Cockroaches(33)
“Well, Bangkok is a hub for all of Asia.”
She looked at him and smiled wistfully. “I wish we did such exciting things. But I think the Ministry is letting him stay here for long and generally loyal service to king and country. Besides, I’m bound by an oath of confidentiality.”
She giggled again and laid a hand on Harry’s arm. “Let’s talk about something else, shall we?”
Harry talked about something else and then went to find another drink. The human body consists of sixty percent water and he had the feeling that during the day most of his had evaporated up toward the blue-gray sky.
He found Miss Ao standing with Sanphet at the back of the room. Sanphet gave him a measured nod.
“Any water?” Harry asked.
Miss Ao passed him a glass.
“What does LM stand for?”
Sanphet raised an eyebrow. “Are you thinking of Mr. Løken?”
“I am.”
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
“In case it’s something you call him behind his back.”
Sanphet grinned. “L stands for ‘living’ and M for ‘morphine.’ It’s an old nickname he acquired working for the UN in Vietnam at the end of the war.”
“Vietnam?”
Sanphet nodded unobtrusively and Miss Ao was gone.
“Løken was with a Vietnamese unit in a landing zone waiting to be picked up by a helicopter when they were attacked by a Vietcong patrol. It was a bloodbath and Løken was one of those hit. He got a bullet right through a muscle in his neck. The Americans had withdrawn their soldiers from Vietnam, but they still had medical orderlies there. They ran around in the elephant grass from soldier to soldier giving first aid. They wrote on the injured men’s helmets in chalk, a kind of makeshift medical chart. If they wrote D it meant the person was dead, so that those who followed didn’t waste any time examining them. L meant the patient was living, and if they wrote M it meant they’d given them morphine. They did that to prevent anyone from being given several shots and dying of an overdose.”
Sanphet nodded toward Løken.
“When they found him he’d already lost consciousness, so they didn’t give him any morphine, just wrote an L on his helmet and loaded him onto the helicopter with the others. When he was woken by his own screams of pain he didn’t understand where he was at first. But when he moved the corpse lying on top of him and saw a man with a white armband injecting one of the others he understood and screamed for morphine. An orderly tapped his helmet and said, ‘Sorry, buddy, you’re already pumped up to the eyeballs.’ Løken couldn’t believe it and tore off his helmet, where, sure enough, there was an L and an M. However, the thing was, it wasn’t his helmet. He looked back at the soldier who had just been injected in the arm. He saw the helmet with an L on, recognized the screwed-up pack of cigarettes under the strap and the UN badge and realized what had happened. The guy had swapped their helmets to get another shot of morphine. He screamed, but his cries of agony were drowned out by the roar of the engine as they took off. Løken lay screaming for half an hour before they reached the golf course.”
“Golf course?”
“The camp. That’s what we called it.”
“So you were there, too?”
Sanphet nodded.
“That’s why you know the story so well?”
“I was a voluntary medical worker and I received them.”
“What happened?”
“Løken’s standing over there. The other guy never woke up again.”
“Overdose?”
“Well, he didn’t die of a shot to the stomach.”
Harry shook his head. “And now you and Løken are working in the same place.”
“By coincidence.”
“What are the odds of that happening?”
“It’s a small world,” Sanphet said.
“LM,” Harry said, then drank up, mumbled he needed more water and went looking for Miss Ao.
“Do you miss the ambassador?” he asked when he found her in the kitchen. She was folding serviettes around the glasses and securing them with elastic bands.
She looked at him in surprise and nodded.
Harry held the empty glass between his hands.
“How long had you been lovers?”
He saw her pretty little mouth open, form an answer, which her brain had not yet prepared, and close and open again, like a goldfish. When the anger reached her eyes and he half expected her to slap him, it died again. Instead her eyes filled with tears.
“I’m sorry,” Harry said without sounding sorry.
“You—”
“I’m sorry, but we have to ask these questions.”