The Red Lotus

by Chris Bohjalian

  And because that was a Saturday night, she’d also worked to save a young guy with a pair of bullet wounds in his stomach, and, two hours later, she and the trauma surgeon had been squeezing a cop’s heart who’d been shot as he approached a car that was blocking the entrance to a parking garage.

  God. Saturday night in the ER. It was where and when she had met Austin. Of course.

  Before setting aside her phone for the night and putting it in airplane mode so nothing would wake her—so she wouldn’t be drawn to its ever-beating heart if she awoke in the small hours of the morning—she checked one last time to see if there was any response from Sara Edens she had somehow managed to miss. But there wasn’t a word. No texts, no calls, no messages, no emails. It was odd. It was the damnedest thing, and she couldn’t help but feel (and then feed) her gift of fear. Hadn’t she seen this game before in Hoi An, a person suddenly seeming to ghost her before the awful truth becomes apparent?

  But then she reminded herself that the woman was an overworked and likely underpaid young scientist in a lab, striving mightily to do her work amidst the pressure and politics of a few dozen other young doctoral candidates.

  She noticed among her emails, most of which were spam and solicitations this time of the night, one from a name that surprised her. It was new. And it was, in its own weird way, an email version of the classic come-hither text, “U up?” The email was from Oscar Bolton. He had written to her using her hospital email, admitting that he had figured it out because most employees had email addresses that were simply the first and last names of the person, separated by a period. He introduced himself politely and wrote that he was awake and thinking of Austin and realizing that he needed to talk to someone, and the two of them shared a relationship with the man that few others at the hospital probably did.

  She sat up in bed, her back against the headboard, and wrote back, asking him if he meant now. Then she waited. She deleted emails: the nighttime solicitations to buy ankle holsters and lingerie and printer ink, to buy products that magically melted belly fat. And then he responded. He said he was just sad and the middle of the night was hard for him, but maybe they could have brunch tomorrow, or a late breakfast. He suggested a place that had, in his opinion, crazy delicious French toast that wasn’t far from the hospital.

  She said yes and they confirmed a time. Nine thirty. A thought came to her and she asked him one last question: had he heard anything about a funeral yet? She hadn’t discussed one with the Harpers when they had been at the hospital. He wrote back that he hadn’t, and they said good night.

  Then she did something she wished she had done sooner: she wrote an email to Austin’s father apologizing for how their meeting had unraveled at the hospital and how she wished she could go back in time and try again. She asked him when they were planning to bury Austin, and what she could do. She would participate in the funeral as much or as little as they wanted. She considered telling him how moved her son had been as they stood at the edge of the city of the dead outside An Bang and what he had said: I wouldn’t mind a dragon watching over my soul. I could probably use one. But she didn’t. She was afraid it would sound intrusive, as if she were hinting at something his son might actually have wanted—and, looking back, she knew now what he really had meant. I’m playing with fire, Alexis, and the afterlife might not be pretty.

  Next, she sent a text to Ken Sarafian with the news that she was having brunch with Oscar Bolton. She worried on some level that she might wake him if he still had his phone on, but she was anxious on a far deeper level that if she did wake him, he would try and talk her out of it. She didn’t believe the hospital executive was any more dangerous than Austin had been, but Sarafian had made clear his feelings about Douglas Webber, her dart-playing neighbor: the man was capable of anything, the detective had said, and that included killing her boyfriend.

  SATURDAY

  30

  It was the weekend and Quang was at home, and so he carried his cell phone outside when he saw it was Vu, the officer who’d been with him that first morning they’d gone to the hotel in Hoi An, who was calling. Quang didn’t want his wife or his daughter to hear even his half of the conversation. He’d felt bad enough that he’d Skyped from the kitchen an hour ago with the American detective and called Immigration about an American named Douglas Webber. Yes, his wife would ask him about his conversation in the backyard when he went back into the house. But he would be evasive, and they had been married long enough that she would know not to press.

  “Your instincts were right,” Vu began.

  “Go ahead.”

  “That food chemist. The woman. She’d received multiple phone calls from Austin Harper, some from America on WhatsApp and some on FaceTime, and a local call on the day that Harper died.”

  “So Harper was pretty likely planning to meet with her.”

  “Or, for all we know, did meet with her. With them—the three of them at that lab. For all we know, he killed them.”

  Quang watched a nuthatch, its eyes as yellow as its beak, on a branch of one of the rubber trees they’d planted in their backyard. “We’ll know soon enough, but I doubt it.”

  “You doubt he killed them?”

  “Oh, I’d bet my house he didn’t kill them. Where would he even have gotten that kind of weaponry? Besides, an American detective just told me he’d bought the woman a dress—the one that was in that bike bag.”

  “It wasn’t for the American doctor?”

  “Apparently not. No, I don’t think Harper ever even got to the lab.”

  “But this wasn’t gang-related if it involves the American,” said Vu.

