The Coroner's Lunch (28 page)

He was talking too fast without rest, getting too excited, running out of breath. He took some gulps of oxygen and kept the mask handy.

“It was an ideal opportunity to create a bit of a diplomatic stir. If they could convince the Vietnamese that their men had been arrested and tortured, it wouldn’t take a great leap in logic to assume that Laos had been responsible for the earlier massacre as well.

“So the Black Boars killed the three in a way that wouldn’t be easy to recognize and then set it up to look like they’d been tortured to death. They flew the bodies to Nam Ngum near the correctional facility, and dropped them into the reservoir. They anchored them to old shell casings, and used cheap string on two of them so they’d eventually bob up to the surface. The second Tran they tied with flex so someone would have to go down and discover the Chinese shells. They knew that would upset the Vietnamese.

“Ngakum ‘just happened’ to be at the reservoir doing some fictitious survey when the first two bodies were found, and
he
‘recognized’ the Vietnamese tattoos. He’s the one who made sure the Vietnamese embassy was involved. Of course, the bodies had been set up. When Tran left Hanoi, he didn’t have any tattoos.”

“No?”

“Not a one. His wife knew nothing about them. They tattooed the poor fellow after he was dead.”

Civilai shook his head. “How did they actually kill them?”

“Nguyen Hong believes two of them had air pumped into their veins. It causes an air embolism that blocks the flow of blood through the heart. After a few weeks in the water, there wouldn’t be much to show what had happened. It was very professionally done, except for one small error.”

“Which was?”

“Tran, the driver, appears to have died from a massive tear in the artery in his chest. There’s only one way that could make any sense, but it’s too horrible to imagine. Tran didn’t die with his countrymen. He was a little fatter than the other two. What if they missed his vein when they injected the air?”

“Then he would have been alive when they electrocuted the bodies?”

“I pray he was unconscious, and not just playing dead. But apparently not even the torture killed him. Civilai, when he arrived at the morgue, we all noticed the expression of horror frozen on his face. There was only one thing that could have caused that look.”

“The fall from the helicopter.”

“It’s quite conclusive that he was still alive when they pushed him out.”

“I can’t imagine a more horrific death,” the commander said.

“I doubt whether it was intentional. I don’t think cruelty was the Americans’ aim. I mean, they could have
actually
tortured them to death if they had wanted it to look authentic.”

The commander sighed. “We have to track them down. I don’t want mercenaries rampaging through the land. But first things first. I want to get my hands on that damn traitor. You’ve convinced me, gentlemen. God knows how many lives have been lost as a result of the bastard’s crimes. If you’ll both excuse me, I have a very painful duty to perform.”

He shook hands with them warmly and left, taking the guard with him. The two old friends remained there in silence. Civilai sat scratching his head, exhausted. Siri sucked on his oxygen. Neither spoke for several minutes. Slowly their smiles turned to laughter. Civilai moved to the bed and grasped Siri’s right hand in his. They squeezed each other’s fists so tightly their knuckles turned white, and they laughed as if the funniest thing in the world had just taken place.

“What are we laughing for?” Siri asked through the tears.

“It’s a nervous reaction. We’re both scared out of our wits.”

“You think this was scary, you wait till I tell you about the
other
case.”

Khen Nahlee had never failed so ingloriously. He ached with humiliation. Revenge was an unprofessional desire, but he wanted nothing more.

He could have been excused the first miss. It was dark. Siri was a shadow against the front door. He should have gone to check the body, but the woman was always there behind her curtain. It wasn’t until the next day that he’d heard the doctor had survived.

By then, Siri had gone, left the capital. So he had to end it some other way. He’d dated the girl from the hairdresser’s. It was nothing serious. He used the Vientiane grapevine to spread the rumor that she was Comrade Kham’s minor wife. It traveled so fast, he heard it back almost at once. Mai didn’t know the comrade from a bowl of noodles, but that didn’t matter. She had enough old men chasing her. No one would be surprised.

