The Coroner's Lunch (9 page)

By some miracle of timing and history, he’d avoided man’s justice. But for many years to come, he’d suffer the justice of remorse, the nightmares of guilt. A soldier may kill a thousand of the enemy in battle and not feel a thing. But the death of one innocent man lodges itself in the conscience forever.

When he could stand it no longer, Siri pulled himself away and searched for a pen and paper in his shoulder bag. On the back of an old envelope, he wrote down some information he remembered from his autopsy report. He forced the paper into Bounheng’s hand.

“Boy. This is the name of the fisherman, and his home village. I believe they have a small altar there. It might help you to go there and talk to him.”

Siri walked slowly back across the fields toward the road. Step by step, the significance of what had just happened pulled him down below the surface of common sense. His old heart started beating like a giant catfish caught in a net. Somehow he’d known. Somehow, the longboat man’s visit had told him. But where was the logic in that? What was the scientific explanation?

He felt no gloating, no pride in what he’d just been able to achieve. He was walking a narrow path between fear and excitement, between power and powerlessness, between sanity and…. He didn’t want to think about what was happening to him.

Two, then three
songtaews
went past him on their way back into town. They beeped their hoarse horns begging him to climb in, but he let them go. He sat under a jackfruit tree and went over the meeting in his mind. He went over it, and over it, and over it. But if he’d hoped for an explanation to come to him, he was going to be disappointed.

“Oh. Good to see you. We assumed you’d died of old age.”

Mr. Geung laughed at, and repeated, Dtui’s irreverent comment.

“We, ah…ah…ah…assumed you died of old age.”

It was after three, and Siri had been missing for over five hours. The army sergeant had asked them where he was. The Nam Ngum Dam security chief had asked them where he was, and Judge Haeng, on the telephone, had asked them where he was. But no one could answer. The staff consensus was that he was now in serious shit.

But, here Dr. Siri was, smiling, in the office doorway. There was a cheeky, somewhat youthful expression on his face. He strode in and went to his desk as if everything were normal.

Everything certainly was not.

“Any new customers, Mr. Geung?”

Geung searched for stock answer number two. “We have a guest in room number one.”

It wasn’t the answer Siri was hoping for. He wanted peace. He wanted to go home. He had enough on his mind already without yet another body in the freezer.

Dtui waltzed over to his desk with a bigger grin than usual on her craggy face. “I probably don’t need to tell you how upset Judge Haeng was to find you out of your office during working hours. As your loyal assistant and official trainee, I was planning to lie and tell him you’d just stepped out for a minute. But he already had a couple of witnesses in his office saying you’d been gone most of the day.”

Siri didn’t seem to care. He continued to smile. “What did he want?”

“He’d love it if you could phone him back before nightfall, because he has several questions to ask you about our new guest.”

“Don’t tell me it’s another celebrity.”

“Nobody knows who he is. But he’s certainly got a lot of people interested in him. They all want to know what he died of.”

“Mr. Geung.” Siri looked over, and Geung stopped rocking. “You saw the body?”

“Yes, Dr. Comrade.”

“What’d he die of?”

“Drowned.”

“Excellent. There you have it, Dtui. If Judge Hinge-face calls back, that’s the initial diagnosis. Tell him I’ll be in touch in the morning.”

He started to claw through the papers on his desk as if he were missing something important. Dtui and Geung looked at each other, mystified.

“Have you two moved anything from here in the last couple of days?”

Geung shook his head violently. Dtui looked indignant.

“I wouldn’t dream of touching your desk.”

“Then where’s the…?” He cast his mind back to the day of Mrs. Nitnoy’s autopsy. He’d been working on the report till late, until…. That was it. That was the “something different.” On the night Comrade Kham sat at his desk and talked him out of doing any more tests on his wife, the report had been there in front of him. The bastard had stolen it.

“Like a common thief.”

“Who is?” Dtui was looking to defend her honor.

