The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (55 page)

"Do I strike you as the kind of man to take unnecessary risks?"

"For her," Robert said, the answer too quick. "Give me a hint what's going on."

"Certain people will be interested in the death of a drug lord, a Mr. Bao, seven years ago."

"Old news. Who cares?"

"Mr. Bao was a businessman. An associate transferred all his drug money to a bank in Thailand. Lots and lots of money. A fortune. Blood money. Revolutions need financing."

"You are that associate? I could get fired," Robert said. "The magazine could be discredited."

"Yes, you could." Linh sat back for a minute, grimacing at the pain in his side that had started up again. "I lied to Helen. I told her that one needed to perform triage during the war, save what could be saved. But now I know differently. Sometimes you have to try even when there is no chance."

Robert nodded and turned away. "Find her."

The ostensible story was
that Linh was sent to cover the exodus out of Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge takeover. He grabbed it like a lifeline. But breaking back into the NVA network proved all but impossible. Mr. Bao had made certain that Linh officially didn't exist. The NVA would never trust a contact with him.

Linh had lost his faith long ago. But now something worthy of faith occurred. For a time after the filming at Angkor, Linh had kept in touch with the boy Veasna, followed his fledging photography career with the gift of Darrow's Rollerflex. They had become lost to each other since, but as Linh began to dig and grasp at any straw that might save Helen--a miracle. Veasna had become involved with the nationalist movement, the Khmers. Anyone on the outside would assume his anti-Americanism, but Linh understood about the gray areas of patriotism. Veasna had risen to a fairly high position. And he remembered their kindness. A camera and money when his family had nothing. Contact to the Cambodians had been achieved; he had found out that Helen and Matt were being held hostage. Money was discussed. There was never any guarantee what would actually happen. The original idea of holding the money until Helen was given up had to be abandoned. Now, bribes paid, it became an act of faith.

In Thailand, Linh went to the border and looked through his binoculars at lands now as inaccessible as the dark side of the moon, the blank part of a map. Looking for something more elusive than a tiger. The remaining Westerners in Phnom Penh, mostly diplomats and journalists, were being convoyed to the Cambodian border town of Poipet to be turned over for release. Helen and Matt were supposed to be thrown into this group and be smuggled across. Hours later, when the group crossed to freedom in small, defeated clusters, they were not among them.

Linh stayed at the border long after everyone else had left. His eyes smarted from staring down the dusty, hazy road, willing her shape to materialize on the horizon, as if his very wanting would make it so. He planned to cross into Cambodia that night under cover of darkness to find her. It was not his country; he was unfamiliar with the land and the language. Chances were he would not survive beyond a few days.

Returning to town, trying to bribe a guide, he sat in one of two restaurants on an empty street in town, ordered a beer and a meal, and as he waited for his contact, he overheard one of the Westerners from the release talking loudly as he stuffed food in his mouth. Linh heard a few French-inflected sentences and turned to stare at him, at his young face, with long brown hair and beard. As he listened the restaurant grew unbearably hot, the beer tasted bitter, and finally he set down the bottle and stood unsteadily and walked up to the man's table.

"Did you see a woman named Helen?" Had his contacts lied to him? Taken the money and run? Had something gone wrong?

Frightened, the man looked up at him, and Linh realized he had been wrong, that despite the youth and loudness, this man cared enough to remain at the border waiting for those who had not come out. "No. No one by that name. Still some of our Cambodian people haven't been released. I don't think they will be. We wait. There is a rumor of another release tomorrow morning."

The guide that Linh had paid never came.

At dawn, Linh waited
with a small group of foreign press. The table of people from the previous day, including the Frenchman, arrived, and he nodded glumly at Linh. A funereal quiet in the group, readying itself for the bad news they expected.

Just as the first rays of sun lit the distant treetops, a dusty pickup could be seen in the far distance, a plume of dust ranging far behind it, marking its progress. It stopped a couple of hundred yards away from the border, whose stone-faced guards, as ferocious as those carved figures on the temples, faced the small, motley crowd of Westerners. They held their weapons at the ready, and Linh smiled at the ridiculousness of their guarding a country no one in their right mind wanted to enter. Soldiers jumped out of the truck and rolled a body out that hit the ground heavily; a collective groan went up in the crowd. The Frenchman rushed to the makeshift gate, but the guards stepped forward in warning. Another person came from the back of the truck, standing up, swaying. Wearing a light blue T-shirt he didn't recognize. Linh's breath caught as he recognized Helen.

"That's her," he said.

"But there's only two," the Frenchman said.

Slowly, Helen bent down and pulled at the prone form. After interminable minutes, the man stood, and supported by her, he began to move with her toward the gate. A cheer started in the small group, but their progress was so slow that the cheer grew ragged and stopped off before they could reach the border. Another bit of cruelty to make them struggle the last few steps to freedom when help was so near. As they got closer, Linh could see the white-blond hair of the man, his face sunburned and bruised, one eye closed, his arm in a makeshift sling. At last, when they were close enough, a guard kicked open the small rickety bamboo gate, and the two stumbled through.

