The Red Lotus

by Chris Bohjalian

  Fortunately, Sinclair paused when he heard Ken’s voice. Came to a complete stop. And that’s when it dawned on him that the guy had absolutely no idea whether he was right- or left-handed, or even who was following him: all he knew was that a guy with a gun had told him to stop. Ken raised the pistol, planting his feet. He was about to tell Sinclair not to move, to put down the animal carrier and stay where he was, when the scientist abruptly took off again. Started to run. And so Ken fired. He dropped him on the third shot, the others banging off the corridor walls. The animal carrier bounced onto the floor beside him. Ken had hit him in the lower back, on the right side. He might live, the PI thought. This was a hospital, after all. It wasn’t where he was aiming, but it had done the trick.

  When he reached the scientist, he saw that the animal carrier was sealed. The rats were still inside it.

  “I’d read you your rights,” he said, standing over him, “but I’m not a cop anymore.”

  “Get away from me,” Sinclair said softly, his brow furrowed against the pain. “Get away from me.”

  “Happy to,” Ken told him, but he didn’t holster his gun when he backed off. He looked down at the pistol, the barrel a little longer than the model that Webber had said he preferred. But that longer barrel, and the accuracy it offered, had sure as hell been an asset just now. With the toe of his shoe, he pushed the animal carrier a half dozen feet away from the scientist. He didn’t want him to rally and roll over, and release the little bastards. Then he texted Alexis where he and Sinclair and the animal carrier were and called 911. He was on the line with the dispatcher, telling her that the rats on the floor near him might have the plague, when somewhere in the distance he heard sirens, and they were growing louder and louder as they cut through the crisp autumn air.

  He sighed. He couldn’t stand up another second, and so he sank against the wall and looked at the scientist. Clearly the guy was in serious pain, but when their eyes met, he said, “I told you, don’t come near me. Stay where you are.”

  Ken considered replying that he was in no position to demand anything, but the PI really didn’t care. Sinclair was down, and he was far from his bloody rats.

  He looked at his right forearm. It was a mess. It was still trickling blood.

  But the damnedest thing? He had a feeling that the sores that were growing with the speed of dandelions in May on his left were a far bigger problem. He coughed and shook his head. This wasn’t the flu and this wasn’t shock. He could kid himself and tell himself that it was one or the other or both. But this was bad. This—this—was why Sinclair kept telling him to keep his distance. He understood now. He got it.

  Ken never wanted to worry Taleen, but for the first time since he’d fallen in love with her, he had an urgent sense that he probably did need to worry her—even after all those years as a cop—because more than anything he wanted to thank her for being her and, yes, to say farewell. And so he balanced his phone on his thigh, put it on speakerphone, and called her.

  She sounded great when she said hello.

  He took a deep breath. He decided that he should, too.

  SUNDAY

  37

  Dina Remnick flipped past the photo in the tabloid, her principal thought that the pop star’s new tattoo looked nothing at all like the actor she was marrying. But even if it had been a better likeness, wasn’t it always a bad idea to tattoo your fiancé’s face onto your biceps?

  Until a few minutes ago, Dina had been standing outside the quarantined section of the ICU at the hospital, but even a mother could only stare at her daughter through the sealed glass window of a quarantine cubicle for so long. Alexis was in a medically induced coma, her beautiful face hidden mostly by the mask of a respirator, her arms and neck—stippled with sores—above the white sheet that was draped over the rest of her body.

  Now Dina was alone in the waiting room on the other side of the nurses’ station, reading the newspaper someone had left on a chrome and glass side table. She read the gossip stories on Page Six, because she was distracted and really couldn’t focus on much else. There was a television in the room, but she silenced it because she couldn’t bear to hear the Sunday-morning talking heads bicker. Finally, she put the paper down and scrolled aimlessly through the contacts on her phone, trying to make sure she hadn’t forgotten to call someone to tell them what was occurring—what had happened to Alexis. She looked again at the business cards from the two FBI agents. She guessed they had both been roughly Alexis’s age. Early to midthirties. It reminded her how young the world was. One was female, the taller of the pair, and one was male.

  It seemed that her daughter had gotten a strain of plague from something called an energy gel. The only reason why they were cautiously optimistic that she was going to live was because most of the pathogen in the gel was dying or dead. The bacteria could live for days without oxygen, but not forever. And so, as sick as she was, this was actually a mild case by the standards of this disease. They expected to pull her from the medically induced coma within days. Tuesday, if all went well. Maybe Wednesday or Thursday, to be safe. In the meantime, her system was getting an IV drip of something called vancomycin 3.0, as they tried—to quote the attending physician—to nuke the infection.

  But the doctor had told her that every moment had mattered, and if Alexis hadn’t called her and she—Dina—hadn’t been so ferociously demanding and gotten her daughter off the floor with the labs and into the ICU so fast, Alexis would very likely be dead now.

  Somewhere in the hospital, she didn’t know where, was Dr. Wilbur Sinclair. He was under arrest and being treated for a bullet wound in his lower back. He was going to live.

