The Coroner's Lunch (13 page)

“I—”

“But
I’m
doing a very difficult job too. I’m doing it reluctantly, and I’m doing it poorly because I don’t have the right facilities or resources or experience. You, boy, aren’t making it any easier for me.

“Whether you or I like it or not, I’m the head coroner. From now on, I shall handle the ‘cases’ that come through my office as I see fit. I shall follow up on them whenever I deem it necessary, and I shall send you reports that state my opinions when I’m ready to. Once they’re signed, there will be no amendments made to suit your statistics. Close your mouth, for goodness sake.”

Haeng put his lips together. They appeared to be quivering.

“If my talking honestly like this offends you, I’m very sorry. I apologize to your mother, who probably loves you in spite of everything. I apologize to her for the fact that I have to remind you to be respectful to your elders.

“If I’ve succeeded only in driving the thought of revenge into your head, let me remind you that I’m seventy-two years old. I’m twenty-two years beyond the national life expectancy. I’ve exceeded. I’m on overtime. In my natural life, I’ve already experienced any form of punishment you could come up with. Basically, there’s nothing you can do to me to fill me with even a smidgen of dread.

“I’d be delighted if you fired me, absolutely ecstatic. Sending me north for re-education would be heaven. I’d be packed before you could shake a pencil. It wouldn’t even be much of a loss to end up in front of a firing squad. Now, I imagine that puts you in a difficult situation, because I no longer intend to take your rudeness.

“Here’s what I’m going to do. Tomorrow, the Vietnamese coroner and myself are going to Nam Ngum Reservoir. We’ll spend a night there, maybe two. I’ll come back here and run tests in my morgue, and consult with Dr. Nguyen Hong. Then, when I’m certain I can’t do anything else in Vientiane, I may very well consider a trip to Khamuan.

“By that time, you will have arranged travel papers for me, and negotiated a flight south on one of the military transports. I’m too old to drive down there on roads full of holes. I’ll also need a small per-diem in case of eventualities. You’ll have reminded the military that there’s only one coroner and he has a very full caseload. As far as I know, the Justice Department isn’t subordinate to the military in peacetime. We’re doing them a favor.

“I’m leaving now.” He stood and handed the pencil back to Haeng. “Naturally, I won’t tell anyone we’ve had this little talk. Whether you discuss it is up to you. In the future, you’ll treat me with civility, and I shall offer you my experience and cooperation to help turn you, bit by bit, into the type of judge you should be.”

Haeng had stared into his powerful green eyes the whole time, hypnotized. Siri nodded, turned, walked to the door, and polished one sandal on the back of his trousers before leaving the eerily silent room.

“Well, I must say this is a lot more civilized than the bus.” Siri and Nguyen Hong sat in the back seat of the black limousine looking at the driver’s thick neck crammed into a tight Vietnamese military uniform. Nguyen Hong was wearing something that fit him better for the trip.

“The ambassador wouldn’t dream of letting me travel anywhere on public transport. He says there are bandits everywhere.”

“And he thinks we’d be safer in a big expensive car?”

“There is an escort.” They looked out through Siri’s window at the short but jolly armed escort on his post office motorcycle. A hunting rifle was slung over his shoulder. An ambush would wipe the lot of them out in seconds.

“I don’t think your ambassador gets out much.”

“Siri, I’ve been reading up on the resilience of the sphincter.” Siri chuckled.

“And they say the Vietnamese aren’t a cultured race.”

“You know we were wondering whether the bowels could have filled with reservoir water naturally over two weeks?” Both bodies had what they considered to be an abnormally large quantity of water in them. “Given the minimal fish and algae damage to the internal organs, the books say the muscle contraction would likely have made the bowels relatively watertight. There shouldn’t have been that much water inside.”

“Come on, Hong. Don’t we have enough mysteries already? Perhaps they were thirsty and drank a lot of lake water before they were killed.”

“None of that water had passed through the kidneys.”

“Then, what are you saying?”

“Have you ever been water-skiing, Siri?”

“Oh. All the time. I often hook up the line behind the yacht when I’m on a cruise.”

Nguyen Hong laughed. The driver looked at Siri in the rearview mirror and despised him for his wealth.

