Disco for the Departed by Colin Cotterill

in and out of his office because he didn't look up from his work when the visitors arrived.
    "Dr. Santiago?" Siri said when he spotted him through the canyons of paper.
    "Da?" The old Cuban still pored over his lists. Siri wasn't surprised to hear him speak Russian. After almost ten years as head of foreign medical aid in Huaphan, Santiago still refused pointedly to learn Lao or Vietnamese. He spoke Spanish, English, and Russian fluently and had reached an age when he considered himself sufficiently full of languages. He hadn't asked to come to Laos, or to work with the Vietnamese, whom he disliked. He certainly wasn't about to make an attempt to cross the cultural divide. He was the expert, and everyone had to make the effort to communicate with him. All in all, not unlike Siri, he was a stubborn but engaging old coot.
    "Dosvidanya," Siri said. It was his only Russian word and he wasn't actually sure what it meant.
    Santiago finally looked up and squinted through his glasses. It seemed to take him a few moments either to focus or to place his old friend in his memory. "Dr. Siri? Is that you?" he asked in English. He jumped up from his chair and ran around the desk to embrace a respected colleague. They smiled and laughed a lot as they hugged, but Dtui noticed they weren't actually conversing. On the journey, Siri had told her that he'd worked with Santiago, on and off, for five years without the benefit of a common language. Siri spoke French and Vietnamese quite fluently but he, too, had reached his linguistic quota. When there was no English/Lao interpreter available, the two had merely observed one another's surgical skills and socialized with the aid of diagrams and mime. It had been such a peculiarly pleasant relationship, Siri wondered whether a common language might have spoiled it in some way.
    Siri finally broke away and pointed to his assistant. "Nurse Dtui," he said.
    "Hello, Dr. Santiago. Pleased to meet you," she said in English.
    Both Siri and Santiago looked at her with astonishment for a few seconds before the Cuban went across to hug her also. It was a culturally inappropriate gesture that seemed to fit into the spirit of the moment. He told her she spoke English well.
    "I read and write," she said. "I don't really speak it." It was true. She'd never used the language to converse. It was just a medium for study. In fact, she was a little surprised to find it coming from her mouth so happily.
    He assured her that whether she read it or spoke it, it was still the same language. And, from that moment, despite the fact that she'd never heard herself using it before, English became their language of communication and Dtui its novice interpreter. She knew her pronunciation was awful, but Santiago had no problem with that because his own accent was equally horrible. He, too, had learned English from American textbooks. Siri was full of admiration for his talented assistant.
    Throughout the morning, the two old doctors caught up with each other's lives since last they'd met. Santiago was spending more time on administering Cuban aid, he told them, and had less and less time available for the job he was actually trained for. Farmers continued to get blown up in their fields, and there were fewer and fewer qualified medical staff members to care for them. There were under a hundred qualified doctors in the entire country so the PL medical staff was spread thinly to fill the roles of the Royalist physicians who'd fled to Thailand. Santiago had funding but nobody to hire.
    Through Dtui, whose confidence increased as time passed, Siri finally got around to the mystery of his cement man. The Cuban thought about it for a moment and asked whether he was certain the incident had taken place early that year.
    "January 21, to be exact," Siri told him.
    "Dr. Santiago says that if it had been a few months earlier, he'd have had two very good candidates for us," Dtui said. "At least that's what I think he means. But he reckons