“Such as?”
“Not a clue,” he shrugged. “Xuan would have noted its shape.”
“Rod shaped. Anaerobic.”
“Where is the other lab tech? The one who’s shaken up?” Quang asked.
“Xuan only spoke to her through a hood. He never touched her or breathed on her.”
“That’s not what I asked. She should be quarantined, too. Right now.”
“Okay.”
“I want everyone Xuan saw after he opened that packet until he was put in isolation looked at.”
“Will do.”
“And Xuan’s lab?” Quang asked. “Has that been buttoned up?”
“It has. It’s under quarantine and being cleaned.”
“We have two—maybe three—people who’ve been exposed to this and one who is already sick. Let’s stop it right there,” he said. He thought of Xuan’s wife and infant son at home. He thought of his own daughter. Then he added, “I looked into whether Austin Harper could have bought that brand of energy gel in Vietnam. He couldn’t. It isn’t sold here. I’m not sure what that means. Maybe it just means he brought a bunch because he liked that brand.”
“Maybe.”
“But…shit.”
“What?”
“I’m going to call the American consulate and make sure someone calls the company that makes them. Let’s not wait until we get the identity of the bacteria. Also, would you touch base with the lab? I want a list of every pathogen that’s shaped like a rod and gram negative.”
“Will do.”
“And let’s go back to whatever’s left of the lab where those three people were killed. This time let’s sweep the debris—anything that didn’t melt or burn up—for the American’s fingerprints. Let’s also bring in a bio team to check for contamination.”
Vu looked confused. “You think a couple of gangbangers and a food chemist might have been with Austin Harper or had something to do with the energy gels?”
“I don’t know. But the chemist was in New York City this summer. And Harper was near the woman’s lab last week. We don’t know his whereabouts for a couple of hours. And there were rat cages in the lab—and rats carry disease.”
“Like the plague?”
Quang hadn’t thought about that, and he hadn’t meant the plague literally. “No,” he said, hoping to calm the officer, but also to reassure himself. “I don’t mean the plague.” But he couldn’t help now but wonder: was the plague gram positive or gram negative?
That’s a good question.
Yes, rats are smart—or, at least, a lot smarter than you think. It’s why they’re used so often in psychological research.
They’re also clean animals. I’ve watched them groom themselves, and I’ve watched them groom each other—their pals. And they really can make delightful pets. It’s why some people love them. They’ll bond with a person, much the same way that a cat or a dog will. They’re much more empathetic than most people realize. Some will sacrifice a piece of chocolate to save a drowning rat from its pack. In some ways, they’re as empathetic as we are. As humans. Look at the work the University of Chicago did a few years ago, and how hard some rats will work to rescue a brother or sister from a trap.
Arguably, the biggest downside to a pet rat if you’re an animal lover is that they don’t live very long. Maybe you’ll get two good years out of the little fellow. Maybe not. If you like the critter, that’s got to be depressing.
Of course, the fact that rats (and mice) don’t live especially long makes them great candidates when we’re studying evolutionary and genetic changes.
Now, there’s likely to be a difference in temperament between a rat you buy at a pet shop and one who is rooting around the garbage in an alley behind an Italian restaurant in Chelsea at two in the morning. The former might snuggle in the crook of your arm while you’re reading a book; the latter, if he winds up there, will bite your nose off to get away.
But the ones we brought to America from Vietnam—our super rats? The CDC regulates, among other animals, cats and dogs and monkeys and African rats. But not Asian rats. At first, we went through the rigmarole of getting permits because these were small mammals that could, conceivably, have diseases that could be transmitted to humans. But then we realized we could transport them as pets in pet carriers and no one cared. No one. You can import practically anything you want from the country we nearly destroyed.
23
Alexis was awakened at nine twenty—ten minutes before her alarm was set to go off—by someone buzzing her from the apartment lobby. She struggled out of bed, a little flummoxed at first, disoriented, and pressed on the intercom. It was a woman who said she was from FedEx and she had a package that needed her signature. Alexis said she’d be right down, pulled on a pair of sweatpants, and went to the lobby in the T-shirt in which she’d been sleeping and her slippers. She wasn’t expecting anything, and couldn’t imagine what in the name of God the package could be.
* * *
. . .
It was a Tyvek pack with a diplomatic pouch inside. It had been sent across the world to her from Toril Bjornstad, the FBI attaché in Cambodia. The note was handwritten on cardstock.
Dear Alexis,
On Sunday afternoon, a tourist found your Austin’s bike bag not far from the top of the Hai Van Pass, where he had been riding that day on Highway One. There was nothing inside it that shed any more light on his accident, but we all assume it was thrown from the bike when he was hit. On Monday, Captain Nguyen was kind enough to send me this one item, a dress, and I thought you should have it. Clearly, Austin bought it for you. Given what I know about mourning and grief, I thought I would forward it on to you posthaste. (Yes, this might not have been the most efficient use of your tax dollars, but it seemed a bit of kindness you deserved in this time of loss and one I think most taxpayers would champion—or, at least, forgive.)
