Thirty-Three Teeth by Colin Cotterill Read Free Book Online Page B

all about?”
    “I’m not terribly clear myself.”
    “Then you needn’t have worried about the phone.”
    “Siri, this order comes from the very top. I don’t have time for any of your temperamental rantings. There’s no choice.”
    Siri wasn’t in the least threatened by the young judge or impressed by orders from the “very top.” But he could see that Haeng was. For the sake of future cooperation from the Justice Department, he decided not to give the man a hard time. And there was one other, more personal, reason why a free trip to Luang Prabang wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
    Luang Prabang was the Royal Capital, the birthplace of his wife, and a very scenic spot, so he’d heard. It was the historic seat of the Lan Xang empire: Lan, a million, Xang, elephants. It was in the mountains and some fifteen degrees cooler than the steampot he was in now. A night up north might not be half-bad at that. He spoke with an excitement in his voice that surprised the judge.
    “Well, let’s not keep the army helicopter waiting.”
    “Eh? Do you need—I don’t know, a toothbrush or anything?”
    Following a similar urgent summons south the previous year, Siri had kept a permanently packed overnight bag in the office. Personally, he traveled light. Most of it was morgue equipment, gloves and wraps.
    “No. Give me five minutes with my team, and I’ll join you in the car.”
    To Haeng, this was a victory of sorts. His first. He decided it deserved a victory lap. He let loose with one of his renowned maxims.
    “That’s the spirit, Siri. It’s moments like this that make the socialist system so great. When the call to arms comes the committed cadre, even on his honeymoon, would gladly climb off his young wife at the crucial moment sooner than let down the Party.”
    If that were so, Siri thought to himself, it might explain the frustrated look he’d often seen on the faces of so many Party members.
    The old Mi-8 “Hip” helicopter swung back and forth beneath its rotor like a poor baby’s crib. The young Lao pilots were friendly enough, but they seemed petrified to find themselves in control of the beast. Siri assumed that they hadn’t long ago passed through the Soviet training course that had farmboys still warm from the backs of buffalo inside a cockpit in three months.
    After the initial “Hot isn’t it?” “Damned hot,” there was too much noise for a conversation. So Siri spent the ninety-minute flight in thought. He was on his way to a place that symbolized Laos to the few people in the outside world who had a clue where Laos was. Yet to him it was another era, another country altogether.
     
    He had been born somewhere around 2446: the year the West knew as 1903. There was only one person who could have confirmed that, and she’d kept it to herself. So when it eventually came to filling out forms, Siri settled on a date that more or less matched his body.
    He was born into a chaotic Laos that existed because the French colonists said it did. They’d drawn lines here and there on maps, and all that fell within them was known as the administrative district of Laos, the fifth piece in France’s Indo-China set. It seemed not to matter a bit that some thirty ethnic groups gathered in that bureaucratic net were neither of Lao origin, nor subservient to the French. When you trawl for featherback, picking up the odd buk fish is unavoidable.
    Despite this nicely inked border, Laos was a divided country. The king, with French permission, ruled the areas in the north around Luang Prabang. The floating southern provinces, once a separate kingdom, had changed hands ten years earlier from the Thais to the French. They were underpopulated and underproductive and left the invaders with more headaches than looted profits. But as the French still had fertile Thai territory in their sights, the south of Laos was a necessary stepping stone. It was into this area of administrative annoyance that Siri had arrived in the