Colin Cotterill - Disco for the Departed

Lit had spent the night writing and copying his detailed report. It lacked only one final paragraph outlining the findings of the last autopsy, that of Hong Lan, the pink orchid. Now he sat on the bench in front of the same middle-school classroom where Siri had spent his night with the buffaloes. None of the patients in the other buildings who looked out at him through their windows could work out why he was wearing a gas mask.

If they’d sat beside him they would have known. Inside the classroom, sweating and confused, Siri and Dtui sat on either side of the skeleton that had once been a beautiful Vietnamese girl. They wore three surgical masks apiece over their mouths and noses. The middle mask had been liberally spread with aromatic Tiger Balm. But nothing could possibly take away the awful smell that permeated the room and everything in it. They’d laughed at Comrade Lit when he’d arrived in his mask. They’d told him their noses were used to the smell of death. But if the glass hadn’t been so restrictive, they would now have been wearing the extra two he’d brought along for them. In all their time in the morgue, they’d never smelled anything like this.

One mummy; one body preserved as adipocere, but now reacting to the air; and one more, interred in a plastic body bag and subjected to the natural ravages of bacteria-each rotted at its own pace, each with its own unique scent of death. The combination was overwhelming, but the doctor wanted all three together to make comparisons and provide inspiration. During the autopsy of Hong Lan, they found their first similarity. Just as in the case of Isandro, what traces remained of the diaphragm suggested that it had been punctured. The body bag had slowed the process of decomposition sufficiently to leave a number of clues that might otherwise have been erased by vermin. Although there were no organs left within the carcass, score marks on the inside of the rib cage suggested that some amateur surgery had been conducted. Those two items combined pointed to the possibility that Hong Lan’s heart had also been removed.

The tendons and ligaments had so far resisted decomposition, and, the uterus was still partly intact.

“My goodness, take a look at this,” Siri said to Dtui.

“What is that?”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

“Well, they look like fibroids, but she was only-what?- eighteen?”

“Unusual, isn’t it? I wonder whether this is the reason for her hospitalization.”

“I thought fibroids were benign.”

“Not always. And don’t forget, there may have been cysts as well. But even if that was the case, there wouldn’t be any trace by now.”

“Is there some way we can find out?”

Siri cleared an area behind the cervix to get a better look at the spinal column. “Oh, my.”

“What?”

“Can you see?”

“What is that? What’s happened to her spine?”

“It’s been eaten, Dtui. The cancer spread from her uterus and infected her bone marrow. It started to destroy her spine. She must have been in terrible pain at the end.”

“Could it have killed her?”

“If it didn’t, there’s no doubt it soon would have.”

“So what does this all mean?”

Siri pulled down his masks, needing air more than he needed to be protected from the smell. He gasped in a few deep breaths and swallowed back the nausea in his throat.

“It means she was in great distress for the last few months of her life. We can only hope her jailers were giving her painkillers.” The memory of the dried opium in the president’s cave came to his mind.

“Surely they couldn’t have been so heartless…”

“You know? I think…” He was too slow to choke back the second arrival of bile and Dtui watched with amusement as he turned away from the table and vomited. She’d outlasted the great surgeon.

Half an hour later they were presenting Lit with their findings. They’d walked away from the room and were sitting in the shadow of the hospital cliff but the smell was still in their noses. They admitted they couldn’t prove the cancer had killed Hong Lan. In order to get to her diaphragm, an attacker would first have to puncture the abdomen. That could have caused enough bleeding to kill the girl, but there was no evidence to prove or disprove whether this had happened. And, as with Isandro, they could find no other obvious cause of death. Comrade Lit was happy to write in the final paragraph of his report that there had been “evidence of foul play in both instances.” He closed with “The hearts of both bodies had been removed, and given that there was only one other suspect present, it has to be assumed that Odon was responsible for these two deaths.”

As Lit’s major criminal responsibility-the body found in the cement path-had been accounted for, he was more than pleased to leave the other two cases pending. He was sure his superiors wouldn’t expect him to interview a dead suspect. He knew the army would have to decide for itself how to punish Giap and the other members of the lynch party. Given the ugliness of the crime they were avenging, he guessed it would take the form of a rebuke and a demotion rather than a firing squad. But it was no longer his concern. He was off the hook.

Before he left to file the report, he announced to Dtui that he would be back later to complete the “unification arrangements.” This she took to mean the wedding, and she wasn’t at all surprised that he was able to make an engagement sound like a merger. She walked with Siri along the skirt of the mountain and breathed in the scents of the tiny wild bladderwort that grew in abundance there. They’d become accustomed now to keeping to well-worn tracks. She doubted she’d have the courage to stroll over unmarked fields or through virgin forest ever again.

Both she and her boss were troubled, and neither had spoken since they’d parted company from Lit. The man had been so elated. It was as if one more barrier had been lifted between him and his next promotion. Siri noticed her glum look.

“Are you thinking about what to say to Comrade Lit?”

“No. Not really. That can take care of itself.”

“Then what is it?”

She stopped walking and put her hands on her hips. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this case.”

“Me, too.”

“All right. You go first. What’s worrying you?”

“Probably all the things that are worrying you. Let’s go over it.” They went to a shaded boulder and sat side by side. “I know it looks like we’ve reached the end of the story, but I keep thinking we’ve missed an essential part of the plot.”

“That’s exactly it. I’m having a lot of those women’s intuition twinges. The mother worries me. You know? They still hadn’t found her daughter but she waltzed back to Vietnam as if it didn’t matter. Then, when they did find the body, she couldn’t even be bothered to come back for the funeral. Her only daughter. That doesn’t sound like a very warm mother-daughter relationship to me.”

“Perhaps she was unbalanced by the death of her husband.”

“So you’d hold on even tighter to the relationship that remained. No. Something happened between them. I’m sure of it. Are you still hosting Odon?”

It was a surprise question. Siri had forgotten all about the wayward spirit. “I don’t think so. I don’t know. I haven’t felt anything since we found the body. I haven’t shimmied once in the past twenty-four hours. It was never really a possession, more like a presence-an influence. And that’s another thing that didn’t ever sit right. If Odon and Isandro were as evil as everyone’s painting them, I wonder why I didn’t feel that? Why didn’t I ever sense their power? I don’t know. I wonder…”