“Not you two. We’ve had a nasty low-life in here ‘borrowing’ reports. Dtui, you still have your notebook?”

“The autopsy book?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah. It’s here in the drawer.” She pulled it open and produced the notebook.

“Good girl. I’ll borrow that, if I may, and start a new report on Mrs. Nitnoy.” He walked over and took it from her.

“Do we know what she died of yet?”

“Not quite. But she certainly didn’t die of
lahp.
And neither of you can mention that outside this room. Got that?” They nodded. “It’s starting to look like somebody wants this case closed in a hurry. We, my children, are no longer common coroners. We are investigators of death. Inspector Siri and his faithful lieutenants. All for one and one for all.” He walked over to the doorway, turned back to his team, clicked the heels of his sandals together, and saluted. He smiled and chuckled his way out the main door and into the carpark. Through the skylight, they could hear him singing the French national anthem until he was finally out of earshot.

Inside, the office was silent. The cockroaches were quiet. For once, Dtui didn’t know what to say. Even Geung, from his other dimension, could recognize the abnormal when he saw it.

“The Comrade Doctor is…is nuts today.”

With all the excitement, it was a wonder that it was still only Thursday. Siri arrived at work refreshed and packing new energy. Again, he was the first there. He unlocked the building, opened the windows, and sent more cockroaches scurrying for cover.

Before embarking on the great telephone adventure, he went to visit the guest in room one. He wasn’t a pretty sight. The puffy skin had begun to shift, as if it had been removed and replaced in a hurry. It was beginning to develop a waxy brown texture that suggested, without any further investigation, that the body had been in the water for two to three weeks. Siri pulled the cover back completely and noticed a thick tourniquet of plastic twine several layers thick around the left ankle. The skin had been worn completely through from the tightness of it. He made a mental note that the blood had settled at the back of the body and around the legs. If he’d been floating since he died, hypostasis would have been evident at the front of the corpse. But there was none.

He noticed all these things but replaced the sheet and set off to find the expert who understood the magic of telephone technology.

A pretty girl was filing. She turned to see who had come in.

“I need to call the Justice Department.”

“The phone’s on the table behind you, Doctor. Just write the number in the book, who spoke to who, and for how long.”

She turned back to the cabinet. Siri stood there uneasily, not yet ready to look at the telephone. She glanced back over her shoulder to see him still in the same position.

“I thought
you
might do it,” he said quietly.

“Do what?”

“Make the telephone call for me.”

“No. It’s just a regular phone. You don’t need an operator.”

He looked around at the somber black machine and walked tentatively toward it. Its numbers peeked out at him from the portholes of the dial. He studied it for a while and carefully picked up the handset. He held it to his ear and listened to the warm buzz.

“Hello?”

There was no response.

“You
have
used a telephone before?” She’d deserted her filing and come to stand behind him. It was the moment of truth. He confessed.

“No.”

“Doctor?”

It did seem rather hard to believe that in seventy-two years, Siri hadn’t once handled a phone. But Laos wasn’t a phone culture. There were fewer than nine hundred working telephones in the entire country, and most of those were in government offices. Even during Laos’s dizzy heights of corruption, only the very well-off families had had their own phones.

To a poor student in France, a phone had been out of the question and, besides, there had been nobody to call. But even then he’d had a phobia about the things. So it was hardly surprising, for a man who’d spent most of his life in jungles, that the skill of manipulating the dreaded machine had passed him by.

“I’ve spoken into field walkie-talkies, but there was always a technician there to twirl the handle.” He smiled.

She was obviously a charitable girl, because she became teary-eyed to find herself in the presence of such a disadvantaged elderly doctor. She took the handpiece from him and smiled back. “What’s the number?”

“Number?”

After a while, she found the Department of Justice in the very slim telephone directory and taught him how to steer the dial around the face of the machine. It was all annoyingly uncomplicated in the end.

