Six and a Half Deadly Sins (A Dr. Siri Paiboun Mystery)

Book Preface

On December 25, 1978, the concrete public-address system pole in South That Luang’s Area Six unexpectedly blew itself up, a Lao skirt with a severed finger sewn into the hem passed through the national postal system unchallenged and Vietnam invaded Cambodia. A few weeks had passed since then, but the two old men sitting on a log beside the milk chocolate–colored Mekhong River hadn’t yet exhausted their opinions on the three events. Dr. Siri Paiboun—ex-national coroner for the Lao People’s Democratic Republic—had been responsible for the first of them. Comrade Civilai Song-sawat—ex-politburo member—had predicted the latter, and nobody had listened to him. But the finger? Well, neither man could make heads or tails of that.

“Do you suppose it might have belonged to the weaver?” asked Civilai. “Some loom accident?”

“What?” said Siri. “You mean she was so engrossed in her skirt-making that she didn’t notice she’d sewn her own finger into the hem? Got home that evening, and her husband says, ‘Hey, where’s your finger?’ And she looks down to find it gone and says, ‘Hm. I must have inadvertently sewn it into one of the skirts’?”

There followed a brief silence while the old boys worked on their baguette lunches. They’d noticed how much more difficult it had become to chew the crusty beasts since reaching their mid-seventies. Siri surmised that just as the rice whiskey distiller had added ingredients that increased the odds of a raging hangover, and the bicycle manufacturers had removed the gears that allowed one to climb hills without becoming winded, so the baker had changed to a more leathery dough recipe. All were signs of the declining standards of modernization.

Civilai took a mouthful of tamarind juice and swirled it around his mouth before swallowing. “Sarcasm,” he said, “is like throwing a stick at your enemy when you’ve run out of bullets.”

Siri nodded and smiled at his oldest friend. “Lenin?”

“Civilai.”

“You don’t say? Well, in that case, it was very good.”

“Thank you. And I stand by my hunch. An illiterate young woman enslaved in a sweatshop sends a last-gasp plea for help by snipping off her finger and sending it out with the day’s batch of pha sin skirts.”

Siri nodded again. His nods were rarely those of agreement. “That’s even sillier, Old Brother,” he said. “I mean, how would we trace her on the strength of a lopped finger?”

“Fingerprints.”

“Fingerprints? Right. Well, that pretty much sums up the difference between a medical man and a politician.”

“How so?”

“A medical man—a man of science—would look at the relative values of a fingerprint. He would consider the options available. Should he go to a central databank of fingerprints like the one we don’t have in Laos? Should he compare it with similar fingerprints found at the absent scene of the crime? Or should he travel door to door like Prince Charming until he found a Cinderella whose stump matched the discarded finger?”

Civilai smiled. “And the politician?”

“He would make a statement promising great things to come, get elected, then blame the scientists when they failed to come up with the goods.”

Contents:

1. The First Deadly Sin

2. The Chicken Autopsy

3. Counting Ghosts

4. The Notion of the Potion

5. Chasing Skirt

6. The British Medical Journal of June 1877

7. Warped

8. A Little War with China

9. The Black-Clad, Evil-Eyed Men at Dr. Dooley’s Place

10. Geckos Don’t Wear Trousers

11. Nobodies

12. The Seventh Deadly Sin

13. The Tears of Madame Daeng

14. Above and Beyond

15. Side Effects

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