Thirty-Three Teeth (16 page)

She’d been thrown to the ground and dragged like a sack of black beans and left where she now sat. Her chest, her face, her thighs were bruised and possibly bleeding. There was no light, not a trickle. The treacly blackness, the thin bad-tasting air, and the noises, these were the devils that made her physical health seem unimportant. They slowly added layer by layer to the horror of what she had stumbled upon.

There was nothing she could do but sit with her back against the wall and listen. Back and forth it paced, panting and shuffling and gurgling from its throat. Then there was the smell. She’d been in the morgue long enough to recognize death, but this was more. The blood and the death mingled with the creature’s own stink as if it were a part of it.

She had never feared more for her life. She could never have been more certain that this was her last day, and it was her own stupid fault. Why, she wondered at first, was she still alive when all the others had been killed instantly? But as her mind cleared, the reason became obvious. This was the final day of the solstice when the moon would be at its fullest. The others had been killed over the five days leading up to this night. The beast was waiting for that moon to rise before taking its final sacrifice. In a few hours, she would be just like the other women, except here in this cold black place nobody would ever find her body.

It wasn’t until he arrived at Hay Sok temple that Siri realized he didn’t know the name of the monk he’d come to find. The moon was rising fast, and the temple grounds stood out in its light like the national stadium under floodlights.

He walked around the inside of the whitewashed wall until he got to the stretch that had been blown up the previous year, along with his house. The monks had done a good job of fixing it. There was no longer a hole to look through; but by standing on the incinerator, he could see the far side. The ruins of his former house still lay there. The rubble hadn’t been collected, and the side wall still warped and leaned inward. All but one, they’d been lucky to get out before the place collapsed.

“Are you up there thanking your lucky stars, Yeh Ming?”

The monk stood behind him, his pate freshly shorn. He wore his saffron wrap as a loincloth. In the moonlight, Siri noticed the rings of tattooed mantras around his upper arms and across his chest. It perhaps explained his magical abilities. Somehow the monk knew all about Siri and Yeh Ming. It was he who had rescued the white talisman, he who had predicted that Dtui’s mother would have a better year.

“I am that,” Siri smiled. “It’s been a while. How have you been?”

He sat down on top of the incinerator.

“You’ll eventually come to understand that luck and coincidence aren’t connected. It wasn’t a coincidence that your dog led you away from the house that night. It was no coincidence that the Indian tackled your policeman friend last evening.”

Siri laughed.

“Is there anything you don’t know?”

“Oh, yes. So many things, but not those things that concern you, Yeh Ming.”

“Who are you exactly?”

“You don’t need to know that. I see you’re wearing the talisman.”

In fact he could see no such thing, not with his eyes anyway. It was around the doctor’s neck beneath his shirt.

“It makes my skin itch.”

“You were fortunate in Luang Prabang. Didn’t I tell you to wear it always?”

“I was always poor at taking advice. But I think I get the idea now.”

“Good. What brings you here?”

“I thought you were all-seeing, all-knowing.”

“Only in spiritual matters.”

It was an odd comment that Siri would come to dwell on later.

“What do you know about weretigers?”

“More than I care to.” He walked over and joined Siri on the incinerator. “A weretiger is a tiger spirit that can from time to time possess the soul of a woman or man.”

“And vice versa?”

“What do you mean?”

“Could it be a man who turns into a tiger?”

“We are talking about spirits, Yeh Ming. Spirits don’t turn people into animals. They may make them believe they are this or that beast, but there’s no physical manifestation.”

Siri was taken aback.

“What? What about werewolves?”

The monk laughed.

“I’d say you have wasted too many hours watching motion picture films.”

It was true. Siri and Boua had sat through many hours of Lon Chaney with a face like a chihuahua biting into the necks of unsuspecting village folk. Given all that had happened to Siri over the last fifteen months, the least he expected was a parade of ghouls and monsters.

“Then explain this,” he said. “A man is released from Don Thao. He claims to be the host of a weretiger. A few days later comes the first of three killings, all showing evidence of a tiger’s bite and scratch marks.”

The monk looked perplexed.

“I cannot.”

“Is there a possibility?”

“As it indeed happened, there has to be a possibility. But in all these years, I’ve never seen or heard of such a thing.”

Siri shook his head and looked up at the huge moon.

“Do you think there could be a connection with the moon?”

“When did the killings take place?”

