Dr Siri Paiboun 01; The Coroner’s Lunch

“Why didn’t you have time to stop when you saw the longboat man?”

Bounheng immediately broke eye contact and set off again on his escape across the fields. “Like I said, he shouldn’t have been there.”

“But you’d have had a pilot, watching. Right?”

Bounheng was obviously used to having a wristwatch that had somehow taken leave of him. He looked at the back of his wrist and swore loudly when he noticed it was missing. “I’ve got to get back. Like you say, you’ve got enough for your report.”

“Of course, I’m sorry to keep you so long. Thanks for your co-operation.”

On the walk back, Bounheng slowed down a little and regained some of his composure. That was until he noticed Siri was no longer beside him. He turned back to see the doctor standing stock-still in the middle of the dead paddy, looking down at the unwatered stubble.

“What is it, Doctor?” He went back to see what Siri was looking at. But the doctor wasn’t actually looking at anything. He was putting together a hypothesis. When he started to chuckle, the captain felt uneasy. “Doctor?”

Siri gazed up at him, and then looked him directly in the eye.

“All right, son. Here’s my theory. It may just be the foolish imagination of an old man, but hear me out. It seems to me, there’s a lot of smuggling goes on across the river. Most of the cigarettes and liquor we get in Laos come from Thailand.”

“What are you…?”

“Just listen up.” Siri noticed how the remaining friendly colour had bleached from Bounheng’s face. He stood with his hands on his waist. “I believe you boat captains are…tempted to turn a blind eye from time to time. Maybe even change your schedule.”

“Are you suggesting…?”

“I’m suggesting for every two hundred crates of whisky you don’t see cross over…” Bounheng turned his back on Siri “…one crate may very well find its way aboard the river patrol boat as a sort of thank-you. I’m suggesting that on the evening the longboat man lost his legs and his life, the crew of your boat and its skipper were drunk as skunks. I’m suggesting you were all so drunk, you had not a brass kip of control over your vessel; over the boat you’d only learned to operate a week earlier.”

He saw a slight shudder pass across Bounheng’s young shoulders and walked closer to him. “I’m suggesting the longboat man wasn’t in the wrong place, but that you were. And by the time you realised it, you were so close to the wall of the bank that you had no time to pull up. I’m suggesting Mekhong Whisky killed the old fisherman.”

He turned to see Bounheng’s face. Tears were rolling down his cheeks and his mouth was contorted with pain. Siri stood there, silent and overwhelmed at his own revelations. The adrenaline had sunk to his stomach, and it fluttered there like moths trapped in a jar. It was some minutes before the young man was able to speak. He couldn’t look at Siri. “Which…which one of them told you?”

“Them?”

“The crew.”

“No, son. I haven’t talked to your crew, or to any witnesses.”

Bounheng faced him, his eyes red with tears.

“It was the longboat man himself that told me.”

The captain dropped his head and sobbed as if the weight of the river were crushing his chest. Siri, too embarrassed to merely stand back and witness the man’s suffering, stepped up and put his arms around him. He felt Bounheng’s body throb with grief, and could understand how much the boy had already suffered for his foolishness. There was nothing to be said.

By some miracle of timing and history, he’d avoided man’s justice. But for many years to come, he’d suffer the justice of remorse, the nightmares of guilt. A soldier may kill a thousand of the enemy in battle and not feel a thing. But the death of one innocent man lodges itself in the conscience forever.

When he could stand it no longer, Siri pulled himself away and searched for a pen and paper in his shoulder bag. On the back of an old envelope, he wrote down some information he remembered from his autopsy report. He forced the paper into Bounheng’s hand.

“Boy. This is the name of the fisherman, and his home village. I believe they have a small altar there. It might help you to go there and talk to him.”

Siri walked slowly back across the fields towards the road. Step by step, the significance of what had just happened pulled him down below the surface of common sense. His old heart started beating like a giant catfish caught in a net. Somehow he’d known. Somehow, the longboat man’s visit had told him. But where was the logic in that? What was the scientific explanation?

He felt no gloating, no pride in what he’d just been able to achieve. He was walking a narrow path between fear and excitement, between power and powerlessness, between sanity and…He didn’t want to think about what was happening to him.

Two, then three songtaews passed him on their way back into town. They beeped their hoarse horns begging him to climb in, but he let them go. He sat under a jackfruit tree and went over the meeting in his mind. He went over it, and over it, and over it. But if he’d hoped for an explanation to come to him, he was going to be disappointed.

¦

“Oh. Good to see you. We assumed you’d died of old age.”

Mr Geung laughed at, and repeated, Dtui’s irreverent comment. “We, ah…ah…ah…assumed you died of old age.”

It was after three, and Siri had been missing for over five hours. The army sergeant had asked them where he was. The Nam Ngum Dam security chief had asked them where he was, and Judge Haeng, on the telephone, had asked them where he was. But no one could answer. The staff consensus was that he was now in serious shit.

But, here Dr Siri was, smiling, in the office doorway. There was a cheeky, somewhat youthful expression on his face. He strode in and went to his desk as if everything were normal.

Everything certainly was not.

“Any new customers, Mr Geung?”

Geung searched for stock answer number two. “We have a guest in room number one.”

It wasn’t the answer Siri was hoping for. He wanted peace. He wanted to go home. He had enough on his mind already without another body in the freezer.

Dtui waltzed over to his desk with a bigger grin than usual on her pimply face. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how upset Judge Haeng was to find you out of your office during working hours. As your loyal assistant and official trainee, I was planning to lie and tell him you’d just stepped out for a minute. But he already had a couple of witnesses in his office saying you’d been gone most of the day.”

Siri didn’t seem to care. He continued to smile. “What did he want?”

“He’d love it if you could phone him back before nightfall, because he has several questions to ask you about our new guest.”

“Don’t tell me it’s another celebrity.”

“Nobody knows who he is. But he’s certainly got a lot of people interested in him. They all want to know what he died of.”

“Mr Geung.” Siri looked over, and Geung stopped rocking. “You saw the body?”

“Yes, Dr Comrade.”

“What’d he die of?”

“Drowned.”

“Excellent. There you have it, Dtui. If Judge Hinge-face calls back, that’s the initial diagnosis. Tell him I’ll be in touch in the morning.”

He started to claw through the papers on his desk as if he were missing something important. Dtui and Geung looked at each other, mystified.

“Have you two moved anything from here in the last couple of days?”

Geung shook his head violently. Dtui looked indignant.