Thirty-Three Teeth Read Free Page A

step from the motorcycle park to the morgue jarred new agony into his brain. There was no question in his mind that the Soviet Union was doomed.
    He walked beneath the French MORGUE sign, carefully wiped his feet on the American WELCOME mat, and stepped inside the cool dark single-story building. He immediately sensed one or two presences, but was far too vodka’d to acknowledge them. They could wait.
    He walked into his office, whose blue walls had been thoroughly whitewashed again and again until they were gray. Anything that wasn’t blue suited Siri just fine. Nurse Dtui was sitting at her desk.
    “Morning, Comrade Siri,” she said, flashing her small, neat teeth but not stirring her large, untidy body.
    “Good morning, Dtui.”
    Those first words of the day came out like a gravel driveway.
    “Oh-ho. Have a bit of a session last night, did we?”
    “A cultural experiment.”
    He flopped into his chair, and his head turned to percussion. He buried it in his hands.
    “Looks like the experiment failed.”
    “No, my faithful assistant. Never assume that negative experiences teach you less than positive ones. I have it filed away that in the future, no matter how free, no matter how fascinating the squiggles on the bottle, I shall avoid Russian vodka as if it were a musthy elephant.”
    Dtui stood. Her uniform was bleached white and stretched across her large frame like butcher’s paper around a hock of pork.
    “What you need is some of my ma’s herbal brew.”
    “Oh, no. Don’t say it. Haven’t I suffered enough?”
    “Don’t go away.”
    She headed for the door.
    “Where’s our other soldier?”
    “He’s in the examination room getting the new guests ready.” She stopped in the doorway. “You’ll like this one: two men dead on a bicycle in the middle of the street. No spare seat or luggage rack. They were going around Nam Poo fountain in the middle of town. Nothing there could have been going fast enough to hit them. They were found on top of the bike. No blood. This looks like a job for…dah-dah-da-dah.”
    “Dtui?”
    “…Super Spirit Doc.”
    She giggled and walked out of the office. Siri groaned. The last thing he wanted on that particular morning was to cut anyone up. He especially didn’t want anything inexplicable to trouble his hurting head.
     
    Dtui was fumbling in the back of the freezer for the corked bottle that held her mother’s secret brew. Although there was a hospital ban on using the morgue freezers for personal perishables, her ma’s brew looked enough like body waste to fool the most pedantic inspector. It was an evil Macbethian mix of bizarre ingredients that tasted horrible but cured just about anything.
    “Wha…wha…what’s that for, Dtui?” Mr. Geung was laying out the second cyclist on the spare aluminum table. Geung was a good-looking man in his forties with pronounced Down-Syndrome features and jet-black hair greased on either side of a crooked center parting. When he asked a question, he had the habit of rocking slightly where he stood. Judge Haeng at the Department of Justice, which oversaw the work of Siri and his team, was lobbying for the removal of the “moron,” but Geung’s condition was neither serious nor disruptive to his work. Although he often became anxious about anomalies outside the regimented pattern of his days, he was a morgue assistant par excellence. He’d been trained with infinite patience by Siri’s predecessor and knew the procedures better than Dtui or Siri himself. He was strong and reliable, and he wielded a mean hacksaw.
    “The boss has got himself a hangover,” Dtui said.
    Geung snorted a laugh. “Al…alcohol is the elixir of the d…devil.”
    “Was that another one of your father’s wisdoms?”
    “No. Comrade Dr. Siri…ss…said it when we cut open the drunk fellow on January first.”
    That was one other thing. You didn’t want to say anything you’d live to regret when Mr. Geung was around. He didn’t forget