The suicide method he selected was one he’d seen a few years earlier. The wife of some man he’d killed slashed her wrists and plunged them into boiling water. It was dramatic enough, suitable for a lover filled with remorse. He set up the crime scene exactly as he remembered it. Exactly. The Vientiane police were there, taking pictures, asking questions. When they found the note, there wasn’t a doubt in anyone’s mind that she’d killed her lover’s wife, then taken her own life.

It was all perfect. Nobody questioned it until
he
came back: the detective pensioner. That interfering old man. He couldn’t leave it alone. He had to poke his nose in. He stripped away the layers of deceit and exposed the truth. He was so damned proud of himself, gloating there by the river as he told his story.

Khen Nahlee thought he couldn’t have hated Siri any more than he did that night. It had gone beyond an assignment. It was a personal matter. No shriveled old quack was going to make a mockery of him.

He went to his arsenal and found a remedy for the doctor’s inquisitive disease. He was patient. He knew what time Siri had come home, so he gave him time to settle down. The old man had been drinking, so he’d tire quickly. Khen Nahlee walked through the silent temple grounds and looked up at the open window. The light was out. He was asleep. Too bad there wouldn’t be those few seconds of panic as he saw the bombs.

He pulled the pins and tossed his farewell in through the window. He didn’t need to wait. He knew what devastation they’d cause. He’d almost reached the temple gate when the explosion came, but he still didn’t bother to look back.

He considered killing the girl and the imbecile at the morgue, as his boss had suggested. But who would ever listen to them? No. All that remained was to remove the evidence. The hospital kitchen was unlocked. The cheap cooking oil burned well. The flames lapped upward to the library and soon took hold of the dry old books. He watched, because it was a satisfying end to a good evening’s work. Finally it was all over.

He even went to report to his boss. Comrade Kham met him in the gazebo behind his house. It was one A.M. But the senior comrade rarely slept any more. These two men had taken part in hundreds of early-morning debriefings, but never one so personal.

Comrade Kham had set up the Discreet Operations Unit some twenty years earlier, when he was still in uniform. Initially, it had been a small department that collected and analyzed data: a humble LPLA version of the CIA. Although very few knew about it, files were compiled on all the senior officials and anyone displaying “uncooperative” or “unhealthy” behavior.

From time to time, the bad mango in the bunch turned out to be so rotten that extreme measures had to be taken. Initially, they were careful to only eliminate those elements likely to cause damage to the movement. But power corrupts, and there were rumors that the only reason Kham was able to rise so rapidly through the ranks was because one or two political rivals “disappeared.”

As the Lao Patriotic Front grew and turned into a political force, so the DOU became more organized. One wing became a semi-autonomous death squad, and Khen Nahlee was named its head in 1970. He was ideally suited for the work. He was intelligent and dedicated to the party, and had been killing on its behalf since his early teens. Most important, he was a master of undercover work. He had gone through so many names and identities over the years that not even his own men could say they knew him.

He was a devoted disciple of the group’s founder, and carried out whatever assignments Kham gave him without question. He knew that any work he did was for the betterment of the Movement. But when Kham told him his secret at the chilly airstrip in Xiang Khouang, their relationship was forced to change. The comrade had killed his wife, and he wanted Khen to make it all right.

There had been no traditional motive, no crime of passion, no insurance claim. Kham had just grown to hate her. He hated what she had become since they moved to the capital. In peacetime, the Lao Women’s Union was developing into a political force. She was the one interviewed by the Khaosan News Agency. She was the one who spoke on the radio. It was her they invited to talk to the students at Dong Dok. And, suddenly, who was he? He was the husband of Comrade Nitnoy. They didn’t even remember his name.

So he killed her. The cyanide tablets came into his possession as a sort of incentive. It was fate. The unhappy couple had returned drunk from a Party reception where he was the senior comrade, but she was the star. He’d been her escort. She passed out drunk on the bed, and he went to his study and put the doctored tablets into her bottle.