  But the fellow who’d shot him? The detective Alexis had retained? He’d died yesterday on the phone with his wife. He’d gotten the plague from her daughter, and he hadn’t made it. The physicians had suggested it was because he was older. A little more frail. Also? He’d been shot by the arms dealer, that Douglas Webber, and he’d lost some blood, which had weakened him further. He was, they had told her, a retired cop and Vietnam War veteran, but he was going to be remembered now for what he had done to stop a pandemic.

  What he and her daughter and some Vietnamese police captain had done to stop a pandemic.

  She looked up when she saw a slim woman a little older than her in the doorway. She was dressed in a lime-green skirt and a white blouse, a blazer draped over her arm, but otherwise looked about as tired and unkempt as Dina knew she herself did. She had shoulder-length hair that was silver and black, and dark eyes. Dina was about to return to the newspaper when the woman spoke to her.

  “They said I might find you here. You’re Alexis Remnick’s mom?”

  “I am,” she said cautiously. Was this woman a reporter? Or did she work for some government agency? Dina thought she was done with both for the moment. “Dina Remnick.”

  “My name is Taleen Sarafian,” the woman told her, and Dina nodded. The PI’s wife. She braced herself and considered standing for the castigation and vitriol that loomed. She could give as good as she got, however, and was prepared to defend her daughter. Alexis had nearly died herself. Yes, Dina was sorry that Alexis had given this woman’s husband the disease that killed him, but she hadn’t known that she had it. Dina felt bad for this widow, but how dare she come here and attack her daughter? Grief could morph into anger; Dina knew that as well as anyone. But to come here to a waiting room while Alexis was in a coma in the ICU? That was beastly, and Dina wouldn’t stand for it.

  “I wanted to see you,” Taleen continued.

  And with that, Dina did rise. “Look—” she began, but Taleen cut her off.

  “Sit,” she said. “I’ll take this chair.”

  “No. I can stand. I’m sorry about your husband. I lost my husband years ago, but—”

  “I know,” Taleen continued, and she rested her hand so gently on Dina’s arm that she was able
to restrain her natural inclination to recoil. “I know. I heard. They told me.”

  Warily Dina sat, and the other woman sank into the chair beside her. “I hear she’s going to make it. Thank God,” Taleen said.

  “She’s not out of the woods yet. But the prognosis is…okay,” Dina told her. “Maybe even good. But a lot can happen, and I don’t want to jinx it.”

  “No, of course not.”

  For a moment neither woman said anything, and Dina understood that Taleen hadn’t come here to attack her. And so she broke the silence and said, “You must be devastated about your husband. I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too. He was”—and her voice broke ever so slightly—“one of the good ones. One of the real good ones. We had almost a half century together. Not quite. But almost.” She reached into the pocket of the blazer in her lap for a tissue and blew her nose. “It’s been a bad year.”

  Dina nodded. “You have children?” she asked. She supposed the woman did.

  “Two. Terrific boys. Men. We had three.”

  Dina took this in. “When did you lose one?” She hated herself for using the word lose—it felt weak, as if they were discussing a cell phone or a wallet she’d forgotten somewhere—and almost clarified herself. But already Taleen was taking something from her purse: a small envelope.

  “This year.”

  “This year?” Dina was incredulous at the horror of it: this poor woman had lost a child and her husband within months of each other.

  “Yes. Kathleen. Cancer. She died in the spring. She was roughly your daughter’s age.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “I know,” Taleen agreed, and she was opening the envelope. But it wasn’t a card or a letter or a note that was inside it. It was a pair of round silver earrings with a circular design that looked runic and medieval. “I know Ken liked your daughter. He thought she was smart and kind, and he wanted to do right by her.”

  “He did,” Dina said.

  Taleen took her hand and Dina let her. Then she watched as the woman put the earrings into her palm. “These were Kathleen’s. I thought someday I’d give them to a daughter-in-law or a granddaughter. But who knows if I’ll ever have either. My sons aren’t showing a lot of interest in domesticity at the moment.” She rolled her eyes. “But they’re pretty spectacular. They’re both downstairs right now. They wanted to come with me, but I told them I wanted to do this alone.”

  “This…”

  “When I heard that Alexis was going to make it—or might make it, as you said, let’s not jinx it—I thought she might like these. The earrings. When they wake her up.”

  Dina found her own eyes welling and fought it. She’d so badly mistaken why this woman was here. “They’re beautiful,” she said, surprised by how quiet her voice had become. “What does it mean? The symbol? Do you know?”

  “Eternity,” the woman answered. “It’s an Armenian symbol for eternity.”

  Dina took this in. She asked when her husband’s funeral was going to be, and Taleen said she hadn’t finalized the date. She would get to that later that day or tomorrow.

  “If Alexis is…” she started to tell Taleen, but Taleen smiled wanly and shook her head.

  “It will probably be Wednesday. Maybe Thursday. You and the doctors shouldn’t feel any pressure to somehow get Alexis there. Don’t even think about that.”

  “Okay.”

  Then they both grew silent, and in the awkwardness looked up at the television. There again were pictures of Alexis and Ken, and then the four hospital employees who were under arrest. That woman who ran advancement and one of her associates; the young lab researcher; and the scientist with the bullet wound. So far, at least four people at the hospital were involved, in addition to the man who’d been her daughter’s boyfriend. But there were going to be others, that was clear. More arrests were expected.

