The Red Lotus Read online

  There were all those blue babies and cold babies and beaten babies…

  Sometimes, the ER was a museum of the monstrous and the macabre. There were the failed suicides, there were the kids too young to drive. There were the incontinent elderly who were unaware where they were, and the mentally ill from the streets whose coughs, you knew, were harbingers of very bad news for them.

  And yet there were other times when it was oddly cerebral. It wasn’t all nail guns and rebar spikes, or restarting the hearts of teenage girls shot playing field hockey. It was abdominal pains and headaches and dizziness. It was vomiting and diarrhea, peculiar skin lesions and inexplicable welts. It was pattern recognition in the quiet of a cubicle, as you asked questions about symptoms and history, where the patient had just been and what sorts of illnesses and surgeries were in the past. Sometimes she created a whiteboard in her mind, the symptoms written in black marker and their connections in blue. You worked backwards, moving intellectually from effect to cause. She’d been in one ER or another since her first year as a resident, and that was seven years ago now. Her match as her fourth year neared its end had been a hospital in Houston, where she had lived and learned—worked—until she had finished her residency at twenty-nine. For the last four years, she’d been in Manhattan. Kip’s Bay. And though she was thirty-three now, she was still learning. The shifts when she’d see something unrecognizable—a pattern she’d never encountered before—were less frequent, but still she saw new things all the time. When she’d had an ER rotation during her third year of medical school, a physician had told her that Arthur Conan Doyle had been a doctor. She wasn’t surprised. So much of what they did back then was detective work based largely on deductive reasoning.

  “We’ll trace the roads he should be on first,” Giang was saying. Scott motioned for her to take the front passenger seat, but she shook her head and climbed into the second row, allowing him to sit there. Altogether, the van had four rows. “You were on some of them just a few hours ago,” Giang continued.

  “Yup,” she said. “That magnificent city of the dead. The rice paddies and that astonishing family temple. Gorgeous. I saw an egret there.”

  “Did you? Lucky you.”

  “It did feel lucky,” she agreed as the three of them started down the driveway. She took solace in the fact that the two men seemed so very calm. Still, she was an addict when she thought consolation was at hand and so she pressed her luck: “I’ll bet you have to send out the van in search of stragglers who’ve disappeared pretty often. I know this is the first time on this tour. But it happens all the time, right?”

  The two men glanced at each other. Then Scott shrugged. “Absolutely,” he told her, “all the time.” She knew instantly that he was lying, but she nodded her head and smiled.

  As Giang pulled onto the road, he had to swerve into the other lane to avoid a half dozen scooters whipping past them, one with a dead pig strapped to the back. “I love the sound of those little motors,” Scott said, but the Vietnamese guide looked at him like he’d lost his mind.

  “They sound like giant mosquitoes,” he said. Then he turned around and asked her, “Good ride today?”

  “It was. I wish there’d been a breeze. Even a headwind. It was hotter than I expected. The forecast said seventies, but it felt a lot steamier.”

  “Then your Austin, who’s very smart, is going to be sipping coconut water or a Tiger beer when we find him. He’ll be at a café or resting for a moment at the summit with a chilled bottle of water.”

  “I can see that,” she agreed. She smiled at the idea and sat forward in her seat, her hands on the backs of the headrests ahead of her, scanning the road before them. Their plan was simply to drive north through Da Nang and then up and over the Hai Van Pass toward Hue. Giang knew the dirt road on the north side of the mountain where Austin was going to detour briefly off Highway One. This time of the day, they expected to find him either racing down the southern side of the mountain or churning his way methodically up the northern side. Or, perhaps, they really might find him resting somewhere along the flats on either side. Or, indeed, at one of the snack shacks.

  Soon they were climbing up toward the summit and the concrete bunkers the French and Americans had built to control the pass and protect the seacoast to the east from the Viet Cong. In her angst, Alexis was struck by the steep, curving gradient that could send a cyclist—even one as accomplished as Austin—careening into a tree or over the side of the hill. Or, at the very least, give a person a pretty gruesome case of road rash if he fell. Or a broken bone or two. And she knew that Austin missed his bike in America. He had paid extra for the best road bike the tour group could provide, but it still wasn’t the—his words, not hers—crotch rocket he was accustomed to.

  She stared at the map. His uncle had spent most of his time in country between Hoi An and Hue, though he had arrived after the Tet Offensive in 1968 had destroyed so much of Hue and the ancient citadel there. His father had been wounded in roughly the same area, his platoon ambushed in the rice paddies that back then were west of the American playground known as China Beach. He’d been taken to a hospital on the coast near Tuy Hoa. His uncle had been a little farther north when he’d died, but still on the seventy-mile trek that Austin was making today. He’d tripped a Bouncing Betty, a landmine that was thrown upward a couple of feet before detonating, and been—quite literally—decapitated. Austin said he had done his homework and knew more or less where his father’s platoon had been when he’d taken machine-gun fire in his thigh and his hip, and where in this area his uncle had been killed.

  She looked out at the rice paddies and then the mountains in the distance, a landscape as enigmatic as it was vast, and tried to convince herself once more that she was worried for naught. They all were. This would be fine. She rested one of her hands on the inside of her thigh, and through her blue jeans reflexively ran her fingers along one of the scars that was there.