“Don’t tell me you have?”

“I had a privileged youth, before I saw the light.”

“Goodness. So, what’s it like?”

“Water-skiing? Invigorating.”

“And there’s a connection between that and the sphincters of Tran and Tran?”

“I’m not sure. There may be. You see, I wasn’t the world’s best water-skier. I spent more time falling down than skiing. And there’s no better way to give yourself an enema than to….”

“I get the point. So, do we assume the Trans were merrily water-skiing on Nam Ngum Reservoir?”

“Hardly. But if they’d been dragged behind a boat….”

“The effect would have been the same. Very clever. And that could have been part of the torture. God, I hope the torturers got something out of them. They certainly put a lot of effort into getting them to talk. You think they really had anything that important to say? You aren’t keeping anything from me, are you?”

“I’ve told you all I know. And I’m certain the driver knew nothing. All he could have disclosed was how many kilometers to the liter his jeep did.”

“Well, if I was the driver I would have told them that at the first sign of danger. Wouldn’t you, driver?” The driver ignored him and concentrated all his energy on rounding potholes and scattering pedestrians.

At the reservoir they met the Nam Ngum district chief, who introduced them to the two fishermen who’d found the Trans. The second of these two poor fellows had been sitting in his boat minding his own business, when a Tran came shooting up out of the water like a missile. The brown, misshapen face looked right at the fisherman before flopping back down. It almost gave him a heart attack.

When Siri told the district chief what he had in mind, he knew there wouldn’t be a long queue of volunteers. Even the best divers in the district would balk at going down in search of a three-week-old corpse. There was a healthy tradition of folklore and superstition around the lake villages, and the discovery of two bodies had shaken most folks up. But in a fishing community there’s always one old-timer who’ll do anything for a couple of
kip.
In this case it was Dun. Dun couldn’t even afford a boat. He usually just waded into the lake to his waist and cast his oft-repaired net into the water a few dozen times. He lived on the low-IQ sprats and water vermin that didn’t have the savvy to avoid him.

“Sure, I’ll do it…for five hundred
kip.
”

Since the devaluation in June, the
kip
had settled at two hundred to the U.S. dollar. He was pushing his luck to ask for such a huge sum, but he fully expected the city fellows to bargain him down. They didn’t. They gave him half in advance. It was his lucky day.

The second fisherman took Dun out to where he’d been frightened by the sudden appearance of Tran, and Siri and Nguyen Hong stood on the shore with the chief. Dun put on the goggles Siri had brought from town and slid over the side of the boat still wearing his shirt. He wasn’t down for more than five seconds before he came up gasping for air. The chief explained it was a result of all the smoking he did. While Dun dove, and choked, dove and choked, Siri got the chief to fill in some of the details of the day they’d found the tattooed man.

“Exactly who was it that identified the marks as Vietnamese?”

“Oh, I was quite certain myself. But it was confirmed by this military chap. He said he’d been stationed over there in Vietnam, and he recognized the tattoos straight away.”

“Is he still around?”

“No. He wasn’t from here. He was just doing a survey.”

“On what?”

“Boat traffic back and forth to the rehabilitation islands, he said.”

They could see the two islands in the distance: Don Thao for the male villains and addicts, and Don Nang for the ladies. Siri dreaded to think what type of rehabilitation was going on there.

“Did you see his orders?”

“Goodness no, Doctor. People in uniforms don’t like to be bullied by laypeople, and he did have a big gun, so I didn’t ask.”

Out by the boat, old Mr. Dun was starting to look like a drowning victim himself. Nguyen Hong was concerned.

“Do you think we should call him back in? I don’t think he’s going to make it.” Siri nodded and they were just about to yell to the fisherman, when Dun stopped coming back up.

“Oh, shit.” They shielded their eyes from the glaring sun and scanned the water for any sign of Dun. The surface was smooth as glass and the man in the boat seemed unconcerned by what horror might have been going on below him.

Both doctors knew that in fresh water the diver had a little over four minutes. Nguyen Hong had been checking his watch. “Three. Why doesn’t the fisherman go down and help him?”

Siri asked the chief.

