Free The Lotus Eaters: A Novel by Tatjana Soli Page A

the small amount of piastres she earned giving lessons to support herself and her parents. She was a pretty young woman, the shape of her face reminding him of Mai. The hours he spent looking at her were like balm, and he made sure not to let his English exceed hers. Her mistakes charmed him. Instead of using "Don't," she said, "Give it a miss." "Don't go down the street" became "The street, give it a miss." Dreaming of Mai, he wanted to give waking a miss.
    In those first terrible months he listened to his sweet-faced teacher conjugate verbs: I am, you are, he is . The plan he came up with was to rejoin his unit in the army and volunteer for the most dangerous missions. Possibly managing to get killed within months if not weeks. We are peaceful , they are the enemy. We kill; they die. Honorable and efficient death. And yet although he was no longer afraid, he did not go.
    On a day neither too hot nor too cold, when the sky was clear, and the sweet-faced teacher smiled at him on the stairs, Linh passed the office of an American news service and stood rooted to the spot as he recognized the name Life , handwritten on paper and taped to the window. A talisman from the day his real life disappeared. Give it a miss, his first thought, but instead he took this as a sign and walked in. He found a large American man hunched over his desk, his face shiny with sweat, staring at a stack of papers.
    "You have a job?" Linh said. "I am a good friend of Mr. Darrow."
    Gary, the office manager, looked like the heat was boiling him from inside out; his potbelly pushed against his belt. He looked up at Linh and gave him a wide-toothed smile. "I didn't know Darrow had any friends." Always, he thought, in the nick of time, look at what the cat drags in. Within ten minutes, Linh was hired. That afternoon they were on a cargo plane bound for Cambodia.
    Gary chewed away rapid-fire on his piece of gum, mopping at the sweat that literally poured off him with a big, soggy handkerchief. "Man, this is good. How did you find us? That office is just a temp space. This is like fate, kismet. If it wasn't for you, it would be me lugging around his stuff." Gary figured the young Vietnamese man's reticence covered up something unpleasant that he would have to deal with later, like a criminal record. Too bad, he couldn't worry about that now. He had a new assistant.
    Linh said nothing. He stared out the cargo door at the jungle rushing beneath them, giving no sign that his stomach was in his feet, that this was the first time he had been in a plane.
    They drove the empty , hacked roads, dust flying like a long sail of sheer red silk behind them, hanging suspended in the coppery sky.
    "You're right, absolutely. Enjoy the ride," Gary said, agreeing with the continued silence. "People talk too much anyway." He was a man who didn't let his ego get in the way of the job. People didn't question him as much if he acted like a cowboy and so he did just that. How could he operate if the staff guessed that he sweated each assignment, felt like he was sending off his own children? Unfazed by Linh's silence, he had changed his mind about him being a criminal. Probably something far worse. The whole damned country was shell-shocked as far as he could tell. At least he had maybe bought himself a few weeks of peace from his prima-donna photog.
    By the time the jeep reached Angkor Thom, the sun throbbed like a tight drum in the late afternoon. Villagers were handling a jungle of equipment--cords snaking over the dirt; large sheets of foil scattered along the ground, heating already hot air to scorching; tripods splayed like long-legged birds; film floating in coolers; and in the middle of it all, directing the chaos like a maestro, stood Sam Darrow.
    Gary handed Linh a bottle of lukewarm Coca-Cola and promptly forgot him, leaving him standing in a group of Cambodian workers. One man, Samang, grumbled that the sodas had been dumped out of the coolers so that there was more room