Colin Cotterill - Thirty-Three Teeth

“I’m embarrassed.”

“No need to be. I’m sure the people working there had no idea either. It was probably boarded over long ago when the steps got dangerous. Now, give me a break. I’m getting hungry.”

He smiled and took a large bite out of the sandwich.

“I guess I was lucky, then,” Phosy decided. “Thank you. But you really should have told me what you had lined up.”

“You’re quite right,” Siri chewed. “I apologize. But I was a little preoccupied with being arrested and put on trial.”

“Darned lucky you weren’t convicted to go with it,” Civilai added.

“Surely you don’t still believe I’m guilty.”

“I tell you, Younger Brother, I certainly wouldn’t want to live next door to that man after all the embarrassment you’ve caused him.”

“Don’t worry, Brother. I’ve met people like him before. They talk a lot, but deep down they’re all cowards. I’m more afraid of living next door to Miss Vong. By the way, did I mention to anyone that I have thirty-three teeth?”

It was too hot to drag lunch out any longer, and Siri wheeled his motorcycle to the hospital parking lot. It was already around two, and he was feeling like a schoolboy who’d skipped classes for half a day. He hadn’t seen Mr. Geung for over a week, and he hoped the poor fellow wasn’t bogged down with bodies.

As he walked into the low concrete building, he called out in his friendliest voice: “Anybody in this morgue still alive?” There was no reply. “Hello?”

Mr. Geung came scurrying out of the office half in panic, half in relief at seeing Siri. He was too flustered to speak. He was rocking fit to roll over.

“Calm down, Geung. Calm down.”

Siri led him back into the office, sat him down, and rubbed his shoulders till his breathing returned.

“Now, slowly.”

“It … it … it’s Dtui.”

“Yes?”

“Shhh … she’s dis … appeared.”

Saloop, the lifesaver, had eaten a healthy rice-and-scrap lunch with his fiancee at the ice-works yard. The owners there liked him and encouraged him to hang around. He was different from the other dogs who seemed to only have one thing on their minds.

But today it was too hot to sit around and spoon and she wasn’t in the mood for romance, so he took a leisurely stroll back home. He’d been enjoying the company of the man from the north and felt he should be there more to look after him. People were hopeless on their own.

He stopped to sniff at an occasional post and wall to make sure there were no interlopers in his territory. But sniffing stale urine on a full stomach in that heat naturally made him feel queasy. That’s probably why his canine senses weren’t as keen as usual. It probably explains why he didn’t notice the movement in the yard before he smelled the scent. But the scent was unmistakable.

He hadn’t had a great many opportunities to sample chocolate. It was a luxury so rare, they didn’t even have any at the Lan Xang Hotel. Yet once, when he was a puppy, some rich foreign lady had given him just enough to get him hooked. He’d followed that lady for blocks until she shook him off, but the taste was with him for life.

He didn’t get his second fix until fifteen years later when he and Siri moved out here to the suburbs. Those neighbors-the kids that ate better than the president-they had chocolate one day. The scent wafted through the air and pulled him by his nose out of a deep sleep. He went to their gate and saw them chewing on bars of the stuff. They teased and taunted him, pretending to give him some, then pulling it away.

It was more than he could take. He feigned a loss of interest, coiled the inside of his neck like a spring then just as the boy was about to pull the bar away he snapped at it. The kid only just got his fingers away in time. He dropped the bar and Saloop strode off with it, victorious. The children ran inside to tell their mother of the vicious dog that attacked them and took their chocolate.

That was a fortnight ago, and he’d been waiting for a chance to get back into his new drug of choice. This was it. Their gate was open and one of the kids had left a half bar of chocolate right there in the middle of the path, melting under the hot sun. It was too easy. He’d probably be as sick as a … well, he’d probably be sick, but anyone who’s ever suffered an addiction knows you can’t fight it.

He walked slowly along the rock pathway, listening carefully for movement inside the house, but not many people were planning on coming out into the sun on a day like this. And suddenly it was under his nose. He sniffed at its glorious milky sweetness, let his tongue dip into the gooey paste and slurped it up.

Life didn’t get any better than this: a house in the suburbs, a caring master, the love of a good bitch, and chocolate. For a second he wondered if he’d ever been happier.

“A fat one?”

“She is quite large, I suppose.”

“Yeah. She was here. You know where she works?”

“Why do you need to know?”

“For the RR29.”

“RR29?”

“It’s the regulation complaint form that accompanies official telephone calls to law enforcement departments.”

“What did she do?”

“Illegal access to government documents. They said I’d need to find out where she works before they can do anything-especially seeing as she didn’t technically steal anything. So, do you?”

The man sat at a small desk in a room so crammed with piles and boxes of papers, one match would have sent the whole building to ashes in minutes.

So, this was it, Siri thought to himself looking at the vaguely Chinese features of a face slowly adopting the shape and color of a sheet of paper. This was what all the triplicates and quadruplicates came to. Hundreds of officious cadres like this, processing endless documents by hand, passing them on to other paper-faced clerks in other offices, and filing them away in rooms like this. What a system.

This was the filing section of the Department of Corrections. The only appointment marked in Dtui’s log for today was:

8:3 °CORRECTIONS

“So, do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Know where she works.”

“No. I have no idea.”

“Then how did you know she was here?”

“You just told me.”

“But why here, at Corrections?”

“It was next on my list. We’re investigating her. She’s tried this kind of thing before.”

“Who’s we?”

Siri produced his well-thumbed letter of introduction from the Justice Department. He was learning that in most cases, just having a document was enough to get him into places. Few bothered to read the long stodgy wording. The letterhead was enough. The clerk sensed he was already involved in a matter of intrigue.

“What’s she done, then?” the clerk asked.

“She goes around impersonating a nurse, you know, goes into this department and that, claiming this and that.”

“Damn. I knew there was something fishy about her. Didn’t look like any nurse I’d ever seen.”

“Suppose you tell me what happened.”

The filing clerk was visibly excited. His dull life desperately needed days such as these.

“She marches in here as if she owns the office and says Dr. Vansana asked her to come and look up something in the files. Dr. Vansana’s the physician we use at the correctional facilities. I mean, ha, as if anyone can just march in and claim to be this or that and get access to my files. I mean, she didn’t have so much as a P24.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I jest you not, comrade. Well, Dr. Vansana’s off at the reservoir today so there wasn’t even any way of checking her story. I wasn’t letting her get her hands in my drawers, I can tell you.”