“Samang die of snakebite two days ago. Veasna is in mourning.” The brother had been climbing the side of an overgrown wall of the ruins when a cobra lurched out and bit him in the thigh.

Darrow slapped at the air. “Why didn’t anyone tell us? We have anti-venom. A doctor is only a few hours away.”

“He die fast. Not want to bother you.”

Shaken, Darrow returned to the camp, slammed his belongings into bags, the spell of the place broken-the girl, the temples, the pancakes-all of it ridiculous and driving him crazy; he just wanted to get back to real work.

Linh walked in and considered him.

“You heard about Samang?” Darrow snapped.

“It is sad.”

“Not sad! Stupid. Ignorant. It didn’t need to happen. Forget this place.”

“Samang could have been working on other job when the snake found him.”

“But he wasn’t. He was on my job.”

Linh picked up his bags. “I’ll go check equipment on the trucks.” He turned away, then turned back. “He was very lucky, doing his duty, earning to support his family. You should give the camera to Veasna. If he does well, he can earn money. That is all that matters to Samang now.”

Darrow snorted and shook his head. He shoved a heavy case out the door with a hard push of his foot. “I hope I’m not as lucky as Samang.” He grabbed a towel and wiped off his face, put his glasses back on. “Damn unlucky in my book.”

“And then there is the young lady you entertained. Their sister-in-law. Widowed with two small children to feed. It would be thoughtful to give her some money so she could do something besides sell her body to foreigners.”

The Europeans, upon finding Angkor, refused to believe that the natives could have built the original temples. Briefly they entertained the thought that they had found Plato’s lost city of Atlantis.

The young woman dropping pieces of warm fruit into Darrow’s mouth had given him a false sense of understanding that was lost again, that did not transport to the modern world, where a syringe and a dying man were separated more by fatalism than actual distance. He felt like that ancient king hacking through the jungle, stone walls of his own trea sure barring his way.

Before leaving Angkor, Linh dropped a sheath of torn-out notebook paper on Darrow’s lap.

During the reign of King Hung there lived two brothers, Tam and Lang, who were devoted to each other. They were orphaned at a young age and came to live with a kind master who had a beautiful daughter. As they grew up, both brothers came to secretly love the girl, but the master gave her hand in marriage to the older brother, Tam. The young man and woman were blissfully in love, so much so that Tam quite forgot about his younger brother, Lang.

Unable to stand his unhappiness anymore-the loss of the two most important people in the world to him, and his jealousy at their happiness-Lang ran away, and when he finally came to the sea and could go no farther, he fell on the ground and died of grief, and was changed into a white, chalky, limestone rock.

Tam, realizing his brother was gone, felt ashamed of his neglect and went in search of him. In despair of not finding him, he stopped when he reached the sea, sat down on a white, chalky, limestone rock, and wept until he died, changing into a tree with a straight trunk and green palm leaves, an Areca tree.

When the young woman realized that her husband was gone, she went in search of him. Worn out, she finally arrived at the sea, and sat down under the shade of an Areca palm, with her back against a large white chalky rock. She cried in despair at losing her husband until she died, and changed into the creeping betel vine, which twined itself around the trunk of the Areca palm.

“Yours?”

“A famous legend of Vietnam. As best as I can remember. So you begin to understand where you are.”

“It’s sad. Tragic.”

“These are our national symbols. We are a people used to grief. Expecting it even.”

When they returned to Saigon, Gary paced the office with a summons from ARVN headquarters demanding Linh’s immediate appearance. The identity papers he had submitted were all faked. “I knew it. I knew you were too good to be true. Who’s Tran Bau Linh? Huh? They think he’s a deserter from the SVA.”

“Hell if I know. Linh’s worked for me the last year.”

“How’s that since I introduced you a few weeks ago?”

“A year. I’ll go down and talk to ARVN. You know with a little grease, they won’t care.”

Linh followed Darrow outside.

“How we met…”

“We’ve worked together for a year.”

“You are sure?”

“Want to go soldiering again?”

“No.”

“A little flattery and some pictures of the boss go a long way. I noticed how late you stayed out so you wouldn’t run into my friend.” Darrow squinted in the sunlight, breaking into a grin. “We make a good team. No one is exactly begging to work with me.”

When Linh became Darrow’s assistant, the war was small and new. A bush war, a civil war in a backwater country. The American presence was the only thing that led Darrow there, a reluctant last stop before retiring from the war business.

They sat in the gloom of rubber trees in Cu Chi, the Iron Triangle region, after a firefight. Linh had stood up to get the picture, before Darrow knocked him down, and small bits of shrapnel had nicked him in the face and neck. Even the Leica he had been shooting with had been damaged. Darrow bent over the medic, making sure he cleaned out the half-moon-shaped nick on his cheek. “Now you have a beauty mark. Women love scars.”

“I can fix the camera,” Linh said.

Darrow took a long drag on his cigarette. “Don’t see how.”

Linh picked up spent shell casings and a metal fork. Darrow watched him, amused.

“Where’d you learn that? SVA doesn’t teach that kind of stuff.”

Linh shrugged.

“You’re the onion man. Peel back a layer and get another mystery.”

“No mystery.”

“I’ve read the NVA train photographers to work under any field conditions,” Darrow said.

“I’ve read that also.”

Darrow laughed. “They pose shots. Making heroes. Unlike us. We’re showing the truth.”

The rest of the company was out of earshot, but still Linh spoke softly.

“Make believe that a man’s father, a professor at the university in Hanoi, fought the French to free our country. And the French became the Americans. And the Nationalists became the Communists. And pretend the son learned to fix a camera with casings and a fork for the North, but that he found their promises to be lies. He escaped but was made to fight for the SVA. And pretend that after all this time fighting, all he wanted was to flee the war. If this was true, would you take this assistant?”

“Why doesn’t he run away?”

“He is tied to his country.” Linh rubbed his hand over his wrist.

Darrow took another drag on his cigarette, handed one to Linh. “This man has suffered enough. I’d be proud to work alongside him.”

Linh turned away. He could not help feeling he had lost face by telling so much, and yet he knew the Americans expected this, needed this abasement to feel comfortable.

“Question?” Darrow said. “This imaginary man who worked in the North, did he ever see Uncle?”

“I imagine… yes.” The more one told, the less real the story seemed.

“Where?”

“Outside Hanoi. Visiting a friend who served as a guard. A tiny village, just a few huts strung along a canal. A small vegetable garden, and he was bent over the rows for hours, weeding. All alone. He was only in his fifties but was sick with TB and looked ancient. Just a glimpse. He was just an old man weeding his garden. Hidden because he was in plain sight.”

They went out with an LRRP (long-range reconnaissance patrol) unit on patrol into a guerilla-dominated province. Darrow favored these small, specialized units who went native because they allowed him to understand the nature of the particular place better than the larger units that turned everyplace into an American base. Special Forces had agreed to let Darrow go along on the condition that there would be no mention of the mission, no pictures. He knew from past experience it was worth it simply to get the lay of the land even though it drove Gary crazy.