Colin Cotterill - Disco for the Departed

She put the proposal to Siri.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I’m just a nurse.”

“Dtui, you’ll never be just a nurse. I could probably play detective here on my own for a bit-but the decision’s yours. The living always take precedence over the dead in my book. Just don’t tell any spirits I said that.”

She turned back to Santiago and asked how certain he was the Cuban doctors would be there by the weekend. He told her he was positive. She told him she would help, and then translated her decision for Siri.

“Good for you,” he said. “I’ll come by and lend a hand whenever I can. But I’m sure you’ll have the place organized in no time. And Dtui…?”

“Yes?”

“You won’t forget these bodies are alive, will you? Don’t try to store anyone in the freezer overnight.”

“Dr. Siri!”

“Sorry.”

Mr. Geung wasn’t designed for walking. His ankles turned outward and his legs were short. But the notion had entered his mind that he should walk back to Vientiane. He knew it was far, but not that it was over three hundred kilometers by road. He knew he didn’t have any money in his pocket to pay for a bus ticket, nor did he have a concept of how else he could get to the morgue to keep his promise. So, when the soldiers stopped to take a pee, he walked to the last truck in the convoy and looked back at the road that snaked down through the mountains. He took a deep breath, as the doctor had taught him, and set off for home. Nobody noticed him go.

After only five minutes, he was alone on the deserted road. Mr. Geung wasn’t one for doing things alone. He was good at joining in with others or doing what he was told, but he had hardly a trace of initiative. The trucks were barely out of sight before he realized he wouldn’t be able to undertake such a journey by himself. He needed a friend. He needed a logical friend to keep him company. And, as if by magic, he looked back over his shoulder and saw Dtui just a few paces behind him. It was a relief. She was the most sensible woman he knew and he was sure she’d guide him back.

“I… I’m sorry, little sister,” he said and smiled at her.

She laughed and took his hand, and walked with him along the badly potholed road. At one point she whispered into his mind that the sun was directly overhead and they didn’t have hats. They decided to walk through the groves of peculiar trees, keeping the road within sight. Having her beside him gave him confidence. As they walked, he reminded her of all the jokes she’d told for the past year. She was impressed that they’d remained stored in his memory. He didn’t know where he’d be without Dtui and her common sense there to guide him.

The image of Mr. Geung appeared so clearly in Dtui’s mind it was as if he were there in the room with her. She opened her eyes and looked around. In the closetless room her clothes hung from the four posts of the bed like pallbearers. The darned holes in the mosquito netting gathered the mesh into fairy stars, adding to her feeling that Guesthouse Number One was mystical in some way. The klooee piper played the same dirge over and over in the distance and, even in late afternoon, the mist had begun to roll against the glass of the window. She realized she must have dozed and dreamed of her friend, but she felt uneasy for him.

She knew that but for the mystery guests in the far wing and the staff sitting around in the empty dining room, the guesthouse was deserted. Siri would be down on the veranda describing their visit with Dr. Santiago to the small-minded security head. What a letdown he’d turned out to be. Before he’d suddenly turned into a raging communist Nazi, Dtui had even considered him as a prospective mate. His cool smile and lean frame fitted her ever-shrinking list of requirements. Unfortunately, she held firmly to the belief that the man for her had to have a mind of his own, an increasingly difficult order to fill. Now that she had ruled him out, she thought it best to opt out of the evening’s briefing downstairs.

But her room was overwhelming her with bizarre thoughts and feelings, so she decided to get away from it. She had two tasks that would keep her occupied for an hour or so. First, she would try to get through to Vientiane on the single guesthouse telephone. About a month earlier, two men in old army uniforms with TELEPHONE COMPANY written across the backs in laundry ink had come to install a phone at Siri’s bungalow. It was another Party reward for Siri’s selfless contribution to the Cause. She knew if it hadn’t been for her mother and the need to keep in constant contact with her, he would have told them where to stick their telephone. “Another intrusion,” he would have called it.

Before the men had left, they wrote down the four-digit number, one that just happened to end in three nines, and assured them all there would be a connection the following day. In fact, it had been two weeks before they heard that distinctive Lao dial tone-a sparrow trying desperately to escape from a crinkly paper bag. Now Dtui was able to check on her mother every few days. It put her mind at ease. Of course, she had to yell her guts out to be heard. Siri was so impressed at the size of her lungs he’d wondered whether the telephone was actually necessary.

And there was something that had been worrying her about the autopsy. She took her sturdy Soviet flashlight downstairs and, after ten minutes of shouting over the phone, she walked out the back way and headed for the president’s house. There had been no reason to lock the door of the meeting room. The body still lay in segments on the plastic tablecloth. The story of the Cuban orderlies had stuck in her mind. There was no way the body in front of her could have belonged to the amorous basketball player, but what about his goat-faced friend? What if he hadn’t gone home? What if the smaller man had somehow been left behind and found himself in trouble?

As no logical alternatives occurred to her, she began to run the flashlight beam across the torso. She was used to Siri’s ongoing discussions with his subjects during autopsies, so she began her inspection with, “Excuse me, Mr. Odon, I was wondering whether perhaps you had a little more to tell us than you have so far.” She’d noticed something at the initial inspection, three marks-almost parallel lines-beneath the left armpit. At the time, she’d merely noted them as interesting. The contraction of the skin had left many such grooves, but there had been something strangely regimented about these three. Their oddity had lingered in her mind and she wanted to satisfy her curiosity.

She shone the beam onto the right side of the chest. It was more deteriorated there, harder to recognize, but after pushing at the leathery hide with her fingers, she had no doubt. Three furrows in an identical position to those on the left-symmetrical. Nothing biological could explain such marks. The body had been scarred in some type of ritual. It certainly did have more to tell.

Siri had arrived at the point where he was prepared to wake up the guesthouse supervisor and complain about the damned noise. Three nights he’d been there, and every night the foreign devil music had blasted out at midnight. Surely the youth of Vieng Xai had better ways to spend their time. Surely the senior cadres of the region ought to clamp down on such bourgeois Western decadence. He couldn’t work it out. Perhaps Huaphan had too few people left who really cared.

As sleep was hard to come by, he went over the points raised at his meeting with Comrade Lit. They’d drawn up a list. One: check the date of departure of Isandro and Odon. Two: locate the Vietnamese colonel who’d made the complaint to Santiago. Three: get information about any other projects in the region in which dark-skinned foreigners were involved. Siri broadened the search to include Vietnamese mountain tribesmen even though he was quite sure the dead man was not Asian.