  “I agree. The two guys? Either they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time or they were there as muscle. Or, just maybe, they were rat wranglers. Rat catchers. One’s connected to a restaurant and one to an exterminator. I think Harper was bringing Pham—that chemist—the gels. She was going to reproduce the pathogen in the packets and sell it to North Korea.”

  “That’s…”

  “It’s a theory, that’s all.”

  “I was going to say, that’s despicable. Who sells a biological weapon to North Korea?”

  “Who sells arms to a lot of countries? Not exactly the work you brag about. You do it to fill your bank accounts in places like Switzerland or the Cayman Islands. You don’t do it to make the world a better place.”

  “I know. But that ER doctor? She seemed really sweet—not the type to be dating an arms dealer.”

  “Maybe she is really sweet. And a really bad judge of character.”

  “Do you think she’s involved?”

  “Not for a second. She gave us the gels, remember.”

  “That’s right,” Vu said. Then he asked, “Are you coming in to the office today?”

  “I am, yes. I’ll see you in an hour or so,” Quang told him, and then he hung up and called Toril Bjornstad in Phnom Penh, but he didn’t reach her and left a message. The last he’d heard, North Korea still wasn’t talking, but he’d been reassured that his own country’s diplomats were meeting with North Korea embassy staff to learn why the food chemist had been there. No one liked the idea of her and a rogue American selling biological weapons to a rogue nation.

  He went back inside to shave, smiling at his wife as he passed her. There was something he was missing, and it was gnawing at him. No, that wasn’t quite it. It was something he hadn’t done and he should do—something no one had done and someone had to do. He hoped it would come to him soon.

  * * *

  . . .

  The clouds were low and heavy but it wasn’t raining, and Quang glanced at the world clock on his phone as he returned to his office, a cup of coffee from a little tourist place in his hand. New York City was a half day behind him. Behind them. It was the small hours of the morning there. It was just after noon here. He paused to watch a group of middl
e school–aged girls in traditional costumes practicing with their gongs in the park across the street. He saw a series of motorcycles and scooters pass a lumbering public bus, and noted how one of the riders was wearing a mask around his nose and mouth. It was just another Saturday, and the rider with the mask had no idea that investigators with the Ministry of Health had fanned out all across the country and spent the last two days looking for some new strain of plague, while he was weaving through the light, early-afternoon traffic.

  The wind was picking up, and the low-slung telephone wire overhead moved like a taut jump rope held by two girls. He thought of his daughter when she’d been younger.

  Quang didn’t see irony in an American bringing poison into his country, he saw only history. He had grown up with the stories of what both the French and then the Americans had done, and seen the damage wrought by the bombing and the napalm and the herbicides. By Agent Orange. He always had classmates with birth defects. And the American was now dead, and so were five Vietnamese, counting the three who’d been executed, the CSCD lab technician, and the cabbie. He noted the numbers. Wasn’t that always the way? So very many more Vietnamese had to die for every Westerner.

  Austin Harper’s family hadn’t wanted his remains cremated, and by now the body was back in America and no one had gotten sick because of it. He would have heard, he presumed, from Toril at the American embassy in Cambodia—or, perhaps, from a duty officer right here in Vietnam. When he and Toril spoke yesterday, she was taking comfort—just like the Ministry of Health—in the fact that none of the men who had recovered the body from the ravine by the switchback and none of the people who had been with it in the morgue, including the coroner, and none of the people who had brought the corpse to the airport in Da Nang had become ill. Quang himself, of course, was fine.

  And Harper hadn’t died of the plague. That was clear. So, whatever it was, Toril had reminded him, it was only in the energy gel—until they had cut the packet open.

  He knew there were two other gels that hadn’t been opened yet. They were now stored in a biohazard locker. He also hadn’t heard yet whether the company had recalled any of the product, and he made a mental note to check his computer when he got to work to see if there was anything in the news.

  * * *

  . . .

  He read the email from Immigration carefully and then cut and pasted the critical information into an email he wrote to Ken Sarafian: Douglas Webber had arrived in Vietnam the Wednesday before Austin Harper died and left the country Saturday night—roughly thirty-six hours after Austin’s body had been found. The guy, according to the American detective, had a relationship with the deceased that went back at least seven months, but likely much longer. On his immigration form, Webber had listed as his temporary residence a nice hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. Before sending the email, however, Quang rang the hotel and asked if Webber had been there on those nights. He hadn’t. He had made a reservation, but canceled upon his arrival in Vietnam. And so, it seemed, he’d used the hotel to clear customs, and then gone elsewhere—probably right here to Da Nang or Hoi An. Quang added that information to the email to Ken, and then pressed Send. It would be waiting for the detective when he woke up.

  When he sat back in his chair, it hit him—what had been nagging at him since Vu had phoned about two hours ago. He should have the FBI reach out to the American ER doctor who had been traveling on the bike tour with Harper. Alexis Remnick. Harper might have had more of those energy gels with him in Vietnam. And if she’d brought some of them home with her and ever ate one? She was likely a dead woman.

  And if she opened it in a crowded space in New York City? She’d be far from alone.

