The Coroner's Lunch

by Colin Cotterill

  Fire spread through Siri’s chest and over his skin, the garrote cut through his neck, he kicked and grunted the finale to his death knell, and he was gone.

  Kumsing watched as Siri stared at the old lady. The doctor sat cross-legged, his hands in his lap, more serene than ever. She smiled back at him, a little nervously. Then the doctor lifted his hand and pointed at her.

  “Phibob,” he said, calmly. “Phibob is in her.” Then, as if he were suddenly tired, he keeled over sideways and collapsed.

  That was the end of the ceremony as far as Siri knew. When he woke up, the sun shining through the unshuttered window was like warm balm against his face. He reached instinctively to his neck, but there was no dressing, no contusion, no injury at all. The amulet was gone.

  “Spiritual wounds don’t leave scars, Yeh Ming.”

  Siri looked to the end of the straw mattress to see Auntie Suab spooning soup from a large black pot into a bowl. His face must have shown fear. She smiled. “Don’t worry, they’re gone. You missed quite a show last night. I missed a lot of it myself, although I was apparently the star.”

  “I’m sorry for ratting on you.”

  “It had to be done.” She brought the soup over to him and helped him sit up against the beam of the hut. He felt weak. She handed him the bowl and a spoon. He looked at the soup with suspicion.

  “Nothing poisonous, Yeh Ming. You need some nourishment. You were as sick as a dog last night.”

  “I was?”

  “At least you waited till they got you outside.”

  “I’m polite that way. What happened?”

  She sat cross-legged on the floor as he ate. “I’m afraid Lao Jong was a bit beyond his depth. He’s actually more of a fixing-of-stomachache, saving-of-vegetable-garden type of medium. He can deal with little troubles like that very well. But what we had last night was hell and brimstone. He’d never experienced anything like that before. Fortunately, you had.”

  A sudden dark flash came across Siri’s mind. He saw himself with his hands around Auntie Suab’s throat during the exorcism. He shrugged it from his mind.

  “Me? What good was I? I was unconscious.”

  “This body was. But Yeh Ming was with us. You acted as a mentor for Lao Jong. Kept everyone calm. Between the two of you, you were able to chase the Phibob from my body. [Siri again saw himself with his hands wrapped tightly around the old lady’s throat, but this time there were sounds: the gong, screaming.] We made certain they couldn’t possess anyone from the village, not even your soldier friend. He was crying like a baby at the end.”

  “Where did they go, the Phibob?”

  “Back to the trees. They don’t use hosts very often. They’re more at home in the jungle.”

  “Why did they pick you?”

  “The amulets, I suppose. I pick up a lot of bad karma from my clients. I handle a lot of cursed talismans. Malevolent spirits often target women.”

  “And you didn’t know they were in you?”

  “The host never knows. Their influence works on your subconscious. This, for example.” She held up the black prism in front of his eyes. “I had no idea it had been tampered with.”

  As it swung back and forth, the images of the previous night became more vivid. He could smell the beeswax from the lamps. Suab was fighting him off with incredible, unearthly strength. Nobody came to help. Lao Jong lay unconscious on the ground, blood seeping from the corner of his mouth.

  Auntie Suab looked at him. “What’s wrong?”

  “I…I’m getting visions of last night. They’re so real.”

  “That’ll continue for a while, I’m afraid. It’s only to be expected after what you went through. That’s one more reason why you need to put this back on.” She slid across the floor toward him and held out the amulet.

  “Put it on? But it was the amulet that stopped me seeing the Phibob in the first place.”

  “It stopped you seeing them while they were in the host. Now that they’re gone from me, there’s no danger. The amulet’s charm has been reversed. The prism will protect you from their revenge. Are you listening?”

  Siri was shaking his head. The quiet of the morning was invaded by the sounds of last night’s ceremony: The villagers were chanting his name. A woman was crying; it was Lao Jong’s wife lying over his body.

  The morning was losing its warmth. The sun through the window had fallen behind a cloud.

  “It’s so real.”

  “Put this on, Yeh Ming. Put this on and it will all go away.”

  “I can’t. For some reason I know I shouldn’t. There’s something wrong here.”

  “You must trust me.” She was losing her patience with him. Her voice became deeper.

  “How do you know they talked of revenge?” The tiniest drip of blood appeared at the corner of her mouth, and Siri understood. The night was not intruding into the morning; the morning was intruding into the night. He wasn’t imagining he was strangling Suab. He actually was. That was the reality. The soft bed, the kind Suab, and the soup, was an image forced into his head by Phibob.

  The malevolent spirits were lulling him, coaxing him to put on the amulet to weaken him. It was their only hope. He had Suab by the neck and he was casting the spirits from her. They couldn’t withstand his power. They’d killed the medium, but Yeh Ming was too strong. He removed one hand from Suab’s neck and with inhuman ferocity slapped her across the face.

  “Be gone, Phibob. Be gone.”

