Thirty-Three Teeth
Colin Cotterill
Copyright © 2005 by Colin Cotterill
Published by E-Reads. All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7592-9529-2
ISBN-10: 0-7592-9529-8
With love to my family for all their years of faith and support.
The neon hammer and sickle buzzed and flickered into life over the night club of the Lan Xang Hotel. The sun had plummeted mauvely into Thailand across the Mekhong River, and the hotel waitresses were lighting the little lamps that turned the simple sky-blue room into a mysterious nighttime cavern.
In an hour, a large Vietnamese delegation would be offered diversion there by members of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party Politburo. They’d be made to watch poor country boys in fur hats do a Lao falling-over version of cossack dancing. They’d be forced to suck semi-fermented rice whiskey from large tubs through long straws until they were dizzy. They’d finally be coerced into embarrassing dances with solid girls in ankle-length skirts and crusty makeup.
And, assuming they survived these delights, they’d be allowed to return to their rooms to sleep. Next day, with heads heavy as pressed rubber, they’d sign their names to documents laying the foundations for the forthcoming Lao/Vietnam Treaty of Friendship, and they probably wouldn’t remember very much about it.
But that was all to come. The understaffed hotel day shift had been replaced by an understaffed night crew. The sweating receptionist was ironing a shirt in the glass office behind her desk. The chambermaid was running a bowl of rice porridge up to a sick guest on the third floor.
Outside, an old guard, in a jacket so large it reached his knees, was locking the back gate that opened onto Sethathirat Road. At night, the gate kept out dogs and the occasional traveler tempted to come into the garden in search of respite from the cruel hot-season nights. An eight-foot wall protected the place as if it were something more special than it was.
Leaves floated in a greasy swimming pool. Obedient flowers stood in well-spaced regiments, better watered than any of the households outside along the street. And then there were the cages. They were solid concrete, so squat that a tall man would have to stoop to see inside. Two were empty. They housed only the spirits of animals temporarily imprisoned there: a monkey replaced by a deer, a peacock taking over the sentence of a wild dog.
But in the grim shadows of the third cage, something wheezed. It moved seldom, only to scratch lethargically at its dry skin. The unchristened black mountain bear was hosed down along with the bougainvilleas and given scraps from the kitchen from time to time. Its fur was patchy and dull, like a carpet in a well-trodden passage. Buddha only knew how the creature had survived for so long in its cramped jail, and the Lord had been banished from the socialist republic some fifteen months hence.
People came in the early evening and at weekends to stand in front of the cage and stare at her. She stared back, although her glazed bloodshot eyes could no longer make out details of the mocking faces. Children laughed and pointed. Brave fathers poked sticks in through the bars, but the black mountain bear no longer appeared to give a damn.
They naturally blamed the old guard the next day. “Too much rice whiskey,” they said. “Slack,” they said. The guard denied it, of course. He swore he’d relocked the cage door. He’d thrown the leftovers from the Vietnamese banquet into the animal’s bowl and locked the cage. He was sure of it. He swore the beast was still in there when he did his rounds at four. He swore he had no idea how it could have gotten out, or where it could have gone. But they sacked him anyway.
After a panicked search of the grounds and the hotel buildings, the manager declared to his staff that the place was safe and it was a problem now for the police. In fact, he didn’t think it would be wise to mention the escape to his guests at all. As far as he was concerned, the problem was over.
But for Vientiane, it had barely started.
The sun baked everything in the new suburb. Comrade Civilai stepped from the hot black limousine and, without locking the doors, walked up to the concrete mausoleum where they’d put Dr. Siri. The gate and the front door were open, and he could see clear through to the small yard at the back. There was no furniture to interrupt the view.
He kicked off his Sunday sandals and walked into the front room. It was as if the builders and decorators had just left. The walls were still virgin Wattay light-blue, to match the swimming-pool-colored Wattay airport. They were unencumbered by pictures or posters or photographs of heroes of the revolution. No French plaster ducks flew in formation. No clock ticked. If he didn’t know Siri had lived here for a month, he would have guessed this to be a vacant house.
