The Red Lotus

by Chris Bohjalian

  “No, we don’t,” Alexis said. “But the coroner certainly believes someone hit him. There is what might be a grill mark on his broken leg.”

  “Still, it’s not a homicide. It’s manslaughter. Maybe. The police in that corner of the country are always stretched a little thin, and that’s going to be especially true in the coming days.”

  “Because of the triple murder north of Da Nang?”

  “You heard about that?”

  “Captain Nguyen got the call when we were at the morgue.”

  “God, I’m so sorry, Alexis. You will leave Vietnam with the most horrible memories of this place. But, actually, it’s such a beautiful country. Please know that. It’s such a beautiful world with such kind and remarkable people. This nightmare you’re experiencing? It’s so awful and so rare.”

  “It is a nightmare,” she agreed. “But I won’t forget how lovely the country was for most of the trip. I’ll try and focus on that.”

  “Good.”

  “Will we investigate his death?”

  “We, meaning Americans?”

  “Uh-huh. Some FBI agents went to his boss’s office at the hospital.”

  “No,” the attaché told her. “We won’t do any more. We sent someone to his office in New York as a courtesy to the police here, when we thought he might still be alive. Asked a few questions.”

  “Did someone go by the ER?”

  “I doubt it. We were inquiring about Austin.”

  “So that’s it…”

  “Yes. This remains the jurisdiction of the Vietnamese police.”

  “Even though he’s an American citizen?”

  “They’re really good, Alexis. Don’t fret. They know what they’re doing. If there’s a reason to follow up on a lead or a clue, they will.”

  “Tell me something.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Why do you think he lied? Was he just embarrassed about his father? It was so unnecessary. It’s all so…so sad.”

  “I doubt we’ll ever know.”

  “I mean, was there more to it? Do you think he had a lover here? Maybe even a child from his last visit?”

  “Okay, I have to admit: that’s something that never crossed my mind.”

  “Is it something the police will investigate?”

  There was quiet while the attaché pondered this. “Not very likely,” she said finally. “I’m sorry. If they do anything, they’ll try and find the driver. Why do you think he had a mistress? Or a child? Did he say something to you that you should share with the police?”

  “No, nothing. It was something a friend of mine in New York suggested to me when we spoke.”

  “Austin said something to her about that?”

  “No. She was just speculating.”

  “Okay, then. I wouldn’t waste a lot of energy there. I’d let that one go.”

  On the top of Austin’s open suitcase, wadded into a corner, were his other cycling jerseys, extra bike gloves, energy gels, and a bottle of sunblock. In another corner she saw his dirty clothes and his toiletries kit. She noted the sneakers he’d worn when they weren’t biking. Behind their suitcases, hanging in the closet, was the suit he had bought just two days ago in Hoi An, as well as the slinky dress he’d had made for her. That seemed months ago now. She sighed. She wouldn’t carry all of his possessions back to America for his parents, but she’d bring them the suit and, after she’d washed it, his favorite cycling jersey. She might—or might not—ask them why they thought their son had lied about their history. About his history. She might try and get a sense if, in fact, it was the father who had lied to the son.

  “May I ask you who was killed in Da Nang? The three people?” Alexis said.

  “A couple of kids: well, not exactly kids. Twentysomethings. And a woman who was some kind of food chemist. Older. In her thirties.”

  “A gang of some sort?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What was it, a meth lab?”

  “A meth lab? No, I don’t believe so. Why would you think that?”

  “Something Captain Nguyen said at the morgue—before he left.”

  “Ah, okay. He hadn’t been there yet. Yes, it was a—for lack of a better term—rogue lab of some sort. But I don’t think they were cooking meth.”

  “Then what?”

  “I really can’t say.”

  “Because you don’t know or you can’t tell me?” Alexis asked.

  “Tell yourself it’s the first but presume it’s the second.”

  “Got it.” She felt a pang of hunger and rose from the bed and picked up one of the energy gels from Austin’s suitcase.

  “Look, the truth is, I really don’t know a whole lot more than you do. They weren’t Americans, so it doesn’t seem to be anything that will involve me or the embassy.”

  She heard someone approaching her door and opened it even before whoever was coming could knock. There was Talia with a tray of cubed mango pieces, sliced rambutans, cut pineapple, and meticulously triangled dragon fruit. She was smiling sadly, sympathetically, her eyebrows an arc. Alexis held up one finger for her, indicating that she would be off the phone in a moment.

  “Well, I’m glad you were here for me, Toril,” she said. “I’m deeply grateful.”

  “I did nothing.”

  “No, you did a lot,” Alexis reassured her, and she tossed the gel packet back into Austin’s suitcase and beckoned Talia into the room. “And now you return to Cambodia?”

  “I do, that’s right.”

  It suddenly seemed immodest to have the suitcases open and vulnerable, their dirty clothes exposed, and so she shut them with the toe of her sandal. She said good-bye to the FBI agent and watched as Talia set the fruit down on the dresser, and she asked her new friend to please stay and keep her company, and to share the plenty she’d brought with her.