As he’d hoped, Judge Haeng had just left for court to preside on another divorce case. The man had a file jam-packed with domestic disputes and paternity suits, but nothing that could in seriousness be called a crime. Haeng’s clerk, Manivone, assured Siri that the judge was livid and expected to find the autopsy report on his desk when he came back from court that afternoon.

Siri asked after her new baby and her husband’s pig problem, and slowly grew quite comfortable with the telephone in his hand. The girl virtually had to tear it away from him in case anyone was trying to get through.

So, Siri had achieved two major feats before the day was barely underway: he’d used a telephone virtually by himself, and he’d communicated with the Justice Department without actually having to talk directly to the annoying little man in the flesh. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to compete the trifecta with the autopsy.

Dtui, more enthusiastic than ever, stood with her notepad poised as Siri restated his previous observations. He noticed several other odd indicators on the ill-fitting skin. Most obvious of these were what looked like burn marks around the nipples and genitalia, but nowhere else.

Dtui quite rightly pointed out that the string round the ankle indicated that he’d been tied to something heavy and sunk. But she made one other observation that Siri hadn’t thought of. “Why didn’t they use cord or wire or something?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you’re going to the trouble of weighing the guy down, you shouldn’t use crap string like this. Everyone knows this cheap Vietnamese nylon stuff doesn’t last very long in water. They used to use it to tie up bamboo for scaffolding. Then in the rainy season it would all fall down ’cause the string rotted.”

“Hmm. Maybe it’s all they had handy. They might have been in a hurry. But that’s a good point. Write it down.” She did so, proudly.

The last note they made, before Siri started to cut, was of the expression on the man’s face. The jaw was locked open and there was a look of horror that none of them had seen before on a corpse. It was unlikely to have happened post-mortem.

Once he was inside the corpse, and they’d recovered from the unpleasant stench, there were one or two more surprises waiting for Siri. With the body so deteriorated, it would have been very difficult to categorically state that drowning was the cause of death. But the opposite wasn’t true. There were ways to show that it wasn’t.

It takes some four minutes to drown in fresh water. In that time, about half the circulating blood is suffused with this intaken liquid. The water, and the algae it contains, will have been pushed into the far recesses of the lungs if the victim was still breathing when he entered the water.

Siri took samples from the stomach, lungs, and arteries, but his first instinct told him that the corpse was already dead when he went into the water. Nothing indicated he’d still been breathing or that his heart had been beating. But Mr. Geung could be forgiven for his assessment of the previous day. All the other signs were there. The man had spent two or three weeks in the water. That was certain.

Secondly….

A man with an extremely loud voice suddenly appeared in the doorway. He had a cloth over his mouth and looked at the team as if he’d caught them being naughty.

“What’s all this bloody stink you’re making in here?”

Siri didn’t look up. “Get out.”

“Not until you stop making this wretched stink. What’s that you’ve got there? A body, is it?”

“Mr. Geung. Could you remove that very rude person from our morgue?”

Geung went at him, but the invader retreated to the alcove before he could do any damage. Still he shouted. “I’m going to report you all to the hospital director I am. Damned stink. It’s not good enough.”

Siri laughed, none the wiser. “Where were we?”

“Secondly….”

“Right. Secondly, there seems to be some anomaly around the chest cavity. There’s livor mortis around the main artery, which suggests heavy internal bleeding.”

“What causes that?”

“No idea. We’ll look it up later.”

He found nothing else. The liver showed the effects of alcohol, but not enough to have killed him. The heart and brain gave nothing away. While Dtui and Geung sewed up, Siri checked the skin samples under the microscope.

“Dtui, do you want to come and take a look at this?” She hurried over to the bench and lowered her eye to the lens. “What do you see?”

“Ehhh, green? Little shiny bits?” She moved the slide. “Black? More shiny bits? It’s very pretty. What is it?”

“Well, this is skin from the area around the nipple that looked burned. The green section could have been caused by copper. The shiny bits are probably metal deposits.”

“Which means?”

“I’ll have to do some chemical tests at the lycée, but I’d say these were electricity burns.”