The Red Lotus

by Chris Bohjalian

  Now, after dinner, Taleen was in the narrow kitchen with Ken, cleaning up. He was at the sink as she brought him the dishes that needed to be scrubbed or put the leftovers away. There were always leftovers, because Taleen always cooked for a family of five, even though it was just the two of them now. It usually meant that she only cooked every other day.

  “Is it uncomfortable to be researching a case with connections to Vietnam?” she asked him, as she slipped their knives and forks into the dishwasher silverware basket. He found it interesting that she hadn’t asked this at dinner. He had a feeling that her inquiring now was deliberate: their conversation, and her questions, would seem less intense if they weren’t looking each other in the eye.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I’m very shallow. You know that.”

  She swatted the back of his trousers with the dish towel. “No. You’re just such a…such a guy.”

  He smiled to himself as he scrubbed the skillet. He knew the sorts of things she was alluding to, because over the years he’d told her bits and pieces. She’d been his own VFW support group. “That’s me. Scarred and repressed.”

  “You’re not either. Restrained would be a better word. Or reticent. But if you want to talk, you know you can. We can even open that arak from the Bekaa Valley you got.”

  He’d seen the booze—weaponized ouzo that had been his father’s favorite alcohol—at an Armenian restaurant in the Flatiron district, tracked down the distributor, and found a liquor store that ordered him the bottle. It hadn’t been his best detective work, but it was still very satisfying. “Now? Nope. We’ll save that for a weekend. A special occasion. Not a Wednesday night. Not the middle of the week.”

  “Well, if you can’t sleep, wake me up.”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise?”

  He nodded obediently. “I promise.”

  But these days, he knew, it was more likely that Taleen would be unable to sleep. Twice he had found her in the night with the old photo albums. She wasn’t crying. She was simply sad and in another place.

  * * *

  . . .

  But that night he did seem to spend a lot of hours staring up at the oyster-colored ceiling, and the shadows cast through the window blinds. He considered waking her, but he didn’t. He never did, just as she never woke him.

  Still, this ER doctor and her dead boyfriend couldn’t help but resurrect the memories that rested most of the year—quiescent as the perennials in Taleen’s Mineola flower garden until the high sun and warm air brought them back into bloom. First there were the memories of his own little girl (and she’d always be a little girl in his mind), even though Alexis looked nothing at all like Kathleen.

  But then there were the synaptic leaps across decades—generations—and hemispheres. Once more in his mind he saw the muzzle flashes from the M-16s around him the first time he was in one of the bunkers outside the base at Quang Tri and the VC were probing the defense in the small hours of the morning. He’d been in country only days, and he was still struck by one thing: the heat alone was going to kill him. He’d emerged from the plane at Cam Ranh Bay, squinted against the sun, and felt his breath sucked from him like a vacuum by a wave of air so stinking hot it was like he’d opened an oven door. Outside the bunker, they had rolls of concertina and razor wire, and it encircled the entire base, and in the midst of all that skin-peeling steel they had claymore mines. So, now he was hot and terrified, a little astonished at the way some of the young guys around him were firing aimlessly into the absolute blackness before them.

  But what frightened him most, at least those first nights in the bunker, were the rockets. The VC would fire rockets toward the base, and any moment he expected the whole place to become the sort of inferno you could see from space, because not far behind him, behind the wall, was the tank farm. Not tanks with turrets and cannons. Tanks filled with jet fuel. Massive tanks that had hundreds of thousands of gallons each. And the tanks didn’t just feed the choppers and planes that came and went from the airfield right there, they were linked by pipelines that went as far south as Hue and as far north as the DMZ. If the rockets hit one of those tanks, it would result in the sort of end-of-days inferno that would burn until there was nothing left, and the bodies would be part of the same ash pile as the jeeps and the helicopters and the plywood huts in which they lived.

