As he stroked the baby’s tiny head, its dark, listless eyes watched him, and in the fastness of their gaze its struggle came alive. It was as if an electric current had run between them, causing him to feel the infant’s hopeless and fading energy. All the tragedies of the war and its aftermath grabbed him fiercely at that moment, up from the past, in from these paltry surroundings, out like a lion from his heart. He felt angry and helpless.

“Dzung!” he finally said. “This baby needs to be in a hospital. I will help you. I don’t care what it costs.”

“He was there, Cong Ly.” Dzung was smiling but his eyes showed his own unease. “They gave me pills for him. He just sick.”

“He’s very sick. We need to do something.”

“Cong Ly. This is Viet Nam. We give him the pills.”

Despite his misgivings Condley knew that Dzung was right. There was nothing else that could be done, and to say anything further would cause his friend to lose face. The best he could do was to self-consciously reach into his paper bag and offer Tu the last three pieces of bread.

“Dzung does very good work for me,” he told her in Vietnamese.

She was gracious, and when her eyes lit up Condley could understand what Dzung had meant when he boasted of her beauty. “You are his good friend,” she said, taking the bread slowly, her movements exaggerated by her weariness. “Cam on ong, cam on rat nhieu.”

Condley straightened back up and discovered Muir standing just next to him. Muir seemed even more addled than before, as if he were struggling with what he was seeing but not wanting even to see it.

“Classic cultural regression,” pronounced Muir, as if standing before a college lecture hall. “Socioeconomic inversion, actually. Not a rare phenomenon when revolutions occur. We saw it in the Soviet Union, obviously, with the disappearance of royalty after 1917 and the doing away of the upper classes. Here the communists did it to those who had any connections with the French or the Americans. They were at the top until the war was lost, and suddenly they had nothing. This is a largely Buddhist land and consequently I hesitate to quote the Bible, but shall we merely say that the last shall be first and the first shall be last?”

“Stop it, Professor. I really don’t need one of those ‘I just found a pile of bones’ kind of speeches.” Condley grabbed the professor’s shoulders, speaking quietly from only a few inches away. “How do we help them? I’m no fucking politician. What do we do, Professor? What do we do?”

Dzung approached them. “Phai di,” he said to Condley, a note of urgency in his recommendation that they now leave.

Condley nudged Muir toward the doorway. “If we don’t get out of here there’s going to be a riot outside.”