The Coroner's Lunch Read online

  Half his mind told him to walk away, go home, leave all the doors open, the lights on. Just get out of there and never come back. But the saner half, the scientist half, told him not to be ridiculous. He turned and walked back through the small vestibule and to the examination room.

  It was lighted by a flickering fluorescent tube. He stood beneath it in the center of the room and listened. He could make out the moths bouncing against the mosquito netting at the window, and the buzz of the light above. He could hear distant muffled conversations from the hospital and the crowing of a cock rehearsing. But that was all he heard.

  A cockroach scurried by his feet and across to the storeroom. There weren’t enough disinfectants on the planet to keep a hospital free of roaches in Southeast Asia. Dtui and Geung mopped and scrubbed four times a day and put down poison and sticky traps, but creatures who had survived the freezing of the earth and the meteor were smart enough to survive Siri’s morgue.

  He followed the creature into the storeroom and switched on the light. A dozen accomplices joined the roach in scurrying for gaps and shadows. Everything in the room was double wrapped or trapped in screwtop jam jars so the vermin had no hope of feasting on the samples that lined the shelves. But the aroma of death pervaded the place and to a cockroach, that was like the scent of jasmine on a warm evening.

  The shelves were set out in library rows with only enough space to pass between them sideways. He inserted himself between rows three and four and edged down to the specimen jars. Just above his head, Mrs. Nitnoy’s brain hung in a noose of cotton in its own small pond of formalin. The cotton prevented it from becoming misshapen against the bottom of the jar. By the next morning, it still wouldn’t be set hard enough to dissect. But perhaps in a few days the comrade’s wife would have something to tell them after all.

  When Mr. Geung arrived at the morgue on Tuesday morning, Dr. Siri was already at the workbench. The specimen jar was in front of him, empty, and he was about to slice into Mrs. Nitnoy’s brain.

  “Hel…hello, Dr. Comrade.”

  Siri looked up. “Good morning Mr. Geung.”

  Geung stood unsteady, staring. “You’re here.”

  “I know I am.” Siri understood the problem. Geung was always the first to arrive. He’d never walked in to find the doctor at work this early, and it threw him out of kilter. He needed order and consistency. Despite the illogic of it, Siri asked, as usual, “Any customers today, Mr. Geung?”

  Geung laughed and clapped. “No customers today, Doctor.” Reoriented, he put his rice basket on his desk and began the morning clean. Siri stooped back to his work.

  “Well! Did you lock yourself in the morgue last night?” Dtui was at the door smiling at him.

  “It isn’t unknown for me to be here early, nurse.”

  “No. It’s not unknown for snow to fall in Vietnam either. But it still makes the front page of the newspaper.” She noticed the freezer door open. “She out jogging?”

  Siri laughed. “If I’d known you were so funny in the morning, I’d have come early every day. Her husband took her home last night.”

  “How romantic.”

  Dtui also went to the office to deposit her lunch on her desk. She bumped into Geung in the doorway.

  “‘Good morning, handsome man,’” he prompted.

  “Good morning, handsome man,” she said.

  “Good morning, beautiful woman. Joke?”

  “What has two wheels and eats people?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “A lion on a bicycle.” Geung laughed so enthusiastically, she found herself joining in. Siri in the next room got caught up in the merriment. He felt a sort of fatherly pride that his staff got along so well together. This was obviously a morning ritual he never got to see. He doubted whether Geung got all Dtui’s jokes, but he knew he’d still be able to recite them verbatim six months later.

  He stared at the brain on the glass tray in front of him. He hadn’t given it sufficient time to set properly. It sprawled like a blancmange. But he didn’t want to wait; for his own peace of mind he had to know. He used his longest scalpel and cut carefully through the brain with one neat slash. He repeated this action several more times until the brain sat in slices like a soggy loaf of bread. He gently separated the sections and used a large magnifying glass to inspect each one.

  Dtui, with a surgical mask over her face against the dust, was sweeping in the storeroom.

  “Dtui, bring me the camera, will you?”

  She looked at him with her brow furrowed. “The camera?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Well….”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “There are only three exposures left on the film.”

  “That’s enough.”

  “Doctor, Sister Bounlan’s wedding party is tonight. I was….”

  “I sympathize with her. But this is more important. Believe me.”

  Once he’d saved and labeled the samples, Siri announced he’d be going out for a while. He collected a plastic bag full of liquid, and some vials, and left. He didn’t say where he was going.

  He walked out of the morgue and past his old crippled motorcycle. It had lain collecting dust and cobwebs in the cycle park for three months. He couldn’t afford the new carburetor it needed. He was about to check to see how much money he had on him for the taxi songtaew fare when he had an idea. He turned back to the morgue and surprised Dtui reading.

  “Dtui.”

  “Oh, my God. Don’t do that. You scared the life out of me.”

  “Then don’t do things you’d be scared to be caught doing. How did you get here today?”