“He says he’s not a very good swimmer. No point in losing both of them.”

It was a little over the four-minute mark when Dun popped out of the water, his face smiling and purple. It was dramatic last-minute stuff, like Houdini. Dun held up his hand to wave and to show he was holding something. It seemed to be the end of a rope. When he yanked on it, first a foot, then a leg rose out of the water. Hok had been retrieved.

In order to get at the body before the air had a chance to speed up the decomposition, the two coroners set up a makeshift morgue in an empty concrete room behind the dam. The chief’s wife kept running in and out with tea.

The findings for Hok were similar to those of the second Tran, but for two major discrepancies. Although there were signs of shock, there was also a huge wound, apparently from a gun fired at close range. It entered his chest a few centimeters from his heart, and exited by the shoulderblade. Nguyen shook his head.

“This really makes no sense. This wound alone should have killed him.”

“You don’t think it did?”

“Well, it couldn’t have. Look.”

Siri leaned over the wound and saw what had confused his colleague. The point of entry was still open and angry. But there were clear indications of scabbing around the exit wound. There was no doubt that Hok’s bullet wound was an old one, one that was still healing when he died.

“What’s he doing running around with delegations with a big hole in his chest? He should have been recuperating somewhere.”

“Question one,” said Siri. “And then there’s question two. Explain this to me.” He held up the rubber-coated electric wire that he’d just unwound from Hok’s ankle. “It just gets more and more weird.”

“You mean, if they had this stuff, why didn’t they use it to tie down all three?”

“There’s enough on this fellow for a whole regiment. Do you suppose it all means something?”

“That we’re being left clues?”

“Perhaps.”

“Then, no offense, but I fear they’ve badly overestimated us. I don’t have any idea what it all means. Do you?”

“Not yet. But I will. When we’re finished here, I think we should go have another chat with Mr. Dun.”

Dun was sitting happily on the veranda of his packing-case bungalow, smoking and drinking his earnings. The thought of offering the doctors anything didn’t enter his mind.

“It was a bomb.”

“What kind of bomb?”

“The type the shithead Americans used to blow us all to nirvana and back. There was three of ’em down there, half-buried in the muck. They had writing on ’em.”

“Do you know what language it was?”

Dun laughed at the idea that he might have ever been blessed with the ability to read. “No. But I tell you what. There was a Chinese flag on one of ’em.”

“It isn’t my job, I tell you. I don’t have to do this. I’m putting in an official complaint to the embassy. This won’t be the end of it.”

Siri wondered whether there’d be an end to the complaining. The Vietnamese driver hadn’t stopped since they left Nam Ngum. Siri had to put up with the brunt of it because he was sitting beside him in the front of the limousine. “It isn’t…natural.”

“I know. Watch that bicycle, will you?”

The trunk of the car might just have been large enough, had it not been for the spare tire and the eight liter cans of petrol. The armed guard had positively refused to have him on the motorcycle pillion. So there really had been no choice.

Mr. Hok, wrapped tightly in canvas but still dripping, leaned stiffly against the back seat beside Dr. Nguyen. Even with the air conditioner full on, the smell was quite overpowering. The driver had half a roll of toilet paper stuffed up his nostrils. Siri turned to Nguyen Hong.

“Do you speak French?”

“Some. It’s a bit rusty.”

“Driver, do you?”

“Ha. Where do you think I would have earned the privilege of a French education? I’m a pauper. I’m a man of the earth. The soul of the new regime.”

“Good.” Siri switched to French. “Any theories yet, doctor?”

“Hundreds, but not a one that makes any sense. You?”

“Let’s try this. Tran and Hok were here on a mission that was so urgent Hok didn’t even wait for his bullet wound to heal. Let’s assume it was something damaging to us, and we picked up the delegation before it could reach its destination. They were brought out here to the islands with all the other criminals, tortured until they talked, then dumped in the lake and weighted down with old Chinese ordnance.

“But our people wanted your people to know we’d caught them, so they used dissolving string. They knew we’d then go looking for the third man and discover the Chinese shell casing which, given the chilly relationship between you folks and Beijing, would only serve to rile you even more. How’s that?”