The Red Lotus

by Chris Bohjalian

  “He said you were shot. An ambush. He said his bike ride that last day would bring him past the jungle where his uncle died and the rice paddies where you were hit. Why do you think he would have told me that?”

  “I have no clue,” Peter began, his tone a little clipped and defensive now. “That’s completely absurd.”

  A delivery truck started to back up near Alexis, the beep to alert people it was moving backwards nearly deafening her, given where she was standing.

  “No idea?” she asked, speaking loudly as she retreated from the truck.

  “None,” he replied. “Are you sure you understood him?”

  “You couldn’t misunderstand that. And that was the story he told all the other people on the bike tour, too. The guests. The guides. It wasn’t just me.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “Maybe he was ashamed of me, but I don’t think so. This whole thing is just nonsense.” Everything had changed in their conversation, that was clear to Alexis. They were no longer two people grieving Austin’s death. He was, yes; but in his eyes, now she was defaming his son’s character with some wild accusation or tall tale. “Look,” he continued, “my son is dead. I don’t have the emotional capital at the moment to care about the idea he may have told one of the women he was dating something…exaggerated.”

  “Exaggerated?” she repeated, stung by the idea that in his eyes she was merely one of the women her son was dating. She had just been in his apartment. There certainly weren’t signs of any other women in his life. And yet the words he had used couldn’t help but remind her of Ellie Thomas’s suppositions. A mistress. A baby mama. Her tone more defensive than she would have liked, Alexis said, “That’s not an exaggeration, that’s a lie.”

  “Look, this is the first I’m hearing of any of this. I have no answer, and I really don’t want to have to explain it or justify it,” he said firmly.

  “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I’m sure there was a good reason.”

  And then they said good-bye and hung up. She was relieved that he hadn’t decided to bar her from his son’s office tomorrow.

  * * *

  . . .

  It was dark now, and Sally Gleason had one last thing to do before leaving the office: she wanted to connect with Ken Sarafian, her late father’s friend. She didn’t view it as a warning, precisely: she hadn’t sicced a madwoman on the elderly detective. Alexis Remnick was sweet and more or less grounded, but she was obsessing over Austin Harper’s death, and that couldn’t be good for her. It couldn’t be good for anyone. And so Sally was going to ask a favor of Ken.

  “I’m calling to apologize,” she began when he picked up. “I’ve sent someone your way.”

  “You want to apologize for a referral? Good Lord, why?”

  “It’s a young ER doctor who can’t let go of a boyfriend. Alexis Remnick is her name. The poor guy was killed last week while biking in Vietnam. A truck or a car hit him. She thinks there’s more to it than that, when it’s pretty clear there isn’t.”

  “And you want me to walk her in off the ledge?”

  “Do you mind? She’s a doctor, and she needs to be focused on her patients, not on this. Be your usual kind self, but explain to her that there really isn’t anything that can be done at this point—or should be done. She might listen to you as an ex-cop and a PI. She sure as heck wasn’t listening to me.”

  “I can talk to her.”

  “Thank you, Ken.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. One foot in front of the other.”

  “It was a beautiful service,” she said softly, referring to Kathleen’s memorial.

  “Thank you.”

  There was quiet at the other end of the line. “I almost didn’t give Alexis your name,” Sally said, wondering if she had made a mistake.

  “Because of Kathleen or because it was in Vietnam that this ER doc lost her boyfriend?”

  “Both, I guess. Was it okay? Reassure me it was.”

  Over the years, Ken had told her father bits and pieces about his time in country, some nineteenth-hole beer gab in the clubhouse, and her father, in turn, had shared bits and pieces with his family. It wasn’t a betrayal. Spouses talked to spouses when the marriage was solid, and fathers talked to their children. Still, Sally was reassured when Ken told her, “No need to fret. I don’t go to pieces when I hear helicopters.”

  When she had hung up and belted herself into her Burberry, she felt better. Ken was a good man. He would explain to Alexis that hers was a fool’s errand, and the ER doctor would get on with her life.

  15

  It was dark now, and Douglas could see the moon from his bed. He was lying on his back, and the woman was nestled against him.

  “Can you see the moon?” he asked her.

  “I can,” she murmured.

  He ran his fingernails through her hair and along her scalp the way she liked. “It’s not quite full. The full moon is what, a day away? Two?” he asked.

  “Something like that.”

  It was a little after nine in the evening. He knew she’d leave him soon. She would roll over, dig her cigarettes from her purse, and light one with those long, slender fingers. He would rub the small of her spine, tickling her, and she would bow her back. If it was even a month earlier, she would then have climbed into her blouse or one of his shirts, and the two of them would have gone to his rooftop terrace and gazed out at the moon from there while she smoked. But it was nearing the fourth week in October. That wasn’t happening tonight. Instead she would sit up and smoke in his bed, her back against the mahogany headboard, and he would rest his head in her lap. On her thigh. She would place a saucer on his nightstand and use it for an ashtray. Then she would get dressed and go home.

