"You've had twenty years. To think where we'd go."

"Well sure. Stop laughing. I used to think I could always take you to Saigon. Drink citron presse and watch the tennis. Scratch that. You want to go to the hospital?"

"Pretend we did go to Saigon. Pretend we did it all. Imagine it. It's all in the mind anyway."

"Not entirely," Jack Lovett said.

Inez looked at him, then away. The cameraman on the steps lit a cigarette and immediately flicked it across the lawn. He picked up his minicam and started toward the car. Inez picked up the lei and dropped it again. "Are we going to the hospital or not," she said finally.

Which was how Inez Victor and Jack Lovett happened to walk together into the third-floor intensive care unit at Queen's Medical Center when, as the older of the two homicide detectives put it, Janet's clock was already running.

"But I don't quite understand this," Inez kept saying to the resident and the two homicide detectives. The homicide detectives were at the hospital only to get a statement from one of the nurses and they wanted no part of Inez's interrogation of the resident. "You got a flat reading at six o'clock. Isn't that what you said?"

"Correct."

"And you need three. Eight hours apart. Isn't that what you told me? This afternoon? About technical death?"

"Also correct." The resident's face was flushed with irritation. "At least eight hours apart."

"Then why are you telling me you scheduled the second electroencephalogram for nine tomorrow morning?"

"At least eight hours apart. At least."

"Never mind 'at least.' You could do it at two this morning."

"That wouldn't be normal procedure."

Inez looked at the homicide detectives.

The homicide detectives looked away.

Inez looked at Jack Lovett.

Jack Lovett shrugged.

"Do it at two," Inez said. "Or she goes someplace where they will do it at two."

"Move the patient, you could confuse the cause of death." The resident looked at the detectives for corroboration. "Cloud it. Legally."

"I don't give a f.u.c.k about the cause of death," Inez said.

There was a silence.

"I'd say do it at two," the older of the two homicide detectives said.

"I notice you're still getting what you want," Jack Lovett said to Inez.

They did it at two and again at ten in the morning and each time it was flat but the chief neurologist, after consultation with the homicide detectives and the hospital lawyers, said that a fourth flat reading would make everyone more comfortable. A fourth flat reading would guarantee that removal of support could not be argued as cause of death. A fourth flat reading would be something everyone could live with.

"Everybody except Janet," Inez said, but she said it only to Jack Lovett.

Eight hours later they did it again and again it was flat and at 7:40 P.M. on Thursday, March 27, Janet Christian Ziegler was p.r.o.nounced dead. During most of the almost twenty-four hours preceding this p.r.o.nouncement Inez had waited on a large sofa in an empty surgical waiting room. During much of this time Jack Lovett was with her. Of whatever Jack Lovett said to Inez during those almost twenty-four hours she could distinctly remember later only a story he told her about a woman who cooked for him in Saigon in 1970. This woman had tried, over a period of some months, to poison selected dinner guests with oleander leaves. She had minced the leaves into certain soup bowls, very fine, a chiffonade of hemotoxins. Although none of these guests died at least two, a Reuters correspondent and an AID a.n.a.lyst, fell ill, but the cook was not suspected until her son-in-law, who believed himself cuckolded by the woman's daughter, came to Jack Lovett with the story.

"What was the point," Inez said.

"Whose point?"

"The cook's." Inez was drinking a bottle of beer that Jack Lovett had brought to the hospital. "What was the cook's motive?"

"Her motive." Jack Lovett seemed not interested in this part of the story. "Turned out she was just deluded. A strictly personal deal. Disappointing, actually. At first I thought I was onto something."

Inez had finished the beer and studied Jack Lovett's face. She considered asking him what he had thought he was onto but decided against it. After this little incident with the cook he had given up on housekeeping, he said. After this little incident with the cook he had gone back to staying at the Duc. Whenever he had to be in Saigon.

"You liked it there," Inez said. The beer had relaxed her and she was beginning to fall asleep, holding Jack Lovett's hand. "You loved it. Didn't you."