  He’d been there two weeks when he mentioned his fear of the rockets to another soldier, a guy from Maine who’d been at the base nearly nine months, who smiled and explained to him patiently that the last thing the enemy wanted was to blow up the tanks. “They siphon off the fuel from the pipelines outside the base,” he told Ken. “The rockets are, I don’t know, show. If they wanted to lob one inside here? Wouldn’t be all that hard.”

  And sure enough, a week after that, he was sent out with a squad to provide cover while some of the very same Navy Seabees who’d built the base repaired a break in a pipeline where the VC had been stealing fuel. It was the first of a dozen times he’d be out there in the jungle, and two of the times he’d wound up flat on his stomach, squirming backwards with the other grunts, over tree roots or through marsh, as the bullets literally buzzed their helmets.

  He thought of the sunny day when they were humping west at the edge of a wide, beautiful swath of rice paddies to repair another point where the pipeline was compromised, and a guy named Conway had heaved his M60—a machine gun—into a plant with pink flowers and lush leaves (a begonia, Taleen had suggested when he’d told her this story), and announced he was done. His feet were killing him, he had a fever, and no matter how many times they fixed the line, the VC would break in and tap another part. He said he’d been vomiting all morning and shitting his pants. They had no witnesses to the first claim, but they had more evidence than they needed to corroborate the second. And it was as the sergeant was turning to Conway and ordering him to nut up and pick his gun off the goddamn ground that the rice paddies burst into flame. The water was on fire and the sergeant was screaming because he was on fire, and so was one of the Seabees, who Ken watched dive through the blaze—into the inferno—as if he thought he might be able to save himself from immolation there. He did. But he also drowned, because there was no place to swim to.

  At first, they’d all assumed this was some sort of cataclysmic friendly-fire napalm fiasco, but there hadn’t been any planes, which momentarily had confused them all. But then they saw the teenage kid, the girl, and they understood. They got it. The VC had been siphoning jet fuel and it spread atop the rice paddies like a thin skin of ice, and the girl had been using it to cook outside the shack in which her family lived. And it had all gone to hell. She was twirling in circles, a great human sparkler, and shrieking as the flames melted her skin and then, after she collapsed, the tissue and muscle until all that was left were her bones.

  Which was when Ken felt something punch into his helmet.

  For a moment he assumed he’d been hit because suddenly the VC were shooting at them, but the projectile had been a slab of bark from some massive, ancient rain-forest tree that was growing all alone by the edge of the water. He had no idea what kind of tree it was and, after the firefight, he hadn’t bothered to ask. (Years later, out of curiosity he had Googled Vietnamese trees and never found an image to match his memory.) Somehow, he wound up with Conway’s machine gun, and he curled up behind the tree’s equally impressive roots—some had seemed nearly knee-high—and fired the weapon in the general direction of the shooting until he was out of ammunition. He caught one poor, charging son of a bitch from his forehead to his waist, unzipping him from top to bottom. He’d never forget that. Eventually, the enemy had slipped away. They counted seven dead Vietnamese, including the fellow Ken had peeled in two, but not including the girl who’d accidentally set the rice paddies on fire, and were told to report seventeen. In the war of attrition, you always counted y
our KIA and said the enemy had lost at least two and a half times that many—no matter what the truth was.

  And yet it wasn’t the near misses that usually kept him awake, or the nights in the bunker outside the tank farm, or what he had done to that enemy soldier probably his age who’d charged him. That made him shake his head in the dark in self-loathing, but that wasn’t what really gnawed at him. It was, in hindsight, the horror of what they did to the civilians. What they all did. The whole damn system. What happened to that poor teenage girl who was cooking with jet fuel. And Ken knew that he wasn’t a war criminal. He knew guys who were, in his opinion. But he had always been a gentleman to the women and kind to the men. The locals, the villagers. He tried not to frighten the children. What often kept him stewing in the small hours of the morning was the ruin they—Americans—had wrought upon a whole nation. It was a burden he’d lived with nearly half a century: yes, there were the men he had killed or presumed he had killed, but what gnawed at him was the landscape his army had helped turn into one long, bleeding carcass.

