Chac nodded. "I understand perfectly. It shall be done. This is he?"
Ba brought the Doctor forward and spoke in English for the first time. "This is Dr. Bulmer. He did all that could be done to make Nhung Thi's last days peaceful."
"Then he shall be as one of us," Chac replied, also in English.
He shook the Doctor's hand and brought him forward, welcoming him into his home.
"I must go," Ba said, feeling the urgency to get back down to the street where the Missus waited unprotected. But first there was something he had to tell the Doctor.
He drew him aside as Chac bustled toward the kitchen to make tea.
"Doctor," he said in a low voice, leaning very close. "Please not to mention the Dat-tay-vao to anyone."
The Doctor's eyebrows lifted. "I hadn't planned to. But why not?"
"Not time to explain now. All will be made clear later. Please do not mention the Dat-tay-vao here. Please?"
The Doctor shrugged. "Okay. Fine with me. But, listen"— he touched Ba's arm—"thanks for tonight. And take good care of that lady."
Ba gave him a slight bow.
As he left the apartment, he heard the child coughing again. Louder.
___48.___
Alan
"You were Nhung Thi's doctor?" Chac said in thickly accented English after Ba had gone and the kettle had yet to boil.
"Yes. Not much I could do for her, I'm afraid." He worked to shut out the memory of her death agonies. A horrible way to go. He'd prefer almost any form of death to being eaten alive by lung cancer.
Alan distracted himself by studying Chac's grotesquely arthritic hands, noting the thickened and gnarled joints, the ulnar deviation of the wrists and fingers. How did this man manage to hand out his papers? How on earth did he make change?
He let his gaze wander around the tiny front room. The cracking plaster had been freshly painted; the furniture was old and rickety but waxed and dust free. A chubby plaster Buddha sat cross-legged on a corner table; a crucifix hung on the wall above it.
The child coughed again from the rear of the apartment. It carried a higher-pitched sound this time.
"Your son?" Alan asked. It seemed unlikely, but you never knew.
"Grandson!" Chac said, puffing himself up.
The coughing persisted, its bark becoming distinctly seal-like. But that wasn't what alarmed Alan. It was the whistling intake of breath, the increasingly labored stridor between coughing spasms that lifted him to his feet and drew him toward the sound.
That child was in trouble!
Chac, too, recognized the distress in the cough. He darted ahead of Alan and led the way. Halfway there, a thin woman of about Chac's age in a long, dark blue robe came out into the hall and joined the procession to the bedroom at the far end of the apartment.
Just before they reached the door, the cough shut off abruptly, as if a noose had been tightened around the throat. Chac turned on the light as they rushed into the room. Alan took one look at the black-haired boy with the mottled face and wide, panicky, black eyes, and knew there wasn't a second to spare.
Croup—with epiglottitis!
"Get a knife, small and sharp!" he said to Chac, shoving him back toward the kitchen.
He was going to have to try an emergency tracheotomy. He'd seen it done twice during his clinical training a dozen or so years ago, but had never yet been called upon to do one himself. He'd always prayed the situation would never arise. Cutting open someone's throat and then crunching through the cricothyroid membrane to form an airway without severing an artery or lacerating the thyroid was a difficult enough proposition on a still patient. On a squirming, bucking, fear-crazed child, it seemed madness to try. But this boy was going to die if he didn't get air soon.
Chac rushed back in and handed him a small knife with a sharp, two-inch blade. Alan would have preferred a narrower blade—would have loved the 14-gauge needle he'd kept in his black bag for a decade now just for an occurrence such as this. But his bag was in the trunk of his car.
The child was rolling and thrashing on the bed, arching his back and neck in a hopeless effort to pull air into his lungs.
"Hold him down," Alan told Chac and his wife.
The woman, whom Chac called Hai, looked at the blade with horror, but Chac shouted something to her in Vietnamese and she steadied her hands on either side of the child's face, now a dark blue. When Chac had situated himself across the boy's body, pinning his arms under him, Alan moved forward. With his heart pounding and the knife slipping around in his sweaty palm, he stretched the skin over the trachea.
Ecstatic voltage shot up his arm.
With a vortical wheeze, air rushed into the child's starved lungs, then out, then in again. Slowly his color returned to normal as he sobbed and clung to his grandmother.
Alan stared at his hand in wonder. How had that happened? He glanced at his watch: 10:45. Was the Hour of Power still on? What time had McCready said for high tide? He couldn't remember! Damn!
But did it matter? The important thing was that the little boy was alive and well and breathing normally.
Chac and his wife were staring at him in awe.
"Dat-tay-vao?" Chac said. "You Dat-tay-vao?"
Alan hesitated. For some strange reason he had a feeling he should say no. Had he been told to deny it? But why? These people knew about the Touch.
He nodded.
"Here?" Chac said, leaning closer and looking in his eyes. "Dat-tay-vao here in America?"
"So I'm told."
The Vietnamese couple laughed and wept and hugged their sobbing grandson, all the while babbling in Vietnamese. Then Chac came forward, holding out his deformed, arthritic hands, smiling timidly.
"Help me? Please?"
Another warning bell sounded in a distant corner of his mind. Hadn't Axford told him that the Touch was damaging his mind? But how could he say such a thing? Alan felt fine!
"Sure," he said. It was the least he could do for the man who was giving him shelter. Alan enclosed the gnarled fingers in his own and waited but nothing happened.
"The hour has passed," he told Chac.
The Vietnamese smiled and bowed. "It will come again. Oh, yes. It will come again. I can wait."
"I'm getting cabin fever," Alan told Sylvia.
He had spent a restless night and had been delighted to hear from her this morning. But talking on the phone was a far cry from being next to her and did little to ease his growing claustrophobia. The little apartment occupied the southeast corner of the building. Nice and warm in the winter, no doubt, but the sun had been blazing through the windows since 6:00 a.m. and the temperature of the soggy air here in the front room had to be pushing into triple figures already.
Hai, dressed in the classic loose white blouse and baggy black pajama pants of her people, bustled around the kitchen while her grandson munched on a cracker, both unmindful of the heat. It all came down to what you were used to.
"I've been cooped up for days—first in that glorified hospital room at the Foundation, now in an apartment so small you rub shoulders with somebody every time you move!"
"You promised to stay one day."
"And I will," he said, looking at the clock. It was 9:00. "In just a little over twelve hours I'm walking out of here. I don't care who's looking for me—McCready or the Mafia— I'm gone."
"I don't think the senator will be doing much looking. He's in a coma in Columbia Presbyterian."
"You're kidding!"
"Of course not! You sound surprised."
"Shouldn't I be?"
"Well, didn't you tell me last night that he went into some sort of convulsion when he tried to make you heal him? What'd you call it—a myasthenic crisis?"