Colin Cotterill - Thirty-Three Teeth

Siri had ridden to the Mekhong at its deepest point and hurled the amulet far out into the murky brown water. There were no coincidences any more in his life. That, he knew. Everything was inked on some sacred parchment. Malevolent spirits were in pursuit of him. The previous year at an exorcism in Khamuan, he’d been given this very amulet, an antique black stone, to ward off the evil spirits of the forest; the Phibob. But it had turned out to be a trick. The stone was actually a spiritual lintel that opened a gateway from their world to his. He’d been lucky to survive their attack. Now they wanted revenge on him. Lah had been selected to deliver this omen, and she was in danger as a result. It was clear that she could never be a part of his life. No matter how strongly he felt attracted to her, it was impossible.

Of course, Civilai said that was all a pile of buffalo dung. He said when the chance of a little over-seventy nooky presented itself, one shouldn’t read too much into coincidence. “At our age, my little brother, these opportunities don’t come along every day.”

“It wasn’t a coincidence. I sent those spirits packing, and in so doing I saved the soldiers that were cutting down their trees. They weren’t happy about that. But I tell you, that stone had been destroyed.”

“Did you see that happen with your own eyes?”

“Yes. Well, not with my own eyes. But I saw the dust before the Hmong took it out to the forest.”

“Then you can’t be sure it came from the stone. Mystery one solved.”

“So how did it get here, to Vientiane? How did it get to the market? And of all the people who could have bought it, why Lah?”

“I’m an elder statesman with a not-inconsequential intellect. I can solve many of the conundrums that arise from the day-to-day running of a little country in the southeast of Asia. But I have a one-mystery-a-day quota,” Civilai said. “Release me now. I have to get home to my dear wife. Remind me where my car is.”

“You think you should drive?”

“Certainly. What is there to hit?”

Siri nodded and escorted him to the door. Civilai was right. On a Sunday afternoon in March, Vientiane had the atmosphere of a town in the talons of a deadly plague. A motorcyclist might brave the late-afternoon heat. A dog might lie on the concrete paving stones to burn off the fleas. But most folks were at home, waiting for the sun to go down.

At dusk, the girls would two-up on bicycles and ride slowly along Fangoum Road, catching some small breeze from the river and advertising their availability to boys two-upping in the opposite direction. They would still be mopping their sweating brows with their mothers’ large pink handkerchiefs until long after nightfall.

Old Auntie See lived in a shed behind a peeling white French colonial mansion that now housed five families. For a living, she bought fruit at the morning market, cut it into colorful slices, and sold it from a card table beside her back gate.

Business was never too brisk, since money for luxuries had become scarcer. As a result, her main diet was overly ripe fruit, which saw her spending much of her nights in the tin latrine behind the shed.

On that particular Sunday night, whilst engaged in her dribbly business, she thought she heard a growl. There were footsteps through the undergrowth of her uncared-for garden. They were too heavy to be those of a dog, but somehow too zigzag and rambling to be those of a person. She called out anyway: “Can’t a woman have a shit in peace any more?”

There was no answer. The noises stopped. And after a few more minutes she forgot all about them. Diarrhea, in its most vindictive state, can erase even thoughts of terror.

Some twenty minutes later, she groaned and rearranged her long cotton phasin around her waist. She stepped through the corrugated tin door, and before she could stoop to wash her hands in the paint can basin, that thing was on her. She had no time to scream-to run-or even to turn her head to see what was biting into the back of her neck. With one swipe of its powerful arm, she was dead.

Siri arrived at the hospital on Monday morning with a vodka hammer beating and a vodka sickle scything through his head. He guessed he couldn’t have a worse hangover if he’d drunk the formaline straight from the sample bottles. Every step from the motorcycle park to the morgue jarred new agony into his brain. There was no question in his mind that the Soviet Union was doomed.

He walked beneath the French morgue sign, carefully wiped his feet on the American welcome mat, and stepped inside the cool dark single-story building. He immediately sensed one or two presences, but was far too vodka’d to acknowledge them. They could wait.

He walked into his office, whose blue walls had been thoroughly whitewashed again and again until they were gray. Anything that wasn’t blue suited Siri just fine. Nurse Dtui was sitting at her desk.

“Morning, Comrade Siri,” she said, flashing her small, neat teeth but not stirring her large, untidy body.

“Good morning, Dtui.”

Those first words of the day came out like a gravel driveway.

“Oh-ho. Have a bit of a session last night, did we?”

“A cultural experiment.”

He flopped into his chair, and his head turned to percussion. He buried it in his hands.

“Looks like the experiment failed.”

“No, my faithful assistant. Never assume that negative experiences teach you less than positive ones. I have it filed away that in the future, no matter how free, no matter how fascinating the squiggles on the bottle, I shall avoid Russian vodka as if it were a musthy elephant.”

Dtui stood. Her uniform was bleached white and stretched across her large frame like butcher’s paper around a hock of pork.

“What you need is some of my ma’s herbal brew.”

“Oh, no. Don’t say it. Haven’t I suffered enough?”

“Don’t go away.”

She headed for the door.

“Where’s our other soldier?”

“He’s in the examination room getting the new guests ready.” She stopped in the doorway. “You’ll like this one: two men dead on a bicycle in the middle of the street. No spare seat or luggage rack. They were going around Nam Poo fountain in the middle of town. Nothing there could have been going fast enough to hit them. They were found on top of the bike. No blood. This looks like a job for … dah-dah-da-dah.”

“Dtui?”

“… Super Spirit Doc.”

She giggled and walked out of the office. Siri groaned. The last thing he wanted on that particular morning was to cut anyone up. He especially didn’t want anything inexplicable to trouble his hurting head.

Dtui was fumbling in the back of the freezer for the corked bottle that held her mother’s secret brew. Although there was a hospital ban on using the morgue freezers for personal perishables, her ma’s brew looked enough like body waste to fool the most pedantic inspector. It was an evil Macbethian mix of bizarre ingredients that tasted horrible but cured just about anything.

“Wha … wha … what’s that for, Dtui?” Mr. Geung was laying out the second cyclist on the spare aluminum table. Geung was a good-looking man in his forties with pronounced Down-Syndrome features and jet-black hair greased on either side of a crooked center parting. When he asked a question, he had the habit of rocking slightly where he stood. Judge Haeng at the Department of Justice, which oversaw the work of Siri and his team, was lobbying for the removal of the “moron,” but Geung’s condition was neither serious nor disruptive to his work. Although he often became anxious about anomalies outside the regimented pattern of his days, he was a morgue assistant par excellence. He’d been trained with infinite patience by Siri’s predecessor and knew the procedures better than Dtui or Siri himself. He was strong and reliable, and he wielded a mean hacksaw.