Stephen Leigh - Card Sharks

"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?"

"Knew him." Croyd said. "A long while back." He let the tips of his claws rap sharply against the glass bottle. "But I won't ever forget him…."

"Tell me about Pan Rudo," Hannah said.

"Now I'm talking early fifties," Croyd answered. "That may be too far back for whatever you're after."

She shook her head.

"I want to hear about it," she told him.

He clapped his hands together abruptly, squashing a darting moth.

"Okay," he said. "I was around twenty years old at the time. But I'd been infected with the wild card virus when I was going on fourteen — so I'd had plenty of experience with it. Too much, it seemed. It still depressed me a lot in those days. I got to thinking about it, and I decided that since I couldn't change the condition maybe I could change my attitude toward it somehow, come to better terms with it. I read a lot of pop psychology books — about making friends with yourself and getting well-adjusted and all that — but they didn't do me any good. So one morning I saw a piece about this guy in the Times . He was chairing a local conference. Kind of interesting. Neuropsychiatrist. He'd actually known Freud, studied with him for a while. Then he was at the Jungian Institute in Switzerland for a time. Got back to physiology then. He was involved with a group doing dauerschlaf research while he was in Zurich. Ever hear of it?"

"Can't say that I have," she said.

He took a swallow of beer, moving his left foot to crush a pawing beetle.

"The theory behind dauerschlaf is that the body and the mind heal themselves better and faster while a person's asleep than when he's awake," he said. "They were experimenting with the treatment of drug withdrawal, psychological disorders, TB, and other stuff by putting people to sleep for long periods of time, using hypnosis and drugs. They'd induce artificial comas to promote healing. He wasn't into that much when I met him, but I'd learned of it earlier, because of my condition — and the connection intrigued me. I checked him out in the phone book, called, got his secretary, made an appointment. He had a cancellation for later that week, and she gave me that one."

Croyd took a quick swallow.

"It was a rainy Thursday afternoon in March of 1951 then, that I first met Pan Rudo — "

"Do you recall the date as well?" Hannah asked.

"Afraid not."

"How is it that you recall the year, the month, and the day so readily?"

"I count days after I wake up," he replied, "to keep track of how far along I am in my waking cycle. It gives me an idea of how much rationality I have left, so I can make plans for things I want to get done. When the days dwindle down to a precious few I avoid my friends and try to get off somewhere by myself so nobody gets hurt. Now, I woke up on Sunday, I came across the article two days later, I got the appointment for two days after that. That makes it a Thursday. And I tend to remember months when things happen, because my picture of a year is kind of a jagged thing based on seasons. This was spring and rainy — March."

He took a drink of beer. He swatted another moth.

"Damn bugs!" he muttered. "Can't stand bugs."

"And the year?" she said. "How can you be sure it was 1951?"

Because it was in the fall of the following year, 1952, that they tested the hydrogen bomb in the Pacific."