  And then there was that travel writer. Or the guy who had pretended to be one. The guy who’d likely killed Austin in Vietnam—or had him killed.

  Dina felt a confusing mix of maternal pride and relief that her exquisite and driven ER doctor was alive, and despair that the husband of the woman beside her was dead. Taleen reached for the TV remote and clicked on the volume just as they were cutting to photos of Douglas Webber and her daughter’s boyfriend, and then a lovely image of some mountain road in Vietnam linking Hue and Hoi An. The media was celebrating Alexis and the PI and a cop in Da Nang for their sheer persistence. Their doggedness. The FBI wasn’t precisely sure yet how far along the plague project was, and no one had been able to piece together precisely what had occurred on the lab floor yesterday afternoon because Alexis was too weak to talk when they reached her and Sarafian had passed away moments later. But this morning, at least, the news cycle was enamored of the PI and the physician.

  When the TV station cut to a commercial, Taleen murmured, “The red lotus.”

  “I know.”

  “Imagine naming a plague after that beautiful flower.”

  “It’s just a name,” Dina said.

  “A lotus sinks at night. The flower. It curls up under water. Then it rises again at dawn.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  Taleen nodded. “Rather like a resurrection. Or, if you will, the resurrection.”

  “I’m not especially religious.”

  “I wasn’t until Kathleen died. Then I took a lot of comfort in that idea. Your girl…”

  “Go on.”

  “She’s the real lotus in this nightmare. I know it. She’ll rise. She’ll bloom again.”

  Then she stood to leave, and so Dina rose, too. “Thank you,” Dina said. She motioned at the earrings. “I know Alexis will love these.”

  Taleen wrapped Dina in her arms, and Dina—uncomfortably at first, but then succumbing gratefully to this kindness—held the other woman in return, her chin nestling in Taleen’s neck, and lost herself in the citrus scent of Taleen’s shampoo.

  When she was gone, the news was back, and a reporter was saying something more about Austin Harper. Dina turned the set off instead of merely muting the sound. She wondered if someday, when Alexis was better, she should ask her daughter what she was thinking, dating a guy like Harper. How had she misjudged him so badly?

  No. Dina shook her head, even though she was alone in the waiting room. She gazed down at the earrings and thought with wonder at the idea of eternity. Maybe this time—this one time—she could let something go.

  I get it, I checked the criminal code. It’s ten years versus life imprisonment. Mere possession versus attempting to sell the shit to another country. And then there is the matter of quantity. We didn’t have a lot.

  Look, I’m a big talker, I can tell them lots. Can we cut a deal that way?

  I don’t expect we can ever completely rehabilitate my name, but “Sally Gleason” also doesn’t have to go down in history like, I don’t know, “Benedict Arnold” or “Julius Rosenberg.”

  Besides, Austin never made it to the lab in Da Nang. He never turned over the pathogen. So, we dodged a bullet, didn’t we? That has to count for something, right? Right?

  EPILOGUE

  The young woman had arrived in Hoi An from Dien Quan, a hamlet in the northwest. The province of Lao Cai. She was from a poor family in a poor village in a poor region of the country.

  But through a combination of pluck and luck, she had made it first to Hanoi and then Hue and, now, Hoi An. An American-based NGO had supported many children in the small school, including her, and her individual American sponsor had done far more than simply have forty dollars automatically billed against his credit card every month. He’d been writing the child since she was ten, and had visited the village with his wife and two sons when he’d brought his family to Vietnam one year. She was sixteen then.

  Now she was a housekeeper at the beautiful boutique hotel with
the infinity pool and the small ponds where lotuses bloomed in June and July. Among the myriad things that the day manager knew about her was that she was diligent and resourceful, and that she had a younger brother who was equally driven. She was helping to support him and had brought him south, too. He was a bellman at another, bigger hotel on the ocean in Hoi An. And so when the American emergency room doctor was leaving that Sunday and told the day manager that he could have most of Austin Harper’s possessions—she didn’t even bring the suitcase with her—he gave them to the housekeeper to give to her brother. Maybe he’d have some use for them.

  The housekeeper saw her brother that evening and handed him the suitcase.

  He kept some of the clothing, even though it was too big for him, as well as the suitcase itself. The toiletries he tossed into the hotel dumpster behind one of the hotel’s three restaurants. The energy gel, which he thought was candy, he gave to a homeless boy who was living that week in an alley behind a tailor shop in Hoi An.

  The boy was dead by lunchtime the next day.

  His body was found that afternoon by two American tourists, a pair of teenage girls, who were following a stray cat they thought was particularly adorable down the alley while their father was fitted for a suit. They nearly fainted when they discovered the corpse curled up behind piles of trash and eaten by rats. The rats were Vietnamese, of course, and didn’t give a damn about the pathogen. And so the hold that an ER doctor and a Manhattan hospital had on the news didn’t last long, because an American family landed in Washington, D.C., and all of them—as well as the passengers around them and two of the flight attendants—were near death.