Colin Cotterill - The Coroner's lunch

“We’ve identified our man. He was a government representative, Nguyen Van Tran. He was part of a delegation that disappeared after they crossed the border into Laos at Nam Phao. They were on their way here to Vientiane, but never showed up. Their mission was top secret.”

“How many of them in the delegation?”

“Three. Two officials and a driver.”

“And you ID’d your man from the tattoos?”

“No, we have fingerprints and dental records, and there was a ring.”

“He was still wearing a ring?”

“Yes. His father’s name was engraved on the inside. There wasn’t anything about the tattoos in his military file, so he must have got them after he enlisted.”

“Do you have the records of all three men?”

Nguyen Hong folded back his long sleeve and reached into his satchel. He produced three manila folders and put them on the desk in front of Siri. “Help yourself.”

Siri opened the three files and looked at the photographs. The second was familiar.

“I reckon this is ours.”

“Then that’s the driver. His name is Tran as well.”

“All right, Doctor. I suggest we take our respective files and reports to the canteen, have a bite to eat, and swap stories. I don’t suppose you’d like to shed that uniform and borrow a white coat, would you?”

“I’d love to.”

Nguyen Hong changed, and Siri put together his carbon copy of the autopsy report. Then the two set off for a real coroner’s lunch in the canteen. Given the topic of their conversation, they were guaranteed a table to themselves.

“Word’s on the streets, I go away and leave you for a couple of days and you’re already in bed with the Vietnamese.”

“I knew you’d be jealous.”

It was Monday, and Siri and Civilai sat on their log washing down their rolls with tepid southern coffee. They looked out at the sleek white tern flying a foot from the surface of the river. It swooped down for a fish, thrust its beak in too deep, and crashed, somersaulting with the current.

“I bet that hurt.”

“Does the committee have a problem with me consorting with the Viets? They are still our allies, aren’t they?”

The battered tern, its feathers flustered, broke triumphantly through the surface of the water with the fish in its beak. The two old friends put down their plastic cups and applauded.

“There are allies and there are allies, Siri. There’s how we see them and how they see themselves. To us, the advisersare resources we can use or ignore as we see fit. They believe they’ve been allocated to this or that department to steer our policies closer to their own, to make us more dependenton them.

“The more advisers we allow in, the more Hanoi sees us as an appendage. That’s why we have a deliberate but unofficial policy of ignoring 40 percent of what they tell us.”

“Even if it’s good advice?”

“We don’t throw it out completely. Rather, we store it away until the chap’s gone off, frustrated at our non-compliance; then we dig it out and pretend it was ours all along.”

“How does my flirtation with the Vietnamese coroner fit into your unofficial policy?”

“Well, as long as we’re getting something out of it…. He is sharing information with you, isn’t he?”

“Everything he knows, I know. The only problem is that we have different results for our two bodies.”

“That’s undoubtedly your mistake. You aren’t really very good, are you?”

“I assumed I’d messed up when I saw his results. My fellow was apparently the driver, Tran. He was in worse shape than the Tran they had on ice at the Vietnamese Embassy.”

“Are they all called Tran over there?”

“Only the ones that aren’t called Nguyen. Anyway, our Tran had been laid out at the local temple for a couple of days while they worked out what to do with him. But then they found the other Tran, the one with the Vietnamese tattoos, so naturally they contacted the Vietnamese Embassy.

“Once a body’s out of the water, it deteriorates quite rapidly, so my Tran was in a horrible state when I got him. They packed their Tran in ice and waited for Nguyen Hong to come and take a look. The ice made a mess of their corpse too. So neither of us had optimal material to work with.”

“Excuses accepted. Did you two agree on anything?”

“We’re both quite certain they didn’t die from drowning. We also agreed they’d been weighted down.”

“So they weren’t supposed to be found?”

“That depends on whether you adhere to the Dtui theory.”

“Which is?”

“If they’d really wanted the bodies to stay down, they would have used flex or wire, something that doesn’t dissolve that fast.”

“Brilliant. So if we accept the Dtui hypothesis, whoever dumped them in the water wanted them bobbing back up. Do you know what they died of?”

“Well, mine appears to have had a major trauma in his chest artery. Nguyen Hong’s seen it often in motorcycle victims: high-speed collisions.”

“And as he was the driver, we could surmise that their car had an accident.”

“Could be.”

“Did you get to see his Tran as well?”

“I’m sneaking in to the embassy this afternoon when all the dignitaries are at the reception. You people are never short of receptions, are you?”

Civilai rolled his eyes. He was obviously slated to meet the Cuban delegation too.

“That’s why it’s called the Communist ‘Party,’ and not the Communist ‘sit down and get some work done’.”

Siri laughed.

“What about the rumors that these fellows had been tortured?”

“True as far as I can tell. Both of them.”

“How peculiar. Why would anyone want to torture a driver?”“This case has more questions than answers, I’m afraid. According to Nguyen Hong, his man may have died from the torture.”

“No connection with a high-speed collision?”

“None he could tell.”

Rajid, the crazy Indian, was walking along the bank toward them. He wore his only sarong, a threadbare old thing. He was an unkempt but very handsome young man who was kept alive by the generosity of the shopkeepers who’d known him since he was a child. They’d never heard him speak.

He sat cross-legged a few feet from the old men and started to play with his penis. The log where they sat was just as much the Indian’s as theirs.

“Hello, Rajid.”

“Hi, Rajid.” But he had better things to do than respond.

For some unfathomable reason, Civilai lowered his voice to continue his interrogation of Siri. “Any indication from your friend as to why the Viets are accusing us of this, rather than the Hmong? If they drove through Borikhumxai, they were asking to get themselves kidnapped by their old enemies.”

“Right. But there are two reasons why they don’t think that happened. And I won’t charge you for all this free intelligence you’re extorting from me. One, they had an armed escort all the way to Paksan. From there, the road was well policed and considered secure. They were last seen at Namching, just sixty kilometers from Vientiane.

“Second, if they didn’t make it to the city, why would the kidnappers go to the trouble of driving them through all the roadblocks, through Vientiane and eighty kilometers north to dump them in the dam? There are plenty of bodies of water in the south, even the river.

“So the skeptics in Hanoi are suggesting that they did make it to Vientiane, but were picked up by our security units, arrested, or something.”

“For what?”

“They haven’t told me yet.”

“Who?”

“The spirits.”

As always, Civilai fell about laughing at the very mention of Siri’s spirits. The doctor’s ongoing burden was just a long running joke to Ai. He was too much of a pragmatist to take any of it seriously. He got nimbly to his feet, put his arms straight in front of him, and began to hop up and down like a Hong Kong ghost. “Ooooh, Doctor Siri, help me. The Pathet Lao electrocuted my nipples because I didn’t stop at the traffic light.”