On his way to the back, he passed a small room where piles of clothes told him he was nearing a primitive life form. In the back yard, he discovered it. Dr. Siri Paiboun, reluctant national coroner, confused psychic, disheartened communist, swung gently on a hammock strung between two jackfruit saplings. A larger man would have brought them both down.
In his shadow, Saloop, rescued street dog and lifesaver, drooled onto the hot earth. He looked up with one eye, decided Civilai was too old and bald to be a threat, and returned to his dream.
A month earlier, the yard had been dirt and debris. Today it was a jungle. Siri had gone to great pains to recreate the environment in which he’d spent the latter forty of his seventy-two years. For the past four weekends, he and his trusted morgue colleagues had set off into the outer suburbs and denuded them unashamedly. They’d transported a variety of trees and shrubs back to this humble bunker—the Party’s thanks for his services.
“I do hope I’m not disturbing you,” Civilai said, knowing full well how disturbing he was being. Siri’s eerie green eyes opened slowly to see his best friend leaning over him.
“Ah, boy. Just put the iced lime juice on the table there and get back to the servants’ quarters post-haste.”
Civilai was two days older than the doctor. Both born in the year of the rabbit, they showed its characteristic industry and guile. Yet neither had exhibited its lustiness: they’d married their first loves and been totally faithful. They were of a rare breed of rabbit in Laos.
“So, this is how the bourgeois medical profession spends its Sundays. Shouldn’t you be out digging ditches for the republic?” He sat back on the wooden cot on the small veranda.
“I’m a frail old man, brother. A day of physical labor could very well put me on the slab. I doubt I have a month left to live as it is. That’s why your politburo buddies should be searching high and low for a coroner to replace me now.”
There was nothing frail about Dr. Siri. He was so far from the black archers of death, he wouldn’t be hearing their arrows thumping into the dry earth for many years to come. His short, solid body still scurried hither and thither like a curious river rat. Younger men were hard-pressed to keep his pace.
His mind, resplendent with its newly honed skills, had become even keener of late. He’d always been a logical man; but in the last five months, he’d acquired the type of knowledge that isn’t given out in universities. For reasons he was still trying to fathom, he’d been delegated Laos’s honorary consul to the spirit world.
This new posting proved ideally suited to his job as the head and only coroner of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. He still hadn’t been able to control the visits from his spirit clients or find a way to ask specific questions of them, but they came to him regularly with clues. What he lacked in experience (he’d only been a coroner for a year), he could often make up for by communing with the dead. His three-dimensional mind had acquired a fourth dimension.
“You know we could never replace you, Little Brother. You’re a legend,” Civilai replied.
“A legend?” Siri slid up the hammock to a sitting position. “Isn’t a legend something that’s long-winded and not widely believed?”
“You’ve got it.”
“Hot, isn’t it?”
“Damned hot.”
This was the hot-season anthem that could be heard ad infinitum around the capital. It had been a particularly hot year so far, so it got even more repetition than usual.
For the first time, Siri noticed the cloth bag that Civilai held on his lap. “You bring me something?”
“Nothing you’d be interested in.”
“Let me be the judge of that.”
“The Soviets have been courting us. They want permission to build a satellite dish to spy on the Yanks. While we think about it, they pepper us with these little incentives.” He teased the cap of a bottle from his bag.
“Vodka?”
“Moskovskaya; best you can get. But I don’t suppose you’re thirsty.”
Siri was off the hammock and rattling around in the kitchen for a second glass before the word thirsty had left Civilai’s lips.
The late morning had become late afternoon.
“I don’t know how the Russians can strink-this-duff.” Civilai’s slurring turned the comment into one long word.
“Me, too. No wonder the women are hairier than the women.”
“Men.”
“Where?”