  And yet somehow the country had risen from the dead.

  Somehow. Thank God.

  He’d never know if he had made the wrong decision going to Vietnam when his number had come up. It wasn’t so much that he pondered how different his life would have been had he found a way to be deferred. He knew plenty of guys who had gamed the system and stayed home, and he even had one high school friend who went to Canada. Other than his pal who went north, he rather doubted these guys would be living lives much different from the ones they were experiencing now—assuming, of course, they lived, which was not really a small assumption at all. Oh, they didn’t have his memories at three in the morning. They were spared that. They were spared the guilt of being a teeny part of the inconceivably vast machine that had ground up a nation. But maybe they had a different kind of guilt: the kind born of doing nothing when a neighbor’s house is on fire and others race in to rescue the children and the cats and the dog. And so, in addition to the guilt that sometimes pricked him in the small hours of the morning, there was also the pride that he had done what was asked of him when he was nineteen. He was the grandson of two people who’d survived a genocide, their families slaughtered in an Anatolian city called Elazig—Kharpert, back then—in what was now eastern Turkey, and America had welcomed them as immigrants. At this point, did it even matter whether his decision to go had been his way of repaying a debt of gratitude or a lapse in moral judgment?

  “Sweetheart?”

  He turned his head on the pillow. Taleen was looking at him, her eyes worried.

  “You said you’d wake me,” she murmured. “You promised.”

  He breathed in deeply. “Yeah, I never keep that promise. I’m fine,” he said softly.

  “You’re not,” she told him. “And maybe that’s why I love you so much. I’d hate to think you were fine.”

  He pulled her into him, and they lay like that, awake but their eyes closed, for another half an hour. He thought of the Vietnam he knew and the one this young ER doc had just seen. He loved the idea of a bunch of Americans on bikes, visiting the stone mandarins that stood guard at the tomb of Khai Dinh, or buying tourist lanterns in Hoi An. It was a fantastic country, and resilient. When Americans thought of the Hoa Lo Prison—nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton by the POWs—they thought only of the naval aviators and air force pilots who had been imprisoned there. But for the first half of the twentieth century, the French had used it to confine and torture tens of thousands of Vietnamese political prisoners in conditions that were unspeakably brutal. The damn thing had a guillotine.

  No, not even French barbarism and American brutality could bring the nation to its knees. Thank God.

  Eventually, he fell asleep. So did Taleen. And neither moved until his alarm went off at quarter to seven.

  THURSDAY

  22

  Quang left the interview room, confident that this latest gangbanger they’d brought in had indeed had nothing to do with the triple murder in Da Nang and really was as clueless as his ridiculous tattoos suggested. He had a merman with a mustache inked on one forearm and a shark’s mouth with a baby sitting inside it—literally, on the tongue—on the other. The interrogation had been a complete waste of everyone’s time. The captain was confident that the dude hadn’t shot anyone and he hadn’t tried to burn down the building.

  What Quang found both interesting and infuriating about the triple murder was that one of the victims had visited the North Korean embassy in Hanoi a few days before the execution, but hadn’t applied for a visa and had no diplomatic reason to be there. It was the woman, a food chemist for one of the country’s largest producers of yogurt and powdered milk. But she seemed to own this makeshift lab, a little place that had nothing to do with her corporate job. It seemed to have nothing to do with dairy products. It was a stand-alone building that once had sold scooters, north of Da Nang on the way to the Hai Van Pass. Across the street was a down-and-almost-out restaurant. The chemist was older than the other two victims—she was in her midthirties—and she was no relation to either. His investigative team was getting absolutely no cooperation from North Korea, which also meant something—though what that something was, he couldn’t say. One of the younger dead guys had worked for a few months as a dishwasher at the restaurant across the street, which likely was a connection of some sort. But, then, why the chemist would be hanging around with a dishwasher who’d left the restaurant was beyond him.