"Some days were better than others, I guess." Jack Lovett let go of Inez's hand and laid his jacket over her bare legs. "Oh sure," he said then. "It was kind of the place to be."

Occasionally during that night and day d.i.c.k Ziegler came to the hospital, but on the whole he seemed relieved to leave the details of the watch to Inez. "Janet doesn't even know we're here," d.i.c.k Ziegler said each time he came to the hospital.

"I'm not here for Janet," Inez said finally, but d.i.c.k Ziegler ignored her.

"Doesn't even know we're here," he repeated.

Quite often during that night and day Billy Dillon came to the hospital. "Naturally you're overwrought," Billy Dillon said each time he came to the hospital. "Which is why I'm not taking this seriously. Ask me what I think about what Inez is doing, I'd say no comment. She's overwrought."

"Listen," Billy Dillon said the last time he came to the hospital. "We're picking up incoming on the King Crab flank. Harry takes the Warner's plane to Seattle to pick up Jessie for the funeral, Jessie informs Harry she doesn't go to funerals."

Inez had looked at Billy Dillon.

"Well?" Billy Dillon said.

"Well what?"

"What should I tell Harry?"

"Tell him he should have advanced it better," Inez Victor said.

13.

I SHOULD tell you something about Jessie Victor that very few people understood. Harry Victor for example never understood it. Inez understood it only dimly. Here it is: Jessie never thought of herself as a problem. She never considered her use of heroin an act of rebellion, or a way of life, or even a bad habit of particular remark; she considered it a consumer decision. Jessie Victor used heroin simply because she preferred heroin to coffee, aspirin, and cigarettes, as well as to movies, records, cosmetics, clothes, and lunch. She had been subjected repeatedly to the usual tests, and each battery showed her to be anxious, highly motivated, more, intelligent than Adlai, and not given to falsification. Perhaps because she lacked the bent for falsification she did not have a notable sense of humor. What she did have was a certain incandescent inscrutability, a kind of luminous gravity, and it was always startling to hear her dismiss someone, in that grave low voice that thrilled Inez as sharply when Jessie was eighteen as it had when Jessie was two, as "an a.s.shole." "You a.s.shole" was what Jessie called Adlai, the night he and Harry Victor arrived in Seattle to pick her up for Janet's funeral and Jessie declined to go. Jessie did agree to have dinner with them, while the Warner Communications G-2 was being refueled, but dinner had gone badly.

"The crux of it is finding a way to transfer anti-war sentiment to a multiple-issue program," Adlai had said at dinner. He was telling Harry Victor about an article he proposed to write for the op-ed page of the New York Times. "It's something we've been tossing back and forth in Cambridge."

"Interesting," Harry Victor said. "Let me vet it. What do you think, Jess?"

"I think he shouldn't say 'Cambridge,' " Jessie said.

"Possibly you were nodding out when I went up there," Adlai said, "but Cambridge happens to be where I go to school."

"Maybe so," Jessie said, "but you don't happen to go to Harvard."

"OK, guys. You both fouled." Harry Victor turned to Adlai. "I could sound somebody out at the Times. If you're serious."

"I'm serious. It's time. Bring my generation into the dialogue, if you see my point."

"You a.s.shole," Jessie said.

"Well," Harry Victor said after Adlai had left the table. "How are things otherwise?"

"I'm ready to leave."

"You said you weren't going. You have a principle. You don't go to funerals. This is a new principle on me, but never mind, you made your case. I accept it. As a principle."

"I don't mean leave for Janet's funeral. I mean actually leave. Period. This place. Seattle."

"You haven't finished the program."

"The program," Jessie said, "is for a.s.sholes."

"Just a minute," Harry said.

"I did the detox, I'm clean, I don't see the point."

"What do you mean you did the detox, the game plan here wasn't detox, it was methadone."

"I don't like methadone."

"Why not?"

