Thirty-Three Teeth

Carbon Corpses

In a small dark room behind the Luang Prabang district office, something was wrapped up in an old U.S. Army parachute. The unfriendly local cadre walked across the dirt floor and forced open the shutters. The afternoon shone directly onto the gray silk.

“That’s them,” he said pointing at the heap. “They don’t smell as bad as they used to, but they still turn my gut.”

The man, Comrade Houey, was one of those who had never learned the maxim of not saying anything at all if you have nothing positive to say. He was the provincial chief: the head communist honcho of Luang Prabang, and he had long since foregone politeness and manners as a waste of good grumbling time. Siri disliked his type.

“How long have they been here?”

“Couple of days.”

Siri leaned over and slowly started to unwrap the bullet-holed tarpaulin. Inside, two carbonized corpses were slotted together in fetal position. He looked up at the fat man whose brow was permanently scowling.

“Thanks for taking such good care of them.”

“Good care? What do they want, coffee and room service?” He laughed at his own sarcasm.

“You could have made some effort to keep them separate. If you really wanted an accurate autopsy, you should have-”

“Just as well, then. I don’t want an autopsy at all. You’re here for one reason and one reason only. We just want to know where these bastards come from.”

Siri lowered his head and looked up at the man through the mat of his eyebrows. “You surely don’t mean their nationality?”

“I certainly do. They told me in Vientiane you were some tit-hot genius when it came to solving puzzles. Well, here’s a puzzle. Solve it.”

“Now, wait. It isn’t as easy as that. How the hell am I supposed to know where they came from?”

“You’re the expert.”

“I can probably tell you what killed them, but …”

“Doesn’t take a genius to tell that. Look at ‘em. It wasn’t bloody lung cancer. Just get on with it.” He turned and walked to the door.

“Hey.”

“What?”

The man stopped and looked back.

“Where am I supposed to look at them?”

“What? You don’t like a little bit of dirt? Just put some of those newspapers down if you’re afraid of getting your nice white coat dirty.”

Siri was an amazingly calm man. If he ever raised his voice, it was generally a deliberate ploy for the benefit of the misguided person in front of him. He considered it his duty to teach good manners to those whose parents had omitted doing so. He took a deep breath.

“You will find me a clean room-”

“I’ll do no such thing.”

“-and if you interrupt me again, I promise you’ll be very sorry.”

This was a showdown. The man’s alcohol-suffused pores began to turn his bloated face the color of a gibbon’s backside.

“Who do you-?”

“You’ll find me a clean room with a table and-”

The man was fit to burst. He trembled. It was obvious he’d never been spoken back to.

“Don’t … don’t you know who I am?”

“‘Who’ doesn’t matter. I know what you are. And what you are is rude. From now on, I shall tell you exactly what I need, and you’ll arrange it for me. Perhaps it’s you who don’t know who I am, or who I have lunch with every day. I am the national coroner, and as such I deserve more respect than you’ve shown so far. Off with you, and find me a room.”

Siri sat on the pile of books beside the corpses and folded his arms. He could see indecision on the fat man’s face mixed with rage, yet Houey tried one final volley.

“You’ll be sorry for this. I’ll-”

Siri stood up very quickly and stepped toward him. There was no intent of malice, but the man saw it as an attack and hurtled himself out of the shed and across the yard. Siri stood in the doorway and watched him go. He knew the district chief would return with either a loaded pistol or news of a vacant room. He hoped the reference to his lunch companion was enough to make it the latter.

The room had once been a kitchen, but there was a large tiled concrete slab in the center that was ideal for the autopsy.

Siri was alone in there. The two corpses were so crisp, there were unlikely to be any delicate organs to weigh, or stomach contents to analyze. There certainly wasn’t going to be a national emblem tattooed anywhere.