  It was interesting to him that tonight the sex had been especially satisfying—she had been uncharacteristically affectionate with him—because Austin was dead. The man’s death had saddened her in a way that he hadn’t expected. She’d told him about it as soon as she’d arrived at his home, and while she hadn’t cried, he’d been surprised to see her have to blink back a tear when she broke the news: the poor guy had been killed on his bike in a hit-and-run accident in Vietnam, she said. He, in return, had feigned shock and then what he supposed was a masculine variant on mourning. He’d shaken his head and looked down at his feet. Austin had been the one who had introduced the two of them.

  “Are you going to show me what you filed today? Can I see the story?” she asked him.

  “It’s not interesting. Wait until it runs and has some nice color photos.”

  “Not that interesting? You didn’t fall in love with the place? I adore Siena.”

  “Remember, it wasn’t my first trip there. It was fine. It was Tuscany. But it really has become Disneyland for adults.”

  “That feels good,” she said softly, referring to the way he was massaging her scalp. She purred. “So, tell me: did you find some gorgeous little enoteca that happened to have a dartboard?”

  “There are a lot of English and Irish expats living there now, but, alas, I did not find a dartboard.”

  “Any withdrawal?”

  “From darts? No. I was fine.”

  A thought seemed to come to her as she pulled away from him, sat up, and lit a cigarette. “I assume you put them in a checked bag. Your darts. I’ve seen them. I can’t imagine they let you bring them into the passenger cabin. You could really hurt someone with one of them.”

  “With a dart? Hardly. No one’s going to take over a flight deck with a dart. No one’s going to hijack a plane with a dart.”

  “Austin used to love to play darts with you.”

  He sighed and hoped the exhalation would be interpreted as grief, not
exasperation. A little Austin had gone a long way as an aphrodisiac; but as postcoital pillow talk, it was just a buzzkill. “I’m glad,” he said simply.

  “It’s just so sad.”

  “It is.”

  “What’s next?”

  “My next assignment?”

  “Uh-huh. Where are you off to next?”

  “Travel and Leisure is sending me to Singapore,” he told her.

  “When?”

  “Unsure.”

  “Italy last week. Singapore…soon. You do lead a glamorous life.”

  She tapped an ash into the saucer, and he found himself smiling. “I like my life. But, as you know, I couldn’t live the way I do or in a place like this if I had to depend on the income of a freelance journalist.”

  “No shame in being born rich,” she said.

  “No. I know that,” he agreed, though he really didn’t know that. He was born wealthy, but his family had certainly not been among the Texas super rich. Growing up, he had always been—to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald—a worst-house-on-the-best-block sort of kid. He’d been on the far side of twenty-five when his father’s Dallas-based engineering and construction team had started to make a killing in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was toppled. At the time, Webber had been a marine there. He’d gone to college, graduated in 2001, and enlisted three months after 9/11. His first tours had been in Afghanistan. Then, starting in 2003, in Iraq. While he was watching IEDs obliterate his friends in Fallujah, his family had started raking in serious scratch rebuilding Baghdad. Or, at least, pretending to rebuild Baghdad. He knew the reality of some of those defense contracts. His real income lately had come from selling arms to Kurdish militia and brokering a couple of deals in Myanmar. The travel writing was a cover. A hobby. An excuse to travel. He never wanted to be mistaken for an Adnan Khashoggi or a Viktor Bout. Webber really had been to Siena, but it had actually been the month before last. He’d been there on his way back from his more lucrative work in Jordan. “Nevertheless, I also know that I play for Team Entitled,” he continued finally.

  She chuckled. “Team,” she said, emphasizing the word. “That word always sounds so corporate to me.”

  “That’s because you don’t follow sports and you never played basketball or soccer in high school. Everything sounds corporate to you.”

  She pinched his stomach hard, and he grunted reflexively against the pain. “I think I should be insulted,” she teased him.

  “Not at all. I am first and foremost a realist.”

  “You are nothing of the sort. You go to beautiful faraway places and write about them and you grow tomatoes in terra-cotta pots in New York City. I loved your story on Australia. You’re a throwback. You’re a romantic.”

  “Someday you should come with me.”

  “Not happening. At least in the foreseeable future. Our world exists in these rooms and these rooms only.” He watched the smoke from her exhalation waft above him before it seemed to disappear into his ceiling fan. It was off right now, and he stared for a moment at the curve of the blade. The shape was the same elegant scythe as the bacteria.

  “Just an idea.”

  “Understood.” Then, after a beat, she said, “Well…”

  And he knew when she said that it meant that soon she would swing her legs over the side of the bed. Whenever she said, “Well…,” it was the beginning of the end of their evening. It always made him a little sad. It was the damnedest thing, but he was confident that he enjoyed their postcoital time together more than she did. He suspected he liked foreplay more than she did, too. She really was the most efficient person he knew when it came to time management. Maybe she was right: maybe he really was a bit of a romantic.

  “You probably know this, but koalas have chlamydia,” she said. “I noticed that wasn’t in your story on Sydney.”