  “Eh? Same as every day. On my bicycle.”

  “Good. I want to borrow it.”

  “What for?”

  “What for? What do people usually use bicycles for?”

  “You aren’t going to ride my bike.”

  “And why not?”

  “I’d never be able to forgive myself if you…well, you know.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Look, doctor. You aren’t a young man.”

  “Are you suggesting I’m too old to ride a bicycle?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “That over the age of seventy, the odds of having a heart attack rise forty percent every year.”

  “God, so I’m already at 120 percent. They aren’t good odds.”

  “Okay. Maybe I got the figures wrong. But I don’t want my bicycle to be the cause of your death.”

  “Dtui. Don’t be ridiculous. I swear I won’t have a heart attack. Just lend me the bike.”

  “No.”

  “Please.” His green eyes became moist. That always melted her.

  “All right. But on two conditions.”

  “I’m sure I’ll regret this, but what are they?”

  “One, that you ride slowly and stop if you feel tired.”

  “Certainly.”

  “And two, that you train me to be the new coroner.”

  “What?”

  “Doctor Siri. There you are begging the Health Department to send someone to train in Eastern Europe and not getting anywhere.”

  “No.”

  “Whereas here you have a young intelligent nurse, absorbent as blotting paper, enthusiastic as a puppy, resilient as a…a…brick, already in place, eager to be your apprentice.”

  “No.”

  “And then you could say you have this bright girl who already trained as a coroner and she’s ready to go to further her education in Bulgaria or some such place.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You aren’t the type.”

  “Because I’m a girl?”

  “Because you read comics and fan magazines.”

  “I need stimulation.”

  “I can’t believe you’re even asking. You’re a bubblehead. When did you suddenly develop an interest in pathology?”

  “I’ve always b
een interested. But you don’t give me a chance to do interesting things. You treat me like a secretary.”

  Geung walked in on them with a bucket in one hand and a mop in the other.

  “Are you h…having a fight?” He smiled.

  Siri grabbed the bike key from Dtui’s desk. “No. We aren’t having a fight. Nurse Dtui is just trying to extort three years of free education and a tour of Europe out of me in return for twenty minutes on her bicycle. That’s fair, don’t you think?”

  Dtui stormed out the door. “Take the damn bike.”

  Considerably more than twenty minutes later, Siri found himself in front of a small house overlooking the grand yellow stupa. He hadn’t ridden a bicycle for thirty years. He should have got off and rested half way up Route That Luang when the air went out of him and his legs began to wobble. But he wanted to show Dtui just how resilient the over seventies could be.

  “Hello, Uncle.” Teacher Oum stood by the open door and looked at the wheezing old doctor, wondering why he wasn’t speaking. She didn’t really know what to do to help him get his breath, so she did nothing. She was a scientist, not a nurse.

  Oum was a prettily oval teacher at Lycée Vientiane. She was particularly attractive to a man like Siri, who found her worth almost killing himself for, for two reasons. First, she was the last surviving teacher of practical chemistry in the country. Siri was desperate for chemicals, and she had them. If you have the key, the color resulting from the mix of body fluids and chemicals can answer a lot of questions.

  Oum had recently returned from Australia, where she’d obtained a degree in chemical engineering and lived with a sexually active Sydney boy named Gary. This left her with a knowledge of chemical compounds unequaled in Laos, a fluent grasp of the English language, and a one-year-old son with red hair.

  English was Siri’s second attraction to her. He had a handbook from Chiang Mai University that unlocked many of the color-test mysteries. If it had been in Thai or French or even Vietnamese, it would have been invaluable to him in his work. But it was, sadly, in English. The poor doctor could boast a vocabulary of some eleven words in the English language, and those he pronounced so horribly nobody knew what he was saying.

  So Siri needed Teacher Oum not only for her chemicals, but also to decipher the text that showed how to use them.

  “What’s in the bag?”

  Siri still had hold of a small plastic bag fastened at the top with rubber bands. His breath and his voice were returning.

  “Stomach contents.”

  “Mmm. Nice. Other people bring soy milk or ice coffee.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You had breakfast yet?”

  “No.”

  An hour later, they were at the school. On Tuesdays she didn’t teach till ten. By holding on to his arm while he sat on his bike, she’d been able to drag him alongside her motorcycle. He was a little stressed from trying to keep his wheels from crashing into her, or diving into a pothole.

  The science lab was poorly equipped. Oum’s office was a walk-in cupboard with shelves reaching to the ceiling, a tiny workbench, and two stools. The shelves were stacked with hundreds of neat bottles with handwritten labels that boasted they contained all kinds of sulphates and nitrates. Unfortunately, most of the boasts were as empty as the bottles. Generous American donations had long since dried up and the room contained mostly what was available locally. That wasn’t much. Oum had tried to keep a little of everything for old times’ sake, but Siri’s visits had seriously depleted her stocks.

  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 we
re 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.”