Colin Cotterill - Disco for the Departed

“It wouldn’t surprise me, given how hard it is to find breakfast up here.”

Lit led them to a walkway that wound up to the cave entrance. Up the incline a little way, a boulder the size of a bloated buffalo lay on a bed of flattened itchy fruit blossoms and poinsettias. It must have given the concrete one heck of a thump when it landed, then bounced into the garden. The force of its impact had tilted up a long, straight section of the three-foot-wide path, causing it to snap at various points. Now it lay in sections, like carriages after a train crash.

Ahead, a small canvas tent had been erected over the path between two of the sections. Lit lifted the canvas from its frame to reveal a mummified arm protruding from one side of a wide gap in the concrete. It was covered in a transparent plastic bag tied to the wrist. Its palm was up and its fingers bent into claws. From its position, Siri estimated that the body, assuming it was still attached to one, would be lying on its back inside the unbroken slab of concrete.

“Well, I suppose we should get cracking,” Siri said to the two workmen who’d followed them up. Both had stonemason’s chisels and metal mallets.

“How would you like it, Doctor?” one asked.

The section that lay before them was over six feet long and two and a half feet deep. Siri pondered for a moment. “I think we should attack it from the sides. Here, I’ll give you some marks to guide you.” He used a block of white limestone to score a line on either side of the broken section of pathway.

“Uhm, Dr. Siri,” Lit asked, “wouldn’t it be easier to go in from the end where the hand’s sticking out, or from the top?”

“Easier, yes, Comrade Lit. But not as beneficial.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“Nurse Dtui will explain it to you.”

Dtui was shocked out of her daydream. “Will I?”

“Certainly.” This was Siri’s way. He often threw her in to see if she’d float. He wouldn’t come to her rescue until he was absolutely certain she couldn’t bob to the surface on her own.

“Okay.” She looked at the peculiar scene and quickly ran through the possibilities in her mind. “Right!” she said. “If there’s a body, it’ll be faceup. Judging from the state of the arm, it’s mummified; ergo, it would have shrunk.”

Siri smiled and she knew she was on the right track. She continued with more confidence.

“As he probably didn’t get inside the concrete after it was set, we have to assume he was deliberately buried in wet cement-or fell in. That means the cement hardened around him. As the body shrank, a mold would have been left of the original person. That mold could tell us as much as the body itself. So we don’t want to damage the concrete too much. Dah dah,” she sang. “I don’t hear clapping.”

Lit and one of the workmen did indeed applaud. The security chief looked at her with undisguised admiration. “Very well done,” he said. “Yes, excellent.”

Siri, still smiling, was looking more closely at the hand. He removed the plastic bag and took a closer look at the clawed fingers. The skin was the color of dark chocolate, not so unusual in mummified bodies. He knew a body at this stage of mummification wouldn’t reveal many secrets. But the palm of this hand seemed several tones lighter than the back of the hand.

The workmen began to chisel along the dotted line he had drawn as carefully as an archaeologist at an ancient dig.

“Gentlemen,” Siri urged, “it’s concrete. At the rate you’re going, you won’t get through it until the year 2006. Smash the hell out of it, for goodness’ sake.”

And smash they did. They worked from either side while Lit, Dtui, and Siri sat at the foot of the karst. A feeble sun had finally burned a hole through the northeastern mist but hadn’t yet warmed the land. Dtui and Lit filled the following hour with their friendly chatter while Siri dozed. The young couple seemed to have a great deal in common. Both had spent the later years of their lives caring for a sick parent. Dtui told Lit that her mother, Monoluk, had cirrhosis, and that they were presently living at Siri’s house. She explained that the doctor didn’t like to live alone and he’d managed to gather a peculiar collection of waifs and strays to share his large Party bungalow. Lit’s father, on the other hand, had lost both his legs and a length of intestine to a bomb that exploded beneath his feet. A few months ago he’d succumbed to his injuries.

Both Lit and Dtui had taken every opportunity to study. Lit had attained his position, despite his relative youth, by working his way through the public service texts. Dtui had memorized numerous medical books in self-taught English. Then, when American aid vanished, she’d gone through the same subjects in self-taught Russian. Her dream was to join the twenty-five hundred Lao presently studying in the Eastern Bloc and to send home whatever she could save to her mother.

Their conversation was terminated by the sound of a loud crack. Siri looked up from his slumber. The workmen had succeeded in prizing the top layer of the slab loose with crowbars. The concrete lid broke in two as they lifted it off the base.

A mummy, as if in frozen horror, lay shriveled within a shell of concrete that it had once filled. One arm was by its side; the other held high above its head. Its knees were bent slightly and it seemed to be dressed only in a pair of nylon football shorts that were now several sizes too large for it. Their brilliant red contrasted sharply with the almost black-chocolate surface of the corpse.

But what shocked the onlookers most-even Siri who had seen death in many forms-was the expression of agony on its face, in which a huge gaping hole had taken the place of its mouth. They had no doubt this had been a torturous death-and no accident.

“What… what happened to its face?” Lit asked in horror.

Siri took hold of the concrete lid of the accidental tomb and heaved it back to study its interior. The mold was completed there, providing an almost perfect concave mask of the head. Where the mouth had attempted its muffled cry for the last time, a tube of cement curled downward. Embedded at its base were the missing teeth.

“I think this explains the hole,” Siri said, not looking up. The others came over to peer within. “It would appear the final breaths of our friend here were of liquid cement. When it hardened and the body began to shrink, the teeth remained in their original position. I wouldn’t be surprised if we found more cement in the lungs.”

“My God,” Lit said. “You mean he was alive when he went into the concrete?”

“It looks that way,” Dtui confirmed.

“What a terrible way to die. Who could have done such a thing?”

“I’d have to suppose, judging from the size of the original body, that it was somebody of enormous strength,” Siri replied.

“Or several people,” Dtui added.

“Yes, indeed. Good point. Comrade Lit, do you think the president would object if we used the meeting room in his house as a makeshift morgue?”

“I have the key,” Lit told him. “But he’ll be here next week for the concert.”

“If we haven’t worked this out by then, we never will, son. It doesn’t take me that long to concede defeat.”

Judge Haeng came back from another half day of fussy domestic disputes in his courtroom. A city whose criminals and potential criminals had all been incarcerated, in which crime had been abolished, was a dull place for a magistrate. He walked past the desks of the Justice Department clerks, who sat sweating into their clunky typewriters. They nodded with little enthusiasm as their young boss went by. In the year since he’d taken up his position fresh from Moscow, he hadn’t spoken to any of them civilly. Usually he addressed them through Mrs. Manivone, the senior clerk. When he approached her desk, she stood politely and smiled her meaningless smile. She wore a neatly ironed khaki blouse and a black pasin ankle-length straight skirt. Usually, she was equally unruffled.