He wrote his observations in a notebook. From the breadth of the skulls, Siri was certain these were males. The smell told him they’d been engulfed in a petroleum fire. It had been intense enough to cremate them rapidly. They had assumed the same attitude, one that suggested they’d been in a sitting position when the flames first hit them. There was no trace left of their feet.

Remarkably, although their bodies and faces had been reduced to carbon, the top quarters of their heads were comparatively unscathed. Their hair was singed but in place, and a line of skin, free of soot, followed the hairline of each man.

With a blunt scalpel, he began to probe at the outer layers that were now a fusion of skin and clothing. With no microscope and no laboratory he’d have to get samples from various locations to take back to Vientiane before he could be absolutely sure of what he was seeing. In the meantime he had to trust his nose. The scent of burned leather was oddly distinct from that of burned skin. He found traces of it at the truncated ankles and at the waists.

This suggested to him that both men had been wearing high-top leather boots and belts. If he ever got to the site of the fire, he’d probably find buckles there to confirm his theory. He also discovered traces of some thick synthetic material welded to the left shoulder and chest of one man and the right shoulder and chest of the other.

He was about to cut into the bodies when he was disturbed by a light tap at the door.

“Come in.”

The door opened slightly and a middle-aged woman with a pleasant face and long healthy hair put her head through the gap. She was deliberate in not looking in the direction of Siri or the bodies.

“Dr. Siri. I’m Latsamy. Comrade Houey has assigned me to take care of you while you’re here.”

Siri melted at the sound of her musical Luang Prabang dialect. There was no tune more erotic in the whole of Laos than the spoken song of a Luang Prabang girl. “Do you need anything?” she asked.

“Perhaps you could just stand here and talk to me for a few hours.”

It was unlikely. She still wasn’t able to turn her head in the direction of the corpses.

“I would like to avoid such a thing if I could, Uncle.”

“Am I that unpleasant?”

“Not you, Uncle, them. I’d be as sick as a vomit bird if I had to look at those things. I don’t know how you can do it. Would you like some tea or anything?”

“Tea would be very nice, thank you.”

Once the door was closed, he reproached himself for flirting. He was old enough to know better. He knew he was a harmless old codger, but he’d probably frightened the girl.

He returned his attention to the bodies. Cutting into them was like retrieving baked roots from an earthen kiln. The heat had done a thorough job of overcooking everything. The angle of the pelvic indentation and the narrow sacrum confirmed that these were male. From the lengths of the femurs he assumed they were of small stature, more likely Asian than Caucasian.

He used a chisel to force open the jaws. The upper incisors curved into the shape of a shovel. This single fact put them into the Mongolian category. There was over an eighty-percent chance that these two poor gentlemen had been Asian. Either that, or they were Finnish. That was as close as he was ever likely to get to establishing their nationality. There was no fancy foreign dental work, no rings or bracelets, and they weren’t talking: not yet, anyway.

It was while he was digging around in one lower abdomen that his tea arrived. It slid in on a chair between the open door and its frame without a word from the server. Siri was about to take a tea break when his scalpel struck metal. It had been his intention to use his cheat list at the back of his notebook to estimate the age of the men from wear and tear on their pelvic bones. But the bullet proved far more interesting.

It was wedged against the pubic crest. Tracing its trajectory was a complex and delicate matter. The damage the bullet had caused was well hidden by the contraction of the muscles. But as he slowly worked his way south, he came across a second bullet, then, at the anus, a third. The bullets had almost certainly entered the body from below.

Inspired by this discovery, he checked the other body and found two bullets. They were higher, almost at the base of the rib cage, but they too had entered from below. All these incidental clues tripped over one another on their way to one conclusion.

He sat on the chair by the door and drank his cold tea. The bodies, like dismembered model kits, sat on the slab looking back at him. He doubted, from the attitude of his host, whether these two would be getting any kind of funeral service. But he still wanted to put them back together, make them look respectable. He had a feeling they’d be back.

