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 how to help him get his breath, so she did nothing. She was a scientist, not a nurse.
Oum was a prettily oval teacher at Lycee Vientiane. She was particularly attractive to a man like Siri, who found her almost worth 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 colour 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 unequalled 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 colour-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 onto 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 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 rumour and scandal crawling out of the rubbish, 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 colour 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.”
