Still, he could not help but sympathize with the Doctor, who must be feeling that his life was no longer his own. And truly it wasn't. Ba had now been privileged to meet two men with the Dat-tay-vao, and neither had been fully in control of his life. For the Touch has a will of its own, and knows no master.

The Monday night traffic was thin. He reached Canal Street quickly and followed it east between Little Italy and Chinatown, then turned downtown on Bowery until he came to a tiny sidestreet where refugees from his country had collected during the seventies. They all shared the kinship of strangers far from home, but none so close as those who had risked the open sea together in his boat. Most of his fellow villagers had settled in Biloxi, Mississippi, still living as fishermen, only now in the Gulf of Mexico instead of the South China Sea. But one or two had straggled to the Northeast. He stopped now before the ramshackle tenement that housed one of the elders of his former village.

The trip had taken less than fifteen minutes. Ba set the emergency brake and turned in his seat.

"You will be safe here," he told the Doctor.

Dr. Bulmer looked up and down the dark, ill-lit street, then up at the rickety building. "I'll have to take your word on that, Ba."

"Come," he said, stepping out and opening the door.

"Go, Alan," said the Missus. "If Ba says it's all right, then you can take it to the bank."

Ba glowed with pride at her words as he watched them embrace and kiss.

"All right," the Doctor said. "But just for tonight. Twenty-four hours and that's it. Then I'm coming home."

As the Doctor stepped out of the car, Ba closed and locked the door behind him. He didn't like leaving the Missus alone here on the street, but the motor was running and he would only be a few minutes.

He guided Dr. Bulmer into the building and up the flaking stairway to the fourth floor.

"Chac is an old friend," he said as they climbed. "If my fishing village still existed, he would have been an elder there."

"What's he do now?"

"He sells newspapers."

"What a shame."

"Better than what was in store for him at home. The communists wanted us to work for them in exchange for a ration of rice. We call that slavery. We have always worked for ourselves."

"You work for Mrs. Nash."

Ba did not pause or look back at the Doctor. He knew the question and knew the answer. "When I work for the Missus, I work for myself."

"I hear you," the Doctor said. And by the tone of his voice, Ba knew that he understood and there was nothing more to be said.

They reached the fourth-floor landing. Ba knocked softly but persistently on the door that read 402. His watch said 11:16. Chac might be asleep—he rose daily at four and was on the street in less than an hour. He hated to disturb the older man's sleep, but the time of his arrival was not of his choosing and Chac would understand.

A voice spoke from the other side of the door. "Who's there?"

Ba announced himself in the Phuoc Tinh dialect. There came the clicks of locks and the rattle of chains, and then the door was pulled open and Ba felt himself embraced by the shorter, older man.

"I cannot stay," Ba said, fending off offers of food and drink. He heard a child cough in the back room. He glanced questioningly at Chac.

"My grandson, Lam Thuy. He's almost three now. He stays here while Mai Chi and Thuy Le work at the restaurant. Here. Sit and let me make you tea."

"The Sergeant's wife awaits me below. But I have a favor to ask."

"Anything for Ba Thuy Nguyen! You know that!"

Ba smiled, warmed by the elder's approbation. "A friend needs shelter for a few days—shelter from the weather and from all eyes except those of this household."

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.