  And gone they were, in a rush of static that sucked the air from the room. Suab’s body became limp, and Yeh Ming let it drop. He looked around at the silent villagers, who held their palms together and cast their tear-filled eyes downward. His work was done. Slowly he crumpled to the ground and slept.

  When he awoke he heard the sound of a spoon clanking against a pot but didn’t dare look. He heard the sound of soup pouring into a bowl and tried not to listen.

  “He’s awake.”

  It was a man’s voice and it was answered by the grunt of another. Siri looked up to see some of the elders sitting in a huddle at the far side of the hut. They got to their feet and hurried across the room. They seemed pleased to see him. The young girl he’d met before was dishing up soup for everyone. It smelled good.

  Siri said nothing to the men. He watched them. He looked for abnormalities, anything out of place, sudden changes in the light. Tshaj spoke first.

  “How are you feeling, Yeh Ming?” The voice seemed legitimate, but Siri wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.

  “Who are you?”

  The men looked at each other, confused. “I’m Tshaj. What’s wrong?”

  “What year is this?”

  “1976.”

  “The date?” Siri figured a malevolent spirit wouldn’t have an up-to-date calendar.

  The elders looked at one another again. Unfortunately, dates weren’t something they needed to concern themselves with either. One of them took a stab at it.

  “November?”

  “What day?”

  “Monday.”

  “No. That isn’t possible. What happened to Friday and Saturday and Sunday?”

  “You slept through them.”

  “You’ve been out like a clod of earth since…that night.”

  It wasn’t unlikely. He felt leaden and uncommonly hungry. The smell of the soup was bringing on rumbling in his insides. But he still wasn’t absolutely at peace with what he was seeing.

  “Where’s Lao Jong?”

  Tshaj looked down at his hands. “He’s gone.”

  “Gone, dead? From the exorcism?”

  The men nodded solemnly.

  “He wasn’t in physical condition to tolerate all that turmoil he was hosting. He’d never really done it before, not to that degree. He had a bad heart already, and the Phibob could tell. I can’t think what they made him see that shocked him so. Not sure I’d want to know.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Lucky for us, Yeh Ming was ope
n to the deities. There was the devil of a battle.”

  “I think I met that devil. What happened to the Phibob?”

  “Back to the forest.”

  “Just like that? They just happily scurried back to the forest with their tails between their legs?”

  “There’ll be nothing happy about it. There’s still a lot of mischief to be had in the jungle. But they’ll think twice about possessing any of us, now that we’re protected. Yeh Ming left us a blessing and put a spell on our village.”

  “Nice of him.” Siri decided this was reality, if only because his stomach was bleating like a tethered goat from the aroma of the soup. Recovering from seventy-two hours of sleep is no easy matter, and he needed help from the elders to sit up. They were flesh and blood, but mostly bone. The blushing girl spooned soup into his mouth. He could have done it himself, but he rather liked the service.

  “What about the captain?” he asked between slurps.

  “He was blessed too. It seemed to make him very confident. He decided to protect his men as well. Auntie 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 marvelous 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 apologized 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 him who’s boss, but I want you to be prepared for revenge. If he chooses to follow up on the curse, you’ll need this. Promise me you’ll carry it with you always.”

  A feeling of déjà 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 toward 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 airplane 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 meters 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 shirtsleeved forester was very helpful in pointing out the project site to Siri as they passed over it. The doctor was overwhelmed by its scope. Hectare upon hectare 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 realize.”

  “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?”

  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 toward 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 signaled 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 get any ideas now.”

  Still flabbergasted by his new relationship with Saloop, he stopped off in the downstairs bathroom and got some water boiling for a hot bath. He deserved that much.

  He could tell someone had been in his room. He could also guess who. There was an unmarked envelope on his desk. Its deliverer, unquestionably some spinster from the Department of Education, had taken advantage of her excuse to enter his room by dusting, sweeping, washing up, and disorganizing his books into neat regiments. It was time, he decided, to invest in a padlock. Some things were worse than crime.

  He went down for a leisurely bath and soaked his hair in the left-over rice water they all used as shampoo. He inspected his well-worn body for evidence of the battle he’d just fought, but, if anything, he looked better now than he had when he left. Clean and refreshed, he returned to his room, wrapped himself in a dry loincloth, and waited for the pot to boil for coffee. He carried the oil lamp across to the coffee table and blew the steam from his cup. Not until then was he ready for his letter. He checked the seal of the flap. It seemed untouched, no evidence of steaming or soaking. He slit it open with an old scalpel and pulled out the two sheets it contained.

  Turning first to the signature, he saw it was penned by “a fellow crime fighter,” an indication that Phosy also feared it might be tampered with.

  It began with a jolt.

  My dear Maigret,

  The hairdresser’s dead. My first suspicion upon hearing that was probably the same as your own. But comK was away at the time and this had all the hallmarks of a suicide. I was in the station when the case came in. The officer who’d gone to her apartment found the body, together with a suicide note. She’d slashed her wrists with one of the cut-throats from the salon.