  “And prairie dogs have the plague. I learned that tidbit two years ago when I did a feature on southern Colorado. But they’re not near people—the prairie dogs.”

  “Okay, I find that frightening.”

  “Really?” He hadn’t planned on bringing up the word plague, but he had, and now—almost out of curiosity—he pressed ever so slightly. “Think of the things the labs in your wing are researching every single day.”

  “I rarely go near the labs. You know that. That’s the university world.”

  He chuckled. “You’re a university hospital.”

  “That whole world terrifies me. They have mice in there, you know.”

  He did know that and had to restrain a small smile.

  “And rats,” she continued, shuddering ever so slightly.

  “Rats are badass little monsters,” he said. “Think of that toilet beast.”

  “I’d rather not, thank you very much.”

  Occasionally, he teased her with his horror stories of rats.

  “No?”

  “No,” she said emphatically. One time she’d chastised him, telling him that his tales were just urban legends and he should know better. He was a journalist, after all. But they weren’t urban legends, and she probably understood this as well as anyone—which was why his stories must have unnerved her and she found them doubly grotesque. Austin said one of the hospital researchers really had one time come across a rat in a toilet. It was in the guy’s apartment. He tried to kill it with a toilet brush, holding it under the water because he couldn’t flush it away: it was just too damn strong a swimmer. But the creature had made short work of the bristles and then started eating the handle. Finally, he had to go to a hardware store and buy a plunger, and then push the rat as far into the porcelain as he could, holding it beneath the rubber dome until the damn thing finally drowned. The scientist, a young guy from Seattle, recalled how he had kept thinking of Roy Scheider in Jaws when he first spotted the shark: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

  They lay there quietly for another a minute, and then she snuffed out her cigarette in the saucer. She kissed the top of his head and scooted her legs out from underneath him to leave the bed and get dressed. He sat up and watched her. He liked the way she always put on her bra before her panties. He loved her hips. Her legs.

  “Did you and Austin and that girlfriend of his ever go out together?” she asked. “Did you all ever do anything interesting?”

  “Never.”

  “She came by my office today.”

  He grew alert, though he kept his tone offhand. “Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she want?”

  “I don’t know. Talk to someone. Then she wanted to look around Austin’s office.”

  “Go on.”

  “She’s clearly having trouble processing the fact that the poor guy died. Letting him go. She cared about him,” she said, her hands behind her back as she clasped shut her bra.

  “Did she?”

  “Care about him?”

  “No. I meant look around his office.”

  “I said she couldn’t. Protocol. But I also said she could come back tomorrow, when his parents are in town.”

  “Well, let me know how she seems. Tomorrow.”

  “I will,” said Sally Gleason. “But I think she’ll be fine. I think she’s just kind of in shock.”

  * * *

  . . .

  Soon after Sally had left, Douglas got a text, and it pissed him off. Once again, he would have to give his digital etiquette lecture. Still, the information was helpful:

  Sinclair brought in a bunch of Vietnamese rats yesterday. It took more anesthesia than usual to knock them out.

  He took serious notice of this. He texted back:

  What did they use? Halothane? Isoflurane?

  The response was quick and, much to Webber’s disgust, actually included a laughing-face emoji.

  That question is way abo
ve my pay grade. No idea.

  He put down his phone and went to the refrigerator for a beer and a couple of ice cubes, and thought of Austin. He guessed the synaptic connection was the word Vietnam. But it could just as well have been rats.

  He wished he could be sure that the moron hadn’t brought any of the pathogen with him to Vietnam. They’d searched him and hadn’t found any. But was it possible he’d already sold whatever he’d brought? It was. Before erasing his laptop and tablet, they’d checked his email and texts. They’d checked his apps. They’d checked his bank accounts. There was no indication that he’d already made the sale—or at least been paid for it.

  Bao had reassured him that they had wiped clean his devices and all they could find on the Cloud.

  And, of course, if he had sold something, the likely buyers were dead. And Bao’s crew had found nothing there, either, and they’d scoured the lab thoroughly before torching it.

  But the girl—the ER doc—had gone to Sally’s office.

  He didn’t like that, and he didn’t know what it meant. It might mean nothing. It probably meant nothing.

  But then again, it might mean everything if her idiot boyfriend had recruited her and involved her in his scheme. He hated loose ends, and the idea was now taking root: this ER doctor might be considerably worse than a mere loose end.

  16

  At first, Alexis had said no when her mother had offered to pick up some Indian food after work and come by her apartment with dinner. Visiting Austin’s apartment had unnerved her, as had speaking with Peter Harper, and now she wanted to be alone. She was also experiencing the slow nausea of serious jet lag. The perfect evening would have been to see if she could access online the full research article on the rats of Vietnam, read it, and then collapse into bed and sleep.

  But her mother was one of the world’s great negotiators—which was why she usually got what she wanted—and she had already called Ellie Thomas, Alexis’s friend in the building, to invite her to dinner, too, and Ellie had said she would join them.