The Coroner's Lunch (7 page)

Together, they’d submitted proposals through the Foreign Aid Department, but they knew they were low on the list. There were shortages of everything. So one Sunday they’d sat down and painstakingly copied letters in Russian and German, which they sent off directly to schools and universities in the Soviet bloc. They’d had no response thus far.

Siri produced the dog-eared Chemical Toxicology lab manual from his cloth shoulder bag. It was a stapled brown roneo copy he’d brought back from Chiang Mai. It was only printed on one side, and his detailed notes from Teacher Oum’s translations filled the blank backs.

“What are we looking for today, uncle?”

“Let’s start with cyanide.”

“Ooh. Poison.” She turned to the cyanide page and looked down the various tests. “We haven’t done poison before. You don’t sound like you’re sure.”

“You know me, Oum. I’ve never been that sure of anything. This is another guess. But there are a couple of clues.”

“Tell me.” She was pulling down jars from the shelves and checking to see how much she had left of the various chemicals she needed.

“Well, first of all, she, the victim, died suddenly without displaying any outward signs of distress. Secondly, her insides were particularly bright red. What are you sniffing that for? They don’t spoil, do they?”

“No, I get a little buzz. Want some?”

“No, thanks. Thirdly, my Mr. Geung noticed something strange while we were cutting. He said he smelled nuts.”

“Nuts?”

“He couldn’t really identify what type of nuts, but my guess is almonds. There aren’t that many nuts with distinctive smells.”

“Well, surely you and the nurse would have smelled it.”

“Not necessarily. A lot of people aren’t able to distinguish that particular smell. Some of Mr. Geung’s senses are quite well developed. I’m wondering if someone slipped her a pill somehow. The most common one available is cyanide. If I still had the body, there are other signs I could be looking for.”

“You lost the body?”

“It was reclaimed by the family.”

Oum looked up at him. “That’s a coincidence.”

“What is?”

“I hear Comrade Kham’s wife passed away suddenly yesterday and he went by the morgue and kidnapped the body.”

“Really? Where did you hear a thing like that?”

“This is Vientiane, not Paris.”

She was right, of course. In Laos, the six-degrees-of-separation rule could easily be downgraded to three, often to two. The population of Laos had dwindled to under three million, and Vientiane didn’t contain more than 150,000 of them. The odds of knowing, or knowing of, someone else were pretty good.

“That’s true. In Paris you don’t have rumor and scandal crawling out of the trash, or up from the drains. If Vientiane folk don’t hear anything scandalous for two days, they just make it up to keep the momentum going.”

“So, you’re telling me the stomach contents you brought to me for breakfast have nothing to do with—”

“Oum, my love. I promise if you don’t ask me that question, I won’t lie to you.”

“Then I won’t ask. Let’s get on with it. There are three color tests for cyanide in the magic book. I’ve got the chemicals to do two of them.”

Siri pulled two plastic film containers from his bag.

“I have her urine and blood here too, so we’ll need to do three samples for each test.”

“Yes, sir. You don’t have any other bits of the comrade’s wife in that bag, do you?”

He looked at her with his angriest and least convincing expression.

“Oum. If I’m right about her, the fewer people who know about it the better. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah. I do. Really. Don’t worry.”

It was lunchtime when Siri returned to the morgue. Auntie Lah had already sold out of baguettes and gone home, but Mr. Geung had kindly picked up the coroner’s lunch and left it on his desk. The office was deserted, so Siri went down to the log and sat alone, eating and thinking. He was surprised to hear Geung’s voice very close behind him.

“Dtui. She…she went home.” Siri turned. His lab assistant was leaning over him like a schoolteacher with his finger pointed at Siri’s nose.

“Oh, hello, Mr. Geung. Thanks for getting my—”

“You were very bad.”

“What?”

“You were very very very bad.”

“What did I do?” He felt curiously nervous.

“She isn’t…isn’t…isn’t a bubblehead. She’s a nice girl.”

“I—”

“It was very bad to say th…th…those things to her.”

Siri thought back to what he’d said. It hadn’t occurred to him anything he said could offend her. He didn’t think she was offendable. “Did you say she’d gone home?”