"Because," Jessie had said patiently, "it doesn't make me feel good."

"It makes you feel bad?"

"It doesn't make me feel bad, no." Jessie had given this question her full attention. "It just doesn't make me feel good."

There had been a silence.

"What is it you want to do exactly?" Harry had said then.

"I want-" Jessie was studying a piece of bread that she seemed to have rolled into a ball. "To get on with my regular life. Make some headway, you know?"

"That's fine. Good news. Admirable."

"Get into my career."

"Which is what exactly?"

Jessie was breaking the ball of bread into little pellets.

"Don't misread me, Jessie. This is all admirable. My only point is that you need a program." Harry Victor found himself warming to the idea of the projected program. "A plan. Two plans, actually. Which dove tail. A long-range plan and a short-term plan. What's your long-range plan?"

"I'm not running for Congress," Jessie said. "If that's what you mean."

There seemed to Harry so plaintive a note in this that he let it go. "Well then. All right. How about your immediate plan?"

Jessie picked up another piece of bread.

Something in Harry Victor snapped. He had been trying for the past hour to avoid any contemplation of why Inez had walked out of Dwight Christian's house the night before with Jack Lovett. Billy Dillon had told him. "You have to think she's overwrought," Billy Dillon had said. "I have to think she's got loony timing," Harry Victor had said. Early on in this dinner he had tried out the overwrought angle on Jessie and Adlai. "I wouldn't be surprised if your mother were a little overwrought," he had said. Adlai had put down the menu and said that he wanted a shrimp c.o.c.ktail and the New York stripper, medium b.l.o.o.d.y, sour cream and chives on the spud. Jessie had put down the menu and stared at him, he imagined fishily, from under the straw tennis visor she had worn to dinner.

Jessie had stared at him fishily from under her tennis visor and Adlai had wanted the New York stripper medium b.l.o.o.d.y and Inez had walked out of Dwight Christian's house with Jack Lovett and now Jessie was tearing her bread into little chicken-s.h.i.t pellets.

"Could you do me a favor? Jessie? Could you either eat the bread or leave it alone?"

Jessie had put her hands in her lap.

"I'm still kind of working on the immediate plan part," she said after a while. "Actually."

In fact Jessie Victor did have an immediate plan that Thursday evening in Seattle, the same plan she had mentioned in its less immediate form to Inez at Christmas, the plan Inez had selectively neglected to mention when she described her visit with Jessie to Harry and Adlai: the plan, if the convergence of yearning and rumor and isolation on which Jessie was operating in Seattle could be called a plan, to get a job in Vietnam.

Inez had not mentioned this plan to Harry because she did not believe it within the range of the possible.

Jessie did not mention this plan to Harry because she did not believe it to be the kind of plan that Harry would understand.

I see Jessie's point of view here. Harry would have talked specifics. Harry would have asked Jessie if she had read a newspaper lately. Harry would not have understood that specifics made no difference to Jessie. Getting a job in Vietnam seemed to Jessie a first step that had actually presented itself, a chance to put herself at last in opportunity's way, and because she believed that whatever went on there was only politics and that politics was for a.s.sholes she would have remained undeflected, that March night in 1975, the same night as it happened that the American evacuation of Da Nang deteriorated into uncontrolled rioting, by anything she might have heard or seen or read in a newspaper.

If in fact Jessie ever read a newspaper.

Which seemed to both Inez and Harry Victor a doubtful proposition.

When word reached them in Honolulu on the following Sunday night, Easter Sunday night 1975, the night before Janet's funeral, that three hours after the Warner Communications G-2 left Seattle, bringing Harry and Adlai Victor down to Honolulu, Jessie had walked out of the clinic that specialized in the treatment of adolescent chemical dependency and talked her way onto a C-5A transport that landed seventeen-and-one-half hours later (refueling twice in flight) at Tan Son Nhut, Saigon. "Maybe she heard she could score there," Adlai said, and Inez slapped him.

14.