentence?”

“He’s overwhelmed by your omnipotence.” Siri smiled again.

“I’m not about to consume any liquids in this place, am I? Tell him to take this away.”

“He speaks Lao quite well.”

“I’m sure he does, eventually. Take it away.” He despaired of the fact that Geung ignored him and stood his ground, just as he despaired because his department was hiring a mongoloid when they had the budget for a “normal” person. But Siri was unshakable. He said the day Geung left, he’d follow.

“What’s so urgent?”

“It’s a delicate matter. You two go and find something to do.”

Siri smiled at Dtui. “I think he means you two.”

She stood very slowly, walked across the room, took Geung’s hand in an extravagant manner, and led him to the door. “Come, Mr. Geung. Let’s go and get started on those excreta samples before they go lumpy.”

She looked back and caught Haeng squirming. When they’d gone, the judge leaned forward and said “Siri, there’s a military helicopter waiting for you at Wattay.”

“Why?”

Before answering, Haeng took a deep breath. He’d run headfirst into Siri’s stubborn streak on a few occasions. “You’re going to Luang Prabang.”

Siri seemed to consider this for a moment. “When?”

“Right now. My car’s outside.”

“But-”

“This is a national security matter. It’s top secret. That’s why I didn’t risk using the telephone.”

“What’s it all about?”

“I’m not terribly clear myself.”

“Then you needn’t have worried about the phone.”

“Siri, this order comes from the very top. I don’t have time for any of your temperamental rantings. There’s no choice.”

Siri wasn’t in the least threatened by the young judge or impressed by orders from the “very top.” But he could see that Haeng was. For the sake of future cooperation from the Justice Department, he decided not to give the man a hard time. And there was one other, more personal, reason why a free trip to Luang Prabang wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Luang Prabang was the Royal Capital, the birthplace of his wife, and a very scenic spot, so he’d heard. It was the historic seat of the Lan Xang empire: Lan, a million, Xang, elephants. It was in the mountains and some fifteen degrees cooler than the steampot he was in now. A night up north might not be half-bad at that. He spoke with an excitement in his voice that surprised the judge.

“Well, let’s not keep the army helicopter waiting.”

“Eh? Do you need-I don’t know, a toothbrush or anything?”

Following a similar urgent summons south the previous year, Siri had kept a permanently packed overnight bag in the office. Personally, he traveled light. Most of it was morgue equipment, gloves and wraps.

“No. Give me five minutes with my team, and I’ll join you in the car.”

To Haeng, this was a victory of sorts. His first. He decided it deserved a victory lap. He let loose with one of his renowned maxims.

“That’s the spirit, Siri. It’s moments like this that make the socialist system so great. When the call to arms comes the committed cadre, even on his honeymoon, would gladly climb off his young wife at the crucial moment sooner than let down the Party.”

If that were so, Siri thought to himself, it might explain the frustrated look he’d often seen on the faces of so many Party members.

The old Mi-8 “Hip” helicopter swung back and forth beneath its rotor like a poor baby’s crib. The young Lao pilots were friendly enough, but they seemed petrified to find themselves in control of the beast. Siri assumed that they hadn’t long ago passed through the Soviet training course that had farmboys still warm from the backs of buffalo inside a cockpit in three months.

After the initial “Hot isn’t it?” “Damned hot,” there was too much noise for a conversation. So Siri spent the ninety-minute flight in thought. He was on his way to a place that symbolized Laos to the few people in the outside world who had a clue where Laos was. Yet to him it was another era, another country altogether.

He had been born somewhere around 2446: the year the West knew as 1903. There was only one person who could have confirmed that, and she’d kept it to herself. So when it eventually came to filling out forms, Siri settled on a date that more or less matched his body.