  Everyone in the CSCD assumed the massacre had something to do with drugs because of the remnants of the lab tools that hadn’t burned up in the fire, but the woman had no history with any known drug dealers and no connection to any known gangs. It was baffling.

  It had crossed Quang’s mind that the link had something to do with pest control. There had been some empty rodent cages at the crime scene, and the uncle of the second young dead man ran a pest-control service. But who kills people because of rats? Who massacres three people? Moreover, the exterminator insisted he had never met the chemist, and there was no evidence that his little company had ever done business at the lab. Still, it was the sort of connection that dogged him, and on other cases had caused his brain to race when he was trying to fall asleep in the night.

  And then there was this: the woman, who wasn’t married and had no children, had traveled to the United States that summer on a tourist visa. She and her sister had flown on Korean Airlines into JFK and spent six days in New York City. The sister had told Quang about the Broadway shows they had seen and the tourist sites they had visited, and Interpol Hanoi had confirmed that the woman was telling the truth. But she had no idea why her sister might have gone to the North Korean Embassy, and neither did the dead woman’s associates at work.

  * * *

  . . .

  Quang was met in the corridor by Officer Vu, who was holding a manila folder and looked agitated.

  “You have no idea how much I would love some good news,” he told Vu, “but I can see in your eyes that you’re going to disappoint me. What’s happened?”

  “You’re going to need to call the lab,” he said, handing him the folder. “Xuan analyzed the American’s energy gels. They weren’t energy gels.”

  “They were drugs?”

  “Well, not recreational ones.”

  “But they weren’t just gel packs?”

  “No. At least that’s not how they were being used. And poor Xuan is now in the hospital. So is the cabbie who drove him there.”

  He looked at the paperwork, the world around him growing quiet but for the breathing of the other officer. Apparently, the tech had photographed and X-rayed each of the gel packets, and then he’d taken a pair of scissors and cut open one of the chocolate-flavored goos—and some had splattered. It was more watery than he’d expected. He was wearing gloves and goggles, but not a respirator hood. He wasn’t working in the biosafety cont
ainment cabinet. Quickly he donned a hood and moved to the cabinet, but by then it was probably too late. Nevertheless, he put some of the gel in a cell culture incubator to amplify what might be growing there for testing, and he put a small smear on glass to look closely at the substance with a simple light microscope. He did a gram stain to determine whether there was bacteria that was gram positive or gram negative. Right away, he saw something. And it wasn’t mere insect filth or production contaminants. It was evident that the product had been adulterated. Or it wasn’t even the product at all. Certainly, it wasn’t the color of chocolate. It was clear and more of a broth than a gel made with a polysaccharide such as pectin. Still, he proceeded to analyze it methodically, to try to identify the foreign ingredient.

  But the fever was coming on fast, and he saw what might have been a series of blisters forming on his hands beneath his gloves. He thought he felt something growing under his arms, though he told himself that was impossible—no bacteria or virus worked that quickly—and he was panicking. Nevertheless, instead of going home, he went straight to the hospital, where he was right now in isolation.

  “And the cabbie’s sick, too?” Quang asked.

  “Not yet—at least not as of fifteen minutes ago. But he’s been quarantined, too.”

  “Good.” He gestured at the folder. “Do we have any idea what may have made Xuan ill? Do we know what’s wrong?”

  “I talked to one of the other lab techs. She’s pretty shaken up. We’ll know more when we see what grows in the incubator.”

  “What about the gram stain?”

  Vu looked at his paperwork. “Gram negative,” he answered. “So that’s a good thing, right?”

  “No. It’s not like a cancer test and negative is good and positive is bad. All it does is help identify bacteria. It has something to do with the cell wall. There’s a lot of nasty shit that’s gram negative.”