The visitors were there to meet Herbert Roper of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. He was in charge of the repatriation program. For every thousand refugees on their way to convenience stores and Asian food markets in the West, there was a handful who’d panicked before heading overseas and decided to go back home. Some had spent years in the camps being vetted and re-vetted at a pace so slow they’d started to wonder if the West really wanted them. Many were Hmong who’d been the backbone of CIA operations during the war. The US had made a brave show of accepting its quota but pointed out that America was currently full and could take no more. But still they came to the camps. By the end of the seventies, families were leaving Laos not because they had deep ideological differences with the ruling socialist regime but because they were poor. And there were the Chinese who had suddenly found themselves victimized as a result of bad feelings toward mainland China. And there were those mountain tribes who’d fought alongside the Pathet Lao but had still been forced down from the hills by their former allies to farm the lowlands. There was any number of reasons to flee. Those who could swim took their chances crossing the Mekong. The camps didn’t get any emptier and the UN started to promote the values of repatriation of refugees from the Thai camps back to Laos. Returnees were promised a place to live, forgiveness for previous affiliations, and, most importantly, a guarantee that they wouldn’t be executed. It was not a tempting package unless you figured in the seventy US dollars for every man, woman, and child in the family, free farming tools, and rice for a year.

The man charged with making all this possible was Herbert Roper, an English anthropologist and linguist. He spoke a number of the languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Indo-European, Altaic, and Mon-Khmer groups and was a veritable erupting volcano of knowledge. He was the gentle type, with the build and manner of a man married to academia. But like many married men he had a secret life. His appetite for beautiful women was voracious and he unashamedly preferred the company of those who had husbands of their own. He was an unlikely but seemingly successful Lothario. Perhaps it was the thrill of the illicit that drew him to bored housewives and them to him. His list of conquests included the wives of men of wealth and power who, had they known, could have ended Roper’s philandering at the end of a razor blade.

When he arrived, flustered, in the UNDP foyer he was already sweating even though he’d come from his air-conditioned office. He was dressed for a chilly spring evening in Surrey. He gave a soggy handshake to Siri but wiped his hand on his trousers before taking the hand of Madam Daeng. Siri observed that this handshake lasted a little too long for his liking. Daeng didn’t seem to mind at all.