“Yes.”

“But she never goes home for lunch. And I had her bicycle.”

“She’s gone home because she’s sad. You made her sad.”

“I—”

But Geung was finished. He turned and walked back to the hospital.

“Mr. Geung?”

He didn’t look back.

Siri had never been to Dtui’s place. It was tucked behind the national stadium in a row of shanties that housed people who’d come down from the north to help rebuild the country. The huts were supposed to be temporary, but no one had yet been rehoused after almost a year. The senior cadres had priority for the new housing that was being built out in the suburbs. The little cogs would have to wait.

As he had no numbers or names to go by, it took him a while to find Dtui’s shed. It was latticed banana leaf with gaps at the corners and between the sheets. Lao workmen had a knack for making the temporary look temporary. There was a shared bathroom at one end of the row.

On the floor in the center of the hut’s only room, there were two unrolled mattresses with a large woman on each. Dtui was one of them. She was reading a Thai magazine.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

Dtui and her mother looked up in surprise to see the doctor at the door, but it was only Dtui who sprang to her feet. She appeared to be devastated that Siri was seeing the conditions she lived in. She didn’t say anything at first, perhaps waiting for her boss to complain about her absence from work. But he didn’t speak.

“Ma, this is Doctor Siri.”

The old lady was lethargic and slow to focus on him. She obviously couldn’t move from where she lay. “Good health, Doctor. Sorry I can’t get up.”

“Ma’s got cirrhosis. I told you about it.”

“Yes. Good health, Mrs. Vongheuan.” It seemed peculiar to be wishing good health to a woman who was clearly not healthy at all. But such was the national greeting. The woman had been ill for years from a liver fluke she had picked up in the north.

Dtui took hold of the doctor’s arm and led him outside. Knickerless toddlers ran amok and rolled in the dust. A dog growled instinctively when Siri passed it. Dtui led him up toward the stadium wall where there were no neighbors to overhear. Siri had an apology prepared, but she beat him to it.

“I’m sorry, Doc. I was up all night with Ma. I didn’t mean to lose it. I was….”

“I just came by to ask you if you’d do me the honor of being my apprentice at the morgue.”

“Ah, no. You’re just saying that because I went nutty. You don’t have to do—”

“I’m serious. I was thinking about it just before I rode your bicycle into the wall of the Presidential Palace.”

“You…?”

“I think you need to get those brakes looked at.”

“I never go fast enough to need brakes. Did you really…?”

“It’s downhill all the way from That Luang, and it didn’t occur to me to check the brakes before I set off. I shot through the center of the Anusawari Arch, and I was traveling at about 120 kilometers an hour by the time I passed the post office. It was a bit of a blur.”

“Doctor.”

“I confess I didn’t actually crash into the palace. But that was only thanks to the poor man selling brooms and brushes beside the road. I decided he’d be much softer than the wall. We both came out of it quite well: I didn’t break anything, and he sold three brooms to the morgue.”

“And the bike?”

“The Chinese aren’t very good at making shoes, but they put together bicycles you couldn’t destroy with mortar fire. So will you?”

“Will I what?”

“Be my apprentice.”

“You’re damn right I will.”

“Good. Before I leave, I may as well take a look at your mother.”

“You fancy her?”

“The cirrhosis, girl. The cirrhosis.”

On Wednesday, Siri was the first one at work again. As if Geung weren’t confused enough already, he walked out back to the furnace to find his boss on his hands and knees in the concrete trough, putting dead cockroaches into a jar.

“Morning, Mr. Geung. Any new customers today?”

“No new customers today, Dr. Comrade.” Geung laughed but stood watching Siri. “That…that’s dirty. You shouldn’t play there.”

“Mr. Geung, you’re quite right. This is where you put the bags before they get thrown in the furnace, right?”

“Yes.”

“The janitor doesn’t seem to be around. Do you know if he burned our waste yesterday?”

“He must. He must. It’s the rules. He must destroy all hospital waste no more than twelve hours from when it arrives. He must.”

“Twelve hours. So what we threw out on Monday evening would have been sitting here overnight?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Please put our little friends here in the refrigerator while I go and get cleaned up.”