But it wasn’t until she’d gone off with them in her handbag the next morning that he started to think it through. Doing it wasn’t enough; he also had to get away with it. Kham left for a week in Xiang Khouang, where he met Khen Nahlee and explained what he’d done. His henchman, ever faithful, promised to make everything turn out right, as he always had. Khen went to the capital and waited. Three days later, word of Mrs. Nitnoy’s death reached Kham. All Khen Nahlee needed to do was put on a uniform and pick up the evidence from the LWU.

But things didn’t go as smoothly as the comrade had hoped. The pill bottle wasn’t in her bag, and Khen didn’t want to attract attention to it by going back a second time. Kham had to hope things would work out in the course of events. But he hadn’t taken Siri’s skill into account. He’d assumed the reluctant coroner was untrained and incompetent, but that was no longer true. If he’d noticed the doctor’s determination, he might not have underestimated him so badly.

He knew. Somehow the little coroner knew, and Kham was afraid he wouldn’t be able to keep him quiet. There was little choice. He ordered Khen Nahlee to kill him before the findings became public.

The comrade had always been a staunch believer in Fate. He began projects only on auspicious dates and consulted the stars. It was Fate that he’d been given the cyanide, and it was Fate that she’d taken it so soon. Up to that point, fortune had been on his side. The assassin had never known failure; so when his bullets flew over Siri’s head that night, it was the first indication that Fate had gone against him. Siri had been given a second chance. Kham looked for another way.

He had Khen Nahlee set up a suicide. One murder of an insignificant girl and it could be all over. It was no scandal for a powerful man to be adored by his mistress. It would be no surprise that she’d killed her rival and taken her own life. The police were satisfied. He gave a tearful statement to the Press. It was all over.

Then Siri came back and screwed it all up again. There really was only one way to challenge Fate. All the logic on the earth dictated that Siri couldn’t escape a second assassination attempt. Nothing human could keep him alive.

But now the senior comrade sat in mid-afternoon in his empty house, drunk. He’d walked out of the Assembly in the middle of the ceremony for heroes of the revolution, ignored all questions. He’d shooed away the driver and driven the limousine home himself. He’d gone four nights without sleep; the journey home had been a blur.

He could compete with men. He’d shown that time and time again. But here he was up against something far beyond anything he’d ever known. His enemy was spiritual. Mrs. Nitnoy wasn’t going to let him forget what he’d done to her. She was in his nightmares, and she was at Siri’s back, protecting him. Something told him he would probably never spend a restful night again, and he couldn’t bear the thought of that.

He turned the radio up to its loudest and tuned it to Thailand. An expert in genealogy was discussing the reasons why Lao communists were so physically unattractive. He listened to find out why he was ugly, and when the music rose at the end of the program, he shot himself in the head.

Khen Nahlee hadn’t failed. Not yet. Although his nemesis was blessed with astoundingly good fortune, it didn’t necessarily mean he’d failed. The boss had told him to go back north. Give it up. But his mission was unfinished. Not failed: just delayed.

He sat in the bare room meticulously oiling his pistol and cleaning the silencer. He went through the plan in his mind. This was the evening of the That Luang Festival. The hospital would maintain a skeleton staff, if they could persuade anyone at all to stay on. The nurses would be made up like porcelain dolls with blood-red lipstick. They’d be parading themselves in front of the boys at the fair. Perhaps he’d go and help himself to one when it was all over.

The Security Section had withdrawn its guards, so Siri should be alone. No luck, no coincidences, could possibly keep him alive a third time.

On his old motorcycle heading down the hill from the Great Stupa, he seemed to be fighting against the current. There were no left and right lanes to the crowds on their way to the festival. They traveled on foot, on bicycles, pushing motorcycles, in one huge colorful herd. He put his scarf around his face and leaned on his horn all the way down to the arch. People laughed and called out names to the strange man who was going the wrong way.

The ride was slow until he reached Lan Xang Avenue, where the police had kept a lane free for Party members returning from the remembrance ceremony. Once he was away from the main roads, he saw no one. He parked his bike near the Department of Education and walked down to the concrete gate posts of Mahosot. There wasn’t even a guard on duty.