I am hoping you are starting to mend.
Sincerely,
Toril
Alexis stared at the material in her lap. It was as beautiful as the black-and-silver cheongsam Austin had bought her at the tailor in Hoi An, but looked like it might be the sort of outfit she might actually wear in public. She recalled the white cocktail dress he’d bought her that summer. This looked to be a similar cut, but the fabric was a silk so soft she wanted to bury her face in it, and the design a kaleidoscopic array of waves, red and purple and orange. It was gorgeous.
She sighed at the mystery of the man. He must have detoured into Hoi An and picked it up the morning he had died. Maybe he was going to give it to her that night, a surprise, and he hadn’t wanted it delivered with his suit and the cheongsam. Maybe he hadn’t wanted her to see it because he was going to give it to her as a present in December.
She stood up and held it against her, pinning the straps against her shoulders with her thumbs and instantly felt her stomach lurch. She recalled Ellie Thomas’s conjectures about mistresses and baby mamas.
She went to the full-length mirror in her bedroom to be sure, and stared at herself and the dress against the front of her body. The dress wasn’t her size. It was nowhere near her size. She was five feet, six inches tall, and this was for a woman at least five or six inches shorter. It was for a woman with far smaller breasts than she had, and almost no hips—a woman who was petite. A size zero.
She looked inside the dress to see if the tailors had sewn in a tag with the size to be sure. They hadn’t. But it was clear that either accidentally they had not used her measurements from when they had fitted her for the cheongsam, or Austin had had this dress made for another woman.
And given what she had learned about the man since he had died, she was quite sure it was the latter.
* * *
. . .
Alexis guessed that she might have consumed a cup of peanut dipping sauce
while she and Austin had been in Vietnam, but no peanut butter. Now, back in America, she was craving it and bought a jar at a grocery store on the way to the hospital. She ate it with a plastic spoon as she climbed into her scrubs and ate some more when she was ready for work and had her stethoscope around her neck. Then she popped a Breath Saver so she didn’t greet her patients with Peter Pan breath. She knew she’d be back for more during the course of the next twelve hours.
She had another day shift—which really only meant about six hours during the day, since the shift began at noon. She almost never had two day shifts in a row, but she did now because she had swapped her Tuesday shift for a Wednesday earlier that week. Before going to work, she’d called Ken Sarafian and told him about the dress. He hadn’t expressed much surprise, though he did try to reassure her that it could have been an innocent mistake at the tailor’s: they’d given Austin the wrong dress or, as she had speculated, inadvertently used the wrong measurements. But she had the sense from his tone that he harbored similar suspicions. Then she had emailed the lead researcher at the university in Ho Chi Minh City who had conducted the rat study—this was the second time—because she still hadn’t heard back from him. If no one had emailed her by the time she finished her shift tonight, she might see if she could reach the scientist by phone. It would be nearly lunchtime by then in Vietnam.
Her mind, she feared, was a mess. A part of her was so indignant at the idea that Austin might have bought a dress for another woman that she wanted to just let him go: release his wrists at the edge of a cliff and let his memory drop from her life. But then there was the man she had known since March, who always treated her with tenderness and kindness and, yes, love. The man who, she was convinced, had been tortured before he was killed. Tortured before, perhaps, he was murdered.
And then there was the simple doggedness of who she was. How could she let this go—let him go—without knowing the truth?
She told herself that maybe tomorrow she would feel differently. Maybe. In the meantime? She would go to work and try her best to clear her head. To solve problems and make people feel better. Literally: make people feel better. In the end, when you boiled all that sap into syrup, wasn’t that what she did?
The first patient she saw was a sixty-five-year-old woman with lung cancer, which she thought was still in remission—at least the woman was telling herself it was still in remission—but she was coughing up blood, and Alexis knew she was going to order a CT scan, see it was bleak, and have her admitted. She was with her husband, who kept telling both Alexis and his wife that it was probably just pneumonia, and so Alexis smiled pleasantly at this charade and went along with it while they waited, but inside her heart was breaking just a little bit. Then she saw a heavyset guy who delivered Chinese takeout on a bike and had been hit by a cab. He seemed to have dodged broken arms or ribs or legs, but he had a gash on his right forearm that needed stitches and very likely a concussion. When she looked at the fellow’s cracked helmet, she was reminded of Austin’s, and wondered if she’d ever get on a bicycle again. Suddenly she hated bicycles, she hated everything about them. It was unreasonable, but she didn’t care. She didn’t even want to sit on a spin bike again.
* * *
. . .
On her break, she walked outside into the crisp autumn air, a fleece pullover the color of cherries with a high collar over her scrubs, and walked to the water, past the new buildings with their signs in the lobby for the pharmaceutical companies that had offices there and past the older ones that were still units of the hospital complex. It was all a little incestuous—there was even that glass walkway on the seventh floor linking the drug companies with the hospital—but she no longer cared. She got it. It was all part of the system, a symbiotic relationship of people and pills and drugs and machines.