“The first was on the eighth. Then the tenth and eleventh.”

“The moon isn’t symbolic of spirit activity, but it is a great source of energy that unleashes a number of innate abilities and quirks. There are theories that the full moon can trigger electrical impulses in the mind. Not all insanity is connected to evil spirits.”

“Where do they hang out? Weretigers.”

“You mean apart from within the souls of humans?”

“Yes.”

“When they aren’t of this world, the Hmong believe they go to the other earth. It is a landscape not unlike the mountains they live their mortal lives on.”

“How do they get there?”

“You enter the other earth through holes in the ground or networks of caves. These lead you to a great body of water where spirits and humans can converse. It’s there that the supreme God, Nyut Vaj, decides whether you are eligible to enter the eternal Kingdom or whether you will have to float in purgatory.”

“I see. So all I have to do is find the other earth and I’ll have our friend, Mr. Seua.”

Siri climbed down from the incinerator and reached out a hand to the nameless monk, who ignored the gesture.

“Yeh Ming…?”

“Yes?”

“There’s no doubt these people were killed by a tiger?”

“Or some other large cat.”

“Then have you considered the possibility it was a real tiger?”

“We thought about it. But how could a wild cat run free in Vientiane without somebody seeing it?”

“What if it isn’t free?”

“You mean if it’s captive? It belongs to someone?”

“Do you know anyone who keeps wild animals?”

Siri’s mind raced to Dtui’s report of her visit to the circus school. He thought of the Russian and his puma. He had a mental image of the trainer late at night walking his big cat at the end of a leash. It was far-fetched but perhaps the only logical explanation, unless the monk was wrong about weretigers and werewolves. Surely Hollywood hadn’t made it all up.

“I may. And that reminds me. If there’s no such thing as a coincidence, I have one more for you to explain. I believe a bear might have sought me out and paid me a visit last Tuesday morning. Is there any connection between Yeh Ming and wild animals?”

“There’s an inseparable connection between Yeh Ming and all nature. Animals sense that.”

As he walked from the temple, one thought nagged at him. At Silver City, the interpreter had told him Dtui hadn’t been there long. He had said it was a flying visit. What if he’d been lying? But why would he? And what could Siri do if he had? The

compound was a fortress, and he had no pretext to get inside. He was flustered and anxious and in such a state he couldn’t think as clearly as he’d like.

As it was close, he stopped again at Dtui’s room. He was disappointed but not surprised to learn that she hadn’t come home. So as not to worry Manoluk, he told her they had a case that might go on all night. He brought her a meal from the night stalls on Koonboulom and administered her medication. He did his best to appear calm; but all the while, his thoughts were on Dtui and what could have become of her.

He was in the back, searching for a glass into which to transfer the guava juice from its plastic bag. He pulled back a cloth on a low shelf and was surprised to find a row of textbooks. He squatted down and looked at the titles. They were in English but the words were similar enough to French to get the drift: Fundamentals of Surgery, Chemical Toxicology, Oncology, Urology, Basics of Nursing. Then there were dictionaries: English–Lao–English, English–Russian. And every book was twice as fat as it should have been because the pages were crammed with notepaper.

He selected the Surgery text. In Dtui’s tiny handwriting, on every page there was a detailed description in Lao, and presumably a translation in Russian. There must have been thousands of such sheets. Siri was overwhelmed for a number of reasons. He walked across to Manoluk with the textbook in his hand.

“Manoluk, does Dtui understand English?”

“She didn’t in the beginning. I think she’s got the hang of it now. She only reads and writes it. Can’t speak much. The problem’s going to be the Russian. She has to learn the whole thing again in a new language.”

“You think she actually knows what it all means?”

She gave him a look reserved for mothers whose daughters have been insulted.

“No, I didn’t mean it to sound like that. She’s an intelligent

girl. But this stuff is hard enough in our native language. Learning it in two others is unbelievable. How long’s she been doing this?”

“Since before she graduated as a nurse. She originally planned to try for a scholarship to America. That was in the old regime and there were a lot of dollars around. So she started going through her old nursing textbooks, translating line by line. Then you folks came and took over, and all the American funds went out the window. So she started all over again with Russian.”

“I think she might have told me.”

“Well, she—”

“What?”

“She was afraid that if anyone knew she had other languages, they’d move her from the morgue.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“Well, one, she got to like the work you do there. I think she’d like to be a, what do you call it?”