  * * *

  . . .

  Quickly they were beyond the roads and sites that Alexis had seen the past two days in the van or on her bike, and there had been absolutely no sign of Austin. Nor was there any sign of him on their way to the mountain peak. There was a stretch of switchbacks along a cliff, the S a giant snake, and they stopped twice to peer over the side, calling down into the boulders and the brush, but the world looked undisturbed as far as the sea. When she wasn’t studying the side of the road, she was checking and rechecking her phone, but the message square on her home screen remained disappointingly empty.

  At the top of the hill there was still a crush of tour buses and entrepreneurs with their cut-open coconuts with straws, and their bottles of water and cans of beer. There were still dozens of tourists milling about the ancient brick tower from the Nguyen dynasty and the military bunker from the last century. There they stopped and found a German couple who spoke English.

  Alexis showed them a series of pictures of Austin on her phone, but they hadn’t seen him. There was an old man at the tower who served as an informal docent, and she gave him a hundred thousand Vietnamese dong—not quite five dollars—and showed him photos of Austin, too, and Giang asked him a variety of questions in Vietnamese. Over and over again, the old man shook his head.

  “He saw a group of bicyclists about two hours ago,” Giang told her. “But they were all together and all part of the same tour. He doesn’t believe your Austin was among them.”

  “How can he be so sure?” she asked.

  “Because they were all women.”

  She took this in and closed her eyes for a moment, gathering herself amidst the sounds of the jibbering insects and the chattering birds, of the growling tour bus engines as they tried to back through the crowds and onto the road.

  And so they drove down the other side, the northern slope, and at Alexis’s insistence stopped at some of the bridges on the hairpin curves and peered over th
e sides there, too. But still there was no sign of him.

  When they arrived at the bottom of the pass on the Hue side, they pulled over beside a snack shack with two rickety outdoor tables at the edge of a small outdoor market, and Alexis looked around, frustrated. She peered inside the restaurant, but she didn’t see anyone but a pair of elderly fishermen. She went to them and opened her phone, showing them the photo of Austin on the home screen, but they shook their heads. Outside, in the back, she saw a young boy in a chair, tossing scraps of food from a red garbage pail to a couple of dogs. She showed him the photo, too, but got the same response.

  “I wouldn’t know how to begin to search for him here,” she murmured when she returned to the two men, aware for the first time of how desperate her tone sounded. Soon they would lose the daylight. Then what?

  Scott ran his fingers through his hair, nodded, and then looked at Giang. “She’s right, you know,” he said.

  “Okay, let’s not stop here. Let’s try that dirt road,” he said.

  And so they did, and the red dirt was packed down hard and solid, despite yesterday’s storm. There was no sign of him and there were no bike tracks in the ground.

  A half hour later they were back on the other side of the mountain, the pass behind them, and on another of those long, flat stretches of road bordered on one side by elephant grass and by swamp on the other. And it was there, as Alexis stared straight ahead, that she saw some garbage on the road that usually she would have ignored, but didn’t this time because it was so very yellow. You couldn’t miss it; it was like a flare. She didn’t want to get her hopes up, but she did, and she demanded they stop.

  Scott followed her from the van, and Giang sat behind the steering wheel, waiting and watching.

  The garbage was, just as she had suspected, packets of Psych energy gel, one that was lemon flavored—the yellow she’d seen like a flare—and a pair that were chocolate. They were about four inches long, reminiscent of the ketchup packets that were ubiquitous at ballparks and fast-food restaurants, but filled instead with a cake icing of amino acids, sodium, and caffeine, flavored to taste like chocolate or lemon or caramel. There were easily a dozen flavors. Austin just had his preferences. He liked chocolate; she hated it. Sometimes she’d eat the lemon flavor, but usually under duress. Out of desperation. You ripped off the top and squeezed the tablespoon or so of stuff in the package into your mouth, and five minutes later you were revived and ready to pedal. Or run. Or climb. Or whatever. The lemon label was the same ridiculous canary color as the van, she had joked with Austin their first day on bikes in Vietnam. He’d brought two dozen packets of the gel with him on the trip—maybe more—mostly lemon, but a couple of chocolates. Athletes, even weekend warriors, liked them because they were lightweight and small, and you could throw three or four into your pocket.

  “He was here,” she told Scott, lifting the packets off the asphalt.

  The guide took the lemon one from her and examined it. “It’s unopened.”

  “It must have fallen out. Maybe when he stopped for a breather,” she said.

  “Are those unopened, too?” he asked.

  “They are. So, he didn’t stop here to consume one,” she replied, and a thought came to her: “Besides, he wouldn’t have stopped in the middle of the road.”

  Scott handed it back to her. “Maybe they fell out when he was reaching for his phone or something,” he said.

  “Maybe. But wouldn’t they be by the side of the road, in that case?”

  “It’s possible that a car blew them here from the shoulder when it passed.”

  She nodded, unable to decide whether a vehicle would have blown them off the road or toward the middle of the lane. “Either way, it could mean this: he could be somewhere between here and the hotel where we’re staying, and somehow we missed him. That’s good news, right?”