“Ha. Little friends.” Geung laughed and ran off inside with the jar.

Siri showered, changed, and again left at about ten without telling them where he was going.

He crossed the road in front of the hospital and picked up his lunch from Auntie Lah. Following Dtui’s comments on Monday, he took the trouble to notice a blush in the lady’s cheeks. For a second, he believed there may have been some truth in it. They exchanged polite conversation for a few minutes, and then he said “Good health” and walked on.

“The hospital’s that way, brother Siri,” she reminded him.

“I’m playing hooky. Don’t tell the director.”

“You should play hooky with me sometime.”

He laughed.

She laughed.

There
was
something.

He walked along the river and turned onto one of the small dirt lanes. The Lao Women’s Union was housed in a two-storey building whose frontage was overgrown with flowering shrubs. They’d been tended to look natural but were kept under total control. The Union sign had been freshly repainted. A slight dribble of white descended from one letter.

He walked into a bustling foyer where everyone seemed to have urgent business, and he wasn’t part of it. He had to throw himself in front of one fast-moving girl to ask his question.

“Do you know where I can find Dr. Pornsawan?”

She was flustered. “Oh, she’s around somewhere. Do you have an appointment?”

“No. Do I need one?”

“You should have phoned. It’s chaotic here today. The wife of the president of Mongolia’s coming.”

Siri felt like he’d come to a strange foreign land. So much speed. So much activity. Appointments. Telephones. He didn’t feel like he was in Laos at all. His wasn’t an appointment culture: you’d turn up; you’d see if the person was there; you’d sit and wait for an hour if he was, go home if he wasn’t.

Who were they, these women of the Union with their alien ideas? And why was there so much excitement about the wife of the president of Mongolia?

After flustering two more busy women, he finally found Dr. Pornsawan in the canteen putting up decorations hand-made from plastic drinking straws. There was a huge banner behind the stage that said WELCOME TO OUR FRIENDS FROM MONGOLIA in Lao and French, two languages the president’s wife probably couldn’t read.

Pornsawan was less flustered and more accommodating than her sisters. She’d heard of the famous Dr. Siri and had some unaccountable professional respect for him. But she still forced him to tie cotton threads to blue and red drinking straws while they spoke. She was a slender lady in her thirties, and she had no eyebrows. She’d briefly entered a nunnery where they had been shaved off and hadn’t ever grown back. She was so devoid of vanity, she didn’t bother to have new ones tattooed or even to draw them on. It left her with a very clean look.

“You’re here about Mrs. Nitnoy.”

“Yes. You were at the table with her when she died?”

“Directly opposite.”

“And she ate from communal plates?”

“Ah. Now, this is intriguing.”

“What is?”

“You’ve done the autopsy and you still think she was poisoned.”

Siri’s cheeks become a little more flushed than normal. “I don’t have any idea.”

“Of course not. Sorry.” She smiled at the straws in her hand. “She ate the same food as all of us, and we’d already started when she got here. She took a few mouthfuls of sticky rice, dipped in chili and fish sauce. At about the second or third mouthful, before she could swallow it, her eyes seemed to cloud over. She spat out the rice, dribbled slightly, and collapsed onto the table.

“I tried to resuscitate her, but I believe she died very suddenly. She didn’t choke, didn’t turn blue. She just died. I tried to massage her heart, gave her mouth-to-mouth, but I didn’t feel there was much hope.”

“Do you know anything about gnathostomiasis?”

“Yes. I’ve lost enough patients over the years to parasites. But that’s not what killed Mrs. Nitnoy.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a very painful death. It comes upon you suddenly, but the last few minutes are agony. Mrs. Nitnoy was perfectly normal until a few seconds before she died.”

“You’re quite right. You seem to have noticed a lot of detail.”

“I was talking to her all the time.”

“Do you know if she had a headache?”

“Why, yes. It’s strange you should ask. That’s what we were talking about. She had a horrible hangover. Mrs. Nitnoy liked her beer, and there had been a reception the night before. She’d had a little bit too much and woke up with a splitting headache. If it hadn’t been for the preparations for today’s visit, she’d probably have taken the day off.”

“Did she take anything for it?”