Colin Cotterill: Thirty-Three Teeth

“The boss has got himself a hangover,” Dtui said.

Geung snorted a laugh. “Al … alcohol is the elixir of the d … devil.”

“Was that another one of your father’s wisdoms?”

“No. Comrade Dr. Siri … ss … said it when we cut open the drunk fellow on January first.”

That was one other thing. You didn’t want to say anything you’d live to regret when Mr. Geung was around. He didn’t forget much.

The autopsy followed the standard pattern they’d settled into. Siri was beginning to sit back and let Dtui give the commentary while he took notes. She was learning the trade and hoped to be sent to the Eastern Bloc on a scholarship. Her eyes were keen, and she often noticed things that Siri had missed. The only setback to this new system was that nobody could read Siri’s notes afterward. Not even Siri.

As the two bodies in the morgue hadn’t been reported as missing, they would temporarily be known as Man A and Man B.

They were an ill-matched pair. Man A was neatly dressed in a white shirt. He had on an old but quite costly wristwatch, wore permanent-press slacks, and had soft, uncallused hands which suggested he wasn’t used to manual labor. But, as Siri and Dtui both noticed, the most remarkable thing about him was that he was wearing socks. The March temperatures were already hitting 107 degrees. Even in those few offices where ancient French air conditioners waged battle with the heat, the best they could ever achieve was “tepid.” It was never so cold you’d need to wear socks.

No, these socks suggested that the poor man had no choice. Since he had become coroner, Siri had been under pressure to wear the black vinyl shoes provided by the Party. It was an example of what he termed the new “shoe over substance” policy. So far, he’d been able to use his seniority and his stubborn streak to remain in his brown leather sandals. But he knew that if he were finally compressed into those toe-torturers, he certainly would have to wear socks also.

Dtui spoke his thought. “I’d say he’s government.”

“The socks?”

“The fingers.”

She was constantly surprising him. Siri went over and held up Mr. A’s hand. All the fingertips were purple: triplicate syndrome.

It was Civilai who’d coined the phrase to describe the peculiar mauve “bruising” so common in socialist bureaucracies. They were bogged down in paperwork, as there had to be copies for every department. This called into play that miracle of modern office timesaving: carbon paper.

Like its shoes and its hair dye, Laos got its carbon paper from China. So most officials that used it found more ink on themselves than on the paper. Mr. A had thumbed his share of carbon sheets.

They stripped him, bagged and labeled his clothes, and took their allotted four color photographs of his outside. Siri noted that no shoes had arrived with the body. There was a thin trail of congealed blood at the corner of the mouth and severe bruising to the chest and abdomen.

Before beginning an internal examination, Siri decided to prepare Mr. B for the chop also. This would ultimately save time and allow them to make comparisons of their respective injuries. Siri ignored Dtui’s comment that “This is how they do it at the abattoir,” and asked her to voice her observations about Mr. B.

She noted that he was certainly from a different end of town than Mr. A. His clothes were threadbare and quite dirty. His hands were rough and covered in scabs of short nicks as if he’d been cut often.

“So, the question remains,” Siri pondered, almost to himself, “… what were two men from very different backgrounds doing sharing a bicycle at two in the morning?”

“Perhaps,” Dtui suggested, “this one was the chauffeur and he was taking his master home.”

Geung let out one of his farmyard laughs.

“Or perhaps they weren’t on the bicycle at all.” Siri glared. “I’m starting to think the fact they were found with the bike was a coincidence.”

“So, how did they get there?”

“Oh, I don’t know everything, Miss Dtui. Perhaps the old chap ran into the government fellow when he was crossing the road.”

“Yeah? And how fast would he have been pedaling to kill the pair of them?”

“Or, alternatively, the government fellow was riding a motorbike and hit the old boy.”

“And …?”

“And someone ran off with the motorbike.”

“I suppose I could buy that one.”

“Did the police bring in the bicycle, Mr. Geung?”

“It’s round the b … round the b … the back.”

“Good. We can take a look at it later.”

They stripped Mr. B. Apart from his obviously broken neck and the massive bruising associated with vertebral artery trauma, there were no recent abrasions or visible marks on him. They finished up the film and laid him out. There the two corpses reclined on either side of the room, like temple step ornaments.

The dual autopsy took exactly two hours. Mr. A had hemorrhaging around the chest cavity and livor mortis around the main artery common in victims of high-speed collisions, so the motorcycle theory still held. Some trauma had also been sufficiently violent to rupture his testicles. From these initial examinations, Siri surmised that the broken neck had killed Mr. B, and the internal bleeding Mr. A. But there were other tests to do.

Mr. Geung cut through the tough crania with his old hacksaw, and Siri tied cotton around the brains in order to suspend them in Formalin for two or three days until they were set firm enough to cut into.

Dtui took samples of the stomach contents and blood. As they had no lab, there were only limited secrets these could disclose. The next day, Siri would take a ride over to the Lycee Vientiane, where he would coerce Teacher Oum into using the last of her science lab chemicals on color tests.

Somewhere out at the customs shed, a crate of school chemicals, kindly donated by the high-school cooperative in Vladivostok, had sat for three months collecting paperwork. Even being the national coroner didn’t carry any weight in pushing that old bureaucratic bus up the hill to socialist nirvana.

Dtui, Geung, and Siri sat on their haunches around the bicycle. The rusty thing that had survived many battles would never be ridden again.

“Now, what do you suppose could cause something like this?” Siri asked of no one in particular. The frame supporting the chain was buckled and almost touching the ground. The handlebars leaned back, the seat forward.

“It looks like I sat on it,” Dtui said, causing a laughing fit in Mr. Geung that took a good deal of back-slapping to arrest.

“No,” Siri said at last. “It would take half a dozen Dtuis to do this. But I think I know what could. What side of the fountain were they found on?”

“Ministry side.”

“I think we’d better go and take a look, don’t you?”

“Is your head up to it?”

“Ah, Dtui. There’s nothing like the dissection of corpses and a dollop of your ma’s brew to cure a hangover.”

The Ministry of Sport, Information and Culture currently and unofficially occupied a seven-story building that overlooked the non-spouting fountain at Nam Poo Square. Given the shape of things in Laos, the square was, naturally, a circle. It was surrounded by quaint and largely neglected two-storied buildings that wouldn’t have felt out of place in a small southern French village. It was a sleepy square where old ladies dried white spring-roll wrappings on mesh tables and crazy Rajid the Indian walked slow laps around the dull concrete fountain.

Although the Lao weren’t yet conceited enough to refer to most of their government departments as anything more grand, Vientiane people had begun to call the incongruous building that housed the sports department “The Ministry.” It was probably the size of the place, rather than its grandeur, that impressed them. The old French Cultural Center had all the architectural class of a two-star hotel in a seaside resort. The Sport, Information and Culture people rattled around inside its large rooms like a destitute woman’s beads in a once-full jewelry box.