Colin Cotterill - Thirty-Three Teeth

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.

Still sore, Siri walked away from his sister-in-law’s simple house feeling even sadder than when he had arrived. Everything about Wilaiwan reminded him of his wife. The way she smiled, her walk, even the widow’s peak that stood on her forehead like the prow of a great white ship.

The sisters had been born nine months apart: yield from the sibling production line so common in well-off families of the old regime. Boua, his wife, had been the middle child of nine and the only rebel. While her family was in the royal capital working under the king’s patronage, Boua was in France training to overthrow the royal family and rescue her country for communism.