Linh touched the purpled bruises of her cheeks, the swelling of her eye. This body that had come to stand for everything that had been lost. Hard to trust that after so much had been taken, so much could still be received. But she was there, alive, his truth. Helen come back from the dead.

Author's Notes

This is a work
of imagination, inspired by real people and events, but I've given myself the fiction writer's prerogative of blending and mixing, outright distorting and making up. I have been an eager reader of every book and movie on Vietnam I've come across since I can remember, so influences are many and impossible to pinpoint. I first became aware of female journalists and photographers in Vietnam when I read about Dickey Chapelle in Horst Faas and Tim Page's
Requiem
. In the course of my research, I found a few others who spent significant time there, among them Katherine Leroy, Kate Webb, and one photographer I only came across in preparation for publication, Barbara Gluck.

In the strange way of fiction, I had been writing the novel for several years, having one of the characters developing into a spy, before I read about the true case of Pham Xuan An, a North Vietnamese intelligence agent who also was working undercover as a journalist for
Time
magazine. That much information was validation, the rest imagination.

When this particular story began to come together, the following is a list of works I read and consulted, instrumental not only for facts but for immersion in the atmosphere of that time and place. It also might make a good reading list for those unfamiliar with the history of the country or the war. If I have forgotten or left off anything, I apologize, and any omission will be added in the future if pointed out.

Specifically for the Fall of Saigon, I'm indebted to:

Butler, David.
The Fall of Saigon
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

Dawson, Alan.
55 Days: The Fall of South Vietnam
. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1977.

General Bibliography

Bourke, Joanna.
An Intimate History of Killing
. New York: Perseus Books, 1999.

Browne, Malcolm W.
Muddy Boots and Red Socks: A Reporter's Life
. New York: Random House, 1993.

Chapelle, Dickey.
What's a Woman Doing Here?
New York: William Morrow, 1962.

Duiker, William J.
Ho Chi Minh
. New York: Hyperion, 2000.

Emerson, Gloria.
Winners and Losers
. New York: Random House, 1972.

Faas, Horst, and Tim Page, eds.
Requiem
. Introduction by David Halberstam. New York: Random House, 1997.

Fall, Bernard B.
Street Without Joy
. Introduction by George C. Herring. Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole Books, 1961.

Fitzgerald, Frances.
Fire in the Lake
. New York: Vintage, 1972.

Halberstam, David.
The Making of a Quagmire
. Introduction by Daniel J. Singal. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Hofmann, Bettina.
Ahead of Survival: American Women Writers Narrate the Vietnam War
. Berlin: Peter Lang, 1996.

Huu, Ngoc.
Sketches for a Portrait of Vietnamese Culture
. Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 1997.

Huynh, Sanh Thong, ed. and trans.
An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems
. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996.

Jamieson, Neil L.
Understanding Vietnam
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Karnow, Stanley.
Vietnam: A History
. New York: Penguin Books, 1983.

Keegan, John.
The Book of War
. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.

Kulka, Richard A. et al.
Trauma and the Vietnamese Generation
. Foreword by Alan Cranston. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1990.

Laurence, John.
The Cat from Hue
. New York: Perseus Books, 1992.

McAlister, Jr., John T. and Paul Mus.
The Vietnamese and Their Revolution
. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

Melson, Charles D.
The War That Would Not End
. Central Point, Ore.: Hell-gate Press, 1998.

Moeller, Susan D.
Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat
. New York: Basic Books, 1989.

Mouhot, Henri.
Travels in Siam, Cambodia, Laos, and Annam
. Bangkok: White Lotus Ltd., 2000.

Nguyen, Du.
Kieu
. Translated by Michael Counsell. Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 1994.

O'Nan, Stewart.
The Vietnam Reader
. New York: Anchor Books, 1998.

Plasters, John L.
SOG: A Photo History of the Secret Wars
. Boulder, Col.: Paladin Press, 2000.

Reporting Vietnam. Part 1: American Journalism, 1959-1969
. New York: Library of America, 1998.

Reporting Vietnam. Part 2: American Journalism, 1969-1975
. New York: Library of America, 1998.

Salisbury, Harrison E., ed.
Vietnam Reconsidered
. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.

Shay, Jonathan.
Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

Sheehan, Neil.
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Taylor, Keith Weller.
The Birth of Vietnam
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

The Traditional Village in Vietnam
. Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 1993.

Thompson, Virginia.
French Indo-China
. New York: Macmillan Co., 1942.

Walker, Keith.
A Piece of My Heart
. Novato: Presidio Press, 1985.

Webb, Kate.
On the Other Side: 23 Days with the Viet Cong
. New York: Quadrangle Books, 1972.

Young, Perry Deane.
Two of the Missing
. New York: Coward, McCann & Geolhegan, 1975.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Nat Sobel, a true gentleman in publishing, who still believes in fighting the good fight for a book. My gratitude also to my brilliant young editor, Hilary Rubin Teeman, who poured her passion and intelligence into the project. For assistance on parts of the manuscript in its earlier incarnations, I'd like to thank Adria Bernardi, Robert Cohen, and Megan Staffel.