  MONDAY AND TUESDAY

  11

  Douglas Webber always obeyed the lizard part of his brain—it was among the reasons why he was still alive—and those dark little folds were telling him that he shouldn’t toss darts ever again in the East Village dive where, invariably, he could find a game. He’d gone there three times with Austin. He wasn’t a member of the New York Dart League—he knew enough not to be a joiner—but he went to their website to see which bars had events or even tournaments lined up that Monday night and which ones were quiet. He wanted a place that was empty of serious activity, but one where he still might find a competitive player. There looked to be a possibility in Chelsea.

  He’d been back in New York a day and a half now, and it felt good to be here. To be home—or what had been home for the better part of this year. He presumed that he’d flown back before Austin’s girlfriend, but even if the gods had conspired against him and put the two of them on the same airline and the same flight, he rather doubted they would be in the same cabin. He certainly hadn’t seen her on board or at the airport in Vietnam or waiting for the connection in Seoul.

  The first thing he’d done when he returned was meet with Oscar Bolton. Bolton had been Austin Harper’s backup, though Harper had no idea that he had a replacement in waiting. Bolton would take a while to fully train, but already he could liaise with the university labs in the hospital complex, and pick up a couple of the pieces before they became problematic.

  Douglas’s apartment was the fourth and fifth floors of a five-story brownstone on Third Street, between Avenue C and Avenue D. It was more room than his body needed, but two bedrooms were the very least that his ego demanded. He grew tomatoes and peppers and basil in pots on his rooftop terrace in the summer. Now the pots were empty and stacked in a corner, along with the tomato cages. He didn’t have much of a view, but he had plenty of sun.

  It was eight thirty at night now and he was deciding where he might get a bite to eat before heading to th
e bar in Chelsea. He was seated on his couch with his dart case in his lap, inspecting the new flights that had arrived in the mail while he had been away. They were bright red and had an image of a black rat on them. The aesthetics were not important to him: if he had wanted a rat, it would have been brown. The brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, had displaced the black rat, Rattus rattus. Norvegicus was bigger than rattus, bulkier, and yet had smaller ears and a more slanted nose. Not nearly as attractive a silhouette. But size beat beauty in the rat-eat-rat world of the urban alley or tenement, and now norvegicus was top rodent. The brown rat was the city slicker, while the black rat had been reduced to—more or less—the country mouse. What mattered to Douglas was that the flights were smooth and slim. He didn’t lob his darts, he threw them hard.

  His phone rang and he saw it was Bao. It was seven thirty on Tuesday morning in Vietnam.

  “Good morning,” Douglas said.

  “Good evening. Am I interrupting dinner?”

  “Nope. Haven’t even started.”

  “You alone?”

  “I am.”

  “Good flight?”

  “Excellent. What’s up, Bao? You didn’t ring me to ask about the amenities on the plane.”

  There was a brief pause, and Douglas could sense that Bao was gathering himself. “The police in Da Nang picked up one of my guys.”

  “One of your guys who took care of the lab?”

  “Ironically, no. It was just a coincidence that they brought him in. There are plenty of witnesses to the fact that he was at the Four Seasons in Hoi An on Friday. Getting a massage and drinking and enjoying the scenery.”

  Two thoughts passed almost simultaneously through Douglas’s mind, but he was careful enough not to give voice to either. First, the man had an alibi. That was excellent. Second, he was paying Bao’s people way too much if one of them was drinking at the Four Seasons.

  “By enjoying the scenery, I presume you mean the young girls in bikinis—not the beach.”

  “Right.”

  “There are witnesses?”

  “Plenty.”

  “Good. Have I met him?” Douglas asked.

  “You haven’t. But he was the driver we’d used the day before. On Thursday.”

  “And the police didn’t ask about that?”

  “Nope. Seems not to have crossed their minds there was a connection.”

  “Where is the truck?”

  “Long gone. He drove to the resort in a silver Kia.”

  Douglas was relieved. Still, he pressed, “And you’re positive that the police asked him nothing about our American friend?”

  “Nothing. That’s clearly just a hit-and-run. They’ve made no connection between his death and the other three—”

  “Got it,” Douglas said, cutting him off.

  “Just keeping you in the loop.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate that. Tell me again…”

  “Go on.”

  “There was nothing on his phone?”

  “Some contact with the food chemist in Da Nang. The dates and times of two phone calls—”

  “Anything to suggest she was more than a business associate of his?” Douglas asked.

  “No, why?”

  “You said she was pretty.”

  “She was. I wouldn’t be surprised if she and Austin were rats with benefits.”

  “You took care of her phone, too?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And there was nothing else on Austin’s phone? No emails? No cellular trail?”

  “Nope. No contact with Myung—the Korean in the labs,” Bao said. “But the fact that Harper was meeting with a woman here with North Korean connections has to make Myung a factor in our minds.”

  “I’ll see what we can find out. Sinclair in any emails or apps?”

  “None. And there was absolutely no information on the creation of the pathogen. No data at all. After we’d gone through everything—and I mean everything—we put the SIM card back in and then wiped it clean. We wiped his laptop, his tablet, and even his desktop at work. We erased everything.”

  “And there was nothing in the cloud?” Douglas asked.