By the time his work was complete, it was already mid-afternoon. It had been a long day, and he was exhausted. He poked his head out of the room and found the lovely Miss Latsamy embroidering the hem of a traditional Lao skirt. She was very adept, and Siri thought she would make a fine surgeon-as long as she didn’t have to look at the bodies.

“Miss Latsamy.” He joined her in the vestibule. “I have three favors to ask.”

“I was told to give you whatever you want.” She blushed at how that came out.

“Good. Then first, I’d like you to go to the least political temple you can think of in Luang Prabang and tell the abbot that we have two bodies here that would very much like to be buried. As the deaths were violent, there probably won’t be a cremation ceremony until the spirits are settled, but it would be nice if they could be buried on temple ground.”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“Secondly, I have to go to a place called Pak Xang this afternoon.”

“Oh.”

“Oh, what?”

“Comrade Houey said you’d be going back to Vientiane this afternoon. The helicopter’s waiting.”

“Comrade Houey made a mistake. I have some business of my own here. I’ll be going back tomorrow. Do you think you can find me some transport to Pak Xang?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“And I suppose it’s time for me to report to the comrade about my findings. It would probably be better if he came here so I could show him what I’ve got. But it’s up to him. Wherever we are, I doubt he’ll be very happy with what I have to say.”

“He never is.”

“I see that.”

“Asian? Damned Asian? Is that the best you can do?” The district chief had come to the room with a short blunt man who seemed to be some type of bodyguard. He nodded aggressively at the end of each utterance that passed the boss’s lips.

“Yes.”

“Well, that isn’t good enough. It takes you three hours and all you discover is that these two could be from anywhere?”

“In Asia, yes.”

“Some genius you turned out to be.”

“There is one other thing.”

“What?”

“Tomorrow morning I need to go and see the crash site.”

“Well, you can’t … What crash site?”

“Where the helicopter came down. These two were pilots.”

“Who the hell told you?”

“They did.”

“Eh? Well, you’re wrong. Totally wrong.”

“Am I? Let’s look at the facts. They were burned in a sitting position. They wore uniforms. Originally they were wearing helmets but I assume your rescue team helped themselves to souvenirs.”

“How could you …?”

“They were strapped in with seat belts and couldn’t get away from the fire. The blast at their feet was extreme and the flames spread so fast, I’m assuming they were covered in fuel from the explosion. That tells me they were carrying a lot of spare gas in the cockpit, which in turn makes me think they expected to be traveling a long distance or carrying a lot of weight.

“And of course, the fact that they’d both been shot a number of times didn’t give them much of a chance of getting out of the burning chopper. The closeness and angle of the bullets suggest they weren’t traveling very fast. That’s why I’m assuming it was a helicopter rather than a plane. I’ve retrieved the bullets, all ak47, lpla issue. So whoever these two gentlemen were, they were probably gunned down by our people. How am I doing?”

Houey looked at the nodding guard and laughed. The man laughed nervously back.

“Our visiting genius from the capital has been doing a lot of guessing. Too bad he isn’t much of a guesser.” He turned to Siri. “No, Comrade. You’re wrong.”

“I don’t think so.”

Houey huffed, and the two men left the room without further comment.

Miss Latsamy stepped into the doorway after they’d gone. Staring at the window, she said “Uncle, can you ride a horse?”

It was barely a horse. It was more a pony with a paunch. But Siri had ridden many such creatures in his time in the mountains. Indeed, he quite relished the thought of returning to the saddle. Pak Xang was about fifteen kilometers from Luang Prabang, a distance he used to cover regularly between villages in his days with the Viet Minh.

But the old Lao saying “A year away from the nipple can make a baby nauseous of breast milk” was coined neither for fun nor for scholastic debate. His motorcycle saddle had made him soft. Five kilometers out of town, he negotiated the animal out of its happy canter and into a more leisurely trot. Old dears on bicycles with huge bundles of lemon grass overtook him. The journey took ninety minutes, not much faster than if he and the animal had changed places.