So had the conversation deteriorated. There were two modest glassfuls left in the bottom of the bottle. The friends sat side by side on the long, uncomfortable wooden cot. The garden wasn’t moving at all, but they swayed like survivors in a lifeboat. Civilai looked up at a rolled mosquito net tied above their heads.
“You sleep out here, Li’l Brother?”
Siri shook his head from side to side. “Yes.”
“What’s the point of having a house?”
“That’s it. That’s the very something I asked Judge Haeng. But he wouldn’t let me have the garden without it. He said—Siri put on the whiny high-pitched accent of his young superior—‘We are senior members of the party, Comrade Siri. As such, we have to lead by example. Sleeping in trees should remain the exclusive domain of the primates.’ I was surprised he knew what a primate was.”
“What have you got against houses?”
“Houses I have not a nothing against. But this isn’t a house. A house is an airy wooden thing on slits that—”
“Stilts.”
“I said that. On slits, that creaks when you walk around. It sways in heavy winds and leaks in the rainy season. This? This is a sarcahoph…a…a saroph…sarpho…sarcophagus.”
“Well said.”
“What is this regime’s fixation on concrete?”
“Sustainability. This house will still be here in a thousand years, after ten generations of your wooden houses have fallen down. Remember the three little pigs.”
“That’s it. It’s a sty.”
“It’s not.”
“Then it’s a tomb. I feel entombed. It’s so morbid in there.”
“How can you, of all people, complain about morbidity?”
“I’m a coroner. Not a corpse.”
Civilai laughed and leaned back against the wall. “How are your ghostly friends, by the way?”
Siri looked at him to see whether he was about to make fun of his spiritual connections—as he always did.
“There hasn’t been a lot of activity since the floating Vietnamese last November. But then again, we haven’t had too many mysteries lately.”
“They only come out in times of confusion?”
“No. They’re around all the time. They all make an appearance, but they don’t ne-cessessarily do anything. I get an old lady sitting opposite me in the office late—he hiccuped—excuse me, at night. She just sits there. I keep waiting for her to do something, flash me a tit or some such, but she just sits, chewing betel, staring at me.”
“You know, Siri, sometimes you scare the daylights out of me.” Civilai leaned over and poured the remains of the Soviet bribe into their chipped glasses. “We should finish this up before it eats through the bottom of the bottle.”
“A toast to the illustrious Union of Sovalist Republicists.”
“I don’t think you need any more.”
They quaffed the dregs and Siri got unsteadily to his feet.
“Thank God that’s over. Now we can have some deluscious coffee.”
The late afternoon was becoming evening.
The shadows from the instant jungle had fallen across the two pickled patriots and were climbing the concrete wall behind them. The chewy coffee was shocking them out of their Sunday stupors. Civilai made one last attempt to encourage his friend to feel at home.
“I think this place is quite charming.”
“Then I’ll move in with your wife and you can live here.”
“Let me think about that.”
“It was supposed to be a reward, but it’s more like punishment, Older Brother. I’ve got busybody Miss Vong on one side of me and some corrupt local official from Oudom Xay on the other.”
“Surely you could shout that a little bit louder.”
Siri ignored him. “I’ve got a goddamned loudspeaker blaring out diatribes against the non-communist world right there at the corner of the street from five A. goddamned M. I couldn’t be any more unhappy.”
“All you need here is a good woman to turn it into a home. I don’t suppose you’ve—”
“Don’t.”
“I was only wondering if you’d—”
“Don’t.”
“—contacted her. That’s all.”
“No. And I won’t. Don’t ask again.”
“Seems silly to me.”
Siri sulked for a moment or two. There had only been one woman, one date, since Boua had died. It was a disaster of a date. Siri knew Lah was a woman he could love. The feeling was returned. Auntie Lah had custom-made baguettes for him at her cart opposite Mahosot Hospital from the first week he arrived there. They joked, they flirted, and she made no secret of the fact she liked him.