  “Would he have gone to Da Nang?” Scott asked her. “Or Hoi An?”

  “I doubt it. Why?”

  “He’s not back at the hotel.”

  She shook her head. Why would he have gone to either place?

  “And, let’s face it,” Scott went on. “I hate to be a downer, but maybe he dropped them this morning—on his way out—and we didn’t notice them earlier. And maybe they aren’t even Austin’s. I’m sure he’s not the only bicyclist in Vietnam who uses Psych gels. I mean, there are other tour companies bringing other Americans here.”

  He was right, but she had an idea. She made a flap with her shirt and dropped the gel packets into it so she didn’t need to handle them any more than she already had. She returned to the van, opened the emergency kit, and found an epi pen in a small plastic bag. Carefully she placed the energy gels in the bag and sealed it. She hoped this wouldn’t turn out to be evidence or that she’d need to prove that Austin had been here with fingerprints or DNA from the packages. But she had to do this, just in case. Then she emerged once more from the van and took photos of the area in all directions. She asked Giang to mark the mileage.

  When they started off once more, Giang flipped on the headlights and the anxiety she was feeling was no match for the Xanax. In the gloaming dark of the van, she felt herself sinking into the great, black maw of fear.

  * * *

  . . .

  Alexis didn’t know whether it was Scott or Giang who was keeping Colleen and the rest of the bike tour abreast of their search, but she presumed it was Scott since Giang was driving. But their Vietnamese guide was as comfortable as any American teen driving with one hand (or his knees) on the wheel, while texting with the other. He might have been texting Colleen or Sheri or Talia. But by the time they returned to the villa a little past nine at night, the group was assembled in the living room waiting for them, and it was like a wake. The other six riders, as well as Colleen, were quiet and somber, and they all stood when she and the other two guides entered the room. Everyone already knew that they hadn’t found Austin, and Austin hadn’t miraculously turned up at the little hotel. Scott reported that they’d come across no one who’d seen the American bicyclist on the roads, and no one had seen him in Da Nang—though the city was big and they certainly hadn’t searched it thoroughly. They’d simply stopped at some of the more popular restaurants and bars, one of the hospitals, and driven some of the streets, now dark, near the suspension bridge. Then they’d taken the beach road to the area’s massive and stately Lady Buddha. Roughly twenty-five stories tall, Scott had told Alexis.

  “This is devastating, but your guy is pretty resilient. I know he’s okay and there will be an explanation for all of this,” said Alan Cooper, the older fellow from North Carolina who, along with his wife, had spent the afternoon at the nearby bird sanctuary. He was standing with his hands in the pockets of his khaki slacks, trying to look upbeat but appearing more like a forlorn grandfather. He was completely bald at the top of his head, and the little hair that he had around his ears and the back of his skull was white and short as a marine’s. But his eyes? They were brown and soft, and Alexis imagined them growing wide with feigned wonder as he read aloud to a grandchild, the boy or the girl curled in his lap like a conch in its shell.

  “Do I call the embassy?” she asked Scott. She hadn’t gotten sick in the van, but she presumed that was only because she hadn’t eaten. Or, just maybe, it was the Xanax. Nevertheless, she believed that she was still firmly in her ER mode; she felt an urgent need to do something.

  “We should call the consulate. The embassy is all the way in Hanoi. The consulate’s closer: Ho Chi Minh City. They can get someone here a little faster.”

  “Someone…”

  “I don’t know. Someone. Someone in consular services. Maybe an FBI attaché. Maybe someone who can work with the local police.”

  He took out his phone, and for a moment she thought he was going to hand it to her. Instead he scrolled through his contacts and then started telling her the
number. She asked him to stop so she could retrieve her own phone.

  “Okay.” He read her the number once more, slowly this time, and she called it. When somebody answered, it was a man with a youthful but extremely formal voice announcing that this was the Consulate for the United States of America and he was Brendan Sutter. She began—and the words were lost in the thrumming she heard in her head—“Hi. My name is Alexis Remnick, and I am at a hotel called the Villa Haldina. It’s near…” She looked at Scott, astonished that she had momentarily forgotten the name of the town, and he mouthed the words Hoi An. “Hoi An,” she continued. “I’m on a bike tour with a bunch of other Americans, and my boyfriend, Austin Harper, has disappeared.”

  “When did he disappear?” Sutter asked.

  “He was last seen around midmorning today. He was due here in Hoi An at three or three thirty this afternoon. No later. I just returned with guides from the bike tour and we retraced his route and we didn’t find him anywhere on it.”

  “You said he was last seen around midmorning. Was that the last time you heard from him?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “No calls or texts since then?”

  “No,” she told him. “Not a one.”

  “Okay. Let me have someone call you right back. Is this the best number?”

  “It is.”

  “I’ll ring the duty officer right now. Someone will phone you soon.”

  “Soon as in five minutes or soon as in an hour?”

  “Somewhere in between—but that’s a guess.”

  “Okay, I’ll sit tight. Thank you,” she said, and she hung up and collapsed into a wing chair at the edge of the library.