The Red Lotus by Chris Bohjalian

Author:Chris Bohjalian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

18

In the morning, before breakfast, Alexis went online again and searched aggressively and methodically for the full research article about the Vietnamese rats, but for some reason, she couldn’t find even the abstract and brief summary—not in English and not in any other language. The article? It was as if it didn’t exist. And so all she had were the pages that she had discovered in Austin’s apartment, which meant that would have to do. Over black coffee and a bowl of yogurt and frozen blueberries she found in the back of her freezer, she read them again, but a lot of it was background and then biographies of the researchers in Vietnam who had conducted the study.

The work had been done by scientists at Viet Nam National University in Ho Chi Minh City. She and Austin had flown into Hanoi on this trip—the tour had spent their first day together savoring different neighborhoods with their guides—and they had gone nowhere near the country’s other behemoth of a city during the excursion. Last year, however, Austin had gone to Vietnam on a different bike tour, and that one had begun in Ho Chi Minh City. Had he been to the school then—on his first trip? Until she got into his laptop or tablet, it was unlikely she would know. But the basic point of the study seemed to be this: there had been easily hundreds of generations of rats since Agent Orange had been brought to the jungles of Vietnam, and the descendants of the rats that hadn’t died of cancer were a very hearty bunch. They carried inside them diseases, some of which were usually fatal to rats, but not to these rats. And some of the pathogens were transmittable to humans. And some of them made very short work of antibiotics.

She knew this was true of New York City rodents, too, and they hadn’t been exposed to Agent Orange. She presumed Austin was aware of this as well. There had been news articles about it, and he—just like her—worked in a university hospital. For all she knew, their own labs were looking into rat viruses and bacteria. She didn’t know anyone who worked there, but she made a mental note to ask around.

At eight thirty, she called the name of the private investigator on the business card that Sally Gleason had given her and was relieved that his answering service was taking calls and a woman at the other end of the line had the PI’s calendar. She wanted to know if Alexis could come in that afternoon, but she explained that she was an ER doctor and had a shift that began at noon, and begged for a morning appointment. She was able to get one at nine forty-five, which meant that she would have to hurry. And so she did, throwing into her bag Austin’s laptop and tablet, their bike tour itinerary, the research abstract on rats, and the bike glove from his right hand.

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