Jeffery Deaver - Ice Cold

“Now, Dr. Kiel have Rickettsia prowazekii , he maybe find vaccine, so biological war not useful.”

The words faded in and out. Miss Bianca had a bad Russian germ, now Abigail had it, maybe she would die for thinking Elena-Magdalena was a communist spy.

The front door opened again. Abigail saw the brown suit. “Look out,” she tried to say, but her teeth were chattering too hard. No words would come out.

The brown legs came down the hall. “Yes, little girl. You are exactly who I want.”

He put an arm around her and dragged her to her feet. Mother had heard the door; she ran into the hall and screamed when she saw the brown suit with Abigail. She rushed toward him but he waved an arm at her and she stopped: he was holding a gun.

He shouted some words in a language that Abigail didn’t understand, but Elena-Magdalena came into the hall.

“I am telling Dr. Spirova that I will shoot you and shoot the little girl unless she comes with me now,” the man said to Rhonda. His voice was calm, as if he was reading a book out loud.

“Yes, you putting little girl down.” Elena’s voice sounded as though her mouth were full of chalk. “I go with you. I see, here is end of story.”

Elena walked slowly toward him. The man grinned and tightened his grip on Abigail. It took Rhonda and Elena a moment to realize he was going to keep Abigail, perhaps use her as a hostage to get safe passage out of Kansas. Rhonda darted forward but Elena shoved her to the ground and seized the man’s arm.

He fired the gun and Elena fell, bleeding, but he had to ease his chokehold on Abigail.

“Miss Bianca, save us!” Abigail screamed.

She dropped the mouse down the man’s shirtfront. Miss Bianca skittered inside in terror. The man began flailing his arms, slapping at his chest, then his armpits, as the mouse frantically tried to escape. He howled in pain: Miss Bianca had bitten him. He managed to reach inside his shirt for the mouse, but by then, Rhonda had snatched the gun from him. She ran to the front door and started shouting for help.

Abigail, her face burning with fever, fought to get the mouse out of his hand. Finally, in despair, she bit his hand. He punched her head, but she was able to catch Miss Bianca as she fell from his open fist.

The police came. They took away the KGB man. An ambulance came and took Elena to the hospital. The doctor came; Abigail had a high fever, she shouldn’t be out of bed, she shouldn’t be keeping mice in dirty boxes under her bed, he told Rhonda sternly, but Abigail became hysterical when he tried to take Miss Bianca away, so he merely lectured Rhonda on her poor parenting decisions. He gave Abigail a shot and said she needed to stay in bed, drink lots of juice, and stay away from dirty animals.

The next morning, Dr. Kiel arrived with a large bouquet of flowers for Abigail. Rhonda made Abigail confess everything to Dr. Kiel, how she had stolen Miss Bianca, how she had stolen tetracycline out of his office. She was afraid he would be furious, but the vein in his forehead didn’t move. Instead, he smiled, his brown eyes soft and even rather loving.

“You cured the mouse with quarters of tetracycline tablets dipped in peanut butter, hmm?” he asked to see the pieces Abigail had cut up. “I think we’re going to have to promote you from feeding animals to being a full-fledged member of the research team.”

A few months later, Dr. Dolan left Kansas to teach in Oklahoma. Later still, Bob did get his PhD. He was a good and kind teacher, even if he never had much success as a researcher. Magdalena recovered from her bullet wound and was given a job at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, where she worked until the fall of the Iron Curtain meant her husband could be released from prison.

Miss Bianca stayed with Abigail, living to the ripe old age of three. Although Rhonda continued to work for Dr. Kiel, she wouldn’t let Abigail back in the animal lab. Even so, Abigail grew up to be a doctor working for Physicians for Social Responsibility, trying to put an end to torture. As for the five lumpy Kiel children, one of them grew up to write about a Chicago private eye named V. I. Warshawski.

Ho Chi Minh City, Socialist Republic of Vietnam, is home now, but my first conscious sensation was of our village in the Mekong River Delta, not far from Can Tho. The sweet stink of night soil. Mist drifting off the paddy in the morning. Utter silence but for birdsong.

The first memory that burned into my brain was me clinging to my mother’s legs, pressing with all my might. I was the second youngest of four. My baby brother was in her arms. We were standing in shade cast by an enormous American officer, an unjolly green giant. He reeked of butter and gunpowder. He had more hair on his arms than on his head.

My mother chanted over and over, “Me no VC. Me no VC. GI number one. GI number one.”

That was her only English, and she was trembling so hard I could barely hang on. My father was nowhere to be seen. Where was Father?

There were helicopters above us, hovering, bristling with guns and rockets, going whoompa whoompa whoompa . Dragonflies from hell, hovering above water buffalo that moved as slowly as the village pace.

A South Vietnamese Army interpreter spoke for the American. He said our village was a suspected Vietcong sanctuary.

“Me no VC. GI number one,” my mother replied.

The interpreter slapped her face hard. We swayed together, managing to keep our feet. Nobody moved to help her. Not the giant. Not the villagers who stood at our rear.

The American officer said that we harbored the enemy. He said we were communist sympathizers. He said we were ungrateful. He said we did not love our country. He said we were traitors. He said we were lower than snake shit. He said that he was declaring a free fire zone.

He gave us ten minutes to pack up and go. He gave us ten minutes to leave our home of ten centuries. The bones of our ancestors were in this ground. They could not leave. What would become of them? When the village was gone, they would be nowhere.

We carried what we could and watched the helicopters vaporize our village. Huts turned fiery orange and bubbled black into the sky. The smoke seared my nostrils with earth, life, and death. I saw faces in that smoke, old old faces that stretched in sooty agony as they rose and diffused in the air. The faces screamed, and so did I.

My mother took us to Saigon. This was before the city was named in honor of Uncle Ho. Our Saigon was not the leafy and elegant colonial Saigon, the Saigon of fine cafés and shops. Our Saigon was a shantytown, 100,000 of us per square kilometer. We had mud and rotted planks for roads. We had lazy rivers of piss and turds and garbage and typhoid. Our roofs were corrugated tin, hot as a stove. Our walls were printed cardboard, with the logos of Coca-Cola and Sony.

Let me tell you, my mother was a beauty. I remember most her aroma, how her perfume overwhelmed the rancid air. She wore makeup and Suzy Wong skirts. She went out at night.

My father never joined us in the city and she refused to discuss him. Years later, my older sister confided that he was working in the paddy that day and had lifted a hoe out of the muck. A jumpy helicopter gunner saw it as an AK-47. That was what happened to Father and why our village came to be a Vietcong sanctuary.

In 1975, when the North Vietnamese rumbled into Saigon in their tanks, my mother scrubbed the paint from her face and threw away the tight dresses. She wore black silk pajamas when she went out at night. We still had to eat.

By 1980, the Americans and their guns and their dollars were long gone. It was the time of the Carter-Reagan embargoes, when we had less to eat than ever. We moved in with Uncle Thanh, a widower with two grown children, a son and a daughter. He lived in an apartment on Yen Do Street, in a crumbling, stuccoed relic of a building. It had wooden shutters, a ceiling fan, and a water closet. Uncle Thanh and our family shared two rooms.