"Then I'm Hannah," she replied. "That bomb. I have to think it was meant for …" Hannah swallowed. She couldn't finish the thought.
Mark had. "I know," he said sadly. "But you gotta believe that it also wasn't meant to be, y'know, like fate had a hand in things and made sure you were safe." Mark patted her on the shoulder, like a brother might. "My friend Moonchild'll make sure that you stay that Way, too. Nothing else will happen to you while you're here. I promise. Moonchild's going to make Free Vietnam a Land of Peace. Man, so much evil has come from here. I figure that the cosmic balance has got to be restored. When a place has been this fucked up for so long, imagine what it's going to be like when it turns around. When that happens, this will be like a paradise."
He was so earnest that Hannah could only smile back at him. He seemed to be one of those people who had an eternal innocence in their souls — despite all that life had dealt Meadows, he'd kept that.
"So why don't you tell me about everything's that's going down?" he said.
"I'm not sure where to start, but I'll try." For the next half hour, Hannah gave Meadows a synopsis of what she had learned. He was a good listener, interrupting only to ask a few questions or to clarify something, otherwise nodding sympathetically and shaking his head.
"Far out," he said afterward. "It's like a downer, y'know — all that energy wasted on hating. Fucked up, just totally fucked up." He gave a deep, ponderous sigh. "I can help you, sure. I'll arrange for you to go anywhere and do anything you need to do here. You can go to Xuan Loc yourself and dig around — you know what you're looking for, and that's as safe a place as any. You want to find out about this Faneuil dude, no problem; I'll ask Ai Quoc's staff — he's the Interior Secretary — to look up all the records we have on him. I know Pan at WHO — he's at good guy. I'll give him a call and prod him."
"I'd appreciate it."
"Hey, here's your guardian angel now," Mark said. Quasiman had entered the room, hand in hand with a lovely, dark-haired child — a girl on the verge of womanhood. "I want you to meet my daughter, Sprout…."
"How did Faneuil die?" Hannah asked.
Ngo Dinh Yie, one of the elders of the village, pursed his lips and nodded as Croyd translated, then closed his eyes as if remembering. "He was old," Ngo said. "His heart burst. That is what the nurse told us."
"Margaret Durand?"
"Yes. She was with my son, Bui, who also lived in the doctor's house, and said that they had found him dead in his bed. He had died in his sleep, peacefully."
"Did you see the body?"
The old man frowned, pressing his lips together again. Ngo's face looked like a crumpled brown paper sack. "No … The nurse, she and Bui took care of the body, wrapping it in a sheet and putting it in the coffin the village woodcarver brought for them." Ngo shook his head. "Western customs. Wasteful."
"Then. how did you know it was Faneuil?"
Ngo looked at her as if she were crazy. "I saw his hand, outside the sheet. The doctor always wore a ring, a big gold one with a blue stone and little diamonds set around it. I saw his hand, the doctor's hand, and I saw the ring. We buried the doctor that evening. There — " The elder pointed to the field where a green mound swelled just before the jungle claimed the land. "Everyone grieved. Everyone loved the doctor. I would do anything he asked me to do. Anything."
"I'm sure you would," Hannah answered. She nodded to Croyd, and he dismissed Ngo. Hannah stopped the tape recorder and leaned hack against the rough wooden railing of the pub.
Ngo's story matched everyone else's. Three days of interviews and searching the few existing records had yielded nothing more. The recent war had destroyed most of the paper trail pertaining to Faneuil. The conflict had swept over Xuan Loc also, inflicting heavy casualties on the inhabitants. The survivors spoke almost universally with affection for the doctor. Faneuil had set up a small clinic in the village, offering medical care for the surrounding area. Hannah could find nothing overtly malicious in Faneuil's care of the people — but then there weren't a great number of jokers in the area, either. On the surface, Faneuil had been a benign and beneficent presence in the jungle, healing as best he could with extremely limited funding and supplies.
"Everyone told her that Faneuil had died of a heart attack, even though no one she spoke with had actually seen the body. The two who had — Ngo Dinh Yie's son Bui and Durand — vanished within a week of the doctor's burial. Supposedly they had gone to Saigon, but Meadows's people had found no trace of them there. And that seemed to he where the trail ended.
The best thing that could be said for their time here was that it had allowed her to begin to deal with the paralyzing fear that had come in the wake of the bomb attack. The first night, in the palace, Hannah couldn't sleep. She relived the explosion in her nightmares, and sometimes she was one of the broken bodies strewn on the street. The constant fear was only now beginning to recede. She didn't think she would ever like Saigon now, no matter how well Moonchild, Mark, and his friends succeeded in their vision of a Land of Peace.
In a way, Hannah found it amusing. For years she'd been prowling through the aftermath of fires and explosions, reveling in the messy work of finding the cause. She'd learned to look at the victims as just pieces of the puzzle. She'd felt sorry for them, yes, but she'd never really given much thought to the pain and terror they'd felt. She'd never really put herself in their place and imagined what they must have experienced, how it affected them. The fires, the explosions — they'd never reached out for her.
Now she knew. She wondered if she'd ever he able to see a fire the old way again.
She wasn't looking at anything the old way any more.
"Might as well go inside," Hannah said to Croyd. "Too hot out here."
The one-room building had been Xuan Loc's bar, evidently of Vietnam War vintage, built in a quasi-American style with an old Wooden bar running the width. Quasiman was sitting at one of the tables, staring into space — he'd been that way for an hour, and Hannah was beginning to wonder if he'd come back. Croyd went behind the bar and pulled a bottle of beer from the styrofoam cooler — Croyd had brought cooler, ice, and what seemed to Hannah to be an inordinate supply of beer from Saigon. The ice was long gone, but Croyd didn't seem to mind. "Want one?" Hannah shook her head. Croyd extended a claw from his forefinger and pried off the cap. "Real useful," he said. He went to sit with Hannah and the vacant-eyed Quasiman. Croyd prodded Quasiman's shoulder with a finger. There was no reaction from the joker. "Nobody home," Croyd said, then looked at Hannah. "What's next? You want me to round up some more of the locals?"
"I guess," Hannah said.
"You're not getting What you want, huh?"
"No. Dead ends and more dead ends. No one actually saw Faneuil dead, but everyone's sure he is. Everyone loved him. He's a frigging saint." Hannah sighed. "I'm not surprised that Dr. Rudo couldn't find out anything either."
Croyd didn't say anything. He swas looking at her strangely. He took a long, slow swallow of the beer and set the bottle down again with an undisguised belch. Hannah could feel his tail brushing her feet under the table. "Rudo," Croyd said. "Dr. Pan Rudo?"
"Yes," Hannah said. "He's one of the directors of WHO."
"And he's been helping you with this?"
"Yes, among others," she said again. "Why?"
Croyd sniffed. He took another pull at the bottle. The tail swished around her knees, poking tentatively between them. "Damn it, Croyd — "
"Sorry. Pan Rudo, huh? He sent you here? He knew Faneuil?"
Hannah didn't answer. "You know Dr. Rudo?"