Colin Cotterill - Disco for the Departed

“Good health, Judge Haeng.”

“Has he gone?”

“Who?”

“The freak at the morgue.”

She sighed. “If you mean Mr. Geung, they collected him last night. He should be there on Wednesday.”

“Good. Excellent.” He set off for his office.

“It’s just…”

He turned back. “What?”

“Well, I’m not sure I understand, Judge. Everybody’s very fond of Mr. Geung.”

“Fond? Fond? Are we running a government department or a home for social outcasts? I’m very fond of my grandmother”-Mrs. Manivone didn’t believe that-”but I wouldn’t give her a responsible job in the national morgue. What image would foreign visitors take home if they came and saw a moron working for the state?”

She had a number of possible responses to that but, under her breath, all she managed was, “One of compassion?

“What was that?”

“I don’t think Dr. Siri’s going to be very pleased about it when he returns.”

The judge sauntered back to her. “Oh, you don’t?”

“No.”

He leaned on her desk and raised his voice so the others could hear. “And remind me-does Dr. Siri work for the Justice Department?”

“Yes, Judge Haeng.”

“And am I the head of the Justice Department, missy?”

Manivone once again reminded herself she had three children to feed. “Yes, Judge Haeng.”

“So, does he do what I tell him, or do I do what he tells me?”

“Well, neither, in fact, as I’ve seen, comrade.” It was a rash comment, albeit true. She knew there was a Party slogan on its way.

“Now, don’t get fresh, Comrade Manivone. Every bee in the socialist hive is as important as the next. But if the worker doesn’t show respect to the queen, the honey does not flow as sweetly. Remember that.”

“Yes, Judge Haeng.”

He looked around at the clerks, whose heads snapped back to their work. He smiled and walked smugly to his office. It would have been a spectacular exit had the door handle not stuck again. He swore at it and finally fought his way into the room before slamming the door.

“God save the queen,” mumbled one clerk to the muffled laughter of his colleagues.

As the truck drove farther and farther from Vientiane, Mr. Geung’s anxiety level increased. Some of the soldiers feared that something might burst inside him. To them he seemed like an animal caught in a trap, one who might bite off his own foot in order to escape. Even the sergeant felt a pang of guilt as he watched Geung shuddering on the bench. But he had his directive: delivery to a work team in the north. The order had come from the Justice Department so he was in no position to argue. Once the sun had gone down, their prisoner stopped responding to the soldiers’ questions, and no attempt to cheer him up was productive. They couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of Geung’s feeling of guilt for letting his friends down, or how terribly lonely and sad he was.

The unit was to spend the night at the Eighth Battalion camp just outside Van Khi. The truck pulled into the fenced compound and Geung looked up to see the gate close behind him. There was no escape.

An autopsy has one purpose: to solve mysteries that surround a death. If, after three hours, the original mysteries remain and have been supplemented by even deeper mysteries, one should begin to consider the procedure a failure. Siri and Dtui looked at each other with every new unanswerable question and shook their heads. Admittedly, the condition of the corpse made their task a good deal more difficult. The cement had been laid in late January so the body had slowly mummified over the subsequent five months. Everything had contracted to the point that wounds or any traces of disease would have become hidden in the tight carapace which the skin had become or the tangle of knots beneath it.

However, three small oddities had presented themselves right away. First, clenched tightly in the right fist was a key- a long, thin type with a circular top and an uncomplicated shape at the bottom. Second, and no surprise to either of them, the corpse’s teeth were pink, indicating the man had probably died a violent death. Third, sticking up from the concrete where the victim’s chest had laid, they found a long broken fingernail, although the corpse’s own nails were trimmed short. It was coated in some type of varnish that had kept it in good condition. They could only conclude that the nail had originally been embedded in the victim’s skin.

These peculiarities had been comparatively easy to spot. The others took longer. For example, they hadn’t discovered the bullet hole in the chest until much later, and only after a meticulous inch-by-inch fingertip examination of the skin. Siri was able to insert a French crochet needle deep into the minute aperture but couldn’t make contact with the bullet. They decided that they would have to wait to make an internal examination.

There were a number of characteristics that suggested the man wasn’t Asian. The bone structure of the face and the fullness of the lips suggested that the corpse was negroid. Siri assumed that to a degree this could have resulted from postmortem distortion but the skin itself was darker than he’d ever seen due to mummification. The corpse’s teeth confirmed Siri’s hypothesis. Dtui had been able to carefully chip the concrete away from them to reveal the shape of the palate. The upper incisors formed a deep U, and that strongly suggested the dead man had been of African ancestry.

The dissection of the body hadn’t produced a great deal more information. Dtui and Siri were mystified by such a neat hole with no trace of a bullet. The channel didn’t pass completely through the body, but no amount of searching had turned it up. This they added to their list of questions.

Lit came to hear their findings. He sat with them around a thermos of tea and three tin cups on the veranda of the guesthouse. It was four in the afternoon and surprisingly quiet. They hadn’t yet got around to discussing the victim.

“Looks like the policemen got lost,” Dtui said, noting that the trucks hadn’t returned. Siri hadn’t thought to tell her of his suspicions as to their fate.

Comrade Lit was more forthcoming.”The American lackeys won’t be back tonight,” he told her quite casually.

Siri was used to the labels the Party attached to the officials of the old regime, but he saw Dtui’s eyebrows rise as if she was seeing a different version of the chief. She shouldn’t have been surprised. A cadre didn’t rise to the position of security head at such a young age without knowing how to tightrope walk along the Party line. It was an ever-swaying line and it was easy to fall off.

“Why not?” Dtui asked.

“They’ve been transferred to a camp,” Lit told her.

“Really? I didn’t see them loading their suitcases onto the truck this morning.”

“No.”

It was a no that Lit anticipated would mark the end of this line of inquiry, but he didn’t know Dtui.

“How can they be transferred without their belongings?”

Siri could see her stepping very close to the edge. Lit had been most polite all day, but staunch Party members didn’t expect to be questioned; they weren’t used to it.

“I think we should talk about our cement man,” the doctor said.

But Lit wished to continue. “They won’t need belongings where they’re going, Nurse Dtui.”

“No belongings?” Dtui stood at the very edge of the crumbling precipice. “No clothes? No toiletries? No mementos of home?”

“No.”

“Why on earth not?” There was suddenly a vacuum between the two.

“Because they have to learn to live without them.”

“Live without clothes? It’s cold up here at night. They’ll catch their deaths.”