He was born into a chaotic Laos that existed because the French colonists said it did. They’d drawn lines here and there on maps, and all that fell within them was known as the administrative district of Laos, the fifth piece in France’s Indo-China set. It seemed not to matter a bit that some thirty ethnic groups gathered in that bureaucratic net were neither of Lao origin, nor subservient to the French. When you trawl for featherback, picking up the odd buk fish is unavoidable.

Despite this nicely inked border, Laos was a divided country. The king, with French permission, ruled the areas in the north around Luang Prabang. The floating southern provinces, once a separate kingdom, had changed hands ten years earlier from the Thais to the French. They were underpopulated and under-productive and left the invaders with more headaches than looted profits. But as the French still had fertile Thai territory in their sights, the south of Laos was a necessary stepping stone. It was into this area of administrative annoyance that Siri had arrived in the world.

The first eight years of his life were a blank and a mystery. His early recollections were of an aunt: a stiff-backed, broad-nosed woman who told him nothing of his parents. And he knew nothing about her. She’d been a rare educated woman, and, between tending her rice and her livestock, she schooled the boy in her rattan hut.

She was a humorless hag with as much love in her as a dag on a goat’s backside. But Siri had a huge appetite for learning. He’d wondered since whether he’d tried so hard to study because he wanted the woman’s respect. If she did respect his hard work, she never let him know.

His home then had been Khamuan, a lush forested province that leaned against the mountains of the Annamite Highlands. But when he was ten years old, the woman set off with him on an unannounced two-day trek. It took them to a paved road, a sight he’d never before seen. There were to be many more spectacles. A truck took them along that marvelously potholed road all the way to a city. It was called Savanaketh, and it stood on the east bank of the Mekhong.

The woman must have told him a dozen times to close his mouth as she dragged him around that city; but to a boy from the bush, it was a wonder. She found a temple she’d been searching for, and he sat on a wall in front of it while she talked to the abbot in the refectory. As she walked past Siri on her way out, she muttered something about being good, and that was the last he ever saw of her.

The boy, who knew nothing of Buddhism, was shorn, draped in itchy saffron robes, and turned into a novice. He studied the scriptures until they oozed from his ears like sap from a bloated rubber tree, but he also discovered another world of knowledge. There was very little written in the Lao language in those days, a situation that hadn’t improved much since. To really become a scholar, he had to fathom the mystery of the shelves of thick books that filled a small room behind the abbey. They were all written in French.

Madame Le Saux was a missionary with the tiny Eglise St. Etoine, who had come to Laos for the very purpose of rescuing third-world children from poverty and ignorance. Like a large number of upper-class French spinsters, she didn’t possess many skills that poor, ignorant Lao children would find useful. So, in Siri, she suddenly had her raison d’etre. He was her boy, her apprentice, her justification for being there.

She had the ego to believe that Siri’s rapid grasp of French was of her doing. He took to the language like a lizard to a fluorescent lamp, and by the end of two years had consumed most of the books in the temple library. She gave him the tools, but the labor was his alone.

He scored top marks on the entrance test for the exclusive lycee, and his mentor gladly paid all the fees. By the time he was eighteen, he’d absorbed everything the school had to offer and was still hungry for more. Strings were pulled, documents of noble birth were forged, and Siri had a scholarship to a reasonable medical school in Paris. There he met, wooed, and wed Boua.

In 1939, with Hitler already making reservations for the trip to Paris, Siri and Boua boarded an airplane belonging to the fledgling Air France Company that took them to Bangkok. He held his new medical certificate. She held a nursing diploma and a letter of introduction from the French Communist Party to one of its founder members: Ho Chi Minh.

So, there it was in a nutshell. Poverty led him to religion, religion to education, education to lust, lust to communism. And communism had brought him back full circle to poverty. There was a Ph.D. dissertation waiting to be written about such a cycle.

Through the scratched window, he saw the sun reflect golden from half a dozen temple stupas. Two rivers converged, and a white shrine, like a delicious meringue, sat on top of a hill overlooking the old royal palace. This had to be Luang Prabang.