It was about four-thirty by the time all the textbook procedures were completed. She’d been measured, but not weighed because they didn’t have a scale. Earlier in the year, they’d experimented with two bathroom scales. Siri and Geung weighed themselves on each, then held up the corpse between them. Due to some obscure law of physics, the body only ever weighed half of what it should have. So they abandoned weighing altogether.
At one point, Siri leaned over the woman’s face. He called to Geung.
“Mr Geung. Your nose is better than mine. What do you smell here?”
Geung didn’t need to lean. He’d smelled it already.
“Balm.”
“Very good. Let’s get the old girl undressed, shall we?”
“And nuts.”
“What?”
“Balm and nuts. I…I smell nuts.”
Siri didn’t smell the nuts or know what Geung was talking about, but he got Dtui to note it down.
Once Mrs Nitnoy’s clothes had been inspected and bagged, the body was photographed. The hospital budget allowed one roll of colour film per seven bodies, which meant one full-body front, one full-body back, one topical specific to the area of cause. The one or two leftover shots were technically for contentious areas of the anatomy, but often got used up on group photographs of nurses who wanted to send them back to their families in the countryside.
On either side of Mrs Nitnoy’s formidable chest, Dr Ski made incisions that came together at the base of her sternum and ran down to her pubic bone. Thus the autopsy began. Everything he did, he explained very slowly, because Dtui had to write it all down in the notebook, and she didn’t take shorthand.
Siri used the old bone cutters to get through her ribcage and, one by one, he described, weighed, and labelled the organs, and Dtui jotted down irregularities in her book. Siri then used a fine scalpel to define the scalp, which he pulled forward over poor Mrs Nitnoy’s face. While he began a more detailed inspection of the organs at the examination bench, Mr Geung set about the cranium.
Although a requisition was in for an electric saw and the hospital board was considering it, in the meantime they had no choice but to use a hacksaw. It was the department’s good fortune that sawing was one of Mr Geung’s superior skills. With his tongue poking from the corner of his mouth, he painstakingly and expertly cut deep enough to penetrate the skull, but not so deep as to damage the brain. It was a skill Siri had been unable to master.
The morgue at the end of 1976 was hardly better equipped than the meatworks behind the morning market. For his own butchery, Siri had blunt saws and knives, a bone cutter, and drills inherited from the French. He had his personal collection of more delicate scalpels and other instruments. There were one or two gauges and drips and pipettes and the like, but there was no laboratory. The closest was forty kilometres away, across the border in Udon Thani, and the border was closed to the dreaded communist hordes.
There was an old microscope Siri had requisitioned from the stores at Dong Dok pedagogical institute. If they ever reopened the science department, it would likely be missed. Even though the microscope was an ancient relic of bygone biologists and should have been in a museum, it still magnified beautifully. It was just that the slide photographs in his old textbooks were so blurred, he couldn’t always tell what he was looking for.
Most of the results from Siri’s morgue relied on archaic colour tests: combinations of chemicals or litmus samples. These were more suitable for telling what wasn’t, rather than what was. Assuming the necessary chemicals were available at Lycee Vientiane’s chemistry department, Siri could usually eliminate fifty possible causes of death, but still be left with a hundred and fifty others.
So it was hardly surprising, when four-thirty came around, that he hadn’t the foggiest idea what had killed Mrs Nitnoy. He could give a list as long as your distal tibia of things that hadn’t. She hadn’t been hit by a train (as there were none in Laos). She hadn’t been shot, stabbed, suffocated, or had her limbs severed by an army launch. But as she’d been in a crowded room when she died, these were no great discoveries.
Some witnesses said she’d choked on her food, but the absence of any in her oesophagus and the abruptness of her death said otherwise. Without a lab, it was next to impossible to check for poison unless you knew which it was, and as the lady had been eating from a communal table it was quite unlikely she alone would have died.
In the absence of Judge Haeng and his helpful advice, Siri had taken particular pains to establish that she hadn’t died from a heart attack. There was no evidence of an occlusion or thrombosis.
He’d read about forensic scientists around the world who revelled in mysteries such as these. He wasn’t yet one of them.
¦
Just as Dtui and Geung were leaving for the hospital gardens to do their hour of vegetable tending, the clerk from the director’s office came rushing in to tell them that Comrade Kham would be arriving at Wattay Airport at six and they were to wait. Siri told his co-workers he’d stay behind himself and that they should go.
He sat at his desk looking through Dtui’s notes. She wrote so small, he considered using the microscope to read them. Instead, he spent the next hour pumping his reading spectacles back and forth in front of his eyes trying to focus on the words. This ultimately gave him a headache and he ended up writing the second half of his report from memory.
It was nine before Senior Comrade Kham turned up, and there was whisky on his breath. His mouth was the only indication of sadness on his face, and it seemed to Siri he was straining to keep a smile inverted.
“I’m so sorry about your loss, Comrade.”
“Where is she?”
“In the freezer.” Siri stood and gestured for the man to follow him to the examination room.
“Where are you going?”
“I thought you’d want to see the body.”
“Heavens no. She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Absolutely.”
Kham walked past him and sat at Siri’s desk, which forced Siri to sit at Dtui’s. The Party man thumbed idly through the papers in front of him. “Have you…er, cut her open?”
“Mm-hm.”
“I’m sorry. You could have made better use of your time. I know what it was that killed her.”
“You do? Well, thank God for that. I have no idea.”
“I’ve been warning the silly woman for years it’d kill her. But I suppose if you’re addicted, you don’t listen to common sense, eh, Siri?”
“What exactly was she addicted to?” He hadn’t found any puncture marks on her arms and her liver was pretty as a picture.
“
“
Raw flesh works as a healthful meal only if it’s fresh. Bacteria get into it very fast, and the parasites work their way around the body. If you’re lucky you may just end up with abscesses, cramps, and chronic diarrhoea for the rest of your life.
But there is a strain of more adventurous parasite that lays eggs in the anterior chamber of the eye. From there it either migrates through the retina, or burrows its way into the brain. One minute you’re feeling fine and showing no symptoms; the next, you’re on a table at the morgue. Siri noticed the comrade was still talking.
“…eating pork
“I stopped off at the police department on my way here and told them all about it. There won’t be anyone filing an unnatural death certificate for this case.”
Siri was still shaking his head. “It was silly of me not to think of it. I didn’t imagine a woman like Mrs Nitnoy eating raw pork.”
“Why not? She was just a country girl. You could dress her up but you’d never get the stink of buffalo out of her skin.”