Once Boua, his only love, his long-departed wife, had given her postmortem permission, he went at that new romance like a teenager. On the night of the fateful date when he first saw Lah waiting there, glamorous and preening like a Likay queen, the butterflies in his belly had almost lifted him from the seat of his motorbike.
She ran over on her unfamiliar heels and sniffed the air at his cheek. He felt the brush of her lips, and parts of him that had been in hibernation for many years began to stir. It was all marvelously portentous. He was at the precipice overlooking what he knew could be a wonderful final cycle to his life.
He was about to leap when she handed him the gift. It was beautifully wrapped and expensively heavy. She said it was something she’d found at the morning market. She said it was as if it had spoken to her. She believed it could stymie his run of bad luck. He opened the box, and all his hope caved in like some badly built temple stupa.
In the cardboard coffin lay a black amulet eroded by decades of hopeful fingers. It was attached to a fraying leather thong. Siri knew it well.
Lah smiled, expecting a smile in return from her dashing beau. But, instead, the expression on his face frightened her. His unkempt white eyebrows gathered at the center of a furrowed brow. He shook his head slowly and asked “How could you do this?”
“Wha—?”
Siri had sped off on his motorcycle clutching the amulet in his left hand, without saying another word. She watched him go with her cherry-red bottom lip hanging open. Of course she had no idea what she’d done. She thought she was showing him a kindness. She thought she was giving him a token of her affection. But it had turned out to be doom. She never saw him again and never understood why.
Siri had ridden to the Mekhong at its deepest point and hurled the amulet far out into the murky brown water. There were no coincidences any more in his life. That, he knew. Everything was inked on some sacred parchment. Malevolent spirits were in pursuit of him. The previous year at an exorcism in Khamuan, he’d been given this very amulet, an antique black stone, to ward off the evil spirits of the forest; the
Phibob
. But it had turned out to be a trick. The stone was actually a spiritual lintel that opened a gateway from their world to his. He’d been lucky to survive their attack. Now they wanted revenge on him. Lah had been selected to deliver this omen, and she was in danger as a result. It was clear that she could never be a part of his life. No matter how strongly he felt attracted to her, it was impossible.
Of course, Civilai said that was all a pile of buffalo dung. He said when the chance of a little over-seventy nooky presented itself, one shouldn’t read too much into coincidence. “At our age, my little brother, these opportunities don’t come along every day.”
“It wasn’t a coincidence. I sent those spirits packing, and in so doing I saved the soldiers that were cutting down their trees. They weren’t happy about that. But I tell you, that stone had been destroyed.”
“Did you see that happen with your own eyes?”
“Yes. Well, not with my own eyes. But I saw the dust before the Hmong took it out to the forest.”
“Then you can’t be sure it came from the stone. Mystery one solved.”
“So how did it get here, to Vientiane? How did it get to the market? And of all the people who could have bought it, why Lah?”
“I’m an elder statesman with a not-inconsequential intellect. I can solve many of the conundrums that arise from the day-to-day running of a little country in the southeast of Asia. But I have a one-mystery-a-day quota,” Civilai said. “Release me now. I have to get home to my dear wife. Remind me where my car is.”
“You think you should drive?”
“Certainly. What is there to hit?”
Siri nodded and escorted him to the door. Civilai was right. On a Sunday afternoon in March, Vientiane had the atmosphere of a town in the talons of a deadly plague. A motorcyclist might brave the late-afternoon heat. A dog might lie on the concrete paving stones to burn off the fleas. But most folks were at home, waiting for the sun to go down.
At dusk, the girls would two-up on bicycles and ride slowly along Fangoum Road, catching some small breeze from the river and advertising their availability to boys two-upping in the opposite direction. They would still be mopping their sweating brows with their mothers’ large pink handkerchiefs until long after nightfall.
Farewell the Diarrhetic
Old Auntie See lived in a shed behind a peeling white French colonial mansion that now housed five families. For a living, she bought fruit at the morning market, cut it into colorful slices, and sold it from a card table beside her back gate.