Colin Cotterill - Thirty-Three Teeth

Mr. Geung had stayed back at the morgue to keep an eye on the guests. Dtui, on her first investigative mission away from the hospital, stood in the middle of the road beside the angels chalked there on the asphalt. Siri was twelve meters away, with his back against the wall of The Ministry. He painted an imaginary arc with his eyebrows from the point where Dtui stood up to the top ledge of the building above him. He shook his head and walked over to the nurse.

“No good?” She asked.

“Well, it isn’t impossible, but … I don’t know. He either took one almighty running jump, or he was tossed. And if someone had thrown him, we would have found marks on his arms or legs. But we didn’t.”

“You don’t think he might have-”

A Vespa scooter came putt-ing around the fountain, causing Siri to leap from its path into the unsuspecting arms of Dtui.

“Dr. Siri. You romantic old thing, you.”

Embarrassed, he untangled himself from her embrace. The scooter stopped a few meters further on, and the rider, a trim attractive man in his forties, looked back and laughed. Inspector Phosy got down, hoisted the silly vehicle onto its stand, and hurried back with a handshake at the ready. Siri grabbed the hand, and the two men patted each other’s backs as they embraced.

“Hot, isn’t it?”

“Damned hot.”

“How’s my favorite policeman?”

“Dr. Siri. I thought you were dead.”

“Don’t you be so sure I’m not.” They broke apart, and Siri looked along the street. “That’s a very impressive cop bike you have. Lilac’s the crime-suppression color of the year, I hear.”

“Be kind, Comrade. These are hard times. We have to take what we can get.” He looked over Siri’s shoulder. “Good health, Dtui. You haven’t lost any weight.”

“And you’re no better looking.”

She shook his hand warmly.

“So,” Siri asked. “How did you get this case?”

“They put me on anything with the word ‘government’ attached to it. As soon as Dtui called and suggested the victim could be a government official, they took me out of the cupboard. How hard do you think this is going to be? Was it a suicide?”

“I don’t know. It’s odd. Unless he was trying to fly, I don’t see why he wouldn’t just drop from the roof. He’d be just as dead without trying to reach the fountain.”

“All right, then. Let’s see if we can get any information from the information department.”

They walked together through the elegant wooden doors and found themselves in a foyer containing nothing but a table. On the table was a small, hand-written sign that said all inquiries upstairs.

Their footsteps echoed up the teak staircase. They noted how stuffy the place felt. Despite the heat, most of the windows hadn’t been opened since the Americans left. (French culture had briefly been supplanted there by American language classes before the building’s current manifestation.) The only culture not in evidence was Lao. Or perhaps it was.

On the second floor, they passed two rooms empty of furniture and life. The third door was slightly ajar, and through the gap they could see two metal cabinets, an uneven shelf with all its books resting at the low end, and a desk with a man on it.

He slept in his undershirt with a blissful expression on his young face. His ironed white shirt made a scarecrow over his chair. Although it was twenty minutes past one, and officially office hours, Phosy knocked politely and said “I’m sorry.”

As the man didn’t stir, he was about to knock a second time when Siri pushed past him into the room. The doctor was a remarkably patient man, but he had no time for incompetence in the government sector. He and Boua had fought for most of their lives to end corrupt systems and he had no intention of being part of one. In his most officious voice, he belted out: “Good God, man! What do you think you’re doing? This is a government department, not a rest home. What if there was some sporting emergency or something?”

Phosy and Dtui raised their eyebrows at each other.

The man came out of his dream flailing, sending a stand of nicely sharpened pencils on a flight across the room. He leaped from the desktop and into his shoes. The visitors watched as he ran around the desk, gathered his shirt, and put it on. He was a plain-looking man with a naturally confused expression. He sat on the chair, fastened his shirt buttons, and, as if they hadn’t witnessed the entire resurrection, asked his visitors, “May I help you?”

Phosy, smiling, handed him a mimeographed sheet with his photograph stapled to a top corner. This was his id. The man scrutinized it with great care.

“Police?” he concluded.

“Very good. There was a death in front of The Ministry last night. Maybe early this morning. Are you missing anyone?”

“Now, that’s hard to say.”

“Why?”

“We’re missing people all the time. Staff off in other provinces. People off sick. We haven’t seen the head or deputy head for over a week.”

“Isn’t there some schedule? Some way to check who is supposed to be where?”

“Hmm. No.”

“Where’s the office that arranges all the trips?”

“Oh, right. That would be me.”

“And you don’t keep some kind of list?”

“It’s a good idea, but nobody’s ever asked before. You’d have to go from room to room and see who’s missing.”

So that’s what they did. Siri was impressed that the department of information could provide so little of it. The search began on the second floor and worked its way up. The young man took them to rooms and introduced them to barely-stressed secretaries and average men whose jobs appeared to be to read newspapers, magazines, and novels.

Siri described the dead man at each office in turn, but soon realized that he could be talking about half the men who worked there. They all wore stay-press trousers and vinyl shoes, and were at varying stages of triplicate syndrome.

The administration rooms on the fifth floor were mostly empty, and the door leading to the top two floors was apparently locked. While the staff ran around looking for a key to open it, ever-resourceful Dtui noticed that there was already a key in the lock from the other side. They knocked and shouted for someone to come down and let them up, but when their banging was met by stony silence the worst was assumed.

“Who works up there?” Siri asked.

“Archives,” said the young man. “It’s like our history department. You know? Preservation and the like.”

Siri wondered to himself how much priority the regime was placing on safeguarding the country’s heritage, given that there weren’t even funds available to station guards at the cultural sites. Anyone who fancied a coffee-table bust of the Buddha could just go and help himself.

After no more than two minutes on her knees, with the deft use of her watch pin and the careful placement of a newspaper beneath the door, Dtui was able to remove and retrieve the key on the other side of the door. Phosy looked on in admiration.

“You know? There are one or two unsolved burglary cases from the old regime …”

“Couldn’t have been me, Officer. I wore gloves. Oops.”

They reinserted the key and opened the door, and Phosy led the way up the staircase to the sixth and seventh floors, which were little more than a few rooms attached to the roof.

Siri sensed some unsettled force as he followed the others. He didn’t feel confident enough of his instincts to warn anyone to be careful.

The main archive department was one large room on the seventh floor. It was in a terrible state. Pots were shattered and spread across the floor. Maps and stone rubbing sheets had been ripped from the walls. Beyond the mess, two things caught Phosy’s eye. The large glass French windows were open, the glass smashed and the catch broken. Beyond them was a trajectory that would have taken a potential jumper swiftly to the chalk angel marks on the road beside the fountain. But he’d have had to take a run at it.