Thirty-Three Teeth Read Free Page B

much.
     
    The autopsy followed the standard pattern they’d settled into. Siri was beginning to sit back and let Dtui give the commentary while he took notes. She was learning the trade and hoped to be sent to the Eastern Bloc on a scholarship. Her eyes were keen, and she often noticed things that Siri had missed. The only setback to this new system was that nobody could read Siri’s notes afterward. Not even Siri.
    As the two bodies in the morgue hadn’t been reported as missing, they would temporarily be known as Man A and Man B. They were an ill-matched pair. Man A was neatly dressed in a white shirt. He had on an old but quite costly wristwatch, wore permanent-press slacks, and had soft, uncallused hands which suggested he wasn’t used to manual labor. But, as Siri and Dtui both noticed, the most remarkable thing about him was that he was wearing socks. The March temperatures were already hitting 107 degrees. Even in those few offices where ancient French air conditioners waged battle with the heat, the best they could ever achieve was “tepid.” It was never so cold you’d need to wear socks.
    No, these socks suggested that the poor man had no choice. Since he had become coroner, Siri had been under pressure to wear the black vinyl shoes provided by the Party. It was an example of what he termed the new “shoe over substance” policy. So far, he’d been able to use his seniority and his stubborn streak to remain in his brown leather sandals. But he knew that if he were finally compressed into those toe-torturers, he certainly would have to wear socks also.
    Dtui spoke his thought. “I’d say he’s government.”
    “The socks?”
    “The fingers.”
    She was constantly surprising him. Siri went over and held up Mr. A’s hand. All the fingertips were purple: triplicate syndrome.
    It was Civilai who’d coined the phrase to describe the peculiar mauve “bruising” so common in socialist bureaucracies. They were bogged down in paperwork, as there had to be copies for every department. This called into play that miracle of modern office timesaving: carbon paper.
    Like its shoes and its hair dye, Laos got its carbon paper from China. So most officials that used it found more ink on themselves than on the paper. Mr. A had thumbed his share of carbon sheets.
    They stripped him, bagged and labeled his clothes, and took their allotted four color photographs of his outside. Siri noted that no shoes had arrived with the body. There was a thin trail of congealed blood at the corner of the mouth and severe bruising to the chest and abdomen.
    Before beginning an internal examination, Siri decided to prepare Mr. B for the chop also. This would ultimately save time and allow them to make comparisons of their respective injuries. Siri ignored Dtui’s comment that “This is how they do it at the abattoir,” and asked her to voice her observations about Mr. B.
    She noted that he was certainly from a different end of town than Mr. A. His clothes were threadbare and quite dirty. His hands were rough and covered in scabs of short nicks as if he’d been cut often.
    “So, the question remains,” Siri pondered, almost to himself, “…what were two men from very different backgrounds doing sharing a bicycle at two in the morning?”
    “Perhaps,” Dtui suggested, “this one was the chauffeur and he was taking his master home.”
    Geung let out one of his farmyard laughs.
    “Or perhaps they weren’t on the bicycle at all.” Siri glared. “I’m starting to think the fact they were found with the bike was a coincidence.”
    “So, how did they get there?”
    “Oh, I don’t know everything, Miss Dtui. Perhaps the old chap ran into the government fellow when he was crossing the road.”
    “Yeah? And how fast would he have been pedaling to kill the pair of them?”
    “Or, alternatively, the government fellow was riding a motorbike and hit the old boy.”
    “And…?”
    “And someone ran off with the