  “Nothing we could find.”

  “Where’s the phone now?”

  “Bottom of a rice paddy.”

  “Okay,” he murmured. So, if anyone in Vietnam ever checked with the telecom company, they would find evidence of two phone calls between Austin Harper and one of the three dead in Da Nang. But who would check? It was the sort of worrisome, dangling thread that irritated Douglas, but he knew in his heart that it was never going to unravel…anything. Because no one would ever pull at that string. Because no one cared and because no one would connect the dead cyclist from the other side of the planet with the massacre the day after he happened to die on his bike.

  “Has there been any fallout at your end?” Bao asked.

  “Not at all. Everyone presumes it was a hit-and-run.”

  “Good.”

  After Douglas said good-bye to Bao, he decided on pasta for dinner. He was friends with the owner of an Italian restaurant who, he knew, kept his kitchen impeccably clean. Not a rat to be found.

  * * *

  . . .

  On his way home, Douglas had the cabdriver drop him off on Sixth Street and Avenue D. It had been a somewhat more dramatic evening than he had anticipated. It had begun uneventfully, with a terrific spaghetti carbonara and a robust Brunello. But then he had gone to the bar to play darts and it had fallen apart. Not cataclysmically, not by a long shot, but in a fashion that had left him unsettled and vexed. He’d met a pair of twin brothers visiting America from Dublin, and he’d played darts with them for an hour. They were younger than he was, in their midthirties, and had family in Westchester. They were good. Very good. Better than he was, and he knew he’d win most New York City–area tournaments if he was willing to sacrifice his anonymity and enter. They took him for a couple rounds of drinks and two hundred bucks, which really was nothing to him, nothing at all, but it still meant that he had lost a lot of games that night.

  Now, as midnight neared, he hoped to walk off his annoyance by heading west on Sixth, away from the FDR Drive and the taller apartments with their tree-shrouded parking lots that seemed to belong in an outer borough. He made a right into an alley where he knew there were rows of dumpsters that would not be emptied until tomorrow morning. They were filled largely by a trendy diner that specialized in comfort food, things like macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, and homemade creamed corn. And there he stood and watched them. The rats. There was just enough light from the streetlight that once his eyes had adjusted to the dark, he could see them as they skittered on the ground against the brick wall, their eyes occasionally meeting his, gnawing at the garbage that had fallen over the side of one of the dumpsters like coconuts on the beach or apples in an orchard. There were two whole bags on the ground. Douglas estimated there were at least a half dozen places he knew where he could watch rats, but this was his favorite. Rats had the culinary tastes of a six-year-old boy. They loved food that was starchy and cheesy. They hated things like beets and celery and cauliflower. So, the refuse from this diner? It was perfect.

  He counted six animals and assumed there were more he was missing. One of the black bags on the alley pavement had movement inside it, and he imagined a baby chick pecking its way from its shell. But, of course, it was a rat that had gnawed a hole in the bag or had found one. Douglas stood still, and they didn’t seem to mind his presence any more than they would a Norway maple. They embraced the shadows, but they were far from dependent on the dark. He noticed a rat trap near the dumpster. So, it seemed, did they. They ignored it, either because they were smart or because it was baited badly.

  A mile or so north of here were all of those university hospitals, three of them he could think
of, including the one where Austin Harper had worked. It was among the locations in the city where scientists were studying the pathogens rodents carried that were proving to be spectacularly resistant to drugs. Among the worst of the pathogens was the one that looked a lot like the bacteria corkscrews called leptospirosis, spread mostly by rat urine. But this new bacteria was longer than lepto and didn’t give a rat’s ass about doxycycline. It ignored every antibiotic the scientists had thrown at it. Scoffed at the very notion there was a drug it should fear. And then there was the one Sinclair was cooking up at Austin’s old haunt that was a variant on the plague, but also antibiotic resistant. The work should have been going on in a BSL-4 lab, and the university’s was only BSL-3. But that also made it possible to fly under the radar. They’d christened that one the red lotus, because their transgenic lab rats had genes from their Vietnamese counterparts.

  An idea came to Douglas and then, right behind it, an impulse. The idea was that he had lost tonight to the Irish brothers not merely because they were better than he was, but because of the brand-new flights he had been using. The ones with the cartoon profile of a rat. Maybe they weren’t slim enough. Maybe they were offering more drag than he liked. The notion was curative, reassuring.

  Carefully, almost in slow motion, he opened his dart case and removed one. He guessed he was no more than ten yards from the rats, which was a lot longer than most tournament tosses, but still not terribly far. The impulse was that he would spear one. Skewer it.

  He took aim at a cluster of three that were eating what he presumed was some sort of bread—a stale bagel with a bit of cream cheese or a baguette with some butter—and then at one in particular that was offering him the full length of his side. He threw hard, a missile shot, and hit it solidly in the midsection. It screamed a great rat scream, a sound that was reminiscent both of a growl and of a creature hyperventilating. It was like a mammalian lawn mower that wouldn’t quite start.

  For a moment he was satisfied, and he wondered if the other rats would start to eat it. That would be interesting. He might stay and watch that.