  Look, my justifications are irrelevant. I know that. I get it.

  But Thomas Malthus understood the problem well before anyone: “The power of population is infinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for men.”

  It’s a fact that our species is destroying the planet, and the more of us there are, the faster the deterioration. The faster the climate change.

  Did I actually want a nation ever to use the pathogen as a weapon? Of course not.

  But, yes, I did tell myself that if one ever did, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. It might, in a twisted sort of way, in fact save it.

  31

  Alexis rarely walked the streets of New York with her earbuds in, but she did this morning, wanting to lose herself in a little music as she prepared for brunch with Oscar Bolton. The buds didn’t drown out the incessant traffic—the frustrated cabdrivers as they honked, the beeping of the delivery trucks as they lumbered backwards into parking spaces, the bass of the young kids (usually male) who were blasting their car stereos, just asking for a noise-induced hearing loss as they drove—but every song came with a memory, and the memories tended to calm her. Music impacted first the subcortical structures, such as the cochlear nuclei and the brain stem, and then literally (and metaphorically) shimmied up the auditory cortices of a person’s gray matter. When it reached the hippocampus and the frontal lobe, it triggered flashbacks and reminiscences. This morning, it made the crowds and the cars but background buzz for the parade of ghosts—most good—that came with each song. Here she was once more curled up on the living room couch with Zelda, her naughty tortie of a cat, when she was twelve, and a heat wave had broken and thunderclouds were rolling in. Eating a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich at the top of New Hampshire’s Mount Lafayette one afternoon when she and two friends from college had hiked to the summit on a summer Sunday in August. The small, dark bedroom in her tiny off-campus apartment when she was twenty-one—not quite twenty-two—and read the email that she had gotten into medical school.

  It was about a block from the restaurant that she made the mistake of checking the New York Post on her phone. She just wanted to see what the headlines were, because in the time it took to walk about twenty-five or thirty steps on the sidewalk she could see the latest celebrity gossip, as well as the latest appalling misbehavior of the city’s social elite. In addition, here were the stories of the schoolteachers who had sex with their students and the guys who brawled in bars and the women who went claw to claw in nail salon catfights. Here were the cops who were corrupt and the pols who were sexting pics of their junk. But this morning was a mistake because the story she saw was this: a photo of rats devouring the carcass of a long-haired honey-and-white cat, and she saw it moments after thinking of Zelda, her own childhood kitty. The image had been taken in an alley beside an apartment in the Bronx, and the point of the story wasn’t that the cat had been killed by the very same rats that its owner had presumed it would make short work of; rather, it was that the city had just announced a thirty-six-million-dollar effort to exterminate rodents at a dozen of the city’s most infested apartment complexes. She stopped walking and stood perfectly still as she read the story, oblivious now to the song in her earbuds, the world around her fading. She felt a wave of dizziness.

  Goddamn rats, she thought.

  Then: just breathe. But, still, the incipient and smoldering unease of the last week now blossomed into a scorching and incandescent bonfire. She had been vacillating for days now between the focus of a physician in a life-threatening emergency and the despair of a woman or man newly widowed.

  Goddamn, fucking rats, she thought.

  She pulled out her earbuds and wrapped them around her phone and shoved it into her bag. She told herself that she was being unreasonable. It was a horrible image, but animals gnawed the flesh from other animals all the time. How many times in her life had she seen turkey vultures on the road picking the meat off a squirrel or skunk that had been hit by a car? How many times had crows scattered from the pavement as the car she was driving neared the roadkill they were eating off the middle of the road?

  She didn’t witness death every day in the ER; far from it. But she saw it a lot. She saw it often enough
. In some ways, she had been forged as a child in the hot fire of her own father’s death, all her strengths and all her weakness.

  Still, you couldn’t unsee the picture of rats eating a cat. And now she found herself leaning against the brick facade between the open-air entrance to a bodega—there were the banded bouquets of flowers in their plastic pots of water and the carts with their paper bags of autumn apples from upstate New York and Vermont—and the thin door with the clean glass windows that led to apartments above it. She guessed that she was probably standing above or beside a rat’s nest. They were beneath the feet of her sneakers, nesting, scurrying, eating.

  Thirty-six million dollars for a dozen apartment complexes. How many hundreds of millions of dollars would it take to eliminate rats from the city? From all five boroughs? There wasn’t enough money in the budget. There wasn’t enough money in the world.

  Rats hadn’t killed her boyfriend; at least not directly. But he hadn’t been killed in an accidental hit and run. That was absolutely clear to her. It was an execution meant to look like an accident and Douglas Webber had killed him, and he’d killed him because of something they were doing with rats. Maybe something Austin had found out. Maybe something Austin was doing. She was sure of that, and Ken Sarafian was sure of that. When you examined his death dispassionately, pure pattern recognition, it was obvious. Any moment now she’d probably get a call from the detective saying that Webber had been in Vietnam when she and Austin had been there. A travel writer? That was horseshit.