“Forensic surgeon.”

“That’s it. And two, you don’t actually have a lot of work in the morgue. Nothing’s so urgent that it can’t wait till morning. It’s a sort of eight-to-five job. She knows if she worked in the wards, they’d put her on shifts and get her translating and stuff. She wouldn’t have time for her study. She’s at it every night. She writes out little test sheets in Lao so I can test her, though I don’t really have any idea what it’s all about. She’s the one with the brains in this family.”

“So it seems.”

Dtui never failed to amaze him. All this time, she’d been preparing herself for further study, even before he recommended her for a scholarship. What he’d thought was an act of kindness on his part was actually the inevitable fulfillment of her plan. She was studying overseas with or without his help.

“Manoluk, we should talk about this again, but right now I have something urgent that needs taking care of. I’m going to have to run.”

He returned the textbook, gave Dtui’s mother her juice, and headed for the door.

“Thanks for coming in. Tell Dtui not to worry about me.”

“I will.”

He felt overwhelmed. As he shut the clunky door that didn’t fit its frame, tears came to his eyes. They were tears for Dtui and her dreams, and for her mother and her lifetime investment in her daughter. And they were tears of helplessness. Where on earth could he look next?

That’s when he remembered something Civilai had said.

Despite constant prodding and poking from the Party, Civilai had still managed to avoid installing a telephone in his house.

“If they want me that urgently, let them get out of bed and come and get me,” he said.

Siri and the bike trailing his pulled up in front of the wooden bungalow in the sprawling compound that had once housed the American community. If it weren’t for the vegetation, you’d swear you were in a suburb in South Dakota. The LPRP had been only too delighted to take over this little piece of Americana and thumb their noses at the CIA who were now confined to a couple of rooms at the embassy.

Six Clicks, as the Americans christened their home away from home, was six kilometers from town. It had a pool and a gymnasium and restaurants and was surrounded by a large wall that could make the expats forget they were in a nasty Southeast Asian country far from home.

As always, one of the armed guards from the main gate had accompanied Siri, just in case he had an urge to detour and assassinate the prime minister. He’d been here hundreds of times, and they still didn’t trust him. Siri beeped his horn.

Civilai appeared at the window and gestured for his friend to come in. His sweet wife appeared beside him and waved. Siri waved back but made no effort to get down from his bike. He pointed to his watch. Civilai had no choice but to come out to the street.

“We’re both over the hoof-and-mouth disease. You could come in, you know.”

“Sorry. I can’t stop. In fact, if you had a phone, I would have preferred to do this without the Six K’s.”

“Good, that. Coming from a man who only learned how to use a telephone last year. What’s so urgent?”

Siri looked at the guard and raised his eyebrows at Civilai, who dismissed the man. “It’s all right. He’s safe. You can go.”

The guard roared away, and Civilai came over to sit on his white front fence.

“You said at lunch you had a call from Dtui this morning.”

“And I thought you never listen to me.”

“It’s important, brother. She’s been missing all day.”

“Shit.”

“What was the call about?”

“Like I said, it was quite peculiar. She wanted to know whether there were any underground caverns or caves around the city.”

“You’re joking. How did she…? What did you tell her?”

“Well, do you recall the PL had its headquarters not far from the Black Stupa? It was just down from the U.S. compound. We used it as a base here till we took over.”

“Yeah.”

“We were always expecting to get attacked or kicked out. So we took a leaf out of the Viet Cong’s survival manual. We gave ourselves a number of escape options.”

“Tunnels?”

“That’s it. There’s quite a network down there.”

“Damn.”

“What is it?”

“Do any of those tunnels go in the direction of the river?”

“Of course. The water was the best way to get away at night. One of them actually passes directly under the French embassy.”

“How do you get access?”

“What are you hatching?”

“Just tell me.”

“Behind the main building, there’s an area covered with large paving stones. One of those stones has a small hole in one corner. You need a hook or some kind of jemmy. It lifts up.”

“Did you tell Dtui that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Listen. Go find someone with a phone.”

“What is it?”

“I think Dtui found those tunnels and something happened to her down there. The best we can hope for is that she got herself lost. But I’m afraid she might have found our weretiger.”

“Our weret…?”

“Tell Phosy to get some men there, armed, as soon as he can. If he’s not around, call in the bloody army. I don’t care what it takes.”