Dr Siri Paiboun 01; The Coroner’s Lunch

Suab’s doing a roaring trade in amulets for the army. She can’t make them fast enough.”

Siri stopped eating. “Auntie Suab? Is she all right?”

“She’s fine. She knows nothing about that night. The host can feel nothing. Once you exposed her, she was unconscious and the Phibob took over.”

“But I was…wasn’t I choking her to death?”

“No. You were attacking the Phibob. They weren’t your hands and it wasn’t Suab’s throat.”

“Thank goodness for that. Feed me, my sweetness.”

The girl blushed and spooned more soup into his mouth.

Once he had shaken the sleep from his body, and the food had re-stoked his energy, Siri felt better than he had for many years. Perhaps he felt better than he ever had. Something was stirring inside him that made him think of youth, of his romance with Boua. It was a marvellous feeling.

An hour after waking, he was walking around Meyu Bo receiving small gifts and congratulations and saying his good-byes. At Suab’s hut he apologised again, but it was certain she neither remembered nor felt a thing. She had no idea what he was talking about when he mentioned the trick she’d played. She handed him a small leather pouch, which he accepted cautiously.

“This isn’t a black prism?”

“No, Yeh Ming. That was destroyed. Smashed to a thousand pieces and scattered over the forestry site. Take a look.” He pulled the drawstring and found a white talisman inside, smaller than the prism but every bit as ancient. It hung on a string of plaited white hair. “This is the converse of the black prism. Where there’s evil, you’ll see it. No spirit can blind you, if you have this.

“I hope the Phibob is finished with you, but it’s a wicked spirit, an amalgam of many malevolent souls. The exorcism probably showed it who’s boss, but I want you to be prepared for revenge. If it chooses to follow up on the curse, you’ll need this. Promise me you’ll carry it with you always.”

A feeling of deja vu came over him, although it seemed unreasonable. Auntie Suab wasn’t Phibob. She was offering him her help. It was just that, if she had no recollection of the possession, how did she know about the curse? He dismissed the thought.

He thanked her for the amulet but had no intention of carrying it with him. He wished her well with her amulet sales, and hoped they would bring in enough revenue for the village to reverse its slide into poverty. There were an awful lot of soldiers, and superstition spread faster than a forest fire.

¦

Later that afternoon, Kumsing escorted Siri to the airstrip. The captain did indeed seem to be a new man. His nervous tic was gone, and he was wearing his uniform with resolute defiance. His own amulet peeked out from between the straining buttons.

They watched the Yak approach from the horizon, like a bee full of pollen. Siri and Kumsing walked towards it with their arms around each other’s shoulders like survivors of a great ordeal.

“You don’t have to hurry back. You could stay and rest up for a day or two,” Kumsing said.

“I think three days of sleep’s enough rest. And who knows when our charming Soviet friends will be back this way again? I have to take the opportunity while it’s here.”

“Siri, about the reports…”

Siri laughed. “If your bosses are anything like mine, I think the last week will have been very mundane. I took a couple of days to do the autopsies. Then I came down with a mild bout of…”

“Malaria.”

“Malaria, that’ll do, and I had to rest up until it passed. I don’t recall anything about any Hmong, do you?”

“Not a thing.” They shook hands. “Siri, how do you feel?”

“About what?”

“This whole bloody circus. I know I can never be normal again after all that’s happened, and I was just an observer. You must be – I don’t know – confused?”

“How could I not be? I’m a man of science and I have not one sensible explanation for what I went through. And yet it happened. You saw it. I felt it. How can I ever go back to being Dr Siri, the downtrodden, after that?”

“I admire you.”

“Because?”

“Just think how interesting the world will be from now on.”

“I’m seventy-two, boy. I was planning on gradually losing interest in the world, not acquiring it. What I’m hoping is that this will all go away once I leave Khamuan. Frankly, the thought of taking Yeh Ming back to Vientiane frightens the life out of me.”

Their conversation was drowned by the sound of the aeroplane bouncing along the strip with its motors roaring. Once it was almost stopped, the Yak opened its door, coughed out one passenger, and sucked in Siri and two forestry specialists. It pivoted, accelerated, and was airborne again all in the space of ten minutes.

Through one small porthole, Siri could see the captain walking back to the truck. A crow with a brown crest, unmoved by the noisy aircraft, sat on a log not five metres from it. The driver ran at the bird, expecting it to fly off, but it sat defiantly and the driver gave up. When the truck drove off, the crow followed.

¦

The shirt-sleeved forester was very helpful in pointing out the project site to Sin as they passed over it. The doctor was overwhelmed by its scope. Vast tracts of prime jungle had been shaven bald. The devastation extended in each direction as far as his eye could see. He pressed his nose up to the scratched glass and shook his head slowly.

“Shit.” He noticed how his hand had involuntarily reached into his pocket and was holding the leather pouch. He mumbled an apology to the Phibob and the other displaced souls. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realise.”

“What was that?” The forester leaned over to hear him better.

“Nothing, just a little prayer.”

“Afraid of flying, are you?”

“Afraid of going back down to the ground, more like. Listen, comrade. You wouldn’t happen to know exactly where this timber goes to in Taiwan, would you?”

? The Coroner’s Lunch ?

12

A Fear of Landing

Siri’s fear of landing was justified in this case. The Yak didn’t have any problems outside of its bad manners. But as soon as it set him down at Wattay, all the suspicion and apprehension he’d left behind awaited him. The invincible Khamuan warrior had apparently missed the flight.

He nervously eyed the visitor’s balcony at the old terminal. Every one of the onlookers could have been holding a gun. The officer who checked his travel papers seemed to stare at him longer than he needed to. When the samlor driver mistakenly took a wrong turn on the way home, Siri interrogated him till he was almost in tears. He got off a block from his house and walked the rest of the way, being careful to pause at the corner of the lane and scan the houses opposite his own.

By the time he reached his front path, all his instincts were honed. He was prepared for every eventuality – that is, apart from the eventuality that actually eventuated. To his utter amazement, Saloop looked up at him from the front step, smiled, and waddled towards him. The dog’s tail was flapping away like the national flag in a monsoon. It nuzzled up to his legs and craned its neck as if expecting affection in return.

The pink sky signalled the end of the day, and Miss Vong walked over to her curtains to light her lamp and close the shutters. Never could she have expected to witness the sight of Siri patting Saloop’s stomach as the animal lay on its back bicycling the air. She stood with her mouth wide open.

Siri looked up and laughed. “Evening, Miss Vong.” And under his breath: “Don’t you