When she got to the East River, she gazed at the docks and the flatlands across the water and at the cluster of skyscrapers a little to the north. She watched a plane descending beneath the clouds toward LaGuardia. Then she turned around and looked back at the wing of the building where Sally Gleason and Oscar Bolton worked, and where Austin had gone in the mornings. She didn’t know Oscar, and she didn’t know what to make of Sally. One minute, she seemed nurturing and kind; the next, she seemed to see all the horror and sadness in the world as a joke. Austin, however, had liked the woman well enough. He certainly hadn’t ever said anything negative about her. But that probably meant nothing now. Still, it just seemed so unbelievable that seven days ago he was alive and they were in Vietnam.
But, of course, she saw daily how quickly a person’s world could be upended and how a life of routine could unravel. She had seen it twice already today: there was the cancer patient who was hoping she was in remission but clearly was not. And then there had been a young mother who had been trying to wrangle her toddler son and his stroller down the stairs into the subway and fallen the last dozen steps. Her maternal instincts had kicked in and she had managed to protect her son, but she had broken an arm and broken a leg, and was going to be in the hospital at least overnight. Maybe a couple of days. She was a single mom without insurance and, it was evident, a support system that consisted mostly of her own mother. She worked at a noodle bar on Seventeenth Street, and Alexis worried that the woman’s fall was the start of one of those cataclysmic event cascades that would end in a homeless shelter.
And, of course, Alexis could point to her own father’s death. One morning he’d gone off to work, and he’d just never come home that night. He’d probably died in that ambulance before her mother had even gotten the call that his car had slid into a concrete bridge stanchion at easily—even after he attempted to brake—fifty-five or sixty miles an hour. But when she had been eating her cereal that day at the breakfast table before school and her father had been scarfing down an English muffin at the counter and her mother had been mainlining her coffee, it hadn’t crossed any of their minds that this was the last time they would all be together.
Before and after. That was the way of the world.
Years ago, in college, she’d spent a Saturday in the campus gym taking a self-defense course for women. There’d been six of them, all sophomores and juniors, and there were two instructors—also women. She’d never needed what she’d learned, and she hoped she never would. She wasn’t sure how much she could even remember. But the day came back to her now when she thought of how quickly a person’s world could change.
She wondered when—if—the Harpers would sit down again and watch whatever videos they had of their son as a little boy. As a teen. She knew she herself hadn’t looked at the videos that existed of her father in years. It was just too painful, even now, to make the effort to get the cassettes converted into a format they could watch. She imagined it was for her mother, too.
She rather doubted her mother would ever remarry. She hoped that was because her mother had loved her father so very much, but this was something Alexis understood that she would never, ever know.
* * *
. . .
Before heading back into the hospital and the ER, she paused before a sign taped to a lamppost on the sidewalk. It was a drawing of a rat and a rose, and underneath it was, arguably, one of the world’s worst limericks:
Roses are red,
Rats are gray.
They love to eat the litter buffet.
And if you don’t scoop,
They’ll feast on dog poop
And continue to multiply every day.
It had been posted by the city’s Department of Sanitation, and for a long moment she simply took in the utter awfulness of the poem and the utter awfulness of the image of a rat eating dog shit. Thank God, the artist had drawn a rose instead of…that.
As she started back inside and looked up at the building, something clicked. She knew that Columbia, much farther uptown, was studying New York City rats and the pathogens they carried,
and their increasing resistance to antibiotics. She thought now of the article abstract she had found in Austin’s apartment and realized that somewhere in the labs in the wing where her boyfriend used to work, it was possible that her university hospital was researching rats, too.
24
Ken Sarafian was methodical and patient. The weather was changing, slipping closer to Halloween and the real gunmetal-gray cold of autumn. He climbed into a wool peacoat that fell to his thighs, buttoned it up, and walked from Fifth Avenue to the East River on the north side of Thirteenth Street, stopping at every brownstone or building that was smaller than six stories. He went east of Avenue C to the FDR Drive. Then he walked all the way back on the south side of Thirteenth. There were three five-story buildings that seemed to have duplexes with rooftop terraces where a person might grow tomato plants, but none had a first name on the buzzer outside the front door that began with Douglas or D.
And so he started south on Broadway, planning to perform this same exercise when he reached Third Street. Sometimes his mind would wander to the dress that Alexis had described for him, but it only deepened his resolve: he didn’t like this Austin Harper, and he wanted to know what he’d really been up to. If his own daughter had ever dated a man like Harper? He rather doubted he would have retained much equanimity and kept his suspicions to himself. At the end, when she’d been dying, she hadn’t had a boyfriend. She’d had a few in her twenties and early thirties, but she’d broken up with a fellow just before her diagnosis. He’d never know if it would have made her death easier to bear if she’d had a boyfriend beside her as well those final months. But he felt a deep, numinous stitch within him as he recalled the deaths he had seen and the one that he’d never get over, and the sad truth that no matter how many or how few people are with you at the end, you really do die alone.
The Red Lotus Page 23
