Colin Cotterill - Anarchy and the Old Dogs

There was pitch-blackness and the pungent odor of fried bodies, and that was when Siri emerged from his dream. He recalled how bright the colors had been there compared to the washed-out hues that surrounded him in his room. How fruity the bordello wine, how sweet the Gitanes’ smoke that hung in the air. All that flavor had gone and he was left with drabness and the monotonous sobbing of a young woman. It took him some minutes to identify the sound as coming from Dtui in the next room.

He found her lying beside her mother’s body on the single mattress. For many painful years, Manoluk had tolerated the pain of cirrhosis as she provided for her girl. Once Dtui graduated, the roles had been reversed, and the larger part of the daughter’s wages had gone toward expensive medication that had never actually performed the miracles claimed. They’d merely kept her mother alive and in pain- until now. As Siri looked on from the doorway he wondered whether Dtui’s tears were of grief or relief. Her mother had finally stopped suffering. If the mattress had been wider, or Dtui and Manoluk narrower, he would have joined them there. He would have held Dtui’s hand and absorbed some small part of her sadness.

In the stuffy heat of August, there was little time to lose. During the day, the housemates joined together to prepare for the bathing rites and the initial ceremony. Siri’s household was a menagerie of misfits. Mrs. Fah and her children delivered the hastily written announcements. Mr. Inthanet, the puppeteer, drove his fiancйe’s old truck to the temple. And Comrade Noo, the renegade Thai forest monk, was already addressing the body’s spiritual needs on the flatbed behind. Dtui had taken the day off to arrange the catering. Lao funerals gave people a hearty appetite, and the problems of feeding the guests kept her mind from feeling sorry for itself.

They’d all chipped in the few kip they had to spare for whatever happened to be available at the fresh market. Shopping in Vientiane had become a lottery. Fruits and vegetables had vanished one by one from the stalls. Farmers were allowed to feed their families but were taxed heavily for anything they produced for sale. It was one more astoundingly silly policy. Far from filling the markets with fresh produce and the treasury with much needed revenue, it succeeded in reversing history to a time when the Lao traditionally produced no more than was absolutely necessary to survive. Nobody could accuse the rural Lao of rising to a challenge. Attempting to piece together a menu from the stalls of brown legumes and flyblown buffalo meat had certainly kept Dtui’s mind off her mother.

Only Dr. Siri had made it to work that day. He’d paid the bulk sum of the funeral expenses; they’d agreed at least one person should be at work to earn next month’s humble salary. He’d spent the day with the crumpled body of the blind man. Performing the autopsy by himself had made him realize how much he’d come to depend on his morgue team. He missed Dtui’s concise note taking and sharp observations. He missed Mr. Geung (presently convalescing from a near death encounter with a mosquito), who manhandled bodies and sawed through bones apparently without effort. By the late afternoon, Siri slumped, exhausted, on a stool beside the body. He’d somehow managed to fold it into one of the brand-new red PVC body bags so generously provided by the Soviet Union.

All that remained was to sign the death certificate and to trace the deceased’s family so they could be notified. Siri was rummaging through the dead man’s clothes for clues when he looked up to see a neat fellow of around forty-five walk into the cutting room. He had the slim build and good looks of a man who took care of himself, but the frayed shirt of one who didn’t.

“Are you looking for something that’ll fit you?” he asked Siri.

“Aha, Phosy. The capital’s only middle-aged policeman. How are you, son?”

“Undernourished but otherwise happy, thanks. You?”

“Sparkling. Just sparkling.” Siri peeled off one rubber glove and shook his friend’s hand enthusiastically. Inspector Phosy smiled and returned the enthusiasm. “What brings you to my morgue?” Siri asked.

“Your traffic accident, of course.”

“Why? I thought you only handled cases with government connections.”

“Right you are. And the weapon in question was an army logging truck, was it not?”

“Of course. Well, I don’t suspect foul play, if that’s what you’re after. You might be able to charge the driver with negligence if he hadn’t fled the scene and vanished. Poor fellow’s probably scared out of his wits they might execute him. But I believe they found the accelerator had stuck. You might stand a better chance of suing the Chinese for selling us their crappy old army surplus vehicles in the first place.”

“I’ll bear that in mind. How about the victim?”

“No idea where he’s from. Blind chap.”

“He didn’t have his name and address written inside his shirt in case he got lost?”

“In braille? No such luck. But he did have this with him.” Siri held up a fawn-colored envelope addressed to “Mr. Bounthan, Vientiane Central Post Office, PO Box 53, Vientiane Prefecture.” The stamp had been postmarked twice: once, six days earlier in Pakse-the largest city in the south-and once, the previous day in Vientiane.

“Well, that’s good,” Phosy said. “We know he has a first name that matches thirty percent of the male population, and no surname.”

“Doesn’t help much, does it?”

“Let’s have a look inside.”

Siri slit open the envelope with a scalpel and pulled out a single sheet of paper. It was white, lined, and folded in half. Siri opened it and glared at the paper.

“Now that’s odd,” he said.

“What does it say?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Take a look.”

Phosy held up the paper by one corner and looked closely at both sides. It was blank.

“What do you make of it?” Siri asked.

“I suppose it makes sense. Him being blind and all.”

Siri laughed. “Ah, nice to see crime prevention in such good hands.”

“All right. So why would anyone go to the trouble of sending an empty sheet of paper?”

“We have to assume it meant something to the deceased. I don’t suppose…?” He took the paper from Phosy and held it up to his nose. He sniffed lightly and shook his head. Then he took a deeper draft. “Eureka. What does this smell like to you, Inspector?”

Phosy sniffed. “I don’t know. Sulphur?”

“Almost right. Copper sulphate to be exact. It’s a common pesticide, very effective poison on humans, too. And it has to be damned strong or, given my present condition, I wouldn’t be able to smell it at all. So what does that suggest to you, my crime-fighting friend?”

“It was sent by an assassin who hoped the blind man would eat it, thus killing himself without leaving a trace?”

“Phosy, I don’t think you’re taking this investigation seriously. Take your active imagination on a walk though the field of espionage.”

“Siri, I did all my training in the northeast of Laos. I’m a sticky-rice-and-raw-fish policeman. You know that. I’ve never been inside a crime laboratory in my life. I rely on earthy logic and gut instinct to solve my cases. Don’t try to baffle me with exotic scents and all that CIA hocus-pocus.”

“Very well. In that case, I suspect what we have here is a message written in invisible ink.”

Phosy raised one eyebrow. “And how would an old bush surgeon know a thing like that?”

“Inspector Phosy, allow me to reintroduce you to Inspector Maigret of the Paris Palais de Justice. I became very involved in a number of his cases as they were outlined on the pages of his L’Oevrewhile I was in France. Unlike ourselves, Inspector Maigret has the very good fortune to be fictional, and thus can dispense with such human annoyances as inefficiency and budget restraints. He always gets his man. In one particular case, a junior minister wrote to his mistress on laundry tickets in invisible ink so her husband wouldn’t be suspicious. Naturally, the husband found out and dispatched the blackguard, but the point is, Maigret described the constituents of the ink and its reagent in great detail. Being of a scientific bent, I retained that information and carry it to this day in my remarkable mind. If this is indeed a hidden message, all we need is sodium carbonate-common washing soda-to be able to read it.”